He leaned close to her face. “We’re husband and wife, or we are not,” he told her. “The choice is yours. Say the word, and I will let you up.”
But she didn’t speak. Her eyes glittered with a fury that matched any he had seen in the face of the most savage Crow warrior. She was dead still, staring at him, challenging him. At last she whispered fiercely, “I am not going back.”
He didn’t know what he had expected from her. He didn’t even know exactly what he wanted.
Yes, he did.
He tried to tell himself that it was the whiskey in him, that he was drunk. But he had drunk to dull the sensations in him, the pain for his father, the desire for this woman. Hating her, doubting her, indeed, still wondering what part she had played in his father’s death.
But it didn’t matter.
He wanted her. Wanted her in a way that defied all reason. It was like a blinding pulse within him, a pulse that quickened its beat with each second that went by. It seemed like the force of a storm, like that of a hundred ponies tearing over the plain. More powerful than thought and reason and even pain. He was seduced as well. She had sold herself to the highest bidder. No matter how he challenged her, she wouldn’t say the words that would force him to set her free now no matter what rage of raw lust had taken root within his loins.
“Again!” he exclaimed harshly, “I ask you?—”
“I will be a wife!” she cried out furiously.
She was trembling, but he didn’t care. He shifted his weight, shoving apart her thighs with the force of his knees, adjusting his buckskin trousers. The painful swell of his sex lay against the softness of her flesh when he noted her eyes again. They had closed. Her lips were slightly parted. Her breasts rose and fell as she gasped for every breath she drew. He watched her, drawing a hand down the length of her hip and thigh, firmly stroking the smooth dip of her abdomen, then running his palm over the golden thatch of her mound before sliding firmly between her legs to part the tender lips of her sex. She shuddered fiercely again, her lips moving, no sound coming from them. He thrust her thighs further apart and felt again the fierce shuddering seize her. He leaned closer against her, pausing to catch her face in his hand, as he leaned down taut upon her. “Open your eyes!” he commanded.
She did so. Swallowing as she faced him. That silver fire still with her. But her eyes seemed huge once again. Luminous. She moistened her lips, wetting them furiously with the tip of her tongue. She writhed as if to combat the threat of him between her thighs. Yet she stopped quickly, meeting his gaze, her lashes falling then.
“You said something,” he whispered to her.
She shook her head.
“You spoke. What did you say?”
Her eyes opened again. “I said…”
“Yes?”
“Please.”
“Please what?”
She shook her head, closing her eyes. “Please, just don’t…”
He ground down on his teeth. Defied the savage hunger in himself.
“You can still be free.”
“I…no.”
“Then please…”
She shook her head again. She shifted. The hard, wildly-aroused length of his sex rubbed against her inner thigh. “Please, don’t…”
He frowned. “Hurt you?” he whispered.
She tried to turn away, forcing the tip of his sex intimately against the portals of her own. She froze, and he felt her body shaking again, rubbing against him, now driving him near to insanity. But he placed his palm against her cheek, brushing his thumb over her lips. “I’ll not hurt you,” he heard himself promise huskily. “I’ll do my damnedest not to hurt you.”
He pressed his mouth to her slightly parted lips, opening them further, filling them with the force of his tongue, tasting, stroking, coercing, moving slowly, leisurely at first, lulling…until he was certain that she responded. He kept his lips upon hers while he allowed his hands the exquisite freedom to roam over her body. Touching. Fingertips light upon the flesh of her inner arms, his palms barely touching the tips of her breasts. Holding, caressing, cradling the weight of them, arousing the peaks once more with a stroke of his palm, the manipulation of his thumb and fingers. His lips rose from her at last. Trailed alongher throat. Took root upon a swollen, crested nipple. Played long, slowly, suckling, teasing, his tongue darting against her flesh. Thunder played havoc in his mind. His body tensed into magnificent knots. He feared that he would implode with the hunger building inside of him…
She didn’t move. Didn’t protest. She trembled. At times, little sounds seemed to escape from her, gasps and moans. Only when he dipped lower against her, his lips skimming her abdomen as he moved his head in a horizontal pattern down the length of her, did her fingers suddenly clench his hair, then release it…and another sound escaped from her throat. He moved his hand down her inner thigh, his fingers stroking with a featherlight touch. With his fingertip, he drew a line that he touched then with the heat of his lips and tongue, feeling the rigid tautness of his own muscles, the straining within him, the desire spiraling with each taste of her. His fingers burned. His body seemed a roaring inferno. He brought the line of his touch, and the damp stroke of his kiss behind it, ever higher. He stroked the soft V of golden blonde hair, parted the outer flesh there, pressed intimately within her. She stiffened, muscles taut, her body shaking despite her efforts to keep still. He teased, invaded with a liquid caress, then rose, his fingers still touching her intimately, watching her curiously as he seared within. Her eyes remained closed. Her fingers were dug into the bed furs with such force that she might have torn the hair from the pelt. Enough. The thunder within him might well cause his heart to cease to beat within seconds. He rose again above her. Thrust apart her thighs, which she had instinctively brought together again. Thrust heedlessly, hungrily within her. Deep, deep within her, being encompassed, the relief of just being inside of her so great that he was both appeased and more wildly aroused and…
He went dead still, his body both burning and frozen, the pounding within his head now something that raged, denying all reason. Denying her innocence.
But he couldn’t deny the physical evidence his own rough force had brought home to him.
