"Don't pull away," he said in a low voice. "I won't hurt you. I just want to… love you." Slowly he turned his head from side to side, caressing Janna with his breath, his stubble-roughened cheeks, his mouth. "You're so sweet, so soft, so warm. I'll be gentle with you. Let me…"
Janna didn't answer, for the hunger and passionate intimacy of Ty's caresses had taken from her the ability to think, to form words, to speak. Her breathing disintegrated into ragged gasps as she felt her body begin a slow, sensual unraveling that had no end, no beginning, just a timeless, ravishing moment in which pleasure burst and grew and burst again, incandescent sensations rippling through her body until she moaned and moved helplessly, totally captive to the man and the ultimate instant of pleasure.
And still the moment and the unraveling and the sweet ravishment continued. Ty's name burst from Janna's lips in a cry of protest and pleasure, for she hadn't known that ecstasy was the mythic phoenix, rising newborn from the steamy ashes of sensual completion. She rose with the phoenix, spiraling higher and higher until she screamed at the violent currents of pleasure searing through her, burning through flesh and her mind, leaving her soul as naked as her body.
And then he touched her so perfectly, so gently, so hotly that she wept his name and died.
For a long time Ty held Janna's trembling body against his own, ignoring the violent demands of his own hunger, stroking her slowly until she could take a breath that didn't fragment with the aftershocks of ecstasy. When she stirred and sighed and began sliding from ecstasy into sleep, he tilted her face up and brushed her lips with his own.
"You're not a whore, Janna Wayland."
Chapter Thirty-Three
Lucifer cantered across the valley toward Ty and Janna. His ears were pricked alertly, his tail was held up like a black banner and his stride was both muscular and effortless. It was only in the chill of morning that he walked stiffly, revealing the injury that was almost, but not quite, healed.
"Hard to believe he's the same horse that stumbled into this valley three weeks ago," Janna said.
"More like a month," Ty corrected.
She said nothing, although she knew that it had been precisely twenty-four days since Ty had carried her to the steamy pool and then had brought such intense, exquisite pleasure to her. Twenty-four days, each one longer than the one before, because he hadn't touched her since then. Not once. Not even in the most casual way. It was as though she stood behind an invisible wall too thick and too high for him to reach across.
Lucifer came to a stop a few feet away from Janna and Ty, tossed his elegant black head and watched both of them. Then he nickered a soft welcome and stretched his neck toward Ty's hands. Janna smiled to see the big stallion's trust. Although he often looked to her to be petted, it was to Ty the stallion came first. An unusual, deep bond had been forged between man and horse on the painful trip from the plateau to the keyhole valley. The bond had been reinforced in the weeks that followed, weeks when Janna had deliberately stayed away from Lucifer much of the time, wanting it to be Ty whose touch and voice and medicines both healed and tamed the stallion.
With a hunger Janna couldn't conceal, she watched Ty's long-fingered hands smooth over Lucifer's black coat. She didn't realize how much her stare revealed until she sensed TV's attention and looked up to find him watching her in the same way that she had watched him. Hastily she looked away, not knowing what else to do, unable to slow the sudden hammering of her heart.
Each time she had begun to think Ty didn't want her anymore, she would turn around suddenly and see him watching her with hunger blazing in his green eyes. Yet he never moved toward her, always away. He would not touch her.
You're not a whore, Janna Wayland.
The words Ty had spoken that first night in the valley echoed in Janna's soul every hour of every day. She believed Ty, but it was the way he had made love to her that had instilled that belief; without his healing touch, the words would have been but a thin balm over a deep wound.
When a week had gone by and Ty had made no move to touch Janna in any way, she had tried to tell him that she understood why he couldn't love her, that she had accepted not being his dream, that it was all right if he touched her, that she wanted to be his lover; but he had turned away and walked out into the meadow, leaving her alone, ignoring the words she called after him in her futile attempt to make him understand that she wanted him without vows or pledges or guarantees of anything beyond a sharing of selves within the hushed stone boundaries of the secret valley.
He still would not touch her.
Janna would have tried to seduce Ty, but she didn't know how. She had no silks to wear, no grand home in which to throw parties, no room to enter gracefully knowing that he waited within to see her. She knew nothing about such civilized rituals of seduction. She only knew that she awoke in the middle of the night with her hands clenched into fists and her body on fire and her heart beating so harshly that her head felt as though it would split with the pain and force of her rushing blood.
But that wasn't the worst.
The worst was the emptiness growing inside Janna, the feeling of having lost something unspeakably rare and beautiful. It was the certainty that where she had once gone through life alone and content, now she would go through life alone and lonely. She was doomed to remember a time when she had touched love and had had it slide like sunlight through her outstretched fingers, leaving bleak night behind to pool in her palms until it overflowed and kept on overflowing, consuming the remaining light, consuming her.
A velvety muzzle nudged Janna gently, then more insistently. She started and realized that she had been staring at Ty once more, her breath held in anticipation of…something. Yet there was nothing to anticipate now but one more day, one day worse than yesterday, more light sliding through her outstretched fingers, more darkness pooling in her empty soul.
With a stifled cry Janna looked away from Ty again. She tried to make herself breathe deeply. It was impossible. Her body was so taut that she vibrated like a bow being drawn by too powerful an archer, the wood bent so harshly that breakage was only a breath away…so she refused to breathe.
I can't be with Ty like this. I can't bear it. It's worse than being alone. It's like watching Papa die all over again, all the life, all the possibilities, all the laughter, all the love, everything sliding away beyond my reach.
Something thumped soundly against Janna's chest. She made a startled noise and looked down. The thump had come from Zebra's muzzle. The mare was getting impatient for her mistress's attention.
"H-hello, girl," Janna said, stammering slightly, unable to prevent the telltale trembling.
The catch in Janna's voice made Ty feel as though a knife had flicked over an open wound. Like her body, her voice said that she wanted him until she shook with it. He wanted her in the same way, wanted her until he felt as if his guts were being drawn through the eye of a red-hot needle.
And he wouldn't take her.
"Easy, son," Ty said, making his voice as gentle as he could under the circumstances.
Lucifer eyed Ty warily, telling the man that his attempt to be reassuring hadn't been very convincing.
"Let's take a look at that wound," Ty murmured, smoothing his hands over the stallion's warm hide. "Easy, son, easy. I'm not going to hurt you."
The echo of Ty's reassurances to Janna by the pool pierced the silence between the two of them with uneasiness. He refused to look at her, knowing that if he did he would see in her eyes the sweet, consuming wildfire of her passion. He had never touched a woman as he had Janna that night; even the memory of it brought an almost shocked disbelief…and a searing hunger to know her that way again, to bathe in her like a warm pool, washing away the impurities of the years in which he hadn't known that he could touch his own soul by soaring deep within Janna's sensual generosity.