Force Of Nature Read online

  Loves. He loves them.…

  Oh, God.…

  Chapter Eighteen

  Anne…where are you? A while ago I caught a glimpse of the light. I reached up and tried to hold on, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t find anything to hold onto, and I kept slipping back.

  It’s comfortable down here in the dark. Too comfortable. I have to fight to keep myself from settling in. I have to struggle to keep from saying, “Okay, this is fine, this is all I want.”

  It’s not all I want. I want you. I want to come home, but I can’t seem to find the way.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Hannah was dreaming. She was dreaming that Hunter was in the bed with her kissing her. Kissing her. And oh, it felt so good, so wonderful.…

  But wait…his leg was heavy on hers and the mattress sagged under his weight.

  This was no dream. He was actually lying beside her with his arms around her and his lips on hers. How could that be?

  Where had he learned that? Where? Was kissing natural?

  Not in the animal kingdom. Wolves don’t kiss.

  But Hunter was no wolf: he was man, all man. Hannah’s questions evaporated under the delicious onslaught of his lips…his hands.

  My God, what he was doing with his hands ought to be declared illegal.

  She was already over the top, and that was before he turned his attention to her breasts. She made whimpering, wanting sounds as he pulled her nipples deep into his mouth. Tangling her hands in his hair, she pulled him closer while explosion after explosion rocked her.

  Need was fire in her blood and she became a wild thing, a she-wolf whose only thought was to be filled with him. “Please,” she whispered, “please.…”

  She tried to struggle onto all fours, but Hunter pressed her back to the bed. When he lifted himself on his elbows to smile down at her, she cried out like a petulant child, “No, please… I want… I need.…”

  Incoherent with passion, she cupped her breasts and offered them to him once more. His tongue was hot, so hot, and she groaned as he stroked and suckled her.

  “Yes. Yes… I’m dying… I’m dying.…” She arched like a fish under the convulsions that shook her. “Hunter…please…please…now!”

  He lifted her hips and entered her. No, not entered. Impaled. That was Hunter’s way. No half measures.

  Pressed flat against the mattress she could see his face. It was absolutely miraculous, this view she had as he reveled in his latest discovery. Pale light came through the window and fell across his cheekbones, his nose, his mouth. He had beautifully sculpted features. She reached up and traced them with her fingertips, marveling.

  “How did you get to be this wonderful?” she whispered, and his mouth curved upward in a smile.

  Did he know? Did he understand?

  Then all questions left her mind as he carried her over the moon and they crash-landed on her tumbled bed.

  “Hmmm, marvelous.” She stretched and curled into him, languorous and satisfied, expecting a repeat of their lovely interlude in the woods, bodies pressed close, hearts keeping time, breaths mingled on the chill night air.

  Instead he licked the tips of her breasts until she was tingling all over.

  “Hunter?” He answered her soft query by sliding under the covers, and when his mouth closed over her, desire swept her once more like fire in a wheatfield.

  “There,” she said, a woman gone wild. “Oh yes, there.…” Then she caught his hair and held him in that good place where nothing mattered except the curve of his mouth, the talent of his tongue and paradise.

  A paradise without end, she was thinking sometime later as he stretched flat on his back and lifted her hips over his. And then thought was impossible for she was in flames and he kept pouring on the gasoline…in inventive ways that mystified and astonished her.

  She screamed her pleasure to the moon…and then to the sun as it laid pale-pink fingers across the windowsill. Sometime after dawn she fell into a hard sleep, and when she jerked awake a short time later Hunter was gone.

  Hannah snatched her robe from the bedpost, and as she streaked past the den the television screen caught her eye.

  She stood in the doorway mesmerized. This was not CNN she was watching, but a channel with movies that made her blush.

  Then they made her laugh. “And all this time I thought he was watching the news,” she said as she flipped off the TV and went in search of Hunter.

  Hunter smiled when he heard her coming. She was making as much noise as a freight train. Funny how the words were coming back, the phrases. They bombarded him every waking moment, except those times when he could lose himself in her sweet hot body.

  “Hunter?” she called. “Where are you?”

  He didn’t dare call out, not yet. Words still felt clumsy on his tongue. Early this morning when he’d slipped from her bed he’d gone into the woods where everything felt familiar, and there he’d practiced saying what he’d heard, what he remembered.

  He listened to her footsteps on the kitchen tile. “Are you in the house? Oh, please, please be in the house.”

  She was worried about him. He didn’t want her to worry.

  He stepped into the hallway just as she came through the kitchen door. She stopped suddenly with her hand over her heart.

  “You scared me.” Something in his face must have given him away. “No, I mean you startled me.” She came close and put her hand on his arm. “Please, please don’t think you ever scare me, Hunter. You don’t. You never have.”

  That had been obvious from the first moment he’d watched her beside the campfire. He wished he could tell her so. The only way he knew to reassure her was with a smile.

  She touched his face. “I think you understand everything I’m saying. Do you?”

  How much should he reveal to her? He didn’t want anything to change her. She was bold and honest, the way wolves are. Nothing held back. Every feeling expressed. Every thought revealed.

