Skye laughed. “Just don’t let it dangle in the water and you’ll be all right.”
“You merciless wench.” He gasped as he stepped down into the water. She followed without blinking. “What makes you so bloomin’ tough for a teeny-tiny woman?” He gasped again as the freezing water danced around his knees.
Prison. “I’m Choctaw.” She’d waded out to mid-thigh. “Now, be still. We have to spot them before we can shoot them.”
“Easier said than—”
“There’s one.” He watched the toned muscles in her arms pull the bow back. Those sexy white teeth bit down on a plump lip and he didn’t even realize when she let go of the bow-string.
THWACK!
“Got him!” She held up the speared fish triumphantly. “I’ve caught my supper, now you catch yours.”
“I’ll have to starve,” he grumbled.
“Look over there, Noah.” She pointed, being very still.
Noah saw the good-size catfish. It was lazily swimming beneath the still waters, slowly making its way to where they stood. Aiming, he tried to take in consideration the movement of the water, the refraction of the sunlight, what the fish might do.
“You’re overthinking this, McCoy,” she mumbled. Noah grinned and let go.
THWACK!
“You got him!” She jumped up and down in the water, splashing icy cold liquid right up his leg.
“There went the balls,” he groaned. “I’ll never get an erection again.”
“Oh, yes you will. That I can promise.”
Her look of complete confidence made him better. Not.
***
They spent the rest of the day riding and becoming friends. “What’s your favorite color?” she asked.
“Green.”
“The color of money.”
“Yep. How about you?”
“Blue, the color of freedom.”
“Nice. What’s your favorite kind of music?” he asked the question this time. “Country?”
“No. I prefer hip-hop, I guess.”
“That surprises me. I like classical.”
Skye smiled. “Of course you do.” He was so out of her league. Sophisticated. Rich. Socially accepted.
She had surprised him earlier by cleaning and frying their fish in a skillet over the campfire. A few potatoes baked in the coals had rounded out their meal. As she’d worked, he’d studied her, taking in her beauty. Now, they were back on the horses, headed for a surprise she said.
“Where did you go to college?” he asked.
“Online, Oklahoma.”
“Oklahoma! Our biggest rival?” Noah winked at her. “We beat you at the Cotton Bowl this year.”
“True.” She knew the McCoys lived and breathed The University of Texas. “I never went to the campus or a football game.” They don’t let you out of prison to attend pep-rallies or proms.
“Where did you go to high school?”
Good Lord! She was determined not to lie to Noah, unless you count the lie of omission. “I took my GED.” To give Noah credit, he didn’t even blink.
“You’re smarter than most people I know.”
Thankfully, about that time they reached their destination. “We’re here. The Sweat Lodge.”
***
Noah was surprised. The structure didn’t look like he expected it to. Instead of a tent, it was made of stucco, a peach color, and was shaped like an igloo. The door faced east and Felts had lit the fires, so when they entered they were immediately awash in a cloud of steam. She showed him how to keep the rocks hot and the steam boiling by tending the fire and adding water. “This isn’t a traditional ceremony.” Skye led him deeper into the dim room. Only a small lantern gave off light after they shut the door.
“What do you mean?”
“Normally, both genders are not allowed to participate at the same time.”
“Bummer.”
She giggled. “And the ritual is usually preceded by prayer, fasting, and abstinence.”
“We’ve totally messed this up, haven’t we?”
“No, not at all.” She picked up his hand and kissed it. “Actually, this is just a sauna. We’re going to do our own version. So, we won’t be breaking any holy rules. It will be private, sacred and special to us.”
Sounded good to him. “Okay, what’s first?”
“Undress.”
He grinned. “We’re always getting naked. It’s my favorite state around you.”
“We’re going to be naked, but we have stuff to do before we fool around.”
God, she was cute. Noah snorted. “I have you know, I’m never fooling around when it comes to sex. I’m dead serious. Besides, you can’t resist me.”
Skye made a face at him. “I’ll try to control myself.” Even though she sounded confident, she was anything but. “The sacred fire is in the center, let’s sit on these rugs in the west so the fire will be to our east. We can face one another and talk.”
Noah followed her with his eyes. She was graceful, elegant and totally feminine. And he was blatantly aroused. After she positioned the rugs and he poured more water on the hot stones, Noah joined her. When she looked up to see him approaching, she widened her eyes at his swollen cock.
“What? I can’t help it. It’s all your fault.”
“That’s right, blame me.” She winked at him. “Just ignore it. We have some mystical stuff to do.”
“All right.” He sat down across from her. Naked. Cross-legged. His cock right there, hard in front of the Great Spirit and Skye. “What do we do?”
“We pray.” At his skeptical expression, she took his hands. “I want to do a couple of things with you. First, give me your hand. We have to declare our connection.” He does. “In intent and purpose, we are one. “
“Did we just get married, Skye?” Funny, the idea didn’t scare the mess out of him like he would have thought.
“No.” She sighed. “We’re not married. But if you don’t behave I’ll throw pebbles at you.”
“Why would you throw pebbles at me?” He was listening, but her nipples were so puffy and sweet and right there for him to see.
