The Savage

Prologue

Texas, 1860

His kiss was more than she bargained for. His hot mouth bore little resemblance to the polite attentions of a gentleman. Instead, his caress was like the man: hard, intense, forbidden.

There was no tenderness. The intimate intrusion of his tongue was like a fiery brand in her mouth, marking her as his…demanding, possessing. Emphasizing that he wasn’t quite civilized.

But then, he was not quite civilized, Summer remembered in a daze. Lance Calder was the sort of man no lady would ever associate with, much less allow such intimacies. He was a half-breed. Part savage Comanche. Raised white, true, but nonetheless a savage.

It excited her, the fierceness of his kiss. And frightened her. She was afraid of the raw sensuality, the barely restrained savagery she felt in him. She should have known better than to flirt so close to danger. Yet she had gotten precisely what she’d wanted. After months of trying, she had finally broken his iron control—and discovered herself unprepared.

She tasted hunger and desire and anger in his kiss. She hadn’t expected the anger. He was furious at her for driving him to this. Neither had she expected her own reaction. The frantic thudding of her heart. The acute breathlessness. The weakness flooding her limbs. She hadn’t anticipated the overwhelming sensations…especially the heat. The heat of his mouth, the heat of her flushed skin, the heat kindling low in her body. A heat that had nothing whatever to do with the warmth of the August night. She’d never experienced anything like it. She felt as if she had never been kissed before in all her life. As if she’d never known what kissing was about.

She could feel herself trembling…or was it he? She felt his arm hard at her back, the rough texture of his work-callused fingers against the side of her throat as he hungrily angled his mouth to get closer.

Summer heard him groan softly, and a thrill of triumph surged through her. It gave her a heady feeling of power to think she could affect a man so, could affect this man so, could make him tremble and lose control.

It startled her when Lance abruptly ended their kiss, dragging his mouth from hers, half pushing her away. His breath sounded harsh in her ears, and she felt him fighting for restraint as he leaned his forehead against hers. The strength of his fingers hurt faintly as he gripped her bare arms below the puffed sleeves of her gown.

“Are you satisfied?” His voice was low, gruff, hoarse. “Did it excite you, ma’am? Did it make you hot, kissing a fierce Injun?”

Confused, Summer drew back and raised her gaze to his. Even in the semidarkness she could see him well enough. The lamp she’d left burning on the back porch spilled a golden light over the yard, illuminating his harsh, strong-boned face bronzed the hue of sunbaked earth. His coal black hair was slicked back from his high forehead and still damp from washing at the pump. He smelled of shaving soap and leather and horses. Obviously he had spruced up for his meeting with her, on the occasion of her seventeenth birthday.

Yet it was his eyes that held her spellbound. There was something dangerous and untamed in his eyes. They were black as ink, deep and hard and fearless, with a smoldering intensity that made her wary. It was like looking into the heart of a brewing storm.

“Well, ma’am…was it different? Did being kissed by a savage feel different from your fancy gentlemen?”

He drawled the word ma’am, his tone holding faint derision, with little of the respect due the white daughter of a powerful Texas landowner. And yet it was his contemptuous use of the word savage that made her wince. “Please…don’t…”

“Don’t, Miss Weston?” He pulled her closer, till her corseted breasts pressed against his hard chest. “Isn’t this what you wanted? What you asked me for?”

Summer shivered. Lance was going much too fast for her. She couldn’t handle him the way she could her other beaux, that much was becoming clear. He wasn’t much older than she—perhaps four or five years, that was all. He looked to be in his early twenties. And yet Lance Calder was a man, with a man’s hard experience. Nothing like the boys she was accustomed to having flock around her, the mere boys she had learned to flirt with and charm since she was old enough to let down her skirts.

There was nothing soft or polite about him. He was whipcord-lean, hard as saddle leather, with a broad, deep chest that dwarfed her slender frame. She could feel the solid resilience of muscle as she clung to him, could feel the coiled tension in his body, in his st

rong hands as they gripped her bare arms.

