by Maren Smith
His eyes flashed, growing so dark they almost seemed black. “You’re lucky then, I guess, since it’s not a real marriage.”
“I thank God for it! Parnell is a prince compared to you! I can’t wait to get back to him!”
“Good!” he snapped.
“It’s not good!” she sneered. “It’s great!”
His face as dark as a thundercloud, Takura snapped around and stalked away from her, leaving Levina holding onto the tree to keep from collapsing straight to her knees. She struggled to stop crying, to slow her ragged breathing and stop shaking in every wildly trembling inch of her. In the dim and infinitely more composed recesses of her mind, she already regretted the things she’d said. This wasn’t good; it certainly wasn’t great. In fact, she couldn’t for the life of her think how any of this could possibly get worse.
A sudden bright flash of lightning lit up the shadows of the jungle, followed by an earth-shaking crack of thunder. The skies opened up then, and within seconds, they were both drenched.
CHAPTER EIGHT
They walked in mud ankle deep. Behind him, Levina slipped, falling to her knees twice. Considering how hard she’d landed, he knew her shins must be filthy and bruised, but Takura refused to look back. He just hacked at the overgrowth with that poorly-mended machete, the blade once more fitted into its handle and tied there with a strip of cloth cut from his bloody shirt sleeve. Between the rain and his injured arm, their progress slowed to a virtual crawl. Even so, Levina struggled to keep pace with him but his pride refused to let him slow down. The sooner they got to that flower, the sooner they could return to civilization where he intended to collect his baby-sitting fee and put her spoiled little rich ass on the first packet back to America.
Why had he said that about her, that she couldn’t do anything right? Getting stabbed might be slightly her fault, but the rest of it wasn’t true. She wasn’t useless, either. Naïve, maybe. Foolish, definitely. Almost as foolish as this fiancé of hers. What sort of man would let a woman like Levina wonder off on her own in the jungle? By her own admission, he didn’t know she was here, although that kind of excuse didn’t hold much water with Takura. If Levina were his, he’d have made it his business to know where she was. He’d have made proper arrangements and then he’d have gone with her. He never would have left her alone long enough to get into this kind of trouble—Montague and Thiago, and trekking through the jungle in search of what? A flower?
For the life of him, he couldn’t think of any plant being worth all this.
Levina seemed to think it was.
He should apologize for saying what he had.
And yet, he didn’t. He just kept walking, listening as she stumbled along behind him, arresting yet another fall by grabbing onto some branches. She was breathing heavily, now. He ought to stop and let her rest awhile. It would be dark soon, and when they reached the next bend in the Rio Negro, whose coffee-colored waters he could already hear flowing through the overhanging vegetation a few dozen yards ahead, just beyond the steep embankment they’d been skirting for the last half mile, then they’d be crossing into Jivaro territory. Already he could feel the fine hairs prickling at the back of his neck. They should start looking for somewhere safe—and preferably dry—to hole up for the night. The last thing he wanted to do was stumble into a hunting (or worse, raiding) party after dusk.
He reached out to catch a blocking branch and his shoulder twinged. He hacked through the netting vines anyway, stomping down the vegetation enough to gain a few more feet of passage, and then stopped.
Levina trudged to a dutiful halt just behind him and stood silently waiting for him to continue. He could all but feel her accusing eyes burning into his shoulder blades.
“We’ll rest here,” he said.
“I’m fine,” she said tersely.
“Fine.” It was amazing how quickly her tone could spark off his temper, but he’d racked up enough regrets for one day. He had to swallow hard to keep from saying anything else to add to that already sizeable list. “You may not need to rest, but I do.”
He cast her a dark frown over one shoulder and then found a root protruding high enough out of the mud to sit on.
Her angry eyes followed him, then drifted down to his wounded shoulder, and then she looked away. She walked a short distance away and sat down on another root, arms folded across her chest to wait.
“You’re a piece of work,” he muttered. As far as apologies went, that didn’t even come close.
