KNIGHT IN A WHITE STETSON

by Claire King

  She'd had the same dream three nights in a row. He should never have asked her about her brother. Whatever pain she had pushed beneath the surface of her conscious mind had obviously been resurrected.

  He exhaled heavily, willing his shaking hands to still, and lay back on his cot. He stared at the tent ceiling.

  Five nights now he'd spent with this woman. Five nights and five days. And he was in love with her. How in the world had he made it more than thirty years without it happening, and in a workweek allowed this wild cowgirl to change everything?

  He'd lied when he'd said he wished he'd never seen her boots sticking out from under that truck. He'd had more fun, laughed more, dreamed more, been more blood-pumpingly alive since that day on the high desert than he'd ever been. He'd found for the first time what a simple kiss against a haystack could do to a man. It could cripple him with longing, could make him feel as powerful as a thunderstorm.

  He'd wanted Heidi, with what he'd thought of then as unusual desire. But when he touched Calla, he knew he'd never really wanted anything before. Not sex, not science, not the secrets of the physical universe.

  And, God, he liked her. Another revelation after his time with Heidi. He liked Calla so much. Liked the way she looked at the world, liked the way she worked, the way she took care of those three old people back at the ranch, the way she remembered her brother and her mother. He liked how she laughed, how she moved, how she thought. He liked that she dashed through lightning to save a frightened horse—it scared him bloodless in practice, but he liked it in theory—and how she stomped around, bossy and cranky and preoccupied, with a heart as fragile as glass.

  But more than any of that, if he was honest, he liked how she made him feel. Not a brain attached to arms and legs, but a man, with emotions as unruly as any man's. When he was with her, when he even thought about her, he was happy or angry or tender or insane with lust. Never indifferent or analytical or detached. In the space of less than four weeks, he'd felt the primitive adrenaline rush of pure jealousy, enough in his system to remind him that, no matter how many years he'd spent in a laboratory, he was still a man, and wanted no other man near the woman he knew to be his. He'd laughed harder, been angrier, felt more passion and fear and tenderness than he had since he was a child, since all those clear, true emotions had been educated out of him.

  She made him think, this clever woman with her quick mind and her world of troubles; but better, she made him feel.

  He turned on his side, found her watching him. Her hands were tucked under her cheek like a child.

  "Henry?"

  "What, honey?"

  "What time is it?"

  Henry looked at the glowing dial of his watch. It was 12:48 a.m. Saturday morning.

  "It's almost one."

  He heard her sigh, saw her close her eyes. "We go home in the morning."

  "Yes."

  During the long silence that followed, he thought she'd gone back to sleep. As he watched over her dreams, he turned his mind and his heart back to the question that had plagued him for days. How was he going to make this woman feel for him all that he felt for her?

  "Henry?"

  "Yes, Calla?"

  "I don't know what to do." Her voice was a whisper in the darkness, but he heard the break in it. It quickened his sore heart.

  "About what?"

  "About Clark. The ranch. About … you."

  His breath stopped. "You know what to do, Calla."

  "There's so much riding on … I have so many responsibilities. So many people counting on me." Dead and alive and not even born yet, she thought, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. A hundred years back, a hundred years forward.

  He shifted onto his elbow, his head propped on his hand. Pretty, he thought. Beautiful, amazing woman.

  She mirrored his posture in her own cot. They watched one another, while she decided, while he willed her forward.

  "I've changed my mind."

  "About what?" he asked. His voice sounded strange in his own ears, thick with sleep, and with a desire that had been simmering for weeks.

  "About you. About us. I don't want to go the rest of my life not knowing. I want…" She stopped, unsure.

  Henry came off his cot slowly, crossed the narrow space between, knelt beside her.

  "Say it, Calla."

  "I can't. You say it for me. I don't want to be wrong about this."

  He touched her hair, her face. "Me, Calla. You want me."

  "Yes."

