by Shirl Henke
His words did not quite register with Olivia because as he spoke, he drew her closer, tangling his fingers in the long flaming skein of her hair, pulling on it until her head tipped back, exposing the vulnerable column of her neck. His mouth moved along her jaw, trailing soft wet kisses downward along her throat, pausing at the frantic pulse beating at its base. His lips were scorching hot, his breath meltingly delicious on her skin as he caressed her collarbone, pulling open the drawstring that she had refastened and shoving the sheer cotton night rail away to reach for her breast.
When his hand cupped her breast, lifting it with soft pressure, she arched against his palm. Then his fingers grazed over the hard distended peak of her nipple, returning to circle and tweak it, until she gasped with the sharp jolts of a pleasure so keen it took her breath away. He shoved the gown down to her waist and his hand moved on to the other breast while his mouth claimed the first one. She was liquid, soft as water running over smooth stones in a swiftly flowing stream. The pressure of his mouth suckling on her breast sent small achingly sweet frissons of raw pleasure radiating through her body, but centering low in her belly. A deep hungry clenching began to grow there as she dug her fingers into the thick shaggy black hair of his head, pulling him closer to her, closer yet.
Samuel felt her eager assent as her arms wrapped around his shoulders. He reached down and scooped her up, then stood and strode from the glow of the firelight to the bed where he knelt, pressing one knee into the soft mattress. He placed her in the center, then bent over her, studying her in the dim light as he pulled the night rail the rest of the way down her body, past her slender waist to the soft hollows at the sides of her flat belly, over the flair of her hips, revealing the downy thatch of fiery red curls at the juncture of her thighs. When the gown was free, he tossed it away, feasting his eyes on her long slender legs with the delicate ankle-bones and sweetly curved calves. Her thighs were slim yet strong, able to clutch a man tightly between them while he plunged into the welcoming wetness of her woman’s core.
“You are perfection,” he murmured as one hand glided up her leg. He watched her eyes close for a moment, replete with the pleasure of his caressing, like a well-petted cat.
Olivia could feel his hungry eyes on her all the while he stripped down the night rail, devouring her nakedness. He loomed over her like some large pagan god, all strength and darkness. His back was to the fire, his expression obscured to her vision yet those dark blue eyes glowed as he examined every inch of her flesh.
She felt suddenly vulnerable. No man had ever before seen her naked. Would he find her too thin? Too tall and gawky? Many men liked pillowy softness and plump curves. When he finally touched her again, running his hand up her leg, the warmth of the contact reassured her for a moment. She closed her eyes, trying to calm the frantic beating of her heart.
Then his hand moved upward to her mound and caressed the curls at the seat of her womanhood, where all the restless unfamiliar sensations were gathering. Her eyes flew open and met his. He was fully clothed, she completely naked. He was calm; she was disoriented. Olivia tried to cover herself with her hands and arms. “I’ve never had anyone look at me this way,” she admitted in a low, husky voice.
Samuel chuckled with amusement. “Turnabout’s fair play. You watched me stripped buck naked walking out of the river that day—and you enjoyed looking, don’t deny it.”
“I...I won’t,” she whispered as he pulled her arms away from her breasts and then eased his hand between her clenched thighs, once again caressing the curls there.
“Now I’m enjoying this...a very great deal,” he murmured raggedly, lowering his mouth to her navel and flicking the tip of his tongue inside until she shivered and moaned. His hands held hers pinned at her sides as he raised up once more claiming her breasts, suckling them until she whimpered and arched against him.
With a muttered oath he sat up and began tearing off the tattered remains of his shirt, then pulling off his boots and hose.
Feeling the loss of his body heat so abruptly, Olivia’s eyes opened again as he rose from the bed and began to strip off his tight buckskin trousers. When he turned back to her, her eyes widened in amazement at the transformation from the last time she had seen his male member lying flaccidly in the black hair of his groin. Now it jutted out, big and dark red, almost menacing...yet not quite.
