Secrets of a Midnight Moon--The Moon Trilogy--Book One

by Jane Bonander

  Nicolas crossed to the door and shouted at one of the children to bring him some hot water. When he returned to the child, he stroked its tiny fingers and made soothing sounds in his throat.

  She felt useless. “Nicolas, what happened?” she repeated, gently running her fingers over the child’s black hair.

  He grabbed a small piece of clean cloth and dabbed at the wound. The gentle probing accelerated the bleeding, and when one of the children came in with a pitch-lined basket of warm water, he quickly moistened another cloth and told Anna to hold it against the cut.

  “Nicolas, please?” She gently dabbed at the wound.

  He pulled down a basket from a shelf by the door and took out several leaves.

  “His mother’s dead,” he answered, shoving the leaves into his mouth.

  Anna looked back at the child. A wave of anguish jolted through her. She didn’t want to believe what he’d said about her people, but somehow, after all she’d learned while she’d been captive at the compound, she knew it was true. “But who … why would someone—” She pressed her lips together, unable to finish the sentence.

  He ignored her. He went to the fireplace and swept some soot into a large, hollowed-out bone. On his way back to the table, he picked up a pot of grease and, with a small paddlelike stick, began mixing the two ingredients together.

  Anna watched him work. She realized that had Shy Fawn been anywhere near, she’d be helping Nicolas. While she might not know what to do, she thought, she could follow orders.

  “What can I do?”

  He put down the bowl of sooty grease and spat the chewed leaves into his palm. ‘Take your hand away.” His voice was sharp, angry.

  She did as he asked, moving her hand down to the baby’s chest.

  When Nicolas placed the masticated leaves along the sides of the wound, the child’s whimpers grew louder. “These will stop the bleeding.”

  She stroked the child’s chest, hoping to sooth him. “What are they?”

  He gave her a brief glance. “Barberry leaves.”

  She reached around him and brought the bowl of mixed soot and grease closer. “And this goes on the wound?” she asked.

  At his terse nod, she handed him the mix. He spread it onto the child’s neck while she held the infant’s weak little arms. Poor thing didn’t have much fight left in him.

  Anna watched Nicolas’s strong, brown fingers move gently over the wound while he chanted something barely audible. His voice soothed the child as nothing else had. “You’re very good at this,” she offered softly.

  He barely glanced at her. “I need some help, not applause.”

  Embarrassment sifted through her. She swallowed hard and tried to appear busy.

  “If you want to be useful, bathe the boy.”

  She did as he instructed, keeping her eyes on her work, realizing she should have known better than to compliment him. It had sounded false and fawning to her own ears. No doubt it had sounded worse to his.

  She gave Nicolas a furtive glance as he pulled off his soiled tunic, revealing his solid brown torso. Memories of their times together tumbled over her, and she willed herself to look away, but it was too late. His hard, corded muscles, so cleanly defined that the blood vessels in his arms stood out like long, blue veins of granite, made her ache with a poignant reminiscence of their past couplings.

  When he stepped near her, she noticed that his skin was bathed in sweat; his scent, powerful and feral, invaded her nostrils. She leaned against the table for support and tried to make some sense of her feelings.

  “Please, won’t you tell me how this happened?” she asked, her hands resting on the child.

  Nicolas tied a fresh cloth around the wound to keep the child from pulling at it. “All you have to know is that the mother is dead.”

  Anna bit her lip. It hurt that he wouldn’t take her into his confidence. She continued to carefully wash the dirt and blood from the infant’s tiny brown body.

  “Dammit, woman.” He pushed her aside. “At that rate, it’ll take you all day to get him clean.”

  She stepped away, hugging her arms with her hands. He’d never been quite this angry with her. Perhaps it was his concern for the infant. But somehow she knew it wasn’t just that. It was personal. As far as he was concerned, she could just as well been the one who’d cut the child’s throat.

