Wind Song (13 page)

“No.” She glanced up at him shyly. “But I wasn’t going anywhere, anyway.” She rubbed her hands along her arms. She had been so warm dancing with Cody.

“Cold?”

Not when his eyes burned over her like that. She looked away. “A little.”

“The pickup isn’t too far off—there, just beyond that buckboard.”

“I really should go back.”

“Joey’s parents don’t expect you to.”

Her head jerked up. “Why not?”

They reached the pickup, and he leaned over the tailgate and brought out a blanket. “Because I told them I was keeping you with me for the night.”

Her lips parted in protest, and he laid his forefinger against them. “Not tonight, Abbie,” he said quietly. “No arguing between us tonight. Nothing will happen that you don’t want.”

She said nothing, merely stood mutely as he draped the soft, fleecy blanket about her, shawl-like. “I’ve been to your world,” he said, smiling down at her. “Too often, I sometimes think. Welcome to mine.” His head lowered over hers and he kissed her lips ... a soft, searching kiss that demanded nothing. But when he raised his head, she was breathless with its effect.

“I could do that all night long, Abbie Dennis, but there are other things I want to show you first.”

She eyed him warily. Then a small smile gradually ripened her mouth. “I would have to say that this is my first date in twenty years . . . and I’m not quite certain after all this time how to act.”

“Forget everything but the essential facts that you are a woman and I am a man and we are here tonight to enjoy ourselves.”

He took her hand and began walking back toward the throng of merrymakers. He pointed out a blanket-wrapped Indian off to their left, juggling rounded stones. Ahead a clown burlesqued the priests, dancing out of step, and the children giggled at his antics. She and Cody joined in the laughter before moving on.

Within a stand of evergreens Cody chose a spot bedded with incense-cedar boughs that was close enough to allow them to watch the succession of ceremonial dances but far enough from the pandemonium of the music and revelers for them to be completely private. Propped against a cedar, he drew her down beside him and, after tucking the blanket about her feet, nestled her shoulders in the crook of his arm.

“Originally the squaw dances, or mountain chants, were war dances celebrating a victory or a call to battle,” he explained, his mouth next to her temple. “Now they’re part of a get-together, a social event that sometimes lasts for as many as three nights. It’s held in a different place each night, usually fifteen or twenty miles apart.”

“Dalah!” she said, suddenly remembering the young Indian girl.

“She came with her family. Because of the isolation of the families, these dances are the only opportunity that many young Navajo women have of meeting and getting acquainted with prospective husbands.”

Abbie looked up into the bronze face. “And are you some maiden’s prospective husband?” she whispered.

His unwavering eyes held hers. “There is not enough room in my thoughts for anyone but you, Abbie.”

She pulled her gaze from his, her senses dazed by the intensity of the passion she read in the depths of his dilated pupils.

Before her passed the dances and legerdemain of the Indian ceremonies, eerie shadows that leaped and bowed. But she was scarcely aware of the performances as she sat there—delighting in the feel of Cody’s knuckles nuzzling her cheek, the masculine scent of his skin, his deep, rich voice.

“It is the Navajo goddess of Creation, the Changing Woman, who created the
Dine’e
—the people,” he told her. “She molded them from the skin of the undersides of her breasts.” His hand, encircling her shoulder, slid down beneath the blanket to cup the underswell of one breast. Her lids closed. Her breathing seemed to stop. “The tenderest and most sensitive part of a woman’s skin, Abbie.”

Her breath came out in a raspy, whispery sigh.

One dance faded into another, children grew sleepy and crawled into their mothers’ arms, the ancient wandered off to exchange a beer and tales of their youth, while the younger took up the passionate beat of the dance. And Abbie sat spellbound as Cody made slow, rapturous love to her beneath the privacy of the blanket.

