by Shirl Henke
And still he desired her.
"I propose that we end the charade." Her voice sounded unnaturally calm. "We should never have begun it. You don't want me—"
"Bloody hell I don't want you!" he snarled, seizing her wrist and yanking her against his chest before she could utter a sound. Her body fit his so perfectly, her unusual height a complement to his own. Her soft curves seemed to mold themselves to his very bones, to melt into him as if they were two streams flowing into one river.
Joss could feel his heart slamming in his chest—or was it her heart keeping a matching thunderous beat? She could not tell as his mouth came down on hers fiercely, hungrily, as if he were angry and wished to devour her. This was quite unlike the way his first seduction had been with its butterfly-light kisses; no, this was raw, desperate.
Her palms pressed against his chest, feeling the flex of muscle, the crisp abrasion of hair that had been graven on her memory for all eternity. A deep compelling need filled her like a deluge of rainfall, wild and turbulent, destructive. Doing this would only bring her more pain, yet she was powerless to stop herself. She slid her hands up his chest, over his shoulders and around his neck, clinging to him as he repositioned his lips over hers, his tongue plunging deep inside her mouth, ravaging.
Joss let her own tongue twine with his, instinctively trying to gentle it, but instead he opened his mouth wider and sucked it in until she was imitating his actions, tasting of him as he had of her. Would he be shocked? Repelled? She no longer cared. He groaned and pressed her tighter against him, the rocking of his hips urging her on.
He tangled his fists in her hair, pulling out the feathers and beads Barbara had so artfully woven through the long masses. The sharp pressure on her scalp tilted her head back and his mouth at last left hers, trailing harsh wet kisses and bites down her jawline to her exposed throat.
Somehow in this rough encounter he'd lost his headgear and his long straight gold hair fell around his face. He'd not cut it since they left London. Her hands reached up, fingers digging into his scalp as she grabbed fistfuls of it, pulling his head closer against her body, lower, lower, toward the aching crests of her breasts. Her nipples were drawn so tight that they burned; she burned for his hands and mouth upon them.
Alex could feel her spine arch, feel the hard peaks of her breasts pressing against his bare chest. The little witch was offering herself to him, damn her! And damn him if he wasn't going to have her, devil take the consequences come morning. He reached up and tore open her tunic, ripping the buttons until the two pale mounds were exposed, glowing in the moonlight.
The deep coral tips seemed to beckon him, tilting upward toward his mouth. Cupping one in his hand, he raised it as his lips skimmed along her collarbone, then down the milky swell of her flesh to suckle. Her low keening cry, her hands pulling his hair, her hips pressing to his, all spoke of her wanting...and sharpened his wanting. He feasted on one nipple, then the other until they glistened darkly in the moonlight.
When he raised his head Joss could feel the cool night air on her breasts and cried out again. She clung to him, her knees too weak to hold her up if he should let her go. For an instant she feared he would when he reached down, but instead he unhooked her belt and ripped the remnants of her tunic from her body, tossing it aside. She shivered, but not from cold, as her upper body was bared for his inspection.
When she started to wrap her arms over her breasts he said in a hoarse, guttural voice she scarcely recognized, "God, you are perfection."
He swept her arms away and took the aching globes in his hands. How perfectly they fit, he thought as she came again into his embrace. Her hands slid inside the open front of his shirt, pushing it from his body, pressing her nails into the tense muscles of his shoulders. She clung to him desperately as he encircled her waist with one arm and pressed her to him once more.
Joss could feel the pressure of his erection through his buckskin loincloth and the layers of her skirts. His pelvis rocked hers in that ancient and now familiar rhythm as he took her mouth once more in another voracious kiss while one hand continued to knead her breast. There was no breath left in her. Her knees buckled with the surge of desire that washed over her. The heat of him scalded her, his hands, his mouth, the hard furry wall of his bare chest, but most of all it came from that part of him yet clothed, straining against her belly. A low piercing ache moved from her breasts downward, into her belly, pooling in her groin.
