Hearth Stone

by Lois Greiman

  “This ain’t no time for daydreaming! Get it done or get out of my way,” the old man snapped, and Sydney reached out, wet rag trembling.

  Chapter 16

  “Thank you.” Sydney pushed out the words with an effort. It was past midnight and Doc had departed, along with the crew from the Lazy. Fatigue gnawed at her, weakening her legs, slowing her movements. But the man on the far side of the kitchen barely acknowledged her sparse appreciation.

  “Eat,” Redhawk said and shoved that damned sleeve of crackers back into her hand.

  Instead, she paced, knees threatening to drop her face-first onto that god-awful linoleum. “I should check on her,” she said and turned to charge out the door, but Hunter caught her by an arm and reeled her back.

  “She’s a thing of the wild, woman. Let her be.”

  “Let her be?” She stiffened her shoulders and tilted her head at him, taking some comfort in the habitual hauteur, though truth to tell, it took all her self-control to keep from slapping his hand away like a distraught toddler. Odd. So odd. She had never been the emotional sort. There were, in fact, a number of individuals back east who would attest to the fact that she had no emotions whatsoever. “Perhaps it would surprise you to know that she would have died out there. Would have expired from dehydration or starvation or …” She took a moment to breathe, nowhere near understanding her own internal turmoil.

  Animals, after all, died every day. Hell, she ate animals. But perhaps the fact that she didn’t have to witness their deaths made all the difference. She didn’t have to see the fear, the determination, the hope, dwindling like daylight in their mercurial eyes. Or maybe her reactions were even more elemental than that. Maybe she herself felt trapped, tangled, hopeless. “Wild animal attacks …” The image of predators circling while the mare lay unable to protect herself made her stomach twist. “She’d probably already be dead if …” She paused, took a calming breath, and remembered whom she was talking to. Remembered Hunter Redhawk charging into the fray for no good reason. “If you hadn’t …” She cleared her throat and drew her shoulders back another half an inch. Pride, that painful, sharp-edged arrogance, still clung to her like a second skin. But some things couldn’t be denied no matter how difficult it was to force out the truth. “If you hadn’t risked your life to save her.”

  His eyes shone in the single overhead light as if he were amused but hadn’t mentioned the fact to his face. His expression remained absolutely impassive, full mouth soft and unbowed. She pulled her gaze from those lips, letting her attention skim lower. His neck was corded with muscle, his shoulders endless, his shirt …

  She scowled at the forgotten rent in the flannel. “You’re injured.”

  He shrugged, movement dismissive as he placed an onion on the cutting board. The skin was as red as a pomegranate. “Eat, before you pass out.”

  She ignored him. It wasn’t a simple task, but she had learned to focus from a man with a German accent and a riding crop. “How badly?”

  “A scratch.”

  She huffed an exhalation of disbelief. “Let me see it,” she ordered, but he neither acquiesced nor refused. Instead, he watched her with dead-steady eyes as he rinsed the blade of his bone-handled knife.

  “If you eat I shall disrobe.”

  “Disrobe!” She actually flinched, jerked as if struck. “I’m not asking for a lap dance!”

  “Ahh.” He lifted one shoulder a quarter of an inch as if in apology. “My mistake.”

  “Yes, it is your …” She paused. Was there laughter in his eyes? Was he teasing her? She pursed her lips. There was nothing in the world she hated more than being teased. Unless it was being laughed at. Or patronized. Or pitied. “Remove your shirt.”

  “Eat your crackers.”

  She lifted the offensive package in one tight fist. “Why are you so insistent about these things?”

  “We’re out of escargot.”

  She huffed, glanced away, then looked at him again. Was it her imagination, or did his face seem a little pale above his scruffy beard? “Fine.” She scowled. “How many would you like me to eat?”

  “Five for each article of clothing.”

  “I only want you to take off your shirt.”

  His shoulders twitched. “Your loss.”

  She rolled her eyes and made some kind of a noise. It couldn’t have been a snort. Wellesleys did not, under threat of death, snort. Opening the plastic sleeve, she removed a cracker and took the first bite. He watched, then turned toward the refrigerator. Removing a large glass jar, he poured milk into a coffee cup and set it beside her elbow.

  She raised her brows at it. “Where did that come from?”

  “Emily brought it.”

  “Emily from the Lazy?”

  “Ai.”

  “Why?”

  “In exchange for pictures,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She is an excellent photographer. I think she wishes to take pictures of the mare.”

  “Courage? Why?”

  “She cares. I believe she will be around quite often. Perhaps the boy, too.”

  “What boy? Ty?”

  He shrugged, nodded toward the milk. “Drink it.”

  “It tastes funny.” She took another cracker and wondered when she had become a five-year-old.

  “Do you want me to start with my socks?” he asked and fiddled with the stove. It hissed, crackled, and spit forth a ring of blue flame. Though honest to God, she had no idea when he had repaired it.

  She scowled at his back. It was the approximate width of the plywood they used as a table. “I thought the Indian was too proud to cheat.”

  “My mother was German,” he said and nodded toward the milk.

