Authors: Jill Barnett
That got him. She was concerned for him. Hell, nobody except Cassidy had ever given a rat’s ass what happened to him. As sure as if she’d rammed her small fist into his gut, guilt got him. It wasn’t a good feeling.
She reached up and touched the sore spot on his jaw. “You’re bruised.”
He watched her eyes, those innocent ice blue eyes, that a few minutes ago had held such hurt. They never left his. Warning bells went off in his head. He didn’t care.
In a quick heated instant, he became aware of the soft pressure of her breasts against his chest, her hand against his back. Each breath she took was like a ticking bomb, counting away the seconds until he’d give in to the urge he felt, an urge he knew would mean trouble.
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand away from his mouth. The only sound in the room was the slow, apprehensive sound of their breathing. Her eyes didn’t leave his until suddenly she flinched and looked at their hands. He followed her gaze to where his hand gripped hers. Her palm was bright red, the skin of her wrist white because he held her wrist so tight. He hadn’t even realized he was doing it. He let go fast, then stood, wanting to put distance between them just as fast. He turned to get the hell out of there.
“Sam.” She stood and placed a hand on his forearm, which tightened.
“What?”
“Were you gonna kiss me a minute ago?” Her hand was like a brand on his arm.
Get out of here, Sammy old boy. Get out fast.
“Were you?”
He stiffened. “No.”
“I just wondered.”
His mind flashed with the image of her words—his mouth on hers, his chest on hers, his hips on hers. Thought left him, sense left him, and he grabbed her shoulders and pulled her hard against his chest. At the same instant his mouth closed over hers, his arms slid around her, and one hand spanned the back of her head, holding her mouth where he wanted it. He tongued her mouth deep and hard, over and over, needing to absorb the taste of her.
A small moan of pleasure caught in her throat, and the sound of it burned a path of fire to his groin. He pulled her tighter against him, suddenly driven by the carnal need to press against her, low and hard.
His hand clasped her buttocks, lifting her up with him. He walked her back against the wall, gently pinning her against it with the pressure of his hips. He rubbed against her and almost groaned aloud from the feel of soft against hard. His hands now free, he raked his fingers from her temples to the back of her head, working her long hair from its tie, running his hands through it, holding her small head in his large hands while he took her mouth the way he wanted to take her body.
Then his thumbs grazed her skin. It was so soft, the softest thing he’d ever touched in his hard life. He pulled back and looked down at her dazed blue eyes, flushed skin, and wet mouth.
God, that mouth . . .
She opened it, and he was lost, tasting it again without gentleness, with intense need. She tasted like whiskey. Fine aged whiskey—sweet, biting, addictive.
His hips moved against hers, rotating slowly, pressing deeper when his body demanded it. Her hands moved over his chest in slow circles as if she were absorbing the feel of him. Her small palm paused, then moved to the neck of his shirt. She touched the bare skin there, toyed with the hair.
His hands left her head, grabbed her shirt, and tore it off her shoulders. He pulled back from her wet mouth, bent and licked a path down her neck. She moaned his name. At the sound of it he gently ran his teeth across her collarbone and felt her shiver. A stream of male power rushed through him. This was instinct, wild and untamed, male versus female. It was primitive power, an instinctive need to make a mate react.
Shoving her shirt down farther, almost to her waist, he used it to pin her arms. He slid the loose undershirt down and lifted her up the wall until her breast was on the same level as his mouth. He licked her nipple.
She gasped, clutching his head to pull him away moaning. “No . . .”
So he watched the pink tip of her breast, didn’t touch her with his mouth, just watched.
Her breath increased, and her fingers gripped his scalp. He waited.
She pulled his head back to her breast and groaned in surrender. He smiled just before his mouth closed over it, drawing on it, flicking it with his tongue, while his hand closed over her other soft breast. Then he pulled his mouth away. She cried out and gripped his head. He pushed his hips forward, pinning her completely, and he pulled her legs around his waist so he could press the hard heat of him against her. He rubbed upward. Her hands went from his head to his shoulders, gripping.
“Oh, my Gawd,” she whispered on a breath.
He smiled, rubbing his mouth, lips, then beard-roughened cheeks across the tender-soft tips of her breasts, all the while moving his hips in the same slow circle of sex, slow, hot long sex. Sex that took eternal hours. Sex where a man could lose himself in a woman so deeply that nothing else would exist.
He wanted to lose himself in her.
That realization stopped him faster than a spray of ice water. He stilled. His heart beat in his chest as if he’d been running. His mouth dried. Keeping his head bent, he placed a hand on either side of her, pressing his damp palms hard against the wall. He counted.
One . . . two . . .
“Sam?” she whispered.
Four . . . five . . .
“Sam?”
He took a deep breath and pulled back, letting her slide back down the wall. With his hands still pressed to the wall he looked down at her. Her look was puzzled; then she followed his gaze to her naked chest and quickly pulled up her shirt. Embarrassment flooded her face, and he pushed away from the wall before he did something stupid like ramming his fist through it.
Turning away, he raked the fingers of one hand through his hair and tried to think of something to say. When nothing came to mind he said, “I’d better go.”
He crossed to the door as fast as he could. The broken lock stopped him. He turned, forced to look at her again. She stood stock still, her white-knuckled hands clutching her shirt closed. All the color was drained from her face, and her eyes were wide and stunned and hurt.
