“Show me what you need,” Elyssa said. “Show me!”
“You’re so small, and I—”
“But I’m not fragile,” she interrupted quickly.
Hunter shuddered. He had never been harder, more ready. Yet he knew very well the slick resilience of Elyssa’s body. If he was careful, she would take him like a sleek satin glove.
He groaned.
“Hunter,” Elyssa pleaded. “Do whatever you must. It’s all right.”
For a moment she thought he hadn’t heard. Then she felt the probing, intimate caress of his fingers between her legs. The delicious stretching sensation came again.
A wave of pleasure curled down from Elyssa’s breastbone to her thighs. The wave broke and spilled hotly between them. The sensuous, caressing pressure increased, sliding deeper.
“Hunter,” she protested raggedly, “I’m supposed to be pleasuring you, not the other way around.”
He tried to answer, but couldn’t. The hot, snug ease of Elyssa’s acceptance took his breath. His hips bunched as he pressed more deeply into her.
Another wave gathered and swept through Elyssa. Her abandoned, silken response made the world begin to slide away from Hunter, spinning him into a place where only fire existed.
Elyssa called Hunter’s name as her body arched, drawn taut by forerunners of ecstasy. Her head turned from side to side as she felt the wildfire biting into her body, a fire conjured by his caresses, a heedless blaze that increased with every motion of his body between her legs. He was burning her alive.
And she loved every sweet sting of the flames.
“This isn’t fair,” Elyssa said raggedly. “You’re giving me—everything—and taking nothing—for yourself.”
Hunter had no words to answer Elyssa. Her body was taking him so hotly, so perfectly. He pushed deeper into her and then deeper still, drawing her legs up beside his, opening her even more.
Liquid fire answered him, urging him to press harder, deeper, quicker.
“Hunter,” Elyssa whispered. “I—”
Her breath was unraveled by sharp, golden claws of ecstasy. Small cries were torn from the back of her throat.
Hunter caught Elyssa’s mouth beneath his. Then he sank into her, kissing her until their mouths were as intimately joined as their bodies.
When Hunter could go no deeper into Elyssa, he began to move. With each motion of his hips, she cried out. She clung to him, moving with him, sharing the sharp, shocking pulses of sensation that lanced through her. With each shared motion, fire burned more intensely, biting deep into her flesh.
Abruptly Hunter’s hips locked hard against her. His head lifted and his whole body shuddered wildly, repeatedly. Her name was ripped from him in a ragged cry of ecstasy.
The sound of her name breaking on Hunter’s lips consumed Elyssa. Crying, holding him with fierce strength, she gave herself to the fire of their joined bodies.
And to him.
It was a long time before Hunter was able to gather himself enough to look down at Elyssa, to see if his wild ardor had hurt her.
Eyes closed, she lay quietly beneath him, utterly relaxed but for the random echoes of ecstasy that shivered through her without warning.
He hadn’t hurt her at all.
Gently Hunter eased from Elyssa’s warmth, gathered her in his arms, and rolled to the side. He held her, stroking her slowly, enjoying the weight of her body against his. He had never felt like this with a woman, both at peace and as powerful as a god.
I could get used to this, Hunter thought. Except for the belt buckle digging into my thigh…
He laughed silently, both amused and amazed by the passion he and Elyssa ignited so effortlessly in one another.
“My sweet, sassy girl,” Hunter said, kissing Elyssa’s hair gently. “Next time I really will have to slow down long enough to get properly undressed.”
Elyssa smiled and nuzzled against Hunter’s chest.
“Maybe after we’re married,” he added lazily.
A chill went through Elyssa as she remembered the first time Hunter had discussed marriage.
With God as my witness, Elyssa Sutton, if you don’t grow up and be a good mother to my children, you will rue the day you teased me into marrying you.
“It’s not necessary,” Elyssa said with a calm she didn’t feel.
“What?” Hunter asked, shocked.
