Winter's Touch

by Hudson, Janis Reams

  “Wantin’? Wantin’, she says! What do ye know of wantin’? ‘Tis a child ye be, too young to be talkin’ of wantin’.”

  “Innes—” Carson began.

  “Too young?” Winter Fawn interrupted, her voice low and quivering. “You’ve had no idea of my age for years. You left me.” Her hands balled into fists at her sides. “You rode away and left me. Why should you care what I do?”

  “Why should I care? Ye gods, lass, you’re ma own flesh and blood.”

  “Yer own flesh and blood, am I? Left to wait on yer whim before I’m allowed to grow up, to become a woman, to have a family of my own. Ye may want me to stay a child, Faither, but ‘tis a woman I am, full grown.”

  “Wot be this, wantin’ ye to remain a child. I never!”

  “Then why did you forbid Grandfather and Two Feathers from accepting a marriage offer for me?”

  “And glad ye should be of it, unless it be Crooked Oak ye be wantin’ for your husband.”

  Winter Fawn let out a string of words in Arapaho that Carson could not understand, but which turned Innes’s ears red.

  “That’s what I think of Crooked Oak.” she cried. “But there are other men. I have passed twenty winters. Other girls my age have husbands and children of their own. But me, I live in my grandmother’s lodge, like a child, because my father canna be bothered to see to my future.”

  “Ye dinna ken of wot ye speak, lass.”

  “And ye dinna ken that I am a woman, not a child. If I want a man, I will have him.”

  “The hell you say!”

  “Aye.” Her eyes narrowed to angry slits. “I do say.”

  She whirled toward Carson, taking him by surprise. Which was nothing compared to what she did next. She grasped his face in both hands, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him full on the mouth, a deep, hot kiss that took his breath.

  She broke off the kiss quickly and turned back to her father, whose face nearly bled, there was so much blood beneath his skin.

  Carson’s own face was flaming, although for a different reason. How could he want her so damn much, with her father standing right beside him?

  What game was she playing? The damn woman was going to get him killed.

  “You accuse Carson,” she told her father, “but he has done nothing wrong. I am as I was before, untouched. Not because I wanted it that way, but because he is an honorable man who wouldna betray the trust of a man he called friend. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  With that, she turned away and marched into the house.

  When the door slammed behind her, Innes eyed Carson.

  “Innes,” Carson began. “I don’t—”

  “Ach, we’ll say no more on it. The lass is too damn much like her mither to suit me. Ye just be sure an’ keep yer hands to yerself, or ye’ll be answerin’ to me, lad, that ye will.”

  When Winter Fawn entered the house, Bess was waiting for her. The girl’s eyes were huge. She said nothing for a long moment, and Winter Fawn wondered what was expected of her in Carson’s home. The silence stretched out.

  Finally Bess blurted, “You kissed him.”

  Winter Fawn wasn’t sure what to say. Warily, she nodded once.

  “What was it like? Oh, you must tell me.”

  Winter Fawn let herself relax and smile. This she understood. Younger white girls, it seemed, were no different from the young girls of Our People.

  “Was it simply fabulous?”

  “I dinna ken this word, fabulous, but it was…exciting.”

  “Oh.” With a sigh, Bess clasped her hands together over her chest. “Oh.”

  “Now you must tell me something,” Winter Fawn said.

  “What?”

  “What is it like to be the woman of your home?”

  Bess laughed nervously and plucked at her skirt. “I have no idea. I’ve never done it before. But I guess I’m getting ready to find out.” She laughed more easily this time.

  Winter Fawn laughed with her.

  “The first thing I must do is see to our guest. You’re my first guest,” she added with a giggle.

  By the time Winter Fawn had made use of the soap and water Bess provided, Megan had returned from the privy behind the house, and Bess had set the table for two.

  Carson stepped through the front door, not sure what to expect. He found the three females talking and laughing and not even noticing his arrival.

