Blue Moon (8 page)

She led the way, encouraging him with soft sighs. Whispering against his lips. Shifting in his embrace, she placed one hand upon his thigh, let it inch slowly upward, toward his manhood. He moaned, a choked sound that might have been a sigh of pleasure or a weak protest. She could not resist. She brushed his buckskin pants where they strained across his arousal, heard him moan, felt him shudder.

Noah’s heart was pounding, beating with such intensity that he thought it might explode. Her light, explorative touch set his blood thrumming through his veins. She tantalized him everywhere at once. Her lips were exquisite, her kiss indescribable. He was consumed with her. With touching her, kissing her. He was exhilarated by her.

The world had narrowed to the two of them. Time had stopped when her lips touched his for the first time. He was certain there had been nothing before and there would be nothing after her and this golden, explosive moment in time.

Brazenly she cupped him, and he nearly jumped out of the bed. She gently cradled his pulsing, aching manhood in her hand and when he felt the heat of her palm through the leather of his pants, he moaned again. All rational thought left him and he acted on instinct as he pressed her back against the pillow and covered her with his body. She slid her hands up to the front of his shirt, tore at the hem as she pulled it out of his pants, exposed his chest and ran her hands up and down his ribs.

Curiosity did not guide him. It was need, pure and simple, need and an intense hunger for this woman who had slipped into his life, into his home—invading his senses, stirring up his world, his desire, igniting him.

His hands found their way to the hem of the doeskin dress. He slipped his hand onto her leg beneath the butter-soft fabric. Her skin was smooth and white as starlight. As he slid his palm up her leg, the dress rose with his hand. When he reached her thigh, he was shaking with need. Touching her intimately was nearly his undoing. He was trembling violently, fighting to hold back, expecting her to come to her senses and push him away.

Instead, Olivia surprised him by rocking her hips, pressing against him in invitation, urging him on with soft cries and whispers. He froze when she frantically untied his pants and shoved them down around his hips. Guiding him, she gently urged him to lie down alongside her. He pressed close to her and felt his throbbing erection against her thigh.

In a dreamlike state, he rose up and over her. Afraid he would reach a climax before he entered her, he watched starbursts explode in his mind’s eye. Exquisite pleasure-pain pulsed through him until he wanted to scream. There would be no turning back now.

Olivia ignored his scar and framed his face with her hands as she kissed him deeply. Where his cheek brushed against hers it became moist with the heat of her tears.

He nudged her legs apart with his knee, wrapped her in his arms, mounted her. Inexperience made him brave. Excitement made him hurry. His heart and mind were focused on only her, on Olivia and his pulsing need. He could not think past his next heartbeat, his next breath. Sliding into her moist, slick passage, he buried himself to the hilt.

Acute awareness hit him. He was inside Olivia, sheathed and surrounded by her. He could feel her sliding up and down around him, taking him in, stretching to admit all of him. She lunged up and up against him, as her hips bucked frantically.

She called out his name, urging him on. Unable to control himself any longer, he climaxed.

Olivia’s breath came in ragged tears. Noah collapsed against her, his cheek against hers, his breath hot against her ear. Shock overwhelmed her so that she could not move or think or speak.

What in the world had she just done?

When had the nightmare ended and the dream begun—the comforting dream that she now realized with terrifying clarity was indeed reality?

She whispered his name.

Looking dazed, he sat up and shoved a hand through his hair.

“Are you all right?” He leaned back on his elbow, staring down at her, watching her closely.

She could see his face clearly in the moonlight filtering through the open window. His expression was clouded by confusion and doubt, as if, like her, he had no explanation of how things had gone so far. As if he, too, doubted the reality of what had just happened.

Oh, my God. What have I done? What have I become?

He had been so strong over the past days. She was well aware that Noah would never have crossed the line if she had not led him over it. She had recognized the desire in his eyes and knew that he wanted her, and he had kept his need under control and never made a move toward her, and probably never would have if she had not wantonly seduced him in the dark.

