Apache-Colton Series

by Janis Reams Hudson

  Then she was finished, and his heart pounded at the sight of all that hair flowing around her. He sunk his fingers into it until he reached her scalp. His eyes slid closed and his breath eased out. “I’ve wanted to do this since the first time I saw your hair down.”

  They both remembered that night her father had died, when Spence had stopped her from cutting her hair and she had cut his face. They let the memory hover a moment, then float away.

  LaRisa wound her arms around his neck and pulled him back down to the blanket. She wanted his weight pressed against her, his heat seeping into her skin. She wanted him. She whispered his name.

  The sound of it from her lips threaded through his mind. He buried his lips at the base of her throat and worked loose the first button on her blouse. And the second. And the third. His lips followed his fingers until he reached her chemise. “Did I ever tell you,” he said as he lifted his head to meet her gaze, “that you are an incredibly beautiful woman?”

  With the tip of one finger, she traced the scar on his cheek and smiled softly. “No.”

  “You are.” He finished unbuttoning her blouse and pulled it open, then lowered the straps of her chemise to bare her breasts to the golden firelight. He brushed his lips across first one tip, then the other. “And soft. So damn soft.”

  So soft, that his control slipped a notch. He took her mouth with his and let his hands roam frantically over her, sliding her clothes off until she was gloriously, perfectly bare. He dragged his hands over her again, touching her everywhere.

  LaRisa caught fire. Everywhere he touched, her skin burned. She wanted—needed—to return the favor. Frantically she tore at his shirt. It had no buttons, dammit. She whimpered in frustration and pulled his shirttail from his pants.

  “Yes,” he whispered hotly. “Touch me.” He knelt above her and tugged the shirt off over his head.

  He looked…pagan, kneeling over her in the darkness of the night. Primitive. Exciting. Like a warrior.

  He took her hands in his and brought them to his chest. His eyes drifted shut, and he shivered. “Touch me.”

  She ran her eager hands over him again and again, but she wanted to feel his hair-dusted chest pressed against her.

  Spence felt her tugging him back to her, and the feel of her naked breasts against his chest was his undoing. The hunger and need were on him again, laughing at his puny attempts at control. He kissed his way along her collarbone and down to the tip of one breast.

  LaRisa held her breath, waiting, waiting. When he pulled her nipple into his mouth she arched away from the blanket, offering him more, offering him everything. He was killing her with pleasure, destroying her ability to think, and she didn’t care. She didn’t want to think, only to feel.

  When his hand found its way to the place no man had ever touched, she cried out with the sheer glory of it. Something wild broke free inside her, and the world spun away in an explosion of light and sensation.

  Spence felt her climax and envied her, but he wouldn’t take his pleasure yet. He had to be sure he wouldn’t hurt her.

  He eased her back to earth with soothing words until her eyes fluttered open. Then he started over, pushing her toward the edge again. Her movements beneath him, the pleasured sounds coming from her throat, destroyed his will. He pulled his hand away and braced himself on both arms, fighting to keep from plunging into her with everything he had.

  Slowly, slowly, he filled her, praying he wouldn’t hurt her, but knowing he couldn’t stop. She wrapped her arms around his chest and brought him home, taking all of him into her hot, sweet depths.

  Spence wanted to savor the moment, the feeling. The subtle undulating of her hips against his drove the wish away. He moved against her, within her, and her body answered. Urgency took over. Heat. Hunger. Need. A primal rhythm that caught and held them in its embrace.

  She cried out again, her nails digging into his back. He felt her climax around him and with a grateful cry of his own, threw his head back and let himself go. He gave her everything he had, and together they soared past the edge of the world.

  And somewhere in the aftermath, as they drifted back to earth in each other’s arms, LaRisa could have sworn that for a moment, for the barest fraction of time, she heard her heart sing.

  When his senses returned, Spence levered himself up on his elbows and looked down into LaRisa’s eyes, wary of what he might see there. Her eyes were closed. The moisture of tears gleamed on her cheeks. He wiped it away with fingers that weren’t quite steady.