While his mouth played gently with her lips, her nape, her ear’s shell-like rim, her lashes, his hand tunneled through her hair, loosing the clasp. His fingers dropped to her sweater and unfastened its furry buttons to slide inside her blouse. He caressed the rise of her breasts and dipped lower beneath the wispy bra to discover the turgid nipples. Her head lolled back against the tree trunk, her lashes lying like sable half-moons on her cheeks.

Once more she experienced that sweet, fierce tugging within her that Cody was capable of arousing. She had thought that that part of her— that intrinsic, internal part of her that was supposed to come alive with sensual arousal—had atrophied from disuse. Brad had often cursed her inability to respond. Yet now—now she felt the sweet excitement that was every woman’s right when she lay with her man.

Had she ever been so thoroughly kissed? Brad would have kissed her hurriedly—as if the act of kissing was a preliminary that had to be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible. Cody was taking his time, all night, as if it was enough for him just to touch her.

“Cody, kiss me . . . there . . . please.”

He released the wispy bra’s front clasp to let her breasts tumble free. She lifted one breast, and his head dipped to allow his tongue to gently lave the stiffened nipple. She gasped at the pleasant sensation generated by his mouth that flexed in hungry, sucking motions, elongating her nipple.

“I want to see you,” he said in a voice husky with his passion. “I want to see your coloring.” His hand pulled the blanket back, and in the shadow of the trees her breasts gleamed pale white, the aureoles a pale brown, darker where the nipples rose taut and aching. The music beat incessantly, in time with the throbbing within her each time his lips claimed her lips, her nipples. The heel of his hand cupped her beneath her bunched skirt, his fingers rubbing that very feminine area protected by her panties, but not invading. She arched her hips with the music, rolling with the movement of his hand as it rhythmically increased in tempo.

Oh, God, it’s happening . . . I’m coming!

“Cody,” was all she whispered when it was over. Tears filled her eyes. Never had anything quite like that happened to her. Cody’s only purpose had been the pure act of giving her pleasure. The aftermath left her spent and shaken.

His fingers brushed the tears from her cheeks. “It’s all right, Abbie.” He gathered the blanket around her and drew her against him.

* * * * *

Just above a mesa the Little Dipper’s handle swung out to measure the passing of the night. A soft morning mist floated over land as red as Cody’s bandana and baptized the fertile earth. Paprika-colored streaks tinged the dawn sky, reflecting off the pickup’s window. The sunrise brought the new day, a day cleansed of old impurities.

Next to Cody, Abbie snuggled deeper in the fleecy gray blanket. She too felt renewed, as if her entire past had been cleansed away. Yet she could not bring herself to look fully at Cody just yet. Past inhibitions warred with the delight that she had found at Cody’s hand. Why had Brad withheld that pleasure from her? And yet it was a weakening pleasure, for she found herself wanting Cody all the more.

Cody took his eyes off the dirt road and looked down at her' with that half smile of his. “You know, Abbie, I get damned tired of taking you back to your apartment.”

Shyly she met his teasing gaze. Her lips unconsciously parted in the smile of a woman who has discovered what it is to feel truly sensuous. “Are you suggesting that I get my own transportation from now on? Perhaps a buckboard?”

He wheeled the pickup into her apartment driveway and turned to her, laying his arm over the back of the seat. “No, I’m suggesting . . .

He looked down into her upturned face and put his fingertip on the indentation in her lower lip. “You know, Abbie, that blanket you’re wearing . . . to the Navajo, when a woman wraps herself in a man’s blanket it represents the commitment she’s making to him. The Anglos call it marriage.” His fingers traced the bow of her upper lip. “I want that commitment from you.”

She searched his countenance, expecting, hoping, to find humor lurking in his brown eyes or at the corners of his long mouth. She found only the implacable set of his square jaw and the uncompromising line of his lips.

Her face grayed. A fear, similar to the fear she had of heights, churned her stomach. She had just been released from a twenty-year commitment. The thought of surrendering the freedom of her soul again . . . it was like a life-long prison sentence.  “Cody . . . I can’t.

