Both his hands were on her now, on her waist, then in her hair. She felt his tongue on hers. He pulled her onto him, so she sat, one leg on either side of him, on his lap. His hands were on her skin, creeping up from her legs to her torso, to the small of her back.
She felt dizzy. She couldn’t breathe. There was a war inside herself.
Fiona! She thought. Granaidh!
They were here. They could walk in at any moment. Anyone from the village could walk in at any moment.
She felt her body pulsing. Her hands were numb, and they began tingling. He’d drawn her back forcefully so that he could look at her, and again the familiarity in his gaze took her aback. She knew him. She knew him from the night before, she let herself think the thought. But then, she knew him from before that. She’d always known him. She felt it in some part of her that she didn’t even know that she had.
She brought her tingling hands to his neck. She could feel his pulse, racing beneath her fingertips. She leaned forward, and laid her forehead on his.
They sat like that for a moment. Elspeth felt the draw toward movement. She wanted to touch, to explore, to learn. But this moment, with all its stillness and closeness, was too precious to disturb.
She felt his hand on her back begin to move, gently, stroking back and forth. She readied herself for the run of blood around her body she knew was coming, and then –
The clang of a pot from another room snapped her head up. For a moment she waited, praying she would not hear –
“Elspeth!” her grandmother’s voice came through the wall, muffled, “come here. I need your help.”
She ran through the possibilities in her mind for a moment. Could she simply not answer? Could she hide? Could she run?
She could not. Her grandmother would come looking for her, and she would find her. Her ankle was much better, but still sore, so even if there had been windows in this room to climb through, she wouldn’t have been able to run far.
Elspeth’s heart sank. She climbed off of him and went towards the kitchen to help her grandmother prepare dinner.
The little church was full. Everyone was there. Elspeth knew she should pay more attention, but she couldn’t focus on anything other than his warm body sitting next to her. She heard them asking questions of Henry. She heard him answer. She heard him defend himself and insist on the truth of the wolf.
She even saw herself stand and defend him, telling the whole village that she had seen the wolf. She heard herself tell the story of it, and how quickly it had dispatched the English soldiers. She did not tell them who the wolf was. She did not tell them of the viciousness she saw in its eyes, nor the kindness there.
Some were convinced. Some were not. It was hard for her to pay attention. She knew that some would leave. She knew that she would stay. She knew that the blacksmith would stay, and that there would be some others. She looked at Henry, and his set jaw, and she knew that however many stayed to defend, it would be enough.
After the meeting, people wandered out into the streets. Several tried to talk to her, but she was in a haze. She walked with Fiona and Granaidh to their house, where the household went to sleep.
Or rather, where Fiona and Granaidh went to sleep, and where Elspeth pretended, for as short a time as she dared, to sleep. The moment she thought it would be safe, she slid out of bed, as quietly as she could so as not to disturb Fiona, slipped on her dress and shoes, and crept from the house.
The night outside was clear, and the ground was drier than it had been the night before. The moon shone brightly and she had no trouble finding her way. The pain in her ankle was only the faintest of inconveniences and hardly even played on her mind.
She had a destination.
Steadily, surely, she walked toward the forest, where she had last seen the wolf. There she sat and waited. The certainty that he would come did not surprise her. It felt inevitable that he would be here, and inevitable that she would wait.
She did not wait long. She did not hear him coming until he was very close and she could see him, so consumed was she with thoughts of earlier that day and what she had felt.
When she did see him, he was bigger than she remembered, but he bent his head down so that she could touch his face. She put her arms around his neck and drew closer to him.
“Please,” she said, “I want to see you.”
Then she blinked, and he was in front of her, her hands still around his neck, the moonlight gleaming on his pale, naked skin.
“But you do see me,” he said. “You always see me.”
Then he kissed her, and she drank in the sweetness of his affection, knowing that however much she got she would never be full. She could feel him against her, and she had never seen a naked man before, but she was not shocked or embarrassed. It was only right that he should be there, and right that he should be naked. And when his hands reached round to undo her dress, and slid it off of her soft, inexperienced body, it was only right that she should be there, naked, against him too.
It was right for him to lay her down, on a patch of soft moss she hadn’t noticed, but he must have known was there for her. And it was only right for them to be together, one breath, one body.
After, they lay on the moss, and looked at the sky and the moon through the branches.
“Why are you helping us?” Elspeth asked out loud, although she felt she knew the answer.
“Because I heard you, at the church yard. And I knew that when you were in pain, I would need to ease that pain. And if you wanted to stay, then I would stay with you.”
She curled up next to him, pulled her dress over them both for warmth, and fell into the deepest sleep she’d ever had.
In the morning, Elspeth woke alone. Henry was gone and she had no memory of him leaving. Only the small tear in the back of her dress convinced her for certain that it hadn’t all been a dream. She put it on, feeling so very alone, and wandered toward the village.