“There’s an ancient Choctaw tradition that if a man wants to marry a maiden, he throws pebbles at her or leaves little piles of them around her tent. It’s his way of declaring his intentions.”
“Pebbles, hmmmm, a tad harder than rice.” He loved to tease her.
“Rice is after the ceremony, pebbles are before.” She turned his hand over and traced his lifeline. “Let me begin.” She put the palm of his hand to her face. “Our purpose for being here today is to rid ourselves of guilt and ask forgiveness for those whom we have hurt.” She swallowed hard and began.
“I ask forgiveness from my mother, because I chose to leave her that fateful Saturday. You see, she didn’t want me to go. We hadn’t been able to spend much time together lately and she asked me to help her plant some roses. What she was really asking for was my attention. My mother wanted to spend time with me, and I said no. I spent the day giggling and talking nonsense with a friend…and she died. I’m sorry, Mother.”
Noah didn’t know what to say. He wiped a tear from her eye. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know.” She acknowledged his attempt to make her feel better. “And I need to ask forgiveness from my father, because I didn’t listen to him—not in time. He tried to talk to me about an injustice he had discovered, and I thought it was drunken ramblings. But instead of encouraging him to go to the proper authorities, I just let it pass and in his drunken state, he confronted the man responsible for the crime, and he paid for it with his life.”
Now, Skye was really crying and Noah felt helpless. He ran his fingers over the soft, smooth skin of her arms, seeking to give
her comfort. “You were sixteen? Right? What could you do? And what do you mean he paid for it with his life?”
“Yes, I was sixteen. And there was an accident on the oil field where he worked, an explosion. My father died because he uncovered slant drilling that was stealing oil on tribal land.” She didn’t say more, she couldn’t bring up the rest, not yet. She needed to be with Noah too much to confess it all to him now.
“Again, this is not your fault. You were a child.”
Needing to cleanse her soul she continued. “I want to ask forgiveness from my brother. Because for a time, when we were separated, I hated him,” she whispered the last three words. “I needed him so much. I had to fight demons so much stronger than I. And when I was defeated, I blamed him. Because if he’d been there, he would have kept me safe. He promised to keep me safe. He said he was my protector. And he left me. He left me and I was lost. So lost.” Noah knelt in front of her and held her while she shook with grief.
From what she’d told him of the rape, Noah assumed this was the demons she had fought. “No young girl should ever have to experience what you did and I’m so, so sorry. I wish I could go back in time and fight those dragons for you. I would slay them, Skye. I’d be your knight in shining armor.” His words seemed to soothe her. He held her until she stopped trembling.
“Thank you for listening, I can’t tell my mother and father I’m sorry, but I will tell Lance when I see him again. Until I began to speak, I didn’t realize I blamed Lance, not as much as I do. And that’s wrong. It wasn’t his fault and I blamed him because I wasn’t brave enough to accept responsibility for my own mistakes.”
“How could you? You were attacked. You were overpowered. The man who violated you was to blame. Not you!”
Skye shook her head. “I could have made different choices. I put myself in danger. I could have…” She stopped talking out loud, but it didn’t shut off her thoughts. Skye knew she could have taken someone with her when she approached Langley. She could have went to the police. It probably wouldn’t have stopped him, but she should have tried. Because he was dead and she was…she was ruined. She was barren.
“Sometimes we make wrong choices, Skye. We don’t have a crystal ball to gaze into. We have to do the best we can. You need to realize that you are a beautiful, caring, intelligent woman and no decision you have made, no action you have taken—nothing that anyone has done to you changes the fact that you are perfect, just the way you are.”
His words felt like a balm to her soul, a gentle rain flowing over parched ground. It was as if he knew her deepest, darkest secrets. She felt as if he could see into the mirror of her soul and what he saw didn’t turn him away. “Thank you.” She sought his lips and kissed him. They were damp, she didn’t know if it was from her tears or his, but at that moment she felt as if they were one. And the feeling was utterly irresistible.
“Now, for me.” Noah cleared his throat. “I need to ask my parents for forgiveness. They made sacrifices for me and I took them for granted. I didn’t realize how much I loved them, how much they meant to me until they were gone.” His hand shook. “What does being a parent mean? Is it giving birth or is it the day to day energy you expend wiping tears, fixing breakfast, worrying in the middle of the night?”
“It’s the day to day, Noah. Anyone can give birth, but not everyone can be a parent. You’re just lucky yours chose to do both.”
He didn’t correct her. So many unanswered questions shook the foundations of his soul. When he went home, this was the first thing he would do. Noah needed to know who he was. He needed to know his identity before he could decide what would come next. But this wasn’t all, not by a long shot.
“I need to ask Harper for forgiveness. She chose a different path to walk than I have chosen. But I condemned her for it. I have a tendency to believe that if someone thinks differently than I do, if they feel differently than I do, if they make choices I would not have made, that this difference makes them wrong.” He stared at her hard in the face as if drawing strength from her eyes. “It doesn’t make them wrong, it just makes them different. So many times I have tried to force my viewpoint on Jacob, on Jessie, on Isaac. I wanted everyone to be just like me. And who am I? I am the least perfect one of all.”
