Shawnee Bride (6 page)

It did not stop him from lying awake m the darkness, his loins feverish with the memory of holding her close. It did not stop his hungry gaze from following her about the lodge, lingering on the graceful sway of a hip or the exquisite bud of a mpple pressing against the threadbare fabric of her bodice. Only his injury and Swan Feather’s nearly constant presence had kept him from reaching out
to catch Clarissa’s waist, pulling her against him and letting their arms, hands and frantic, eager mouths bridge the chasm that had opened between them.

That, and the fear that she would not welcome him.

“I asked whether you were hungry.” Her voice was low and taut as she knelt beside the basket, her sun-flecked green eyes on a level with his own.

“Swan Feather gave me something before she left,” he said, feeling the tension that crackled between them like the prelude to summer lightning. “You don’t have to stay, Clarissa,” he added softly.

“Did Swan Feather change your poultices?” Her fingers quivered as she sorted the herbs, spreading them in a fan on the packed earth floor.

“The poultices can wait.” He studied her from where he sat, painfully braced by the frame of willows. Her hands had slowed in their motion. When she raised her eyes to look at him, her face was flushed. Beautiful, he thought.

“I can change the poultices,” she ventured impulsively. “I’ve watched Swan Feather do it. I know what she uses. Here, let me—”

She reached out to touch his wrappings, but he checked her motion with a dangerous flash of his eyes. At any other time he might have welcomed her touch, but the idea that she would be repulsed by his filthy condition was more than he could bear.

“What’s the matter?” Her green eyes blazed like a bobcat’s. “You don’t think I can do the job? I’ve a mind to tie you down and show you I can, Seth Johnson!”

The use of Wolf Heart’s Christian name was meant to irritate him, and it did. “Then save one hand to hold your nose,” he snapped, “because that’s what you’ll need!”

She stared at him then, sitting on her haunches, biting
back suppressed laughter. “By heaven, you do smell like a sheep pen on an August afternoon, don’t you? We can’t have that!”

She scrambled to her feet and began rummaging through Swan Feather’s stash of bowls, calabashes and odd scraps of buckskin. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, suddenly uneasy.

Her tangled hair swung as she glanced back over her shoulder. “You need a bath,” she announced, her eyes sparking with determination and mischief. “And I’m going to give you one!”

W
hat in heaven’s name had possessed her?

Clarissa shook her head in disbelief as she dropped a heated stone into a large calabash of water to warm it. Offering to give Wolf Heart a bath had been the last thing on her mind when she’d walked into the lodge and found him alone. But his words and manner had challenged her, triggering her calamitous temper. She had blundered into her own trap, and now there was no way out.

He watched her in silence, glowering from under his thick black eyebrows as she selected a soft scrap of tanned buckskin, rough on its inner side, to serve as a washcloth. Scrubbing down a wounded bear would be less daunting, she thought. For all his white blood, there were times when Wolf Heart appeared savage to the core. This was one of them.

“You’ll thank me when this is over,” she said, approaching him with the heavy calabash balanced between her hands. “I hope you’ll have the good sense not to struggle. It wouldn’t take much strain to undo the healing of those ribs.”

He glared at her as the words sank home, but he did
not move. Wolf Heart was no fool. “You don’t have to do this,” he growled.

“Oh?” Clarissa knelt beside him, dipped the buckskin into the calabash and left it for a moment to soak up the warm water. “And what, pray tell, are my other choices? Listen to you grumble all day because you’re so filthy you can’t stand yourself? Put up with the smell of you night after mght until you’re well enough to leave? No, thank you!”

She wrung out the buckskin and started on his face. At the touch of the pleasantly warm water she felt the resistance easing out of him. He closed his eyes as she wiped down his forehead, his temples, his nose and cheeks, tracing each contour of his powerful jutting bones. His lashes lay as black as the barbs of a crow feather against his golden skin.

Clarissa willed her emotions to freeze, her mind to focus on her task, but his nearness was already doing disturbing things to her. She could feel the quickening of her pulse and the small, warm, jerky flutters low m her body, like an itch in desperate need of scratching. She should try to talk, she thought. Chat about the weather, about the coming ball game, anything. But no words would form in her mind.

Abruptly surprise came to her rescue. Her hand paused. She leaned closer, gazing at his chin in astonishment.

His eyes shot open. “What is it now?” he demanded gruffly.

“You have…whiskers!” she gasped, staring at the minuscule dots of black stubble.

“Of course I do.”

“But I’ve never seen—” She groped for the rest of the phrase, thinking how ridiculous she must sound. “I’ve never seen you shave1”

“I don’t,” he answered calmly. “Most Shawnee men have no hair on their faces. Those few who do—” he gave her a sharp sidelong glance “—usually have it pulled out.”

“And you?” She stared at him, flabbergasted.

“Years ago, when my beard started to come in, my Shawnee mother began pulling it out one hair at a time because she wanted me to look like one of her people. I fought like a young bear at first, but with time I got used to it.”

