“Don’t look so sleepy,” he said with a grin. “We haven’t consummated the marriage yet.”
Dear God. He was right. She was still technically a virgin. Elizabeth became aware of something really hard pressing against her thigh. Something hard and really long. She ventured a glance, and then swallowed hard. And thick. His manhood was even more engorged than when she had seen him after his bath. It would never fit—
Panic began to bubble up, and for a crazy moment, she wished she were back in her own century, safe in her own bed. Alone. By all the Saints—no, by the Irish patron saint, Brighid—she needed a woman’s help at the moment—she said a quick prayer for help.
Oddly enough, it came, stopping her trembling. A voice, soft and faint—comforting.
“Relax,my child, and welcome your womanhood. You’ve waited centuries—“
Elizabeth took a deep breath. Maybe if he let her hands play with it, it would go down or something. She reached out and touched him. He felt like velvet-covered steel.
He caught her hand. “Not tonight. I’ll have no control left if you do that. And I want to make this last as long as possible.”
She had to tell him. “Miguel—“ but her words went unfinished as his mouth covered hers, this time harsh and demanding, the heat from his body permeating the air, filling her with the masculine scent of him.
“Ah, Elizabeth,” Miguel whispered as he straddled her and splayed her legs. “I’ve waited so long for this.”
She flung her arms around his neck and felt the rounded head of his shaft probing her, finding her entry, pushing. Elizabeth closed her eyes, clung to him, and bit her lip.
Nothing happened. He wasn’t moving. She was pretty sure he was supposed to move. After all, she’d read her share of romance novels. She opened her eyes slowly to find him raised on his elbows, staring at her, his dark eyes inscrutable.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“You—you’re a virgin.” His voice shook.
“Yes.”
“Not a working girl.”
“No. I tried to tell you.”
“Oh, God, Elizabeth. Can you ever forgive me?” He rained kisses on her face and the tip of her nose. “All those times when I assumed—when I tried to take advantage— No wonder you were angry with me. You were right. I am an arrogant—“
“Hush.” Elizabeth said and gave him a long, melting, deep kiss. She looked into his eyes. “It’s just that—well, I don’t think—” She paused.
“You don’t think what? That you want to make love to me?” He held very still.
“No. I mean yes. I do want to make love to you.” She was finding this more and more embarrassing, especially since he was still a little bit inside of her. “I just don’t think you’ll fit,” she blurted. “You’re too big.”
The relief on his face was obvious and he stifled a laugh. “Thank you for the compliment, but I can assure you, I’ll fit.” Then he sobered. “I’ll try not to hurt you, but there will be some pain the first time, sweetheart. I’ll make it as easy as I can.”
Miguel’s head was reeling. All of this time, when he had been so sure she was just holding him off to arouse him even more, that she was really adept at the game, she had been pure. And she was his. His wife. No man had claimed her before, and no man ever would. His heart swelled with pride and love.
He ignored the pulsing of his painfully rigid erection and spent some time using his fingers to pleasure her again while stretching the opening. She was tight, and hot, and so wet. Everything that a man could want—and after tonight, he could ram into her as hard and deep as he liked and bring her to heights she didn’t know existed. But for now—
Miguel eased himself on top of her and nudged his cock to the edge of the barrier inside her. He felt her muscles involuntarily contract. “Relax, love. It won’t hurt so much if you do.”
“I’m…I’m trying.”
He covered her mouth with his, his tongue leisurely playing with hers, sliding in and retreating, mimicking the action that would soon follow. Gradually, he felt the tension ease around his shaft. He deepened the kiss, and with one fluid motion, plunged through the barrier and filled her.
She shuddered, a scream swallowed by his kiss, and dug her nails into his shoulders. He lay perfectly still, giving her time to adjust to the feel of him. He nibbled her neck. “Does it still hurt?”
She took a shaky breath. “It’s easing.” She wiggled a little. “You feel strange.”
