She shook her head in a negative gesture. Against her cheek she could feel the strong beat of his heart.
“The name gin,” he continued lightly, “comes from the old French word for juniper, genievre—a glass of which you will, no doubt, have need of when we get back.”
Foolishly, she wished the ride could continue forever. She told herself that it was only because she wished to postpone the inevitable meeting with Miss Halliburton.
All the lights in the school buildings blazed.
And the Dragon Lady was waiting on the school porch, arms akimbo, when Cody rode into the fenced-in grounds.
* * * * *
With a shudder, Abbie told Marshall about the nightmare of the field trip when he took her up on her invitation for coffee the next day. “The worst,” she lamented, “is that Miss Halliburton has written me up for the incident. It won’t take many such blots on my record before I’m relieved of my duties.”
“As long as she doesn’t file the report with the BIA in Gallop, you’ll be all right. I might remind you, Abbie, that you still have the rest of your two-year contract to convert her opinion.” He stirred cream into his coffee. “Why do you stay, Abbie?”
“I’m not sure,” she said with a strained smile. “Maybe because I want to prove that Abbie Dennis can function just as easily as Mrs. Brad Dennis. Maybe just to prove that Abbie Dennis does exist. But I won’t give up. No matter how badly Miss Halliburton wants me to leave, no matter what kind of incompetent Cody Strawhand thinks I am, no matter how much you yourself try to persuade me of the futility of my efforts.”
“I think I’m becoming glad you don’t listen to me.
She passed off the indirect compliment. “And you? Why did you come to Kaibeto, Marshall?”
He took another swallow of coffee. His freckles were as pale as the diluted liquid. “My wife took our daughter and left. I was with an international division of a food company. Moving from country to country, living in dirty cities like New Delhi or Teheran. It wasn’t the executive wife’s life she had in mind when we graduated. And, to do her justice, not many of the marriages in international divisions last. I could have applied for a stateside job—a big desk, long lunch hours, country club membership. But to me the benefits glittered like fool’s gold. There had to be more to life.”
“And is there?” His answer was important to Abbie.
He shifted and crossed his ankle over one knee. “For me—yes, there is. The beauty and simplicity of this land and its people. Where else do you see such kaleidoscopic sunsets and rainbows that are doubled and tripled?” An embarrassed grin at his impassioned speech spread across his face. “At least here I’m not suffering bleeding ulcers and tension headaches. Two of the side benefits— along with people like you, not to mention your coffee.”
Abbie needed more than coffee when she picked up her mail the following week at the trading post, which besides serving as the Kaibeto post office also passed as a bank, though none of the local Indians possessed checking accounts. The envelope was marked with the State of Pennsylvania’s return address. Slowly she unfolded the legal-size sheets. For long moments she stood at the counter, staring at the blurred words.
“Bad news?” Orville asked.
She looked up at the kindly old man. His mustache drooped like her spirits. He wore the same baggy, rumpled pants, along with a ragged, faded mulberry red sweater. “I’m a Ms. now.” Her trembling hands passed him the sheaf of papers. “My husband—we’re divorced.”
It was something she had been expecting. But now that it had happened—the finale after twenty years—it was like a blow to her stomach, taking her breath away, hurting.
She could never have filed for divorce herself. Maybe it had something to do with all those Sundays when her parents made her sit quietly on the pew between them. Brad had done the kindest thing, ending the marriage for her. Still, the dissolution of twenty years of joy and tears and anger and laughter . . . she hadn’t been prepared for it. She felt as if her lifeline had been cut and she were now adrift in the midst of fifty-foot waves.
Orville passed the papers back with a “hmmmph” that fluttered his mustache. “Looks like you got the short end of the stick, gal.”
“I didn’t want anything,” she whispered. “I’d already had too much of everything.”
“But not enough of love, eh?”
She looked at him in surprise.
“ ’Pears you’re better off. We need to toast your new marital status.”
