He wanted the pain that came with the first time to be brief. He wanted her to remember the good of their first joining, not the bad.
Chapter Thirty
As birds sang overhead in the trees, like soft music being played just for this moment, Nicole lay in her lover’s arms, his mouth eager on hers. She had dreamed of being with Eagle Wolf, of making love, and now her dreams were coming true.
As she clung to him, her body yearning for his, she felt the possessive heat of his kiss. Slowly, gently, he thrust his manhood where she was throbbing with a need all new to her.
She held on to him as he gave one last shove, and she felt a slight stabbing of pain upon his entry. But the pain lasted for only a moment. Then, as he began to move gently within her, a pleasure she had never known began to grow within her. She strained her body against his, hungry for more of the exquisite pleasure he was awakening within her.
She instinctively wrapped her legs around his waist, and rode with each of his thrusts. His movements aroused the most wondrous of feelings within her.
“My woman,” Eagle Wolf whispered against her lips. “I love you ka-bike-hozhoni-bi. Forevermore.”
“And I shall love you ka-bike-hozhoni-bi,” she whispered back to him.
Then he moved more earnestly within her, and she felt the sweetest of currents spreading through her.
She closed her eyes and allowed herself to feel it all as he again kissed her with such passion, she sighed with pleasure. She clung to him, her body moving with his.
She was flooded with emotion as Eagle Wolf swept a hand around one of her breasts and kneaded it so that she felt the nipple grow tight against his palm. She sucked in a breath of utter pleasure when he moved his lips to that same nipple and gently sucked it between his teeth, softly nibbling.
Then he swirled his tongue around it, and again sucked the nipple into his mouth.
“What you are doing is…driving…me wild,” Nicole whispered, feeling heat surge through her whole body, this sensual awakening that was so sweet and wonderful.
“Just enjoy,” Eagle Wolf whispered against her cheek. “You feel it all now, do you not? You feel my need for you. You feel my want of you.”
“I feel everything wonderful, my darling,” Nicole said, gazing up at him through passion-clouded eyes. “My handsome Navaho chief. Oh, how I do love you.”
“We were destined to meet and to know a love so fierce it should shake the heavens,” Eagle Wolf said, smiling into her eyes. “It should awaken all of nature. Hear the birds? Their songs accompany our love dance.”
His lips came down onto Nicole’s and kissed her more passionately than before. He swept his arms around her and held her tightly against his body, experiencing something with Nicole that he had never felt before with any other woman, not even his wife.
Now he saw how wrong he had been to marry for the wrong reasons.
This time his wife, his Nicole, would experience everything that love could give. He knew that she would always return his love, twofold, as she was doing today.
She clung and rocked with him, and heat spread through him, a liquid heat that melted his insides. His whole body was quivering with anticipation.
His skin actually tingled with an aliveness he had never felt before. And his stomach was churning wildly.
No, never before had he experienced anything even close to how he was feeling now with this woman.
That day when he lay there so overwhelmed with fever, it was fate that led her to him. Had she not come, his life would never have been complete.
Now that they had found come together, they completed each other.
Nicole was almost mindless with the pleasure that Eagle Wolf was introducing her to. She was feeling a strange sort of pressure building within her.
And then, as his lips came to hers again in a demanding kiss, she arched her back and hugged him tightly to her.
Suddenly it seemed as though lights were flashing inside her brain, and the most delicious feeling swept through her, rocking her with an intensity she had never imagined possible. She clung to him. She sighed. She cried out his name just as he cried out hers against her lips. His body trembled and he thrust himself over and over again inside her, and then lay quietly against her, his breathing as quick as her own.
“What I just felt…” she said, marveling over what had happened to her body. It was as if she had been reborn into a new and different world, a world of sensuality.
“I felt the same,” Eagle Wolf said, rolling away from her and stretching out on his back on the soft moss. “You just discovered the truth about lovemaking and what can happen inside the body, inside the soul, when you truly love someone as you and I love each other.”
