Daisies In The Wind

by Jill Gregory

  Wolf smiled thinly, and now that he had their undivided attention he continued in that same deadly-chilling tone, his ghost-gray eyes scanning each man and seeming instantaneously to take his measure. “I want the woman—and the two men that brought her. No outsiders have to die tonight—unless they want to,” he added coldly.

  Rebeccah didn’t even dare to breathe. Wolf was either very sure of himself or very foolish. How cool he was, she marveled in awe, even as her heart hammered with sick fear. If he didn’t succeed in facing them all down, he’d have to take them all on—all six of them. One man against six?

  She felt her throat closing in terror.

  Suddenly there was no more time for fear or wondering or even hope. Homer Bell, cussing, went for his gun.

  Wolf yelled, “Rebeccah, get down!” and at the same moment, with cold purpose, he fired.

  Blood bloomed across Homer’s chest, bubbled from his lips, and he crashed to the floor, twitching. Biting back her screams, Rebeccah dove under the table. She was never sure later exactly what happened next.

  Another outlaw in the saloon opened fire; there was an explosion of deafening gunshots, the stink of gunsmoke, the thud of another body. And a death scream.

  Rebeccah had her derringer out. She saw Russ go for his gun, drawing on Wolf, who had leaped forward in a half crouch, then a spin, firing and dodging bullets with a cool, astonishing agility beyond her comprehension. In a flash she aimed the derringer, but even before she could fire, Wolf wheeled toward Russ and shot first. Gaglin slumped to the floor right beside her, blood spouting in a crimson fountain from his temple.

  On her hands and knees, staring into his sightless eyes, Rebeccah bit her lips against rising hysteria.

  She heard someone—the bartender? one of the other outlaws?—say in a low tone, “Don’t try anything, Huff, that’s Wolf Bodine!”

  Then she heard Wolf’s voice, just as purposeful, drawling, “Mighty wise of you, fellows.”

  He edged toward her table, still with his gun trained on the remaining three men. With a sudden movement he tossed aside the table under which she crouched and, still training one of his revolvers on the bartender and the remaining two outlaws, he reached down a hand.

  “Come on, we’re getting out of here.”

  Somehow, then, they were out in the blizzarding night and Wolf was lifting her into the saddle. In one quick motion he had untethered Russ’s horse and was holding its reins, and then he vaulted up behind Rebeccah and spurred Dusty to a gallop.

  “Did they hurt you?” he shouted into the wind, as the sorrel’s long legs gathered speed and the whirling snow blanketed their shoulders and whipped against their eyes and cheeks.

  She shook her head, nestling deeper into his arms, letting herself go limp with relief and weariness.

  “We’re not going far,” Wolf yelled. “I know a place where we can spend the night!”

  “Wolf.” She stirred suddenly, and raised her voice, calling to him over her shoulder. “Is Toby all right?”

  “Toby’s fine,” he yelled back, and they both leaned low over Dusty’s mane as they swung under a cluster of low-hanging branches as the horse veered onto a twisting, wooded track.

  They rode in silence then through a belt of forest, emerged to follow a short burst of rolling land, then twisted their way along a steep, treacherously snow-covered ravine. Then once more they were flying along beneath slender silver birches. A rabbit bolted through the white night, its tracks quickly swallowed up by the endlessly twirling snow. At last they snaked their way through a convoluted trail that led between two walls of rocks, then rode downward into a hidden gully. There, tucked behind a copse of pine, sheltered on all sides by rock, was a small cabin, barely noticeable in the dimness, blending into the trees that surrounded it.

  Wolf rode to the rear of the cabin. He halted Dusty before a half-hidden lean-to amid the brush. With her help he tethered both horses in the lean-to, then paused a moment, listening. When he was satisfied that there was no pursuit, he turned back to Rebeccah.

  She looked half frozen and utterly exhausted, her normally pale skin bright from the cold. Shivering, her sable hair glistening with snow, she looked as if she would sink down to the earth at any moment with exhaustion.