  The word caught in her throat as he rose, giving her a starlit view of that honed body she'd come to crave more than anything else. He shucked his old-fashioned shorts and stood, already fully aroused, letting her know the impact of her decision for just a moment before he dropped beside her again.

  "I haven't even touched you," she whispered, awestruck, embarrassed, but he stopped her silly words when he kissed her. And kept on kissing her.

  Time made its own way, then, as it will for lovers. It seemed hours that he knelt beside her, kissing her, allowing her to kiss him. Such a gift, she mused.

  It may have been hours. Calla didn't know, and Henry didn't care. He didn't feel the rough boards under his knees, or the chill of the night air on his back. The long wait, the weeks-long lovers' dance, the power of every glance and delay of every touch was passed between them in those kisses, along with murmurs and moans and sweet words.

  Tongues met, stroked, met again and soothed, dove greedily into dark crevasses and slipped gently along wet surfaces. Oh, to kiss like this. Neither had ever done so, and they could barely stop for breath. This kind of kissing was for teenagers, for young lovers with nothing but time and no other outlet, but neither Calla nor Henry had ever been so young, and they took their time to learn, so late, what everyone else already knew. Calla's broken heart was forgotten, Henry's indifferent heart filled with new love, as sweet as any young love.

  And finally, he touched her, and she hadn't known how desperately she'd wanted him to until he did. His hands, the hands she'd so admired, the hands that had been the focus of too many small fantasies to count, slid beneath the cover of her sleeping bag and smoothed down her body, over the soft cloth of a worn nightgown, into the curves and dips of her body, stopping to admire with sensitive fingertips this flat plane, that high peak. She shivered and writhed under them.

  Henry fisted one hand in her hair to keep her still—he was terrified she'd make him stop—while the other one made the most incredible discoveries. He rolled a taut nipple between his thumb and forefinger, measured the length of a strong, smooth thigh, smoothed the flannel of her gown over the triangle of hair below her stomach, over and over until she cried out, until he felt a wetness through the heavy fabric, and he wished fervently that it was noon, so he could see what he was touching.

  He reached for the hem of her gown and tugged it upward. She lifted her bottom and he took it higher, higher. He touched again everything he'd touched before, only without barrier this time. Eyes closed, he let his lesser senses, of touch and smell, take over every other. His hand shook.

  The poor, rough skin of her mending scrape he tended to gently, apologizing without words for his part in marking her. He gripped her throat, slid his open hand down the center of her, smoothed over her hip, reached under and palmed her bottom. He touched her everywhere, and if she'd protested, he would have completely, unconscionably, ignored her.

  He came back to her breasts—finally, she thought, finally—and tugged at them, rolled them between his rough fingers, until the nipples stood as stiff as gemstones, and she begged for his mouth on her.

  He dropped his head and suckled. It brought him as much comfort as it did pleasure. Calla experienced nothing of that deeper significance. All she felt was the lust.

  It exploded inside her like a range fire. She gripped his head and kept him in place, arching under him so he'd take more, suck harder. She felt wild, displaced, frantic.

  "Oh. My. Goodness." She moaned out each word separate
ly as she slid to the floor onto her knees. She bunched her nightgown at her chest and arced her back to give him better access and wondered why the hell she'd never done this before.

  And when Henry dipped his finger into her, and groaned like a man dying when he felt how wet she was, she knew she'd die with him, from gratification and greediness and bliss.

  He played with her mercilessly. Slow circles, long strokes, his clever fingers dancing, fluttering, exploring, soothing, inciting. When it became too much to passively bear, she fell upon him like a madwoman, breaking contact with his fingers and his busy mouth on a cry of dismay, tipping him over backward, straddling him, kissing him frantically because she didn't know what else to do.

  Luckily, he knew. He might have smiled, in triumph, at her impatience, if he hadn't been caught in the same frenzy.

  "Take that off," he said.

  She leaned back and whipped the gown over her head.

  "Oh, Calla," he breathed. She towered over him like a goddess, her plum-tipped breasts firm and swollen with passion, the wet curls against his belly the same color as her hair. He rubbed his knuckles across them.

