No Other Man

by Shannon Drake

"You think it a game?" he inquired softly.

  "I think you need to let me out of here!"

  "I think not!" His hand upon her arm drew her back into the room and sent her spinning toward the bed once again. She caught herself before she could fall against it. The robe was slipping off her. She drew it back together, drawing the belt tighter. She placed a hand against the poster at the foot of the bed for support.

  "The army is in residence out here!" she cried. "And when they finally come, I swear I'll see to it that you are hanged!"

  "They might just hang you."

  "What?"

  "For murder. The murder of Lord Douglas."

  The night was insane; it was all insanity. Perhaps that's what caused her to snap and, in a moment of sheer madness, pit herself at him again. Instead of running, sensibly keeping her distance, she flew across the floor, raising a hand to slap him. When he caught her right hand, she was ready with her left. When she was deterred from his face, she did her best to beat against his chest. Sobs shook her body. She was only barely aware that she was lifted from the floor. Her head was spinning now. He must have poured half the bottle of whiskey into her cup the second time he filled it. It had given her courage and strength. Now she was paying for that false bravado.

  "Stop it!"

  She dimly heard his voice. No matter how rough the command, it didn't seem to penetrate to her mind. She couldn't stop fighting or sobbing, hysterically pummeling him with a strength born of raw fear and rage.

  "Stop it!"

  Her feet were off the ground. She was lifted, flying— and suddenly on the bed again. He was straddling her hips, pinning her wrists high above her head to keep her from hitting him. She inhaled raggedly, trying to get a grip on herself. She could barely breathe. Her robe had fallen open. So had his. The ridiculous intimacy of their situation fueled her hysteria.

  "Please, please... !" she gasped out. She tossed and writhed, twisting against him, trying to throw him off her.

  The fur bedcover and the sheets became tangled beneath her. His bare flesh pressed against her, as hers did against his. The pounding of her heart was growing louder and louder, along with the desperate sounds of struggling that escaped from her.

  The pounding ... it wasn't her heart. It was a knocking at the cabin door.

  The door .. .

  It was suddenly thrown open.

  "Hawk?" said a worried, masculine voice.

  The man atop Skylar twisted at the sound of his name being called. Skylar stared past him to see that there were two men standing in the doorway.

  Two men in uniform.

  Uniform!

  One was young with sandy hair and a clean-shaven face; the other man was older, with a graying set of whiskers, the mustache perfectly waxed and groomed.

  Oh, God! The cavalry had come.

  She let out a shriek.

  "Oh, sweet Jesu, sorry, Hawk!" the older man said. He punched the other, his face turning beet red. "He's—occupied! With a lady."

  Occupied ... with a lady! The words echoed in her mind. Then the realization struck her. They thought that...

  "No!" Skylar gasped, inhaling raggedly. He was still on top of her. He leaned down upon her. Close. His breath all but fanning her cheeks.

  She couldn't get enough air to explain. She was mortified; she was more than half naked; his flesh was solidly pressed against hers; it did look like ...

  She stared with horror into those strange green eyes that now carried a wicked glint of pure amusement. Eyes so close to hers ...

  "Hush, hush!" he assured her, his voice mockingly tender. "My dear, the soldiers are gallant men, they'll say nothing."

  "The soldiers will say nothing!" she exclaimed. "Dear

  God, they will certainly—" she began furiously, but a shift in his weight cut her off as what air she had managed to inhale was exhaled beneath his weight.

  "Darling, please. You mustn't be so upset. It's really going to be all right. Shh..." came his whisper, his lips atop hers.

  Then upon them. Forming perfectly over hers. His tongue demanding entry. She found her mouth parted with a startling force, the mercurial, hot thrust of his tongue. The taste of coffee and whiskey. She tried to twist away, but his fingers were threaded through hers and brought close to her skull, holding her so taut she couldn't begin to resist. She couldn't breathe; the room was spinning . .. black stars burst before her ...

  "It's all right, my dear. Truly. You needn't be embarrassed."

  He wasn't kissing her anymore. He was staring down at her, still looking amused while she desperately dragged in breath.

