“Mrs. LeMaster? No, I didn’t.” There was definitely disappointment in his friend’s eyes, and that impressed John more than the thought of Vivienne Medina nursing soldiers. “She’s a widow,” he remarked casually, glancing up to see Cody’s reaction. It was brief, a fraction of hesitation between hammer blows, but the meaning was clear enough.
“I’m glad you made it here in time for the party,” Cody said. “At least I’ll have a real person to talk to.”
“Party?” John helped his friend move another board into place. “You didn’t mention anything about a party in your last letter.”
He gestured over his shoulder to the fine new residence on a low hill at the edge of town. “It was supposed to be a meeting, but Vivienne said we should use her house to show the senators what Freewill can be once the railroad comes through.”
Before John could reply, an argument broke out at the other end of the street. Cody let out something akin to a growl. John followed as his friend went to investigate.
“You have no right charging me ten dollars more in freight when you charge everybody else half or less!”
Matt Logan hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his embroidered vest and chomped down on his fat cigar. “That’s my rate. Pay it or don’t. If you don’t, I’ll keep your merchandise.”
“It’s not fair!” the black settler shouted, waving the bill of lading in the air. “You know I need the equipment. That Medina woman had four times as much stuff shipped last week and you didn’t charge her this much.”
“That’s probably because she has white skin,” Cody said.
Matt Logan gave Cody a sideways glance, his pale eyes narrowing. He removed the cigar from his mouth and spit. Cody stepped aside just in time. “You may own most of the land this town sits on, Indian, but you don’t own my building, my stage coaches, the mine, or me. I can raise and lower my rates any damn time I please.” He turned back to the settler “You paying or not?’
Grumbling, the man paid the freight charges and was given the merchandise he’d ordered from Cheyenne. Cody stepped forward, seeming to look down on Matt Logan, despite the other man’s height advantage. “Your day will come, Logan. As soon as the railroad rolls through, you’ll be out of business. I’ll see to it personally.”
The older man laughed and flicked his cigar to the ground. “If the railroad comes through, Blackheart. Who knows what can crop up to change their minds.”
“Nothing will change their minds.”
“We’ll see,” Logan said. “There’s just no telling what that savage brother of yours might do.” He stepped into the stage office, humming a bright tune.
Cody growled his displeasure, and when he reached toward the knife in his belt, John grabbed his hand. “It’s not worth it.”
Cody’s dark gaze was still glued to the empty doorway. “Someday it might be.”
***
Standing on a low stool in Kate’s sitting room, Vivienne had a clear view of the end of the street. From Cody’s rigid stance and clenched fists, it was clear Matt Logan was stirring up trouble again. She certainly didn’t like the man and wouldn’t patronize his business if there had been any other way to transport goods from the nearest railroad stop. At least she found a small measure of satisfaction in knowing she was beating him at his own game without him even knowing it.
“Vivienne?”
Nervously clearing her throat, she stepped off the stool. “Sorry. It looked as though Cody and his friend, Mr. Avery, were having words with our resident bigot, Matt Logan. He has a nasty habit of basing his stage fees on the color of a person’s skin. Of course, you experienced Mr. Logan’s business philosophy yesterday.”
Kate took a final measurement. “I suppose I shouldn’t bother to complain about that stage driver’s awful behavior, then.”
“It wouldn’t do much good,” Vivienne agreed. “At least you weren’t out there alone.”
“That is the one saving grace.” Kate unfolded the bolt of grosgrain silk. “Mr. Avery is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.” Her brow creased as she cut the dress fabric. “I think I was rather nasty to his friend, though. The one who came to get us. I’m not generally rude….”
Vivienne nodded, bringing over the bolt of pointe lace. “Cody isn’t the type to hold a grudge. I’m sure he knows you had a rough trip and didn’t need a man pawing at you even if he was trying to be helpful.” Kate’s faint blush told Vivienne a lot. “Cody Blackheart is a good man,” she said sincerely.
