Wild Abandon

“New moon, new moon, here I am in your presence,” he sang. “Here I am in your presence. Make it so that only I may occupy my woman’s heart tonight. My heart is like a rose tonight, opening its petals to embrace my woman. Let it be so.”

When he was finished and he turned his dark eyes down to Lauralee, she smiled through a haze of tears up at him. “That was so beautiful,” she murmured, then trembled sensually when he whisked her up into his arms and carried her into his cabin.

With a foot, he closed the door. His eyes never leaving hers, he carried Lauralee to the buffalo robe spread on the

floor in front of the fireplace.

Without words, their eyes saying everything they were feeling about each other, they undressed and threw their clothes aside.

Vibrant and glowing, Lauralee drifted into Dancing Cloud’s arms, his hard body like velvet and steel against hers.

A kind of slow heat began licking through Lauralee’s body as Dancing Cloud crushed her lips with a fevered kiss, his palms moving seductively down her body, teasing, stroking her fiery flesh.

Feeling the heat of his passion pressed against her abdomen made Lauralee reel with the onslaught of pleasure. When his hands stroked her slim, white thighs, she lifted one of her legs around him.

She gasped with ecstasy when he came to her in one bold thrust. She locked her arms around his neck as her body absorbed how it felt to be with him again. She felt a drugged passion overwhelm her as his kisses became more demanding. He tantalized and loved her, his powerful hands caressing and stroking her silken flesh.

She abandoned herself to the torrent of feelings that washed over her. She clung to him around the neck and kissed him long and hard as his hands kneaded her breasts. Her hips moved rhythmically with his.

When that maddening rush of rapture was near again, she tried to hold back so that she could share the ultimate of pleasure with him. She could tell that he was nearing that point of wonder by how his body had stiffened and his chest was heaving. She could tell by how frenzied he was kissing her now. His fingers bit into her as he lifted her closer to him.

Then he pressed his lips against the slender column of her throat. She wove her fingers lovingly through his hair as he reverently breathed her name against her flesh.

And then he kissed her lips again as their bodies quavered and shook and quaked. They spoke in quiet, spasmodic gasps against each others’ lips. They clung hard as the stars in the heavens reached into their hearts and the winds became their breaths as their climax went on and on in a wild, dizzying rhythm, and then tapered off, leaving them shaken and spent once it ended.

Wet with perspiration, her breathing erratic, Lauralee rolled from beneath Dancing Cloud.

He moved to his side, his eyes never leaving her. “My o-ge-ye, I had no true life before you,” he said, smoothing his hand down the flat plane of her stomach. “You fulfill my every want as a man.”

“The days, especially the nights, seemed so long without you,” Lauralee murmured. She moved next to him, so that his hard body encompassed hers. “I missed you so.”

“There will be times when we will be apart,” Dancing Cloud said, his fingers weaving through her silken hair. “But only physically. In spirit, I am always with you. Remember that when you are lonely for me. If you allow yourself, you will feel me with you, though you cannot see me. You will reach out into the darkness of night and my hand will be touching yours.”

“I shall try and remember that,” Lauralee said, smiling over at him.

He drew her lips to his. “Let us not talk anymore,” he said huskily. “Let us make love again.”

“Shouldn’t we discuss Brian Brave Walker?” Lauralee said, her heart racing as his hands swept over her in a slow caress.

“This child is not feeling everything that he pretends,” Dancing Cloud said, kissing her eyes closed. “Deep down inside his heart he knows the goodness in you. Did you not nurse him back to health? Did you not sit with him day and night while he was so ill? He cannot forget who was so kind to him. It is just something in his past that causes him to hate whites so much. In time we will find out who. Then pity the man or woman of his past who has mistreated him. This Cherokee warrior will make them wish they had never put such a dread in the child’s heart.”

“And if we never find out who did this to him?” Lauralee asked, slowly losing her senses to his caresses.

“We truly do not need to know who, to make him forget,” Dancing Cloud said, brushing soft kisses across her throat. “He will learn to love just as a child learns how to talk, run, and laugh. Who could have a better teacher than you?”

“You have such faith in me.” Lauralee sighed. “But I . . .” He sealed her lips with a kiss, stopping her worries and her fears, again propelling her to a place where all question and doubt was left behind, to a place of flaming passion.

Chapter 28

Our love, it was stronger by far than the

love of those who were older than we.

—EDGAR ALLAN POE

The region in which Dancing Cloud and Lauralee were traveling was beautiful with its myriad bright-tinted blossoms and sweet wild fruits.

Lauralee clung to her horse’s reins as she guided her steed down a narrow path beneath the towering trees, ducking now and then so that a low limb would not knock her from her horse.