  He took advantage of the moment and looked around the house his father had built, wondering what Winter Fawn saw when she looked at it. Did she compare it to that cabin in the mountains and find the house enormous? There must be so many things here that were foreign to someone who had lived all her life in a tepee. Wooden doors to extra rooms, the narrow staircase to the second floor. The iron cookstove. Oil lamps. The table and chairs at the kitchen end of the great room, the horse-hide sofa and wooden rocker at the opposite end, by the fireplace.

  Everything must look strange to her.

  And what about Bess? What did she see when she looked at her father’s home? It didn’t begin to measure up to the gracious elegance of Greenbrier, nor even the quiet dignity of Gussie’s home in Atlanta. But then, Bess hadn’t lived in either of those houses in years, and he wondered how much of them she remembered. And missed.

  Still, the Martins, with whom the girls and Gussie had been living since the middle of the war when Gussie’s husband, Oliver, had been killed, had a nice house. Polished oak floors, carpets, wallpaper, velvet drapes, imported furniture, landscapes and family portraits on the walls.

  Did Bess find her new home lacking? She could have no understanding of how hard their father had worked to build this place for them. He’d gone into the mountains and cut the trees himself for every wall, dragged them down the mountains. No telling how many trips, how long it had taken. The plank flooring had been hauled all the way from Denver, as had the cookstove and every stick of furniture. The rocks for the fireplace had been gathered by their father right there on the ranch. Edmond Dulaney had lifted every log, set every rock, hammered every nail himself. He’d even put in an indoor pump so they could have water right at the sink in the built-in counter in the kitchen.

  When Carson looked around the house, he did not compare it with what they had once had. When he looked, he saw a man’s hopes and dreams, a man’s love for the family who thought he had abandoned them.

  “There you are, Carson,” Bess said brightly. “Come wash up. Your supper’s ready.”

  The meal was silent except for the occasional scrape of spoon against bowl or the creak of Carson’s chair as he shifted his weight. The table sat ten. His father had had big dreams.

  Bess seated Carson at the head and Winter Fawn at the foot, then brought a tablet and pencil and sat next to Winter Fawn.

  “What are you writing?” Carson asked, feeling isolated at his end of the table.

  Bess looked up and smiled. “I’m making an inventory and planning meals and chores. How is the cornbread?”

  Carson laughed. “It’s great, and you know it.”

  “Of course it’s great. Aunt Gussie said it was Mama’s recipe.”

  “Do you miss her?” he asked softly.

  “Yes,” she said with feeling. “I wish she could have come with us.”

  Carson pursed his lips. “I don’t think she would have enjoyed our little adventure.”

  Bess giggled, turning from young lady to little girl in the blink of an eye. “We might not have had such an adventure if Aunt Gussie had been with us. She would have scared those warriors off with one of her looks.” Bess arched one brow, looked down her nose, and puckered her lips, in so perfect an imitation of Gussie in one of her disapproving moods that Carson broke out laughing.

  “Oh, Winter Fawn.” Bess placed her hand on Winter Fawn’s arm. “I wish you could meet our Aunt Gussie. You would love her.”

  Winter Fawn’s lips twitched. “She sounds like an interesting person.”

  “Oh, she’s simply wonderful.�
�

  Carson was still looking at Winter Fawn, unable, unwilling, to take his eyes from her, when Bess jumped up from her chair as though someone had set it on fire.

  “Oh! A fine hostess I am.” She rushed to the counter and grabbed a large kettle. Pushing it up beneath the water pump, she began working the handle. “If I don’t get this water heated, it will be midnight before Winter Fawn can have a bath.”

  A vivid picture of Winter Fawn, dewy wet and naked and lounging in a bathtub seared Carson’s mind. On top of that kiss she’d given him outside earlier, it was more than enough to make a man sweat.

  Because thinking of the kiss made him uneasy, he tried to block the memory. She hadn’t kissed him because she’d been suddenly overwhelmed by passion. She had kissed him to shock her father, to make him angry.

  Ordinarily Carson wouldn’t care why a beautiful woman kissed him, he would just be glad that she did. But this time it bothered him. He wanted Winter Fawn, there was no doubt of that. But he’d been used before to get a father’s attention. He’d be damned if he would stand still for it again.