Reeling, she closed her eyes, thinking back over the last few moments, trying to sort out the tumultuous upheaval inside her. At the end of her nightmare when she awoke in his embrace, she had wanted the safety and security of his arms to go on and on.

She could not blame Noah for what happened, for she had initiated their lovemaking. She had kissed him first, touched him first, urged him on, prompted him until he had acted on his desire. She had used him, used his desire to get what she had wanted so desperately—freedom from the memory of Darcy Lankanal, to feel cherished and protected and safe from her past, if only for a few stolen moments.

He reached out and touched her cheek where her tears had dried, and he smiled at her for the first time since she had met him. The smile transformed him, lit up his face.

“You are mine now, Olivia. You belong to me.” He sounded so certain, so sure. As if she were a treasure he had been searching for his whole life long.

Ashamed of what she had become, of what she had done and was about to do to him, she pressed her hands over her eyes. “Oh, Noah, I’m so sorry.”

Beside her, he stiffened. “Sorry?”

She dropped her hands. Looked over at him again. “I never meant for this to happen. I … I was confused.”

“Confused?”

“Yes, the nightmare …”

What could she tell him that would not make her sound like a madwoman? That she had used him to help her forget her past, and her fear, and Darcy? That she had wanted to feel him inside her, hoping to experience a rebirth as well as release? That she wanted to erase the memory of Darcy, and carry only thoughts of Noah with her when she left?

Could she tell him that something inside her hoped that what was so very good and so very honorable in him might take root in her, that his goodness might cancel out the sordid months she had spent in New Orleans?

Now he lay beside her waiting for explanations she could not give without telling him everything. She was about to hurt him, but there was no other way.

“At dawn I want you to take me to the edge of the swamp. I can’t stay here any longer.”

She buried her face in her hands and as she did, she felt him climb over her and leave the bed. She heard his clothing rustle.

“I understand,” he said. There was a new hardness to his tone, one she had not heard him use before. She looked up and saw the fury on his face, but more than that, the hurt and betrayal.

“Noah, you don’t understand at all.”

He nodded. “Oh, but I do. You didn’t mean to make love to a one-eyed half-breed. Now you’re sorry.” He turned around and tied the waistband of his pants.

“That’s not true,” she cried. “That’s not the way of it at all. I don’t think of you that way.”

A cold, silent tension filled the air until he turned around again. “Don’t worry, Olivia. It was nothing to me either.”

She stood up and went to him, trying to grab his sleeve, but he jerked his arm away. “Don’t say that, please. I know you wanted me and I wanted
you
, Noah, truly I did, and it was beautiful. But I never meant for this to happen. I never meant for things to go that far.”

She clasped her hands together, then pulled them apart, trying to put her feelings into words. “I’m not worthy of a man like you.”

He laughed, but there was a hollow, bitter ring to it.

“Really, Noah, you have no idea. You deserve so much better. You deserve someone with a clear conscience, someone with an unblemished soul.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Because you don’t know me or what I have done. I have to find my family, Noah. I have to find out what happened to them. I have a past, Noah. I have much to settle inside myself, and it wouldn’t be fair to drag you into any of this.”

“What if you don’t find them?”

She took a deep breath. The same question had entered her mind and given her pause often enough. Beyond finding her family, she had no future.

“I honestly don’t know what I’ll do then. I just know that we can’t be together. Things are not that simple, Noah.”

“Why not?”

“Because of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. If you knew, you would never want me again.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m too ashamed.”

“What are you saying, Olivia?”

She shook her head. “I’m asking you to let me go, Noah. Take me to the edge of the swamp and let me go.”

“I can’t do that. Not until I know why.”

He stared down at her, solid and immovable, his arms folded across his chest. There was no hunger in his eyes now, only anger and betrayal, but most of all confusion.

He had taken her in and shown her only kindness and respect. She had done this to him, tempted him beyond reason, drawn him into her arms, into her body—and used him in a frantic, misguided effort to heal herself. She had succeeded in hurting him, her savior, the one man who had shown her only kindness.

