Follow the Sun (19 page)

“No. Since I seem to be something other than a normal human being now, I don’t need company.”

“Tess, calm down—”

“I really would like to be alone.” She felt as if she already were.

“All right,” he said slowly, his voice grim.

Tess left him standing there, his emotions closed
within a vault that she no longer had the power to open.

H
E’D CAUSED HIS
own destruction. The aborigine shaman had been right: Jeopard had brought it on himself. And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it except sit on his side of the campfire and watch with anguish as Tess remained sitting at the cave entrance, where she’d been since supper, staring into the night sky.

Jeopard ground his teeth together. But wasn’t he doing the best thing for them both? He couldn’t complicate her new life with a commitment to him. She was only twenty-six years old; she was going to have fame and wealth beyond imagination.

How could she tie herself to a private, moody man with a past that would feed the world media’s gossip mill? A man who was ready to settle down and have children? A man who wanted nothing more grand than to stay in these mountains alone with her?

Kyle rose from his spot by the fire. “Well, good night,” he announced dramatically. “We’re going to have a long day tomorrow. Let’s leave by dawn. Tonight I’m ‘going to water,’ myself, Tess. The sound of the creek might make me forget how much I hate camping out.”

“Me too,” Drake said, and vaulted up. He busied himself grabbing his sleeping bag and a few pieces of gear, just as Kyle was doing. “We’ll see you two in the morning. ‘Night.”

Cupids
, Jeopard thought darkly.
Two large, bumbling Cupids
.

“There’s no need,” he told them.
Can’t you apes see what I’m trying to avoid here?
“Stay put.”

Tess swiveled her head and tortured Jeopard with her wounded gaze. “Are you uncomfortable in my royal presence?” Before he could say anything else she told Kyle and Drake, “Thank you. And good night.”

They hurried out, sensing the upcoming battle like
two old war horses, and anxious to get out of harm’s way. Jeopard thought ruefully.

Tess rose, went to the lantern that lit the cave, and brusquely turned it off. Star-softened darkness surrounded the campfire like a lover and enhanced its flickering light.

Jeopard’s skin tingled with alertness and a sense of anticipation that was blatantly erotic, no matter how much he wanted to ignore it. She walked to the end of his mattress and stood looking down at him.

Then she began to undress.

Given the privacy of the shadows. Jeopard let his mouth drop open. What kind of tactic was this? No.
No
.

“Don’t do it, Tess,” he warned in a husky voice.

She flung her shirt and shorts onto the ground, followed them with her underwear, and stood there defiantly, a mysterious Cherokee war woman outlined in sensual detail by the firelight.

“I want to see if you can make love to me the way you did that first night on the
Irresistible
,” she said in a haughty tone. “Without emotion.”

He groaned inwardly. “It wasn’t without emotion. I just couldn’t let you see how much you affected me.”

“You’re awfully good at that. I won’t have it, you hear? I won’t be shut out now as if I’m some strange, rare beast at the zoo. You can’t keep me at a distance.”

“Yes, I can,” he murmured. “I’ve spent all of my adult life learning how to do that with people.”

She knelt on the mattress and crawled slinkily up to him, a ferocious cat on the prowl. “It won’t wash, Sundance. Give up. I’ve got your number. You can’t tell me that you want me less, now that I’m royalty.”

“We need to back away from each other. There are going to be a lot of changes in your life, a lot of new opportunities …”

He gasped as she ran a hand up the inside of his thigh and caressed him through his shorts. “What does that have to do you and me?” She skimmed her
hand over the rock-hard bulge at the apex of his thighs. “Yes, you want me as much as ever. If this is the only way you can show your love for me right now, I’ll take it.”

Jeopard grasped her wrist with a trembling hand. “Stop.”

“I saved your life. You owe me.”

He groaned. She had his shorts unzipped now. “That’s not fair.”

“You force me to play this way, the way you like.”

“No. I love your honesty.”

“Then give some in return.”

She quickly tugged his shorts and briefs down to his thighs and cupped him in both hands. His chest heaving. Jeopard fell back on one elbow and cursed softly.

“This is honest,” she murmured hoarsely. “Your body, hard and hot and eager for whatever I do to it. Is this all you’re willing to share with the future queen of Kara?”

“Yes,” he said in harsh agony.

“So be it.” She stripped his clothes off and straddled him, then ran her hands over his chest and stomach with wicked intent. “I shall enjoy ruining your defenses, my fine peasant.”

His back arched as she slid herself over him. Her hips moved fluidly while she circled his nipples with her fingernails. “Love me, Jep,” she begged. “Love me the way I love you.
Please.
”

His defenses broke apart at the sound of her sweet English voice torn by passion and despair. “Tess, I do.” He moaned and dragged her down to his chest.

Jeopard kissed her intimately, sucking the tongue she slipped deep into his mouth and gliding his own tongue between her lips. She cried out and slid her arms around his neck, careful even in her wildness not to hurt his swollen shoulder.

Her body shuddered, driving him to the brink and holding him there as she loved him in a slow, breathless rhythm. He grasped her hips and arched upward,
knowing that he’d never get enough of her, either in bed or out of it.

