“Drop what?” he asked, before he noticed the pistol she was gripping, almost hidden in the folds of her dark blue velvet skirt. “You fool,” he said with a flare of anger. “Why didn’t you just toss it away?”
“Didn’t drop it...didn’t drop it...”
She kept repeating the words, as if she hadn’t heard him. Just as well, Roy thought, furious at himself for the thoughtless outburst. Gingerly, he pried the pistol out of her grip and shoved it into the empty holster at his hip. “Let’s get you dry.”
He gathered her in his arms and straightened on his feet. As he carried her over to the flat piece of ground at the base of the cliffs, her waterlogged clothing soaked his shirt. He laid her down between a boulder and the single struggling cottonwood, went to the pile of goods he had unloaded earlier and unraveled her two pink blankets as well as his own gray one.
“You need to get out of those wet clothes.”
“Here? Out in the open?” Her head swiveled left and right, damp strands of hair flapping about her shoulders as she craned her neck to survey the trail that led up to the plateau above the valley. “Someone could come.”
“I’ll make a shelter to give you privacy.”
He created a small enclosure by tying the gray blanket to the spindly tree and wedging the opposite end against the tall boulder with a piece of driftwood. By now, the sun had set, giving way to dusk. The temperature was plummeting. Roy cursed himself for not waiting to cross the river in the morning, when they could have benefited from the warmth of the sun.
Rushing around while Celia was getting undressed, he took care of the horses and collected a few pieces of driftwood to start a fire. The urgent tasks completed, he came back and peeked over the edge of the blanket. “How are you getting on in there?”
Celia lay slumped on the ground, still in her wet clothes. Her skin was deathly pale, her eyes closed, her body racked with shivers. She appeared barely conscious. Roy fought a flare of panic. He had little experience of well-bred ladies, but he expected them to be delicate creatures, prone to chills and fevers.
Not wasting any time on worrying about propriety or that he might give offense to feminine sensibilities, he ducked beneath the makeshift curtain. With quick, expert motions, he built a fire and lit it. Once the flames were crackling, he knelt beside Celia.
“You’ve got to get out of those wet clothes. Let’s start with the shoes.”
He undressed her like one might undress a sleepy child, talking softly, asking for guidance as he located rows of hidden hooks, untied knots and released buttons. All through the task, Celia made no resistance. Stiff and cold beneath his hands, she responded to his commands, lifting her arms, turning, helping him to shed the layers of soaked clothing.
By the time he had her stripped down to a thin cotton chemise and drawers, Roy found himself shaking with pent-up tension. He tried not to look, did his best to curb his masculine instincts. But the fine, hand-embroidered garments became nearly transparent as the damp fabric clung to her skin, revealing a dark triangle at the apex of her thighs and the rosy circles at the tips of her breasts.
Exercising every bit of restraint he could muster, Roy looked away. He spread his long duster on the ground, settled Celia to sit upon it and wrapped one of the pink blankets around her shoulders. When he spoke, his voice was strained. “I’m going to turn my back now. You get out of those wet things, all the way to your birthday suit. Bundle up into the blanket and I’ll rub you warm. Let me know when you are ready and I can turn around again.”
As he stood with his back to her, his ears picked out every rustle of fabric, every swish of damp hair as she undressed. The river rippled only yards away, the wind blew in gusts along the valley, a hawk screeched overhead, but those sounds faded away as his senses attuned to the woman behind him removing the last scraps of clothing that covered her nakedness.
“I’m ready,” she informed him.
Roy’s heart was beating wildly, his hands trembling. While he’d undressed her, the aftermath of terror and the surge of relief that followed had helped him keep his rising desire at bay. Now, as he turned around and saw her sitting on the ground, the blanket draped over her shoulders, his body reacted with a sudden violence to the knowledge that beneath the blanket she was naked, totally naked, without a stitch.
