But she could not find the words. She was filled with an angry despair only known by her one other time in her life—when her mother had been assaulted.
Dancing Cloud stepped up beside Lauralee. “I go willingly back with you to stand trial,” he said, balding his wrists out for handcuffs. “But spare your niece of such humiliation. She does not deserve to be treated as a common criminal. She released an innocent man. She is as innocent, herself.”
Lauralee’s eyes pooled with tears as she looked up at Dancing Cloud. Then she gasped and grew weak in the knees when Paul Brown rode up. He had apparently lagged behind the others. With him, tied by a rope into his reins, was the beautiful, sleek white stallion that was the cause for all of these misunderstandings.
Her thoughts became scrambled.
Where had Paul gotten the horse?
Why had he brought it here?
“Paul, bring the stallion to me,” Abner said, turning to smile at Paul as he dismounted.
Dancing Cloud’s heart raced at the sight of the horse and what it might mean. If they had the stallion, then they surely had the true criminal!
But if so, why had the posse been so hell-bent on trailing him and Lauralee?
They had been unmerciful in their pursuit!
Lauralee’s eyes widened in disbelief when Paul brought the horse to her uncle, who in turn, placed the reins in Dancing Cloud’s hands.
“He’s yours, Dancing Cloud,” Abner said, his eyes wavering over at Lauralee. He then looked at Dancing Cloud. “Damn it, Dancing Cloud, you deserve the horse. And there’ll be nobody questioning your ownership. He’s bought and paid for. I paid for him.”
Lauralee’s head was spinning. “Uncle Abner, I don’t understand any of this,” she said, watching how proudly Dancing Cloud stroked the stallion’s sleek mane. “Does this mean that you found the true criminal?”
“Sure as hell did,” Abner said in a low, tight growl. “The very man who owned him is the guilty party.”
“Kevin Banks?” Lauralee gasped. “How? Why?”
“To make it look had for Dancing Cloud,” Abner said. He took Lauralee’s hands and drew her into his embrace. “Honey, Kevin hid the horse. He said that Dancing Cloud stole it. He made up the lie about the Pratt boy having seen Dancing Cloud snooping around the corral that night, near the stallion. Kevin hoped that Dancing Cloud would hang for the crime.”
Lauralee’s eyes searched Abner’s. “But why would he do such a thing?” she said, her voice soft and drawn.
“You know the answer already. Dancing Cloud is an Indian and he fought against the North, and . . .” Abner said, pausing to glance over at Dancing Cloud.
Then he turned back to Lauralee. “And because Kevin did not see it fit for a white woman to be cavorting with an Indian.”
Lauralee blushed and quickly lowered her eyes.
Then she just as quickly and stubbornly gazed up at Abner again. “Kevin Banks is an evil, vile man,” she said, jerking her hands from her uncle’s. She clenched them into fists at her sides. “I hope that he’s behind bars now.”
“Yes,” Abner said, sighing. “He’s incarcerated. Thanks to my snooping around, he’s behind bars, Lauralee. I just couldn’t rest easy with Dancing Cloud being accused of stealing that horse. It came to me that night of the fire. I awakened with a start that Kevin might be lying. By damn, Lauralee, I found the stallion locked up in a shed on property only a few feet away from The Stables.”
Lauralee’s eyes wavered as she smiled wanly up at her uncle. “The fire,” she murmured. “Did it totally destroy your building?”
Now beginning to relax with the whole situation, Abner laughed loosely. “Yes, by damn, to the ground,” he said, nodding. “And arson is suspected. But I tell you, honey, if I ever caught up with the son of a gun that set fire to that shack, I’d not place him behind bars. I’d offer him a handshake for having gotten rid of the place for me.”
Lauralee started to blurt out that she had done it, then decided not to. If the sheriff had a mind to, he could arrest her for aiding and abetting in the release of a prisoner; stealing from her aunt; and setting fire to her uncle’s building. One thing had led to another until she had a string of crimes lined up behind her.