He turned on to his side toward her. He bent his head to her breasts, and swept his tongue around one nipple and then the other, feeling the heat of her flesh against his lips.
Nicole threw her head back and closed her eyes in ecstasy as Eagle Wolf then kissed her lips with a warmth and passion that would always be there.
She would always need him.
She would always love him.
She twined her fingers through his long black hair, loving the feel of it against her hand. Then she swept her hands across his muscled back, stopping at his buttocks, where she splayed her fingers across his flesh.
“Your body is so magnificent,” she murmured as he leaned his face away from hers, his eyes gazing intently into hers.
“Your body is more than that,” Eagle Wolf said, laughing huskily. “I cannot keep my hands or lips off you.”
“I am yours, for always,” Nicole murmured, closing her eyes in ecstasy again when he kissed first one breast, and then the other.
They were abruptly startled away from each other when they heard a noise behind them, in the bushes.
All Nicole could think of was Sam Partain!
Had he found his way onto the mountain? Had he observed their lovemaking, only to kill them afterward?
She knew that the knife Eagle Wolf always carried in a sheath at his hip was now with his clothes and hers, too far away for him to grab it.
His rifle was in the gun boot on his horse.
They were defenseless.
Both sat up quickly.
Nicole trembled as she covered her bare breasts with her hands and looked toward the bushes where the noise had come from.
Eagle Wolf sat beside her, his hand inching out toward his sheathed knife. But he realized that it was too far away for him to get it without leaving Nicole’s side. That might give whatever was there time to attack Nicole in his absence.
He could not chance it.
Suddenly they both saw a pair of golden eyes through a break in the bushes. Both recognized those eyes at the same moment.
“The wolf,” Nicole gasped out as Eagle Wolf whispered the same.
“It’s the wolf I’ve seen before,” Nicole said, wondering why the animal continued to stand there. “I recognize it by that large scar.”
“It is the same wolf that I have also seen many times before,” Eagle Wolf said, his eyes looking deeply into the wolf’s. “It is the very one that I saved those many sleeps ago. It has appeared to me since then more than once.”
“Yet…yet…it is not attacking either of us,” Nicole said, her voice trembling with fear.
“We are not what it seeks,” Eagle Wolf said, just as the wolf turned and ran away from them. It was soon lost from sight in the shadows of the aspen forest.
Nicole sighed with relief. She scambled to her feet, went to her clothes and hurried into them while Eagle Wolf did the same.
“You said that you saved the wolf,” Nicole murmured. “How?”
“The wolf came to me that day, injured from a fight. It trusted me enough to allow me to use medicine on it, herbs from the forest that my shaman taught me how to find. Since then it has appeared to me many times, but it’s never come as close to me again as it did on the day that I found it near death.”
“I saw the wolf when I was all alone on the mountain. I was afraid that it would attack me, yet it didn’t,” Nicole murmured. “It gave me a look that I could not comprehend, and then went on its way. It appeared to me more than that one time. It is so mystical a creature, Eagle Wolf. I just cannot help wondering why it appears, yet never attacks. I see that as a miracle.”
“The miracle is that the wolf survived its wounds,” Eagle Wolf said, taking Nicole by the hand and leading her to her mare. “Although I did what I could for it, I doubted it would survive. It had lost a lot of blood.”
“Yet there it was again today,” Nicole said, mounting her steed while Eagle Wolf went and mounted his own. “It’s quite a mystery.”
“I believe the wolf is on a hunting expedition,” Eagle Wolf said, riding away from the stream at Nicole’s side.
“A hunting expedition?” Nicole repeated. “For food?”
“No, for whatever scarred it in such a horrendous way,” Eagle Wolf answered, slowly nodding. “I pity the enemy, two-legged or four-legged, that is the reason for its restlessness. If the wolf did not have this need, it would have returned to others of its own kind.”
“I had always thought that wolves were quite fearful of humans,” Nicole said, now riding through tall, blowing, sandy-colored grass.
