The Renegades: Cole (17 page)

“Wrong. Cookie brought it to me,” he said. “Wind blew it right into his wagon.”

She looked him straight in the eye, trying not to laugh. Trying to keep from reaching out to touch his face.

“We usually save the tall tales until after supper,” she said, “and tell them while we’re sitting around the fire.”

“I can think of better things to do by the fire.”

His steady, deep, dark eyes told her what those better things were. The look made her legs turn to jelly.

“Co-o-me and git it, a’fore I throw it out!” Cookie yelled.

Cole stood up.

“Let me serve you, ma’am,” he said, with an exaggerated tip of the hat in question. “You just keep your seat right there.”

So Aurora sat, helpless not to watch him, while he got two plates and filled them, brought them to her, and then two cups of coffee.

They soon realized they were starving, so they ate in silence in true cowboy fashion, as the others did. Aurora hardly could swallow, however, because she was so close to Cole. It was torture, being so near him and unable to touch.

As soon as she’d finished her meal, she stood up and took her dishes to the wreck pan.

It was unbearable, being near Cole. He was looking at her now, following her with his eyes, and she ached to turn and run back to him. Another three seconds, and she’d be throwing herself into his arms in front of her entire crew.

“Good night,” she called to him, and then looked around to include all the others. “You all better turn in pretty soon. It’ll be an early start tomorrow to look for strays.”

“Don’t you worry, Missy,” Cookie said. “I’ll run ‘em into their bedrolls. I’ll cut their coffee off.”

Cole gave her a small gesture of salute, then turned to say something to Frank as she left the campfire. She went straight to her wagon and
climbed inside, closing the flap behind her, driven by a desperate need for refuge.

But it was refuge from wanting Cole that she needed, and that she didn’t find. The wanting came right on into the wagon with her.

T
he first guard had come in to bed, the second had been wakened and gone out. The exhausted cattle stayed where they’d dropped, mostly silent, mostly sleeping. The camp lay quiet except for the shifting, slow stirring of the wind. The only storm remaining was the one inside Aurora.

She got up, wrapped a blanket around her, held aside the canvas flap to her wagon, and stepped out into the night, washed silver by the moon. Cole was out there, somewhere, waiting for her either to come to him or to learn to live with this wild restlessness that refused to be tamed.

From the minute she’d seen him after the run, she had known which it would be. Now was the time.

She jumped to the ground and walked swiftly toward the trees that grew all the way down to the foot of the hill. They formed a crescent-shaped nook that opened its arms to the camp
toward her wagon and caught the moonlight. She could see her way plain as day.

An instant before Cole spoke, she saw him, too. A dark shadow inside a darker one, he was a graceful shape, with his shoulders leaning back against a tall pine, one long leg bent at the knee, his heel propped on the tree trunk, too. He was hipshot and loose and very, very sure of himself.

And of her. It made her smile.

“Once you finally came out of your lair you came straight to me,” he murmured, his voice like a song on the night breeze. “You never hesitated. How’d you know where I was?”

“I can feel you,” she said. “I always know where you are.”

That surprised him for a moment, then he chuckled.

“Miss Aurora.”

His voice was low and sweet, it warmed her more than the blanket did in the cool wind.

And then he reached for her and she was
riding
on that wind.

“You’re supposed to be my bodyguard,” she said, teasing him, “and here you are way out here. It would’ve taken you a long time to get to me if I’d called.”

“You just call me and see how long it takes.”

The hard significance in his voice sent a thrill all through her.

“I didn’t even have to call, you were watching for me.”

“Ready to guard your beautiful body,” he
said, laughing low. “Come here to me.”

He set his feet wide apart and took her into his arms, folded her close and, securing her breasts against his hard chest, tucking her head beneath his chin, held her to him for a long, trembling moment. She felt his face in her hair.

“I thought you’d never come,” he murmured. “Lord, Aurora, I was about to come blasting into that wagon after you.”

“And scandalize the whole crew?” she said, dropping a kiss into the open neck of his shirt. “Your skin smells like rain.”

His hand slipped inside the blanket, stroked her back, hot and hard through the thin fabric of her gown. It slid downward to caress her hip. Her blood began to blaze.

“You smell like heaven,” he said.

His one hand pressed her closer to him, brought her belly against his hardening manhood.

“What does heaven smell like?” “You.”

She laughed and went on tiptoe, lifted her face to his.

“Were you really about to come after me?”

“Damn straight. I just didn’t want Cookie coming after
me
with a shotgun, that’s all.”

