Lord of the Wolves (16 page)

Sarah
gasped and strained against him. Oh, blessed torment! The scorching tide was
rising, a welling desire that left her shaken and weak, completely at his mercy.
Kingston seemed to sense it, for he pressed his advantage, drawing out the
carnal caresses, increasing Sarah’s agony until she could no longer bear it. Then,
he withdrew his hand and took her waist, lifting her, guiding her legs around
his middle and urging her down until the source of her need rested intimately
against his. Slowly, he began to move, teasing the source of her need without a
true penetration, fanning the flames that licked along her senses.

Sarah
clung to him, joining in the subtle rhythm, wanting more and knowing it could
never be. It rendered the encounter all the more bittersweet, a brief and
beautiful interlude to hold inside her secret heart for all the endless nights
to come when she would share a stranger’s marriage bed.

The
thought was excruciating; instinctively Sarah pushed it back, giving herself up
to the moment, struggling against the tension mounting deep inside her,
glorying in the feel of Kingston’s arms around her, so warm, so strong. Sarah’s
desire mounted, gathering in strength and intensity, and, finally, crashing
down upon her senses so that she was awash in wave after wave of pure physical
bliss.

One
final thrust and Kingston pulled away with a shudder, spilling his seed into
the water.

Long
after the pleasurable glow had faded, Sarah lay curled against Kingston’s side
on the mossy banks of the deep pool, her head pillowed on his breast and the
steady thud of his heart in her ear, and dreamed that she had found in the
American wilderness a second Eden, a place where all things were possible,
where even a Lord of the Wolves, given an abundance of patience, love and
understanding, could be tamed.

Later
that same evening, several miles west of the glade where they had lingered
throughout the long hot afternoon, Sarah sat with her legs crossed, plucking
the feathers from the fat bird Kingston had killed earlier. It was a simple
task, quickly accomplished once she understood what was required of her, and
one for which she was inordinately grateful, for it kept her from dwelling on
the earth-shattering events of the afternoon, however temporarily.

Her
behavior would doubtless seem perfectly scandalous in the eyes of the Lord, yet
far worse in Sarah’s mind was the realization that although she felt shy and
embarrassed in Kingston’s company, she was not the least bit remorseful. The
fact that she knew little about her lover compounded the sin tenfold, for not
only had she fallen, she’d fallen into the outstretched arms of a veritable
stranger.

He
must have sensed her turmoil, for he spoke without looking up from his task. “Something
troubles Madame?”

Sarah
felt the blood rise to her cheeks. “Yes.” She looked down at her hands, which
were covered with soft gray pin feathers. “I suppose there is a great deal that
weighs heavily on my heart and my mind this evening.”

“The
heart I can heal,” he said with an answering smile. “The head—well, that is not
so easily fixed. Will you tell me about it? Or shall I hazard a guess?”

“In
light of—” Sarah broke off, greatly discomfited at broaching the subject of
their recent intimate encounter, then wet her lips, gathered her courage, and
tried again. “It has occurred to me how little we know one another. I fear we
are virtual strangers, and yet—”

“Yet,
we have made love, after a fashion?” he supplied with a nonchalance Sarah found
maddening. “Expressed our passion for one another in an act of physical
intimacy? Your body and mine, entwined, sharing sexual completion?”

Her
blush ripening, Sarah inverted her face. “Indeed, yes. All of that.”

His
eyes were warm in the glow of the fire he was kindling. “Sarah, we care for one
another, we deal well together, and I am as taken with you as you are with me. What
else matters?”

“The
past, for one thing,” Sarah replied. “The present. And certainly the future.”

He
frowned at the kindling he was adding to the flames. “The past is over and done
with. Why drag all of that unpleasantness out into the light? As for the
future—” he shrugged easily. “Who can say what the Creator has planned for us?”

Sarah
lifted her chin, prepared to do battle. “I should very much like to know you
better.”

“Would
you not rather know the man I am now, than the boy I once was?”

“By
discovering the latter, I shall better come to understand the former,” Sarah
insisted.

He
gave her a searching look, then shook his head and sighed.
“Madame,
you are impossibly stubborn, intent always on having your own way.”

Sarah
slanted him a look from beneath the cover of her lashes, holding firm. “I bowed
to your request earlier today and followed where my heart led. Now, I ask that
you bow to mine. Tell me about the village where you dwelt amongst your
mother’s people. What was it like, growing up there?”

He
took the bird from her hands and finished plucking it, quartered it, and then
placed it on the spit he had fashioned over the shallow fire pit. “It was a
good place to be a youth,” he said. “In those days, game was still plentiful. My
uncles taught me to hunt with a bow, and later on, to shoot the rifle my father
presented to me during my ninth summer. They were kind to me in those days,
before I went away—even Great Wind, who hated whites and whom I much admired. They
were the sons of Gray Wolf, strong men, who took great care to teach me the
things a boy must know in order to become a man, and they held great sway upon
my early life.”

Sarah
smiled, adding the turkey feathers to the fire—all but one, which he rescued
from the flames. He held it to the light as Sarah brushed the pin feathers from
her hands. “It sounds idyllic,” she said. “I knew no such freedom growing up in
London. My father was a military man, who later joined the Moravian Church, and
my mother was very protective of me.”

His
expression solemn, he pulled the strings that secured her prayer cap beneath
her chin, releasing the neat bow and plucking the cap from her head. Carefully,
he removed the pins that held her chignon in place, arranged the shining brown
mass over one shoulder and affixed the turkey feather among the waves so that
it curved gracefully at her cheek. When he’d finished, he sat back to study her.
“Now, you look the part of Sauvage’s woman.”

Sarah
touched the feather with reverent fingers. His comment, casually uttered,
warmed her heart considerably. “The village,” she prompted, her eyes cast
demurely downward.

