Seemingly intent upon sampling every inch of her flesh, he took her lobe into his mouth, gently nibbling the sensitive flesh, running his tongue into the shallow hollow beneath it, tracing a scorching path down her throat.
Fire followed in his wake.
Reagan felt it lick along her nerves, felt it sear her vitals, and fought to catch her breath. But she was too weak with wanting, too breathless with excitement to form a protest when he reached for the bone buttons that held the front of the homespun shirt in place. A flick of his deft fingers freed the fasteners from their rough moorings, and Jackson parted the front of the garment, baring her breasts to his ravenous gaze.
“Beautiful,” he murmured, bending to tease one small pink nipple to an aching peak. “So beautiful.”
Reagan watched breathlessly as his raven head dipped and his sooty lashes drifted down, and her heart swelled alarmingly in her breast as he took her nipple into his mouth. Heat, such blessed heat. She feared that she would die of it. Starting at his carnal kiss, it flooded, molten and immediate, demanding, past her vitals and into the secret place between her legs.
Oh, touch me there, she silently willed him. And somehow, miraculously, his hand slid over her waist and down. Seek out and soothe the ache you have created. Conceived in passion, born of a burgeoning fascination, and fostered by dark magic, his touch was a sorcerer’s trick meant to woo her right out of her virtue.
And it was working.
Jackson’s touch was anything but soothing. He threaded his fingers through the downy thatch of sable curls that crowned her womanhood, and Reagan arched against him, tangling her fingers into the silk of his hair, sighing her impatience as she kissed his temple, his cheek. The devil take her virtue. She wanted this. Wanted whatever came next, and wanted to touch him, too, skin against skin.
“Kaintuck,” he said, leaving one breast in favor of the other, “I want you. I ache to lose myself in your sweet, irresistible charms.”
Reagan wanted him, too, but reality had chosen that moment to rear its ugly head. “I must know. What happens after? Where do we go from here?”
Jackson replied without thinking. “We go to Saint Louis, precisely as planned.” Yet the words had no sooner left his mouth than he realized that he had committed a grievous error, for the body that, seconds ago, had been so pliant, seemingly so willing, suddenly had all the pliancy of a glacier.
“No more,” she said, “leave be.” And then, when he attempted to drown her protests with a fresh onslaught of seduction, she wedged an elbow against his Adam’s apple.
“Reagan, sweetheart,” he said with a disarming smile. “I beg you, don’t act in haste. Don’t do anything that we both may come to regret.”
She shoved at his shoulders, weakly, and he saw that her hands were trembling. “I regret it already. Now get off!”
Jackson released her, sprawling on his side in the grass, trying to appear nonchalant when he was anything but. His blood was still running hot, and the throbbing ache in his loins was annoyingly persistent. “Was it something I said?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Then we are to pretend this episode never occurred?” he questioned quietly, almost casually. It was a commendable performance, considering the fact that he wanted badly to press her back into the grass, to still her protests and pretensions with his kisses, to selfishly take what she had so generously offered a moment ago. “Pretend that we did not make love a moment ago, forget the intimacies we shared and reveled in? And I should forget the succulent fullness of your breasts, forget how sweetly you sighed your surrender?”
She threw him a thunderous look by way of reply.
“Very well, then. I shall strive to honor your request, though I must admit it isn’t going to be easy, given the fact that I find myself quite taken with your charms.”
Though he would not have thought it possible, her frown deepened. “A gentleman would have stopped flappin’ his jaws five minutes ago.”
Josephine crept near, insinuating herself between them. Shifting positions, Jackson scratched the feline’s chin, addressing the cat with a weary sigh. “Poor Papa. I am afraid our sweet mountain lily no longer likes me.”
“I like you just fine, at a distance,” she said stiffly.
Jackson frowned at her. “You liked me well enough a moment ago, and if I remember correctly, we were quite... close.”
“Since your memory’s so good, you might try rememberin’ that husband you mentioned before. I don’t know what’s proper in Saint Louis, but in Kentucky a virtuous woman doesn’t lie with one man and marry another.”
