The Renegades: Nick

by Dellin, Genell

  He’d seen regret there, though. Hope surged to life in him—maybe he had ridden out here to hold her, after all.

  She glanced at the bottom of the page she had written.

  “My name’s at the beginning.”

  “Yes, but it needs your signature at the end.”

  “Very well,” she said irritably. “Did you bring pen and ink?”

  He realized then what he had done. He had come to bring her back. To bring her home. All along, he’d been afraid to know it.

  “No.”

  She lifted those green eyes and looked at him. Somewhere, off far away to the southwest, thunder rumbled low behind the cloudy sky.

  “I have ink and pens packed in my supplies,” she said abruptly, and turned away.

  Maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe she hadn’t leaned into him for just one heartbeat when he had his arms around her. Maybe she would refuse to come with him.

  He followed her to the wagon wheel and helped her climb up to the seat. She moved quickly, let him touch her very little. When she was in and turning toward the back, to her meager load of supplies, he couldn’t take his eyes from her. He held his breath.

  Thunder sounded again.

  “Oh, don’t go to all that trouble,” he said, as she went to a stack of boxes carefully wrapped in her oilskin sheet. “Come on back to the house. It won’t take long and it’s a shame to tear into your boxes now.”

  She hesitated. A drumbeat of panic rolled through his blood. Her boxes belonged in his house. She belonged in his house. Oh, God, could he make her see that?

  “Well,” she said, turning toward the now-stronger sound of the thunder, “it might rain.”

  He forced his words to come out light and careless.

  “It’s October,” he said with a shrug. “About time for the fall rains.”

  She glanced around at her things.

  “I was going to stop in Santa Fe and buy a wagon cover.”

  Was. He didn’t dare say a word. He waited.

  “All right,” she said, at last. “No sense getting everything wet before I can get to town. I’ll go back and wait out the storm.”

  He longed to climb up to the seat and take the lines from her when she sat down and picked them up, but he couldn’t, for fear of scaring her away. For fear of reaching for her too soon, before he thought of what to say.

  “Good plan,” he said, and vaulted up onto the Shapeshifter. The horse turned back toward home as if he’d understood every word.

  “You caught up with me just in time,” Callie said, as she brought the wagon around, “like you did the first time.”

  “First time?”

  “Here’s where I was driving my stake on your claim,” she said matter-of-factly.

  He glanced around. She was right, within a stone’s throw. His pulse quickened—maybe it was a sign.

  The trail up the canyon was too narrow in most places for them to travel abreast. Callie seemed lost in her own thoughts, anyway, and he wanted time to pull his together. He didn’t know what to do or say, but he did know he had to convince her to stay.

  The thunder sounded louder as they rode up the dry creekbed, and he began to smell rain much heavier in the air.

  “Maybe it’ll come a good, long rain,” he called to Callie, who only nodded.

  He couldn’t could care less about the rain, except as it served to keep Callie with him. If only it could be a long, steady deluge that would go on all day! He might need time to convince her to stay. That was what he wanted, he knew that now, but on what terms? Was he wanting to make their marriage a real one?

  Scattered drops hit them on the way past the pond, and huge fast ones began to pelt down as they drove into the yard.

  “Drive on into the barn!” he called, but she was already doing so, as if she did indeed live there.

  Smiling, he opened his mouth to say something about unhitching her team, then snapped it shut again. She was intending to drive on soon; she didn’t know yet what he was thinking.

  She might not want to know, either, but he had to try to tell her, or spend the rest of his life battling even worse regret than he was now. He knew that.

  Nick rode in behind the wagon, stripped the Shifter of his bridle, and turned the horse out. All the horses were running and calling, excited by the coming storm.

  “We’re going to get wet!” Callie was laughing when she said it, when she ran up to him at the pasture gate.

  He looked into her beautiful, open face, with the raindrops running down her cheeks like big tears.

  “Do we care?”

  She laughed again.

  “No. At least it’ll settle the awful dust.”

  Just then the heavens opened and it began to pour. He grabbed her hand and they raced for the shelter of the porch.

  “I thought we didn’t care if we got wet,” she teased, as they ran up the steps.

  “We don’t. We’re going to go right in and stir up the fire.”

  He opened the door and shepherded her in ahead of him. Now, suddenly, he knew what he must do. He had known it since he’d walked in here and seen that mug sitting on his table desk.

  “But first,” he said, “let’s take care of our business.”

  She had headed toward the fire but she stopped.

  “Yes,” she said, suddenly sober, “let’s.”

  Going toward the desk, she glanced back at him. “Then, when the rain stops, I’ll be on my way.”

  He didn’t answer, only pulled the sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. Callie sat down in his chair and opened the bottle of ink, took up the pen, and wiped it.

