“I love you, you know,” Kirsten says, and then freezes, unable to believe she’s actually spoken her heart aloud.
“That’s good,” Dakota replies after a moment, gently tugging on the collar of her shirt, “because I love you, too.”
“You…do?” Kirsten’s voice is soft and filled with wonder.
“Mm. I do.”
The gentle tug comes again, and Kirsten goes with it, lowering her head and brushing against Koda’s offered lips.
“So very much,” Koda whispers, deepening the kiss as she helps Kirsten stretch out on her side. Asi gives an affronted grunt, but moves away as the two women settle together, bodies touching and moving along their lengths.
Tracing the tips of her fingers over the delicate whorls of Kirsten’s ear, Dakota deepens the kiss, parting her lips and inviting her inside. Moaning softly, Kirsten accepts the invitation. It’s all she can do not to crawl inside this woman who has so effortlessly stolen her heart, and she growls in frustration as her hands clamp down on the thin material covering Koda’s broad back, stretching and pulling the fabric near to tearing.
Caught up in the emotion of the moment, Dakota allows the passion between them to rise, breasting new heights as her tongue tenderly duels with Kirsten’s, tasting their shared excitement on her palate as the flavor of their kisses changes and grows heady.
Breathing deep through her nose, she deftly begins to bank the fire before it blazes beyond her ability to control. It’s not that she doesn’t want what is happening between them. Far from it; she finds herself wanting it more than she can ever remember wanting anything. But she knows, surely as she can feel the frantic beat of Kirsten’s straining heart against her breasts, that there is a time for everything, and the time for a full exploration of their love is not yet.
The transition from burn to simmer is so seamless that Kirsten doesn’t even protest as Koda softly pulls away. Her eyes flutter open and she smiles, happy beyond knowing. “This is nice,” she purrs, her voice husky and a full octave lower than her normal speaking voice.
“Mm. Very nice.” Tipping her head, she rubs her nose along Kirsten’s, then dips further to steal a soft kiss before pulling away again. “I love you.”
Tears immediately spring to Kirsten’s eyes. Her smile is radiance itself. “You don’t know how it feels to hear you say that.”
Tenderly wiping the tears away with her thumb, Koda leans in for another tender kiss. “I think I might have some idea,” she murmurs, lingering for another moment. She then slides her cheek against Kirsten’s silken skin and holds her in a warm, tight embrace, reveling in the closeness and the love that permeates her soul.
This is right. As right as anything could ever be, even in a world gone totally wrong. She lets the last of her barriers slip free without a parting thought, and opens herself totally to the love this one special woman offers up so easily.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“GOD DAMN YOU all, I want justice for my father!”
“Mr. Dietrich,” Harcourt begins patiently, “we know you’re grieved by the loss of your father. But we have a procedure here—”
“You have a procedure here that’s taking the word of the sons-of-bitches who killed him! He’s not here to speak for himself!”
Koda’s hands clench into fists on her knees, fingers curled so tightly into the palms that her skin shows white and taut above the sharp angles of the bones. All through Manny’s account of finding and freeing Dietrich’s victims, all through Andrews’ corroborating testimony, she has held herself small and quiet behind a barrier of calm, withdrawing into the far places of her mind where her grandfather and Wa Uspewicakiyapi himself have taught her to seek refuge from pain. And in those places is Kirsten.
With a conscious effort, Koda forces herself to ignore the anger battering against the walls of her refuge from without, forces back the rage that burns white-hot just beyond the limit of conscious thought, that requires only a moment’s inattention to burn through. Instead she deliberately recalls the pressure of Kirsten’s body against her own, the generous yielding of her mouth. Deliberately too, she recalls the sense of rightness in their coming together, as if her own journey from her parents’ home, Kirsten’s struggle over half a continent, had found their appointed ends in the snow at Minot.
Everything happens precisely as it should. Precisely.
And where, she wonders, does that come from? Dakota is no fatalist. Nor, she knows, is Kirsten. If the last months have taught her anything, it is that fate is shaped by human will, or by lack of it. Many of the uprising’s victims have died not so much from the androids’ onslaught as from a moment’s unbelieving paralysis. Like Kirsten, she has come to Minot and now to Ellsworth by a series of refusals to be stunned into inaction, by choices to fight against an enemy still unknown. And out of those actions has come the warrior she has felt dormant within her the whole of her life. And out of them, too, this unexpected love, ripening now in its appointed season.
“No!”
The shout breaks her calm, jerking her mind abruptly back into the anger that pulses off Dietrich in waves. With an effort she stifles the rage that rises to meet it: if he did not set the traps himself, then certainly he knew of them, was complicit in the pain and death of every creature caught in them. He stands before the court, his face blotched scarlet, his hand raised as if to strike out at the men and women of the jury panel.
“Sit down, Mr. Dietrich.” Harcourt motions to the uniformed Sergeant still standing at the door of the Judge’s Chambers. “If you persist in this disruption, I will have the Bailiff remove you.
Dietrich’s color remains high, but he pauses for a moment, deliberately lowering his hand to rest at his belt. When he speaks his voice is quieter, though none of the tension has gone out of the corded tendons at his neck. “You heard them. They were robbing his traps. He had a right to defend his property.”
“Given that, item—the Judge ticks off his points one by one on his fingers— leghold traps are illegal; and that, item, trapping of any kind without a license is illegal; and further, that the grey wolf remains a federally-listed endangered species, I’m not sure that the late Mr. Dietrich could lawfully claim any property interest in the fruits of his activities. Now: sit down, sir. Dr. Rivers, please.”
Dietrich resumes his seat as Koda takes up her place beside the table with the projector. As she steps up to the low dais, a murmur runs through the room. Deliberately she turns her eyes away from the crowd. She knows what she will see in their faces: admiration in some, awe in others, contempt in a very few still trapped in the prejudices of an age long dead. It is the same almost everywhere she goes now, except for the clinic or among the men and women who have stood shoulder to shoulder with her under fire and who give her the respect of one warrior to another, no less and no more.
“I must warn the court that some of what I have to show you is graphic and disturbing,” she says as she unpacks the laptop and attaches the cable to the projector. “Some of these slides are from photographs taken by Lieutenant Rivers and Lieutenant Andrews at the sites of the traps and depict injured animals in pain. Others show victims that did not survive.”
She begins with the snapshot of the coyote, which draws a nervous giggle from the back of the room. Keeping her voice even, she says, “Among the Lakota, Coyote is a trickster, famous for getting himself into difficulties. Many of those adventures are funny, with the joke on Coyote himself. But this,” she says as she turns to face the audience, “this is an individual animal, not a myth or Coyote-with-a-capital-C in a traditional story. If you look more closely, you will see that he has chewed his own tail half through in a effort to escape.” A flick of the switch zooms in on the wound, with teeth marks clear on the small vertebrae. “A little more closely, and you can see the infection that might well have killed him even if he had succeeded in freeing himself.”