  At the touch of his fingers, LaRisa opened her eyes.

  “Why the tears?” he asked softly. “Was I too rough?”

  She shook her head. “No. I just…I never knew anything could be so…overwhelming.”

  “Neither did I.” He kissed her. Once, twice. The embers of their fierce coupling heated and glowed. And caught fire again.

  LaRisa ran her hands down his back and moaned.

  Still joined with her, Spence flexed his hips.

  Flames erupted. It started slow and easy. There was no hurry. They had all night. But the fire burned too hot, the flames surged too high, and slow and easy were charred to cinders as two bodies, two hearts, two souls, joined as one and reached for the heavens.

  LaRisa burrowed deeper into the warmth surrounding her, unwilling to open her eyes to the new day. A slow, steady drumbeat sounded in her ear. She stretched, and the drumbeat quickened. No, not a drumbeat…

  A heartbeat. Spence’s heartbeat.

  She squeezed her eyes to keep them shut. She did not want to start this day. Today he would remind her that last night had meant nothing, had changed nothing. She didn’t want to hear it.

  What they had shared last night meant everything to her. She couldn’t bear to hear him say otherwise. And while it may not have changed anything for him, it had changed her. Irrevocably. She was not the same woman she’d been yesterday. For today she knew what it was to love a man.

  An icy shudder of sheer terror racked her. Denial, quick and sharp, came next. She was not in love with Spencer Colton. A white man. A man who didn’t want a wife. Heaven help her, of course she wasn’t. Her mind had played a trick on her, making her think he was a warrior. A white man couldn’t be a warrior. What they had shared had been of the flesh, not the heart.

  But, oh, how her flesh had loved his.

  While he tugged the blanket more tightly around her shoulders, she pretended sleep. She kept on pretending, even when he eased away from her side and got up.

  She heard him slip on his clothes, then start a new fire. “Better get up,” he said quietly. “It’ll be light soon.”

  Those were not exactly the words a woman longed to hear from the man who’d spent the better part of last night making wild, sweet love to her. She especially didn’t want to hear them in that low, cool tone that said he knew she was awake. In a tone that told her he’d already put last night behind him.

  A hollow ache blossomed in her chest and threatened to swallow her.

  “LaRisa?”

  “I hear you.”

  Spence heard the hurt in her voice and silently called himself every kind of low-life bastard there was. For her, this should have been a morning of soft touches and tender words. Teasing kisses that turned hot and needful. A morning full of love, shared by lovers.

  For him, it was the morning after a night that should never have happened. And dammit, she deserved better than that. He stood slowly and turned, surprised to find her up and dressed, rolling the blankets into a tight bundle.

  LaRisa felt his eyes on her and straightened slowly. She met his troubled gaze with a halfhearted smile. “Good morning.”

  “Are you…all right?”

  No, she thought. She wasn’t all right. But this pain inside was her problem, not his. “I’m fine, Spence.”

  Spence felt something tighten inside himself. He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had called him Spence. That she would do so now, after he’d s
lunk out of bed like the snake he was, made him feel even smaller and more disgusted with himself than before.

  When he didn’t say anything else, her smile faltered.

  They shared a silent breakfast of bacon and pan biscuits, then saddled up and rode out of the deep gully.

  They hadn’t been on the trail more than half an hour when a deep chill shook him. Then another. And another. And he knew his time had run out. Unlike the chill he’d felt when he’d seen LaRisa being mistreated at the hands of the bandits, or when he’d seen Broken Hand hit her, this chill, he knew, would not go away. Not until the fever of malaria burned it out sometime within the next several hours. “Goddamn.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Spence?” He was shaking violently. Alarmed, LaRisa nudged her mare closer to him. “Spence, what is it?”

  A muscle bulged along his jaw. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to t-take a little…detour.”

  She saw the way his hands trembled on the reins, the way he hunched his shoulders, the lines of strain in his ashen face. “You’re sick,” she cried, her pulse racing.