“Put that chair under the doorknob after I leave.”
“But—”
“For your own damn good. Shut up and do it!” He closed the door behind him, hard enough to rattle the jamb, but not hard enough to wipe out the horror of what had almost happened.
The real horror was that he wanted it to happen. He, Sam Forester—the bastard kid who had beaten the odds and escaped the slums of Chicago, lived through blazing war on four continents, survived enough barrages of gunfire to make Swiss cheese of most men, even made it through the loss of an eye—had just been brought to his knees by a little blond from South Carolina who was longer on drawl than brains.
He needed a drink, a good strong drink.
After taking his bungalow steps two at a time, he blasted through the door, kicked it closed, and headed for the bottle on the table. He wrenched out the cork, tossed it over his shoulder, and swilled down a few burning gulps. Wiping his mouth with the back of his shaking hand, he walked over to his cot, then reached over and turned down the wick on the kerosene lamp and sat, staring at nothing in the darkness of the room.
He took another drink, wondering if such a hard life could make a man weak-minded enough to fall for a blond twit with the name of a hootchy-kootchy dancer from the Club Paris.
He wondered what the hell was wrong with him. There’d been women in his life. A man couldn’t reach thirty-three, having lived as he had, without there having been plenty of women. Not as many as Cassidy, but Sam doubted many men could have had that many women and lived. He’d had his share of experienced women who never asked for more than what he was willing to give—sex, good, hard, long sex.
Jesus Christ. He stared open-mouthed at the opposite wall, having just had an awful thought. She was probably a virgin. A goddamn virgin. He took another drink, coughed, and lay back on the cot with a groan. He was in deep shit. That stupid bird was right. He needed a shovel to dig himself out of this one. But for tonight, he’d use the bottle instead, drowning himself in whiskey until he didn’t see those innocent ice blue eyes staring back at him in the dark.
Lollie lay on her cot
staring at the dark room. Every so often her pensive gaze would return to the door where that green chair was wedged under the knob. Part of her wished she’d see the doorknob turn, wished Sam would come back, and part of her wished she were home in her room at Hickory House with everything she knew.
What had happened tonight was nothing she’d known before, never. She lay there, alone on her cot, staring at the dark ceiling and remembering Sam’s mouth on hers, the way he tasted. To remind herself it had been real, she ran her fingers lightly over her lips. They felt swollen. She licked them, and they stung a little. Like her pride. It, too, was stinging from the way he’d left her, the way he’d looked at her before he ordered her to keep the chair there, as if he were angry with her.
She sighed, remembering how she’d all but asked him to kiss her. She groaned and flung an arm over her eyes. She’d gone and done it again, done something that angered him.
Admittedly she had said something in the hope that he would kiss her. Some evil little devil within her had wanted him to, wanted to test the difference between the one chaste smooch she’d had at fourteen, Jim Cassidy’s advance, and Sam.
Sam won.
Never in all her born days had she felt what Sam made her feel. There was that old phrase she’d always heard about a woman who was in love. It was said she acted as if he had hung the moon and the stars. Now she understood.
Her eyes drifted closed at the memory of him touching her, holding her, kissing her, of the hard weight of his chest against hers, his hands spanning her waist, his fingers tunneling through her hair to pull it free and hold her mouth against his. She could still taste him, and if she breathed very deeply, she could still smell the scent of him on her clothes and her skin.
She didn’t know that such things could be between men and women. At school she’d heard some talk, and she knew there was something men and women did after marriage. But it had sounded strange, and it was a sin to do that before marriage.
She pulled a blanket up around her, hugging it because she needed to hold something. The thought crossed her mind that maybe what she’d done with Sam was that sin, the privileges that a woman didn’t give a man until they were married. She pondered that thought long and hard. Finally she turned onto her side, having come to a sure conclusion. Anything that felt that good couldn’t possibly be sinful.
Lollie closed the perimeter gate and walked toward the empty hutches. She counted them. Eight. That was what she’d thought. There had been eight birds, and she’d found only five. Also, she needed a way to capture them since all but two were still apprehensive and skittish whenever she fed them. Somehow she’d have to search out those other birds.
She bit back a yawn, then stared at the cages. But not today, she thought. She’d already spent hours out there in the thick jungle, fending off a cloud of mosquitoes while trying to corral those birds. The bugs had swarmed around her like sugar ants to honey, probably because the humidity had increased so. It was hot, wet, and sticky, and so was she, not to mention itchy, dirty, and plumb tired.
Last night had been another night of tossing and turning, and the sleeplessness was taking its toll. She rolled her shoulders to work out the kinks, the result of sleeping on that cot and staying hunched over to try to coax those wild cocks out from under the bushes. She rammed her rolled shirtsleeves up past her elbows and scratched the bites on her forearms while she headed back toward her bungalow.
By the time she reached the steps her arms and neck were a mass of itchy red bumps that she hoped a wet cloth would soothe. Shoving open the door, she hurried inside and twisted the lock, which Gomez had repaired the day before. It kept sticking, but he hadn’t bothered to speak to her, let alone ask her if the lock was okay. She didn’t feel up to suffering that glaring silence again. When she had fixed everything and made up to the men for her mistake, then maybe she’d tell them about the lock. Until then she’d keep to herself.