Authors: Shirl Henke

Sundancer (Cheyenne Series) (57 page)

Roxanna gloried in his hands gliding all over her tingling flesh, his lips caressing with licks, nips, soft brushing kisses. Then he withdrew abruptly and stood back. Her eyes flew open wide in surprise and dismay as she raised her head and propped herself up, resting on one elbow, looking at him hungrily.

“You wanted me to strip for you,” he said, watching the little pink points of her nipples tighten even harder.

She blinked and gave a breathless nod, letting her eyes feast on his tall, lithe body. His eyes met hers hotly, dancing with deviltry as he shrugged the black wool jacket from his broad shoulders and tossed it carelessly onto a chair. His hands, those marvelous long-fingered hands, reached up and began to loosen the knot of his tie, slipping the steel-gray silk free with a long slow swish, then letting it dangle from his fingers and slide to the floor. He held up one cuff and pulled out one diamond link, then the other.

“Catch,” he said, tossing them one at a time to her. She sat up and reached for the sparkling jewelry, grabbing the first one, missing the second as she licked her lips and watched him pull the studs from his shirt, slowly peeling away the starched white linen to reveal that fascinating pattern of curly black hair on his chest. He let one hand rub over a bulging pectoral muscle, touching the freshly healed scar from the Sun Dance, and she moaned softly.

“Don't stop now,” she whispered raggedly when he stood with the shirt half on, half off his body.

“Your slightest wish...” He shoved the fistful of jewelry into his pants pocket and walked with pantherish grace to the bootjack, shrugging the shirt off and tossing it away. Then he pressed his palms against the wall, back turned to her as he worked off his boots.

Roxanna watched the muscles move in sinuous ripples beneath the bronzed skin of his back. His long arms were extended, emphasizing the breadth of his shoulders and narrowness of his waist. Straight black hair, still without the attention of a barber, covered his neck, barely brushing his shoulders. She shuddered, thinking of the feel of his hair when she buried her hands in it, pulling his head to her for hot wet kisses.

Cain turned halfway around, with one palm still braced against the wall, and pulled off one sock, then the other. Then he strode slowly back to the bed. “How am I doing so far?”

“Keep going,” she whispered hoarsely. God, he was beautiful! Her eyes traveled hungrily from his face with its smoldering heavy-lidded eyes to the scars on his chest—a badge of honor, a pledge of love. Soon she would tell him about her dream...but not right now. The bulge in his fitted black wool trousers was visual proof of the urgency they both felt. Her breath hitched when his hands began to unfasten his belt and pull it through the loops, then toss it to the floor and move back to the buttons at his fly.

“If you tear them off I'll be happy to sew them back on later,” she urged raggedly.

He grinned, working the placket open quickly, then took a deep breath to steady himself as his sex sprang free of the tight confinement. Kicking the britches and underdrawers away, he stepped directly in front of her and stood looking down. “Was that something like you had in mind?” he said with a grin, repeating her words to him.

“Something like,” she echoed breathlessly, returning the grin as his rigidly erect phallus jutted out at eye level. A single pearly drop of semen glistened on the dark head of his staff. She reached out and wrapped one hand around the length of it, sliding back and forth until he cried out. “Come to me, Cain...come deep inside of me,” she invited, still holding on to him as he climbed onto the bed and knelt between her spread thighs.

He covered her body as she guided the pearly tip to her wet swollen petals. He plunged deep inside of her then, unable to stop himself after holding out for so long, especially when she arched up to meet him, tightening her thighs around his hips and pulling his head down to her breasts.

Alternately suckling the delectable feast of one pink nipple, then the other, Cain set a deep, slow rhythm, thrusting as she rolled her hips. “I've ached...wanting to do this each...day...I was gone,” he said as he kissed his way up her neck to her face, then centered his mouth over hers.

Roxanna moaned as his tongue met hers, digging her nails into the hard satiny muscles of his shoulders, pulling him closer as the spiraling waves of ecstasy built higher and higher until she thought she would go mad with the pleasure and the craving, wanting that shimmering culmination, yet wanting the searing sweet friction to continue forever...forever...forever.

