by Beverly Bird
She didn’t answer. She settled her legs between his, her belly flat against him, an excruciating, sweet weight. He groaned as she slid downward, her nipples tight and hard through her T-shirt, teasing skin that was suddenly too sensitive, too hot. Then her hands closed over his shaft and her mouth followed. He growled something that could have been her name, plunging his hands into her hair.
She tortured him. His jaw ached with the pain of restraint. When he thought he would lose control anyway, she was suddenly above him again, tugging off her panties, moving up over him, but her mouth...still there was her mouth, moving across his chest now, his neck. He understood what she was doing and hated it even as he loved it. She was giving him something to remember, leaving something behind.
It was more than Anelle had done, but she had always been so much more woman than Anelle, even from the start.
Her legs were strong and smooth against his sides and her fingernails raked slowly and deliberately across his skin. He knew she was marking him as he had once tried to mark her. He was close to exploding, hot and rigid to the point of pain, when she finally came down on him and enfolded him.
He supposed turnabout was fair play, and he’d certainly tried to torture her the previous time, but he’d had enough of it now.
He rolled over suddenly, taking her with him, hearing her gasp, pressing into her again, fast and hard, when she was beneath him. He held her legs up and drove into her again and again until she wept his name and he knew it would echo in her heart a long time after she was gone.
Magnificent and silent, the mountain rose above them. Its shadows shifted in the moonlight as if it were breathing, alive, watching them.
Chapter 18
For a long time afterward there was only the deep black sky and the shadows of the land. Then an even colder wind howled down from the mountain and Catherine shivered.
Jericho closed his arms around her. He had been lying with them splayed out, like a man who had just been run down by something a lot bigger, a lot stronger, than he was. An ironic, almost pained smile pulled at one corner of his mouth with the thought.
“We’ll go inside,” he murmured.
“In a minute.” Somehow she had the sense that once they got up from here, once they left this spot, something beautiful and amazing would be over.
But a minute was too long. Fresh wind blew, and it carried the scent of icy moisture this time. Catherine pulled away from him reluctantly and sat up, hugging herself.
“Another storm?” she wondered.
“It’s the season for it.” He sensed it too, she realized, that feeling that once they went inside, they would never be able to get back to a place, a time like this ever again. She could tell from his voice, and it almost made her moan aloud.
Suddenly she was desperate to forestall it. “I’ll put some coffee on.”
“No.”
Her heart staggered. Was he going to leave then, right now? But she saw a small grin on his face as he looked for his jeans and the gun again.
“I’ll make it,” he finished. “The stuff you brew tastes like a warm puddle.”
“It does not!”
“So you can’t cook. No big deal.”
“I can cook.” She was feeling more indignant by the moment.
“Well, you can’t roll fry bread.”
That sobered her. Not the basic truth of it, but all the little innuendos inherent in it. This was a land of fry bread, after all.
They started back for her trailer. “There’s a trick to the chocolate stuff anyway,” he said finally as they went inside. “You’ve got to use a little bit of milk in place of some of the water, otherwise it’s too bitter.”
She sat at the table and watched him move around the kitchen area. He was so male, so large, yet as graceful as a cat. How was she supposed to go through each day without him in it?
She pulled breath in painfully. “You could come with me,” she blurted suddenly, then she colored to the roots of her hair. It would be a huge sacrifice for a man to make, even for a woman he loved. And Jericho loved his people, his land, with nearly all his passion.
Yet he actually seemed to think about it. At least, he didn’t answer for a long time. Then he shook his head, and though she had known he would, it still made her throat hurt.
“No way, Cat Eyes,” he said finally. “I already tried that.”
“Living in Boston?” She was startled, and the question was admittedly stupid.
“Albuquerque.” He brought the coffee back to the table and drew up the other chair. He didn’t look at her. “After school in Gallup, I went to the university there.”
There was more to it than that. She sensed it like a black cloud, the way he must have sensed that something was wrong with her before she got sick.
“College is rarely pleasant if you take it seriously,” she said tentatively.
“College was fine. But I tried to stay there.”
“Why?”
“The women.”
Catherine jolted. Something cold was trying to replace her blood. “What about them?” she asked carefully.
“They were just like you, Cat Eyes. Fine boned and delicate, with porcelain skin and crystal-clear eyes.”
“Is that why you hated me at first?”
“No. That was why I wanted you at first, and why I hated myself for it.”
She flinched, then she forced one shoulder up nonchalantly. “So I was just...your type.”
He leaned back, stretching his long legs out beneath the table. Words weren’t so hard after all, he realized, once he got into the swing of them.
“That’s what Shadow said the first day you turned up in the wash. Actually, you were a type I tried to avoid.”
“It showed,” she answered shortly, before she could stop herself.
“No doubt.” He used his finger to inch his coffee cup around in little circles. “You get burned, you learn a healthy respect for fire.”
“I never burned you.”
“Ah, but you will, Cat Eyes, and I’m going to let you.”