  She stared at his hands as he worked. There was a gentleness about him when he touched the baby that sucked out all the hate and frustration she had for him and replaced it with a soft blanket of love. He was so wonderful with everyone. Everyone but her …

  He turned and glared at her. “Can you at least wrap him in a blanket before he’s too old to need one?”

  His sarcastic tone hurt. “Of course,” she answered quietly, stepping to his side and wrapping the flannel around the child. “What will happen to him?”

  Nicolas cupped his hands in the warm water and sluiced it over his torso. “It’s obvious, don’t you think?” His voice was hard.

  She looked at him, noting the way the water tunneled through his chest hair on its way to his navel She coughed and looked up, blinking furiously when she found him watching her. “It’s not obvious to me, Nicolas. How would I know?”

  He swore. “I should have found Shy Fawn,” he muttered. “At least she’s not useless in a crisis.”

  Anna clamped her mouth shut. Turning away from him, she finished wrapping the boy in the blanket. Of course she was useless. She’d never had to survive in the wilderness. She didn’t know what to do with a bleeding child, much less one who was bleeding miles from civilization. It wasn’t fair for him to compare her to Shy Fawn.

  She felt stupid, foolish tears sting her eyes as she lifted the child into her arms. Keeping her back to Nicolas, she walked to the window, gently hushing and soothing the fussy boy. Or maybe she was soothing her own battered feelings.

  She stared outside. Comparing her uselessness to Shy Fawn’s many talents was just the last in a long string of insults she’d had to endure this past month. Shy Fawn hadn’t let up on her at all, but she’d taken the woman’s anger in stride. She’d done more than her share of work and had tried to be pleasant in spite of Shy Fawn’s mean remarks.

  She bent her head and covertly wiped the moisture from her cheeks on the blanket. Nothing had changed. Nothing! Nicolas was back, but he still treated her like an outsider.

  He walked passed her, jarring her from her moody thoughts. “Bring him to Shy Fawn,” he said, avoiding her eyes.

  Anna glared at his back. “You’re welcome.”

  He stopped and slowly turned to face her. Giving her the briefest of nods, he mumbled a terse thank you and left.

  She stared after him, her eyes misting with unshed tears. She was the biggest fool on the face of the earth. It was impossible to love a man like him.

  Spinning sharply from the window, she cradled the whimpering child in her arms and went to find Shy Fawn. After that she would take a bath. A long, leisurely bath. One that would wash away not only the dirt and grime, but hopefully the stupid feelings of longing she had whenever she thought about Nicolas. Loving a man like that could only bring her more pain. And she didn’t need that. Sweet heaven, she didn’t need that.

  When she’d finished her bath, she slipped into the buckskin dress she’d found in the dresser a month before. Nothing she had ever worn had felt like this. She ran her hands down over her hips and relished the freedom she had to move beneath the dress. She was glad she’d decided to wear it. After all, she thought, pushing her feet into the ankle-high moccasins Joke had made for her, most of her own clothes had become rags.

  She reached into the pocket of her apron, took out her brush and pulled it through the long, heavy hair that hung over her shoulder nearly to her waist. After she’d brushed it until her scalp tingled, she coaxed the heavy mass into a long, fat curl, then ried it with a mink ribbon. After emptying the water and cleaning out the tub, she picked up her soiled clothes and lef
t the sweathouse.

  As she made her way back toward the compound, she saw the children over on the hillside for the first time since Nicolas had left. Now he was back, hypnotizing them with his stories. The sound of his voice as he talked sent dozens of fluttering butterflies to her stomach.

  She looked away, unable to understand why her body would react this way. She was still angry at how he’d treated her the morning he’d forced himself on her and left Tier sobbing with shame. He’d been hateful, savage, and violent. He’d held her down and fought her attempts to free herself. He’d enjoyed taunting her, threatening her and overpowering her. …

  She closed her eyes and hung her head. As much as she’d hated him, as much as she’d loathed his demoralizing assault on her body, she’d felt the deep, hot stirrings of passion coil in her belly the moment he’d lost his own anger and began loving her more gently. What was worse and almost more painful, was the realization that she knew he had felt her shameless response.

