Lily's Secrets [Elk Creek 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (10 page)

She suddenly realized that she knew next to nothing about Dakota. She wanted to remedy that. She was interested in him and wanted to know as much about him as she would want to know about anyone she considered a friend.

A friend with whom you want to be more
.

“I missed the pleasure of your company,” Dakota whispered, answering her initial question, and Lily felt her heart skip several beats in her chest. “I missed your voice, especially when you sing.”

She shrugged, too choked up to say anything.

“Why would returning to teach not be a good idea?”

Lily smiled at how easily he changed the subject. Evidently, Dakota didn’t have the same qualms about asking her questions that she had about asking him questions. “I’m not the same person I was several years ago. Things have happened.”

“Does it have anything to do with why you and Wyatt are so distant from each other?”

“You picked up on that, did you?”

Now it was Dakota’s turn to shrug. “It was difficult to miss.”

Heat surged to her face and she lowered her head. She wanted to crawl under the floorboards and hide when she remembered the way she had confided in this man over the last few days while he had been unconscious. Aside from picking up things from her and Wyatt’s behavior toward one another, she was sure he had caught and instinctively retained some things she had said to him.

“Please do not be ill at ease.”

She raised her head to see him sitting beside her when he grasped her hand in his. She hadn’t even heard or seen him move. She was awed by his skill as she had never mastered the art of
kajika
and doubted that she would no matter how long she had stayed among the Kiowas. She had learned the tribe’s language and some daily rituals and special ceremonies, but her white skin and blood always made her an outsider.

At four her son had been more of a natural Kiowa than she had, but then it was all he had ever known. The tribe was his people, his family. He’d lived among them since his birth and he’d died with them.

Lily’s free hand flew to her mouth to smother an unexpected sob. She had thought by now that she had gotten over the loss, but every now and then the grief crept up to choke her with its cruelty. It reminded her of the little life she had barely gotten to know. It reminded her of the little boy that Wyatt had been deprived of knowing at all.

Despite everything, Lily knew she had been blessed, if only for the four years of her son’s life she had shared with him. At least she had gotten to know Little Wyatt. She had gotten to love her son as much as she loved his father. For the longest time the idea and finally the reality of Little Wyatt had been the only thing that had kept her going, the only thing that had given her something to look forward to in the mornings besides learning Indian customs and adjusting to her new life with an Indian tribe.

“Tell me how I can make things better for you, Lily, and I will do it.” Dakota lightly squeezed her hand.

Lily blinked to try and clear the tears from her eyes, but it didn’t help. She stared at him through tear-blurred vision, tasting the salt as several drops slid down her face and she automatically licked her lips.

Dakota cupped her face with one hand and caught some of the deluge with his thumb, gently massaging her cheekbone.

The slow, steady motion hypnotized her as much as his intense expression. Her breath caught in her chest and her nipples tightened as they had the night before with Wyatt.

When Dakota leaned toward her a moment later, she wasn’t surprised. Her body vibrated with anticipation and he finally placed his mouth against hers. Lily parted her lips, making room for the tip of his tongue as if welcoming him home.

She tilted her head to one side and closed her eyes as his tongue explored just inside the entrance of her mouth. He circled the rim of her lips like a bee buzzing around before it pollinates a flower. When his tongue finally thrust inside, Lily groaned and turned her body into his, seeking his heat. She moved her hands up to his head, sliding her hands into his ebony hair, the strands just as silken as but much longer than Wyatt’s.

He was so different from Wyatt yet not, and as Lily squeezed her eyes tight as if to deny and shut out the sin she was committing, she saw her husband and Dakota before her mind’s eye, their features melding and shifting until there was just one perfect man in her arms kissing her—a perfect man with Dakota’s blue eyes and Wyatt’s azure eyes, a perfect man with Dakota’s shiny dark hair and Wyatt’s full, golden-blond hair, a perfect man with Dakota’s copper skin and Wyatt’s olive skin.

