A Cowboy Is Forever

by Shirley Larson

He made a sound in his throat, a sound she’d never heard before in her life, half exultant, half agonized. Slowly she lifted her arms, letting him lean into her, taking the hard weight of him onto her soft chest. He was totally unfamiliar, yet familiar. This was what she’d wished for for so long, Luke heavy on her breasts and his brown eyes ablaze.

  He tried one last time to keep her safe. “This is total insanity. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “We both know better.”

  “I know.”

  At last his arms came around her and he buried his face in her hair. “You feel like my safe harbor. Maybe you always have been. Maybe that’s why I was lost at sea.”

  His murmur was so low, she almost didn’t hear him. It seemed such a part of the rustle of the cottonwoods, the whisper of the night zephyr. And so was his touch, drifting lightly over her, discovering the hollow of her throat. She wasn’t afraid. She’d never been afraid of Luke. She was only afraid of herself, afraid she’d ask too much, love too much. She could not, would not, ask for more than he was willing to give. “I must have been a lighthouse in my other life.”

  Deliberately he unfastened her shirt, his eyes on hers as he guided his hand over the soft fullness of her, slipped his fingers under her bra strap to let his hands slide farther down on the roundness of her breast underneath the white cotton. “You don’t feel like a lighthouse.” When he heard her soft, sudden intake of breath, his smile disappeared and he said, soberly, seriously, “Ah. The brave lady isn’t quite so brave as she thought.”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m…all right.”

  His fingers were cool, bringing the chill of the night air to her burning skin. She wanted, really wanted, to be sophisticated about this, but every nerve cell she had was crying out with excitement, and she felt as if she were going up in flames. But just when she would have told him to wait a bit, he said softly, “Stay with me, love. You’re doing beautifully,” and he slipped his hand between her skin and the cloth and cupped her completely in his warm, competent hand. And, that quickly, he took her heart into his keeping.

  “Better now?”

  She was filled with a white heat that spiraled upward, and there was no strength in her to speak. She could only nod.

  “Mmm…” he said. “Better for me, too. But if we just did this—” His clever hands lifted her, flicked her bra loose and easily moved the fabric aside. The sensual exquisiteness of having him bare her breast, lift and settle her again in the curve of his arm, where she would be easily accessible to his mouth, made her body ache with longing, and she was full and ready for him when he found her.

  It was a sensation like none she’d ever had in her life, the heat, the moistness, the slight tug at her breast, his hair brushing her naked skin. It seemed to go on and on, while he simply settled in, calling on his natural stamina and athlete’s ability to pace himself. She didn’t have his ability. She moved, asking for release from the exquisite torture of his mouth.

  He lifted away then, a slight frown on his forehead. “Let’s make you a little bit more comfortable.” He pushed the saddle away and, his gaze steady on hers, he pulled her shirt loose from her jeans and unbuttoned the last two buttons. “You need a pillow.” He slid her arms out of her shirt, folded it and tucked it under her head. When her bra was gone, she lay there, bare in the heat of his eyes. “Beautiful,” he breathed. “But, darlin’…” His eyes sparkled with humor. “How extraordinary. You have another one.” The darkest, most sensual smile she’d ever seen curved his lips as he leaned down over her and taught her other breast to love his mouth, to love his tongue. She felt herself lift, writhe, implode, under his caressing. “Luke, please—”

  He lifted his head, and his mouth and eyes had the look of a man satisfied with his work. “You could return the favor, love.” She stared up at him, unable to process the words.

  “Mine aren’t as nice as yours, but maybe you won’t mind.” He unbuttoned his shirt, took her hand and placed her palm against his chest. Pleasure flooded her from a new source, his heated skin, the crisply male hair, the hard jut of his collar-bone, the nub of his nipple rising to her touch.

