The Endless Sky (Cheyenne Series) (49 page)

      
Slowly they sank onto their knees in the soft grass. He lifted the fringed edge of her tunic, pulling it swiftly up and over her head. She was naked beneath, as was the custom of Cheyenne women. But she was not Cheyenne. Her body, lush yet delicate, bloomed milky pale where the sun had not touched it. His hands were dark against the satiny whiteness of her breasts, lifting the full soft mounds to his lips, suckling on one pink tip, then the other. She arched into his caresses, all the while her fingers tugged at his breechclout until it came unfastened. When she grasped the hard pulsing staff in her hand, he let out a ragged cry of pleasure.

      
“I ache to bury it deep inside of you,” he said, pushing her toward the ground.

      
But Stephanie surprised him, pressing her palms against his chest until it was he who lay down on his back beside the fire, looking up at her. She sat back on her heels and shook the long shimmering cascade of bronze hair away from her face. All the while her eyes looked down on him, devouring every long-limbed powerfully muscled inch of his naked flesh. Then she straddled his hips and positioned herself above his straining phallus. Slowly she impaled herself on it as he watched.

      
Chase's hands bit into the curve of her hips and moved around to her buttocks, cupping them and kneading the soft flesh, lifting her as she rode him. Stephanie moved slowly and deliberately, setting an even rhythm to make their joining last as long as possible. Leaning forward she touched the washboard hardness of his belly, then moved her hands higher into the hair on his chest, digging her fingertips into the pelt, then feeling the jagged edges of his Sun Dance scars. The muscles of his chest bunched as his hips kept pace with hers.

      
She could feel his heart slamming against her palm as she slowly lowered her head to his chest. Her long hair spilled over him, curtaining them from the dull glow of the firelight, the soft ends feathering against his skin in light wispy caresses that he thought would drive him mad. Her mouth made contact with his hot skin. He could feel his chest heave and tremble as she began to press kisses on his scars. When she opened her lips and traced the thick ridges with her tongue, he moaned her name and tangled his fists in the bronze sheen of her hair, pulling her closer, closer.

      
This was her Indian lover, scarred in a pagan ritual. This was the father of her unborn child, the only man she could ever love. Stephanie gloried in these scars for they had given him his vision and she was part of it, even sharing the dream with him. That and the child they had made would bind their spirits together long after they would be separated. She kissed the rough knotted tissue, pressing tongue and lips to it, laving it as he groaned deep in his throat, a guttural cry of pleasure and longing. Her scalp stung from the tug of his hands in her hair but she felt no pain.

      
Of their own volition, Stephanie's hips began to increase their tempo, taking him deep inside of her, then rising high, only to plunge once more. Chase kept sync with her, thrusting up on each down stroke. What had begun slowly now built to a desperately sought climax. He pulled on her hair until her head raised up to meet his and his lips could claim hers in another devouring kiss. When he felt the satiny flexing of her sheath and heard her low mewling cries deep in his mouth, he let go, swelling and pulsing his life-bringing fluids deep inside of her.

      
Stephanie held onto him, riding out the maelstrom of anguished pleasure that filled her mind as well as her body. His heart slammed furiously against her palms as they crested together. The hot spurt of his seed sent her spiraling yet higher until the sky and all the stars dissolved and the earth beneath them melted away. They were the White Wolf and Eyes Like Sun, all there was in the universe at that moment, two lovers alone and utterly at peace in the warm sweet wash of satiation. But that peace was fleeting.

      
Stephanie collapsed on top of him, pressing her face to his chest, feeling the roughness of scar tissue against the smoothness of her cheek. She felt his arms around her, one hand splayed across the small of her back while the other reached up to brush the heavy curtain of hair away from her face.

      
“I will always remember this,” she murmured against his chest, letting the tears seep from beneath her lashes to touch his hot skin.

