Follow the Sun

by Deborah Smith

  The beech tree was the only thing close by. Nathan had asked for a room on the other side of the house.

  Why did he make it clear that he liked her, wanted her as a woman, but intended to avoid her? Kat stood in the shower and scrubbed her hair fiercely, trying to wash him out of it, as the old song said.

  Okay, so she was a nobody, a nomad with no immediate future outside of the weird show biz world of wrestling. She wasn’t cut out to get an ordinary job. It would drive her nuts, seeing the same office or store every day, sitting still most of the time.

  Nathan had a good job, not a normal job, but an entirely respectable, even sort of glamorous one. He had money. He certainly had no trouble attracting women—she’d watched a salesgirl nearly drool over him. And he even had a regular family back in Arkansas, had grown up on the homeplace Nathaniel Chatham had acquired before the Civil War. He had roots.

  In short, Nathan didn’t need a female wrestler with no education, no decent clothes, a credit rating that made loan officers laugh, and a personal history that included rape plus a failed marriage.

  She could just imagine how his family would freak if he brought home an ex-circus performer who was also a Gallatin. They’d be conjuring up General Custer inside of twenty-four hours.

  Nathan liked her, he was her friend, and he even wanted to make love to her. But he wasn’t going to do it, because he was a gentleman, and he knew she’d be hurt when he left.

  And on that point he was very, very right.

  NATHAN STOOD ON the back balcony, waiting anxiously. He hadn’t seen her in an hour. He rocked in a rocking chair. He walked. Finally he shoved his hands through his hair and muttered oaths. Would this get worse? Would he get to the point where he couldn’t stand to be away from her for thirty minutes, then fifteen, then five, until eventually he’d become her constant shadow?

  At the other end of the gallery her door opened. Nathan glanced at his scrubbed hiking boots, brushed a tiny piece of tobacco off the tan trousers he’d purchased, fiddled with his suspenders, and checked the rolled-up sleeves of a striped shirt that still smelled like a menswear shop despite all the pipe smoke he’d blown on it.

  God, he hadn’t been this antsy the night he’d had to explain to a Zambinawee chief that he didn’t want to get married, even if it meant he’d own all four of the chief’s daughters.

  Kat stepped onto the gallery, fluffing her hair as if it weren’t quite dry. Nathan gripped the gallery railing and stared at her.

  She’d chosen a white dress of some crinkly white material. The short-sleeved bodice knew what to do over her curves and the full skirt knew how to swirl gracefully around her legs.

  The white material heightened the honey of her skin and made her hair look blue-black. The dress’s neckline was decorated with white fringe and brightly colored beads, giving it a boutique-native look that would have been too cute on anyone but a real native. With the dress she wore plain white sandals and absolutely no jewelry or makeup. Nathan wanted to eat her alive. In Cherokee love formulas, that was the ultimate compliment.

  She saw him and abruptly stopped stroking her hair. Her hands framed her face, making a lovely picture which imprinted itself forever in Nathan’s mind.

  Kat lowered her arms, tilted her head to one side, looked him up and down with unmistakable distress, then quickly adjusted her expression and smiled widely.

  “Hi ya, sweetcakes. “

  She was still edgy around him, he realized, and she wasn’t going to take him seriously, no matter how much money he had. It was time to do a little work on the hair.

  Nathan walked toward her calmly, putting what he hoped was a cocky smile on his face. “That outfit’s great, Katlanicha.”

  “Two hundred bucks’ worth?”

  “Two thousand.”

  “That’s what my car cost.”

  He reached her and halted, noting the darkening of her cheeks. Her complexion didn’t show a blush, but it took on a richer color, as if someone were mixing strawberries with the honey.

  Her eyes flickered with tension but held his gaze. “Ready for dinner?”

  “Is your hair dry?” he said softly.

  “Oh, yeah …”

  Nathan slid his hands into it, lifted it on both sides, and studied it as if truly concerned about dryness. “A little damp. Sit down and let me air it for you.”

  He took one look at her sloe-eyed expression and knew he’d scored a direct hit. “Sure,” she squeaked, then cleared her throat and said, “Sure.”