“You can’t?” he challenged.  “I’ve watched you bridge the cultural and social barriers you have encountered here. So, the question is then, can you bridge the barrier of yourself?”

“You ask too much of me.”

His lids narrowed over eyes as hard as obsidian. “I won’t settle for less. I won’t be a diversion for you. An outlet for your pent-up sexual frustrations.”

All those years of self-discipline, that proud mask of cool control, exploded in the slap she delivered. He didn't move. The imprint of her fingers against the high ridge of his cheek slowly reddened, and her mouth dropped open at what she had done. She expected instantaneous retribution, but he merely said, “I’m giving you one month to make the decision, Abbie.”

“Or what?”

He leaned across her and opened the pickup door. “Or I’ll make it for you.”

Inside her apartment she hurled the blanket across the bedroom. Cody and his damn ceremonial marriage blanket! Who was he to issue ultimatums? And yet his threat had been very real. She sensed that he meant to have her. And he was the kind of man who would let nothing stand in his way.

One month. She alternately fretted and fumed about the ultimatum over the following weeks. Cody. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She saw his face in every Navajo child, in every leathery old Indian and wrinkled squaw, in every handsome brave and modest maiden. Those deep, dark eyes that concealed the mystery of life. Those generous lips that promised days of laughter and nights of rapture.

About that one rapturous night, the night of the wind song ceremony, she would not let herself think. His cutting words had unerringly found those feelings about which she was most sensitive. She had trustingly opened herself to him, trying to suppress the inhibitions that had frozen her all those years. And he had used them against her.

No, she couldn’t allow his overpowering sensuality to weaken her again. She was resolved to stand on her own two feet, to be her own person before it was too late. Commitments were binding. And she had been wound up with so many commitments that she felt like a spool of thread.

She tried to concentrate on the upcoming holidays. She was attempting to teach the children Christmas carols, and often she would end up laughing when they inadvertently combined “Away in a Manger” with one of their own ritual chants. With their angelic dusky faces with the rosy cheeks and great lustrous eyes they were little cherubs who took her mind off the month that was rapidly running out.

The teachers decorated the school building for the holiday festivities with wreaths of cedar and pinon and juniper berries. Abbie hung up the children’s drawings of the nativity scene— invariably mangers set in a desert of red sand. It struck her that this land she found so strange and often unappealing greatly resembled the Holy Land, with its shepherds who watched their flocks by night, and her heart warmed once again to the little shepherds in her classroom—warmed to all but one, churlish Robert.

Excitement ran through the air as the last days before the Christmas vacation approached. Marshall stopped by for coffee and mentioned that he would be visiting his daughter in Oklahoma for the holidays. Jason wrote that he and Justin were going skiing in New Hampshire for the Christmas season.

And herself? What was she going to do?

The week before school let out, she spent the nights hand-sewing miniature Christmas stockings for her students, stuffing each stocking with a candy cane that she had asked Marshall to buy. She faced a countdown of four days. Surely, she told herself as she worked the needle in and out of the red felt, she and Cody could discuss the issue like two civilized adults.

But there was nothing civilized about passion, was there? Passion, she was discovering, was a primeval, irresistible force, a force that she was not yet ready to reckon with, certainly not when dealing with a man of Cody’s sensual magnetism.

When the last day of school arrived, the children were unable to keep still in their seats. They were excited—and she was anxious. Her month was up.

She didn’t even attempt to teach that afternoon, but played games with the children. Their favorite—cowboys and Indians. Yet each child refused to play the part of the Indian, because they were not Indians. They were
Dine’e
—the people. She ended up hiding behind her desk, drawing her bow against thirty-four cowboys. Even Robert partook of the merriment. She noticed that he wore a beautifully crafted bracelet of silver and turquoise that was much too large for his thin wrist. The gift for his father that he had been making at Cody’s shop?