As the Cowboy Commands [Ecstasy in the Old West 2] (Siren Publishing Allure) (4 page)

“I’ll protect you,” Jared said, his lips moving softly against Helen’s fingertips, his tone now husky with suppressed passion. “I promise you that.”

Helen almost told Jared that she could protect herself. She had been an independent woman too long to not immediately consider such a response. It was what she wanted to say, even though logic told her that, in this particular instance, she needed Jared more than she had ever needed any man in her life. She also wanted to hide her naked breast with her hand, as she had previously, but when she took her hand away from Jared’s mouth, her arm dropped to hang loose at her side.

“I’ll take care of you,” Jared said as he bent down, his face coming closer to Helen’s. “Trust me. You’ve got to trust me.”

A thousand separate thoughts ricocheted through Helen’s brain. Jared bent slowly, so there was plenty of time for her to indicate that she did not wish to experience his kisses. But she gave no such indication. She just stood there, her left hand over one breast, her other breast exposed, as Jared brought his mouth to hers.

A vicious brute like Jared is incapable of knowing how to kiss, Helen thought an instant before his lips came into contact with her own.

As had happened before, Helen discovered that her initial assessment of the stranger with the quicksilver draw and deadly accuracy was inaccurate. She was completely, blissfully, magnificently
wrong.

And never in her life had it felt so right to be so wrong.

Initially, Jared merely brushed his lips across Helen’s, planting butterfly kisses from one side of her mouth to the other. And then, very softly, the tip of his tongue came out to moisten her lips, first the upper, then the lower. Only when all this had been done with the most erotic lethargy, so that Helen’s entire soul and being were aching for the full impact of his kiss upon her lips, did Jared slant his mouth down over hers. The kiss was firm, authoritative, and when Helen felt Jared’s lips open, she opened her own invitingly. His tongue, slick and devilish, glided between her lips, entering her mouth to dance with her own tongue.

The soft, tremulous moan of female acquiescence that drifted to Helen’s ears seemed odd somehow. It took a second or two for her to realize that she had been the one to moan with passion, and it was several seconds later that she became aware that she had never before really heard the sound of her own excitement. In the past, when Gregg put his tongue in her mouth, all she felt was an unpleasantness that didn’t quite reach the level of revulsion. This was different.

The kiss deepened, and though Helen at first simply received Jared’s kiss, within seconds she was returning the lusty kiss with equal ardor, playing her tongue against his. She raised her hands, slipping her arms loosely over his broad shoulders. When she felt Jared’s powerful hands slide over the naked extravagance of her breasts, another softly hissing sigh of desire escaped her.

“Oh, Jared,” Helen whispered, her lips brushing his as her better judgment stridently insisted that protests should be given a voice. After all, she hardly knew the man—she didn’t even know his last name!—and there was really no reason in the world she should be kissing him now while a dozen violent young outlaws were searching for them.

But protests from Helen to Jared were easier to think about than they were to actually speak aloud. This was especially true when Jared, with surprising delicacy considering the demonstrated strength in his hands, captured her nipples between forefingers and thumbs and twisted with a connoisseur’s precision, using just enough force that the pleasure went completely through Helen. Jared never crossed the gossamer-thin line that separates forceful from painful—but he danced constantly on the high wire defining pleasure from pain, and that made all the difference in the world to Helen’s awakening libido.

The kiss seemed to last an eternity, but even that wasn’t sufficiently long enough for Helen’s satisfaction. When Jared finally took his mouth away from hers, Helen’s legs were weak, her blood was heated, and there was a distinctly traitorous hunger between her legs that she wished with futile desperation did not exist. Helen adamantly did not want to be sexually aroused by this distinctly dangerous stranger, and she had every intention in the world to tell him so.

Sometime soon.

Not quite yet, but very soon.

Maybe.

