Jessie's War (Civil War Steam)

by Connors, Meggan

  She pushed aside how he’d found her. Naked. With an equally naked Luke Bradshaw.

  Determined to follow him, she urged Taba to follow, but she’d only made it a few paces before someone whistled, and the horse stopped short.

  One of her kinsmen quickly caught up to her. “No, little sister, you stay with us.”

  She turned to him, noticing he addressed her as little sister rather than cousin. Her tribe had no word for cousin. Cheveyo had obviously adopted the term to create distance from her. The thought twisted her stomach into a knot that refused to ease.

  “I wanted to talk to him,” she began.

  “He’s done talking. You must let him go.”

  “Amitola,” she began, but her protest was weak, even to her.

  Her large kinsman waved her words away. “No. He’ll come back when he’s ready.” His eyes followed Cheveyo as he made his way toward the river. “You will not question me further. I will not answer.”

  So she didn’t.

  By the time they caught up to Cheveyo, the sun had begun to dip behind the western mountains. Pale gold light reflected against the white snow, an effect so different from the brilliant reds cast by the sun through smoke that she was used to. Her cousin turned a rabbit on a spit he’d constructed. “You made it.”

  “Amitola refused to let me follow.”

  Cheveyo sniffed. “The Jessie I knew never would have let that stop her.”

  She dismounted and busied herself with seeing to the needs of her horse. “We’re not kids anymore. You’re different, too.”

  “That’s true,” he said, with a deliberate, measured nod. He chewed on his lower lip, and for a moment, he looked the boy she remembered.

  “I missed you, Cheveyo.”

  “It’s been a long time,” he agreed. “Come sit with me by the fire, cousin.” Perhaps it was an overture in exchange for an overture.

  It was a start she could live with.

  * * * *

  “We’ll leave tomorrow at dawn. You’ll want to get some sleep,” Cheveyo said after they’d eaten their meager meal of dried berries and rabbit meat. He stood and walked toward his wikiup constructed of bark and sticks and covered in animal hides. He’d spent the better part of the evening constructing it, rather than talking to her.

  Standing, she trailed after him.

  He turned to her. “No.”

  “Where am I supposed to sleep?” she asked. “The other wikiup is too small for three.”

  “Grandfather would have your head if you slept with those two.” Cheveyo motioned to Amitola and his brother.

  “It would only be sleep.”

  Cheveyo answered her with a shrug.

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “My tent is large enough for two,” Luke offered. He patted the flap to his tent.

  She hadn’t even realized he’d been watching her, but she should have guessed he would be. “Not if you were the last man on Earth.”

  “Then build your own wikiup,” Cheveyo advised.

  “You took all the wood to make these two.” She motioned to his and Amitola’s shelters. “Besides, we’re cousins. As you pointed out, it’s forbidden to stay in the shelter of a man neither kin nor husband. Bradshaw is neither, but you are kin. Perfectly appropriate.”

  “First, I’m your adopted cousin, so while I’m a member of your tribe, your taking shelter with me is not appropriate at all,” Cheveyo said, his voice calm and reasonable. “Second, where are your blankets?”

  “I—I don’t have any.”

  “Right. There’s our second problem. I am not sharing my blankets with you.”

  “I have blankets. I’m more than happy to share,” Luke called out.

  “Shut up, Bradshaw!”

  “And I’ve already seen you naked.”

  “Shut up, Bradshaw!”

  Cheveyo pulled Jessie into the circle of his arms, and for the first time since he’d ridden back into her life, she felt welcomed.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he whispered in warning. “You haven’t won.” He kissed her forehead. In Paviotso, he said quietly, “Go sleep with your man.”

  She wrinkled her nose and scowled at him. “Ugh.”

  Cheveyo kissed each of her cheeks. “I missed you too, cousin.” For an instant, she thought he might relent. Instead, he kissed her once more on the forehead, released her, and walked into his wikiup.

  Which left her with the choice of sleeping outside in the snow or sleeping with Luke.

