by Cait London
She quickly ran her hands down slender hips encased in jeans. “It’s what I do best. There’s a freshwater creek out back. I’ll bring in water. Those cuts need cleaning, but your face looks like you’ve already had the experience.”
He’d had plenty of experience, beginning with his father’s hands. But now, tough Joel Palladin desperately needed to feel Fiona’s hands on him. He damned himself for his weakness, his need of anyone, and swept out a hand, claiming her slender wrist. “You’ll clean the cuts for me, won’t you?”
A woman who called her own terms, she gauged him with a hard look. “You’ll have to do what I say. It will hurt.”
“Sometimes hurting heals.” Joel watched Fiona’s eyes darken, and the air quivered between them. He understood: she was a survivor, not sparing him softness, but prepared to do what she must.
“Some things never heal,” she said quietly and left the house.
His father had murdered her parents. The past leaped between them, and Joel suddenly felt very old, burdened by images, guilt and boyhood hunger that he’d placed in a mental cupboard.
He sighed and allowed himself to doze, plastic rustling beneath his head. He had the woman he sought; all he had to do was to keep her close until he could handle the past and her.
At four o’clock in the morning, Fiona propped her sock-covered feet on an old wooden chair. Exhausted, she leaned back. She folded her arms across her chest and studied the man dozing restlessly on the bed.
After cleaning the wounds thoroughly, she’d sewn two stitches in each deep cut—she was adept at first aid, and a stint as a field nurse at a Montana commune had told her that butterfly bandages wouldn’t service the cuts. Though the man turned pale, he didn’t complain, even as she secured a square of disposable diaper over his wounds. He’d simply placed both hands around her waist and held her gently as she worked over him; he held her as though he were feeling her bones, sensing, angling to see what made her tick....
He was not used to being touched or cared for a wary man, with dark brown hair that waved around his harsh face, softening it and flowing onto a neck tense with muscles. The candlelight was not kind to his face. It was all angles and jutting cheekbones, lean cheeks and, beneath a dark stubble, a jaw that was set and square. His nose had been broken, perhaps more than once. Oddly, amid the raw masculine features, his mouth seemed almost gentle.
His eyes were green, brooding, hard as jade and dark with tired shadows. He watched her as if he knew something she did not. Awakening briefly, he always found her in the darkness, latching on to her with his eyes as if he would never let her go. He clearly had his secrets, but she had hers, and their eyes had locked and warred. Fiona had had to look away, wary of the heat and shadows she found in his eyes.
“Call me Joel,” he’d said earlier, as she’d propped him in a chair while she covered the new mattress with bedding.
Since it was only fair, she’d given him her name, and he’d tried it on his lips, a soft purring sound, “Fiona.” He’d said it again as though testing the curl of it around his tongue, as if she’d just given him a gift. A shiver had jarred Fiona, his tone intimate, masculine, longing.
When he had tried and failed to undress, Fiona had gently leaned him against a wall and had deftly undone his belt, unzipped his jeans and had eased him into bed.
“You’ve done this before,” he had murmured, unsettling her by wrapping his hand around her wrist.
While she was a woman who rushed through life, devouring it and speeding on to her next challenge, he was a “toucher” she decided, a man whose pleasures ran to lingering over a woman’s softer skin. His disturbing tone had insinuated she’d had legions of lovers.
“I told you. I have brothers,” she’d said, not wanting to give him any portion of her life.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you. That it was so hard on you,” he’d whispered, drifting into sleep.
He probably meant how she had dodged the thieves’ bullets. Fiona inhaled. What had happened to her? Everything? Nothing. She’d lived, survived and flown through life, suiting herself, and she was tired, so tired of fighting.
Joel—with a snarling, fighting dragon tattooed on his upper arm—that was all she knew of him. There was more, an angular lean body, corded and hard, weighing more than she’d expected, packed with solid muscle. He admitted to nothing, leaving her to assumptions. She’d collected a secret-keeper and she needed him. Fiona resented the tall, lean muscular man tossing on the bed. Taking care of him had slowed her down and had added to her fatigue.
