“I know,” came her breathless answer. “God help me, I know. But if this is all we have, this one night, then love me, Blake. Pretend there is no tomorrow. Because this is right, Blake. You know it is. Nothing in the world has ever been so right.”
His own breath caught. It was true. Nothing had ever been so right as the feel of her body stretched out beneath his. Her hands in his hair, on his face, around his neck, pulling him down until their lips met.
“Ah, hell, Jess, I don’t want to leave you.”
“Then don’t. Not tonight.”
And he knew he couldn’t.
His hands shook as he undressed her in the darkness. He wished for light, so he could see each creamy inch of her skin as it was revealed. But he didn’t dare light a lamp. No telling when her mother and sister would return. If they caught him in Jessie’s bed, they’d castrate him.
But he couldn’t leave. He didn’t have the strength.
Jessie couldn’t wait for him to take off her clothes, then his. She wanted to touch him now. While he fumbled with buttons and tugged on laces, she boldly attacked his uniform.
When she had his shirt off, she spread her hands carefully, slowly against his bare chest. His skin was hot and smooth, hairless, stretched tight over hard muscles. Oh, how she wanted to see him, but she dared not light the lamp.
And then before she realized it, her clothes were gone, and so were his, and they were touching head to toe. And it was the most glorious thing imaginable.
With eager hands she discovered him, inch by inch, as she discovered herself through his touch. She could almost hear her blood singing in her veins, so pleasurable was the feel of his hands on her, hers on him. His name escaped her lips on a sigh.
The sound of it whirled in Blake’s mind until he was dizzy with it. Impatient now, he left her mouth and tasted the soft silky skin of her cheek, her jaw, her neck. By the time he reached her breast his chest was heaving with the effort to draw in air. No woman had ever tasted so good, so sweet. No woman had ever made him tremble with her touch. No woman but Jessie.
“How could you even think I didn’t want you?” But he didn’t give her a chance to answer. “I love the color of your eyes, your hair. And the shape of you…” He trailed kisses up the slope of her breast until he hovered over the taut peak. “Ah, the shape of you drives me wild. Your breasts are perfect. Your hips, your height—everything about you is perfect for me, Jess.”
And she believed him. Right then, with his weight pressing her into the mattress, his hot breath teasing her aching nipple, she felt perfect. So perfect, she thought she might faint from it.
When he brushed his lips across the tip of her breast she nearly cried out. But at the last minute, she bit her lip to hold back the sound. She didn’t want to let any of this fierce pleasure go, not even through her voice. She wanted to hold it in and give it back to the man she loved. And she did love him, with her whole heart. Without a doubt.
His calloused hands slid down her ribs, igniting sparks in their wake. When he took his mouth from her nipple, where it had tugged at invisible strings inside her, she cried out a wordless protest.
“Shh,” he murmured. “I’m here. I won’t leave you.”
Then he proved it by kissing his way to her other breast, where he teased with tongue and lips and teeth until she squirmed beneath him, wanting something more, not knowing fully what that was.
Then his hands swirled lower, across her stomach, down her hips, her thighs. Back up again to tease the hair between her legs until she felt it everywhere. Then he dipped lower, to the place that begged for his touch. This…this was what she hadn’t known, but had yearned for. She wanted to tell him, but all she could manage was his name, over and over.
Her soft gasping cries sent the blood pounding through Blake’s veins, sent it hot and pulsing where he was already hotter, already pulsing harder than ever before. He’d never heard a sweeter sound than his name on her lips.
Beneath his fingers she was slick and hot and tight. He shook with the need to bury his hard, aching flesh in her hidden depths.
But not yet. Not yet. She wasn’t desperate enough. She wasn’t hungry enough. Her hands weren’t shaking the way his were.
With his hands and fingers, his lips and teeth and tongue, he drove her higher, and in so doing, drove himself closer and closer to the edge. Sweat gathered on his brow and chest and between his shoulder blades.
He flicked his thumb across the spot where every nerve in her body ended, or began. He sensed her surprise, heard it in her gasp, felt it in the clenching of her muscles.
