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“You were thinking about wishing to go to your uncle?” Dancing Cloud’s eyes filled with a sudden hurt.
“No, no,” Lauralee said, laughing lightly. “It’s not that. It’s that you seemed to know what I was thinking about, not that I regretted not going with my uncle.”
She turned and faced him. She gently framed his face between her hands. “Darling, I was thinking also of long ago, when I was a little girl, wishing to be a part of a family,” she murmured. “I had thought that family could mean only having a mother and father. I had not ventured as far as to think about when I would find a man with whom I would start my own family.”
“And you have found that man?” Dancing Cloud asked, his frown fading into a warm smile.
“Oh, yes, yes,” Lauralee said, leaning against him as he circled his arms around her waist.
“And, darling, don’t you see?” she whispered, looking adoringly up at him. “It is all now possible and we may do as we wish without any interference from anyone. Our world is now the most perfect world of all.”
She did not let on that she still feared Clint McCloud with every ounce of her being, that he might be the one to spoil their happiness, to possibly even kill any chances of them having a beautiful future together.
No. She would not say that man’s name again in a whisper to herself, or aloud to Dancing Cloud. She would try and force him from her mind again. She had almost managed to after having fallen in love with Dancing Cloud.
But seeing the Yankee fiend again in Mattoon had started the cycle all over again in her mind . . . the remembrance of her mother being raped . . . of her mother being murdered....
“We are free now to fulfill our intertwined destinies,” Dancing Cloud said, brushin
g a soft kiss across her lips. “Once my mourning for my father is behind me after we reach my village, then I can agree with you that everything is right in our world.”
The sound of powerful wings overhead, like a vast rush of wind, drew their thoughts elsewhere. Eyes wide, and standing arm and arm, they looked upward.
Lauralee sucked in a wild breath of wonder as she watched two eagles overhead doing a kind of mating dance in midair, oblivious of an audience. First they were two birds on the wing, then they merged as one.
Then as one tilted up in the down draft of the evening breeze, the other went down, soaring . . . soaring, the deep blue of evening and the orange of the sunset mingling and captured gloriously in the sheen of the feathers.
As the eagles met again and swept across the sky so effortlessly, their feathers wrapped around their sandy faces like human hair over a goddess’s cheek.
And then they soared on away and got lost to Dancing Cloud and Lauralee’s sight high in a puff of white clouds, only then to reemerge as only two dots far away in the darkening heaven.
“I’ve never seen anything as beautiful,” Lauralee said, still touched deeply by the sight.
Dancing Cloud took Lauralee’s hand and turned her to face him again. “We are like the eagles, free to love, free to mate,” he said huskily.
“I want you so badly,” Lauralee said. Her hands moved gently over his bare chest, savoring the touch of his smooth, copper flesh.
Her fingers gingerly touched the bandage that she had tied over his wound. “Perhaps we should wait?” she murmured. “Aren’t you in pain?’
“There is much pain in my body now, ii, yes,” Dancing Cloud said, his eyes flared with hungry intent.
“Then, darling, we have time now to lie down so that you can rest without the fear of being overcome by lawmen,” Lauralee said, easing away from him.
His hands held her in place as they locked around her waist.
She stared up at him. “Dancing Cloud, you are looking at me as though . . . as though . . . rest is the last thing on your mind,” she said, smiling slowly.
She trembled sensually when he took one of her hands and led it to the place on his body that throbbed and ached with need of her.
“You are feeling my pain, my need,” he said throatily.
A hot flush rose from her neck to her cheeks when she felt the most identifiable shape of his manhood straining against the inside buckskin fabric of his breeches.
“How can I ease your pain, my darling?” she teased, her hands already stroking him through the soft fabric.
Dancing Cloud leaned his head back. He closed his eyes and moaned as her fingers stirred a fire within him. The flames grew higher, licking their way through him. His whole body quivered with the pleasure.
Wanting more, needing more, he placed his thumbs at the waist of his breeches on each side and slowly lowered them past his hips, then kicked them away.
