IRONHEART

by Rachel Lee

  Dimly, from the other side of oblivion, she felt Gideon slide up over her, felt him slowly, surely, fill her. And then he was lifting her yet again, carrying her away as if he were winged Pegasus heading for the stars.

  "Now," she heard him say hoarsely. "Now!"

  And in some fantastic, unbelievable way, she turned into a supernova in a burst of light, heat and joy that seared her very soul.

  * * *

  Cold roast beef sandwiches had never tasted so good. Having finished hers, Sara sat in Gideon's bed, wrapped in one of his flannel shirts, her hair still damp from her shower, and thought that dreams really could come true. Despite all that had happened between them, she still couldn't believe that this powerful, virile, attractive man, wearing nothing but unbuttoned jeans, was lying propped on an elbow beside her on his bed. That he had just loved her to the edge of sanity, and that now he was calmly pulling the stems from green grapes and popping the grapes one at a time into her mouth. Smiling each time he did so.

  Impulsively, she reached out and touched the corner of his lips. Immediately he turned his head and drew her finger into his mouth. Feeling the rasp of his tongue on her sensitive flesh, she caught her breath. Remembering what that tongue had so recently done to other tender flesh, she stopped breathing entirely.

  Gideon bit her finger gently and released it. Smiling, he popped another grape into her mouth. "Full yet?" he asked. Sara's appetite for food was as healthy as everything else about her.

  "Getting there," she managed to say.

  The corners of his eyes creased with a deepening smile as he gave her another grape. "Have y'all figured out anything about who attacked Zeke?"

  Sara shook her head. "There isn't a whole lot to go on. No fingerprints. The yard was too hard to take a tire impression. About the only hope we have is that Zeke will remember."

  "Those cigarette butts and boot prints Micah found weren't useful, then?"

  Sara shook her head and declined another grape. "I'm stuffed. We'd probably never catch him even if we did have something more. Nate's pretty much convinced it was just some drifter looking for money, probably on drugs or something, and he got mean when he didn't find what he wanted."

  "Since we haven't had any more trouble in a week, I guess he's right."

  Sara shrugged. "What else could it be?"

  "Nothing." He took the bowl of grapes from the bed between them and twisted to set it on the night table. Then he was looking at her again, head propped on his hand, a faint smile on his firm mouth. "You've enchanted me," he said unexpectedly.

  For an instant everything inside Sara stilled to perfect quiet in a moment of exquisite awareness. Then she shook loose, reminding herself that this man was a tumbleweed, and that nothing he said mattered beyond the moment. "Must be those newt eyes and toadstools I threw in your lunch earlier."

  "Must be." The corners of his eyes crinkled. "Or it could be I'm a sucker for little brown mice with warm eyes and a need to be stroked. I talked to Joey earlier this evening."

  The swift change of subject distracted her, as he had intended. "Joey?" she repeated. "Has he done something?"

  "No, nothing. We just got to talking. Some of the things he said… Sara, I just can't figure how he went bad."

  "Me, either," she admitted. "I never thought… I never saw anything in him that made me think he was bad. But the way he's been acting…"

  "He's mad. Something has really hurt him." Gideon paused, then added, "He was talking about doing the Sun Dance this summer."

  "He was?" Sara was clearly astonished, but after a moment she looked thoughtful. "He went to the Pine Ridge Reservation two years ago for the annual powwow. Chester Elk Horn and his grandson took him."

  "He told me."

  "I remember he was irritated by all the tourists. Not so much that people were interested, I guess, but rather that they didn't understand the religious significance of the Sun Dance. He didn't feel it should be performed as a public spectacle. Grandfather reminded him that tourists attend religious ceremonies all over the world. Catholic Masses in missions around San Antonio. Processions in Mexico… That kind of thing. I'm not sure it calmed him any. You know how passionate kids get about things at that age."

  "About some things at any age," he said, and leaned over to kiss her wrist. He smiled when he felt her shiver faintly in response. "He mentioned Pine Ridge to me, too. He said he wants to participate in the Sun Dance that's held privately on the Rosebud Reservation. And he appears to think he won't be allowed to go because he's on probation."

