The Man from Forever (14 page)

He looked no different from the last time she'd seen him, and yet it felt as if she were absorbing him for the first time.
She'd never known a man who took his body so much for granted. None had ever accepted near nakedness as if it were as natural as breathing. Loka did. And the way he was looking at her—not like a warrior studying his enemy but like a man watching his lover approach—did she dare believe?

“I sensed—somehow I knew you were here,” she managed.

“I have been watching you. You do not look where your feet take you.”

How can I? You're all that matters.
Feeling as if she might splinter at any moment, she waited while he stepped out of the tree's shade and easily, effortlessly, covered the space separating them. His eyes were so intent on her that she wondered if he was trying to strip her naked. She didn't mind. Nothing mattered except that they were together again. For this moment. Finally she found her voice. “You were there earlier today, weren't you? In Fern Cave.”

He nodded, the gesture allowing his ebony hair to slide forward. He pushed it out of his eyes with a practiced gesture. If they were ordinary people, she would ask him if he wanted her to cut his hair, and when he said yes—she needed him to say yes so she could touch him—she would draw out the act until taking lock after lock of hair between her fingers became part of the act of lovemaking. “How did you get in there?” she thought to ask. “There's only the one entrance, the one Fenton and I used.”

“You do not understand.” He'd stopped just out of her reach. She wondered if that was because he didn't trust her, or didn't trust himself around her. “No one but a Maklaks can.”

“No.” She felt as if she were starving, sustenance just out of reach. “I can't believe that. You took me up Spirit Mountain. I saw Eagle. Impossible as it is, I believe in Eagle, and in Wolf. I want to know everything, Loka. Everything about you and your world.”

For the briefest fraction of time, she knew he wanted to give her what she'd just asked for. But then, all too soon, the
window between them closed, and he was again a warrior testing his world for safety.

“I heard,” he said. “I listened and I heard. The man you were with seeks to dishonor a holy place.”

“I—yes.”

“I will kill him.”

“No! Loka, you can't!”

“What would you have me do? Allow him to bring uncounted numbers of the enemy to where my people spoke with the ancients?”

“Spoke with the ancients? I, ah…”

His eyes narrowed. Much as she hated it, she understood he was questioning the wisdom of saying anything more to her. She didn't blame him. Given what had happened to him and his people, would he trust anyone, even her? “Loka,” she said softly. Tears crowded her throat. “Fern Cave was a sacred place for the Modocs, wasn't it?” She took a deep breath, not because she needed to, but to give herself time to consider what she might say next. In the end, only the truth mattered. “Sacred because that's where the spirits of your ancestors dwelled. At least where everyone believed they'd once been.”

He didn't move so much as a single muscle, and yet she felt his intensity. Whether he believed she had no right being privy to what had been his secret she couldn't say, but then it didn't matter because she'd spoken with every ounce of honesty in her. “Loka, I felt something that first day out at Captain Jack's Stronghold. I told myself I was simply reacting to standing where the Modocs once had, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe—oh, I don't know what I'm saying.”

He shrugged, the gesture slow and studied. If he'd thrown a thousand words at her, the impact couldn't have been greater. Heedless of any danger, she stepped closer and touched the back of his hand. He looked down at what she'd done, still motionless, still as much a part of his surroundings as any wild animal. She would never say there was a vul
nerability to him, but something—maybe it was the loneliness he'd endured since awakening—was etched on every line of his body. He had his memory of his son, Eagle and Wolf, the essence of his people still living in the air around him, but she was the first human being who'd touched him in six months—no, in over a hundred years.

Thinking of nothing except putting an end to that, she slipped closer. She could plainly see his chest rising and falling and focused on that. The wilderness-scented air seeped into her lungs, into her pores and memory even. She saw nothing except brush and trees and rock, heard only the beating of her own heart and the faint call of some unseen bird. All hesitation fled, leaving her with nothing except longing.

