The Ballad of Hattie Taylor Page 7

  “Noo,” she moaned and hunched her shoulders.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart. Easy, now. It’s okay.” He kissed her nipple lightly, as if not to cause her the least discomfort. “God, I love you. You are so beautiful.”

  His words were a balm, but they didn’t compensate for the embarrassment of having all her private places exposed and touched. Jane-Ellen squeezed her eyes shut, praying he would just get it over with. But when his hand smoothed down over her belly, moving lower, her eyes flew open. He wouldn’t dare!

  He dared. His fingers moved between her thighs and she wanted to die of mortification. Not even she touched herself there except when absolutely necessary for hygienic purposes. It was unthinkable, and, oh dear Lord, his fingers were separating her.

  When Jake slid his fingers between Jane-Ellen’s legs, he found her completely dry. Bringing his fingers to his mouth, he gathered some moisture off his tongue and returned them to lubricate the arid folds. Something curdled deep inside him when his actions made her shudder with revulsion. Jesus, being scared was one thing. But didn’t she desire him at all? He pushed up on one elbow and looked down at her. “Jane-Ellen, did anyone tell you what to expect?”

  “N-no.”

  “Shit,” he breathed and raked a hand through his hair. Lifting her right hand, he brought it, resisting, to his chest. In easy stages, he smoothed it across his pectorals and down the ridged muscles of his stomach, before descending to his lower abdomen until her fingertips touched the thick tangle of hair surrounding his phallus. He raised her palm to brush his erection.

  She struggled to extricate her hand, but carefully Jake wrapped it around the throbbing thickness and whispered, “It’s okay, Jane-Ellen. This is a cock.” He released her hand and she snatched it away.

  Tenderly, he ran a finger down the cleft between her legs and pushed his middle fingertip against the portal of her vagina. “It goes in here.”

  “No!” she protested. “It’s too big; that cannot be right.”

  His finger circled the small muscular ring guarding her entrance, attempting to stretch it out a little to ease her coming discomfort. “It is right, sweetheart. This is the way we make love . . . and how babies are made. I know you don’t think so at the moment, but it can feel good, Jane-Ellen. Let me show you.”

  He returned his mouth to her breast and his newly redampened fingers between her legs. Jane-Ellen went rigid with obvious distaste. She rejected every overture he made, clearly neither knowing nor caring about the discipline he exerted over his own emotions. He could practically hear her thinking, Please, let him stop touching me and just do what he has to do.

  Finally, Jake rolled on top of her and gently spread her resisting legs. Her obvious repugnance had killed his joyous anticipation, and the most he could hope for was that once he breached her maidenhead, she’d relax enough to begin feeling the pleasure that could be hers. Very carefully, he aligned himself with her virginal opening.

  As he gently pushed forward, Jane-Ellen’s eyes opened wide. She tried to close her legs, which was impossible with Jake’s hips firmly entrenched between them. He thrust in a tiny bit farther, a feat made difficult by the dryness of her passage.

  “Jake, stop!” his new bride said. “Please, don’t do this. It hurts.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart.” He held himself very still. “Try to relax. It’ll be so much easier for you.”

  Relax? Jane-Ellen stared at him in disbelief. He could not be serious. Her most private place was being torn apart by an object a simpleton could tell was much too large to fit inside it, and he was telling her to relax? Why didn’t he just stop? This was horrible! She inhaled with relief as she felt him begin to withdraw. Then suddenly he lunged forward. She felt something tear, and pain she never knew existed exploded inside her. Jane-Ellen opened her mouth to scream, but Jake’s hand was there to muffle the sound.

  “Shh, shh, now. It’s done.” He removed the hand gagging her and brushed away her tears. He kissed her tenderly. “You’re no longer a virgin, Jane-Ellen, and it will never hurt like that again. Easy, sweetheart. Give yourself a minute and the pain will go away.”

  He was correct; the pain did fade. But still that large intrusive part of him was inside her, and it made her feel dirty and vile. When he suddenly began to move, at first slowly and then with gathering speed, she whimpered and tightened all her muscles in protest. The pain returned, all the worse for having been momentarily eased.