  "He's probably right. Unless Nate agreed to let me take him. He's Joey's probation officer now."

  "Would you take him?"

  Sara's gaze rose from her lap to his dark eyes. "I don't know," she said truthfully. "I was raised with a foot in two worlds, but mostly in the Anglo world, and so was Joey. Zeke has always spoken of these things, the way he does with you, but he has always recognized that this is a white man's world now, and Joey and I are more Anglo than not. I have to question why Joey wants to do this."

  "Maybe he needs a sense of who he is that he hasn't discovered so far. Maybe he needs a purpose he hasn't found. Maybe he needs it to find his manhood."

  Sara's head jerked a little, and she stared hard at him. "Gideon?" There was more in his words than a casually considered group of possible reasons for Joey's desire to participate in the grueling Sun Dance.

  "Ah, hell." At the back of his mind, a flashback was trying to happen, a sense of splintering blue sky that kept dancing in the corners of his mind, a sensation of falling when he was lying perfectly still. "Ah, hell," he said again. He needed to talk. His whole life long, he'd never really talked to anybody. Even Barney, his best friend, had never been a confidant. "You're tired," he said, making one last attempt to keep from spilling his guts.

  Somehow Sara knew. The impassioned speech about Joey finding himself had said an awful lot about Gideon Ironheart. Not so much in words that her ears had heard, but more in feelings that her heart had sensed. She lay down facing him, and before he could react in any way, she threw her long, bare leg over his denim-clad hips and wrapped her arm around his neck, drawing his head into the dark, warm hollow created by her shoulder and cheek. "I'm not too tired to listen."

  "Ah, hell," he said roughly. "You don't want to hear this crap."

  "I do," she murmured, tunneling her fingers into his long hair. "I want to hear anything you need to tell me. It's about Barney, isn't it? About his fall and your flashbacks."

  "What are you? A mind reader?"

  "Grandfather always taught me to see with my heart, not my eyes," Sara answered softly, while every cell in her body tensed for his inevitable rejection. She was pushing him, she knew, pushing him hard, and he would probably step down hard on her. But somewhere in her helpless, headlong tumble into love with this man, she had discovered a new kind of courage in herself, a courage to take emotional risks. For him she would expose herself to the reopening of the scar that had kept her in hiding for a decade.

  To see with her heart. Slowly, slowly, Gideon relaxed against her, giving up the battle with himself. If she saw with her heart, then perhaps she could see through the pain that scoured him raw. Perhaps she could point the way to the other side of the spiritual chasm that yawned before him.

  "I'm afraid," he said, his whisper husky. "It's not unusual for a man to be scared after a near miss. It happens to us all, and for a time we work on the ground, until we feel ready to go up again. Nobody thinks anything of it. It's normal. Natural."

  Sara's hand never stopped moving, just kept combing soothingly through his hair. "I should think so," she murmured when it seemed he needed some kind of response. "Only a fool wouldn't have some kind of reaction."

  "Yeah. Most of the time it only takes a week or two. But … I can't go up at all anymore. Hell, I even get vertigo in the barn loft. I'm not sure I could handle a drainage ditch, to tell you the truth."

  None of this sounded so very terrible o
n the face of it, but, listening with her heart, Sara heard something else. Something more. She heard what had happened to his self-confidence, his self-image, his identity. In one fell swoop Gideon had lost his best friend, his career, his belief in himself, and an essential part of his manhood: his courage. Or what he believed to be his courage.

  It was on the tip of her tongue to point out that going up to the top of those buildings to walk those narrow beams in the first place had displayed a kind of courage few people ever had. And that in losing that courage he had merely come down to the level of the rest of the world. But that was easy to say, and it wouldn't help Gideon at all. He had lost something of himself, something he'd once had, something that had been an integral part of him. The fact that it was something most people never had was hardly going to mitigate the loss.

  Finally, she said the only thing she could. "I'm sorry. That must really hurt."

