Night of the Panther

by Suzanne Forster

  “Good God, child,” Hale Bartholomew said. “All these years and you still haven’t come to your senses?”

  “No, you’re quite wrong, Father,” she said, all the anger gone out of her. “I have come to my senses, just this moment.” It was true, she realized. Several insights had come upon her in the last few moments, stunning insights about herself, her father, and Johnny.

  Summoning courage, she prepared herself to deal with the two most difficult and intimidating men in her life. “I’m in love with Johnny,” she said with uncharacteristic bluntness. “I’ve always loved him. I’m even thinking of asking him to marry me.”

  Honor hazarded a glance at Johnny and saw that he’d gone nearly as pale as her father. Neither man said a word. She seemed to have rendered them both speechless. It was Honor’s first real taste of her own power, and it hit her in such a dizzying rush, she almost smiled.

  Aware of her father’s stricken expression, she felt a welling sympathy. “I know you can’t understand this, but it’s what I truly want, and it’s taken me a long time to find the courage to say it.” There was something else she needed to say. “I love you. Father,” she told him softly. “In spite of everything, I always have. All I ever wanted was your love and approval when I was a child, but I realize now that I don’t need either to survive. Still, I hope someday we’ll learn to understand and accept our differences, and perhaps even build a bridge back to each other.”

  She hesitated, saddened when her father couldn’t seem to bring himself to look up at her. She stepped back from both men and saw that Johnny couldn’t look at her either. He seemed completely preoccupied, as if he’d vanished into some inner world. Either he was still thunderstruck, or he simply hadn’t wanted to hear what she had to say. Suddenly her father’s spacious office seemed small and claustrophobic.

  “Make the right decision about the mine, Father,” she said, brushing past Johnny as she left.

  Moments later she was across the street from the Bartholomew Building, walking in the same park she and Hale, Jr., had played in as children. The sky was a sharp cerulean blue, and the breezes rustling through the trees overhead made it an unusually mild day for midsummer.

  Honor stopped at the edge of a small fountain, remembering how Hale had gone wading there once and been caught by their father. Hale had cried and immediately been forgiven. Honor, of course, wouldn’t have thought to disobey in the first place. Things had changed drastically, she realized. She didn’t regret a word of what she’d said in her father’s office. It had been imperative that she tell him how she felt. She’d had to open her heart where both men were concerned, even if it meant losing them.

  “Honor?”

  It was Johnny’s voice, but she didn’t turn, afraid to face him. She felt almost clairvoyant where he was concerned, as if she were able to read the future in his eyes. One look and she would know everything.

  “The lady seems a little tense,” he said, coming up behind her. “I’ll bet she could use a massage?”

  “Massage?” Had she heard him correctly? He actually sounded as if he might be smiling, having fun with her. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry. “If the lady were any more tense, she’d be one of the park’s statues. I think it’s going to take more than a massage, thank you.”

  “What is it going to take?”

  His voice stirred her senses like the wind rifling through the trees overhead. His hand stroked down her arm and caught hold of the fist she’d clasped against her stomach. He covered it and brought her up against him, holding her gently, breathing warmth into her hair.

  “This could work,” she allowed.

  He felt wonderful, as warm and enveloping as the night he’d held her on the mountain. She closed her eyes, wishing as she had then that she could be absorbed into his heat, drawn into his sheltering male strength like a kitten tucked away in a pocket. She didn’t want to move, to think, or even to breathe, for fear that she might lose the beautiful feelings he brought her.

  “Honor, you said some things in there, and I—” He hesitated, clearing the graininess from his throat. “I know you were angry at your father, but I wondered if you meant all of that . . . or any of it?”

  Was he stumbling over the words? She thanked God at that moment that she wasn’t looking a him. Surely he would have seen the astonishment in her eyes. She never thought she would live long enough to hear Johnny Starhawk fumble his lines. She must really have blown some circuits with her proposal.