  She went to a cushioned bench by the gallery railing and sat down stiffly, tucking her skirt around her in a defensive way.

  “Lean forward,” Nathan crooned. “Lean on the railing.”

  Slowly, glancing over her shoulder with doleful wariness which reminded him of a worried puppy, she rested her forearms on the rail. Finally she faced forward and lowered her chin on her hands.

  The mane of hair flowed down her back like a beautiful black river. Nathan didn’t think he had a hair fetish, but his body reacted that way.

  He stroked his fingers through her hair, gathered it in one hand, then put the other hand underneath, palm up, at the base of her head. Nathan wove his fingers up into the black silk and pulled them along the underside, letting strands slip free until he was holding only a single lock when he reached the end.

  Tugging it playfully, he brushed the feathery tip along one of her arms.

  Kat trembled. “I don’t think you’re airing, I think you’re daring,” she murmured hoarsely. “And it’s not funny, okay?”

  Nathan dropped the strand of hair, smoothed it into place, and silently cursed himself for pushing her too far, too soon. “I was just teasing,” he assured her. “Relax.”

  “Just teasing.” She lifted her head, brushed a hand across her eyes, and sighed. “Jeez, I’m tired and crabby. Sure you want to go to dinner with me?”

  “We’ll be tired and crabby together. Come on.”

  When she turned to look up at him her eyes seemed ancient and sad and familiar in a way that made him feel desperate.

  “Aw, Katie,” he whispered, the nickname coming to his lips so easily. “I’ve been waiting a long time, too.”

  She erased her strange expression, stood up, and patted his shoulder like a pal. “Yeah, I made you wait while I primped. You must be starving for some dinner. Let’s go. We can cut through my room to the hall.”

  Smiling crookedly, she breezed past him and into the house. Nathan frowned in bewilderment. He wasn’t certain what he’d been talking about, but he knew it had nothing to do with dinner.

  NATHAN KEPT BROODING about his strange words, and he was still puzzling over them as he lay in bed that night. The inn’s wide, soft four-poster was hard on his back, accustomed as he was to sleeping on the ground. So sleep eluded him.

  Lost in deep thought, he lifted a hand to a streak of moonlight on his coverlet. Some things were eternal-moonlight, sunlight, souls. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more between him and Kat than their brief relationship warranted.

  There’d been no shortage of women in his life; he’d broken hearts and had his broken in return, more than once. But he’d never felt anything like this before. Was it just a special brand of man-woman chemistry, wonderful but nothing mysterious? If so, then why did he keep saying things to her that he didn’t understand, as if they’d been buried inside him long before he met her, just waiting to be said to her alone?

  Listen, O Ancient White Fire! This woman’s soul has come to rest with me, and I will never let it go.

  Nathan was a very spiritual man, and he believed many things were possible. But as much as he was drawn to Kat, he wasn’t certain he believed that he’d known her before.

  He groaned in dismay, laughed wearily, and sat up in bed, holding his head in both hands. If he’d been through this torment in another life, he damned sure wouldn’t have forgotten it. Nathan cursed in jovial disgust and got up, pulling the bedcovers with him. He’d sleep
on the floor and pretend he’d once been a rug.

  As he dropped the covers his ears picked up the sound of hurrying feet. Listening intently, Nathan gazed at the door that led from his room on to the gallery.

  It was glass-paned and curtained with diaphanous white material that let him immediately identify the small, shadowy form that halted there. He had the door open before Kat knocked.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked quickly.

  She stood there half-hidden in moonlight, barefoot, still wearing her new dress because it was the only clean clothing she had. In one hand she held a book of local history they’d bought at a store on the town square.

  “I’m sorry, I had to talk to you,” she said in a tear-soaked voice.

  “Katie, what is it?” He drew her inside and shut the door.

  She held the book up, her hand trembling. “My great-great-grandfather Justis never married Katlanicha. He couldn’t have. He had a white wife and family here.”