She glared at him first, and then looked away again.
She was soaking wet. They both were. Her long hair was plastered to her head and shoulders in ropy copper tangles. Her shift clung to her, outlining her curves in ways that made it hard not to think about kneeling in front of her, her naked hips cradled in his hands and every soft, feminine aspect of her, cloaked behind a downy thatch of red curls, right at his eye level. She’d looked good, wearing only that fiery blush. She’d smelled good too, all feminine musk and budding arousal.
Her eyes were red-rimmed now. She had dirt on her cheeks and her nose, and her arms were polka dotted in more bug bites than he cared to count, but she still looked good. It was really kind of too bad that neither one of them could stand the other right now.
And whose fault was that?
Takura rubbed his face before slapping his hands back down into his lap.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally, if for no other reason than to hopefully bring an end to the heavy anger hanging between them. “I have no idea why I said what I did. It wasn’t true and I didn’t mean it. You’re not useless.”
“I’m not a menace or a plague either,” she said testily, not at all appeased.
“No,” he said, rubbing his aching shoulder. “No, you’re not.”
“And you never should have spanked me,” she pressed.
“That’s the only thing I’m not sorry for,” he snapped, all hints of reconciliation vanishing from his tone. “You hired me to be your guide, to bring you safely through this unforgiving hell and back to civilization again in one piece. I can’t do that when you insist on venturing off on your own. You did it because you were in a snit and for no other reason than to get back at me. Don’t deny it. That’s all that stunt back there was; you trying to get back at me for what I said, never mind the danger to either one of us.”
Levina flushed, and she made no effort to deny anything. “That’s still no way to treat your wife, real or otherwise.”
“The first time my ‘real’ wife does what you did, I’ll not only bare her ass, I’ll use my belt.” Takura cast his glare as far away from her as he could turn his head, not wanting her to see the frown that pulled at his mouth just at the thought of her faceless fiancé. “Your prince Parny might smother your misbehaviors in hugs and kisses; I’d rather keep you alive.”
Levina shifted, folding and refolding her hands in her lap, a decisively guilty look pulling at her damp features. They were both quiet; Takura struggled to swallow past his jealousy at the mental image of some distant white man folding a melting Levina into his princely embrace. The image refused to be banished.
“Parnell would not have kissed me,” Levina eventually admitted. “He…” She looked at him, and then quickly away again. “He probably would have deemed that worthy of two good licks. Maybe even four.”
“You keep saying that.” He thought of her, half naked and intoxicated on chicha drink, leaning in to flick at him with the tip of her pink bedeviling tongue. Once there, that image completely overwhelmed the first. Great. Now he couldn’t get that out of his head, either. “What exactly does that mean, two good licks?”
“Parnell, he…” Levina shifted again, a slow flush burning across her sunburned cheeks as she stole awkward peeks at him and then away again. Her fingers knotted together, tight in her narrow lap, the knuckles whitening. “He has a…a great fondness, you see…for the cane.”
Takura stared at her, his frown deepening. “He canes you?”
“How civilized,” he said flatly, for the first time heartily wishing her fiancé were here. He would have loved to get his hands on the man.
Her eyebrows beetled, and that blunt criticism toward her fiancé re-ignited sparks of her temper. “As if you have any room to be so disapproving. You’ve already admitted your preference for belts. Frankly, I don’t see how that’s any better.”
“This is my preference,” Takura held up his right hand.
She looked at it, and something he couldn’t quite read flittered across her features, taking most of her anger with it before it disappeared. Twin spots of colors darkened her already red-stained cheeks. Her fingers clenched tight in her lap again and then she squirmed, shifting tenderly on the root she sat upon.