  Peeking up at him through narrowed eyes, she was horrified to see Jake’s face that of a stranger: teeth bared, eyes blindly staring—and the low sounds he made frightened and disgusted her. She remembered Aunt Clara’s advice and, knowing now what it was she must endure, she began to recite scriptures in her head. Quite suddenly, Jake’s head reared back, his hips thrust forward, and a longer, louder groan rattled in his throat. A second later he collapsed. Oh, thank goodness; was it finally over?

  Jake pushed up on his arms, relieving her of his weight, and tenderly brushed wisps of hair away from her face. “Are you all right?”

  “Y-yes. I think so.” He rolled off her and Jane-Ellen grimaced at the rush of hot liquid streaming between her thighs. Burning with embarrassment, she stammered, “Uh, Jake?” Oh goodness, how could she tell him she had wet herself? She would just die.

  But Jake, discerning her problem, threw back the blankets. He scooped a bit of white fluid from her thigh, visibly winced at the amount of blood mixed with it, then determinedly brought it up to show her. “This is my seed. I transfer it to you when I’m inside you, and when it meets your eggs, it makes babies.”

  For God’s sake. Jane-Ellen closed her eyes. She had always found Jake to be delicate in his dealings with her, but tonight she was seeing a different side of his personality. One she didn’t appreciate one bit. Men simply did not discuss bodily functions with women—of course she was appalled at his lack of decorum. She pulled her night rail together and began buttoning it with trembling hands. When Jake reached out to gather her in his arms, she shrugged him away and rolled to the edge of the bed. “I’m going to the necessary.”

  Jake dropped back onto the pillows and watched his new wife hobble to the bathroom like a woman decades beyond her age. How had things gotten so out of hand? This was supposed to be the happiest day of his life.

  Give her a chance, Murdock, a voice whispered in his brain. The poor thing lost her virginity tonight. It was obviously a traumatic experience for a gently reared girl. Especially one no one bothered to tell what to expect, so she would be prepared. But things will get better.

  Unfortunately, even when Jane-Ellen returned to bed and allowed him to hold her in his arms, Jake could sense her censorious regard. And long after she slept, he lay awake.

  Filled with an awful, hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  8

  Murdock Ranch

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 4, 1900

  Something sharp stung Hattie’s neck and she slapped her hand against the spot. She thought she’d been stung by a bee. But the skin of her palm encountered a small, soggy lump of paper. Oh, for pity’s sake, it was a spit wad. Peeling it off her neck, she looked over her shoulder into the grinning face of the culprit. “Clever, Moses. Very mature.”

  Moses shrugged unrepentantly and dropped to sit cross-legged beside her. His white-blond hair glinted in the brilliant sunlight. “We’re twelve. Ain’t s’posed to be mature.” He helped himself to a piece of her watermelon. “This is good. Wanna have a seed-spitting contest?”

  Ordinarily she’d love to, but she felt less than chipper all of a sudden. She had no idea why. Until now, she’d been having a grand time. It was a hot summer day, and the Murdocks had opened their ranch for a church social. Hattie had eaten her share of sweets this afternoon. But she’d never suffered from overindulgence in the past, and it hadn’t slowed her down during the sack races or the penny hunt through t
he hay pile. She’d simply enjoyed running and laughing with the boys, relishing the heat beating down on her hatless head.

  Then out of nowhere a band of pain had gripped her stomach and lower back, her head felt achy, and stranger still, her bosoms hurt. Suddenly the noise and laughter grated on her nerves, and most mysterious of all, she felt like crying.

  So, she refused his offer. “I’m not feeling so good,” she said by way of explanation when he showed signs of persisting. “I think I’m gonna walk down by the creek.”

  “You want company?”

  Unaccountably, Hattie’s temper rose, tempting her to snap at him. “No, thanks,” she retorted with strained patience. “I just wanna be by myself for a little while.” Offering him the rest of her plate, she stood and walked away.

  Once she had distanced herself from the festivities, her mood lightened. She followed the creek through a patch of woods and out the other side to a spot where the banks widened and the creek formed a shallow pool. This was one of her favorite spots in all of Mattawa. She’d discovered it last summer, shortly after coming to live with Aunt Augusta.