Sick at heart, empty inside, she walked back to the bed and sat down. There was no going back or denying what had just passed between them, not with the scent of their lovemaking still heavy in the air. The sheets were tangled. The intensity of her release still pulsed faintly at her core.

Wrapping her arms around her midriff, Olivia hugged herself and rocked back and forth, cursing Darcy Lankanal for what he had made her. He had taught her too long and too well. She was as dirty as he was now, her blood just as hot, her soul just as tainted.

She shoved her hand through her hair, pushing it back off her face. She sighed. “Sit down, Noah. It’s a long story and not a pretty one.”

•   •   •

Olivia lost herself in the telling, becoming caught up in it so much that it was as if she had slipped back in time, over a year, to that very day on the Ohio River.

It was a beautiful, terrible day. The little boys, her half-brothers, had needed her constant attention. They were understandably restless and bored after days of confining travel. Neither the flatboat nor the river fascinated them anymore.

She felt uneasy when a man calling himself Colonel Sullivan had hailed them from the shore. Her father agreed to give him a ride downriver so that he could meet up with some companions. After watching the man closely, Olivia thought him too shifty. There was nothing he had actually done to alarm her; it was just a feeling that she had. He made her skin crawl.

She took her father aside and tried to persuade him not to allow Sullivan aboard, but Payson Bond would not consider leaving a man stranded; he told Olivia so before assuring her that she need not worry. He sent her to mind the boys and keep them from upsetting her stepmother, Susanna.

While she spoke, Noah kept moving, stoked the fire, made a pot of coffee. She waited while he filled two cups and brought her one.

“You father saw nothing wrong with the man?” He stood over her until she took the first sip and then sat down on a stool near the table.

Olivia wiped away a tear as she shook her head. “My father prides himself on trying to live the golden rule. He welcomed the ‘colonel’ aboard, even though he was shabbily dressed and crude-talking. Sullivan went back among the boxes and crates and made himself comfortable and we pulled back out into the river.”

“I know what happened next,” Noah said. “He started shouting that the flatboat was leaking and you had to pull into shore.”

She was shocked. “How did you know?”

“It’s an old trick,” he told her, ignoring his coffee. “A man will beg passage and while aboard, drill a hole in the bottom of the flatboat. He times it so that the pilot will have to pull into shore at a place where the rest of the thieves are waiting.”

“We were so naive,” she whispered. “Does it happen often?”

“More than most folks know,” he assured her. “River pirates prey on the settlers. There are caves and hideouts up and down the rivers.”

Olivia wanted this over with, so she began again. “As soon as we landed, four more of the bandits stepped out of the woods and hailed Colonel Sullivan. He drew a gun and demanded we all disembark.” She tried to swallow the taste of fear as she relived the memory aloud for the first time.

“My father was able to get to his rifle, but when he tried to hold them all off, the colonel said that he’d never succeed. He told my father that if he handed me over to them, that he would let the rest of the family go.”

“Your half-brothers, their mother, your father,” Noah clarified.

She nodded. “Yes. Susanna was carrying another child. She was upset, begging my father to listen to them, to give me up. I am certain they would have killed us all. I was surprised when they kept their word and didn’t kill the rest of my family anyway.” She fell silent, remembering the river, the terrible grief brought on by the separation, the fact that Susanna could not meet her eyes just before the men dragged her away.

Noah’s hand tightened on the coffee cup. “You father did not fight?”

“No. He isn’t a fighting man.”

“The pirates took you to New Orleans.” He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees.

“They did not touch me. A virgin was worth more.” She answered the question hanging between them. “They sold me to a gambler who owns a whorehouse. A man named Darcy Lankanal. He locked me in his suite, kept me for his own personal use for a year.”

Noah was watching her so intently that she could not bear to meet his gaze. Her shame was heavy as she looked down at her hands folded in her lap.