  The stars reeled, a coyote called, a cow mooed. Her heightened senses heard, felt, saw. Her jeans gave, and cool air rushed in. His hand smoothed over the flatness of her belly and then, inevitably, down into the dark curls and the feminine sweetness of her. She swallowed once, twice, held on to him while he explored and caressed with a tender delicacy that swamped her senses. Luke’s back was smooth and hard with muscle, and over his shoulder the moon turned his hair to a black silk and his face to the shadowed magnificence of a man poised on the edge of possession, his eyes black with desire.

  “Charlotte,” he said softly, his mouth against her cheek, and her name was the stuff of a thousand years of longing.

  She shook her head, and he drew back. “No,” she hastened to say. “I didn’t mean that you should stop. I meant…don’t stop to ask. Don’t let me think. Just…love me.”

  And he gathered her up carefully, and his mouth sought hers, gently at first, and then, as he felt her bonelessness, her yearning, her yielding, he took her mouth as he would her body, filling and thrusting. She opened to him, equal to his desire, catching him and holding him. He finished undressing her with infinite care, sliding her jeans from her as easily as if they were silk. And while her body burned, he stood, stripped off his clothes and lay beside her, long, lean, naked, male. He asked her the silent question and she gave him the silent answer. His eyes dark and ancient with the primitive knowledge, the memory of primal mating, he lifted her over him, settling her on him, watching as she took him deep inside her.

  “All right?” he asked, his eyes very wise, old as the hills around him with the ancient knowledge of her.

  She nodded, not wanting to meet his eyes, not wanting him to see the ecstasy in hers, the burning, the deep satisfaction, the total surrender.

  But he was Luke, who would not give her quarter, and he cupped her chin and tipped her face up so that he could see her eyes. “You feel like home,” he breathed, and slid his hand along her thigh, making her more comfortable astride him.

  He’d warned her that he wasn’t the Luke she’d known, that he was no knight in shining armor, but nothing in her life had ever made her feel whole like this. She might have one night with him and nothing more, and the thought hurt desperately deep, but she would take everything this night had to give. She began to move, and Luke groaned and held her arms tight, tight, and murmured something that sounded like “I didn’t know it could be like this,” and she sought his mouth and loved his body in ways she hadn’t known she knew, ways she wanted him to remember forever.

  The night turned around them, and the moon drifted higher in the sky, and the coyote cried his lonely cry, but for a little while, just a little while, she was no longer lonely, she was complete. She had Luke inside her and around her. She covered his mouth with kisses, and he returned her kisses like a man in a fever, gazing at her with the deep, vulnerable heat of man on the edge of ecstasy.

  She hadn’t known bliss had shades, shades of white heat and dark passion and the blazing yellow of the sun. He took her through all the shades, taught her tease and capture, taught her to kiss him in all the places her mouth would reach, taught her to love him with a wild abandon that equaled his own. Most of all, he taught her what she’d always known, that he was the only one she truly wanted to take into her body, to give all that she was. And her hair fell down around him and she loved him with her body, her heart, her life.

  She was like a wildflower to Luke, and he wanted to handle her with the same sweet gentleness, but she put a fire in his bloodstream, and he demanded, and she gave, until his body burned with the need to give her as much as she had given him. He’d thought he knew everything there was to know about lovemaking, and now he discovered he’d known nothing at all. He hung poised on the edge until, with a smile like Eve’s, she tossed him out onto the
sea and then joined him there.

  Chapter Nine

  Luke’s arms were hard, masculine, around her. Hard not to tremble in them, hard to look into those wonderful, languorous eyes and know that she alone had put that satisfaction there…but only for tonight. Hard to feel the deep, curled strength of his chest muscles, to absorb the wild, mountain-air scent of his body vitalized with perspiration and know that there was no turning back, that she had given everything she was to this man who wanted no tomorrow with her.

  Close, so close to him that she could feel him breathe. His eyes caught hers, asked the silent question, Are you all right?

  No, she wasn’t, but she’d die before she’d let him see. Pride had carried her through so many things, pride would carry her through this. “You must be uncomfortable….”

