Elizabeth Lowell (36 page)

The pressure of his strong hand cupping her so deliberately made a shimmering tension gather in the pit of her stomach.

“You need me, butterfly,” he said, flexing his hand, feeling her alluring heat calling to him. He bent to take her lips, then stopped just short of that goal. “You need me, but do you want me, too?”

She tried to answer. All that came out was a breathless sound when his tongue touched her lips and she realized how hungry she was for his kiss. Vaguely she felt a shifting pressure at her waist, but she barely noticed, for his teeth had caught her lower lip and were holding it captive for the slow probing of his tongue. He released her soft lip by tiny increments.

“Do you want me?” he asked huskily while his hand flicked open buttons, pushed aside cloth, slid beneath fabric, seeking her feminine core. “Will you let me undress you, touch you, tease you until you’re hot and wild and you can’t breathe without calling my name?”

She couldn’t answer, for his hand had claimed her and the blind searching of his fingertip was making her tremble in anticipation of the ecstasy she would know again at her lover’s hands.

“Janna,” Ty said in a low voice. “Tell me what you want.”

“Touch me,” she said raggedly.

“I’m already touching you.”

She shivered and shifted her legs unconsciously, silently telling him what she wanted.

“Say it,” he whispered. “I want to hear it. I need to know that I’m giving you something as sweet and powerful as you gave to me.”

“I…I…”

She turned her face against his chest in a gesture of trust and shyness that made him smile despite the need clenching fiercely within him. She had been so abandoned in her seduction of him a few moments before that he had forgotten she was new to sensuous play.

“Then I’ll tell you what pleases me,” Ty said, and as he spoke, his fingertip barely brushed the dark auburn triangle that both defined and concealed Janna’s softness. “I love seeing you this way, with your clothes opened and your breasts bare and my hand between your beautiful thighs. I love watching your nipples rise and tighten even though nothing of me is touching you but my words. I love watching your breath shorten and your legs move restlessly until you open for me, asking that I touch what no other man has.”

Smiling with frank sensuality, he watched the effect of his words on her. He encouraged her movements with teasing hesitations and tiny touches on her breasts, her navel, the heavy auburn silk at the apex of her thighs, and she moved beneath his touch, response and plea at once.

“Yes, like that. Just like that,” he said, his voice thickening. His hands moved, caressing and revealing her in the same motions. “I love parting your soft lips and sliding into you. So warm…”

A ragged cry came from Janna as she felt a bubble of sensation expand wildly within her and then burst, heat spilling over at her lover’s words, his touch, his clear enjoyment of her body.

“Yes, I love that, too,” he said.

He advanced then withdrew his touch from her, teasing her and pleasuring her in the same motions, feeling the increase in her heat and softness with each caress. His voice changed with the heavy running of his own blood, becoming dark, deep, as elemental as the endless hunger he felt for the woman whose body became his at a touch.

“The way you respond to me makes me feel like a god. Hot satin butterfly…” Ty’s voice broke as he felt the sudden constriction in her satin depths, heard her breath hesitate and then come out in a low moan. “Love,” he whispered, bending down to her, “tell me what you need. I’ll give it to you, all of it, and then I’ll begin all over again, touching you, pleasuring you again and again until neither one of us has the strength to speak…if that’s what you want. Tell me what you want.”

His name came from her lips in a ripple of small cries marking the rings of pleasure expanding and bursting sweetly within her body. Blindly her hands moved over his hot skin until she found the flesh that she had come to know so intimately. He was hard and smooth to her touch, as tight as though it had been weeks rather than minutes since he had known release. Having tangible proof of her ability to affect Ty was like another kind of caress, deep and hot and unbearably sweet.

“I want you,” Janna said, her voice breaking from an unexpected, wild burst of pleasure at feeling him so thick and heavy in her hands. “I want to be joined so closely with you that I can feel each heartbeat, each pulse of life…”

Her words shattered into rippling sounds, tiny cries called from her very core as Ty swept her loose pants from her body and merged their bodies with a single powerful motion, giving her all that she had asked for and more, for he had wanted the joining as intensely as she had.

