Lord of the Wilderness Page 14

  Juliet stopped. With certainty, her movement might provoke the reptile. If the rattlesnake bit Mary, she’d die a painful death.

  Two Eagles moved stealthily forward, bobbing and weaving, as if casting some kind of spell, mesmerizing the snake and distracting the rattler away from Mary He slowly drew his knife and threw. Juliet’s hand sailed to her chest. The blade traveled end over end and severed the snake from its head, the body uncoiling, and writhing with its last breath.

  Juliet could not move if she wanted to.

  Mary fell into his embrace, weeping.

  Two Eagles held her at arm’s length, and spoke angrily. “An Indian woman will learn to be as brave and uncomplaining as his brothers in the forest. The wounded wolf or bear, the dying deer never cries out in pain. The beasts bear their pain in silence, giving no outward sign. They go forward to meet danger. They shrink not from pain or suffering, sickness or death.”

  Two Eagles gathered her in his arms, rubbing his hand up and down her back.

  “An Indian child is taught never to cry. Loud sounds of grief will attract a wolf or panther or an enemy of the Oneidas. You must learn to bear your pain and give no sign.”

  Juliet opened and closed her mouth, no more shocked than Mary who tilted her head up and stared at Two Eagles. “You speak English? Joshua said you didn’t—”

  “Joshua was correct. I don’t like to speak English. I prefer my own tongue.”

  Mary’s hands flew to her cheeks. “All this time…and you let me think…what a fool you must think of me…all the things I said about you.”

  Two Eagles smiled and placed her palms on his chest. “I like how your heart spoke.”

  She pushed away from him but his arms held her head to his chest, touching her hair. “I’ve not once seen hair this color before. It is like the gold of corn tassel.”

  “I like your strong heartbeat beneath my fingers,” Mary said tentatively.

  “You don’t need to fear when I’m with you, Mary. I’m a warrior and will protect you.”

  “I have many fears. I am alone and the wilderness is frightening.”

  Two Eagles held up her chin and gazed into her eyes. “There is no shame in fear. What matters is how we face it.”

  “I have been wounded—”

  “I know of the baby and the man. I listened to Juliet speak when you were asleep in the canoe and she did not know I understood English. Baron Bearsted is a coiling rattlesnake, whose bite is like the sting of bad arrows.”

  “You do not judge me?”

  “I would kill him. Death would be his atonement. An Indian man would never abandon his woman or his child. Nor will I ever abandon you.” Then…he kissed her.

  Juliet’s eyes widened, her mouth fell open. A second later, she shook her head and not keen to be caught as a voyeur, she retraced her steps to the camp. Mary and a savage? No.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Juliet strode down to the river to confront Joshua regarding his deception with Two Eagles. He sat on a rock, his hair tied back with a leather thong, fingering a letter, absently lifting a lace-edged handkerchief to his nose. But it was the way he clutched the letter, grief ravaging his face. When he noticed her, he secreted the items in his pack, burying his despair, and then cast his gaze over the waterfall.

  “What is it?” His tone was gruff.

  She pulled herself up to full posture. “I have a matter to discuss with you. Two Eagles can speak English. Why did you mislead me?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck and that devilish smile of his came back. “Oh that—”

  You let Mary think and say those things about him.”

  “What did she say?”

  Juliet clamped her mouth shut. He’d not been around when Mary was mooning over Two Eagles like an infatuated schoolgirl. His innocent expression gave him away. No doubt, Two Eagles told him. Never in a million years would she give Joshua the satisfaction of repeating what Mary said.

  “You let me struggle trying to understand him, knowing full well he could speak English?”

  “At no time did I say, he couldn’t speak English. I said he didn’t like to speak English.”

  “A dance of words, Joshua, making me a fool.”

  He towered over her. “I could say of course to that notion, if you consider yourself foolish, but I know you wouldn’t find that agreeable.”

  Oh, he called her foolish! Juliet pushed him. Arms flailing, he splashed into the water. He stood up roaring with laughter, and combing loose wisps of his dark hair off his face, the water dripping from his face down to his chest.

