Capture the Sun (Cheyenne Series) (58 page)

      
“Could you ever know?” he countered, facing her once more, the pain and guilt of a moment ago once more transformed into anger. “Could you ever imagine how it is to grow up belonging nowhere, to no one? Always being an outcast, spit on behind your back by polite society everywhere you went?”

      
“Yes, I can. Only they weren't afraid of me—they spit on me right to my face!” Her voice was surprisingly calm for all the turmoil inside her. “I've just spent two years as a branded adulteress, white trash who loved an Indian and bore his brat. How do you think the good people in Miles City treated me, Hawk? What do you think Noah did when he found out—oh yes, he found out, over a month before Perry was born, thanks to Mrs. Thorndyke. He would have killed us both if he'd lived to see your son! All the men were quitting, everyone but Feliz and her children. I was left with Caleb Rider for protection. Cy Cummins wouldn't even sell me supplies on credit anymore. If Kyle hadn't come back when he did, I'd have lost Circle S, lost our son's birthright!” She watched his stricken face, then plunged ahead.

      
“You bet I've learned what it is to be an outsider! At least they respect you—or your guns. They fear you, and you're a man. The rules are a little different for a woman, in case you never thought of it. I'll always be the worst sort of harlot to them—a white woman who betrayed her race and her husband.” Her shoulders slumped, and she turned from his frozen, expressionless face. “And you blame me, too. You don't want me.” She began to move toward the door, not thinking or caring where she would go. His touch on her arm, as gentle as his voice, stopped her.

      
“Carrie, why did you tell me all this, come here and do all this? Just to marry me, so you could give Perry a legal father? If you married Wolf and took Perry abroad for an education, he'd be just as respectable, even more accepted than he'll ever be here.”

      
She did not turn around, but choked out the words in a tear-thickened voice. “I’ll never do that. I'll never take him away from his father, from the land that's his birthright. I'm proud he is my son and I'm proud you are his father.”

      
He pulled her around and into his arms slowly, then tipped her head up so she had to look at him. “And what about love, Firehair? I know you love Perry, but you've never said you love me.”

      
“You've never given me a chance. You read everything I do wrong, no matter what I say—oh, Hawk, of course I love you! More than anything in life!” She burrowed her head against his chest, holding him around the waist tightly, crying in great, wracking sobs as he stroked her bright hair and kissed the top of her head.

      
“What a fool I've been! Oh, Carrie, Carrie, my love. I've always been so afraid you turned to me that night in the garden out of loneliness and desperation, as an escape from Noah's cruelty. You needed gentleness and, yes, physical satisfaction, too. We both were drawn by that from the first minute we laid eyes on each other. I knew it even though I fought it, but you were so naive, so innocent.” He kissed her upturned face gently, brushing away the tears with his lips.

      
She said softly, “I never realized what a carnal creature I was until that day in the pool when I watched you undress.” Her face flamed, but her lips curved into an incredibly seductive smile as she reached them up to his.

      
He groaned and kissed her with fierce passion now, letting all his defenses and inhibitions down. “I love you, Firehair,” he growled hoarsely. She responded, pressing boldly against him, starved for his body after so long an abstinence.

      
“Tomorrow we'll go to town and get Judge Benton to marry us,” he said, scooping her up and heading for the bedroom.

      
“Tomorrow,” she repeated, renewing the kiss.

      
He slid her feet to the floor inside the bedroom door, still holding her tightly around the waist. Neither wanted to let the other go as they clung together, swaying in a dizzying kiss that spoke of so much longing, so much love, long denied. His tongue teased her lips, brushing the soft insides, then skimmed across her teeth. When she boldly followed his lead and pressed her eager tongue against his, he growled and twined them together in a swirl of rioting sensation.

      
Carrie kissed him back, returning caress for caress, her starved senses clamoring for every touch, every sensation she had remembered on all the long lonely nights of the past two years. She ran her hands up his shoulders and neck, curling her fingers in his thick, coarse black hair. It was growing longer again and she loved the feel of it, taking fistfuls and pulling his head closer to hers in the embrace.