“Touch me,” he commanded softly, seeming to understand the fascination which drew her. When she hesitated, he reached out and took her hand, pulling it to the scalding heat of his thigh as he placed one knee on the edge of the bed and sank down on it. Then he moved her hand upward, toward his aching shaft and wrapped her small soft fingers around the pulsing engorgement.
Olivia felt the sleek muscles of his thigh, but nothing prepared her for the shock of touching his sex. Like steel in velvet, silky smooth and hot, so vibrantly alive with power. She watched his jaw clench and then he threw back his head, shuddering. “Did I hurt you?” she whispered, trying to withdraw her hand.
But he would not release it. “God, no!” he ground out, showing her how to slide her hand up and down the length of him rhythmically. When she caught the motion, he released his hand from hers and clenched his fists at his sides, breathing rapidly, reveling in the pleasure of her touch until he knew he could stand it no longer without losing complete control. He reached down and caught her wrist, pulling her hand away and pinioning it and her other one above her head as he covered her, sinking onto her on the soft mattress.
She felt a small frisson of fear as his big body pressed against hers but it passed quickly as his mouth once more found hers. This time there was no gentleness in the kiss. It was as hot and hungry as those they had shared all the times past. And yet it was different, too, as they lay together naked, poised on the brink of yet another discovery. She felt protected by the hardness of him, hair roughened and muscled, the opposite of her silky smooth and softly rounded body. She gave herself over to the kiss.
He could sense the tension in her body when he first moved over her, but when his mouth claimed hers, she opened to the insinuating caress of his tongue, allowing it access to the sweetness inside, to plunge and plunder above as he soon would below. He slanted his mouth across hers, deepening the kiss. When he released his hold on her wrists to bury his hands in her hair, he felt her arms encircle his waist and her palms glide up his back until her fingernails dug into his shoulders. She was ready...and he was more than ready.
When Samuel’s knee separated her thighs, opening her for his touch, she was beyond coherent thought, lost in a maelstrom of passionate new sensations, oblivious to the eminent sundering of her maidenhead. His hand glided down her body, pausing at the curve of her breast to flick the pebble hard nipple and let his fingertips glide around the aching mound. She whimpered as jagged bolts of pleasure mixed with an inexplicable need centered low where she could feel the heaviness of his phallus pressing against her core.
Then his hand swept down, brushing the curls as his fingers quested deeper, separating her labia with a soft gliding touch made smooth and wet by the creamy moisture her body gave off. He was pleased that she was so responsive and forced himself not to consider how many other men might have trespassed where irrationally he felt only he had ever possessed the right to be. He guided the tip of his aching staff against her sweet welcome, teasing her with the gliding friction until she spread her legs wider and arched up involuntarily, crying out his name.
Her last movements drove him past all control. He had to have her that very instant. Without further delay he positioned himself and plunged deep inside her. When he began the slick glorious penetration she was incredibly tight, almost as if there were a barrier, but that could not be.
Olivia tossed her head back and forth against the pillows, her whole body like a bowstring drawn taut, ready to be released in some unknown soaring flight. She writhed in ecstasy against his hand and then against his scalding hot maleness as waves of unbelievable pleasure swamped h
er. But when he poised the tip of his staff at her center and drove deeply into her, the intensity of feeling moved abruptly from joy to sharp unexpected pain, almost as if she were being torn in two.
She looked up into his face and saw in his eyes the sudden comprehension she had known would vindicate her, but the pain was a cost far dearer than she had thought to pay.
He felt her whole body stiffen as he tore into her tender flesh and knew at once the enormity of what he had done. She did not cry out but bit her lip, then turned her head away, no longer able to meet the shocked surprise and guilt on his face. At once he lay still within her, not moving his lower body as he struggled to regain control. His breaths came in great shuddering pants as the heat and softness of her body enveloped him. Every nerve cried out for him to move, to plunge up and down for the surcease he had craved all these many months.
