Comanche Moon (45 page)

Her cousin looked up, there were tears on her cheeks but a faint smile curved her mouth. Blue eyes glistened as she shook her head. “No. I want to stay here with Dexter.”

Deborah had expected no other answer. “Be happy,” she whispered, and then there was no time to say more because Zack was pulling her with him, his long strides taking them to the next ridge and his horse.

He threw her atop, then vaulted up behind her and reached around her for the reins. His pistol nudged her side as he wheeled the horse around and kicked it into a run. The sound of hoofbeats on hard-packed ground echoed in her ears, and she leaned back against Zack’s muscled chest and closed her eyes. The rhythmic motion of the horse and the strain of the past weeks left her drained, and she was barely aware of her surroundings. All that mattered was Zack, and that she was with him.

“Notsa?ka,”
Zack whispered
as he pulled Deborah from his horse and shook her gently awake. “No one can find us here. You need to rest for a while.”

Her eyes opened slowly, and a faint smile curved her mouth as she leaned back against his sturdy strength. “What does that mean?”

“What?”

“Notsa?ka.”

He grinned, tracing a finger over her cheek and down to her mouth. His voice was husky. “Sweetheart.” Her eyes opened wide. “Am I?”

“My sweetheart? Yes. My only heart.” His arms closed around her tightly, and he dragged in a deep breath and let it out slowly, so that it stirred the deep fiery tendrils of her hair.

For a moment she didn’t say anything. Then she asked, “Where are we?” Zack’s head lifted, and he shrugged. “The Hueco Mountains.”

“Where are we going?”

“Presidio County.”

Turning in his embrace, she looked up at him with puzzled eyes.

“What’s there?”

“My mother.”

“Your mother.” There was a short pause, then she said, “You were going to tell me about her.”

“Yes. I will. First, let’s build a fire and eat something, then I’ll tell you.” Deborah sat on a flat rock and held her hands out to the blaze Zack started with swift efficiency. In just a short time, he’d fashioned a shelter from brush and rock, and spread blankets and a serape on the ground for them. “You came prepared,” she commented, and he looked up at her, firelight making his bronzed features glow. A faint smile touched the corners of his mouth.

“Yes.”

“Are you ever unprepared for the unexpected?” White teeth flashed as he grinned at her. “I wasn’t prepared for you.”

“Complaining already?’

The shadows in his eyes altered subtly, taking on a different light, and Deborah caught her breath. He looked at her with the same intensity he had the first time he’d seen her, and she felt the familiar clutch of her heart.

A pulse began throbbing between her thighs, warm and strong and insistent, and she vibrated with the same longing she could sense in him.

“No,” he said softly, “I’m not complaining.” He rose to his feet in a lithe motion and crossed to her, reaching down to pull her up against him. Deborah felt the thud of his heart beneath the palm she put on his chest, and his muscles flexed as he folded her into his embrace.

“I want you to know something,” he said in a husky, strained voice that made her tense. He sounded reluctant, as if it was an effort for him to speak.

“What is it, Zack?”

“I didn’t kill Dexter because I did not want to kill your child’s father. It would be too much of a burden. No,” he said when she opened her mouth to speak, “let me finish. Your child will never know hatred from me. I will keep it as my own, and love it. The father doesn’t matter. I will be the father.” Hot tears sprang to her eyes, and emotion choked her so that she couldn’t speak for a moment. He thought the child was Dexter’s, yet he was willing to love it anyway. His own painful betrayal still hurt him after all these years. She buried her face in the warmth of his shoulder and held back a sob.

When his arms closed around her more tightly and he leaned back to tilt her chin up for his kiss, Deborah wondered if he could see the love shining in her eyes.

“Zack—oh, my love—the child is yours. Ours. When early spring comes, you will have a child of our love to hold in your arms. We’ll be a family.”

For a long moment, he didn’t say anything. His face was impassive, emotionless. Only his eyes showed any emotion, and the shadows were slowly replaced with growing peace.

There were no words to express what he felt, and he sank slowly to his knees on the blankets he’d spread, taking Deborah with him. He held her hard against him, breathing in deep, regulated rhythm.

“You are sure of this?” he finally asked, and there was no censure in his voice. Deborah nodded. “Dexter never touched me. He wanted to at first, but then—he didn’t.”

