He proceeded to inspect every inch of her flesh. Each time he came across a bruise, he kissed it first, then soothed it with the cream. He rolled her to her side again and found one last bruise on her left shoulder blade. He treated it the same as he had the others.
After setting the jar aside, he gently massaged her lower back. She moaned softly and arched in pleasure. Travis kept massaging until he felt the tight muscles on each side of her spine relax.
When she tried to draw the sheet up over herself he tugged it from her fingers. “Is it this you don’t want me to see?” He ran his fingers lightly across the hard mound of her belly. “Or this?” He slid his fingers down her thigh and settled on the scars on the inside of each leg.
With a sharp intake of breath, she turned her head away. Her cheeks turned pale. Her lips trembled.
“Look at me.” At his gentle insistence, she complied.
“I’ve seen them before, you know.” At the startled look in her eyes, he continued. “When you were shot I helped Rosita bathe you. I’ve seen all your scars, so there’s no reason to be shy with me.”
“But Travis,” she gasped, blushing from her navel to the roots of her hair. “We weren’t even married then! We barely knew each other.”
A slow grin spread across his face. “I know.” He wriggled his eyebrows suggestively.
“And you still married me?” she asked in wonder.
“Of course I married you. What do a few scars have to do with anything?”
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew how I got them,” she said tightly, her gaze darting away from his. With a sharp tug, she jerked her nightgown over herself to hide her nakedness.
Travis moved up beside her again and turned her face toward his, but she refused to look at him. “How did you get them?” he asked softly.
She swallowed hard and stared at a point below his chin. In a shaky voice she said, “Believe me, you don’t want to know.”
Travis smoothed a knuckle across her cheek. “I do, Dani. I need to know. I need to know everything about you.” When she didn’t answer, he went on. “It was the Apaches, wasn’t it?”
She squeezed her eyes shut and inhaled sharply.
“You’ve never said much about that night,” Travis said quietly, his knuckle still stroking back and forth across her silky cheek. “You keep it all locked up inside, and it sits there between us and festers. Let it out. Talk to me. Let me share the pain, and maybe then it won’t hurt so much.”
She shuddered violently. With a sob, she rolled toward him and buried her face against his shoulder. Her words came out in a tortured whisper. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
Travis cupped the back of her head in his large palm, careful not to touch the tender lump she’d received just hours ago. “I’m asking you to let me carry part of your burden. Nothing you can say will change the way I feel about you. Just talk to me, Dani.”
She lay there so long, her face pressed against him, her breath coming in short, rapid little gasps, Travis feared she wasn’t going to say anything. Then another hard shudder ripped through her, and her voice came, low and anguished.
“It was a stick. From the fire. I wouldn’t…I…oh, God!” she cried.
Travis held her close and soothed her with his hands and voice. After awhile she calmed. Then, in a voice devoid of all emotion, she told him everything, from the attack on the stagecoach until she came to the next morning with the streak of white in her hair.
When she told of how she’d locked her ankles together, and of a warrior pulling a burning stick from the fire, thrusting it between her thighs to make her spread them, Travis felt bile rise in his throat. It stayed there, choking him, as she told of one man after another, seven in all, taking her brutally, there on the ground, beside what remained of the two men who’d been captured with her.
Travis fought to control the sickness in his gut and the rage in his heart. It was all he could do to just hold her and let her talk.
When she was quiet for a while, he stroked her hair and rolled his face against the pillow to wipe the dampness from his lashes. Then she started talking again, in that same lifeless voice, telling him about her recovery, her adoption by Cochise, her visions of Travis and Matt, her friendship with Dee-O-Det, her trip home, when Travis and his men had tried to ambush her and her escort, and finally, she told him about her father, stepmother, and the little brother they’d tried to keep from her.
Her own father! How could the man be so damned cruel?