  She turned to leave, but as she walked away, she found that she wanted to stay. Not because of Nicolas, she told herself. No. She just wanted to blend into the background and listen as he spoke with the children.

  Hurrying softly, she took the long way around to the back of the hill. As she got closer, she could hear his deep, resonant voice more clearly. It splashed over her, again giving her confusing messages of remembered pleasure and pain. Partially hidden behind some low lying brush, she leaned against the trunk of an oak tree. She tried to ignore the sound of his voice, the wide, handsome spread of his shoulders, the gentle way he had of touching the children … and she almost convinced herself that she only wanted to hear the story.

  But as she sat there, listening to him spin his magical tales, her senses opened to his presence. A gust of wind tousled his black hair, and she could almost feel the coarse waves as they’d touched her skin the first time he’d made love to her.

  When he leaned over and accepted a kiss from Summer, Anna remembered how his firm, insistent mouth had closed over hers. The warmth from his breath as it had caressed her lips filled her with sensual reminders of his tongue courting hers, his teeth nibbling her earlobe.

  She dragged her gaze back to Nicolas’s seated form just as he touched Two Leafs shoulder. Her skin tingled as she recalled his hands cupping her breasts, teasing her nipples, moving slowly and erotically down over her stomach. Heat rushed low into her belly, desire spiraled through her, and she hung her head, fighting the urge to sob with shame.

  “What’s the next story, Nick?” Two Leaf sat at Nicolas’s side and looked up at him, grinning with joy at his hero’s return.

  “It’s the story of the end of the world.”

  One of the smaller children who had just begun to understand the stories started to cry and rushed into Nicolas’s arms. He soothed the child with his big, calloused hand, and Anna’s heart softened further. She wondered how he would be with a child of his own. Their child. The one growing inside me.

  Stop it! She must stop thinking about it. She wasn’t pregnant. She wasn’t! But she absently ran her hand over her breasts. They’d become more tender lately. …

  She closed her eyes and cleared her mind of everything but the sound of Nicolas’s voice as he spoke to the children. The story was different from the others. It was about the impatience of Water, who wanted to flood the earth, and of Spirit, who scolded him. It was about how the earth would flood and drown everyone after all of the Indians were gone.

  “The white man has never cared for our land,” Nicolas said, shaking his proud head. “They don’t care for our deer and they don’t care for our bear. When we kill meat, we eat it all up. What we don’t eat, we use in other ways.”

  He turned and rubbed his chin against Summer’s shiny black hair. “When we dig roots,” he said, smoothing Summer’s wayward strands behind one ear while she snuggled closer to his side, “we make little holes. We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We don’t chop down trees. We only use dead wood. The whites plow the ground. They pull up the trees. They kill everything.”

  Anna thought of her father’s meticulously plowed fields. He’d spent weeks felling ancient trees and bragging about it to anyone who would listen. She’d been quietly proud of her father’s strength and ambition to make things better for his family.

  She’d never questioned the values she’d grown up with. She’d never wavered in her belief that God approved of the way they’d lived. They had always shared what they had with those who had nothing. And her father, though stern and unbending with his children, had taken sacks of potatoes and grain to the families who’d been flooded out in the low lands.

  Why, then, did Nicolas’s words make her feel such shame?

  ‘Tree says, ‘Don’t,’ ” Nicolas continued. “ ‘I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But the whites don’t care how much the ground cries out. Everywhere the white man has touched, the earth is sore. It looks sick.”

  When Two Leaf said he wished the white man had never come to California, Nicolas put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “It’s too late for that. What we have to do now is make sure you can fit into their world.”

  “All white man is bad!” one child pouted.

  Anna could see him glower from where she sat. She waited for Nicolas’s answer, for he was walking a fine line with the children. It would be so easy to feed their hatred. As much as she knew he might want to, she also knew he wouldn’t. The realization saddened her. He was always fair-minded—with everyone but her.

  “No,” Nicolas admonished softly. He sat quietly for a long time, as if wondering how to say what he had to say. “It’s true that many of them do bad things to people. But some of them are good.”

