And she was not that dream.
With an inarticulate cry she tried to push away his hands. It was like pushing on warm stone.
“It’s too late to be shy,” he said flatly, ignoring her attempts to stop him from unwrapping her breasts. “Hold still while I get this wet stuff off you.”
“Let go of me.”
The quality of her voice was chilling. His hands froze in the act of unwrapping her.
“Janna, what’s wrong?”
His voice was gentle but she didn’t hear that, or the emotions churning just beneath his control. She heard only her own memories, his voice echoing and reechoing in her mind as he listed all her shortcomings as a woman—nothing to offer a husband, too unskilled to be a mistress, good only for the male need that built up inexorably when no other woman was around.
“Little one?” he asked, tipping her chin up and brushing a kiss over her lips. They were as cold as her voice had been. “What did I do to make you so angry with me?”
When he would have kissed her again, she jerked her head away. “Don’t touch me. I don’t feel like being your whore tonight.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Ty’s tightly held emotions exploded into a fury that was unlike any he had ever felt. He stopped trying to peel off layers of wet cloth and grabbed Janna’s shoulders instead.
“Don’t say something like that about yourself! Do you hear me, Janna Wayland? You are not a whore.”
Angry, ashamed, defiant, she stood shivering within his grasp. “Just what would you call it?”
“We’re…lovers.”
“I don’t think so,” she said distinctly. “To be someone’s lover suggests a certain affection mixed in with the lust. I’m not your lover. I’m a convenience until you take Lucifer and go off to buy your silk—”
“Don’t say it,” Ty interrupted savagely. “I’m sick to death of having those words flung in my face.”
“Then stop flinging them in mine.”
“I’ve never—”
“The hell you haven’t,” she interrupted, her voice as savage as his. “‘I’ll have my silken lady or I’ll have none at all for longer than it takes to pleasure myself,’” she quoted, each word clipped. “‘You’re the least female female I’ve ever seen.’ Then you said that Cascabel looked more like a mesquite bush than I looked like a woman, and the comparisons didn’t stop after you had me, either. You couldn’t wait to tell me that it was a woman you’d needed, not me.”
Ty was took shocked to speak.
Her voice broke, then steadied as words rushed out. “And then you told me that my virginity was all I had to offer to a husband because I had no family, no profession, no money. You said that you had ruined me, because now I wasn’t good enough to be a wife and wasn’t educated enough to be a mistress and that meant that I wasn’t good enough to be anything but a ‘toy of many men, not one.’ That’s a whore in any man’s language.”
“Janna—my God, I never meant—”
“I’m not finished,” she said, cutting across his horrified words. “Or maybe I should say you’re not finished. You’ve had a lot to say about my shortcomings as a woman. As woman hungry as you were, I couldn’t even seduce you. You said, ‘Sugar, you don’t have the least idea how to seduce a man. A woman seduces a man with rustling silks and—’”
His hand clamped across her mouth, cutting off her bitter recitation of his words.
“You don’t understand,” he said urgently. “I didn’t mean any of that to belittle you. Not after we made love.”
The mute defiance of her eyes and the hot rain of her tears said that she had understood him all too well.
“Janna,” he whispered, kissing her eyelashes, tasting her tears, “please believe me. I never meant the words as an insult to you. You’re a young girl alone in the world and I seduced you, knowing I shouldn’t. That’s all the words meant. My shortcomings, not yours.”
She trembled as she felt his caresses and soft words stripping away her anger, revealing the despair that was the other side of her fury. Nothing he had said or could say would change the heartbreaking reality that she was not the silken lady of her lover’s dreams.
“Do you believe me?” Ty asked, the words as soft as the repeated brush of his lips over Janna’s eyelids, her cheeks, her mouth. “I never meant to belittle you. Satin butterfly...believe me...I never meant...”
Gentle words became tender kisses, which lingered and deepened until Ty’s tongue touched Janna’s for just an instant. Then he withdrew.
“You’re so cold you’re shivering,” he said huskily.
With a volatile mixture of despair and tenderness and desire, she waited for him to suggest the obvious way to warm her.
Ty looked from Janna’s clear, fathomless eyes to the fire whose flames were licking against a huge wall of stone. “And that fire has a lot of rock to warm before it will do us any good.” Suddenly he smiled. “But there’s a better way.”
Her answering smile was bittersweet as Ty’s hands went to the soggy material that was still wrapped around her breasts. She could refuse him when she was in the grip of anger, but she could never refuse the man who had kissed her so gently just moments before.
When he saw the sad acceptance of her smile, he felt as though a knife were turning within his body. He knew that he could have her now, that she would give herself to him once more with all the sensual generosity that had been such a marvel each time he had experienced it.
But this time, after the shattering ecstasy had passed, she would believe herself a whore once again.
Nothing Ty could say would change her mind, for he had said too much already, heedlessly, not knowing that his words were wounding her. He had never meant to strip her pride away. But he had, and he finally knew it.
Too late.
Janna felt the world tilt as Ty picked her up and carried her away from the fire. She made a startled sound and threw her arms around his neck.
“It’s all right. I won’t drop you.”