“Ah, but there are ways,” Jackson said, his voice deliberately silky. “Your future husband need never know.”
“I would know!” she shot back angrily. “It ain’t right, and it wouldn’t be fair—not to the man I marry, and not to me.” Jackson got up and slowly sauntered to where she sat, her arms wrapped around her upraised legs, her chin resting on her knees. “Come,” he said, reaching down to grasp her wrist, urging her up and onto her feet. Her manner was decidedly hesitant, almost nervous; she wouldn’t meet his gaze at all, but kept her lashes lowered, partially masking the light of desire that still shone in her soft gray eyes.
Reaching out, he brought her trembling into his arms and kissed her again, passionately. He kissed her until he heard her soft, heartfelt moan and felt her melt against him... until she’d looped her arms about his neck to hold him closer, closer... and then he let her go. “Now tell me again how wrong it is,” he said, “this desire we share. Tell me that you do not want my love in any form or fashion.”
Her perfect features wrenched suddenly, as if she were in pain. “Damn it all, Jackson!” she cried, pushing him hard and stumbling back. “Don’t you get it? This isn’t love! Hell’s fire, it ain’t even close. What you speak of burns hot for a while, and then it dies. Love—real love—lasts. It endures the bad times; it flourishes in the good.”
“Myths and fairy stories,” Jackson said contemptuously. “How can you be sure this great love awaits you out there?” He made a dramatic flourish with one hand. All of this talk about love was in reality the death knell of a wonderfully promising evening, an excuse to hold herself apart from him. It made him impatient. “Passion is all there is!”
“Passion is fleeting!” Reagan snapped. “And a damn poor companion when the body’s weary and the nights grow long and cold. Love—real love—is more than a moment’s pleasure. Oh, Jackson, don’t you see? It’s the sparkle in an old man’s eye when he gazes at his wife of fifty years, it’s caring, steadfastness, loyalty, compassion! It’s laying your head down beside someone and knowing they’ll be there in the morning when you wake... and for all the mornings after, for as long as you both shall live. It’s the warmth a mother or father feels in here,” she said, placing her fist over her heart, “looking into the faces of the little ones as they grow sleepy by the fire, and knowing their babies are the product and the proof of the love they share. It’s all of that, and more....”
“Those things may exist in your world,” he replied softly. “But there is no room in my world for such romantic sentiment. Mother of God, I almost wish there were. I wish that loyalty and steadfastness abounded, instead of hatred and mistrust... firelight and children’s sleepy faces instead of shadows and deceit.” He paused and drew a weary breath before continuing. “It’s a pretty dream, Kaintuck, a beautiful idyll, and I hope I’m there when you find it. I should like to know that such happiness truly exists.”
With that he took up his rifle and returned to the darkness, leaving Reagan to curl into a ball by the fire and cover her ears in a futile attempt to block out the incessant howling of the wind.
She must have dozed, for she dreamed, ragged, disjointed images of a dark-haired rogue who looked like Jackson, but bore the pencil-thin mustache of Arley Pratt. Just as Arley had done years before, he stole a kiss under the grape arbor, whispered sweet promises in her ear, then turned to s
omeone else. Yet his kiss was not the prim peck Arley had given her; his promises were hot and salacious, not merely insincere, and instead of marrying Mildred Grumacher in a hastily arranged ceremony, performed by the light of the harvest moon to the accompaniment of Mildred’s older brother’s squirrel gun, the Jackson of her dreams strolled away laughing with a lady of obvious charms and questionable character, leaving Reagan to deal with the squalling consequences of their brief liaison that had somehow miraculously appeared.
In her tormented mind, she jostled the crying infant, a mirror image of its father, from his bright green eyes right down to his pencil-thin mustache, and agonized over her shattered reputation.
The absurdity of the dream did not lessen its heart-pounding effect, and for several seconds after she awakened, Reagan lay staring up at the stars, drawing in great gulps of cool night air and trying to shrug off a lingering uneasiness.
