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What the hell. He should do something to celebrate his brief command of the brigade.
Tikka seemed like five and a half feet of uncomplicated lust. He'd just have to make sure to use a condom for something other than keeping rain out of his gun barrel.
uDo you want to be seen walking into my tent, or will you sneak in under cover of darkness?"
"Let's go to mine. It's more secluded. I'm picketed to make sure the dumb things don't blunder into the stream."
"I'll change so I can blend in."
He buttoned his shirt and threw his uniform coat over his arm and went to his tent. While he put on his leathers, she refilled her pistol belt from the company supply.
"What in the world did you do to your rig?" she asked. "All your hooks and catches are gone."
"My maiden aunt Dolly was always complaining about the chips to her furniture. Kept snagging doilies at headquarters too."
She licked her lips. "I think I can tell when you're joking now."
"Good."
They walked through the knee-high grasses to the legworm camp, a little below the Southern Command encampment and closer to the stream. They wound through grazing legworms. On the hill opposite the stream, two riders sat on a mount back-to-back, keeping watch.
She beckoned him into her tent. Some tack odds and ends sat in a chest that opened out into shelves, and various ponchos and bandannas hung on a grate-like folding clothes tree. Her bed was a net-and-frame double with a rather battered-looking down mattress. It looked too rickety to support both of them.
"You should have taken better care of your leathers," she said, disrobing with a matter-of-factness that made Valentine remember a girl he'd once known in Little Rock. "You know, it's supposed to be the mark of a real well-suited pair of riders if they can do it without any punctures or lacerations. Kind of a good omen for their future together."
She had muscular buttocks and legs, good shoulders and a sleek, feline back. Her breasts, high and small and capped by determined, thumblike nipples, gave the tiniest of bobs as she danced out of her leathers. Their full firmness made her waist look even narrower by comparison.
"I could put some barbed wire around my nethers."
"Don't you dare," she said, coming forward and into his arms.
Her kiss was as wanting, hungry, and open as a baby bird's mouth. It had been so long since he'd had a woman press against him like this, her arms tight on his shoulder blades, he'd almost forgotten the delightful feel of breasts crushed against his chest, or a round hip just where his hand could fall as he tested the curves.
He lifted her easily and she laughed, pulling at his ears. She still had the day's sweat lingering between her breasts. It smelled like salt and sun and that powerful, caressing scent that women carried like a secret weapon for infighting. One of her heels pressed against the small of his back; the other rubbed the back of his leg. His pants seemed insufferably confining.
They worked together to get him out of them.
She dropped to her knees, employed her mouth, but he hardly needed encouragement.
"Now. Hurry. God, I'm so fucking horny!" she said.
They didn't even bother disturbing the bed. The tamped-down grass was cool and smooth inside the tent's shade, and there was less chance of breaking it as she bucked and gasped under his thrusts.
After, she played with his hair. "God, that was good. I even forgot about Zak while you were doing that Morse code with your tongue. Why didn't we do this four years ago?"
"I had someone else then. Or I thought I did."
"That redhead? She could be pretty if she tried. And cut back on the attitutde."
Valentine let her be wrong. He didn't want to talk about Malita and his daughter. In the rather formal, most recent letter, she'd been described as half monkey, half jaguar, climbing trees as easily as most kids walked.
Valentine felt strangely uncomfortable at the mention of Duvalier.
"We could try making up for lost time," he said, changing the subject. He reached for her.
* * * *
So began a love affair carried out as discreetly as could be managed in a camp full of soldiers.