“That’s it, Jess.” Breathless, his voice rasped. “Let it happen.”
What he was doing to her was indescribable. Jessie sucked in air, but nothing short of dying would ease the pressure, douse the fire. And then she was soaring free of the earth—or maybe she really was dying, but if so, she didn’t care. Explosions rocked her body and mind, colors burst behind her closed eyes.
Blake felt her shattering release. The last of his control slipped loose. With his jaw clenched against the need to plunge into her with one fierce thrust, he entered slowly, one exquisite, hot inch at a time.
Jessie had thought there was no more left to feel as she slowly came back to earth. But the feel of Blake’s flesh joining with hers, making them one inseparable being, sent her senses reeling again. Fire licked at her soul. She arched beneath him and felt herself stretch to accommodate and welcome him home.
“Easy,” he whispered hotly. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
But Jessie couldn’t wait. She wanted all of him, and she wanted it now. She thrust her hips and felt a sharp, swift pain.
Blake froze. “Jess?”
“Please,” she pleaded.
“Please what? Tell me.”
She moved beneath him, around him, and the pain was drowned in searing pleasure. “Please.”
Blake felt her body accept his, felt his heart pound. The room, the world faded away, leaving nothing and no one but the two of them. Just Jessie and him. He moved inside her and gritted his teeth against pleasure like he’d never known before.
Again and again he thrust, faster, harder, hotter. Jessie took and gave and matched him heartbeat for heartbeat, her sharp nails digging into his back and urging him on until he felt her climax around him. It stole his breath. It pulled him right over the edge with her until they soared together and drank each other’s cries with lips that clung. And somewhere deep inside himself, he felt their souls merge.
When his breath and the world returned, Blake raised himself on trembling arms. Outside thunder crashed and rolled across the night and rain pelted against the glass panes in the window. He’d forgotten it was storming. There’d been another storm, more intense, more spectacular, more life-altering, right here in Jessie’s bed.
He could barely see her in the darkness, but he felt her along every inch of his body. He brushed a hand lightly across her cheek. Her wet cheek. His breath stilled. “Jessie…oh, God, Jessie.”
Her arms tightened around his back. Her voice, barely audible, shook. “I’m sorry.” She sniffed quietly. “I just never knew anything could be so…beautiful, so powerful. Oh, Blake, is it always like that?”
Blake shook with relief. And with pleasure at her words. “No,” he whispered softly. “At least, it’s never been like this for me before. This was…I don’t know how to tell you what loving you is like for me.”
“Can we do it again?”
Blake wanted to shout with sheer joyous laughter. God, was there ever a woman like her? Still smiling, he shook his head. “And have your mother and sister come barging in?”
Her laughter was low and husky and seductive as hell. “You locked the doors, remember?”
He nudged her lips with his. “So I did.”
They shared a kiss that was sweeter than sin and sent Blake’s pulse pounding low and hard.
“So, can we?” Jessie whispered against his lips, with a little nudge o
f her hips for incentive.
His mouth still on hers, Blake smiled. “Can we what?”
She took a swipe at his lips with her tongue. “Can we do it again?”
He felt the heat gather into hardness in his loins. “I think we already are.”
“Oh…good.”
And so it went, deep into the night. They loved slow and deep, fast and hot, teasing and frantic, again and again. Sometime during the night they heard Jessie’s mother and sister return. They held their breath, but no one came to the door of Jessie’s room. After a few minutes, the sitting room grew silent as the two women went to bed.
“I should go,” Blake said softly.
Instant panic assailed Jessie. She tightened her arms around Blake’s neck. “Not yet. Not yet.”
He could no more resist her plea than he could keep the sun from rising on what would surely be their last day together.
Not even that. They wouldn’t have the day together, he knew. When he left her bed…that would be the end of their time together. He couldn’t bring himself to do anything to end his time with her even one second sooner than necessary.
So he stayed. And they loved.
