The Savage

“Summer? You have to tell me what you like.” His whisper was hoarse in her ear.

“Yes…Lance…yes.” She could scarcely summon the power to think. His long, brazen fingers were lingering over her sensitive nipples, kneading, plucking, until they throbbed and pleaded for his touch, till they felt like points of fire.

Then one of his arms slipped beneath her while his other closed around her waist, pulling her tight against his nakedness. Summer shuddered at the feel of him: the hard, hot wall of his chest at her back, the powerful horseman’s thighs cradling hers, the heated granite probe of his manhood.

And then his caressing hand moved lower.

Drawing a sharp breath, Summer held it as his hand crept downward, over her slim waist and flat stomach, seeking the soft mound of hair between her thighs, sliding intimately between her legs.

She was wet there…hotly, invitingly, drenched with dew.

“Does this make you hot, princess? Does it feel good when I touch you here?”

He trailed his fingertips over the soft lips, probing the moist secrets of her.

A long, tremulous wave of longing racked her body. Yes, she was hot, flaming hot. Her whole body burned in anticipation. She wanted to be touched, wanted Lance to stroke her there.

She arched her hips feverishly against his fingers as he parted the quivering folds of flesh.

“Does this feel good, Summer?” she heard him ask.

Whimpering in answer, she clenched her hands as those fingers teased her, sliding inside her…lingering, withdrawing, moving slowly in and out. Summer trembled at the sweet assault, the exquisite torture.

“Do you want me, princess?” Lance growled softly in her ear.

Yes, she wanted him. She wanted him with a fierceness that shocked her.

When she moaned a breathless “Yes…” Lance replied with a terse “Good.”

Abruptly withdrawing his fingers from between her legs, he gave the curve of her hip a condescending pat. He wouldn’t give her the release her hot little body was craving.

Releasing his hold on her waist, he turned over on the pallet, giving Summer his back.

“Lance?” Her tone was bewildered, shaken, her body rigid with unfulfilled sexual tension as she raised herself up on one elbow.

“Go to sleep, princess.”

“Sleep? You expect me to sleep now?”

Lance’s smile was grim in the darkness. “Now you know how I feel all the time. I only left you aching like you do me.”

In the stunned silence that followed, he was certain he could feel his wife’s green eyes glaring daggers between his shoulder blades. It was a long, long moment before she lay back down on the pallet with a definite flounce.

Unsympathetically, Lance shrugged. Let her suffer a little while. It wouldn’t hurt Summer to know what it was like to want someone so bad, it kept her up nights. Maybe now she would understand what her heartless teasing did to flesh and blood.

He wouldn’t satisfy her craving for him—or his for her. He would live with his own deep ache.

And he would keep his hands off her if it killed him.

Chapter 9

The following week at the Comanche camp was one of the most trying of Summer’s entire life. Besides the mental strain and uncertainty regarding her sister’s fate, and the added tension of sleeping naked and aroused in Lance’s arms each night, the physical effort expected of her nearly drove her to exhaus

tion.

Her every waking moment was filled with work—gathering firewood, carrying water, preparing meals, keeping the tepees in order, dressing and tanning hides, sewing clothing and robes, storing supplies for the winter months, all the thousand and one tasks that a Comanche wife was responsible for. To make matters worse, Short Dress was not only Fights Bears’s third wife, but the chore wife, which meant she performed many of the menial tasks the other two wives didn’t care to do. And Summer was required to help. Lance’s grandmother saw to that.

A virtual slave driver, Wasp Lady oversaw her progress with a sharp eye for laziness or mistakes, frequently waving her gnarled fists. Once the old woman nearly struck her.