“Not to me.” She caressed his face. “Not to me.”
“And I need to ask Aron for forgiveness. This is something I can only whisper to you, because I’ve lied to myself and others.”
Skye squeezed his fingers.
“I am so torn. Aron is my hero, more than Sebastian McCoy ever was. But there is a part of me that wonders if something I did, if something I said made him want to leave our family.”
“No, no, no.” Skye couldn’t stand to see him suffer. “Aron would never leave you, or your brothers. He especially would never leave Libby or the babies. Wherever Aron is, there is something preventing him from coming home. If it’s not death, it may be chains, if it’s not chains, it may be something else. But I can promise you, the man I saw take his vows...the man I saw who was so eager to share his happiness with his family…that man did not decide to stop being Aron McCoy.” She sniffled. “When you love someone, there is nothing they can do to you that you cannot forgive. My mother used to quote a scripture to me. It said, ‘Above all, love one another earnestly because love covers a multitude of sins.”
“If he doesn’t come home, Skye, our family will never be the same.”
“Your family is the strongest family I know. Today we have asked to be forgiven for any harm we have caused another. Let us choose to have faith that all things will work together for good.” At that moment, she felt closer to Noah than she’d ever felt to anyone else in the entire world.
“All things have worked together for good, because I am here. With you.” He reached for her. “Now, can I hold you?”
“Please.” Gratefully she went into his arms. Their lips meeting, their bodies slick with the steam. He pulled her into his lap, her legs straddling his. She cupped his face and looked deep into his eyes. “Keep me safe, Noah. Just for tonight.”
“You are safe with me, don’t ever forget that.” Softly, gently he lowered his mouth to hers, sealing their lips together with a kiss which spoke as much of trust as it did of passion. His erection which had waned, now came roaring back to full measure.
Noah’s tender touch undid her almost as much as did his raw masculinity. She soothed her hands over his chest, loving the wealth of muscles under her hands. He clasped her butt and pulled her tighter against him. “I feel so close to you right now,” she confessed.
“I want to be closer. I want inside of you.” Noah cupped her swollen breasts, raking the pads of his thumbs over her nipples.
Skye arched against him, her fingers tracing patterns over the smooth skin of his back. She could feel her nipples tighten under his touch, as he rubbed them between his fingers. With a sigh, she exposed her throat to him as he feathered kisses over her collarbone. “Lower, please.”
“You want my mouth on your nipples?” She could feel him smile against her skin as he continued to tease the tips of her breasts.
“I’ll bake you a cake, if you’ll suck them.” Bribery was a good thing. She was desperate for his lips on her nipples. Wild for that deep suction, so good she could feel the pull all the way down to her clit.
“I’ll hold you to it,” he whispered against the top swell of one luscious mound. She leaned a little farther back, offering herself to him. “I adore your breasts. I love the way they feel in my hand, the way the nipples bloom in my mouth.” As he praised her, he plumped her tits, molding and lifting them, taking his tongue and twirling it around and around the diamond hard peak.
“Chocolate icing, if you…God, yes, that’s it.” Relief was in her voice as his mouth covered her aching nipple, possessing it, sucking and lashing as he grunted his enjoyment.
Unable to wait, she sought his hardness, her hand closing around him. She pumped his length, grasping his stalk and rubbing her thumb over the tiny slit at the end. “You’re so big and hard. I love how you feel when you push inside of me. No one is like you—no one.”
“Rise up and take me.” He instructed as he moved to torment her other breast. She held on to his shoulder and lifted her hips, guiding him into her aching emptiness. As soon as she had the tip inserted, he took over, working his way in. He reached between them and cupped her vulva, massaging her mound and her clit, even as his cock tunneled in, stretching her slick channel.
Ecstasy ricocheted through her body. “This is so good. I love this, Noah. I love belonging to you.” The words just slipped from her lips and she stiffened a bit, but his only reaction was to up the ante by moving faster and harder inside of her. Skye was overwhelmed by pleasure and a passion so intense she felt her whole body might go up in flames.
At that moment, Noah owned her. He owned her pleasure, her orgasms. God, he owned her heart and soul. They had laid bare their fears, they had confessed their sin, allowed their dreams to be refined in the fires of regret and they had emerged stronger.
“This won’t last long, I’m too far gone. Being inside of you is just so damn perfect.” He wrapped his arms around her, holding her close, slowly rocking her body back and forth.
Skye let her inner muscles play around him. “Noah, can you feel me? I’m loving you.”
“God, yes.” He flexed his cock inside of her. In response, she tightened her arms around him and concentrated on massaging him deep inside. God, if felt good. Locking her legs around his waist and her arms around his waist, she pressed against him, riding him back and forth. “Too much. Too much.”
Pressing her backward, he took control. Placing her legs over his shoulders, he loomed over her—big, beautiful and all male. Noah began to fuck her in earnest, harder, faster, deep plunging strokes that catapulted her off the face of the earth. Waves of emotions, exquisite pleasure and overpowering sensations stripped her of the ability to mask her feelings. But she didn’t say the words out loud, she whispered them, too low for him to hear. “I love you, Noah. I love you.”
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