When the room turned gray with predawn light, Jessie felt the panic rush back. Blake rose on one elbow and leaned over her. His face, his dear, beautiful face, was harsh, ravaged by regret. Just looking at him brought tears to her eyes.
“One more time, Jessie. Let me love you one last time.”
Wade huddled beneath the folds of his slicker and cursed the rain that had finally leveled off to a steady drizzle. He was more than a little drunk, had spent more than a little money, and it was all for nothing, goddammit.
He’d spent most of the night pouring drinks down three soldiers, trying to find out what they knew of Blake’s activities at the fort. The sorry bastards hadn’t known a damn thing.
He swore again and stepped into the courtyard of the Menger Hotel. There, he froze. Finally! Finally Lady Luck had smiled on him.
One dim light at the far end of the courtyard gleamed against the rain-slicked stone slabs of the floor. The courtyard was deserted. Almost. A lone man leaned against the wall and stared up toward the corner room. He had his back to the door not three feet away, where Wade stood. A lone man in a cavalry greatcoat and officer’s hat. Staring like a lovesick puppy at the suite occupied by the Colton women. Damn, Blake must have it bad.
And he was going to have it worse. Much worse.
With barely a sliver of sound, Wade pulled the knife from his boot. The wicked blade, as long as his forearm and sharp as lightning, gleamed dully in the faint light. In one swift move, he locked an arm around Blake’s throat and pressed the tip of the blade to his chin. “Don’t make a sound, or I’ll carve you a new smile here and now.”
Blake didn’t make a sound. Wade smiled grimly. He finally had the bastard right where he wanted him.
He forced his prey backward out the door into the alley. In a dark, muddy nook behind a pile of rotting garbage, Wade coolly, calmly, and with more satisfaction than he’d ever found between a woman’s legs, he sliced the bastard’s throat.
He let the body fall, watching with eager eyes as it bled into the mud and twitched its last. A feeling of power surged through him. He was invincible. Nothing could stop him now. Nothing, and no one. He wanted to shout, to gloat, to dance on the bastard’s grave.
Ah, hell. He didn’t want anybody stumbling over the body until he was out of town. He was going to have to dig a goddamn grave.
Then he smelled the wet, rotting garbage and thought it a fitting end to the man who’d plagued him all his life. He kicked the corpse at his feet. “Even garbage is too good for you, but I guess it’ll have to do.”
And then, just so he could remember with pleasure the way Blake Renard looked in death, Wade bent down and struck a match. And swore.
“Goddamn. Goddamn.”
The face staring back up at him sightlessly was that of a total stranger.
Leaving Jessie, the warmth of her arms, the honeyed sweetness of her lips, the healing embrace of her body, the soft whisper of “I love you” echoing through his heart, was the hardest thing Blake had ever done or would ever do. He hadn’t told her good-bye, hadn’t let her say it, either. It would have killed him. As he’d slipped out of her room onto the cold damp landing of the hall, he did as she’d suggested earlier. He pretended that this wasn’t the end.
But it was. The cold chill snaking down his arms, a chill that had nothing to do with the weather, told him so.
Damn his hide. Was the path of revenge he’d set for himself worth losing Jessie? Were his orders, straight from as high up as they could come, worth the pain that felt like he was ripping himself apart?
But then, what was a man’s honor worth? He’d made his vow, given his word, and accepted the orders. His thoughts more grim with each step he took away from Jessie, he knew he would do what he had to do. And one way or another, even if he lived, his life would be over.
A glance down into the courtyard told him Tipplemire had given up his vigil. Blake entered his room and closed the door softly behind him. He’d have to find the sergeant this morning and retrieve his hat and coat. He was going to need them.
He slipped the sheath for his knife onto his belt. He fingered the scar on his cheek, then the blade of his knife. How many years had he carried them now, the scar and the knife? Fifteen? No, fourteen. He’d been ten the day he’d received the one and taken the other.
Now, finally, after all these years, he was going to give the goddamn knife back, just the way he’d promised.
He slid the blade into the leather sheath. Maybe he wouldn’t give it back. Maybe he’d use it, then keep it. Wherever he ended up, he was liable to need a good knife.
