Sweet Sarah Ross
Their Mutual Attraction was Infinitely Tempting and Utterly Impossible!Sarah knew that a proper Baltimore miss shouldn't even glance at a man who had lost all his clothes, but the barefaced truth was that this man appeared to be the only thing standing between her and disaster. Sarah Ross Harris was a beautiful idiot, Wes Powell reasoned.Who else would argue with a buck-naked stranger while fleeing an Indian attack? How on earth would the two of them ever survive the dangers that lay ahead, let alone the fire that burned between them… ?
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Table of Contents
“Am I disturbing you?”
When Wesley didn’t answer that, Sarah continued guilelessly, “But you’re finished, aren’t you? I mean, you’re dressed—” She ran her eyes over the muscled planes of his torso turned toward her. “That is, you’re more dressed than you usually are, and you’ve finished shaving. So I didn’t think I was disturbing you by wanting my turn to lie down.” Her smile was especially warm, even melting. “Did your rest restore you?”
The look he gave her suggested that he had been restored to health but not to serenity.
“Hungry?” she asked next. She relished this teasing, testing, pushing, prodding.
He opened his mouth, glanced beyond her to the flaps at the front of the wagon, then thought better of what he was going to say. His eyes narrowed, and she had the most scandalous sensation that he had just stripped her naked….
JULIE TETEL
has always loved both history and romance, making it easy for her to love reading and writing historical romances. She is from a suburb of Chicago and currently lives in Durham, North Carolina. She has two sons, two careers, at least two points of view and one husband.
May 1836
On the Oregon Trail
Sarah knelt at a shady spot on the bank of the river and wondered what all the fuss was supposed to be about. In the two weeks since she’d left Independence, Missouri, the trip west had certainly not lived up to its arduous reputation. Instead it had been rather more like a pleasant outing. The only disagreeable aspect of the journey—besides the presence of her bratty little sisters, of course—was that horrible Mrs. Fletcher who had joined their wagon train at the last minute. Sarah was determined to put the old gossip in her place before they arrived in Oregon at the end of the summer.
Dipping her hands into the shallow water, she admitted to herself that difficulties might lie ahead. Nevertheless, nothing she had experienced thus far compared to the dire stories she had heard back in Independence. She was inclined to think that the tellers of those tales either intended to scare off the faint of heart or were faint-hearts themselves.
She splashed her face and allowed her sense of self-satisfaction to expand. She hadn’t wanted to come on this trip, but she was pleased to judge herself an excellent traveler even when the conditions were far beneath her. No, she hadn’t wanted to come, but when she had refused William’s insipid offer of marriage, her usually loving mother had been unaccountably angry with her and demanded that she accompany the family on the journey to join her brother and his wife, who had settled years ago in the Oregon Territory.
Even her normally reasonable father had refused to understand the logic of her arguments in favor of staying behind in Maryland, and had cut her off by saying, “This time, Sarah Ross, you’ll not wrap me around your little finger.” It had been too absurd of him to fail to see that at the mature age of almost twenty-two she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Not to mention that she had money of her own—never minding the fact that she wouldn’t have access to it for a few more years yet. And to have accused her of wheedling had been unjust!
Drinking from cupped hands, Sarah tasted the purity of the river, felt the chill against her teeth. She was caught short by the stray thought that here one could never feel tired or old. She rose to her feet and critically surveyed her surroundings. The broad green river braided before her and away on either side. Grassland sloped up behind her. An improbable indigo sky bowled above. A dry breeze rustled around her, mixing the scent of grass and sandy loam. The calm pulse of the prairie hummed in her ears.
When confronted with odd experiences, she often imagined how her father—her real father, the General—might have reacted, and she paused to consider what he would have thought of the rustic charms of this wilderness adventure. With a sniff she concluded that he would have agreed that she deserved the elegancies of life, not the rigors, and with some distaste she found a secluded clump of trees where she relieved herself. Afterward she adjusted her skirts and twitched her shawl into place. Then she secured the ties of the reticule hanging from her waist and fiddled coquettishly with the brim of her bonnet as if she were stepping out into a fashionable shopping street in Baltimore.
She was about to return to the wagon train circled beyond the slope behind her just out of sight, when the afternoon calm was shattered by piercing cries. Suddenly, she was distracted by glinting flashes of splashing water at the edge of the riverbed about twenty feet away from her. She had taken a half step out from the shelter of trees but quickly drew back in and behind the nearest tree trunk. A large, strange beast was lumbering in the water, balanced only on its hind legs, moving in her direction. Her heart jumped to her throat when the beast turned the bend in the river and began to head straight for the trees.