“Let’s get you warm.” Moving with an odd reluctance, he sank on one knee beside her and began to rub her body through the blanket. Arms, shoulders, legs. He tried to think of something else, tried to forget that she was unclothed, but his mind refused to obey.
Celia spoke in a soft whisper. “I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry,” he replied, striving to keep his tone bland. “You couldn’t help it. Baldur is used to following Dagur on the trail. When the mare saw me unsaddle the gelding, she knew the day’s work was over, and she was impatient to join him.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
Curious, Roy glanced up at Celia’s face. Until now, he’d been staring at the solid surface of the boulder beside him. At the barren earth in front of him. At the deepening shadows around them. Anywhere but directly at her. And now he froze. His hands ceased their rubbing and stilled, his fingers circling one slender ankle.
The blanket that covered Celia’s nakedness had slipped down a fraction. Her back was straight, her legs lightly folded as she sat on the ground, her shoulders rising from the folds of the fabric like the statue of a goddess. Roy caught a glimpse of the upper slopes of her breasts, a pair of rosy pink nipples. It was clear to him that she knew what he could see. And she was letting him look. A lady and an outlaw. And she was letting him look.
He spoke through a tightened throat. “Celia...don’t tempt me. Don’t test your feminine charms on me. You’re taking too many chances.”
“No.” She shook her head, her expression fraught. “I’m sorry, truly sorry for what I said earlier...about you testifying that my father is innocent. I didn’t mean it like that... I was thinking that if you turned yourself in and served your sentence, you would be free.” Her voice grew bolder, her tone more confident. “And don’t lie to me. Don’t tell me that you haven’t thought about it yourself. That you haven’t been dreaming of a better life.”
The strain of looking at her and not touching added to the bitterness inside Roy. Of course he had dreamed! But he knew how unattainable, how impossible those dreams were. Her naive confidence was like wishing on a star and trusting for the wish to come true, and because of that foolish faith his response came out on a surge of anger.
“You act as if you care about me, but you don’t. Not really. You’re simply latching onto me as the first person who broke your loneliness. When I found you hiding in your house in Rock Springs, I told you that you were happy to see me. And you were. But not because of anything to do with me. Because I was a human contact. Someone to talk to. I know how terrible it can feel to be completely isolated, and how easy it is to cling to anyone who eases that isolation.”
“I was happy to see you.”
Roy ignored the comment and resumed his task of rubbing Celia’s icy limbs. Slipping his hands beneath the blanket, he tried to close his mind to the shape of her leg, the soft texture of her skin, the subtle scent of her. As he worked to get her warm, he talked softly, telling her of his past, as much to unburden himself of the painful memories as to make her understand what he meant.
“My mother grew up on a horse ranch, and when she was sixteen she ran off to join a traveling circus. A year later, she came back, heavy with child. My grandparents found a man to marry her. He didn’t love her, but he wanted the ranch. She was an only child and would one day inherit the property.
“I was born with different-colored eyes, and my grandparents took it as a sign that I was cursed, because of my mother’s wanton ways. My stepfather hated me for what I was—another man’s bastard. My mother...” He shrugged, unsure as he h
ad always been. “Perhaps my mother loved me, but she feared the opinion of others, and her fear was greater than her love.”
His hands stilled as the memories flooded over him. He told Celia of his lonely childhood, of being an object of fear and suspicion. “I went to school but I had no friends. At home, I had to eat at a separate table in the corner of the kitchen. My family, including my mother, barely spoke to me. And then, when I was ten, both my grandparents died of a fever, and my mother broke her neck practicing her tricks on a horse. I was left alone with the stepfather who hated me.”
Roy paused and gritted his teeth, the old pain still sharp. He told Celia how he had been banished from the house and was no longer allowed to attend school. He’d lived at the stables. Every morning, his stepfather had chalked a list of chores on a slate and put it by the back door of the house. In the evening, if Roy had completed the tasks, a plate of food would be left on the doorstep. If he failed to do the work, he’d go hungry.