Kate nodded slightly before cutting the lace. “Could your maid could keep an eye on Jamie for another hour or so while I cut the pattern pieces?”
“I was about to go out for a breath of fresh air. Do you think he’d like to go for a walk?”
Kate’s expression brightened. “He loves the outdoors especially when it’s sunny. Thank you, Vivienne”
“No thanks needed.”
***
“Look,” Cody said, tapping John on the shoulder and pointing across the street.
John chuckled along with his friend at the sight of Vivienne Medina, bent over, holding the hands of Kate LeMaster’s baby. The baby was trying to walk, his chubby legs bowed, his unsteady feet catching the hem of Vivienne’s dress, almost causing her to topple forward onto him. John laughed louder when Vivienne lifted Jamie to her hip and rubbed her back with her free hand.
“Just think how your back will feel when you have one of your own and have to do that all day long,” John teased, never expecting to see a look of revulsion cross her face.
“You’ll have this jail finished in no time,” she said to Cody, pointedly ignoring John.
“It’s coming along real well,” Cody agreed. “You mind if I get the boys from the livery to help us raise this section later?”
“They’re your employees, too.” She took hold of Jamie’s hand when he reached out, trying to grab the red tipped eagle feather braided into Cody’s hair.
“It’s all right.” He took the baby from her and tickled his little nose with the feather’s tip. The baby sneezed then giggled and grabbed for the feather again. Cody played the game, drawing long looks from his friends.
“That’s the second smile I’ve seen on your face this week, Cody. That must be some kind of record,” Vivienne quipped.
It pleased John to see his old friend taking such pleasure in making faces at the laughing baby. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think that little guy was yours. When you gonna settle down and get a couple kids of your own?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” he said, handing Jamie back to Vivienne.
She let out a shriek and held Jamie away from her, revealing a large wet stain on her hip. She glared at Cody, who flashed her a sheepish smile. “Excuse me, gentlemen.” Placing the baby back on her hip, she hurried toward the hotel.
“That’s that woman’s baby, the one from the stage?” Cody picked up his hammer from the ground.
“Yep. He’s a friendly little guy.”
“Too bad his mother isn’t the same.” Cody pounded a new nail into the framing lumber harder than necessary.
“Ever think you might be jumping to a few conclusions?” John asked when Cody stopped pounding long enough to reach for another nail.
The reply was a grunt followed by silence. John considered trying to play matchmaker for his lonely friend and the comely young widow, disregarding the crazy idea in the same moment. He needed to learn to start minding his own damn business.
***
Romantic notions drifted through John Avery’s mind a second time that day when he returned to the hotel and became the object of Vivienne Medina’s attention.
“Considering that you’re not a paying guest of this hotel, may I suggest that you use the kitchen door if you plan to come in here all dirty and— You’re bleeding!” She rushed around the front desk and lifted the edge of the rag he was holding against the side of his right hand. “Come with me.” Applying pressure to the wound, she dra
gged him through the dining room and into the kitchen.
“What on earth happened?” She stuck his hand into a large bowl sitting on the counter where the cook had been about to peel potatoes.
“Cody bent a nail, and I was trying to pull it out for him.”
She came back, a copper kettle in hand.
She tipped the kettle over the bowl. He jerked back. “Yeow! Are you trying to cook me?”
Vivienne regarded him critically then motioned for him to put his hand back. She poured the remaining hot water into the bowl.
“It isn’t that hot, Mr. Avery. I just put it on to boil before I went out to the desk.”
Without giving him a chance to argue the point, she went to the pantry and returned with a small wooden box. When she poured a stinging antiseptic on his cut, John glared at her.
“What in blue blazes did I ever do to you?”
“If you prefer, I can let it stay dirty until it festers and kills you.”
John grumbled, but in fact, she was caring for his wound better than some doctors he’d seen during the war. She was fast, and she was skilled.
