Elizabeth Lowell (31 page)

She was alone.

“Ty?” she called softly.

No one answered.

“Ty?” This time her call was louder. “There’s room here for both of us. You don’t have to wait to get warm.”

Words that she couldn’t distinguish came from the direction of camp. She listened intently but no other sounds came. She started to get out of the pool, only to begin shivering immediately. Experience told her if she stayed in the pool for a long enough time her body would absorb so much heat that the walk back to the campfire wouldn’t chill her, even in the middle of winter.

She took off her remaining clothes, slid back into the pool and let the hot water claim her body once more. Eyes closed, half-floating in the gently flowing water, she wondered why he hadn’t gotten into the pool with her. Surely he had to be as cold as she was, for he hadn’t even had the protection of the makeshift poncho against the rain and wind.

Gradually she realized that she was no longer alone. She opened her eyes and saw him sitting cross-legged at the edge of the pool, fully clothed, smiling as he watched her. She didn’t know that her answering, half-shy smile was another knife of regret turning within him. She only knew that for an instant he looked so sad that tears burned behind her eyes.

“Ty?”

“I’m here, little one.”

Janna didn’t hesitate or withdraw when Ty bent over the pool. She turned her face toward him, expecting to be pulled into his arms for a kiss that was as steamy and deep as the hot spring itself.

“Close your eyes and hold your breath,” he said huskily.

She blinked in surprise, then did as he asked.

“Now go under the water.”

Saying nothing, she moved down the ledge until she slipped beneath the veils of mist and water. When she surfaced again he was waiting for her with a mound of soft, fragrant soap in his palm. The haunting scent of summer roses expanded through the steamy air.

“No wonder your backpack was so heavy I could hardly drag it,” she said. “You must have cleaned Preacher out.”

The white curve of Ty’s smile gleamed in the moonlight. “It had been a long time since I’d been in a store with a poke of gold to spend.”

Soon Ty’s strong fingers were working the soap through Janna’s hair until soft mounds of lather gathered and dropped to the water, only to float away downstream like tiny ghost ships in the moonlight. She closed her eyes and luxuriated in the unprecedented pleasure of having someone wash her hair.

“Ready to hold your breath again?”

She nodded even as she sank beneath the gently steaming water once more. When she emerged he was waiting with more fragrant soap. He lathered her hair again, working slowly, enjoying the feel and scent of the soap, savoring the pleased curve he had brought to her lips, a smile that was untinged by sadness. It was many minutes before his fingers reluctantly released her soft, rose-scented hair.

“Hold your breath.”

Smiling, Janna held her breath and slipped into the pool’s seamless embrace. When she came up again her hair was free of soap, yet the fragrance of roses lingered.

Ty inhaled deeply, letting the scent caress his senses. He dipped into the pot of soft soap once more before he began washing the rest of her as gently as though she were a child. The hard rise of her nipples beneath his palms told him that she was a woman, not a child, but he forced himself to continue bathing her without lingering over the breasts that were silently begging for his caresses.

His hands didn’t pause in their slippery travel from her ribs to her hips. He tried to bathe her sleek legs with the same, almost impersonal touch he had used on her shoulders. He succeeded until he came to the triangle of hair that was glittering midnight now but had been brushed by fire in the hushed twilight when he had first undressed her.

As his long fingers began washing the warm mound at the apex of her thighs, she trembled and made a broken sound.

“Hush, little one,” he murmured, ignoring the doubled beating of his own heart. “At least you won’t have to hold your breath to rinse off. I’ll be able to do it for you.”

Janna’s answering smile lasted only an instant before the intimacy of Ty’s touch called another small cry from her lips. He made the same kind of meaningless, reassuring, almost purring sound he had so often used on Lucifer.

“It’s all right,” he said softly. “I’m not going to take you again. I’m just bathing you. Do you mind that so very much?”

“It’s…no one has ever…”

Her words fragmented into an involuntary sound of pleasure as his fingers moved between her legs, washing and setting fire to her in the same sliding motions.