Feeling her begin to slip over the abyss, he murmured into her ear, “Now,” then let go, plunging harder, faster, swelling and pumping his seed deep inside her as her silky sheath squeezed him dry.

He collapsed on top of her, feeling her arms hold him tightly while she feathered small swift kisses across his face and down his neck. He hummed in contentment when her tongue licked a trickle of perspiration off his skin.

Carefully, he rolled over onto his back, carrying her with him, not breaking their joining. “I think Sees Much will have to find a new name for you,” he said, smiling.

She propped her chin on her hands, which were crossed over his chest, and replied, “Oh?”

“Her Back Is Straight doesn't fit a woman who can wriggle and arch and buck and—”

She pummeled him playfully, then began to kiss his chest, letting her fingers rifle through the springy black hair, pausing to touch and caress the Sun Dance scars. “Do they hurt, Brother of the Spirit Bull?” she asked.

“Not any longer. I never told you about my dream. I think—”

“There is something I must tell you first, my love. Sees Much instructed me very specifically.”

His brow crinkled, in perplexity. “What is it?”

She described her dream about the lone bull, watching the look of incredulous wonder spread across his face.

“If I ever had any doubt about the meaning of the vision I had in the Medicine Lodge, you've just put it to rest forever. In my vision you healed me. You—”

“A Sun and Moon Woman healed you.” She nodded. “I was there in Sees Much's lodge, helping him treat your wounds when you described it all. He already knew about my dream. Do you think he knew you'd have the final fulfillment of it in yours?”

He smiled tenderly at her. “We'll ask him next summer.”

* * * *

PROMONTORY POINT, UTAH, MAY 10, 1869

There was a hushed air of expectancy hanging over the crowd. The heat was stultifying, with scarcely a hint of a breeze to dispel the golden scorch of the sun high overhead. The two locomotives, one pointing east, the other west, stood only a few yards apart. The dignitaries clustered around the small space between them, preparing to complete the final act of the drama which had begun a dozen years and fifteen hundred miles ago. A small man with a green eyeshade hunched expectantly over his telegraph key.

“Damn Leland Stanford's long-windedness,” Jubal groused as he wiped at the sweat trickling down into the starched collar of his shirt. “If he'd rambled on with that speech any longer, the rails would have melted in this heat.”

Cain MacKenzie chuckled as he leaned over to shade his wife and their daughter Jubalee beneath the protection of the large sun umbrella he was holding. His little silver-haired vixen of a daughter looked up at him with adoring wide dark eyes and cooed. Roxanna smiled, rocking the child, when a sudden cheer erupted across the assembly.

The golden spike had been driven into the last rail, linking a continent from sea to sea. Hats flew up into the air as men yelled and women waved their kerchiefs in excitement. The message tapped out by the telegrapher sang across the wires to all points east and west. The transcontinental railroad was complete. Slowly the two engines puffed and chugged, inching across the last few feet until the cowcatchers touched. People swarmed all over the two trains, everyone laughing and talking at once.

Jubal exchanged a smile with the newest director of the Central Pacific, who happened to be his son and business partner, and said, “Damn me if I'm not almost as good at building railroads as I am at building families.”

About the Author

SHIRL HENKE lives in St. Louis, where she enjoys gardening in her yard and greenhouse, cooking holiday dinners for her family and listening to jazz. In addition to helping brainstorm and research her books, her husband Jim is “lion tamer” for their two wild young tomcats, Pewter and Sooty, geniuses at pillage and destruction.

Shirl has been a RITA finalist twice, and has won three Career Achievement Awards, an Industry Award and three Reviewer’s Choice Awards from
Romantic Times

“I wrote my first twenty-two novels in longhand with a ballpoint pen—it’s hard to get good quills these days,” she says. Dragged into the twenty-first century by her son Matt, a telecommunication specialist, Shirl now uses two of those “devil machines.” Another troglodyte bites the dust. Please visit her at

www.shirlhenke.com
.

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