The simple feel of her hands on his felt good. More than good. He studied her, so beautiful and intent on her nursing. It was a pity she was white. Then again, this was likely the most tolerant town he’d ever seen, judging from the mixed brood Alton Gaines had, and Cody’s own half-blood brother, not to mention Miss Belle actually running a business, as illicit as it might be.
As if sensing his interest, she looked up, and he fell headlong into the depths of her hazel eyes. Lord, but this woman had beautiful eyes. They were young and old, aloof and loving, and he finally understood the phrase about the eyes being the windows of the soul. He wanted more than anything to look deeper into Vivienne Medina’s soul and know what went on inside.
She tucked the edge of the bandage to secure it then dropped his hand like a hot coal. Clearly uncomfortable under his scrutiny, she made quick work in clearing away the first aid supplies.
“You’ll need to cover that when you get a bath.”
“Then again, maybe you could sit by my side and hold it out of the water.”
Vivienne slapped his face.
He watched her stomp out of the kitchen. “Well pardon me, Miss Medina,” he muttered, rubbing his stinging cheek. Damn. That woman’s hand stung worse than the bite of an overseer’s whip.
Chapter Four
Cody’s mother, Sha-ko-ka, watched him pick at the braised buffalo meat she’d made for him, her expression a mixture of concern and disappointment. “Do you wish me to cook white man’s food?”
Shaking his head, he patted her hand. “I’m just tired. John and I worked hard today on the jail.”
“You stayed with this friend last night at the house of women.”
“Ina—”
“I understand the needs of men, Blackheart, but those women….” She waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “You spent many days at the village. Do no Shoshone women interest you as they once did?”
Cody shrugged and pushed his chair back from the table. “They interest me but not enough. Not like….”
“Who?”
Shaking his head, Cody stood. “No one.”
His mother nodded thoughtfully. “It’s for the best, my son. “
“Do you mind if I sleep out in the lodge tonight? I need to think.”
Sha-ko-ka kissed her son’s cheek. “The nights are still cold and these old bones are too used to this warm house. I like the earth lodge in the summer. It reminds me of home.”
Cody hugged his mother, his heart sad that she still mourned the loss of her tribe to the smallpox that had decimated them three decades earlier. “I’ll take you north. You have cousins still living. You know they’ll welcome you.”
Pulling back, she caressed his face, smoothing back the white strands of hair that matched her own. “It’s not the same. I don’t want be there without your father.” She sighed. “Of three husbands, he is the one who had my whole heart….”
Nodding, Cody offered her a joyless smile. He kissed her forehead. “If you need me, you call. I’ll hear you.”
He went to his bedroom at the rear of the spacious house he’d built on the parcel of land Alton Gaines told him to take after winning the larger spread left by his stepfather, Luc Dauville. What a total dumb ass Bennett had been to literally bet the ranch on a drunken card game. But Gaines had been a decent man and was willing to call off the bet.
The brothers let him keep the winnings. Bennett had no immediate use for the land left by his father. He planned to stay East after the war, and Cody had no wife and kids waiting like Gaines, so it had been for the best.
Cody smiled a little as he took off his cotton shirt, denims, and boots. Gaines had really made use of the space with his own kids and a couple orphans he and the missus had taken in on the journey West. Generations living and working on the land was what Luc had envisioned, and it would come to pass even if it wasn’t his blood that had the biggest parcel.
After slipping on a pair of intricately beaded moccasins and a breechclout, Cody walked out to the traditional lodge Luc had paid to have constructed for Sha-ko-ka when he brought her from the decimated Mandan village. Through the years, the lodge had become as much Cody’s retreat as his mother’s, the place he came to think whenever life’s problems and the unanswerable questions they bred plagued him.
