by Jenna Kernan
Even in slumber she was beautiful, her full lips gently parted to allow her soft breathing. She was curled about herself as if she were cold. Sky collected wood and set a fire, knowing he must wait until full dark before lighting it. Smoke was harder to spot at night, but even so, he would keep the flames low and hot.
Finally, he retrieved her blanket and covered her.
He closed his eyes and slept hard for several hours. He woke at an unfamiliar sound. The night had closed in about them. The horses were still and, judging from their breathing, they were asleep, as well. But something had roused him. He reached for his pistol and cocked the trigger.
“Sky?”
He turned to see Lucie raised up on one elbow, holding very still.
“I have to excuse myself.”
“What woke you?” he asked, still cautious.
“My bladder, I suppose.” He saw her raise her hands. “I just flipped back the blanket and then I heard you cocking that gun.”
He released the hammer of his pistol. “Sorry.”
They faced each other in awkward silence.
“Don’t go far.”
“I won’t.” She rose and then paused, looking back over her shoulder. Her hair shimmered in the moonlight and her face seemed carved of bone. “Don’t shoot me when I come back.”
He lifted both his hands, showing they were empty. It was the very reason he did not like to carry a gun. Perhaps when this was over he would put it away forever.
She nodded and crept away, lifting her skirts to mid-calf. He watched her until she vanished into a pine grove, then he listened hard for anything else amiss, but heard nothing.
When she returned, he was sitting on one of the felled logs.
“I have to check my snares.”
She stopped in her tracks. He could not see her face, but she clasped her hands before her, massaging the base of her thumb with the opposite one in a worried sort of motion.
“I’ll come, too.”
“No need. I’ll be within hearing, all the time,” he assured her.
She nodded and returned to her blanket. But this time he noted that she sat up against the log, waiting.
He was surprised at how hard it was to walk away, but their food stores were nearly gone and he could not leave the snares there. It was wrong to kill without reason and all animals that died at his hand deserved to be valued, not left to rot. He drew a deep breath and slipped along the animal trail, cutting between the ferns to his left.
He found two of his traps had snared rabbits. He lifted the limp bodies one after the other, thanking them for their lives and all rabbits for being so plentiful. When he returned, he found Lucie sitting up on the log, waiting. Her shoulders relaxed at the sight of him. Her relief warmed him. For a moment he could imagine what it would be like to return to this woman, to keep her always, protect her, care for her—love her.
But here was a woman who did not want to be kept. A captive who had been owned as property and treated with all the scorn and abuse of a slave. How did he convince her that she would never be ill-treated, that his love would not confine her?
He couldn’t. Because it wasn’t true. He wanted to own her—just as Eagle Dancer had once done. What if she would not have him?
Suddenly, he felt as lifeless as the rabbits he held. He needed to tell her all that was in his heart. But he feared that she would turn from him as she turned from Eagle Dancer. Perhaps she only saved him because he had saved the boys.
But she had clung to him when they tried to take him and then risked her life to bring him out of the fort. Didn’t that mean she had some feelings? After what had happened to her, could she ever trust a man again?
He entered the clearing where she waited and offered his kill to her. Lucie accepted the rabbits with a smile.
“Something fresh.” The smile faded. “Can we have a fire?”
He nodded. “Small one.”
She drew her skinning knife as he set to work on the fire. When the hardwood had burned down to coals, he sat beside Lucie, to find she had skinned the two rabbits, gutted them and skewered them. She had already made two hoops from the pliable pine branches and was sewing the green hide inside the ring.
“I haven’t done this in years,” she admitted.
He lifted one skewer. “You’d never know it.”
Her smile brightened and Sky felt something flip in his belly. Suddenly food was the farthest thing from his mind. Lucie was hungry, he told himself, and he must see to her needs. He took the carcasses and staked them over the coals. The sizzle of fat dripping to the coals and the smell of roasting meat aroused a powerful appetite in Sky and judging from the way Lucie now sat forward on the log and stared at the rabbits, he supposed she was famished, as well.
He sat beside her, wondering how to open his heart. It had been closed for so long, he hardly knew if he was capable of tenderness. If she would accept him, she would want to live in the white world. A world he had rejected for so long. How could he have her if he did not understand the role she would expect him to play?
“This reminds me of all the times we had to move north, away from the wagon roads,” she said. “The women in the front and the men guarding our retreat.”
He nodded, thinking back to those days. His father was head man and a war chief. He had allowed Sky to ride between the women and the men on the first pony Sky had ever caught. Actually, his first pony, Follows Home, had done just that. He had been a yearling chased off by the new stallion in the herd. Sky had taken him home on a bridle he’d woven on the spot out of prairie grass.
“You’ve got a far-off look in your eye,” said Lucie.
“I was remembering my first horse.”
The meat that was getting crispy on one side, so Lucie left her place to turn it. The hissing of blood and juices hitting the coals began again. “The white one with the brown blanket?”
Sky grinned. “Yes, that’s right.”