He continued to watch her, his beautiful eyes seeing things in her she knew no other human being ever had.
I've been alone, too,
she said with her heart.
I know what you're feeling. Not everything, but enough. Please believe me. Enough.

His powerful fingers closed over her wrist, laid a molten trail up her arm, heated her shoulder, covered the back of her neck. He drew her close, closer, gentle despite his strength. Her heart now pounded; she could barely remember how to breathe. Silence still coated the air between him, and yet, because his eyes no longer kept anything from her, she knew. He wanted her. Nothing else mattered. He wanted her.

Could she give herself to a warrior, to a man who had killed?

Could she not surrender to the only human being in her world?

Don't think,
she warned herself.
Just take, and give.

T
he sun loved his hair. Although it was black as the darkest night, today, red highlights ran through it. His jaw, squared and hardened by nature and what he'd endured, called to her. Keeping to her vow to let no outside thought filter in, she stood on tiptoe and touched his jaw lightly with her lips. When he ran his fingers up the hair at the back of her head, she followed her first kiss with another.

Her body seemed to be losing form. It flowed warm and liquid around her, and she drank hungrily from what she found of his essence. Growing bolder, she rested her hands on his shoulders, feeling the hint of velvet on his flesh.

She tried to remain calm, struggled to stay in control of her emotions, but the feeling that she might never return to what she'd once been continued to grow. Afraid of and yet craving him, she ran her lips over his throat, his cheeks, the tip of his nose. He flattened his free hand against the small of her back, guided her to him.

Her belly was now pressed against him, increasing her awareness of him, her knowledge that they'd stepped over a
line from which they could never retreat. Her face felt flushed; surely he knew what was happening to her. But maybe, maybe his own body and emotions overwhelmed him. If they did… Breathing. Feeling. Need. Nothing except that.

When it was the last thing she wanted, he gripped her waist and drew her away from him. She continued to cling to his shoulders, her mouth slack, breathing quick and honest.

“You want this?” he whispered. “I must know. You want this?”

No! If I give myself to you, I'll never be the same.
“I don't know how to answer.” She should look around and assure herself that they were alone and he safe, but she couldn't take her eyes off him, might never have enough of looking at him. “I don't…” She'd been about to tell him she wasn't the kind of woman who jumped into bed with a man she'd just met, but in his world maybe something like that didn't matter. She tried to remember what male/female Modoc relationships had been like, but the sun still colored his hair with life and his eyes were dark and his lips waited for her.

“I have watched,” he said. “Watched men and women who think they are alone. Something happens between them which I know little about.”

“You've seen them making love?”

He nodded with no hint of embarrassment, with nothing except loneliness in his eyes. He'd been alone, had wanted it that way. But he'd still needed to know what it could be like for others. Not sure how much longer she could put off experiencing him—all of him—she pressed her hand against his chest. She should be able to say something, anything, shouldn't she?

“Making love,” he said. “I do not understand what that means.”

“You don't?”

“They were filling their need. Copulating. What is this making love?”

How could she ever explain romance to a man who
thought of sex as simply that and no more? “When people care for each other,” she began, “when they want to be with each other and no one else, when they're ready to take certain emotional risks….” The words died inside her, unmourned because maybe they weren't needed at all.

Leaning forward, she kissed first one hard breast and then the other. She sensed him sucking in his belly, had no doubt that he was physically ready for her. In that private and uncivilized part of her that she'd always kept at bay, the wanton woman she could be struggled for freedom. Lovemaking didn't matter. She would take sex, raw and wonderful.

But if that happened between them, he would never really know her and she would never know the man she believed he could be. Reining in what she could of her need, she gripped his hands, which were now cupped over her buttocks, and placed them firmly by his side.

“I don't know what it was like between you and your wife, Loka, but I'm not that woman. I need—I need…” She swallowed, but that did nothing to help recapture her failing self-confidence. “I don't know if I'm going to say this right. All I can do is try. I want you—never think otherwise.” He started to reach for her again, but she stopped him, firmly placing his arms back by his side. He was so damnable powerful, so male. Not thinking about that was impossible. Not responding took every bit of self-control she had in her.

