A Thread of Sand

Blurb

In 1891, a young gifted British artist, Lady Julia Carstairs, travels to the Wild West. She learns more than a young lady should about life as she survives the rigors of a Texas brothel. Julia escapes and flees the US to find work as an artist in Egypt. Follow her journey as she avoids the clutches of sinister Dervish rebels. Feel the temperature rise, as she is passionately seduced by both men and women on the way, finding true love in the arms of a British Lieutenant.

A seductive erotic story that spans half the globe. Can Julia’s love survive the turmoil of these perilous times?

Excerpt

Julia heard him ride up to their ranch house and dismount. After her month of waiting, she wanted to run out through the kitchen doorway and throw herself into his arms. But no, his homecoming routine was an untouchable ritual and she had been forewarned of his arrival by his Navaho brother, Shilah. As Buck turned his roan stallion out into the corral where water, fresh hay and a bucket of oats waited, she hoped in the blue-shadowed twilight he would see the small iron stove with its glowing firebox next to the kitchen’s outside log wall. Atop the stove, a hot water kettle bubbled. Two steps away, shaded beneath the lodgepole-porch roof, a Sears Roebuck enameled claw-foot tub squatted. Two buckets of cold water drawn from their well stood between the tub and an upside-down empty apple crate supporting a wood brush and a bar of lye soap.

Julia sat at the large kitchen table nibbling a fingernail. Tall, with auburn hair reaching down her back, her British breeding, coarsened by a brutal year in the western United States finally shone through. His tender care had put flesh and muscle back on her starved bones. Her cheekbones flanked a patrician nose above a full mouth and a strong chin, and unplucked brows shaded her large, wide-set chameleon eyes, today reflecting the color of the evening Arizona sky. Listening hard, her ears were the only gauge of his homecoming’s success.

A loud laugh outside the window made her heart leap. Splash! Splash! The cold water half-filled the tub.

“Hi-yah, hi-yah, hi-yah,” his Navaho half sang out as boots and spurs thumped and jingled off the kitchen wall logs. Shotgun chaps, followed by a linsey shirt and finally long johns completed the untidy heap.

“Hosh nateeli! Buck called out. “Hot water!” And more laughter as he emptied the kettle into the tub. Water splashed followed by a loud, contented “Ahhhhh!”

Julia wanted to join him in that tub. Her body seemed to hum like a tuning fork as her imagination saw that brush sudsing his massive chest and lean hips, playing over his picked-out abs, and plunging down between those bronc-gripping thighs. She tore a rip of bread off the loaf she’d baked, crusty on the outside and buttery soft in the center as he had taught her. Her teeth tore into the bread as she breathed through her nostrils, chewing and making small sounds in her throat.

Just the thought of him filled her. She’d spent months working the sheep ranch on horseback. He’d taught her how to whistle up his pair of keen border collies, Dog and Other Dog, black and white fur streaks among the cowed sheep. He’d taught her to drive off wolves at the gallop with a Winchester rifle. Julia had hoed the garden and learned to put up vegetables in Mason jars for the winter; she reveled in her new skills.

The corner of her eye lingered on the thick buffalo robes spread before a large stone fireplace that glowed black-edged with an armload of fragrant mesquite.

Outside, a final splash; the snatch of a large towel from a clothesline stretched between the porch-supporting poles; bare feet thudded on worn threshold planks. The door latch slid open.

With a squeal, the heavy door swung back on its iron hinges and he stood there, naked, gripping the towel in front of him so it hung to his knees. Buck looked like a large school boy surprised at a swimming hole. Tanned forearms, neck and face, the rest naturally bronzed from his Navaho genes. A sunburned face reflected his Caucasian father, squared, creased and sharply featured, framed by long black hair reaching down to his shoulders. He smiled at her, a soft little-boy smile that betrayed his weeks of loneliness on the trail tracking cattle thieves for the Arizona Rangers.

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