After the Thunder (27 page)

“I’m much tougher to tempt than most men,” he said.

She laughed.

“Maybe. But you aren’t tough enough.”

“Oh?”

He scooted toward her on the bedroll and bent to whisper against her ear. “Try me.”

“No,” she said and moved away. “I’d be taking advantage of you.” But her breath caught in her throat, and she could barely finish the last of it because that one hot breath in her ear, that seductive growl of two inviting words had melted her bones.

His arm brushed against hers and sent a heated thrill racing through her helpless flesh. She leaned back into the curve of his shoulder for one sweet moment of warmth.

Then she pulled herself together to inch teasingly away again.

“It wouldn’t be fair,” she said.

“Ah!” he said. “So you’re afraid of defeat.”

“No, you’ve dallied too long,” she said. “You’ve waited too late. Now I don’t believe that you really want me at all.”

“Well, you have to make your own decisions,” he murmured, “according to what your spirit tells you to do.”

She flashed him a look over her shoulder.

“And your flesh,” she murmured in return. “You also must listen to what your flesh tells you to do.”

He reached out and ran his hand over her hair.

“Mmm, your hair is smoother than cornsilks,” he murmured. “I love to feel it against my skin.”

“You should feel my skin against your skin.”

But she gave him a brilliant smile and shifted farther away from him.

He laughed. “I’m far too tough to fall for a blatant temptation like that. You’ll have to do better.”

“But I’m not trying to tempt you anymore.”

“Yes, you are. It’s not nice to lie.”

He pulled back a little and looked at her in the glow of the camp flames, brushed back a loose strand of her hair and circled her ear with his fingertip, then trailed it slowly down the side of her neck. A sparkle of fire went dancing through her blood. It took her breath away, and he saw that it did.

He was the tempter now, and he knew it.

“Don’t you be touching me, Shadow,” she said, in a tone that meant just the opposite.

He leaned forward and laid his big hand at the nape of her neck in a gesture so slow, so deliberate, that it could have only one intention: possession. Her heart stopped.

Her hair hung down her back in one long, thick braid, and he brought it over her shoulder with a dizzying caress that made her bend toward his hand. He untied the scrap of ribbon and began running his fingers through it.

“Or, instead of cornsilks, maybe your hair’s smoother than a raven’s wing,” he said. “It’s certainly blacker.”

“Mmn.”

He moved back and turned so he could use both hands.

“This is the way you should always wear your hair,” he said, spreading it out across her shoulders. “Look how it gleams in the firelight.”

She laughed softly, shaking her head.

“If I always wore it like this, there wouldn’t be any
left to gleam in the firelight,” she said. “Every tree limb I passed would reach out and catch it.”

He smiled dreamily.

“Cotannah. Beautiful Cotannah. Every thing and every person wants to reach out and catch you as you pass. Especially every man.”

His eyes gleamed with a fierce heat. He dropped his arms around her suddenly, and turned her face away from his, pulled her back against his hard body. He fit her head into his shoulder, brushed her hair behind her ear before he pressed his cheek to hers.

His whole body was taut with desire now, she could feel it vibrating through him, through her, between them, like the plucked string of a bow. But he didn’t touch her in any other way.

“I know you’re right about our bodies coming together,” he whispered, “but Cotannah, I would never forgive myself if I broke your heart.”

H
er blood stopped pumping. He couldn’t deny her now, he just couldn’t. Not after the change of heart she’d seen in his face.

Yet, he stayed very still, the chiseled bones of his face pressing into hers.

“You won’t. I’ll die of a broken heart if you don’t love me, Shadow.”

“I do love you. With all my heart, my soul, and my spirit. But if I love you with my body, it’ll make it worse, much worse, for you when I’m gone. Then I won’t have to suffer, but your flesh and your skin will long for me, too, as well as your mind and your spirit.”

“They will anyway,” she whispered, her lips almost too stiff with despair to speak. “All of me is longing for you now so much that it’s devouring me.”

She pulled away from him then, although the loss of his hard warmth made her feel so bereft she could cry, and shifted her body to face him, took his dear face in her hands.

“I know how you feel,” she cried, and she willed her voice not to break. “You think that our coming together will make it harder for me, but it’s harder for us both
right now, not to have the joy we could have as one spirit and one body.”

He stared deep into her eyes in the firelight. He was listening to her with his whole self.

“It’s wrong for us to throw away that joy, don’t you see?”

He made a noncommittal noise, deep in his throat. She didn’t know what it meant, but somehow it gave her hope.

“Remember when you said that you had to live, really live this last week?” she cried. “We can’t do that unless our bodies come together and we share all of ourselves, Shadow, darling! If we don’t, we’ll be wanting it so much that denying our instincts will take all our strength, and we won’t really experience anything else!”

His eyes consumed her face, but he didn’t speak.

“I need your spirit to help me in the years to come,” she said simply. “And you need my earthiness to fully experience this life in this world. We are meant to share ourselves completely now.”

