Night Flower (Gone-to-Texas Trilogy) (33 page)

      
“You have no right to ask me that,” she cried out, stung half by his unfairness, half by her own guilt; for she had wished fervently that she could react to Jeremy the way she reacted to Lee.

      
“I have every right—to anything I want,” he growled, turning her to face him, his hands no longer gentle but firm and unrelenting. “I'm your husband and I think it's long past time we had our honeymoon night.”

      
“You promised me—the annulment was your idea. You despise everything I believe in, everything I am!” she cried out in small, wounded gasps as he kissed her, crushing the breath from her body, trailing his lips from her ear to her neck, then down where his hand cupped the fullness of her breast. He pulled it free of its lacy confinement to suckle fiercely on it. All the remembered sensations from that insane, breathless day on the hillside came rushing back to jolt her with the force of a stampede. “No, Lee, please,” she moaned.

      
“Yes, Lee, please,” he echoed, lost in the golden promise of her body, that lush, voluptuous body he'd lain awake dreaming of for weeks. He could feel the points of her nipples as they hardened beneath the subtle persuasion of his mouth and hands, the pounding of her heart as he brushed his lips in the deep vale between her breasts. “You were made to be loved, Night Flower,” he whispered, ignoring her gasped moans of dismay.

      
“No! You don't love me—you only want me,” she cried out with more force, struggling to break the heated magic his body was working on hers. “It's the same as it was the first time—just lust!” She pushed herself free of him at last and stood flushed and trembling, pulling her unfastened camisole up to cover the bounty of bare rose-nippled breasts.

      
He straightened up, fury and frustration etched across every plane and angle of his hawkish face. “You've behaved more than once as if you're well acquainted with lust and not at all averse to it! You and Lawrence put on a touching little show at the end of the dance tonight,” he rasped out bitterly.

      
“How would you know? You left me alone! You never paid the slightest attention to me all night long. Between attending to Larena Sandoval and the punch bowl, I'm amazed you even noticed I was alive!” Her eyes blazed like molten gold as anger raged through every nerve of her body.

      
“Well, I'm noticing now, and I have a right to sample what you've probably already offered Lawrence. Is that it, Melanie? Have you and that ranger bastard been lovers? Is that why you don't want me to touch you—afraid I'll find out the truth?” The moment he spat out the accusations he knew they were untrue. Her face blanched and her eyes dilated in shocked, horrified denial; but she uttered not a sound, standing proudly before him as if daring him to do his worst.

      
Rather than assuaging his racing desire, her obvious innocence fueled it anew. He would be the first, and by God he would have her! When he reached out both arms and took her by the shoulders to pull her back into his embrace, she stood woodenly, like a sleepwalker, in shock over his monstrous accusations and raging jealousy.

      
With her hair down and high heels off, she was tiny as a doll. He bent down and lifted her, pressing the length of her soft curves against his chest and belly, groaning in exquisite torture, “Oh, Melanie, Night Flower, I must have you, I need you. I can't wait any longer.”

      
Before she could answer, his mouth swooped down to fasten on hers, hot and firm, as his tongue insinuated itself between her lips. With a volition of its own her mouth opened and allowed him access. He tasted faintly of tobacco and more pungently of whiskey. Her senses swam as his tongue entwined with her own and his lips continued their almost savage onslaught. He was holding her very tightly, lifting her feet from the carpet so she hung suspended in midair, clinging to him.

      
Melanie had been angered at the presumption of his assault; but she became bemused, acquiescing to the anguished pleading of his last words.
He needs me, he desires me—he was jealous just like Charlee said he'd be!
Confused thoughts dashed helter-skelter through her mind as she felt her senses reeling and that hypnotic heat once more stealing through her body. All reason fled as she gave herself up to this mysterious, inexorable need.
I need him
,
too
, was her last coherent thought before he swept her up in his arms and silently carried her into the bedroom.

