Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold
Available for purchase or borrow at Amazon (paperback and ebook).
Story Summary:
Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold is a story of romance and family conflicts set in Colorado in 1885.
Anne Wells has embarrassed her rigidly proper family since she was a child with occasional but grievous lapses from ladylike behavior. They blame those lapses for the disgraceful fact she is a spinster at twenty-eight.
Cord Bennett, the son of his father’s second marriage to a Cheyenne woman, is more than an embarrassment to his well-to-do family of ranchers and lawyers—they are ashamed and afraid of their black sheep.
When Anne and Cord are found alone together, her father’s fury leads to violence. Cord’s family accepts that the fault is his. Can Anne and Cord use the freedom of being condemned for sins they didn’t commit to make a life together? Or will their disapproving, interfering families tear them apart?
Excerpt:
“Dance with me, Annie?”
Did he want to learn here and now? Unsure, she placed a hand on his shoulder, and Cord gathered her up and swooped her away. She should have known. “You said you couldn’t dance.”
“I said I don’t dance. Hannah and Martha used me to teach Marie, but I haven’t tried it since Marie’s wedding. You know what would happen if we danced in there.”
He guided her through the velvety summer darkness in silence, and Anne floated effortlessly through the warm night, carried by raw male power and grace. This was not just a dance, but a prelude, and the heat of his hands on her flesh was but a hint, a promise of raging fire to come.
Her pulse quickened, her breathing felt exaggerated. She brushed against him with every step, leaving nerve endings tingling, awareness heightened.
The new moon was only a sliver of light, and close as they were she could hardly discern his features. He was a sensuous ghost, yet he was her husband, her lover, her friend. Anne wondered if he knew, felt any part of what she felt. As the last notes from the piano died, he answered her unspoken question by tightening his hold until she pressed full against him, melted into him, and he left her weak in his arms with a searing kiss.
They walked through the night hand in hand but arrived at Ephraim’s only minutes before the rest of the family. An hour later, Anne lay in one of the narrow beds in Martha’s spare room, alone, biting her lower lip, unsure whether she was stopping herself from crying or shrieking.
Martha had explained the rearranged sleeping arrangements with no sign she realized she was ruining anyone’s night.
“Now that the whole family’s here, I put a cot for Beth in your room, Anne. Judith will be in the other bed. Frank and the boys will share the other spare rooms.”
“What about Cord?” Anne asked.
“Oh, he can’t stand to be squeezed in with the rest. He always makes a bed for himself in the parlor. Didn’t he tell you?” Martha said blithely.
No, he hadn’t, and from the look of him, he hadn’t thought about changed sleeping arrangements tonight and wasn’t any happier about it than she was.
Cord lay wide awake in his makeshift bed on the parlor floor in such a rage he could barely control the urge to smash things. If he had any sense of humor left at all, the comical dismay on his wife’s face when she saw the sleeping arrangements might have amused him, but he was quite beyond humor.
How the hell had he let himself forget how much squeezing it took to fit the whole family in here overnight? He had slept on this floor many times over the years, and it had never before seemed so hard or so unyielding.
What would happen if he stormed upstairs, snatched his wife from her narrow, pristine bed and carried her off into the night? Judith would start screaming, that’s what. And then Beth would start crying. Damn it.
He ought to get up, make himself some coffee, read something off of Ephraim’s shelves, pass the night somehow. Instead, he lay perfectly still, listening to his own blood pounding in his ears, sexual tension and fury creating a more and more volatile mixture. He could get up and walk through the town. Of course, he’d get into the first fight he came across—start one probably.
Slight rustling sounds from the staircase caught his attention. A white apparition moved slowly toward him, feeling her way from one piece of furniture to another. Anne’s bare feet touched the edge of his blanket bed before he was sure who it was, and even then he still thought his heated imagination might have conjured her up.
Her white nightgown rose then fluttered to the floor. Cord didn’t move, was not sure he could until he heard the soft words, “Cord? Are you awake? Please be awake.”
Anne crouched down and slid between the blankets beside him. As one silken leg skimmed along the taut muscles of his, Cord came to life with all the bottled up fury of the last hours, seizing her, rolling her under his weight, his mouth hungry, demanding.
Surprised, Anne stiffened, but only for an instant. As time had passed, she had lain awake in the narrow bed upstairs, aching from head to toe for his touch, waiting for Judith and Beth to stop talking and go to sleep so she could sneak out of the bedroom and down the stairs. She began to be afraid he would be asleep, that she would have to endure the fever of the night alone.
By the time the house was quiet, her skin was on fire; her very bones ached. She had crept to the stairs on ridiculously shaky legs, unsure she could negotiate the steps. The soft cloth of the nightgown tortured her sensitized skin.
Now she kissed him back with equal abandon, whimpering with relief at finding a need as great as her own. She loved the feel of his hands and mouth on her, often thought she could never get enough of the gentle caresses, but not tonight. Tonight her need was immediate and consuming. She could feel him hard and ready against her thigh. Her leg slipped up, letting him feel her own swollen, moist heat.
A deep, throaty sound came from her always silent husband, half groan, half growl, as he responded by shifting his body and entering her with a single hard thrust.
In all their months together he had never been anything but gentle, but this coupling would have been too rough, too fierce, if she were not as frenzied as he. He drove into her, and she met each thrust with all her strength.
With legs, arms, and mouth she tried to hold and envelop as much of him as possible, arched upward frantically, trying to take him deeper with every stroke. She locked her legs around him, dug her hands into his surging back muscles and let him take her breath away.
She tried to smother the sounds of pleasure she couldn’t suppress against his face and neck as a climax as violent as their coupling swept through her. She heard another low growl as he shuddered, then her name. She held him in her as long as she could, sighed softly when he shifted his weight away.
Neither of them moved again until Anne shivered in the cooling summer night. Cord cradled her against his chest, pulled the blanket over her and tucked it under her chin. “You all right?”
“More than all right. Lovely.” Anne brushed her fingers over his cheekbone, across his mouth. He kissed her palm.
“I thought they’d never go to sleep. I wanted you so much it hurt.”
His arms tightened, holding her hard.
After the long, full day, Anne drifted off to sleep moments later.
Cord fought sleep, wanting to savor the moment and the memories of the day. Anne’s breath fanned across his throat sweetly. I wanted you so much it hurt. She made him feel like the king he was sure she had been born for. He thought of her face as she ran into his arms after the race, the feel of her in his arms dancing in the summer night. Perhaps there would never again be such a day, but he had this one. And he had her—now.
He finally stopped fighting sleep. Maybe occasionally the gods designed a woman fit for a king or a prince and gave her to an ordinary man. Maybe they did such a thing once in a while, knowing an ordinary man would treasure her more, love her better. Maybe they even let him keep her—for a while.
More of Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold:
If after you have read Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold, you would like to spend a little more time with Cord and Anne Bennett, you can download the Latimer Chapter.
