Hostage Heart

by Lindsay McKenna

Suppressing a momentary twinge of guilt, Matt lunged out from behind the beam. He threw one arm around her slender waist and grabbed the rifle with the other.

  Lark gasped as an arm like steel jerked her backward off her feet. The rifle was torn out of her grasp and sailed harmlessly away from her. A scream clawed up her throat, her hair flying wildly as she struggled to free herself. A rough, callused hand clamped hard against her mouth, crushing her lips against her teeth. Her nostrils flared, and she drank in the sweet stench of blood and the smell of a white man. Fear ate away her previous anger. It wasn’t Ga’n! Lark twisted, biting his fingers. He groaned and jerked away his hand.

  She made a half turn, twisting to catch a glimpse of her captor. He towered over her. Though tall, she felt like a mere child against his powerful chest and broad shoulders. The harsh planes of his face were frozen with—what? A small cry escaped her and Lark tried to push away from him. They both tilted off balance. She saw the man tense and he gave a cry, his left leg suddenly collapsing out from beneath him. They toppled to the straw.

  The air was knocked out of Lark as the man landed heavily on top of her. She lay for several seconds, stunned and gasping for breath, unable to move. The sensation of a man’s body touching hers was shocking. No Apache man ever touched an Apache maiden. It was forbidden before marriage. His hips ground into hers and another electric sensation uncurled through her. Panicked by the sudden turn of events, Lark, began to struggle, trying to pull her hands free.

  Matt cursed, clamping one hand across her mouth and capturing her wrists above her head. He lay on top of her, both of them breathing heavily. Despite his fever and weakness, he was wildly aware of her firm, young breasts pressing into his chest. The soft yielding of her hips beneath his sparked a primal animal urge in him. He looked down, able to study her closely for the first time. His voice came harsh and rasping.

  “Quit struggling, I won’t hurt you. I need your help.” Her huge blue-violet eyes widened. Slowly he removed his hand. That mouth He stared down at it: a full, expressive mouth with corners that turned softly upward; lips that were wildly sensual and begged to be tamed.

  Lark ceased struggling. Terror mixed with confusion as she heard the pain lacing his words. “What?”

  He liked her slightly breathless voice, which reminded him of mellow whiskey. “I need help. My name is Matt Kincaid. I’ve been shot and I need a doctor.” He saw the fear dissolve in her luminous eyes; eyes in which a man could lose his soul forever. She must be someone’s wife. The lucky bastard. Matt slowly loosened his hold on her slender wrists. “If I let you go, will you stay? I’ve got to have help.”

  Gulping unsteadily, Lark nodded once. Fire licked through her straining body as she felt each point of contact with him. The sensation wasn’t unpleasant, and she was shamefully aware that her nipples were hardening beneath his chest. “Y-yes. I won’t leave,” she managed to say.

  Matt rolled off her, releasing her completely. Too weak to move, he gave in momentarily to the pain and fever, rolling over on his back. Another wave of light-headedness assaulted him. He didn’t fight it this time. Through half-closed eyes he watched the woman get slowly to her knees. He knew she would help him. Maybe it was her heart-shaped face, those eyes now fraught with concern and kindness, that told him so. Or was it the soothing touch of her cool hand upon his sweaty brow after she gently removed his hat? Matt didn’t know. Closing his eyes, he gave in to his weakness.

  “Wake up!” Lark begged, shaking his broad, powerful shoulders. In the dim light, she could see blood covering his left leg. The putrid smell of torn flesh stung her sensitive nostrils. The stench of blood and sweat mingled with the sour odor of his unwashed body and almost made her retch. Lark gripped his dirty cotton shirt and gave him another sharp shake. “Wake up! I can’t help you unless I can get you to the house. You’ve got to get up!”

  Lark struggled to her feet. He was a pindah-lickoyee, a white eyes…someone who hated her kind. But there was something about his broad, generous face, the curve of his month, and the look in his pain-filled gray eyes that pushed her defensiveness aside. She tried to analyze why this man had touched her heart as effortlessly as Holos, the Sun, caressed the meadow flowers with his warming rays. He tried a taut, one-cornered smile to reward her, and Lark’s heart beat once in response to his unspoken thanks.