“When you got married, it was because your parents had arranged it, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Your wife—the first time you slept with her, what was it like?”

“She had been married before—her first husband died. She knew what was expected of her.”

Expected.
“Did you want to sleep with her?”

“Want? I had needs. It was her role to satisfy them.”

Role.
“I understand. But beyond that?”

“Beyond?”

Why had she started this? It would have been easier to
simply surrender to the needs he'd spoken about. But, she believed, he'd watched lovers not because he was a voyeur, but because he realized they were experiencing something he desperately needed. “Did you love her?”

He lifted his hand as if to push away her question. “No.”

“But you lived together. You had a child together. Surely you cared—”

“It was not right for either of us to live alone. The tribe was strengthened by our marriage.”

“I understand,” she said, wondering if she ever truly could. The hot hunger she'd experienced at his touch had cooled a little, but if she didn't guard herself against him, it might take no more than a single word. The slightest touch.

“Loka, it's no longer like that. These days, when people marry, when they live together, it's because they want to, not because their families or chiefs have told them they must.”

“Want to?”

“Because—” She swallowed in an attempt to free her dry throat. “Because they're in love, or think they are. There's physical need—that hasn't changed. But it's the emotional component that…” Damn it, she sounded like a psychiatrist when a studied and stilted explanation meant nothing to him. “When you were with your wife, did you feel as if you wanted to spend the rest of your life with her?”

He tried to keep his features immobile. Hurting for him, she concentrated on the effort and understood a great deal about him, knowledge that found a home deep within her heart. “We did not want the same things out of life,” he said. “Our hearts did not sing the same songs.”

This was a primitive man, a man ruled by nothing more than the need to stay alive? Looking into his eyes, she joyously answered her question. Yes, concerns and hardships she couldn't imagine had consumed his days, but he'd stared into night skies and listened to the wind and felt the same stirring in his soul that she did.

His heart needed the same things hers did.

“Did—did you ever look for someone who thought and felt like you?”

“Once.”

“Once?”

“Before I was married, before we were forced onto the reservation with the Klamaths. It was a long time ago.”

“I want to hear about it.”

He blinked, sighed. “We laughed together, shared our bodies, watched a mother rabbit with her young and spoke of children. But she was promised to another, and I did what I had to and forgot her.”

Except he hadn't. She didn't resent the woman from his past. Instead, she sent up a prayer of thankfulness that he'd experienced the most precious of emotions—love. “That—that's what it's like, what everyone looks for these days. People marry for love. They sleep together because they love each other.” It wasn't always like that. He must know that as well as she did, but standing in front of him with his life force flowing around her, nothing except him and her and the two of them mattered.

“I want you.”

His hard words shocked her. It wasn't until she forced herself to study him that she understood. He didn't know what to do with what she'd told him, didn't know how to handle his reaction to both her and the dawning understanding that there could be something precious between a man and a woman. As a consequence, he was reverting back to what his people had expected him to be—a stoic and fearless warrior. Proud and defiant, he was using words to protect himself from her.

“Take me, then.”

That made him blink. But instead of saying anything, doing anything, he simply stood, arms tense at his sides, hands fisted. He seemed to have pulled into himself. She guessed he was weighing, not what he could do with her offer, but what might happen between them if nothing except physical need drove him.

“I won't fight you, Loka. It won't be love, but it won't be rape, either. Do you know what I'm saying?”

“Many of our women were raped by soldiers.”

“I know.” It was as if she could hear the women's cries and feel their men's helpless anger. “That still happens,” she was forced to tell him. “But it's not part of lovemaking.”
Not part of what I need from you.

“I will not be like the soldiers.”

She'd been fighting instinct too long. She had to touch him, to feel his warmth against hers. He shuddered slightly when her fingers brushed his waist. For an instant she saw the depths of this man who had slept alone too long.

