by Brenda Joyce
On a platform boasting the flags of both the United States of America and the state of Texas, Nick, Storm, and Rathe stood, grinning happily. Nick raised his hand, and the crowd shouted, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEREK!”
Derek rode up to the platform, eyes wide, as if stunned beyond belief. Watching by the side, Lucy bit her lip. “What the hell is going on?” Derek roared.
“SURPRISE!” A thousand people roared back.
Derek’s hand went to his heart and Lucy gasped. Then she realized her grandfather was hamming it up. He slid from his mount and was practically dragged by his sons onto the platform. Derek was grinning, but protested. “I don’t know what the hell is going on here,” he said into the megaphone. Everyone laughed and Nick appropriated the speaker.
“Father,” he said, “I’m happy to enlighten you.” He grinned. “You gave me the perfect opening. All of these people have traveled a helluva distance to honor you on this occasion, the day of your eightieth birthday. They’ve come not just out of friendship, but out of respect. No one man symbolizes more what this country and this state stand for.
“You were born in the mountains in a shack in obscurity. Yet today you have become one of the most powerful men in this state and in America. And everything we see here—” Nick gestured “—was created with your own two hands, with your own sweat—with your own blood and guts. You are a testimony to the success of the American pioneer through courage, integrity, and perseverance against the worst odds. Against the odds of foreign powers, like Mexico, whom you fought against to liberate this land, just as you fought against the Comanches, to civilize it, and most of all, against the brutal and unyielding land itself. Your success is not just your own. It is the success of this state and this country. The greatness of Texas and America would not have come about without the ambition and courage and dedication of men like yourself.”
Lucy hollered and cheered with everyone else, tears streaking her cheeks. Next to her mother and Aunt Jane, Storm held her grandmother, who was both smiling and crying at the same time, her rapt gaze on her husband. Lucy thought that Derek’s face looked a bit red when he took the megaphone from Nick.
“Thanks, son.” He coughed. “I think enough’s been said for the moment. I only want to add my thanks to everyone here, and everyone who couldn’t be here but wanted to come. And to my family. To my children and their children, to my wife. It’s for them that I did all of this, not for anyone else.” He paused when thunderous applause greeted this. He grinned and leaned forward. “Now let’s have a fiesta!”
Shoz stood in the shade of a tree, leaning against it, arms crossed, and eyed the guests.
To one side, hundreds of steaks were being barbecued on ten huge grills, and a dozen vast pots were simmering with beans. A score of picnic tables were cheerily draped in red, white, and blue bunting with the words Happy Birthday DEREK stenciled across the top of each one. One was set up just to serve hundreds of fresh rolls, thousands of ears of com on the cob, fresh salads, desserts, and punch, sangria, lemonade, and coffee.
Guests milled everywhere, easterners and locals mixing with the hired hands. To the other side, a Spanish band was playing, and already couples were whirling across an area covered with sawdust and marked off by bales of hay. Shoz had to admit, the Braggs knew how to throw a party.
He took his time inspecting the ladies. There were more than a few pretty faces and alluring bodies in the crowd, but he was disappointed when he realized no one could compare to Lucy Bragg. He knew where she was—he’d known all along. She was impossible to miss.
She wore a low-cut flame-red dress that left her shoulders completely bare, her hair hanging loose in riotous titian waves. She was dancing enthusiastically with Billy, who’d finally claimed her from that easterner. That easterner. For a moment Shoz stared at him, while he stared in annoyance at Lucy and Billy.
Shoz disliked everything about the man, from the tips of his polished shoes to his impeccably starched shirts. He disliked the man’s casual elegance, his blond good looks, his background, breeding and wealth. All of it showed, and if he’d shouted to the heavens who and what he was, it couldn’t have been clearer. He was Lucy’s equal in every way.
They made a handsome couple.
One day, they’d make the ideal man and wife.
