He wanted to marry her. The hot look in his eyes made her knees weak. He wanted her, and she yearned for his kisses, the feel of his hands on her body once more. But she wanted his heart, too, and he did not love her.
It was wiser, she knew, to keep him at a distance. If she gave in to him, he would grow to hate her. He would not long tolerate the prejudices of his neighbors.
But it hurt, turning away from him. Deep inside it hurt.
Carson watched the delight on her face fade away when she spotted him. Dammit, she wouldn’t even look him in the eye.
“Bess, Megan, why don’t you two run on into the house and help Aunt Gussie. I need to talk to Winter Fawn.”
He saw the refusal building in Winter Fawn’s face.
“Please,” he added.
When the girls were gone, Winter Fawn folded her arms across her chest and looked away toward the mountains in the west.
“You worked hard today,” he offered.
“We all did.”
“And you enjoyed it.”
“Perhaps.”
“I heard you laughing. I haven’t heard you laugh in a long time. It sounded good.”
When she said nothing, Carson was tempted to grab her and shake her. Talk to me, dammit. But he didn’t.
“Your father says you agreed to think about marrying me.”
“My father says too much.”
“Are you thinking about it?”
The quick flash of pain across her face hurt him, but it told him she cared. If she didn’t care, none of this would hurt her. Relieved that he hadn’t completely lost her yet, he scrambled for something to say.
Finally, slowly, he spoke. “You asked me the other night if I loved you.”
Her sharp intake of breath assured him he had her attention. “It is not important.”
“I don’t believe you. If it wasn’t important to you, you wouldn’t have asked. You wouldn’t have said you couldn’t marry a man who didn’t love you. I didn’t answer you that night because I didn’t know what to say.”
“It was a simple question. Yes or no would have served.”
“But for me it’s not a simple question,” he said. “I don’t trust love, Winter Fawn. Not the kind of love you meant. I mean, love for a child, a parent, that kind of love I understand. I accept that. But what passes for love between a man and a woman…I’ve just never seen it work right. Mainly I just trust what I can see and touch.”
“What about Megan’s mother?” Winter Fawn asked quietly. “Did you not love her?”
“Yes. I thought so. But it didn’t make either of us happy. It just got in the way.”
“It got you a beautiful daughter.”
“No. Love didn’t get us Megan. That was sex. Sex, I trust. I understand it. We could have that, you and I. It would be good between us, Winter Fawn. Better than good. I can make you happy if you’ll give me the chance.”
Finally, finally she met his gaze. “You ask me to give you, and sex, a chance. Yet you give love no chance at all. What happened with your wife that makes you so distrustful of love?”
It was human nature to protect oneself against pain, and Carson was not immune to such instinct. He had humbled himself before her more than with any other person. Yet still she pushed for more. He could not give her what she wanted.
With a shake of his head, he said, “That was a long time ago, and it’s not something I care to talk about.”
Winter Fawn had not thought her heart could ache worse, but she’d been wrong.
“This isn’t about Julia and me,” he said. “It’s about me and you, the two of us. It’s about the future, not the past. I’m asking you to give us a chance, Winter Fawn.”
“A chance for what?” she cried softly. “Do you not see the future you speak of, Carson? Have you already forgotten how you scraped your knuckles in town? How long will you want a wife who is scorned by all your neighbors? How long before you come to hate me for it?”
“I don’t believe you said that. Do you think I give a damn what those small-minded people think?” he demanded.
“Do you want their hate for me to fall on Megan? On Bess?”
“It won’t happen,” he protested. “Not if you give us a chance. Give those people in town a chance to know you.”
“Me?” she cried. “Why do they not give me a chance? They have judged me and condemned me because of the color of my skin. Now I know you cannot love me if you can suggest that the burden be mine. And you are not thinking of your family, of the hurt that could be done to them. And what if we had children? Do you want children with Arapaho blood? You ask if I have thought of marrying you. I have thought of little else for days, and I see no way for either of us to be happy. If you search your heart, you will know I speak the truth. You canna deny it.”
“Deny it?” Lord, had a woman ever made him so furious? “Why should I bother denying it, when you’ve got everything all figured out? You have all the answers, and they’re all bad ones. But you forgot one thing, and it’s something you can’t deny.”
She stood before him, half defiant, half wary. “What?”
“This.” Before she could protest, before she could slip away, he pulled her to his chest and took her mouth with his. No soft, exploring kiss this time, no gentle giving. He took. Hard and fast and deep, he ravaged her mouth with his, claiming her. She was his, by damn, his.
And he was bruising her. Appalled at his own harshness, he gentled the kiss and slid his arms around her, feeling her heart pound in rhythm with his. When her hands moved to his shoulders, he nearly sagged in relief. She still wanted him. This magic that happened between them was still there, still real. She felt it, too.
Slowly he eased his lips from hers and looked down at her face. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted.
When her eyes fluttered open he saw the hunger in them.
“Deny that,” he whispered. “If you can.”
Trembling, she stepped back and pressed a hand to her lips.
