Bride of the High Country

by Kaki Warner

  “I know you’ve been lied to and cheated and driven from your land, Thomas. But this is still your home. It may have changed from what you knew, but there’s a place in it for you and all the tribes, as well as the whites, and Africans, and Chinese, and the countless others flooding this country. But it won’t wait for you to claim it. You must put your stake in it and make your voice heard. I can help with that. But not from here. I have to go where the need is.”

  He was silent for a long time. Then in that flat, expressionless tone, “Will you ever come back?”

  She felt as if her heart were breaking. “Of course I will, Thomas. This is my true home. These people—and you, especially you—are my family. I don’t want to leave you, but I must.”

  “No one makes you do this. It is what you choose.”

  “Do you choose to go in the mountains when your spirit guides call? Or is it something you feel you must do?”

  He had no answer, but she felt defeat in the slump in his shoulders.

  “I need to do this, Thomas. Can you understand?”

  Without answering, he carried her to the side of the pool and set her down on a warm flat rock jutting out just below the surface. Sitting beside her, he gently ran his hand over her breast and down her belly, as if imprinting the curves and hollows on his mind in preparation for the parting to come.

  “The People have a saying,” he said, watching his hand move over her beneath the water’s surface. “‘In an eagle there is all the wisdom in the world.’ I named you Eho’nehevehohtse—One Who Walks in Wolf Tracks—because you are smart enough to fool men. But I was wrong.” Tipping his head back, he looked into her face. “You are Voaxaa’e. The Eagle.”

  He leaned forward and pressed his mouth to hers in a tender, sweet kiss that spoke more of love than passion. Then he settled back, a sad smile playing at his lips. “Did you know that eagles have one mate for all of their lives, Prudence Lincoln? They might fly away for many months, but they always return to the same nest. The same mate.” His hand stroked up her inner thigh. “Will you come back to me, Voaxaa’e?”

  “I could love no other, Thomas.”

  “Then I will wait for you.”

  “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “I will wait for you,” he said again in that solemn way of his.

  “Then I’ll come back to you whenever I can,” she promised. “There will be no one but you in my life, Thomas. Ever.”

  “Do not stay away from me too long,” he warned, his hand stroking higher as he pressed gentle kisses across her jaw and cheek and brow. “Or on some snowy night like this, or maybe in summer as you sleep to the song of the crickets, or when a storm awakens you with rolling thunder . . . you will open your eyes and I will be there.”

  She shifted. Opened her legs wider. “I would like that, Thomas.”

  “Maybe I will step out of the darkness and touch you here.” He brushed his fingers against her, knowing exactly where to touch. “And you will fly away with me.”

  She gasped, her body arching in the water, her mind exploding into bright flashes of light. He continued to stroke her, murmuring words she didn’t understand, until she sank, trembling, back to earth.

  But the lights were still there, hanging in wavering bands of green and blue and yellow with streaks of red. The snow had stopped, the clouds had parted. And overhead, a sensuous, undulating ribbon of colored light bled across the black canvas of the sky. “Thomas, look,” she said, pointing.

  He turned to look up, and smiled. “It is the dance of the spirits, Voaxaa’e. A rare thing. They have come down from the top of the world to dance for us.”

  “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered, awed by the otherworldly sight.

  “It is a blessing, I think.”

  “Yes.” Pru wrapped her arms and her heart around the man she would love for all of her life. And safe in his care in this sacred place, she watched through her tears as mist rose up to meet the ghostly lights that rippled and danced and arced across the wide Colorado sky.

  A blessing, indeed.

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  Heartbreak Creek

  Available now from Berkley Sensation!

  Colorado, April 1870

  Twenty-seven days after signing over her childhood home to the Bayou Bank & Trust of Sycamore Parish, Edwina Ladoux stared bleakly out the soot-streaked window at her shoulder.

  Just a few more miles. An hour, at most. And they would finally arrive in Heartbreak Creek and begin the exciting new life awaiting them.