Alex felt her hips buck against his hips, exerting even more pressure on his sex. If he did not sheath it inside her he would explode! Thinking of nothing but the woman in his arms, he sank to the fragrant pine planks of the floor. She came willingly with him. They knelt a dozen feet from the bridal pallet, which had been decked with flowers and sweet herbs. Later, there would time for the bed.
"Now," he groaned as he pressed her back onto the floor and slid his hand beneath the voluminous cotton skirt, moving up her leg until he encountered her very English undergarments, frilly lace and silk. This should have stopped him, this reminder of who she was, what their agreement had been...but it did not.
She felt his hand glide over the curves of her bare calf, ruching up her skirt until it bunched around her hips in a crimson billow. When his hand hesitated an instant at contact with her silk drawers, she feared he would reject her. Then with a muffled oath he reached high to the tape at her waist and tore them off her in several vicious yanks, leaving her exposed, feeling her own dampness in the night air.
He cupped her mound of soft, pale brown curls with one large, warm palm. Her hips rose against the pressure of his hand, bucking again. His smile was more a fearful grimace of inevitability. This had been bound to happen from the moment he'd married her. The thought crashed over him in sudden revelation. She was his wife. He desired her and she desired him as well—at least for the moment. Alex was unable to think further, for when his fingers probed her petals they came away wet with the sweet musky essence of feminine desire.
His intimate touch was even sharper, sweeter, more intense than she remembered. Joss gasped and cried out his name, writhing in feverish need as the mind-numbing pleasure rushed over her so hard that it hurt. Her young body had been starved for his touch since that first night of initiation into the way of men and women. She wanted him. She needed him. She ached for the union of their flesh with feverish urgency.
Alex tugged at his breechclout with fingers made clumsy by desperation, tearing the soft leather away to free his straining shaft. He covered her body, positioning himself between her legs, guiding himself home with little thought for her virginity. Some small remnant of consciousness broke through the haze of his lust when she flinched as the head of his sex pressed at the edge of her portal.
She is a virgin. Go slow. He bit down on his lip and stopped from plunging in a headlong hard stroke, even though every fiber of his being screamed for him to do it. Instead he took the head of his staff and circled the gates of paradise, reveling in the creamy wetness of her, the slickness that promised the sublime.
Joss remembered the pain, even expected it. She welcomed it, for had it not come the first time he had penetrated her body? Yet afterward it had quickly faded. Surely it would do so again—if he would only join himself with her. And the twain shall become one flesh. She arched up in supplication.
He groaned out a guttural oath and gave in, unable to resist driving himself deep within her sweet welcoming heat. The tight fit, the old yet new sensations that he had been deprived of for months smothered him, blotting out everything but the urge to thrust relentlessly inside her. There was no virgin's barrier, no cry of pain or even a stiffening indicating discomfort. Yet none of that registered as he felt her arms around his neck, holding him fast, her lower body rocking up and down with his, her legs opening wide to accommodate him, then closing tightly around his hips to draw him deeper.
This was homecoming, the most perfectly made female body he had ever possessed, made just for him like no other...but
one. The nagging familiarity of her aroused scent, the tentative yet passionate responses of her tongue, hands, hips—all of it cried out that he had known her before. But at the moment Alex's mind was not functioning. The pleasure shut down all else, building and building. His only thought was to make it last.
Joss felt the powerful thrust of his staff deep within her, filling her, stretching her. Yet magically there was no pain this time, only a boundless, slowly increasing pleasure that was so keen it was almost unbearable. And with that ecstasy there was a nameless need, a hunger that far transcended any she had ever experienced before in her life. Every stroke of his body in hers, of hers closing around his, brought her one step nearer the brink...of what?
She concentrated single-mindedly on that need, just as he seemed to, all else blotted out as his mouth nuzzled her throat, then rose to her lips to claim them in a fierce kiss that mimed the stroking of their lower bodies. Joss dug her nails into his back, instinctively tightening her thighs around his churning hips. She could feel the dampness of perspiration on their bodies. The night air, at first cool, was now hot, redolent with the heavy perfume of desire, the heady scent of their musk, the essence of each blended together as they ascended to the summit of the abyss.
