He slipped his arms around me as I drifted into him and the warmth that enveloped me made a jacket on this cold night obsolete. How could a healthy man be so warm? I’d only felt heat like that once when Mother had come down with a fever one autumn when I was younger.
Kristina and Luke said their goodnights and excused themselves to the barn. I reached for our empty plates but Jeremiah tugged me back to him. “No. Just stay here a little while. The dishes will hold.”
The scared crevices inside of me wanted to balk against his pull, but the darkness made me braver and I relaxed into him once more.
His voice was a delicious rumble against my neck. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about all of this earlier. I meant to. I was going to tell you that first night but you were so damned beautiful and I knew I’d lose you if I told you I had no home to give you.”
“How do you know I wouldn’t have come anyway?”
“Anyone with eyes in their heads could see you were well-bred, Lorelei. I already didn’t deserve you.”
“Don’t say that. Neither one of us is beneath the other. I felt like that in my last marriage and I’d never wish it on you. I think after that night you talked to Daniel, I still would’ve followed you here. He scared me.”
“Mmm,” Jeremiah rumbled. “You don’t have to be scared again. I won’t let nothin’ happen to you.”
I turned so I could see his eyes when I asked, “Is there anything else I should know?”
His eyes dropped for a moment but were on me again. “I mail-ordered Kristina first. She was supposed to me mine but I couldn’t settle with marryin’ a whore, so I pushed her off on my brother.”
Pursing my lips, I let that little tidbit settle on me before I lashed out. I had no reason to be jealous. She and Luke were a good and loving match, and even though she seemed to have insight into Jeremiah that was downright unsettling at times, she was happy being Luke’s wife. It was obvious they loved each other deeply.
“That ain’t all,” he said.
I tried not to glare.
“Luke ran scared last year and left her in my care for a season. When I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to come back and give her a name, I proposed to her.”
I scrunched up my face and squeezed my eyes tightly closed. “So, you lived with Kristina for some months, up here all alone, and both of you unmarried?”
“Nothin’ happened. We weren’t ever physically attracted to each other, Lorelei. My word is good and I give you my word on my honor. I care for her as a sister, but I know you two are friends now and I want this coming from me.”
I huffed air and leaned against him none too gently. They were up here all alone with no society to hold them accountable on decorum, and they hadn’t been intimate? “Did you kiss her?”
“Never.”
I suppose I could understand it, but I sure as hades didn’t like it. “I forgive you.”
His chuckle reverberated through my dress and caressed my back. “Good. You ready to see where you’ll be sleeping?”
“Show me to my castle, good sir.” I stood and wiped dirt and dried leaves from the back of my skirts.
He groaned as he tried and failed to stand and a tiny sliver of worry snaked through me. He was hot as fever and sore. He was too strong a man to be this weak while healthy. I offered my hand but he waved me off and used the log for leverage instead.
“Are you all right?”
“Just sore from the carriage ride is all. This way.”
He pulled me by the hand down a well-worn path behind the charred remains of the house. The trail snaked and curved through the trees until the half-moon glinted off the shell of a canvas tent, much like the ones I’d seen in shanty towns. There would be room enough for both of us, and he’d built a wood floor to keep us hovered above the moist, bug-riddled ground, so at least that was something. The floor was covered in furs, though what kind I hadn’t the experience to identify. They were big and warm looking and that was good enough for me.
Seducing a man was a talent I hadn’t mastered, and likely never would, but Kristina’s words had me feeling bolder than I ever had with Daniel. While Jeremiah talked about his plans for a cabin and rearranged the furs, I pulled on the back laces of my dress and it billowed into a pool around my feet like the fabric of some great sail. My shift was next and Jeremiah froze with his profile to me. The wind was a soft caress as it lifted the strands of my hair that had escaped their pins. Maybe if I clenched my hands, it would stop them from shaking. My breath, however, quaked on.
“You don’t have to do this tonight,” he said in deep, husky voice.
I closed my eyes against the embarrassment. “You don’t want to?”
Faster than I thought humanly possible, he was here with his arms around me. He captured my mouth with his and some deep instinct had me gripping him closer. I didn’t know he’d lifted me or carried me into the tent until I was there, under the furs with him. His touch was fire against my skin—teasing, consuming…mesmerizing.”
My body reacted with blooming warmth, and my mind threatened to shut down completely to ride the waves of want. I plucked his buttons open one by one and slid my cold hand against the warm, hard planes of his chest. Good gracious, my hand was meant to be against the steel planes of his silken skin.
So this was what it was like to touch a man—to feel a man.
Pulling at his shirt until it gave under my frantic grip, he shrugged out of the confines of the fabric and pressed his bare skin to mine. How could I have lived my entire life without his embrace? How could I have lived another day more without it?
A helpless groan escaped my lips and Jeremiah dipped his head to my neck. “Please,” I breathed against his ear. I didn’t even know what I was begging for.
A long, low rumbling sound came from the depths of his chest. It vibrated against my skin and called to the warmth deep within me. His arms were stone as he froze and my fingers searched his skin for softness where none could be found. Iron hard muscle twitched under my fingertips.
