And the darkness beyond the window screen was deeper than any city darkness. She understood now why ancient peoples had created all sorts of myths about the night world.
Shivering, Erica squinted at the bare light bulb in an old fixture on the ceiling. More lights, that was what she needed. The next day she’d put up flood lamps outside. Just let the creepies try to get past a two-hundred-watt bulb. She got up and went to fetch the book she’d brought with her, the latest Stephen King novel.
She loved thrillers and suspense novels—they were such fun when read in the cozy confines of her condo bedroom. Suddenly she froze. On second thought, reading Stephen King might not be a good idea that night.
Something very real was growling outside the bedroom window.
JAMES HAD BORROWED his grandfather’s truck, and the high-set headlights cast a bright arc of light on Dove’s narrow, graveled driveway. They caught the two boys full in the eyes.
The pair, dressed in shorts and dark T-shirts, bolted into the woods that bordered the road. James cursed grimly and floored the accelerator. This was what he’d suspected.
Dove’s house was dark, a mere outline against black woods. James leaped onto the porch and pounded on the door with his fist. Quick-running feet crossed the creaking porch as he whipped around, searching the darkness.
He heard an ominous whirring sound just as something sharp jabbed him in the arm. Pain and surprise made him react with automatic reflexes honed by years of competitive sports. He swung powerfully and cuffed the attacker with the heel of his hand. The boy was tall, and the blow hit him in the temple.
With a soft yelp the youngster crashed against the side of the house and slid into a heap at James’s feet. The whirring sound stopped.
“Sorry, kid,” James muttered anxiously, bending over. “But your game’s pretty damned reckless.” He latched his hands onto slender shoulders and felt his way up. Horror ran through him when his fingers curled into wavy, shoulder-length hair.
Oh, no. A tall kid. Not again.
She-Who-Makes-Noise was frighteningly silent.
CHAPTER 4
LAND OF THE Giants, that was what this was. Maybe she was just woozy from being thumped in the head, but for the first time in her life, Erica didn’t feel too big.
She estimated that Echo Tall Wolf was six two and Becky Tall Wolf, the puny one of the family, was maybe five ten. Grandpa Sam Tall Wolf was nearly as tall as James, which meant about six five. Becky, Echo, and Grandpa Sam looked majestic even in terry-cloth robes.
Erica smiled groggily. Robes were the attire many tall people favored when forced out of bed at this time of night.
James kept one hand on her forearm and one between her shoulder blades as he guided her into a rustic den with a decor somewhere between a middle-class family room and a Cherokee museum. He sat Erica down on an overstuffed sofa and covered her in a colorful quilt as she squinted around at Indian paintings, woven rugs, a big stone fireplace, and lots of homey clutter.
“She needs some fresh ice,” James said. He took the washcloth she held against her temple and dabbed her face with it.
Eric barely noticed the soreness radiating through the spot beside her right eye. No matter what she thought of James most of the time, that night he’d been utterly wonderful—except for knocking her in the head, of course, but she couldn’t blame him for that.
She glanced at the angry bruise below the sleeve of his white golf shirt.
“I’m sorry I drilled you,” she murmured again. “It was the only weapon I had.”
“It’s sort of funny. How many women are skilled in hand-to-drill combat?”
“I have to hear this story, but right now I’ll get the ice,” Becky Tall Wolf said in a soft, musical voice, and left the room.
“James, she needs to be checked by a doctor,” Echo Tall Wolf scolded, trading a sympathetic gaze with Erica. Beautiful and majestic, with rump-length hair and a magnificent figure that had to be size sixteen at least. Echo knelt in front of Erica and held up a hand. “How many fingers?”
“Two. And three left over.”
Grandpa Tall Wolf chortled. “She’s all right.”
Erica nodded, feeling uncomfortable under all the scrutiny. “James didn’t knock me out. I just couldn’t find my eyeballs for a minute.”
James rubbed his own face with the washcloth. “I was more upset after it happened than she was.”