And plunged over it. His mouth muffled her cries when the first rippling waves suddenly swept over her, radiating out in ever-widening circles. She was robbed of breath by the splendor of it, this wondrous, unexpected gift of his body to hers. This was the very essence of life...and life giving.
As she quivered in fulfillment her sense of him seemed to intensify. His staff swelled even more, while his whole body stiffened and arched, pressing her hard against the unyielding floor. Trembling, he collapsed on top of her, his hands clenched in the spilled silk of her hair.
Alex's mind was still miles behind his body, even after the orgasm struck him with the force of a cannonball. She had drained him utterly. A sense of exhausted, mindless euphoria swept over him for several moments. He simply reveled in the satiation so long denied his body. How perfect this coupling had been. How perfectly she fit with him. How familiar that fit, that body, those responses were!
He was poleaxed after inhaling her scent once again. Rolling away from her, he heard her faint murmur of protest. She lay open and vulnerable as he sat up and looked down into her dazed face, a furious expression on his own. "You know I searched for you for four months." His voice was cold, deliberate, lethal.
Joss, still awash in the aftermath of her first orgasm, tried to focus on his words. The sense of loss when he withdrew from her left her bereft. For a moment his words did not register any more than did her dishabille. Then the cold, accusatory look in his eyes skewered her and she realized she lay bare-breasted with her skirts ruched above her bare legs, with his seed wet on her thighs.
Struggling to cover herself, she sat up, trying to frame a reply...if only she could remember the question! Her hair fell around her shoulders, meager protection for her breasts, yet welcome as she swallowed and forced herself to meet his hostile gaze. He had refastened his breechclout and sat with his clothes neatly back together. She hated him for destroying this moment, for being so angry yet self- possessed at the same time.
His eyes glowed like dark coals from some hellish hearth. "Why did you do it? To make a fool of me?"
"I did not have to make you one, Alex Blackthorne. You already managed that quite nicely yourself," she snapped back. At least her wits were returning. And so was a deep painful emptiness in her heart. "You are a heartless philanderer who takes his pleasure selfishly, even despoiling an innocent virgin."
"I could hardly despoil my own wife, now, could I?" he asked sarcastically.
"You were drunk," she accused.
"And you were willing. What the hell made you climb into my bed and lie in wait for me? We had an agreement—or at least I believed we did."
"I did not lie in wait for you," she denied vehemently. "You were to be away for the weekend and there'd been a fire upstairs, remember? I scarcely planned it." She was not certain if she meant the fire or the seduction.
Neither was he. "You'd been tippling sherry—fair reeked of it." Alex no longer knew what was fueling his anger—her deception, his reaction to his mysterious virgin, or, most alarmingly, the fact that his ardor for his wife had been growing even before that night. He desired a woman who looked down on his Indian blood, a woman who would never make a loving wife for a man like him. Hell, he'd never even wanted a wife in the first place! "Why in blazes did you do such a reckless thing?" was all he could think to ask.
Remembering her two "fortifying" glasses of sherry to give her the courage to sleep in his bed—her own husband's bed—Joss stiffened her spine. How could she answer? She would never reveal her love or her cowardice to this hostile angry man accusing her of wanting to be what she now irrefutably was—his wife.
"It was a regrettable accident on both of our parts, Alex," she finally got out over the lump in her throat. "Just as tonight was. An annulment is no longer an option if you wish to rid yourself of me." Do you wish me gone, Alex? She waited, holding her breath, as he studied her with brooding dark eyes.
"Damned if I know what I wish to do, Joss," he replied as he rose to his feet. Looking down at her, he said, "You may have the bridal bed. It's expected. I'll sleep downstairs. No one will know in the morning." With that he turned and climbed down the ladder, leaving her alone in the moonlight.