Suddenly he picked his cup up and swallowed deeply, as if it were laced with fortification instead of just chocolate. “Oh, hell, it wasn’t just the women,” he said finally. “Your world is one of available riches and opportunity. That bit me too. But look around this Res, Cat Eyes—really look at the women. They own the hogans, the sheep, they rule their families with hands of steel.” He gave a short, abrupt laugh, but it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. “Shadow pushes me around, and I don’t even want to tell you about my mother. I took one look at all those Anglo girls, soft, dependent, fragile in comparison. I learned quick enough that few of them saw themselves that way, but I decided to marry one anyway.”
Marry? Of all the things she thought he might be keeping from her, that had never even crossed her mind. She had always wondered where he went at night, not who he went home to. Her eyes darted helplessly to his left hand, to his ring finger, then she bit down hard on her lip when he held it up to remind her.
No ring.
“She’s dead,” he said flatly.
Catherine’s head swam. She didn’t know what to say.
“I turned my back on my roots, on my past, on my history, and I stayed in Albuquerque with her. She was a rich city girl and Mommy and Daddy laid the world at her feet. Her name was Anelle. For a while it was easy. For a while she was...joy. Then she got pregnant and she aborted the kid.”
Catherine blanched. His face twisted with emotion, even now, even all this time later, and she could only watch, sick and spellbound.
She struggled for her voice. “But...there’s little danger to that procedure nowadays.”
“Danger?” he spat, and she recoiled a little at his fury. “For who? For the grandparents who were fretting over the social consequences of a child with Navajo blood? For the mother, who cared more for her parents’ feelings than those of her husband? For the father, who didn’t even know about it until six goddamn weeks late
r?”
Secrets. “Jericho—”
But now he had found words, and he wouldn’t—couldn’t—be stopped. Because finally, with each one that burst from him, he felt somehow purged of it all.
“When she finally told me, she said she wasn’t ready for the responsibility of a family, that she was still a kid herself. But she couldn’t tell me that with conviction, and I knew her parents had talked her into it because they—they—were suddenly so satisfied. It was as if something had been eating at them for months, and all of a sudden they took a deep breath and relaxed. The problem was disposed of.” He made a bitter sound. “And I responded like a caveman, like the savage they thought I was. Anelle was different after that, haunted...my God, she’d aborted her own child because of familial pressure. So I grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out of Albuquerque, back here to the Res. I brought her here because the land heals, and sometimes it soothes. And sometimes it forgives.”
Catherine was beginning to understand. “But she couldn’t forgive herself.”
“No.” He looked at her finally, his deep black eyes filled with cloudy pain. “I will always have to wonder,” he said slowly, “if she would have managed it if she had stayed in Albuquerque, if I hadn’t dragged her back here. Maybe I should have just let her go.”
“You...loved her,” she whispered. It brought a strange kind of hurt, a jealousy of longing to be that woman, a woman who perhaps hadn’t known what she had.
Jericho seemed to deeply consider her words. “I was obsessed with her,” he corrected. “She was mine, the most beautiful thing I had ever found. She was like a gem you put away somewhere to keep it safe, and every night you take it out to look at it and stroke it.”
And oh, how those hands could stroke. Catherine wanted to cry.
He raked his fingers through his long hair in that way he had when he was struggling with something. “She didn’t belong here, and I guess I knew it right from the beginning, a nagging little idea in my gut that I wouldn’t look at too closely. My instincts told me the land would destroy her. She wasn’t hardy enough for it, especially after what had happened with the baby. She was—in the purest sense—a city girl.” His mouth quirked in something that could have been a bitter smile. “But instead of sending her back where she belonged, I tried to change my land to suit her.
“I had some money saved from working in the city and I built her a house up on the slope, so she wouldn’t have to live in a trailer or hogan. I took her to sings and tried to teach her what this country was about, some of its secrets. Bought her a decent car so she wouldn’t feel so isolated here and I wouldn’t have to worry about her breaking down God knows where. And in the end, she took it and drove it off the mountain.”
Catherine gasped, but he only finished his coffee, setting the cup down with a decisive cracking sound.
“So now you get it, Cat Eyes. Yeah, I can see in your eyes that you do.” He pushed his chair back. “The hell of it is, it took me a long time to come back from that, and it was the land that finally brought me around. That and Uncle Ernie. Teaching me the sings, teaching me where I belonged. I belong here, Cat Eyes, and you...don’t. I’m not going to drag you away from what you want, what you are, and try to make you stay here. And I can’t leave the people who saved me by needing me. And that,” he said quietly, “is that.”
He was at the door. She had to stop him. She had to make him understand.
I never burned you.
Ah, but you will, Cat Eyes, and I’m going to let you.
She couldn’t tell him he was wrong. Because he wasn’t. She understood perfectly what he was telling her, because she had already thought of it herself. To the best of his ability, he had shown her his world these past few weeks, had let her in and given her the kindest part of himself. It was there for her if she wanted it, if she thought she could live with it, stay with it without it driving her mad. But they both knew she would have to give up everything else to keep it, and that was a choice only she could make. He would not ask it of her; he wouldn’t make it for her.
And she could not stand to be that hollow, that useless, ever again.
“But I love you,” she whispered.
The door clicked quietly behind him. He was already gone.