Dakota’s touch grew more insistent, one hand sliding down to cup the base of her skull with restrained force as he pressed her face against his to deepen the kiss.

Lily panted against his mouth, tangling her tongue with his in a duel of desperation and relief. Her heart pounded behind her rib cage, and she felt liquid heat flow into her underwear when Dakota’s other hand found one of her breasts and caressed the underside just enough to make her nipples painfully stand at attention.

What was she doing? What if Wyatt walked in?

These thoughts, however, did nothing to slow her progress or change the inevitable path she had been on from the moment she and Wyatt found Dakota injured in the woods and decided to bring him home to nurse back to health.

Her touch now had nothing at all to do with nursing his body and everything to do with nursing her soul and appeasing the throbbing ache between her legs.

Lily broke the kiss, but only long enough to bury her face in the crook between Dakota’s neck and shoulder. She took a deep breath, infusing her senses with his fresh woodsy aroma—familiar, so familiar—an intoxicating mix of his own scent and the freshly laundered shirt he wore that still bore a whiff of Wyatt.

Her memories of another night in the woods clashed with her memories of finding Dakota in the woods just several days ago. The memories came into and went out of focus, shifting and blurring until she didn’t know what reality was and what reality wasn’t.

Dakota framed her face with both hands, searching her gaze with his. “You are so beautiful, Lily, so brave and strong. You deserve so much better than what you have been given. I wish that I could give you what you deserve. I wish that you were mine.”

She didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t make her sound like she wanted to have her cake and eat it, too. She knew very well how Dakota felt. He had been making it painfully clear since they’d brought him home. She felt the same way. She wanted to belong to him
and
Wyatt. She wanted both men to belong to her in the only ways that counted, and how wrong was all that?

She was a married woman! She had a man who loved her, a man she loved. Why couldn’t she be satisfied with that when so many women in the territory had no men at all or had lost their men to disease, war, and other societal ills?

God would certainly strike her down for being so greedy, for wanting more than one woman could ever need in a lifetime, more than her fair share.

Dakota leaned in again to kiss her and she put a hand on his chest to stop him. The frantic beating against her palm excited and pleased her as much as it filled her with a sense of dismay and hopelessness. “I love my husband,” she murmured. The instant the words left her mouth, Lily heard a floorboard in the front vestibule creak beneath the weight of a distinctive boot.

She gasped and jerked her head toward the door, gaze wide and searching.

“Lily?”

She stood from the sofa, barely hearing Dakota address her above the wild pulsation of her heart. She drifted toward the doorway, dread suffusing her as she reached the doorjamb and paused on the threshold. She took a deep breath before stepping into the hallway, not knowing what to expect.

No one was there.

Lily didn’t know whether or not to be relieved.

Could the noise have been her imagination running wild because of her guilty conscience? Had the savage who attacked her gotten bold and, believing her alone again, returned for more after all this time?

“What is it, Lily?”

She felt Dakota’s steadying hand on her shoulder as he stood behind her, but his touch did precious little to comfort her because she knew in her heart her worst nightmare had come true.

Wyatt had seen them kissing.

“Yah! Go! Yah!” Wyatt dug his heels into Gambit’s strong-muscled flanks and the animal galloped down the dirt road toward town like a horse running for The Pony Express.

Gambit was an exquisite black stallion on which he had splurged a few years back but hadn’t had the opportunity to ride in the last several months the way he liked to and the way the horse deserved. Unlike a plow or cart horse, Gambit was sleek, made strictly for speed and pleasure. There’d been no real occasion before now to fulfill the animal’s and his needs, as Wyatt rarely did anything these days for the sheer enjoyment of it. If an activity didn’t involve tending his land and maintaining his home, he didn’t engage in it.

Now he saw no reason not to.

He knew he should have stayed and made his presence known. He should have confronted them, but then what purpose would that have served except to satisfy his masculine sense of self-worth? Not to mention he’d practically pushed Lily into the Indian’s arms by refusing to let her work out in the fields with him like she used to. He had given her more time in the house alone with the Indian whether he wanted to admit it or not.