Zack’s mouth smothered anything else she might have said, and he pushed her gently back into the blankets with the weight of his body. She tingled everywhere he touched her, thrills of flame racing along her nerve-endings and starting blazes. This time, there were no shadows between them, no reservations.

Moonlight shimmered around them. Zack slowly undressed her, pausing to put a warm palm on the mound of her belly and gaze at her with love and wonder and raw emotion flickering over his features. He knelt with his bent legs between hers, his hands exploring the soft contours of her body.

“I love you,” he said hoarsely, and Deborah reached up to pull his shirt off his shoulders.

“I love you, Zack,” she murmured. “Hawk—my beautiful, arrogant lover. Did you know that the hawk came to me when I was alone and lost and hurting, and 1 knew it had to be you. It brought me back when I thought I’d never want to live again.” He pulled her skirt free of her hips, sliding his warm palms down her thighs to her knees, lifting her legs to pull them around his waist. He was still wearing his pants, and she could feel the rough texture of the denim material against her tender skin. His lashes lifted, and she saw the smoky gleam of his eyes as he gazed at her with love and a male hunger that made her breath come a little faster.

Slowly drawing his fingers down from the rapid beat of a pulse in the hollow of her throat to the firm thrust of her breasts, he shaped the creamy mounds with his palms, his eyes half-closing. “You’re so beautiful,” he murmured, his voice a little hoarse and his breathing ragged. “I used to dream about you . . . doing this . . . touching you and just learning you.” His thumbs dragged over the taut, aching peaks of her breasts in a tantalizing caress, and Deborah felt the heat in her belly rise and curl and flush her entire body. When his knees pressed her thighs a little wider, he spread a hand from her breast to the obvious swell of her belly. He looked up at her, eyes darkening to a blue so deep it was almost black.

At that moment, he made her think of a savage again, fierce and brutal with pleasure. The exultant light in his eyes was a deep, steady flame.

“We are one, Deborah. You have my heart. And I have yours. There will be no more misunderstandings between us.”

“No,” she whispered. Her fingers trailed down the strong curve of his arms to his wrists where he held his hand on her stomach. “One—together.” Spreading his fingers across her stomach, he looked startled, and Deborah laughed softly.

“Our child wants to remind us that we will be three together.” A strange look stole over his features, and Zack sat quietly for several minutes, feeling the strong thumps against his palm as the child moved. She saw his throat work for air, and his expression blurred as he closed his eyes as if in pain. When his lashes lifted again, thick and shadowing his eyes, she saw his mouth flatten and curve into a smile.

“I hope he does not mind if I share his mother for a while.” Deborah held her breath when his hands moved lower, grazing the tender curve of her inner thighs, stroking her with leisurely caresses that made her tremble. His weight and the gentle pressure of his knees holding her legs apart made her feel hot and restless with growing excitement.

He bent his head, his hands dark against her pale skin as he watched her reaction to what his hands were doing. In between drags of heated air, Deborah saw the smooth, muscled curve of his broad shoulders shudder slightly as he stroked her, his fingers moving to the pulsing warmth between her legs.

When she pressed up into his hand with a ragged moan, he muttered something in Comanche and sat back. He fumbled at the buttons of his pants, rose to his knees to push them down, then kicked them away. Deborah stared at him with appreciation, the lean hard strength of him, the bronzed muscle that roped his body and flexed with his movements, and then he was back over her, his knees wedging between her thighs again.

Her breath came in short, tortured pants for air, the need for him rising so strong and demanding that she reached out. “Zack . . . please.” The renewed pressure of his body against her damp, hot center made her shudder, and her fingers caught at his long hair and pulled his head down to hers. She caught his lower lip between her teeth, nibbling with tiny, fevered bites that made him groan, and he thrust his tongue between her lips. The exploration of her mouth made the heat rise to a fever-pitch, and when his hands found her taut nipples, she cried out.

Zack didn’t try to smother her cries, but instead, seemed to take a fierce pleasure in them. His breath came harsh and fast, and his braced arms trembled with strain as he held himself over her. He raked his lower body up and over her sensitive folds of flesh in an erotic rhythm that made her squirm and shudder and strain toward him.