On the other hand, though he didn’t know it, he had provided safety for Eunice. Everything came with a price, Fiona decided wearily...and she had paid her share of them.
Joel’s eyes opened, gleaming in the firelight coming from the old stove. He stared at her, and time stretched into a full minute, and then he shivered, his eyes locked with hers, the shadows trembling, hovering between them.
“Are you cold?” she whispered, and wondered if he was really awake, or if fever was setting in from his wounds.
“Talk to me,” he murmured and shivered again.
“You should be warm enough,” she worried aloud and rose, padding to him in her socks. She untied the king-size sleeping bag she’d found in his car, opened it and placed it over the down quilt covering him. “I checked the car’s registration in the glove box. The name was Pete Glass, not Joel.”
“I haven’t had time to—”
“Sure.” Fiona slashed at him flatly, angry with herself that she had collected a car thief on her way to save Eunice. “Don’t you think that a down feather bed is a strange thing for a man to carry around in the back of a tiny sports car? And this down comforter? They should both be warm enough.”
They were new, a cash register tape had tumbled from their sacks. Joel Whoever shopped in pricey stores. Or whoever owned the sports car before it was stolen liked expensive, lush bedding—the down comforter was of a masculine brown and black design, the sheets and pillowcases striped in the same shades.
“Talk to me,” he repeated.
She was too tired, and that was when she was most vulnerable. Impatient with her weakness, she spoke sharply, “Look, we both need rest. You most of all—”
He frowned slowly, studying her with those quiet green eyes, firelight gleaming on his dark skin, hard bones thrusting beneath the surface. “You’re protecting yourself,” he said. “Not wanting to give me anything. I know the feeling. Are you afraid of me? I won’t hurt you.”
He’d caught her unprepared for that quick, perfect insight, and she tensed. “Why should I be afraid of you? You’re the one stretched out, wearing my stitches and helpless. I’m still on my feet and ready to walk out the door when it suits me.”
Joel simply sighed and wearily closed his eyes. After his second shiver, Fiona shook her head. She was exhausted, too wound up to sleep, and feeling fragile, an emotion she rarely allowed herself. When Joel shivered again, Fiona sighed. He needed body heat. She sat on the bed next to him, watched him shiver again, and, shaking her head at the folly of lying next to a man who looked this tough and worn, she slowly eased beneath the sleeping bag. “I’m right here.”
He found her hand, curling his larger, rougher one around it. She hadn’t expected the calluses. Fiona stiffened, ready to withdraw her hand, then she surrendered to the oddly familiar comfort of a male’s larger hand enfolding hers, a selfish need that she was too tired to deny. Slowly, so slowly, his head eased over to her pillow, sharing it. and she studied him as he slept. “You’ll be lucky if your temperature stays down. You look exhausted and you’re going to ache down to your bones tomorrow. It is tomorrow.” she corrected.
Fiona stared at the firelight flickering on the old ceiling, which needed plastering. She’d come so many miles, fought so hard, and she found herself speaking. “Last December, I came home for Christmas.”
She glanced at Joel, who appeared to be sleeping. The sound of her voice would comfort him;
her words wouldn’t matter. “There I was, just in from battling, saving another historical site from being blasted by developers and suddenly I was dead tired. I didn’t have anything left. I wanted my family.”
Fiona smiled softly, listening to the man’s even breathing, and knew that he slept. He wouldn’t remember her secrets, and she needed to talk, even to a stranger she’d collected at a convenience store holdup. “You’re not so bad, Joel. You don’t like being ordered, the blaze of your eyes and the way you tense your body tells me that. I’ve got brothers who act like that. I’ve always liked having the upper hand, though, and I’m used to getting my way.”
He sighed heavily, his breath brushing her throat.
Fiona blinked away the tears that suddenly sprang to her lids. “I have a big family. There’s my oldest brother Duncan, then Calum, Birk and my sister Elspeth. I’m the youngest and they’ve all worried about me all my life, especially when my parents were killed in a convenience store holdup. My folks had stopped by to pick up pizza for us. We were waiting at home, and they interrupted a robbery. My brothers tracked the killer into the mountains—they were the only trackers who could follow the trail at night up into the wilderness, and the sheriff knew it. They brought him back, but my parents were never coming back. They’re buried up on Tallchief Mountain.”