  So he tried not to think about it. But that left the bath, and he didn’t dare think about that.

  “A heated bath?” Winter Fawn stared at Bess. “I have heard of this.”

  “Oh, my stars.” Bess blinked like a baby owl. “I hadn’t thought, but it makes sense that you would never have had a hot bath in a tub. Oh, Winter Fawn, you just don’t know what you’ve been missing. You’re going to love it.”

  Winter Fawn looked uncertain. “You must heat the water over the fire? ‘Tis a lot of work for you for me to have this warm bath.”

  “No,” Bess said hurriedly. “No, it’s no trouble. And after you see how wonderful it is, you’ll probably be in here heating your own water. Just wait.”

  “If you’re sure it isna too much trouble.”

  “I’m sure. Carson, there’s more room in your bedroom, so that’s where we’ve been keeping the tub. You won’t mind if she bathes in there, will you?”

  An invisible fist tightened around Carson’s throat. Another one clutched his groin. Dewy wet and naked and lounging in a bathtub in his bedroom.

  He had to clear his throat twice before he could speak. “Uh, no. I mean, I don’t mind. That’s…that’s fine.”

  As far as he knew, no man had ever finished a meal and escaped a house as fast as he did right then.

  How strange it felt to sleep totally alone. Of course, she wasn’t asleep, but she should be, Winter Fawn acknowledged. How lonely white people must be if they all slept away from each other every night. There was no comforting snore from Grandfather nearby. No soft snuffling from her grandmother. No family close at all, since her father and Hunter had made their beds in the barn.

  In the room next to her Bess and Megan lay asleep. Down on the first floor, there was Carson.

  But here in this room high above the ground, on a mattress stuffed with straw and raised knee-high off the floor by a wooden frame with legs, there was no family close at hand. There was only Winter Fawn, and she could not sleep.

  Yet it wasn’t only missing her family that kept her awake, it was also the bath. When she’d been a child and heard her father talk of a hot bath in a tub she had thought he’d been teasing her. Now she knew that he’d been telling the truth. Yet as wonderful as he had made it sound, his words had not come close to describing the incredible pleasure of immersing herself in hot water for the first time in her life.

  It had been like nothing she had ever before experienced. The only thing that compared was the feel of Carson’s warm hands on her bare skin. That was what she had thought of as she had been surrounded by the liquid heat of the water. Carson. His heat. His touch.

  Loneliness, that was what kept her awake this night. No, it was not her family she was missing. It was Carson.

  When sleep finally claimed her, she dreamed of him.

  A hot bath was the first of many new experiences for Winter Fawn. The next morning she came to realize that white people ate at regular times throughout the day. All of them, together. Such a thing certainly made it easier on the woman responsible for cooking in that she could plan her day around when meals were expected, but still, it seemed strange. What if one were not hungry when the regular time came?

  She voiced this question at the breakfast table the next morning when she first realized how firmly whites believed in such a system.

  Her father chuckled. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I will?” She blinked. Did that mean she would be around white people long enough to become accustomed to eating by the sun instead of when hungry?

  “Aye, if you’ve a mind to,” her father said.

  Winter Fawn glanced at her brother, who sat next to her, but he was so intent on devouring as many of Bess’s biscuits as possible that he paid no mind to the conversation around him. Her father was likewise occupied.

  From the opposite end of the table, Carson met her gaze. “Your father has agreed to stay and help us get the ranch on its feet.”

  “On its feet? I dinna understand.”

  Carson smiled. “Sorry. We have a lot of work to do to make the ranch profitable. Your father says he’d like to give staying in one place a try for a while and help us.”

  She looked at her father, her heart pounding. Staying in one place? “Is this true, Da?”

  “Aye,” he said around a mouthful of biscuit. “I was thinkin’ you and your brother might want to stay, too. You’re half white. ‘Tis time—past time, I’m thinkin’—for the two of you to learn white ways.”