Erica nodded, and patted his arm gently. “I haven’t been carried so many places since I was in diapers. I hope he didn’t get a hernia.”
Becky came back with a cup of ice. Curvaceous, graceful, her ink-black hair cut in short, feathery layers, Becky looked like a modern earth mother.
Erica watched silently as James held the washcloth for Becky and Echo to arrange ice in it. “You guys make a great team. If first aid becomes an Olympic sport, you’ll take the gold.”
The women laughed, and even James smiled. “If there were more of us, we’d start a basketball squad.”
He wrapped the ice into a tight bundle. “Lie down, and I’ll hold this in place for you.”
Grandpa Sam tossed James a pillow from the recliner across the room. James put it next to his leg while Erica gingerly stretched out on her side. She put her head on the pillow and decided that an injured woman couldn’t be called a flirt even though the top of her head was mashed cozily against a man’s thigh.
So she enjoyed herself thoroughly each time his thick, ropey muscles flexed against her head. Who would have thought that a scalp could be an erogenous zone?
Gently James placed the ice pack on her temple and let his hand rest against her hair. “How’s that, Red?”
“Fine.” Fantastic. “This is the first time I’ve stretched out on a couch where my feet didn’t hang off the end.”
“James built this couch when he was in high school,” Echo told her. “He did everything, even the upholstery.”
“I build furniture. It’s a hobby,” James said with a touch of embarrassment.
He’s a builder, like me, Erica thought happily.
“It was an anniversary gift to our parents,” Becky noted.
“Where do your parents live now?”
“They were killed in a car accident a few years ago,” James answered in a guarded tone. After a second he added, “Travis’s wife and Echo’s husband were killed in the same wreck.”
Erica winced and raised her head. Echo and Becky sat on the floor, which was carpeted in well-worn deep shag, a pretty fawn color complementing their skin tone. Grandpa Sam sat in the recliner, an unlit pipe in his big, gnarled hands. He had luxurious white hair that hung below his shoulders, and his weathered, craggy face made Erica think of a nice old walnut tree.
His and his granddaughters’ expressions were somber, touched by memories that would always be with them.
“I’m sorry about your loss,” Erica said softly. She couldn’t turn her head to see James, but she felt his fingers brush her cheek in gratitude.
“Be still. Let your brain settle.”
She rested her head on the pillow again. “Does Travis live near here?”
“He has a trailer in the woods a few miles off,” Becky said. “He’s building a house beside it.”
“Ummmph,” Grandpa Sam offered with disdain. “Some year.”
He added more comments in a long string of undecipherable sounds, although he kept repeating Travis’s name in a way that said Travis was a source of concern in the family. Erica tingled with excitement as she realized Grandpa Sam was speaking Cherokee.
James answered him in the same language. It was the most intriguing thing Erica had ever heard, full of long vowels and round tones, with emphatic pauses. It came from the back of the throat, and the few consonants she noticed were only languid hints of their English counterparts.
When he finished everyone was silent for a moment, and she sensed old disagreements in the air, “No more,” James said.
“We’re not trying to shut yo
u out. Erica,” Echo added quickly. “We don’t usually speak Cherokee in front of guests. I apologize.”
Erica waved a hand excitedly. “I love the language. I want to learn it. Would it be difficult?”
“Try this,” James offered. “Gah yo, le sa lon Cha-lag-gee.”
“Gah yo, le sa lon Cha-lag-gee.”
“There. You said, ‘I speak Cherokee a little.’ ”
She repeated the sentence several times, smiling.
“Good,” Becky told her. “Now you’re fluent in one sentence. The rest is easy. Now say, Do yu nayga je nah we.”
Erica dutifully repeated the words. “What’s that?”
“I am of white origin.”
“Ah. No. My great-great-grandmother was Cherokee. Katherine Gallatin.”
“Don’t argue with this woman,” James warned his sister. “She packs a mean drill.”