  German. Really? She took a sip. It wasn’t too bad. Maybe she would get used to it, she thought, and finishing her fifth cracker, brushed off her hands and pushed the coffee cup aside. “Let’s get this done.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” he assured her.

  “You’ll take off your shirt,” she ordered and stepped forward. Temper flaring, she tugged his hem toward his chest. “Or I’ll …” A two-inch crescent of incised flesh brushed her knuckles. Blood smeared liberally across her hand. She jerked back.

  “You should sit,” he suggested.

  “I don’t have to,” she said, but the words sounded a little garbled.

  “Sit!” he ordered, and taking her arm, eased her onto the piano bench.

  She sat, not because he’d made her but because it was the practical thing to do. Swooning like a punch-drunk pugilist would be more theatrical than sensible to her way of thinking.

  “You have to see a doctor,” she said.

  But he shook his head and moved toward the refrigerator again. It was as old as Medusa and just as ugly. He drew out a carton of eggs, cracked six into a chipped bowl he had gotten from who knows where, and mixed them with the tarnished tines of an ancient fork they’d picked up at the Re Uzit Shop in Custer. Turning his back, he added a number of ingredients she didn’t know he had purchased.

  “Hunter …” She said his name softly. He glanced over his shoulder at her. In the five days since their acquaintance, she had rarely used his given name. The look in his eyes made her stomach clench. Or maybe it was just the smell of bacon sizzling in the pan. It smelled astonishingly good. And she never ate bacon.

  “Please …”

  She wondered how often she had said that word in her lifetime. It felt foreign and out of place. “You have to have that looked at.”

  “You looked,” he said, and removing the bacon, added the onions he had diced moments before. “It did little good.”

  “I’m not a doctor.”

  He stirred the onions, broke up the fried bacon. “That is why I let you look.”

  “Why don’t you like doctors?”

  His shoulders had stiffened, she noticed, his tone hardened, though his hands never ceased to stir and chop and fiddle. “They don’t need me to stroke
their egos or pad their bank accounts.”

  “Oh.” The truth struck her suddenly. He was concerned about money. Just because he had helped her buy building supplies hardly meant he was wealthy. But … wouldn’t insurance cover this sort of eventuality? It was embarrassing to admit, even to herself, how little she knew of life. Oh, she could canter a perfect pirouette or entertain a hundred A-list guests for a six-course dinner. But she’d never in her life filled out an insurance form or fed a baby or bought tires for her car. “I can … I can loan you the money, if that’s the problem.”

  He dumped the contents of the bowl into the pan and glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “I wasn’t aware that you had money to waste.”

  “I didn’t plan to waste it.”

  He turned fully toward her, letting his hips rest against the stove behind him for a moment. “You cannot afford to repair your own home.”

  “It’s not as if a quick trip to the emergency room is going to cost ten thousand dollars.” She blinked, feeling foolish and a little sick. “Is it?”

  “Not if I don’t go,” he said and returned to his cooking.

  She scowled, certain his logic was full of holes. But before she could point them out, he had taken a lone spoon from a drawer, cut his concoction in two, and shoved a half-moon shape onto a chipped plate before placing it on the plywood in front of her.

  “Bon appétit.”

  She breathed it in, olfactory glands humming with the scent of cheddar and bacon. “You made me an omelet?”

  He shrugged and tapped it toward her. “I am out of pemmican. And Emily brought eggs when she came for pictures of Courage.”

  She ignored most of his verbiage and focused on the meal. “You can cook?” Even to her own ears, her tone sounded blatantly offended at this unknown expertise, and for a moment she was half afraid she’d cry. What the devil was wrong with her? It wasn’t as if she was completely without skills. She could … What? she wondered dismally. What could she do?

  “Eat it,” he ordered, but she shook her head.

  “You eat it.” Her voice had gone from insulted to petulant in the blink of an eye.

  He gritted his teeth in irritation and for one wild second a surge of fear rushed her. What did she really know about this man? Who was he? Why did he refuse to see a doctor? Maybe it wasn’t for financial reasons at all. After all, he did have skills. Skills that could surely earn him a decent living. So maybe … Breath clogged in her throat. Was he a criminal? Was that why he was alone and homeless and reticent?

  She drew a careful breath. “Are you wanted?” Her words were very quiet, but he heard them. Their gazes met with a soft clash.

  “Not by many,” he said and turned back to the stove.

  “What does that mean?”

  He angled toward her and folded his arms across his chest. His rucked-up sleeves displayed broad bone and corded muscle. Black hair was sprinkled lightly across dark skin. It looked hopelessly touchable. Which was ridiculous. She didn’t like burly men. In fact, she wasn’t sure she liked men at all.

  “Eat,” he ordered.

  She was tempted. The bacon smelled like heaven, though it was common knowledge that nitrates came straight from the devil. Father had never eaten bacon a day in his life. Grandmother only ate chicken breast, carefully trimmed and spritzed with lemon juice. “I’ll make you a trade,” she said.

  He stared at her in that quiet way he had.

  “I’ll eat if you go to the doctor.”

  “No.” There wasn’t a moment’s pause before his refusal.

  “Then I’m not going to—”

  “But if you eat, I’ll let you tend my wound.”

