Love Song For A Raven

Was that why Raven wasn’t attracted to Janna?

Janna bit her lip against the words crowding her tongue. If Raven wanted her to know about his Angel, he would tell her without being prodded by unsubtle questions such as: Were you married to her? Are you married still? Are you in love? Engaged? Who are you, Carlson Raven? Why does your sadness and your laughter tear at me until I want to cry and laugh, too?

Janna watched as Raven bent down, loaded shampoo and other items into the bucket and turned toward her. Every movement was both enormously powerful and oddly beautiful. It was like watching the tide flowing, strength both smooth and endless, supple and potent. She had been raised among big men, strong men; male strength had always thwarted and irritated her, not fascinated her. But Raven was different. She could not stop watching him.

„Ready?“ Raven asked, holding the wire-handled bucket in one big hand.

Silently Janna turned and walked from the creek through a screen of windswept, mist-spangled cedar to the rocky margin where sea met land. The path she followed was overgrown, barely visible, older than the thick evergreens lifting to the sky. She wondered if Raven’s people had come from the abandoned village whose rough-hewn cedar houses and savage totems were slowly being engulfed by the resurgent forest. Had his ancestors carved the eerie, powerful images that faced the sea like human cries frozen within time?

„Careful,“ Raven said, clutching Janna as she stumbled on a mossy rock. „We’re going to have to tie up your socks.“

Janna felt Raven’s breathtaking, casual strength as he steadied and then released her. She looked down at her feet. Her tennis shoes had survived their dip in the inlet and their subsequent drying in the galley oven, but her socks had been kicked aside and forgotten in Raven’s haste to warm her. As a result, today she was wearing a pair of his wool socks while hers decorated the galley railing. She had rolled and rolled the borrowed socks, but the heel still came above her ankle. It was the same for her shirt. Raven’s shirt, actually. The cuffs engulfed her entire hand and the tail came below her knees.

With a sigh, Janna conceded that the islands had reduced her to looking like a refugee from a low-budget circus. All she needed was thick makeup and a painted-on smile.

Watching Raven didn’t make her feel any better about her own appearance. He looked as elemental as the land itself. Wind and wet cedar boughs had combed his hair into an untamed black pelt that gleamed darkly with every shift of his body. It was the same for the rest of him; he was perfectly suited to the place and the time, as though he had always been here, a part of the island’s savage perfection. She was a ragged urchin – and he was the mist and the rugged mountains, the wind and the wild sea. It was there in his fathomless eyes, in his immense strength, in his silences.

Shivering with reaction to Raven’s elemental presence, Janna rubbed her hands up and down her arms. The knowledge that Raven had worn the very shirt that was warming her flesh didn’t soothe her. Nothing about him soothed her. Yet even as that thought came, she knew it wasn’t completely true. Nothing in her life had ever felt as right as the instants before she fell asleep with his powerful arms around her and his big body radiating heat into her own chilled flesh. She had never felt safer, more at peace, more cherished.

Raven looked back over his shoulder in time to see Janna shiver and rub her arms as though trying to warm herself. He frowned, wondering if she were coming down with a fever. He held aside the last evergreen barrier between himself and the beach and motioned Janna forward. As she brushed by him he looked intently at her. Other than the subtle sadness that came over her face at times, there was nothing obviously wrong with her. Her skin didn’t look dry or pale.

„Wait,“ Raven said, releasing the cedar bough.

Janna turned. „ Is something – “

Her breath hissed in as he put one hand on her shoulder and the other on her forehead. The fragrance of evergreen clinging to him teased her nostrils. She knew that she would never smell cedar again without remembering this instant, Raven so close to her that she couldn’t take a breath without drawing in his scent, primal man and evergreen combined.

„You were shivering,“ he said, his voice rumbling gently. „You feel fine, though. No fever.“

That won’t last if you keep touching me.

Janna crushed her thought before it became incautious words. She had learned with her husband that if a man didn’t want you, he didn’t want you. Period. She had read an entire shelf full of books whose sexual instructions were both explicit and frankly boggling. She had gritted her teeth, taken a deep breath and tried some of those „surefire“ methods of arousal on Mark.

It had been about as arousing as a bucket of ice water. For both of them.

„I’m fine,“ Janna said with determined cheerfulness, stepping away from Raven’s touch before she shivered again in response to his closeness. „Actually, I’m disgustingly healthy. No feminine fits of the vapors, no delicate squeamishness, no interesting pallor. Just hearty, wholesome American girl. All I need are gingham checks, patent shoes and a puppy dog pulling at my anklets.“

Raven heard the unhappiness underlying Janna’s wry words. He looked intently at her, wondering what had happened to her that she so underestimated her own appeal to men. It would take a blind man not to respond to her. Her hair was a silky wildness framing her oval face. The forest green of his flannel shirt made her skin glow like mother-of-pearl on a sunrise beach. Her eyes picked up the green of cloth and forest, changing it, silvering it with emotions the way the wind changed the surface of the sea. Even the oversize shirt couldn’t hide the womanly promise of her breasts, the allure of hip and thigh, the feminine curves leading down to ankles that looked ridiculously slender rising out of his bunched socks.

Watching Janna as she stood framed against the ancient forest made Raven want to smooth away all the coarse masculine clothes, to brush her with satin and incense, to caress the essential femininity of her. He wanted to arouse her until she cried out his name and wept and left passionate marks on his body. He wanted to give her a pleasure to equal the courage and determination he had seen when she had pushed herself beyond exhaustion, driven by the bitter imperatives of survival, and, then, still in the grip of those imperatives, she had let go of fighting and given herself to him, trusting him as no one ever had, even Angel.

Emotion went through Raven like a gust of wind through the cedar forest, stirring everything, leaving restlessness in its wake. Through narrowed eyes he watched as Janna picked her way over slippery rocks toward the log he had lashed to old, rotted cedar posts jutting up from the beach. The makeshift dock bobbed unpredictably. Years ago he had been a logger; for him, the erratic motions of a log floating on water were as easy to walk on as a stairway. Janna, however, lacked the experience to know how the log would react to a push here and a nudge there. Several times she had almost come to grief.

Janna stood on the shore, eyeing the bobbing log distrustfully. She tested the dampness of her hair, hesitated and shrugged.

„It’s not worth it,“ she muttered, turning away.

„What isn’t?“

„Dry hair. I’ll slip on that log and take a header into the inlet,“ she said in a resigned tone. She shivered again. This time it was the wind off the inlet rather than Raven’s presence that drew the involuntary response. „On second thought, it’s worth it for the jeans alone. If they’re dry by now?“ she added, looking up at Raven.

„Should be.“

„I was afraid you’d say that.“

„Wait,“ Raven said, touching Janna’s arm. „I’ll get your jeans for you. And a scarf,“ he added as the wind lifted her hair in a damp, silky cloud. A few of the flying auburn strands caressed his face. They felt cool and smelled sweet against the tangy, salt-laden wind.

„Afraid you’ll have to fish me out again?“ Janna asked wryly, eyeing the log.

Raven felt his body kindle at the memory of drying Janna off and wrapping her in a warm blanket. Naked. With a muffled sound of exasperation at his unruly thoughts, he walked the log to the Black Star. Moments later he returned with her jeans, still warm from the oven, and a scarf that was the clear blue-green color of the sea under full sunlight. Janna took one look at the fine, delicate cloth and knew that it was Angel’s.

„No,“ Janna said, refusing the scarf. „I’ll ruin it.“ She stared at the glorious, blue-