Wildest Dreams - By Rosanne Bittner Page 0,266

touch me this way for so long."

He moved his lips over her throat, up over her eyes, meeting her lips again. "I'm sorry for the way I've hurt you," he whispered between kisses. "Forgive me, Alice."

"There is nothing to forgive." She moved her hands over the hard muscle of his arms, her breath catching in her throat when he moved his lips toward her breasts. He kissed at them through the cloth of her dress, grasped at them eagerly, moved his hand down to grab hold of her dress and push it up so that he could run his hand along her ruffled drawers. He grasped at her firm bottom, squeezing it, pressing his hardness against her thigh.

In those few moments she was lost in him. Everyone downstairs could wait, and she didn't care if they thought she was being terribly sinful. Tyler Fontaine wanted her. He loved her. That was all she needed to know. Before she knew what was happening to her, her dress was unbuttoned and her camisole was untied and he was tasting her taut, aching nipples. Somehow she lost her drawers, and then he was raging inside of her, completely taking her breath away with a mixture of pain and ecstasy. At last she knew the magic of lying in Tyler Fontaine's arms.

April 1888

Lettie looked up from the pastry board to greet Billy Sacks, who had been ushered into the kitchen by Leena. "They're finally back," he told her. "They'll be up at the house pretty quick. I don't think the news is very good, Mrs. Fontaine."

"Thanks, Billy." Lettie took a deep breath, knowing

Luke needed her to be strong. She looked at Alice, both of them knowing they could expect the worst. Luke and Ty and Nathan had been gone with several other Double L men for nearly a month now, inspecting the damage that the blizzard of '88 had left behind. Both women wiped their hands on their aprons, and Alice set aside the bread dough she had been kneading.

Billy left, and Lettie wrung her hands in distress. The waiting had been almost unbearable, and she and Leena and Alice had knitted and crocheted and baked and thought of a hundred other ways to keep busy. Today they were helping Mae with her baking. They did not want to think about what Luke and the other men might find as they combed the many square miles of the Double L to check the damage.

The winter of '86 to '87 had been a bad one, but they had survived. Tyler had ended up losing two toes to frostbite, but the weather had cleared enough that Dr. Manning had been able to come to the house to operate on Ty himself. When Luke fetched the doctor, he had also brought along a preacher to marry Ty and Alice, and just two months earlier Alice had given birth to Ty's and her first child, a son named Patrick. Leena and Lettie had helped in the delivery themselves, as it had still been impossible to get a doctor to the house then because of the snow.

January of '88 had brought a winter unlike any Lettie could remember since coming to Montana, and that was saying a lot. When some of the Double L men had finally managed to get to Billings to buy a newspaper, their suspicions had been verified by the headlines.

"Worst Blizzards in U.S. History," they read. Not only had the West been struck by the awful snows, but so had the East, crippling snowstorms that had locked whole cities as big as New York into immobile prisons. Many people had either frozen or starved to death. Railroads had been halted, and already a stench was in the air. They knew before Luke and Ty and Nathan even went out to investigate that the smell came from the carcasses of dead cattle finally beginning to thaw. Few living things could have survived the snows that had kept them prisoners in their own house for three months.

"We just have to be grateful for our blessings," she reminded Alice. "Your son was born healthy. Pearl and Lawrence have a baby girl now." They had gotten the letter from Pearl last July, before the awful blizzards. Pearl had named her little girl Anastasia, born in May of '87, and she and Lawrence planned to visit this coming summer. That was something else to be grateful for, let alone the fact that Ty was happier than he had been in