I want you to feel alive again, whole. To be the woman you turn to at night. Forever.

Of course it was insane. Forever wasn't for them, not with worlds and generations separating them. But they had today. She would cling to today.

“You weaken me,” he whispered when he held her in his arms. “I think of you and I forget everything else.”

“You're all that matters to me,” she said from the shelter, the mountain of his chest. She heard him suck in a long and unsteady breath, but it gave her no feeling of control over him. What was it he'd said? That she weakened him? Did he have any idea how helpless, how molten she felt at this moment? She needed to tell him she was nothing without him, but if she did, she would have to think about tomorrow, and she couldn't.

She wouldn't.

His hands that had fought her great-great-grandfather's army slid over her arms and back, her neck and hips, less insistent this time, more as if she were a precious jewel that had somehow come into his possession.

She felt safe with this man, and yet her heart continued to beat out of time. Her body belonged, not to her, but to him, to what he was doing to her. To the world he was taking her into. Because he already wore next to nothing, nothing stood in the way of her exploration of him, and yet she held back.
She had kissed his lips and chin, wrapped her arms around his neck and held on to his powerful arm, but if she gave in to the need to trail her fingers over his hips, to stroke his thighs, to hold his weight in the palm of her hand, she might lose herself.

She was already lost, she admitted with something that might have been laughter but was probably a silent sob. Loka, who knew nothing of the nuances of lovemaking, obviously thought nothing of claiming her breasts, her belly, of drawing her leg up and around him. If he'd been anyone except who he was, she would have warned him he was going too fast, taking too many liberties. But she'd entered his world and what he wanted was right. Anything he wanted.

He managed to unbutton her jeans but knew nothing about how a zipper worked. After kicking out of her shoes, she showed him, not just because she didn't want to see him frustrated, but because she needed to be wearing no more than he did. When he pulled her jeans down over her hips, she clung to him, moving with his hands until she stepped out of the garment. He slid his hands under her blouse and began to push it upward but stopped when his fingers grazed her belly. Leaning back, he narrowed his gaze on her under-pants. She told him what they were but could only imagine what he was thinking.

“They are useless.”

“Useless?”

“Do they keep you warm in winter? Do they protect you from injury?”

“No.” She smiled, shivered, when he slid his hand under the waistband and tested it. “But it's no longer that kind of a world, Loka. Protection and warmth—most people take that for granted.”

“They do not fell trees and split logs for heat?”

“No,” she said, trying to imagine what it had been like for him and his people as they huddled in unheated caves. Shadows settled in his eyes and told her he was thinking the same thing. “Don't live in the past,” she begged. “Please.
If I could change it for you, I would, but it's behind us now. There's only today. And the future.”

“The future?” His hold on her increased, became an unspoken demand. “Tell me about my future, Tory.”

She wouldn't, couldn't do that, not just because she feared what tomorrow might bring for him, but because her body was interested only in today. This moment. Him. Telling him that, not with words but with gestures, she covered his bronze breasts with her paler hands.

He looked down at her, sunlight slowly returning to his eyes. She'd never thought of herself as a particularly feminine woman. True, her body had been designed with a gentle hand, but she'd always been more interested in her brain than the physical package. Today she felt new and alive, prayed that her body would please this man, trembled at the thought of what their coming together would be like.

“You are so small,” he whispered. The top button of her blouse came free under his fingers. “Like a bird.”

“You make me think of a cougar.” She wanted to go on touching him, giving him pleasure, but soon she would be naked. She couldn't think beyond that.

Another button. “A bird and a cougar? No, we are not that.”

“It—it's a lovely thought.” Button number three.

“Lovely? I do not know the meaning of the word.”

“Then I'll teach you,” she told him before her throat closed. The final button had been released. She sagged forward slightly as if protecting herself from his gaze, from his fingers. But when he touched the base of her throat and trailed his fingers downward, she straightened. Gave him permission to do what he wanted with her.