  “No,” he said, “not at all.” His brown eyes roved over her face with penetrating astuteness, and he caught her arms, his fingers possessively gentle, locking her to him, as if he sensed that her attempt to ease her weight away was really the need to deny him that intimacy at the end of lovemaking that was nearly as soul-revealing. “Stay where you are.”

  She fought against his subtle seduction, knowing that he wanted more, knowing that she did, too. She was greedy when it came to Luke, she’d been wanting him for so long. And so, even with her heart in jeopardy, she would take all that she could, even though he wasn’t hers.

  As if he sensed her retreat into modesty, he reached for the sleeping bag and covered her with it, making that considerate act a continuation of intimacy. He tugged on the end, but the corner just barely covered her.

  “The Ritz has short-sheeted us,” she murmured.

  He chuckled, his body rippling with amusement under her. She’d meant to ease the intimacy with humor, but the feel of his laughter echoing through his body into hers brought a tingle of pleasure that reached to her toes. He seemed content to stay exactly where he was, his hand splayed on her back, holding the cover in place. She knew he didn’t love her, and the sooner she eased herself away from him the better it would be for both of them, but his other hand came and pressed her head into the hollow of his shoulder, and his mouth found her forehead.

  “Not only that, they’ve let the roof leak.”

  She heard the words, but with her mind and heart in turmoil, they made no sense. “What?”

  “It’s raining, darlin’.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I may not be serious, but that big old cloud is. As I look past your beautiful face, I see that the stars are gone and another drop just plopped on my hand. Do you want to get up and try to keep our clothes reasonably dry while we run for the shack, or just forget the whole thing and take our cold shower as it comes?”

  She didn’t want the reality of rain. She wanted to drift in the world where there was just the two of them. “I suppose we’d better try for the shack.” But she didn’t move. And neither did he.

  “Is there a problem?” His mouth found the vulnerable hollow of her throat, and the curve of his smile touched her skin.

  The problem was, she didn’t want to leave him, but she couldn’t say that. She could only let her body stay just where it was, her breasts flattened against his chest. Needing a camouflage, she seized on the first thing that came into her head. “That place may have other…tenants.”

  “Ah. I remember. Spiders. You really hate spiders. Rattlesnakes are no problem, you just calmly step up and shoot them, but spiders are your deadly enemies. I seem to remember a rubber spider one Halloween finding its way into the drawer of your desk at school. We heard you scream all the way up in the chemistry lab.”

  Charlotte didn’t know whether he was purposely lightening the mood, but she suspected he was. “That was you! I thought so. No one else would know so exactly how to frighten the life out of me. Thank goodness Miss Parker hated spiders, too. She told me it was perfectly all right to scream, that any normal person would do the same thing. I was only in second grade then. How could you pick on a such a little girl?”

  “That’s all I could do to you then, tease you. Now that you’re all grown up, there are so many more interesting possibilities,” he murmured, kissing her nose. “And how nicely you’ve grown up.” His hands moved down and cupped her rear end. She felt him coming to life…along with the first cool drops of rain in her hair.

  “We’d better go.”

  He released her arms, let his hands fall back on the earth in dramatic fashion. “It’s all up to you, sweet.”

  His darkly masculine face was shining with mock submission, his mouth lifted at one corner with amusement. He was all charm and intelligence and complicated man, and she no longer felt self-conscious. He was hers, for whatever time they had together. She kissed that sensual mouth just long enough to tease him and then sprang to her feet. Before she had time to feel ill at ease, even in the dark, he was wrapping the sleeping blanket around her.

  He helped her collect her clothes, said a graphic word when he stepped on a pebble. She laughed at him, he tugged at her sleeping blanket in retaliation. She knelt with mock ceremony and held his boots for him to step into, he steadied her while she slipped into hers. Then, with him tugging at her hand, and her laughing at him in his bareness and boots, they made their way into the shack.