The questions raised by the problem of Matt Logan would be answered in time, but they weren’t taking center stage tonight, anyway. That woman from the stagecoach and the feeling, the something she roused in him, troubled Cody. He’d felt that something again when playing with her baby. It seemed as though an element was missing from his world, but not. He hardly understood the sensation and knew it was foolish to try. And yet he couldn’t make the odd, empty feeling go.
He lit a fire in the pit of the mounded earth lodge and stretched out on a buffalo skin robe. Gazing at the flickering shadows cast by the dancing flames, he watched the column of wispy smoke curl and rise out of the ventilation hole in the roof. That strange something taunted him again the instant he pictured the woman’s—Kate’s—sad face. She’d been in pain, and he’d wanted more than anything to ease that pain, to shelter her in his arms and protect her.
That inexplicable need had been foolish—more than foolish. He didn’t know her, and after the way she’d treated him, frazzled or not, he didn’t want to know her. But seeing her son, holding him, playing his silly game, and hearing that sunny baby laugh, brought home to Cody what his life lacked.
Judging from the size of the Gaines clan, children were life’s greatest pleasure, but Cody knew the love he was missing was the thing that would seal his fate and doom him to an early grave. A part of him had always longed for a deep love to be the center of his life, a love that would grant him more happiness than he’d ever known. But love would fulfill the rest of his late grandfather’s prophesy and end in his death.
A birdlike cry interrupted his thoughts. He got up and stood by the entrance of the lodge. All was quiet, the area deserted as it usually was. He answered the bird’s call with his own and went back inside, waiting for his youngest half-brother to appear.
White Bear entered. A fearsome young warrior, he fit the mental image conjured by the lurid news accounts and fantastic dime novel stories of bloodthirsty Indians who roamed the Great Plains.
Cody nodded a greeting. “I didn’t think you’d come so soon. When did you get back to camp?”
“I never left. I didn’t want to see you then, and I don’t want to see you now.”
“Then why are you here?” Cody resisted the urge to point out to White Bear that he had mixed both the Shoshone and the English languages.
White Bear crossed his arms over his muscular, painted chest. “I captured many Crow horses during the last raid. I saved two for my mother.”
“Our mother,” Cody corrected. “You should have brought two more. Bennett and Sarah are coming out
next week. Sarah will probably stay now that she’s finished her schooling.”
“Chumani should never have left. You had no right to take her from us and turn her against us, or take away her name.”
Cody took the long clay pipe from its holder and filled it with tobacco. “I didn’t make her do anything. She wanted to go East. She wanted to get an education. She chose her own Christian name.”
At first White Bear waved away the pipe, but then he sat opposite his brother and accepted it. “What will she do? Stay in your town? Marry one of them?”
He shrugged. “I think she wants to teach. We’re going to build a school.”
“She will need to relearn all she has forgotten, all she has turned away like it means nothing. She should marry one of her own, breed a new generation of warriors.”
He tensed. “So they can be slaughtered by the white man’s Army?”
White Bear blew the smoke roughly. “Your Army.”
Cody shook his head. “They were killing each other not us. I scouted for them then left when my enlistment was up.”
Shaking his head, White Bear accepted the pipe again. “You brought your body back. Your heart remains in their world.”
Taking the pipe, Cody changed the subject. “Bennett is bringing important men with him, congressmen and men who will bring business with the railroad—”
“No.” White Bear bolted to his feet, his dark eyes narrowed, his powerful body tense.
Cody held the pipe across his lap. “Things can’t go on the way they’ve been doing. I know you were part of that Feuerman business. How long do you think you can draw out small groups of soldiers with decoy parties? The next time, they might send reinforcements that outnumber you, and you’ll be the one lying dead in the grass. The settlers will take over eventually. Bennett thinks we can make a good deal securing land between here and the Washee Pass.”
“The same way they agreed that my father was a ‘good friend of the Great White Father’ in Washington? Will their treaty paper protect our band as it protected him? How long before the treaty for the Powder River land is made and broken?”
Dreams, Deceptions and Desires Page 4
