Tallchief for Keeps (9 page)

Instinctively Elspeth straddled him and pinned his wrists beside his head. His body lurched just once upward against her, and he shuddered before lying beneath her. “Elspeth, I do believe that you are not always shy.”

Elspeth realized to her horror that Alek was aroused.

“Now, this is more like it,” he
drawled in a deeply pleased tone. His wicked expression challenged her. “Ah-ha! The dominant position. I like games, especially ones with you. So you’ve tossed me on my back and straddled me. I’m your prisoner, Elspeth. I yield. Now what are you going to do with me?”

They both knew that he could easily overpower her, and Alek grinned up at her. He lifted his hips playfully and bounced her upon him; the movement forced her—an experienced horsewoman—to clamp her thighs tighter against his hips.

In her lifetime, no one played with her, treated her lightly. ‘This is no game, and we’re not teenagers. I am going to get up, and you are going to let me.” She braced her hands on his chest, aware that Alek’s body thrust at her through the layers of their jeans.

“I feel like a boy around you….” The admission was dark, begrudging, and the look in Alek’s expression denied her freedom. Beneath her, Alek was big and solid, his heart pounding against her braced hands. “How long do you think you can run from me? From what happened?” he asked softly, easing her hand to his mouth and brushing his lips across the palm.

She braced herself awkwardly above him, her
breasts too close to his face as Alek slowly looked downward.

When his teeth nipped her fingertip, she refused to be intimidated. “I am not running from you, Alek.”

“No? Then let’s talk about it” He sucked her finger and sent her a look that said he wanted to taste her from toes to forehead and back down the other side. A bolt of heat shot to her lower stomach, startling her. Alek watched her as he slowly licked and sucked another finger.

“Alek…” She could almost taste
his mouth on hers—fierce, hungry, delighted, tormenting—but fought the softening heat of her body and tried to breathe quietly.

“I knew we were making a baby that night, your heart pounding like a wild bird against me. Why didn’t you stop me?”

Elspeth closed her eyes against Alek and the memory of that night, of Alek poised to enter her fully, shocked by her body’s resistance.

Alek caressed her back, kneaded muscles taut and
aching from hours at the loom. He went right for the tight knots, working them. Elspeth fought to hold her body still when it wanted to arch against him.

“Do you know what it does to a man to know he’s been the first and probably the last man to love a woman?” Alek’s voice was husky, deep, sweeping through her.

“Let me go, Alek. You’ve had your fun.” In another minute, she’d be arching to the motion of his hand.

“Not yet, Elspeth. Not until you stand and fight
and we settle what is between us. Not until you tell me what Una’s journals say about the shawl’s legend.”

There was no softness in him as he rose to stand over her. He pulled her to her feet, and Elspeth stared at him, her mouth open. Alek Petrovna dared to treat her as if she were a child.

He wanted to treat her like a lover, the evidence bulging against the confinement of his jeans.

“What are you going to do with that?” he asked in that slow Texas drawl, and looked down at her fist. “Go ahead. Take your best shot.”

She knew where to punch to knock the air from his inflated ego…but she wouldn’t. Moonlight glinted off the edges of his teeth as he grinned, daring her. She wouldn’t—

Then she did, and heard the satisfying grunt and the whoosh of air.

Elspeth tried to
walk away slowly, then she began to run.

In her house, she ripped away her sweater and jeans and slid into a cool, old-fashioned gown, racing for her loom. She didn’t want to know what was inside her, why she ached to have Alek hold her close and safe. On another level, her body recognized her first lover and ached with stark, primitive needs she didn’t want to acknowledge.

She slid through the familiar, comforting shadows of her home, passing Una’s journals on the living-room floor. Next to them was a huge wooden bread bowl, filled with arrowheads she used in her wall hangings. Elspeth probed the buckskin scraps, stick men painted on them, and found the envelope containing the pieces of the shawl’s legend. She closed her eyes, willing herself back to safety. Suddenly she needed to know about the legend of Una’s shawl. Her hands trembled as she shook the pieces from the envelope, and they tumbled into a square of moonlight on her woven rug.

Her fingers trembled as she eased the pieces into a page. The ink had been blurred by moisture, and the lines wavered, emotions sweeping from Una to the paper.
The Marrying Moon.
The moon had been a huge disk that night, lighting Alek’s fierce expression and bathing their naked bodies in silver.