“And who does this for you now?”

“The children in the village have sharp eyes and small fingers. As these whiskers grow long enough to be pulled, they will do it for me and have great fun at my expense.”

“All that so you’ll look Shawnee1” Clarissa exploded. “Good heavens, doesn’t it hurt?”

He scowled at her as if she were a backward child who had asked too many questions. “As I told you, I’ve grown used to the pain,” he said. “And, yes, I do it to look Shawnee. To
be
Shawnee.”

Clarissa restrained the urge to fling the wet buckskin in his exasperating face and stalk out of the lodge. That a man would go to such lengths to forsake his own blood was beyond her understanding. Thank heaven, she was planning her escape! The sooner she left this maddening man and his adopted tribe of savages behind her, the better off she would be!

Resolutely she dipped the buckskin into the warm water, lifted the dripping mass and squeezed the excess from its folds. “Lean forward if you can, and I’ll scrub your back,” she said.

He strained against the woven willow brace, allowing her to reach behind him. His back was rock hard, the rows of muscle like buttresses of coiled stone. They tightened
at her touch, quivering subtly along the curve of his spine.

Steeling herself against his nearness, she reached lower to find the inward slope at the small of his back and, still lower, the thumb-sized hollows above his buttocks. “Let me know if I hurt you,” she murmured, her voice rasping in her tight throat.

His only answer was a low, almost inaudible groan.

Clarissa’s thoughts blurred as she rubbed the buckskin in slow circles over his satiny skin. Drifting in a whirlpool of sensation, she inhaled the damp musky scent of him. Her breast pressed the muscled curve of his neck where she leaned past his shoulder, the contact igniting small shimmering waves inside her, the sensation so delicious that she could not will herself to pull away. She closed her eyes.

The brush of her knuckles against the leather thong of his loincloth—quite by accident—jolted her with sudden awareness. She paused, her eyes wide and startled, her breath catching in her throat. Wolf Heart’s body was too close, his masculine aura too threatening to the fragile barrier of her innocence. Her own desire was drawing her toward a precipice, and once she stepped over its edge there could be no going back.

Was that what she wanted—the precipice? That spiral of wild abandon that would end her girlhood forever? All she had to do was let her fingers venture lower. If it didn’t happen now, it would happen soon. That much she knew.

“That…should take care of your back,” she muttered, slipping out of the awkward position and plunging the buckskin into the water again. Her gaze darted from her hands to the floor, then to the empty doorway. She had never been a shy person, but she could not look at him now. Her eyes would tell him everything. “Lean back.”
She pieced the words together like beads from a broken string. “I’ll do your shoulders next. And your arms. And when I’m finished, I’ll change your poultices, unless, of course, you think I’m not able.”

“Clarissa” His massive hand seized her wrist, yanking her around, forcing her to face him. “You can quit playacting,” he said in a thick voice. “We both know where this rubdown is going. The only question is, how far will we get before you slap my face and go flouncing out of here?”

“How dare you?” Clarissa would have drawn away in a show of outrage, but his grip on her arm held her prisoner, half-crouching above him, her eyes mere inches from his own. “I was doing you a kindness,” she hissed, “a simple act of Christian charity, and if you choose to interpret that as anything but—”

He kissed her then, his free hand catching the nape of her neck and twisting her head down toward him. His lips were fierce in their taking, raw and hard; and as his naked need met her own, Clarissa whimpered like a small lost animal. Her flailing fingers tangled in his hair. Her mouth softened like hot tallow, molding to his hardness, opening as if she could drink him into her.

“You little wanton,” he muttered, his chapped lips rasping hers. “All that show of being a proper lady…this is what you are, Clarissa. This is
who
you are!”

He kissed her again, a savage, bruising kiss that blazed through her body, igniting tiny rivers of flame that surged through every part of her. Her free hand fluttered over his chest, brushing the tiny hard beads of his nipples, ranging down over the buckskin wrappings that held him to the willow brace, skimming his navel, then venturing lower, lower still to explore the contours of the solid shaft
that thrust upward, straining the confines of his loincloth. Dear heaven, the size of him…

She pulled back abruptly, her heart pounding like the hooves of a runaway mare.

“I won’t hurt you, Clarissa,” he murmured, drawing her back into his arms. “There’s no part of me that would ever hurt you.”

“I—know.” She twisted away from him, flinging herself backward with a force that almost sent her sprawling. “It’s not that! It’s not that at all!”

“Then what’s the matter?” His eyes glittered sardonically, turning cold as he leaned back into his willow brace. “Did your prim side win out after all? Or is it that you can’t stomach the idea of being touched by a dirty savage?”

“Oh—” Clarissa stared at him, rage and frustration exploding inside her. How could she explain her reason for pulling away? How could she tell Wolf Heart that loving him would bind her to this place in a way she had no wish to be bound, making escape impossible? It could not be done.