  "Dammit!" she cried out.

  "Sweet Jesu, I am sorry!" the older man protested. "Oh, ma'am, so sorry. Hawk, we'd no idea you had the company of a woman friend—"

  The Indian interrupted, eloquent to a truly staggering degree.

  "Captain, all apologies accepted. I should truly be embarrassed that I did not hear your arrival."

  "Damn you all, wait!" Skylar lashed out again furiously.

  "My dear! My dear! Don't you think these poor men are suffering enough as it is? I should have heard them—"

  "That's what worried us," the older man said. "Why, Hawk, you can usually hear a pony snort a mile away."

  "Ah, but then, I have been quite occupied, I admit," Hawk said.

  The captain laughed. "The Sioux men may be darned right in their attitudes toward women, Hawk. Those boys know that being too close to a lady can cloud the mind and steal the senses!"

  "Indeed, I'm humiliated."

  "Hell, it proves you're human."

  "Human!" Skylar managed to get in.

  "Why thank you, Captain," the Indian stated, another shift of his weight making her gasp for breath again. "Perhaps I do have a respectable excuse. This is Lady Douglas, Captain."

  All the while that he spoke, he stared down at her, still seeming to laugh down at her.

  "Lady Douglas!" the captain said, gaping suddenly. "I didn't know that—"

  "Yes!" Skylar managed to assert. They weren't going to get the better of her this time; she was going to make them understand. A feeling of triumph rising within her, she stared at the Indian with victorious eyes as she cried out, "Yes! Yes, damn you all, I am Lady Douglas." It was about time! She was going to make these men realize that she was desperate to be rescued, make them realize the situation. "Yes, my name is Skylar Douglas. Please, I—"

  "Oh, ma'am, we just didn't know, hadn't heard.. . Please, please forgive us! Hawk, it's a matter of some importance, but I can find you within the next few days. I am sorry. We're leaving."

  "Quite all right, my friend. Apology accepted. Of course, we would like to be alone again...."

  The older cavalry officer pulled the younger man out, slamming the door hard.

  "No!" Skylar shrieked. "No! We wouldn't like to be alone! No! Wait!" She slammed her fists against the Indian and tried to kick, jab.

  Bite.

  She got her teeth into his shoulder. He didn't blink an eye, but again, his fingers came threading into her hair. Pulling.

  "Don't bite!" he warned icily.

  "Then let me up!"

  To her astonishment, he moved aside. She leaped from the bed, heedless that the robe barely covered her. She raced after the soldiers.

  She threw herself against the door, fumbling then to find the latch to draw it open. "Wait! Wait!" she cried out. "Please, you're not listening to me. Won't anybody help me! My God, I swear to you that I am Lady Douglas. Please—" She finished the plea with a shriek because she suddenly found herself wrenched back into the room, away from the door, by the English-speaking redskin they'd called Hawk.

  Spun around, she stared into his eyes again. She looked down. His long bronze fingers held her wrist.

  No.

  The cavalry had come.

  Help had been here!

  "Help" had watched her on the bed with this man.. .

  She looked wildly back to the door. "You have to let me by! They ha
ve to help me. They're the cavalry. You're an Indian. My God, what's going on with them? The entire world has gone insane!" She tried to shake free from his hold. She could not do so. She slammed her fists against his chest, half laughing, half crying. "Let me go! I've got to get to them; I've got to make them understand . .."

  She broke off, hearing the hoofbeats of the men's horses fading away.

  The cavalry had come.

  And gone.

  "Let me go. Please, let me go!"

  "For what?"

  "So I can get them to help me!"

  He released her, crossing his arms over his chest as he spoke to her next.

  "They're not going to help you."

  "They will.when they know what's really happening. That you've abducted me, half—half—raped me! They'll save me from you—"

  "They're not going to help you and they're not going to save you from me, even if you are Lady Douglas. Especially if you are Lady Douglas."

  She inhaled deeply, her spine suddenly very straight and stiff. "Why not, damn you?" she demanded. "Why won't they help me?"