He smiled grimly. “When my…wife—” Her eyes flicked back to his. “—leaves me no other recourse, then she’s going to feel every ounce of my displeasure in the repeated claps of this hand across her bottom. But she is going to feel it while I am holding her; over my knee, bent under my arm, or lying across our marriage bed—wherever that might be. Canes are cold and impersonal. They teach their lessons at arm’s length, and that’s someplace I never want the woman I love to be. She’ll never suffer that kind of instruction alone. Hands—” Takura waggled his fingers and she looked at them again. “—are intimate and very personal. So are hairbrushes. And when the offence warrants severity, so is the belt. But, I’ll still hold her while I wield it, even if all I can hold are her hands up and out of the way. From beginning to end, through the tears and the shame and the worst of the pain, my wife will always feel me holding her and suffering the strokes with her.”
Levina looked frozen. For a long time, she barely seemed to breathe. “How noble,” she finally said, seeming to shake herself out of whatever memories his words had evoked.
“It can be,” Takura agreed, ignoring her less than generous implication.
“How would you know when it doesn’t actually hurt you?”
“You think it doesn’t?”
Startled, she met his dark eyes, but couldn’t hold them for very long. Dropping her eyes to her lap, she began to pick flecks of dirt from her shift. When she ran out of real ones, she turned her attention to the imaginary. “Is that w-why you stopped…?”
Too soon. She bit her bottom lip, not quite brave enough to say those words, but he heard them anyway.
“No.” He waited until her nervous gaze came back to his. “I stopped spanking you because until that moment you had no idea what the consequences of your actions would be.” He felt a sharp stab sink into his chest, moving through him, twisting in his guts, but he made himself say it anyway. “And because you don’t belong to me.”
“No, I don’t.” She folded her hands tight in her lap, her knuckles whitening all over again. She took two hesitant breaths before she could look at him again. She tried to smile, but her voice was trembling. “Do you know what they call me back home?”
“I’ve always assumed princess.”
She tried to laugh, but he could find no hint of humor in the sad notes. “No, I…I’m Jinxie. Because no matter what I do, it turns into a mess.”
Takura frowned, but she didn’t seem to notice. She simply held up her hands, a helpless shrug that indicated the jungle all around them.
“See?” She clasped her hands in her lap again. “We’re lost, we’re dirty, we’re tired. We’re half-eaten by mosquitos and your boat is on the bottom of the river. I don’t know h-how I…” Her voice was getting softer and her bottom lip began to quiver. “How I could ever h-have thought…I could do s-something so—so foolish and—and important and dangerous!”
Takura stood up when she tried to hide her mouth behind her hand, but twin tears were already rolling down her cheeks and she just didn’t have enough hands to hide it all. She bent when he started toward her, bowing under the weight of her misery until her forehead almost touched her knees.
“Everyone is going to be so disappointed in me,” she wept. “I can hear it now, ‘Oh Jinxie!’ All said in varying tones of appalled disapproval.”
Takura sat down on the root beside her, folding his arm around her small shoulders and pulling her back against him. She came with very little encouragement, crawling into his lap and burying her tear-streaked face against the side of his neck. He could feel the heat emanating from her hot little bottom, burning into his thighs. Her fingers clutched at his shirt, and each shaky breath she cried ended in tiny hiccupy puffs against his chest. She fit into his arms so perfectly and yet, as unhappy as she was, all he could think was how much he liked the feel of her there.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, stroking the gentle slope of her back. “Those that matter, won’t hold a grudge. And your—” It left a bad taste in his mouth, but he managed to say it anyway. “—your Prince Parny will be happy enough once you hand him that flower.”
“You shouldn’t call him that.”
It was the nicest thing Takura could think of to call him.
Sniffling, Levina shook her head. “It’s not true anyway. He’ll say I’ve disappointed him, and then he’ll look for a suitable cane.” She raised her head at that, brushing the wet tangles of her hair back from her face as she gave the brush around them a forlorn look. “I guess that’s one good thing about being lost in a jungle. There’s never a shortage of sturdy sticks.”
“I’ll break his nose if he tries.” He tried to keep his voice gentle, but he wasn’t at all joking.
