Panther on the Prowl

by Nancy Morse

  He rolled his eyes. “What was me?”

  “You were the person Craig was talking to that night on the telephone. You knew all along he didn’t love me.”

  “Love?” he caustically echoed. “Love is for those who have nothing greater to aspire to. Men don’t achieve greatness on love. And neither do women, I might add. You must be practical, Renata. Your mother knew that. But since she’s not here, I feel it is my obligation to make you aware of it.”

  Rennie’s eyes flashed. “What right have you to talk to me about my mother? You didn’t even know her. You never stopped to see who she was. All you saw was her bank account.”

  His face mottled with fury, but she didn’t care. It was time to set the record straight, and to hell with the consequences.

  “For your information, I’m not my mother. I don’t worship money. I can live without it. And unlike her, I’d never marry without love.”

  They were words too long left unspoken, festering like a wound she thought would never heal. Until she met a man whose wounds were deeper than her own and who gave her the courage to begin the painful healing process. Her face flushed with anger, she felt a staggering rush of relief as the words, like an infection, poured out.

  “Furthermore, you’re not my father.”

  Perhaps if she had seen a flash of hurt in his eyes, or the merest flinching of a muscle on his face telling her that she had wounded him, she would have said no more. But those features fixed in cold disdain told her with cruel certainty that he had never loved her enough to be hurt by her.

  “I’m under no obligation to do anything you say, and that includes marrying a despicable worm like Craig Wolfson. If you like him so much, you marry him!”

  She stormed out, slamming the door on him and on that part of her life.

  Later that night, at home alone in her condo, she was unable to sleep, feeling angry, confused and guilty. She’d never forgive him for his part in the conspiracy to marry her off to a man she didn’t love, but he’d been a major component in her life since she was eight years old, and despite the flaws in his character, he had provided well for her and her mother. She would wait until things cooled down and then she’d call him. But there would be no apologies for what she’d done or said, and no more explanations.

  The bullying, the manipulation, the control, were over, and in their ashes was the realization that if anyone was to blame for it, it was herself. But rather than bear shame over it, it felt like a burden had been lifted from her shoulders.

  She wished her mother had known the kind of freedom that came with this kind of self-awareness. She no longer had to be what others wanted her to be. She could be simply who she was. And who she was was a woman who had come into existence the day she fell from the sky.

  In a few short weeks she had learned what it was like to live without money to insulate her, and it turned her view of the world, and herself, upside down.

  Behind the facade that was Renata Hollander, she discovered Rennie, a woman who could identify a bird by its call, to whom a place as primitive and wild as the Everglades could feel like home and who loved a man as fiercely compelling as John Panther.

  Was it real, any of it? The touch of his hands? The whisper of his voice? The pandemonium he unleashed in her soul? She didn’t care what he was. She knew only that for the first time in her life she was deeply and desperately in love. But what about John Panther? Deep in his soul, was he even capable of love?

  The road snaked north toward the Big Cypress Reservation through sighing saw grass and low-lying pastures where cattle crowded shoulder-deep in the tall grass. The land rose dark green from the softness of the Everglades, and although the orange trees stood in regimental rows and the road curved past modern houses and a shiny new school, there was a wild feel to the place, like the stubborn independence that filled John’s heart.

  But even at Big Cypress, miles away from anywhere, the outside world encroached. Mistrust of the white world had been part of Seminole culture and history for years, and here he was, pining for a white woman as if he had learned nothing at all.

  She was the reason he was driving to the reservation. He had to get away from that cabin where memories of her lingered in every corner or he’d go mad. The place that had been his refuge for more than a year and a half felt like a coffin, smothering him with its closeness and isolation. It reached a point where the sound of no one answering every time he spoke was more than he could bear. By day he was doomed by her memory that would not go away. At night he was haunted by dreams of her. He would awaken in a sweat and reach for her, but she wasn’t there. Life without her suddenly seemed like no life at all.

  Lorena knew her son was in trouble the instant she saw his face. He had the look of a man who felt that his life was reeling out of control. It wasn’t like John to lose control over anything. Even the way he hunted the panther was controlled and precise. She knew in her heart that he would one day capture and kill it, and she was afraid for him.

  The panther was a subject that invariably hardened his features, but this look was altogether different. Standing in her doorway, he looked so lost, the expression on his face so plaintive that it could only be one thing.

  She moved aside for him to enter. In the language of their people, she said to him, “The woman?”

  John slumped down onto the couch, answering in kind, “Gone.”

  She heard the pain resonating in the single spoken word. This was worse than she thought. Her son was in love, and he didn’t even know it.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “A couple of weeks.”

  Wasn’t it just like him to bravely shield his pain? She could only imagine what it must have been like for him these past two weeks alone with his heartache, and the desperation that led him here today.

  “Will she be back?”

  John shook his head.

  “People move in and out of our lives,” Lorena said softly. “Your wife.” She left the name unspoken out of respect for the dead. “And now this white woman.”

