Cale didn’t shave right away. In fact, it took him a whole week to work up the courage. Even then, he went off alone to do the deed. When he returned, Raven stared at him as though he were a creature from the deep woods.
“Well?” he demanded. “What do you think?” He asked the question with bravado, unwilling to admit her opinion mattered.
Raven quickly covered the distance between them and put her hands on either side of his clean-shaven cheeks. It was a gesture of reverence, of great gentleness and—the word love leapt to mind. Cale stood still beneath her caress, but the earth moved beneath his feet. The world shifted on its axis, and he saw things in a whole new way. An immense realm of possibilities appeared before him, and Raven was a part of it all. What if he kept her with him? What if they spent the rest of their lives together?
“You are beautiful,” she said. “Not a beast at all,” she added under her breath.
He ignored the second half of her statement and focused on the first. Even that wasn’t exactly the sort of compliment he had hoped for. What man wants to be beautiful?
“Beautiful?” he complained.
“Yes, beautiful.” She nodded for emphasis. Her deep brown eyes glowed with approval that warmed a cold, bottomless place inside him.
This time she curved her hand around his nape and drew him down for a kiss. He slanted his mouth across hers, which was already open to him. His tongue stroked inside to be greeted by hers. Passion rose swift and strong, and his arms closed around her and pulled her tight against him, so that his hardened shaft was pressed against her belly. He reached for her breast and felt the weight of it soft and heavy in his hand. His thumb skimmed the crest, and her nipple pebbled beneath his touch.
Raven pulled away from him abruptly, and he let her go. She was panting, and her eyes showed white around the edges. He suspected she must be remembering what had happened with Ribbon Jack. It wasn’t what he had already done to her that she feared, he deduced, but what was to come.
He reached out a hand to touch her and saw the courage it took for her to keep from flinching. He cupped her cheek in his callused hand, willing her to trust him. “I would never hurt you, Raven. Is this the first time. . . . Have you ever lain with a man?”
He was asking if Jack had raped her. He was asking if she had given herself to that other man—the one she had described in such glowing terms.
“You would be the first,” she admitted in a soft, shy voice.
Cale felt the awesome weight of responsibility for assuaging her virgin fears, along with a heady joy. No other man had touched her. He would be the first to bring her to ecstasy, to put his seed inside her and claim her as his own.
But he would have to move carefully if he didn’t want to frighten her. Raven was willing.
He had seen the evidence of that. But she was also frightened. His seduction would have to be accomplished with gentleness and consideration. It was a new experience for Cale.
Not that he hadn’t taken his time wooing Charlotte, but Charlotte had been years beyond Raven in experience before he even met her. And, he suddenly realized, he had never worried about Charlotte’s feelings the way he worried about Raven’s.
“Have I told you that I think you’re beautiful, too?” he said to Raven.
A faint pink climbed her throat to her cheeks. “Do you think so?”
He bent his knees and tried looking into her eyes. She lowered her lids demurely. “I definitely think so.”
Instead of laying her down under him, he made up a chore that took them out of the cabin. At the last moment, he had gotten cold feet. He was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to still her fears. That she might turn to stone in his arms, or become hysterical and fight him, thinking he was Ribbon Jack. He didn’t think he could endure that.
He backed off. As the days passed, he saw the confusion in her eyes, but he didn’t know how to explain his fear to her. Men were the strong ones. They weren’t supposed to be afraid. Cale became the most avuncular of friends. That was the solution, he had decided. If she truly trusted him as a friend, she wouldn’t be afraid. But, as he held their relationship in abeyance, he was conscious that time was running out.
With his beard and mustache gone, it had quickly become apparent that his hair was too long. Finally, that morning, he chopped it off, too. His efforts were rewarded when he presented himself to Raven. Her wide smile and gurgle of pleased laughter wrenched his insides with a torrent of need. It was hard not to touch her. He searched her eyes looking for something, he wasn’t sure what. And he found it. Willingness. Trust. They were there in full measure. His hands began to tremble, and he turned from her to regain a measure of calm.