  “Honor?” he pressed, his arm tightening around her middle. “Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you mean it?”

  A terrible impulse came over her. She wanted to do something she wouldn’t have believed herself capable of. She wanted to keep him dangling. “That I loved my father?” she said softly, wickedly. “Of course I meant it.”

  The muscles of his arm tautened. She could feel the heat of his body burning through her clothing. She could hear his impatient exhalation and knew she was in trouble. Wonderful trouble!

  He turned her in his arms, whirling her so possessively, she was breathless and dizzy as he caught her up against him. The dark flames leaped in his eyes. His gaze burned as hotly as ever, but there was love in its heat, tenderness.

  “Didn’t anybody ever teach you not to tease the animals in the zoo?” he warned. A sexy growl rumbled in his throat as he curved his hand to her throat. “Despite your efforts, this one isn’t quite tamed or domesticated yet.”

  “And never will be,” she conceded, a thrill spiraling up from the depths of her. “Despite my efforts.” She touched his mouth, her fingers trembling over its fine sensuality. “Yes, I meant it, every word. I love you, Johnny. I always have.”

  He smiled with effort, as if his jaw had suddenly locked. “Forgive me if I’m having some trouble with this,” he said. “I never thought it could happen.” His laughter had an aching sound. “Are you sure? You actually want to marry me? A crazy Irish-Apache lawyer?”

  “It’s the lawyer part I’m worried about.”

  He shook his head, disbelieving. “As long as you know what you’re getting into. I’m not an easy man to live with. I’m prone to jealous rages, and I’ll probably do terrible things to you, just like in the mountains.”

  “Oh! I’m looking forward to it!”

  His jaw locked again, and his dark eyes flared with pain and passion. “I love you, baby.”

  She gazed up at him, her chin trembling, her heart so full she couldn’t speak a word.

  Johnny knew the sweetest kind of agony as he pulled her into his arms and rocked her. She felt like heaven, or all he would ever know of that perfect place. She was the girl of his dreams, the woman of his heart. Maybe this was destiny playing itself out in his life in some inexplicable way. He didn’t know. But whatever was happening, it was bigger than his puny doubts and fears. He knew legal procedure like the back of his hand, but there was so much he didn’t understand about life, things like forgiveness, tolerance, and humility. Maybe he was supposed to learn those things . . . from her.

  “Let’s have kids,” he said, holding her back.

  “Oh, yes! Beautiful Irish-Apache babies with dark eyes.”

  “No way,” he countered, laughing huskily. “Dimpled cherubs with golden hair and misty blue eyes.” He loved her. Nothing could alter that irrefutable fact. He loved her like nothing else in this world, with every cell of his heart and mind.

  A leaf spiraled down from one of the trees above them and landed in Honor’s hair. Johnny picked it out of her blond tresses and was about to toss it aside when Honor gasped.

  “No, let me,” she said, taking it from him. She waited for a gust of wind and released the leaf, watching it catch the currents and soar, free and trembling, off on a great adventure.

  Tears sparkled in her eyes as she turned back to Johnny. “That was your grandfather wishing us good luck.”

  Epilogue

  Six Months Later . . .
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  JOHNNY HAD NEVER seen the river look like that. Even in his youth, when the sunsets had often been spectacular, he’d never seen the twilight sky open up and pour out its fire, turning the water’s surface to a necklace of dark jewels set in gold.

  The crowd that had gathered for the ceremony alongside the riverbanks seemed silenced by its beauty. Or perhaps it was the woman walking among them who created the hush. The water’s jeweled surface was Honor’s backdrop as she approached the canopy of cottonwoods where Johnny stood with Chy Starhawk. In her fringed and beaded buckskin dress and with her hair around her shoulders, she looked as if she’d risen from the river’s golden radiance.

  “Johnny,” she said, his name on her lips even before she’d reached him. Tears sparkled in her eyes as if she were reliving some tender moment of their adolescence. She came to stand beside him and took his dusky hand, reminding him how different they were, and how much the same.