He grinned. “That won’t last long.” He experimented with a slow partial withdrawal and then full penetration again. Her eyes widened. “Does that feel good?”
“Ummm.” It did feel good. More than just good. The throbbing between her legs started again and this time it was demanding movement from him. She arched her back and could feel the tip of him pressing against her womb. “I think I might like this.”
Miguel’s grin widened, and he began a slow, rhythmic thrusting, forcing himself to stay gentle with her until her responses became urgent. When she began to buck under him, he finally allowed himself to drive deeper and faster, grinding his hips against the slick wetness of her, loving the snugness that hugged him as he withdrew and lunged into her sweet depths. He felt the tension mounting in her, even as his own fire surged upward threatening to become a blazing inferno. She gave a shrill cry and then came that blessed contraction, gripping him, letting him know that the world had shattered for her.
With a final forceful thrust, he gave into the luxury of finding his own release and spilled himself inside of her.
Elizabeth curled into his arms and nuzzled his neck. “And to think I was afraid. I want to do this every night for the rest of our lives.”
Miguel kissed her forehead and pulled her closer. “We will. Believe me. We have our entire future before us.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN—BACK TO THE FUTURE
Elizabeth rolled over in bed, extending an arm and groping for Miguel. Her hand felt empty space. Sleepily, she blinked her eyes open against the morning sun that was streaming in the window. The pillow beside her was plump and untouched.
Untouched. Vaguely, the thought wandered through her mind that the comforter on the bed wasn’t Miguel’s quilt. She stared at the blank pink wall. The walls in her old bedroom in Arlington had been pink. And what was that noise? Cars?
Elizabeth shot to a sitting position, her heart pounding. It couldn’t be. She ran to the window and then gripped the sill to keep herself from falling as she gazed in horror at the cars parked in the apartment complex.
She was back in the twenty-first century. Her head reeled, and she felt light-headed. She grasped her arms with icy fingers and eased herself into an upholstered chair, gasping. She forced herself to breathe deeply and slowly, and tried not to panic.
What had happened? Was it all really a dream? She remembered going to bed just before Christmas, after the fight with Edward and wishing she’d been born a century earlier. Could she really have dreamt it all? Miguel, Raul and the ranch? Swift Hawk and the abduction? She glanced at the window again and shook her head. The trees had new leaves on them; it was spring, not winter. The month of May, if reality hadn’t totally left her. And the pleasant soreness between her legs was real. She couldn’t have dreamed that. Not all of it anyway. She hadn’t even known there were so many sensitive areas on her body nor imagined how many ways pleasure could be taken.
It had to have been real. She twisted the ring on her finger, and then realized what she was doing. The ring was still there. Miguel’s mother’s ring of soft eighteen-karat gold encrusted with tiny dazzling diamonds. Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn’t crazy—and then she felt a hysterical bubble rising in her throat.
How had she time-traveled again? She’d burned the fetish. This wasn’t supposed to have happened. And where was Miguel? Trapped in the nineteenth century?
Ironic that Miguel had thought her a bit off, at first, and now, if she told anyone in today’s world she’d time-tra
veled, they’d probably pack her off to John Peter Smith Hospital in Ft. Worth for a psychiatric examination. What was she going to do? More importantly, could she return to Miguel?
• ♥ •
“Have you seen Elizabeth this morning?” Miguel asked as he walked into the kitchen and kissed Olga’s cheek and helped himself to a cup of coffee.
He’d been disappointed when he’d awakened to find her side of the bed empty. All he’d wanted to do was repeat last night’s marathon performance. In fact, he was surprised Elizabeth had the energy to be up and about. They had finally rested, in total exhaustion, as dawn was breaking.
“I haven’t seen her.” Olga set his steaming oatmeal in front of him with a thoughtful look. “You didn’t have one of your fights, did you? On your wedding night?”
