Angel In The Rain (Western Historical Romance) (15 page)

“What shoulder?”

As though she weighed nothing, he carried her to the bed and lowered her to the lumpy mattress. An instant of panic shadowed her bliss when he loomed over her.

How could this be wrong when it felt so right?

With trembling hands, she helped him strip away her clammy skirt and coarse drawers. Near darkness emboldened her, softened the sight of her naked body lying next to him.

His lips trailed over her cheek and settled, hot and tingly, against the side of her throat. She strained against him as her body quickened into an aching bundle of need.

He moved lower, dragging his tongue into the valley between her breasts with slow torture. Her nipples hardened, begging for him. When he finally scaled one pale peak and settled the moist, scalding heat of his mouth over her, she gasped and nearly came off the bed. She hadn’t known. Nothing had prepared her. She moaned and tangled her fingers into the damp, silken hair at the back of his head, holding him. When he applied suction and drew her deep into his mouth, an echo of sensation throbbed between her thighs. Raw pleasure rippled through her belly and lapped downward.

His heart pounded against the side of her ribs. Harsh breaths competed with the sounds of the rain pelting the shuttered window and door. After a lingering kiss on her swollen nipple, he moved to her other breast and bent his leg so that his buckskin-clad thigh came between hers.

The same hand she knew capable of absolute violence settled atop her stomach with utter gentleness, inflicting warmth and curious little thrills that burrowed deep into her core. He stroked downward, moving against the inside of her thigh, brushing against the moist heat centered between her legs with just enough insistence to send her following his movement with her body.

She arched her back and curled her fingers trapped in his hair, digging into his scalp. Instinctively, her legs tightened around his hard-muscled thigh.

He lifted his head. Breath heaved between his parted lips. Heavy-lidded with passion, his dark eyes seemed to glitter in the semi-darkness. “
Mí Dios, mí ángela.
I want to be inside you.”

To be inside you... The words, their intent, sank in on Angel. She swallowed thickly, but offered no objection. She couldn’t. She wanted him, too.

Bracing himself on one forearm, he moved the hand that had been stroking her, unfastened his trouser buttons, and shoved the buckskins down his long legs with jerky movements. When he pressed against her once more, his erection came to rest atop her leg with scorching heat and a weighty presence she found surprising. Even this felt right. Oh, so right.

With a low groan rumbling in his chest, he levered himself onto his knees and hovered over her, his heat centered between her legs. She felt the leashed tension vibrating through his rigidly held muscles, humming almost, as a too-tightly strung run of barbed wire.

Rane couldn’t hold back any longer. A shiver trickled down his spine, and pushed him ever closer to losing the miniscule control he had left. He squeezed his eyes closed and pulled in a long breath, fighting for it. No woman had ever had this devastating effect on him. Until Angel.

Why resist any longer? She was as wet and swollen as he was.

Grasping her hips, he arched and drove into her in one, long shattering stroke. Her body’s tightness squeezed him almost painfully. He registered the slickness bursting around him, heard her small cry, felt her nails scoring the flesh on his upper arms where she held him in a death grip.

His mind stumbled over the implications. He froze, as an improbable thought took precedence over his body’s demands.

Against the dark blankets, she looked pale, her face drawn with the pain she tried valiantly to hide.

“Angel? Is this...the first time?”

She nodded, and that simple motion sent an icy chill spearing through his heart. He started to pull back.

“No!” In a move he could only attribute to instinct, she wrapped both legs around his waist and held him. “I want you to do this.”

Just that quickly, her action halted his body’s retreat. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

She offered a brave smile. “I knew what to expect.”

The damage had been done, common sense argued, and no power under the sun could restore her virtue. He didn’t want to disappoint her, any more than he wanted to deny himself the satisfaction of finishing what they’d started. Silently, he cursed himself for a weak fool.

Still firmly embedded inside her, he braced on his hands and locked his elbows to hold his weight off her. God above, she was a vision. Just looking at her, her tight little body gripping him, he felt himself growing even harder. Her eyes widened.

“Angel, I don’t want to hurt you. I want to give you pleasure.”

Laying her hands around his wrists, she stroked upward to his shoulders and smiled. “I trust you’re capable of doing just that.”

If she meant to simper at him seductively, her expression reminded him more of a shy miss flirting with her first beau.

“It would be better if you relax,” he suggested.

“I thought I was relaxed.”

“Trust me, you’re not relaxed. Try squeezing me.”

Her brows pulled together. “How?”

He pried his right hand from the bed and splayed his fingers across her lower abdomen. “Here. Try it.”

She caught on quickly. He sucked in his breath as her strong little muscles closed around him even tighter. “Now, relax and try it again.”

After the second time, he started to move within her when she relaxed her inner muscles. They played at this give and take until he thought he would explode. But he felt her opening to him, accepting, stroking him back. Making love to him with her body.

Rane’s heart stampeded. A primal pulse slogged heavily in the place where his body joined to hers. He couldn’t hold back much longer. Reaching between them, he found her secreted bud and worked a little magic with a moistened fingertip.

She sucked in an audible breath and arched up beneath him, convulsing around him in the throes of release. He let go then and tumbled with her. Spiraling into that white, blinding flash of intense pleasure, he drove deep one final time and held there, adrift in a sea of pure sensation. And somewhere, in the midst of it, he heard her cry out his name. The sound echoed through the long-sealed chamber of emptiness he kept buried deep in his heart.

Rane lifted his head, still panting for breath, his heart tripping in double-time. Beneath him, Angel’s pale body glistened with a fine sheen of moisture. He thought he saw tears seeping from the corners of her eyes, but a dreamy smile of contentment curved her lips. She looked like a sleek kitten that had just lapped up an entire bowl of thick cream.