Aside from the dream, she had the vague impression that something wasn’t right. The wind had ceased its mournful wail while she slept, and now blew gently out of the northeast, an eerie, noiseless presence that made itself felt, if no longer heard. Underlying that presence was a profound and unnatural silence. The noisy nightly serenade of crickets, cicadas, and the strange, poignant call of the cranes and egrets wading in the shallows of the river—a chorus that struck up with each dusk and ended with the dawn—was strangely absent.
Reagan’s hackles rose as she listened to the silence. It was almost as if the prairie, and all of the creatures inhabiting it, was waiting.
But waiting for what?
The possibilities loomed large and frightening, preying upon Reagan’s increasing uneasiness.
How much time had passed since Jackson had gone off again? She glanced at the position of the moon. It was almost overhead. It must be nearing midnight; Jackson should have returned by now. Following on the heels of that thought came another, born of her steadily mounting insecurity.
What if, as Luther had, he’d decided that she was more trouble than he’d anticipated, only instead of selling her at auction, he’d simply walked away?
The idea of being abandoned in this flat, foreign, treeless place set her heart to thudding painfully against her ribs. Panic surged through her, filling the center of her being, crowding her stomach and lungs, threatening to choke her, to block out all rational thought. In a moment she would begin that same mindless wail to which Granny Dawes had been reduced when informed that Raymond, her only son and Reagan’s father, wasn’t coming home from the hinterlands beyond the broad Ohio. Reagan had been but three years old, and she could barely recall her father, but she remembered that awful, half-human howl.
“Breathe, Reagan,” she commanded herself, glancing around, keeping a stranglehold on her sanity. “Slow and deep. They had to threaten to smother Granny with a feather pillow to make her stop, and her caterwaulin’ was not a pretty sight.”
Calming slightly, she forced herself to glance around, taking stock of her situation, and her gaze lit instantly on the leather saddlebags that contained Jackson’s worldly possessions.
She reached out to drag them close, flipping them open. His gold pocket watch was still nestled in among his other things: the fancy silver case that held the slim black cigars he favored, a pearl-handled razor, a gold toothpick, his dwindling supply of coffee, a pound sack of sugar, and the frying pan in which he prepared their morning meal.
She’d seen him toy with the watch on numerous occasions, flipping open the lid, his expression troubled, thoughtful, as he ran a fingertip around the inscription in the lid. She’d even stolen a peek once, but she couldn’t make sense of the tiny jumble of foreign words. Seeing it in the leather bag made her breathe a little easier, but it was the presence of the cast iron skillet and the coffee, sugar, and bacon that restored her confidence in him.
A decent breakfast was Jackson’s one true concession to civilization, and Reagan was certain that he would not depart without supplies that were so intrinsic to his hedonistic nature.
Impulsively she touched, then closed her hand around the skillet’s handle, taking a strange sort of comfort from the cold, hard metal, the solidness and considerable heft of the homely implement. As she clutched it to her bosom, a heavy footfall sounded directly behind her, accompanied by a wheezing laugh that set the fine hairs at Reagan’s nape to standing on end.
“Well, I’ll be dipped. If it ain’t L’il Sister way out here in the grasslands, with Jack Seek-Um nowhere to be seen. My, my, how opportune, how generous of that Frenchified breed to give old Abe and his blushin’ bride time to get reacquainted, after we was so heartlessly torn apart.”
Chapter Five
The stench from Abe McFarland, the combined odors of bear grease and unwashed male, rolled over Reagan in a noxious wave, galvanizing her into action. As she shot up from her place by the fire, he planted a huge hand on her shoulder, kneading the tender flesh. Gripping the handle of the skillet in both hands, Reagan pivoted, swinging the iron implement with all the strength she could muster.
Clang!
The makeshift weapon rang like a rusted bell as it connected with Abe’s thick skull.
The force of the impact rocked him up on the balls of his feet, where he teetered for a moment, then sat down hard in the grass.