“Wolves normally are afraid of humans, and stay away from them, but from all that I see about this wolf, it is very different,” Eagle Wolf said, looking over his shoulder in the direction where he had last seen the wolf. “I do wonder sometimes why it seeks me out as it has more than once.”
“Because it sees you as a friend,” Nicole murmured. She smiled softly. “I believe I am seen as a friend, too, for the wolf has never threatened me.”
“Perhaps it senses your feelings toward me,” Eagle Wolf said, now guiding his steed into a forest of aspens.
“But how?” Nicole asked, following behind Eagle Wolf because there was no room to ride beside him.
“That is where mysticism comes into play,” Eagle Wolf said, smiling over his shoulder at her. “My woman, as you live among my people you will be exposed to many things that puzzle you, but always remember that there is a reason for everything and there is always something or someone to watch over you.”
“I feel it already,” Nicole said, returning his smile. “And I feel so blessed because of it…because of you.”
“I hunt tomorrow while you help in the garden. Soon there will be a wedding for my people to celebrate,” Eagle Wolf said. “Ours, my woman. Ours.”
That made Nicole feel a sense of happiness and peace that she had never known before, and it was all because of a man most whites would kill if they saw him riding alone in the forest.
That thought made her shudder with a strange, sudden fear that was new to her.
Chapter Thirty-one
The campfire was burning low as Sam Partain and his men got up to begin a new day of their search.
But things had changed. Several of the men who had ridden with him on his quest to find Nicole Tyler had left angrily in the night.
They had tried to talk Sam into forgetting this nonsense and letting the woman be. When he refused to listen to reason, they snuck away in the darkness.
Now there were only two men riding with Sam, their eyes set on the upper slopes of the mountain.
Searching farther and farther up the mountain had become Sam’s obsession. He would not let the fear of Navaho Injuns spook him out of getting his revenge.
But he had decided that if he hadn’t found Nicole in the next two days, he would finally give up on her and return with his friends to St. Louis. The nights had already proven that winter was not far away. The higher elevations of the mountain were already snow-shrouded.
“Sam, can’t you feel how cold it is this morning?” Ace asked as Sam kicked the last of the dirt on the campfire until all the glowing embers were covered. “Take a gander up yonder. Snow, Sam. There’s more snow on the peaks than yesterday. Don’t that give you a hint of what’s to come? Sam, two more days are two days too many for me. I don’t trust this mountain. It’s haunted by Injuns. Who’s to say when a hard snowfall will suddenly come and cover us like thick, white blankets, sent by the spirits of this damn mountain? Navaho spirits, Sam.”
“You believe in too much superstitious fluff,” Sam said, laughing contemptuously as he placed his blanket in his saddlebag. “Come on. Get in your saddle and let’s go. The sun will soon warm you through and through. You’ll forget the chill of the night. And as for snow? Good Lord, man, it’s too early in the season to think about it, much less cause me to give up my search for the Tyler woman.”
Ace gave Tom a harried look, hoping the other man would back him up. Maybe Tom could come up with some argument that would stop Sam from continuing this idiotic search for a woman who meant nothing at all to Tom, or Ace.
Tom just shrugged and mounted his horse, and Ace had no choice but to follow him.
They gave Sam a harried look, then rode farther up the mountain pass that they had found only yesterday. It was worn enough to tell them that it was used frequently, no doubt by the Navaho, who were the only ones who came this far up the mountain.
Sam supposed that knowledge should have sent him running for cover, but he was too intent on finding Nicole to care. Once he did, he would get out of this place as fast as his horse would carry him.
He wasn’t as dumb as his friends thought him to be. He knew that he was chancing everything in order to take his revenge.
“She’s got to be on this mountain,” Sam grumbled as he snapped his horse’s reins. “We’ve been all over lookin’ for her. No prints lead farther than this mountain. They’re hers, you know it. We followed them from where she was last. In that Mormon community. I might not be an Injun, but damn it, I’m skilled at trackin’ horses’ prints. And she just can’t have gotten far. We’ll find her today or my name ain’t Sam Partain.”
