Wind Shadow (8 page)

Pleasant!
What could be more pleasant than the soothing massage from those able hands? But “pleasant” and “relaxing” were two different things in this case. “I’ll try.”

His thumbs were slowly circling either side of her spine, and she found herself unconsciously circling her lips with her tongue, matching his deliberate movements. Closing her eyes and moving her hands from her chin, she turned her
face to her side. Laying her cheek on the cool blanket, she let out a sigh of contentment as the fatigue and stiffness drained away. After a minute—or possibly ten minutes, her fogged mind couldn’t be sure—she heard Wade whisper her name, almost as though he were afraid of waking her. “Silky?”

She blinked heavy lids, but didn’t quite get her eyes opened. “Hmmmmm?”

“Didn’t Rex ever massage your back?” As he spoke, he slid his hands, palms spread, toward her shoulders. It felt so good that she breathed an audible sigh. What had he asked? Her eyes fluttered sleepily as she queried with a throaty, “Hummm?”

“Nothing.” His fingers were kneading, pressing with firm but gentle authority. As his hands moved apart, his fingers, still working their warm miracles over her, dipped down her sides, lightly grazing the swell of her breasts. There, they lingered, tracing lightly along her sweetly feminine contours. His hands stilled, and as they did, she thought she heard him breathe her name. Or was it a velvety soft curse? Before she had time to consider which it had been she was brought fully awake when he jerked his hands away from her back, pulling the T-shirt down smartly over her tingling skin. She lost the warmth of his thighs against her hips as he rolled off of her and sat up, wrapping his arms stiffly about his knees, which were drawn up almost protectively to his chest. “Okay, Silky,”
he croaked, “that’s it for me. A man can only take so much.”

She pulled up on one elbow, staring apprehensively over at him, hunched there as though he were ill. “What?” she asked, sitting beside him. They were both facing the fire now, and she could see that his face was set in a troubled frown. “Are you sick, Wade?”

He closed his eyes, his expression remaining pained as he exhaled a long breath. When he finally looked at her again, his lips twisted in a humorless grin. “I had an attack just then, but I’ll survive. Give me a minute.”

“Attack?” She pulled her legs up under her and sat back on her heels. “Your leg?”

He snorted, shifting his ebony eyes toward the fire, giving them the red glow of burning coal. “No,” he muttered, “plain old, physically debilitating lust.” Inclining his head, he looked down at her and watched the gradual blossom of shock that widened her eyes and parted her lips. His smirk was charmingly wry. “I knew you’d be pleased.”

With a few seconds to take the edge off of her astonishment, she felt herself relax a little. Squinting dubiously, she diagnosed. “You’ve just been on the road too long.”

His smile softened slightly. “The
road
has nothing to do with it.”

Strangely, she felt no threat from his unabashed honesty. Her lips twitched impudently, as she challenged, “So, an attack of lust does
that
to you?” She indicated his almost fetal position with an airy wave of her hand. “I have to tell you, Lieutenant, it’s not a pretty sight.”

“I’m sure. But it was either this, or storm your flimsy little terrycloth walls.”

Undaunted, she shook her head, plunging on. “Cops don’t storm women’s walls against their will. They help women.”

A heartbeat passed before he chuckled with soft irony. “Maybe—but,
I
damn well know I almost helped you out of your clothes.” Leveling his dark eyes on her, he sobered as he reached out and took her wrist in the warm vice of his fingers. “You’d better hope you’re right about cops.” With his free hand on her shoulder, he pressed her down onto the bedroll.

Silky felt the quilt mold to her back, but she didn’t struggle. “Wade?” she breathed. “What are you doing?”

Unsmiling, he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he murmured in a slightly unsteady voice that she hardly recognized to be his, and she couldn’t help but believe him.

A surge of fear, mingled strongly with excitement, raced through her as she lay there staring up into the hypnotic darkness of his eyes. Somewhere in a small corner of her temporarily malfunctioning mind, a weak little voice railed on about curiosity and how it killed cats and foolish women. If he’d only said he was going to make love to her, she could have soundly rejected him. If he’d just admitted he was going to rape her,
she could have fought with all of her strength. But he’d said he didn’t know what he was going to do. And because he didn’t know, it became imperative that she
did.
The heat she saw in his eyes didn’t alarm her, though it probably should have. Yet she could have sworn that even in the smoky blackness, she could detect no violence. What then? Determination? Yes, but there was something else, something not quite readable. It had been there this morning when they had rested under the willows. She swallowed spasmodically. “Do—do you know yet?”