Shoz did not care. Why should he? Lucy was nothing to him but a passing distraction. In fact, it was amusing the way she struggled so hard to be proper with Leon—when she hadn’t been proper with him at all. He wondered how Leon would feel when he took his wife and found out she wasn’t a virgin. Shoz uncharitably felt satisfaction at beating the man on that one score. Leon would not be pleased; in fact, Shoz was a good judge of character, and he suspected he would be downright ugly about it. The man might have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he was cold and ambitious, not soft at all. He laughed as he thought about warning Lucy to fake her virginity on her wedding night.
He stared again at Leon. It was the utmost irony that he was Marianne’s son. When he had first seen Leon, he had thought there was something familiar about him. He knew Marianne adored Leon, from the few conversations they’d had when they’d been lovers, and he knew she wanted him to attain vast power and wealth. Undoubtedly she approved of Lucy Bragg for her son. Shoz felt even better about having taken what Leon wanted so much. Even though his interest in Lucy had nothing to do with revenge, the coincidence, of who her beau was, was damn nice.
If he really wanted to, he could pluck the plum right from Leon’s grasp. Too bad he wasn’t such a bastard. He didn’t have it in his character to publicly ruin an innocent girl, no matter how much he would love to avenge himself on Marianne Claxton.
He watched Lucy. She was laughing while she danced, her red skirts twirling to reveal a lot of lovely leg and immodestly high heels. She was reveling in the physical release.
He had been watching her for hours. He wasn’t surprised that she should dance like a gypsy. He’d already touched on her passion for sex, and now she was dancing with the same wild yearning, the same abandon. And he knew that she knew he was watching; she had known it all night. Her sensuous movements were for him, and if she intended to arouse him, it was working. He had never wanted her more.
He made up his mind. No more games. He wanted her and would have her, regardless. Tonight. He would just make sure no one would ever know—nice guy that he was.
And then, then his gaze swept past a woman, a slim blond woman, exquisitely dressed, flashing jewels, with an exquisitely proportioned body. It couldn’t be. Just because Leon Claxton was here … His gaze shot to her again.
Marianne Claxton stared back at him.
And Shoz was thrown completely back through the gates of hell.
14
He was born in the Dragoon Mountains of Arizona in the summer of 1861. His natural mother was a Coyotero Apache and his father’s second wife, the first being Candice. His father was known as Jack Savage to the white men and El Salvaje to the Apaches. A half-breed of unknown origins himself, he had been captured by Cochise as a young boy and adopted by a Coyotero couple. Although he had left his clan and later married a white woman, Candice Carter, he’d returned to Cochise to fight with him when the Apache Wars began.
Shoz was born in those first brutal days of the war. His full name was Shozkay, after his father’s brother, one of the war’s first casualties. When his father took Candice and their daughter, Christina, to California to start a new life, he took Shoz as well. Shoz’s mother remained behind in the Dragoon Mountains with her people.
Shoz grew up on their ranch outside of Bakersfield with his half-sister and three other younger half-brothers. Candice was the only mother he remembered. It was a distinct shock to learn that she was not his real mother. Jack explained it kindly when he was seven, wanting him to know the truth—and to be proud of his own heritage. His father told him not just about his natural mother, but about her people, and about Cochise and their battle for survival. He vividly
described what it was like to live in that time, to ride with Cochise. He explained it in such a way that the young Shoz was proud to be who he was, and the hurt of discovering that Candice wasn’t his real mother passed quickly.
He grew up working the ranch alongside his father and his brothers. His family was very close, and he and Christina were like twins, having been born only months apart. In the school they attended in town, he was quick to defend her honor—and she his.
The prejudice began when he and Christina went to school for the first time. On their third or fourth day, Christina came to him crying. The school bully, a big twelve-year-old, had called her “squaw.” Shoz didn’t exactly understand why it was an insult, but he knew it was intended as such—and he was incensed. He got a black eye for his efforts to defend Christina—and so did she when she tried to help him in his losing battle.