Melissa!
Alek’s cry had echoed through the night, spearing into her, killing her dreams.

Elspeth turned on the lamp, holding the pieces of paper up to it. Her instinct told her that Una’s legend and Alek seemed entwined from that night…Both were too close and too dangerous.

“A scarred
warrior”—the piece fluttered from Elspeth’s fingers, and she replaced it, running her finger across the other words: “mist,” “mountain,” “wind.” References to a shawl punctuated Una’s journals, but the entire legend was only on this page. It amused Una that Tallchief found the shawl so lovely, and she had blended a legend from his ancestry with hers. On another page Una had written,

Heat lives in the shawl. When a warrior wraps his lady love in it and the Marrying Moon is right, they will know the flames. I think my coppery-skinned husband blushes when I tell him this and he remembers that night beneath the Marrying Moon. He won’t say the words, but he knows that something passed between us that night that would unite our souls forever.

Elspeth squeezed her lids closed. She’d believed so deeply from reading Una’s journals that if she could just find the shawl, romance would come to her.

Romance was a foolish, girlish dream waylaid by the necessities of survival and coming upon her later than most.

Elspeth rummaged through a
file she had created years ago while trying to find the shawl. The shawl had been sold with the rest of Una’s dowry to protect Tallchief land, and passed through several hands and then out of the country. Elspeth wanted that shawl desperately now; it was hers, and with it in her keeping she would be safe…. She wanted all the bits of the Tallchiefs’ lives tucked safely within their keeping. They’d learned early to depend only on themselves in dangerous times, and she clung to that knowledge now.

She sensed the room’s shadows shifting, and Alek tossed her gear onto the sofa. “You forgot this when you ran away. You’ve got quite a punch for someone who is supposed to be elegant and coolheaded.”

She wanted to take
cool,
wrap it around his neck and squeeze tightly. “Get out.”

He glanced at the journal and the torn pieces of the page. “That tells about the shawl, doesn’t it? You’ve pledged to return it to the family. It bothers you that you’ve dropped your quest.”

Alek braced his western boot
on the low rock hearth beside her. He leaned closer to her. “Let me tell you something about quests, Elspeth. Either seek them out with everything you’ve got, run them down and claim them…or forget them. But I don’t think you can forget the shawl. Would you like help?”

Elspeth came smoothly to her feet, thankful for the long cotton gown, high at the neck and sweeping her toes. “Leave, Alek.”

His gaze swept down her loosened hair, to her breasts, taut against the well-washed cotton. He closed his eyes, and a muscle tightened in his jaw, a vein throbbing heavily in his throat. Then his eyes cut to hers. “If you would have told me about the baby, I would have married you…taken care of you. We could have made it work.”

Her body jerked in response to the passion in his expression. “Stay away from me, Alek.”

“Not likely.” The
bitter lines around his mouth deepened, and then he was gone.

An amateur playwright, Talia Petrovna demanded a party at Maddy’s Hot Spot after the success of her Saturday-night play,
Beer and Boomerangs.
With the
Sentinel
ready to hatch, Alek should have been working with Brad.

The newspaper was what he wanted,
to start that beautiful old equipment running, to write about small-town USA, Amen Flats, about new babies and tomatoes the size of basketballs. But words didn’t hold him now; images of Elspeth distracted him too often to hold the thread of the story.

Full circle, Alek thought. He wanted
to come full circle with Elspeth and this time to play for keeps.

He almost regretted Elspeth’s contract with the Denver gallery. Almost. He’d set out to force her into interacting with him, and the contract would do that. Now he wanted time alone with her, without brothers to rescue her and without convenient separate living arrangements. The gallery would provide an ideal environment to manage the elusive Elspeth.

Manipulative? Yes. Hungry for her? Yes
and yes. Used to being alone, without tethers, Alek turned the idea.

He’d left it to her to tell her brothers about their past, and she hadn’t yet. All hell would break loose the moment they knew.

Alek lifted a beer, blew the foam off it
and nodded to Maddy for another. The beefy bartender chewed on an unlighted, worn cigar and waved to the sheriff’s patrol car on the street. Maddy plopped a pitcher of beer on the table and groaned. “The sheriff has all the dogs stirred up. He’s left his mike button on again. It’s bad enough the sopranos are in heat, but does he have to try to sing with them? Jeez, he sounds like nails on a blackboard—throw in a bull moose in mating season.”