With a show of bravado, she gave a faint laugh. “Well, yes. I was curious, I admit it. But just because I let you steal a kiss doesn’t give you—”

“Steal?” He expelled a harsh breath. “That’s not how I remember it. Seems to me I only fulfilled your birthday wish.”

He was right, of course. He would never have dared touch her if she hadn’t encouraged him, Summer knew. She’d spent months trying to get this man to notice her, trying to get him to break. She’d teased and taunted him all summer, subtly casting out lures and covert glances and secret smiles, flirting outrageously with her other beaux in front of him in a vain attempt to make him jealous.

Lance might have been a stone statue for all the attention he paid her.

He had ignored her until she was ready to scream, until her feminine pique had become a desire for retribution, a driving need to have him pay her homage. She was determined to conquer his stoic reserve, to bring him to his knees…if she could. Only, taming this fierce, half-civilized male no longer seemed as easy as her fantasies had led her to believe. The challenge of having him succumb to her feminine charms had backfired, if the breathless trembling of her body now was any indication. With a single kiss Lance had left her feeling shaken and uncertain and defenseless. Her knees were the weak ones, Summer discovered to her dismay when Lance suddenly released her.

She reached out and clutched at the rope swing that hung from a pecan limb overhead. Watching him turn away, she wondered if he meant to abandon her.

“Don’t go,” she was surprised into saying.

For a moment she thought he meant to ignore her plea. But he merely leaned a muscular shoulder against the trunk of the pecan tree, as if he planned to stay a bit longer, even against his will.

Summer let out her breath in relief. Unsteadily she lowered herself into the swing, carefully spreading her wide hooped skirts over the wooden seat. Her party gown of pink organdy and gros point lace was fabulously expensive and quite grown-up, but Lance hadn’t said a single complimentary word about her appearance. Not that she’d expected him to. He spoke rarely, although she would never have called him a quiet man. It was more like he was holding all his anger, all his violent thoughts and feelings, inside, waiting to explode.

“I’m a damned fool,” she heard him mutter. “Your pa wouldn’t stop with taking a horsewhip to me if he caught me here with you.”

He was right about that, too, Summer thought, glancing over her shoulder at her family’s big, white frame ranch house with its slender wooden columns gracing the lower story. Papa would have an apoplectic fit if he knew she was out here in the dark with a “murdering savage.”

Papa called all Indians murdering savages. Ever since Mama had died so horribly in a Comanche raid thirteen years ago, he hadn’t been able to bear the sight of one. Ordinarily not even the fact that Lance Calder was probably the best mustanger in Texas would be sufficient reason to let him set foot on the Sky Valley Ranch. Nor even the recommendation of one of Papa’s most respected friends, the Texas Ranger who had looked out for Lance after his mama passed on.

But Lance had saved her brother Reed’s life last spring during a stagecoach ambush, which had earned him the chance to hire on as a wrangler. Papa raised horses, and so far Lance had proven his worth a dozen times over—but that didn’t mean he would ever be accepted as a civilized man.

His looks were a strike against him, Summer thought with a covert glance at him from beneath her lashes. Not that he wasn’t handsome. That wasn’t the case at all, despite the harsh angles and planes of his bronzed features. His complexion was not overly dark, either—no more than if he’d been burned by the sun. But there was no doubt he was part Indian, with his skin pulled taut over high cheekbones and his wild mane of coal black hair streaming beyond his shoulders. He wore his hair long—out of sheer defiance, she suspected. Broadcasting the fact that he was an Indian. And Texans didn’t take kindly to uppity Indians.

Certainly Lance hadn’t been invited to the party celebrating her seventeenth birthday. Her papa would never have allowed an Indian inside the house, especially not a Comanche, even a half-breed who claimed to be white. She had been willing to risk her father’s rage, however, for the chance to put a notch in Lance’s invincibility.