“No.” He was leaning over her, one hand pinning her shoulder, the other holding her wrist to her side. Their eyes held, clung together, as the sensuous darkness of his gaze drew closer, becoming her total reality. In an almost soundless whisper, he teased her lips with his as he asked, “Did I thank you for the aspirin?” A gentle, brotherly kiss moistened the tip of her nose.

She lifted her chin slightly, her lips parting in an unconscious and very unsisterly invitation for him to place the same light gift lower. With a sigh that held her name, he accepted her tiny offering, molding his lips to hers. The kiss did not devour or consume, but merely taunted, so lightly that she lifted her face to meet his lips more firmly; to taste him to the fullest. Through languidly lowered lashes, she could see a pleasant upward turn at the corner of his lips. He moved his hand from her shoulder up to cradle
the back of her head. Holding her securely, he laid final claim to her eagerly parted lips. It was an infinitesimal assertion of ownership, if one considered the vastness of the wilderness in which they lay. But the point was moot.

Silky’s eyes were closed to the beauty of the endless wilds, her concentration centered only on the wild intimacy that he was unleashing within her body. She could not, would not, make herself aware of anything but the curious ease with which their lips fitted together. Odder still—because a kiss is a fluid, living thing—was the comfortable way they continued to come together. The joy of the contact did not lessen as the intimate ballet moved and changed, but increased and became even more pleasurable.

He nipped lightly at her upper lip, sending a renewed charge of feeling rushing through her, igniting a heated, liquid sensation in her stomach that spread like warm, sweet syrup through her body. Her lips fairly throbbed with it, and she parted them farther, inviting his exploration. Again he accepted, his tongue enticing, tempting, warming her more.

She felt the light tracing of his fingers as he slid his hand beneath her T-shirt, and caressed her rib cage below her breasts. He stroked as lightly with his fingertips as he did with his tongue, his thumb gently moving back and forth in the valley between her breasts. With each feathery caress of his fingers, she expected him to slip his hand up to capture her quivering
fullness. But he did not. His fingertips grazed the barest rise of flesh so sensitive to a man’s touch, tantalizing, promising, but he went no further. She thought she would go mad, wild with desire for him to hold her. The core of her being burned for the promises that he was so eloquently making to be kept.

Whimpering, she moved against him. It wasn’t a planned thing. It was a necessary thing, a need that went beyond civilization—back, back to something very strong, very basic. “Wade …” She gasped as he lifted his scalding kiss from her lips. Taking his hand, she lifted it, and with trembling fingers, pressed it over her milky softness.

Silky felt a quick shiver wrack his body as he moaned, “My God, woman. Do you know what you’re doing?”

“No.” The word was a plaintive sigh as she rolled her head from side to side in a conscious effort to negate what her body was doing. Even so, she circled his back, sliding her hands up, then down, over the corded muscles that flexed beneath her urgent touch.

He stilled her head, kissing her jaw and tracing along the rapidly beating pulse in her throat with his tongue. She pulled him to her, and as he settled over her, she let out a short, sharp gasp to feel the full measure of his desire.

As he lifted his face to look into her eyes, he pulled her T-shirt up over her breasts, revealing them, at last, to his devouring gaze. “Silky, if
this is a dream, be kind and let me dream it.” His features lost their sharp edges. He was all softness, all gentleness, and though he wasn’t smiling, and his shadowed face revealed a vaguely haunted bleakness in the eyes, Silky thought his face was the most beautiful sight she could remember seeing. A smile parted her lips and she lifted her hands to his thick, tousled hair, lowering his marvelous, distracted face to her waiting mounds of femininity, nipples stretched taut in anticipation of his kisses.

He nuzzled her there and she loved the slight roughness of his face. His tongue flicked at a rosy nipple, inspiring a long, languid sigh of pure ecstasy from her parted lips. At her response, he put his arms about her, pulling her as close to him as was humanly possible. “Let me love you, Silky,” he murmured, sliding one hand down to cup her hip. Deft fingers curled under the sheer fabric of her underpants to stroke the skin there.

