Sun God (29 page)

Like a flash of heat lightning, reality washed over her. And with it, shock. Was this actually happening? Was she, Amy Sullivan Parnell, naked and on all fours, making love in a barn like an untamed animal while an excited stallion whickered a few feet from her and a hundred people were but a stone’s throw away?

Luiz, sensitive to her every nuance, felt the change in her body and knew what had happened, and knew exactly what to do about it.

“There’s no one in this world but the two of us, sweetheart. Nobody else.” He kept his voice low and calm. But his temples throbbed and he was consumed by his feverish lust for her. “Just us,
querida.
”

Inch by inch he let himself sink more fully into her, increasing the length of his strokes, allowing his hardness to fill her completely. And driving away any worrisome traces of logical thought.

Amy’s body and mind immediately responded. The stallion, the crowd, her misgivings faded away. There was nobody but the two of them, their slick bodies fitting together so perfectly, so deliciously.

Amy sighed and her hips began that rolling, rhythmic gyration that made the man linked to her groan with heightened pleasure and whisper his encouragement and praise. His was the only voice she heard.

The palms of her hands, her knees, and her toes crushing the hay on the floor, her unbound hair spilling into her eyes, Amy was like some wild, untamed being, totally lost in physical pleasure. Her lover knew it, was inflamed by her absolute abandon, and longed to give her even more pleasure.

Luiz leaned forward, gripped Amy’s shoulders and pulled her up. They knelt there together for an instant, with him still inside her while he told her how beautiful she was, how sweet. Then he sat back on his heels, bringing her with him, and spread his knees wide. He settled Amy’s bare, soft bottom on his muscular thighs, placed a gentle hand around her throat, and urged her head back to his shoulder.

He said softly, “Never have you pleased me more.” He brushed a kiss to her temple. “Never have I wanted to please you more.”

“You please me.” She sighed. “Too much.”

“Never too much.” His voice was low, husky. “Never enough.”

“I—I couldn’t stand any more pleasure,” she told him, and meant it.

Then found out that she could.

While Luiz’s gentle fingers stroked the graceful curve of her throat, he laid his free hand on her stomach. And he began to stroke the tiny line of barely visible golden fuzz that led from her navel downward. While he stroked, he continued to buck his pelvis rhythmically against her buttocks, plunging his painfully swollen maleness high up into her.

It was glorious.

Amy squirmed and panted and thrilled to the magic fingers stroking her throat, her belly, and to the awesomely hard male flesh so thoroughly impaling her. With the elevated pleasure came lowered inhibitions.

And with lowered inhibitions, the quest for even more pleasure. Turning her face into his, Amy whispered, “Do you really want to give me more pleasure?”

“I’ll do anything to make it so,
querida.
”

“You know what I want you to do,” she said brazenly.

He did know, but he told her, “I want to hear you say it. Ask me for it. You will get it.”

Without shame or hesitation, Amy did just that. She said the words she’d never spoken. She asked him aloud and never knew how much it excited him. She gave a soft little wince of ecstasy when, promptly complying with her graphically spoken wish, Luiz put his hand between parted thighs, found that slick, distended little nub of ultra-sensitive female flesh, and began expertly caressing it.

“Ohhhhh … Luiz,” Amy murmured. “Luiz, Luiz, Luiz.”

“I know, baby. I know.”

El Capitán Luiz Quintano sat on his bare heels on the hay-covered floor of Noche’s stable and made hot, unorthodox love to Amy Parnell in the May moonlight. Sweat glistened on his bronzed body. His pelvis lifted and lowered, thrusting into her. His fingers stroked, coaxed, circled. His deep voice caressed, praised, encouraged.

Between murmured words of passion, he gritted his even white teeth, struggling to hold back his release until she was totally fulfilled.

Her sweet-scented hair whipping about in his face, her luscious, fevered body slipping and sliding so splendidly on his, her sweet childlike voice whispering his name was almost more than he could bear. He could not hold back much longer.

Amy began to breathe rapidly through her mouth and she gasped, “Noooo … Luiz … I …”

“Yes!” he persuaded, feeling her deep contractions starting, gripping him tightly. “Yes, baby, let it come. Let it come.”

