Night Flower (Gone-to-Texas Trilogy)

by Shirl Henke

  Melanie's small hands sought the rock-solid expanse of his chest, flattening her soft palms against it and running her fingers through the thick springy black hair. Electricity, like summer lightning, flashed between them. When he reached down to suckle her breasts again, she eagerly accommodated him, her long nails digging into the muscles of his shoulders, pulling him against her this time. Scorching heat spiraled out from her breasts, dipping lower, uncoiling in her belly, then lower still.

  Reacting instinctively, he pulled her lower body firmly against his, then guided her hips in a slow rotation against the burgeoning heat of his erection. Feeling the soft pressure of her pelvis, he groaned with the exquisite torture and grabbed the fastening of her pantalets, yanking the lacy drawers below her hips. Then, he scooped her up and deposited her on the bed.

  Melanie looked up at him, her wide gold eyes glazed with passion as he quickly slid the pantalets off her and tossed them on the floor. She was completely naked and vulnerable, yet a languid, hot paralysis held her in thrall. Watching the expressions play across his taut features, she knew he thought her body beautiful. His burning hands traveled from her breasts to her waist, then lower over her hips, pausing at that small tangle of black curls between her thighs, then lower still to caress her sleekly curved little calves. One bronzed hand encircled a fragile ankle and then moved upward, retracing the course to her flushed face.

  “You are perfection,” he ground out as he stood up and began to unbutton his pants.

  In the dim recesses of her mind, Melanie knew that she should feel embarrassment at his savoring perusal and bold words of praise for the most intimate parts of her body; but all she could do was wait with her eyes riveted to his swarthy male beauty as he roughly yanked his tightly fitted suit pants free of his body. Having three younger brothers, Melanie was familiar with male anatomy, but it had never looked like this! Once freed of the constraint of his pants, Lee's pulsing shaft seemed enormous.

  Thinking of his earlier accusations about Jeremy and knowing his opinion about the morals of a placée's daughter, Melanie grew suddenly afraid. What if he hurt her? She struggled to remember Deborah's explanations about what went on between men and women; but everything was confused as her mind skipped back and forth, torn between fear and desire.

  Lee looked down at her small expressive face and followed the path of her wide golden gaze. She's afraid of me, he realized in sudden amazement, remembering all too well the fiery, passionate little creature that day on the hillside. But now, naked together in bed, it must seem different to a virginal woman. She was so tiny and fragile, for all her lushly curved feminine allure. He took a deep, steadying breath and knelt on the bed once more, splaying his fingertips across her belly and running them delicately in ever widening circles, caressing her breasts and thighs but avoiding the core of her that enticed him with its untried innocence.

  As he stroked her, Melanie felt the fearfulness abate, replaced by another kind of tension, a tightly coiling ache. She looked up at his dark beauty, hesitantly raising her own hand to trace the pattern that was formed by the black hair on his chest. It narrowed in an arrow like descent on his belly. Her busy fingers stopped midway down.

  With a low, wicked laugh, he caught her wrist and pulled her hand the rest of the way toward his erection, then slipped it around the hard, pulsing flesh and stroked up and down slowly. Struggling to keep from crying out, he released her hand and rolled onto his side to lay next to her.

  “Kiss me, Night Flower,” he commanded raggedly and was rewarded when she moved toward him and reached her arms up to grasp his shoulders. He pulled her beneath him as they joined their mouths in a sealing kiss.

  This time she parted her lips and entwined her tongue with his eagerly. As he deepened the kiss, he slid his knee between her thighs, then reached down with one hand to stroke the dark curly mound. He felt her tense and instinctively arch upward toward his hand as he parted the hot, wet core of her. She whimpered and writhed as he stroked the sensitive aching tissue. Her eager desperation was all the more beguiling because it was untutored.

  Lee felt the throbbing in his groin growing almost unbearable as he raised himself up over her and guided his shaft home—home to enter the hot, velvety sleekness of her body. He forced himself to pause just inside the welcoming lips, probing carefully for the barrier of her maidenhead.