  She knew which one she wanted.

  Her breath fogged the cold night air as she brushed snow off a rock, wrapped a blanket around her body, and sat. The fractured moonlight reflected on the ocean of white snow stretching out in front of her for miles. Beautiful and stark and deadly.

  Behind her, Luke’s footfalls were heavy as he worked his way through frozen sagebrush to get to her. “Jessie.” He laid a hand on her shoulder.

  Her heart danced when he touched her, and she tried to ignore it. In the dim light, he was even more handsome—something about the way the moonlight lit his features or the way he looked at her, or perhaps it was simply the way he was.

  Her fingers ached to touch him, and because they did, she twisted her hands in her lap. If she touched him, she’d want more. She’d forget why she was so angry with him, and would risk falling for him all over again. She couldn’t lose him again. Once had been bad enough.

  But it wasn’t the bad times she remembered when she looked at Luke. The light on his face reminded her of those times he’d kissed her behind her father’s barn, his lips warm as they pressed against hers, a tentative kiss that had warmed her in a way she’d not known before or since. Her name on his lips reminded her of those times he’d whispered her name with reverence in his voice, as if no one existed for him but Jessie. Making her believe in him. In them.

  Lies, she told herself, and tried to force herself to believe the word.

  “Bradshaw,” she acknowledged in a voice as frozen as the fog of pogonip.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said. “Come into my tent. You’ll freeze out here.”

  “Hate to repeat myself, but not if you were the last man on Earth.” If he could lie to her, she would lie to him.

  “Bedding you isn’t high on my list either, sweetheart.”

  “You seemed eager enough this morning.” She lifted an eyebrow.

  “You’re a woman and you were naked.” He scowled. “I’m a man and not that discriminating.”

  “There you go again.”

  Luke was quiet for a moment. “This really isn’t going the way I’d planned. I’m starting to think these may not be my finest moments,” he acknowledged gravely, and Jessie wondered if, in his own fashion, he had just apologized. “But my company must be preferable to death from exposure, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe.”

  He smiled and took her hand in his, and electricity jumped between them. “Come with me, Jess.”

  She pulled her hand away. “It is forbidden for a woman to sleep in the shelter of a man neither kin nor husband,” she whispered, quoting Cheveyo.

  “We’ve already slept together.” His voice didn’t hold the suggestiveness she expected. Luke cleared his throat. “Last night, I mean. And just slept.”

  “I knew what you meant.” But it didn’t matter how he meant it. Either way, they had slept together. Her earlier bitterness died. “But you don’t know what Grandfather will do—to you, to me—if he finds out. You’re white. You’re the enemy. You don’t understand. I can’t do this.”

  But what Luke proposed was not forbidden in the eyes of her people. According to custom, she’d become Luke’s wife years before, when she’d given him the gift of her body.

  She’d become Luke’s wife in her own eyes, too.

  “I’m not the enemy,” he said. “Not his. Not yours. I’m just a man looking for answers.”

  “Everyone’s looking for something,” she said. “You don’t think th
at’s the excuse the miners used when they took our land from us? Everyone was ‘just passing through’ to California until the gold dried up. Then silver was found, and we fought wars over the land, or what was under it. Men died on both sides, and still do. Grandfather will never believe you aren’t the enemy. Never.”

  “You talk like you consider yourself native. I’m not your enemy, Jess. I only want to find your father, like you do.”

  “I am native, and this isn’t some altruistic adventure on your part. You’re not doing this for me, or even for Pop.” Strange, how that small bit of truth pained her. “You have a goal, and my father is part of that. If I didn’t have the information you need, would you still bring me along?”

  Luke was quiet for a time, and she heard his answer in his silence.

  “You mind if I sit here for a spell?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks,” he said, as if she’d given him a different answer. He sat on the rock next to her, so close their bodies touched. He adjusted his hat and looked up at the night sky, and out of the corner of her eyes, she studied his profile.

