Free Shawnee Bride by Elizabeth Lane

jutting bones. His lashes lay as black as the barbs of a crow feather against his golden skin.
    Clarissa willed her emotions to freeze, her mind to focus on her task, but his nearness was already doing disturbing things to her. She could feel the quickening of her pulse and the small, warm, jerky flutters low m her body, like an itch in desperate need of scratching. She should try to talk, she thought. Chat about the weather, about the coming ball game, anything. But no words would form in her mind.
    Abruptly surprise came to her rescue. Her hand paused. She leaned closer, gazing at his chin in astonishment.
    His eyes shot open. “What is it now?” he demanded gruffly.
    “You have…whiskers!” she gasped, staring at the minuscule dots of black stubble.
    “Of course I do.”
    “But I’ve never seen—” She groped for the rest of the phrase, thinking how ridiculous she must sound. “I’ve never seen you shave1”
    “I don’t,” he answered calmly. “Most Shawnee men have no hair on their faces. Those few who do—” he gave her a sharp sidelong glance “—usually have it pulled out.”
    “And you?” She stared at him, flabbergasted.
    “Years ago, when my beard started to come in, my Shawnee mother began pulling it out one hair at a time because she wanted me to look like one of her people. I fought like a young bear at first, but with time I got used to it.”
    “And who does this for you now?”
    “The children in the village have sharp eyes and small fingers. As these whiskers grow long enough to be pulled, they will do it for me and have great fun at my expense.”
    “All that so you’ll look Shawnee1” Clarissa exploded. “Good heavens, doesn’t it hurt?”
    He scowled at her as if she were a backward child who had asked too many questions. “As I told you, I’ve grown used to the pain,” he said. “And, yes, I do it to look Shawnee. To be Shawnee.”
    Clarissa restrained the urge to fling the wet buckskin in his exasperating face and stalk out of the lodge. That a man would go to such lengths to forsake his own blood was beyond her understanding. Thank heaven, she was planning her escape! The sooner she left this maddening man and his adopted tribe of savages behind her, the better off she would be!
    Resolutely she dipped the buckskin into the warm water, lifted the dripping mass and squeezed the excess from its folds. “Lean forward if you can, and I’ll scrub your back,” she said.
    He strained against the woven willow brace, allowing her to reach behind him. His back was rock hard, the rows of muscle like buttresses of coiled stone. They tightenedat her touch, quivering subtly along the curve of his spine.
    Steeling herself against his nearness, she reached lower to find the inward slope at the small of his back and, still lower, the thumb-sized hollows above his buttocks. “Let me know if I hurt you,” she murmured, her voice rasping in her tight throat.
    His only answer was a low, almost inaudible groan.
    Clarissa’s thoughts blurred as she rubbed the buckskin in slow circles over his satiny skin. Drifting in a whirlpool of sensation, she inhaled the damp musky scent of him. Her breast pressed the muscled curve of his neck where she leaned past his shoulder, the contact igniting small shimmering waves inside her, the sensation so delicious that she could not will herself to pull away. She closed her eyes.
    The brush of her knuckles against the leather thong of his loincloth—quite by accident—jolted her with sudden awareness. She paused, her eyes wide and startled, her breath catching in her throat. Wolf Heart’s body was too close, his masculine aura too threatening to the fragile barrier of her innocence. Her own desire was drawing her toward a precipice, and once she stepped over its edge there could be no going back.
    Was that what she wanted—the precipice? That spiral of wild abandon that would end her girlhood forever? All she had to do was let her fingers venture