But he could not do it. He gazed down at her lovely profile. Her face was pressed against the pillow and her eyes, those magical green eyes, remained squeezed tightly closed. He could see the faint glistening of tears gathered beneath her thick dark red lashes. She made not a sound. He reached down with one hand and stroked her cheek gently, then bent and kissed her lashes, releasing a single diamond bright teardrop, which he lapped up with the tip of his tongue.
“Salty and sweet, just like you,” he murmured softly.
Olivia could withstand anything but his tenderness. He did not love her, nor did he trust her. She could not bear that he should pity her, feel sorry for her pain or guilty because he had inflicted it. Yet when his lips continued their soft seductive caressing, moving across her cheek, temple, nose, to press once again at the edge of her mouth, she felt that old familiar warmth eddying inside of her.
The pain began to recede slowly but the feeling of being stretched almost beyond endurance remained. She moved ever so slightly, restive beneath the weight of him, the fullness of his body invading hers. At once she heard his ragged intake of breath.
“Don’t move, please, not yet,” he commanded raggedly. “I... I can’t control myself if you do. Give me time and I will make it good for you, Livy, I promise.”
His voice was low and husky, the words swiftly spoken, the shortening of her name almost an unconscious endearment. She turned her face to meet his kiss head-on, and opened her mouth when his tongue glided along the seam of her lips. Now when he plundered inside, she understood what the action mimicked. How could the one be so pleasurable when the other hurt? Yet a stealing warmth had begun to invade her senses once more, making her body liquid and heavy. She felt the tightening in her belly begin to ease, but the ache of wanting did not. It grew and grew with every fierce kiss and caress he bestowed on her, until she was returning them with abandon.
Samuel could feel her respond and that refueled his ardor until it burned out of control once more. He moved slowly at first, waiting for a sign from her that it was good. When her hands stole up around his neck once more and her thighs tightened around his hips, he knew he need hesitate no longer. His tempo picked up slowly, building gradually, waiting for her responses.
Olivia felt the hot coiling tension in her lower body blaze into open flames, the inferno stoked by Samuel’s movements. His body was perspiring in the cool room as he, too, seemed ready to blaze with the same scorching need. He savaged her mouth with fierce kisses, then moved to her neck. She loved the feel of his rapacious mouth on the sensitive skin of her throat and wanted to taste of him the same way.
Her lips brushed against the bristling whiskers on his cheek and jaw, then moved to the corded column of his neck. She touched the tip of her tongue to his hot skin and it tasted salty with perspiration, male and vital. This was Samuel, her love, her husband. She bit down on the thick bunched muscles where his neck and shoulder joined as the blinding surges of ecstasy spiraled out of control from deep within the center of her body. He continued to stroke with ever faster rhythm until she thought she might faint or die from the pleasure he brought her.
But she did neither, only waited for some mysterious culmination that her body intuited, even though her mind had never known of its existence...until that moment. She bit down, her teeth drawing blood as they dug into his skin, tasting even more of him as the dizzying contractions seemed to shatter her into a million diamond bright shards.
Samuel felt her sheath’s rhythmic pulsing begin deep inside of her, squeezing his staff so exquisitely he could not endure the pleasure without spilling himself. When she made an incoherent cry and bit into his shoulder, her whole body rigid with climax, he gave in to the glory of joining her, shuddering and pulsing his seed into her until he was more utterly drained than he could ever remember being in his life.
Olivia felt his body stiffen and his staff swell even more as it pulsed its life deep inside her womb. As he collapsed onto her body, cradling her beneath him, she held him locked tightly in her arms and legs. I could be carrying your child now. The thought stole over her unaware. Although it took her by surprise, the idea was not unwelcome. A small black-haired replica of her love would be a part of him she could keep, even if he chose to leave her.