His arms trembled from the prolonged strain of holding his weight above her. She had sapped him, drained him of his seed and his strength as no one ever had.

He levered himself over and collapsed in a loose-limbed sprawl beside her. When he lifted his arm and laid the back of a wrist across his eyes, she turned to him and slipped her arm around his waist.

“Rane?” Her voice sounded uncertain.

In answer, he curled his arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer, stroking the tangled strands of hair from her face. He kissed her forehead, her cheek, and tasted the salty bite of her tears on his tongue.

“Don’t cry, Angel. It’s too late for tears.”

“I’m not crying.”

“Then go to sleep.” The words came out sounding harsher than he intended. She snuggled down against him, one long, slender leg draped over his, her arm curved across his stomach. He felt the hard pounding of her heart against his ribs, felt it slowly lessen until her soft breath settled into a slow, even rhythm.

He ventured a glance at her upturned face and saw that her eyes were closed. The innocence of her sleeping, angelic features speared him with guilt.

A virgin! In innocence, she had come to him, and he had taken what she offered with greedy hands.

He muttered a vile curse and damned to hell all the wagging tongues that had spread lies about her. But most of all, he damned himself for listening, for not trusting what he had felt in his own gut all along. It had been so much easier to believe the lies and think of her as a wanton.

He should have known. In fact, he
had
known, but lust had blinded him.

It was too late for regrets. All he could do now was try to keep his wits about him and stay alive until he finished the job he’d set out to do. But the guilt still nagged at him. He had dared a taste of the forbidden fruit. He couldn’t help wondering, somewhere down the road, what price they would both be forced to pay for their one stolen hour of intense sweetness.

Chapter Ten

The shutters on the solitary window stood open and soft, white daylight filled the room. Angel stretched with lazy contentment and ran her hand beneath the rumpled blankets. The space beside her was empty. No Rane. Not even a trace of his warmth remained.

She turned to her side. The movement touched off a dull ache in uncustomary parts of her body. Bunching the cover in her hand, she held it tight against her chest, thinking, remembering. A murmur of sensation bloomed low in her belly when she recalled the intense, soaring pleasure Rane had given her in the darkest hours of the night. Feminine instinct told her, somehow, she had given that same gift back to him. The ultimate mystery revealed. If the worst should happen today, she would have no regrets.

The smell of coffee coaxed her fully awake. She draped the cover around her bare shoulders and sat on the side of the bed. Rane was nowhere in sight.

Streaks of dried blood smeared the insides of her thighs. She stared at it and traced a fingertip over the tender skin. The smudges were all that remained of lost innocence, once preciously guarded, a treasure she had discarded all too easily when it suited her.

Fallen. Soiled goods. The denigrating words reared up like phantom vipers and hissed at her. She shook her head.
No.
She wouldn’t listen. She didn’t feel the least bit soiled. If anything, she felt reborn. She had given herself to the only man she’d ever wanted... the man she loved.

Angel’s hand flew to her mouth.
Dear God in heaven!

At some point during the past several days, her vision of her future had changed. She no longer saw herself standing in some grand ballroom surrounded by a throng of admiring beaux, the sons of cattle barons. She no longer saw her father standing on the sidelines, beaming with pride. Now, her thoughts of going home all included Rane somewhere in the picture.

How could that be? She’d fallen in love with a man who not only had a disreputable past, he also, almost certainly, had no future. Even if her father didn’t shoot him on sight, he’d never accept Rane. He’d disown her before that happened. She’d spent two long, grueling years in New York, learning to behave like a proper lady, only to return to Texas and commit the one act the gossips had always accused her of—being a wanton woman.

Her father would be furious. Devastated. How could she face him? How could she not? If it came to a choice, her father’s respect or Rane, which would she choose?

She shook her head. Getting ahead of herself only borrowed grief. Somehow, during the past eight days, she’d lost her heart to Rane Mantorres. That didn’t mean he felt the same. To a man such as he, she was probably nothing more than another conquest. A conquest easily won, she realized. She’d practically thrown herself at him.

Her breath hitched as the pressure around her heart increased to a poignant ache. Sitting there on the side of the bed, trying to second-guess him would get her nowhere. There was only one way to find out.

Fortified with strong coffee and dressed in the scant peasant clothes—which Rane had evidently hung to dry on the rope stretched across the room—Angel walked out of the adobe nearly an hour later. With her hair swept up and pinned into a neat coil around the crown of her head, she hoped she more closely resembled the civilized woman who had boarded the train in New York nearly three weeks ago.

Outside, the night’s storm had lain to rest the dust and sand. Sunlight streamed through the trees, shifting dappled patches of light and darkness over the ground. The air smelled fresh and sweet. Her little paint mare and Pago, the name she now knew Rane called his big stallion, stood in the corrals, chewing contentedly on rations of grain. The stallion’s owner was nowhere in sight.

Footprints showed up plainly in the freshly washed sand. They milled at the corrals, then led toward the creek. Angel followed. With each step, her nerves thrummed. The thought of facing Rane in the bare light of day after the intimacy they’d shared made her want to turn tail and run. But she had to know where she stood.

The narrow stream ran swollen and muddy with floodwater. Following the tracks, Angel paralleled the rushing water southward. Limber willows bordered the banks, dripping moisture from their trailing branches. The tracks led her to another stand of cottonwoods.

In the midst of the trees, a weathered slab of stone marked a solitary grave. Rane stood beside the narrow mound with his hat in his hands, his dark head bowed, solemn and respectful.

Angel halted. Her first impulse urged her to turn around and go back. She felt like an intruder. Yet, curiosity rooted her to the spot. She leaned against a tree trunk, dug her nails into the rough bark, and focused on the name carved into the headstone.