The swift fulfillment was like lightning searching through her flesh, creating an incandescent network of fire, burning through to her soul. She didn’t know that she called Ty’s name even as ecstasy transfixed her, but he did. He heard his own name, felt the satin convulsions deep within her body, and he smiled in a mixture of triumph and passionate restraint as he bent to drink from her lips the taste of ecstasy.

Only when the last of her cries had faded and the final echoes of passionate release had stilled in her body did Ty begin the slow dance of love, penetration and withdrawal, sliding deeply, retreating, sheathing himself within her once more, retreating, sheathing.

Janna’s body gave no warning. Suddenly she was in the grip of something unknown, something hot and vital coiling relentlessly within her, tighter with each movement, tension dragging breath from her lungs and strength from her limbs.

His answer was an even more complete sheathing followed by husky laughter when he felt her back arch in helpless reflex to his presence deep within her body. Her cries unraveled into a moan as she joined with him in the sinuous dance of love, her body driven by the pressure coiling within her.

He encouraged her with dark words whispered into her ear and the strength of his arm circling beneath her hips, sealing their bodies tightly together. He felt the tension vibrating within her satin depths as surely as she did. The realization that she was poised on the brink of violent rapture slammed through him, nearly wrenching away his own control.

He fought against his own climax, dragging himself back from the brink. He didn’t want release yet. Not before he had drunk the wine of Janna’s passion to the last glorious drop.

The feel of her nails against his buttocks was like being burned by sensual fire. He groaned and gave her what she was demanding, what she needed, the elemental joining of his body to hers, no borders, no calculation, nothing but heat and sweet friction and the driving rhythms of life.

The tightness within Janna increased until she would have screamed, but her voice was paralyzed. Her body twisted and her legs wrapped around Ty’s lean hips as she strained toward something she both feared and needed, something so powerful that having it might destroy her—but not having it would certainly destroy her. She began to call Ty’s name with each breath, broken sounds, she was being pulled apart by the tension that had no end, no release, nothing but a need that drove her relentlessly higher.

And then the tension doubled and redoubled with each heartbeat. She screamed his name and burst into a thousand blazing pieces, each one of them a separate ecstasy consuming her all the way to her soul.

Ty held Janna, drinking her passion, feeling her climax to the marrow of his bones and beyond, kissing her with both gentleness and hunger, holding himself still despite the tension still hammering in his body with each breath, each heartbeat. He didn’t move because he wanted it to last forever.

There had never been a woman for him like Janna. He had learned in a twilight meadow on Black Plateau her rare gift for ecstasy. Now he was driven to learn the boundaries of that gift. He began to move again, caressing and probing and filling her once more, each motion inciting flesh still quivering from the height of sensual stimulation and wild release.

“Ty?” she asked, opening dazed eyes.

“Yes,” he said, bending down to Janna’s mouth. “To the last drop of passion. Until we can’t breathe. Until we die.”

Janna looked at the stone overhang that had been the only home she had ever had. Only scattered ashes remained of the campfire that had always been carefully tended. The pots and pans had been washed, upended and set aside. The trunk had been filled with herbs that would discourage insects or mice from settling in.

All that she had kept out was a small pack consisting of her bedroll, herb pouch, and canteen...and the sketch of her mother, a silken lady who hadn’t survived the demands of frontier life.

“We’ll be able to get the books once the Army takes care of Cascabel,” Ty said, putting his arm around Janna.

For an instant she leaned against him, savoring his strength and the knowledge that for once she didn’t have to stand alone. Then she straightened and smiled up at him, but she said nothing about their coming back to the secret valley. If she kept her portion of Mad Jack’s gold, she could build a home anywhere she wished, save one—wherever Ty was.

That she would not do.

She had been lucky enough to have her dream of a home made possible. The fact that she now wished for Ty to share that dream was unfortunate, but it was her misfortune, not his. She had taken advantage of his natural woman-hunger by teasing him until he was beside himself with need. She hadn’t realized the power of the weapon she had turned on him. He had tried to resist, but he hadn’t been able to, not entirely. That was her fault, not his.