  Melanie felt him begin a desperate plunge, then stop short, laboring to breathe and calm himself. But the heat and hardness that was positioned at the seat of her desire drove her to seek completion of the act. Heedless of her earlier fears, she arched up, clawing at his back and tightening her legs around his hips.

  With a muffled oath he responded, unable to stop himself this time as he tore through the thin membrane in one fast, hard thrust. He heard her small gasp of surprised pain, but was beyond the point where it registered. He continued to thrust in and out, rhythmically, joyously, after waiting so long.

  The initial penetration was hurtful, but not nearly so much as Melanie had first imagined when she had looked on his swollen phallus. The pain quickly receded as he continued to labor over her, driving into her in steady, even strokes. The heat and ache, her constant companions since that day on the hillside, once more took over, driving her wild with a need for something beyond her imagination, yet something as elemental, as necessary as air. She struggled for it, looking up into his passion-glazed eyes as she watched him, arching to meet each stroke, unaware her eyes were as revealing as his.

  Melanie didn't understand what was happening as she pulled him closer, fixated on her own blinding need. It was as if she wanted to absorb him into her body. He suddenly stiffened and cried out her name—as if in protest. She could feel him swell even larger inside her as he made several fast, hard thrusts that gave her what she had been so desperately seeking.

  Lee bit his bottom lip in an attempt to prolong the exquisite, torturous rapture throbbing through his whole body. Stroke slow, easy, don't stop, don't ever stop—“Oh, Mellie, no, no!” The cry was torn from him as she gasped and clawed at him, arching her back and driving him over the brink into a final burst of meteoric fury that spent him utterly.

  As he stilled and collapsed on her, she tightened her knees around his hips and lay still while the rippling contractions radiated outward through her entire body. Gradually, as she came to herself she realized she had been panting and crying like a wounded animal!

  So this is how a man bends a woman to him, enslaving her mind and her will, making her breed for him and obey him. She squeezed her eyes closed tightly and buried her face in the curve of his shoulder, feeling his heart thud next to hers as both gradually returned to a slower rhythm.

  Lee sensed the unnatural stillness in his wife's small body and felt the wetness of her tears against his shoulder. Completely drained and exhausted, he wanted only satiated sleep, but he could not ignore her. She had followed him over the edge, he was certain of that. After all the times Dulcia had lain stiff and still, filled with his seed, her body totally unaffected by what they had done together, he knew the difference well enough. For all her virgin's pain, Melanie had clawed at him, impaling herself and moving with him, as hot and desperate as any woman he had ever encountered. And in his travels from Mexico to the Apachería, Leandro Velasquez had encountered many women.

  Demanding, passionate little vixen—you almost caused me to finish without you, he thought through a groggy haze of oddly mixed pleasure and guilt. As he rolled away from her, he pulled her small soft body up against his hard long one and fell blessedly asleep.

  Melanie did not resist his hold on her. She lay staring out across the darkened room. The wick light had long since burned out. Lee's even breathing indicated to her that the combination of the alcohol and his sexual release had made him fall asleep. She was grateful, wanting the time to think and regain control of her emotions.

  It was so intense, this man-woman experience. The feelings were so confusing and contradictory—pain and
pleasure, fear and trust, lust and love. Love? No. He found her beautiful, he desired her; but had wanted her tonight out of a perverse sense of possessive anger and pride, not out of love. She was certain of that. He had watched her with Jeremy and misread everything. But what did you expect, little fool? He thinks you have the morals of a whore—at least the inferior bloodlines of one.

  As the tears overflowed, she refused to consider why his bigotry could hurt her so much. She focused instead on what giving in to his physical demands would mean. I’ll be tied to him, enslaved as surely as my African ancestors were. Even if she were of impeccable Hispanic lineage, she would still be a possession to a man like Lee Velasquez, a woman to preside over his household and bear his children.

  I can't live that way, I can't.... Frightened and confused by all the new needs and emotions awakened in her that night, Melanie finally fell into an exhausted sleep.

  Lee woke up the following morning with a foul hangover throbbing at his temples and a long-unfamiliar sensation prickling at his consciousness. He was in bed with a woman. For all the plenitude of whores he'd used in the past six years, Lee had never slept with one after she dispensed her services. He had deliberately paid them and sent them on their way.