  “I’m about to be.”

  LaRisa cut her horse in front of his, forcing him to halt. “Tell me.”

  Shaking, shivering uncontrollably, he met her gaze. There were things in his eyes she didn’t understand.

  “Damn,” he finally said, looking away. “See that road down there?” He nodded toward the ribbon of bare, rutted ground threading through the grassland that spread out at the base of the low hill they were on.

  “What about it?”

  “We’re going to take it north. The town of Bisbee is just up ahead. I don’t want to take you there, but I don’t have…a choice. We’ll get—”

  “Spence, wha—”

  “—two rooms at the hotel. You have to…promise me you’ll…stay in your room and not come out for anything. It’s not…safe. We’ll start home…in a day or two.”

  “You’re sick, and you expect me to lock myself in my room and ignore you?”

  “That’s exactly what I expect.”

  “Not on your life. This is one argument you’re going to lose, white man. You obviously know what’s wrong with you, so why don’t you save us both a lot of trouble and just tell me?”

  Dammit, he didn’t want to tell her. But hell, who did he think he was kidding? He could barely stay in the saddle, let alone make her do anything she didn’t want to do. Damn, stubborn woman. He couldn’t stand the thought of her seeing him weak, sick, delirious. Was he to have no pride left at all? He shivered under the hot July sun.

  “Tell me,” she demanded.

  “All right! I have malaria.”

  LaRisa suffered a shiver of her own. “No!” Her father had had malaria. It had killed him. “Spence, no!”

  “Yes,” he hissed.

  LaRisa swallowed. “You’ve had it before?”

  “Two or three times a year for the past five years.”

  “How…how bad does it get?”

  “Bad enough.”

  All right, she told herself. He had malaria. That was no reason for her to fall apart. She squared her shoulders. “I hope you’ve got quinine in that bag of yours.”

  “I do.” He managed a wry grin. “Come on. Let’s go. I’ll be all right. It only lasts a day or so.”

  By the time Spence and LaRisa dismounted at the hotel in Bisbee, Spence’s teeth were clacking together so hard that he could barely speak.

  “Here.” He handed her a small leather bag of gold coins. “Y-you d-do the t-t-talking. T-two…r-rooms.”

  LaRisa clamped her mouth shut and braced her shoulder beneath his arm to steady him as they made their way inside. Two rooms, indeed.

  She’d had time to think since realizing an hour ago that Spence had malaria, and her fear had receded. He needed her to be strong and take care of him. He did not need her to swoon in a fit of hysteria. If he’d had the malaria for five years, he was obviously living with it. He wasn’t suffering from malnutrition, he had not been living in hopelessly unsanitary conditions. If she took proper care of him, the complication that had killed her father—pneumonia—shouldn’t be a problem.

  Dear God, don’t let it be a problem.

  At the registration desk, LaRisa gave the bespeckled clerk a smile. “We’d like a room, please.”

  The old man blinked. “Come again?”

  “I said, we’d like a room, please.”

  The clerk frowned. He peered hard at LaRisa, then Spence, then LaRisa again. “You don’t sound like no Apache, but you kinda got the look of one. Ain’t seen no Apaches ‘round here since Hector was a pup. Ain’t lettin’ one sleep under my roof, neither.”

  Spence opened his mouth to speak, but LaRisa jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow to keep him quiet. She didn’t have time to deal with a white man’s opinions of Apaches. Giving the clerk a glittering smile, she tilted her head at an angle and bobbed it forward and down in a rhythm that matched her speech. “My name ees Eeeenga. Iyam Sveeedish. Thees is my hoosband, Sven. He yis Sveeedish, too. You know Sveeedish, ya? From Sveeetzerland?”

  Spence covered his mouth with his hand and started coughing.

  The desk clerk narrowed one eye and widened the other. “If you’re Swedish, I’m a ring-tail ‘coon.”

  “Ya, yoo must be. So glad to meeet you, Meester Coon.”