Seized by a joy so intense it was frightening, Amy couldn’t have stopped it had she wanted. Her hot body out of control, she screamed out his name in her mounting ecstasy. It was the sweetest of sounds to Luiz. He could let himself go at last. He pumped madly into her, staying with her, giving her all he had. As her wild, wrenching climax was coming to an end, his own exploding release began and his loud groans of joy joined her dying cries of elation.

T
HAT SAME FULL MAY
moon that shone on the two passionate lovers kneeling in a hay-strewn stable on Orilla spilled into a garishly decorated bedroom on San Francisco’s rollicking Barbary Coast. While nymphs and satyrs of ivory plaster cavorted on the high ceiling above their heads, a flesh-and-blood nymph with coppery skin and raven hair frolicked with a debauched, insatiable golden-haired satyr.

His liquor-clouded blue eyes following every lewd movement of the dark-haired woman’s supple body, the blond man sat naked on a red satin bed, his knees apart, a long cigar in one hand, a glass of Kentucky bourbon in the other.

The woman, at his command, danced for him. Had been dancing for more than an hour. She was hot and tired and rivers of perspiration washed over the ample curves of her copper-hued body. Her thick black hair, parted in the middle, fell to her hips and was tangled and damp. It slapped at her shiny face and shoulders as she spun and writhed and contorted her agile body into obscene poses for the blond man’s benefit.

Her name was Nacori. A half-breed, she had been born twenty-four years ago to a fifteen-year-old Mimbreño Apache mother and a fifty-one-year-old English father who had come to America to head up a British-owned ranching operation.

Ranching proved not to be to Sir Alfred Whittington’s taste, nor was the prospect of being father to an Indian child. When his young Apache companion’s belly grew round with his child, Sir Alfred cast her out and sailed back to England where his sedate, horse-faced wife and family of five awaited.

The pregnant Apache girl wandered back to her people. Her baby was born in Chief Mangas Colorado’s camp in northern Mexico and was cherished by his whole band. The child, Nacori, grew into a lovely girl and was sought after by the bravest of the young warriors.

Nacori’s mother taught her the English she’d learned from the rancher, and told her of the fine home where she’d lived with Nacori’s father, but warned her half-white daughter that only heartbreak awaited in that other world.

Married and widowed twice by the time she was twenty-two, Nacori longed to see for herself what the white world was like. In the darkness of a hot summer night, she stole away from camp. Unfortunately her path soon crossed that of a trio of Mescalero Apaches. They took her to their cool uplands camp high in the Chisos mountains. There their tall, lanky chief, a hideously ugly man they called Snake Tongue, took one look at the pretty, light-skinned woman and ordered his braves to bring her to his wickiup.

All Nacori’s screams and protests fell on deaf ears. Within minutes of riding into camp, she found herself being pushed inside Chief Snake Tongue’s dim wickiup. Terrified, she blinked and spun about, searching for the tall, ugly man who had followed her inside.

The ghastly Mescalero chief with the beady black eyes, huge, bulbous nose, and slashing, grotesque mouth from which an incredibly long tongue habitually darted—hence his tribal name—was so close she could feel his body heat.

Nacori tensed. From out of the silence came the sound of his buckskin trousers being dropped to the floor. In seconds he stood before her, naked from the waist down, his ugly, frightening face now concealed behind an equally ugly, frightening devil’s mask.

It was a hideous carved mask with horns made of deer antlers dripped in crimson, a long leather tongue and ferocious fangs, and eerie marble eyes with slits below to see through.

Frozen with horror, Nacori screamed when the chief roughly tore away her doeskin dress and undergarments. She fought for a time, but managed only to annoy him. His long, evil-looking tongue darting out over the limp leather tongue of the devil’s mask, he flung Nacori atop a bed of buffalo furs and followed her down.

At the first touch of his long wet tongue on her bare left breast, Nacori spasmed in revulsion. It was only the beginning of a long, hot afternoon in which, inside the dim, tightly closed wickiup, the chief in his devil’s mask slowly, methodically licked every inch of her writhing body.

When there was not one spot left—not the soles of her feet nor the palms of her hands nor the deep insides of her ears—that the chief had not thoroughly licked, he flopped over onto his back and ordered her to climb astride him. Willing to do almost anything to have the nightmare end, Nacori settled herself on the chief’s straining member, ground her hips, and in seconds heard his shout of satisfaction.

