She took a breath and nodded. For a time they worked in
silence. When he’d gathered enough wood, he handed Star his rifle—it was far
heavier than she’d have imagined—and knelt on one knee to build the fire. She
watched silently, marveling at his efficiency; he only used one match. Tilting
his head, he blew on the baby flames, bringing the birch bark to a crackling
roar. She gulped. How would it feel, she wondered, to be that bark, to feel his
breath warm on her neck, in her ears. . .
She’d burst into flames, too.
He added kindling, followed by larger and larger pieces of
wood, and as he did, she could feel passion’s fire building inside of her. At
length, he rose and turned to her to take his rifle back. He was so near to her
that his pine and leather scent wafted under her nose, through her lungs and into
her heart. His lovely mouth was just inches away. Temptation burned away all
common sense. She reached up to curl one hand around his neck, while bringing
her mouth up to his.
At first his lips were cold—cold and motionless. Ignoring
his stiffening muscles, she moved her mouth lightly over his, then oh-so-gently
applied pressure. With the smallest of groans, he succumbed. His arm circled
her waist, pulling her against him, and he kissed her back. His tongue pried
open her lips to surge inside.
She melted.
The flush from her face spread down to her fingers and toes,
then upward again, a wondrous tingling that washed all thought from her brain.
His tongue swept through her mouth, touching, tasting, inviting her inside.
Desire flowed through her body, pooling in those soft areas down below. Closing
her eyes, she sank into sensation as his left hand drifted over the curve of
her waist, then higher—
He stiffened suddenly. His mouth slid to her neck. “Hold
still,” he rasped in her ear.
Hold still? What? Hold what still?
His breath was a whisper against her cheek. “Don’t move, not
a muscle.”
His hand was coasting along her waist, and then covered her
hand. His heat penetrated her gloves, and she trembled, closing her eyes in an
attempt to recapture that incredible thoughtlessness—
He tugged at something in her hand. The rifle.
“Hold on tight, I have to cock it,” he whispered.
Cock? What?—vulgarity. . .
“Good, now release the rifle. I’m going to count to three.
When I reach three, you hunt grass. Go to your right.”
Hunt grass?
“One—two—
three
!”
She didn’t have to hunt anything. He shoved her aside and
she fell, barely reacting fast enough to save herself from a severe bruising.
The rifle exploded above her, and Star bit back a gasp of
shock as the sound echoed through the valley. Slowly, she rolled over to regard
Nicholas. In the haze of bemusement, her mind registered a click followed by
another explosion. The pungent smell of gun smoke floated in the air.
“Got it!” he exclaimed triumphantly. He looked down, smiling
as he offered her a hand. “You O.K.? Hope I didn’t push too hard.”
“I’m not certain,” she said, taking his hand and rising.
“How hard is too hard?”
“That’s the spirit,” he said with another quick grin.
Dropping her hand, he took several long strides to the edge of the pond where a
very
large yellow cat lay. Good gracious, it was a mountain lion! A very
dead mountain lion, too, for blood seeped from its head and chest, turning the
snow pink, then red.
Nicholas squatted down next to it, his back to her, his pants
pulled tight against his rear end, his coat molding his broad back. His
muscular shoulders were attached to equally muscular arms, which had been
wrapped around her seconds before he’d shot his rifle and killed something that
no doubt wished to kill
them
. Quite suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. . .
.
Foolish notion, she thought sucking in air. Of course she
could breathe. She was Star Montgomery. Virginia Star Montgomery, daughter of
Boston Brahmin Ward Montgomery, descendant of a long line of very well-breathing
Montgomerys. Situations—men—did not affect her this way.
But no one had ever before saved her life.
Surely, though, Nicholas had done no such thing, for what
had the cat against them that it would try to kill them? At any rate, it was
too far away to pounce, she admonished her stupid, tight lungs. No doubt it had
merely been wandering through the clearing, minding its own business, and
Nicholas had shot the poor creature to prove his masculinity.
“Just like I thought,” he said smugly. “It was mad. See the
foam around its mouth.” He turned to her as he motioned to its mouth, hanging
open. “Rabies, and in the late stages too. Not in its right mind, or it’d never
have come near us, ’specially during the day.”
