"No," she said.
"I nearly refused. I nearly told your father that if that was the kind of house you wanted you would have to come and live in mine."
His hand stroking her naked back pressed her briefly. Smith started and then froze into stillness.
"What did you say?" she asked hoarsely.
"But for all I knew, your father...I decided instead that I'd make a deal with you. You'd have to come and be my wife till the house was built, you'd have to give me the chance to...."
Smith's throat closed up, and her breathing stopped. Johnny's hand clenched her arm.
"Well," he said, in a voice so filled with pain it hurt her, "you have to take the chances fate gives. I'll promise not to build your father's house, Shulamith, if you'll come and live with me for six months. After that, if you still…after that, if I have to, I'll let you go."
He rolled her onto her back and bent over her, and his black eyes met hers, and there was no gentleness in them. "That's my best offer," he said. "If you turn it down I'll build your father's house, and I'll build the Concord building, and I'll get every commission I can from your friends and your father's friends, and you'll never be free of me. I'll refuse to divorce you. I'll hang on like death till I've made you love me or hate me."
Her heartbeat was loud in her ears, and wherever he touched her, her flesh ached with need.
She swallowed. "Do you love me?" she asked.
His lips stretched into a line. "I love you." His voice cracked. "Don't you know it? You're my life."
She closed her eyes. "What would it mean, if I learned to love you? Would it mean you could stop loving me?"
"No!" he whispered. He looked shaken.
She said, "I couldn't go through it again. I loved you. I let myself love you, and you—you looked at me as though you hated me. You said...you said, 'My God, what have I done?'"
She remembered the horror of that morning with a sudden clarity that brought a choking lump to her throat. "I was nervous that morning," she said. "But if you hadn't looked at me like that, if you'd loved me then....It wasn't temporary insanity or Stockholm Syndrome for me!" she cried. "I loved you! You asked me to love you, and when I did you threw it back in my face!"
"I know. I was a fool. Forgive me," he said.
There were tears on her cheeks. "And now you want me to love you again, but you don't say why." She sobbed once. "You want me for six months. What will happen then? You obviously think you'll have it out of your system after six months, but what about me? I'm better off where I am, Johnny. I'm halfway through it, I can see the light now." What a lie. She would never stop loving him, but at least he would never know. "What do I do when it's over for you? What if I can't stop loving you to order?"
He kissed her. He kissed the tears from her cheeks, and then he kissed her mouth, and he looked at her and she knew suddenly that he did know, that he had read what she had tried to hide. And what did that mean? What would he do with the knowledge?
"Love me forever," he begged her softly. "Please love me forever."
"No!" she wailed on a high, pleading cry. "Please don't, please, Johnny, it will kill me! I can't live with you! I'll do whatever you want, but please don't, please don't make me—"
She began to sob in earnest, and he held her and let her cry. "You don't understand," she sobbed brokenly. "You don't know what it's like. It would kill me. I spent so long trying to make my father love me, and I couldn't do it, it's impossible, I can't make anyone love me. It wouldn't be fair to pretend I could, Johnny, don't make me think I could. He says he always loved me, but why didn't he tell me? Why did he act as if he hated me? And I kept trying to please him, Johnny, but nothing ever pleased him!
"I swore to myself I'd never beg you for your love, but if you made me live with you, I'd start trying. It would be the same thing all over again, Johnny, I'd be trying to make you love me! Don't!" she begged desperately, covering her face and knowing that she had told him everything, everything she had meant to keep hidden. Nowhere was safe now; she would never be safe from him again. "Please don't."
He kissed her and let her cry out her despair against his chest until at last there were no tears left. She lay still in his arms then, while her shuddering breath calmed, and all the pain of a lifetime was in her eyes.
In the silence the sound of wind and rain was loud. Johnny lay back and drew her onto his chest and stroked her hair with a tenderness that shook her.