  The thought filled her with absolute terror.

  Not that she wanted to put off this meeting forever. Or could. The signed proxy papers were in her carpetbag, all nice and tidy and legal. She had spent the man’s money and had used the train tickets he had sent. She was obligated. Married. A wife again.

  Thank heavens she had had the foresight to insist upon a two-month waiting period before actual consummation took place—God, how she dreaded going through that again—so for now, anyway, her husband couldn’t force his attentions on her. Her husband.

  It was madness. Ridiculous. The very idea that Edwina Whitney Ladoux, once the reigning belle of Sycamore Parish, should be reduced to marrying a complete stranger—a man who apparently was so hard-pressed he had to advertise for a wife in a newspaper—was ludicrous. Absurd.

  Yet here she was, so terrified at the thought of having a husband again, her stomach felt like it was stuffed with hot nails.

  Especially when the train began to slow. She clutched at Pru’s arm. “Are we there? So soon?”

  “Soon? It’s been almost three weeks, Edwina. I, for one, am ready for this journey to end.”

  “Maybe something has happened.” Edwina peered out the window toward the front of the slowing train, but saw nothing untoward. “We just stopped to put water in the tender, so it can’t be that. Perhaps there’s been a rockslide. Or a tree has fallen across the tracks.”

  She hoped so. She hoped it was something so catastrophic she could delay the meeting looming ahead of her for weeks. Months. Forever.

  “Second thoughts, Edwina?”

  Of course she had second thoughts. Hundreds of them. Thousands. What had seemed like a viable solution back when penury was panting in her face now seemed like the most foolish thing she had ever done. Not that she would ever admit such a thing to her sister after tearing her from the only home she had ever known and dragging her halfway across the country. It was too late, anyway. Edwina had given her word and had signed her name. There was no stopping it now.

  Unless she died. Or the train fell into the ravine. But that seemed a bit drastic. “Maybe it’s another herd of buffalo.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.” Beside her, Pru fussed with the front of her traveling cloak, then checked the tilt of her black horsehair bonnet. “They rarely range this high into the mountains.”

  Ever neat, Pru was. Sometimes such excessive attention to detail drove the imp in Edwina to do or say something to mess up that perfect order. But not today.

  Today—assuming a host of guardian angels didn’t swoop down to rescue them—they would arrive at the small depot five miles south of Heartbreak Creek, where her husband would be waiting. With his four children. Arms outstretched to welcome his bride.

  The thought almost made her vomit.

  “I suppose it could be a herd of bighorn sheep,” Pru mused. “Or elk. The book said both are common in mountainous terrain.”

  Oh, who cares? Biting back her mounting apprehension, Edwina stared stoically out the window. She wished she could be more like her sister, eagerly devouring each new tidbit of information, delighting in ev
ery long-winded description of the fauna and flora of the Rocky Mountains, as if this journey was some grand adventure rather than an act of pure desperation.

  But then, Pru wasn’t the one who would soon have a strange man coming at her with consummation in mind.

  Edwina shuddered. In sudden panic, she reached over and gave her sister’s hand a hard squeeze. “Thank you for coming with me, Pru. I couldn’t have come without you.”

  “And I couldn’t have stayed without you.”

  With a sigh, Edwina tipped her head against the cool glass and studied the small canyon below with its fast-moving stream and toppled boulders and deep, dark forests pushing right up to the edge of the churning water. Back home, the bayous and rivers were sluggish and warm and brown, shaded by sycamores, stately cypress, and moss-draped oaks. By now, the redbuds and dogwoods would be blooming and the magnolia buds would be fattening for their annual summer display of fragrant, showy blossoms.

  A sudden, intense swell of homesickness almost choked her.

  Gone. All of it. Forever.

  The clackety-clack of the slowing train wheels gave way to the screech of brakes. Finally the train shuddered to a full stop. Passengers twisted in their seats, trying to see past the vapor from the smokestack that coiled around the windows like lost clouds.

