Dangerous to Hold (32 page)

Swallowing, she watched him brush by Katerina with a nod and a curt word. Her cousin's brows rose in astonishment as she, too, turned to stare after him.

No wonder Katerina was surprised. The Sloan who strode through the camp was a different person than either she or Alex had thought him.

This wasn't the dusty outsider who'd laughed when she threatened to teach him to dance, Cossack-style.

Nor the man who'd warmed her frozen toes with his hands, and her heart with his tales of his improbable youth.

This was a stranger. A hard, unsmiling stranger who radiated anger and authority in every line of his long, lean body. One who challenged her as a woman as much as he now seemed to challenge her authority.

Alex gave a silent groan as a scowling Katerina made her way across the square. Still shaken by the confrontation with Sloan, she was in no mood for more of her cousin's dark looks.

“So, cousin. The
Amerikanski
stomps through the camp like a bear with one foot in the trap, and you, you pucker your lips like one who has eaten the persimmon. You fight with him, no?”

Alex ground her teeth. “Can't a person have a single conversation or thought in this camp without everyone watching and commenting on it?”

“No, one cannot,” Katerina retorted. “You know that! Nor can one spend every waking moment with a man and not raise comment. Why has he stuck to you like flies to the dungpile these last few days?”

Alex twisted her lips at the imagery.

Katerina mistook the reason behind that small, tight smile. Planting her hands on her hips, she glared at Alex.

“So, it appears you change your mind about him, no? Is that why you dress yourself in your prettiest tunic? Is that
why you wear the lipstick? Do you now think to take him to stud yourself?”

“Don't be crude, Katerina.”

“I, crude? I'm not the one who proposed such a plan. You
said
you didn't want him, cousin. You
said
one of us was to have him.”

Alex's temper flared. “You may have him, Katerina, I told you that! If you're woman enough to hold him.”

Katerina stepped back, her eyes widening at the sharp retort.

Alex wasn't about to stay for the next round in this escalating war between them. She'd had enough of Katerina. Enough of Nate Sloan. Enough of this whole damned cluster of goathide tents and curious aunts and cousins and aged, bent warriors.

“Tell Dimitri I'll be at the ice cave. And you, my cousin, may go to—go to join the rest who cook pastries and pour vodka!”

Whirling, Alex strode to the north pasture. In three minutes she had a snaffle bit and saddle on her gray. In five, she was heading for the retreat that had been her special place since childhood.

 

With the feel of the gelding's pounding hooves vibrating through her body and the sun beating down on her shoulders, Alex rode across the plains.

For an hour or so, she would leave the camp behind. She would leave her responsibilities and her worries and her cousin's animosity. She would pretend, if only for an hour or so, that she was once again the thin, long-legged teenager who had galloped across the steppes as though she owned them.

When she reached a line of low, serrated hills, Alex guided the gelding toward a rocky incline. Halfway up, she found the narrow, almost indiscernible path between tumbled, sharp-sided boulders. After a few moments, Alex reined the gray in on a flat, circular plateau surrounded by boulders and dismounted.

“Well done, my friend.”

She gave the gray's dusty neck a pat, then slid her rifle from its case and pulled the reins over the animal's head to let them drag the ground. Trained by Petr himself, the gelding would not move unless or until called by its rider.

For a moment, Alex paused to look out over the rim of tumbled rocks. High, grassy seas stretched to the distant horizon. Gray-green melted into blue where earth and sky met. From this elevation, she could see the jagged scars in the surface, the sharp ravines and deep gorges carved by centuries of rains and swollen spring rivers.

She could see, as well, a distant horseman patrolling a small, barbed wire compound. Inside that wire, beneath a grassy, overgrown mound, was a cylinder of steel and death.

The missile site looked so innocent from this distance and this height. A slight bulge in the earth. A patch of shorter grass in a sea of waving stalks. Miles from the deserted launch facility that straddled the border between Karistan and Balminsk.

From her research, Alex knew that the U.S. missile sites scattered across Montana and Utah and Wyoming were just as isolated, just as remote. Just as innocuous-looking. Linked by underground umbilical cords to launch facilities hundreds of miles away, the weapons themselves were protected by an array of sophisticated intrusion-detection systems.

In more peaceful times, cattle had grazed near the Karistani site and scratched their backs on those twists of barbed wire. Soldiers in Soviet uniforms had come to inspect the warheads and the intrusion-detection systems. Now the soldiers were gone, and only a lone Karistani rider patrolled the site. Watching. Waiting. As they all waited.