Although his voice was as gentle as his kisses had been, in the moonlight his face was a portrait composed of harsh planes and angles, and the line of his mouth was as sad as hers had been. At first the clammy fabric of his shirt made her shiver with renewed chill. Caught between two bodies, the cloth quickly warmed, and so did she.
Neither of them spoke while he walked down the path that led to the hot spring. As the stone ramparts closed in and the valley narrowed, the temperature rose because of the heat radiated by the hottest pool. He stopped well short of the first pool, choosing instead the one they called the Tub.
There he knelt and lowered her into the water without bothering to remove the rest of her clothes. She made a long sound of pleasure as the water’s heat penetrated the chill that had come from hours of riding through the storm with only the haphazard protection of the poncho to turn aside the cold rain.
“That feels wonderful,” Janna murmured.
With a sigh she sank up to her chin in the water, all but disappearing beneath the veils of steam lifting from the pool’s surface. Automatically she searched out the water-smoothed ledge that she usually half floated and half lay on while she soaked in the pool’s heated water. Closing her eyes, she eased down the ledge to make room for him to join her.
When minutes passed and there was no splash or displacement of water from his entry into the pool, she opened her eyes.
She was alone.
“Ty?” she called softly.
No one answered.
“Ty?” This time her call was louder. “There’s room here for both of us. You don’t have to wait to get warm.”
Words that she couldn’t distinguish came from the direction of camp. She listened intently but no other sounds came. She started to get out of the pool, only to begin shivering immediately. Experience told her if she stayed in the pool for a long enough time her body would absorb so much heat that the walk back to the campfire wouldn’t chill her, even in the middle of
winter.
She took off her remaining clothes, slid back into the pool and let the hot water claim her body once more. Eyes closed, half-floating in the gently flowing water, she wondered why he hadn’t gotten into the pool with her. Surely he had to be as cold as she was, for he hadn’t even had the protection of the makeshift poncho against the rain and wind.
Gradually she realized that she was no longer alone. She opened her eyes and saw him sitting cross-legged at the edge of the pool, fully clothed, smiling as he watched her. She didn’t know that her answering, half-shy smile was another knife of regret turning within him. She only knew that for an instant he looked so sad that tears burned behind her eyes.
“Ty?”
“I’m here, little one.”
Janna didn’t hesitate or withdraw when Ty bent over the pool. She turned her face toward him, expecting to be pulled into his arms for a kiss that was as steamy and deep as the hot spring itself.
“Close your eyes and hold your breath,” he said huskily.
She blinked in surprise, then did as he asked.
“Now go under the water.”
Saying nothing, she moved down the ledge until she slipped beneath the veils of mist and water. When she surfaced again he was waiting for her with a mound of soft, fragrant soap in his palm. The haunting scent of summer roses expanded through the steamy air.
“No wonder your backpack was so heavy I could hardly drag it,” she said. “You must have cleaned Preacher out.”
The white curve of Ty’s smile gleamed in the moonlight. “It had been a long time since I’d been in a store with a poke of gold to spend.”
Soon Ty’s strong fingers were working the soap through Janna’s hair until soft mounds of lather gathered and dropped to the water, only to float away downstream like tiny ghost ships in the moonlight. She closed her eyes and luxuriated in the unprecedented pleasure of having someone wash her hair.
“Ready to hold your breath again?”
She nodded even as she sank beneath the gently steaming water once more. When she emerged he was waiting with more fragrant soap. He lathered her hair again, working slowly, enjoying the feel and scent of the soap, savoring the pleased curve he had brought to her lips, a smile that was untinged by sadness. It was many minutes before his fingers reluctantly released her soft, rose-scented hair.
“Hold your breath.”
Smiling, Janna held her breath and slipped into the pool’s seamless embrace. When she came up again her hair was free of soap, yet the fragrance of roses lingered.
Ty inhaled deeply, letting the scent caress his senses. He dipped into the pot of soft soap once more before he began washing the rest of her as gently as though she were a child. The hard rise of her nipples beneath his palms told him that she was a woman, not a child, but he forced himself to continue bathing her without lingering over the breasts that were silently begging for his caresses.
His hands didn’t pause in their slippery travel from her ribs to her hips. He tried to bathe her sleek legs with the same, almost impersonal touch he had used on her shoulders. He succeeded until he came to the triangle of hair that was glittering midnight now but had been brushed by fire in the hushed twilight when he had first undressed her.
As his long fingers began washing the warm mound at the apex of her thighs, she trembled and made a broken sound.
“Hush, little one,” he murmured, ignoring the doubled beating of his own heart. “At least you won’t have to hold your breath to rinse off. I’ll be able to do it for you.”
Janna’s answering smile lasted only an instant before the intimacy of Ty’s touch called another small cry from her lips. He made the same kind of meaningless, reassuring, almost purring sound he had so often used on Lucifer.
“It’s all right,” he said softly. “I’m not going to take you again. I’m just bathing you. Do you mind that so very much?”
“It’s…no one has ever…”
Her words fragmented into an involuntary sound of pleasure as his fingers moved between her legs, washing and setting fire to her in the same sliding motions.