  The door at the front of the passenger coach swung open, and the conductor stepped inside. Stopping in the aisle between the two long rows of bench seats, he hooked his thumbs into his vest pockets and studied the expectant faces turned his way, his lips pursed beneath a bushy gray mustache that looped around his red-veined cheeks to join equally bushy muttonchop sideburns. He didn’t look happy.

  “There’s a problem, folks,” he announced. “Three miles up, a washout took out the Damnation Creek trestle.”

  The passengers moved restively. “What does that mean?” one asked.

  “Means we’ll be stuck for a while.”

  Edwina perked up. A while? How long was “a while”?

  Raising his hands to quiet the angry muttering, the conductor explained. “They’re sending wagons to carry you around the washout to Heartbreak Creek. The railroad will put you up there until the trestle is repaired.”

  “How long?” a man called out.

  “A week. Maybe two.”

  Immediately, more voices rose. The conductor had to shout to continue, but Edwina scarcely heard a word. With something akin to giddiness, she turned to Pru. “We’re saved, praise the Lord.”

  “A reprieve only.” When Edwina started to say something more, Pru shushed her and leaned forward to attend the conductor’s words.

  But Edwina was feeling too euphoric to heed more than a word or phrase here and there—“hotel . . . meals . . . don’t drink the water.” To her, it all meant the same thing. A delay. A blessed reprieve. She wouldn’t be meeting her new husband in Heartbreak Creek today as expected.

  Thank you, Lord.

  The conductor concluded his announcements and left, promising the wagons would arrive within an hour or so.

  Pru fidgeted and sighed. “At least they’ll be covering the cost of our accommodations in Heartbreak Creek until the tracks are repaired.” She shot Edwina a look. “Stop grinning. And what makes you think your new husband won’t travel the extra distance around the washout and be there waiting?”

  “Oh, Sister, pray he doesn’t.”

  Pru’s elbow poked her ribs. “Hush,” she warned in a low voice. “You must stop referring to me as your sister.”

  Edwina almost snorted. Prudence was more than her sister. She was her lifelong best friend, her confidant, the one who gave her courage when everything seemed so bleak. “You are my sister,” she argued, rubbing her bruised side.

  “Half sister. And to call attention to that fact is unseemly and casts your father in a poor light.”

  “Our father.”

  Pru pressed her full lips in a tight line, a clear indication she was losing patience. “Must you be so obstinate? If you’re trying to make a new start, Edwina, why carry old baggage along?”

  “Old baggage?” Edwina gave her a look of haughty disbelief. “Even though you’re twenty-seven and an entire year older than me, Sister, I have never considered you ‘baggage.’”

  Waving that aside, Pru went on in the same low voice. “There is no need to bandy it about that your father—”

  “Our father. Who adored your mother. As well he should.” Edwina was growing weary of this endless argument. Back home, Pru’s parentage had been common knowledge. Everyone at Rose Hill had loved Ester, who had taken on the role of Edwina’s mammy as soon as it had become apparent that Pricilla Whitney was incapable of caring for her own child. Had he been able, Charles Whitney would have gladly married Pru’s mother; as it was, he had been utterly devoted to her until the night the Yankees had swept through Sycamore Parish, leaving death and destruction in their wake.

  In truth, Edwina had loved Pru’s mother more than her own.

  Her gaze dropped to the fine, pale web of scars marring the brown skin that showed between the cuff and glove on Pru’s right wrist. Other scars, hidden by the long sleeve of her gray bombazine, stretched up her right arm and halfway across her chest and back. Burn scars, given to her by Edwina’s mother when Pru had tried to protect her little sister.

  Edwina had scars, too, although other than a few pale stripes across her back, they were of a more subtle kind, the kind that festered in the soul and left behind invisible wounds of doubt and guilt and distrust.