  Wolf slipped a strong arm around her waist, alarmed as she sagged against him.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Looking up into his strong, dearly handsome face, so filled with concern, she felt a surge of powerful love bursting through her. She didn’t know how much longer she could hold it back. He had rescued her—again. He had risked his life to save her. He must have ridden for hours through the dark and the snow, despite all weariness, doubt, and the battering of the elements, tracking Russ and Homer somehow, with relentless determination and skills she could not even begin to imagine. He had found her, killed for her, and brought her to safety.

  “I’m fine—no, I’m perfect—now that I’m with you,” she heard herself whispering, a catch in her voice, and with a sweet ache inside of her she reached up shaking fingers to touch his cheek.

  She felt his body tense with some powerful emotion—a reaction to her words, or her touch, or both. His eyes lit with a vivid silvery-gray intensity, pinning hers so powerfully, she could not look away. Then Wolf swept her into his arms and carried her with no apparent effort and a great deal of lithe grace into the hidden cabin.

  21

  Wolf set her down on the floor of the pitch-black cabin, but his hands lingered around her waist, as if he was reluctant to let her go. His eyes quickly accustomed themselves to the darkness of the cabin. Moving away from her at last, he busied himself with matches and a kerosene lamp, which sat on a long table near the stove. He turned up the wick until the cabin was flooded by a soft yellow glow.

  It was only one tiny, square room, but to her weary eyes it was a beautiful, snug haven. It needed a good sweeping, but otherwise it was surprisingly clean and neat. Besides the table there was a wooden bench, a pile of logs in a crate beside a blackened hearth, and an old cast-iron stove over in one corner.

  But she noticed there wasn’t a bed.

  The wind wailed mournfully against the cabin’s two small rawhide windows. The log walls creaked beneath the force of it.

  “I’ll get my saddlebags and start a fire.” Wolf studied her lovely, cold-reddened face. “You look like you could use some brandy, Miss Rawlings. As luck would have it, I’ve got a flask in my pack.”

  “You certainly come prepared for everything, don’t you?” she said lightly, for now, more than the ordeal she’d gone through with Russ and Homer, it was the idea of being alone here in the dark woods with him all night that made her tremble. She tried to keep the conversation casual. “And I suppose you’ve forgotten my high susceptibility to spirits?”

  “I haven’t forgotten anything about you,” he returned with a cool grin that made her eyes widen and her heart spin like a top. “I have every intention of taking full advantage of your ‘high susceptibility to spirits’—so consider yourself warned.”

  He disappeared into the bitter night.

  A short time later they spread a heavy woven Indian blanket before the blazing fire and sat side by side a few feet from the flames. They sipped from steaming mugs of coffee generously laced with brandy. As the snowfall tapered to a gentle tumbling of lacy white bits and the brandy-flavored coffee tingled down her throat hot and potent and comforting, Rebeccah felt her cares slide from her shoulders.

  He’s doing this on purpose, she thought, feeling her body grow warm and relaxed, her skin begin to glow, and all the remaining tension melting from her limbs. He’s trying to make me forget about those other women forever hanging around him, trying to make me forget about all the reasons we do not suit each other, trying to make me forget that whenever we are together, one of us always ends up angry with the other.

  It was working. Whatever his plan, whatever his intentions, as she sat there beside him in that tiny fire
lit cabin hidden away in the woods, protected by rocks, trees, and a secret gully, she felt herself growing increasingly warm, felt every worry and objection and doubt rinsing away as though she stood with dust-caked skin beneath a softly sparkling waterfall.

  She turned her head to gaze at him. He was looking into the flames, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully, the thick, burnished hair so like the color of fine mahogany tumbling carelessly over his brow.

  He was so different from that carefree young man who had discovered her under the bed in that hideout cabin so many years ago—so much had befallen him since. His brother’s death, the hard years as a lawman battling the worst savagery of the West, Clarissa’s desertion ... and now Caitlin’s death.

  Rebeccah didn’t know if it was the brandy warming her and stimulating her blood or the rush of feelings long kept dammed, but she suddenly wanted Wolf Bodine more than she had ever wanted anything before: she wanted to reach out to him, to chase his demons away, to soothe his troubled soul. For she knew once and for all that beneath the steely veneer of the professional lawman, beneath the hard set of his features and the keen flintiness of his gray eyes, there lurked a lonely man.