He looked at her some more, for the long, thudding length of a slow heartbeat and then, without a word, he held out both arms. She went into them and her heart took flight.

He settled her head into the crook of his neck and rubbed his cheek against her hair. With that same deliberate possessiveness as before, he wrapped her into his embrace and began to rock her back and forth.

“You are wise,” he said. “My every instinct tells me you are right.”

He pressed a hot kiss against the sensitive skin of her temple.

“But Cotannah, I don’t know how you can be so sure of how much you’re risking. I worry so for you after I’m gone. Can it be true that you really love me this
much? I’ve heard the old men say that once a woman lies with a man, then she always needs a man. Perhaps that need is what you are feeling …”

She was already shaking her head, “no” and she turned quickly in his arms to meet his eyes.

“I need you. Only you.”

His dark face suffused with a light that had nothing to do with the fire or the rising new moon.

“Only you, Walks-With-Spirits. Only you.”

He made a low, broken sound and pulled her down with him onto the ground, already cupping her breast in his hand, kissing her mercilessly with wild teeth and tongue, stopping her breath forever and then giving her his own. She had no strength, not even to move one finger, but she untied his woven belt and snatched at the tails of his long hunting shirt. Finally, with his help, it came off over his head and that is when they broke the kiss—for that one flashing instant only.

She ran her palms over his back, feeling the contours of his muscles flexing like iron wrapped in silk, and her whole body exploded with the need for that same delicious sensation. Only to assist him with her clothes and his did she leave off that caressing, and after a lifetime of the agony of doing without it, at last she came into his arms, flesh to sweet flesh with nothing between.

“Now,” she said, her voice a ragged whisper as she brushed the desperate tips of her breasts back and forth against his hard chest, “now tell me, Walks-With-Spirits, is this too blatant a temptation for you?”

He laughed, a low, throaty sound that truly did take all her strength away and leave her helpless in his arms, her lips parted, existing only for his kiss. His mouth came closer and closer, slowly, with its inexorable heat and when she thought she couldn’t live another second
without tasting him, he grazed her lips with his. Once, twice, and then again.

“And this?” he whispered. “Is this tempting you?”

“Yes! Yes! I’ll even beg if you want me to.”

“Not necessary,” he murmured. “I’ll give you anything you want with open arms.”

Except your life
.

But instantly the wretched thought was gone and he was hers forever, a part of her, because he knew without thinking what she needed before she herself knew. He held her like a treasure too precious for price, he cherished her like a woman too passionate for playing at love.

And that told her, suddenly and well, in a way that felt so different in her blood from the way she already knew it in her mind, that this time, indeed, she was not playing at all. This was going to sear her very soul, this was going to bind her to him for all the rest of the days and nights that she drew breath.

He kissed her mouth to satiation, then he held her breast in his hand and suckled it until she cried out his name and thrust her fingers into his hair to hold him there and never let him go. Until she begged him to stop and then implored him to do it some more.

“More,” she murmured, with her greedy, bruised lips already craving another kiss, “more.”

She wanted more of his kisses and his touch, more of everything he was doing and was going to do with her. She wanted to be part of him, she wanted to be inside his skin and have him inside her.

The voluptuousness of his power, the dark delight of his body struck into her heart like a shivering lance. This was more, more than she’d bargained for, more than she’d ever imagined. Maybe more than she could bear.

More than she could ever hope to control, she knew that already.

But there was no stopping now.

Her palms hungered to know every ripple of sinew, every bulging of muscle, every stretching of tendon, every shape of bone beneath his flesh. Never before had she felt this need, this pulsing of desperate desire that she could not command. She could only give herself to it, go with it wherever it carried her.

Her fingers thrust into his hair, brought his mouth back to hers, but before she kissed him, she had to whisper against his lips.

“Love you,” she said. “Walks-With-Spirits, I love you.”

Never before had she made love with a man that she loved.

Never before had she loved a man.

And with those two thoughts her mind left her. Walks-With-Spirits was kissing her again with a leisurely, lazy, possessive pleasure that made her blood run fast and hot and her breath slow to stopping.

But even breathless, even existing without air, without sight, hearing or speech, she never had felt so gloriously alive inside and outside her skin. Alive and dangerous. Alive and able to do anything.

He knew before she did that she had to have him at her breast again and this time he took the other rigid, begging tip into his mouth to send those arcing sparks of fiery happiness flying through her body until the pleasure grew so great she could not bear it. No, it was the other wantings he was creating with his teeth and tongue that she could not bear, for she needed his mouth at the wet center of her woman’s body and his hands on her, on every bit of her skin that was not already pressed against his.

Walks-With-Spirits knew that, too, for he knew her too well, far too well. He slipped his free hand along the curve of her waist and then, as she arched up and into his mouth more fully, he cupped the swell of her hip and pressed her against his hardened manhood. Then he moved his mouth back to hers in a kiss so slow and gentle and hot and succoring that it melted her very bones into the ground.

Her mouth melded with his and then they parted, only far enough for delicious torment, only long enough to prove that they could come back together again and again. Always. They always came back together again.