  “Now looky here—”

  “Tooo nights, please.”

  The clerk gestured toward Spence. “Whatsa matter with you? You’re shakin’ like you got the palsy.”

  “Ya,” LaRisa said. “He fall in creek and get a cheeel. Vee get extra blankets, ya?”

  “Cost ya extra.”

  Still grinning like an idiot, she bobbed her head again. “Ya.”

  The clerk eyed the couple a moment longer, then gave in. “All right. Sign here in the book. With the extra blankets, that’ll be two dollars.”

  LaRisa pulled two silver dollars from the bag Spence had given her and laid them on the counter. Then she picked up the pen to sign the register. In a fit of defiance and with no little flourish, signed them in as Dr. and Mrs. Spencer Colton. Let the old goat chew on that for a while.

  The clerk passed her a room key and leaned down to read the register.

  LaRisa grabbed the key and offered her shoulder again to Spence for support. He was still chuckling as they made their way up the narrow stairs.

  “Hey,” the clerk cried out. “I thought you said your names was…ah, to heck with it,” he muttered.

  Spence more or less fell onto the narrow bed in the small, stuffy room. LaRisa couldn’t tell how much of his shaking was from laughter, or the chills that racked him.

  “Eeeenga?” he managed. “I never thought I’d l-laugh my way through a c-case of m-malaria. Where’d you come up with an a-accent like that?”

  LaRisa quickly rescued his hat before he could crush it. “From a hired girl on one of the farms I was sent to one summer.” She worked at the buckle on his holster. His shivering seemed to be getting worse. He tried to help her with the buckle, and their hands touched. His skin was on fire. “How long do the chills usually last?”

  “A f-few hours.”

  The buckle came loose. She pulled the holster free and placed it on the floor beneath the bed. “How many is a few?”

  He frowned and wrapped his arms around his chest, tucking his hands into his arm pits. “Three. Four. Maybe five.”

  She tried to help him get up so he could finish undressing. “Too cold,” he objected.

  “At least your boots, then.”

  He agreed and helped her tug off his boots, then, still fully clothed, he crawled beneath the thin blanket.

  “I’m going to get your medical bag and see to the horses.”

  The only answer was the clattering of his teeth.

  “Spence? Did you hear me?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be all r-right.”

  LaRisa paid a young boy on the street to help her carry their belongings up t
o the room, then she boarded the horses at the livery two blocks away. Before going back to Spence, she inquired about a doctor, but the last doctor anyone had seen in Bisbee had left four months ago. She was on her own with Spence.

  She returned to the room and found him just as she’d left him, huddled under the blankets from their bedrolls, hugging himself for warmth. His eyes followed her as she went to his medical bag and took out the quinine, watched her as she measured out the proper amount, stayed on her as he swallowed the bitter medicine.

  “I don’t s-suppose you’ll rec-consider and g-get your own r-room.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed his hair back with her fingers. “I don’t suppose. Somebody’s got to take care of you. Come on.” She peeled back the blankets covering him. “You’ll be more comfortable once you’re out of these clothes.”

  “Too cold,” he objected, reaching for the blankets.

  “We’ll leave your shirt on, if you want, but those pants can’t be comfortable.”

  Spence hated to admit she was right. He hated everything about the situation. He didn’t want her to see him this way, weak and trembly like a baby. Helpless. Useless. Every time she looked at him he felt unmanned.

  While he was trying to think of a way to get her to leave him, she was reaching for the buttons on his pants. “Huh,” he managed. “I’ve created a monster. One night together, and now I c-can’t keep you out of my p-pants.”

  Her cheeks flamed. “Is that wishful thinking, white man? Or is your fever so high you’re hallucinating?”

  “Not yet,” he said grimly. “But I will. Are you s-sure I can’t talk you into staying in another r-room?”

  She tugged his pants down and off, but left his drawers and socks in place. “Be reasonable, Spence, I can’t leave you alone when you’re sick.”