“I must go in now. I must…help set the table.”
Carson fought the urge to grab her again and never let her go. In his arms was the one place where she did not argue.
Instead, he let her walk away and tried to calm the fury, the pain rising inside him like a sickness. If she could walk away from him this way, he could not hide from the truth.
He was losing her.
During the next few days Winter Fawn tried to act as if nothing was wrong.
Gussie insisted on making a dress for her from some of the fabric she’d bought in town. At first Winter Fawn had been wary, until Gussie assured her that she would not strap her up in one of those awful things Gussie wore beneath her dresses. A corset, she called it.
Once that fear was dispensed with, Winter Fawn eagerly agreed to the new dress, but insisted on helping. She was good with a needle and thread. Her own steel needles had been given to her by her father many years ago. But along with everything but the clothes she had been wearing for so long now, the needles had been left behind. She hoped her grandmother, who had her own needles, would find someone to put them to good use.
Gussie and Bess had both brought needles with them, and they were smoother and finer than hers.
The blue gingham dress she and Gussie designed was made in a simple, wrap-around fashion with long sleeves and a decorative collar.
“Oh, it’s lovely,” Bess claimed. “And the color is perfect on you.”
Winter Fawn ran her hands down the skirt, loving the crisp feel of the new fabric. “I’ll be afraid to wear it,” she said with a smile. “I’ll get it soiled.” She was also afraid the new dress would draw Carson’s attention.
“That,” Gussie proclaimed, “is why you need another dress, of the dark green this time, I think. And an apron. That will help protect them.”
So, even as Winter Fawn strengthened her resolve to return to Our People in the fall, she took another step into the white world. She lived in a log house on a ranch, took
heated baths in a tin tub, cooked on an iron stove. She sewed by the light of a glass-globed lantern. She wore a white woman’s dress. And like any white farmer, she studied the furrows in the turned earth every day for a sign of something green.
“Something other than grass,” she muttered, yanking out yet another interloper in the garden. The grass, it seemed, did not wish to remain plowed under. It knew where it wanted to grow and did not care that Winter Fawn had other plans for that particular patch of soil.
Every morning as soon as it was light Winter Fawn walked the garden, careful to step only between the rows where the precious seeds were planted. She pulled grass, checked the moisture level, carried water in a bucket if one area seemed too dry while the rest of the garden was still damp from the last irrigation.
Hunter stood by one afternoon watching her bend and stoop and inspect. “Da says you must have patience.”
She laughed. “Does he say where this patience is supposed to come from?”
Her brother smiled. “Nae.”
Winter Fawn strolled to the end of the row and stood beside him. “You are content here.” She made it a statement rather than a question, because she could see the truth of it in his face each day. He and their father were nearly inseparable, and Winter Fawn was glad for them.
“Aye,” he said. “That surprises you?”
“Nae.” She shrugged and watched a hawk glide high above the river.
“You would be content, too, if you could settle your differences with Carson.”
Winter Fawn shook her head. “It’s not that simple. Doesn’t it bother you the way they treated us in town?”
“Nae, why should it? Do you remember when we were children we talked about how we wanted one day to see the world our father described to us, the world beyond the one we knew?”
“Aye.” Across the river now, the hawk dove for its prey. “I remember.”
“Then after he left, we dreamed of going with him, of him coming for us one day to take us with him.”
“Aye, but we never thought about how the whites would treat us.”
“I don’t understand why you care about that.”
She shrugged again. “Maybe for myself I don’t, although I find it hurtful to be despised for nothing more than the color of my skin.”
“Do not Our People think of whites in the same way? Have we not raided the white man’s settlements and ranches and farms, stolen his cattle, sometimes even his children? Killed him and carried his scalp on our lances with pride? Simply because he is white?”
“No,” she told him. “Not simply because he is white. At least not at first. It was because the whites keep pushing us away from our hunting grounds, telling us we have no right to go where we will. Killing off all the game so we go hungry.”
Hunter nodded as though giving her the point. “Still, can you not see beyond your hurt and ignore those people in town?”
“Perhaps,” she admitted. “But how long can I ignore the fights Carson will get into because of me? How long before those people turn on Megan and Bess and Gussie for befriending us? Nae, I canna accept that. I canna be responsible for that.”
Hunter frowned at her. “You are not responsible. They are,” he said with a wave in the general direction of town. “And I will tell you this, sister, it is not your place to make decisions for Bess and the others, including Carson. They can make up their own minds if they want to deal with those other people or not.”
Deep into the night Winter Fawn thought about Hunter’s words. In the end they only served to confuse her more.
More than a week had passed since the seeds were buried in the soil behind the house. Winter Fawn was about to decide that the entire effort was a miserable failure, yet she could not stop herself from making her daily trek outdoors as soon as they had cleaned up after breakfast. The sun was usually just breaking the horizon by that time. It was not, perhaps, the best light by which to discover tiny green sprouts, but she would stand and wait for the sun to rise, for the light to come.
