Nobody's Child. Ann Major

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СКАЧАТЬ she was illegitimate, everybody in Westville had said she was trash. All her life Cheyenne had tried to live down the taint of her birth. She hadn’t dated because every time she looked at a boy, people said she was as bad and strange as her odd, fast-living mama, Ivory Rose.

      As Martin Lord’s wife, everybody would admire her. She could go back to Westville with a grander name than the Wests, her father’s “real family.” Chantal could no longer act so superior. If she, Cheyenne, had her own husband, maybe it would no longer matter that Chantal had married Jack, the young boy whom Chantal’s mother had rescued from the barrio so many years ago. Ever since then, he’d used “West” as his surname.

      Before coming to the island Cheyenne had told Martin she hadn’t made up her mind about marrying him. She’d told his odious brother the same thing.

      Not that she’d thought there was much to think about. Jack was lost to her forever. Boyish and charming, Martin was the nicest guy she’d met since she’d escaped Westville.

      Until Lyon.

      A smart girl wouldn’t consider marriage to a stranger who’d washed up on a deserted beach. Even if he had made flowers bloom.

      Distracted, she continued to stare outside.

      Nothing. Just golden grass and white sand. And endless wildflowers. Yesterday Lyon hadn’t come back all day.

      She decided to risk an hour on the deck.

      Carefully she tiptoed outside where she took off her gauzy cover-up and swam several laps in the sparkling pool. The water was too cold, so she got out and dried off and lay down on a long white towel.

      After a few minutes the warm sunlight drugged her senses.

      She didn’t hear him approach.

      Suddenly he was just there, blocking the sun—a huge male animal, bronzed and magnificent, his legs thrust widely apart as he loomed over her as if he were a dark giant from a fairy tale.

      She twisted her head and looked straight into his starkly handsome face.

      And suddenly Martin and all her dreams of a new life vanished.

      There was only Lyon. Only this moment and this sharp need. Only this fierce recognition of her other half.

      She saw her own desire mirrored in his fiery eyes and for the first time in a long, long time, all the lies she had told and lived since she had run from Westville to Dallas melted away. She didn’t know who he really was, and she didn’t care. His naked, lonely soul reached out to hers and re-created her into some truer self that had longed to exist but had lacked the courage to be until she had formed this incomprehensible bond with him.

      Still, when she got up on shaky legs, and he held out her gauzy cover-up, she ran from those outstretched brown hands and from him.

      But he had seen the truth in her glowing eyes, or maybe just her desire.

      Whatever. He chased her.

      Panting, she locked herself inside the patio doors.

      But she stood there just inside, expectantly staring at him from behind the shining glass—waiting excitedly.

      “Go away,” she whispered even as some deep and truer part of herself challenged him to unthought-of needs and violent deeds.

      A huge piece of driftwood that she had found on the beach the first day before the storm and lugged to the deck glistened in the sun at his bronzed feet.

      Easily he leaned down and picked up the limb. Then staring into her eager, wide gaze for a long moment, he lifted it high above his head.

      Transfixed, she watched as the muscles of his arm bulged before he hurled the wood against the glass, smashing it.

      The explosion of zillions of slivered shards of flying glass dazzled her.

      Or was it just Lyon?

      When he kicked a few shards aside and strode across that ruined threshold, his shoes made crackling sounds in the glass. She just stood there, as frozen and still as a statue while her blood sang with a silent, shocking wildness.

      There was no wind, but a powerful force whipped the sea oxeye, sunflowers and sea oats. Suddenly more summer flowers burst forth into bloom.

      She knew she should have run and fought and struggled.

      But when he seized her and wrapped his body around hers, when his lips came down hard on hers, claiming her in that most basic and eternal way, she could deny him nothing.

      She had never existed before his hot mouth made her flame into being just as the dune flowers had.

      Nor had he.

      Both their lives had been lies.

      Nothing on earth—not all the precious dreams and ambitions she had lived on since a child, not even her dream to be as grand as her sister—mattered in the face of Lyon who had become the master of their mutual reality.

      Lyon—who was he?

      She didn’t know.

      She only knew that even as his hands shredded her bikini and tore the bra from her breasts, even as he ripped off his ragged jeans and shirt, she would belong to him forever.

      Even if all he ever wanted from her was sex.

      She had hungered for her own respectable identity ever since she’d been five and her sister had first branded her with the word bastard.

      She had thought money and marriage would give her the security and the respect she craved.

      Lyon was everything.

      She would be whatever he wanted.

      For as long as he wanted. With or without marriage.

      He was hers. In that single shining moment, as he held and kissed Cheyenne, they burned with the same flame and everything was very simple.

      Only later did it become so complex and terrible.

      Cutter made no sound as he lifted her and carried her across the litter of white carpets, up the swirl of stairs, to the bedroom that looked across the dunes to the sea. He took time to open all the doors, so that the surf roared in their ears, so that they could smell the salt and feel the damp wind against their hot, naked bodies. Then he fell across her on the bed and, with one fist grasping her long red hair, he shaped her to him and plunged inside her.

      They came together violently, in quick, fluid thrusts, like a primitive couple, their bodies sparking, rising and falling in the wildness of the ancient ritual.

      They took no time to know each other.

      Both were shocked.

      He to discover that this wanton whose golden body responded to him with such primitive eager response was a virgin.

      She to discover that pain could open the floodgates to ecstasy and knowledge of another’s soul.

      They СКАЧАТЬ