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  His dark eyes burned with frustration as he glared at her, and suddenly he seemed to realize he was still holding her hand. He released her abruptly and stood. “Look, you can’t be my friend. We can’t befriends.”

  Now that her hand was free, Mary felt abandoned and cold. She clasped her hands in her lap and looked up at him. “Why? Of course, if you simply don’t like me…” Her voice trailed off, and she bent her head to examine her hands as if she’d never seen them before.

  Not like her? He couldn’t sleep, his temper was frayed, he got hard whenever he thought about her, and he thought about her too damn much. He was so physically frustrated that he thought he might go mad, but he couldn’t even ease himself with Julie Oakes or any other woman now, because all he could think about was baby-fine brown hair, slate-blue eyes and skin like translucent rose petals. It was all he could do to keep from taking her, and only the knowledge of how the good townspeople of Ruth would turn on her if he made her his woman kept him from grabbing her. Her stubborn principles hadn’t prepared her for the pain and trouble she would face.

  Suddenly his frustration boiled over, and he was filled with rage at having to walk away from the one woman he wanted to the point of madness. Before he could stop himself, he reached down and grasped her wrists, hauling her to her feet. “No, damn it, we can’t befriends! Do you want to know why? Because I can’t be around you without thinking of stripping you naked and taking you, wherever we happen to be. Hell, I don’t know if I’d take the time to strip you! I want your breasts in my hands, your nipples in my mouth. I want your legs around my waist, or your ankles on my shoulders, or any position at all if I can just get inside you.” He’d pulled her so close that his warm breath brushed her cheeks as he rasped the low, harsh words at her. “So, sweetheart, there’s no way we can be friends.”

  Mary shivered as her body responded to his words. Though they’d been spoken in anger, they told her that he felt the same way she did, and described actions she could only half imagine. She was too inexperienced and honest to hide her feelings from him, so she didn’t even try. Her eyes were filled with painful longing. “Wolf?”

  Just that, but the way she said his name, with an aching little inflection at the end, made his grip on her wrists tighten. “No.”

  “I—I want you.”

  Her whispered, trembly confession left her completely vulnerable to him, and he knew it. He groaned inwardly. Damn it, didn’t she have any sense of self-protection at all? Didn’t she know what it did to a man to have the woman he wanted offer herself like that, with no qualifications or holding back? His control was stretched hair-thin, but he grimly held on to it because the hard truth was that she truly didn’t know. She was a virgin. She was old-fashioned, strictly raised, and had only the vaguest idea of what she was inviting.

  “Don’t say that,” he finally muttered. “I’ve told you before—”

  “I know,” she interrupted. “I’m too inexperienced to be interesting, and you…you don’t want to be used as a guinea pig. I remember.” She seldom cried, but she felt the salty wetness burning her eyes, and he winced at the hurt he saw there.

  “I lied. God, how I lied.”

  Then his control broke. He had to hold her, feel her in his arms just for a little while, have her taste on his mouth again. He drew her wrists up and placed her hands around his neck, then bent his head even as he locked his arms around her and drew her up tight against him. His mouth covered hers, and her eager response seared him. She knew what to do now; her lips parted, allowing his tongue entrance, where she met him with soft, welcoming touches from her own tongue. He had taught her that, just as he’d taught her to melt against him, and the knowledge drove him almost as crazy as the feel of her soft breasts flattening against his chest.

  Mary drowned in the sheer ecstasy of being in his arms again, and the tears that she’d held back spilled past her lashes. This was too painful, and too wonderful, to be mere lust. If this was love, she didn’t know if she could bear it.

  His mouth was hungry and hard, taking long, deep kisses that left her clinging to him mindlessly. His hand moved surely up her stomach and closed over her breast, and all she could do was make a soft sound of pleasure low in her throat. Her nipples burned and throbbed; his touch both assuaged the pain and intensified it, making her want more. She wanted it the way he had described it, with his mouth on her breasts, and she twisted feverishly against him. She was empty and needed to be filled. She needed to be his woman.

  He jerked his head up and pressed her face against his shoulder. “I have to stop. Now.” He groaned the words. He was shaking, as hot as any teenage stud in the back seat of his daddy’s car.

  Mary briefly weighed all of Aunt Ardith’s strictures against the way she felt and accepted that she was in love, because this mingled glory and torment could be nothing else. “I don’t want to stop,” she said raggedly. “I want you to love me.”

  “No. I’m Indian. You’re white. The people in this town would destroy you. Tonight was just a taste of what you’d have to go through.”

  “I’m willing to risk it!” she cried desperately.

  “I’m not. I can take it, but you—you hang on to your Pollyanna principles, sweetheart. I can’t offer you anything in return.” If he’d thought there was even a fifty-fifty chance of living here in peace, Wolf would have taken the risk, but he knew there wasn’t, not the way things were. Other than Joe, she was the only human being in the world he’d ever wanted to protect, and it was the hardest thing he’d ever done.

  Mary lifted her head from his shoulder, revealing her wet cheeks. “All I want is you.”

  “I’m the one thing you can’t have. They’d tear you apart.” Very gently he pulled her arms down and turned to leave.

  Her voice came behind him, low and strained as she fought against tears. “I’ll risk it.”

  He stopped, his hand on the doorknob. “I won’t.”

  For the second time she watched him walk away, and this time was far worse than the first.

  Chapter Five

  Joe was unusually distracted; he was normally the most attentive of students, applying himself to the subject at hand with almost phenomenal concentration, but tonight he had something else on his mind. He’d accepted without comment their move to the school for lessons and never even hinted that he’d learned the subject of the school board meeting that had resulted in the change of locations. As it was the beginning of May, and the day had been unseasonably warm, Mary was half inclined to put his restlessness down to spring fever. It had been a long winter, and she was restless herself.

  Finally she closed the book before her. “Why don’t we go home early tonight?” she suggested. “We’re not getting much done.”

  Joe closed his own book and pushed his fingers through his thick black hair, identical to his father’s. Mary had to look away. “Sorry,” he said on a long exhalation. It was typical that he didn’t offer an explanation. Joe didn’t often feel the need to justify himself.

  But in the weeks she’d been tutoring him, they had had a lot of personal conversations between the prepared lessons, and Mary never hesitated when she thought one of her students might be troubled. If it were only spring fever gnawing at him, then she wanted him to say so. “Is something bothering you?”

  He gave her a wry smile, one that was too adult to belong to a sixteen-year-old boy. “You could say that.”

  “Ah.” That smile relieved her, because now she thought she knew the cause of his restlessness. It was indeed spring fever, after a fashion. As Aunt Ardith had often lectured her niece, “When a young man’s sap rises, a girl should look out. I declare, they seem to run mad.” Evidently Joe’s sap was rising. Mary wondered if women had sap, too.

  He picked up his pen and fiddled with it for a moment before tossing it a side as he made up his mind to say more. “Pam Hearst asked me to take her to a movie.”

  “Pam?” This was a surprise, and possible trouble. Ralph Hearst was