  She shook her head and knew she was weak because the truth was, she didn’t want to. Not anymore. She had imagined his injury to be a scratch. An inconsequential nick that could be mended with a dab of iodine and an adhesive bandage. “Perhaps you’ve mistaken me for someone with skills, Redhawk.”

  His brows lifted a little. “I saw you with the horse.”

  She winced at the memory of the gore that filled the bucket she’d used to scrub the mare’s legs.

  “You have the touch.”

  She remembered words to the contrary. From her father, from her riding instructors. “That’s not what I’ve been told.”

  He held her gaze, steady and soft, like a swallow in his hand. “ ‘All mankind was blessed with speech. Fool and scholar alike. But wonder I if jaded sage be gifted as awestruck tyke.’ ”

  She raised her brows at him, mind riffling through a hundred memorized poems. “Yeats?”

  “Ty Roberts.”

  She made a face. “Angel’s owner?”

  He nodded once.

  “The boy’s a poet?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes people are not what they seem.”

  “Are we talking about you?”

  Another shrug. “Perhaps we speak of you.”

  She held his gaze for a second before looking away. “What you see is what you get.”

  “And what do I see?”

  “A spoiled little rich girl with no patience for foolishness.”

  He narrowed his eyes and shook his head once, but didn’t call her a liar outright. “To my way of thinking it would be foolish to pass out from hunger.”

  “It just so happens I don’t think it would be all that brilliant if you dropped dead on my ugly linoleum.”

  They remained as they were. At a standoff. Staring at each other.

  She was the first to break. “You’ll let me bandage that if I eat?”

  “Ai.”

  “Was that the German or the Indian talking?”

  “This once they are in agreement.”

  “Then you have a bargain,” she said and, turning fully toward her meal, tasted the first bite. The tang of melted cheddar struck her first. But it was the blend of farm-fresh egg and smoky bacon that made her taste buds sing. She chewed slowly, trying to quiet the symphony before she spoke. “Where did you learn to cook?”

  Lifting the frying pan, he steadied it against his chest. The blackened cast iron against soft flannel made a homey picture, and did earthy things to her equilibrium.

  “Mom took a job off the rez to help pay the bills,” he said. “It was learn to cook or starve.”

  So he had been alone, too, she thought, and though she fought the warm feelings that bloomed like spring wildflowers, she couldn’t stop the question. “And your father?”

  “Could scorch water.” He took his first bite. “And frequently did.”

  “So he was present?”

  He gave her a quizzical look.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t …” She paused, wondered if she had apologized more in the past three weeks than ever in her life, and continued. “This is …” She shook her head at the simple concoction and brushed back her wayward hair. “You shouldn’t be able to fix a furnace and cook. It disrupts the natural balance of things.”

  He watched her in silence, meal momentarily forgotten in the pan.

  “It’s simply …” She cleared her throat. When had she become a throat clearer? Next thing she knew she’d be picking her nose and belching the alphabet. “I’m sure the reservation isn’t like it’s portrayed by Hollywood.”

  “How is that?”

  She exhaled, considered softening her words, but decided on truthfulness. “Poverty, abandonment, rampant abuse.”

  He took a bite of his omelet. She watched it travel to his mouth. His teeth looked primal white against his beard. White but not perfectly straight. Not like hers, which had been cranked into rigid uniformity by an orthodontist with no facial wrinkles whatsoever. She refrained from adding “lack of dental care” to her list of reservation curses.

  “You forgot alcoholism and suicide,” he said.

  “I wasn’t judging,” she told him and found, to her surprise, that it was true. He had pitched battle for a horse others would have sneered at. Herself included. She felt strangely humbled, patently ash
amed.

  “I had three brothers.”

  She caught her breath at his words. In the past he had not exactly been one to ramble on about his childhood.

  “None of them were blood.”

  She waited for more, but he ate in silence.

  “Abandonment,” he said finally. A muscle flexed in his jaw. “There are times when Hollywood hits the mark dead-on.”

  She tried to read the nuances and ventured a guess. “Your mother took them in?”

  “Our father did not object.” His lips twitched a little and his eyes flashed, as if he remembered something that almost amused him. “Not aloud, at least. He believed that courage was not proved by idiocy.”

  She drank some milk and waited for an explanation.

  “She was known on the rez as the Hun. Some called her other things, but none to her face and not within my father’s hearing.” He smiled, just a glimmer of joy in the spark of his eyes, in the twist of his lips. “She could be …” He paused, carefully considering. “Bossy.”

  There was something in his voice, something almost unfathomable, a kindness, a melancholy, an admiration so deep it all but hummed in him.

  “So you inherited your size from her.”

  “Don’t forget the beard.”

  She raised her brows at him and wondered if she dared disparage his mother with a question regarding hirsutism, but it seemed that even he wasn’t brave enough to slander the woman who had raised him.

  “From her people,” he corrected.

  “And her impetuous personality?” she asked.

  “The Hunkpapa have a saying.”

  She waited and ate while she did so. There seemed little point in trying to rush him.

  “If the rain is coming, you will know it when your head is wet.”

  She considered that as she chewed. “Patience is a virtue?”