“You
asked if my early life was idyllic,” he said with a sigh. “Yes, I suppose that
it was. But a man never truly appreciates the beauty of his home or knows how
precious it is until he has lost it. I would never know the peace of my early
life in that valley until after I was taken from it. When at last I returned,
the peace had been shattered, the fields and village razed, the people
scattered to the four winds.”

“It
is still possible to find peace,” Sarah put in. “There are places yet where men
and women live in harmony with their neighbors, red and white, English, or
French.”

“Perhaps
for other men these places still exist.”

“Not
just for other men,” Sarah existed, “but for you, too.”

He
shook his raven head, and the slight movement set his scarlet silk tassels to
swaying. “This rifle is my life,” he said, laying a hand upon the weapon,
always close at hand. “I was not born to guide a plow, nor was I meant to deal
in trade, as my father discovered, soon after our arrival in Quebec.”

“He
took you into his trading business?”

“You
are surprised,” he said with a slight curve of his sensual mouth, the same
mouth that had worshipped her breasts earlier. The thought made Sarah tingle. “That
was Claudia Baer’s reaction as well, though I fear it was not as politely
expressed.”

“She
did not approve?”

“She
was outraged. As Jean’s mother, and my father’s legal wife, she viewed my
presence in her household as an insult. I was a half-breed, after all, neither
wholly red, nor truly white, and the product of an illicit affair, a fact that
she never allowed me to forget. That it was an affair of the heart, and not
just the flesh, compounded the injury.”

“I
remember that first night as if it were yesterday. She and my father argued
bitterly. I had been deposited in a second floor bedchamber that overlooked the
city, and late into the night I stood at the small shuttered window, gazing at
the lamplight pouring from the houses while Claudia complained bitterly, and my
father roared his intentions. I was a son of the household, he said, and I was
to be treated as such. I would share Jean’s tutor, take my meals at table with
the rest of the family, and spend my evenings at his warehouse, learning the
business of trade, just as Jean was doing.”

“It
must have been difficult for you,” Sarah sympathized. “Being suddenly thrust
into a household full of hostile strangers, with only your father to act as a
buffer.”

“That
first year, I was sick inside,” Kingston admitted. “I missed the village, the
wooded hills, the black and silent river. Most of all, I missed my family. My
mother was gone, but two of my uncles were still living, and I spent a great
deal of time wishing that I had been permitted to stay with them. My father was
a different man in Quebec than he was residing at our village. He drank too
much brandy, and was often away from the house until late into the night. When
present, he was brooding and silent. At times, I felt that he hated Quebec as
much as I did, more so, perhaps, for it was a hell of his own making.”

“Was
he aware of your unhappiness?” Sarah asked. “Aware of his wife’s hostility?”

“I
think that he must have sensed my discontent, my loneliness: certainly he was
aware of Claudia’s hatred of me, yet I doubt he ever realized the lengths to
which she would go to have her revenge against him. As for Jean, Father had a
certain blindness where he was concerned, an ability to overlook all but the
most blatant disregard of his dictates. And Jean was Claudia’s child in every
sense of the word.”

Sarah
frowned. “She turned him against you?”

“It
was more that she cultivated the scorn that was already present,” Kingston
explained. “They shared one mind, one will, one malevolence. Once Claudia slyly
suggested that I took too much pride in my savage appearance. Shortly
thereafter, Jean enlisted the aid of a footman to overpower me, and cut off my
hair with a carving knife. It was possibly the worst thing he had ever done to
me, though he would never know that—worse than all of the beatings, the
humiliations, the threats, for my unshorn hair marked me as one of the People. By
cutting my hair, he had stolen a part of my identity.”

“How
terrible!” Sarah said. “What happened after? Did your father discover Jean’s
perfidy? Was he punished?”

Kingston
smiled at her reaction, but there was sadness in his eyes. “He was found out,
and sternly warned against further acts of hostility, but never truly punished.
The incident seemed to set my father to thinking. For the first time since
bringing me into the house, he seemed to realize that I was having trouble
adjusting to my new life, and deemed that a stronger course of action as the
best medicine for what ailed me.

“The
very next morning, a maid brought a gleaming copper tub and a pair of scissors
to my room, and Jean, Claudia, and my father watched as the boy White Wolf was
transformed into Kingston Sauvage. My skin was roughly scrubbed as I had seen
others ceremoniously scrubbed in the river prior to adoption. That ceremonial
scrubbing performed in the village had signified the cleansing away of ever
last drop of white blood, and from that moment on, I was to be a citizen of New
France in every sense of the word.

“When
I rose from the tub, my skin was raw and bleeding, my hair was clubbed at my
nape, and I was forbidden to utter so much as a single word of my mother’s
tongue.”

“How
unfeeling! How heartless and cold!” Sarah said, incensed for the injustices he
had suffered at the hands of his family. “What happened then? Did you obey?”

Leaning
forward, he dropped a kiss on Sarah’s cheek. “At first I was rebelliously
silent. I hated the stiff clothing and uncomfortable shoes. Most of all, I
hated my father for forcing me to this shameful pass. As time went on, I spoke
French and English almost exclusively, resorting to my own language only when I
was alone. My reluctance to speak faded, and only my resentment for Antoine
Baer and his world remained.”

“You
did not forgive him?” Sarah questioned. “His actions were deplorable, it’s
true, but it is our place to forgive others, so that we ourselves can be
forgiven.”

He
smiled at that. “Yes, but you are full of goodness, and I am not. My father
died of an apoplectic seizure during my eighteenth summer, our difficulties
still unresolved. That same evening, I departed Quebec and never looked back.”

“And
from there, you returned to the village of your birth?” By now, Sarah was
thoroughly engrossed in the tale, filled with empathy for the young man he had
been.