  He caught her upper arms, pulling her back close to him. /nd his eyes glittered now with both amusement and fury.

  ' 'Because, my lovely little gold digger, Andrew Douglas is not dead. I am Lord Andrew Douglas. Your dearly beloved husband."

  "You're a liar! Lord Douglas is dead. And you can't be Lord anyone! You're an—an—"

  "Indian?" he suggested.

  "Yes! A savage, painted IndianV'

  ' 'That I am. But I do assure you, I am also Lord Douglas."

  She stared into his eyes.

  Green eyes.

  Oh, God, yes. They were familiar.

  "Damn you, know it! I am Lord Douglas!"

  Green eyes. Eyes very similiar to a pair she had seen before. Set into an older face.

  Green eyes.

  They faded to black.

  Three

  who the hell was she?

  Staring at her, Andrew Douglas, called Hawk by both his Sioux kin and white friends, shook his head. She'd put up a hell of a fight—until his last words had struck home with her.

  Then she'd passed out cold. Good thing. Now she lay against the bear-fur cover on the bed, a creature of ethereal—and, thank God, silent—beauty.

  Deadly beauty, so it seemed, he thought bitterly. He still didn't understand the particulars, but it seemed apparent that his father had met this woman. She had coerced a marriage and had assumed she was marrying his father.

  What had gone on?

  And what truth could he ever really know? His father was dead.

  She was going to tell him. Exactly what had happened to her.

  It was difficult to keep his hands off her. He longed to shake her until he got the truth out of her.

  But he managed to keep his distance and tried very hard to be analytical—something he had gotten fairly good at over the years, being a man split between two vastly dif-

  ferent cultures. His years at West Point hadn't hurt the development of his analytical abilities either.

  So again. Who in God's name was she? Where had she come from?

  Any feelings of tenderness that might have been touched in him by her beauty were stilled by the painful reminder that David, the late Lord Douglas, was dead.

  Hawk had received word from Henry Pierpont, his father's beleaguered but ever-proper attorney, who had been informed by the president of their Maryland bank that David had died of apparent heart failure in Baltimore just two weeks ago. Henry hadn't mentioned anything then about a bride—for either his father or himself. It appeared that this woman did believe she was married to—or widowed by— his father. Yet she had said the name Andrew. His own.

  Just what exactly had gone on between this absurdly young woman and his aging father? He couldn't begin to fathom it. David had always been dignified to the extreme, a proud man, a wise one. He had deeply loved only two women in his life; he had married them both. He had been in reasonably good health when he had traveled east, in full control of all his faculties.

  Then how...

  The woman who lay before him must have been incredibly persuasive. And yet, though she seemed convinced that she was the widow of Lord Douglas, she apparently knew nothing about her late husband's life—or her late husband himself, for that matter. She hadn't even known that his name had been David, not Andrew.

  All she'd needed to know, he figured, was that his father was titled with a British peerage and had obtained a land grant in the Black Hills, in one of the few areas not considered Sa Papa, or Holy Land, by the Sioux, where he had also discovered gold.

  Again, he longed to shake her. How could anyone appear so fragile and innocent, yet fight like a cougar and have the instincts of an alley cat! She lay there, still silent, her breath barely causing a slow but constant rise and fall of her breasts.

  She would come around all right. He rubbed his chin, feeling his irritation grow along with an unbidden rise of desire within him. His robe was not adequate cover for her. Whatever had he been thinking to strip away her clothing and dunk her in the tub? It had been her insistence that she needed to bathe that had triggered his action. And perhaps he'd been goaded by her greed, which was so great that it had apparently led her into what was still—despite the ever-encroaching army and the wave of white emigrants— basically Sioux country where few men dared to tread. She'd come here, so she'd deserved to discover the perils that awaited the unwary. Whites were often waylaid, robbed, raped, abducted, murdered—scalped.

  And he hadn't taken it so far as to scalp her.

  Yet.

  All right. He wasn't going to scalp her.