“Of course not.” Even if he’d wanted to, which he didn’t, he could not have found a single fault with Elizabeth last night. After her initial fear, she had opened herself to him without hesitation, begging him to take her deeper and harder, as eager to please him as he was to please her. And she was a fast learner. Just remembering the slow, long strokes she had given his shaft gave him an erection, and when she’d covered the tip of him with her mouth and sucked—Miguel groaned, instantly hard.
He pushed the bowl aside and stood. “Maybe she’s decided a game of hide-and-seek will pique my interest.” He grinned at Olga. “Not that it needs it.”
He returned to the kitchen nearly an hour later, a worried expression on his face. “I’ve looked everywhere. Plata is in the barn. Olaf hasn’t seen Elizabeth. The gardens are empty.” He frowned. Women didn’t just disappear from his bed. If Swift Hawk had still been there, he might fleetingly have entertained the thought that the Indian had really counted coup and stolen her away. He was stealthy enough, but Miguel had checked with the guards that were posted since Chief Jim Ned’s uprising. No Indians had been spotted anywhere.
“Have you sent for the Rangers?” Olga asked as she down beside him.
He nodded wearily. “Olaf went for them. They’ll search, but I can’t imagine where she could have gone on foot. I’ve sent our ranch hands out to scour the surrounding areas. No one has returned yet.” He refused to face his worse fear: that she was lying hurt somewhere, or worse.
Miguel went over the events again in his mind. They had finally finished making love—he’d lost count of the times—and were lying entwined in each other’s arms. The last thing she’d murmured to him, half-asleep, was that they would be together for the rest of their lives. Not something a woman would say and then sneak out of bed to run away. He shook his head. He knew Elizabeth loved him. Not only had she said it, she’d shown him in every way she could. He trusted her; she had built that trust with everything she did: caring for Raul, helping Olga, taking an interest in livestock, even in standing up to him.
An uneasy thought niggled its way into his brain. Elizabeth had never stopped insisting she was from the future. He hadn’t believed her any more than he had about her not being a working girl. Yet, she had proved that she was a virgin. If he could have been so wrong about that—what if Elizabeth hadn’t been imagining?
The idea was disturbing. It made no sense to his logical brain. People were born on earth and people died, all in one lifetime. They didn’t travel through time. They didn’t come back from the grave. He paused, remembering the conversation he’d had with Lily about the girl who called herself Gwenevere. Did they?
Cactus Flower interrupted his reverie. Her face was unusually pale and her normally quick steps slow.
“What is it?” he asked as she sat down at the table. “Do you know where Elizabeth went?”
She shook her head, but she looked miserable.
“It’s okay to tell me. I have to know, Cactus Flower, even if the news is bad.”
She looked up at him, her large doe eyes wet with tears. “I don’t know for sure. I think maybe the dream catcher was cursed.”
Miguel wrinkled his brow. Dream catcher? Ah. The one Elizabeth had hung before they went to bed. He had hardly noticed, intent as he was on what would follow. “Cursed? What do you mean?”
“My father. He said he made it to make peace, but—”
“But what?” Miguel leaned forward.
“Swift Hawk went in to visit him while he was making it,” Cactus Flower said softly. “I remember seeing the raven feathers in his hands and I thought the colors my father had chosen were odd for a dream catcher. Red and black are used for war.”
“Go on.”
“The last thing Swift Hawk wanted was for you to marry Elizabeth. He still had some notion he would get her back somehow, even though his father told him to stop thinking about her.”
“So you think Hawk asked your father to place a curse on the gift?” Miguel asked, puzzled. “Even so, it couldn’t have made her disappear.”
Cactus Flower took a deep breath. “My father has strong magic and Swift Hawk provided the feathers. If he touched the dream catcher while it was being made, the strands of his hate for you and his desire for Elizabeth would be woven into its threads. It would be a powerful dark charm, especially if he convinced my father to put a demon inside the web.”