Suddenly Sam went quiet as he spied something that made him stare with disbelief.
The wolf!
It had to be the same wolf that he had left for dead some months ago after it had come up on him while he was alone at a river.
He was stunned that the wolf had lived after what Sam had done to it. Why, Sam had practically skinned it after stabbing the son of a gun in the side.
He’d left the wolf for dead, and then he and his friends had hightailed it outta there quicklike in case the wolf ran with a pack that might attack them.
The last time he had looked back at that wolf, it was lying in its life blood, but Sam had noticed that it was still breathing, its golden eyes following Sam’s every move. Sam had thought to go back and put it out of its misery by shooting it. But instead, he had laughingly gone on his way, leaving the wolf half alive.
Damn it, how on earth had that wolf stayed alive?
He grabbed for the rifle in his gun boot, but the wolf was gone in a flash, like a ghost that might materialize and then disappear just as quickly.
A chill rode his spine. What if that had been the ghost of a wolf, come back to haunt Sam?
“What’re you staring at?” Ace asked as he came up beside Sam’s horse. “Why, Sam, you’re as pale as a spook. What scared you?”
“It’s the damnedest thing,” Sam said, idly scratching his brow. “You know that wolf I told you about while we were on our way to Tyler City? The one I left to die?”
“Yeah, what about it?” Ace asked, lifting an eyebrow.
“Well, if’n I didn’t know better, I’d believe I just saw that same damn wolf peering out at me from those bushes over yonder,” he said, pointing with the barrel of his rifle to where he was sure that he had seen the animal. “It has to be the same one. The deep scar, where no fur grows, shows where I cut that damn wolf. I just know it. It is the same critter.”
“So it lived—” Ace shrugged. “What of it? When you get the chance, shoot it and this time make certain it’s dead. I don’t like the idea of being st
alked by a damn, angry wolf.”
“Me neither,” Tom said as he came to Sam’s other side. “In fact, gents, let’s hunt that rascal down and make sure it’s dead this time.”
“That’s a good idea,” Sam growled. He slid his rifle back into his gun boot. The three men took off at a fast clip on their horses in the direction Sam had last seen the wolf running.
But no matter how far they rode, or in which direction, they didn’t find the wolf.
“Well, that’s that,” Sam said, disgruntled. “It’s given us the slip. But keep an eye out for it. I can’t imagine that thing leaving me alive after what I done to it.”
“Another reason we should turn back and hightail it to St. Louis,” Ace said, glaring at Sam. “Sam, I’m tired of this. I’m leavin’ you now. I’ve had it. The thought of that wolf out there is enough to spook me into sayin’ good-bye until we meet again in St. Louis.”
He looked over at Tom. “Joining me?” he asked. “Had enough?”
“Yep, I’d say so,” Tom said, swinging his horse around and heading it back down the mountain. He looked over his shoulder at Sam. “See ya in hell, Sam, for sure enough, if that wolf has anything to do with it, that’s where you’re gonna wind up. It’s just waitin’ for the right moment to jump out at ya.”
Sam stared disbelievingly at Ace as he joined Tom on the trek downward. “You’re both cowards!” he shouted as he waved a fist at them. “I ought to shoot you for deserting me.”
“I wouldn’t fire that gun if I wuz you,” Ace said. “That would sure enough let the Navaho know they were no longer alone on their mountain.”
“The mountain don’t belong to the Navaho,” Sam shouted angrily at him. “It’s everyone’s.”
“Including the wolf’s,” Ace said, then rode away from Sam with Tom alongside him.
Sam felt bewildered by what had just happened. First he saw what he knew was that same wolf that he had left to die, and then the rest of his friends deserted him?
He heard a rustling behind him.
He turned with a start and gasped. He felt the color drain from his face when he saw the wolf step out from behind the bushes, its golden eyes intent on him.
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