  “I remember the last time you surprised me by dumping a bucket of cold water on my head. This time there will be retribution.”

  “Ha!” She turned to go back to camp. “Is a cougar troubled by a mouse?”

  Water sloshed behind as she took a step. Arms of steel wrapped around her and dragged into the water. He drew her up to him, holding her tight in his embrace, as if shielding her with his body against the world, against all the torments, fears and loneliness.

  Cocooned within Joshua’s arms, Juliet drank it all in—the man, the millions of ways he moved her. God, he was warm. And strong. Too strong. His dark lashes swept down veiling a mischievous glint in his eyes. She pushed a finger in his chest. “You are a son of a motherless goat.”

  He laughed, pretended to slip and she grabbed around his neck. “Where is Lady Faulkner?”

  Juliet pushed away from him, swam a few strokes, keeping out of his reach, the water cool and soothing.

  She looked behind, transfixed by the droplets dribbling down, down, down. She raised her eyes to Joshua’s face. For an infinite moment their eyes locked, and Juliet forgot her fears, forgot England, forgot to breathe.

  But what lingered in her mind was what had damaged him. She wanted to understand his secrets. “What is written in the letter?”

  “There will be no discussion—” His voice was low, his tone firm. Ominous.

  His moods were like the winds, ever shifting. “I do not judge,” she said softly.

  “I was to be married to the love of my life.”

  He was to be married? He had a sweetheart? At Tionnontigo, he had told her did not have a wife and she wondered of his anger at the time when she’d mentioned the subject. Had the woman jilted him? Found him wanting? “Why did you not marry?”

  The ensuing silence punctuated only by the thundering of the falls seemed to go on forever. He simply stood there, eyes glazed with chilling hate. His big hands flexed and fisted as if he wished to twist someone’s neck.

  Juliet took a step toward him. “Oh, Joshua. I’m guessing for whatever reason, she called off the wedding. I cannot begin to fathom your grief.”

  Her voice seemed to snap the cord of his patience. A foul oath burst from him and he waded from the water.

  She ran up the steep bank, grabbed his arm and swung him to face her. The lines in his face hardened and, without warning, he reached out to touch her cheek. Juliet stood her ground. His hand lingered, lightly traced the line of her jaw.

  “So many words get lost. They stay in my throat…lose their courage. I want to ignore it, but how can I hide from something that will never go away?”

  “I assumed there’d be one great love in my life. Sarah. For ages, I reasoned she was the only one, yet a flame-haired beauty with her omnipresent smiles makes me crawl out from beneath a fog of guilt and forces me to come alive, makes me want more of which I have no right.”

  Sarah? Juliet gasped. What nightmarish agony had the woman put him through?

  “She is dead.”

  Joshua suddenly hauled her close against his pounding heart. His emotions were out of control despite his efforts to grapple them into submission. He didn’t tell her Sarah had been murdered by some sick bastard…couldn’t say the words. Not yet.

  Juliet, whose face had shone like the sparkling sun, and whose laugh, like the happy sound of falling waters, looked at him questioningly.

 
Unable to quell the urge, he reached out and gently touched her flaming red hair, like he did every night when he had held her in his arms, when she was asleep and did not know he gazed upon her.

  “Stay with me. Do not go away.”

  Joshua put his finger on her chin and lifted her face, studying her as if a rare butterfly had landed on his fingertip. She was a threat to his necessary isolation, yet she stole into his soul. He would hold her, and that would be all.

  Even as he touched his lips to hers, he told himself to resist. Yet his thirst for her dominated all rational thought and caution winged upward, vanishing like embers in the sky.

  She brought her arms around his neck and sighed against his mouth. His wild hunger whetted, he slid the tip of his tongue along the crease of her lips, seeking entrance, insisting that they part, and when finally they did, his tongue plunged into the sweetness of her mouth, and then slowly withdrew, then plunged again in flagrant imitation of the act he craved.

  He picked her up and lay her down on the soft sweet grass, pulling her next to him. She came willingly, seeming to melt in warm submission, as if she had been anticipating this instant.