  He nuzzled her shoulder, inhaling deeply of the scent of warm woman, the scent of Sara. Then, relaxing even more, he wrapped his own arms around her waist. After a while he spoke again.

  "It's not that I want to be a connector again," he said slowly. "I'm too old, and there's no way on earth I'd do it even if I found a partner as good as Barney. I'd be a danger to him, because I'm slowing down. Barney and I would have had to quit soon. We both knew it. We were getting older, slower. Not enough to be dangerous yet, but enough that we couldn't pretend we weren't. We'd even begun to talk about working on the ground."

  Sara made an encouraging sound and let her hand wander lower, to the smooth, warm skin of his back.

  "It's just that…" He didn't know if there were even words to encompass all that he had lost along with Barney. "It's just that everything I ever knew, everything I ever believed about myself, turned out to be an illusion. All of a sudden, there I was with nothing. Absolutely nothing. As if everything I'd done with the first forty years of my life was absolutely pointless. Why am I telling you this?"

  "Because you need to. Because I want to listen."

  He tilted his head back and looked her right in the eye. He was suddenly angry with himself for spilling all this ridiculous tripe on her, but just as suddenly his anger died. Something in her soft brown eyes killed it. Something of understanding and caring and concern. In that instant, he knew he had words to say what he felt, and that she would understand them.

  "Mouse," he said hoarsely, "I lost myself."

  Her expression grew sad; the corners of her mouth turned down. Her hand lifted from his shoulder to touch his cheek gently, to trace the line of his strong jaw, then to cradle the back of his head and draw him closer.

  "Let me hold you," she whispered. "Let me hold you, because I've only just found you."

  Somehow that seemed to make perfect sense. He wrapped himself around her, wrapped her around him, and neither let go of the other until the night was over.

  * * *

  Chapter 10

  « ^ »

  "We're going to have guests for dinner tonight," Sara announced. Three masculine heads at the breakfast table lifted from plates full of ham and eggs and looked at her. "I'll do the cooking, Grandfather."

  "Don't be silly, child. I've been cooking for this household since you started working. I'll cook, and you'll help."

  Sara laughed at the twinkle in her grandfather's eye. "I invited Micah and Faith Parish over. I asked Emma and Gage, too, but they couldn't make it. Emma has to speak to some library meeting or other in Cheyenne, so they'll be gone for a few days."

  "Well, just ask them for next week," Zeke said. "It's been a while since we had guests." He was always pleased whenever Sara invited any of her friends over, and always encouraged her to do it more often.

  "I'll do that." She glanced at Joey and found her brother looking indifferent. Well, he would probably just vanish right after dinner, so it wouldn't make a whole lot of difference to him. Looking past him to Gideon, Sara said, "You're invited, too, of course." In case he didn't realize that. "You said you wanted to meet Micah."

  Gideon nodded briefly and fastened his attention on his plate. "Thanks," he managed to say. Moments later he shoved his chair back from the table and carried his half-eaten breakfast over to the sink. "I need to see to some stuff in town, Zeke. I took care of the livestock already, so there's nothing that can't wait until I get back." Snatching his hat from the peg, he stomped out of the kitchen.

  "Well, what got into him?" Sara wondered aloud.

  Zeke shrugged. "Time will tell, Sarey. Time will tell."

  * * *

  Muttering every oath he knew, Gideon drove down the rutted drive to the highway and wondered if he carried a personal curse of some kind. Maybe the fates were after him because he'd never listened to his grandfather, never lived up to the responsibility of the "power" people kept telling him he had.

  All he knew, all he could remember, was holding Sara in his arms the night of their picnic, gently seducing her and himself, and asking about Micah. Silently encouraging her to offer to introduce him to Micah. He swore again and spun loose gravel out from beneath his tires. He didn't need to be a genius to know what Sara was going to think if she learned Micah was his brother.

  But surely, he told himself, she would remember that he hadn't mentioned Micah again since that night almost two weeks ago. She had to realize by now that he wasn't making love to her because he wanted her to introduce him socially to Micah Parish. Surely.