He gave a low moan, he held her closer yet, but still he wouldn’t kiss her. She brushed her lips back and forth on his skin, she touched the tip of her tongue to the sweet hollow at the base of his throat.

“Stop that, now. I have to give you your present first.”

She pulled back to look up at him.

“My
present?
I have a present from you?”

He chuckled low in her ear.

“Greedy. You’d rather have a present than a kiss from me.”

“I would
not. You’re
the one who won’t kiss
me!
”

Laughing, he swept her up into his arms, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and clung to him, her heart roaring in her chest. How had she lived this long without him?

He carried her only a few steps back into the trees, into a tiny cove of a clearing on the side of the hill that had a floor strewn with pine needles painted silver by the moon.

“I don’t know,” he muttered, “you made me wait so long and waitin’s so hard for me to do, maybe I ought to keep this present. Might teach you a lesson.”

“You don’t dare,” she said dangerously. “No one has given me a present since … I can’t remember when.”

But they both had trouble breathing as they talked. He pressed a quick, hard kiss to her temple, she tasted his cheek with the tip of her tongue and wrapped herself more tightly around him. The gift really wasn’t important at all.

She couldn’t even tear her gaze away from his face long enough to see what it was.

The shadows flickered across his eyes, the
moon laid a ribbon of shining silver across his mouth. Her very heart turned over inside her. His gorgeous, sensual lips, full and slightly parted, curved at the corners in the ghost of a smile. A smile on that fiercely handsome face could make any woman weak with desire.

He knelt, and she felt a soft bed beneath her, but she couldn’t loose her arms from around his neck.

“No use trying to distract me now …,” he said, dropping hot, sweet kisses onto her cheeks and hair, her forehead, the last one deliberately, tantalizingly close to the edge of her lips.

She turned her face to try to catch his lips with hers, but his mouth danced away.

“… I’m a stronger man than that.”

“
You’re
the one distracting …”

He turned her around, settled her back against his chest, surrounded her with the iron safety of his arms.

“There,” he said. “For you, Miss Aurora.”

A huge bouquet of flowers shone at the head of the bedroll he had spread there, some lighter, some darker, but all silver in the moonlight. All silver and all wonderfully beautiful and all for her.

Sudden tears blurred her eyes. To think that he would do such a thing!

“Gorgeous,” she whispered. “Oh, Cole.”

“I saw ‘em when I was hunting my hat,” he said, “and stole a bucket from Cookie to put ‘em in.”

“Oh, Cole.”

“ ‘Course they were already soaking wet from the storm, but I didn’t know how long before they’d wilt.”

“Oh, Cole.”

“In the morning you can see they’re the color of the sky—and your eyes.”

“Oh, Cole!”

“You’ve gone to repeating yourself somethin’ terrible,” he said, and began rubbing his cheek against hers, his lips seeking hers, demanding her kiss. “We’re gonna have to put a stop to that.”

His mouth, hot and hungry, took hers, and she turned in his arms like a starving person.

“Ah, Aurora,
darlin
’,” he moaned into her mouth as he drove her down beneath him on his bed.

He broke the kiss only for the most fleeting instant, though, and she fell into it with a passionate abandon that wiped away the world. Nothing else existed, nothing, except Cole, hard and strong and wanting her, bringing her flowers, melting her against him until she needed nothing more.

Except more of him.

His tongue twined with hers, talked to her without words, tempted her and tantalized all of her body, set her blood to rolling high, filled her with fire. His hands opened the blanket, slipped beneath her gown, stroked her ardent skin.

She reached for the buckle of his belt, ran her palm over the bulging buttons of his Levis. The
touch made him moan with pleasure.

The buckle came undone.

“Boots,”
he muttered against her lips.

Finally, with an incoherent sound of protest that came from deep in his throat, he tore his mouth from hers and sat up to pull off his boots, but with one hand still touching her almost all the time, with his mouth coming back to hers again and again. Aurora found the fly of his jeans with both hands, began work on the buttons.

One by one they popped open, the huge hardness of his manhood beneath them swelling beneath her fingers, torturing her trembling hands. He gave a desperate groan and ground his mouth into hers, cupped her breast in his hand, kneading it, rubbing the standing nipple with his thumb through the thin fabric of her gown. With the other, he began to help her, and somehow the two of them managed to divest him of his pants without breaking the kiss or removing his hand.

She ran her hands up under his shirt and rubbed the muscles rippling under the smooth skin of his back with her palms. Until she could no longer stand any barrier between them.

“Quick,” she said, gasping for air but wanting nothing but his mouth again, “get this off me.

