About the Author
Susan Johnson, award-winning author of nationally bestselling novels, lives in the country near North Branch, Minnesota. A former art historian, she considers the life of a writer the best of all possible worlds. Researching her novels takes her to past and distant places, and bringing characters to life allows her imagination full rein, while the creative process offers occasional fascinating glimpses into complicated machinery of the mind. But most important...writing stories is fun.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
BOSTON, FEBRUARY 1861
Strong dark hands lazily stroking a warm spine …
A fragile woman smelling of summer roses …
Shadows and half-light in a deserted hallway …
The rubbed walnut paneling felt solid behind his back. Beneath his fingers, Lyon silk, delicate and heated, inundated his senses with pleasure. Slowly savoring the feel, his hands slid up the silken back of the woman pressed against him, glided over the ruched neckline of her gown to lightly close on naked scented shoulders. She smelled of violets too, and when he unobtrusively turned his head to glance down the darkened hallway, his jaw brushed across perfumed golden curls, soft as feathers.
“I hope you don’t mind my coaxing you up here.” A coyly whispered preamble.
“I don’t mind,” the deep masculine voice huskily replied.
“You’re the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen—north or south of the Mason-Dixon line,” a honeyed southern accent purred, luscious as sable, while a voluptuous body moved provocatively against the man’s obvious arousal.
A low, noncommital murmur modestly acknowledged the sugared compliment while eyes dark as a moonless midnight gazed down at the pretty female held lightly in his hands.
The tall, sun-bronzed man with a faultless face like Attic sculpture, untamed raven hair, and arresting jet eyes, was dressed in full Plains Indian regalia: fringed elkskins decorated with ermine and quillwork; moccasins beaded in sinuous bands of gold, red, and black; an exquisite collar of bear claws and feathers spilling down his partially bared chest.
It was that heavily muscled chest which was currently the object of the lady’s rapt attention; its contours were being caressed with long, lingering strokes. And the two figures, one powerful and tall, the other dainty and fragrant, pressed together in the dimly lit second floor corridor, were carrying on an abbreviated, softly murmured conversation between languid body movements and gently roving hands.
“Where are you from?” the extravagantly clothed woman, arrayed in lavish French court dress, whispered. Her hands moved down, slipping under the waistband of the leather leggings.
“Montana,” the hawk-faced man replied on a sharply drawn breath.
“What tribe is all this from?” she asked in a soft, throaty tone, and while her question implied the costume, her fingers were touching his blatantly rigid manhood.
He swallowed once before answering, “Absarokee,” and immediately felt the small hand suspend its exploration. Correctly interpreting the hesitation, he murmured in clarification, “Mountain Crow,” giving the name the outside world knew.
The intimate fingers began moving again, drifting upward, luxuriating in the rock-hard sinew and muscle beneath her slowly gliding hands, and every nerve in her heated body melted into flame at the raw power underlying the dark skin. She could sense the years of physical exertion and training, could almost inhale the exotic smell of far-flung prairie and mountain. He was inches taller than most men, strong, quiet, the incarnation of majestic nature and freedom.
Why hadn’t he kissed her yet? Why? she somewhat petulantly asked herself, when it was perfectly clear he wasn’t immune to her charms. Lillebet Ravencour wasn’t accustomed to such resolute control; men had been throwing themselves at her feet since she was sixteen. In a whisper of silk she stirred against his lean form, with a delicate balance acquired long ago—that perfect nuance, subtly ambiguous, between suggestion and demureness—moved into the male hardness and felt it swell against her although no sound came from the man holding her easily in his arms. Now he’d kiss her, she thought, and the lovely face framed in golden ringlets lifted expectantly.
But he didn’t kiss her. Instead, his strong hands slid around her back and legs and, lifting in one smooth movement of shifting thigh and bicep muscles, put an end to their mating ceremonies. He carried her swiftly into the nearest bedroom, the lush folds of primrose silk billowing over his arm, trailing behind in pale, gleaming rivers in the corridor.
Later—only moments later—did he kiss her. He kissed her all over while he slowly undressed her. His mouth and lips and tongue caressed every curve, swell, hollow, every cresting peak and luscious plane. He kissed her in places she’d never been kissed before, intimate, dewy places, and she thought at first she’d die when his warm breath touched her there.… But she didn’t die, of course, and when his tongue followed where his mouth and teeth so obligingly led, a tongue that licked and teased, she knew she’d never been so near paradise.
She regained her reason briefly when he rose to strip off his own clothes. Kicking off his moccasins, he pulled the leather shirt over his head in one swift masculine tug. “What if someone comes in?” she murmured, watching him toss the necklace on the bedside table with one hand and strip the leather leggings from his lean hips with the other. Stepping out of the fringed trousers, he left them where they lay, inches from a tumble of lace petticoats representing six months’ hand labor of a dozen peasant women. Tall, broad-shouldered, lean near spareness through torso and hips, he walked the short distance to the bed, his erection beautifully formed. Lillebet’s gaze dropped as if magnetized by the sight, and the fire between her thighs burned higher.
“Don’t worry,” he quietly assured her, his body already lowering over hers. Intent on the pulsing arousal even now sliding slowly into her womanly sweetness, his long-lashed eyes lifted and he glanced up at her face. Her eyes were tightly closed, her mouth slightly open, her breathing intermittently punctuated with little panting whimpers.
The lady seemed satisfied. He forgot about the question and bent to kiss the softly parted lips.
THREE blocks away, on a gently sloping street, elevated enough to offer a glittering view across the Charles River, a young girl with unruly flame-red hair stood at her bedroom window, looking out into the wet, dense darkness.
“Another night of fog,” she lamented with a sigh, dropping the heavy lace curtain back over the small paned window. “I suppose it’ll be too rainy to go riding again tomorrow.”
The elderly woman readying the bed ignored the sigh and the dispirited comment. “Come sit down, Miss Venetia, and I’ll braid your hair.”
The nightgowned girl padded barefoot across the plush pink carpet and flopped dejectedly on the bed. “Dammit, Hannah, if I don’t get out riding soon, I’m going to die of boredom!”
“Miss Venetia,” her former nanny turned personal maid remonstrated, “watch your tongue. If your mama ever heard you, she’d have you put to bed without supper for a week.
Unmollified by the threat, the young woman with wide spaced eyes the color of clear mountain lakes wrinkled her face into a momentary pout. “Since I see her only at teatime on the rare days she’s home and doesn’t have a headache, it’s not likely she’ll ever hear, Hannah. Besides, Daddy doesn’t care if I swear once in a while. He says one has to release one’s frustrations somehow; and being a girl leaves out almost every other conceivable way of releasing frustration. Except shopping, of course,” she finished scathingly. “as Mama spends her life doing.”
“Come now, pet, it’s not so bad.” Hannah had been soothing these childish tantrums and gloom since Venetia first entered the world.
The slim young girl fell back on the bed in a lethargic sprawl, her tumbled red hair in jarring juxtaposition to the rose-colored bedspread. The eyelet bedcover had been selected, as had all the room’s decor, by a mother stubbornly resistant to the imperfection of her daughter’s coloring. Miss Venetia morosely threw her arms above her head and sighed again. “Oh, Hannah, it is. It’s terrible. The only excitement in my life is riding and I haven’t been riding in a week. Rain, rain, fog, rain, cold—every day.…” A third sigh—large and theatrical—drifted across the richly furnished room.
