Savage Desire (Savage Lagonda 1) by Constance O'Banyon

can I make you understand?"
    Tajarez watched the worried expression on her face. So her name was Mara. Yes, it fit—a beautiful-sounding name, like the sound of the wind in the trees.
    He looked away from her. Her nearness was doing strange things to him. He had always been in command where women were concerned. It was usually they who trembled at his nearness. He knew well how to please a woman, any woman. But she, this mere child, had his mind and his body ready to be her willing slave, if only she knew it. Looking upward to the ceiling of the cave, he tried to regain control of himself.
    "Please do not ignore me," she pleaded, placing her hand on his arm. Tajarez was startled. No one had ever dared touch him without his permission. Was he not Tajarez, prince royal of the Lagonda tribe?
    Mara drew her hand away quickly, seeing the anger flashing in his eyes.
    "Why do you hate me?" she whispered. "I have done you no harm. If anything, it is your kind who has wronged me." Tears glistened in her green eyes.
    Tajarez watched spellbound as a tear rolled down her lovely face. He wanted to take her in his arms and tell her he did not hate her, but burned instead with a deep and lasting love. Did he dare touch her? Would it frighten her? He was reminded of how young she was. Reaching up, he wiped the tear from her face with his finger, and placed it to his lips. Mara had no way of knowing that that one small gesture had so much meaning attached to it. In the Lagonda tribe it said: I feel your pain as though it were my own.
    But Mara was only aware of his earlier anger. Rising to her feet, she stumbled to the fur robe and lay down, losing herself in her grief. She wanted so badly to return to her family, but she would never be able to communicate that wish to him. Had her family given up finding her? Did they believe her dead?
    Mara felt rather than heard him when he lay down beside her. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she was embarrassed by her outburst.
    He was lying on his back, resting his head on his arms, staring at the ceiling of the cave.
    Rolling over to her stomach, she decided to try once more to talk to him. "I am sorry for the tears. If you are like most men you must detest a woman's tears. My father once told me that a woman's tears can sometimes turn the hardest man soft—or the softest man hard." Then she gave him a smile that had been the undoing of many young men of her acquaintance. "Of course, I am only sixteen, not yet considered to be a woman, so maybe I can be forgiven my weakness."
    His eyes rested on her face.
    "I think perhaps you do not understand anything I say, but I feel I must say it anyway. I am most grateful to you for saving me from the two Indians. I do not know what would have been my fate if you had not come along when you did."
    He seemed to be listening, so she felt encouraged to continue. Somehow he did not seem as distant as before.
    Mara laughed. "I would not be able to tell you this if you understood, but you are most probably the handsomest man I have ever met. There must be many women of your tribe who feel as I do. I bet you have the ladies going out of their way to please you or to gain a smile from you. Your eyes are incredibly beautiful. Did you know that?"
    Tajarez smiled inwardly. If only she knew, he understood everything she was saying. So she was sixteen summers, a child. In his dream she had been older, he was sure of it. He was ten summers older than she. How could he have such strong feelings for one so young?
    "I know you would like for me to be silent," she continued, "but it seem'! to help just talking to you, even though you do not understand. I have known such fear since my abduction." She sighed heavily. "Sometimes it is still hard for me to believe it all happened. I expect to awaken in my own bedroom at home and find it was all a bad dream."
    Mara felt she was rambling, talking yet saying nothing, but it had a therapeutic effect on her and helped exorcise her ghosts.