She shook off the intimate thought and refocused her attention on Dalah, who had moved further back into the hogan to show her the loom her mother used to weave the sheep’s wool. “My mother designed her rug from linoleum floor sample,” Dalah said, reverting to the Navajo’s habit of not pluralizing words.
But Abbie heard only what went on behind her. Cody shifted his hunkered-down position. The fine hair at her nape tingled her flesh, and she knew instinctively that he was watching her. Yet when she turned around he was lighting a cigarette.
Soon the family gathered around the firepit for dinner. Cody sat across from Abbie; Dalah and her mother were on either side of her. Tentatively she tasted the beans and stew. Across the fire she saw the mockery that curved Cody’s lips. He said something in Navajo to Dalah, and the young woman laughed. “Cody reminds me to tell you that the stew is made of mutton.”
“It does ease my qualms,” Abbie said dryly. She had no reservations about the sweet bread. The air bubbles in it were filled with honey. “I don’t think anything has ever tasted anything so good,” she said with a sigh.
“That’s because Navajo women use their spittle to add extra moisture,” Dalah explained.
Abbie was afraid to ask if she had heard aright. She swallowed hard and left the remaining bread on her tin plate.
Between bites the conversation was carried on in Navajo, with the children, all sharing Dalah’s lovely dark eyes and rose-shaded cheeks, piping in like magpies. Not once did Cody accord Abbie the courtesy of addressing her, and she would have felt left out had it not been for Dalah, who translated much of the conversation into English —except for the final sentence Cody directed to her father before he uncrossed his moccasined feet to rise in one smooth motion.
“I have told Dalah’s father I will save him the necessity of taking you back to the school,” he translated himself as he spoke to her for the first time.
Abbie sat dumbfounded. To argue would have been discourteous to the older man. But she certainly did not want to return with Cody. This was the second time that she had been forced to accept his offer of transportation—and the last, she silently swore as she took his outstretched hand and let him pull her to her feet.
She thanked Dalah, whose face had a curious expression, and the girl’s mother and father, who merely nodded. Cody shrugged into his denim jacket but didn’t bother to help her with her own. Wordlessly he escorted her to his pickup, his hand firmly at her elbow, as if he thought she would bolt. She refused to say anything, either. She sat in furious silence as the vehicle picked its way down the rutted trail, lit by the headlights and the bright, frosted light of a pumpkin moon.
Cody shook a cigarette from its package and offered her one. She badly wanted and needed it. “No, thank you,” she said stiffly, even so.
He pocketed the package and said, “Tonight you discovered what a narrow little world you lived in before coming to Kaibeto, didn’t you?”
“Is that why you didn’t once speak to me?” she asked in a voice tight with growing anger.
The lighter flared in the darkness of the cab, and he bent his dark head to the flame. “I didn’t think you would notice.”
She ignored his sarcasm. “You were unspeakably rude.”
“Was I?” He returned his attention to the demands of the almost nonexistent road. “How many times has the white man done the same?”
“That’s unfair!” she accused. “You’re generalizing.” She leaned toward him. Her voice was low and harsh, her clipped words rapid. “You were purposefully rude because you wanted to make me feel uncomfortable. You still want to prove that I don’t belong at Kaibeto.” She paused and caught her breath, then said in a puzzled tone, “You don’t want me here, do you?”
Without taking the cigarette from between his lips, he muttered, “No.”
“Why?”
He braked the pickup in the shadows of Camel Rock and flicked the half-smoked cigarette out the window. Looking straight ahead, he said, “Your kind—”
“I’m tired of you throwing ‘my kind’ up to me,” she lashed out.
He swung to face her. “I’ve met others like you,” he grated.
“But I’m not them!”
“I know.”