“I hope you’re not waiting for an apology,” he said in a flinty voice. “If you are, you’ll be waiting a long, long time. I’m no gentleman, Clarissa. And you, for all your fine airs, are no lady.”

If he’d aimed his words at inciting her, they had hit their mark.. “You!” She shot his cold anger back at him. “You are the most arrogant, self-righteous, contemptible-”

She could not finish the sentence. As the tears came, she could only wheel away from him and stumble blindly out the lodge, upsetting the calabash of water and almost colliding with Swan Feather, who was just coming home. The old woman shot her a concerned glance as Clarissa
veered out of her path. Clarissa knew that out of respect, if nothing else, she should stop and explain. But her throat was so choked with emotion that she could not trust herself to speak. She could only hope Swan Feather would understand and forgive her.

The forest loomed in her tear-blurred vision, its shadowy depths offering a place to hide. She plunged onto the meadow path, running blindly, wanting only escape and the release of exhaustion. She ran until her ribs heaved and her chest ached and her gait had slowed to a stumble. She ran until one dragging toe caught in a tree root, sending her into a headlong sprawl.

She landed hard, but a hundred seasons of rotting leaves cushioned her fall. She lay there, facedown on the damp forest floor, too tired to get up and too humiliated to go home—wherever home might be. Nothing seemed solid or certain anymore, least of all who she was and where she belonged.

Wolf Heart gazed at Swan Feather through the drifting haze of smoke. There was no need to explain what had happened between himself and Clarissa. The old woman had seen both their hot flushed faces. She knew.

He spoke formally, choosing his words with care. “My bones are mending swiftly. You have cared well for me, friend of my mother, and I am grateful, but it is time for me to return to my own lodge.”

“You know you are welcome to stay.” Her own speech too was guarded and deliberate, allowing him to save face. “But perhaps you would sleep better alone, without the snores of an old woman to trouble you.”

“I have slept very well here, but I have wearied you. You are the one who needs to rest.” He studied her
through the smoky haze. Her eyes, of late, appeared shadowed, sunk deeply into the wrinkled pits of their sockets.

“You may sleep in your own lodge, then,” she conceded as if it were her decision. “But you must let me bring your meals and change your wrappings, unless…” She let the words trail off as she stared into the smoke. Then, as if picking up a dropped thread, she finished. “Unless, of course, you would rather have the girl do it. She has learned well and is quite capable of caring for your needs.”

There it was. Behind his own stoic facade, Wolf Heart felt his pulse skitter like a youth’s. Swan Feather’s words had opened the door to his asking for Clarissa in marriage. He had only to make the next move.

He was searching for words to explain his dilemmawhen she spoke again.

“You promised the council you would take a Shawnee woman. Once, as I told you, I believed that she could never become Shawnee. But she has proven herself many times over. She is strong and brave and not afraid of hard work. She is worthy in every respect.”

“Worthy, yes. Willing, no,” Wolf Heart said. “She has no wish to become Shawnee or to become my wife. These things she has told me.”

“Naturally she has.” A wistful smile flickered in Swan Feather’s ancient eyes. “Before he took me in marriage, I told my husband much the same thing—that I had no wish to live with a Kispoko warrior, among his people. But even as I spoke the words, my heart was straining to go with him.”

“At least you were Shawnee,” Wolf Heart said, warmed by her manner in spite of himself. “That made things simpler.”

“True. But the girl cares for you, I know. The day you
were carried here, so badly hurt, she never left your side. I have seen the way she watches you when you aren’t aware of it. I have seen the softness in her eyes.”

“And I have felt the sharpness of her claws.”

“Would you choose a woman without passion? Without spirit?”

Wolf Heart shifted his weight against the willow brace, remembering how Clarissa had gone molten in his arms—and remembering the contempt in her eyes when she had pulled away from him.

“Enough. We’re talking in circles,” he growled, pushing to a crouch, then rising unsteadily to his feet. His legs quivered as he started toward the door, waving away the old woman’s efforts to help him.

“It’s too soon for you to leave,” she argued. “Surely you can stay a few more days.”

“I have already stayed too long, friend of my mother. A man should sleep in his own lodge.” He moved toward the doorway, steeled against explosions of pain that ricocheted like musket fire around his ribs. Pride and his status as a warrior demanded that he walk home under his own power, showing a stoic face to the world. It would demand all the strength he possessed.

“I will make your fire and bring your food,” Swan Feather called after him as he bent to clear the low doorway.

“When my ribs are mended I will shoot and dress a buck just for you,” he answered, his jaw tightening with each movement.

“And I will make you a fine pair of leggings from the hide,” Swan Feather shouted after him, not to be outdone. “They will be finished in time for your wedding!”

Wolf Heart walked through the village, greeting those he passed as if nothing were amiss. Only after he had
entered the solitude of his own
wegiwa
did he slump to the floor and allow himself a long, low grunt of agony.