"I love you," he said quietly. She moved, but he held her fast. "Just listen," he said. "Just let me say it. I love you, Shulamith. I loved you the first moment I saw you, when you burst into your father's room and started to give us all a piece of your mind." He laughed a little. "I felt as though some...it was as though my spirit and yours were suddenly bound together—I could almost see it. Looking back now I know I didn't take you with me because I thought you'd recognized my face. That was the excuse I gave myself. I took you because you were mine, because we belonged together.
"There was that legend in my family. Do you believe in race memory? Sometimes I thought it was happening again, that you had come to me to fulfil that legend. Other times I just thought I'd gone crazy. I did it all wrong, I should have gone away that night and found another way to meet you. And I knew that because I'd done it wrong, something was bound to separate us. I thought if I could get you to marry me I could prevent it from happening. I didn't know—I never imagined that the danger was from myself.
"What I told you about myself that morning was right. I had always felt the need to get my heritage back, to be accepted by my people. When I fell in love with you, it seemed to me that it was no longer important, that I had to accept what I had done with my life and go on.
"But in the morning—you know what happened in the morning. Everything I had thought unimportant came back to haunt me. I told myself that what I had done was irrational, that I had been possessed...but it was done, there was no going back. And I panicked."
"But you married me so I wouldn't be able to accuse you, didn't you?" Shulamith asked.
That shook him. "What? No!" he said. His voice trembled. "No. My God, is that what you thought?"
"Sometimes," she whispered. "Afterwards, when you told me—
"You thought it was all a lie? You thought I was lying to you from the beginning?"
"There were times I told myself you must have thought you loved me once. But on my black days, and there were plenty of those…."
Johnny closed his eyes. "The first lie I told you was the morning I said I didn't love you," Johnny said. "I lied to myself, too. Afterward I needed you so desperately I had to go to you—even though the police were as thick as flies around you—but I was still lying to myself. Lying to you. I don't know why. The day we were married I had no other thought than to make you mine forever."
Shulamith smiled and suddenly remembered to breathe.
"When did you stop lying to yourself?"
He breathed. "That morning you sat in the kitchen and sang your song to me and told me how many men you'd be waking up to say goodbye to in the future...something shifted then. There was a knife in my gut and you were twisting it, and you didn't even know. I told myself if I'd killed your love it was my own fault, and I told myself I'd have my heritage to keep me warm. I thought I could let you go."
Slowly, tentatively, a ripple of happiness nudged against her heart. "You still think it," she said. "You said you would let me go."
He grasped her arms and held her tightly to him, more tightly than she had ever been held—safe and secure. "Did I?" he rasped. "It's a lie. I can't live without you. I can't let you go. My grandfather was wrong. I have found my soul. You are my soul.
"Be sure it's what you want, Shulamith, because if you ask me to love you now, I will. And there'll be no going back. You're mine, and you'll be mine till we're in our graves. And I will never let you go."
He kissed her hungrily, and his body found hers with an urgency that raised her need to fever
pitch, and her giving was free and open, and she would never be afraid again.
***
"You got it back!" Shulamith exclaimed in delight. "Is it all right?" She rushed over to take the robe from him and flung it out over the bed. The brilliantly coloured dragon glittered and postured as before. A faint discolouration—a kind of dulling—showed where the long smear of grease had been. Shulamith bent to examine it more closely. The tears in the delicate silk had been invisibly mended and the signs hardly showed. The robe had been cleaned and pressed.
"It must have been a painstaking job to mend it." she said. "It really is beautiful."
"It took an art restorer two months to do." Johnny was looking at her oddly as she knelt on the bed and examined every inch of fabric and embroidery. "You knew it had been damaged?" he asked.
"Mmm," she nodded absentmindedly. "Staff Sergeant Podborski showed it to me. He wanted to know if it was mine. Did they pay for the repair?"
"The police don't pay for anything. My insurance paid. You never told me, you know," Johnny added curiously. "You told me they had it, but you didn't say they'd mutilated it."