That sparked new curiosity. Nothing would satisfy James’s family until he recounted the night’s lunacy in detail. Then they wanted to know about Erica’s Cherokee history, and why she’d decided to visit the reservation. She carefully omitted any mention of her bargain with James.
“James can bring you to the museum tomorrow if you want to buy some books about the tribe,” Echo told her. “I teach elementary school, but during the summer I work at the museum store. I’ll pick out some good texts for you.”
“And when I have time I’ll take you to rent some furniture for Dove’s house,” Becky added. “I run a restaurant on the tourist strip, but I’ve got a couple of free hours after the lunch rush.”
Erica tried to smile her thanks at the Tall Wolf sisters, but couldn’t move her head enough without disturbing James’s touch. She wanted to lie there forever, her head against his leg, feeling his hand gently rub the ice pack over her temple. The thick, callused pad of his thumb kept brushing her cheekbone.
Of course he was just being polite because he felt guilty for whacking her, but she wouldn’t quibble over that. She nudged his leg. “Do you really think that those boys didn’t mean any harm?”
“No, not the way they were running from a drill-carrying mountain witch. They weren’t exactly tough punks.”
“Aw, of course not,” Sam added.
“Dove’s house is supposed to be haunted,” James explained. “Going up there to pester you was an act of courage.”
“Uhmmm. Like counting coup in battle?”
“I don’t know if Cherokees ever did much coup counting,” James answered wryly. “We didn’t fight very often after about 1800—not against the whites, at any rate. We did help Andrew Jackson beat the Creek Indians during the War of 1812.”
“And see how little good it did us?” Sam said in consternation, as if he’d been there. “Jackson got elected President, and he kicked us off our land! We shoulda helped fight him.”
Erica’s thoughts were still tuned to her unwelcome visitors. “Did those boys want to scare me because I’m white?”
“Could be,” James murmured. “Most of the tribe are mixed-bloods. They’re friendlier to tourist types than the full-bloods, as a rule. There’s a conservative element that doesn’t want much to do with the outside world. Dove’s house is in a conservative community.”
Tourist type. Erica was disappointed James had classified her that way, even though his arrogance shouldn’t have surprised her. She phrased her words carefully. “Does the Tall Wolf family fit the conservative description?”
“Moderate,” Becky answered. “We want to preserve the old ways and benefit from the new.”
“We welcome anybody who wants to fit in,” Echo assured her.
Erica smiled. Take that, James. “I’m glad.”
“We’ll see,” he announced grimly. “Time for bed.” He got up and held out a hand. “Come on. I’ll put you in my old room. The gals and I’ll take turns checking on you to make sure you’re all right.”
“I’m fine,” she insisted. She tried to take his hand, but found herself being hoisted into his arms again. He made the effort so nonchalantly that she felt almost little. It was a wonderful discovery.
“Good night. And thank you,” she told the others hurriedly as James carried her out of the room. They looked a little shocked by his actions, and she wondered if he’d done something that was unusual for him.
He climbed a short set of stairs and moved sideways down the second-story hall so that her feet wouldn’t bump knickknacks and family portraits on the wall. Erica glanced around curiously. Seams showed on the pale green wallpaper, and the carpet had a foot trail in the center, but the ambiance was homey rather than shabby.
“Good floors. Solid construction. Careful attention to detail,” she observed.
“Thank you, carpenter ant.”
She almost grinned at him. “The spirit is friendly. Where I grew up in Boston, the housekeeper yelled at us all the time.”
“My mother never yelled. She just roped off rooms and threatened to set them on fire if we didn’t clean up. My father called it slash-and-burn housekeeping. But it worked. When I got my first pro contract I gave them the money to build a new house, but they wanted to keep this one.”
He carried her into a small room crammed with storage boxes. James worked his way along a cleared path to a bed that was twin-sized in width but giant-sized in length. “You made this bed frame,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Yep. The mattress isn’t as long as the frame, so the end is stuffed with pillows.”