  Spreading the page out in front of her, he bent over to hold it flat. He shouldn’t have. She smelled like rain, and as always, like flowers—which should have been impossible, since there couldn’t be a fragrant blossom alive within a hundred miles.

  He fought the need to touch her while she dipped the pen into the ink and the rain poured down outside.

  Calladonia Sloane Smith, she wrote.

  He couldn’t stop looking at those words. Would she ever write them again?

  “There,” she said briskly, in her schoolteacher voice.

  “Thank you.”

  He picked the paper up with his fingers gone stiff with fear.

  “Now we’d better stir up the fire,” she said. “From the sound of it, the rain won’t stop for awhile.”

  It was a deluge, nothing less, water streaming from skies that had been dry for months. Years.

  He walked toward the fire because he didn’t know what else to do. He knew he couldn’t touch her until he said something, but his tongue was tied.

  How did a man get a woman past all those terrible things he’d said?

  She wasn’t coming along behind him; she hadn’t gotten up from the chair. She wasn’t making a sound.

  He got to the hearth and dropped to his haunches in front of the glowing coals. Holding the deed in one hand, he reached into the kindling box with the other.

  “Callie,” he said, in a voice he hardly recognized, “would you be so kind as to bring me some lucifers from that box in the drawer? This has burned down pretty low.”

  He tucked the paper beneath the sole of one boot and kept busy arranging the kindling on top of the barely glowing pieces of old logs, while his heart beat as hard and slow as death to let him listen in between.

  At last, the drawer opened and closed. The chair scraped back. Her skirts swished; her heels clicked against the planks of the floor.

  “Here.”

  He glanced up, took them and struck one against the fireplace stone, breathing in its scent of sulphur as he held it to the kindling. A whiff of hell, they said. And if he didn’t do this right, if Callie left him now, that was exactly where he’d be.

  The twigs caught fire.

  He half turned and cocked his head so he could look Callie in the eye.

  Rocking back on his heel, he took the quit-claim deed, crumpled it in his hand, and dr
opped it onto the bursting flames. Then he gathered all his courage and stood up to talk to her.

  “Nick! You just had me sign that!” she cried, glancing back and forth from him to the fire as if to rescue the paper. “What are you doing?”

  As she stared at him, though, a dawning understanding mingled with the shock in her eyes. The look stripped him of fear and brought the truth to his tongue.

  “Trying to prove that I trust you,” he said hoarsely.

  She looked at him for a long minute more, as if trying to memorize him, and then she reached up to touch his cheek with her velvet fingertips.

  “I’m sorry,” he rasped, “Callie, I didn’t mean those things I said.”

  “Oh, Nick,” she whispered, “you put your homeplace in my hands.”

  “I’m putting my life in your hands.”

  She took his face between her hands as if to prove what he said was true, then stood on tiptoe to bring her mouth to his.

  He accepted the kiss and kissed her back, with a desperation he had never known before. She felt it, too. It trembled through her with the same ruthless force as through him; he could feel it in every inch of her body.

  To reassure her, he stroked her back, her shoulders, her arms. Then he cupped her bottom and brought her up against him so close that nothing could ever get between them again. His tongue found hers and did the same. She thrust her fingers into his hair and pulled him down to the floor in front of the fire.

  He helped her unfasten her bodice, she helped him peel out of his jeans, both of them clumsy as dolts. Lost in the magic of the kiss, they fought the endless stream of barriers they wanted gone, ripping and tearing, sending buttons flying and garments after them until they lay tangled on the solid oak planks, skin to sweet skin.

  “If you’d gotten away, I’d have lost my mind,” Nickajack murmured against her lips when he finally broke the kiss. “I tell you, Callie, I would have.”

  She gave a breathless chuckle.

  “I think you have, anyway.”

  “I have,” he said, “so get ready. I won’t get up from here until I kiss every inch of your body.”

  “You have to do it twice,” she said, tightening her arms around his neck. “I’ve lost my mind, too.”

  He froze and stared down into her eyes.

  “The babe! I forgot.”

  She laid her finger across his lips.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered. “It’s very early yet.”

  Then she cradled his face in her hands again and kissed him in such a way that he forgot everything he’d ever known, even his own name. When he finally reclaimed his mouth, then kept the promise he’d made her, she cried out and arched beneath him so hotly he could barely restrain himself.

  “Now, you stop that,” he murmured, as she stroked her soft thigh against him. “You won’t trust me unless I keep my promises. I promised to kiss every …”

  She brushed her taut nipples against his chest.

  “You are a she-devil,” he rasped and shifted so that he could reach one of them with his mouth.

  “That’s not what you say when you want me to sign some paper or other,” she purred, writhing beneath him, running restless fingers through his hair.

  Her breathing went shallow and quick as he dropped a ring of kisses around the tip of her breast, but she stubbornly kept on talking.