  Calla whimpered and bowed back her body as a gift to him. "Henry…"

  He touched her again, parting her, running a long finger along her cleft, the pearl waiting there rising to meet him. It was as firm as a new rosebud, as soft as wet silk, as soft as anything he'd ever touched.

  He levered up, took a nipple between his teeth, making her cry out. He would've liked to have touched her breasts again, molded them, run his thumbs over the plum-colored crests, but what he touched now was too precious, too amazing. He couldn't make himself stop stroking, stroking, stroking.

  She came like a wave crashing, uninhibited. He watched her, intent on everything, her look, her scent, her movement. She bucked against him, unknowingly, as she crested, and he nearly went with her.

  No rest for the wicked, though. She snapped from her climax greedier than before. Her hands started to move before the last quiver inside her had abated. Aah. Henry.

  Straddling him, her eyes still closed, she took the same journey of his body he'd taken of hers. And she found that the dreams she'd had of him were so much less than what he really was. His chest was wide and hairy, with a narrow line of brown fuzz that winnowed down to his navel. She raked her short, functional nails through the hair, sorry for the first time in her life she didn't have inch-long claws. Henry didn't seem to mind. His back and hips came off the bare floor when she touched his nipples, making of himself a bow with his shoulders and heels, of her the arrow notched above.

  Ah, so he is sensitive there. Who knew a man could be so fascinating? She toyed with him, kissed and suckled and bit, and found that if she wriggled backward just a little, and slid ever so slightly back and forth, it made his eyes roll back in his head. And drove her insane.

  "Wait. Wait," he whispered frantically. He really would like to actually get inside her before he spilled like a randy teenage virgin.

  "Here." He sat up, banding her to him as he moved, and snagged her sleeping bag. Rocking back and forth on his knees, he managed to spread the bag beneath them. He stretched out again, taking her with him, lying next to her, then, when instinct could dictate nothing else, on top of her.

  He kissed her again, and she ran her hands along the taut muscles of his back down to his tight buttocks, lifting for him, urging him silently, in the way of women since the first coupling, to come to her. She felt as needy as if he'd never touched her. But he wouldn't be rushed; the wait had been too long, the sensations now, too intense. He kissed the hollow of her throat, the valley between her breasts, the rosy, tightened buds, the soft, white curve. He kissed her belly, the indentations at her hips of flesh stretched across bone, the delicate cup of her naval. He murmured regret over the bruise he'd given her, and kissed it gently, too. Every kiss he took as though it would be his last, every kiss she received as though it were her first.

  And when he reached that slick nub, that little, perfect center of her, and took her between his lips to brush at her with his tongue, and tasted what he'd already brought forth from her body, all worlds came apart; his, hers and the one they'd made together.

  "Ah … ah…" She reached for it. And it swooped down to take her, stronger, sharper, a thousand times keener than before.

  He hummed his pleasure as she bucked against his deft and mobile mouth. And before the first high crest subsided, he was inside, where he belonged.

  "Calla." It was his turn to moan. She was tight, hot, wet, everything he could have asked for. The mold within which he'd been cast. "Don't move … don't…"

  Innocent. It flashed through his head, where he dismissed it. Innocent. No, it couldn't be.

  She moved under him, in a way that told him she knew everything there was to know about this, even if it was the first time.

  He gathered what strength he could and lifted his head to look into her beautiful, her beloved face. "Calla?"

  "Henry," she moaned, her eyes tightly shut, and she writhed beneath him once more, seeking further rapture, a higher release. She clutched at him, trying to force him deeper, though he knew he could go no deeper; they were fully, gloriously together.

  A better man might have been able to resist the lure of her, to question and console, but he couldn't. He slid out of her body until he could feel those chestnut curls against his sensitive tip, and sank in again.

  Over and over, faster, faster, until she was gone again. He watched her climax under him until his own vision grayed and his own head dropped forward in surrender.