Despite his fierce desire, Ty’s smile was gentle. “I’m glad. I’ve never bathed a woman before.” He started to add that he had never wanted to, but she cried out and he remembered the past night, her innocence ripped away, and his repeated, urgent penetrations of her untouched body. “Are you sore, darling? Am I hurting you now?”
She tried to speak, couldn’t, and shook her head instead, sending wavelets lapping against the sandy rim of the pool.
“Are you sure?”
She nodded, making more tiny waves.
“Cat got your tongue?”
The lazy, sensual humor in Ty’s voice made Janna smile just before she stuck out her tongue. As she had hoped, he pulled her halfway from the pool even as he bent to kiss her. And the kiss was what she had longed for, a sharing as hot and deep as the pool itself.
“I’m getting you wet,” she said when he finally released her, letting her slide back into the heated water.
“The rain already took care of that. Open your legs, satin butterfly. I don’t want to leave any soap on that soft, soft skin.”
The swirling motions of the water as Ty rinsed Janna made heat shimmer up through her body. She smelled the haunting fragrance of roses again when he scooped a bit more soap onto his palm.
“Wash your hair once for cleanliness, twice for beauty. Isn’t that what mothers tell their daughters?” he asked.
“Is that what mothers tell daughters?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” she whispered, shivering in anticipation.
Again his hand slid and pleasured, skimming over her, sensitizing her until her breath was a husky sigh. When he pressed apart her thighs, she gave herself willingly, shivering with each hot swirl of water rinsing her, crying out helplessly when his finger began to ease into her warmth. Instantly he stopped.
“Was that a cry of pain?” he asked huskily.
“No.”
The word became a moan as he stole tenderly into her. The satin flutter of her response tore a barely throttled groan from him. He didn’t know how he had borne being without her all the long hours of the day—or how he would be able to bear not having her again day and night without end.
“Satin butterfly,” he whispered, withdrawing from her, his hand trembling.
He lifted her from the water and laid her in the center of the blanket he had brought back to the pool. Steam rose from her body even as it did from the water itself, veiling her in silver mist. He folded over the sides of the blanket until she was covered snugly. With long, leisurely sweeps of his hands over cloth, he dried her. When she would have helped, he captured her hands, kissed them and tucked them along her sides beneath the blanket once more.
“Let me,” he said huskily, peeling back the edges of the blanket until her nipples were just barely uncovered.
“Yes,” Janna whispered, feeling herself tighten as she remembered the pleasure of Ty’s mouth loving her.
But it was his hands that came to her breasts, caressed them, plucked at their rosy tips until her back arched in response to the currents of pleasure pouring through her. She closed her eyes and gave herself to the shimmering sensations her lover’s hands called from her body. Her teeth sank into her lower lip, biting back the cries that came when his mouth caught one nipple and suckled until a bubble of pleasure burst within her. When his hands skimmed down her body and pressed between her legs, she shifted, allowing him the freedom of her body.
Her reward was a love bite that made pleasure expand through her until she could hold no more and sultry heat overflowed, merging her scent with that of roses. He groaned beneath the redoubled violence of his own arousal. He would have given his soul to take her while she melted around him, but he knew it wasn’t his soul that would be forfeited.
It would be hers.
She trembled as he kissed and licked and nuzzled the length of her torso, smoothing her legs ap
art as he had in the pool. This time there were no hot swirls of water to caress her, only the heat and textures of her lover teasing the humid softness that his fingertips had first discovered.
The first gliding touch of his tongue brought a startled cry from her. It was answered by a reassuring murmur and a kiss both tender and hotly intimate. She tried to say his name, but all that came out was a whimper of shock and pleasure. She started to sit up, only to be impaled by a shaft of ecstasy when her lover captured and teased the violently sensitive nub that had been hidden between soft folds of skin. A sound came from deep in her throat, protest and extraordinary pleasure combined.
His hands flexed, holding her captive and sensuously kneading her thighs at the same time.
“Don’t pull away,” he said in a low voice. “I won’t hurt you. I just want to...love you.” Slowly he turned his head from side to side, caressing her with his breath, his stubble-roughened cheeks, his mouth. “You’re so sweet, so soft, so warm. I’ll be gentle with you. Let me...”
She didn’t answer, for the hunger and passionate intimacy of his caresses had taken from her the ability to think, to form words, to speak. Her breathing disintegrated into ragged gasps as she felt her body begin a slow, sensual unraveling that had no end, no beginning, just a timeless, ravishing moment in which pleasure burst and grew and burst again, incandescent sensations rippling through her body until she moaned and moved helplessly, totally captive to the man and the ultimate instant of pleasure.
And still the moment and the unraveling and the sweet ravishment continued.
His name burst from her lips in a cry of protest and pleasure, for she hadn’t known that ecstasy was the mythic phoenix, rising newborn from the steamy ashes of sensual completion. She rose with the phoenix, spiraling higher and higher until she screamed at the violent currents of pleasure searing through her, burning through flesh and her mind, leaving her soul as naked as her body.
Elizabeth Lowell Page 24