Sighing, Alex turned toward a crack in the stone wall behind her. Angling sideways, she edged through the opening and left the twentieth century behind.

She stood in a high-ceilinged cavern lighted by narrow fissures in the cliff overhead. The air was cool, the temperature constant. It was an ice cave, her grandfather had told her when
he first brought her here, so many years ago. It had been cut into the rock by long-ago glaciers, and had been used by hunters and travelers down through the ages.

As her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, Alex sought the faint, fading splotches of color on a far wall. Propping her rifle against the stone, she went over to examine the paintings. She had too much respect to touch them. She wouldn't even breathe on them. A team of paleontologists from Moscow had examined them some years ago, promising funds to study and protect them. But these pictographs, like so much else, had fallen victim to the disintegration of the Soviet state.

One of Alex's goals, when—and if—she secured Karistan's future, was to protect this part of its past.

Her fingers itched for her sketch pad as she studied the outline of a shaggy-humped ox, an ancestor of the yak that had migrated centuries ago to Tibet and Central Asia. She drank in the graceful lines of a tusked white tiger, similar to those that had inhabited these parts long before encroaching civilization drove them east to Siberia. And the artist in her marveled at the skill of the long-ago painter, who'd captured in just a few strokes the determination of the naked, heavily muscled hunters moving in for the kill.

Alex walked farther into the cavern, to where the chamber divided into smaller, darker tunnels. There were more paintings in these spokes, she knew, and a few piles of bones.

The hunters had wintered here, according to the paleontologists. They'd eaten around fires in the main cavern, stored their supplies of meat and roots in the tunnels, wrapped their dead in hides and left them in the small, dark fissures because the ground was too frozen for burial. If they'd believed in burial.

Ducking her head, she entered one of the narrow tunnels. Enough light came from the main chamber behind her to show her the way, although she'd been here often enough to know it even in the dark. She was halfway to her special place when a faint rattle made her pause.

She glanced over her shoulder, listening intently. Was
someone or something in the main cavern? It couldn't be Dimitri, or anyone else from camp. They would call out to her, signal their presence.

An animal? A bear, or one of the silver foxes that made their lairs in the stony precipices?

No, her horse would have whinnied, given notice of a predator's approach.

A rodent of some kind, a cave dweller whose nest she had unwittingly disturbed in passing?

Another chink of stone against stone told her that whatever came behind her was too large to be rodent.

Instinctively Alex dropped to a crouch and balanced on the balls of her feet. Her arms outstretched, fingertips pressing against cool stone, she peered through the dimness.

Only shadows and stillness stretched behind her.

Her heart began a slow, painful hammering. Her eyes strained.

One of the shadows moved. Came closer. Took on the vague outline of a man.

Alex didn't waste time cursing her stupidity in leaving her rifle in the cavern. Her grandfather had taught her not to spend energy on that which she could not change. Instead, she must concentrate on that which she could.

All right, she told herself. All right. Someone was between her and the Enfield. Someone who had seen the gelding outside. Someone who now stalked her with silent, deliberate stealth.

Alex took a swift inventory of her weapons. She had the bone-handled knife in her boot. And the short braided whip looped around her wrist. And the fissures along the tunnel to conceal herself in.

The dim shadow, hardly more than a notion of movement along the dark wall, drifted toward her.

Her breath suspended, Alex eased upright and flattened her back against the stone. Moving with infinite caution, she inched her shoulders along the wall until the left one dipped into a crevice.

When her left side fit into the opening, Alex wanted to sob with relief. Instead, she swallowed the fear that clogged her throat and carefully moved her body into darkness. She didn't let herself think what might be behind her. If there were bones, they could do her no harm. If there were pictographs painted on the slick, cold stone, she'd explore them some other time. Assuming she lived to explore another time.

She didn't have any illusions about what could happen to her if the man coming toward her had, somehow, slipped across the border from Balminsk.

For many years, just the threat of her grandfather's retribution had laid a mantle of protection over the women of the host. Justice was swift and sure to any who violated a Karistani woman. But the wars, the killings, the mutilations—by both sides—had stripped away the thin veneer of civilization of the people of this area.

They were descended from the Cossacks. Some from the Tartars, who took few prisoners and made those they did take beg for death. That so few of the Karistani men survived today was evidence of the savagery and the hate the wars with Balminsk had generated.

The shadow merged with the darkness of the tunnel. Alex couldn't see anything now. Nor could she hear anything. Except silence and the pounding of her own heart.

She sensed the intruder's presence before she saw him.

Her fingers gripped the knife's bone handle. She held it as her grandfather had taught her, with the blade low and pointed upward to slash at an unprotected belly.