From the way Roy could feel Celia’s body shaking, he could tell she was weeping, silent sobs that rocked her shoulders. A beautiful woman, weeping for him. The thought eased the impact of the stark memories. He wanted to see her expression, wanted to see the empathy on her face, but he found that he couldn’t look at her, for he couldn’t trust himself not to reach out for her and take the comfort she was offering.
His voice hoarse now, as if it hurt to speak the words, but he went on, “When I was fourteen, my stepfather ordered me to leave the ranch. He was going to remarry and he didn’t want me around his new wife. So he told me I had to be out by nightfall. I could take one horse with me. That’s how I came to be riding the black stallion that got me mixed up with the outlaws.”
Shaking his head ruefully at the memories, Roy suppressed a bitter smile. “At first, I was overwhelmed by the companionship, the camaraderie. Every outlaw at the camp seemed like a friend. I thought I loved them all. But as the weeks turned into months, and months turned into years, I grew to know some of them as the meanest, cruelest, sorriest excuses for a human being that ever trod the earth.” His voice cracked, all artifice stripped away. “But when you’ve been all alone, isolated from the world, like you were in your house, any man who comes along will seem like a hero. It’s not me you are hankering after. It is the comfort of companionship after having been ostracized by others, condemned to the prison of solitude, an outcast through no fault of your own.”
Finally, he chanced a glance up at Celia’s face. Tears were trailing down her cheeks, and her expression was gentle. In her misty eyes he could read pity, but also tenderness.
The truth he had tried to forget slipped out. “My mother...before she died, she was preparing to go away. I knew it, because I’d spied on her when she took a horse to a clearing in the forest. She was practicing her circus tricks, jumping on and off at full gallop, making handstands on the back of a horse. She was planning to leave, and she wasn’t going to take me with her. Even if she had lived, I’d have been alone.”
With a gentle smile, Celia opened her arms to him, the blanket spread wide, her bare breasts shining milky white in the falling darkness. “You don’t have to be alone anymore,” she told him softly. “At least not right now.”
Roy abandoned the fight to stand aloof. With a harsh groan of emotion, he pulled Celia against him. Eyes closed, he kissed her—her mouth, her cheeks, her neck—hungry kisses that tasted salty from her tears, tears she had shed for the child he had once been. He hugged her tight to his chest and clung to her, as if trying to mold them into one so he would never have to let her go.
“Your shirt is damp,” Celia murmured. “Take it off.”
Reluctantly, Roy broke the embrace. It awed him to think that Celia welcomed his kisses, his touch. The knowledge filled him, soothing the childhood hurts that had never healed, making him feel complete for the first time in his life. Light-headed with a sense of elation, he released her, got to his feet and fetched more wood for the fire. Then he pulled his shirt over his head, hung their wet clothes over branches in the tree and came back to her.
Celia was lying down now, huddled beneath the blankets. Roy settled beside her, stretching out on his side. Without hesitation, she lifted the edge of the blankets, inviting him to join her. Inviting him to take whatever he wanted from her.
“Celia...” The protest died on Roy’s lips. Slowly, as if giving in to a greater force than his reason, he joined her inside the warm cocoon of blankets. With a rough sound of longing, he reached out and let his hand slide over her soft skin. Inch by inch, he traced her shape. The slope of her breasts. The dip of her waist. The slight rise of her belly. He’d never felt anything so delicate beneath his callused palm.
Emotion rose within him, like a storm he could not hold back. It had never been like this when he sought comfort in a whore’s bed. The very fact that he had paid for the pleasure, that he was one man in the string of many, to be forgotten as soon as the door closed behind him, had reduced the act to merely a physical release, without the sense of acceptance, the sense of validation he had sought his entire life.
As his hand swept back up over Celia’s breast, she arched her spine and emitted a startled sound of pleasure. “Tell me,” Roy said in a hoarse whisper. “Tell me what you like. Tell me what feels good for you.”
