For the first time Emmet understood the voracious hunger men could feel for gold. In his hand he held every dream he'd ever dreamed--passage to exotic ports, fine horses and beautiful women, books with leather bindings and uncut pages.

A home--a house on a hill somewhere, so he could see the far blue mountains--where he didn't have to stand watch at night or wake with rain in his face. A big house, with rich woods and carved balusters and colorful carpets.

A home for Hattie.

With a sneer at his own fantasies, Emmet flung the second handful onto his shirt and stepped out of the water. Shaking himself again, he pulled on his buckskin pants, thinking it was high time he moved on. He was starting to believe there was a place in the world for him, like any decent man had a right to expect.

But there wasn't. Not for a man who failed everyone who ever depended on him.

Chapter Fourteen.

Hattie was combing her hair when he returned. Again he stopped at the edge of the hollow and watched.

She seldom freed it from its tight braid. It was a nuisance, she'd told him, always getting caught on things, falling into her food, tangling until she considered cutting it off rather than fussing with it.

So he'd rarely seen it flowing across her shoulders as it was now, reminding him of dark, moss-tinted water running silently through deep, shady woods. His hands clenched at his sides as he thought of catching the fluid mass and raising it to his face, to see if it smelled of lilacs, too.

She looked up. "Good morning." Her smile was bright, inviting. "I... ah, Emmet, I'm sorry."

"Sorry?"

"I promised I'd never complain about our bargain," she said, not quite meeting his eyes, "and I've tried not to." Biting her lower lip, she paused, the cords on her neck the only evidence of her distress. "I've really tried to accept it, and mostly, I think, I have. But for a little while there, this morning, well...."

"Never mind," he said, laying his shirt carefully beside his unused bedroll.

"You don't have to say anything." He was still angry with her, for trying to tie him to her. He was, no matter how she tried to apologize.

One hand closed into a fist against her mouth. Her head turned slowly, side to side. After a few moments, she said, "Yes, I do. I want you to understand."

The deep breath she took lifted her breasts and Emmet could almost feel them filling his hands. "A body can't help wanting what makes her feel good," she said, still avoiding his eyes. "That doesn't mean she expects to get it." Her smile this time was truly amused. "When I was a little girl, I used to get into the molasses barrel, no matter what my ma did when she caught me."

He had to smile back when she rubbed her bottom.

"I still love molasses better than anything, but I've learned not to eat it with a spoon." Her giggle was childlike. "At least not very often."

Emmet remembered a little boy who'd stolen a whole jar of preserves, long ago.

Again he smiled. "I can't resist strawberries," he admitted.

"You're better than molasses," she said, the words coming out almost as one, "and I just have to learn I can't have all I want of you."

He came to his knees beside her, heat flooding through him. "Sweetheart, you can have all of me while I'm still around." He pulled her against him and kissed her, letting his hands tangle in hair that was as silky as he'd imagined.

She pulled back, laying a finger against his mouth. "I promise I won't hold you when it's time for you to go, Emmet Lachlan. But can we pretend--just for this week, while we're alone--that we're like any other married folk, together for always?"

Licking at the fingers that lay so sweetly against his mouth, he agreed. "No more talk about what comes next. For all we know, this week is the only always we'll ever have."

No one knew better than Hattie how true his words were. Never again would she believe in forever.

They made love again, there in the morning sunlight. Ellen slept quietly beside them while they reached new heights of passion and satiation. Hattie was able to put her fears of the future aside, wanting nothing to ruin this perfect time.

The sun was nearing its zenith when she finally admitted to hunger of another kind.

Emmet went to the fire naked, as natural and easy as if he'd never worn clothes in his life. Hattie watched him, loving the flow and shift of muscle under his sleek skin, the length of his legs, the breadth of his shoulders. His chest was almost bare of hair, but at his belly a narrow line arrowed downwards to the golden nest in which his now relaxed manhood rested.

"It's a good thing," he said over his shoulder, "that I wasn't paying much attention to what I was doing this morning. If the fire hadn't gone out, we'd have fried grounds." He shook the coffeepot. Hattie could hear how little water it held.

She rolled to the edge of the bed. "I should be doing that." Reaching for her skirt, she wondered if the stream would be too cold for her to bathe. She was sticky with the residue of their lovemaking.

As if he read her mind, he said, "Go on down to the creek and wash yourself.

I'll take care of breakfast." When she hesitated, he warned her, "Hurry now.

Ellen's not going to sleep all day."

Hattie hurried.

When she returned he had meat warm in the pan and coffee cooling in her cup. And Ellen on his still bare arm, awake and content to be held and talked to.

"Eat," he told her, "while she's happy with me."

Hattie did, gratefully. She wondered if all babies hungered at mealtimes, or if only her child was determined that her mother would not enjoy an uninterrupted meal as long as she nursed.

