About the Author
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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.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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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,
“ain Crow,” giving the name the outside world knew.
The 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 ain. 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, , 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 , 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 ain lakes d 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.
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