“I’m not a virgin. Just because we’re…”
Elyssa’s voice died. She didn’t know how to describe what they were to each other.
“We’re just lovers,” she said after a moment. “No promises are necessary. We don’t have to marry.”
Hunter didn’t believe what he was hearing.
And not hearing.
Abruptly Hunter realized that for all the sweet cries he had dragged from Elyssa, her love for him had not been spoken aloud. In the heat of passion he hadn’t noticed.
He was noticing now.
“Don’t be a fool,” Hunter said roughly.
“Exactly,” she retorted. “I’m glad we agree.”
“I’ll send for a preacher as soon as—”
“What for?” Elyssa asked in a tight voice. “If you’re missing a formal sermon on Sundays, go to Camp Halleck.”
“Damn it, Sassy, what we just had is too good to walk away from!”
“Yes, but it’s not enough for a life sentence.”
“Of all the damn fool—”
“You want a woman for a wife, not a sassy girl,” Elyssa interrupted tonelessly. “You want a woman you respect, someone you can trust to raise your children. That’s not me, is it?”
For an instant Hunter hesitated as memories rose in a black wave. The last time he had let desire choose his wife, his children had paid with their lives.
Hunter’s hesitation was all the answer Elyssa needed. Quietly she closed her eyes and fought not to cry.
He made love to me so carefully this time, I had hoped…she thought. Then, painfully, Hunter’s right.
I’m a fool.
Hunter felt the change in Elyssa’s body, tension replacing relaxation, distance replacing trust. When she tried to sit up, he held her against his body.
“I was thinking of the past just now, not of you,” Hunter said.
Elyssa shook her head.
“Damn it, honey. It’s not how you took it.”
Elyssa looked at Hunter. In the mysterious twilight of the cave, her eyes were as darkly gleaming as the pool.
“If I were a widow,” she said, “would you be pressing marriage now?”
Hunter stared at Elyssa, not able to believe that she could calmly get up from their shared bed and act as though nothing special had happened.
We’re just lovers.
No breathless promises of love.
Just lovers.
Anger replaced the contentment that had stolen through Hunter.
“You aren’t a widow,” Hunter retorted. “You’re a hot-blooded, reckless girl who doesn’t know her own mind from one minute to the next.”
Hunter heard his own words and realized that his temper was digging a hole deep enough to bury him. He bit off a savage curse and tried again to reason with Elyssa.
Just lovers.
“You’re a young woman,” Hunter said with great care, “and I’m a man old enough to know better. I’m prepared to do what is right.”
Anger flicked through Elyssa’s veins.
“I’m not,” she said.
“Damnation, Sassy! A few days ago you said you loved me!”
Hunter’s words went into Elyssa like knives. Her breath sucked in on a wave of pain.
“Did I?” she asked in a brittle voice.
“You damn well did and you know it.”
“Well, what do you expect from a hot-blooded, reckless girl but girlish declarations of love?”
Hunter winced at hearing his own words. Tenderly he stroked Elyssa’s long, tangled hair and tried to gather her closer. The stiff resistance of
her body didn’t change.
“Honey,” Hunter said gently, nuzzling her ear, “I didn’t mean that as an insult to you. I love your reckless passion.”
A sensuous shiver went through Elyssa at Hunter’s caress. Even angry and hurt, she couldn’t help responding to him. It didn’t even surprise her anymore.
Elyssa had never known anything close to the incandescent pleasure Hunter gave her. Just the thought of sharing his body again made her breath shorten.
“In bed, yes, you love my reckless passion,” Elyssa said. “But there’s more to marriage than sex.”
“Will you listen to reason?” he asked tightly.
“I always do. But you’re not always reasonable.”
Before Hunter could answer, Elyssa was speaking again. The sad acceptance in her voice should have come from a woman much older.
“Don’t let your conscience grind on you,” Elyssa said against Hunter’s neck.
Hunter’s fingertips caressed her hair and the downward curve of her mouth. He didn’t know what to say. Every word he spoke only seemed to make it worse.
