“I missed you every minute,” she said. “Every second of every minute for two years.”
Pain twisted his heart even as his erection tightened, wanting more. “They wouldn’t let me come back to you. I tried so hard.” Even now, they hunted him. They hadn’t let him go—he’d escaped, and he knew the Alpha wouldn’t let him live for that transgression. “But I’m here to stay. I’m never leaving again. I promise.”
Naomi said nothing. He couldn’t tell whether she believed him or not.
Jamison stroked her hair. She had thick hair, silken and beautiful. She didn’t like to wear it long; she cut it when it reached past her neck.
“I want you again,” he said.
He expected her to say she wanted to sleep instead, but to his delight, she turned over and smiled at him. It was a wicked smile, one that made every blood vessel inside him heat.
“Please,” she said in a seductive voice.
“Damn, I missed you.”
He pulled her to her hands and knees and entered her. The lovemaking was faster this time, but just as intense.
Not long later, they fell again, landing together on the bed. Jamison had just enough strength to pull a quilt over their bodies before he fell into a black, untroubled sleep.
aomi was stirring tomato sauce on the stove not long later, when she felt Jamison’s arms come around her from behind. She closed her eyes briefly, enjoying the sensation of him.
Julie, perched on a stool at the breakfast bar, grinned at them both. Her hands started to move. “Mom and Jamison, sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”
“Where did you learn that?” Jamison asked her.
“My teacher,” Julie answered.
Naomi said, “She says that if Julie mainstreams in high school, she’ll need to know all the silly things hearing kids learn growing up.”
Julie was homeschooled because schools for the deaf were expensive and heartbreakingly far away. A teacher from Santa Fe, specializing in deaf children, came out to Magellan three days a week to teach Julie. In a few years, when Julie was ready to attend junior high, she’d be going to Tucson to stay with Naomi’s parents and attend the deaf day school there. Naomi wanted Julie to have the best education possible, but at the same time, she didn’t look forward to the day Julie would pack her things and leave.
Jamison kissed Naomi’s neck. He’d showered, and now smelled of shampoo and soap. He rummaged in the refrigerator to pull out soft drinks for himself and Julie. Jamison never touched alcohol; he said it clouded both his artistic and shamanistic abilities.
Caffeine must not, because he guzzled coffee, tea, and soft drinks by the gallon. Naomi suspected that another reason Jamison didn’t drink was because his father had been an alcoholic, and he’d died in a single-car accident on a lonely road in the middle of the Navajo reservation.
Jamison sat down with Julie and became the Jamison Naomi had known before. He told Julie stories and made her laugh while Naomi finished cooking. He helped clean up the dishes afterward, and then he and Julie settled in for some serious TV watching, Christmas special after Christmas special.
Naomi sat a little apart from them. Jamison’s lovemaking upstairs had been incredible, nothing short of explosive. Jamison had always been good, but that. God. Her whole body throbbed just thinking about it.
The intensity had been more than about going two years without sex. Jamison had turned into a live, dangerous animal right in front of her, slapping down her Unbeliever skepticism. Then he’d made love to her with animal wildness, showing her he’d changed more than just in shape.
Jamison put Julie to bed himself, and then he came downstairs and checked that the doors and windows were secure. He took Naomi by the hand. “Come with me. I need to show you something.”
“You mean there’s more?” she asked. “I don’t know if I can take more.”
“You need to understand.” Jamison pressed a brief kiss to her lips, one that told her his fires hadn’t been dampened at all.
She locked her fingers around his, and he led her outside, heading for the art studio that waited silently in the corner of the yard, away from the now-empty parking lot of Hansen’s Garden Center. Back here, in the private world Jamison had carved for himself, all was quiet and serene.
He unlocked the padlock on the door of the studio and ushered Naomi into his sanctuary.
THREE
Jamison loved his art studio. He’d constructed it like he J would a hogan, but the roof was copper sheeting with a huge skylight to let in the sunshine as he worked. The door faced due east, and he’d scattered corn to bless the studio before he’d moved in his sculpting tools.
In the middle of the room a table held the chisels with which he created the sculptures that for some reason people paid big money for. He sculpted what moved him, from stones nature put in his way—an abstract hawk, the stillness of a wolf watching his prey. He breathed a prayer and a bit of magic into every piece.
He also sculpted things from scrap iron, or custom designed decorative wrought iron for extra money. His iron-working tools stood against the north wall with an acetylene torch that he’d refilled when he cleaned up this morning and scraps of twisted iron he’d been working on before he’d gone.