He turned his face from me and sat up. “I can’t tonight,” he gritted out.
A stinging ache brushed my skin where his warmth had left it, like a part of me was missing and left the rest of me raw and exposed. Cold air slithered in between us and sang of my failure. “Why?”
“I just can’t.” His voice sounded off…raspier and deeper. “Use that pistol if anyone comes before I get back.”
“I don’t understand,” I said to his back, but then he was gone. I crossed my arms over my bare chest, exposed to the elements and chilling to the bone. “What did I do wrong?”
The song of breeze against barren tree branches was my only answer.
Biting my lip, I sank into the warm folds of the furs and pressed my hand against my chest until the pounding of my heart slowed to its normal rhythm. Rejection burned like a hot ember against my soul and I squeezed my eyes closed against the pain. An intense desperation washed over me for unconsciousness to free me from my churning thoughts and wonderings.
Unfortunately, sleep came slowly, like the first buds of spring after an eternal winter.
I’d tied the tent opening as tightly closed as I could and stared at the holster of pistols for a long time. Even if I wasn’t deathly afraid to touch the things, I wouldn’t know how to use them on an intruder. He’d left me alone on my first night in this scary place. I didn’t trust myself to make it safely back to the barn or I would’ve escaped my tiny prison.
Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, I’d found the comforting darkness behind my eyelids.
I only woke once in the night to the shuffling and snuffling of some wild creature outside my tent. Try as I might, I couldn’t make out its figure through the tent walls but it sounded big. I lay there in terror, too afraid to move for fear of alerting the animal an easy meal lay just inside the fabric of the camp. And just like he’d appeared, the sound of his feet against the dry forest carpet faded into the night and I slept again.
Chapter Fifteen
Lorelei
I awoke to the gray light of early morning. As I stretched my legs they brushed against something solid and warm.
“It’s just me,” Jeremiah said in a sleepy voice.
“Aaah!” I squawked. Why on earth hadn’t I put my clothes back on last night? I yanked on the covers until I likely resembled a wooly bear with human eyes, then shoved Jeremiah away with the tips of my toes.
“What’re you doing?” The tiny remnants of his amusement were obnoxious.
“What are you doing? You don’t come back all night, you leave me to the animals on my first night home, and then you snuggle my naked body without my permission?” Okay, I was yelling, but so what? The man had clearly lost his mind.
“I thought you gave me permission last night. You were the one takin’ all your clothes off if I remember correctly.”
“Well…a lot of good that bloody did me! I’m mortified!”
He moved with the grace of a deer with none of the soreness he’d showed last night. He grabbed my kicking ankle and gave me a devilish smile. “Now why are you feelin’ mortified?” He pulled my bare foot against his lap. His thick, long erection pressed against his thin pants, and I gasped as he drew the pad of my big toe the length of it. “You got me riled up to an inferno in two seconds flat.”
“What? I don’t even know what that means. You left me…like that. In the middle of...” I yanked my foot out of his grasp to save what was left of my dignity. “I want my dress!”
How could he be so rampantly happy when I felt like the grit underneath the floorboards? Had he no consideration for me at all? He stood and disappeared from our flimsy shanty, then tossed my dress into the open tent flaps. The unapologetic oaf waited just outside with a baiting grin on his face. He had nothing more than light cotton trousers on and his torso, which I hadn’t been able to make out much in the dark last night, was bare and tantalizing for me to glare at. Hard planes of muscle rippled and flexed as he lifted his hands to rest on his hips. Breathtaking, infuriating man! Not an ounce of fat was on the entirety of his body. Jagged little scars ran over the majority of his skin but they looked old and long healed and they only added to his rugged appeal. They didn’t make them like this in the city.
“You like what you see?” he asked.
I clacked my gaping mouth closed. “Turn around. I need to get dressed.”
He leaned against a tree and scratched his lip with the back of his thumbnail. “If I turn around, how will I see your body?”
I opened then closed my mouth, floundering for words like some landed trout. The fur was warm and soft as I clutched it tighter. “Please, don’t look at me.”
He frowned and shoved off the tree as I escaped the tent with my furry shield. “Hey,” he said, pulling me to him and rubbing a finger down the side of my face. “What happened to the brave woman from last night?”
“You rejected her.” With my back to him I slipped into my dress. He could look or he couldn’t. My pride hadn’t been bruised. It had been annihilated and now, on top of everything else, he was laughing at me.
When I turned around, his back was to me. At least he had some manners.
“I’m taking you to visit some friends. They have a bunch of ponies they’d trade for the horse you have now and you can pick what you want.”
“Fine,” I growled. I tried to stomp away through the forest but I got lost in about two and a half yards and had to wait for Jeremiah to lead me back to the clearing. And tapping the toe of my high button leather shoe with impatience didn’t make him go any faster.
“I’ll saddle your horse. Why don’t you go get some breakfast?” he offered.
I stomped off toward Kristina without another word. Without turning around, I could feel his eyes upon me as if they bored tiny holes into the back of my neck. I curbed the urge to throw a stick at him, but just barely.
Kristina sat by the fire licking her fingers. “Did you guys have fun last night?” she said, waggling her eyebrows.