  Lark gasped for breath as she tugged and pulled Matt Kincaid to his unsteady feet. She sagged beneath his weight. His arm went around her shoulders, and he leaned heavily on her, his head against her hair. She felt him shudder with each step they took.

  “You can make it,” she insisted, her arm wrapped tightly around his waist. “It’s just a little way to the ranch house. Please, try….” She groaned as he leaned more heavily against her. If only one of the wranglers was present to help. None of the other women was as tall or as strong as she was, so there was no sense in waking them to get their help.

  Matt bit back a groan, his head swimming, making it impossible for him to limp in a straight line. Despite his semiconscious state, he was aware of the woman’s surprising strength. She reminded him of a lithe cougar. His six-foot, three-inch frame weighed two hundred pounds yet she was supporting him. As he rested his face against her head, he inhaled the natural feminine sweetness of her hair. Beautiful hair, he thought disjointedly. Not coarse like a horse’s mane, but just as thick. He buried his face in the strands.

  Lark staggered up the three steps of the porch with the cowboy in tow. How she managed to push open the front door and get him inside she didn’t know. She remembered her father describing how his god would perform miracles for his people every now and then. Did this cowboy believe in the same god?

  Lark got the stranger to the brass bed and let him fall backward onto it. She watched as he sank into the feather mattress, already unconscious.

  Rubbing her aching shoulder, she looked down to see rust-colored blood smeared across the pristine whiteness of her gown. It struck Lark that, despite the racial gulf between them, they both shared red blood. Was her father right? Was there truly little difference between the races, as he had always preached? She cast a backward glance at Matt Kincaid, who lay half on the bed and half off it. Ga’n’s words haunted her as she quickly pulled off the gown and donned her usual workday clothes. Was this the bear he had spoken of? Was this the man who had been hunting Ga’n?

  Shivering, Lark tugged and pulled until she got the dusty cowboy boots off the man’s feet. After getting Kincaid situated on the bed and covered, she ran lightly across the yard. The eastern horizon was lightening from gray to a pale pink, announcing that within another hour Holos would rise.

  There were two bunkhouses, one for the single wranglers and the other for the old Apache men and women who had been left behind by their clans to die. Small homes set farther back in the forest housed the families of the married wranglers.

  As Lark neared the second bunkhouse, she thanked Us’an and her father for his generosity of spirit. It had become widely known over the years that Roarke Gallagher would take in the Old Ones who could no longer move with their rancherias.

  Nomads, the Apache clans moved around the desert and mountains with the seasons. When the elderly could no longer keep up, they voluntarily stayed behind to starve to death. Roarke had taken in twelve such Apaches over the years and, in return for one hour of work a day, they got free room and board. A soft smile touched Lark’s mouth as she mounted the steps and quietly opened the wooden door.

  “I was expecting you, daughter.”

  Old Ny-Oden, his white hair hanging long across his shoulders, sat on his bunk. Once he had been the shaman, or medicine man, for the Jicarilla Apache. Roarke Gallagher had made it known years ago that when Ny-Oden wanted to step down as shaman and pass his knowledge on to a younger man, he would be welcomed at the ranch. Lark remembered the small, wiry Apache with sparkling obsidian eyes who had come to the ranch when she was five years old. Ny-Oden had taught her the ways of a shaman, and she loved h
im like a grandfather.

  “There isn’t much time, Grandfather. A man is hurt. A bullet wound in his leg. He’s asked for our help.”

  Ny-Oden placed his clawlike hand in hers, allowing her to help him stand. His hands, once supple, were now frozen into the talonlike positions of an eagle hunting prey. The knuckles were permanently swollen, and over the years he had lost all of his manual mobility.

  When that had happened, Ny-Oden had gone to Roarke and told him he was no longer of use and would leave the ranch to die alone. Roarke had told him that if he would teach Lark the ways of shaman and guide her in nursing the people as well as the animals, he could stay. The bargain had been struck to the happiness of all concerned.

  “You were waiting for me,” Lark said, noticing that the old man was already dressed. “Why?”

  “Daughter of mine, Us’an awakened me moments ago and told me to wait for your arrival.”

  Lark patiently led Ny-Oden out to the porch. “I wish Us’an talked to me the way he talks with you. Ga’n was here shortly after sunset,” she said.

  Ny-Oden tilted his white head, studying her intently. “There were words between you?”