She wanted only to go back to her apartment and crawl into bed for the rest of the day, but it would be too rude of her to turn Orville down.
He bent down behind the counter. “Blast it.” His voice was muffled. “That’s what I always hated about owning a trading post—can’t sell liquor on the reservation. Thought I had some whiskey stuck away. Must have finished off the bottle last year when Cody sold that piece to the Kansas Art Collection.”
The old man’s head shot up above the counter. Beneath the bushy snow-white brows his blue eyes were bright. “That’s it! Cody’s got some liquor stashed away. Gin or rum. Maybe both. Doesn’t matter. Anything’ll do for a divorce celebration. Right?”
She hesitated. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but the last thing she wanted to do was to celebrate something that had failed. And especially not with Cody Strawhand.
Orville grabbed her hand. “Come on, gal, time’s a’wasting.” He pulled her along behind him. At the door he grabbed the “Open” sign and flipped it around to “Closed.”
“But it’s not five o’clock yet,” she protested. “You shouldn’t be clos – I”
“Hell, as Jimmy Buffet says, it’s five o’clock somewhere. Besides, it don’t have to be five o’clock to lift a glass. I oughta know that. Why do you think I’m living in this godforsaken area? Lifted too many glasses.” He chuckled as he shut the door behind him and kept walking; she had already learned that no one ever locked a door at Kaibeto. “I banished myself to the least likely place where I would find a drop of liquor. But this, gal, is a special occasion.”
He was so excited that she hated to dampen his enthusiasm. Maybe, with any kind of luck, Cody wouldn’t be there.
Her luck had apparently run out. Cody met them at the front door. Like the first time she had come to his house, he was bare to the waist. His dusky skin gleamed like polished copper. A towel was thrown over his shoulder, and his hair glistened with water drops.
“If you’re going anywhere, Cody, call it off.” Orville stalked past him. “Get out the booze. We’re having ourselves a party tonight.”
Cody cocked a brow at Abbie. Her hands fidgeted in her skirt pockets. She felt compelled to explain. “Orville decided ... I was ...”
“She got her divorce papers today,” Orville yelled from the kitchen. Doors could be heard banging and pans rattling. “Where on God’s green earth do you keep your firewater, Cody?”
“In here,” Cody called without taking his eyes from Abbie.
She felt miserable. Miserable about her divorce, miserable about being with other people, miserable about the way Cody was looking at her, as if he could see the hurt that beat a tattoo in her heart. There had to be a way she could back out gracefully from the unpleasant situation. “Really, I’d rather go on back ho – ” She had no home now. Wrong, Kaibeto was her home. She felt the tears that stung her eyes. And felt Cody’s hand on her upper arm.
He propelled her toward the sofa. “Stay,” he said simply. She felt incapable of making any decision at that moment and watched as he crossed to a hand-carved hutch and took out a bottle of expensive scotch. She liked the way he moved, his grace that could in no way be associated with femininity. He was pure masculinity, raw sexuality.
Orville rambled into the room and headed for one of the deep leather-tufted chairs in the far corner. “Make mine a double, Cody. I never did celebrate my last divorce properlike.”
“How many times have you been married?” she asked the ol
d man.
He tugged at his mustache. “Well, let’s see. Six, maybe seven. Not rightly sure, gal.”
She had to smile. The drink Cody handed her made the smiling easier, though its undiluted strength burned her throat raw. She smothered a choking cough while Orville launched into a humorous accounting of his many marriages and divorces.
“My last wife—she weighed nearly three hundred pounds and could knock the stuffing out of me—ate me out of house and home. That was the last time I took up drinking. When I started drinking more than she could eat, she left me, praise the Lord.”
Cody sprawled at the other end of the sofa, listening, saying little as Orville continued to entertain them. Abbie found herself grateful to the old man. He was making the evening easier for her. When Cody handed her another drink, she shook her head. “I really must get back.”
“Drink it,” Cody said quietly. “The night will be a long, lonely one.”