      
He moved his devouring mouth off hers and slid it hotly down her cheek to the slender column of her throat. She threw back her head and bared it to his rapacious kisses, licks, and love bites, gasping and softly moaning his name.

      
He reached one hand up to the buttons on the front of her dress, unfastening them one at a time, pausing to lower his mouth to each bared inch of flesh as he pulled the dress away. His lips brushed her shoulder, her collarbone, the valley between her breasts until she thought she would scream with the pleasure. Her breasts throbbed for his touch. Ever so slowly he continued the exquisite torture, freeing first one, then the other high, pointed peak. She arched against him, desperate for the heat of his mouth on her sensitive nipples. He teased and enveloped one, then the other, alternating between them like a starved man at a banquet until she held on to his shoulders, reeling in frenzied pleasure.

      
She could feel his hands, still busy with the fastening of her dress. When he had it freed, he stood back and she helped him pull it off her arms and drop it over her hips to the floor. The thin chemise was wadded around her waist, and she hastily unfastened it and tossed it down as he slid his large, dark hands over the white pantalets, easing them off her long, slim legs. He knelt and slipped her shoes off, then stood up once more, never taking his eyes from her willowy, golden body.

      
“You are the most beautiful woman I've ever seen,” he breathed, running his hands up her thighs to span her slim waist and then slide over her rib cage to lift and cup the upthrust young breasts.

      
“I'm not changed? I mean since Perry was born?” she whispered, looking into his glowing eyes, which reflected her naked image on them.

      
“Maybe a little larger here.” He pulled softly on a breast, sending ripples of pleasure shooting down to her toes and back up to lodge in the core of her.

      
She reached up and began unbuttoning his shirt. “Now my turn,” she said in breathless concentration as she peeled the soft cotton off his broad shoulders and pulled it free of his pants. He shrugged it off and returned his hands to work their blistering magic on the hardened points of her breasts. With trembling hands she ran her fingers through the black hair on his chest, then pressed her face against its hard surface, feeling the sharp imprint of the medallion that gleamed in its usual place. “How long I've wanted to do this,” she breathed. She inhaled the scent of him, male and vital, clean and enticing as her hands followed the pattern of his body hair downward to the waistband of his pants.

      
With a wicked chuckle she began to unfasten the straining buttons, slowly, as he gasped in pain and pleasure at being freed from the tight confinement. When she eased the pants down his straight, hard thighs, his shaft stood proud and straight.

      
He kicked pants and moccasins off hurriedly while she knelt and reached one hand out to hold a hard narrow buttock. The other hand cupped him experimentally. The sensation was electric, and now it was his turn to moan in need. “You'd better stop that, or I won't be able to control myself!”

      
He pulled her up into his arms and they both reveled in the sensation of naked breast and belly pressed tightly together, rubbing sensuously, smooth and silky against hard and hairy. Once more he picked her up and carried her the few steps to the bed, then dropped her onto its inviting width and followed her as they rolled, arms and legs entwined, to the center.

      
“The sheets smell like violets,” he breathed into her hair.

      
“Big improvement over how they smelled before,” she retorted, nipping playfully at his face and neck.

      
“Oh, Firehair, it smells like you now, all soft and clean, like wildflowers.” He rolled on his back and pulled her on top of him for a long, languorous kiss, all the while running his hands up and down the delicate bones in her spine, cupping her delectable buttocks and massaging her silky flanks.

      
Carrie writhed against him, loving his hard, long body and his hands roaming over her. After a minute more of such close contact, she raised her head and looked into his eyes. “Please, Hawk, now. Love me now.”

      
With amazing gentleness, he rolled them over and poised above her, looking down at her flushed, beautiful face with its plea for fulfillment. Ever so carefully he slid into her velvet warmth, concentrating with all his strength on going slowly to wait for her. It was as if he had been without a woman for as long as he knew she had been without a man.