Travis wanted to rush out across the mountains and kill Howard Blackwood, strangle him slowly with his bare hands. But he didn’t. He’d been right—she needed to talk, to finally get everything out in the open. He’d known what she’d gone through had been horrible, but until now he’d had no idea just how big a miracle it was that she was even alive, let alone sane.
She kept talking, telling him everything right up until the day she’d come to the Triple C that first time.
Travis held her for a long time after she finished speaking. When he felt her start to relax, he turned her face up to his and kissed her forehead, her nose, and gently as he could, her lips.
“It’s over, Dani. All the bad things are over now. The scars may always be there, but like I said, what do a few scars matter? You may even get a few more, you know.” He ran his hand over her stomach again. “From the babies.”
“Rosita says I won’t,” she said shyly. At his questioning look, she pointed to one of the bottles on the bedside table.
Travis reached for it, pulled the cork, and poured thick, fragrant lotion into his palm. He spread it liberally over her abdomen, smoothing it into her skin. “I can’t believe something so delicate can possibly stretch so much.” When her stomach was smooth and dry to the touch again, his lips followed the paths his hands had made. Then he poured more lotion and massaged it gently into each breast, wringing a moan of pleasure from her.
Daniella’s eyelids grew heavy, and she couldn’t hold them open. That empty, tingling sensation deep inside was back, and this time she welcomed it. She arched, pressing her breasts more firmly into Travis’s hands. When his lips touched hers, she opened her mouth, hungry for the taste of him. He pressed himself along her side, and she felt the proof of his desire hard and throbbing against her hip. The thought of shying away, of being afraid, never entered her mind. She moved instinctively against him in a gesture as old as time, somehow knowing the greatest pleasure in the world awaited her.
He pressed himself against her hip, then groaned and pulled away. He flung himself onto his back and covered his face in the crook of his arm while his breath rasped in his throat. His other hand covered his groin.
“Travis?” she asked anxiously. She rolled to her side and rested a hand lightly on his chest, feeling his heart pound against his ribs. “Travis, what is it?”
His arm came down from his face and he gripped her fingers in a crushing hold. “God, Dani, I’m sorry. I never meant to lose control like that.” He brought her hand to his cheek and held it there. “It’s just that I want you so much.”
Daniella gazed at him steadily. “Then why did you stop?”
Was that her voice? How could she sound so calm, when her heart was sending pulsebeats to places in her body that had never pulsed before?
“God knows, I don’t want to stop.” He smoothed a strand of hair from her face. “But you took quite a fall today out there at the creek. You’re bruised and sore, and these babies are due in a few weeks.” He held a palm firmly against her stomach. “If we don’t stop I might hurt you or the babies. As much as I want you, I just can’t take that chance.”
She studied his expression closely, trying to determine the truth of his words. Were those his real reasons for pulling away from her? Panic raced through her veins, dousing the fires of passion. “Or is it the things I told you?”
She didn’t realize she’d spoken her fear aloud until she saw Travis’s fierce frown. He turned until they lay face
to face and gripped her shoulders tightly. “No!” he cried. “Dani, no. It has nothing to do with that.”
He saw the panic in her eyes and knew he hadn’t convinced her. She didn’t believe him. All her old insecurities were back full force. “I swear it, Dani. Nothing you’ve told me tonight could make me not want you.” He gazed into her eyes steadily, willing her to believe him.
“I hate what they did to you, the Apaches, your family. I’d like to kill every single person who ever hurt you,” he said fiercely. He ran a hand around her hip and gripped the inside of her scarred thigh. “And the first bastard I’d like to kill is the one who did this.”
Her bright blue eyes swam in pools of tears. She swallowed once, then whispered, “You already have.”
For one brief instant, Travis stared at her in disbelief. Then he understood. Loco. All the pieces fell into place. Her reaction on the way home when Matt mentioned Loco. Loco’s own boastful words about how he’d been the first bastard to—
Travis pulled Dani to him roughly and buried his face in her long, soft hair. His voice, when it came, was choked and harsh. “I wish I could bring him back from the dead, just so I could kill him again, slower this time. It was too damn clean the first time, too easy. He deserves—they all deserve the slowest, most hideous torture possible for what they did to you.”