Especially yesterday, when she had thrown herself at him with utter abandon, touching him in ways that made it impossible for him to turn away. Even now the memories made her tremble with the aftershocks of what they had shared.

But her wantonness was no reason for Ty to give up his own dream. Requiring him to give up his deepest desire just because he had been the first man to show her ecstasy…that would be an act of hatred, not of love.

And she loved Ty so much it felt as though she were being pulled apart by claws of ice and fire and night.

Silken lady, wherever you are, whoever you are, be kind to the man I love. Give him the dream he has wanted for so many years.

“Janna?” Ty asked, his throat aching with the sadness he felt twisting through her, the bleak shadow of night just beneath her sunny smile. “We’ll come back. I prom—”

She put her fingers over his lips, sealing in the unwanted promise before it could be spoken. “It’s all right,” she said. “I knew I would have to leave someday. Someday…is today.”

He lifted her hand and pressed a kiss into her palm. “Wyoming is beautiful, too. If you don’t like it there we can go anywhere.”

Tears Janna couldn’t conceal came to her eyes. Ty’s words were agony to her, for they weren’t the words she had longed so much to hear, the words he only spoke to her in her dreams, the words his silken lady would someday hear from his lips.

I love you.

But Ty didn’t love Janna. He was amused by her, he liked her, and he was enthralled by her sensuality without realizing that passion’s wellspring was her own deep love for him. He talked about their future together, but it was a future decreed by his unbending sense of honor and duty, not his desire to make Janna his mate, his lifetime companion, the mother of his children.

Honor and duty weren’t love. Neither was kindness.

Janna would rather live the rest of her life in the wild than watch Ty become bitter and ground down by regrets for the freedom and the dream he had lost.

And she would rather die than live to see the day when Ty stood like a captive mustang, his head down and his eyes as dead as stones.

“Go ahead and cry,” he said, folding her into his arms, rocking her. “It’s all right, sugar. It’s all right. You’ll have the home you’ve dreamed of if it’s the last thing I do. It’s the very least that I owe you.”

She closed her eyes to conceal the wave of pain his words had caused. Very gently she brushed her lips over his shirtfront, savoring for the last time his heat, his scent, his strength, the male vitality that radiated from him.

“You owe me nothing at all.”

His laugh was harsh and humorless. “Like hell I don’t. You saved my life, and all I’ve done since then is take from you. When I think of you throwing yourself under Lucifer’s hooves just to catch him for me, I…”

Ty’s words faded into a hoarse sound. Strong arms tightened almost painfully around Janna, as though he was trying to convince himself that she was all right despite all the dangers she had endured for him.

“I didn’t catch Lucifer to make you feel obligated to me,” Janna said quietly. “I did it so Lucifer wouldn’t be killed by some greedy mustanger or be caught by a man too cruel to do anything but make the horse into a killer. You were the one who gentled Lucifer. You were the one who taught him to trust a man. Without that, what I did would have been worse than useless. Thank yourself for Lucifer, not me.”

Ty tilted up Janna’s chin and stared at her translucent gray eyes. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

“I know it.
You don
’
t owe me anything.
Not for your life, not for Lucifer, and not for the pleasure we shared. Not one damn thing. Once we get to the fort we’re quits. You’re as free as Lucifer once was. And so am I.”

A chill came over Ty, making his skin tighten and move in primitive reflex. Janna’s voice was calm and precise, lacking in emotion, as bleak as the darkness underlying her smile. She was pulling away from him, cutting the ties that had grown silently, powerfully between them during the time they had spent in the hidden valley.

“No.”

Ty said nothing more, just the single word denying what Janna had said. Before she could say anything in argument, he turned away and whistled shrilly.

Moments later Lucifer came trotting over and began lipping at Ty’s shirt in search of the pinch of salt Ty often had hidden in a twist of paper. There was no salt today, simply the voice and hands Lucifer had come to enjoy.