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"I am being forced to conform to many things now that I live away from the Chippewa," he said, brushing his mouth lightly against her lips. "But if I am ever to have a full night of sleep again, I had to do away with that damn bed."
Now understanding, Melanie laughed softly. She twined her fingers through his blond hair, curving her body into his as he lay beside her. She looked up at his sun-bronzed, finely chiseled face as he gazed down at her. "Darling, however you choose to sleep is fine with me," she whispered. "I don't need a bed. All I need is you."
Shane turned to lie on his back and lifted her atop him. His loins grew hot as he felt the weight of her breasts pressing against his chest. "Melanie, how can I tell you how much it means to me to have you?" he asked, searching her face with his eyes, seeing her flawless features, how delicately sweet and sculpted her lips were. Her eyes, brown and soft, looked adoringly down at him, firing his desire.
"That you have returned assures me that I can believe what you say," Melanie murmured, gently placing a hand to his cheek, ignoring the two-day growth of blond stubble. "Yet, there are questions, Shane. I know that I should not ask them, but I must."
Shane brushed a kiss across her lips, then rolled her back down beside him. He leaned on an elbow and faced her, his eyes haunted with remembrance. "You need not ask," he said gently. "Let me tell you, for you see, I know your thoughts without your speaking them aloud to me."
Melanie's eyes clouded with tears. She waited anxiously for his explanation, yet as the moments passed, nothing but that he was there with her seemed all that important to her anymore. He could have been slain on his expedition to the Indian village to steal the horses and pelts!
But he hadn't been.
He could have decided not to return to his farm, knowing the obstacles that stood in his way.
But he had!
Not only had he returned, but he was now with her, proving to her that he was devoted to herthat he truly loved her. If he had loved Cedar Maid in that way, he would have never left her! He would have taken her with him when he was forced to leave the village. He would have made Cedar Maid his wife!
But he hadn't.
"You want to know about Cedar Maid, fearing that she was more to me than I have professed," Shane said. "Cedar Maid and I shared many secrets. Many times we bathed together in the river. We strolled through the forest, hand in hand. I knew everything about her. She, everything about me. But never did we touch in any way but as brother and sister."
"You loved her so very much," Melanie said, hearing the melancholy in his voice.
"Melanie, she was a sister to me," Shane said, smoothing a fallen lock of her hair back from her eyes. "We were raised in the same wigwam. Did I love her? No true sister could have been any dearer to me. But the love in her life belonged to
Red Raven. He was going to ask her to marry him. Soon. But the trapper offered the bride price before Red Raven had the chance. The trapper had more to offer, so if Red Raven had even asked Cedar Maid to marry him, she would have been denied him.''
He moved over Melanie, resting on his knees above her. "So you see?" he said softly. "She occupied a large portion of my heart for many years, but never in the way that you do, now. You have given me a different sort of lovethe sort a man would die for!"
He wrapped her within his arms and drew her against him as he stretched out atop her. His mouth came to her in a heated kiss. Melanie answered his kiss with abandon, a curling of heat tightening within her. She moaned against his lips as he kneaded her breasts through her dress, making her need for him grow with fevered intensity.
"Please let me undress you," she whispered, drawing her lips away.
Her hands went to his fringed buckskin shirt and slid it slowly up his broad, tanned chest and over his head. With a boldness she had never known in herself before, Melanie untied the leather laces of his fringed breeches and pushed this garment down, revealing his risen manhood to her, and she knew that his desire for her was great. With exquisite tenderness, she encircled his hardness with her hand and moved her fingers on him, watching his eyes become filled with a hazy, unleashed passion.
Her gaze swept over him, seeing his long, lithe body, slim-hipped and well-muscled.
And he was so very, very aroused!
Hardly able to stand the way she was maddeningly arousing him, Shane moved her hand away. He placed a hand to Melanie's waist and lifted her to her feet as he moved to his.
Slowly, meditatingly, Shane began undressing her. Once she was silkenly nude, he lowered his mouth to a breast and flicked his tongue over the nipple, causing it to harden into a tight, dark peak.
With slow deliberation, Shane's hands traveled over Melanie's slim, sinuous body. Her long, drifting hair cascaded across her shoulders as she held her head back, sighing langorously, when his lips replaced his hands, moving hotly down her body, drugging her.
"I must have you," Shane whispered, engulfing her within his arms, easing her back down onto the pallet of furs. "Now."
"Yes, my love," Melanie whispered, smoothing his hair back from his face as he rose above her. She drifted toward him, arching her hips to meet him. She placed her cheek on his chest. "You smell of spring rain." She licked his neck, then around his hardened nipples. "So sweet. Oh, Shane, you are so wonderfully sweet."
Shane's jaw tightened with pleasure. "It is good that I thought to bathe today in the river while the horses were watering," he whispered. "I shall remember to do that more often if it arouses you in this way." He gritted his teeth as her tongue
swept into his ear, then
again down, around a tightened nipple.
"My darling, don't you know that it is not because of your bath?" Melanie giggled, looking adoringly up at him. "It is you, Shane. Just being with you causes me to behave so wantonly!"