Chapter Twenty
Joss spent the night lying on the soft fragrant bed strewn with flowers and sweet herbs, the bridal bed she and Alex should have shared. Sleep would not come. She squeezed her eyes closed to keep from crying and muffled the sounds of her sobs in the mattress when she could not. How had they reached such a terrible impasse? She had always believed marrying him and spending her life with a man who was unaware of her as a woman would be the worst fate that could befall her.
But she was wrong. Alex was certainly aware of her as a woman. The wildly passionate, almost furious mating on the floor had made it abundantly clear that he desired her as fiercely as she did him—and that he resented it bitterly. He did not want to want her. After all, had he not persuaded her to wed him just so he would never be encumbered with a real wife?
She had not intended to deceive him that night she slept in his bed. It had been completely innocent, an accident that was every bit as much his fault as her own. If he were not such a randy womanizer he would never have seduced a female unexpectedly found in his bed—in pitch-darkness to boot! The rogue. The cad.
While Joss pitched and tossed above him, Alex paced like a caged tiger, eager to get as far away from his troubling wife as he could, yet unable to leave the house without attracting the attention of revelers who wandered about the surrounding houses. Gossip in a Muskogee town spread every bit as fast as it did in London. He would not shame Joss by seeming to reject her as his wife.
His wife. She had been so since early spring and he'd never even known it. Why had she not told him? Small wonder she'd been so upset that following morning, using the silly excuse about the fire. An excuse you eagerly seized upon, his conscience taunted him. He had considered that she could have been his marvelous bedmate but had pushed the thought aside as ridiculous. Had he always desired her, no matter that she had been dowdy and plain, a bluestocking puss with an acerbic wit? Perhaps that explained why he'd been so insistent that she marry him. Perhaps he was simply losing his mind, he thought, ceasing his pacing to press his palms against the door frame of the house and hang his head in perplexity.
At least one issue was resolved. She certainly had not been repelled by the physical intimacies of the marriage bed. Whoever would have believed prim, cool Jocelyn Woodbridge, missionary's daughter and reforming zealot, could be such a passionate creature? Just thinking about their explosive coming together upstairs made him hard again.
He desired her more intensely than he ever had another woman. What did Joss feel in return besides the obvious l
ust they shared? She certainly did not fit in among the Muskogee, nor had she seemed to do well with his white family in Savannah. Surely Joss was not like Cybill Chamberlain and so many of her ilk, excited by the thrill of the forbidden, beguiled by his mixed blood.
No. If there was one thing he knew of Jocelyn Wood- bridge—Blackthorne, he amended—it was that she was not shallow. She, like him, had been caught up in a passion that they could no longer deny. If they continued living together, he'd soon make her pregnant and they would well and truly be bound together. He would have the responsibilities of a wife and children, the very things he'd sworn to avoid.
Would that be so awful? his inner voice asked. He considered it and realized that there had been a time—most of his life, in fact—when he would never have even conceived such a thought, much less turned it over in his mind. Time. That was the key. He needed time to think, time away from Joss and she from him, so they both could deal with all the roiling emotions jumbled up inside them. And, too, he needed time to get used to the idea of her sneaking into his bed in London and then never telling him that she had done it. She had made a fool out of him and it still rankled. How Monty and Drum would laugh if ever they learned of it! They never would from him—or Joss, or by heaven he would throttle her!
With the dawn, Alex slipped from the house and went down to the river for a brisk swim to clear the cobwebs from his mind. Usually there was a large gathering of men at the spot, for all Muskogee bathed each day religiously. But it was barely light and the preceding evening everyone had feasted and danced until quite late. He had the water to himself—until a runner from Talisi approached him with the news that an American king's man had brought many fire guns and shot to the Upper Creek town. He was urging the people to follow Peter McQueen, the Red Stick war leader who had accompanied him.
Alex dressed quickly and went to raise his father. Devon was awake, sitting with Barbara in their quarters, sipping hot coffee. They made an intimate tableau and for an instant Alex wondered what it might be like if he and Joss settled into such domestic bliss. The idea was swiftly dismissed as they discussed the alarming news.