“He had knobby knees,” said Lucie. Her smile told him she was teasing.
“Oh, but he was fast. Riding him, it was like flying.”
Lucie struggled to hold her smile and he knew her memories were not so fond.
Sky’s smile faded. “I miss that horse.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. I had to leave him behind.” He had lost his horse along with everything else he had loved. What if he lost Lucie, as well?
They sat side by side, but Sky feared they were drifting apart, pulled by memories to distant shores. The aroma of roasting meat filled the air about them.
Lucie checked one of the rabbits and then offered him the stick. She took up another and the next several minutes was spent pulling tender meat from the bone and blowing on scorched fingers. Lucie claimed she was full before she had finished her rabbit. He ate the second, but would not take any of hers and she ended up finishing it.
“When will we be safe?” she asked.
He was reluctant to tell her, for he knew that once they reached a town or village, she could leave him if she chose. He would have no right to stop her.
“If all goes well, we will make the border before the next moon’s rising.”
She set aside the remains of the carcass.
“So close?”
Was that regret in her voice? He felt a moment’s hope.
The night had closed in about them. The horses were still and, judging from their breathing, they were still asleep.
“They won’t cross?”
He shook his head. “They might not even know we got by them for a week or so.”
“And the Canadian police, they’ll allow you to stay?”
Why had she said you instead of us? Would she leave him once they crossed the border? Was he just one more of her humanitarian projects, no different than the girls she had tried to make over in a white image?
He had been years on his own, but he’d never known her then, never tried to fill a day and night without hope of seeing h
er again.
“Sky?”
She waited for his answer. He danced around the issue, hoping she might tell him what she intended. “They might order us out of the country, but they won’t turn me over to the US Army.”
Her shoulders relaxed at this reassurance.
Would she stay with him? She was a free woman now, free to stay, free to go. He frowned.
“You can’t go back either, Lucie. You’re wanted, too.”
“I know.”
She said nothing further, just stared steadily at him. Why had he said that? Why didn’t he say something to ease her mind, instead of adding to her burdens?
He wanted to tell her that his heart’s desire was to love her every day of her life, if she’d let him. And that if the Great Spirit blessed them, he would build her a fine home where they could raise horses and children. And in that instant he knew that his fear of losing her was not as powerful as the need he had to love her. He would build her a white man’s house, if that would make her happy. He would go and sit in the confinement of a church once every seven days to please her. She could teach their sons and daughters to read and write the English letters and he would teach them Lakota and tell them stories of the Bitterroot People and how they had two grandfathers, Ten Horses and Joy Cat. Three, he recalled, thinking of Lucie’s father, Thomas West. His smile slipped. He recalled her father as a fearless man, relentless as his wife. He had been the reason Sky had avoided Lucie at the fort, after her rescue. The man was a human watchdog. What would West think of him as a potential son-in-law?
Sky’s head hung.
“Perhaps it is bad luck, when we are so close, to speak of Canada.” Lucie used some of the grass to clean her hands and then sat beside him in silence.
Sky stared straight ahead. He’d never felt this kind of terror. Not even when Eagle Dancer had pointed him toward the fort and given him a little push with the word, “Go.” Yet then he had been able to speak, to reason. But now, faced with losing Lucie, he was paralyzed with fright.
The words she had spoken to him in the block house came back to him like a curse. You are running—have been all your life because if you stop, you might just love someone again and then you’d have to face the possibility of losing her. She was right. He did love her, enough to risk his life to save her and to fight all comers to have her. But that was child’s play compared to opening his heart and speaking the words he needed her to hear.
What did he have to offer? He was a vagabond, a drifter with no home, no family. Joy Cat’s words came to him. He was Bitterroot again. But Lucie did not want to be one of the People. She needed a white man’s home, with straight walls and sharp corners. She would want a man who would give her the things a white woman needed. But what were these things?
He had money, after all, the silver and, sewn into the lining of his saddlebags, one hundred gold coins. Was that enough for a white woman’s dowry? He knew that most fathers demanded at least three horses and some as many as twenty. But white men didn’t take horses for their daughters. He knew that much.
The wife of the Mormon he’d lived with for three years was always talking about dowries and hope chests for her daughters. But he had never seen the chest or what the new husband was expected to fill it with. It must be gold. It was all the white men cared about. He thought of one hundred gold pieces and thought it a very small pile, not enough to prove his worthiness as a provider.
“Sky, I’m getting sleepy. Will we ride tonight or shall I go back to bed?”
He looked at her now, in the dim light of the roasting coals.
Her brow wrinkled as she stared at him. “What is it? You look worried.”
He did not understand her world, but she knew his. Perhaps that was enough.
He captured her hand. She opened her mouth in a surprised little O and her gaze turned from concern to caution with just the widening of her eyes.
“I have traveled many years alone. I am not used to people, women especially. But if anyone could understand me, Lucie, it’s you.”
