Ellie's Wolf (22 page)

His lips skimming down her throat made her shudder. “I’ll make you forget everything else for the rest of the night,” he returned in a husky whisper. “I’m going to make love to every inch of you, from each one of your little toes to these sweet breasts. I’m going to worship you with my body.”

That struck Ellie as being a little too close to blasphemy for her comfort, but the wet velvet glide of his tongue over her nipple was too delicious for her to protest his words right now. His fingers speared into her hair and caught on something. A small burst of pain at her scalp made her hiss in a breath. Quill jerked his head up, leaving her nipple aching with the need for his caress.

“What is that?” he asked, concern making his voice rough.

“Mashed beans,” she answered with a giggle, able to find amusement in it now. “Connor objected to eating them so he shared them with me.”

“Oh, so that’s what I was smelling.” Quill sounded meditative. “I was hoping it wasn’t a new perfume.”

“Perfume?” The giggles overflowed. She slapped playfully at his chest. “You.” Her hand slid down his torso to his penis, and the giggles dissolved in breathy need. “Make love to me, Quill. I want you inside me.”

“Soon. First I need to finish my worship.”

Sensations of pure bliss followed his lips when he sucked her breast into his mouth. “I’m not God,” she managed to say. “Only God is worthy of worship.”

“With my body I thee worship,” he reminded her, quoting the marriage vow he’d made to her. His mouth returned to her breast while the fingers of one hand teased the aching nub of flesh between her legs with exquisite care.

Her answer was a long, drawn-out moan. Quill took his time worshiping her body, and with every touch, the burden of frustration she’d carried all day drained away, to be replaced by a different frustration. When he finally opened her legs and slid deep inside her, she almost wept with the beauty of it.

“I love you, Ellie Wolfe,” he told her. He withdrew and pushed back in. “You don’t need to say anything to me. I just want you to know that I love you.”

Ellie couldn’t have answered. She was too caught up in utter pleasure to be able to form a coherent sentence. He moved inside her in a gentle rhythm that grew in force and pace. Her orgasm was close; she strained for it, almost sobbing with need. He gave a low grunt with every thrust, a steady tattoo of male satisfaction. He gave another grunt, this one different in tone, and stopped moving.

“Quill?” she asked in a groan of protest.

He fell heavily over her, a limp dead weight pinning her to the blanket.

“Quill?” she said again, before the world went insane.

Quill’s weight shifted on her. A multitude of confused impressions came to her. People? Were there people moving in the cold, wet dark? Something was pressed against her nose and mouth. It had a strange odor, and she tried to twist away from it, but she was pinned by hard hands. Light fell over her, flickering on Quill’s slack face before he slid out of sight. Voices smeared the dark, almost incomprehensible, distorted like her reflection in the ancient warped mirror over her dresser in Moore’s house.

“Direct hit.”

“Good job.”

“He’s got so much poison in him he was dead before he even felt the dart.”

Ellie struggled to comprehend the words. Failed.

“Grab her clothes.”

“Wrap the blanket around her.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

There were several different voices, and the muted sound of boots scuffling the wet grass swam in Ellie’s head. She wondered,
What is happening? Who is dead? What poison?
She tried to clear the fog from her brain
. I have to scream. I have to get help from Paint and Snow
. But no matter how hard she tried to escape the sweet stench saturating the cloth clamped to her face, she couldn’t get a clean breath in. Then she was being lifted away from the warmth of Quill’s body, and everything went black.

Thump. Thump. Thump
. Pain throbbed in Ellie’s head in the same deliberate rhythm the feet of the mourners at her father’s funeral had paced out as they followed his coffin to Odessa’s graveyard. It took her long confused moments to realize she was face down over something. A horse. Her head hung on one side, grass blurring before her eyes. Her feet hung on the other side, cold burning her toes. Her toes were cold because they were naked. In fact, all of her was naked. The horse was moving at a fast canter, and the fabric wrapped around her—a blanket?—flapped in the breeze created by the speed. All the bouncing on her belly was making her…

Sick. She threw up in short violent spasms, the vomit splashing over the horse’s side and onto the grass. And over the leg of the man who was holding her on the horse.

“Dammit!” he swore. “The woman’s awake. She’s spewing all over me!”