Until, at last, with his hands caressing her shoulders and his legs wrapped around hers, as if to enclose her in a living circle of his body, he began to trail kisses along the line of her jaw and then over the vulnerable curve of her throat that she offered to him. Tiny, laving tastings of his tongue to her skin. He wanted to love every inch of her, those kisses told her. He wanted to know and to love all of her.

He made his way down into the valley between her breasts, which were aching for his attentions again, but his mouth moved past them, on down and down, not varying from its straight path. Until he reached her waist.

Then he stopped and got up onto his knees beside her, raised his head to look at her. She laid her hand against his heart and felt it bucking against the cage of his chest-bone.

Very gently, with a touch so intriguing, so tantalizing that she trembled and let her hand fall away from him, he stroked her thighs, the delicate, responsive insides of her thighs, which were yearning for him. Which she opened to him. He knelt between them and looked down at her.

“Cotannah,” he said.

That was all. Just “Cotannah.”

But his eyes gleamed with the amber of the fire, and his chiseled cheekbones silvered in the starlight when he cocked his head and looked at her as if she were the most wonderful sight he ever had seen. A smile touched the corners of his full, sensual lips.

Then he bent to bestow a perfect, tender kiss on the sensitive spot halfway between her belly button and the core of her woman’s body, hot and wet and weeping for him. A kiss as a gift holding all of his love.

And then he slipped inside her and gathered her up, all of her, swiftly into his arms, held her hard and fast as they began to move together in the ancient, timeless rhythm that now was new as the slender moon rising. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and clung to him, drew in great breaths of the scents of his skin and his hair and his breath before she kissed his neck and licked his shoulder and filled her mouth with the taste of his sweat and then of his lips and tongue until his essence rushed in her veins with her blood and swirled in the marrow of her bones.

He plunged deeper and she welcomed him, clung to the immutable, solid strength of his dear body and loved it with hers, stroke for stroke, and flash for flash until they went soaring, fused together, spinning up and out through the dark sky into a sparkling spangle of stars.

He woke with Cotannah’s breasts warm against his side, her face buried in his shoulder, and her back and rounded bottom chilled by the autumn night air. With his free hand, he managed to reach the other quilted bedroll and pull it over them.

Then he lay, looking up into the blue-black, silvery haze of the night, gradually coming back into his mind now that his blood was no longer roaring in his head,
glorying in holding Cotannah in his arms. What they had done had been magnificent, and he wasn’t going to worry now that it would make her pain worse later on. No matter that it was too late now, anyway, but such worry would only ruin the time they had left. She had made him realize that.

She had wanted this, too, she had told him in words and she had told him, oh, dear Lord, how she had told him with her body! And she had given it careful thought.

Triumphant heat bloomed in his veins. He had done well. He had known by instinct what to do, and they had fused, body and spirit, in a fire of passion. Now he knew why people set such store by this showing of love with their bodies. It was a mystery, he thought, as he slowly stroked her sweet skin while she lay sleeping with her arm splayed out across his chest—a wonderful, mysterious magic, in which somehow the mating of bodies made spirits mate as well.

Or maybe their spirits, already drawn together by love, were what created the wondrous sensations of their bodies.

Either way, it was joy, pure joy, and he was so glad that he had partaken of it. And that he had given it to Cotannah. Truly, though, it was Cotannah with her wise words who had given it to him, to both of them.

He let the wandering thoughts drift around and around in his head while he luxuriated in the feel of the soft quilt on one side and Cotannah’s even softer skin on the other. Their bed was already growing warm. Snuggling deeper into their nest, he shifted her position a little, pulling the quilt closer around her, leaning her head back against his arm so that he could see her face.

“Walks-With-Spirits?”

His name was a murmured question, but then she
flung her arm around his neck with a satisfied sigh that proved she knew full well who he was.

“Is it morning?”

He chuckled and picked up her hand to kiss each of her fingertips in turn.

“No, you haven’t slept long. Look up and see the stars.”

She opened her eyes, he cradled her head in the curve of his shoulder.

“Crescent moon,” she said drowsily, “white feather moon.”

“Mmhm,” he said, and bent his head to drop a kiss onto her hair.

She froze, then, quit breathing in his arms, and for a heart-stopping moment he thought she was rejecting the caress.

“Look!” she cried. “Look at that star!”

He glanced up to see a star so bright that it stood out from the others like a beacon.

“Why didn’t I see that before?” he muttered, half to himself.

“Because it’s for both of us, because we’re meant to see it together!”

He stared at it.

It stared back at him, shining white-bright, not twinkling, not moving at all up there in the far, far away night blue sky.

Cotannah sat straight up, shivering in the sudden chill, and lifted her hand as if to try to touch it.

“That is our star, Walks-With-Spirits; it’s here for us.”

She whirled around to challenge him, her hair sweetly tousled, the quilt hanging half-off one beautifully curved, milky shoulder. She clutched it desperately against her chest like a talisman.