She looked an apology at him. "I was afraid it would be too much for you to take, with everything else. Besides—"
"Besides?"
"I didn't know who it had belonged to, who you'd bought it for. I always thought you must have loved her very much. And I was afraid—well, you'd had enough that day."
Johnny tied the belt of his robe with a snap and walked over to her. "You were protecting me from the pain of losing a memento of another woman?"
"Yes, why not?"
He bent and kissed her. "No reason, Peaceable Woman," he said. "But for your information the last woman to wear this robe died probably two hundred years ago."
"What?"
"It's a robe from Imperial China, from the Ching dynasty," he told her. "The dragon is a symbol of power. The flowers and birds are prayers for happiness or long life." His hand traced the shape of a flower. "Only the emperor or his courtiers were allowed to wear the dragon. This is a woman's robe, with a five-clawed dragon. Only a very favoured powerful woman close to the emperor would have been allowed to wear it. Perhaps a very beloved wife." He kissed her and smiled. "Like you.
"I bought the robe in Hong Kong. It reminds me of the decorated cloaks that were used among the Chopa for religious rituals. I meant to have it framed and hung."
Shulamith looked at him goggle-eyed. "It's a museum piece?" she demanded in astonishment. "It's an antique? I knew it was a work of art but—Johnny, I could have spilt coffee on it, or—" She began to fold it up in delicate haste. "Why on earth did you let me wear it?"
"Because when I saw you I knew that its proper place was on a beautiful woman. I wanted to see you wear it. Did you know that when you move the dragon seems alive? You bring it to life."
"I'm not wearing it anymore!" Shulamith declared firmly. "You must be crazy!"
"It was made to be worn," he said, "not hung behind glass. It belongs in life. There are other dragon robes preserved in museums around the world. I want to see this one on you." He held it up for her and looked at her with such certainty that she stood and obediently slipped her naked arms into its cool, silky folds. His arms encircled her and held her enwrapped.
"There is something about a dragon!" She rested her head against his shoulder. "I feel like an empress. It makes me feel powerful."
She felt the lightest of kisses on top of her head. "Do you feel happiness, too?"
She turned in his arms. "All the happiness in the world."
"There's something else I want to see you wear." He let her go, crossing to the closet again and pulling open one of the drawers that ran up one wall inside it. He took out a small golden circle and brought it back to her.
His slow smile made her weak at the knees as she held out her left hand. Johnny slid the wedding band back where it belonged and bent and kissed her hand. "Wife," he said, as though the thought gave him satisfaction. "Don't take it off anymore," he commanded softly, and she shook her head, and then he kissed her mouth to seal the renewal of their promise.
"Did you save my wedding dress, too?" she asked as they walked to the kitchen. The floorboard creaked as they passed his study, and she grinned at him. "I used to think that was a deliberate booby trap!" she told him.
"I wish," he said. "It's more of a jinx. Of course I saved your wedding dress." They made coffee and sat looking out over the gorge. The storm had died down; the rain was much gentler, but the wind still bent the trees.
"How's Wilf?" she asked as she got up to pick up her damp clothing from the floor and threw it into the passage to take to the laundry. "You know, you need that washer and dryer down here in the kitchen."
"Do we? Whatever you want. Wilf's getting around okay, but he's not as active as he used to be."
"Can he still paddle over to Oyster Island?"
"Yes, but not so often. He's down at his cabin. Would you like to visit him later?"
She nodded. "I'll dry my clothes."
Johnny said, "You know, if I hadn't been such a blinkered fool Wilf would never have been hurt. If we'd announced our marriage the police would have lost interest."
"Yes," she said sadly.
"That was one thing that helped to wake me up—by yearning after something I couldn't have I risked losing everything I did have. Wilf could have died that night. And you might be next. They'd already threatened to arrest you—"
"Was it you who tipped off the CBC, then?" Smith interrupted in amazement. "I always thought it must have been one of the witnesses." It hadn't been Lew. She had asked him point-blank.