  Johnny thought about the gamut of emotion he’d experienced in their relationship—the young love and reverence, the hurt, the hatred, the grief—and realized he’d come full circle. Perhaps he could never love her with the same fierce purity of youth, perhaps their innocence was gone forever, but the reverence was there, the sweetness that ripped through his heart and seared his soul like fire. His feelings for her were as deep and spiritual as they were animal. They’d taken on a unifying force that seemed as elemental as the earth itself.

  Their hands joined, they turned to face Chy Starhawk and to silently receive his blessings. In the ancient language of the Apache, the shaman said a traditional prayer for the woman first, and then for the man, after which he turned in each direction of the compass, offering sacred pollen to the four winds.

  When he was finished, Chy Starhawk stepped aside, and the minister of the church Honor had attended as a child stepped forward. “We are gathered here today to unite this man and this woman in holy matrimony,” he said to the crowd.

  Blood roared through Johnny’s heart, blocking out everything else the clergyman said. Johnny heard nothing but the low thunder of the river behind them, the answering thunder of his pulse. He was aware that Honor had released his hand, that she was standing beside him, but nothing else reached his consciousness until the minister repeated the phrase, “Who gives this woman . . . ?”

  In the silence that followed, Johnny turned to the crowd and saw Hale Bartholomew rise. The older man’s blue eyes were lit like torches in the frail bones of his face. They burned with the pride of his bearing and the last vestiges of his indomitable will to win. Honor’s father was reluctant in his surrender, but Johnny accepted the grace with which the older man met his gaze, the wisdom with which he acknowledged what was inevitable. They might never be friends, Johnny realized, but they both loved the same woman, and that would keep them from being enemies, from meeting in the battleground of the courtroom.

  “I do,” Hale Bartholomew said. “I give this woman.” Johnny watched as Honor’s eyes filled with tears. He wanted to stop the ceremony and take her into his arms. He wanted to shield her from anything and everything that could hurt her, but he knew her pain came from joy. She hadn’t expected her father to come to this ceremony, or that he would ever dignify their union in such a way.

  Johnny reached for her hand, gripping it tightly. As they turned back to the minister, something that might have been tears blurred his own eyes. He felt her joy, her pain. He wanted her to feel his reassurance. It would be all right. They would balance the years of heartbreak with as many years of happiness. Only tears of joy, Honor, he promised silently, swearing to do everything in his power to keep that vow. Only tears of joy.

  The crowd rose to their feet as the minister pronounced the couple husband and wife. As Johnny turned to Honor, he caught a glimpse of familiar faces among the guests—Chase Beaudine with a cowboy hat tilted low over his eyes and a dimpled redheaded baby in his arms. His wife, Annie, was standing next to him, very proud, very pregnant. Even Geoff Dias was there, sitting on his Harley at the back of the assembly, a raffish smile on his face. But what Johnny didn’t see as he bent to kiss his new bride was the hawk soaring over their heads.

  It swooped and dipped above them, its snow-white wingtips silvery in the sunlight as it pulled out of a graceful dive and swept upward, ever upward, rising to meet the falling sun. Chy Starhawk saw the magnificent creature and turned, following the bird’s ascent until, in a sudden, brilliant flash, it disappeared from sight. It was a good omen. All things would flow in harmony for the new couple, the sun, the moon, the stars. Their love, brought to life at the river’s edge, would be fruitful, just as the spring floods made the earth warm and the soil fertile. The seed of their seed would be favored for generations to come.

  The shaman smiled. His blessing had been heard.

  A Biography of Suzanne Forster

  Suzanne Forster, the New York Times bestselling author of more than forty romance novels, was on a career path to becoming a clinical psychologist until a life-altering car accident changed everything. While recovering, she tried her hand at writing to pass the time and quickly found that it was her true passion. Before she was ready to return to school, her first manuscript had won second place in a contest sponsored by the Romance Writers of America for unpublished writers. Before she knew it, she sold her first novel, Undercover Angel (1985), and embarked on a new path.