  They would stay. Winter Fawn looked down at her plate, the fork feeling awkward in her hand. She wanted very much to stay with her father. She wanted just as much, if not more, to remain near Carson. But what of Our People? Was she never to go back? Did she want to?

  “Give it time,” Carson said quietly.

  She looked up to find him watching her with understanding in his eyes. Did he know her so well, then, that he could see how she was pulled in two directions?

  “I’m sure your father would understand if you decided you didn’t like it here and wanted to go back to the Arapaho. As for us—” Carson glanced at Bess and Megan, including them in his statement. “We hope you and your brother—your father, too—will stay as long as you want, as our guests.”

  “Ach, now,” Innes said. “There’ll be none of this guest business. MacDougalls earn their keep, they do. I can do whatever needs doin’, fix whatever might get broke.”

  “There’s plenty around here to fix,” Frank added.

  “No foolin’,” Beau agreed, laughing.

  “Winter Fawn,” Innes said, “can sew and cook and all sorts of other things to help the young lass run the house. And Hunter, why, you’ll be findin’ no better man to work your horses. He’s got a gift, does the lad.”

  “A gift?” Bess asked, her gaze locked on Hunter. “What kind of gift?”

  Hunter stopped eating long enough to look at her. If Winter Fawn did not know what a cocky young man her brother was, she would almost swear he was blushing. “’Tis nothing,” he murmured, looking back down at his food.

  Winter Fawn nearly choked. Modesty? From Hunter? Even their father, who was not around often enough to know either of his children well, raised a brow at Hunter’s response.

  “Nothing, is it?” Innes said with a chuckle. “I’ll tell you, Miss Bess, ‘tis nothing short of magic, is what it is. All he has to do is whisper in a horse’s ear, and the animal will stand on his head, if the lad asked it of him.”

  Megan, seated directly across from Hunter, stared at him in awe. “Really? I’ve never seen a horse stand on its head before.”

  When presented with the prospect of helping Bess around the house, Winter Fawn had feared that she would feel much as a second wife, having to take orders from and bow to the wishes of a jealous head wife. Only for them, there was no husband.

  But such was not the case. Bess eagerly accepted Winter
Fawn’s help.

  Not that Winter Fawn felt especially helpful. There was so much to learn! White people, it seemed, went to a great deal of trouble to create work for themselves.

  A fire pit did not have to be scrubbed. A cast iron stove, it seemed, did.

  A lodge with a dirt floor did not have to be swept clean of dirt. A wooden floor did.

  A trade blanket and a buffalo robe did not show soil. White sheets of cotton did.

  Moccasins did not require polishing. Leather shoes and boots did.

  The list of chores for a white woman was apparently endless.

  White men, however, also worked, she discovered. The men of her tribe were responsible only for hunting, protection from enemies, and the care and acquisition of weapons and ammunition. The rest of their time was spent gambling, racing their horses, or sitting around watching their women work. White men had to build corrals, dig wells—why was a mystery, since there was river so close at hand—herd cattle, and any number of other chores that apparently kept them as busy as any woman.

  Everything was new and, at first, strange to Winter Fawn. Learning to use the cook stove, the unfamiliar foods, boiling water over a big fire outside to wash clothes and bedding. Dusting, sweeping, breakable plates.

  But Winter Fawn did not mind the work. For once, she felt truly needed. There was far too much for Bess to manage on her own. Especially when trying to keep a six-year-old girl entertained and out of the way. Not to mention taking care of all of Megan’s little scrapes and bruises. The child could get into trouble so fast it was amazing.

  “Megan, I’ll swan,” Bess said, exasperated when Megan rushed in from outside tearfully begging Bess to pull out her newest splinter. “I’m buried in bread dough right now. See if Winter Fawn can help.”

  “Help what?” Winter Fawn asked, having just finished changing the bedding upstairs.

  “Kiss it,” Megan cried, holding up her tiny forefinger. “It hurts.”

  “Here, let me see.” Winter Fawn seated Megan on a chair at the table, then knelt before her. A thin sliver of wood protruded from the tip of the finger. “How did you manage to do this?”