A low growl drifted out of the darkness.

“I'm going to get stuck if I go much farther into this tunnel. You'd better come out, Alex.”

Relief crashed over her in waves. Followed immediately by a wave of fury.

“You fool!” She slid sideways through the narrow aperture. “You idiot! Why didn't you call out? Let me know who you were? I was about to gut you!”

“You were about to try,” he said, with a smile in his voice that sent Alex's anger spiraling.

“You think this is funny? You think it's something to laugh about?”

“No, sweetheart, I don't. I was just remembering the first time we met. Best I recall, you used about the same terms of endearment.”

“Don't
sweetheart
me, you damned cowboy. I ought to…”

“I know, I know.” He reached out and gripped her wrist, twisting it and the knife downward. “You ought to gut me and tan my hide. Or boil me in fish oil. Or feed me to the prairie dogs. You Karistani women are sure a bloodthirsty lot.”

“Sloan…”

“Nate,” he reminded her, using the hold to tug her closer.

“Let go of me.”

“I'm just keeping that rib-tickler out of our way while we settle some things between us.”

“There's nothing to settle.”

With a smooth twist of his arm, he had Alex's wrist tucked behind her and her body up against his.

“Yes, Alexandra Danilova, there is.”

“Sloan…”

The arm banding her to him tightened. “Nate.”

“Let me go.”

Even in the dim shadows, she could see the glint in his eyes. “Did anyone ever tell you that you're one stubborn female?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. My grandfather, twice a day, every day I spent with him. Now let me go.”

“I don't think so.”

The soft implacability in his voice sent a shiver dancing along Alex's nerves.

“Aren't you forgetting the
nagaika?
”

His breath fanned her lips. “I guess I'll just have to take my licks.”

“Sloan… Nate…”

His lips brushed hers. “It's too late, Alexandra. Way too late. For both of us.”

E
ver afterward, when she thought about that moment of contact in the dark, narrow tunnel, Alex would know it was Sloan's combination of gentleness and strength that shattered the last of the barriers she'd erected around herself.

He was a man who knew his strength, and wasn't afraid to show gentleness. His mouth moved over hers with warm insistence. Tasting. Exploring. Giving a pleasure that stirred a response deep within her.

At first, Alex refused to acknowledge it. She held herself stiff and unmoving, not fighting, not cooperating.

At first, he didn't seem to mind her lack of participation. He drew what he needed from her lips, like a thirsty man taking a long-awaited drink.

All too soon, the situation satisfied neither one of them. Alex made a little movement against him, as if to pull away, and discovered that his hand had already loosened its grip on her wrist. She'd been held, not by his strength, but by his gentleness.

Though she knew she was free, she didn't move. She
should, she told herself. She should push away from the seductive nearness of this man. She should go outside, back to the camp. Back to her responsibilities.

At the thought, something deep within her rebelled. For weeks now, she'd carried this burden that had been thrust on her. For weeks, she'd sublimated her own life, her own desires, for those of the others. A sudden, totally selfish need rose in her. She wanted a few more minutes with Nate. She wanted to lean into his power. She wanted his arms around her. His mouth on hers.

Oh, God, she wanted him.

With the admission came a molten spear of heat. She was woman enough to recognize the heat for what it was. And honest enough to acknowledge what she intended to do about it.

Reaching up on tiptoe, she wrapped her arms around Nate's neck and brought his head to hers.

This was right.

The moment she tasted the hard, driving hunger in his kiss and felt her own rise to meet it, she knew this was right.

Here in the darkness, in the cold splendor of the caves where her ancestors had found shelter and perhaps survival, the primitive urge that surged through her was right. And natural. And shattering in its intensity.

He was made for this. She was. Their bodies fit together at knee and thigh and hip. She had to stretch a bit, he had to bend a little, but they managed to make contact everywhere that mattered. Her blood firing, she arched into him. His mouth ravaged hers. Her hips ground against his.

She wasn't sure whether it was minutes or hours later that he speared both hands through her hair, holding her head still as he dragged his own back. She waited unmoving, her breath as ragged as his.

Calling on every ounce of discipline he possessed, Nate willed himself to control. This was crazy. Insane. He hadn't intended for this to happen when he followed Alex across the plains, spurred by the twin needs to protect this stubborn
woman and to know where she was going. He hadn't intended to let his desire to hold her, to drink in her taste and texture, get out of hand like this.

But even as he fought his own pumping desire, he felt hers in the ragged, panting breath that washed against his throat and the hard nipples that pushed through the red wool of her blouse.