  A strong, courageous, decent, and ultimately lonely man—a man who would risk his own life for others, who would be strong for them and brave when no one else would be. But she knew a secret about him, something she felt certain he did not suspect she knew. Beneath the steady strength and courage of his everyday life, he felt an emptiness, a long-standing sense of pained betrayal that was all Clarissa’s doing.

  Rebeccah wanted suddenly, yearningly, to pervade that emptiness, to fill that void. But there was something she needed to discover first.

  “Wolf?”

  At the husky note in her voice he turned his head. She nearly took his breath away, she was so beautiful. Her delicate face aglow in firelight, her hair shining blue black, like the finest, glossiest sable. But it was the expression in her brilliant violet eyes that was his undoing. Soft, rapt, glistening with something that could only be tenderness.

  It seemed impossible that the cold and haughty young woman who had stepped off the stagecoach a few short months ago with a chip on her shoulder and a grudge against lawmen could be looking at him this way now ... her eyes begging him to kiss her, her lips seeming to beckon and summon his to taste of their sweetness.

  Memories flooded over him. He remembered how gentle she had been with Caitlin at the end, how she had soothed her with music, and how openly and understandingly she had talked with Billy. She was not the same brittle girl who had come to Powder Creek—or was it he who had changed, he who now saw beneath the stony pretense she paraded for the world, he who now recognized her softness, her goodness, her inner beauty. ...

  “Wolf,” she breathed again, as he continued to stare at her, drinking in the sight of her, a sight warmer and more potent than a gallon of brandy-laced coffee.

  He couldn’t drag his gaze from those bewitching eyes.

  “What, Rebeccah?”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You just did.”

  The bewitching eyes smiled. “Tell me if the rumors are true,” she murmured, trying to sound casual, trying to disguise how much depended on his answer, how the direction of her life, her dreams, all hinged on what he replied.

  “Rumors are almost never true,” Wolf commented ruefully. He lifted one brow. “Which rumors do you mean?”

  “That you are either already betrothed or about to become betrothed to—”

  “False.”

  “False?” Rebeccah’s normally dulcet, low-pitched voice actually squeaked with excitement. The rapt sparkle suddenly returned to her eyes.

  Wolf stared at her in disbelief, wondering who had filled her head with such stories. “False,” he reiterated firmly. “No way. Anything else?”

  She nodded, so relieved and overjoyed by this abrupt dismissal of her worst fears that she said the next thing that popped into her mind.

  “Make love to me.”

  Wolf reached out and gently touched his finger to her lips, tracing the tender shape of her mouth as lightly as a butterfly. “Rebeccah, you shouldn’t say a thing like that to a man if you don’t mean it.”

  “I mean it.”

  Damn it, he thought, every muscle heating, his loins growing hard and heavy at her words and at the eager invitation in her eyes.

  Was she drunk? Despite what he’d said earlier, he couldn’t take advantage of that. One man had already taken advantage of her in the cruelest way imaginable and he couldn’t add to her pain.

  But she was leaning toward him, sliding her delicate hands around his neck, murmuring against his lips as she closed the distance between them with a little wriggle. “I’m not drunk, if that’s what you’re thinking. And I’m not going to change my mind. I love you, Wolf. I want you. I hoped you wanted me too. Maybe I was wrong.”

  “You loco little she-devil, I do want you—more than I ever wanted any woman—more than I ever wanted Clarissa.” He gripped her wrists. “You’re in my blood, woman, like gold fever or whiskey—only worse. Hell, much worse. I can’t think of anything but you. The other women I know—women I thought I could care for—can’t hold a candle to you. When I’m with them, I think of you. When I’m alone, I think of you. And when I’m with you, God help me, I think about the things I’d like to do to you.”

  “Do them,” she urged breathlessly, and ignited his mouth with hers.

  The kiss was soft, dazzlingly sweet, but after a few moments it became heatedly intense. His lips seared and tormented hers with a devouring urgency that left her moaning and gasping for more. Holding her head firmly between his hands, he deepened the kiss still more. His tongue touched hers, caressingly at first, then more boldly, possessively. Rebeccah felt her senses spinning out of control.