Despite his fierce desire, Ty’s smile was gentle. “I’m glad. I’ve never bathed a woman before.” He started to add that he had never wanted to, but she cried out and he remembered the past night, her innocence ripped away, and his repeated, urgent penetrations of her untouched body. “Are you sore, darling? Am I hurting you now?”

She tried to speak, couldn’t, and shook her head instead, sending wavelets lapping against the sandy rim of the pool.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded, making more tiny waves.

“Cat got your tongue?”

The lazy, sensual humor in Ty’s voice made Janna smile just before she stuck out her tongue. As she had hoped, he pulled her halfway from the pool even as he bent to kiss her. And the kiss was what she had longed for, a sharing as hot and deep as the pool itself.

“I’m getting you wet,” she said when he finally released her, letting her slide back into the heated water.

“The rain already took care of that. Open your legs, satin butterfly. I don’t want to leave any soap on that soft, soft skin.”

The swirling motions of the water as Ty rinsed Janna made heat shimmer up through her body. She smelled the haunting fragrance of roses again when he scooped a bit more soap onto his palm.

“Wash your hair once for cleanliness, twice for beauty. Isn’t that what mothers tell their daughters?” he asked.

“Is that what mothers tell daughters?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” she whispered, shivering in anticipation.

Again his hand slid and pleasured, skimming over her, sensitizing her until her breath was a husky sigh. When he pressed apart her thighs, she gave herself willingly, shivering with each hot swirl of water rinsing her, crying out helplessly when his finger began to ease into her warmth. Instantly he stopped.

“Was that a cry of pain?” he asked huskily.

“No.”

The word became a moan as he stole tenderly into her. The satin flutter of her response tore a barely throttled groan from him. He didn’t know how he had borne being without her all the long hours of the day—or how he would be able to bear not having her again day and night without end.

“Satin butterfly,” he whispered, withdrawing from her, his hand trembling.

He lifted her from the water and laid her in the center of the blanket he had brought back to the pool. Steam rose from her body even as it did from the water itself, veiling her in silver mist. He folded over the sides of the blanket until she was covered snugly. With long, leisurely sweeps of his hands over cloth, he dried her. When she would have helped, he captured her hands, kissed them and tucked them along her sides beneath the blanket once more.

“Let me,” he said huskily, peeling back the edges of the blanket until her nipples were just barely uncovered.

“Yes,” Janna whispered, feeling herself tighten as she remembered the pleasure of Ty’s mouth loving her.

But it was his hands that came to her breasts, caressed them, plucked at their rosy tips until her back arched in response to the currents of pleasure pouring through her. She closed her eyes and gave herself to the shimmering sensations her lover’s hands called from her body. Her teeth sank into her lower lip, biting back the cries that came when his mouth caught one nipple and suckled until a bubble of pleasure burst within her. When his hands skimmed down her body and pressed between her legs, she shifted, allowing him the freedom of her body.

Her reward was a love bite that made pleasure expand through her until she could hold no more and sultry heat overflowed, merging her scent with that of roses. He groaned beneath the redoubled violence of his own arousal. He would have given his soul to take her while she melted around him, but he knew it wasn’t his soul that would be forfeited.

It would be hers.

She trembled as he kissed and licked and nuzzled the length of her torso, smoothing her legs apart as he had in the pool. This time there were no hot swirls of water to caress her, only the heat and textures of her lover teasing the humid softness that his fingertips had first discovered.

The first gliding touch of his tongue brought a startled cry from her. It was answered by a reassuring murmur and a kiss both tender and hotly intimate. She tried to say his name, but all that came out was a whimper of shock and pleasure. She started to sit up, only to be impaled by a shaft of ecstasy when her lover captured and teased the violently sensitive nub that had been hidden between soft folds of skin. A sound came from deep in her throat, protest and extraordinary pleasure combined.

His hands flexed, holding her captive and sensuously kneading her thighs at the same time.

“Don’t pull away,” he said in a low voice. “I won’t hurt you. I just want to...love you.” Slowly he turned his head from side to side, caressing her with his breath, his stubble-roughened cheeks, his mouth. “You’re so sweet, so soft, so warm. I’ll be gentle with you. Let me...”