Any hope of control shattered when she arched her lower body into his with an intimacy that sent a white-hot heat through his groin.

“I want you, Nate,” she whispered. “Just for a little while, I—need you to hold me.”

She did. More than she realized. Even more than he himself had realized until this instant. Nate heard the vulnerability in her voice, the aching loneliness.

With stunning intensity, a dozen different forces collided within him. The driving male urge to mate that had him hard and rampant. The masculine impulse to claim the woman who'd haunted his nights and filled his days. The purely personal and far more urgent desire to lose himself inside this shimmering, complex, compelling creature that was Alex. The simple need to give her pleasure.

He'd hold this woman…for a whole lot longer than the little while she'd asked for.

“I want you, too, Alexandra. I have since the first moment I met you. But not like this. Not in the darkness and the shadows.”

She made a murmur of protest.

“I want to see your eyes dilated with pleasure and your mouth swollen from my kisses. I want to see your forehead.”

“What?”

“Just come with me.”

He wouldn't, couldn't, take the time to tell her now that his entire being was concentrated on erasing every damn worry line from her face and replacing them with a flush of pleasure.

When they slipped through the opening in the cliff face,
the bright, dazzling sunlight blinded them. Alex stumbled and would have fallen if Nate hadn't caught her with an arm around her waist and swung her back against the cliff face. Pinning her body to the stone with his, he took up where they'd left off in the dark cave.

Nate couldn't have said how long it was before hard, hungry kisses and the friction of their clothed bodies against each other weren't enough…for either of them.

Her mouth locked with his, Alex slid her hands inside his jacket and peeled it over his shoulders. While her tongue played with his and he drank in her soft little sounds of pleasure, her fingers groped at the buttons on his cotton shirt.

With one arm still wrapped around her waist to cushion her from the rock wall, Nate tugged at the high collar of her red top. Frustrated at the small patch of soft skin her collar gave him access to, he put just enough distance between them to fumble with the buttons on the tunic.

Alex leaned against the wall, her mouth satisfactorily swollen and her forehead free of all lines, while Nate worked the gold frog fastenings that marched with military precision down the front of her blouse. He soon found himself cursing under his breath at the elaborate fastenings. They looked impressive, but they were hell for a man with hands the size of his to get undone. Impatient, he worked the last one free and shoved the soft red wool down to her elbows. When he saw the bra that cupped her breasts, Nate didn't know whether to grin or to groan.

He'd held that bit of lace in his hands the night Red raided Ivana's honey pot, and spent more than one sweat-drenched hour wondering how it would look on Alex's body. None of his imaginings had ever come close to reality, he discovered as he stripped away the rest of her clothes.

She was glorious. As slender and smooth as a willow sapling. Long-legged as a newborn colt, but far more graceful. Her skin gleamed with ivory tints and satin shadows in the sunlight. Dusky nipples crowned her small, high breasts, and the triangle at the juncture of her thighs was as dark and as
silky as her mane of tumbling sable hair. But if Nate had been allowed only one memory to take away with him of that moment, one vivid impression, it would have been her eyes. Golden and glorious, they held no hint of fear, no shadow of worry. Only a smiling invitation that made him ache with wanting her.

“I want to see you, too,” she murmured, sliding her hands inside his shirt. “All of you.”

By the time Alex had managed—with Nate's ready assistance—to rid him of his clothing, she was liquid with need.

He was magnificent. Lean, finely honed by exercise or work, each muscle well-defined under supple skin lightly furred with soft golden hair. His body showed evidence of the hard youth he'd told her of that day when the storm cocooned them on the shallow ledge. There were long white scars that traced back to his rodeo days, she suspected. Hard ridges of flesh. And a small round patch of puckered skin on the right side of his chest.

Alex had spent enough summers on the steppes to recognize a bullet wound when she saw one.

“When did you get this?” she asked, her voice husky.

“A long time ago.”

Her fingers traced the scarred flesh. “How?”

His hand closed over hers, trapping it against his skin. “It doesn't matter. It's part of my past. At this particular moment, I'm more concerned about the present.”

Alex felt a rush of dissatisfaction that Nate would shut any part of himself off from her. The feeling was irrational, she knew. At this point in time, she probably had many more secrets tucked away inside her than he did.

With a sudden, fierce resolve, she shoved aside the past and refused to think about the future. He was right. For this slice of time, at least, there was only here. And now. And Nate.

She slid her hand free of his loose hold and let it travel slowly down his chest. Across his smooth-planed middle. Over his flat belly. With the tip of one nail, she traced the length of his hard, rampant arousal.