      
Slowly he thrust and she arched, recalling the wonderful ballet of love they had played out that night in his room at the big house. Then she had never been made love to before, but it all came back to her now in such poignant sweetness that it took her breath away. She opened her eyes, focusing them after the initial haze of ecstasy, to look up at him as he stared down at her. Their gazes locked as all the love and vulnerability in their souls rushed out and intermingled.

      
All too soon the slow cadence became frenzied as Carrie's hunger drove her to pull him closer, to urge him to move faster and harder until she made one final convulsive arch, crying out his name. He watched her as his own body blazed with the heat of a thousand stars, and then he collapsed, shuddering, on top of her. Carrie locked her legs around him and held him fiercely to her breast, never wanting to let him go.

      
He caressed her neck with soft, nuzzling kisses, saying in a laughing whisper, “I was afraid I couldn't hold back for you!”

      
“It's been so long. What did you expect after two months?” She buried her face against his neck.

      
“Mmm,” he murmured in her ear, “then you admit you enjoyed my savage lovemaking at the lake?” His face darkened in self-condemnation. “I didn't want to hurt you, my beautiful Firehair, but I was so jealous, so—”

      
She cut him off with a kiss. “You were right—I wanted you. Oh, Hawk, I've always wanted you, always loved you. Never doubt it. I couldn't bear it if you left me again.”

      
“No, no, never. I'll never be that big a fool again.” He rolled over and sat up, then reached for the medallion around his neck. He took it off, saying, “I believe this belongs to you, Firehair.” With that he slipped it over her head, gently lifting her hair to place it around her neck so that it nestled between her breasts.

      
They snuggled beneath the covers and she caressed his cheek softly, saying, “You belong to me, Hunting Hawk or Evan Sinclair, both sides of you that I've seen, and any I haven't, it doesn't matter. And I belong to you.”

      
“Fate, the white man says, or destiny. I never thought it was as poetic or as caring as the Cheyenne way. Let me tell you about my medicine dream, Firehair, when I received my name.”

      
As he told her of the vision he had in that broiling-hot medicine lodge high on the Dakota mountainside, Carrie's eyes widened. He described the hawk and the wolf, the stolen cub, and the blazing, sun-streaked sky. Forgetting her nakedness, she sat up in bed. “You dreamed that the summer you were fourteen? And I was seven, back in St. Louis! It was hot and I awoke from my nap crying for my mother. That was the first time,” she whispered, her hand reaching out to caress his cheek, awe in her voice.

      
He took her hand and kissed the soft palm. “I know. When you told me that day by the lake, I was stunned. I didn't understand what to make of it because I was so sure you hated me. It's strange, I never was certain whether the sun was rising or setting in the dream. Now I know it was rising.”

      
“The beginning of a whole life together,” she breathed as he sunk his fingers into her thick, flaming hair, scorched with the heat and beauty of it. He pulled her down in a fierce, sweet kiss.

      
Just as in the medicine dream, he had at last captured the sun here in his arms. He would hold her fiery love in his hands and in his heart forever.

Epilogue

Yellowstone County, 1886

      
The sun blazed across the summer sky, arching its golden light even through the dense foliage of the trees where Kyle waited with Carrie and her children. Perry sat proudly on his own small pony. He was five years old, and already his legs were long and his face serious. Even if he was three-quarters white, he looked Cheyenne. The boy controlled his mount with the inherent skill bred into the horsemen of the plains. Kyle held Ferris, Perry's three-year-old brother, who squirmed and fussed, eager to be down and exploring the strange new sights and sounds around them. Carrie sat on the ground, crooning to her two-month-old daughter Carolina while the baby dozed on her lap.

      
She looked worriedly over at Kyle. “Are you sure Iron Heart is still alive? That the council will let Hawk see his grandfather? I couldn't bear for him to be hurt again.”