He didn’t lose too many battles after that, learning that when you go up against someone twice your age and twice your size, anything goes. Shoz learned to fight mean, and dirty, if need be.
Children can be cruel, and epithets like redskin, Injun, and breed were occasionally flung at him until he quit school at sixteen. No one ever dared to insult Christina again, though, or his younger brothers, because they quickly learned that while Shoz might smile indifferently when they insulted him, his fury knew no bounds when his family was the target of their taunts.
But it wasn’t bad, just the infrequent and callous harassment of an occasional bully. In general, his family was well thought of in Bakersfield, and respected. Shoz knew most of the townspeople by sight, at least, and was known to help the old widow Calder across the street or earn a penny and an apple from Mr. Dickson for sweeping up at the general store.
When Shoz was eighteen, he left home to make his own way. It was one of the hardest things he’d ever done in his life. His father understood and didn’t try to hold him back, although his mother wept so much, Shoz almost changed his mind. He wanted to travel, see the land, experience more than what Bakersfield offered. His first destination was the land of his people, the land of the Chiricahua.
He drifted through the territory, hoping to find out if his mother was alive, only to be caught up in the final assault being made by the U.S. Army on the last free Apaches, led by Geronimo. He joined Geronimo, after having proved his courage and his ability to fight. He was incensed by the army’s methodical slaughter of the Apache—incensed by the conditions on the few reservations he’d seen—and sickened by the Apache’s vicious response. They burned and raped and maimed. In his father’s day, no Apache would ever rape innocent women or kill innocent children. He left them with no regrets, just with the horrifying memories time could not erase.
He rode the range throughout most of central Texas, once even joining one of the last drives up the Chisholm Trail. He drifted into Memphis. He had been learning hard, bitter lessons. On the trail he was accepted grudgingly by other men, but only after he had proved he could work harder than anyone. In the big cities, he found he was considered socially unacceptable by just about everyone. The only work he could find was of the lowest sort, fit for children or the aged and infirm, with the lowest of wages. He was considered taboo by the women he approached. It didn’t stop any of the latter from sharing his bed, but only in the utmost secrecy. Should he pass a lover in the street, she would pretend not to know him. He soon despised their hypocrisy. He despised them.
It was worse in St. Louis, where he was stared at as if he were a freak. He began to see white women as conquests, vehicles for his pleasure, nothing more, to be used and discarded at whim. His attitude hardened with a quality of deliberate vengeance. They were his payback for the insults he’d withstood from their white brothers and fathers.
At twenty, Shoz realized he couldn’t drift endlessly, he had to make a decision to do something with his life. He returned home and announced he was going to go to a university and study the law. His parents were thrilled. Jack encouraged him to apply to the top schools back East. He was accepted by Columbia University on a partial scholarship, and began his freshman year when he was twenty-one in 1882.
New York was not like St. Louis. New Yorkers prided themselves on their liberalism and their avant-garde ways. It was all bullshit. Shoz bitterly realized he’d been accepted because he was an Indian, not because he’d done well on their entrance exams. He was the token redskin, to soothe the board’s guilty consciences for their innate bigotry and their government’s systematic genocide of his people.
He was determined to match their disguised contempt and even outstrip it. He excelled at his studies despite having to work part-time. He proved not just his equality, but his superiority to his white classmates by graduating number two in his class—and screwing more New York ladies than all his classmates combined.
The summer before his last year at New York Law School, he began seeing Marianne Claxton. She was a beautiful married woman who was a born slut. Their appetites were well matched. His own prowess was becoming legendary in certain circles.
Marianne had a little maid named Bettina, plump and lush and very interesting. One day Marianne caught Shoz and Bettina in her own bed. Bettina promptly wound up unemployed. Shoz stayed where he was—in Marianne’s bed, soothing her ruffled feathers.
