by Shirl Henke
Before she could protest further he stuffed the cloth in her open mouth, then secured the binding on her wrists to an iron wall hook in the lean-to, hoisting her up so high that her feet barely touched the ground. She tried to spit out the gag, then to rub it out of her mouth against her arm, but nothing availed as she twisted and struggled ineffectually. Leaving her to thrash and make muffled cries, he quickly slung his saddle up on one shoulder and called softly in Cheyenne for his big dun gelding. The horse came to the corral gate obediently and he let it out, then quickly saddled up, grateful he had been prepared to ride out after meeting the Frenchman. De Boef would just have to wait till another time.
He led the horse the few yards to the lean-to. Reaching over, he lifted her off the hook, and threw her across his saddle. Then he mounted and walked the horse down the deserted back street.
Slung so awkwardly across the saddle, Stephanie could not even get her breath, much less scream. The horse picked up speed as they reached the outskirts of town, bouncing her against the unyielding hardness of leather and Chase's thighs. It was oddly intimate. Her breasts pressed against his leg and her hair, worked loose from its pins, flowed like a heavy cloud around his boot. She tried to kick with her feet but he stopped her struggle with a sharp swat to her derriere.
“Lie still or you'll fall and break that beautiful little neck,” he whispered, but she continued to squirm until he cleared the last of the small shanties scattered at the edge of town.
Then he kneed the dun into a ground-eating canter, which so winded her that she ceased struggling, afraid she would suffocate. After what seemed an eternity of the pounding punishment, he reined in and slipped gracefully from the horse, then eased her down. Her legs buckled beneath her and everything started to go black as she coughed and choked through the gag. Her head throbbed from being upside down so long.
Chase removed the gag and cut the bindings from her wrists, then swept her up in his arms and carried her to the edge of a small stream. After placing her on the ground, he walked back to his horse, took a tin cup from his saddlebags and filled it with cool water from his canteen. “Here, drink,” he ordered.
Stephanie wanted to hurl the cup in his face but her mouth was parched from the gag, her throat literally closed off. She held it up in her numb hands and drank greedily. Finally stopping after she had drained the cup, she wiped her hand across her chin awkwardly, then watched him drink directly from the canteen. The strong bronzed column of his throat moved with each swallow.
Limned in moonlight, his profile was even more beautifully sculpted than in her erotic fantasies. In Boston she had been a green virginal girl. Now she was a woman who knew a man's touch. God help me! I never wanted Hugh but I want you! When he, too, finished drinking, he refilled the canteen at the stream, then walked over to his horse, seeming to ignore her. “What are you going to do with me?” she asked in growing alarm when he shrugged off his tattered shirt and moccasins, then began to unbutton the fly of the greasy denims.
“Not what you think,” he answered with a wicked leer. “I hate the stink of white men's clothing. I'm going to bathe in the stream and change. Nobody will be after us this soon.”
Stephanie sat appalled as he continued removing his pants. The muscles of his arms and shoulders flexed with each movement, gleaming hard and satiny in the soft light. She could see the dark thatch of hair on his chest and remembered its texture. Mesmerized, she still knew every nuance of his body, the male scent of him, the heat and the hardness when he had crushed her to him and kissed her. She squeezed her eyes closed, shamed to the core of her soul by her base physical cravings.
Her eyes flew open when he kicked away his pants and turned toward the stream, completely naked. She watched his long-legged stride, taking in the breadth of his shoulders, his small tight buttocks and lean sinewy thighs. What was wrong with her, ogling her naked abductor! She had just been given the opportunity to escape while the arrogant savage was in the water.
Stealthily, she stood up, then began edging slowly to the dun gelding. She grabbed the reins and swung up onto the horse, kicking him into a gallop. A shrill whistle split the air before she had ridden a dozen yards. The dun skidded to a halt, then turned toward Chase, his ears held forward, waiting obediently. No amount of cajolery would budge him. In that instant, she remembered how he had trained Thunderbolt the same way back in Boston. The big black had always come to him. No one could ever steal him.