      
When he reached the bed, Lee slowly set her down alongside it, all the while nibbling soft, wet kisses from her mouth to her shoulders and around her throat. Then, he slipped the camisole straps down her shoulders and shoved the frilly bit of fluff to her waist, tearing the buttons off in his impatience. Leaning back, he gazed breathlessly at her breasts, completely bared and standing proudly upthrust. He filled his hands with them, lifting and massaging them. “For a body so small to have these so large...” he whispered in awe, feeling her arch into his palms, thrusting the aching points of her nipples against his fingertips.

      
Melanie's small hands sought the rock-solid expanse of his chest, flattening her soft palms against it and running her fingers through the thick springy black hair. Electricity, like summer lightning, flashed between them. When he reached down to suckle her breasts again, she eagerly accommodated him, her long nails digging into the muscles of his shoulders, pulling him against her this time. Scorching heat spiraled out from her breasts, dipping lower, uncoiling in her belly, then lower still.

      
Reacting instinctively, he pulled her lower body firmly against his, then guided her hips in a slow rotation against the burgeoning heat of his erection. Feeling the soft pressure of her pelvis, he groaned with the exquisite torture and grabbed the fastening of her pantalets, yanking the lacy drawers below her hips. Then, he scooped her up and deposited her on the bed.

      
Melanie looked up at him, her wide gold eyes glazed with passion as he quickly slid the pantalets off her and tossed them on the floor. She was completely naked and vulnerable, yet a languid, hot paralysis held her in thrall. Watching the expressions play across his taut features, she knew he thought her body beautiful. His burning hands traveled from her breasts to her waist, then lower over her hips, pausing at that small tangle of black curls between her thighs, then lower still to caress her sleekly curved little calves. One bronzed hand encircled a fragile ankle and then moved upward, retracing the course to her flushed face.

      
“You are perfection,” he ground out as he stood up and began to unbutton his pants.

      
In the dim recesses of her mind, Melanie knew that she should feel embarrassment at his savoring perusal and bold words of praise for the most intimate parts of her body; but all she could do was wait with her eyes riveted to his swarthy male beauty as he roughly yanked his tightly fitted suit pants free of his body. Having three younger brothers, Melanie was familiar with male anatomy, but it had never looked like this! Once freed of the constraint of his pants, Lee's pulsing shaft seemed enormous.

      
Thinking of his earlier accusations about Jeremy and knowing his opinion about the morals of a
placée's
daughter, Melanie grew suddenly afraid. What if he hurt her? She struggled to remember Deborah's explanations about what went on between men and women; but everything was confused as her mind skipped back and forth, torn between fear and desire.

      
Lee looked down at her small expressive face and followed the path of her wide golden gaze.
She's afraid of me,
he realized in sudden amazement, remembering all too well the fiery, passionate little creature that day on the hillside. But now, naked together in bed, it must seem different to a virginal woman. She was so tiny and fragile, for all her lushly curved feminine allure. He took a deep, steadying breath and knelt on the bed once more, splaying his fingertips across her belly and running them delicately in ever widening circles, caressing her breasts and thighs but avoiding the core of her that enticed him with its untried innocence.

      
As he stroked her, Melanie felt the fearfulness abate, replaced by another kind of tension, a tightly coiling ache. She looked up at his dark beauty, hesitantly raising her own hand to trace the pattern that was formed by the black hair on his chest. It narrowed in an arrow like descent on his belly. Her busy fingers stopped midway down.

      
With a low, wicked laugh, he caught her wrist and pulled her hand the rest of the way toward his erection, then slipped it around the hard, pulsing flesh and stroked up and down slowly. Struggling to keep from crying out, he released her hand and rolled onto his side to lay next to her.

      
“Kiss me, Night Flower,” he commanded raggedly and was rewarded when she moved toward him and reached her arms up to grasp his shoulders. He pulled her beneath him as they joined their mouths in a sealing kiss.

      
This time she parted her lips and entwined her tongue with his eagerly. As he deepened the kiss, he slid his knee between her thighs, then reached down with one hand to stroke the dark curly mound. He felt her tense and instinctively arch upward toward his hand as he parted the hot, wet core of her. She whimpered and writhed as he stroked the sensitive aching tissue. Her eager desperation was all the more beguiling because it was untutored.

