from battle, an Indian in from the hunt, a woodsman who had endured months of loneliness. This Griff had a side to his character other than just tenderness and compassion…
One by one, he undid the buttons of her shirt. His palms slid the material off her shoulders. Cold air rushed over her vulnerable flesh…and she suddenly felt terribly sensitive to cold.
He tugged her arms up and wrapped them around his neck, his mouth still hard on hers with a pressure that arched her head back. Over and over, his hands swept the contours of her back, forcing her sensitive breasts against the rough, abrasive wool of his shirt. His tongue stole between her parted lips, probing the inside of her cheek… She was suddenly not so cold.
His hands gradually took a long, slow trail downward, exploring the satin inward curve of her spine, splaying possessively over her bottom, stretching down to stroke the supple muscles of her thighs. His arousal pressed like an announcement between them.
Yet it was a seduction. His thumb and forefinger twisted the button on her jeans; then his hand stole inside, chasing the material down at the same time that he was caressing her hips and thighs. Her underwear was drying on a bush near the fire; he knew that, yet her total nudity seemed to shock him, setting off a flash fire in his eyes as he looked at her. The sound of his ragged breathing set off an answering response in Susan.
She pulled free, just far enough so that she could reach the buttons of his shirt. Her trembling fingers pulled rather than unfastened; she soon tired of the frustration and groped for the waistband of his jeans. Two could play this game. He wasn’t wearing anything beneath his clothes either; she wanted to feel flesh, just as he did; she wanted to know this man deep inside her. In her heart, she acknowledged a sudden fierce loneliness she hadn’t known was there before, born of the weeks past, of an anxiety over the distance between herself and his children, of a fear that their love had somehow changed as they settled in to the real world of being married and living together and dealing with the problems of his offspring.
These days together in the wilderness had destroyed that distance. Griff was a smart, smart man to have insisted on this time alone with her. She had been opposed to the trip; they had so much to do; she hated leaving everything a mess… Very smart, her Griff.
When her hands kneading the tight, taut skin of his buttocks, she heard a guttural groan from deep in his throat and raised her head to look at him. His pupils were dilated, his brown-black eyes all shine and glaze as he kicked off his pants and shrugged out of his shirt. She felt a shimmering, sheer feminine pleasure at the response she drew from him almost without trying… and she was more than willing to try.
Her eyes swept up and down, up and down, admiring his muscular body naked in the night, his muscles as sinewed as those of the cougars that haunted the woods, his hair the color of the silver mink, his body as virile and bluntly male as the most predatory of all nature’s creatures: man.
He stood still while she studied him; he stood still as she stepped forward again to close that distance and apply the tenderest of silken kisses to his throat. Her fingers skimmed down in deliberate, featherlight attack, sweeping over his arms and shoulders, then his powerful chest, finally teasing more provocatively as a single finger traced the length of all that virility.
“Susan…” She heard the guttural warning; his mood wasn’t playful. His arms reached for her, but she shivered and danced free of him.
“Shall we play hide-and-seek in the woods at night, Griff?” she whispered. She danced yet another step away, her breasts firm and glowing like satin in the firelight, her supple hips all grace in motion…and seduction in invitation. Those clear eyes of hers were full of intoxicating feminine powers, and he exulted in them.
In two steps, he had lifted her high in his arms, her soft laughter echoing long into the night. “You think I’d let you walk out there and risk a wolf taking a sweet little nip out of your fanny, do you?” he growled.
“I’m not afraid.”
“Aren’t you?” he murmured.
The balance of power shifted as he eased her down on the sleeping bag and captured her legs with one of his. His eyes met hers, a dark look of such fierce possession that her breath caught. She was not afraid. Of wolves.
His rough cheek glazed the smooth flesh of breasts already tight with need, already aching for his touch. His whiskered cheek contrasted to the soft texture of his lips, closing first on one breast, then the other, his tongue flicking insistent little messages on her nipples. Her fingers threaded in his hair, splaying in his scalp, encouraging his head that much closer. She was suddenly submissive.
His mouth swept lower, taking in the flat contour of her stomach, hungry for the curve where leg joined torso. Her thigh flexed, of its own volition, wanting to draw him in and hold him, yet she had a terrible feeling he knew her too well. It would happen, but not yet. He wanted to play a very masculine game of let’s-see-who’s-the-master-at- tease; she wanted to say,
The earth, the stream, the trees, all sent out powerful scents in the night. Susan sent out the faintest, most elusive sweet musk, a fragrance Griff drew in as he breathed, kissing his way down the stretch of her leg, trailing kisses up her side, over the lovely curved hip and waist, under the swell of her breasts.
“Griff…”
He paid no attention, stopping only to smother that whispered cry by touching tongue with tongue. His forefinger traced a leisurely path down her profile-forehead, nose, over those swollen and parted lips, down the vulnerable hollow of her throat to the crevice between her breasts, over her heart, down…
Her whole body shuddered when his finger claimed her moist secrets, his hand cupping that private mount as if laying claim to treasure, inviting the responsive twist of her hips. She whispered something incoherent, almost frantic, and his palm released her. He shifted up again and she thought,
Instead, his lips took that same lazy path, first exploring her gentle profile. Forehead, nose, throat, the hollow between breasts; his lips loved that hollow. He loved the perfect flat slope of her stomach, the soft, curling mat below; he loved her flesh and scent and shape, every mystery that made her Susan. The need to possess, to own, to take, was sheer lust, a full-blooded male instinct that was raging through him, out of control. Nothing could prevent him from possessing her now. Yet the same need to possess, to claim, to take, was just as fiercely a part of love, and he didn’t raise his lips again until he had felt a long, low quiver tremble through her entire body.
She was still shuddering when he shifted his hips over hers, when she felt his hand beneath her buttocks, lifting her. That first fierce thrust filled her, caused a thousand stars to explode behind her eyes. She cried out, lost somewhere in a wilderness of consuming passion. So powerful, so painfully intense… She felt her sense of self slipping, her sense of being Susan. The rhythm that locked their bodies together denied that there were two; insisted there was only one.
Her cry of ecstasy matched his, but it was Griff’s primal moan that she heard, echoing over and over in the privacy of the night.
Chapter 8
Dusk was falling as Griff’s station wagon devoured the last miles between Duluth and St. Paul. The goal had been to get home before dark on Sunday, but a side trip had taken them to Griff’s four hundred acres, where jack pine was slowly being replaced by aspen and spruce and elm and birch.
“Planting trees in a row will never add up to a woods,” Griff had told her. “A forest is a
That was the heritage he wanted for his children, a Minnesota wilderness not so very different from where they’d spent the weekend. Not sawmills, not industrial plants like the ones he owned in St. Paul. Susan leaned back against the headrest, totally and happily exhausted, studying her husband with secret pleasure. He could lash out at business competitors with a machete tongue; very few people saw his idealistic side.
He was dressed in jeans, as she was, and a soft flannel shirt, like hers. Her toes felt sand-gritty, and her hair was tousled, and the very instant she got home she would head for the shower.
In the meantime, she felt perfectly beautiful. Griff’s doing.
“Snuggle up and nap,” he advised her lazily. “We won’t be home for at least another hour.”
“I’m not sleepy.”