  Still, he didn’t want her to give up on him. He didn’t want her to think that teaching him was impossible. And so he nodded.

  Yes. I understand.

  “I knew it.” Hannah laughed, then cupped his face. “I could tell by looking into your eyes that you understood.”

  She stepped back from him, suddenly self-conscious, and he was almost sorry he’d revealed the truth.

  “What I said in the woods…about teaching you.…” She lifted her long hair off her flushed face. “I mean…after last night.…”

  He stopped her flow of words with his mouth. A kiss. Lovely word. Lovely practice.

  Hunter took a long time easing her embarrassment. With his mouth covering hers, his sap rose quickly. The wonder of it all was more than he could bear to think about, and so he didn’t think: he acted.

  He lifted her off her feet and she wrapped her legs around him; then braced against the wall he entered her. She was instantly hot and ready, which seemed only natural to him.

  The wolf always chose his mate wisely, and Hunter had learned from the wolves…and the television.

  Chapter Twenty

  “I would ask if you’re hungry, but I saw that whole pack of honey buns you devoured this morning.”

  Hannah was leaning against the wall outside her office door, too satisfied to move and barely able to think. One thing was certain: she had to get her mind off her libido and onto the business at hand or she’d never get Hunter ready to reclaim his birthright.

  She had her story to write, too, otherwise Jack would be calling to see why she hadn’t met her deadline. Thank God she’d lost only one roll of film in the ravine.

  “Hunter, what were you doing here when I found you?”

  He led the way into the office, went straight to her bookshelves and selected Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Several novels already lay open on her desk…works by James Joyce and William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. She’d thought, of course, that reading to him would be a good way to reacquaint him with language, but she�
�d had something simpler in mind, something that a nine-year-old might have read twenty years ago.

  He handed the book to her then put his finger on her mouth.

  “You want me to read this to you?”

  He nodded, and of course that made perfect sense now that Hannah thought about it. He’d been a child prodigy. He’d probably been reading at high-school level before his parents’ plane went down. Possibly even college. My Friend Flicka was not for him.

  “I think this is a very good idea, but first you have to put some clothes on. You’re quite a distraction, you know.”

  She was looking directly at his most impressive body part, and he laughed. Well, let him. She didn’t care as long as he kept doing what he was doing. And if last night and this morning were any indication, there didn’t seem to be any danger that he would stop.

  Still.…

  “Here’s what I suggest. Let’s take a bath, then get dressed. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?” Why didn’t he wipe that grin off his face? “Well, of course, you do. And I’m not talking about those smelly old bearskins, either. Today you will wear proper clothes.”

  His grin got bigger, darn his hide. Of course, she could see both the humor and the irony of what she was saying. She started grinning, herself.

  “Let me amend that. You’ll wear clothes as long as I can keep my hands off you. I’m afraid you’ve unleashed something wild in me.”

  He scooped her off her feet and headed toward the bathroom.

  “I was talking about separate baths, you know.” He bent down and took her nipple deep into his mouth. “Then again…maybe not.”

  She wondered what the endurance record was for twenty-nine-year-old males?

  Somewhere in the middle of their “bath,” Hannah’s thinking shifted a hundred and eighty degrees. What had once been unfettered sex and uncomplicated need became an unexpected matter of the heart. Wrapped tightly against Hunter with water sloshing over the side of the tub she understood how Pygmalion must have felt when the ivory statue he’d created changed from an object of beauty to an object of love.

  But this was no Greek legend. Hannah didn’t have a goddess Aphrodite to magically transform her creation. She only had her own limited resources.

  If she succeeded in her mission, then what? What would a man who had spent twenty years in the wilderness do in a society that thought writing a letter was primitive? Her head hurt just thinking about it…and her heart.

  What had she done?

  Hunter cupped her chin and studied her face, then lifted her out of the tub, wrapped her in a towel and carried her to the bedroom.

  “I don’t think I’m up to this,” she said.

  He laughed, then gently placed her on the bed, left the room and shut the door. She was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

  Hunter dressed while Hannah slept. The clothes constricted him, but he was determined to wear them for Hannah’s sake. And for his own.

  He stared at his own image in the mirror, amazed that such a simple act as wearing jeans and a T-shirt had the power to transform him. He felt almost human again.

  Some part of him had known that all along, but over the course of years his identity had merged with that of his wolf brothers. They were his protectors, his teachers, his friends. They were a loyal, fearless, loving family—and they were all he had, all he knew, all he’d had any hope of knowing until Hannah came along.

  He’d thought of himself as one of them for so long that he experienced a shock every time he caught a glimpse of himself in Hannah’s mirror. But it wasn’t merely his outside appearance that had changed. He was becoming someone else on the inside, someone with disturbing questions.

  Once he’d pondered where he would find his next meal, and now he wondered whether he would ever completely find his way back to civilization. Or whether he even wanted to. If what he’d seen and heard on CNN was true, then he wasn’t certain he would ever fit in.

  The code of the wolf was simple—loyalty, obedience and fidelity. Those were the rules. Those were the keys to survival.