Miguel leaned back and studied her. He knew the shaman was well taught from his ancestors in the use of medicinal herbs, some of them both potent and dangerous. The Indians held strong beliefs in totems and fetishes, but this sounded more like the ancient voodoo practiced in New Orleans. Lily had hired a quadroon once who claimed to be a daughter of Marie Laveau. The girl had managed to make most of the others ill so she could have the choice of men—or maybe it was a particular man—before Lily sent her on her way. Still, that had probably been as simple as poisoning the food. If one didn’t believe in voodoo, it held no power. Did it?
“In the white man’s world, that would make your father a sorcerer, not a healer.”
Cactus Flower shrugged. “My father has learned many things from many people. He has even tried to learn to bind spells from the Great Spirit our people know as Dream Catcher, but so far, she has not favored him.”
Miguel almost smiled. “How do you know this spirit is a woman?”
“That’s easy. When she is summoned in the sacred smoke, she always appears the same. Several of the elders have seen her, dressed in white doeskin, her hair in braids…her hair is the same fire-color as Elizabeth’s,” Cactus Flower finished slowly. “That is why Swift Hawk wants her. He thinks the power of Dream Catcher lives in Elizabeth.”
The woman he’d seen in the Army hospital. A slight chill spread along Miguel’s spine. She had seemed so real that he’d even asked about her. She had a healer’s touch, making the pain recede for him. He had not sensed evil about her. He grimaced, thinking he was letting his imagination run loose. A spirit could not have whisked his wife out of bed.
“That’s crazy,” he said.
“To you, maybe, but not to my people,” Cactus Flower said gently. “My father has called on the spirits before to shield our warriors from human sight.”
Miguel stared at her. How many times had he heard the Army soldiers say settlers had no warning of death raids? And Swift Hawk was able to count coup before anyone knew he was there. Could Elizabeth’s disappearance be an illusion? That somehow some sort of smokescreen was concealing her? He cringed inwardly, thinking of those times when he’s wondered about her sanity. His own thoughts were going loco.
“Perhaps you should take the dream catcher to the priest,” Cactus Flower said. “Does your religion not have a way to remove…devils, I think you say.”
Miguel raised an eyebrow. “An exorcist? Elizabeth has disappeared, not gone mad.”
“Still,” Cactus Flower insisted, “a holy man might be able to take the evil out of the charm. Once that is removed, we may find her.”
She might have a point, there. Everyone in his graduating class at Harvard had to take one course in religious philosophy. He remembered reading a theory about something like that. If t
hey didn’t find Elizabeth soon, it wouldn’t hurt to try. Yet, he knew the elderly priest who ministered to them here had no such training. He would have to make the month-long trip back to “civilization” as Elena had always called it. New Orleans. Bishop de Neckère, who had performed that marriage, was no longer there, but an archbishop had been appointed to the newly built St. Louis Cathedral. Perhaps he could give some direction. Miguel didn’t know what else he could do. Silently, he whispered, “Elizabeth, I love you. Somehow, we will be together again.”
• ♥ •
Brooke looked worried. Elizabeth could hardly blame her as her friend sat across the living room in a chair whose sheet cover lay on the floor. She’d just told her everything that had happened.
“We thought Edward had taken you to Europe,” Brooke said shakily. “He left town just about the time you did.”
“I would never have quit my job without warning,” Elizabeth said. She had called the school administration earlier, only to be told she had been replaced and would have to reapply if she wanted to teach in the fall. The secretary’s cold tone had implied they didn’t think much of people who just stopped coming to work. Not that Elizabeth blamed her. She had always prided herself on being reliable.
“I know,” Brooke said. “When I hadn’t heard from you and you weren’t answering the phone, I called the police. They didn’t seem too concerned since there was no sign of a struggle or forced entry.”
“But all my stuff was here! My purse and car keys—“
Brooke nodded. “I pointed that out and they finally agreed to put out a bulletin. They tried to question Edward, but when they found out he’d gone to France, the idea grew that you’d eloped with him. The manager of his condo said you’d been there two nights before.”
Elizabeth groaned. Too bad no one had seen her leave after she’d discovered Edward with the other woman. “Did anyone call my mother?”
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