It was said in such a muffled voice that she wasn’t sure she had heard him. His hands shot out to grab her upper arms and jerk her against him. She should have pulled away, but something in the dark liquid eyes held her in an almost catatonic stupor, so that it seemed she ceased to breathe as he lowered his head to hers. His lips were hard with his anger, stunning her own lips to the point that she sat nearly passive beneath the onslaught of the kiss—until his lips softened almost imperceptibly and he matched his mouth to hers. Slowly she came alive to the sweet passion his kiss infused in her. Her hands, splayed defensively against his chest, slipped up in hesitant increments to clasp the muscled ridges of his shoulders.
The kiss after the flash flood—she had experienced its virulence and reveled in it. But this tenderness—it nearly undid her. Small tremors in her stomach rippled outward until her entire body was shaking.
“Open your mouth, Abbie,” Cody mumbled in a husky voice against her trembling lips. Unwilling to think clearly, incapable of refusing, she did as he bade. His tongue played lightly on her bottom lip before shafting between the two of them to find her tongue.
The hands that had clasped his shoulders now clenched with unfamiliar feelings, feelings long forgotten, that coursed through her. Her tongue answered the primeval question his own posed. The kiss lasted a lifetime. ... It lasted through the twenty years of homogenized love- making she had known. Its intensity staggered her. Inexplicably she wanted to cry, but the rising passion, setting her afire, quenched the need to release her emotions in tears and replaced it with a stronger need, the invincible desire of one soul, one body, to fuse with another.
His lips relinquished hers to find the hollow of her throat. “Your mouth . . .” he said. “It tastes of the honey you ate tonight. I want to know how the rest of you tastes.”
She murmured no protest when he pressed her down on the seat, his massive body half covering hers. His hand slid inside her jacket and under her cashmere sweater to rub tantalizingly along the curvature of her ribs. “Abbie,” he muttered rhetorically, his lips feathering along her arched neck, “why did you have to come to Kaibeto?” His hand cupped the underswell of one breast. “Why couldn’t you have stayed in your own safe little world?”
She didn’t care what he was asking; she only wanted him to continue what he was doing to her. Again and again he kissed her so that mere thinking was impossible. His hand slipped lower to clamp about her hipbone and press into the concavity of her abdomen. Her hips shifted, arched to meet the gentle but persistent persuasion of that hand. It slid under her sweater again and around to the small of her back to press her into him.
His lips found her ear to trace its delicate convolutions. He raised his head. His eyes glittered against the darkness. “Abbie, I want to make love to you.”
“Love?” she echoed blankly. “I . . . I don’t remember what it is.” She shook her head, as if trying to clear away the fog of sensual lethargy that stupefied her brain. Her hands strained at his corded upper arms. “I know that you haven’t one particle of affection for me, Cody, that you despise me . . . and still I want you.”
He pulled away to sit up. “You’re harmfully honest.”
She laughed brightly, almost too spontaneously. “If I were, I wouldn’t have fooled myself, even for a minute, about what was happening just now.”
To her astonishment he pulled her upright and drew her jacket about her. “And what did happen?” he asked quietly as his nimble fingers prodded at the jacket’s buttons.
“Nothing,” she murmured after a moment.
“Exactly,” he said coldly, precisely. “But it could have.”
She flared at his words, but he ignored her furious sputter. Finished with the buttons, he started the
pickup. “As I told you before, Abbie, your kind doesn’t belong out here. You belong in your safe little world of protocol and propriety.” Surprising her, his strong, white teeth glistened amidst the darkness in the semblance of a smile. “You won’t last the year, Abbie Dennis.”
She answered his smile. “I’ll prove your prophecy wrong, Cody Strawhand.”
He laughed, his gaze suddenly tender. “I think I’d better get you home before I decide to forget that you’re a married woman.”
Chapter 5
It was the middle of November and the last of Indian summer, just before the perfect fall days gave way to the harsh winter. Indian summer. The words conjured up beauty and mystery and romance.
And Cody Strawhand.
She couldn’t stop thinking about him.
He wasn’t the average man next door. There was a charisma about him—the way children clung to him, adults deferred to him, women watched him. She sensed that he must have overcome tremendous obstacles to rise to his position of importance in the art world, social prejudice being the least of them.