“I’m not by nature a careless man, Stevie,” Chase said as he casually wrapped himself in a soft buckskin breech-clout and pulled on fringed buckskin leggings. After slipping the beaded moccasins on again, he strolled casually toward her.
“What if I'd reached for your gun instead of your horse?” she asked.
He shrugged enigmatically. “Then I imagine we'd both have found out if you could pull the trigger.”
“You don't think I could.”
He studied her face in the shadowy light. “I'm not sure. Once I thought I knew you but that was before you married Phillips.”
“Why do you hate Hugh so much?”
“You accused the White Wolf of being a killer and I am, but I don't attack women and children. My warriors don't rape thirteen-year-old girls and club old men's brains out either.”
“You're saying Hugh does that?” She felt faint and dizzy, remembering those helpless captives being herded into corrals by Hugh's men—young girls and old people, treated as if they were livestock being sent to the slaughterhouse. Was it possible?
“Believe what you want,” he replied when she sat mute, staring down at him. He turned his back on her and walked over to the edge of the stream, stuffed his white man's gear in his saddlebags, then returned to fasten them behind the saddle.
Stephanie sat astride the horse with her legs indecently exposed. If Chase was aware of the bare flesh, he gave no indication of it until she tried to pull down her rucked up skirts to cover herself. Then he reached out one hand and closed it over the curve of her calf.
“Don't,” he said softly as his dark fingers glided over her pale smooth skin.
She held her breath, her mouth once more gone suddenly as dry as it had been when he removed the gag. Moistening her lips she asked, “Why did you kidnap me, Chase? The whole army will be scouring the territory searching for me.”
“It was that or kill you,” he replied tersely as he swung up behind her on the dun and kicked him into an easy lope.
“You think I'd tell them you're the White Wolf?”
“Probably. After all, you're a soldier's wife and I'm a bloodthirsty savage with a price on my head.”
“How did this happen, Chase? When you left Boston you said you wanted to find your father's people. Couldn't you locate them...or were they all dead?’'
“No. I found my uncle and great-aunt among the Northern Cheyenne, although it took nearly a year.”
“Then why aren't you with them? Why not live away from white civilization, just be Cheyenne?”
“You mean, why become a raider? Have you lived out here the past three years and seen nothing? The Cheyenne can't live as they did when I was a boy. The buffalo are vanishing, most other game is scarce—wantonly slaughtered in a deliberate policy to starve us and the other plains nations, to drive us all onto reservations where we can live on the White Father's dole...and our spirits can die slowly. “Red Cloud of the Oglala and Morning Star of the Northern Cheyenne tried to make peace—to keep to the great hunting preserve supposedly given to the tribes in the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, to trade with the government agencies. Then last summer Custer came riding right into the heart of the sacred Black Hills, looking for gold. Do you know what they call the glorious trail he blazed on our land—the Thieves Road.”
She could feel the bitterness emanate from him as he sat behind her and they rocked with the steady cadence of the horse's gait. “So you chose to fight back—even though you must know it's hopeless. All you're doing is giving men like Custer and my husband
the excuse to kill you.”
“They don't need excuses, Stevie. I'd rather die quick and clean as a warrior than slowly as a beggar.”
“That's why you masquerade as a tame Indian to learn where best to strike. What are you doing with all the gold you've stolen? Buying more guns?”
“Sometimes. We can't fight Henrys and Winchesters with bows and lances. We also use the money to buy food, blankets and medicine when I can't steal them directly. White men's diseases kill my people even faster than bullets or starvation.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I nursed the prisoners at Fort Steele. A remarkable Quaker woman named Hannah Wiette recruited me to work in her hospital.” His harsh mocking laughter surprised her.
“You always were tough and resourceful, even though you are a rich man's daughter.” He paused, scrutinizing the black dress she wore as a thought suddenly occurred to him. “Is Josiah dead?”
“He died several months ago,” she replied.