She whispered his name, giving herself to a vortex of emotion that defied him to remain aloof. Lost, lost, he thought as he sank his hands into her hair and kissed her face desperately, licking her skin with the tip of his tongue, making gruff, yearning sounds deep in his throat.

Tess surrounded him with an explosion of pleasure that stroked the last bit of restraint from his body and his mind. He was lifted to a level of loving that merged the physical with the spiritual, until all he could do was float in a dimension where her voice was his only connection with reality.

She called him back, her lips on his face, her hands fervently caressing his hair.

“Did I hurt you?” she implored. “Are you all right?”

No, he’d never be all right if he lost her
.

He was almost crying, and as much as it horrified him, he couldn’t keep his voice from cracking when he said, “Do you want me to go with you to Kara?”

“Yes,
yes
, of course.” She made a whimpering sound. “Is
that
what’s upset you? I thought perhaps you wanted to get rid of me, that you’d be glad to send me off without you.”

“You think I’d stop loving you that easily?”

“No, but you’re accustomed to being alone. And we’ve become so inseparable so quickly. Does it worry you?”

“
No
. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But you need to face the fact that your whole perspective on life is about to change. You can have anything or anyone you want.”

“I’ve already got the
anyone.
”

“You may not be free to make that choice.”

She speared her fingers into his hair and looked down at him possessively. “Now, you listen to me. Doesn’t a princess have special privileges to do what
she wants and love who she wants? Certainly! Otherwise, why would anyone take the bloody job?”

Jeopard would have chuckled, but he was afraid it might sound ragged. “I can’t imagine,” he told her solemnly, and hugged her to him, wishing that their last night in the mountains together would never end.

S
HE ABSOLUTELY WOULD
not cry, because she didn’t want to admit to anyone that she was already homesick for those ancient, blue-green Nantahala mountains and that she was terrified of what waited for her outside them.

The same small jet sat on the same runway, ready this time to take her and Jeopard to New York, where they’d board the Concorde for Europe.

Jeopard clasped his brother’s hand, then Drake’s. Tess handed Drake her medallion.

“I have a favor to ask.”

He looked down at her with gentle, curious eyes. “Anything.”

“Will you take it to the reservation and see if anyone can translate it?”

“I’ll be glad to.” He carefully slipped the medallion into a shirt pocket.

Tess blinked hard and fought a lump in her throat. “I intended to do that myself, but I … I’ll have to put it off.”

Jeopard slid a consoling arm around her shoulders, sensing her distress. “Damn, I haven’t got any handkerchiefs.”

Tess chuckled hoarsely and kissed his cheek. “Then we’d better leave this instant.” She hugged Drake and Kyle, feeling like a sorrowful Dorothy leaving Oz.

She and Jeopard would have to find their way back to this side of the rainbow, somehow.

CHAPTER 11

D
URING THE FOUR
days since Jeopard and Tess’s arrival, the palace-protocol officers had let him attend every meeting with her—but only because she had insisted. They’d assigned him a servant’s room adjoining her luxurious ten-room apartment in the palace, even though Tess had delicately explained that he’d be staying in her suite.

As soon as the maids confirmed that the princess wasn’t kidding, that she shared her bed with the
liv-vakt
, the bodyguard—everyone went into quiet hysterics.

Sanders, the U.S. State Department man, explained that Jeopard was a former government agent and now a self-employed businessman, but wild rumors started anyway.

Jeopard sighed. Now they simply pushed him to the sidelines, and when Tess protested he gallantly winked at her as if it were all some silly game that she and he would win eventually. When she wasn’t looking he seethed behind his nonchalant facade.

One day he was waiting tensely in a high-backed chair to one side of a conference table in a huge, opulent meeting room. Tess was seated at the head of the enormous table, flanked by the Karan prime minister and his five-member cabinet.

She looked serene and elegant in a white double-breasted dress ornamented by a sapphire broach that had belonged to her mother. But Jeopard knew that the antler amulet was hidden underneath her clothes, and the way she kept glancing at him over her shoulder radiated volumes of anxiety.

Various people got up and made speeches. Since Jeopard didn’t understand Swedish, he had no idea what those speeches concerned.

But he knew that Tess was upset. When it was time for her to respond she stood up and clutched the edge of the table, her knuckles white. She spoke at length in fluent Swedish, her demeanor gracious but firm, and his heart twisted with bittersweet pride.

Even if she hadn’t had one drop of royal blood, she deserved to be queen; they’d never find another woman with such intelligence and innate class.

Whatever she was saying, it knocked them on their Scandinavian ears. Strained looks and nervous finger-tapping shouted the politicians’ discomfort.

She finished, gestured to him to accompany her, and they walked out of the meeting hall.

Back in her suite, he got right to the point. “What went on in that meeting just now?”

“They asked me outright if I want the crown and the responsibility that goes along with it—you know, representing Kara all over the world, lending my support to charities, acting as a proper figurehead. They want me to do it. They say I was
bred
for it by generations of royalty, all the way back to the Vikings, at least on my mother’s side of the lineage. And Jep? Olaf Starheim arrives tomorrow. They want to introduce me to him. My second cousin.” Sheadded drolly, “Isn’t
that
special?”

Jeopard finally had reason to smile, even though it was the kind of smile that might have frozen a fjord in midsummer. “I look forward to tomorrow.”