  CHAPTER 6

  NATHAN WENT to a bedside table and fumbled with the switch on an old-fashioned globe lamp. When he finally had it working he pivoted to find Kat wiping her eyes and trying desperately to look calm.

  “Katie,” he whispered sadly, and went to her with his arms held out. “It couldn’t be that bad.”

  She leaned against him, her face burrowed into his shoulder, and he held her snugly, stroking her disheveled hair.

  “I was in bed reading this d-damned book.” she said, her chest rising and falling in a shallow, swift rhythm. “I had to come tell you about it.”

  The book was entitled Gold Ridge—The Early Years. A Newspaper History. It contained the complete texts of the town’s first paper, a crudely typeset weekly called the Gold Ridge Gazette.

  Nathan took the thick hardcover and tossed it on the floor, then hugged her sympathetically. “What’d you find, gal?”

  “Well the paper started about three years before the Cherokees left, ‘cause it talks about how Gold Ridge was being built on land owned by the Cherokee Nation but how that was okay ‘cause the government was negotiating a treaty to make the Indians leave.”

  Nathan kept caressing her hair and hoped she wouldn’t notice that he was wearing nothing but white briefs. He didn’t want her to move away.

  He didn’t have to worry. She put her free arm around his bare waist and held him as if he were a life buoy in a stormy sea.

  “Justis must have been a VIP around here,” she continued. “There was a list of big mines, and two of ’em were owned by the Gallatin Company. There was a Gallatin General Store, and a Gallatin Hotel, and even a Gallatin saloon. Justis was a gold miner. He came here to take gold out of Cherokee land, just like all the other settlers. I bet he was only interested in Katlanicha because he thought there was gold on her farm.”

  Nathan kissed her forehead and tried to ignore the ugly pang of guilt about his own intentions. “There’s too much we’ll never know. It could’ve been different from how it sounds. I mean, if all he wanted was gold, then he didn’t have to stay with her out in Oklahoma and raise children with her, right?”

  New tears slid over Kat’s black lashes. “I was givin’ him the benefit of the doubt until I came to the m-marriage part. The year after the Cherokees got kicked out, the year after great-great-grandmother and her family had to leave”—she exhaled raggedly—”Justis married a judge’s daughter named Amarintha Parnell.”

  Her voice became bitter. “The judge was a VIP too. He owned a mine here. I guess Justis wanted to have a proper wife from a real good white family.”

  Nathan felt so bad for her that he hardly knew what to say. “But ol’ Justis didn’t stay with Amarintha. You know that.” He tried to joke. “He couldn’t have loved some babe with a prissy name like Amarintha.”

  Kat laughed. “Well, he might not have loved her, but he sure did sleep with her a time or two, ‘cause six months later the paper ran a birth announcement. She and Justis had a baby girl.”

  Nathan made an inarticulate sound of distress and then a soothing one. “It’s all right. Sssh. He must have divorced her later and married your great-great-grandmother.”

  “Divorce? Back then? No.” She jabbed a finger toward the offending book. “The society column mentions two times during the next fifteen years when he came back to take care of his businesses and visit his wife. Course, the paper makes it sound respectable—like there’s nothing strange about a husband and wife not living together.”

  She sighed. “Then Amarintha and the daughter died from some sort of fever that was going around. The paper listed their names in the obituaries.”

  “Well, let’s see,” Nathan said hopefully. “Fifteen years later, that’d be 1853. Hmmm, Justis could have married Katlanicha then.”

  “Yeah, after they already had three sons.”

  “Who says they did? I only know about Holt, and he was just a kid during the Civil War. He could have been born in 1853.”

  Kat patted his cheek in gratitude. “Harmonica man, you’re playing a happy tune, but it’s not workin’. Erica’s and Tess’s great-grandpas were old enough to fight in the Civil War. Erica says hers was shot as a spy—and he was old enough to leave behind a wife and a son.”

  She shook her head. “So ol’ Justis had himself two families going at the same time—one nice and legal and white, the other one … the other one …”

  Nathan ached with sorrow as she looked up at him in anguish. “Oh, Nathan, my great-great-grandmother was just his Indian wife, and back then that meant she wasn’t anything. People didn’t just think of my great-grandpa Holt as a killer, they thought of him as a bastard.”