She leaned her head against Joel’s, needing the touch of life. “Suddenly, last Christmas, I knew I had to come back, to watch Megan, Daniel, Kira and Elspeth’s Heather and all the rest of the babies that would come into the Tallchief family. Now there’s Birk and Lacey’s Willow and—I had to be here. I had to come back and settle what was in me somehow. I had to have peace. I’m too tired, Joel. I’m missing something inside me. Maybe I’ve given it away, piece by piece.”
He continued to breathe evenly, deeply, and Fiona inhaled. “It helps to grow things and please people with my plants and flowers arrangements—I own a florist shop with a small greenhouse. I’m tired of causes, Joel, and except for this time, I’ve been minding my own busmess. I’d like to find a man. Not that I believe in fantasy or love, but I have a biological clock ticking, you know, especially with all the babies my family is producing. I’ve got this awful, sinking feeling that I need a conventional relationship, a man to make me happy, a house to tend and reams of children to pass on the Tallchief legends. You could say that I’m lonely. Or that a piece of me is missing.”
She tapped her fingers and settled more deeply into her thoughts. “Or perhaps I’m sexually hungry. I have this awful feeling that if the right man touches me, I’ll change and never be the same. I feel as if...as if I’d tear off my clothes and have him on the spot I’m a savage when I want something badly. It’s darned hard being the last virgin, you know. No, you probably wouldn’t know.”
Joel issued a taut shudder and a groan. She yawned after he settled close to her side. “I’m a difficult woman. I’ve been told that often enough. But every one of the legends attached to Una’s dowry has materialized. Una was my great-great-grandmother, a Scottish indentured servant who was captured by a Sioux chieftain, Tallchief. They fell in love, and to save Tallchief land, she sold her dowry. Just after my parents died, we each pledged to return a portion of it to our family. My family has done their share, and each legend attached to the dowry has come true.”
She stretched, the warmth of bedding and the man beside her seducing her into sleep. Joel moved her hand onto his chest, and she allowed the trespass and the comfort. “I pledged to find Una’s sewing chest According to her journals, it’s small, wooden and brass, but filled with sewing clutter—tatting shuttles, needles, thimbles and buttons. The odd things my grandmothers before Una treasured, tiny bits of their lives, like Celtic jewelry. The legend has to do with the oddest thing—a circle. Of course, the Celts fashioned intricate designs, based on everything relating, coming full circle, so it’s no wonder. And my Native American heritage says everything is related, a part of everything else, forming a whole.”
Joel sighed heavily, almost abruptly, startling her. Fiona watched him for a moment and then decided that a bruise had hurt him as he moved.
She continued, freewheeling through her thoughts. “I want lust. Good old-fashioned lust and desire for a man who makes me happy...and who I make happy. I want to be desired, Joel, really desired, so much that deep down in my bones I feel the heat vibrating, pouring off me. I want to laminate myself to him, breathe his breath, taste him, revel in what I am—a woman—and then I’ll feel complete. I want our skins to simmer, our bones to lock, our mouths to taste and lick and devour. I want to really know him, taste him down one side and up the other. I want the sounds of our lovemaking to boil our brains. I want to feast on him and him on me, and I want an orgasm so deep and so perfect and so unique that I’ll spin off into the moon, the stars. I want to wallow in afterplay—”
She paused as Joel’s big body lurched unexpectedly and he groaned lightly, unevenly. She waited for him to settle again and continued, “Though I’ve been prowling, trying to fit different men into an image of giving me the ultimate release, I’ve never lain on a bed with a man before—other than my brothers when they were comforting me as a child,” she whispered as he continued to sleep. “You’re my first, Joel Whoever-You-Are, and though you’re the size of a mountain, I’m not exactly helpless. So just sleep on and dream of another sports car to steal and let me talk. It’s seldom that I stop long enough to let anyone know what is in my mind or my heart, and you should consider yourself one lucky guy. And for me, it’s cheap therapy.”