She knew that he was right and also that she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts, so she sipped the scotch and listened to Orville, who began to nod intermittently between the rambling of his stories. At one point, she decided that she really had to go back to the apartment, that six-thirty would come too early the next morning. But Cody was talking to her, asking her about her marriage.
“I don’t know,” she found herself saying honestly. “I don’t know if I ever really loved Brad, if maybe it wasn’t just infatuation, but still . . . the divorce ...”
“Any divorce forces you to feel a certain amount of self-recrimination, self-blame.” Surprised by the gentleness in his words, she looked up into his face. It was out of focus and nearer her own than it had been a moment ago. “What caused you to leave him, Abbie?”
She looked down into the amber liquor in her glass which had somehow mysteriously refilled itself. “It wasn’t anything momentous,” she murmured. “I guess it was the high school class reunion that finally triggered everything.”
As she had looked around the lavish hotel ballroom at her classmates, she had realized that she represented the epitome of success. Her clothes were the chicest. Her looks—well, if anything, she looked better than the day when she both graduated and married Brad. And her mind hadn’t atrophied as some others’ had. Having the twins that first year hadn’t stopped her from finishing college. Raising Jason and Justin had only postponed her graduation; by the time she received her B.A., Brad had been practicing law for three years.
“I had worked hard to be the perfect mother, the perfect wife,” she continued in a voice softened by introspection. “Yet the night of the class reunion I felt no triumph, no satisfaction.”
She had felt only an emptiness that had gnawed at her the rest of the night, an emptiness that she had been feeling, but not acknowledging, for years. “The next morning I left with only what I could carry in a suitcase.”
Where had their marriage gone wrong? The question lingered on the tips of the tongues of everyone who had known them. They had been the perfect couple. Only Abbie had known that they were far from perfect. They had achieved their goal—Brad’s successful career; her place in society; a showplace of a home; two handsome, intelligent sons—but at the expense of their emotional growth.
Oh, Brad had been willing to continue as they were . . . though he had been honest enough not to dissuade her from leaving with words of love. Hadn’t they both worked too hard to jeopardize everything by a divorce? he reasoned. What would everyone think? And what about the twins?
But the boys had gone off to college the year before. They were on their own now. And she— was she undergoing the empty-nest syndrome? She doubted it. She was wise enough to recognize that for twenty years of marriage she had been emotionally stymied.
She leaned her head against Cody’s shoulder. “Have you ever been married, Cody?”
* * * * *
“No,” he said shortly. “My parents were divorced. Their marriage was hell. They came from two different environments.”
He knew he was talking too much, but the bitterness wouldn’t stop. “Like most Indians, I was torn between bettering myself or being a Navajo . . . torn between two worlds. I never found a woman from either world who . . .’’He swallowed the last of the scotch in his glass. His third or fourth drink, he wasn’t sure. He was only sure that he had wanted to drown his desire for this woman.
He thought of her too often ... the way she smelled, fresh and clean, without the cloying sweetness of some women’s perfume; the way she looked him in the eyes when she spoke instead of fluttering her lashes and teasing as others did; the innocence in her eyes, as if after all these years she were still a virgin, a novice to the ways of a man and a woman. And yet there was the way she had responded to him the night he brought her home from Dalah’s house. It had surprised her, he was sure, as much as it had surprised him. He hadn’t expected the heated sensuality that ran beneath the glacial exterior.
And then there was the wariness in her eyes, in her manner, that made him want to protect her, to tell her that everything would be all right.
What a bunch of garbage that was . . . because she wouldn’t be all right with him. Another drink and he would take her into his bedroom, and all that innocence in her eyes would be destroyed. He wanted to make love to her. He wanted to keep her there with him, to listen to her soft, melodious voice, to understand the intricacy of her mind . . . and to intimately explore the beauty of her body.
Holy Mother, but he was drunk. Across from him Orville was snoring like an asthmatic walrus. Next to him, half-reclining against him, Abbie stirred, her hand falling lightly on his thigh. He smothered a groan. She didn’t know what she was doing to him—or the dangerously thin wire she was walking.