  Anger sharpened his tone. “Are you saying I should be used to it?”

  “I am saying that you cannot live your life without pain. It’s how you deal with the pain that makes you who you are. I have never known you to crumble under it or to let it stop you from doing what you feel in your heart you must do.”

  She had never approved of his decision to go after the panther, warning him on numerous occasions that it could only lead to trouble. But he suspected that her meaning now had nothing to do with the panther. He looked hard into her ebony eyes. “You’re not telling me to go after her, are you?”

  Lorena had witnessed firsthand the white man’s influence on their people, but she was, after all, his mother, and she could not stand by and watch him suffer just for loving someone, even if that someone was white. She also knew how difficult it had always been for him to reconcile his emotions.

  “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

  The words were familiar. All his life, this brave, intelligent woman had encouraged him to go beyond the bounds he set for himself, to challenge the world around him, Seminole and white, and to answer only to his inner self. He knew what she was telling him now. He had to put his fear aside and go after the one good thing in his life that he let slip away. But how could he do that without revealing to Rennie the thing he had struggled so hard to keep secret?

  “She knows,” he said. ‘The panther legend. She knows.”

  Lorena looked up sharply. “Who told her?”

  “Willie Cypress.”

  “That old fool,” she said with disgust. “So, what do you think she will do with this knowledge.”

  “I don’t know. Probably nothing. Rennie’s a good person. She’s kindhearted and honest, and I believe she cares too much about this place to see it invaded by outsiders.”

  “Then what troubles you?”

  He got up and began to pace back and forth across the floor in angry,
smooth strides, reminding Lorena of the cat he was relentlessly hunting. Didn’t he realize how much alike the two of them were, the man and the cat, each consumed by loneliness and a secret too terrible to share?

  “If she knows about the legend, she might find out about…about…me.” He spat out the word as if it had a bitter taste upon his tongue.

  She went to him and clamped her fingers around his arm to stop his pacing. “Why do you not see yourself as others see you?” she implored. “As a good man who made a mistake? Why must you punish yourself for something that happened in the past when you have your whole life ahead of you to live and to love?”

  His head whipped up at that, one dark lock of hair slicing across his face. “Love? Tell me what woman would love a man who cannot protect her.”

  Lorena looked at him incredulously. “From what? The panther?”

  “I can blame it on the panther for the rest of my life, but I know in my heart that’s the coward’s way out. No, mother, I meant from myself.”

  She knew he’d been deeply hurt by his wife’s death and the terrible load of shame he carried over it. But until now she had not truly understood the depth of that pain, nor the extent of the blame he placed upon himself.

  “The panther killed Maggie because of me. Because I couldn’t protect her. Because of my stupidity. I should have known from the legend what can happen when you hunt for a reason that’s not true.”

  “The panthers are disappearing,” she said. “You were only trying to help.”

  His voice rose above the urgent plea in hers. “Don’t you see? I should have left them alone!”

  Lorena’s fingers tightened around his forearm. Harshly she admonished, “If it was the Spirit Being’s will that you be the one to aid His children, the panthers, who are you to question it? And if it is His will that you are to love again, who are you to doubt it? Put that arrogance away. It has no place in a Seminole’s heart.”

  His mother’s shaming words hit John hard. She was right. It was arrogant of him to assume that he called the shots that led him to this junction in his life, when in fact it had all been planned long before he had drawn his first breath. In his Indian soul he knew he was just a small part in the scheme of things. He didn’t know what the Spirit Being’s plan was, but if all things were a part of the one plan, and he was a part of all things, then Rennie was a part of him.

  His mother was right about something else. Quitting just wasn’t a part of his nature. He’d never given up before. But what was he supposed to do? Barge into Rennie’s world? And tell her what? That she was in his blood and in the very air he breathed? That her absence left a void inside of him that he knew in the deepest part of his soul would remain empty for a very long time?

  The anger flooded out of him, leaving only sadness and regret. “It wouldn’t work. I don’t fit in her world, and she doesn’t belong in mine.”

  Lorena looked at him skeptically. “Is that what really stops you?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” he confessed.

  “Search your heart,” she said gently. “There you’ll find the answer.”

  Chapter 12

  With an absentminded tug, Rennie pulled the sash of her satin robe tighter around her waist and pushed back the tousled hair that fell into her eyes as she made her way into the kitchen.

  She put a kettle of water on the burner and dropped two slices of bread into the toaster. Gone was her appetite for anything more elaborate in the morning than toast and coffee. And even that seemed somehow purposeless to her.

  If she had been going through the motions of living before, then the way she was living now was worse. Before, she did it without knowing why she was doing it, or even that she was doing it. Living outside of herself was the norm—until her plane had crashed and her inner world had exploded. She still went through the motions of living as before, only now she was aware of it, and knowing only made it that much harder.

