by Cait London
“Will I? You want to bet on that, too?” His gray eyes flowed over her hair, a thumb reaching to stroke a strand waving across her hot cheek. Desire poured from him, weaving around her, and, inexperienced with sensual play, Michelle shivered. “You want to slot me into a pigeonhole, to understand something that doesn’t concern you? At the Tallchiefs, Silver said you are divorced. Let’s talk about your ex-husband. He let you walk all over him, didn’t he? And then you walked out.”
It was the truth. Oliver hadn’t resisted anything she wanted, even the divorce. It was her father who fought— “Let’s talk about your wife, shall we?” she cut back at Liam.
She hadn’t expect the tender shadows enveloping him as he spoke. “Sweet, sensitive, loving. I loved her. She died when J.T. was born, and I’ll never forgive myself for letting her talk me into the pregnancy. She wasn’t well—”
“You regret your son? That beautiful, sweet baby?” Michelle’s statement cut harshly into the night.
“No. He’s everything to me. Karen gave him to me, and he was what she wanted, to leave a bit of herself alive and healthy as she’d never been…. This is what I do regret—” Then his hand cupped the back of her head, and he took her mouth, searing her with heat, fusing his lips to hers. The stormy emotions locked her immobile and she could do nothing, but taste and feel. She slanted her head to tighten the fight, and the pleased, hungry growl coming from low in Liam’s throat was a unique, first pleasure. He freed her wrists and filled his fists with her hair, his mouth moving eagerly, hungrily upon hers. His scent filled her, the heat of his body, and she was soaring to a heavenly, exciting place she’d never been—
She had to capture him, to hold him close, and she touched his hard stomach, smoothed the ridges with her fingertips and heard his sharp inhaling breath against her cheek. He stood still, shivering, heat pouring from him, his hands trembling as they left her hair and began stroking her back. He was giving her a choice, she sensed, to take or to walk away—
Then those stormy gray eyes moved slowly down her body to the shirt torn by the brush on her run to the lake and freed of its upper buttons. His gaze locked on her breasts, clad in beige lace and with a big hand open upon her back, he gently eased her against him, watching the fit of their bodies. He breathed shallowly, his features harsh, and she knew that one word, one movement would free her.
She desperately wanted him to touch her, to cup the soft flesh he was studying, nestled against his chest, that dark passionate expression branding her. She held him tight, anchoring him close. This powerful, beautiful man wanted, and yet would not take without permission—She didn’t know how to tempt him, and when she breathed deeply, her flesh rising against his, he groaned unsteadily. Slowly, watching her, he lifted his hand to carefully, reverently mold her breast. His thumb ran across the crest of a hardened nipple and he circled it slowly. She could no more have moved than she could start her heart beating again—the magical touch sucked away her breath and made her head spin.
“Why haven’t you had children, pretty witch? The real reason, not the canned words you’ve prepared for others,” he asked roughly, caressing her as her hands slid upward in the storm of unsteady emotions, to dig into his hard, safe shoulders.
“I haven’t felt the need—” The rest of the words were caught by his lips, the kiss gentle now, searching and tempting and heating. His hands locked around her waist, then eased to her hips, fingers digging in slightly. She knew then, deep within her, that she’d needed a man to hold her tight, to test her strength as a woman. She needed a force equal to hers, to the wild, reckless calling within her—kept hidden too long. She parted her lips against the gentle nudge of his tongue and quivered as the kiss deepened, heat rocking their bodies, much as the earth trembled around a volcano before it released the red-hot lava—
Liam’s hands caressed a downward path to smooth her bottom and then eased her closer to his hardened desire. His whisper was hoarse and unsteady against her lips, “Don’t play games. I don’t. The air is filled with your body’s sweet warmth mixed with that wildflower—”
The statement was shocking, elemental, but she refused to acknowledge the damp warmth of her body, her arousal amid the other scents. The wildness leaped within her, hot and barely controlled and aching to be free—when had she ever been truly free? To take and give and—She’d always been controlled, but now she wanted to tear away Liam’s white dress shirt and press herself against him.