“During the commotion of the fire you helped Dancing Cloud escape?” Abner said, frowning down at her, as though he had just read her thoughts. “Didn’t you know the dangers, Lauralee, of setting a man free from jail?”
“I’d do it all over again if Dancing Cloud was arrested a second time,” Lauralee said with a lifted chin. Then her eyes softened into her uncle’s. “He is free now to go on to his village, isn’t he? You don’t plan to arrest me, do you, for my criminal act tonight?”
“You’re both free to go,” Abner said, stepping around Lauralee. He placed a hand on Dancing Cloud’s shoulder. “Son, I know I’d be wasting my time asking Lauralee to return to Mattoon with me. Any woman who’d put her life on the line for a man like she did proves just how much she loves the man. She’ll be going on with you to your mountain home. Take care of her. Guard her with your life. She’s precious, Dancing Cloud. Precious.”
Tears flowed from Lauralee’s eyes. She flung herself into her uncle’s arms. “Thank you,” she murmured. “Thank you so much.”
She looked over her shoulder at Paul Brown. They exchanged warm smiles.
Chapter 25
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompence.
—ANNE BRADSTREET
Stunned at how things had turned out, Lauralee leaned against Dancing Cloud as they watched the posse ride away.
When Abner turned and gave Lauralee a final wave of goodbye, she choked on a sob and returned the wave. With him went what she had always prayed for when she was a child.
A chance to be a family again, with a mother and father.
If she could have looked into the future all of those long years ago and had seen herself turning her back on this opportunity, she would have never thought it possible.
“Are you certain you do not wish to go with him?” Dancing Cloud asked, drawing Lauralee’s eyes suddenly to his.
“You always seem to be able to read my thoughts,” she stammered.
“You were thinking about wishing to go to your uncle?” Dancing Cloud’s eyes filled with a sudden hurt.
“No, no,” Lauralee said, laughing lightly. “It’s not that. It’s that you seemed to know what I was thinking about, not that I regretted not going with my uncle.”
She turned and faced him. She gently framed his face between her hands. “Darling, I was thinking also of long ago, when I was a little girl, wishing to be a part of a family,” she murmured. “I had thought that family could mean only having a mother and father. I had not ventured as far as to think about when I would find a man with whom I would start my own family.”
“And you have found that man?” Dancing Cloud asked, his frown fading into a warm smile.
“Oh, yes, yes,” Lauralee said, leaning against him as he circled his arms around her waist.
“And, darling, don’t you see?” she whispered, looking adoringly up at him. “It is all now possible and we may do as we wish without any interference from anyone. Our world is now the most perfect world of all.”
She did not let on that she still feared Clint McCloud with every ounce of her being, that he might be the one to spoil their happiness, to possibly even kill any chances of them having a beautiful future together.
No. She would not say that man’s name again in a whisper to herself, or aloud to Dancing Cloud. She would try and force him from her mind again. She had almost managed to after having fallen in love with Dancing Cloud.
But seeing the Yankee fiend again in Mattoon had started the cycle all over again in her mind . . . the remembrance of her mother being raped . . . of her mother being murdered....
“We are free now to fulfill our intertwined destinies,” Dancing Cloud said, brushin
g a soft kiss across her lips. “Once my mourning for my father is behind me after we reach my village, then I can agree with you that everything is right in our world.”
The sound of powerful wings overhead, like a vast rush of wind, drew their thoughts elsewhere. Eyes wide, and standing arm and arm, they looked upward.
Lauralee sucked in a wild breath of wonder as she watched two eagles overhead doing a kind of mating dance in midair, oblivious of an audience. First they were two birds on the wing, then they merged as one.
Then as one tilted up in the down draft of the evening breeze, the other went down, soaring . . . soaring, the deep blue of evening and the orange of the sunset mingling and captured gloriously in the sheen of the feathers.
As the eagles met again and swept across the sky so effortlessly, their feathers wrapped around their sandy faces like human hair over a goddess’s cheek.
And then they soared on away and got lost to Dancing Cloud and Lauralee’s sight high in a puff of white clouds, only then to reemerge as only two dots far away in the darkening heaven.