“I know I’m not the love of your life,” Elyssa said. “But like marriage, love isn’t necessary for pleasure, is it?”
“Sassy, that’s—”
“We just proved it,” she interrupted. “Didn’t we?”
Elyssa’s teeth closed not quite gently on Hunter’s neck. If all she could have of Hunter was his body, she would take it. Deliberately her hands smoothed down Hunter’s torso until she found the place where he was most different from her.
Hunter’s eyes narrowed against the sudden, impossible leap of his flesh. Her fingertips caressed him like living flames, tracing each sensitive ridge of flesh, every changing texture, learning his growing strength in a silence that burned.
Then Elyssa’s hot, hungry mouth slid down Hunter’s body, tasting all that she had discovered, memorizing him in a way that left him shaken and wild.
“Now I know why they’re called fancy men,” Elyssa breathed against Hunter’s aroused, painfully sensitive flesh. “I’m so plain compared to you.”
With a hoarse sound Hunter dragged Elyssa up his body, rolled over and buried himself in her, ending one sweet torment and beginning another. He moved heavily inside her, sparing her nothing of his potency. Her cries and the hot scoring of her nails told Hunter that Elyssa liked his power.
The third time Hunter held Elyssa arched and shivering with ecstasy, he let go of control. The endless, pulsing release left him too spent to raise his head.
Only later, much later, did Hunter realize that no more had been said about duty or conscience or marriage.
Or love.
23
By the time Hunter and Elyssa finally left the twilight intimacy of the cave, it was mid-afternoon. Silently they rode toward the ranch.
Neither spoke, for neither wanted to argue about what their future should be. For the time being it was enough simply to ride close to each other, near enough to give a gentle touch and receive the flash of a smile in response.
When Hunter and Elyssa were still a mile from the ranch house, Morgan came at a gallop toward them.
“Did you see her?” Morgan asked them.
“Who?” Hunter asked. “Penny?”
“The Indian girl.”
“No,” Hunter and Elyssa said together.
“Well, she’s gone.”
“What happened?” Hunter demanded.
“No one knows,” Morgan said. “When Penny found out the girl was gone, she rang the dinner bell.”
“When was this?” Elyssa asked.
“Morning.”
As Morgan spoke, his glance went from Elyssa to Hunter. Morgan’s shrewd brown eyes didn’t miss the telltale red of her cheeks. The color could have come from rouge, except that Elyssa didn’t wear makeup. It could have been sun or windburn, but Morgan suspected the color came from something closer to hand.
Hunter’s beard stubble, to be precise. A girl with skin as tender and fair as Elyssa’s showed each loving abrasion of a man’s cheek.
“She can’t get far on foot,” Elyssa said.
“She isn’t on foot,” Morgan answered. “She took that big bay mare we caught running wild last week, the one with the fresh Slash River brand on her hip.”
Elyssa bit back a curse. “That mare was one of my mother’s favorites. Thoroughbred and Arab. I had hopes for her as a broodmare.”
“No one ever accused Utes of lacking an eye for good horseflesh,” Hunter said sardonically.
Elyssa thought of the battered, bloodied Indian girl who had suffered so much at the Culpeppers’ hands. Elyssa couldn’t blame the girl for taking a Ladder S horse and running back to her own people at the first opportunity.
“One horse more or less won’t break us,” Elyssa said after a few moments. “Let her go and worry about the cattle.”
Hunter and Morgan exchanged a glance. Hunter nodded minutely.
“Yes, ma’am,” Morgan said. “I’ve got a bunch in mind.”
He spun his pony and cantered off toward the marsh.
“What are you two planning?” Elyssa asked.
Hunter’s head snapped toward her.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Just what I said.”
For a moment Hunter considered lying to Elyssa. Then he saw the clear, measuring intelligence in her blue-green eyes and knew it wouldn’t work.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” Hunter said.
“Rot.”
Despite Elyssa’s waiting silence, he didn’t speak again.
