He turned from smoothing the garments and looked at her reclining there in the soapy water, curls of steam rising from the tub’s still surface, soppy ringlets of her blond hair turned dark, pasted against the side of her face as her eyes watched him approach, then looked away to stare at the ceiling.
Yes, he thought, the Mormon faithful. They would once more respond to a charismatic leader. They could not fail to respond to his power once he made his play against Young.
As big a man of towering bulk as he was, Usher slipped into the tub with barely a ripple, settling back against the side, where he took up one of her feet and kneaded the sole of it with his thumbs. Her eyelids always fell when he did that—perhaps in some hedonistic response to the sheer pleasure of it, perhaps because she realized what always came next.
After kneading the sole of her other foot, Jubilee brought the woman’s feet together at his groin, stroking his soft underbelly with her wrinkled toes, working the feet downward, ever downward until he had them both pressed around his hardening flesh. Up and down, slowly, deliciously slow he moved her feet along his shaft in that warming womb of soapy water, studying her half-lidded eyes as he brought himself to a full erection.
Most Mormon women were flannel-mouthed and all too often kept their legs locked together so that a man could never have any randy fun for fun’s own sake. But not this one.
He could never think of giving her up.
A year after Jubilee’s army first came to winter in Cedar City, Brigham Young himself had given Usher’s father the directive to forward a message for the elder’s son, in whatever manner he could contact Jubilee:
Little did the Prophet know what needs this woman truly satisfied in Jubilee Usher.
Oh, Young made much of the fact that in February of 1870 Utah had followed Wyoming’s 1869 lead in granting women full suffrage rights. But in this realm of the Church Empire women served their greatest function not as political tools in the electoral process—but as repositories of future Saints. It was through the woman’s power to conceive, carry, and give birth to babies that the Mormon faithful grew. Evermore were the disembodied spiritual star-seeds required to find earthly, temporal homes among the Latter-day Saints. A woman’s greatest role on this earth, her spiritual gift, lay in giving birth to a baby where would rest another wandering, disembodied soul come home at last to Zion.
What, after all, was more important now? Jubilee wondered. After all these years of building and grooming his army? Should he obey Brigham Young and abandon the woman?
Damn that heretic who had allowed his feet to wander away from the path that led to the throne of Almighty God!
Usher took one of the woman’s hands and wrapped the soft, wrinkled fingers around his oak-hard shaft, holding that hand in both of his as he worked hers up and down, sensing the approach of climax.
Or, Usher thought as he brought himself to full arousal, in the end was he called upon by the Almighty Himself to challenge the false Prophet?
This woman was here of a purpose. And here she would stay.
There would come a day when he had it all: the throne of power in Zion and this woman there beside him.
Closing his eyes as he began to erupt in the warm, soapy water, furiously dragging her hand up and down the length of his hardened flesh, Usher trembled slightly.
She was the only weakness he allowed himself.
His flesh throbbed at the boiling surface of the bath water.
He would kill all who attempted to take her from him.
His heart hammered at his temples.
Jubilee Usher would strip away all obstacles that stood in his road to achieving leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
And he would joyfully kill any man—Prophet or no—who dared separate him from the woman he loved.
Not just kill him … but revel in that man’s destruction.
30
IT SEEMED THE wind had howled for days, the frozen icy snow driven against the crusty side of the buffalo-hide lodge, rattling like hailstones against a hollowed log.
It was February. The heart of winter on the central plains.
She was alone again.