      
“Don't, Stevie, don't speak, don't cry,” he replied softly as he stroked her hair.
How can I give her up? She is my life
. His vengeance against Phillips, his warrior's honor, even the Cheyenne themselves meant nothing compared to his love for her. And he had told her that was over. Such a paltry lie. Yet it was a lie he must live with until he died. For if he did not she would die with him and he could not bear that.

      
So they held each other in the stillness of the night as a coyote howled on the distant plain and an owl hooted softly from the overhanging limbs of an aspen tree. After a while, their bodies still joined, Chase rolled them over and they made love again. Alternately through the night they slept and loved as if racing against the sun.

      
But the sun did rise. Stephanie awakened to find Chase already up, saddling her mare as his big dun watched placidly. He was dressed in buckskin leggings but still bare chested. His hair hung loose, falling across his shoulders as he walked over and stirred the fire where another freshly killed pair of rabbits were roasting. Feeling her eyes on him, he turned his head and grinned. Absurdly after what they had done all night, she felt the urge to blush and cover herself. There had always been a magical newness about loving Chase Remington, from the first moment he'd kissed her so long ago in Boston.

      
“We let the ones last night burn up so I snared us more. Hungry?”

      
His eyes taunted her. “Starved,” she replied, reaching for her tunic, which lay discarded hastily beside their pallet.

      
They ate in silence, then shared the simple tasks of breaking camp and mounted up, heading relentlessly south, to civilization.

* * * *

      
“I hate this place! The dust is thick enough to choke the horses and the mosquitoes could carry away a large dog!” Sabrina Remington slammed the lid of her traveling trunk with an oath and glared at her husband across the austere room in the Brunswick Hotel. “Why did you insist on dragging me into this hellish wasteland?”

      
Burke studied her with a detached air from across the room where he stood sipping from a glass of brandy. “You're not exactly trustworthy, left to your own devices in Boston, much less Washington, while I'm traveling west on senatorial business.”

      
“Why, Burke, whatever—”

      
He cut off her indignant protest with a sharp bark of laughter, harsh and ugly. Then he fixed her with cold blue eyes. “The ‘whatever,’ as we both perfectly well know, is that damned Nevada congressman you've been fucking.”

      
Sabrina's porcelain complexion mottled red with temper. “That's a vulgar and disgusting thing to say! Rory Madigan and I are merely social acquaintances. He's very wealthy and moves in our circles even if he is a Democrat.”

      
“He's a crass Irish immigrant who managed to strike it rich. Just the sort of pretty face you've always fancied. If I weren't already assured of your barrenness, I'd have killed you long ago, Sabrina my pet, before I let you saddle me with a bastard from one of your indiscretions.”

      
Her face quickly lost its rosy tint as the implication of his remarks sunk in. “Have we come here because of Chase, Burke?”

      
“Of course. We have to verify that our beloved nephew has finally been laid to his well-deserved rest,” he replied with false geniality.

      
“You don't need me to prove Chase is dead. I know you've hired men to track him down and kill him for the reward money you've secretly put up through various merchants.” In spite of her precarious position, she could not resist the hint of snideness in her voice.

      
His icy blue gaze riveted on her. “You fucked him. That, I'm afraid, I shall never forgive—a dirty, filthy savage. You'll recall it was at the time you began your dalliance with Chase that I quit your bed permanently. I can stomach a great many things, even an Irishman, but the leavings of a red Indian are beyond the pale.”

      
“You've scarcely noticed whether I was dead or alive since you married me, much less cared to bed me. All I ever was to you was a social ornament, a hostess for your political friends.”

      
“And a splendid ornament you have been,” he purred, moving across the threadbare carpet to where she stood beside a hideous gargoyle of a settee. When he touched one bouncing inky curl, she flinched in distaste. “But you've grown indiscreet. I can no longer trust you to your own devices when I leave the capital. I will not have the political harpies gossiping behind my back, making me a laughingstock—an older man with a beautiful younger wife who's cuckolding him. Bad enough when it was the Indian but then he broke it off.” He smiled chillingly. “Imagine that, a savage with more conscience than the flower of Virginia aristocracy.”