  * * *

  "A virgin." He could not believe it.

  "Mmm." He felt the low rumble of her laugh against his chest. "Not anymore."

  "Calla, you should have told me."

  "Why? So you could wonder what a twenty-four-year-old woman like me was still doing with a hymen?"

  "You didn't have a hymen."

  "I know. Horseback riding. It was a figure of speech." She opened her eyes to see him staring down into her face. She touched his face with tender intent. "How did you know?"

  How? He wasn't sure. It had been a revelation, like a vision in the desert. He was her first, he'd be her last. "I just knew."

  "Oh, well, so I didn't need to tell you, anyway."

  "You should have," he insisted. "I would have been more…" Something.

  She smiled up at him. "Gentle, tender, wonderful, spectacular? What?" She grinned up at him. "If you'd been more of anything, it would have killed me."

  Well, that was certainly good for the old male ego, she thought. She watched him in amusement as his concern turned slowly, manfully, inexorably, to satisfaction. He buried his face in her hair, took hold of her earlobe and bit down softly. She could practically hear him crowing.

  "It was like that for me, too," he whispered into her ear. If she hadn't known better, she'd have sworn he had turned just a little shy.

  He had, in truth, and it made him feel a bit idiotic. But that he'd pleased her so well, that it had been everything he'd hoped it would be, made him giddy. He wanted to laugh, to squeeze her tightly to him and never let go, to weep with the newness and discovery of it all. But he wouldn't tell her all that. Not yet.

  He rolled until she was stretched on top of him, protecting her from the hard floor as he wanted to protect her from everything. He ran his hand from her hip to her shoulder, again and again.

  "So," he asked after a while, "was that, um, your first orgasm?"

  She laughed. "Egomaniac. No. In fact, I had one just the other morning."

  "When?"

  "The other morning. When I woke up so crabby."

  "You'll have to be more specific."

  "I had a dream, about you. I had one then. I can't believe I'm telling you this."

  "You had an erotic dream? About me?" He was touchingly thrilled about that. It may have been the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. He was also hard again thinking about it. "What was I doing?"<
br />
  "Um, basically what you were doing a little while ago."

  "Which? With my fingers?"

  "Your mouth."

  "Huh." He wanted to slide down and do it again, with her on top this time. But he did have one more question first. "So, why were you?"

  She buried her face in the warm hollow of his neck. "Look, I think you know enough now."

  "Come on. Spill it."

  "It's my private business!"

  "Need I remind you where my mouth was a few minutes ago? You don't have private business from me anymore."

  She bit his shoulder, was pleased by the little yelp. "Dog."

  "Just tell me."

  "Why are you so curious?"

  "I just am. I'm curious about everything about you. So, spill."

  She should have had the will to separate from him. She should have got up, put her nightgown back on and gone back to her narrow cot. It was over, her curiosity and her lust were satisfied, and they both understood it shouldn't get any more intimate that it already was. But she couldn't resist. She snuggled naked on top of him and chatted as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  "I was a mess after Benny died. Grief-stricken and guilty and, God, for a while there, even suicidal." Henry tightened his hold on her for a minute. His grip almost took the breath out of her. "While everyone else in high school was steaming up the windows in their father's pickups, I was working like a maniac on the farm, trying to take Benny's place and keep my sanity."

  "But, eventually, I mean, you're twenty-four, and gorgeous, Calla. There must have been a thousand men since high school who wanted…"

  "Oh, please," she mumbled, flattered. "You've been up on this mountain too long. There were a couple guys I dated, but Paradise is not exactly teeming with eligible bachelors. Sober, employed ones, anyway. And I was always working, anyway. And when I went to college, I worked even harder, to justify the loan Mom had taken out."

  "And Dartmouth is obviously gay."

  Calla laughed. "No. But it's not like I have a lot of privacy in that old house. It's like living in an elder hostel. Besides, I'd already waited this long, and there didn't seem much point to doing it until I got married."