  She preferred not to think about how much she had wished for a moment like this once, so she stared up at the sky with him. The stars were bright, and she marveled at them. She’d missed the stars almost as much as she’d missed the man sitting beside her.

  “Remember the summer when you taught me all the names of the constellations?”

  “Yeah,” she whispered. “Gideon made fun of me for weeks.”

  A smile flirted with the corners of his lips. He reached for her, and she surprised herself by allowing him to take her hand in his. His big hand encircled hers and he squeezed her fingers. “Me, too.” He turned to her. “God, I miss him.”

  Against her better judgment, she leaned into him. She wanted to share his warmth, to share her loneliness with someone who understood, who mourned Gideon as much as she did. Because no matter what else Luke had done, he’d loved Gideon once.

  She tried to convince herself she allowed this platonic intimacy because there was no one else. Cheveyo made it clear he didn’t want to reestablish the bonds they’d once had. She only relied on Luke because he was there.

  She could turn away any time she wanted.

  “Me, too,” she whispered.

  He put his arm around her shoulders.

  He lifted her chin and their eyes met. With the pad of his thumb, he traced her lips, and she didn’t pull away. When he finally pulled her into his lap, she didn’t resist.

  Leaning in slowly, he gave her plenty of time to see the intensity of his eyes before he closed them. Enough time to pull away.

  His lips brushed against hers, a taste of what he offered.

  Reaching up, she touched his face, the stubble of his whiskers rough beneath her palm.

  He held her loosely as if he expected her to jump up and run from him, and perhaps she should have.

  Instead, she kissed him back.

  Luke cupped her neck at the base of her skull, tilting her head back to kiss her deeply, his tongue gliding into her mouth, taking her lower lip between his teeth and sucking gently. Never giving her a chance to get used to him, he teased her into wanting more. Small laps, kissing the corners of her mouth, then plunging in, crushing her lips with his before retreating, a combination of gentle and rough, sweet and passionate. He kissed the underside of her jaw, her mouth, her eyelids, the sensitive spot below her ear.

  Her body contracted with want, heat gathering at the juncture of her thighs.

  “Jessie,” he whispered, his lips against her ear.

  She shook herself out of the daze of desire gripping her, and discovered she had wrapped her arms around his neck and fisted her hands in his hair. Pulling him closer. Her still-bruised heart quaked, but her body hummed with anticipation.

  All she had was want. Not reason or common sense. Not even anger or fear. Only a desire so intense it hurt, a pain going beyond the physicality of lust. It left her trembling and raw.

  She allowed her shaking hands to fall into her lap as she quivered under the force of all that need. “Luke,” she whispered, and then hastily amended, “Bradshaw.”

  Beneath her fingers, his muscles tensed. He rested his chin on the top of her head. “You mind if we set for a spell?”

  Jessie pressed her ear against his chest and listened to the drumming of his heart. His embrace was warm and she was so tired. She didn’t want to fight anymore—not with him, not with Cheveyo, not with anyone. She only wanted to forget for a moment and go to sleep, though even that would be impossible. What passed for sleep in her life were short catnaps broken by nightmares and the ever-present fear.

  Luke stroked her hair.

  She liked being in the circle of his arms, feeling the rise and fall of his chest against her, reminding her that he lived. That they both lived. She told herself it was because she had been alone for so long.

  For the first time in years, she felt alive and wanted to stay that way.

  “I guess that would be all right,” she murmured.

  Then she promptly fell asleep.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Luke woke the next morning, Jessie’s face was pressed into his bare chest. Her head rested on his bicep, and he brushed his cheek against her dark hair, resisting the urge to taste the salt of her skin and the sweetness of her mouth.

  She inhaled deeply, and if he didn’t know better, he’d think her content.

  He knew he was.

  Nothing felt more right than having Jessie lie in his arms. The warmth of her body, her scent, it all wrapped around him, clenching his heart in a tight fist. Though she was thinner than she had been when he’d left, her body had filled out, become the form of a woman.

  The desperate thrumming of his desire for her disconcerted him.