“I’ve never seen anything as beautiful,” Lauralee said, still touched deeply by the sight.
Dancing Cloud took Lauralee’s hand and turned her to face him again. “We are like the eagles, free to love, free to mate,” he said huskily.
“I want you so badly,” Lauralee said. Her hands moved gently over his bare chest, savoring the touch of his smooth, copper flesh.
Her fingers gingerly touched the bandage that she had tied over his wound. “Perhaps we should wait?” she murmured. “Aren’t you in pain?’
“There is much pain in my body now, ii, yes,” Dancing Cloud said, his eyes flared with hungry intent.
“Then, darling, we have time now to lie down so that you can rest without the fear of being overcome by lawmen,” Lauralee said, easing away from him.
His hands held her in place as they locked around her waist.
She stared up at him. “Dancing Cloud, you are looking at me as though . . . as though . . . rest is the last thing on your mind,” she said, smiling slowly.
She trembled sensually when he took one of her hands and led it to the place on his body that throbbed and ached with need of her.
“You are feeling my pain, my need,” he said throatily.
A hot flush rose from her neck to her cheeks when she felt the most identifiable shape of his manhood straining against the inside buckskin fabric of his breeches.
“How can I ease your pain, my darling?” she teased, her hands already stroking him through the soft fabric.
Dancing Cloud leaned his head back. He closed his eyes and moaned as her fingers stirred a fire within him. The flames grew higher, licking their way through him. His whole body quivered with the pleasure.
Wanting more, needing more, he placed his thumbs at the waist of his breeches on each side and slowly lowered them past his hips, then kicked them away.
He spread his legs and again enjoyed her caresses, her hands soft, sweet, and warm.
But when he felt that the pleasure was building to an intensity that threatened sharing it with her, he gently eased her hand away.
Lauralee’s heart throbbed as Dancing Cloud removed her blouse, her skirt, and her underthings. Her body tingled with pleasure each time the flesh of his fingers brushed against her body while disrobing her.
When he grazed a breast, she sucked in a breath of pleasure.
When his fingers brushed against her thigh, she trembled and closed her eyes.
After she was fully nude he stepped away from her, his dark, stormy eyes feeding on the sweetness of her flesh. His gaze burned along her bare skin as his eyes swept over her with a silent, urgent message.
In turn, her eyes moved over the sleekness of his body, his muscular thighs, his narrow hips, his long, lean torso.
When she gazed down at the full length of his manhood remembrances of how he so magnificently made love made her shoulders sway with unleashed passion.
Dancing Cloud placed his hands to Lauralee’s waist and led her to a blanket on the ground. As night fell over the valley, a faint silvery mist appeared above the water. The frogs began to boom and croak. The forest behind them became alive with the call of insects.
Dancing Cloud knelt down over Lauralee and silently gazed upon her loveliness again.
Her coppery red hair lay disarrayed around her smooth, creamy shoulders. Her hips curving voluptuously from her waist framed the triangle of hair beneath which lay the secrets of her desire. It was a hot, moist place where he would again find escape and intense pleasure.
Unable to wait any longer for that paradise that he always found in Lauralee’s arms, Dancing Cloud blanketed her with his body.
Lauralee’s soft, full thighs opened as Dancing Cloud’s loins surged forth. He entered her with one deep thrust. His lean, sinewy buttocks moved rhythmically within her, plunging into her, reaching deeply for her innermost part.
Feeling the quickening of her senses, Lauralee clung to Dancing Cloud with a rapturous intensity. Soft moans repeatedly surfaced from inside her as his lips came to her in a grinding, fierce and fevered kiss.
He kissed her long and deep, his hand cupping a breast, his thumb rolling the nipple. He squeezed the breast gently, pulling and rotating the stiff, resilient nipple.
Her hips moved and rocked.
She pressed her pelvis into his.
Dancing Cloud felt the nerves in his body tensing, the wild abandon near. His hand moved over her creamy flesh, then held her in a torrid embrace as he shoved more deeply into her.