  Nathan swallowed a lump in his throat as she clung to him, crying softly. “Kat, don’t set so much store by niceties. A lot of men—white and Cherokee—had more than one wife. Some Cherokee women had more than one husband, or several husbands one right after the other.

  “Things weren’t real legal and neat, and nobody cared. Most likely nobody thought anything about Justis and Katlanicha’s arrangement. They were probably married in a Cherokee ceremony. That’s just as good.”

  “But he used her,” Kat insisted. “He didn’t make her a legal wife under white law, under his law.” She clenched her hands against Nathan’s chest. “And I bet I know why he stayed with her.

  “I read in one of my other books that out in the Indian Territory a white man could claim Cherokee land if he had a Cherokee wife.”

  Nathan grimaced. She was right on that point. “Yeah, that’s the way it was. And here in Georgia, too, when this town was still part of the Cherokee Nation.”

  “Justis had the best of both worlds—a respectable white wife and a profitable Indian one.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does!” Her eyes glittered with anger. “You don’t know what it’s like to want to have something to be proud of. I do! You wanna know why I never talk about my mother? She was from the reservation in North Carolina. Her people sold moonshine and stole cars!”

  “So who cares?”

  “I care!” She began to thump his chest for emphasis. “Growing up, I was snubbed by regular people who figure circus performers are scum, and now I’m snubbed by people who think lady wrestlers are tramps! And, hey, I’m a multiminority representative when it comes to getting insulted by confused bigots! Name your choice—I’m not only Indian, I’m Cuban, Mexican, Oriental, and Iranian—and once some jerk even called me a ‘whale-sucking Eskimo’!”

  “Kat, you’re denting my rib cage. Calm down.”

  She grasped his face between her hands and searched his eyes for answers, for help. “Is it too much to want respect and love just for me, for what I am, no matter how different I am from everybody else?” Her voice was low and choked. “I don’t want to go through the rest of my life bein’ raped and used and laughed at.”

  Nathan inhaled sharply. Oh God, she hurt so much. “Katie, I’ll make it up to you, I swear,” he said hoarsely, caught in a bli
nding need to right every wrong that had ever been done to her. “We can have it all this time.”

  “This time?”

  Nathan shut his eyes and grimaced. “I don’t know what I’m saying, but I know what I mean.” She was stroking his face with quick, possessive little caresses, her hands trembling.

  “Katie,” he said again, without thinking. That nickname was part of his soul. Nathan shuddered with emotion. “Forget what you read tonight. Trust me.”

  That was stranger than what he’d already said. Nathan looked at her anxiously. “I don’t make sense around you. I want you too much to make sense. Don’t run scared because I’m this way.”

  She moaned softly. “I’m not scared. I haven’t been scared since the first time you called me ‘Katie.’ Oh, Nathan, what’s going on between us?”

  “I don’t understand it either,” he whispered, lifting her onto her toes. His voice dropped even lower. “I don’t have to understand it.”

  She slid her arms around his neck. “Make love to me, she begged. “I won’t ask for too much.”

  “You won’t have to ask. Everything—everything you want, or need—it’s yours.”

  “You, I need you,” she cried as he covered her mouth with his.

  They were quick, almost rough, fired by needs and emotions that swept the whole world away to leave only the two of them touching, loving, seeking to give pleasure.

  Her dress barely survived. Nathan no sooner jerked the bodice open in back than she was fiercely struggling to get her arms out of it. Underneath she wore absolutely nothing. He pulled the dress down to her waist and she tugged him to her, her eyes flaring when her naked breasts flattened against his chest. He reached between their bodies to squeeze her nipples, pulling them forward, rubbing the peaks, wrapping his fingers around first one breast and then the other in an almost frantic desire to make her back arch again and again.

  The dress fell off her hips, leaving only one barrier between them. Nathan thought he would burn up from the pure, lovely bawdiness in her as she slid her hands under the waistband of his briefs.