“That...what you just did...do it again...” Despite the darkness, Roy could see her blush, understood that although she was brave enough for the act, she lacked the boldness to put her desire into words.
“All right,” he replied. His reticence gone now, he cupped her breasts, stroked his thumb across the peaked nipples. When Celia made those low, husky sounds again, it broke the last of his restraint. Bracing his weight on his elbow, he eased half on top of her, his leg sliding between hers. When Celia’s thighs parted in invitation, a wave of desire swept over Roy like a dark cloak that covered him, blotting out his decency and common sense.
He could feel his pulse pounding in his ears, could feel his blood surging in his veins. His entire body trembled with need. Within the confines of his clothing, his erection strained and throbbed, pressing against the soft swell of Celia’s belly. Reaching down between their bodies, Roy fumbled with the button at his waist, driven by the prospect of release.
The sudden shifting of his weight on top of Celia’s body must have hurt her, for she let out a whimper of pain. Roy could feel her wriggle, trying to get more comfortable. Like a light being snapped on in a darkened room, he suddenly saw himself in his mind, sprawled over her, intent on taking his pleasure, no matter what the cost to her.
With a supreme effort, he stopped. Lifting his weight away from her, he rolled onto his back. By now, stars had appeared in the sky. Bright, shining stars. And each of them seemed like a mark of judgment, telling him what a bastard he was.
Roy waited for a moment to calm down his ragged breathing. When he knew the words would come out casual, without the tremor of yearning or the huskiness of desire, he gathered his determination to prove those judgmental stars wrong.
“Celia, we must stop. Right now, before things get out of hand.”
“I don’t want to stop.”
Roy let out a heavy sigh, tried to hold on to his resolve, prayed for strength. “There are few things in my life that I can take pride in, but I can honestly swear that I’ve never hurt a woman. If we take things too far, I’ll end up hurting you.”
“You could never hurt me.”
“I will, if I get you with child.”
For a moment, only the rush of the river filled the silence. Then Celia spoke very quietly. “When a woman is left a spinster, unwanted by any man, she misses out on life. Not just the role of a wife and mother, but she also misses out on physical passions.” She leveled her gaze at Roy, her eyes full of uncertainty. “What I feel now...what I want now...is a taste of that passion. How can it be so very wrong?”
Roy studied her ex
pression in the darkness, saw a mix of longing and doubt. “It’s not just a question of hurting you, Celia,” he told her softly. “I won’t risk bringing a child into this world and having him suffer because of my sins. Even if you might be able to hide the fact that he is an outlaw’s bastard, the child would grow up without a father to protect him. I will not have you taking such chances. I will not have us taking such chances.”
“But couldn’t we just...”
“No, Celia.” His tone was blunt. “If we start something, I may not have the strength to pull back when I should. But I know that I must not take your innocence, or create the possibility of a child. If we don’t stop right now, it will only bring suffering to both of us.”
In the flickering firelight, Roy could see Celia’s expression grow somber. He sighed, a heavy sound that held as much frustration as regret. Easing over to his side, he hauled Celia into the shelter of his body, her back pressed to his naked chest. He draped one arm across her waist to anchor her close to him and spoke in a soothing tone into her ear.
“Sleep now, Celia. That’s one thing I can offer you tonight. I can watch over you while you sleep. Keep you safe. Safe from the world. Safe from me. For you should understand that right now the greatest danger you face is from me.”
Chapter Nine
Dressed in her wrinkled velvet riding costume that had lost its elegance, Celia crouched by the river’s edge and rinsed her face and teeth. To her surprise, she felt at peace with the world, even though her father was languishing in prison and tomorrow she would have to say goodbye to Roy. It seemed as if the warmth and closeness of spending the night in Roy’s arms had created a shield that limited her horizon to this moment only, to this second, isolating her from worries that might lurk around the corner or wait for her back in civilization.
The Outlaw and the Runaway Page 12