That is, she would have told Jared he must behave like a gentleman…had he not kissed her cheek, and then her neck, nipping at her tender, silken flesh with his teeth. The sensation hinted at pain, but did nothing more than hint. The pleasure that Jared’s teasing love bites brought was enormous. Helen angled her head to the side, silently availing herself to Jared’s desires, positioning herself so that she would not thwart any of his cravings. Never once—not in all the times that she had been in Gregg’s arms—had she made such an obvious act of sexual submissiveness and acceptance to masculine dominance.

In the distance—though Helen, at that moment, could give no intelligent guess as to what that distance might be—the sounds of the outlaws running and shouting to each other took on a new note. Helen tried, ever so briefly, to convince herself that the vicious gunmen that she had escaped from only minutes earlier were what she should concentrate on, but this thought vanished when she felt Jared’s right hand release her breast, then his fingertips brushed feather-soft over her stomach, moving downward.

I must stop this insanity, Helen thought.

But once again the thought brought no action. Logic and reason had vanished with the application of Jared’s kisses and caresses. All that was left was a responsive, traitorous body that melted at Jared’s discretion.

Jared kissed her collarbone, nudging her torn dress open a little more with his chin. His kisses traveled downward, inching closer and closer to her exposed breasts. His right hand moved past the slender, leather belt encircling her waist, gliding over the curve of her hip to ease downward even more.

“Don’t,” Helen whispered, feeling Jared’s warm, moist, tempting lips on the upper slope of her breast.

She had always had very sensitive nipples, and she knew with frightening certainty that whatever sense of logic and reason she possessed would be stripped away completely if she ever felt this sexy man’s devilish mouth capture her nipple. Action had to be taken, and taken immediately, if she was to have any chance whatsoever of preventing this accident—and Helen had no doubt at all that any semblance of a romantic entanglement with a man like Jared was most definitely an accident—from happening.

“Please, I’m begging you. Stop,” Helen whispered, once again hating the weak, frightened tone of her voice.

“You don’t mean that,” Jared replied, casually dismissing Helen’s words, his right hand now pulling up the skirt of Helen’s dress. The tone of his voice was husky, infinitely seductive. “You’ll beg me…but it won’t be to stop.”

“But…” Helen began. It seemed to her completely unfair that he should have such a tempting voice. The sound of his words shouldn’t cause her to feel like she was being caressed with a mink glove. But she was in the process of discovering that Jared was the exception to every rule.

Jared raised his right hand high enough to press his middle two fingers against Helen’s pussy. Even though the thin barrier of her cotton drawers prevented his fingers from actually touching her tingling flesh, the pleasure that surged through her veins was instantaneous and breathtaking. With devastating precision, as Jared touched her so intimately, he opened his lips wide and sucked the crest of her left breast into his mouth. The liquid heat of his mouth against her sensitive nipple caused Helen to curl forward as she clutched onto his broad shoulders.

She felt as though she were being devoured. Blissfully, passionately, ecstatically devoured. She was being eaten alive in a way that made her embarrassingly aware of her own sexual inexperience.

Please stop! Please stop! thought Helen, delusively believing that she really did want Jared to cease his kisses and caresses.

She could not force the words from her throat. She simply couldn’t tell Jared to do something that—had she been capable of being entirely honest with herself—she really didn’t want him to do. For all his negative traits, he was the man who had put himself in mortal danger to come to her rescue at the precise moment in her life when rescuing was exactly what she had desperately needed. He was also masculine to a heightened degree, and when Helen was feeling weak and vulnerable, ostentatious virility and overwhelming male strength and courage were traits that she could not find entirely offensive. In fact, she could find nothing offensive about them at all.

Helen’s hips began to move. She hadn’t intended for it to happen, it just…happened. Slowly at first, just from side to side. It was an unconscious movement caused by the unprecedented pleasure charging through her, but even when she became aware of what she was doing, she could not stop herself. She could no more stop her hips from moving than she could stop herself from breathing. Jared touched her with astonishing skill, rubbing the pads of his middle two fingers up and down over the delicate, nerve-laden lips of her pussy, forcing cotton to rub tantalizingly against her responsive labia and even more responsive clit. Looking down, she saw his handsome profile, his cheek hollowed as he drew a tight suction upon her breast, and she wished once more that she could find the internal willpower to put an end to this luscious, deliriously exhilarating madness.