  Throughout her career, Forster has made unconventional plot choices for the romance genre, such as setting her novel The Devil and Ms. Moody (1990) in the gritty world of motorcycle gangs, an idea her publisher resisted for years. The hero, Diablo, an intimidating yet tender rogue in black leather who rides a Harley-Davidson, was given the WISH (Women in Search of a Hero) Award by RT Book Reviews. For her Stealth Commandos trilogy she chose mercenaries and bounty hunters as her heroes. Child Bride (1992), the first in the trilogy, became her publisher’s top-selling series romance that year. The romantic thriller The Morning After (2000) appeared on several bestseller lists including the New York Times.

  RT Book Reviews has twice honored Forster’s work, first in 1990 with a Career Achievement Award in Series Sensual Romance, and again in 1996 in the category of Best Contemporary Romantic Suspense. In 1996 she was also a nominee for the Romance Reader’s Anonymous Award for Best Contemporary Author. Her mainstream debut, Shameless (2001), won the National Readers Choice Award. Forster’s 2004 novel Unfinished Business was made into a movie, called Romancing the Bride, for the Oxygen Network.

  Forster lives in Southern California with her husband, and has taught women’s contemporary fiction writing seminars at UCLA and UC Riverside.

  Suzanne at five years old, smiling with her beloved family dog, Duchess. Suzanne was the youngest of four children, and Duchess was passed down to the children as they grew up.

  Suzanne sitting on her grandfather’s knee outside their home in Olympia, Washington. Known in the community as the unofficial poet laureate of Olympia, her grandfather was a prolific writer and performer of poetry, actively performing at church, community events, and special occasions. The family never had a Sunday dinner without him reading a new poem.

  A family Christmas photograph from Suzanne’s childhood. Suzanne, age seven, is at the far left, standing by older sister Carolyn, brothers Michael and John, and her parents. Suzanne credits her father’s side of the family with sparking her artistic ability, as her father was a writer of eloquent letters and her grandfather a prolific writer of poetry.

  Suzanne with husband Allan at their wedding in the mid-seventies. The two married in a wedding chapel in California, and then took a three-week trip up the coastline to Vancouver, British Columbia, stopping to spend time with Suzanne’s family in Olympia, Washington.

  Suzanne at her college graduation, photographed by her mother. Suzanne graduated with a degree in psychology from the University of California at Irvine in 1978, and went on to a post-graduate degree in psychology. She wouldn’t begin writing until her psychology career was
derailed by a car accident; in order to pass the time while recovering, she began to write some of her first stories.

  A photograph of Suzanne with husband Allan in their first apartment together in Westminster, California. After they married in the early 1980s, Suzanne and Allan had a ready-made family, including Suzanne’s son, Kenny, and Allan’s three children from his first marriage. At the time of the photograph, Suzanne was working on her first book, Undercover Angel.

  Suzanne at her first book signing at a small independent bookstore in California. The signing was held for Wild Child, Suzanne’s second release through the Loveswept series, and was a success—over one hundred copies of the book were sold.

  Suzanne, left, with close friend and fellow author Meryl Sawyer at the RT Book Lovers Convention in Atlanta in 1990. The two are celebrating The Devil and Ms. Moody, which garnered myriad awards that year, including the Career Achievement Award for its author.

  One of Suzanne’s favorite photographs: she and Allan in Hawaii, preparing to take a helicopter tour of Maui. Suzanne frequently mined her vacations for material for her books, and later used a lunging helicopter in her romantic suspense novel The Morning After.

  Suzanne, left, spending time with her son, Kenny, her grandchildren, and extended family.

  Suzanne wearing a biker jacket in reference to The Devil and Ms. Moody, her award-winning motorcycle romance novel. Her husband, Allan, bought the jacket as a gift in honor of her biker romances that swept award ceremonies in the 1990s and essentially established her as a star in the genre.