Rabid. Her heart skipped a beat. He
had
saved her
life.
Deep, primal excitement burst through her, then flowed
downward reigniting the embers of desire in her belly. It felt good, and so her
mind repeated the phrase.
He saved me
. More excitement, followed by
little thrills in the soft area between her thighs.
He lifted his head and his eyebrows gathered into a bemused
frown. “It’s dead. There’s no cause for fear,” he soothed.
Yes there was, and oh, how that fear added to desire, like
kerosene to a fire.
“I’m not afraid,” Star replied.
No, Nick thought, holding her gaze, she wasn’t afraid. She
was exhilarated. It shot across the clearing to hit him square in the chest,
and then drove downward to where lust resided. A harsh, writhing lust, the kind
a man felt for whores, maybe even for a wife, but never for a died-in-the-wool
suffragette. Not for the noble-blooded daughter of a Boston aristocrat.
’Specially not for the daughter of a friend.
A friend that reminded him of his father.
For a second, disgust at his sick cravings displaced the
lust. Then he remembered that Ward Montgomery wasn’t his father. Ward’d never
even met Pa.
“Anyhow,” he said standing, while wrangling with the urge to
cross the clearing, drag her into his arms and kiss her again until they were
both breathless. “I don’t reckon you can get rabies from a dead animal, but
I’ll leave the pelt all the same. Not worth the chance.” He glanced down at the
animal, shaking his head. “Tho’ it’s a shame. Would’ve made a nice little coat
for Sam.”
“Your niece? Yes, I imagine it would,” Star said with a
hiccup of a laugh, “but I appreciate you not making the attempt.”
When he focused on her again, she wore a grimace of
revulsion, mocking the merriment sparkling in her eyes. He grinned. “I bet with
what was left, Melinda could sew you a nice hand muff to bring back to Boston.
Show off to all your highfalutin’ friends.”
She chuckled, a warm, gentle tickle to his ears. “Thank you,
Nicholas, but I much rather not bring that back to my friends—although I’m
certain they would be
very
impressed—if it means watching you skin that
unfortunate beast.”
He pushed back his hat and squinted at her in mock
concentration. “You sure?”
“I’m positive.”
He chuckled and righted his hat again. “O.K., then I’ll get
that java going. It’s long past lunch time and I’m starved,” he said moving
toward his horse. “Mack packed the beans in your bag. If you get that, I’ll
fetch the sandwiches and cookies Melinda made.”
Her eyes flickered over the cat. She bit her lip. “He’s
staring at me.”
Amusement tickled his chest. “She—it’s a female. Want me to
throw a tarp over it?”
She arched one silky eyebrow and his heart skipped a beat.
Sonuvabitch, what was it about that movement that stole his attention every
time?
“Do you have one? It would help.”
“Sure. Never travel without something to keep the weather
off, not in these parts, anyhow.”
A short while later they were eating in comfortable silence,
a fire crackling between them. Nick’d dragged more wood from the pile and
periodically fed it to the fire. The heat turned Miz Montgomery’s face a pretty
shade of red, reminding him of the color it’d been right before she’d kissed
him.
No. No, no, no, he was
not
riding down that road.
Never mind that her wildcat eyes kept straying to his mouth as if she wanted
another taste. Forget that they were alone in the woods, and nobody would ever
know if he kissed her again and built a big enough fire so that when he pulled
up those skirts—
No. He formed one hand into a fist. He’d keep the fire
between
them and anything else he could think of, too, to keep his distance and maybe
smother the hunger down below. A good man didn’t fool with his friend’s
daughter, no matter that her family let her run wild. He was a crude Western
rancher. She was the daughter of a Boston aristocrat. Nothing good could come
from this.
“You sure recovered from your fear fast,” he said to keep
his mind off what neither one of them was going to do.