Reagan took to her heels, along the banks of the river, the makeshift weapon clutched tightly to her as Abe’s voice rang out behind her. “It won’t do no good to run! I’ve got a nose like a starvin’ hound. Sooner or later I’ll run you to ground... and when I do, I’m gonna pound the piss ’n’ vinegar outta you.”
“You’ll have to catch me first, polecat!” she cried, yet the moment she was out of sight her bravado left her, and a niggling fear crept in.
She’d always been agile and quick, able to dart ahead of her brothers, to pull herself up into the low-hanging limbs of a sycamore tree and watch from the cover of the foliage as they scratched their heads below. Such tricks had helped compensate for her lack of lung power. Yet here on the prairie they were useless.
There was nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide, and except for her doubtful protector, she was alone in the wilderness.
That thought, more than anything, spurred her on. She ran until her breath was a searing pain in her lungs, until the stitch in her side made her footsteps drag. Sweat ran down her face in thin, hot rivulets, stinging her eyes.
Just when she thought she couldn’t take another step, the slap-swish of moccasins pounding the grassy earth a few paces behind her came distinctly to her ears. Unable to resist the urge to do so, she risked a glance back.
A few dozen paces behind her, a large form suddenly loomed up out of nowhere. Overhead the fickle moon slipped behind a bank of heavy clouds, casting the vast plain in deep shadow, preventing Reagan from gleaning any detail.
Someone was following her, and from his breakneck pace, there was no doubt in her mind that he meant to run her down. Cold terror congealed in the pit of her belly as she realized her nightmare had been realized: she hadn’t hit Abe hard enough to make good her escape. She’d managed only to delay the inevitable.
With an unintelligible curse, her pursuer leaped forward, treading so close upon her heels that his hot breath seemed to sear her sensitive nape.
In Reagan’s mind, the mountain of flesh that was Abe McFarland hurled itself against her, bore her cruelly to the ground as her whimpering cries floated over the dark rippling waters of the Platte....
The Platte was running swiftly off to her right. It was a mile wide, an inch deep, with a swift-running current and the occasional bed of quicksand, so she hadn’t considered it a viable option. But with the feel of Abe McFarland’s pinching fingers still fresh in her mind, she veered to the right and leaped for the shimmering, dark water.
Treading close upon her heels, Jackson lunged, catching a handful of homespun and dragging her back from the treacherous current of the river.
She did not take his intervention well. Spitting l
ike an enraged she-cat, she crouched and spun, swinging the cast-iron implement in a wicked arc.
Jackson ducked, cursing as the wind from the weapon whistled past his left ear. She swung again, and this time he caught her wrist. “Damn it, woman!” he bellowed. “Have a care where you aim that thing! You might have taken my head off just now!”
Her eyes were wild and held the light of terror still, as if she looked beyond him to something too horrible to contemplate. Unsure what tack to take, he held her immobile until she found herself again, until the terror dimmed in her eyes, and unabashed relief took its place. “Oh, Jackson,” she said, hurling herself against him. “Thank God it’s you.”
“But of course it is I,” he said, his arms coming around her, drawing her even closer. The gesture was automatic, so natural that it seemed second nature, so that for a fleeting instant he wondered how he had managed to spend his days and nights before he found her.
When she had calmed sufficiently, he held her at arm’s length, looking down into her upturned face. Just then the moon slid from behind the clouds, shining down in all its full white glory. “What were you thinking back there?” he demanded, pushing back the strand of gleaming dark hair that had fallen forward into her face. “I called out to you. Why did you run? And, pray, do not tell me you were intent upon a bath. It’s too late in the evening for that. Besides, you know the riverbed is treacherous.”
“I’d sooner take my chances with the quicksand,” she replied, “than with that big oaf back there.”
“Oaf? What oaf?”
“The one you outbid for the pleasure of my company.”
“Abe McFarland?” Jackson said, a trifle dubiously. “Are you sure that it wasn’t just a nightmare?”
Bride of the Shining Mountains (The St. Claire Men) Page 8