* * *
After a few short hours in the clinic the next morning, Catherine knew that Jericho wasn’t going to show up. He wouldn’t thump-thump his way up the steps this time and throw his jacket over the chair. He wouldn’t go to the mountain for a few days and come back, raging in as if the storm had blown him. He wouldn’t carry her to the bed and love her until dawn.
He wouldn’t do any of those things, because he was waiting for her to make up her mind. He wouldn’t put himself through five final days of hell, waiting to see if what he had given her would be enough.
Catherine tensed her jaw and stared down stubbornly at the file in her hands, trying to read it. There was a woman in one of the exam rooms with an infected boil on her big toe and apparently it kept coming back. She had been one of Kolkline’s rare patients, but then she had given up on him. Catherine needed to find out what kind of imbecilic, negligent thing he had done to her to make her decide she’d rather live with the pain.
But Kolkline’s spidery handwriting kept smearing on the page, even when she sniffed quietly and got a tissue to try to circumspectly blow her nose. Ellen was watching her. Catherine finally straightened her shoulders and tucked the file under her arm, marching off to the exam room.
The woman sat on the table waiting for her, one foot clad in a tennis shoe, the other one bare. “Well,” Catherine murmured, “no matter what Dr. Kolkline did, it only makes sense to clean it up first, don’t you think? Maybe then we can see what the problem is.”
She hunkered down in front of one of the cabinets to get some swabs and astringent. As soon as she opened the door, a startled deermouse darted out. Catherine cringed instinctively, then she let out nervous laughter.
“Don’t let ‘em bother you none,” the woman said. “They’re all over. More and more, the colder it gets.”
“I know.” Still, Catherine thought, she would have to clean these cabinets out well, the first chance she got.
She got what she needed and helped the woman move around so that her bad foot was resting on the table. She bent over it, then she looked up at her again sharply.
“What did you say?”
“When it gets cold, they come in to try to get warm. In the summer, they just stay long enough to hunt up some food, but in the winter they snuggle in. They’re even worse up Two Gray Hills way this year. I got a niece living up there. She had to spend seventeen dollars last week on traps, and that man at the hardware place in Shiprock only takes cash. You don’t, do you? Ellen said I could give you some of my turquoise.”
“I beg your pardon?” Catherine breathed.
“Turquoise. I got plenty. My man makes jewelry. That okay with you?”
“I...that’s fine.”
Catherine cleaned her toe without seeing it and gave her some antibiotic ointment. Two Gray Hills way. More and more, the colder it gets.
Lisa had been up to Two Gray Hills country, although Jericho had decided it probably didn’t mean anything. And Louie had had a deermouse in his bedding. The cases were escalating steadily with the colder weather. But how had she gotten it? The only mouse she had encountered was the one in Louie’s blankets. It had never touched her, and if it had contaminated Louie’s bedding, then Jericho and certainly Bessie should have gotten Tah honeesgai, too.
Unless it wasn’t the mice that were transmitting it. Unless the contamination was in something they were leaving behind, in the clinic cupboards, in Louie’s bedding, something the victims had direct contact with.
Their droppings. How many times had she shoved her hands blindly into these cabinets, she and Ellen too, but rarely Jericho?
Ellen.
She pushed the tube of antibiotic into the woman’s hand. “You need to ru
b some of that in there two times a day, even if it hurts, Mrs. Nakai. And come back here next week. I want to look at it again. You can give me the turquoise later.”
Except she wouldn’t be here next week. And the toe was as infected as it was because the woman had refused to see Kolkline any longer.
But she couldn’t think of that now. She hurried back into the front room. A few new faces stared back at her and Lance had returned to have his bite rechecked, but Ellen was nowhere in sight.
“Where’s the nurse?” she demanded.
One woman smiled helpfully. “She didn’t feel good. She went home.”
“Oh, my God.” She looked wildly at Lance. “Are you sober? Can you drive?”
He looked highly indignant. “I can always drive.”
She doubted that, but she had no choice but to believe him. She couldn’t imagine there was much traffic on the mountain anyway.
“You’ve got to find Jericho. Do you know where he lives?”
“Sure. I can see his house from my windmill.”
“Then get him. Find him.” Please God, let him have stayed at home. “Tell him to go to Ellen’s and take her to University. Tell him I figured it out and it’s the mice.”
“The mice?”
She was losing them. They were all exchanging looks. She couldn’t care. “Hurry!” She looked around at the others. “Come back tomorrow,” she said abruptly. “The clinic’s closed.”
They began shuffling out, muttering and casting glances back at her. She locked the door behind them and leaned against it, her pulse clamoring.
The clinic had to be cleaned—top to bottom—before she let anyone back in here. Who knew where the mice had left deposits? But first she had to find some droppings. She went back to the exam-room cabinets. It shouldn’t be hard.
She pulled on some surgical gloves, not sure if she had immunity now or not. But she was going to find out; she was going to know everything about this disease before the day was over. There were some droppings in the back of the cabinet the mouse had scurried out of and she knocked them into a plastic bag with a small scalpel and carried the bag to the front room, grabbing the phone.