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seamstress some time in the future and thus bettering herself and her surroundings. She could hightail it for the wilds past the Mississippi and would most likely be able to lose herself there. But she didn’t want to do that. She liked having four walls around her and a fire in the hearth. Perhaps she was too soft and should have given that idea more thought, but she knew she wouldn’t last very long in the West.
    So here she was, lying next to a man she barely knew who was supposedly her husband. She kept thinking of him as such to hold him at bay within her mind, even if she could never do that with any success physically. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been completely nude for any reason, yet he had taken a position right next to her as if they’d been sleeping like this for years.
    As he slept, he repositioned himself a little, and she found her hand coming into contact with something long and thick that she couldn’t place. She wasn’t trying to touch it, it was reaching out for her, growing thicker and harder as his hips began to pump slightly, moving that part of him back and forth against her palm.
    Thoroughly mortified despite the fact that she didn’t really know what was going on, Hannah made several valiant attempts to sit up, deliberately waking him.
    They were so close that she heard him swallow before his sleepy voice rumbled into her ear, “Where do you think you’re going?”
    She didn’t have a ready answer for that question, but one fell off her lips nonetheless. “I have to use the out house.” It wasn’t the best solution to the matter, she was sure, as she colored violently once the words were out of her mouth, but it would get her away from him for a while.
    Reluctantly, he removed his arm and let her get up. Hannah began to rummage around in the small chest of drawers for a nightgown, but found him carefully gathering her arms and closing the drawer. She blustered. “I have to have something to wear to go outside.”
    “Who’s going to see you?” he asked, having come much more awake than she had wanted him to. Wolf reached down and took the quilt off the bed. “Wear this, if you have to.”
    Hannah shrugged the quilt over her shoulders, and it more than covered her. “I do have to, thank you very much.” She stalked to the door but paused with her hand on the knob as she realized that he was following her as he rubbed his eyes. “I really can make it to the outhouse by myself,” she complained, letting her tone leave no doubt that she thought him following her out there was patently ridiculous.
    “I’m quite sure you can, Madame, but you’ve slipped away from me once and I don’t intend to have to trail you to Canada. Let’s get going so that we can get back to sleep.”
    The man was going to send her round the bend, she knew it! Hannah seethed the whole way out, the entire time on the pot, and then the cold trip back. The quilt hid what she wanted it to, but it wasn’t the best source of warmth, although she thought the severe humiliation of having him standing outside while she made use of the facilities would have been enough to keep her warm for years.
    When they got back into the cabin, he took the quilt from around her and put it back on the bed, standing next to it and staring at her, as if issuing a silent command.
    Hannah pursed her lips. She did not want to get back into that bed with him. She also did not want to be treated to another session over his lap. She thought if he so much as looked at her bottom threateningly that she was going to obey him instantaneously, and that thought made her sadder than anything else that had happened this evening.
    She didn’t want to be broken, by him or anything else. She’d always been a fighter – first for her sisters’ against her sometimes violently drunken father, and then for herself as she’d made her way in a new land. But within the space of a few hours, he’d made her want to comply with him,