She folded the last of the Idaho Pink Beans burlap sacks that Orville had donated for the day’s outing and placed it on her desk with the rest. She couldn’t have chosen a better day to pick juniper seeds. The curio stands along the highways had given her the idea. Why couldn’t the children make necklaces out of dried seeds and glass beads and sell the finished product themselves? Dalah had already agreed to take the finished necklaces along with her hand-woven blankets into Tuba City for consignment there.
Persuading Miss Halliburton had presented more of a problem. “You can’t possibly watch thirty-four children, Mrs. Dennis. They’ll run wild. They could get hurt or lost.”
“Give me a chance.”
The woman relented, but Abbie suspected that the principal was almost waiting with baited breath for her predictions to come to pass. Transportation had presented another problem. Getting thirty-four children back into the canyons where the junipers grew thickest could never be accomplished in the government Jeep. But then Abbie had what she thought of as a brilliant solution: They could take the old springboard wagon.
True, driving a team of obstinate burros was beyond her capability. But there was Robert. More than once at recess, when she had panicked and thought that he had run away again, she had discovered that the child had wandered off to the corral by the shed to watch the malodorous burros. The indifferent creatures even suffered his caressing strokes. Surely Robert could hitch the burros to the wagon, and probably drive them, as well.
He indicated as much when she asked him, using charades as a last resort in the face of his blank look. The brief crimping of his lips told her that he had understood. She felt a tremendous sense of achievement in having solved two problems at once—transportation and Robert’s refusal to get involved.
Miss Halliburton sailed majestically into the room, and the children sprang to their feet, eager to be off. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Mrs. Dennis. The responsibility you are assuming?”
“Yes. I’ve even placed an order for boxes of coral beads from an outlet in Taiwan.”
Miss Halliburton’s narrow lips, bereft of liptick, twitched in exasperation. She fixed gray brown eyes that resembled ball bearings on Abbie. “You mean Kaibeto will be palming these necklaces off as genuine handmade Indian articles?”
Abbie tried to smile. “Well, they will be handmade by the Indians.”
Miss Halliburton's choleric expression indicated that she saw no humor in the remark, but before she could put forth another argument to block the field trip altogether, Abbie pointed to the tall boy in the back of the room and said, “Wagon, please, Robert.”
The boy bolted from his desk and sprang past Miss Halliburton like a contestant in the fifty-yard dash. The old woman grabbed at her wig as if she expected a backwash of wind to blow it off.
“Children,” Abbie admonished, when all of them began bobbing up from their chairs, “form a single line.”
“Don’t say I didn't warn you, Mrs. Dennis,” Miss Halliburton said and stalked from the room.
In the shed Robert deftly harnessed the two scurvy old burros and hitched them to the wagon. The children all scrambled for a place in the wagon bed that was blanketed with musty hay. Abbie climbed up beside Robert. Julie Begay, who had developed a case of adulation ever since Abbie’s wild drive into Tuba City, camped on Abbie’s other side.
For more than an hour the wagon bumped over a narrow rutted road that wound back through a red-streaked, sheer-cliffed canyon. The children’s laughter amplified with each steep dip and perilous curve of the road where the wash dropped away far below, but Abbie found her hand clutching Julie’s bony knee.
She exhaled a pent-up breath and managed a weak smile for the children when Robert halted the wagon in a box canyon studded with gray green junipers. With bean sacks in hand, the children spilled out of the wagon and took off for the trees, scrambling under their low branches to collect the seeds.
Their squeals of delight at escaping the stuffy classroom on such a gorgeous afternoon echoed up and down the canyon. The pungent aroma of pinon and juniper scented the air. A light breeze, carrying the promise of winter, rustled through the needle-leafed trees. Bees droned over a patch of sunflowers. Nearby the burros cropped contentedly at the clumps of grass that thrust through the rock’s crevices.
A glorious day! Abbie would have liked nothing better than to stretch out on the shale-bedded slope and watch the meringue kisses of clouds that floated above. But, alas, only children had that privilege. She had to be content to sit and watch the children dart from beneath the trees like little field mice.