He was also going to need supplies, a horse and tack, and ammunition. Two horses, then, for he would take as many supplies as he could. If he was spotted and identified, he would have to flee the country. Or be hanged. His orders were verbal, and he was on his own. He’d known that when he’d accepted the assignment, and it hadn’t mattered.
That was before Jessie. Now it mattered. It mattered too damn much.
By midmorning the city was hot and steaming under a cloudless blue sky. Humidity hung heavy in the air, making each breath more difficult than the last. The wind blew briefly in gusts, hot and damp, then stilled.
Jessie blotted the perspiration from her brow with a scented, lace-trimmed handkerchief and stepped across a puddle of water to enter the courtyard of the hotel. She had finished purchasing the last of the supplies needed for the long journey home.
Tonight was the night.
A shiver of dread raced down her spine, along with the deep ache of sorrow that had lodged in her breast as she’d watched Blake slip from her room at dawn.
Don’t think of Blake. Don’t remember. Don’t want. Don’t love him.
But the advice was wasted on her heart.
Tonight in the shadows of darkness, Jessie, her mother, and Serena, would somehow—she didn’t yet fully understand just how—free Pace from imprisonment at the fort. Then they would flee. They wouldn’t be able to take the train home, for surely they would be caught. They would have to go by horseback over rough country. The journey would take weeks.
Maybe in that amount of time she would be able to teach her heart not to bleed. Maybe by the time she reached home, she would be able to go, oh, two, perhaps as long as three minutes without remembering Blake. Without seeing him every time she closed her eyes. Without feeling his touch, his breath on her skin, his precious weight pressing against her. Without tasting his lips and…
I will not cry. I will not cry. “I will not—”
“Who are you talking to?”
Jessie jerked at the sound of Serena’s voice behind her on the stairs to their rooms. “Myself, I guess. What have you got there?” She nodded toward the large bundle Serena carried in both arms.
Serena’s smile bordered on wicked. �
�Wait ’til you see. They’re for tonight.”
When they entered the suite they found their mother seated on the settee with her face buried in her hands. Daniella looked up at them, her eyes and face filled with despair and worry. The fine lines around her eyes cut deeper than usual.
Jessie’s heart quailed. In that instant, her mother suddenly looked every one of her fifty-four years. And it scared Jessie half to death. “Mama, what’s happened?” She rushed to her mother’s side while Serena dropped her bundle and followed.
“The prisoners…there really is a plan to kill them.”
“Mama?” Jessie asked, sitting down beside her.
Daniella shook her head. “It seems the rumors we heard about an attack on Geronimo and the others are considerably more than rumors. The Army…is planning to have them all shot.”
“They can’t!” Serena cried.
“They wouldn’t!” Jessie claimed.
“They can, and they would,” Daniella said grimly. “The official report will claim they were shot while trying to escape.”
Jessie closed her eyes and saw again the hopelessness and despair on the faces of the Apaches just before they’d boarded the train in Bowie. Something else had been in their eyes, too. Something she hadn’t realized until just now. Resignation. And fear.
Jessie gasped. “They knew!”
“What are you talking about?” Daniella asked. “Who knew what?”
Tormented by her new understanding, Jessie met her mother’s gaze. “The Apaches, in Bowie. Before they ever got on that train, they realized something like this might happen. I saw it in their eyes, but I didn’t understand, didn’t know what I was seeing. Mama, we’ve got to do something. We can’t sit back and let them be killed.”
“Jessie,” Daniella said slowly. “You’ve never been involved with the Apaches before this.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Jessie wanted to know. “I don’t condone what Geronimo and the others have done these past few years—the killing and raping and stealing. But I can’t possibly have been raised under your roof and not have at least a slight understanding of why they’ve broken out of the reservation time and again. Why they raid and steal and kill. But, Mama, it’s over. They surrendered in good faith and accepted that they’d be imprisoned for two years. To kill them now, to murder them—it makes no sense. And it’s wrong, Mama. We have to do something.”
Apache-Colton Series Page 128