      
Lee felt the throbbing in his groin growing almost unbearable as he raised himself up over her and guided his shaft home—home to enter the hot, velvety sleekness of her body. He forced himself to pause just inside the welcoming lips, probing carefully for the barrier of her maidenhead.

      
Melanie felt him begin a desperate plunge, then stop short, laboring to breathe and calm himself. But the heat and hardness that was positioned at the seat of her desire drove her to seek completion of the act. Heedless of her earlier fears, she arched up, clawing at his back and tightening her legs around his hips.

      
With a muffled oath he responded, unable to stop himself this time as he tore through the thin membrane in one fast, hard thrust. He heard her small gasp of surprised pain, but was beyond the point where it registered. He continued to thrust in and out, rhythmically, joyously, after waiting so long.

      
The initial penetration was hurtful, but not nearly so much as Melanie had first imagined when she had looked on his swollen phallus. The pain quickly receded as he continued to labor over her, driving into her in steady, even strokes. The heat and ache, her constant companions since that day on the hillside, once more took over, driving her wild with a need for something beyond her imagination, yet something as elemental, as necessary as air. She struggled for it, looking up into his passion-glazed eyes as she watched him, arching to meet each stroke, unaware her eyes were as revealing as his.

      
Melanie didn't understand what was happening as she pulled him closer, fixated on her own blinding need. It was as if she wanted to absorb him into her body. He suddenly stiffened and cried out her name—as if in protest. She could feel him swell even larger inside her as he made several fast, hard thrusts that gave her what she had been so desperately seeking.

      
Lee bit his bottom lip in an attempt to prolong the exquisite, torturous rapture throbbing through his whole body.
Stroke slow, easy, don't stop, don't ever stop
—“Oh, Mellie, no, no!” The cry was torn from him as she gasped and clawed at him, arching her back and driving him over the brink into a final burst of meteoric fury that spent him utterly.

      
As he stilled and collapsed on her, she tightened her knees around his hips and lay still while the rippling contractions radiated outward through her entire body. Gradually, as she came to herself she realized she had been panting and crying like a wounded animal!

      
So this is how a man bends a woman to him, enslaving her mind and her will, making her breed for him and obey him.
She squeezed her eyes closed tightly and buried her face in the curve of his shoulder, feeling his heart thud next to hers as both gradually returned to a slower rhythm.

      
Lee sensed the unnatural stillness in his wife's small body and felt the wetness of her tears against his shoulder. Completely drained and exhausted, he wanted only satiated sleep, but he could not ignore her. She had followed him over the edge, he was certain of that. After all the times Dulcia had lain stiff and still, filled with his seed, her body totally unaffected by what they had done together, he knew the difference well enough. For all her virgin's pain, Melanie had clawed at him, impaling herself and moving with him, as hot and desperate as any woman he had ever encountered. And in his travels from Mexico to the
Apachería
, Leandro Velasquez had encountered many women.

      
Demanding, passionate little vixen—you almost caused me to finish without you
, he thought through a groggy haze of oddly mixed pleasure and guilt. As he rolled away from her, he pulled her small soft body up against his hard long one and fell blessedly asleep.

      
Melanie did not resist his hold on her. She lay staring out across the darkened room. The wick light had long since burned out. Lee's even breathing indicated to her that the combination of the alcohol and his sexual release had made him fall asleep. She was grateful, wanting the time to think and regain control of her emotions.

      
It was so intense, this man-woman experience. The feelings were so confusing and contradictory—pain and pleasure, fear and trust, lust and love. Love? No. He found her beautiful, he desired her; but had wanted her tonight out of a perverse sense of possessive anger and pride, not out of love. She was certain of that. He had watched her with Jeremy and misread everything.
But what did you expect, little fool? He thinks you have the morals of a whore—at least the inferior bloodlines of one.