Breed True
Page 18
"That's not why I married you. That's the excuse I gave myself, in order to have what I'd been wanting since I saw you at the Eclipse Social the first time almost five years ago."
As she pondered his words, he turned to pull her close. "So, it's not me you don't want. It's just not time yet for us to have another young'n?"
She nodded, and he said, "Well, I reckon we can find ways to hold off on that."
"But you need a son, I promised…" Anxiety filled her voice again.
"Come here," he urged her. "I didn't get my morning kiss."
But she turned away and walked to the mantle and took the box from where it always rested.
"All right," he said, stoic—resigned.
But instead of taking off the ring, she threw the box in the fire that burned on the grate.
It lay there for a minute, a cruel reminder of another woman's betrayal. But then flames consumed the ancient wood, turning it to ash.
"Now," she said defiantly. "You can quit looking at it and wondering when I'm going to put this ring back in it. The answer is never."
He crossed the distance between them and stood watching the ashes disintegrate and turn to nothing.
"Did our bargain not say you would give me a child before the end of the year, Julie?" His voice was stern, implacable, and she felt her stomach twist in disappointment.
His voice cut through her distress as he continued. "I think the neighbors got a look at my family and saw that we already made a good start with two."
At her indrawn breath of surprise, he scolded her.
"Who is the father of your babies, Julie Hawks?" he demanded in his warrior voice.
But she smiled, understanding at last.
"You are, Cetan Ate," Julie whispered, turning into his embrace. "You are Father Hawk." She wrapped her arms around his neck. "You are my love," she murmured as she drew his lips to hers.
Epilogue
Eighteen months later
Grady leaned next to Dan on the fence, watching the twins cast the chicken feed out to the greedy hens. He kept one eye on them and another on the cabin where Julie was being examined by a doctor.
"She seems all right," he muttered. He didn't like the idea of anything being wrong with his family, and Julie was the heart of his home.
"You worry too much, Cetan Nagin," Dan chided him easily. "All your impatience to have a son has brought you a family to be proud of. Your woman is fine."
"You sure this doctor knows what she's doing?" Amy took that moment to drop her bucket and chase after a biddy hen, trying to catch it by its tail feathers.
"I don't know how I'm going to keep the wolves at bay once those two grow to womanhood. I'll be damned if they don't look just like their mama."
He opened the chicken fence and rescued the red laying hen from his daughter.
He was about to scold her when the door to the cabin opened, and Dr. Grace Souter emerged.
His cousin's gaze rested on the doctor too, but his possessive stare said more than he revealed in words.
"So does she know she belongs to you, yet?" Grady asked him casually.
Dan's pensive look told the tale. "She will," he assured Grady. "Soon."
Grady forgot about his cousin's woman troubles when Julie joined the doctor on the porch.
"Watch the girls," he ordered Dan, already striding toward the two women.
"Everything all right?" He tried to remain casual but failed to fool even himself.
Julie laughed at him. Stood right there in the open of the porch and made fun of his worry. "I'm fine, Little Henry is fine, but it looks to me like the girls are getting the best of Dan."
Grady didn't give a shit about Dan and the chickens. He stepped onto the porch and closed the space between them. "What did you need to see the doctor about, then?"
His voice was truculent. She'd been evasive when she'd asked him to send Dan to fetch Grace Souter to their home.
"I'll tell you later," she shushed him with a smile.
"You'll tell me now, damn it. If there's something wrong, you don't need to keep me in the dark. I want to know now."
The woman doctor had apparently heard enough. "Six-week check-up, Mr. Hawks.
Your wife and son are in perfect health. Julie just wanted to make sure…"
He felt the tension ease from his shoulders and had just begun to relax when the lady doctor completed her sentence. "Sure that she could resume her marital duties."
"What marital duties? Julie doesn't need to think about doing anything until I say she can."
Even the doctor smiled at that remark. "Somehow I don't think you'll find this task too arduous for your wife."
She turned to Julie and said, "Henry is gaining weight just fine. He was a little early." She cast Grady another look. "Impatience seems to run in the family. But he's a healthy boy, and I don't expect to see him again before the fall.
Julie had slipped away and returned now holding Grady's son in her arms. Not being able to decide which one he wanted to hold, Grady slung his arm around Julie's shoulders and held them both.
He inspected his son smugly. Gray eyes set in tan skin stared into his own. Young Henry's thatch of black hair mimicked his father's, his gray eyes were the same as his grandfather's, but bronze skin had been replaced with a golden tone closer to his mother's.
Faint signs of freckles splattered across the nose that already shaped itself like his Kiowa ancestors.
"We did good, didn't we, Julie?" Grady meant it. His son was a fine cross between two unlikely parents. The next generation of Hawks would be a whole new breed, adding strong bloodlines to the state of Texas.
Grace Souter frowned as Dan untied her horse from the hitching rail, lifted the twins into the saddle, and walked horse and riders to the porch. When he presented the giggling girls to Grady and silently waited for the doctor to mount, she gave an exasperated sigh.
"You don't have to wait on me."
"But I will." Dan's growled response made it clear that he spoke of more than a trip to town.
Grady held the squirming twins in his arms and shook his head as he watched Dan and his lady doctor ride toward Eclipse. "Reckon Dan has found something he can't whisper and make tame."
"Time will tell." Julie kissed Grady's jaw and then moved to return to the cabin.
"Wait just a damned minute." He stopped her. "What the hell are marital duties?"
Julie laughed softly and hugged the baby close in her arms. "Ask me after the kids are in bed tonight, Cetan Nagin, and I'll show you."
Historical Notes
Apache is a combination of two words, from the Yuma dialect meaning "fighting-men" and from the Zuni language meaning "enemy." It is a collective term referring to several culturally related groups of Native Americans who inhabited the Southwest. The Apache tribe consisted of six sub-tribes—the Western Apache, Mescalero, Jicarilla, Chiricahua, Lipan, and Kiowa. The Kiowa roamed over the southern plains of Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas, but by 1868, like most of the Apache tribes, they had been driven from their homes and relocated on reservations.
Victorio, a Chiricahua Apache, and his followers escaped the San Carlos Reservation in 1877 and made war on the white settlers who had taken the Apache homeland. At this time, many Apache renegades from all six sub-tribes banded together to fight.
Victorio and his followers were accompanied by his sister, Lozen. According to reports from that time, she could ride, shoot, and plot battle strategy as well as her brother. When Victorio was ambushed and killed in 1880, Lozen joined the 74-year-old Chief Nana, who led the remnants of multiple Apache tribes in a bloody campaign of vengeance across southwestern New Mexico.
The Texas Indian Relocation Act mirrored the U.S. government strategy used to gain control of land that was still occupied by the Apache tribes. It was an attempt to remove the few remaining Native Americans from the little land they still controlled.
The End
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