  She owed Pru her sanity, if not her life. And she loved her for it.

  “Be that as it may,” Pru went on, regaining Edwina’s attention. “Races don’t mix. It’s against the laws of man and God, and you know it.”

  “Here we go again.” Edwina faked a yawn behind her gloved hand. “If reason fails, bring out the Scriptures.”

  “Edwina!”

  “Well, really, Pru. If it’s true that white and black shouldn’t mix, you would be a drooling, crossed-eyed hunchback with an extra ear. Instead you’re beautiful.”

  Pru snorted. “Except for the hair and nose.”

  “Not as bad as the wart on my elbow,” Edwina chimed in. “And my less-than-ample bosom and—”

  A soft, feminine chuckle interrupted Edwina’s self-deprecation. Looking past Pru, she saw the blond lady across the aisle was smiling at them. Edwina had seen the smartly dressed young woman several times over the last days, nearly always seated with another young, attractive lady toward the rear of the coach. But today, after the train had stopped in Santa Lucia to fill the tender with water, both women had moved to the vacant bench across the aisle from Pru.

  “Are you truly arguing about which of you is less attractive?” the woman asked, her green eyes dancing with amusement. Beautiful eyes, with a slight upward tilt at the outside corners that might have hinted at wide-eyed innocence if not for the hard knowledge behind the knowing smile. A Yankee, by her accent. Poor thing. No wonder she seemed jaded.

  Before Edwina could respond to the comment, the other woman, seated next to the window, looked over with a wide smile. Where the blond had shown a worldly-wise weariness beneath her cool green eyes, this auburn-haired lady seemed without artifice. An ingenuous, dimpled smile complemented intense chocolate brown eyes that sparkled with such life and intelligence Edwina couldn’t help but smile back. “You are both too beautiful by half,” the woman said in a clipped English accent. “Your bone structure is superb, both of you. And I assure you, I would know.”

  Edwina wasn’t sure what to make of that. Usually, any compliments she received—mostly from men—involved her magnolia skin, which always sounded a bit sickly to her, or her glorious hair, which she thought was abysmally average, ranging from mouse brown to light brown, depending on how many lemons were available, and her soulful blue eye
s, which were admittedly her best feature and the exact shade of the early spring forget-me-nots that had bloomed along the garden wall back home.

  How sad that they, and the wall, and all the handsome young men with their pretty compliments were gone forever.

  “Excuse me for intruding.” The blond woman held out a hand encased in a finely sewn white kid glove. “I’m Lucinda Hathaway.”

  “Edwina Ladoux . . . Brodie.” Leaning past Pru to take the proffered hand, she noted the gold ear bobs, the fine fabric of the blond’s traveling cloak, the shiny button-top boots planted protectively against an expensive leather valise stowed under her seat. Even though Edwina had supported herself and Pru as a seamstress—barely—and was skilled at refitting made-over dresses to look stylish, she couldn’t help but feel dowdy in comparison to this pretty woman. “And this is, Prudence, my—”

  “Traveling companion,” Pru cut in, ignoring Edwina’s sharp look. “So pleased to meet you.”

  “Madeline Wallace, but I prefer Maddie,” the auburn-haired woman chimed in with a wave in Edwina’s and Pru’s direction. She wore no gloves, and a thick signet ring was visible on her left hand.

  “You’re married?” Edwina was taken aback by the notion that a married woman would be traveling alone if she didn’t have to. Then realizing how rude that sounded, she quickly added, “I saw your ring.”

  Maddie held up her hand, palm out. She studied the thick gold band for a moment, then shrugged. “I suppose I am married, although I haven’t heard from Angus in over three years. Perhaps he’s dead.” A brief flash of distress at that startling announcement, then she let her hand fall back into her lap and smiled. “He’s Scottish,” she clarified, which clarified nothing. “A soldier. I couldn’t bear to stay another day with his family—they have low regard for the English, you know, and little hesitation in showing it—so I left.”