  Cursing again, he pulled off onto the road that led to Sara's favorite glade. Once there, he climbed out of the truck, walked through the thick wildflowers, yellow ones now joining the paintbrushes, and sat cross-legged on a rock beside the snow-fed stream. Farther up the slope, a waterfall provided a soothing rush of sound.

  He needed to go into the silence, he thought. It had been days since he had taken the time for his morning meditation, and he was sorely feeling the lack. His center seemed to be escaping his grasp along with his identity and his manhood. He was losing his hold on everything. Everything.

  So he closed his eyes and dove inward, seeking the deep, quiet pool of his innermost self, that place from which all the rest of him sprang. He was in desperate need of an anchor to hang on to, a piece of solid ground on which to stand. Without that, he couldn't even hope to begin rebuilding his life.

  * * *

  Gideon watched from the window of the bunkhouse as Micah Parish and his family arrived. Faith Parish was every bit as small and blond as Sara had said, so tiny beside her large husband that she looked like a sprite, almost insubstantial. And it was obvious from the way the big man hovered over her that she was the center of his world and the light of his life.

  Gideon smiled in spite of himself and felt a painful yearning tug in the vicinity of his breastbone. He ignored it, wondering what he was going to do about Micah. The question had settled onto the back burner lately while he'd been busy working the ranch, worrying about Zeke and getting to know Sara. Now it couldn't be ignored any longer.

  He had come to Conard County with the best of intentions, wanting only to learn something of the brother he had never known, never intending to disrupt any lives. He had convinced himself that if he said nothing, no one would be hurt.

  With each passing day, however, his silence looked less like wisdom and grew closer to deception. At the beginning he had told himself that he only wanted to know a little about Micah, to see him for himself, but not to establish any kind of relationship with him. After all, if Micah or their father, Amory Parish, had ever had any interest in what had happened to Gideon, surely it would have showed by now.

  He felt, he thought, something like a kid who'd been adopted, needing to know something about his real roots, but aware that his interest might be very unwelcome. Coming anonymously to Conard County and saying nothing to Micah had initially seemed like a matter of respecting Micah's privacy. It had also seemed like a way to protect his own. What if Micah had turned out to be a man he wouldn't want to know?

  Gideon sighe
d, thinking his reasons sounded awfully flimsy now. And the closer he grew to Sara and Zeke, the worse it got.

  His grandfather, he felt suddenly, would probably have had his hide for a stunt like this. For all his faults, the old Cherokee medicine man had been unfailingly honest with himself and all those with whom he dealt. Without a doubt, he would have told Gideon that nothing justified deception.

  "Ah, hell." And he still hadn't decided whether to tell Micah the truth. All he knew was that the longer he waited, the tougher it was going to get.

  "Hell," he said again, and turned from the window. Time to go up to the house before his tardiness became remarkable.

  Everyone except Joey had gathered in the living room. For a moment Gideon stood unnoticed on the threshold between the dining room and living room, and he took the opportunity to study his new sister-in-law. She was every bit the fairy-tale princess Sara had said, tiny, blond and lovely. She watched Micah with adoring eyes when he spoke, and cradled her child close to her breast.

  And again Gideon felt that strange pang of longing.

  "Gideon!" Sara spied him and smiled. "We've been wondering where you were. You know Micah, of course, and this is his wife, Faith, and their daughter, Sally."

  Micah rose to shake his hand. For an instant, a split second so brief it might almost never have happened, their eyes locked, and Gideon felt something pass between them. Something beyond words.

  Then he was treated to the full effect of Faith Parish's shining blue eyes and brilliant smile. And, irresistibly, he was drawn to squat and bend over the baby. A pair of blue eyes stared back at him from a frame of pink blanket and fragile skin. A tiny rosebud mouth opened in a yawn.

  "She's beautiful," he told Faith, and reached out to touch one tiny fist. "Three months?"

  "Three and a half. How could you tell that? Most men aren't very interested in babies."