  The soft warmth curled beside him was definitely feminine. The sweet fragrance of night flowers filled his nostrils. He turned his head and was almost glad for the hammering agony inside his skull. It was a penance for his stupidity. The preceding evening came back to him in shadowy-edged visions—visions of the ebony-haired beauty lying so innocently asleep in his bed. She had driven him wild with jealousy, a golden butterfly flirting and dancing with all those besotted men, especially that damned ranger. He had watched and seethed and drunk. Drunk. Yes, that described it. A dangerous combination—fury and liquor.

  He looked at her sleeping face, framed by the billowing clouds of black satin hair. She was so young and vulnerable with those wicked gold-coin eyes closed, their thick brushy lashes fanning her cheeks. The night had been cool and she snuggled near him for warmth, pressing her lush curves tightly to his body. What man, drunk or sober, could resist Melanie Fleming? No, he amended, Melanie Velasquez. His wife. He supposed it was inevitable that she become his wife in fact. But not the way it had happened—in a fit of liquor-sodden lust. Although he knew her passion matched his own, he despised his roughness in taking her; and even more, he despised the naked hunger, the need that he had revealed in his drunken weakness last night.

  Suppressing that thought, he brushed a lock of silky hair off her cheek with his fingertips, grinning as he remembered her cries of passion and the startled expression on her face when she climaxed. So unlike Dulcia, the thought flashed traitorously into his mind. He scowled darkly, feeling a renewed surge of guilt when he remembered the comparison he'd made between her and Melanie last night.

  Melanie was certainly unlike Dulcia; and had he a choice, he would never have married this fiery, passionate little she-cat sleeping beside him. But all that was behind him now. For better or worse, he had taken an irrevocable step last night, and now he must make the best of it and try to build a life with his Night Flower. First, he must apologize for his drunken temper, he thought with a sigh, wishing the pounding misery in his head would abate so he could think more lucidly. She stirred.

  “Good morning, I think,” Lee whispered, wanting to keep noise at a minimum in deference to his splitting skull.

  Melanie sat up, then, realizing she was naked, yanked up the tangled mass of sheets from the foot of the bed and pulled them defensively around her body. She had been cuddled up to him like a damn lapdog and he had been watching her, no doubt with a self-satisfied male smirk! She heard a slight rumble of baritone laughter and scooted across the narrow bed, turning to confront her nemesis with as much dignity as she could muster.

  “Why the qualification? Aren't you sure it's a good morning? Could your fondness for whiskey perchance have something to do with your doubt?” she inquired with acid sweetness, trying desperately not to look at that dark, hard body, so virile with black curly hair set in cunning patterns. She had caressed every inch of him last night! Now, just the thought of looking into his fathomless black eyes made her quake.

  He swung his long legs over the other side of the bed and stood up gingerly, rubbing his head as if it were made of fragile crystal.

  “A temperance lecture—just what every man needs in the morning,” he groused. Seemingly unconcerned with his nakedness, he walked slowly over to where a pair of buckskin breeches lay, tossed carelessly across a chair. Lee slid the soft old leather up his lean, hard legs and over his narrow hips, standing in profile to her as he buttoned the fly. She blushed and looked away. Did he notice?

  “Mellie, we have to talk about last night.” He hesitated, looking at her, so small and lovely, huddled on the bed like a doll. She gasped in affront at his use of her family's pet name. He knew she disliked it on his lips, for some perverse reason. Shaking his head very carefully, he was rewarded with a slight clearing of his vision as he walked over to the bed. He sat down and looked at her. “Look, what's done is done. I'm sorry I drank so much. I didn't want—”

  She bounced off the bed like a coiled spring. “You're sorry! Too bad it means the end of your plans with Larena Sandoval! Get drunk and rape me and then beg pardon!”

  Lee's face first went blank in amazement, then hardened like granite as she finished her tirade. “Raped you! Why you vicious little slut! You cried my name and clawed my back, clung to me and met me thrust for thrust. You found your release as surely as any hot-blooded Creole belle kissed by the tar brush ever did!” He stood up and glared down at her, fists clenched at his sides.