  Wolves never fought over territory; a leader and his mate merely moved on until they found their own. And contrary to the legends Hannah had told him, wolves never killed for the thrill.

  How could a society that called itself civilized know less than their brothers in the wild about civilized behavior? In Hannah’s world civil disobedience seemed to be the norm.

  Hunter went into her office and picked up the photographs she’d taken in Denali—Whitey’s son Snow who had become the leader after Whitey’s death and Rain, his mate, one of the kindest females Hunter had ever known. Loss and uncertainty almost brought him to his knees.

  He’d been one of the most skilled animals in the wilderness, but here he felt as helpless as a newborn. Would his comprehension of the written language return as quickly as his understanding of the spoken language?

  He bent over the photographs and traced the dear familiar faces with his fingertips.

  “You dressed.”

  He whirled at the sound of Hannah’s voice. She stood in the doorway dressed in jeans and a simple white shirt, her hair long and loose, her cheeks still flushed from sleep. His loins stirred powerfully. He wanted to take her again.

  He took a step toward her, and a familiar light leaped into her eyes. She was receptive. The urge to take her on the floor in his customary way almost overpowered him.

  Forgetfulness would come so quickly, but confusion merely waited in the background. The minute he left the wilderness he’d set out on a path that he knew would be dangerous.

  In the wilderness only the fit survived. In some ways it was the same in civilized society. The only difference was in the training required for survival.

  He reached for the book and thrust it into her hand.

  “You want me to read?” she asked, and he nodded. “This is a very good idea.”

  He led her to the sofa and she settled down beside him then opened the book.

  “Eudora Welty’s short stories…this is great Southern literature. Did you have any idea what you were choosing?”

  He shook his head. No. And yet, hadn’t some sixth sense whispered her name?

  “I’m going to start with ‘Why I Live at the PO.’ It’s hilarious, and one of my favorites.”

  He leaned over her shoulder as she started to read, but he could discover no connection between what she was saying and the words that marched across the page. He put two fingers over her lips.

  “What’s wrong?” She smiled when he scooped her up. “What about our lesson?”

  Considering that the mere sight of her aroused him, having her shapely bottom perched so conveniently in his lap caused an immediate response. Her eyes widened and her face softened in a way that was becoming increasingly familiar and dear to him.

  How easy it would be to forget about training. How easy it would be pretend there was no world outside the confines of Hannah’s cottage.

  But another challenge stirred his blood. Years ago, he’d stopped dreaming of the future, yet now it stretched before him, attainable at last…if he could prove himself worthy.

  Hunter opened the book then placed her right hand on the page and touched her lips.

  “You want me to point out the words as I read?” He nodded yes. “That’s a good idea, a very good idea.”

  With Hunter leaning over her shoulder, Hannah read until her voice was hoarse. She’d been reading hours, and yet he never lost concentration, never displayed signs of unrest.

  “I have to stop awhile.”

  He closed the book and stared at her with those molten silver eyes. Suddenly Hannah was all too aware of the heat of his body, of the way it warmed her skin and stirred her blood. Lord, she was beginning to have a one-track mind.

  It wasn’t merely sex she had on her mind, but the delicious blending of spirits she felt with him…and the more dangerous merging of hearts. She had to stop this before it was too late. Or was it alr
eady?

  What had happened to that sensible woman who was going to simply enjoy the moment until it came time for Hunter to leave? What had happened to simplicity and purpose? What had happened to sanity?

  He lifted a strand of her hair and let it sift through his fingers. The gesture was natural and so absolutely normal and civilized that for a moment Hannah forgot this wonderfully virile, complex, intelligent man was only one step away from the primitive bearskin-clad wolfman she’d found in the wilderness.

  She cupped his face and looked deeply into his eyes. “I want you to know something Hunter Wolfe, I’m terribly proud of you. You’ve exceeded all my expectations.…” A flush crept into her cheeks, and she amended her earlier statement.

  “I’m not going to be coy and pretend you don’t exceed my expectations with sex…mating, as you knew it with the wolves. Certainly, you do. I never dreamed such pleasure was possible.”

  He smiled, presenting the perfect picture of a self-satisfied male with a huge ego. Was she creating that bane of women worldwide, a player? Lord, imagine turning him loose on the unsuspecting female population.

  A surge of jealousy took her by surprise. She had to get control of herself.

  “I’m going into the kitchen and make something for us to eat. Why don’t you come and watch? It will be good for your education.”

  She sounded like a schoolmarm, and he didn’t miss a single nuance. His grin proved that.

  Hannah jumped off his lap and took a fighting stance, hands on hips, chin outthrust.

  “Go ahead and laugh. That’s just like a man.”

  His laughter goaded her, and as she stomped off to the kitchen she realized she was madder at herself than she was at him. She marched to the cabinets and began to slam doors. After all, she had to take her anger out on something, and it most certainly wouldn’t be the hunk of primitive pulchritude lurking in her living room.

  What was he doing in there, anyway?

  She marched to the refrigerator and jerked open the door. It looked like a slaughterhouse. A ton of fish, half a cow and a whole hog stared back at her.