The look in her eyes changed. Bleak acceptance replaced the memories of intimacy.
“You don’t trust me at all, do you?” she said neutrally. “Not even a little bit.”
Hunter’s hand closed over Leopard’s reins just before Elyssa could turn the stallion away.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” Hunter said.
“Of course.”
The polite agreement in Elyssa’s voice nudged Hunter’s uncertain temper.
“Damn it, Sassy. What good would it do for you to fret about the Ladder S raiding the Culpeppers?”
“None at all, from your point of view.”
“To hell with me. I’m worried about you! There’s too much on your plate already, what with the Culpeppers and Penny still sick and finding out Bill is your father and the missing livestock and the battle over that Indian girl and…”
Hunter’s voice trailed into silence.
“Taking my first lover?” Elyssa finished.
Curtly Hunter nodded.
She gave him a haunting, bittersweet smile.
“Fancy man,” Elyssa said caressingly, “you are by far the best part of what is on my plate.”
Hunter winced at the nickname but didn’t protest it. Since he had felt Elyssa’s wild, sweet mouth all over him, he couldn’t react with real anger when she called him “fancy man.”
“I wish we were back at the cave,” Hunter said in a low voice, “and I was bathing you again, tasting you again. Cinnamon and cream and fire, a kind of fire I’d only dreamed of until you.”
Elyssa’s hand went to Hunter’s mouth, stilling his words. The trembling of her fingers against his lips told Hunter that she remembered as clearly as he did.
His tongue slid between her fingers.
“Hunter,” she said shakily. “Don’t.”
“Why? We both like it.”
“But we can’t do anything about it!”
“You’d be surprised what two can do on horseback,” he said, his voice teasing.
Inviting.
Elyssa bit back a groan.
“You’re used to this kind of thing,” she said. “I’m not.”
“Used to it?” Hunter shook his head emphatically. “Weren’t you listening, Sassy? I’ve never wanted a woman more after I’ve had her than before I did. Never.”
Elyssa’s eyes widened. “But that’s the way I feel with you. Each time m
ore. Isn’t that, er, customary?”
“Not for me,” Hunter said. “It’s damned addictive, though. Like you.”
Ruefully he shifted in the saddle, trying to accommodate his sudden, surging arousal.
“I think,” Hunter said carefully, “we’d better change the subject. Unless, of course, you’d like to climb up in the saddle with me right now.”
The thought of it made Elyssa smile.
“Don’t tempt me,” she said, repeating Hunter’s earlier words to her.
He gave a crack of laughter. Then he touched her mouth with breathtaking tenderness.
“When the men ride out tonight,” Hunter said in a low voice, “don’t follow. Promise me.”
Elyssa paled. “Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why you took me to the cave today,” she said starkly. “You were afraid you wouldn’t come back.”
“I couldn’t leave you with the memory of pain and humiliation. The thought of it…tore at me.”
“Let me go with you,” she said urgently.
“No.”
The word was like Hunter’s expression, hard and inflexible.
“But—” she began.
“No. Promise me.”
“But—”
“Do you want me to die looking over my shoulder for you?”
“That isn’t fair!”
“Do you?” Hunter asked again.
It was the very softness of his voice that told Elyssa she had lost.
“Of course not,” she said in a defeated voice.
“Then stay home.”
Methodically Hunter went through the ranch house and closed all the shutters. Because John Sutton had been a plainsman, an Indian fighter, and a cautious man, he had built heavy wooden shutters on the inside of the house rather than the outside. The shutters were meant to keep out bullets and arrows, not wind and rain.
Elyssa moved alongside Hunter, followed by the dogs. She had called them into the house to avoid any possibility that they would give away the men’s presence to the raiders.
As Hunter closed shutters, she opened the gun slits that ran in a vertical line down each shutter. There were slits in the heavy log walls, as well.
Penny tended to those openings before she took the dogs into her room and shut them up out of the way.
Autumn Lover Page 31