“I'm sorry,” he said, feeling awkward, knowing there had been no love between father and daughter.
“Don't be.” Her voice was cold now. She would never reveal to him that she had been disinherited by Josiah. Shifting the subject back to her nursing skills, at which he had scoffed, she asked, “Don't you think I'm capable of nursing sick Indians?”
“I don't doubt you're capable of a great many things, Stevie.”
“Now who's playing the bigot? You obviously think the worst of me simply because I'm white, don't you, Chase?”
“I think you and all those do-gooder Quakers and others like them simply don't understand. You can't make red men into white. We can't live caged. Even if you keep our bodies alive, our spirits will die that way.”
She had no answer.
They rode in silence until the first faint streaks of dawn reached across the eastern horizon, shafts of breathtaking pink and golden light. Chase veered from the direction they had been traveling for the past several hours, heading for an outcropping of shale surrounded by a scraggly copse of alders. Reining in behind the shelter of the trees, he slid from the horse and lifted her down, then began to unsaddle the gelding.
“A buck riding with a white woman would get himself shot, if we happened on anyone. So, we'll rest by day and travel by night,” he said tersely. His back was turned as he slung the heavy saddle onto a boulder beside the dun. “You can wash up in the stream over there if you want. I have some food here for us to eat.”
She saw the small clear creek gurgling just beyond the rocks. “Do you know every water hole in the territory?”
He shrugged as he knelt with his back still to her, fishing something from the leather pouch. “This territory and several others. The Cheyenne once ranged from the Canadian border all the way onto the Staked Plains of Texas following the buffalo.”
Stephanie glanced at the earth which was strewn with small hunks of loose shale interspersed with several solid rounded rocks, any one of which might bash out a man's brains. Perhaps she could just stun him and make good her escape before he could signal the horse.
As if reading her mind he said, “I wouldn't try anything foolish, Stevie.”
When he heard her stomp off to the water's edge, he let out a sigh. What insanity had he committed? She was right, the army would hound him relentlessly if they ever found out he had taken her. Of course, he was certain Rocky Rhoades would not incriminate herself by revealing it, but there was always the possibility someone else might add up her mysterious disappearance and Asa Grant's sudden absence and put the two together.
He cursed his rotten luck, then considered the options. Leaving her to reveal his identity would mean giving up his disguise as the bounty-hunting Osage and that he could not do. It was an edge his band had that no other Cheyenne or their allies possessed. He provided essential survival tools and valuable information to use against their enemies. The only alternative to bringing her with him was to kill her...and that was really not an option, for he knew he could never harm Stevie Summerfield.
You still want her. He tried to deny the nagging voice in his head but could not. What the hell would he do with a spoiled, beautiful rich girl when he reached their camp?
As if echoing his thoughts, Stephanie walked back from the stream and stopped beside him. Using every ounce of the courage she had worked up, she asked, “You still haven't said what you plan to do with me, Chase.” He stood up and faced her. Her face paled as she stepped back, wide gold eyes riveted to the scars on his bare chest. He had not been marked that way when he undressed the day they were snowbound. “What...what happened to you—did the soldiers do this?”
Chase smiled grimly as she stared, horror-struck. “I imagine this seems a barbaric disfigurement to you,” he said, striking his chest with one fist, “but among my people these scars are a badge of honor.”
Over the years spent at half a dozen frontier posts, Stephanie had overheard talk about the savage self-mutilation rituals performed by the Indians. “The...the Sun Dance. You underwent the Sun Dance?” she asked incredulously.
His eyes narrowed dangerously on her as a sudden surge of anger coursed through him. “Difficult to believe, isn't it? That a Harvard man would participate in something so primitive and offensive to civilized sensibilities,” he sneered.
She swallowed her gorge as images of his flesh ripping free of crude rawhide bindings flashed before her eyes. “I didn't mean to sound superior,” she said defensively.
“Yes you did. Everything I am has always offended white people. Even when I dressed in silk shirts and Oxford tailored suits I was still nothing more than a stinking dirty redskin to the good people of Boston.”