When she got there, she found a changed place. About a third of the people had left their homes, and the rest were terrified, or excited, or a combination of both.
“Where is Henry?” people kept asking her, over and over, and she had no answer for them.
She thought Granaidh would be very cross with her when she finally found her, but to her surprise she was only concerned.
“What’s happened?” she asked her grandmother. “Why is everyone so concerned?”
“There was a man who came in the night. He’d seen the English coming and ran all the way here to warn us. He says they will be here today.”
Elspeth felt her heart begin to race.
“Where is Henry?” her grandmother asked. “Where is the wolf?”
Elspeth had no answer.
They spent the rest of that day in a panic. People came to the house over and over to ask her questions. Had she seen Henry? No, no she had not. Was he coming back? Was he bringing the wolf?
She told them that she was sure, that of course he was. She tried her best to act as certain of this as the ground beneath her feet, but she could tell from the worried looks on their faces that she could not conceal the doubt that had crept into her heart.
What if he had gone? What if he had gotten what he wanted from her and then, like so many words spoken into the night air, disappeared to leave her and her village to their fate?
Facts that she had previously overlooked began springing, unbidden, to her mind. Certainly he had been able to dispatch six terrified soldiers in a forest at night. But then he had had the advantage, hadn’t he? He’d been concealed and they were cowards, anyway, who had run from the battle in the first place and did not even have enough sense between them to find the right direction to rejoin the army.
And the village had so very few men who could even fight. They would do the best they could, but they had been relying on the wolf – a wolf that, Elspeth now saw, would be out of its depth. Surely Henry must have known this. Surely he must have known all these things from the beginnin
g.
Had he never intended to help? Had she been absurd? Had she been blinded by the magic of the situation, of the man who could be a beast, to recognize the truth of what all men – wolf or no wolf – truly were?
Elspeth tried to push these thoughts away. She tried to believe in what she had felt the night before. She tried to summon the certainty she had felt lying on the moss, looking at the shards of sky she could see between the branches. But hope was slippery, and as the hours wore on, became harder and harder to hold on to.
Finally, after a day that seemed so long it must have been a week, there was a figure spotted at the horizon. Elspeth had been in her room, lying on her bed, alternating between utter faith and absolute heartsickness. Fiona came in and got her, and told her to come.
It was a lone figure, large and limping, and impossible to make out at a distance. But Elspeth knew instantly who it was.
The doubt that had plagued her in the afternoon was banished in one glorious instant, and she ran out to meet her wolf with all the energy of a child.
Henry’s wounds were deep, and he did not change to a man. He could not speak to her, but she did not need him to. She didn’t know whether he did not change because he could not change in such an injured state, or because wounds such as these inflicted on a human would surely kill him. She did not need to know.
Rumors spread throughout the village, but no one asked her any questions directly. There were those sent out to investigate, who discovered a band of solders on the road who had been torn to pieces, their banner ripped and bloody, lying in the dirt.
For seven days, the wolf lay on the table in Elspeth’s house, and when Henry walked through the village at the end of that week, no one asked him what had happened. They only greeted him with overly large smiles, and brought food to him as he recovered.
And no one questioned when he did not leave Elspeth’s house once he was healed, and no one questioned when they married, soon later, after such a short time.
The only one who had any further questions for Henry was Elspeth, when, some months later she asked him if he had always intended to fight the English alone as he did.
“Yes,” he had replied, after some time.
“Why would you do such a thing?” Elspeth asked, angrier, even after all this time, than she had a right to be. “Why not fight in the village, where you would have had help. Why go alone?
“That’s simple,” he said. “I would have had help if I had fought in the village, and I would have been safer. But your life would have been at risk, too, not only mine. And I only risk things I can afford to lose.”
Then he kissed her forehead, and they never spoke of the past again, only of the future.
THE END
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I.
“You know,” Buck said, pulling up on the reins of the sorrel gelding and looking over at Karissa. “I’ve sunk every cent I’ve ever made and a hell of a lot of blood, sweat and tears into building this place up. It wasn’t much when my Dad died and left it to me, but I’ve made do with it and built it into something that he’d have been proud of.”
“It’s certainly beautiful.” Even in jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt, Karissa McCall looked the part of an immaculately kept, attorney of a higher social class. Her blonde hair was kept perfectly under the brand new felt hat that she had bought just for the occasion. “It’s so peaceful and that breeze blowing off of the mountain bringing the hint of wildflowers, umm.”
She tilted her head back, closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.
Buck Kaufman was silent for a few minutes, watching the attractive blonde as she enjoyed something of which he held a great deal of pride. She was certainly out of his league, but he couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to hold her in his arms, stroke those silky blonde strands and take in the fragrance of her expensive perfume.