She warmed water for him to shave with and sat at his elbow, avidly observing him as he removed the dark beard that had grown overnight.
“Don’t you ever get tired of watching me do this?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. “It reminds me you are not a beast, that you are a man.”
He frowned. “Was there ever any question of that?”
She grinned back at him. “You were awfully hairy when I first met you.”
Cale punished her by grabbing her up in his arms and nuzzling her with his bristly cheek. She giggled with delight and fought him—not much and not long—until his mouth found hers, and her laughter turned into a moan of pleasure. Their tongues mated as his hands found her breasts. She arched herself into him as he thrust his body against hers, teasing them both, taunting them both, with hints of what their ultimate joining might be like.
She surprised him by pushing his long john shirt up out of the way and sliding her hands up his belly to his ribs. Her fingertips traced the bones that protected his heart, giving pleasure and seeking it in return. He paused to stare at her.
“Does it not please you?” she asked, her eyes wary.
“It pleases me very much,” he assured her. “I was only surprised because . . . well, because you’ve never done it before.”
“But I have wanted to touch you,” she said.
He saw from her lazy-lidded look that she was indeed enjoying herself. There was no fear in her eyes, no caution in what she was doing. So he had not been mistaken. He had earned her trust. The waiting was over at last. He felt such a burst of jubilation that it was all he could do not to shout aloud.
“Help yourself,” he said with a lopsided grin. “Touch me all you want.”
He hadn’t dreamed, when he issued his invitation, that she would take him at his word. Or rather, he’d had no notion of what it was she really wanted to touch. Because before he could say Sam Jackrabbit, her hand slid down the front of him, across the bulge in his buckskins.
It felt so good he bit his lip to keep from groaning. She eased her hand back up and the groan slid out anyway. Was there anything that felt as good as a woman’s hand on a man’s body?
His fingers clutched her waist, where he forced them to remain as she investigated his body thoroughly. She must be damned curious, he thought, to need so much touching to figure the whole business out. His eyes drifted closed as he focused all his attention on the feel of her hands, measuring the length of him, moving lower, seeking out the sac that drew up tight as her fingers closed around it.
Then her hand was gone, and his eyes opened to find her staring curiously at him.
“Did I hurt you?” she asked.
“No,” he managed to grate out. “Why would you think that?”
“The look on your face . . .” She reached up to smooth a brow he hadn’t realized was furrowed. “And your mouth,” she said, suiting deed to word and tracing his lips with her fingertip. “It looked as though your teeth were clenched.”
Cale didn’t doubt that. It took every ounce of control he had not to lay her flat and take her right then and there. “What you were doing felt good,” he admitted grudgingly. “It’s hard for a man if he can’t finish what he’s started.”
“Oh,” she said.
But she didn’t offer to help him out. She just backed herself right up and said, “I need to go pick some wild onions.”
She hurried out the door and didn’t come back. He left the house shortly after her and didn’t return for lunch.
He wasn’t sure why she had fled. Maidenly shyness? Virginal fears? It had to be one or both, he thought. But neither were the reasons he had been keeping his distance. Those were fears he could handle. She had given him all the encouragement any man could need. He knew that when he returned to the cabin, she would be waiting for him.
It was late September. The aspens were turning gold and some had already lost their leaves. Their white trunks stood like beleaguered sentinels waiting for the first snowfall. The bull elk had begun to bugle their challenge, eager to fight for the right to mate with the females in their harem. The haunting, shrieking sound pierced the forest, heralding the onset of winter.
The first snowfall might come as soon as early October. Of course it would melt away; the snow usually didn’t stay on the ground until late November. But Orrin had said he would come with the first snowfall. That could be a week from now, maybe two, but surely not longer than that. Cale knew he couldn’t wait any longer. Raven might never be totally unafraid. He was willing to take the chance that she was ready to be loved by him.
Tonight he would make Raven his.