  “I love you, Rebeccah, every single beautiful thing about you,” Wolf breathed, his voice low and husky. Rebeccah could feel the heat and hardness and strength of him, she felt also the whipcord tension vibrating through his broad shoulders, his muscled arms and legs.

  “I love you, Wolf. I want you. Need ... you.”

  She murmured incoherently as his hands found her breasts and cupped them through the layers of her garments, sending delicious spirals of delight straight down to her knees. Desire sprang eagerly through her, soft as sunshine, intense as flame. While he kneaded her breasts, his fingers moving ever more arousingly as little squirms and moans of pleasure came from her, his lips, warm and sensuous, seared kisses down the side of her neck.

  Sweet, sweet torture. Rebeccah gave a low moan deep in her throat as he lowered her onto the blanket. He straddled her, gazing with glinting purposefulness into her passion-glowing eyes. Slowly, letting the tension and suspense build between them, he began unbuttoning her blouse. His fingers were sure and knowing, his eyes full of determined promise, while all the while he brushed kisses across her eyelids, her cheeks, and inside the fragile, exquisitely sensitive hollow of her throat.

  Dizzying sensations electrified her everywhere he touched. His mouth was heat lightning, his fingertips pure fire. And what she saw in his eyes filled her with a half-joyous, half-fearful anticipation. When he at last tugged the blouse free from the waistband of her serviceable navy wool skirt and tossed it aside, leaving her soft, rose-peaked breasts all but exposed except for the dainty lace camisole, Rebeccah’s pulse quickened painfully. Her heart was beating so rapidly, she thought it would explode through the wall of her chest.

  Wolf’s keen gray eyes gleamed with pure sensual appreciation as they roamed over her, seeming to drink in the exposed sight of her beneath him.

  He smiled down at her, a hard, yet oddly tender smile, as he noted the glowing sheen of her skin, hot to his touch, the quickness of her breathing, and the delectable rise and fall of her breasts as she reached up to pull him down to her.

  She was so lovely. So warm and giving and innocent, he thought he would die with the wanting of her. He inhaled th
e sweetness of her hair, letting the dark, satiny strands trail through his fingers. He lowered his head and licked at one impudent, hard-peaked breast, his own excitement growing as she gave a startled gasp. His mouth closed over the nipple even as his hand firmly captured its twin and began a deliberate torment.

  Her body was so hot and soft and willing. Passion ruled this dark-haired angel, however cool and starched a facade she might present to the world. Whatever Neely Stoner had done to her, at least it hadn’t destroyed this part of her, the capacity to feel passion and love. As Rebeccah’s body arced and writhed beneath the expert torment of his lips and hands, Wolf knew that he would never get enough of her, not until the end of his days.

  Moaning softly, Rebeccah wrapped her fingers in the silk of his hair even as her mouth demanded attention from his. His body pressed upon hers felt as much on fire as hers did, and his manhood felt huge and powerful. Her effect on him filled her with a curious, surging sense of power. Without thinking, acting only on need and instinct, she arced to meet the hard angles of his form and with insistent arms, entwined him ever closer.

  “You’re beautiful, Rebeccah. You’re so unbelievably beautiful,” he whispered, his breath warm against her lips. “I promise you I won’t hurt you, sweetheart. I’ll never let anything hurt you again.”

  What followed between them was a blur of taut, sweet sensation. Rebeccah only knew that she wanted him with a fierceness that would not be denied, and she sought to give him the same savage pleasure he was raining ruthlessly down on her. They were naked before the firelight, their garments flung in little careless heaps, and the woven blanket rough against their burning skin as they thrashed together on the floor of the cabin.

  She wrapped her legs around him and fluttered kisses across his shoulders and his chest. Lively hands played with the muscles that rippled across his supple back. With her head flung back, she found herself clinging to him, submitting to the pleasures of his hands, his tongue, and his teeth, which stopped just short of inflicting pain as he kissed the satiny length of her body and gently, surely, probed the moist, sweet depths of her womanhood.