  “Name one!” a child shouted, his voice holding a dare.

  “Miss Anna is a real good white man, isn’t she, Nick?” June’s chin jutted stubbornly toward the other child.

  Anna smiled at June’s reference and knew the girl’s dark eyes would be mutinous, but she held her breath for Nicolas’s answer. He took his time, unwittingly causing Anna to arch forward as she waited. Finally, she heard him sigh.

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “Miss Anna is good. She’s your teacher.”

  Though his answer was noncommittal, Anna realized there was nothing else he could say. Whether he agreed with June or not, he could hardly speak out against her in front of the children.

  When he’d finished the story, Two Leaf begged him to tell them a happier one. As Nicolas began the legend of Coyote, Anna rose quietly from her hiding place, not wanting to call attention to herself. Just then she heard Summer’s voice.

  “Anya!”

  She cringed. As Summer left Nicolas and ran toward her, Anna lifted her eyes and met his arrogant stare. Evidence of the tiredness she’d noticed earlier was still there, but he quickly masked it. He studied her, giving her a quiet, private once-over. She quickly looked away. It was amazing how easily she could love him when his energy was focused on someone else. Then, the minute he looked at her, her feelings of love were visited by a poignant ache. She didn’t know what hurt more, loving him or knowing that he didn’t love her back. Probably a little bit of both.

  “I’d hoped I wouldn’t disturb you.” She bent down and lifted Summer into her arms. As she walked toward the group, Nicolas continued to stare at her.

  “You could have joined us,” Nicolas drawled. “We won’t bite, will we, children?”

  The children hooted with laughter, but Anna’s eyes were locked with his. His predatory scowl reminded her of a potent threat he’d used before. I’ll bite off your juicy little earlobe. Her pulse quickened.

  “Anya pree.”

  Summer’s voice brought Anna back to the present. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she answered absently as Summer touched the long, loosely tied curl that hung over Anna’s shoulder.

  “Anya stay?”

  “I’m sure she has better things to do, Summer.”

  Anna noted his dismissive tone as she appr
oached the circle of children with Summer in her arms. She was tempted to stay and make him a liar, but knew she’d be the one to suffer. “I’m sorry, Summer. I … I really do have some things to do.” She put Summer on the grass beside her brother and bravely avoided Nicolas’s eyes.

  “Oh, Miss Anna!” June’s voice was a breathy sigh as she gazed at Anna’s dress. “You look real beautiful.”

  Anna suddenly felt terribly self-conscious. “Well … well thank you, June.” She tossed a quick glance at Nicolas. His seductive glare hadn’t changed. She still felt like a mare alone in a pasture with a rutting stallion. Somehow it wasn’t the least bit soothing to know that she was useless to him as a nurse but still desirable as his whore. The thought strengthened her, and she turned to leave.

  “Where did you get this?” June asked, running her thin hand over the soft hide of her dress.

  “It … I found it in—”

  “Oooh,” June interrupted, touching the black and pearl design at the neck. “It’s nicer than Shy Fawn’s. Who gave it to you?”

  “I did.”

  Dumbfounded, Anna stared at Nicolas. Her stomach twisted into anxious, sickening knots. Shame and anger surged through her. Of course. Why hadn’t she realized it before? He’d treated her like a whore, and he’d thought to pay her off. Suddenly the soft, buckskin dress became a cloak of thorns, pressing angrily into Anna’s tender skin.

  “Why’d you give her a dress, Nick?”

  Anna watched Nicolas, her heart pounding in her throat as she waited for his answer. She wondered what kind of loathsome lie he would come up with.

  He looked at her for a long moment, his gaze hot and his lips curled into a small, secret smile, one that clearly said to Anna, I always buy my whores a gift.

  He looked away and reached over to chuck Two Leaf under the chin. “Because,” he said, “she was ruining her city clothes up here. That’s why.”

  Anna almost laughed out loud. God above, he didn’t give a tinker’s damn whether her clothes fell off her back in shreds.