Seeming to echo her last melancholy thought, he pulled out of her and rolled over onto his back, flinging one arm across his eyes. She felt the sudden chill of night air on her perspiration slicked flesh, once more vulnerable. Her first impulse was to slip from the bed and clean herself up, then don the ripped night rail to cover her nakedness. But just as she started to move, his words froze her.
“I wouldn’t have hurt you if I’d known. I’m sorry, Livy.”
The words stung her with his guilt and she retorted in kind, quickly, without thinking, “Sorry you hurt me or sorry you’ve inadvertently let slip your chance for an annulment?”
He sat up in the bed, resting his arm loosely across his bent knee but the casual pose belied the tension simmering inside him. “If you had explained to me that you were a virgin instead of coming at me with claws bared—”
“Explained? As if you would have believed anything I said! I told you I wanted an annulment and you laughed that cynical, patronizing laugh of yours. Nothing I could have said would have made any difference to you. Nothing any woman says ever will. You are nothing but an emotional cripple, Samuel Shelby, a man who hates all women because of your mother and your wife!”
“You are my wife now—and I’d hardly call what just passed between us hate,” he said softly, watching the heat creep up into her cheeks as she realized that she was kneeling on the edge of the bed facing him stark naked.
“You believe in no one, nothing. I pity your lonely life,” she said, slipping from the bed to scoop up her gown and hold it in front of her like a shield.
He, too, removed himself from the bed and grabbed his discarded clothes, cursing himself for the fit of lust which had made him fling them with such hasty abandon all about the floor. “I do have scruples, whether or not you believe it, else I’d never have married you,” he said angrily, as he slipped on his breeches and reached for his shirt.
“So, duty before dishonor...” she said brittlely, willing the pain of his callous words not to bite so deeply. “Are you a spy, Samuel? Is that why you are so suspicious?” She was grasping at straws and she knew it.
He grew very still, his shirt hanging open and unlaced as he stared at her with slate blue eyes that cut through the dim light of the dying fire. Damn, he had been right not to trust her! “Don’t confuse my dismay over our circumstances with some deep, sinister motives on my part,” he said with biting sarcasm. “Stuart Pardee is allied with your guardian, who offered your luscious little body to me after losing a bet that he himself had insisted on. I’ve since learned that Pardee is distributing guns and whiskey among the Osage in direct violation of the law. I’d be an unbelievable fool to trust a word you say.”
He had learned over the years that the best way to deflect an unwanted line of inquiry was to attack the inquirer. It worked all too well this time. Olivia grew silent and the glitter
in her eyes brightened with tears that she held at bay by sheer force of will. She stood clutching the pitiful remnants of her night rail—the night rail he had ripped off her body—just staring at him in hurt amazement. He wished she would scream, throw things, curse him or come at him with her nails, anything but the stony silence she chose instead.
“Repair yourself, then get some rest. I’ll be back in the morning,” he said gruffly as he pulled on his boots and headed to the door.
“Where are you going?” she could not help but ask.
He turned to her with one eyebrow raised sardonically. “Why, to get drunk, my dear wife. Damn good and drunk.”
With that he was gone.
She was left alone with the dying embers in the fireplace casting their pale gray light on the wreckage of the room...and the shambles of her dreams.
Olivia lay alone in the bed, which seemed so much larger without Samuel’s big body in it. After bathing herself and straightening up the room as best she could, she had climbed back into the bed, so emotionally and physically exhausted that sleep should have claimed her instantly. But it did not. Instead, she had lain awake for hours, reliving every encounter she had ever had with Samuel Sheridan Shelby, from their first electric meeting in that crowded Washington ballroom to the shocking betrayal when her guardian had tried to sell her to Samuel. Was her husband partially right—had Wescott wanted to use her to gain entree to the colonel’s secrets?
Samuel had far more freedom to pursue a broader scope of assignments than any regular army officer she had ever encountered. Whom did he work for? The Secretary of War? Perhaps even President Madison himself? She imagined such a life might harden a man predisposed to mistrust those close to him from the onset.