He put her down on a thin red blanket with a geometric eagle design woven into it, Erica glanced around at walls covered with high-school and college football memorabilia. He cleared his throat awkwardly.
“My parents kept it like a shrine.”
“They must have been proud.”
“Yeah. There were a lot of things I wanted to give them in return, if they’d lived.”
She looked at him in quiet sympathy. He frowned, and gestured toward the long, slender legs sticking out of her cut-offs. “Get rid of those.”
Erica chuckled nervously. “My legs?”
“Those shorts. Wear jeans or skirts. You don’t want to look like a show-off. The old folks will approve of you quicker if you’re a little on the prim side.”
“No one has ever accused me of flaunting these knobby knees. And I’ve always been on the prim side.”
“Not in those shorts,” he insisted.
She stared at him in bewilderment, and finally decided that her legs were such bean poles that the sight bothered him. “James, in town I saw plenty of homely tourists in short-shorts and halter tops. If nobody is offended by them, they won’t give a second glance to my legs in respectable cut-offs.”
“If you want to be a tourist, go ahead,” he retorted, his face stern. “If you want to get your hands on Dove’s papers, do what I tell you to do.”
Her friendly thoughts about him faded in a burst of aggravation.
BY THE END of the next day Erica had furniture-funky, lime-green furniture rented from Trader Tom’s Motor Lodge. Because Dove’s two bedrooms were tiny, Erica put the queen-size bed and the dresser in the living room, along with a couch. She decided wryly that the arrangement looked like a low-rent bordello.
The kitchen now sported a table and four green chairs, plus mix-matched dishes and cookware loaned by the Tall Wolf sisters. The old cupboards were stocked, and a small bookcase in the living room/bedroom held a dozen texts Erica had purchased at the reservation museum.
It was home—at least for now—and she felt content. After she ate dinner Erica donned her cut-offs over a black bathing suit and watched the sunset from a rocking chair also loaned by the Tall Wolf household.
That night she lay in bed reading Myths and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees by the light of a lamp on a lime-green nightstand. There were formulas for everything from doctoring to romance.
Erica found one called “To Fix The Affections” and smiled thoughtfully. Well, what the heck.
“Now the souls have met, neve
r to part. His eyes have come to fasten themselves on one alone. Whither can his soul escape? Let him be sorrowing as he goes along, and not for one night alone.”
Erica paused. Good. Perpetual sorrowing on her behalf. “Let him become an aimless wanderer, whose trail may never be followed.
Take that, James, she added.
She suddenly felt very free from worry, and in celebration she stripped naked. Erica stretched out on top of the blanket, loving the brisk spring air on her body. She turned out the light and began to doze, lulled by the big new flood lamps she’d installed on each corner of the house. Through an open window she heard the forest moving in the night wind, the trees whispering secrets she badly wanted to learn.
Her last thoughts before sleep were happy. An aimless wanderer … sorrowing as he goes along.
The next thing she heard was the click of the lamp and a low, masculine groan of dismay.
CHAPTER 5
JAMES THOUGHT LATER that it was like finding an unexpected gift without the gift wrapping.
In the second before Erica gasped and scrambled to the other side of the bed, pulling the blanket up to her chest, he glimpsed a long, svelte torso with beautiful breasts and a taut stomach just made for a man’s lips.
He groaned because that kind of temptation was the last thing he needed. Seeing her in shorts and a T-shirt the day before had convinced James that “skinny” was a description he’d never use again. She was a tall, coltish woman, but her angles were soft, and his senses went into high gear whenever he imagined how her body would feel under his.
“What are you trying to do?” she yelled, her eyes like green ice. “Do you want to be drilled in a spot that really hurts?”
No. Particularly not at the moment, he thought.
James sighed and backed away from the bed, his hands up. “I knocked. You didn’t wake up. I have a key to the front door. I didn’t expect you to be in the living room naked.”
“What are you doing here?”
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