“You’re aroused,” she whispered back, though they were alone in the cool August night beside the lake. The novelty of seducing a man as quickly and as thoroughly as she had Liam went straight to that empty, aching hole in her life, filling her with a warm, fuzzy womanly emotion she didn’t dare define.
“Could be,” he whispered, easing to nibble on her ear. “Probably not. It’s a condition that comes upon me infrequently, every few years or so. But you’re not my type, so I’m probably not aroused. If I were, and admitted it, you’d probably run back to your nice safe little office.”
“I don’t run. I have a huge office and I could seduce you right here on this rock and you know it,” she stated, the warm, fuzzy womanly emotion fading away, replaced by a nettling anger.
“Nope. I’m not in the mood,” he said quite cheerfully, and freed her, stepping back on the rock.
He grabbed her wrists, just as she pushed him hard, tumbling them both into the cold, black lake. When she surfaced, sputtering and angry, Liam was grinning at her in the moonlight. She splashed water at him, muttered about the ways she would murder him and began to work her way up the marshy bank. She slid, her shoe with the broken strap floating away into the lake with her not-so-dependable control. Liam snatched the sandal, stuffed it in his pocket and chuckled. When she turned to glare at him, he splashed her.
Michelle decided to retreat from the playful, boyish devastation grinning up at her. She turned and gripped the reeds, which came free, and she hurled them back at him. “Can’t take it, can you?” he asked, chuckling.
“I choose what I take,” she returned hotly, reminding him of his arrogant statement.
“Is that right?” Coming up behind her, Liam supported her bottom with both big hands, helping as she crawled the rest of the way up the bank. The undignified retreat nicked at her pride, and she wanted to fly at Liam, careless of the consequences.
One look down her torn silk blouse and slacks and Michelle rounded on Liam, quivering with anger. They stood on the flat rock now, his hands on his hips as he watched her struggle for words. “You’re muddy,” he said, watching her, waiting for her to ignite.
“I’m wet,” she finally managed. “I’m wet and muddy and not very happy at the moment.”
He tilted his head, eyeing her curiously as water dripped from his shaggy hair. “Is that the best you can do?”
“This is a French designer outfit, and now it’s ruined. Give me my shoe,” she said, snatching her sandal from his chest pocket.
While she glared accusingly up at him, Liam’s gaze slowly warmed a path down to her muddied blouse. The silk lay intimately upon her, outlining her breasts. In the moonlight her nipples peaked against the damp cloth.
Liam slowly began to unbutton his shirt, and Michelle’s heart began to race. She wanted to run—she wanted to hurl herself against him, fist his hair as he had hers and take…. Uneasy with her emotions and wanting to distract him, she began to talk. “The Tallchief bridal tepees are placed beside the lake—”
“Take off your blouse.”
“What? You can’t possibly—”
“What? Have you? Here?” He grinned down at her and waggled her head as if she were a child. “I’ll turn my back,” he explained too patiently, watching her reaction. “You can wear my shirt back—yours reveals more than it hides now.”
“There’s no need to turn your back. We’re both adults,” she said, struggling to be worldly. He wasn’t forcing her to act prudish; she wasn’t. Her fingers trembled over the buttons as she
met his look, daring him to taunt her further. Liam’s eyes darkened as he unbuttoned his shirt and held it loosely at his side. “Here. Hold this,” she said, handing her blouse to him.
He tucked a length of her shirt into his back pocket and, still holding her eyes, began to carefully ease her into his shirt. He buttoned it slowly, carefully, as if placing his thoughts in order with each button. “This cheap cotton is a bit more concealing that your silk and lace…. You’re a hothead, Ms. Farrell. A volatile woman—”
“Am not.” She resented the childish statement flinging from her lips. After all she was a businesswoman, an executive—
“Hot-blooded and sweet and bewitching,” he added, lifting her hair away from the shirt’s collar to study the strands clinging to his fingers in the moonlight. “But a little too much trouble.”
With that, he bent slightly and hefted her over his shoulder. While Michelle held her sandal and wondered what had happened, Liam began to walk back to the Tallchiefs. “You’d better put me down,” she yelled, and began squirming.