He shook his head. "Not me. Hal checked around for me, and as far as he could gather, you're right. One of the witnesses, who apparently put two and two together when he saw our names connected in the news."
"So the new provos never talked?"
"No," he agreed. "The new provos were very shamed by what happened to Wilf. And what you said to them in the hospital also cut deep."
Shulamith glanced involuntarily at her hands. "I hope they've learned from it." She looked at him. "My father could have died, too."
"Yes," Johnny said. "I'm sorry. Did I ever say that? It was a stupid venture from the start."
"I can't complain about how it's changed my own life, though." She leaned across the table to kiss him. "And if you hadn't been in my father's room that night Jake wouldn't have sold the band the timber rights." She smiled. "And you and I might never have met."
"Yes, we would," said Johnny. "I'd been looking for you too long not to find you."
Their eyes met. Shulamith took a breath and looked away. "But under other circumstances you wouldn't have let yourself fall in love with me," she pointed out. "You'd have been thinking about your lost heritage and your children's."
"Maybe," he admitted. "But I'd like to think—" he reached out to touch her cheek "—that one way or another I'd have learned the lesson I had to learn in time."
She looked steadily at him. "You won't regret it if they do change that law? If one day it happens that marrying a native woman would give you back your heritage?"
"I've stopped regretting that part of my life, Shulamith. Over these past few weeks I've proved I can help my people as much from the outside as I could have from the inside. They accept that—they always have. But I could never see it. Because they didn't count me as one of them, I took it as rejection. But I'm not one of them. Legally and every other way. They see that and always have. I was taken away when I was eight. I can never belong to that life, and they know it. I've always known it, too. I just wouldn't admit it to myself."
She reached out to him, and he took her hand in a grip that was both fierce and tender. "You're my future," said Johnny Winterhawk.
The coffee in their cups had grown cold, and Smith got up to make fresh. "What I don't understand is why you never told me all this before. You say you knew you loved me way back when, but..."
"I trie
d," said Johnny emphatically. "You convinced me you didn't want to hear it."
She whirled so fast that the sleeve of the dragon robe dragged a spoon to the floor. "When? You never!"
''I came back from Amsterdam to tell you I loved you. To ask you if you'd be willing to try to make our marriage a real one."
"But you didn't ask—you didn't even hint," Smith wailed.
He said dryly, "You were very sure that night that you didn't love me, you know. You informed me you'd only thought you loved me because you thought I loved you."
"But you never said a word! Why didn't you ask?"
"I asked," Johnny said, as though the memory still held pain. "I took you in my arms, and I asked for you. You said, 'I can't,' and you cried, and you asked me to go away."
"Oh, Johnny," she said sadly. If only she'd known. "I had no idea. I thought...at first I thought you came to me for comfort—because of the Cartier Commission report."
"I did."
"And I thought the comfort you wanted was to take me to bed, to make love to me."
"That, too."
"But that was all you wanted! You'd told me before that it was only physical, the special connection we had. You said you never wondered if it might be love."
"Yes, I know I did. And then I heard your song in Amsterdam. And I kept hearing you telling me about all the lovers you'd have to wake up to say goodbye. You'd written that song to me, and there was a yearning in it that must have been meant for me, once. I didn't want to accept that I'd lost that, destroyed it for the sake of giving a heritage to children that I wouldn't want to have unless they were yours.
"That's when I came to terms with it—in Amsterdam. Up until then I'd convinced myself that even though I loved you I had to give you up. So I went from feeling I had to give you up to fearing I'd lost you through my own stupidity. I came you that night knee deep in that fear. I guess what you said played right into that."
She smiled. "So it was all the fault of my song?" she teased.
Johnny pulled her into his lap. "You're a poetic genius," he agreed. "What happened to the song you were working on the night I got back from Amsterdam? Did you write it?"
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