Wyatt wondered if, subconsciously, he had pushed Lily and Dakota into each other’s path just to see if they would succumb to temptation and the desire brewing between them. Had he been testing them, testing his Lily?

He didn’t want to believe he was that cruel, but what other reason did he have for pushing her away night after night, distancing himself, if not a wicked need to punish her? Or maybe he was punishing himself for not being there when she had needed him most.

If anyone had asked him, he and Lily had both been punished enough.

Which brought Wyatt right back to the other reason he had left after witnessing that kiss.

Lily had never looked more beautiful, more content than she had been when she was in the Indian’s arms. For his part, Dakota had handled her with the gentle reverence that a man would reserve for the woman he treasured and loved.

Despite being Lily’s husband, who was he to stand in the way of that kind of bond, something that seemed so…destined?

Wyatt frowned at the term.

Unlike Lily, he wasn’t very spiritual and only went to church because his mama and papa used to make him go. He didn’t believe in the kind of farfetched, fatalistic hogwash that religious men preached from their pulpits
.
If he couldn’t see it, touch it, smell it, or hear it, then it wasn’t real to him and didn’t matter none anyway. Except that since Doctor Malloy and his wife Maia and his brother Cade had moved to Elk Creek, he had started to think twice about dreams coming true, happily ever afters, and fairy tales. He had started to believe in a power outside of himself, like magic—the exact thing he associated with what was going on between his wife and the Indian.

How could he compete with something like that?

Wyatt’s heart suddenly balled up tight in his chest with frustration and the pain of his wife’s betrayal. He wanted to believe that Lily still had for him the same tender affection she had shown the Indian. He needed to have faith that his presence still brought her joy and that what they had sown several years ago when they got married could be salvaged.

Could a woman, so sweet and basic like Lily, love two men? More importantly, could he be with a woman who loved two men, even if one of them was him?

Wyatt knew himself and he knew his weaknesses and faults better than anyone. He knew he could be jealous and possessive of Lily. He had been this way even before her attack. The men in town often teased him about his having “that pretty little wife of your’n on a short leash.” He didn’t care how anyone saw his and Lily’s relationship. He just knew that from the moment he had exchanged vows with his intended before Elk Creek’s Justice of the Peace, he considered Lily his to love and protect always. He only cared how
she
saw their relationship.

It actually surprised him that he’d chosen to leave rather than stay and wring the Indian’s neck for daring to touch what belonged to Wyatt. He supposed part of it was because he knew that Dakota had only gone as far as Lily allowed him and wanted him to. Knowing this had dispelled Wyatt’s initial, natural instinct to claim what was his and crush any challenger for his Lily’s affections.

Wyatt spurred Gambit to move even faster, silently apologizing in advance for pushing the animal to his limits. He needed to get as far away from the source of his rage and confusion as he could, for if he had stayed in that house a moment longer, he might have broken something. He didn’t want to contemplate what that something might have been.

Tarnation, he had done more ruminating in the last hour than he had for most of his life!

Wyatt wasn’t much of a thinker, definitely not scholarly like his wife, though he liked to read and used to enjoy helping her prepare lesson plans for her students. However, he was impulsive and considered himself more of a doer. Lily said he had a mite of a temper. He knew it was true, especially where anyone threatening his marriage was concerned.

He’d gotten better since he’d married Lily. He’d settled down considerably since his footloose and fancy-free bachelor days when he’d only looked forward to being out on the range or going on the trail with like-minded men. He’d settled down thanks to Lily. She was his great equalizer. She balanced him out.

He realized in that instant that he not only wanted her in his life, he needed her. He was willing to keep her, too, in any capacity, on her terms, because if he didn’t follow his heart on this he wouldn’t be able to look himself in the mirror and say he’d done all he could to save their marriage.