  Melanie was struck by a knifelike pain squeezing the breath from her, blinding her to all reason. Unthinkingly she dropped the sheet and reached up to slap him with all the strength her tiny hand could muster. “Yes, I'm kissed by the tar brush—a placée's daughter, a dirty Indian breed! All those filthy inferior things you despise, and yet you want me! You desire me and you hate yourself for it. You'd take a woman like me in any bordello and never think twice. But I'm your wife—I bear that vaunted Velasquez name, and now I might even be carrying your child! Something to be sorry for, indeed, Don Leandro!”

  He almost struck her back; he was shaking so badly his teeth chattered. “Bitch—you beautiful little bitch!” he ground out as he struggled to keep his arms at his sides. “You know all the tricks to tease and torment a man, just as surely as your Creole mother ever did. But she was more honest—she just wanted a man to support her in return for her favors. You—you don't want me. You don't really want any man, just your goddamn causes. I hope you find temperance and suffrage comfort you in bed at night, madam. I can assure you, you will sleep alone. No other man will touch my wife, and I don't choose to!”

  Melanie stood trembling and breathless through his diatribe, afraid he would strike her. Wasn't he a scalper, a man who had killed, maimed, lived outside the law for years? She had never seen such hell as those tormented night-dark eyes revealed. But Lee spun on his heel and grabbed his boots and shirt, leaving the room in a few stiff, controlled strides.

  When she heard the door to the outside hall slam, it sounded painfully final, like closing the door to a crypt. She was young and alive, yet shackled for life to a man who despised her, a man who had just sworn to hold her in a cruel travesty of a marriage with no care for her feelings, her dreams, her self. She ached but refused to give in to another self-pitying bout of tears. With the same rigid control Lee had exhibited, she began to dress for the day.

  Chapter Seventeen

  That same morning Jim Slade sat watching the sunrise at Bluebonnet. It was a magic time, especially on a cool, crisp fall morning as the golden rays touched the dew-drenched grasses and shrubbery surrounding the front veranda, setting everything ablaze like a million fragments of diamond. Slade reclined on a sturdy oak bench, sipping a cup of coffee, surveying his land from the veranda. This was a morn
ing ritual of his from early spring when the wildflowers turned the hillsides to riotous blue violet, to late fall when the mustard weed made them blaze yellow and bronze. Born and raised on this piece of land, he could imagine no life elsewhere.

  “This is one of the loveliest spots in the Almighty's creation, I do believe.” Sam Houston's sonorous voice interrupted Slade's ruminations. Cup in hand, he walked out the front door and sat down beside his younger friend. The two men sipped their coffee, drinking in the morning as much as the scalding black liquid.

  “Your friend should be here soon,” Jim said, finally breaking the companionable silence. They had important matters to discuss, matters that related to the very beauty and tranquility surrounding them.

  Houston shrugged. “I don't really know a good deal about Jeremy Lawrence personally. I met him in Washington last spring for the first time. When this matter first came to my attention, I, er, investigated his background and decided he was the right man for the job.”

  Jim grinned and took another sip of coffee. “With your usual thoroughness, I'm certain you know what he eats for breakfast and who his maternal grandmother was.”

  Houston threw back his leonine head and laughed. “As always, Jim-boy, you ascribe more virtue to me than I possess. Still, I did find Lawrence has lived off and on in Texas since leaving Virginia as a youth. He has several years' experience as a peace officer and rode with the rangers during the war. Jack Hays spoke highly of him, and the few men in the Indian Office I trust also think he's honest and capable.”

  Slade nodded. “Sounds good to me. How long has he worked for the office?”

  “He was an agent for the superintendent in St. Louis for one year. In fact, that's why he was in Washington—to speak before Congress when they passed the Indian Office Appropriations Act last winter, reorganizing and expanding the office. He worked closely with the special investigating commissioners Campbell and Temple, whose mission in Texas was all too brief.” Houston swore and pounded his big, meaty fist on the smooth oak bench. “If only those fools in Congress had extended the financial support for that commission, we might not have the mess we have now.”