Emmet shifted Ellen to his other arm and picked up his buckskin shirt, letting Hattie see that it was wrapped around something small and heavy. He dropped it carefully beside her. "Take a look," he said.

Hattie finished her fried venison, wishing they had some bacon, some eggs, even some oatmeal. Once she got to the Willamette, she would never eat venison again.

Setting her plate beside her, she reached for the shirt.

"Careful. Don't spill it."

She opened the bundle. And gasped at the pile of raw gold it held.

"Yeah. And that was only in one little hole." He grinned. "You'll have yourself a mansion, Hattie girl. And a stable full of horses, a carriage with red velvet cushions. Whatever you want."

All I want is you.But she smiled, "I told you Buffalo wouldn't lie about this."

"That you did."

Just then Ellen decided she'd been patient quite long enough. Hattie held out her arms.

They harvested the gold almost as they would watercress, with bare hands and a bucket. For a few hours each day Hattie made her way along the creek bank, carrying the bucket, receiving the handsful of nuggets and golden sand Emmet dug out of quiet holes under mossy banks, picked up from eddies where the creek showed its fickleness by taking off in a new direction.

In the other hours, they learned of each other. They spoke of childhoods different as night and day, of places Emmet had been and Hattie only dreamed of.

Oh, yes, and they loved.

It took only a glance, a touch, sometimes simply a word, and they were in each other's arms. They came together on grassy banks with the music of the creek a joyous counterpoint to their loving. Once he took her up in his arms, her legs wrapped around his hips, in too much of a hurry even to find a place to lay them down. Another time she pulled him atop her on a huge gray boulder--a soft rock, she insisted later, because it had no sharp edges--while her babe gurgled and sang in the cradleboard, hung from a sturdy branch.

"I remember the sky," Emmet said, one afternoon as they lay, naked, in filtered sunlight. The creek here split into branches, and one followed a narrow cut through a grove of the tall firs. "It was gray, like before a rain, but all the time." He was telling the little he remembered of Manchester, before his parents had used every cent they had to purchase the cheapest of passages to America.

"And everything else was gray, too, it seemed like. I don't remember any color at all." He reached out to touch a tiny pink blossom, the miner's lettuce that had been their only fresh food so much of the winter. "No flowers, no grass, no sky." Rolling on his back, he pulled her close. "On our second or third day at sea I can remember looking up and seeing the sky. I was frightened--such a strange color."

"Strange?" she murmured, tracing a finger across his chest. She loved the hard feel of it, always warm, vibrating faintly with each beat of his heart.

He chuckled. "It was blue," he said, "blue and clean. And the sea was green. I was so excited I rushed back down after Da, tried to drag him on deck to see for himself." He fell silent and his eyes grew distant and sad. "But he was seasick.

They all were."

Hattie knew pity for a child full of the thrill of discovery and no one to share it with. She remembered how her mother and father had always taken time to listen to their children. They had never had much, beyond happiness. But that had been enough, for her memories of those years before her whole family was snatched away from her were mostly good ones.

"We went through some towns in Pennsylvania where there were mines and mills--I don't know what they were mining--and the sky was like that. It was hideous."

She had commented then on the dreariness of people's lives who lived like that and Karl had reminded her that she would not like a world without tools and modern conveniences--like fine steel needles and comfortable wagons with iron-tired wheels.

"Da talked about going to the coal fields," Emmet said, "but we never did." He was silent a long time and Hattie felt his regret. "When we got to Boston, we had nothing and he had to work at whatever he could find." Another silence, shorter this time. "It wasn't much. There were three or four men for every job."

We slept in the streets for, oh, I don't know. Two or three nights maybe, until we found a room to share with another family."

"A room?" For once Hattie was grateful that her father had been a good cowman.

While the houses prosperous farmers provided for their hired men were rarely more than hovels, at least Charles Holmes had never failed to provide food and shelter for his family.

"One room, maybe twice as big as Buff's cabin. Altogether there were nine of us--ten after Jonathan was born."

Now Hattie understood why he had spent so few daylight hours in the cabin through the winter. It must have reminded him painfully of a time he would rather forget. "Was Jonathan your brother?" She'd never heard him speak of brothers or sisters and had assumed he was an only child. The only one that had survived to grow up, at least.

Emmet nodded. "He was born a little while after we landed in Boston. I don't know how long, but Ma had showed her condition on the boat, so it couldn't have been too long." Absently he touched her body, cupping her breasts, then stroking across her belly. "She always seemed to be pregnant, far back as I can remember.

But Jonathan was the only baby born. The others always came too soon."

"Oh, no!" Hattie said, wondering how she could have endured losing Ellen before she even held her. "So there was only you and Jonathan?"