Her eyes limpid, she smiled up at him. “I don't think you have to be too concerned about the present.”

He half laughed, half groaned.

Alex closed her fingers around his rigid shaft, then blinked in surprise when he pulled away.

“Wait,” he ordered softly. “Wait a moment.”

He turned and hunkered down to dig through their pile of discarded clothing. While Alex admired the smooth line of his tanned back and his tight white buns, he emptied the pockets of his jeans. He tossed an old pocketknife, what looked like a half-empty package of chewing gum and a handful of coins on top of her crumpled tunic before he found what he wanted.

Straightening, he walked back to her side.

Alex fought a feeling of feminine pique as she stared at the foil packet. She should've known someone with Nate's laughing eyes and rugged handsomeness would be prepared for just these circumstances.

“Do you always carry an emergency supply?” she asked, a hint of coolness in her voice.

He propped an arm against the cliff and used his free hand to tip her head back.

“Always, sweetheart. Wily Willie taught me that a man isn't a man if he doesn't protect his spread, his horse, and his woman.”

“I can imagine which one came first with Willie,” she retorted, refusing to acknowledge the shiver that darted down her spine at his use of the possessive.

“I never had the nerve to ask,” he responded with a grin. “But I can tell you which comes first with me. You, Alexandra Danilova Jordan. You, my wild, beautiful woman of the steppes.”

When he bent to nuzzle her neck, Alex arched against him. His teeth and his tongue worked her flesh, causing explosions of heat in parts of her body well below her neckline. The unyielding stone wall held her immobile, unable to withdraw any part of herself from him even if she'd wanted to.

And she didn't.

Sweet heaven above, she didn't.

When his hand shaped her breast and tipped it up for a small, biting kiss, she gasped and lifted herself higher. When he suckled the aching nipple, streaks of fire shot straight from her breast to her loins. When one of his hair-roughened thighs parted hers, and a hand slid down her belly to delve into the moist warmth at her center, Alex buried her face in his neck to muffle her moan.

Sometime later, he rasped softly in her ear, “Look at me, Alexandra.”

She shook her head, keeping her face against his neck. She didn't want to see, to think, to do anything but feel the exquisite sensations his hands and his mouth were bringing her. And return them in some way.

“Alex, I want to see your eyes.”

“I…I thought it was my forehead,” she gasped, wriggling desperately as his thumb pressed the nub of flesh between her thighs.

“Whatever,” he growled.

She brought her head back, her eyes narrowed against the sun and her own spiraling pleasure. Wanting, needing, to give in return, she matched him stroke for stroke, kiss for kiss.

When she felt as though she were about to drown in the waves of sensation that washed over her, he stepped back to tear open the packet and sheathe himself.

Then his strong, square hands circled her waist.

Holding her back away from the rough cliffside, he lifted her, and brought her down onto him. Alex gave a ragged groan as his rigid shaft entered her slick channel. Her muscles tightened involuntarily, then loosened to accept him.

Fierce masculine satisfaction flared in his eyes for a moment, before giving way to an emotion Alex might have tried to identify if she hadn't been caught up in a whirling, spinning vortex of pure sensation. Using his muscled thigh, his straining member, his hands and his mouth, Nate stoked the fires
within her, fanning the leaping flames, until at last she exploded into shards of white light and blazing red heat.

When the spasms that held her rigid subsided, Alex slumped against his chest. Which was when she first realized he hadn't climaxed. Or, if he had, he didn't give any evidence of it that she could tell.

“Oh, Nate,” she murmured breathlessly. “I'm sorry. I can't… I've never…”

She swallowed, and tried unsuccessfully to force her limp muscles to move. “Just give me a little while.”

He managed a grin and eased himself out of her. “Isn't that usually the man's line?”

“Yes, well…”

Alex wet her lips, not wanting to confess that she'd never before exploded into so many pieces, and wasn't sure exactly how to put herself back together.

“It's okay, sweetheart,” he assured her, brushing a strand of limp hair from her forehead. “I'll live.”

At his words, Alex felt a mix of guilt and satisfaction and responsibility. She wasn't the kind of woman to take and not give.

“I want you to do more than just live, Nate. You just made me feel as though I was…”

His eyes glinted. “Yeah?”

“Flying across the steppes on a wild pony,” she told him with a wry smile. “I want you to fly, too.”

“Well, I wouldn't mind a little flying, you understand, but I'm afraid my emergency supply won't make it through another ride across the steppes.”

She gave the supply in question a quick inspection, then sent him a look of inquiry.

“I don't want to risk tearing it, Alex. I won't add to your worries.”