Anxiously she slid off his body and was rising to her knees when he caught her and drew her back.

He said in Apache, “You will stay here with me. You will be my woman.” When she wildly shook her head, he picked up a sharp knife, put it to her bare throat, and repeated, “You will be my woman.”

From that day forward, Nacori was Chief Snake Tongue’s woman. She was watched constantly. Everyone knew that the chief prized his woman for her fine looks and light skin. He was partial to light-skinned women. He had once captured a full-figured white woman and had so worshipped her, it was said he actually loved her to death. No one knew for sure what had really happened, but the white woman, after less than a year with the chief, had grown so thin and sickly it was no surprise when she died.

Nacori was of stronger stuff. She did not grow skinny. She did not get sick. She did not die, although there were times when she wished she was dead. She never let the chief know how she felt. She cleverly pretended, within weeks of her capture, that she was mad about the ugly, depraved chief.

Steeling herself, she became constantly affectionate to the man whose tall, bronzed body was a study in male perfection, but whose face was repulsive. She pretended she couldn’t stand having him out of her sight. She followed him about as a worshipping dog might, her adoring gaze always fixed on his monstrous face.

When with him in the privacy of their wickiup, she indulged his every perversion as if she enjoyed it. She lay sighing and moaning for hours at a time, feigning pleasure while he licked her as if he would never get enough.

Nacori remained with Chief Snake Tongue for eighteen months before she finally got a clear opportunity for escape. The entire band was convinced of her devotion to the chief, so well had she played her part. And so, on a cloudy gray day in January, after spending the long afternoon coddling the naked chief, Nacori stole from his arms as he lay napping, hurriedly dressed, and walked, unchallenged, right out of the camp.

Her heart pounding with hope and excitement, she easily cut the fastest pony out of the remuda, climbed on its bare back, and rode down out of the hills.

It took more than two months to reach San Francisco, but that was where Nacori had always dreamed of going. It was one of the few cities she had heard of. She loved the big, noisy place at once and, seeing all the finely dressed gentlemen crowding the wooden sidewalks, Nacori was resolved to so beguile one of the rich dandies that he would beg her to be his wife.

On her first night in the teeming city, she met the man of her dreams. A tall, good-looking dandy with vivid blue eyes and gleaming blond hair came strolling out of a place called El Dorado, practically bumping into Nacori.

He flashed her a dazzling smile and Nacori felt her heartbeat quicken. When he politely took her arm and asked if she’d like to go inside with him, she couldn’t believe her good fortune.

“Yes. Yes, I would,” Nacori tried to enunciate the words distinctly so that he wouldn’t know she’d spent all her days in the wilderness with uncivilized savages. She suddenly hated the soft doeskin dress she wore and decided, as he took her arm to guide her inside, that she would cut off her long black hair and dress it some fancy way atop her head.

Inside Nacori’s lips fell open in wonder. She’d never seen anything so grand in all her life. They stood in a large, square room, the walls covered with costly paintings of pale nude women in suggestively abandoned postures. The furniture was dark mahogany, the lights above their heads sparkling crystal chandeliers. At one end was a raised platform draped with bunting and colored streamers. An orchestra played loudly from atop the platform.

At the other end was a bar and behind it were huge mirrors of cut glass. Scattered throughout the room were gaming tables on which huge stacks of gold and silver coins rested. Behind each table sat a dealer, nattily clad in black and white.

Awed by the riches surrounding her, Nacori clung to her tall blond gentleman’s arm and followed him to the far side of the crowded room. He reached out, swept back a curtain of scarlet muslin, and handed her inside a small private booth with a long low couch.

Without a word he shrugged out of his tailored gray suit jacket and began unbuttoning his white shirt.

Nacori blinked at him, but asked, “You wish me to be your woman?”

“Yes,” he said, and smiled at her, a smile so radiant, Nacori was filled with happiness. He failed to add that he wanted her to be his woman only for the next fifteen minutes.

Half an hour later, when he was buttoning his trousers, Nacori sprang naked from the couch and said, “You will take me with you to our mansion?”