He pulled away from her and forced her to meet his gaze. “But Dani, nothing, not them, not what they did to you, nothing can make me not want you. I swear it.”
Her eyes darkened with pain and doubt. “Do you want me? Do you really?”
Bruised and heavy with child she might be, but Travis was starting to understand that her emotional bruises were far more important than the physical ones.
The eyes looking up at him were deep pools of need. Not physical need, but emotional. She needed his lovemaking to prove her father wrong. To assure her that what she’d endured in the past did not keep him from wanting her. That even in her present childbearing state she was a desirable woman.
One glimpse of that stark, devastating need, and he was humbled. And lost.
He wondered if he had the strength to control his near violent desire for her enough to be as gentle as she needed him to be. If he hurt her in any way he’d never forgive himself. And he understood now that denying her what she needed at this moment would be the cruelest hurt of all.
Slowly, deliberately, he took her hand and placed it against the front of his pants, letting her feel the pulsing hardness that lay beneath the fabric. “Feel how much I want you,” he whispered roughly.
Her eyes, still locked on his, widened. Travis swallowed heavily when her pink tongue darted out to swipe her upper lip.
“Then please…don’t stop.”
As she spoke the words, her hand squeezed him, wringing a groan from deep in his throat. Travis closed his eyes briefly, then looked at her again. “Do you know what you’re saying?” He held his breath, waiting for her to change her mind.
Instead, her hand squeezed again, and she said softly, “Make love to me, Travis.”
Slowly, cautiously, praying he was doing the right thing, he brushed his lips against hers. Once. Twice. His voice came on a whispered breath. “If I do anything that hurts, anything you don’t like, anything that scares you, you tell me, all right?” She sighed and nodded, and he lost himself in the warmth of her kiss.
As the kiss deepened, Daniella forgot. She forgot the Apaches, her father and stepmother, her attacker this afternoon. She forgot about pain and humiliation. She forgot about insecurities. She forgot her fear of the things he made her feel. She forgot her own name. She forgot to breathe.
There was only Travis, with his warm lips and questing hands. She stopped thinking, and simply felt. Like a woman. For the first time in her life.
He left her lips and trailed a searing string of kisses down her neck, over her collar bone, across the nightgown she’d pulled up to shield herself with earlier. When his hot mouth settled on the tip of her breast, she arched toward him with a gasp. He was pulling those strings again, the ones that ran from his lips, through her breast, clear down to the heavy throbbing between her legs.
She cried out in protest when he pulled away, but he only kissed a path to her other breast. She put a hand on his cheek to stop him. “Wait,” she whispered.
Travis froze. His eyes flew to hers, questioning, wary.
She smiled and tugged the nightgown out of the way. His gaze flew to the newly exposed flesh and he sucked in his breath. Tears stung the back of her throat when she realized the big, calloused hand reaching for her bare breast was trembling. Somehow, she hadn’t expected him to be as affected as she was.
With her own hands none too steady, she guided his mouth to her breast. This time there was no tentative brushing of lips, but an all out, passionate assault. He tongued and teethed and suckled until her breath rasped in her throat.
She’d never felt this way before, never dreamed there were such feelings. Without her fear, everything was intensified a hundredfold. When his hand slid over the mound of her stomach and cupped her between her legs, she thought she’d die with the sheer pleasure of it. Surely nothing could be better than this.
In the next instant his flexing fingers proved her wrong. Passionately, excitingly wrong.
As if guided by instinct, she caressed his hardness in rhythm with every movement of his fingers.
“Oh, God,” he said against her hardened nipple. His tongue lapped once, twice. “You taste so good.” The hand between her legs shifted. When his finger slid into her, she gasped. “And you feel so good, so hot, so ready.”
With a moan, he ground himself into her hand.