The big hand on her bottom kept her still and locked to him. Unused to being handled, Michelle tried her best to be poised—but then dangling over a man’s broad shoulder didn’t allow much for dignity. He did put her down in front of the assembled Tallchief family, and when she whipped around to tell him exactly where to go, he grinned. “You said ‘put me down.”’
As if it were evidence before the jury, he reached to his back pocket and handed the muddy blouse to her. To the Tallchiefs standing on the big front porch, he said, “She can’t talk right now. She’s in a snit and she apologizes.”
Then he placed his big hand on her head and waggled it gently, playfully, until she slashed it away. Michelle looked up at his smile and the humor lighting his gray eyes and wanted to toss him onto the ground and thoroughly mash him, kiss that smile from his lips and explore that lovely, gleaming broad chest. But pride and temper ruled her, and she managed to grasp a small measure of control as she marched up the steps, carrying her shoe. “It was a lovely dinner and a lovely swim, and Mr. Tallchief assures me that he’ll be coming back to visit you. But I’m going home now, to Silver’s. Business calls, you know,” she lied with as much dignity as she could summon. “Thank you for the wonderful evening.”
Four
The next afternoon Elspeth opened the door at the first knock. In her mind, while tending her herbs, she’d seen Liam Tallchief walking toward her, his heart questioning. Wanting to have Liam to herself, she’d asked Alek to take the children to the ice cream parlor. Loving a woman descended from a Scottish seer and a Native American shaman, Alek knew when her senses were prowling. She looked up at the man filling her doorway, his face masked in the shadows of the past. He looked so much like her brothers, but while their pain had been eased by love, Liam wore his scars like a silent cloak. “I’m glad you came,” she said simply. “Time for fresh applesauce cake and iced tea, and time to talk,” she added, sensing his need and noting the small wooden chest tucked beneath his arm.
Liam wore a clean, long-sleeved cotton shirt and the loose carpenter pants she’d seen his son gripping tightly. She ached for him, a man alone and trying his best for his son. “Emily is baby-sitting, then. She’s got a way with children, especially the boys. She’ll be off again to college soon, and leaving a trail of broken hearts,” she said as she led Liam into her workroom, filled with Una’s loom and the herbs that would dye the Tallchief wool into colored yarn.
For what she must do, Elspeth chose the most familiar setting, the room layered with her weaving and her family’s past. Una’s journals stacked neatly on one shelf, waiting for Liam. Scents from the hanging lavender bundles curled around her, and she prayed that this lonely, scarred man would find peace. He looked surprised at the small table she’d prepared, applesauce cake cut on plates and served with iced tea on her woven place mats. She’d known he would come, when that quiet, troubled gaze sought hers at the Tallchiefs’. Michelle Farrell had him brooding, a strong woman tossed into the tempest of his life. Liam Tallchief had much to settle, and Elspeth would try. “Sit. Let’s talk,” she invited, aching for him as he noted the huge loom Tallchief had fashioned for Una, a weaver. “I learned from my mother and she from hers, and then some from Una’s journals. She was a woman alone, except for her love, in a strange, frightening country, and I think the journals helped. He loved her of course, though she wounded his pride.”
“You knew I was coming. I’ve heard you can—”
Elspeth shrugged, making light of the senses that prowled within her, telling her the future and of the past. Liam was silent, sipping his tea, the small chest at his feet. He met her eyes finally, after taking his fill of the room, cluttered with yarn and a spinning wheel and the massive loom. “It’s too much,” he said quietly.
“I know. The feelings are in you as they are in us, but we’ve had time to understand. It’s new to you.”
As tall and powerful as her beloved Alek, Liam ran a rough hand down his jaw. “I want this for my son,” he said unevenly. “I’m leaving the chest—for now. It was found with me. There are letters inside from your mother and other things. I’d like those things back, please. When you’re finished.”
“The letters seemed too private, a woman writing to another woman?” A woman who had raised and fought with her brothers, Elspeth knew that honor ran deep within Liam. “Who told you?”