Birk Tallchief—without Chelsey in tow—lifted the edge of a sheet draped over a painting of a nude woman. He peered under it. “I like that tall, fully stacked look. I don’t know why you’re desecrating good art.”

Alek’s gaze slid to Elspeth at another table. The long, lean look appealed to him.

Maddy’s thick neck shortened as his jowls sank into his battered black T-shirt. “Women. They’re delicate. Don’t want any of them offended. Did you ever watch any of those temperance movies? The women stormed bars, took hatchets and smashed them to smithereens. Scared the hell out of me.”

Alek watched the lines of dancing couples. “Line dancing. Whatever happened to men holding women against them, you know the old thigh-nudging thing and dips? The way a girl snuggled to a guy and he had both hands free to roam? The old blowing-into-her-ear thing? Slow dancing had its moments.”

Talia laughed and cuddled against Calum. “I think someone is in a romantic mood…you’re outdated, Alek.”

“Is that so?” He surveyed the room, his gaze focusing on the woman he sought. Seated at a table with Sybil, Elspeth was deep in an intense conversation. Dressed in a black turtleneck sweater, loose slacks and a shawl, Elspeth had been snatched from her house by Talia. Elspeth’s black hair was twisted in a fat, gleaming knot that caused Alek to want to loosen it, to feel it sift through his fingers. Small silver disks resembling moons dangled from her ears.
The Marrying Moon
…

Alek’s fingers went to his earring, a
new habit he’d recognized when thinking of Elspeth. The sight of her standing in that old-fashioned gown had had him wanting to pick her up and cradle her, soothing the past and giving her new memories.

Duncan and Calum and Birk shared an expression. Birk clapped a hand on Alek’s shoulder. His wry tone was understanding. “Son, you’re horny.”

“Could be. The urge comes upon me infrequently, but I’d say I was ripe now.” Alek looked straight at Duncan, who had already tensed.

“Pick someone else.” Duncan’s
tone was low, primitive, a man protecting his loved one.

Calum studied Alek. “It’s more than that There’s something running between them. He’s set Elspeth on edge.”

Edges.
Alek should have been satisfied that the Tallchiefs recognized the cracks showing in Elspeth’s life. He wasn’t. He wanted to smooth those lovely, secretive edges. The Tallchiefs knew something brewed between the eldest Tallchief sister and himself, and Alek had no doubt that he’d be called out if they knew it was a baby. From what he’d heard of Fiona, the sister causing trouble in Wisconsin, she’d raise hell if she knew.

Tonight his thoughts were drawn to necking in a back
seat and the taste of hunger on Elspeth’s lips..,.

Talia stood instantly, clearly prepared to smooth any tense moments between the Tallchiefs and her brother. “Come on. I’ve been waiting for this.” She tossed a tape at Maddy. “Play that, will you?”

“Like I have a choice,” Maddy grumbled, and padded off to the tape player. “Probably some stuff with fiddles that think they’re violins.”

The high-voltage sounds of a Russian folk song filled the room, surprising the country-music dancers. Maddy went down behind the bar, protecting himself from the barrage of plastic roses used as table decorations that came flying at him. Talia moved into the open space, placed her Hessian boots in position and lifted her arms. “Alek?”

He groaned and rose slowly to his feet. He glanced at Calum. “You should be doing this. Anton and I will give you Talia’s Petrovna dances. She has no idea if they are authentic, but it was either that or eat her meals of an indefinable origin.”

“Alek!” Waiting for him, Talia
clapped dramatically and stamped her boots.

“Do something, Alek. My wife is pregnant. See that she doesn’t hurt herself,” Calum ordered in the tone of a western gunslinger.

“You’ll have to learn this, Calum.
No more of that Latin smooth stuff if you want to keep up with the Petrovnas.” Alek glanced at Elspeth and knew he would dance for her.

Talia began dancing, moving her boots to an intricate step and weaving to the music as it grew faster.

Alek picked her up and held her as he lifted his free arm, going around and around. Talia laughed, and together they began an intricate, fast-paced dance, boots stomping. They shouted and swirled around the room with Talia laughing up at Alek. When the music was almost finished, Alek lifted her and gently twirled her into Calum’s waiting arms.