“Well, hold her head up so she don’t choke on it,” said another voice. Ellie heard more amusement than concern in his tone. “We told you what the drug would do to her. You volunteered to ride with her so you could cop a feel. Deal with it.”

She threw up again until there was nothing left to come up and she only retched drily. She tried to free an arm to wipe her face. It was stuck to her side, trapped by the blanket.

“Let me up!” she said.

It came out in a croak, not the shout she intended. She coughed and cleared her throat to try again.

“Let me up!”

That was more successful. The man whose thighs she was draped over slapped her rear end sharply. “Shut up, bitch,” he grunted.

Where was she? She tried to look around and gradually registered the fact that it was daylight. The last thing she remembered was making love with Quill in the dark. Her breath choked her when she jerked it in. Quill! Where was Quill? She fought to drag her fragmented pieces of memory together into a single lucid piece. She and Quill had been making love. He’d told her again he loved her. Something had happened. He had made a noise that sounded off, surprised or angry, and then he had fallen on top of her, as limp as a feather tick. And then…She fought against panic.
What had happened then?

“Please,” she called, doing her best to sound calm and humble. “Let me sit up. My head hurts.”

“Oh, what the hell,” the man on the horse with her muttered and jerked her up with rough strength, ruthlessly arranging her to sit astride the horse.

This position didn’t provide the relief she expected. For one thing, her head swam as the blood left it, and for another, the blanket didn’t stay wrapped around her. Only the press of his front against her back prevented the blanket from blowing off completely. She snatched frantically at it, trying to pull it back over her shoulders to cover herself. His hand smacked hers away before settling on her breast and squeezing. One of her fingernails snapped off at the quick when she clawed at him.

“Don’t,” she screamed.

“Shut up, little girl.”

“I’m not a little girl. I’m a mother. A widow—I mean, a wife—”

His laugh was ugly. “You were right the first time if the guy you were fucking when we caught you was your husband.”

“Quill.” She gasped almost soundlessly. “What did you do to Quill?”

“He’s dead as a door nail.” The gloating satisfaction in his voice made her sick. “Poison on a dart. We got him from a hundred yards away. Killed him in less than five seconds.”

Her stomach dropped, and she wondered if it was being trampled under the horse’s hooves. It felt like it. Quill. She saw his face again, smiling when he’d told her he was happy. She could hear the warm note in his voice when he’d said he loved her. The way he moved last night when he said he’d worship her with his body. Oh, God, they were supposed to have years of happiness ahead of them! Years of raising children together, of laughing and loving and sharing their lives with each other. She’d wanted Quill’s child…

Connor!

“What did you do to my son?” she screamed, and she screamed again when he gave her nipple a vicious pinch. She forced herself to ignore the pain. “What about the others? Did you kill them too?”

Another horse surged up beside them. “Johnny, can’t you keep that bitch quiet?”

Ellie jerked her gaze to the man who’d spoken. He looked grizzled with age and hardened by life. “Where are my clothes?” she demanded.

His smile revealed few teeth, and the ones he had were dark with rot. “You won’t be needing ’em, girlie. Maybe in a few weeks we’ll let you get dressed.” He laughed as if it were a great joke. “Do you know how long it’s been since I was between the thighs of a female? I’ve never been with one as young and pretty as you.”

Ice speared her stomach, followed by fresh nausea bubbling like lava. Ellie swallowed and set her teeth. “What did you do to the others?”

“That fancy camp full of men and big-ass dogs?” Johnny, the man who held her before him on his horse, spat over her shoulder. “Nothin’.”

Relief made her reckless. “Then they’ll find us, and when they do, you’ll be sorry.”

Both men laughed, and other men joined in. Ellie wrenched her gaze around, finding and counting other riders. There were five of them that she could see, besides Johnny, but there could be others behind them and perhaps another few riding farther ahead as scouts. How could these filthy men have snuck up on sharp-eared wolves?

“No way in hell they’ll be able to find us,” the grizzled man said. “There’s only six of them, and they got two kids to take care of. Even if some of ’em come after us, they won’t be able to follow us. We’ve rode hard for near on ten hours. I bet the guys in camp wouldn’t’a missed you and lover boy until dawn, right? So we’ve got a plenty good head start. The rain would’a wiped out our trail. We’ve crossed the river a half dozen times, so even if them dogs can follow a scent trail, they’ll lose it. Them dogs didn’t look like bloodhounds anyways, right, Johnny?”