Fiona closed her eyes and opened them to the fingers of fire-light playing in the shadows. “I want no easy lover, but an even match. I want to feel his heart racing against mine and know that his desire for me is as true as Tallchief’s was for Una—keep in mind that I’m not wanting love, that would be too much to ask. That when he gives himself to me, I’ll know I have something he’s never given another woman, and that the fire is only between us, hot enough to meld us into one, if only temporarily, and then...” She inhaled slowly. “I want to know what my great-great-grandmother and the rest and my sister and brothers have felt. But now I’m home where my roots are, and I just know that I’ll find what I need in Amen Flats.”
Fiona traced his chest with her thumb, his hand covering hers. “You’ll forget all about this private conversation, won’t you? So you won’t mind if I tell you the legend, will you? It’s so strange—To finish the circle, an unlikely love of the battlemaiden will come calling, bearing his angry dragon on one arm and the chest to win her heart. Then the magic circle will be as true as their love.”
She lay quietly for a moment, tangled in the warmth of the man sleeping beside her and the legend curling through her mind. “Una wrote other things, like how his kisses stopped her fiery mouth, and how the magic ran like heated sunlight and honey between them, and her with her stitching and him with his dreams came to make the circle complete...how he gentled her heart in the end. I think she gentled him, too—rather she tamed him. It’s a lovely fairy tale. Love is a fairy tale for me, though I know my brothers and sister have found it. I have no illusions about love entering my life. I’ve tried it, and the shoe doesn’t fit. It always causes pain, and I’ve had enough, seen enough, not to want more. I just want good, solid physical contact. I’m a physical woman who understands her body’s needs. I like action, and I’ve never kissed a man yet who could make me want to—”
She yawned, sliding into the warmth of the bed and badly needed sleep.
He was here, the man she sought, the dream lover. He’d come before, just once, and when she’d awakened he was gone. She trusted him now, giving herself to his touch. She floated in the soothing warmth, the big warm hand lightly stroking her cheek, fitting itself to her, cupping. She sighed, moving her head slightly, turning to the irresistible safety, and a man’s thumb ran lightly across her lips. She kissed it softly and turned her body to his, irritated with the heavy layers separating them.
Fiona wa
nted him close to her, so close that nothing separated them. She eased closer, arching against his length. Oh, yes, he fitted her perfectly, all hard and warm and so...so tender.
She lifted her face, giving him her mouth, and his light, tender kisses tasted of honeyed dreams and love and happiness. To draw him closer, Fiona slid her hands up to his throat, seeking his strong pulse, wanting him closer until they were one. His lips eased softly upon hers, and she tasted the dreams inside him, let them curl around her.
She splayed her fingers through his hair, letting it curl around them as she drew him nearer.
His hands were large and firm and yet so light, trembling as they touched her shoulders, her back, her waist...a man who knew what he wanted and who took it, though his ways enchanted and tantalized.
He groaned softly as if desiring her more than air, and his hands opened, claimed, fitting her hips to his.
She changed the kiss, slanted it, fused her lips to his, wanting the heat she knew he’d give, the desire she tasted on his tongue....
His breath swept across her, and she dived into the flavors of desire, dreams and shadows.
He moved as if to draw away, and Fiona slid over him, claiming him with her body, seeking his lips, touching his tongue with hers, suckling him to the rhythm of her desire.
She had been right...she was a woman of action, not waiting to take what she wanted. He was meant for her alone.
He tasted of her dreams, her love, the legend of the dragon-lover, the circle coming true—
Heat pounded through her, wrapped in desire. She hurled herself into the storms, the hunger and—
She blinked, trembling, the savage need humming through her as she looked down at the man she had captured.
He was still sleeping, his lips swollen with her kisses. Fiona trembled, forced herself to lie very still, shocked that his body wanted her—his hands were open, warm, firm and knowing. Beneath her jeans, one hand cupped her bottom, bringing her tight against his hardness. The other cradled her breast, a thumb brushing the tip, tantalizing her. Joel’s dark cheeks were flushed, heat pouring off him, a pulse pounding in the vein at his temple—