Chapter 6 #2
“Ah, but alas! I’ve fallen into no stupor. And, as you can see, I’m not on the verge of a heart attack, either.”
“You’ll wind up stabbed in the heart!” she cried, slamming against him again.
“Some men are easier to kill than others.”
He straddled her, his fingers sliding along the length of her bare arms to her wrists, capturing them.
He leaned close to her face. “We’re husband and wife, or we are not,” he told her. “The choice is yours. Say the word, and I will let you up.”
But she didn’t speak. Her eyes glittered with a fury that matched any he had seen in the face of the most savage Crow warrior. She was dead still, staring at him, challenging him. At last she whispered fiercely, “I am not going back.”
He didn’t know what he had expected from her. He didn’t even know exactly what he wanted.
Yes, he did.
He tried to tell himself that it was the whiskey in him, that he was drunk. But he had drunk to dull the sensations in him, the pain for his father, the desire for this woman. Hating her, doubting her, indeed, still wondering what part she had played in his father’s death.
But it didn’t matter.
He wanted her. Wanted her in a way that defied all reason.
It was like a blinding pulse within him, a pulse that quickened its beat with each second that went by.
It seemed like the force of a storm, like that of a hundred ponies tearing over the plain.
More powerful than thought and reason and even pain.
He was seduced as well. She had sold herself to the highest bidder.
No matter how he challenged her, she wouldn’t say the words that would force him to set her free now no matter what rage of raw lust had taken root within his loins.
“Again!” he exclaimed harshly, “I ask you—”
“I will be a wife!” she cried out furiously.
She was trembling, but he didn’t care. He shifted his weight, shoving apart her thighs with the force of his knees, adjusting his buckskin trousers.
The painful swell of his sex lay against the softness of her flesh when he noted her eyes again.
They had closed. Her lips were slightly parted.
Her breasts rose and fell as she gasped for every breath she drew.
He watched her, drawing a hand down the length of her hip and thigh, firmly stroking the smooth dip of her abdomen, then running his palm over the golden thatch of her mound before sliding firmly between her legs to part the tender lips of her sex.
She shuddered fiercely again, her lips moving, no sound coming from them.
He thrust her thighs further apart and felt again the fierce shuddering seize her.
He leaned closer against her, pausing to catch her face in his hand, as he leaned down taut upon her. “Open your eyes!” he commanded.
She did so. Swallowing as she faced him.
That silver fire still with her. But her eyes seemed huge once again.
Luminous. She moistened her lips, wetting them furiously with the tip of her tongue.
She writhed as if to combat the threat of him between her thighs.
Yet she stopped quickly, meeting his gaze, her lashes falling then.
“You said something,” he whispered to her.
She shook her head.
“You spoke. What did you say?”
Her eyes opened again. “I said…”
“Yes?”
“Please.”
“Please what?”
She shook her head, closing her eyes. “Please, just don’t…”
He ground down on his teeth. Defied the savage hunger in himself.
“You can still be free.”
“I…no.”
“Then please…”
She shook her head again. She shifted. The hard, wildly-aroused length of his sex rubbed against her inner thigh. “Please, don’t…”
He frowned. “Hurt you?” he whispered.
She tried to turn away, forcing the tip of his sex intimately against the portals of her own.
She froze, and he felt her body shaking again, rubbing against him, now driving him near to insanity.
But he placed his palm against her cheek, brushing his thumb over her lips.
“I’ll not hurt you,” he heard himself promise huskily. “I’ll do my damnedest not to hurt you.”
He pressed his mouth to her slightly parted lips, opening them further, filling them with the force of his tongue, tasting, stroking, coercing, moving slowly, leisurely at first, lulling…
until he was certain that she responded.
He kept his lips upon hers while he allowed his hands the exquisite freedom to roam over her body.
Touching. Fingertips light upon the flesh of her inner arms, his palms barely touching the tips of her breasts.
Holding, caressing, cradling the weight of them, arousing the peaks once more with a stroke of his palm, the manipulation of his thumb and fingers.
His lips rose from her at last. Trailed along her throat.
Took root upon a swollen, crested nipple.
Played long, slowly, suckling, teasing, his tongue darting against her flesh.
Thunder played havoc in his mind. His body tensed into magnificent knots.
He feared that he would implode with the hunger building inside of him…
She didn’t move. Didn’t protest. She trembled.
At times, little sounds seemed to escape from her, gasps and moans.
Only when he dipped lower against her, his lips skimming her abdomen as he moved his head in a horizontal pattern down the length of her, did her fingers suddenly clench his hair, then release it…
and another sound escaped from her throat.
He moved his hand down her inner thigh, his fingers stroking with a featherlight touch.
With his fingertip, he drew a line that he touched then with the heat of his lips and tongue, feeling the rigid tautness of his own muscles, the straining within him, the desire spiraling with each taste of her.
His fingers burned. His body seemed a roaring inferno.
He brought the line of his touch, and the damp stroke of his kiss behind it, ever higher.
He stroked the soft V of golden blonde hair, parted the outer flesh there, pressed intimately within her.
She stiffened, muscles taut, her body shaking despite her efforts to keep still.
He teased, invaded with a liquid caress, then rose, his fingers still touching her intimately, watching her curiously as he seared within.
Her eyes remained closed. Her fingers were dug into the bed furs with such force that she might have torn the hair from the pelt.
Enough. The thunder within him might well cause his heart to cease to beat within seconds.
