green wisp and had a depressing thought. „I’ll bet it’s the same color as her eyes.“
Raven’s black eyebrows shot up. „How did you know?“
Janna sighed. „She’s blond, too. Right? Small boned, willowy, graceful, a figure to break your heart, with a smile that hints at passion and tragedy?“
„Are you a witch?“ he asked, only half joking.
„If I were, Angel would be a warthog,“ Janna muttered under her breath.
„What?“
„Nothing,“ she said brightly.
Janna glared at her jeans and looked around for a place to sit that wasn’t wet. The closest one was on the boat. She muttered one of her brothers’ favorite words. Life simply wasn’t fair. In order to put on her jeans without getting wet, she was going to have to hop around on one foot and then the other, looking about as graceful as a pig on roller skates. Meanwhile Raven could watch and compare her with the oh-so- delicate Angel.
Mentally Janna sorted through her brothers’ vocabulary of locker-room epithets. She found some truly appalling phrases and spoke them in the silence of her mind. Finally she smiled, feeling better. She’d always known her brothers were good for something.
„Here,“ Raven said, realizing Janna’s difficulty as she tried to balance on one foot on the slick pebble beach. „Brace yourself against me.“
She hesitated, then mentally shrugged. He’d had her naked in bed and hadn’t turned a hair. He was hardly going to be affected if she braced her fanny against his thighs while she put the jeans on in the only way possible to mortals – one leg at a time.
Leaning against Raven wasn’t quite enough to make the job easy. The jeans were a little overcooked; they had shrunk in the oven. Now they fit her the way bark fit a tree – faithful to even the tiniest curve and hollow. Wriggling into the stubborn cloth was the only way to get the jeans on. With her tennis shoes catching every inch of the way, she had to do some major wriggling to get the jeans up her legs.
Raven suffered the innocent bump and grind of Janna’s sexy bottom against his thighs as long as he could before he slipped an arm around her rib cage and braced her firmly, hoping that she would have to squirm around less that way. The strategy was partially successful. She did indeed have to squirm less. On the other hand, her breasts inevitably rested on his forearm, their sweet weight swaying with every movement of her body. Raven didn’t know whether to regret or applaud the fact that Janna’s bra, like her socks, had been lost in the first frantic moments of undressing her and getting her warm.
He remembered finding the bra that morning. The sheer midnight-blue lace had looked incredibly fragile in his hand. The thought of undressing her again had come to him like lightning; only this time it would be the heat of his tongue that transformed her nipples into tight pink crowns. He could almost see them pushing against the delicate lace, rising to the caress of his mouth.
The sensual images glittered through Raven’s mind, impossible to control, like salmon schooling in the sea’s mysterious darkness, gathering for the freshwater culmination that sang to them from their deepest instincts.
With a barely stifled groan Raven turned, using his hip to brace Janna rather than his thighs. The speed and intensity of his arousal surprised him. He told himself forcefully that he was no boy to go crazy over a woman’s un-confined breasts brushing against his arm. He had solved the sexual mystery of male and female long ago. He knew his own needs, knew when to control them and when to appease them. Now was definitely not the time for appeasing.
In the most primitive analysis, Janna was helpless against him – and they both knew it. He was far stronger. He knew the land, knew the sea, knew how to survive on both. He had saved her life. She was utterly dependent on the civilized veneer that covered his elemental survival calculations. She knew that, too, at some unconscious, primitive level far deeper than language and culture.
And she was too damned vulnerable because of it. If he asked, she would give herself to him. He could see it in her eyes as she watched him almost secretly – admiration to the point of hero- worship. Or was it simply fear? Was that why she sometimes trembled when she brushed against him? Had she instinctively sensed what he had only just realized?
He wanted her with an intensity that bordered on violence.
He had wanted her since he had seen her refusal to give in against overwhelming odds. He had saved her life, and now some savage, ungovernable part of his mind insisted that she was his for the taking.
Even as the realization came he fought against it. He didn’t want her like that, a woman coming to him for all the wrong reasons, gratitude and a primitive survival reflex driving her into his arms. He wanted Janna to come to him willingly, when she had all the alternatives of civilization open before her.
And if he kept telling himself that often enough, he might even believe it.
Chapter 4
The tide was out, leaving behind a damp, plant-slicked, glistening swath of shoreline for Raven and Janna to pick over in their search for dinner. Living off the land wasn’t really necessary; Raven had enough emergency stores to keep both himself and Janna well fed for the days it would take for the storm to blow itself out along the coast. On the other hand, he was reluctant to use the emergency food unless he had to. Though the chance of the storm lasting more than a few days was small, it was on such small chances that survival often hinged. More people got into trouble through bad planning than bad luck.
Besides, Raven very much enjoyed walking along the shoreline with Janna in search of food. It was the time between squall lines, when the rain was little more than a sparkling edge to the wind. Janna accepted the wind and mist and rain with the same good nature she accepted having to wear sweaters and jackets that came down to her knees.
Raven could think of a lot of women who would have shut themselves up in the warm boat rather than scramble over chilly, slippery rocks in search of seashore life that only a scientist or a very hungry person could describe in terms of enthusiasm. Janna was both. She was happily crouched over a stretch of rocky tide pools that waves would bury in foam within a few hours. Slick seaweed glistened around her. Beneath the oversize jacket she wore, her legs looked very sleek and feminine encased in her jeans. Raven knew that her legs would look even better on the boat, when she would wear nothing more than one of his long shirts while her jeans toasted and dried in the oven.
The thought made Raven smile. He knew he would never again be able to smell sea-wet jeans and tennis shoes drying without remembering the days when a summer storm had given him a gift and then sealed him within Totem Inlet to enjoy the present. Raven couldn’t think of a time he had had half so much fun as he had in the past three days. Janna was good company. Her quick mind and wry sense of humor had made the hours fly – at least in the daytime. Knowing that she was only a few feet away had made the nights incredibly long.
„What do you call this?“ Janna asked, turning toward Raven.
He stared from the creature balanced on the palm of her hand to Janna, disbelief clear on his rugged face. „What did you say you majored in?“
Janna blinked, then began laughing. „Marine biology. If it will make you feel better, I know that what I’m holding is phylum Echinodermata, class Echinoidea, and is known to its friends as
„A purple sea urchin,“ Raven said dryly.
Janna looked up at the cloudy, windswept, glittering sky as though seeking aid or inspiration. „In Haida,“ she said carefully. „What do you call a purple sea urchin in Haida?“
Janna turned her face back to Raven, waiting for him to speak. Her head was cocked in an attitude of anticipation. She had learned from him that the Haida language was technically described as an isolate, a language totally unrelated to any other on the face of the earth. Basque was the only other living