He lay his cheek against hers and closed his eyes. He anchored her fiercely still for a moment, then again plunged into her.
The blood was spinning hot through his veins.
Lauralee tremored sensually when Dancing Cloud pressed his lips to her throat, then swept his tongue down her flesh, soon lapping one of her nipples to an even more taut tightness. The golden web of magic was spinning around them, capturing them as their other world slowly melted away.
Then the warmth spread, bringing them together as though one, their bodies quaking, throbbing, and shuddering.
Lauralee arched and cried out and clung to Dancing Cloud with a wildness and desperation as that most wondrous of feelings overwhelmed her. She could tell that he had reached that same pinnacle of pleasure, for he was plunging over and over again inside her. His grip was tight, as though she were being held within a vise.
When their bodies subsided and Dancing Cloud rolled away from Lauralee, he knelt over her and lifted her head from the ground, raining kisses on her lids, and on her hair.
“I so adore you,” Lauralee whispered. Her hands traveled over him, never tiring of feeling his wonderfully muscled copper body. She rediscovered the contours of his sculpted face as he leaned only a fraction away from her, his eyes filled with a loving warmth and peace.
Dancing Cloud suddenly laughed softly as his stomach growled, filling the night air with the sound. “More of myself now needs fed,” he said. “My desires have been fed. Now I must see to the needs of my stomach.”
The night breeze had turned cool. Lauralee sat up and drew the blanket around her shoulders. “If you build a fire I shall prepare our evening meal,” she said, her eyes twinkling into his.
“I believe that is an easy enough bargain to make,” Dancing Cloud said, pulling on his breeches. He slipped his shirt over his head, again aware of the pain in his shoulder. While making love, he had been oblivious of everything but Lauralee.
Lauralee hurried into her own clothes and set about spreading a tablecloth on the ground, and then sliced an apple, peeled a banana, and placed these with a hunk of cheese on a platter.
Unwrapping a checkered table napkin, she withdrew a loaf of bread, surprising Dancing Cloud that she seemed to have thought of everything.
Soon the aroma of coffee filled the air.
Crickets chirped musically.
An owl hooted in the distance.
&nbs
p; Lauralee playfully fed Dancing Cloud small slices of banana. “I feel wicked I am so happy,” she murmured. “But I have waited so long for such a happiness, I shan’t allow anything to spoil it.”
She paused.
“How much longer will it take us to reach your home in the mountains?”
Dancing Cloud’s smile faded as he gazed into the leaping flames of the fire. “Many more days,” he said dryly. “Then duties to my father must be paid.”
He looked slowly over at her. “Do not feel neglected when I begin mourning my father’s death with my people,” he said softly. “Although I spoke with my father in the spirit world, his spirit is not wholly there until the proper mourning has been seen to. I could not do that until I was among my people. We all mourn together our greater losses.”
“I shall mourn with you,” Lauralee said, moving to sit beside him. She melted against him when he swung his arm around her shoulders.
“My people might feel uncomfortable about that,” he said thickly. “Until they grow to know you better, I would think that it would be best for you not to join the mourning rituals for my father. In time, though, you will be a part of everything I and my people do.”
Lauralee felt hurt by the rejection, then thought more about it and understood. He had his private times to see to. She would not interfere.
She rested against him. What he had just said pulled her into worrisome thoughts again about things that had concerned her when she discovered they were in love. She had heard Dancing Cloud say more than once that his clan of Cherokee were full bloods. She could not help but worry again about whether or not his people would tolerate her breaking this practice? Or even Dancing Cloud, for being the one to bring her into their fold?
It gave her a deep, dark feeling of apprehension to think that possibly they would look to her as one might look upon an alien.
* * *
A shadow moved through the darkness, silencing the night creatures in its wake. Brian Brave Walker’s eyes were wild and wide as he ventured on through the dense forest. His father, who had never been a father at all in the true sense of the word, hadn’t prepared him to know how to fend for one’s self. He had never taught his son how to shoot a gun, or how to ride a horse, or anything.
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