“Why did I listen to you?” he lamented.
“It was fun and you know it.” Her Viking was disgusted with himself; she started chuckling again. She pulled off her shoes and peeled off her jeans; Griff did the same. “It kills me. You can’t even hear it now.”
“Hear what?”
“Listen,” she said softly, and just for an instant they stopped their frantic attempts to get warm and dry.
The roar of rushing rapids was only a murmur now. The forest so totally masked sounds that they might have been in a completely different world. Silence touched their small, private island. Aspens and white birch formed an orange and gold roof; the forest floor was rich, dark earth, carpeted with moss and rustling with dry leaves. Across the winding stream was a jutting finger of land that reflected their own landscape. It was a very old virgin forest, with spaces between the trees large enough to drive through-if a car could make it to this country, an eventuality she hoped no amount of human ingenuity would ever be able to bring about.
Stark naked, they suddenly smiled at each other, anticipating the fire they would build for warmth, anticipating how good the coffee was going to feel in their stomachs…anticipating the night ahead. Each other. The plan had been to find a special spot in the wilderness to camp for the night…
“It’ll do,” Griff said. His voice came out on a husky note that seemed to echo through the woods.
Crouched on his heels, Griff added another dry branch to the fire. Crackling flames shot orange sparks into the darkness, and a long hiss of smoke trailed off on the breeze. Just ahead of him the stream was jet-black and still, as shiny-dark as the star-peppered sky. Earlier, they’d caught trout and cooked it over the coals, listening to the loons’ maniacal cries; before that, Griff had rubbed Susan down until she complained that her skin was neither flint nor steel and she was more than warm enough without his going so far as to set her on fire.
He wasn’t convinced. If she caught cold because of that unfortunate dunking, he was going to be furious…and from the very beginning he’d made every effort to keep his temper in check for Susan’s sake. That she had delighted in shooting the little rapids and was more than ready to take on tomorrow’s adventures rather floored him. One minute Susan was so distinctly a lady, all sweet and gentle, all shy and reserved about expressing her feelings, and the next minute…
How could he label the other side of her? Still on his haunches, Griff swiveled his head around to study her. They’d lost her hairbrush in the water. A sleeping bag was swaddled around her, her bare toes peeking out from beneath it. Her head was thrown back. The silky mop of dark hair framed a face golden by firelight, sensually lovely in its translucence, strong in its serenity.
The image of a Dakota Indian woman shot through his mind. He wouldn’t have said it aloud because he knew she would throw a handful of sand in his direction. The white man’s word, squaw, had nothing to do with the reality of Indian cultures. The Dakotas were the first Indians to claim these northern woods, their women strong and earthy and fiercely loyal. The nomadic Dakotas often went hungry because of their dependence on the buffalo. It fell to the women to pack up the children and belongings and move with the wandering herds. Their strength was the core of the tribe, the tie that bound the rest together…
Susan was that way. Taking on his troubles by choice, the choice of love. He was increasingly irked at the obsessive way she was taking on his children, however. He’d expected it, because he knew Susan and her capacity for love, but he had not expected that their own relationship would be so quickly shifted by the wayside. The free time he both expected and needed from her seemed to be increasingly spent in projects she created for his children. That Tom hadn’t come for the weekend yet seemed only to be another reason to do more for Tiger and Barbara. He wasn’t angry with her. But these four days were theirs alone. They’d gobbled up the privacy so eagerly, with talk and sharing and laughter. Perhaps subconsciously he’d wanted to remind Susan that their first commitment was to each other…
And his desire to claim her, his possessiveness, ran deeper in his feelings for Susan than it ever had in his relationship with any other woman; it was as primitive as the landscape around them, as private as the night, as potent as the arousal he felt just looking at her.
“Griff? What are you thinking about?” From the shadows, Susan had been lazily inhaling the forest smells, the pungent earth and leaves, the hint of smoke and sweet crispness of clean air and darkness. Suddenly aware of the silence, she had glanced at her husband and found Griff staring at her, his silver-blond head framing rough-sculpted features, all shadow and taut stillness by firelight. When he stood up, he was a primitive woodsman from a century ago, brawny shoulders barely contained in a rough woolen shirt, jeans molded to long, muscular thighs. His shadow cast a giant’s figure on the pebbly stream bank, and far into the woods she heard the strange, mournful howl of an animal, primal and hungry.
“Griff?” A shiver touched her. For no reason. Certainly not fear, yet images suddenly crowded her mind when he started stalking toward her, causing her blood to hurry through her veins as she reacted to the man, to the wilderness at night, perhaps to some primitive instinct that struck a responsive chord in her.
He wanted to make love to her. Now. She saw it in his eyes before his hand so much as touched her… He pushed the sleeping bag back from her shoulders and claimed her hands, pulling her up.
His mouth settled down on hers, with all the luxury of length to length. She rose up on tiptoe, willingly caught in the hunter’s snare. He scared the hell out of her when he was like this. It was such damn fun being scared. Danger made her pulse race, quickened her heartbeat. Griff would take, would have, this night, like a warrior coming in 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. Feel it, Susan. No games. No soft seduction.
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.