“That depends on what you call fun. I thought we would, but obviously I’ve done something wrong, yet again, and he disappeared for the rest of the night.” I squashed the lip tremble. Riding my anger out was better than giving into the sting of my welted pride.
“He didn’t bed you? Oooooh,” she said with serious eyes gone wide enough to rival a wood sprite’s. “Yeah, that wasn’t your fault.”
“Then whose fault is it? What possible reason could a man have for running out in the middle of—well, you know?”
She shoveled scrambled eggs and thinly sliced venison steak onto a plate and handed it to me. “Now I can’t tell you anything about that stuff because it’s Jeremiah’s place to answer those questions. But trust me when I say, it ain’t you. Now, where do you want your house? Luke is starting on the hearth today while you’re away.”
Well, that was an unexpected turn of conversation. The house was actually much more preferable to talk about than the embarrassing events of my failed seduction. “I can pick anywhere?”
“Anywhere in this clearing. It’s safest if we can get to each other easily though. Traipsing through the woods trying to track each other down is a bad idea. Oh, and probably not on that side of the barn unless you want to be downwind of the pigs and chickens and wake up to someone cleaning game meat on the hook every other morning.”
“Unsavory. What about…over there?” I pointed to the far end of the clearing on the other side of the old burned house. “I should ask Jeremiah if he’s okay with being that far away from the barn though.”
Kristina slurped a bite of eggs. “Good wife. Jeremiah,” she said at a normal conversational volume.
“What do you need?” he yelled back from the doorway of the barn like he’d heard her.
“If you don’t answer he’ll eventually come over here and find out what you want,” she said, shoveling another bite.
“More marital advice?”
“More Dawson advice. They think its fine and dandy to have a conversation from a mile away.”
Jeremiah pulled two horses behind him and left them to graze the half frozen grass near the lumber. “Did you need something?”
“I was thinking the house could go over there.”
He pulled his pants over his boots and squinted in the direction I pointed. “We’d have the wind at our backs and if we face it right we could keep the sun out of the bedroom window in the morning so you could sleep in when you feel like it. Let’s go take a look at it.”
Like I’d never yelled at him at all, he encased my tiny hand in his and walked beside me until I said, “Here.”
He took a few giant steps and spun around in a circle. “It’s not too far from the barn. I like it. Come here.” He wrapped his arms around my waist and my traitorous body leaned back into him. “Imagine,” he rumbled into my ear, “we’re standing at the front door of our home, the home we built together, and we’re lookin’ out over the clearing. Is this the view you want, Lorelei?”
The tension left my body as I exhaled. I could imagine it all too well. With children running around and Kristina and Luke waving goodnight from their house across the way. “I want a porch with rocking chairs.”
“Naturally.”
“And I want a bed to sleep on, Jeremiah. Not just a pile of furs. An actual bed.”
“We may have to wait for the money from the next cattle drive, but I’ll give you what you need.”
I gave a curt nod. “Pretty horse, porch, bed. Those and you, and I’ll be happy.”
A delicious smile edged his voice. “You’ve already got one of ’em, now let’s go work on that pretty horse for you.”
Mounted sidesaddle, I waved to Kristina who was rinsing dishes inside of a small wooden bucket under the water pump. “Tell Kicking Bull hi for me,” she called.
“Who’s Kicking Bull?” I asked.
Jeremiah nudged his horse with his knees. “You’ll see.”
Chapte
r Sixteen
Lorelei
“If the Ute are a nomadic tribe, then how do you intend to find them?” I asked as I ducked under another passing tree branch.
“I can smell them,” Jeremiah said.
“Oh, you can smell them,” I said lightly. “Well that’s good for you. All I can smell is fur and copious amounts of equine fecal matter.”
“Equine fecal…you mean horse crap? That’s because your horse is working through some serious stomach cramps.”
“Will they have any spotted horses like Kristina’s?”
“Maybe. My advice, for what it’s worth, is to pick a horse you like the temperament on first and the looks second. You don’t want a demon with a pretty face. We can pull a few you’ll like and you can figure out which one you get along with best.”
Three young boys met us at a tree line and pretended to throw toy spears at Jeremiah. He laughed and acted like they’d got him, then they ran off whooping and celebrating. Seven large teepees dotted the land and a rushing river snaked behind the Indian’s camp. Dogs and horses roamed freely and children ran around harried mother’s legs in play. Women were dressed in rich earth tones and their dark, cascading, parted hair lifted loosely in the breeze. Warriors wore their hair in braids with feathers and carried spears adorned with the tails of animals. Some wore elegant head dresses with hundreds of feathers that draped strings of beads.
“Mahtuhgurch Sahdteech,” the men said in slow, lyrical voices as we passed.
“What does that mean?” I asked Jeremiah, who greeted some he obviously knew.
“The translation doesn’t work exactly right to English. It’s a name they call my brothers and me. It means something like Dog of the Moon.”
“Strange nickname,” I said, waving to a trio of curious little girls. They waved back and ducked into one of the teepees.
“Not strange to them. It’s a term of respect they don’t give out lightly.” He hopped from his horse and pulled me down from my mount. “It’s an honor.”