  “You set me on fire,” he breathed against her, tormenting himself with the shape and softness of her mouth, and drawing small urgent whimpers from the back of her throat. The admission came effortlessly. He kissed her again, fiercer, and they sank further onto the grass, pungent with the scent of wildflowers. No bed of feathers could have felt more opulent.

  Joshua reveled in the warmth radiating through him, causing the tension in his chest to ease. His tongue probed her soft mouth as if the intimate search would yield the key to her essence. He sought to venerate her, to treasure her, to give her satisfaction.

  She clung to him, and her desperate intensity captivated him. She was a woman of many aspects, and at her center dwelt a cache of wild passion he wanted to explore. He stroked her hair, like silk it was, fine as gossamer and spilling like warm liquid through his outspread fingers.

  “Your hair is like the sun setting into the sea.” He drew a wavy lock across his cheek and cursed the aunt who said contrary.

  Her head fell back and sunlight showered the curve of her throat. He moved his lips to the pulse leaping there, tasted the saltiness of her skin. He lifted her deerskin dress over her head, her breasts bathed in bright sunlight.

  Joshua felt a jolt of surprise touched with a lusciously forbidden edge of a dream, for no woman had ever appeared so lovely to him. His hand trembled as he cupped it first over one breast and then the other. “Never hide yourself from me,” he said huskily.

  The satiny weight of her breast in his hand resurrected an alien and exotic sensation for a man accustomed to keeping himself numb to all feeling.

  Beneath his palm, her nipple rose up proudly, and he bent his head, brushing his lips back and forth against the brazen tip, feeling the delicate, velvety texture. He felt her gasp of shocked delight against his mouth as her fingers dug convulsively into his shoulder, and she kissed him deeply, as if trying to return the pleasure he gave her.

  Stunned by the tormenting sweetness of her response, Joshua lifted his mouth from hers, gazing down at her flushed, intoxicating face while he continued to caress her breast, telling himself that in a moment he would let her go.

  Her back arched, and in the brilliant sunbeams she looked like a princess, lovely, delectable, irresistible. Desire burned white-hot at his core.

  Slowly, Joshua took his hand from her swollen breast, commanding himself to end what he had begun and end it now. No doubt, tomorrow, he’d regret taking things this far with his in-name only wife.

  His gaze drifted downward, riveted on the enticing banquet bared before him. Exquisite breasts, round and full, tipped with pink nipples hardened into tight buds of desire, quivered beneath his gaze. Her skin was as smooth as cream, glowing in the sun as untouched as new-fallen snow. And therein lay the problem. Juliet was untouched.

  Yet he ignored the judgement that warned him, and the control he had schooled into himself. To bring a new power of Juliet to life, the power that had been slumbering for a lifetime: the bright passion, the sexual thirsting, the womanly appeal she had kept at a distance…until he had met her.

  And with some half-formed idea of allowing them both a little more of the pleasure they seemed to be finding together, he bent his head, taking the bud of her breast into his mouth and whisked it with his tongue.

  “Joshua?” Hands gripped his shoulders and pushed him back. “What are you…”

  He exhaled, unable to speak; his throat aching.

  She clasped his cheek. “It’s—I don’t know my own feelings…you make me feel things…but when we part, then what?”

  “Not now,” he said, not wanting to hear his own icy logic hurled back in his face. He dragged his gaze from her breasts to her lips and then to her mesmerizing eyes, while his hand rested on her hip. “I can give you pleasure without taking from you what can’t be undone. Do you understand?”

  “But how?” She touched her finger to his lower lip.

  “I can teach your body to experience womanly desires without your loss of innocence. I need to touch you,” he confessed.

  All the days and weeks since he had met her had been building a tension between them, and it was time to release that strain. “I’m thinking of you, Juliet. There is one more night until you are returned to your cousin.”

  She widened her eyes. “Only one night?”