Johnny laughed. “Damn straight. Those morons will be lucky if their dogs don’t turn on them. Looked more like wolves to me.”

“That’s because they are wolves,” Ellie said loudly, clearly, so all the men could hear her. “From the Lakota Wolf Clan. Have you heard of them?” A few muttered curses from the other riders told her they had. “My father’s sister married into the Clan. Her son, Taye Wolfe, is my cousin. They
will
catch up with you, and when they do, you’ll pay.”

The man behind her went very still for a moment, then before she could savor her victory, he struck her across the temple so hard she nearly fell off the horse. “Stupid, lying bitch!”

Her ears buzzed, and her eyes saw black ovals sparkling over the grass. “Not lying,” she managed to say. “The more you hurt me, the more Taye will hurt you.”

There was a mutter of talk she couldn’t quite hear well enough to understand, but she caught something about resting the horses, and the pace lessened from a canter to a jarring trot and then a walk. She managed to catch the edges of the blanket and drag it closed over her nakedness. Johnny either didn’t notice or didn’t care because he made no move to stop her. From the corner of her eye, she could see that he was gesturing with the hand he had used to grope her. Three of the five men she’d seen had bunched their horses close together and were talking in low, hard tones.

“Who says those fuckers can find us?” Johnny said, jabbing a finger at one of the other men. “We’ve been hiding in our hole for fifteen years, and they’ve never even heard of us, I bet.”

“We’ve never taken one of their women before,” another with a bushy, dark beard countered. “I say we kill her and dump her and get the hell out of here.”

Ellie clamped her hands on the blanket edges and listened hard, feeling numbly cold.

“Don’t be stupid.” This man was possibly the ugliest of them, with hair more iron gray than brown, a fat shiny scar drawing his lips into a permanent snarl, and a long nose that curved down at the tip, almost meeting the unshaven, pointy chin. He reminded Ellie of an illustration of a witch she’d seen in the library in Kearney. “The wolves will hunt us down for sure if we kill her. The traders will be in Littleton by now. We can sell her to them.”

Protests broke out. Johnny stabbed a finger at the ugly man. “Fuck that. They won’t find us. We’ve got us some prime woman flesh here. She’s young; she’s strong. She’ll last a long time, not like the last two crones we caught.”

Agreement was muttered by a couple other men, but it was cut through by a man on Ellie’s left. “Lenny’s right. The sooner she’s off our hands, the safer we’ll be.”

She turned her aching head to look at him. He was a little younger than the others and almost as ugly as the witch man, with a broad flat face and only half a nose, as if it had been cut off at the bridge. Ellie tried not to stare, repelled by his looks more than she’d ever been repelled by Paint’s scars.

“We head for Littleton, sell her to the traders, and ride far away from this area.”

“Fuck that, and fuck you!” Johnny shouted. “You can ride wherever the hell you want, but I’m keeping her.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m sick of doing your scrawny ass,” Johnny snarled. “I want a—”

What he wanted Ellie didn’t hear. There was a low hissing sound, and then Johnny slapped a hand to the side of his neck. “Fuck!” he said, surprised. “You fucking poisoned me.”

Then he tumbled slowly from the saddle, dragging Ellie with him to the wet grass. The other men pulled their horses to a stop. She scrambled to her feet in a flurry of blanket, looking frantically around for a place to run. Horses bunched around her, cutting escape off. She swallowed and looked up at the man with half a nose.

“Len, give the lady her clothes,” he said, without taking his muddy brown eyes off her.

“Aw, come on,” whined Len. “We can’t keep her, but we can do her while we have her, right?”

“Wrong. Give her her clothes.”

In a moment her jeans, shirt, and breast wrap landed on the grass in front of her. She hesitated. “Shoes?” she asked.

“We forgot ’em,” Half-Nose said with a cold smile. “Hurry up. We can’t afford to lose time.”

“Yeah, hurry,” said Len with a cackle. “But we want to see the show, so take your time, darlin’.”