Wild Ecstasy Read Free Page A

“father.” He had become a bitter, unpleasant man, one whom most called sinister. Mariah herself was very aware of the crooked dealings and raids that her father participated in with the devious, evil Tanner McCloud.
    Just the thought of Tanner McCloud made shivers run up and down Mariah’s spine. He was a man of no scruples, who surely did not know the meaning of honesty. And with the whites of his eyes yellowed by some strange, unknown disease, he was also a man who was anything but pleasant to look at. When he gazed at Mariah with those yellow eyes, she always felt as though he was undressing her. For sure, Mariah wearing men’s attire had not fooled him. He knew what lay beneath the bulky oversize jackets worn over her cotton shirts, and breeches twice the size of what she should be wearing, held up by a rope tied at her waist—a girl having developed into a woman at her ripe age of eighteen.
    â€œAnd so you want to be like your mother, eh?” Victor said, brandishing the scissors in the air as he talked, as though they were a weapon. “Do you want to be dead at age twenty-three?” He slipped the scissors into his rear pants pocket and grabbed Mariah by the arm. “Daughter, that ain’t going to happen if I have anything to say about it. I’ve protected you just fine these past years. I don’t intend to stop now.”
    Mariah paled. “Papa, please don’t,” she begged, trying to jerk free of his grasp. “My hair is all that is left that is pretty about me. At least at night, when I remove my dreadful mannish clothes, I can look in the mirror and see that I am a woman. Papa, do you want me to forget? Do you? Don’t you ever want to see me married to a fine gentleman? Don’t you even want grandchildren?”
    â€œAnd where do you expect to find what you call a ‘fine gentleman’ way out here in this wilderness?” he scoffed, grasping her arm more tightly. “Those I have met are anything but what I would want for a son-in-law. Most are filthy, with only one thing on their minds when they see the flash of a woman’s skirt. Their one concern is getting that skirt lifted and pokin’ her until they get their hunger for sex filled for that moment.”
    Mariah gasped and her face became flushed with embarrassment, her father having never before spoken of sex in her presence.
    But even this did not stop her argument. “While gathering supplies at Fort Snelling, I saw many men who were surely gentlemen,” she said, daring him with a haughty gaze. “The soldiers are all so very polite. And . . . some are quite handsome.”
    She cast her eyes downward. “But of course, none have ever approached me,” she murmured. “They think they are walking past a young lad when they pass by me in the courtyard of the fort.”
    She looked back up at him with an anxiousness in her eyes. “Papa, I’ve always fooled them before by wearing my hair coiled beneath my hat,” she said in a rush of words. “Please? Please let me continue hiding my hair instead of cutting it.”
    â€œThat only works if the hat stays in place,” Victor said, going to the window, peering down below at the pack mules being unloaded. He could see many prime pelts among those being carried into his trading post, and did not want to take much more time with this chore at hand. He wanted to make sure those who assisted him at his post did not cheat him while his back was turned.
    He wheeled around and faced Mariah again. “The day you tripped over a bale of hay at the fort? Your hair came rushing out from beneath your hat like streamers of sunshine. And who had to be there, to be witness to the truth of your identity? That damned Colonel Snelling and his wife, Abigail. Since then they haven’t let me alone, chiding me for forcing you to wear breeches and shirts. Why, Abigail even forced one of her dresses on me one day