  “Aren’t there always? At one time, he wasn’t evil. Now, he is. I think he’s under the wicked spell of Owl-Man Monster.”

  The Apache believed that the monster took on the guise of a man with the face of an owl and stalked the night, hunting for victims to kill. Roarke had told her that Owl-Man Monster was akin to the bogeyman that white people believed existed in the dark of night. She placed her arm around the frail, sixty-year-old Apache. “I’m frightened, Grandfather. I think this is the man for whom Ga’n was hunting. He’s badly wounded.”

  “My di-yin told me that a pindah would come,” Ny-Oden agreed in his reedlike voice.

  “I wish you had told me.” But Lark knew that a shaman’s di-yin, or power from the unseen world, often told him many things. Whether Ny-Oden passed them on to her was up to him. Many times, Ny-Oden would get a vague feeling of something about to happen, but be unable to describe it in detail. Still, Lark would have settled for even an inkling of this night’s unending surprises.

  When they had climbed the porch steps, Ny-Oden halted to catch his breath. “My di-yin has told me much of this stranger’s arrival, daughter.”

  Worriedly Lark looked down at the old man, who was stooped over with age. “Grandfather, tell me that no more sadness or violence will befall us. I’m young, but my heart is torn and bleeding. I cannot take much more. I have forty people to clothe and feed. I must make money for the bank so that we can keep our beautiful home. I cannot disappoint those who have created this ranch.” She gestured toward the bedroom, and they walked toward it at a snail’s pace. “My own feelings tell me this is no ordinary pindah. I sense much trouble and anger in him, Grandfather.”

  Several seconds passed before Ny-Oden spoke. “You come from the strongest of Apache blood, my daughter. Those in your family were all chiefs and leaders. You are no less than them. Take heart and remember that. The stranger must be cared for. No pindah doctor will come from Prescott to save his life. He is in our hands, as it should be.”

  Shoving aside her own personal disappointment in Ny-Oden’s riddle-like answer, Lark led him through the door.

  Ny-Oden lowered himself slowly into a maple rocking chair near the bed. Lark took a multicolored blanket and placed it across the old Apache’s lap to keep him warm in the chill of the early morning.

  “Daughter, you will need your shaman’s supplies,” Ny-Oden directed. “But first, examine the extent of his wound.”

  Lark gazed down at the ugly, festering wound that could be seen through the slit in Kincaid’s dirty Levi’s. “It appears to be a single bullet, Grandfather.”

  “How many days old? Your nose will tell you.”

  With a grimace, Lark straightened. She lit three kerosene lamps, setting two on stands on either side of the brass bed and a third on the mantel of the fireplace. “It festers badly. I would guess three, perhaps four days.”

  Ny-Oden nodded sagely. “Does it seep with a straw color or blood?”

  Lark would have to slit open the Levi’s in order to ascertain that. “I don’t know.”

  “Undress him completely, daughter.”

  Lark stared at the shaman. “Grandfather?”

  “Undress him. His clothes are of filth and more than likely filled with lice or other vermin. Place many blankets beneath him to soak up his fever sweat.”

  “But…” She had never seen a man completely undressed except for the young male children who played naked in the summer. It was not permissible for any maiden to look on a man’s body until after she was married.

  “I would do it myself were it not for my frozen hands and failing eyesight,” Ny-Oden said. “All I can do is sit here and guide you. Hear me, daughter. Us’an has placed this man’s life in your hands. A shaman, whether man or woman, must minister to both without blushing like a red field poppy.”

  Lark nodded, ashamed of her reaction to his request. Ny-Oden had not been able to treat anyone for the last five years. Instead, he had led her verbally, step-by-step, through whatever needed to be done; whether it was to mend a child, a woman, or a man, or to heal an animal’s wound. The situation had never arisen in which she had to doctor a naked man. Lark woodenly began to strip Matt Kincaid of his clothes. Her fingers trembled as she unbuttoned the dark blue cotton shirt, pulling it apart to expose his darkly haired barrel chest. Eyes widening, Lark hesitated. Among Apaches, a hairless body was desirable and considered a pleasing mark of beauty. No Apache had hair such as this man! He looked like a black bear in her mind. Yet, as Lark stared at him, she acknowledged that he had a primal male beauty about him. His shoulders were clean and broad, silently attesting to the hidden strength lying in wait in them. Like the Apaches, his chest was well rounded, the muscles taut and firm beneath that light mat of unsightly hair. A sheen of sweat glistened beneath that curly abundance, and it forced Lark back to work.