  Hattie sat on the grassy bank and struggled with her shoes. They weren’t easy to unfasten without her buttonhook, but finally she freed her feet and quickly rolled down her stockings, grabbing their toes to pull them off. After carefully placing the thin stockings in her shoes, she gathered up her skirts and petticoat and stepped into the water.

  Glacier fed somewhere in the Cascades, it was ice-cold even on the hottest days, and Hattie hissed in a breath at the shock of it. Its temporarily numbing chill, however, didn’t prevent her from edging across the pebbled creek bed until she was immersed to her knees.

  Then, growing accustomed to the chill, she sighed with pleasure. She was tempted to strip down to her chemise and drawers so she could plunge into the depths of the pool where it deepened in the lee of a jutting outcrop of boulders. If the ranch wasn’t swarming with people, she’d have already done so. Thinking about the privacy she’d lost, she experienced a flash of resentment toward the church congregation for overrunning the ranch.

  And promptly felt ashamed of herself. Criminy, the ranch wasn’t even hers; she didn’t understand her sudden possessiveness and grumpy mood at all. Climbing out of the creek, she collapsed on the grassy bank and sat with her legs thrust out in front of her, skirts cocked around her thighs to allow the sun access to her damp skin.

  It wasn’t like her to give in to such mean-spirited moodiness. If she was happy, she generally smiled and laughed. If she was angry, she yelled. If she was sad, she cried—but in private, if possible, because she hated the defenseless, out-of-control feeling crying created. It was bad enough to find herself a helpless victim of tears. The last thing she needed was to have another person witness them.

  So, her disposition was ordinarily straightforward. It wasn’t like her to be having a grand time at a church picnic one minute, then resenting the people who helped organize it the next.

  Heavy cramping in her lower back and stomach struck suddenly, and Hattie’s knees pulled into her chest in an instinctive attempt to lessen the pain. Wrapping her arms around her shins, she hugged her legs tightly to her body and rolled into a fetal position on her side.

  What in mercy’s name was the matter with her? She was getting scared and for the first time realized perhaps wandering away from the crowd hadn’t been in her best interests. When the pain lessened a little, she pushed to a sitting position and reached for her stockings.

  She was just working her toes into the first one when she felt a warm, liquid rush between her legs. Skirts canted up around her hips, she stared in horror at the blood slowly spreading a darkening red stain across the pristine white crotch of her drawers.

  * * *

  —

  “Hello, Moses.”

  “Hiya, Mr. Murdock. This is some swell picnic.”

  “It turned out pretty nice, didn’t it? Have you seen Hattie around?”

  Moses swallowed the too-large bite of apple pie he’d just forked into his mouth. Knuckling the crumbs off his mouth, he replied, “She said she didn’t feel so hot. Last I saw of her, she was heading for the creek. Said she wanted to be alone when I offered t’go with her.”

  “Okay, I’ll track her down from here. Thanks.”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Murdock.” Moses scraped the last of the pie into his mouth and headed back to the dessert-laden table.

  Jake struck out for the woods, glad to leave the festivities. In the ten months since his marriage, he’d had less and less reason to laugh, and it was exhausting pretending to be happy when he wasn’t. It didn’t help knowing he had no one to blame for his predicament but himself.

  The signs had all been there, but he’d refused to read them. Jane-Ellen hadn’t changed overnight; she was still the sweet girl she’d always been. He couldn’t even fool himself into thinking she’d tricked him by pretending to be enamored of his physical advances before their marriage. The truth was, he’d been so eager to believe she was anticipating the intimacies of marriage as much as he was, he had willfully ignored every indication to the contrary.

  If he hadn’t allowed himself to be so ruled by lust every time she was near, he might have noticed she disdained his tongue when they were kissing, that she knocked his hand away whenever it trespassed in the vicinity of her breasts.

  He blew out a frustrated breath. He might have noticed they actually had very little in common. But, no. He had let his cock do his thinking and now he was reaping what he’d sown.