She pressed her lips together and he felt his chances slipping away. But the words poured out of him now, like water through a break in a beaver’s dam.
“I know you were forced into marriage and maybe you don’t ever want to marry again. But I also know you’ve been lonely, too. We’re like the last two ponies in the lot. One’s half crazy and the other is a paint and no one likes her markings.”
Her brow wrinkled and he knew he had said the wrong thing. He hurried to recover.
“That’s not the reason I’m asking, because nobody wants, I mean, or because I can’t get anyone else. I want you because I don’t want anyone else. Do you see?”
She gave a slow, cautious shake of her head.
“I’m hoping what you feel for me is more than just loneliness—because I already love you with everything I got.”
She gasped. “What are you saying?”
“I want to marry you, Lucie. I want you to be my first and only wife.”
Her eyes were round and full as the moon. As she stared in silence he felt his dreams burn up and blow away like ash. She was thinking of a way to escape him now and he’d have to let her go or be exactly like the man she never loved.
Lucie could only stare in surprise at Sky’s proposal. During all the long stretches of silence and the excruciating pauses, she knew he was getting ready to tell her something. But she had assumed he was going to prepare her for their parting. She had been bracing for rejection, wondering why she was not accustomed to it by now, when he had asked her to be his wife. But more than that, he had shown her the honor of making her his only wife. Most women would not understand, but she did. Sky was prepared to devote himself only to her, have children only with her and provide only for her. No one had ever made such a generous offer.
And now his eyes reflected all the uncertainty that she had felt only moments earlier.
Say something, you idiot.
“Sky, I have been married once and I have been asked by another to be his bride. But I have never had a man of my choosing and I have never been in love.”
He nodded his acceptance of this and let her hands slide from his.
“Until now,” she finished.
His head snapped back around and he grasped her shoulders in a grip that made her wince. He relaxed his hands, but his face remained taut as his eyes searched her expression. She smiled.
“You love me?” he asked.
She nodded. “I am afraid I do—desperately, foolishly and completely. I don’t know what I would have done if you had left me at the border. I probably would have followed you.”
“Left you?” His voice echoed astonishment. “Is that what you thought?”
“Well, you said yourself you’re unaccustomed to women and you were so distant. I thought you were trying to think of a way to detach yourself without hurting me too badly.”
“I was thinking of all the things you said, about not having any choice and wanting your freedom. I couldn’t figure you’d give that up for me.”
She laughed. “The only thing I’m giving up is my loneliness.”
He clasped her hands. “I’ll build you a ranch house with the tallest pine in Vancouver.”
“Vancouver?”
His smile slipped. “It doesn’t have to be there. Anywhere you say. I just thought we’d be closer to your family and still safe on that side of the border. The land is good for horses.”
She nodded her acceptance of this.
“We can be married soon as we find a preacher and a church. Would that suit you?”
Her heart squeezed and she felt warm all over with the joy. He was offering her a proper wedding, the kind he’d expect her to want, when as far as she knew he’d never gone into a church by choice. It showed how much he meant to do to make her happy.
“I think that would be wonderful, but we don’t have to wait so long.”
Now his eyes rounded as she stood, tugging his hands, encouragi
ng him to come to his feet before her. She gazed up into his eyes and spoke the words in Lakota that would bind them.
“I take you as my husband.”
His smile spread from ear to ear. He had to swallow once to find his voice but when he spoke it was in a clear baritone.
“I take you as my wife. You will never go hungry and I will protect you always.”
She stood on her toes to meet him as he swept down to claim a kiss from his bride. She clasped her hands about his neck and kissed him back, hoping he could sense the faith and joy that carried her into his arms. She drew back and saw her wonder reflected in his eyes.
“I can’t believe it,” he whispered. “My wife.”
He reached to the ground and swept up the blanket, wrapping them both in the coarse wool. He knew Lucie understood the significance of this gesture. It was under such a blanket that all the Lakota newlyweds shared their first kiss as husband and wife.
Chapter Seventeen
The joy filling Sky’s heart was so big he was afraid it might break through his chest. She rose up on her toes once more and kissed him again, but this time with none of the chaste reserve of a new bride, but with the wanting hunger of a new wife.
“Lucie.” His voice was like a caress.
Her eyes opened wide as he drew back and she stared into the fluid blue of his eyes.
“I love you and I never want to be parted from you, but I’ll honor the Lakota way. You are free to leave me when you will.”
“I do not wish to be a captive, husband, but that does not mean I do not want to be possessed.”
His eyes widened in understanding. His mouth slanted over hers and the pressing of lips quickly escalated into a frenzied dance of tongue upon tongue. His hands caressed her throat, then traveled down her shoulders and back, drawing them still closer.
The blanket slid from their shoulders. Sky paused, waiting for her to decide what to do. She collected the blanket and laid it out beside the fire, then she unfastened her bodice and slipped it off her shoulders, leaving only her chemise. Sky copied her, dragging his shirt, still buttoned, over his head, revealing his wide, muscular chest.