He did, while she ripped open the buttons of his shirt and pushed it off his huge shoulders. He shook it off his arms and away, and they fell back into each other’s arms. She arched her
back enough to rub the hard tips of her breasts against his chest, and he gave a rough, primal cry of wanting,
needing
, needing
her
, that melded her to him.

“Darlin’,”
he whispered.

The endearment was only the lightest feather drifting on that one long breath of his, but it floated all the way into her heart. How could she ever have lived for twenty-four years without this? She hadn’t. She had only existed.

She’d never have the power of speech anymore, those had been her last words, ever, because for the rest of her time on earth all she was going to do was give her mouth to Cole, take his mouth with hers, kiss him brazenly and mutely for the rest of her natural life. That’s all she would need, that and his hard, hot length on top of her. And his hands caressing her skin.

And … yet, something more.

Cole knew that. He broke the kiss and slipped his hand beneath her back to arch her up again and hold her gently, like a treasure newly found. He lowered his head to her breast and took her hard nipple into his mouth, surrounded it with his tongue and suckled it with his lips. All power of thought left her, too.

Moving on pure instinct, she thrust her fingers into his hair to cradle his head in her hands, to hold it carefully there so he could never stop what he was doing, never, ever. He was creating heat in her blood that rose all the way through her skin, he was sending thrills
along her skin that sank all the way into her bones.

He was making her tremble all over, making her womanhood weep for him.

He was destroying her, for she would never be the same. And she did not care, all she wanted was more.

She let him move to her other breast, but she kept running her fingers through his hair, kept holding his mouth where she wanted it, willing this delight never to end, until he began stroking his calloused palm over her hip, over her thigh, along the inside of her thigh. Then his fingers moved higher and into her and her hands fell away from him, she collapsed with her arms at her sides, lost in the sensations Cole created, lost in the magic he made that filled every one of her senses.

To make her beg in helpless silence for more.

He knew that, too. He heard her begin to whimper deep in her throat, he felt her arching to him, pleading with her breasts, her wordless tongue.

But it was not until she was able to lift her hands and to find his hard shoulders, to rake her nails over them and cry out in incoherent, frantic supplication that he lifted himself over her and she brought him in. A sting of pain ran through her at that first moment, but then she melted around him and moved with him in the ageless, seductive rhythm of a woman and a man.

And then the lightning struck again, into the
midst of this new, mighty storm, struck
inside
them both as one, and they were burning, together, like the flame of a tall pine in the wind. Dancing through the sultry air together, flashing like one glittering star in the dark of the night.

When their blaze became a conflagration, it consumed her, heart and soul, for Cole tore his mouth from hers, threw back his head, and called out her name.

He woke at first light. For one long, delicious moment, no thoughts came to him, only the feel of Aurora, nestled in his arms, and the scent of her. The warm satin of her skin against his. The cloud of her hair tickling his chin, shining like the spun gold of a fairy tale, even in the last feeble light from the moon. The soft, gentle sound of her slow breathing, deep as a sleeping child’s.

She was a woman, for sure, though. He’d never known one with such passion.

So how could he have known that he was the first man for her?

He couldn’t have, so he shouldn’t feel guilty about that. After all, hadn’t she talked about suitors from here to Philadelphia? Hadn’t she come to his bed in her nightgown?

A tenderness took him, anyway, and he held her even closer, although already they were fastened together everywhere they touched like the bark on a tree. And he was gratified by every inch of it. He could barely remember
what it was like to wake up with her
not
in his arms.

That was a damned dangerous position to be in, for an old renegade like him. He never stayed the night with any woman, ever.

He hardly ever even cared to be with any woman twice.

Right now, he wanted to be with Aurora forever.

He ought to tell her, as soon as she opened those big blue eyes of hers, that this would never happen again. That was it. He was her bodyguard. That was all.

Just waking up holding her was heaven, though. He waited a minute more.

Finally he kissed her shoulder, then gathered her to him and squeezed her tightly for one heartbeat, then two.

“Aurora,” he whispered. “You don’t want to miss your namesake, do you?”

She opened her eyes and shifted in the curve of his arm to turn to look at him.

“Your skin’s soft as a foal’s nose,” he said, stroking her arm.

Her slow smile made his heart turn over.

“Well, well, that certainly is an improvement,” she said, her words slurry with sleep, “better than ‘Aurora, you’re stubborn as a mule’ by a long shot.”

He laughed.

“What was it you said when I woke up?”

He looked into her eyes and forgot what the question was, much less the answer.