  He was noble and heroic, a true gentleman. He had her stand just inside the door while he used his shirt to swipe at the cobwebs in the shack. She could just barely see him in the dim light from the one window, his long length of gleaming skin shining with drops of rain, his shoulder muscles moving as he worked. There was a cot, and he turned it upside down and rapped on it sharply. When at last he was reasonably certain the cot was clean and free of visitors, he pulled her into his arms. He held her for a moment, up close, warm, with that faint smell of dust clinging to him from his labors. She nestled in his arms, thinking how very long it had been since someone had smoothed the path for her. And she loved him more, though it seemed impossible. For this was the stuff real love was made of, the tenderness after the passion, and the consideration.

  “I’ll leave the door open for light,” he said. He reached around her to push the door back, and then carefully, his arms around her to take her with him, he sat down on the cot.

  The rain patted softly on the roof, and his mouth found her temple. A little gust of a breeze rattled the tiny windowpane in the one window, bringing her the moisture and coolness of his body, like pure ozone flowing over her. She opened her sleeping bag to let Luke share her warmth, and when he felt the soft curves of her breast, he gently, so gently, eased her down. Her hands showed him how to lie on top of her without crushing her, and he showed his gratitude by burying his nose in the side of her hair and settling himself agilely over her. She touched the moist drops clinging to his skin, smoothed the damp silk of his hair back from his forehead. His face changed, took on that darkly sensual look, and her heart came up into her throat.

  “I need to ask a very stupid, very belated question.”

  She petted his hair as she might have a child’s. She’d wondered why he hadn’t asked, why he hadn’t sought protection, for himself as much as for her. It seemed very unlike Luke to act first and worry later. Luke had always been overwhelmingly responsible, even as a young man.

  “Do you?” she murmured. “Maybe your question isn’t…necessary.”

  He studied her face. “You’re already protected, then?” he said.

  “I…had a prescription that I had been taking for irregular menses, and I…started taking it again.”

  She tried to hide her face from him, but he used both hands to bring her head up so that she had to look at him. “When did you do that?”

  She thought about trying to keep from sharing this one last bit of soul-baring. It wasn’t possible. “It was after the night we went out to the lake. I…knew then that if you stayed, and if you asked, I wouldn’t be able to say no.”

  He thought of the other women he’d known, and the prevarication
s he’d heard, and his heart warmed and swelled and he sought her lips with his. “Sweet, honest Charlotte. Thank you for being so quick and smart and wise. And responsible.” Against her mouth, he said, “You’ve never known how to be anything else, have you?”

  “Oh, I’ve known,” she murmured. “I just haven’t had the opportunity…until now.”

  “You have rather thrown caution to the winds this night, haven’t you?” He sounded amused and more than a little pleased with himself, and his hands found new territories to explore, curves and hollows in her hips and the sweet flatness of her abdomen that he treated to careful attention. “Just how incautious will you be before this night is over, I wonder?” And suddenly, easily, he slipped inside her, joining with her again, watching her eyes as he sheathed himself inside her.

  “I seem to have lost all sense of propriety,” she whispered, knowing now how to move to please him, listening to his soft intake of breath as she moved her hips.

  He was vulnerable to her, so incredibly vulnerable, and he raised his head and shifted his weight to let her work her magic, his shoulders tense with exquisite pleasure, his eyes closed.

  “I’ve fallen into the clutches of a wanton woman,” he said, his eyes opened now and he looked down at her. “A fate worse than death.” He was smiling the smile of a dark angel, and he looked like a man more than ready to take the fate that lay in store for him, and he loved her and she him until they both lay exhausted. They dozed then, and night crept away and day returned to claim its share of the earth.

  She woke to the smell of something being wafted under her nose. “What—”

  “Toothpaste.” He smiled looking down at her, taking a dab from the tube he held and placing it with clinical precision in the middle of her bottom lip. “I didn’t have coffee, so I thought I’d try the next best thing.”

  She licked. It was minty. “Why is it you have toothpaste?”

  “I always carry my kit with me. I got in the habit.” His eyes darkened briefly. “Don’t ask why. Do you have any coffee in your thermos?”