      
“Is that the real reason you're so obsessed with killing Chase?”

      
He studied her as if she were a butterfly pinned on a velvet board. “My reasons are my own and you do not signify in the slightest. Although I daresay if Jeremiah did succeed in making our nephew his sole heir after I die, you'd be rather put out. I doubt he'd be so foolish as to marry an older woman.”

      
She instinctively raised her hand to slap him but he caught her wrist in a bone-crushing grip. “Ooh! You're hurting me, Burke. Let go!” she wailed, rubbing her arm when he flung it away as if it were a viper.

      
Disgusted with his faithless whore of a wife, Remington turned and walked to the window. The streets of Rawlins were thick with dust. If the pewter gray clouds gathering in the northwest were any indication, a torrential rainstorm would soon reduce that dust to knee-deep mud. God, how he hated Wyoming! He hated the whole windswept barren starkness that was the West with its bitter searing cold and intense blazing heat, its endless sky that stretched in every direction, limitless, soulless, empty. It frightened him with its immensity. But this was where Chase had fled and he must follow to see that Anthea's bastard died.

      
He took another pull on the brandy in his glass. It was early, only four or so, but it had been a hellish trip and he needed the liquor, an indulgence Burke seldom allowed himself. “We're having dinner with Major Phillips tonight. He indicated in his wire that he finally has some news regarding your Indian. It's about time he did something to earn the major's bars I secured for him.”

      
The way he said the words
your Indian
sent a shudder racing along her already overwrought nerves. “Why have you really brought me to Wyoming, Burke?”

      
The cold dread in her voice amused him. Feeling expansive, he polished off the brandy and turned to her. “Why do you think, Sabrina?” A slight smile touched his lips but not his eyes.

      
She swallowed nervously, instinctively knowing after all the years she'd been married to Burke Remington, that showing fear would set him upon her like a hound on a hare. “I wonder if you think you can arrange an unfortunate accident for me out here in this heathen wilderness, so far away from the protection of my family. It won't work. Papa would find out. He's always hated you.”

      
“Yes, he has. If it weren't for all those dirty Yankee dollars I've lavished on his vaunted Virginia heritage, he'd have lost Sugar Pines and he can't get that unstuck from his craw, can he? But he's still beholden to me and he damn well knows it.” He reached out and caressed the swell of her breast, then moved his hand up to lift her chin. “If I were to return East prostrate with grief over your death at the hands of marauding savages, he'd never guess—or even if he did, he'd keep quiet.”

      
He let the words sink in, watching her try to hide the cringing fear licking like flames behind her eyes. “But perhaps it won't be necessary…if you promise to amend your ways. Madigan's returned to Nevada. I hear he doesn't plan to seek reelection. If you don't take another lover…”

      
She did not trust Burke but had little choice. He was a United States senator and his family had President Grant's ear. The only one who'd ever defied and eluded him was Chase. Chase! She seized upon the idea greedily. If anyone had more cause than she to hate Burke, it was his nephew. They were natural allies. And when he won the war with her husband, Chase Remington would be a very, very rich man. She felt certain Chase would turn the tables and kill Burke. If she could just stay alive till then.

      
“Very well, Burke. I shall be a model of decorum,” she said smoothly, willing her hands not to tremble as she poured herself a generous libation from Burke's brandy bottle on the table. “Now, tell me about this cavalry officer you've kept in touch with over the winter

* * * *

      
Hugh Phillips raised his field glasses and scanned the dense pines and firs towering on the steep cliff sides all around him. “Damned if I don't think we've lost them,” he said to the Arikira scout.

      
Bloody Hand's impassive face looked up and his keen black eyes scanned the rugged mountains surrounding them. “There,” he said, pointing to a particularly dense stand of white fir. “That is way to stronghold. In not many miles, there be Cheyenne, watching.”