But she could not. Could not and would not. And if she was really being honest with herself—which she wasn’t—Helen would admit that she did not want this to end. Perhaps, in some odd way that Helen did not understand, the element of fear had heightened her senses and had stimulated long-neglected nerve receptors. Perhaps it was because Jared was nearly everything she disliked in men. Maybe it was because at any second they might be caught by the vicious outlaws who wanted to rape her and kill Jared. Whatever the reason, Helen felt as though the surface of her skin had been magically sensitized, so that she felt everything with infinitely greater precision than ever before in her life. Her fingers kneaded the muscles in Jared’s shoulders, caressing him through his finely tailored suit coat and shirt, loving the suppressed power she felt there.

He could break me in half if he wanted to, Helen thought. But he knows how to be strong without hurting me. I could kneel at this man’s feet and not feel ashamed of myself.

She pushed her fingers into his thick, ebony hair, shocking herself by guiding Jared’s hungry mouth from the crest of one breast to the other. When Jared captured her nipple between his teeth and nibbled softly, another startled cry escaped her. The intensity of the pleasure was so shocking she couldn’t contain herself. Suddenly, inexplicably, she considered doing to Jared things that Gregg had asked for. With Gregg, she had adamantly refused…but with Jared, the temptation to behave wickedly was so powerful it made her shiver.

Jared feasted upon her breasts, sucking and licking, using his lips and tongue and especially his teeth to give her pleasure that constantly danced between pleasure and pain.

“Oh, Jared. I’m on fire,” Helen whispered, her arms looped over his broad back as his lips tantalized her breasts. She was certain that if she did not hold onto Jared, the strength in her legs would be insufficient to keep her standing.

Jared’s fingers eased higher, relieving the pressure against her clit. A moment later she felt deft fingers pulling loose the drawstring of her drawers. The warning alarms that almost always protected Helen began clanging furiously in her brain, infinitely louder than ever before in her life. Her drawers, once loosened, were tugged down. She felt Jared’s fingers slide over the soft, curly hair above her pubis, then felt him touch the heated, wet lips of her pussy.

Helen’s entire body flinched at the contact. She uttered the name of a deity, then a curse, utterly oblivious to the inconsistency of what she was saying, distinctly aware that she was traveling into an area of sensual emotions that, for her, was entirely uncharted territory. She was aware only of her body and of the thoroughly frightening yet ecstatic way that she responded to everything that Jared was doing to it. When she felt his fingertips come in contact with her throbbing clit, more tremulous words came from her, though if they were words or merely sounds, even Helen could not be certain.

Helen opened her mouth wider, hungry for the taste of Jared’s tongue. She moaned lustily as she felt her clit being rubbed lightly with a fingertip. She knew that if Jared continued to kiss and caress her as he was now, she would have an orgasm—and this was almost unimaginable for her. She had never climaxed through any way other than with self-administered passion.

Jared slipped a single finger between the tight, slick folds of Helen’s pussy. She started to cry out, and he again silenced her with a demanding kiss. She felt as though she were melting inside. Helen had no logical, rational reason for why she felt so completely out of control of her own actions and emotions. All that she knew with certainty was that a kiss from Jared was more exciting than any caress she’d ever received from Gregg and that a caress from Jared touched her to the core of her soul and burned her with a fiery intensity that she hadn’t imagined possible.

The outlaws were nearly upon them before Jared’s survival instincts warned him that the trap was being set. Helen was unaware of anything other than Jared, and how magnificent he made her feel—until he pushed her hard against the brick wall. He sprang into action, attacking the two young padfeet who had come across them hiding in the alley.