  Listlessly she buttered the toast and nibbled on it while she sipped her coffee. It was useless to try and concentrate on anything when John Panther invaded every thought. He was out of her life, and God knew she’d tried in the past couple of weeks to put him out of her mind, as well. But he was there, everywhere, in her dreams and in her thoughts. Even when she wasn’t consciously thinking about him, she could feel his brooding presence in the air. How was it possible, she wondered, that she could still smell the fragrance of the sweet, damp earth that came from his hair? Or that her flesh could quiver at the mere thought of him as surely as if he were right there touching her?

  It was ironic to think that she had run away from one man only to fall desperately and hopelessly in love with another man. Thinking back, she recalled the precise moment when she knew she loved him. It was the day she learned the truth about the panther legend from Willie Cypress. John made love to her that night with ferocious passion, and it was when she was caught up in the frenzy of the moment that she realized she loved him. Because of what he was or in spite of it, she didn’t know. All she knew then, and all she knew now, was that she had never loved anyone like this before and never would again.

  What happened between them was inevitable. She knew he wanted her. He proved just how much the night before she left. The other times it had been breathtaking and exciting and frightening all at once. But that night, making love with him by the light of the moon that came in through the window, feeling, and finally being able to see, the raw power of him, was even more thrilling, even more frightening because it had been goodbye, and they both knew it.

  Never before had she felt so completely taken, so filled by his desperate desire. But she knew that desire and love were two separate things. That he desired her was indisputable. But what about love? Could she live with one and not the other?

  There was no denying the passion that raged between them. But animal desire was not enough. Once, what seemed like a long time ago, the person she was then might have been willing to settle for only that. But the woman she was now would not. Making love with him would always leave her breathless, but she would always long for more, and he would be unable to give it. No, it was for the best that she left, so that he could get on with the tragic consequences of his life, and she could get on with what was left of hers.

  She turned the hot water on in the shower and slipped out of her robe. It was funny how things that were previously so ritualistic now seemed out of character. She held her hand beneath the stream of water. Even that felt oddly out of sync. While the water was heating up, she went back into the bedroom and sat down on the bed, mechanically planning her day the way she did every morning since she’d been back. Get dressed. Go to work. Come home. Eat dinner. Go to bed. Dream of the man she couldn’t have. And in the morning, do it all over again.

  She glanced dismally around the room, seeing no connection to herself anywhere she looked. Outside, the sunshine glistened off the ocean, sending reflections of light into the room. She had chosen this condo for its view of the water. At night she liked to stand on the terrace and drink in the breeze that wafted up twenty-one floors. This was where she retreated after a hard day at work or on the heels of a trying episode with her stepfather. But the view that stretched beyond her windows paled in comparison to what she had experienced first with her senses and then with her eyesight in the Everglades.

  Whatever comfort or solace she derived from this refuge was gone. She felt like a stranger within the walls of her own home. Home. That was a laugh. This place was no more home to her than the house in which she had grown up. Home was where your heart was, and her heart was in that wild and unforgiving place where the endless prairie of saw grass swayed in the breeze, and where a man unlike any other held a piece of her heart that could never be replaced.

  At night she dreamed of what might have been and all the what-ifs, but morning brought with it a sad reality. What kind of life would they have had if she’d stayed? The answer was painful and invariably the same. It would have been a life in whi
ch a large part of the time she would have been without him. By day he would have belonged to her and she to him. By night she would be alone, while he lived out his cruel destiny. Children? How could she bring his child into this world knowing that it might suffer the same fate as its father? And yet in spite of every obstacle she could imagine, the sad and simple truth was that she would have stayed despite all the odds if only he had told her that he loved her.

  A terrible loneliness engulfed her. It wasn’t just the wistful yearning for something undefined. It was an acute longing for someone. For John. For the hard, driving strength of his body filling hers. How ironic it was that the very thing she loved most was the reason she could never go back.

  A hot shower did little to ease Rennie’s pain. But then, this was hardly a case of sore muscles. This was a suffering that went much deeper, past muscle and tendon, to the very fibers of her heart that loved him beyond all doubt and reason.

  After her shower the mirror above the sink squeaked when she ran her hand over it to erase the steam. She bent over from the waist and began to dry her hair with a towel, when a knock on the door brought her head up sharply, sending droplets of water flying into the air from the ends of her still-wet hair. Her thoughts screeched to a halt. Oh, God, she groaned. It could only be Craig. After her meeting with the senator last night, she knew it was only a matter of time before he called or showed up. The two men were no doubt joining forces. Pulling her robe off the hook behind the door, she swirled it around her naked body and stormed inside.

  “It certainly didn’t take you long to get here, did it?” she said heatedly as she yanked the door open.

  John Panther stood in the doorway, seeming to fill up the entire space with his tall, intimidating presence. In that deep growl of a voice he asked, “How did you know I was coming?”

  “I…I didn’t,” she stammered, faltering at the sight of him.

  He looked edgy and out of place, with something odd in his gaze that she’d never seen before. She gestured weakly for him to come in. He moved past her, and in those few moments when his back was to her, she took several deep breaths, trying to pull herself together. She closed the door and said a hopeless prayer that her emotions would not get the best of her.