That night, in his small apartment above Vincenzo’s Ristorante, the police came and showed him a search warrant. In his own trousers they found a ten-carat diamond ring. He was arrested immediately, and held without bail.
The trial lasted less than two working days. Justice was swift. Marianne testified that it was her ring. Bettina testified that she had, indeed, had an affair with him and that he had been in the house. Shoz declared himself innocent. As far as Bettina went, he admitted to having slept with her, “among others.” And he looked right at Marianne.
She denied it, of course. But he’d made another mistake. Her husband was Roger Claxton II, a very powerful senator as well as the ancestor of a founding New York family. Claxton came up to him after he’d sullied his wife’s name. “You just signed yourself into prison, boy,” he said.
His sentence was seven years without parole.
In the fall of 1889, Shoz was incarcerated. Seven months later he escaped.
* * *
Shoz strolled toward Marianne, never taking his eyes from her.
She stood absolutely motionless except for the mad fluttering of her hand-painted Chinese fan. Her eyes were wide and blue and fixed upon him.
He smiled. “Hello, Marianne.”
The hummingbird movement of her fan increased. “Shoz.” Her tone was husky, a tone he knew so very well.
His gaze swept her crudely. “I wonder who’s luckier because of this chance meeting, you or me?”
She didn’t seem to understand, or didn’t try to. “How are you, Shoz?”
He sneered. “Even better than the last time.”
This innuendo didn’t escape her. Two tiny patches of color appeared on her delicate cheeks. Her eyes smoldered. “What are you doing here, of all places?”
“I work here. And you, Mrs. Claxton? What brings you out West? You never struck me as having a fondness for anything other than ballrooms—and bedrooms.”
The two pink stains on her cheeks darkened. “My son Leon is enamored of Derek Bragg’s granddaughter. Shoz. I am sorry, so very sorry.”
“Really? Then why don’t you set the record straight and tell the truth.”
“I can’t. You know I can’t. How could I! I’d be ruined!”
He wanted to strangle her. “See you around, Mrs. Claxton.”
“Wait.” She touched his arm, and didn’t remove her hand.
He turned.
“Shoz,” she said, low and breathless.
Unbelievable, he thought. He’d treated her like the bitch she was—and she still wanted more. He wondered if he should give it to her—and realized he’d lost all interest. “Enjoy the party, Marianne,” he said.
“Wait!” She grabbed hi
m. “We must talk!”
“Talk?”
“Please! Meet me in an hour and we—”
“If you think there’s going to be a repeat performance of the last time, think again.”
Her eyes flared with anger. “I think you’ll be interested in something I have to say. Try this word for size: blackmail.”
His lips curled up at the corners, but she had his complete attention now.
“I’m sure,” she said, her gaze drifting down his denim-clad hips, “Derek Bragg would love to know exactly whom he’s hired.”
The curl of his lips increased. He took her arm and propelled her roughly forward. Marianne stumbled. He moved her through the crowd until they had rounded one of the barns and were alone. He pushed her up against it. She stared at him, her breasts straining against her low bodice.
“Do you want it now, or later?”
“Shoz,” she protested, all innocence now.
He caught her face between his hands and held it, frightening her. “Don’t you ever threaten me.”
She couldn’t speak, although she tried to.
“Go ahead, tell Bragg; see if I care. But find your fucking somewhere else.” He released her.
Her eyes blazed with fury. “You son of a bitch.”
“The gutter becomes you, Marianne,” he said.
He was about to leave when, from behind them, a soft voice said, “Hello, Mother. I saw you coming out here and wondered what you were doing.”
Shoz turned to glimpse a younger version of Marianne, a blond, blue-eyed vision who had to be her daughter. The girl gave him a very pretty smile. “Hello.” Her voice had that same distinct well-bred tone.
He nodded.
“Shoz is an old friend, dear.” There was tight exasperation in Marianne’s voice as she introduced her daughter, Darlene.