  She accepted what he offered, his brave, sensual Juliet. She turned her head to kiss him, and she was so sweet and pliant that he erased his vow from his mind. Erased the war, erased the dangers of the frontier, erased what had brought them together and what would ultimately tear them apart.

  For now, she was the woman in his arms, his Juliet, and he yielded to his impulse to provide her pleasure. His mouth began a slow, erotic seduction that soon had Juliet moaning low in her throat. He forced her lips to open wider until he captured her tongue, drawing it delicately into his mouth as if to sip from its nectar, and then he gave her his…until Juliet matched his movements and when she did the kiss went wild. His hands shoved into her hair, and Julie twined her arms around his neck, lost in the earth-shattering kiss.

  His lower body lifted, his legs nudging hers apart, and he forced her into the vibrant awareness of his rigid desire taut beneath his buckskins. Her breasts pushed into his chest, and she stifled a cry when he pulled his mouth from hers, then gasping with surprise as he lowered his mouth to her breasts. His lips closed on her nipple, tugging gently, then tightening, drawing hard on it until her back arched and her legs stirred restlessly with that elusive hunger. He moved his hand lower, over her knee and sliding it over the soft firm flesh of her thigh, always laving her breast, while she ran fingers through his hair, and mindlessly held his head pressed to her.

  She writhed and sighed, music to his ears. Right now, she was a woman who desperately wanted the sweet release he could give her.

  He pressed her thighs apart and caressed damp, downy curls, the flesh there tender with her wanting. A smile tugged at his mouth, knowing he’d pushed her past maidenly inhibitions, beyond learned taboos, past caring about why she was here and what the future would hold, and possessing no idea where his touch would take her.

  Oh, but he knew and he craved it for her. He pressed down the need of his throbbing cock, knew he was being selfish, ending her innocence to bring the dazzling silky path of erotic pleasure; to make her glorious sun set simply to rise again in a boundless instant of exquisite and intoxicating pleasure.

  Slicked with her moisture, his fingers moved, knowing intuitively where to please her, manipulating the pressure and maintaining the slow rhythmic in and out motion of his finger and where to apply it. Drawn taut as a bow-string, quivering from his onslaught. Breathing hard, he watched her, luscious, sensual, gauging her response, and waiting for her rapture, his fingers stroking in time with her thrusts.

  In that instant, he
felt her thighs tremble, her belly shudder, and heard her keening cries as her hips rocked and her womanhood tightened in a convulsive movement, the heady perfume of her feminine essence washing over his hand. Letting out a breath, Joshua held her close, reveling in the feel of her as he cradled her yielding body with his. He dropped a soft kiss on her forehead, cherishing the rapid beat of her heart against his chest, and closing his eyes to the searing agony of self-denial.

  “Joshua?” she asked, her voice filled with wonder yet tentative.

  “Hmm?”

  She took a deep breath. “Did you?”

  He nudged his chin into her silky hair. “What do you think?”

  She pulled her doeskin dress to cover her and nestled closer to him. Cradled above in the boughs of an oak came the rich and low song of an Indigo bunting called to its mate. “This is new…I had no idea. I believe you made love to me. But it seemed a bit…one-sided. Perhaps I should—”

  “Oh, Juliet. What you have experienced is a sample of desire.” He played idly with the beads on her dress, telling himself to quit touching her. That it could go no further.

  “I am curious why a trained midwife did not know what occurred between a man and a woman.”

  “I have led a sheltered life, protected fiercely by Moira and not privy to intimacies. Do I—” He could see her holding her breath, waiting for him to declare his feelings, silently begging him not to hurt her.

  “Juliet, I gave you a little taste of what it is meant to be a woman. The rest will be supplied by your real husband when you marry.”

  She turned to her side and stared straight into his eyes, searching so deeply, he felt certain she could grasp the shaking soul he concealed beneath his sham veneer.

  “I don’t believe what you are saying. I know you have feelings for me.”

  He looked away, down the infinite river and beyond, anything to escape her accusatory gaze. When I see you, I smile. When I touch you, I feel. I love you, Juliet. “No, Juliet. You are wrong. I have a fondness for you, but do not mistake—”