Today, as the light grew stronger, she stood with her arms around herself to ward off the morning chill and stared out over the rows. There! What was that? It looked like…like moss. They had not planted moss, she was sure of that.
Stooping for a closer look, Winter Fawn’s eyes widened. Slowly, tentatively, she ran one finger over the tiny green growth.
Radishes.
Oh! Oh! “They sprouted. Oh, my. They sprouted.” They didn’t look like radishes, but they would. Oh, they would! She knew what they were because she had made herself memorize the location of every type of seed they had planted, and Gussie had said the radishes should be the first to sprout. There were dozens and dozens, so tiny and tender, like a small green blanket over the soil.
“Look at them,” she breathed.
Behind her came a low chuckle. “We’ll make a farmer out of you yet.”
On her knees and totally oblivious to the dirt she was grinding into her new dress and apron, Winter Fawn turned to smile up at Carson in wonder. “Aren’t they beautiful? There are so many!”
Carson laughed. “You’ll thin them down to give them room to grow.”
Her eyes widened in horror. “Thin them down?” She didna like the sound of that, no, not at all. “You mean…kill them?”
This time Carson’s laughter boomed and echoed through the trees along the river beyond the garden.
Gussie, Bess, and Megan rounded the house just then, on their way to have their own daily look.
“Gussie,” Winter Fawn cried. “Gussie, come look! We have radishes! Carson says we must kill some of them to give them room to grow. He canna mean it! After all our work?”
As gently and mater-of-factly as she could, Gussie explained the concept of thinning to Winter Fawn.
Winter Fawn did not like it, but she saw the sense in it and resigned herself. But pulling up so many of those tiny, beautiful seedlings was one of the hardest things she had ever done in her life. It hurt.
But soon she was too busy in the garden to worry about those small plants she was forced to pluck from the ground. The emergence of the radishes, it seemed, was a signal to the rest of the seeds that it was time to send down roots and sprout leaves. Winter Fawn spent hours thinning, pulling grass and weeds, irrigating. She spent even more hours simply standing beside the garden and staring at it in growing wonder. It was a miracle, this business of gardening.
Sadly, she acknowledged that when she returned to Our People in the fall, she would never be able to plant another garden.
Maybe she wouldn’t return to the tribe. Or perhaps when they moved out onto the plains again next spring she would simply stay in their winter valley and plant a garden there.
Alone?
The mere thought of living her life alone, even for only the spring and summer seasons, brought an unbearable ache to her heart. She could not live alone, with no one to talk to, no one to love. It was not the way of Our People to live alone. It was not her way.
Shaking off the depressing thought, she vowed that if this were to be her only garden, she would work to make it the best it could be.
Standing at the corner of the house, Carson thought he could almost read her thoughts as her expression changed from delight to pride to sadness. Damn her stubbornness.
Hell, if she wouldn’t marry him, maybe he could hire her to be his gardener.
He tugged on the brim of his hat and strolled toward her. “It looks good,” he told her.
She took a deep breath. “Aye, it does, doesn’t it? Of course I’ve never seen a garden before so I have naught to compare it to, but to me it is a beautiful, miraculous thing.”
“If the corn does well,” he said casually while tension tightened his shoulders, “we should plant a couple of acres of it next year.”
“Perhaps you should.”
“Don’t,” he said sharply. “Don’t exclude yourself that way, as if you won’t be here next year. I won’t let you go, Winter Fawn.”<
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She turned on him with anger in her eyes. “Am I as a horse to you, that you think you can control me? Own me?”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“I will chose my own staying and leaving, and you will have naught to say about it, Carson Dulaney.”
Dammit, he thought as she stomped away from him. He always managed to say the wrong thing to her. He either made her mad, or sad, no matter what he said.
They should stop talking. They did much better together when the didn’t talk.
He didn’t think of her as his property, like a horse. But she was still his, by damn. All he had to do was figure out a way to make her realize it.
Chapter Sixteen
Two nights later, a sharp crack of thunder woke Carson sometime after midnight. For one unguarded moment, before he was fully awake, he thought it was cannon fire. He bolted upright and for three beats of his heart, he didn’t know where he was.
Then he heard the loud roar of rain pounding on the roof.
Home. He was home on the ranch in Colorado. No cannons. No war. No piles of dead bodies. It was only thunder, only a storm.
As his pulse slowed and his mind cleared, his first thought was to worry about Winter Fawn’s garden. His second was to worry about Winter Fawn herself. She was frightened by storms. Had the thunder and lightning awakened her?
The thought of her huddled in the corner of the sofa with her hands ice cold and shaking with terror drove him from his bed. He would check on her, he thought as he stepped into his pants and fastened them. It wouldn’t hurt to check on her.
As he stepped out of his room a shaft of lightning revealed her right where he feared she would be, huddled in a tight little ball in the corner of the sofa.
“Ah, honey.” Sitting next to her, he slid his arms around her. “You’re freezing.” It was like putting his arms around a block of ice. A shivering block of ice.
“I’m all r-right.” Her teeth were chattering. “I d-didna mean to w-wake ye.”
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