  Yet no matter what his fury regarding his father, she disturbed him, and he suddenly wished that he'd confronted her in a white man's court of law. Once he'd seen her, however, at Riley's, where he'd been with his cousins while her stagecoach was being repaired, his temper had taken control. There she'd been, claiming to be Lady Douglas, when he'd never seen her before, heard of her—or even imagined that a Lady Douglas could possibly exist. He'd been so damned determined to torment such an impostor, show her the dangers of the deceitful charade she played, force the truth from her. It seemed somewhat ironic now. Had he been so convinced that he could certainly not fall for the wiles of such a fortune hunter himself?

  Wiles be damned. She was simply a well-built female, and the robe was falling open, allowing him far more of a view of her breasts than he wanted. His own fault, however ...

  He'd have to be dead not to be attracted to her himself.

  He drew part of the robe over her breast. It fell back. Something within him quickened, and he muttered a sound of self-disgust, walking from the bedside to find the shreds of the black mourning dress she had been wearing. He searched the skirt for pockets and found one. It contained several gold coins, a small mirror, and a brush. He tossed those items impatiently at the foot of the bed, then searched the skirt again. In another pocket, he found what he sought.

  Papers.

  He drew them out, studying them with a fierce frown.

  She carried a marriage license. It appeared to be a proper and fully legal document stating that Skylar Connor had been wed, by proxy, to Lord Andrew Douglas by the Right Honorable Magistrate Timothy Carone in Baltimore a little more than two weeks ago.

  The exact date of his father's death.

  He stared at the marriage license in his hand and then at the appendix behind it. His own signature was scrawled upon it. He frowned, reading further. The appendix was a proxy agreement. He didn't remember signing the paper— didn't even remember seeing it before—but it was indisputably his signature upon the paper.

  But then he had been so impatient and irritable right before his father had started on his journey back east. When something pertained to the Scottish estates or Maryland property, Hawk had told David he must do as he saw fit because the property was his own. He was aware that his lather had put many of his holdings into their jo
int ownership, determined there would never be any doubt that his Sioux son was now his legal heir. It was quite ironic. One i>l the first things his father had ever taught him was to read every word of a written contract.

  He never read through a paper when his father asked for his signature. He'd still considered his father's property to Ik- just that and had thought that David should manage it is he saw fit.

  Too late, he realized now that such an attitude had actually been selfish on his part. He had cared when it came to the Black Hills or their home here on the Western frontier,

  But he had not been able to see beyond the Black Hills and the surrounding countryside because the situation here had been growing more and more tense since the end of the war.

  So did this mean that the wily vixen on the bed was indeed Lady Douglas? Had he—taken a wife?

  Could it be legal?

  He groaned softly. Lately his father had been urging him to marry again. Insisting he needed a wife. A white wife. Hawk had had long, passionate discussions with his father regarding the future of the red man in the West, but indisputably, no matter how passionately he had argued against his father's statements, he'd known they would eventually prove true—as true as the endless tide of white settlers and army who continued to come west in wave after land- hungry wave. David had not been without some influence in Washington, and even before his most recent trip, he had wearily assured his son that in the end the government would not honor any treaty. Whatever lands the Indians were given, the whites would take back. Americans considered it their "Manifest Destiny" to move from "sea to shining sea," to occupy the whole of the North American continent. If they could, they'd push back the Mexicans and the British in Canada. That might be difficult to do in light of world opinion. But to exterminate Indians... red men...

  It was a damned frightening possibility. Coming closer and closer.

  Hawk knew that it had been his father's love for him that had convinced his father he must marry a white woman. Live a white life. So what had David done? Pretended to a young gold digger that she was marrying a man on his last leg only to fall prey to her before bringing her west?

  Because he hadn't wanted to see his son exterminated.

  Except that David Douglas hadn't been on his last leg when he had gone east. He hadn't looked any different than he had looked all his life. A tall man, lean, white-haired, aging, still handsome with his extreme dignity, eyes that seemed to see and know everything, and understand. He had been healthy all his life. He had constantly endured the rigors of travel. He had lived among the warriors of the Sioux nation, he had withstood tests of endurance with the heartiest of them. Of course, that had been many years ago. But still, when he had left here, he had seemed fine.