Apparently, Levina thought he was. The first hint of a real smile tugged at her lips as she gazed up at him, her eyes so big and green that any man would be hard pressed not to fall inside them and be lost forever.
“Thank you for making me feel better,” she said. “Someday, when you get married for real, you’re going to make one really lucky lady a truly wonderful husband.”
Takura smiled back, trying his best to pretend he couldn’t feel that knife twisting in his gut. “Your Parnell is getting better than he deserves.”
Her smile broadened and she sat up a little straighter. “Really?”
“Really.”
Shifting to face him more fully, she touched her hand to his uninjured shoulder and then leaned in. To kiss his cheek, he realized, if only at the last moment he hadn’t moved to intercept and captured her soft mouth with his. There was no denying she could be a pain in the ass at times, but she was his pain in the ass. And in that moment, she tasted just like an angel—salty from her tears; sweet in the hesitancy with which she yielded herself to him. One tender caress of her lips became two, and then three, and neither pulled away. Not when he brought his hand up to cup her cheek. Not even when he parted his lips, coaxing her to do the same.
Tender gratitude gave way to something more, something hungry. It tightened in the pit of his rapidly heating belly, growing by passionate degrees as his fingers combed into her wet hair. The tangles gently captured him, and her breathy moan broke the tentative threads of his reserve. She was his wife, by happen chance if not intent, and he kissed her like one, drinking her into him, loving the taste, the mating caress of her tongue, the feel of her twisting in his arms to touch him as hungrily as he did her.
He had no idea exactly when he slipped from his perch on that root and lowered her to the damp earth. Wet as they both were, he barely felt the extra moisture soaking into his trousers at his knees and shins. It was the heat of her breasts burning into his chest that he felt instead, the damp barrier of their clothes becoming no barrier at all once he pulled his shirt up over his head and tugged her muddy lacings free. Her small breasts were the perfect handful, molding into his palms, the peaks tightening beneath his lips as he bent to lick the rain and sweat from her skin.
The soft sound she made in the back of her throat tightened the growing heat
inside him. It was as far from a wordless plea for him to stop as she could make, and stopping was the last thing he wanted anyway.
He suckled her nipple fiercely, just to hear her make that sound again. He pulled the tangled skirt of her shift up over her bloomers. Elegant cloth never meant for jungle life tore when he pulled them down her thighs. He cast them off her and filled his hands with the smooth touch of her bare legs, the expanse of her thighs, the wounded flesh of her hot bottom as he cupped her, squeezing gently and rising swiftly to catching her soft gasp with his mouth.
She arched, her legs splaying with very little provocation to wrap around him, pulling at him to settle in the cradle of her thighs. He could not get his pants unbuttoned fast enough. Her heat rivaled the jungle and it drew him in. With one sharp thrust, happenchance or not, he made her his wife in every way that mattered.
Levina stiffened, her soft cry melting into hungry moans as he moved over her. Her hands gripped and pulled at him with swiftly renewing urgency. Thunder growled overhead. It began to rain again; he still didn’t care. He lost himself in her. In her breathy gasps and moans, in the near desperate way she urged him on, faster and deeper, to touch her, all of her, to take her and lay his claim. He pressed a hand down between their bodies, combing through the curly thatch that crowned her sex and finding the tiny jewel hidden there.
“T-Takura!” Her eyes grew wide, her hips bucking up into his fingers and his thrusts. “Oh! Oh please!”
She arched with a gasp, her whole body shuddering with the pleasure he stroked from her, and lost in the throes of those beautiful convulsions, he found his own release. Pushing as deep into her as he could reach, he locked her in his arms and held her until the fury of her shaking reached its zenith, and gradually they both fell still.
* * * * *
Levina lay beneath Takura, dazed, doing her best just to remember how to breathe. Wide-eyed, she stared up at the canopy of dripping vines and leaves—and, good heavens, were those monkeys?—struggling to make sense of what had happened.