Buck had brought his divorce attorney, Karissa out to the ranch for the day, hoping that it would motivate her to help him hold onto it. 5000 acres of prime grassland with two streams that provided good water and allowed him to produce winter feed along their banks, wandered up off of the plains and up into the edge of the mountains.
Up to that point, it appeared that his plan was working out. She seemed to be enjoying herself and was being swept up into the spirit of “the wind and the wild,” which is how he liked to refer to it. The only drawback was that he was struggling with the fact that his typically sinister outlook on attorneys was slowly changing and she was beginning to become human; a damn fine looking human at that.
“So, you told me that you have 5000 acres that runs right up to the edge of the mountains?” she ventured. “This place must have one hell of a price tag on it. No wonder Denise is going after you so hard.”
That was the end of his fantasies. Just like your typical lawyer to head right back to focusing on the dollar signs. “To me it’s priceless,” he muttered.
“I think I saw a valuation of $15,000,000 in your paperwork?” she ventured.
“That’s just the dollar figure that some assessor put on it,” he replied. He was frustrated that she hadn’t yet caught on to what he was trying to communicate to her. You couldn’t put a dollar amount on something like his ranch. Sure, everything, in the eyes of an assessor, would have a dollar value to it, but the value that he had in the ranch was something that sunk down deep into his soul.
Seeing his frustration, Karissa quickly backtracked. “Yeah, of course, it has a great deal of sentimental value to you that an assessor couldn’t possibly figure into the price.” She was regretting that she had gone in that direction with the conversation. Her problem was that she wasn’t sure how to talk to Buck. They were from two different worlds. In her world, value was always represented with a dollar sign in front of it. Though she could feel that there was something special about Donavon’s Spread; the name, Buck had told her, was given to the place by his grandfather, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on what it meant. What she did know, though putting it into words wasn’t coming to her at the moment, was that making certain that Buck was able to hold on to most if not all of it was becoming a major motivation to her.
She’d been on a horse a few times when she was younger, but hadn’t ridden a great deal, therefore, when Buck had invited her to go out to the ranch and go for a ride with him, she had accepted eagerly. She’d been pretty intimidated by her lack of experience when she first swung her leg over the saddle and took her seat, but since Buck had kept a pretty easy pace going, her confidence in her riding skills had grown quickly.
“Look,” she said, trying to fill the long, awkward silence that had suddenly turned up. “I know what you’re doing and it’s working. I promise that I’m not looking at this place in terms of dollars, but in value. There’s a lot more to value than the numbers behind a dollar sign.”
Buck had tried to conceal his disappointment, but evidently she was able to see right through him. She’d nailed down his feelings in that short statement. Since he and Denise had separated, he’d done nothing but worry about how he was going to hold onto his family’s place. It had been in the possession of three generations before he came along and he wasn’t about to become the one that lost it. Needless to say, he had been pulling his hair out, looking at things from every angle and trying to figure out how Denise was going to play her hand.
“I guess I’m wearing my feelings on my sleeve, huh?” He hoped that the stirring attraction that he’d been feeling for her hadn’t been quite as obvious. He wasn’t in the mood for embarrassing himself.
“Yeah,”
she laughed softly. “You could say that. But that’s not all, Buck. This place is really starting to grow on me.”
“Well, hell,” he chuckled. “By the time this damned divorce is finished and I have to liquidate, you might pick it up for a song.” It was a cowboy’s way to make light of their own difficulties. He’d grown up with that sort of gallows humor all around him and didn’t realize that Karissa might take it as an insult.
“I should hope that I wouldn’t do that badly,” she countered, pushing her lower lip out in something of a pout. The moment she produced that expression, she drew her lip back in. What had possessed her to act like a schoolgirl? Sure, he was attractive and rugged, she’d thought so the minute he walked into the office, but she wasn’t looking for a man, she had a career to think of and goals to achieve. Besides, he probably wasn’t interested in hooking up with someone while the wound from his separation from Denise was still so raw. Why am I even thinking about that right now? She reeled in her feelings.
“I didn’t mean that you won’t do well on my behalf.” He’d just screwed that up. That’s one of the problems that came with two people from so dramatically different backgrounds tried to communicate with one another. Maybe his whole idea of bringing her out to the ranch, other than getting a chance to see how well she filled out a pair of jeans, had been a bad idea. I wouldn’t mind spending a hell of a lot more time riding with her. You better head off thoughts like that, Buck.
Most of the conversation died out from that point on and a somewhat awkward silence lingered around the edges. Neither of them was sure if they were making the other one uncomfortable, or if they were just uncomfortable and projecting their own discomfort onto the other. The more they each tried to analyze it in their own minds; however, the harder it became to try to communicate in any form.
AFRICAN AMERICAN URBAN FICTION: BWWM ROMANCE: Billionaire Baby Daddy (Billionaire Secret Baby Pregnancy Romance) (Multicultural & Interracial Romance Short Stories) Page 42