Laughter bubbled low in her throat. “I thought Indians got drunk easily.”
“They do.” I am.
“Strawhand. That’s a funny name.”
He grinned. “No funnier than Jones or Smith if you say them a couple of times over.”
She tilted her head, as if considering the validity of his statement. Her eyes closed. “Jones, Jones, Jo . . .”
His mouth brushed hers, and her eyes flew open. “No,” she whispered.
“Yes.” He kissed one lid closed, then the other. “You need to be loved.”
He showered kisses over the face she turned up to him. But it was her lips, sweet and soft and tremulous, that his mouth kept returning to. The last time he had kissed her—he knew it had been a long time since she had been kissed like the sensuous woman she was. A long time since she had been held as a woman should be held. When his hand slipped down from her shoulder and encircled her waist to pull her over atop him, the slight way she trembled—her almost inaudible moan—told him that it had been a long time since she had found fulfillment. Her husband was a fool.
Her ex-husband.
One part of him delighted in the knowledge that she was no longer married but free. Another part whispered that he was a fool to be thinking the way he was, to want her the way he did. She had her world which she would go back to, a world he had lived in and ultimately rejected.
Yet all the rationalization didn’t help. Not with her breasts pressing into his chest and her hips shifting against his. He groaned. The hard core of his want for her filled his jeans and throbbed against her soft stomach. He scooped her into his arms and staggered upright. “You’re heavy, Abbie.”
Her sleepy laughter tickled his neck. Somehow he found the bedroom and the bed. He rolled over atop her, marveling in the wonder of her slender body beneath his own much larger one. He could crush her. But he wanted only to love her. And not for just that night only. “Abbie,” he whispered, wanting to hear her marvelous voice, to hear her say she wanted him.
“Ummmm?”
He raised himself up on one elbow to look at her. Her champagne hair was spilled out on the bed about her head. Her eyes were closed. A dreamy half-smile curved her lips.
“Hell,” he muttered, “I think I’m too
drunk, anyway. Walk in beauty, Abbie Dennis.”
* * * * *
Cody sat at the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. His groan awoke Abbie. He watched over his shoulder as her eyes opened, then snapped shut against the blast of sunlight from the arched window opposite the king-size bed. Her head fell back onto the pillow. “Oh, no! School is in progress!”
He rose from the bed in one motion to face her. “I think I may live!”
Once more her eyes opened, this time to mere slits as she eyed his naked length. He stretched, and turned toward her, uninhibited by the obvious proof of his desire.
Quickly she looked away. “How did I . . . er ... get undressed?”
“I undressed you.”
“What ... did ... did anything . . . happen last night?”
His eyes narrowed as he surveyed her. The sheet did nothing to hide the curves of her body, only accentuated them. Her chin was tilted imperiously, her lashes shielding her eyes. Was she returning once more to the grand lady? He leaned across the bed and grasped her chin, turning her face toward him. “If anything had,” he said with barely controlled politeness, “you can bet you’d remember.”
Which was not entirely true. After he had removed the dove gray skirt and blouse, her slip and bra, his passion had gotten the best of him. A rakish smile lifted the corners of his lips as he vaguely recalled tracing a stretch mark with his fingertip, tracing it all the way to the downy nest . . . and the delicate folds his finger found there. Fortunately for her royal highness, the scotch had gotten the best of him shortly thereafter. And fortunately for him, as well.This wanting of her was lunacy. Oil and water didn’t mix
“Get your clothes on. I’ll run you back to your apartment.”
* * * * * *
Orville was still snoring when Abbie and Cody left. On the ride back to the boarding school she kept to the far side of the pickup. A slow heat stole over her as she recalled the way she had wantonly pressed herself against him. That much she too vividly remembered. What else had happened? And what must he think? That because she was divorced she was up for grabs?
Wind Song Page 8