  “No-o-o. Then you’re all polite and nice to me and it’s ‘Callie, you’re an angel this, and Callie, you’re an angel that.’ “

  “Will you hush?” he said, laughing in spite of the pain of his great, swollen manhood. “I never knew you were so silly.”

  “There’s lots you don’t know about …”

  He took the rosebud nipple into his mouth and laved it with his tongue, and she couldn’t say any more. She could only give a soft cry and tangle her fingers, hard, into his hair.

  “O-o-oh, Nick.”

  She barely breathed his name but he heard it. He couldn’t stop hearing it, said in that sweet and loving tone.

  Then he moved to her other breast by marking a trail down into the fragrant valley between them and up the other side, and she could only gasp her pleasure and run her nails over his back and give little moans. His heart galloped; his body ached for release.

  But he laid slow, deliberate siege to her breast and reached for the tangle of red-gold curls between her legs. He brushed his hand across there, back and forth, then slipped inside to stroke the sweet, feminine folds.

  She fell to pieces.

  “Please,” she cried, squirming helplessly beneath him, but there was joy hidden in the plea. “Please, Nick …”

  She arched to him, then tried to twist the other way.

  “Nick, I want … please, Nick …”

  He tried, he truly did try, to keep his promise, but when she stroked his back, his hip, and then reached to close her silky hand around his huge, hard rod, he gave it up and gave in to her begging. He took her small, perfect hips in his hands and entered her.

  The joy pierced his spirit.

  If his life had ended at that moment, he could have been transported, happy, to that bright, yellow ball of the moon. For she cried out in pleasure and held onto him as if she would never let him go, and she kissed him as if she loved him. As if she would love him and stay with him forever.

  Callie was the partner he had needed all his life.

  He managed to kiss the tip of her turned-up nose, and then he forgot the promise and everything else. He let himself go into the hot, wild world they created together, and when it exploded inside them, he felt that his heart had exploded as well.

  It had spilled over into hers, and now it would belong to her forever.

  They lay entwined for a long time afterward, just breathing into each other’s ear, just feeling each other’s skin, just listening to the rain come drumming down.

  “I love you,” he said, before he even knew he would speak.

  Words he had never said to a woman before now.

  “I love you, Nickajack. I always will.”

  He raised up on his elbow to look into her shining eyes.

  “When I came into the house this morning and saw that mug sitting over there on the paper, I knew you were gone and I thought I would die.”

  “I took my time about leaving.” She smiled her ten-thousand-dollar smile.

  “I am so sorry, Callie,” he said, holding her gaze with his. “I don’t know how I ever could’ve said you were like other women, or that all women are alike.”

  Her smile changed to a teasing grin.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “I know how unreasonable men can be.”

  As they laughed together, he had never felt so close to anyone before.

  “You’ve left a piece of business undone,” she said, stroking his shoulder slowly, slowly.

  Spent as he was, desire began to stir again.

  “What is it?”

  “You came after me for your marriage certificate, remember?”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “What did you want with it, to throw it into the fire, too?”

  He laughed and brushed back the curving hair from her face.

  “N-o-o,” he said, “I was after proof of my husbandly rights.”

  She traced the shape of his lips with one tantalizing finger.

  “You don’t need words written on a piece of paper for that,” she said. “And you never will.”

  He kissed her again just to see if she meant it.

  And she did.

  About the Author

  GENELL DELLIN is a native Oklahoman who, except for some college years in Texas, has never lived in any other state. Her present home is not far from the long-ago border between the Cherokee Nation and the Cherokee Strip.

  Their son has finished college and gone away to learn to be a quarterhorse trainer, so Genell and her husband now share their house and barn with only furry, four-footed members of the family. One of them is a crochety, seventeen-y
ear-old cat named Tiger Tom, who waits on Genell’s footstool to steal her chair when she gets up from the computer. Bubba, her big wolf/dog who can almost speak English, is a character in the first book of her Western series, The Renegades: Cole.

  The Renegades: Nick is the second book in the series.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

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  THE LAST THING HE EVER EXPECTED TO DO WAS TO KISS HER.

  All Nick had wanted was for Callie not to get hurt when she fell off that crazy mare, not to get trampled or killed. But as he caught her in mid-air and felt the sweet weight of her in his arms, he instantly turned greedy for more.

  There she was, still wild-eyed with fear, gasping with relief, her luscious lips parted and her breasts rising and falling against his chest with her hard breathing. Then she buried her face in his neck.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said, her lips hot against his skin. “I thought … I’d die … before I could get to you.”

  The words wrapped themselves around Nick’s heart. He crushed her closer, and, still struggling for breath, she lifted her face and looked at him as if he were the most wonderful thing she’d ever seen.

  “Callie,” he said, ‘You have got to learn to ride.”

  Then he kissed her, long and hard.