  “He’s sweating heavily, Grandfather.” She removed the shirt and dropped it on the oak floor beside the bed.

  “Fever is eating him up. We must hurry, daughter.”

  Ny-Oden rarely sounded so urgent, and Lark quickly pulled open the belt. Her mouth grew dry as she unsnapped the six buttons to the Levi’s. Apache men wore a breechclout beneath their trousers. He wore something similar, although Lark thought the garment looked strange as she peeled the Levi’s down his narrow hips. Her bowie knife was beneath the other pillow and she retrieved it, then positioned the tip over the wounded thigh. The steel blade glinted in the predawn light as she snagged a torn slit of the Levi’s, ripping it cleanly open.

  “Ugh.” Lark groaned, watching with mounting fear as a straw-colored ooze pearled across his swollen and discolored leg.

  Ny-Oden leaned forward, watching her intently. “Quickly, daughter. The wound is crying to be cleaned and eased of its fevered state.”

  Matt Kincaid was beautiful, Lark realized as she finished removing his trousers. His thighs were hard, and as powerfully built as the finest of stallions. Despite the hair on his legs, Lark admitted he was well proportioned as few men could be. He was a giant, even taller and larger than her father. He possessed walnut-brown hair that held strands of gold beneath the lamplight.

  Girding herself to follow Ny-Oden’s orders, Lark pulled off the strange-looking breechclout. Heat burned in her cheeks, and she avoided Ny-Oden’s gaze. She scolded herself: he looked no different from the Kentucky Stud before he was going to breed a mare in heat.

  “Cover him with many blankets except around the wound,” Ny-Oden urged more gently. “Later he will need to be bathed.”

  Lark nodded, tucking several blankets around him. His name is Matt Kincaid, she reminded herself sourly. Ny-Oden had said Us’an had chosen her to care for him. Humbly she must accept his dictate. Didn’t Us’an realize how unsure she was around pindahs? Would Matt Kincaid wake to curse her as the children
at the school in Prescott had done when she rode in with her father? Biting down on her lower lip, Lark went to the kitchen to start a fire in the iron stove and set several kettles of water on to boil.

  For the next half hour, while the water heated, Lark set out the supplies she would need. After determining that a single bullet was lodged deep in Matt’s thigh, she concentrated on how to get it out. She mixed yerba santos mer, an herb that coagulated the blood, into a thick pulp. Taking some moldy tortillas from the kitchen, Lark crumbled them up with the herb and added hodenten, made from ground poppies and made sacred by Ny-Oden’s incantations. A bit of water finished the preparation and she set aside the large bowl. After passing the tip of her smaller hunting knife through the flame of one of the kerosene lamps, Lark was ready.

  She prayed to Us’an that he would keep Matt Kincaid unconscious so that he would not feel the pain. Her hand shook briefly as she held the knife over the wound.

  “I am afraid, Grandfather.”

  “Us’an will guide your hand, my daughter.”

  Taking a deep breath, she twisted the knife once and dug deftly. Dark black blood flowed out of the wound, spilling across her fingers as she held his leg steady. And then fresh red blood followed as she retrieved the flattened piece of lead from his body.

  Kincaid groaned, and Lark froze. He moved slightly, muttering unintelligibly, but remained unconscious. Grateful, Lark quickly took hot, soapy water and a cloth and cleansed the wound. Around the ranch, she was called upon to minister to animal wounds all the time. She tried to imagine that Matt was an animal in need of her gentle hand.

  After packing the wound with the poultice, Lark wrapped his thigh. Wiping the perspiration from her brow, she glanced over at Ny-Oden, whose black eyes were shiny with silent praise.

  She set to work cleaning Matt Kincaid’s filthy body next. By the time she got to his hips, Lark began to feel shaky inside. She tried not to stare at his large male symbol, pretending he was the stallion instead. Nevertheless, her heart quickened as a cauldron of new and undefined emotions swirled and eddied deep within her. She gently held him captive in her fingers, cleaning him. Was this the source of mysterious joy that a newly married woman described in whispers only to her married friends? Was this the source of delight she had heard them talk about in words of awe and trembling beauty?