  Yet . . . what twenty-three-year-old man didn’t? Jake bent to scoop up a few stones and furiously flung one at a felled tree. What the hell had he ever done to deserve being shackled for life to a woman who found his touch repulsive? He winged another rock, watching it hit the exact same spot. Repulsive, for Christ’s sake! He hammered the spot again with his last stone.

  A caustic, humorless smile twisted Jake’s mouth. Well, how the mighty had fallen. The uncontested prince of the pleasure palaces not only couldn’t arouse his own wife; she found his touch repugnant. What a bitter joke. Too damn bad he’d forgotten how to laugh.

  Impatient with his self-pity, Jake wondered what ailed Hattie. She’d looked the height of health when he’d noticed her earlier skipping rope, skirts flying, fat braid bouncing, its ribbon trailing untidily as usual into the explosion of curls beneath its constricting knot. If she’d been stuffing herself at the same rate as her friend Moses, she probably had a stomachache, although according to Mirabel she possessed a cast-iron constitution that was decidedly undeserved.

  Stepping from dim woods to sunshine was momentarily blinding, but not to the extent that he couldn’t recognize Hattie down by the creek pool, naked as the day she was born, except for her chemise. A smile tugged the corner of his mouth. Hell, she’d just snuck off for a swim.

  Then her frantic movements made a frown furrow his brow. Why was she splashing water up her legs like a dog spraying dirt digging up a bone? As Jake drew closer he was shocked to see tears pouring down her cheeks and realized her actions were tainted by hysteria.

  He broke into a run. “Hattie?”

  Hattie’s head snapped up. “Jake?” She scrambled out of the creek and threw herself into his arms. She was never so relieved to see anyone in her life. She’d torn off her dress, petticoat, and bloomers before wading knee-deep into the stream in a frantic attempt to rinse the blood away. But it kept trickling out of her despite her efforts to staunch it.

  “Oh, Jake, there’s something the matter with me. My stomach and back hurt so bad and I’m bleeding and it won’t quit . . . uhh, jeez!” She bent double with a new cramp, her arms wrapped around her middle.

  Jake scooped her up and carried her to a level spot on the grassy slope. Placing her on a patch, he sat beside her and whispered, “Shh, baby, it’s okay. Show me where you’re bleeding and I’ll fix you up.
Did you crack yourself on something?”

  She clutched his pastel suspender in a frantic fist. “No, you don’t understand. It just started for no reason at all, and it’s coming out of my private place and won’t stop. Please, we’ve got to stop it before I bleed to death. Please, Jake.”

  “Your private . . . ?” Jake froze. His one brief, involuntary glance down showed him budding breasts beneath Hattie’s thin chemise—and wispy curls gracing her mound, lighter in color than the brilliant copper on her head. A bit of blood smeared her thighs. Oh.

  Oh shit. He whipped his head in the other direction, staring determinedly through the trees as he kicked himself for being so wrapped up in his own life these past long months, he’d neglected to notice the changes she was undergoing. At the same time, he sagged with the relief of knowing she wasn’t seriously hurt. “Hattie, honey, I think you’re getting your first menses.”

  Jesus, the poor kid must have had a million and one questions and no one to answer them. He was filled with a quiet fury. Neither his mother, nor Mirabel, nor his wife, apparently, had seen fit to prepare her, and consequently she’d been unnecessarily terrified. His fury raged hotter at the damned hypocritical system deliberately fostering ignorance in its young women in the name of purity and morality.

  He wanted to hit something for the fright Hattie had received and for Jane-Ellen’s unnatural fear of sexual intimacy. Instead, he removed his handkerchief from his pocket, folded it into a pad, and, keeping his eyes averted, instructed her to press it between her legs. He gathered Hattie’s clothes together, rinsed her soiled drawers, and spread them in the sun to dry. He instructed her to dress and watched the leaves of a nearby aspen flutter gently in the breeze. Finally, he resumed his seat next to her. After a brief hesitation, Jake pulled her onto his lap.

  And began to talk.

  Hattie listened with growing relief as Jake explained about menstruation and all the other bodily changes she’d been experiencing. He stressed it was a natural element of growing up, explained the reasons for the changes, and briefly described how babies were made.