On fire with need, Deborah moaned again, “Please, Zack, oh please love me . . .”

This time he answered with a shift of his body so that the hard heat of him pressed into her. Her hips lifted in an automatic move to accept him. She felt his throb and shudder as he hesitated, then the hot, delicious slide of him into her that made the world spin around her in a blur of moonlight and sensation.

Zack made a sound somewhere between pain and pleasure, and his breath feathered over her cheek as he bent his head. Soft moans escaped her, tangled in his hair, brushed against his ear. His invasion filled her, hard and strong and powerful and making her arch upward into his thrusts until she felt as if she was sailing above the earth.

Before, Deborah had always felt as if he’d held something back from her, some part of himself that he could not share as easily as he did his body.

Not this time. This time he lost himself in her, driving into her with mindless passion and whispered words of love, some of them she understood and some she didn’t. His heat and the smells of their lovemaking drove her to match his fierce thrusts.

Her hands slid with almost frantic urgency over the glistening curve of his shoulders, down the ridged bend of his ribs to his lean, hard waist, then moved to cup and hold his buttocks in her palms. She could feel the flex of muscle as he moved, the thrust and drag of him inside her, the almost unbearable friction growing higher and hotter until she thought she would explode with it.

When the release came, it washed over her in endless waves that spun her up so high she thought she was touching the moon. Light everywhere, flashes behind her eyes, bathing her in warmth and love.

Spiralling slowly back to earth, she grew more aware of Zack, his body heavy atop her, some of his weight braced on his bent arms, his breath harsh and ragged in her ear. She remembered his groan, the husky word he had muttered when he had exploded inside her.

“Usúni.”

Forever. Yes. Forever.

Epilogue

Pecos River, Texas

1873

“I got a letter from Judith.” Deborah held out the page, and Zack took it, his eyes scanning the neat scrawl. He handed it back to her after a moment.

“She seems happy enough since they got married.”

“Yes.” Deborah folded the paper and tucked it back into the envelope, smiling at her husband as he held their child in the strong cradle of his arms.

“It’s a good thing my divorce came through. She and Dexter are expecting a child next spring.”

A faint smile curved the hard line of his mouth, and Zack muttered,

“Poor child.”

Deborah pressed a hand over her mouth,, and her voice was reproving when she said, “That’s not fair. Judith only wanted someone to love her, and Dexter—” She paused, and he lifted a brow and grinned wickedly.

“Yes? You were going to say something nice about poor Dexter? I’m waiting.” When she gave him a glance of reproof, he couldn’t help laughing.

“Sweetheart, you know he’s too damned mean and ambitious for his own good. I just hope your cousin knows what she’s got herself in for.” Sighing, Deborah said, “I think she does. She loves him, and that’s all that matters.”

Zack felt something raw and still painful move in his chest, the memory of the years without love clawing at him. Thank God those memories were slowly fading now. He had Deborah, and he had his son, an armful of active baby that chose that moment to wet his napkin and his father’s lap.

Holding him with an expression of chagrin and disgust, Zack heard the front door open and his mother laugh.

“Zachary dear, you should know that these things happen on occasion.” Amelia Banning Miles moved onto the porch with a twinkle lighting blue eyes remarkably like her son’s.

She bent over and lifted the squirming child from his father’s arms, tucking him into the angle of her arm and shoulder and cooing softly to him.

Laughing, the baby waved chubby arms, staring up at his grandmother with thick-lashed golden eyes. His dark hair and tawny skin echoed his heritage, but the bright smile was a replica of his mother’s. The eyes were strictly his own. Wolf eyes, Zack had named them, and that was what he called the child.

Wolf. Deborah had insisted upon a more proper name for their son, that decision echoed by Amelia. In the end, they had settled on Caleb Hamilton Banning. Little Cale answered just as readily to either name, Deborah and Amelia had noticed with dismay. Six months old and active, he literally ran the household.

Zack smiled at his mother, and saw her eyes cloud with shadow. She still regretted the lost years, he knew. Daniel Miles had died several years before, and the ranch belonged to Amelia and Danny now. His older half brother had asked him to remain and help out, but Zack had still not made up his mind. At first, he’d not known what was going to happen to him if Albright died, but then the gunman had survived and all charges had been dropped.