Suddenly Daniella wanted to feel his bare skin against hers. Needed it. Frantic, she tugged at his shirt, pulling it from his pants, and ran her free hand beneath it up his bare back.
Then he was pulling away from her. She whimpered in protest until she saw him jerking at the buttons on his shirt. With eager hands she reached to help him. When he tugged it from his arms and tossed it to the floor, her fingers, hungry for the feel of him, threaded themselves through the golden curls on his chest.
Travis threw back his head and closed his eyes. Her touch! Lord, how he’d craved it. Forever. Her small, inexperienced hands did things to him no other woman had ever done. Right then he was sure he’d never even known another woman. There was only Dani. And she was his.
He opened his eyes and watched her face as she stroked his chest, his shoulders, his stomach. When she raised her gaze slowly, deliberately it seemed, to his, the look in her eyes took his breath away. This wasn’t the look of the half-scared, totally defiant girl who’d come to his house and claimed to know where his son was. It wasn’t the look of a woman who’d looked death and defilement in the face and lived to tell about it. Nor was it the look of the woman he’d terrified with his actions a few days ago.
This was a look as old as time, one women had been giving to men since Eve first bit into the apple. It was the look of hot, sultry passion. The come-hither look of a woman who wanted her man, and wanted him now. It was a look that could bring a man to his knees and crumble empires.
If he’d had an empire, he would have let it crumble in that moment, just to see that look in her eyes for him. For him alone.
Sweat beaded across his brow and the tightness in his loins became unbearable. With a groan, he took her lips with his fiercely, demanding the response her eyes promised. And she gave it.
The true test came a moment later when, with heaving chest, he tore his lips and hands free and shed the rest of his clothes. He tensed, feeling her eyes on him as though they were hands. He was hard and boldly ready for her. Would she draw back, shrink from him in fear and revulsion? He held his breath.
She stared at him so long, not moving, not speaking, he closed his eyes in dread. He’d done it. He’d scared her with his eagerness, his loss of control. He should have gone slower. He should have doused the light so she couldn’
t see him. He should have—
Warm, soft fingers touched his aching hardness. He gasped. He groaned. “Oh, yes,” he whispered hoarsely. “Touch me, Dani, touch me.”
At his desperate plea, something warm and wonderful burst in Daniella’s heart, sending bubbles of ecstasy shooting to her fingers and toes. He wanted her! He wanted and needed her as much as she did him.
With a woman’s confidence, she stroked him from base to tip and smiled at his jerking reaction. Then his hand closed over hers and wrapped her fingers around him. He guided her hand up and down, up and down, then, with a ragged breath, he drew her hand away.
Before she could ask what was wrong, he rolled her over until her back was to him. He wrapped his body around hers from behind until they were like two spoons nestled together. What was he doing? “Travis?”
“It’s all right, love. Trust me.” He tucked a pillow beneath her upper knee, then swept the hair from the back of her neck and placed hot, fevered kisses along her nape. “This way I won’t crush you.” His hand roamed over her stomach and down between her legs again, working its magic until she was once again breathless. She felt herself grow hot and heavy.
When his fingers slipped from her she wanted to cry out in protest. But in the next instant, she felt the hot, hard length of him slip inside her.
She moaned in pure pleasure.
He stopped. “Am I hurting you?”
His voice was rough with passion, and so was hers when she answered, “No! Don’t stop.”
Travis steeled himself for control and eased forward, pushing himself into her hot, sweet depths. Depths so tight, so virginally tight, even though she wasn’t a virgin. His control slipped. He gasped and grasped for it, but it was gone. He buried himself within her, and buried his face in her hair.
He was the first. No matter who had gone before him, he knew he was the first to make her eyes flutter closed, to make her moan deep in her throat that way, to put that secret, woman’s smile on her lips.
His body screamed for release. With trembling fingers, he found the tiny bud of pleasure between her velvet folds and massaged it in time with his slow, rhythmic thrusts.
Apache-Colton Series Page 32