Contrary to Miss Halliburton’s dire predictions, the field trip was going without a slip-up. No casualties. No arguments. Only happy grins and sacks that were filling rapidly with seeds. Abbie was so pleased with the successful outing that she postponed the return trip for a full half-hour until the sun tiptoed atop a mesa that resembled an Indian woman’s flounced skirt.
Abbie never knew what caused the burros to take off with the wagon as if the starting bell had rung at the Kentucky Derby. The children claimed it was the tchindee spirits. Abbie suspected it was the bees she had heard humming earlier. Whatever, the braying of the burros grew fainter with each passing moment. Mary, Delbert, Julie, Joey, Wendy—all the children’s eyes turned to her as they waited for her wise counsel. All but Robert. He simply set his face toward the east. Abbie wanted to comfort him, because she knew he sensed that it was his fault the burros had bolted, that he should have secured the reins. But it would never have done for him to admit weakness before the other children.
She sighed. “We had better start walking back, children.”
When would she ever learn to wear sensible shoes in this abysmal terrain? She turned her ankle more than once, and only Julie’s quick little hands kept her from sprawling like a rug. Off came the high heels.
The canyon’s walls cast eerie shadows, but visions of a wrathful Miss Halliburton were even more frightening. Abbie could only hope that the children knew the way back. What if, in the dark, a child stepped off into the void of one of the deep washes? She cringed at the image of a sheer drop-off, a wayward step. Her fear of heights went to work, her stomach churning at each rolling pebble.
Soon a chill settled like a mist over the canyons. The children would get colds. The faint clip-clop of hooves reached her ears. “The burros!” she breathed. Ahead of her Leo Her Many Horses let out a war whoop of joy.
Abbie’s own joy was short-lived when the silhouette of a horseman came into view. The beam from his flashlight temporarily blinded her. Sudden exclamations in Navajo erupted from the children, and she recognized Cody’s deep voice reassuring them. Damn! One more reason to justify his judgment that she didn’t belong at Kaibeto.
He reined in the Appaloosa alongside her. His flashlight’s peripheral glow illuminated his mocking grin. “If it isn’t Moses and the lost tribes wande
ring in the wilderness.”
She checked her rush of grateful words. “Your humor is ill-timed. I suppose everyone is out looking for us?”
Beneath the brim of his hat his eyes laughed at her. “No, only Orville in his Packard. He persuaded Miss Halliburton to let the two of us search before she called out the tribal police, the BIA search heliocopters, the Arizona Highway Patrol ...”
Abbie groaned. “Say no more, please.”
He didn’t. He leaned over and, before she realized what was happening, caught her by the waist, pulling her up into the saddle to sit sideways in front of him. “Shall we go back and face the music?”
“I don’t think music is what I’m going to be hearing,” she said, her dejected laughter muffled against his denim jacket. She encircled his waist for support with one arm while her free hand tugged, to no avail, at the skirt that had ridden high up on her thighs.
Like the Pied Piper, Cody, astride the horse with her ensconced in the crook of his arm, led the children down out of the canyons. The children loved the adventurous trek. And Abbie— she tried not to let herself think or feel anything during that odyssey. But it was impossible, with Cody’s hand resting tantalizingly just below her breast. Beneath her thigh she could feel the hardness of him. He wanted her . . . but did he even like her? His contempt was too often evident.
In an effort to redeem herself, she tried to explain the circumstances that had caused the predicament into which she had gotten herself and the children. “With the profits the children make from selling the beads, we can take a field trip into Flagstaff come spring. Just think, these children have never seen a train or a plane or a supermarket. . . . But now I’m afraid that the Dragon Lady will cancel the trip.”
Above her head his low chuckle fanned her hair. “I’m sure you’ll carry through with aplomb, Abbie Dennis.”
He began to talk of other things—to take her mind off the coming confrontation with the principal, she suspected. “Did you know, Abbie, that the juniper berries, because of their pungency, are used to flavor gin?”
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