Whispering against the delighted tip of her breast, he said, “It’s right. It has been since the first night we met. You know it, don’t you?” The fingers that were hooked over the hip-hugging band of her panties slowly began to move down as he urged with a passion-thickened voice, “Don’t you, darling?”

She was weak with need for him. Feeling the flimsy but very real barrier of lace being carefully disposed of, she tried to muster a vestige of regret, but none would come. Her body needed the things he was offering, and she was defenseless
against him. She hadn’t, for one sane or insane instant, wanted to resist him. The tiny piece of lace that had been her clothes slipped easily over her knees and was gone. She didn’t mourn its passing.

He took her hand and moved it to the fastening of his shorts. “When you’re ready.” He covered her hand reassuringly for a moment before moving to caress her thigh. Turning slightly, he placed his other arm firmly under her head, cradling her in the crook of his arm, holding her close. She kissed his chest and cuddled closer. Somehow she instinctively sensed what he would do now, and she moistened her lips in anticipation as his hand slid between her legs where he touched her ever so softly. She quivered and let her head fall back, closing her eyes to everything but the exquisite sensations he was eliciting with his gentle exploration. “You’re a delight, Silky,” he murmured into the shell of her ear. With a light kiss on her lobe, he touched her more intimately.

“Ohhh—oh Wade,” she cried.

“Yes, love.”

She moved against him, her desire so heightened that she could not stand being without him a moment longer. She became a part of the wild, untamed land in his arms, drawn unfathomably to the virile force that he was, a powerful wind that carried her where it willed. She tugged distractedly at his shorts, but he whispered, “Not yet, sweetheart.” He hastened his movements,
and she arched against him, whimpering her desire. “Wade—I want you so—so much.”

“And I want you, beautiful Silky.” He nipped at her ear. His breath tempted the sensitive skin, sending a sweet shock down her spine as expert hands sent surge after surge of white-hot sensations careening throughout her body. She felt as though he were tearing her apart, and it was a wonderful rending.

A breeze floated across them. Silky could feel its extreme coolness, and realized that she must be glistening with sweat as her body tensed, reaching desperately for the zenith of feeling that he was creating within her. Her breath was coming in short, panting cries, and she turned her face into Wade’s chest, crying into the tangle of musky hair, “Wade—Wade!” With one final arch, her body quivered. The sigh that began deep in her throat was exhaled slowly with sweet ecstasy of feeling. Then, with a tingling warmth, the golden feeling began to drain away, leaving her sated and whole.

She let go of the bedroll she had been clutching and turned to Wade, kissing his chest and rubbing her face in the mat of softness. Another light kiss teased his nipple. With her fingers spread, she ran a hand through the vee of hair that ran up toward his chest. Feeling contented in his arms, she questioned, a little hoarsely, “Why?”

He shifted, and she fluttered a tentative, almost shy glance up at his face. He was smiling
down at her. “Why what?” he coaxed, hugging her closer.

“You know why what. Why didn’t you …” She stopped, unable to go on.

“I told you.” His hands were caressing her back with silken strokes. “I wanted to make you happy.”

She dropped her eyes as she toyed with the waistband of his shorts. Unable to stop herself, she mumbled, “Was it worth it?”

He chuckled, and she could feel the deep reverberation of his delight tickle her ear. “Of course. You make it sound like a sacrifice.” He kissed her forehead and, as he turned her head up so that she could accept his next kiss on her lips, he whispered almost too softly for her to hear, “You’re a beautiful woman.” His hands, never still, were bringing freshly awakened nerve endings to life again as he took possession of her lips and did wonderful things to them.

Not recognizing the wanton woman who had taken over her body, Silky put her hands under the waistband of his shorts, and slowly began to pull them down. He lifted his hips to help, and she soon had him completely free of his clothes. Her eyes moved over the fully aroused length of him. In the waning glow of the fire he seemed more like a reclining heathen god, completely content with his dominion over this trackless wilderness. She pushed herself up to sit so that she could look down at him. As she lay both hands softly on his chest, her name floated up to
her in a questioning whisper. She shook her head, quieting him. She closed her eyes. The memory of his puzzled expression lingered in her mind’s eyes as she began to touch him. She had to know the feel of his flesh. Her hands slid down the hard, flat belly, and she heard him groan. He squeezed her shoulder for a moment before he let her go, allowing his hand to slide down her arm and drop to the bedroll.