She didn’t answer, for the hunger and passionate intimacy of his caresses had taken from her the ability to think, to form words, to speak. Her breathing disintegrated into ragged gasps as she felt her body begin a slow, sensual unraveling that had no end, no beginning, just a timeless, ravishing moment in which pleasure burst and grew and burst again, incandescent sensations rippling through her body until she moaned and moved helplessly, totally captive to the man and the ultimate instant of pleasure.

And still the moment and the unraveling and the sweet ravishment continued.

His name burst from her lips in a cry of protest and pleasure, for she hadn’t known that ecstasy was the mythic phoenix, rising newborn from the steamy ashes of sensual completion. She rose with the phoenix, spiraling higher and higher until she screamed at the violent currents of pleasure searing through her, burning through flesh and her mind, leaving her soul as naked as her body.

And then he touched her so perfectly, so gently, so hotly that she wept his name and died.

For a long time Ty held Janna’s trembling body against his own, ignoring the violent demands of his own hunger, stroking her slowly until she could take a breath that didn’t fragment with the aftershocks of ecstasy. When she stirred and sighed and began sliding from ecstasy into sleep, he tilted her face up and brushed her lips with his own.

“You’re not a whore, Janna Wayland.”

Lucifer cantered across the valley toward Ty and Janna. His ears were pricked alertly, his tail was held up like a black banner and his stride was both muscular and effortless. It was only in the chill of morning that he walked stiffly, revealing the injury that was almost, but not quite, healed.

“Hard to believe he’s the same horse that stumbled into this valley three weeks ago,” Janna said.

“More like a month,” Ty corrected.

She said nothing, although she knew that it had been precisely twenty-four days since he had carried her to the steamy pool and then had brought such intense, exquisite pleasure to her. Twenty-four days, each one longer than the one before, because he hadn’t touched her since then.

Not once.

Not even in the most casual way. It was as though she stood behind an invisible wall too thick and too high for him to reach across.

Lucifer came to a stop a few feet away from them, tossed his elegant black head, and nickered a soft welcome as he stretched his neck toward Ty’s hands. Janna smiled to see the big stallion’s trust. Although he often looked to her to be petted, it was to Ty the stallion came first.

An unusual, deep bond had been forged between man and horse on the painful trip from the plateau to the keyhole valley. The bond had been reinforced in the weeks that followed, weeks when Janna had deliberately stayed away from Lucifer much of the time, wanting it to be Ty whose touch and voice and medicines both healed and tamed the stallion.

With a hunger she couldn’t conceal, she watched Ty’s long-fingered hands smooth over Lucifer’s black coat. She didn’t realize how much her stare revealed until she sensed Ty’s attention and looked up to find him watching her in the same way that she had watched him. Hastily she looked away, not knowing what else to do, unable to slow the sudden hammering of her heart.

Each time she had begun to think he didn’t want her anymore, she would turn around suddenly and see him watching her with hunger blazing in his green eyes. Yet he never moved toward her, always away.

He would not touch her.

You
’
re not a whore, Janna Wayland.

The words Ty had spoken that first night in the valley echoed in Janna’s soul every hour of every day. She believed him but, it was the way he had made love to her that had instilled that belief. Without his healing touch, the words would have been but a thin balm over a deep wound.

When a week had gone by and he had made no move to touch her in any way, she had tried to tell him that she understood why he couldn’t love her, that she had accepted not being his dream, that it was all right if he touched her, that she wanted to be his lover. But he had turned away and walked out into the meadow, leaving her alone, ignoring the words she called after him in her futile attempt to make him understand that she wanted him without vows or pledges or guarantees of anything beyond a sharing of selves within the hushed stone boundaries of the secret valley.

He still would not touch her.

She would have tried to seduce him, but she didn’t know how. She had no silks to wear, no grand home for parties, no room to enter gracefully knowing that he waited within to see her. She knew nothing about such civilized rituals of seduction. She only knew that she awoke in the middle of the night with her hands clenched into fists and her body on fire and her heart beating so harshly that her head felt as though it would split with the pain and force of her rushing blood.