She shrugged as she washed down a bite of sandwich with
coffee. Black as sin and thick as mud, cowboy coffee. She’d made a face after
the first sip, but had valiantly drunk it without complaint. For all her blue
blood, she had a deal of spunk. And spunk in bed—
“Why, Nicholas,” she answered him, thankfully cutting off
that thought, “I no longer have any reason to be afraid. You’ve proven very
capable of protecting me.” Her eyes sparkling, she fluttered her lashes like
she was a lost, helpless young girl, entirely dependent on him and his big,
strong arms. But the woman was just a few inches shy of his six feet, and she
didn’t have a helpless muscle in that tall, lush body. The expression oughta
have looked ridiculous on her. It didn’t and damned if it didn’t touch his fool
pride. And stir the embers of lust—“It was a pretty easy shot,” he said, and
ruthlessly buried those thoughts, once and for all. “Not like the animal was
hiding or moving fast. Mostly a mercy killing.”
“Oh no, you’re being far too modest, sir. I understand that
rabid animals are quite unpredictable.”
“Yeah, like women,” he said with a smirk.
She burst into laughter, vanquishing that little-girl-lost
expression. “Game, set, match,” she said. “You are the most terrifying man,
Nicholas McGraw! Swear to me, sir, that you never shoot women merely for being
unpredictable, for upon my honor, I am all a twitter at the notion!”
He grinned and shook his head as he took the pot off the
coals. He poured the last dregs into the snow. “Well you can set your mind—and
your twitterin’—to rest. They hang ya for killing women, even if sometimes
that’d be a mercy killin’, too. Mercy for the man, that is.”
She lifted her eyebrows, over large, laughing eyes. “Now,
Nicholas, you
must
know that as a women’s rights advocate, I am all but
required
to object to that statement. As women are legally and socially at men’s whims,
how much misery can one woman cause?”
He squinted at her. “You serious? You never saw a woman
cause a man misery?”
For a moment she appeared to try to school her face into
solemnity. She lost the battle and broke into a smile. “All right, I confess
that some women are shrews. Many men are horrible, as well, however.
You
must admit that.”
“Yes, ma’am, I do,” he said standing and smiling down at
her. “There are a few men I’d like to shoot, too. Now, if you drink that coffee
on down, we’d better head on back. I don’t like the look of that sky. Could be
snow, and we don’t want to get caught up here in a storm.”
***
They rode for half an hour with little comment, as Nicholas
carefully guided them down a steep, single-file path. Star focused her body on
the movements of the horse while her brain traveled an entirely different path,
one of marvel over the rabid animal and the wonder of Nicholas’s kiss. By and
by, however, it settled upon Nicholas’s ultimate disregard of that kiss. After
shooting the mountain lion, he’d said nothing at all about the kiss, behaving
as if it had not occurred. Had she been too brash? She was no fool; she knew
she was not every man’s style: too tall, too mannish, too aggressive and, oh, a
hundred different things a man might dislike in a woman. Doubtless, a strong woman
would not intimidate a man with Nicholas’s strength and confidence, but that
didn’t mean he wanted one. Possibly he was the sort who was attracted to
opposites. Quite possibly, she thought, her spirits sinking, he, like most men,
preferred women who were quiet and demure.
She couldn’t even feign that.
She had, however, feigned other characteristics for her many
fiancés, which had led to some rather stimulating encounters. Like Leander
Cushing who, believing her wide-eyed sexual naiveté, had, in the frenzy of
introducing her to passion, come close to taking her innocence . . . right
before demanding marriage. And Ambrose Thompson, who’d been fervently attracted
to her little-girl-lost magic, determined to protect her from the big bad
world, and in the process of “comforting” her, had brought her to her first
climax. To be fair to Ambrose, though, the little-girl-lost façade hadn’t been
all pretense. He’d started pursuing right after Minnie’s death, when she had
been lost.
She swallowed and shook off that memory.
At any rate, it was too late for pretense with Nicholas.
From the moment they’d met, she’d shown him her true self, which, she must now
accept, repelled him. True, he
had
responded to her kiss, but that must
be merely an instinctual male reaction or he would have followed through
afterward. She’d been deluding herself, drat it all, in believing that he felt
this connection between them. Instead of a short, feverish liaison like she’d
hoped, she’d spend the next weeks in frustration.
Ah well, she thought with a light sigh, she might yet
salvage something from the afternoon. If she could not enjoy Nicholas’s
physical attentions, then she might enjoy his conversation. She’d mourn the
rest later, in the privacy of her room.