"And Sheila." A hard note came into Emmet's voice. "She was older than me. Three or four years, I guess. And pretty as a new penny."

Hattie was afraid to ask what had become of his family. The way he spoke of them, they were all gone. That or he had lost touch with them as he wandered the world.

"We never did get to the coal fields," he said, after another of the long, bitter silences. "Da finally found work with a carter. Delivering beer. In barrels." He told her how they'd moved into a larger room, all theirs, and how his mother was slow to recover from Jonathan's birth. "I tried to help with him, but mostly he was hungry and I... I didn't know what to do about that. I did my best."

Emmet's best was far more than most men were capable of. Hattie wondered if his family had appreciated what he had done, a mere child burdened with responsibilities beyond his years.

He went on. "Sheila found work too. She said it was in a fine house where she was an upstairs maid. Since she bought a few pennies home every Sunday, nobody thought too much about it."

The story unfolded, filled with hopelessness and defeat. Emmet's mother had never recovered from childbirth. Her cough, which had been only a nuisance for several years, had worsened as winter caught Boston in its freezing grasp. Soon she was unable to move from her pallet, unable to feed the tiny, wizened boy who lay wasting beside her.

"Da bought milk and I tried to feed him, but the cow's milk didn't agree with him. We tried gruel and broth, and they helped. Then one day Da didn't come home."

Oh my God!Hattie didn't want to hear any more. She laid her hand on Emmet's mouth, but he merely lifted it off, unkissed.

"I went looking for him. I knew his delivery route, so I backtracked when they told me at the brewery that his wagon was still out. When I found him... oh, God, I can still see it!" Turning his face away from her, Emmet covered his eyes with his forearm.

Hattie wanted to hold him, to comfort him, but suspected that he would not accept her sympathy. It was too much like pity.

It was almost as if he had to tell the rest, no matter how it hurt him to speak the words. "He was lying in the street. They'd moved the barrel off him, but he wasflat . His eyes were open and he saw me." His voice broke, but after a few deep breaths, he went on. "'You'll have to be the man now, son' he said. Then he just... he just stopped."

Hattie soothed, speaking meaningless syllables, touching him with love and tenderness, but without seduction. Although she had seen other children thrust into adult responsibilities as a tender age, it never failed to affect her. How fortunate she had been to have Uncle James and Aunt Nettie, for they'd let her ease gradually into adulthood, for a while at least.

Emmet accepted her sympathy this time. She felt his body slowly relax, gradually lose the rigidity it had taken on as he related his family's fate. She hoped he'd sleep, here in the grassy meadow, under the warm spring sun.

Instead he turned to her and took her, fiercely, hungrily, as if seeking solace of another kind.

"It's a good thing," Emmet said, one afternoon as they lay naked under the sun, "that the gold does 'jest lay on the ground for the takin'. Else we'd end up in the poorhouse."

Hattie laughed at his imitation of Buffalo's style of speech. Pulling a green, feathery grass head from the clump where his head rested, she drew it across his bare chest, laughing again when he snatched it away from her.

They wrestled for the tickler, but it was soon forgotten as Emmet felt still another surge of desire for her. He wondered if he would ever slake this enduring thirst for her. She brought him joy as well as soul-deep contentment.

But it could not last, this special time. It was too good to last, too intoxicating. He had not laughed--had not had such reason to laugh with sheer joy--so much in his entire life.

Soon enough they would return to the others. But until then he would not willingly give up one single moment of his time with Hattie.

"Look!" Hattie pointed upward. A dark shape circled above them, its white head and tail shining in the sunlight. "Do you suppose it can see us?" She rolled into the shelter of his arm, rested her head on his shoulder.

"I reckon it can," he said, "and it's probably wishing we'd go away so it can hunt its supper."

"Wouldn't it be wonderful to fly? To be so high above the ground, so free?"

"Hattie girl, nothing's free." Emmet had, more than once, thought he'd found freedom, only to discover that he'd found another sort of unwanted responsibility.

Her voice was thoughtful when she finally answered. "Oh, but with some things you don't mind the cost."

He refused to pursue that thought, and set about distracting her in the best way he knew.

The days slipped one into another as gradually their panniers became filled with gold, until it was time to go back. The night before they would return to the others, Emmet took Hattie again and again to the peak, wanting her to have incomparable memories of him, no matter who she married, there in the Willamette.

For she would marry. He had no doubt. A woman like Hattie was meant to be a wife, to be a mother.

Emmet all but forgot his own throbbing need as he pleasured her. There was not a fingertip's breadth of her body that he did not touch and kiss and taste. She screamed when his tongue found the center of her womanhood, then subsided to tortured, formless cries as he teased and tasted, inhaling the musky scent of her.