“Not to me, Chase,” she replied defiantly. Still afraid of the half-naked scarred stranger who had once been her love but unable to stop her yearning to touch him, Stephanie reached out tentatively and grazed the raised welts of scar tissue on his chest.
At once his hand came up and seized hers, pressing the palm flat against the swift thudding of his heartbeat. “I feel anything but civilized right now, Stevie,” he said raggedly as they stood motionless, facing each other.
Chapter Eleven
He could feel the pulse in her wrist racing as wildly as his heart. This was insane. She was another man's wife—a bluebelly' s wife. She was forbidden to him. But she was Stevie. He forced himself to remember how he lived now, the path he had chosen. She could never survive with the Cheyenne—even if she wanted to. Would she want to share his lodge, bear his children? The sudden thought shook him to the core and he angrily shoved her hand away as if it bore a rattler's sting. “Use the chokecherry bushes over there to relieve yourself. After living out west this long I assume you know to watch for rattlers.”
Stephanie glared at him. Then, red faced, she headed for the shelter of the bushes, too desperately in need for pride to rule. As she struggled with her skirt and petticoats, she heard the unmistakable sound of him making water a few yards away on the opposite side of the shrubbery.
Memories of their childhood suddenly flashed into her mind and she cringed, recalling the forthrightly curious little girl who had asked him how he could pee so much faster than she could when they were romping in the woods behind his grandfather's country place. When he was too embarrassed to explain, she had spied on him the next time but could see nothing from her position behind him. He simply stood with his drawers still up...doing it. She had thought it mysterious and frustrating because girls couldn't perform such a basic act of nature with that ease and she told him so! Afterward he had teased her, knowing she had followed him. Still red faced, Stephanie wondered if he was recalling the same incident right now.
As she straightened her clothing, she muttered to herself, “I can't cower in the bushes until he comes looking for me.” Steeling her courage, she walked back to the stream where Chase waited.
“I've laid out the food. Not lobster bisque, I'm afraid, but you'll eat if you're wise,” he said, gesturing to the parfleche packe
d with pemmican and a dozen hardtack biscuits all carefully placed on a clean piece of cloth. Then he stalked to where he'd thrown the saddle and began to unroll some blankets.
Still trembling, she sank down in front of the meager cold food, humiliated by her forwardness and his rejection. What had possessed her to touch him like that? Placing her hand on his scars seemed even more intimate than the moments they had spent in his bed together so long ago.
Her stomach growled and cramped, reminding her that she had skipped dinner last evening and spent the night bouncing madly on horseback. Gingerly she reached out for a biscuit, eyeing the strange grayish looking substance he called pemmican with uncertainty. The biscuit was hard and salty, difficult to get down without something to moisten it. She broke off a piece of the soft greasy stuff and placed it on the bread. It had the tang of chokecherries and other wild fruits, combined with the almost buttery flavor of well-refined white lard. All in all, not too unpalatable.
Chase watched her eat, surprised that she would not find camp food too repulsive to taste. But Stevie had always been a game one, even as a kid, he mused as he spread his bedroll on a bit of moss growing in the shade beside the stream. Then he rejoined her, grabbing a couple of hunks of hardtack and making a sandwich with the pemmican as she had. “White man's biscuits and red man's suet and fruit. Half-breed food. Fitting, don't you think?” he asked, taking a bite.
“Why do you blame me for what's happened to your life, Chase? I didn't leave you—you left me. I never cared a fig about your mixed blood.”
“That was back in Boston...before you saw me as I am. And I am Cheyenne, one of those savage inferior people who require enlightenment and inspire pity.”
Her cheeks flushed as she remembered just those very feelings the first time she had seen red men and women after coming west.
“You'd have made a good Quaker yourself,” he said scornfully, taking in her guilty expression. He finished off the last of his food and washed it down with a draught from the canteen, then offered it to her, as if daring her to wipe off the rim before she drank.