Blue Willow by Deborah Smith Page A

world doesn’t work like something out of ‘Cinderella.’ ”
    “Let her daydream,” Little Sis whispered. “Maybe it’ll keep her away from the bull-necked dimwits around here. You want her to go to college, don’t you? And you sure don’t want her pregnant or married before she’s old enough to know her head from a hole in the ground.”
    Lily listened in stark despair as they tiptoed from the room. She opened her eyes and let the tears roll out the corners. She wasn’t going to marry anyone, not Artemas, or dimwits, or anybody else.
    She wrote to Artemas about getting shot. By return mail he sent a large package. Inside neatly folded tissue paper was his beautiful gray academy jacket, with gold piping at the stiff, stand-up collar, ornate brass buttons down the center, four gold stars pinned in a perfect horizontal line across one breast, and under them, a shiny little nameplate with ARTEMAS COLEBROOK, SENIOR CADET COMMANDER in etched black letters.
    On a piece of academy stationery he had written, I wore this to graduation. Now, I want you to have it. What you did was very brave but you have to promise not to get shot again .
    She wrote back, I promise. It wasn’t much fun .
    Lily modeled the jacket for Mama and Daddy. Artemas’s jacket swallowed her. “He must be as big as Daddy,” she said in awe. So big and sweet that he wouldn’t mind that she was wild as a mustang, with fuzzy red hair, big hands, big feet, knobby knees, and a long bullet scar on her shoulder.
    Artemas would come back someday. He already knew she was odd , and it didn’t seem to bother him.

Six
    These were Artemas’s last few weeks of freedom before he entered West Point, and the summer sun splaying down through the trees was warm as life on his naked body, and Susan de Gude was his first girl.
    “Yes, like that,” she whispered against his ear, bare and golden beside him on the soft forest floor. Even though the air rolling in from the sound was tepid, he burned, sinking into a blinding need to learn what a girl felt like inside. But this was her first time, too, and he didn’t want to hurt her, or God help him, do anything that would make her want to stop.
    They’d spent what seemed like hours reaching this point, touching each other with awe and, for a while, embarrassment, until the fire of excitement erased everything but sensation. Now, she was writhing under his hand, and he was exploring the moist recesses between her legs with a restraint that made him light-headed. “You’re so smooth inside,” he murmured, taking her mouth as she tilted her head up to his again. She moaned into his lips, then broke away, her green eyes smoldering, her hair, dark red and tangled, catching on bits of grass as she twisted her head from side to side.
    He felt as if the ache between his legs would consumehim. There was no longer any way of knowing where it ended and the limits of his skin began. She and he had managed to get a condom in place only seconds ago, snickering over it, nearly shooting it across his belly a time or two before the laughter faded into desperate intensity, and her fingers, trembling but incredible, had stroked it down firmly.
    “Now, okay?” she begged, her narrow hips grinding upward into his palm. Her face and breasts turned a brighter shade of pink, her small nipples becoming as dark as roses. Her lashes quivered and lowered shyly. “I’m going to do it, you know, come , any second.”
    Those were the most erotic words in the world. Shaking, Artemas tried to say something coherent but only managed “Me too” before he carefully moved over her, frantically aware that she was much smaller and softer than his brutally muscled body. There was a painfully awkward moment in which their legs became entwined and he jabbed her upper thigh with his jutting arousal, but then he instinctively slid his hands under her and lifted her legs around him, and they were dignified again.
    Then, suddenly, he was pressing into