He rose again above her. Thrust apart her thighs, which she had instinctively brought together again.
Thrust heedlessly, hungrily within her. Deep, deep within her, being encompassed, the relief of just being inside of her so great that he was both appeased and more wildly aroused and…
He went dead still, his body both burning and frozen, the pounding within his head now something that raged, denying all reason. Denying her innocence.
But he couldn’t deny the physical evidence his own rough force had brought home to him.
Whatever else she might have done, she hadn’t seduced his father into bed. Or at least not this far. Nor had she made her way through life sleeping with any man.
She didn’t cry out. The same reckless courage that had brought her this far kept her silent now.
Her fingers clenched the furs so tightly that her knuckles were white.
Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling above.
She had bit into her lower lip with such fierce determination that a tiny drop of blood rested there now…
His muscles knotted, eased, tensed, contorted again. Reason demanded he withdraw, sanity demanded that he not. He caught her ashen face between his fingers, forcing her to look at him.
He should have whispered something reassuring, said something tender, gentle.
He’d taken a virgin before, a virgin wife at that, and the night had been one filled with laughter and sweet, erotic pleasure for them both.
But they’d both known what they wanted, what they were doing. They’d known one another…
“Damn you!” he whispered.
So much for tender words. But he could not withdraw, would not withdraw. They had come this far. She had insisted on being a wife.
He’d said he wouldn’t hurt her. He hadn’t realized…
“Damn you!” he whispered once again. But he drew her fingers from the fur, threading them through his own, holding her hands rightly, very slowly beginning to move.
He kissed her lips, forcing open her mouth.
As slowly as he moved with the thrust of his sex, he coerced and teased with his kiss against her lips, with the tip of his tongue upon her mouth, throat, breasts.
Until finally her fingers were no longer entwined with his but braced upon his shoulders, his back, moving.
Until it seemed that her lips parted to his demand, that her body arched, her nipples hardened again, her breasts swelled, the length of her form…
Undulated.
Arched. Moved to his.
Caution was lost. The thunder was like a hammer blow, driving him to a relentless, furious, shuddering rhythm.
Heat built within like the rage of a firestorm.
It spiraled throughout him, into her. Her fingers dug into his flesh, sounds tore from her throat.
Her teeth grazed his shoulder, her head arched back.
He grasped her knees, parting her further.
A gasp ripped from her throat, the supple perfection of her form locked around his, rocked, writhed, undulated, moved with and against his…
That supple movement forced him to the explosive brink of climax. He strained to hold himself back, force her ever higher, force from her…
A cry, strangled back, so quickly swallowed.
Yet not so easily hidden in the rigidity of her form before it went limp, the dampness that closed so warmly around his sex, driving him the last few seconds into an explosive, staggering climax, one that brought him thundering into her again and again and once again, his body constricted to a taut line, spilling out the firestorm that had raged and swept within him.
It racked his body, shook it, tensed it, eased it, tensed it…
And then, it was over.
He braced over her, his flesh soaked beneath the clothing he had never found the time to shed.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had known such hunger or such fulfillment, such wanting, and such a volatile climax.
He was unbelievably sated, yet thinking of her alone could trigger the sparks of something deep inside him again, ignite anew the subtle growth of such a wild hunger again. He stared down at her.
She didn’t open her eyes. She had to inhale several times before she could manage to speak, and even then, her words were barely a whisper. “Could you…get off me now?”
He held still for a moment, chagrined, both his temper and a sense of shame he told himself he didn’t have to feel growing.
He couldn’t say how many women he had known, Indian, white, respectable, experienced, just beyond the bounds of innocence.
But he’d never had an encounter end like this, with the woman politely asking him to remove himself from her person.
But then again, he’d never been so incensed as to come to something so very close to force as this. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d offered her every possible way out.
“No, I don’t think so,” he told her.
Her eyes opened. In them he thought he saw confusion, pain, and astonishment as if she’d just gained some startling new knowledge. Which he supposed she had.
“You could have told me you hadn’t engaged in intimate relations before.”
“Intimate relations!” she choked out. “Oh, God, coming from you that sounds so strange.” Fire filled her silver orbs once again.
“You have everything set in your mind. Why in God’s name would I tell you anything?
What you want to know, you can just find out on your own every damned time! ” she promised him vehemently.
She had a way about her. A way of creating a wicked, unbearable rise in his temper and his blood.
He smiled grimly. He smoothed back a tangled lock of her hair, then rose, shedding his tangled clothing at last.
She’d created such a knot within him that he hit the mantle with one boot, the door with the other, the ground with his trousers and shirt.
When he turned back to her, she was seated against the bedpost, furs drawn around her, her arms wrapped protectively around her knees, her eyes wide with alarm at last. Her silver eyes slid over the length of him.
She trembled, flicking her eyes back to his.
“I’ve been a wife, right?” she demanded. “I’m so very tired—”
“You can sleep soon enough. But for the moment…”
“What?”
“Well, I’m curious. I think I want to find out just how long it will take me to arouse you a second time.”
“Arouse me? Oh, you are a conceited and arrogant man. I never—” she began indignantly.
He smiled wickedly. “You liar. You did.”
“No!”
She let out a shriek when he caught hold of her ankles, dragging her down the length of the bed. She brought her fists flying against his chest when he laid his body over hers.
But when he forced his kiss upon her, her arms stole around his neck.
And he was convinced that there was no pain.
Only pleasure.