He breathed deeply, sucking in the past and releasing into her keeping a scarred wound reopened, and pain ran through the shadows of his face. “Mary Cartwright. Wife of Reuben, who carried me home from my parents’ wrecked car and gave me to her—to raise as a son. You’re right, I don’t like women’s letters and for a reason. I found a letter from Mary after Reuben died—she’d hidden it. Mary was already gone, so was my wife—Karen died giving birth to J.T. I want more for my son than I had,” he said more strongly, emotion threading his deep voice. “I had a son and didn’t even know who I was. What I was.”
“None of it was your fault. You’ll find what you need. Give it time. You know you’re named for Liam Tallchief, one of the five children of Una and Tallchief.” And so Elspeth told Liam of how Elizabeth Montclair, an English noblewoman, and her hunting party had been trapped by the lawless on Tallchief Mountain. Forced by the outlaws to save her sister and herself, Elizabeth entered the tent and took the fierce, fighting man staked to the ground within her. It pleased the renegade band that an English lady would mount an unwilling man, a half-blood staked to the ground, and let him pierce her virgin body. Furious that he had no choice and that she had taken his seed from him, Liam had hated her. Then she was safe back in England, away from the raw land. But the child she bore was his, and he claimed them both, pirating them back to Tallchief land. “She came to love him, and they treasured each other. But the taming wasn’t easy for both of them. She threw away her jewels to save his pride, and he gave her his heart.”
“I want J.T. to know love. How it feels,” Liam stated, emotion rumbling in his tone.
“You love him. He knows that.”
She could have cried when Liam lifted his pain-filled eyes to hers and said, “I’m not certain I know about love. How to give it.”
“Then it’s time,” she whispered, her heart bleeding for him.
“I have to be ready…inside. I can’t just read them.”
“You will be.” She hugged her mother’s letters tight against her, and fought damning the murderer who took her parents away too soon. “I’ll keep them for you, and we’ll talk again. Thank you. I loved my mother very much.”
“You’ll see to my son, if I’m late tonight? You’ll take care of him?” he asked, the desperation in his voice slicing through her.
“Aye, I will. Rest easy on that, Liam Tallchief, and do what you must,” she answered. The man had been too alone, fearing for his son’s safety over his own. “We’ll tend him well, if anything ever happened to you. He’s one of us, and so are you. When you claimed the name
Tallchief as your right, we claimed you.”
“It’s the feeling,” he whispered. “That I am a part of a family. That I am not. That I have a heritage I don’t understand. Not just the bloodline, but what goes with it. Storms move inside me and other needs I haven’t explored. You know, don’t you, that Reuben Cartwright made me what I am?”
Other needs, Elspeth repeated silently. Michelle had raised those fierce needs to take and to claim, and, being a controlled man, walking in shadows, Liam wasn’t prepared for the urgent calling.
“Your past was cold and hard. You aren’t. You did what you had to do to survive, to provide for your son. When it’s time, we’ll have tea again, and I’m glad you’re not as ill-mannered as my brothers. Birk calls my teatime ‘torture and drinking grass.’ Thank goodness I don’t have to tend them anymore…. I want you to have this—”
She rose from the table and took a folded length of tartan sash from the shelf. “It’s the Tallchief plaid, blue and ‘dragon-green’ and vermillion for Tallchief. And I’ll have no complaining as my brothers did, when I finish your kilt. No crude comments about the cold wind blowing up your backside. You’ll be wearing it like the rest and tearing the heart from the ladies, just as they do, the beasts. J.T. will have one, too.”
On top of the folded tartan, Elspeth placed a small neat journal. “It’s Elizabeth Montclair Tallchief’s. You’ll find out more about our heritage, and you won’t be faced with your past just yet. Sometimes these things are better to ease into…when you are ready. I’ll do what I can to help you with that journey. You take your time, Liam Tallchief. I’ll see that J.T. is cared for.”
“A few hours on the mountain. By myself, then I’ll be back,” he said, holding the tartan very carefully as if he’d never been given gifts before. She nodded and promised herself that Liam would see more gifts—and love—coming his way. Softness and love and gifts hadn’t been in Liam’s life, and his big hands trembled, his expression humbled.