  She was here, now. With him.

  Her hand snaked around his waist, brushing up against his flank. First on the waistband of his trousers, then on the bare skin of his back. Luke nearly lost himself to the power of that touch when he heard rustling outside his tent. As the tent flap opened, he drew his gun and had it cocked before Cheveyo’s face appeared.

  “This is cozy,” he said.

  Luke decocked his weapon and set it down. He rested his hand possessively on her hip, and she didn’t pull away.

  She kept her eyes closed, feigning sleep, not acknowledging her cousin or addressing the fact she lay in his arms.

  “I guess it’s not quite so forbidden when it’s cold, is it, cousin?”

  Jessie made no move to confront her cousin or his taunts. Cheveyo’s dark eyes mocked him, daring a confrontation, and Luke, despite his better judgment, acquiesced.

  He gingerly moved his arm out from underneath Jessie’s head and stood up, her dark hair sliding over him like a satiny sheet as he stood up to duck under the flap of the tent. The cold morning air burned his skin, but he ignored it.

  If anyone started this fight, it would be Cheveyo, but Luke would make damn certain he finished it. His knuckles ached from clenching his fists.

  “Are we going to have words, Cheveyo son of Chayton?”

  Cheveyo gaze shifted from Luke’s face to the flap of his tent, and back. “I’m not sure I like the way you were touching my cousin, Luke Bradshaw.”

  “If you don’t like it, you take her,” Luke returned.

  Cheveyo didn’t call Luke’s bluff. “Not sure I like you either, white man.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  Amusement lit Cheveyo’s features, and every muscle in Luke’s body stiffened.

  Jessie was suddenly between them, a blanket over her shoulders. She put a hand on his bare chest, and his body tensed for an entirely different reason. “This isn’t about you,” she whispered. “It’s about me.”

  Luke’s anger dissipated at her touch, but he remained cautious, waiting for some trick on her part. She’d been so angry since he’d come back into her life. Her anger he understood. The gentleness of
her touch seemed foreign, out of place, disconcerting. Fear flashed in her dark eyes, and she dropped her hand, but he still felt the imprint of her palm against his flesh long after she’d broken contact, as if she had marked him with the impression of golden skin, sleek hair, and woman.

  She rubbed her hand against her skirt, and turned to her cousin. “You left me little choice, brother. But let me assure you, nothing happened. Nothing will happen.”

  Luke snorted a bitter laugh, because he remembered all too well what had once happened between them. Then Jessie’s eyes met his over her shoulder, and his posturing shamed him. She wasn’t some prize to be won, some possession to be fought over. Regardless of whatever claim he may have on her, she was, and always would be, Jessie.

  Cheveyo’s smile was wolfish. False. “Honestly, cousin, I believe you. But you don’t need to convince me.”

  Jessie’s features became pinched, her eyes pained.

  Luke fought to urge to punch Cheveyo in the face. Only stopped himself because even he recognized how impulsive and wrong his actions were. He’d survived for as long as he had because everything he did was calculated.

  Everything, that is, until he had found out about this assignment.

  Her eyes went wide as she peeked around Luke.

  He turned, and there, on the horizon, a group of warriors crested the hill, led by a man wearing an elaborate headdress, allowing any and all who saw him to know precisely who and what he was, even at a great distance.

  A man who led the Paviotso tribe whose name, when translated, meant “death singers.”

  A man who had single-handedly won a war with nothing more than the power of his voice. A man declared enemy by Luke’s government. The most dangerous man in the West.

  Ewepu So’wina’.

  Jessie’s grandfather.

  * * * *

  Half an hour later, Jessie would face her grandfather.

  Luke emerged from behind a small copse of cottonwood trees whose bare branches reached for the pale winter sun like skeletal fingers. Jessie watched him as he climbed the bank of the river, dressed in a clean white shirt, black vest and trousers, his black slouch hat shading his eyes. His silver badge caught the sunlight, and he had a pistol holstered on his left hip and a knife strapped to his thigh.