He laughed aloud, arching a brow high once again.
“I’m trying to be decent,” she assured him. “I believe you’re feeling the pain of your past tonight. I’m trying not to intrude on your memories. I didn’t mean to come into your life, hurt you worse?—”
“You didn’t mean to come into my life—or have me in yours.”
“You twist everything!” she accused him. “I was trying to leave you alone?—”
“But I don’t want to be alone.” He wasn’t quite sure what it was in his tone or perhaps even in the way that he looked at her, but he somehow disturbed or startled her.
She took a step backward, tripped over the sleeping robe, and landed hard on her back and buttocks upon the hide-strewn ground. Not one to lose an advantage, he quickly pounced on top of her, straddling her hips. The buckskin dress had slid upward when she fell so that his thighs embraced bare flesh. The soft brush of her blonde triangle teased against his own flesh made bare by the briefness of his breechclout. A shudder ripped through her, yet she stared up at him quite defiantly as he smiled, threading his fingers through hers before pressing her hands to the earth by her side. He leaned low, his lips just inches from hers as he asked her politely, “Now, just what was it you intended for me to lose?”
“You think you’ve got me down, don’t you?” she queried.
He looked at his position and hers. Shifted slightly. Felt the rub of her flesh, her softness.
“Quite frankly—yes.”
“Your time will come.”
“I’m planning on it,” he assured her.
She shook her head and sighed with exasperation, but her eyes were bright, filled with laughter as well as irritation as she tried to ignore the sensuous fire that was being stoked between them. “I was truly just trying to give you time to think?—”
“I don’t want to think.”
“Ah! That’s right!” she murmured, staring defiantly into his eyes. “You like—” She hesitated, swallowing. Every ounce of sensation within him must have been vividly clear to her at that moment. “—the nights,” she finished a little breathlessly. Then added, “Even in a tipi.”
“Especially in a tipi. I love the scent of the earth. The feel of the night. The fire so close that you lie right beside it, feel its heat on your flesh…”
Flesh…God, he could feel her flesh!
“Isn’t…isn’t there some sort of a taboo against such things while you’re in the midst of important male discussions?” Skylar queried sweetly. She shifted slightly. The dress rose higher.
“Though there are many things I find exceptionally admirable about my mother’s people, I am also quite glad at times to be white. Sioux braves believe that intimacy with their wives weakens them when they are about to go into battle. Before they leave on a war party, they abstain from sex and go through various purification rights. Often, when I’m among my Oglala brethren, I try to do as they do.”
“Do you?”
He smiled at her, moving his hand from hers to draw a strand of hair from her face. “Ah, don’t sound so anxious, my love! You see, a meeting is quite different. There is no war party being planned for the moment. And if there were…the white half of me just wouldn’t feel the need for abstinence.”
“No?” she whispered.
“No.” With his free hand he removed the breechclout and tossed it away.
He was probably lucky it didn’t land in the fire.
Didn’t matter at the moment.
She mattered.
He shifted his position, thrusting his knees between her thighs, lowering his face very slowly to hers, meeting the silver glitter in her eyes all the while. His mouth touched hers. He ran his hand down the length of her thigh, from her knee to her buttocks, shoving the buckskin dress still higher, caressing the soft, firm flesh of her derriere, lifting her. He thumbed the soft petals of her sex, teasing, stroking, parting. Thrusting. Finding the perfect place.
He had ceased kissing her. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted. Her breath came in ragged bursts. She tossed and writhed, set her hands upon his shoulders to push him away, to stop the seductive movement of his fingers. Her eyes opened, and he smiled, as pleased as a wildcat with its prey. He shoved her knees higher, shifted his weight once again, and thrust within her with the fullness of his sex, sinking until she had taken him completely inside her, holding there as their eyes locked, and smiling once again before beginning a slow, torturous movement, building, blinding, becoming thunder, hammering in his ears, throughout him. His body quickened, stretched, reached, and seemed to…explode.
Long moments later, when his heartbeat and breathing had slowed to something of a normal rate, he rose from her side, stripping off his moccasins and leggings, and tugging gently upon the garment she had smoothed back down over her hips. “That dress is really beautiful,” he said, running his finger over her cheek, then down upon the embroidery at the bodice. “Deer Woman’s work?”
“Yes,” Skylar said.
He leaned close to her. “I’m glad that you accepted the present so graciously. But you needn’t wear a dress into a sleeping robe.” He smiled, thinking that the Sioux sleeping robe, a huge blanket that swept around the body bringing comfort and warmth, was a wonderful invention. Two in a robe was incredibly intimate. He caught her about the waist, lifting her, drawing the gown carefully over her head and folding it before setting it aside. She sat, watching him gravely, at long last seemingly comfortable with him in her nakedness. The low-crackling firelight played upon her shoulders and breasts, bathing them in the soft crimson fire. Her hair was touched by it, too, her breasts, half-shadowed by the dance of the fire, peeked out from swirls and waves of golden hair. Silver eyes studied him gravely from the classical perfection of her ivory features, so out of place among the Sioux, yet so strangely in tune with the setting.
