Apache-Colton Series

by Janis Reams Hudson

  “Would you lie to me?”

  She almost smiled. “Yes, but this time I’m not.” Her near-smile turned into a gasp of pain when he probed a rib.

  “Sorry.” He moved to the next rib and probed again. “That one, too. I don’t think they’re cracked, though. Just badly bruised. How about this one?”

  “No. It’s okay.”

  Okay, he thought. The hell it was. Nothing in the world was okay when someone could beat a young girl—woman—so severely. The cuts from the belt buckle appeared to be restricted to her back and buttocks, but he couldn’t be sure, because the bruises extended around her sides. He didn’t want her lying on her back just yet, so he couldn’t tell her to turn over and let him check the rest of her injuries. “I’m going to help you sit up now.”

  “I can do it,” she muttered.

  He knew she could, had known she would insist, but something inside him wanted to help her. There was more than that inside him, too, and it disturbed him. He wanted to soothe and comfort, to hold and protect. The feelings shook him. Irritated him. He wasn’t supposed to care, not like this, and didn’t want to. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t let himself. He moved out of her way.

  She pushed herself up with one arm and held the front of her chemise over her chest with the other. He let her struggle with her skirt and kept his mouth shut. She wouldn’t care that the sight of her legs wasn’t going to send him into a slavering lust, or whatever it was girls were told about keeping their legs hidden. He just wouldn’t look at her legs.

  Finally situated on the edge of the bunk, she said, “Turn around so I can get dressed.”

  “Not just yet.” He knelt before her and reached for her wrist. “I’ll see the rest of those bruises now.”

  “No!” LaRisa hugged herself fiercely, inadvertently pushing the swell of her breasts above the meager protection of the chemise she held against herself. “You’ve seen all my bruises.”

  Spence calmly released her wrist and ran a finger along her flesh just above the chemise. “Then what’s this?”

  LaRisa gasped and leaned away. “Don’t!”

  Spence raised his gaze to hers. Shock and fear stared back at him. “LaRisa, I’m a doctor. What’s more, I’m Matt’s brother and your father’s friend. I’m not going to hurt you. But I am going to check the rest of your injuries.”

  His voice and eyes seemed to hypnotize her. Or maybe it was fear that held her immobile. When he reached for her wrists and pulled her arms to her sides, she kept her gaze locked on his and let him, even as the heat of embarrassment flooded her from the waist up. He really seemed to care that she was hurt, she thought in wonder.

  Spence did care, more than he wanted to. Unfortunately, he felt more than caring at the moment, and he didn’t want that either. He didn’t want to notice the size and shape of her breasts, the slenderness of her rib cage, or the narrowness of her waist. He was supposed to be examining her injuries, not cataloging her attributes. Christ, where was his objectivity? She wasn’t for him. There would never be a woman for him.

  But her breasts were perfectly shaped, full and round, not too small and not too large, the creamy copper-tinted flesh peaked with beautifully dark areolas and nipples that hardened under his gaze and made his blood rush. Her torso was perfectly formed, angling gently inward to a perfect waist he knew he could span with his hands.

  And all of that perfect femininity was obscenely marred by deliberately inflicted bruises. The black and purple splotches that matched the size and shape of a man’s fingers and circled one breast were a particular sacrilege. He traced the circle of bruises with the tip of his forefinger. When she shivered in response, he raised his gaze to hers and asked again, “Who did this to you?”

  LaRisa mutely shook her head. Was she supposed to be able to speak? A doctor’s touch had always been an impersonal thing to her. This doctor’s finger on the skin of her breast was far from impersonal. To her it felt very personal. It felt…intimate, and surprisingly gentle. The answering tightening in her nipples appalled her even as it sent sharp tingles of pleasure shooting low and deep inside her.

  “Tell me,” he urged. “Tell me who did this?”

  “Why?” she managed.

  The blue in his eyes sharpened and his voice turned harsh. “To make them pay.”

  She trembled under the fierceness of his answer. “You…you would do that? For me? Why?”

  “Because it shouldn’t have happened,” he said fiercely. “The Army may have given itself the right to call you a prisoner of war. The government may have assumed the right to take you away from your father. The school undoubtedly believed it had the right to discipline you. Legally the Army probably has the right to put you in a cell, or even sentence you to death for particular crimes. But LaRisa, no one, no one has the right to beat you. Not ever!”

  His impassioned words were nearly her undoing. The backs of her eyes stung and her lips trembled. She had to look away from him to keep from crying and falling into his arms, to keep from begging to know why this had happened to her.

  She knew why it had happened. It happened because some people are cruel and vicious. It happened because she was an Apache at the mercy of whites. Because she’d had no control over her own life. She blinked away her tears and looked at him again. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For caring.”

  Spence bit back a reply. She wasn’t going to tell him what he wanted to know. Again, he let it go. For now.

  Reaching deep inside himself, Spence finally found a measure of his usually impersonal demeanor and concentrated on examining her. The bruises were tender, but her ribs seemed intact. Through her skirt, he probed for internal abdominal injuries and gratefully found none. He gently raised the front of her chemise and let her cover herself. Then he forced himself to ask the obvious question, one he was afraid to hear the answer to. “Were you raped?”

  She flushed and looked away. “No.”

  “LaRisa?” He grasped her chin and made her face him. “Look at me. Were you raped?”

  “No.”

  Relief rushed through him and left him weak. She was telling the truth. “Thank God.” He took a deep breath and released her, both from his touch and from his stare.

  “Since your ribs are only bruised I’m not going to bind you, but you have to take it easy. I want you to spend the next four days on this train resting.” He started putting away his supplies. “Do you need any help getting into your nightgown?”

  With her flesh once again hidden from those blue eyes, LaRisa felt her equilibrium return. “No, actually, I’ve been doing it all by myself for a number of years. Rather clever of me, don’t you think?”

  Spence heard a hint of laughter in her voice this time, rather than ire or pain. “Smart aleck. I’m going to visit the smoking car and have a cigar. I’ll expect you to be asleep when I get back.”

  She started to tell him she didn’t mind if he smoked in their compartment, but swallowed the words. She couldn’t change clothes with him around. Then too, a few minutes to herself would surely clear her mind of the memory of his touch. The feel of his gentle hands against her skin could not be allowed to linger. The building need to feel him hold her in his arms had to be banished. She wouldn’t find comfort there, not from a white man.

  Spence finished repacking his medical bag, then left. It was stupid, he thought, this irresistible urge to flee, but flee, he did. Not so much from the compartment, though, if he were honest with himself, as from the girl. Hell, she was two-thirds his age—a very young, naïve nineteen. A child, really. But when presented with her bare back and hips, the marred perfection of her breasts, he’d suddenly found himself unaccountably nervous, as though she were his first patient. Or his first woman. He remembered both vividly.

  His first woman had been eighteen-year-old Consuela Martino. A much older, experienced woman of the world compared to his tender fourteen at the time. She was married now to a shopkeeper in Tombstone and at last c
ount had five children. Oddly enough, no matter how much she’d gotten around in her younger days, Spence had no doubt that all five children were sired by her husband. Hell of a woman, Consuela.

  His first patient, too, had been a hell of a woman, but he hadn’t availed himself of her services, much to her dismay. He’d been twenty-one and full of himself, straight out of medical school, working with Dr. Grissom in Boston while waiting for the ship to take him to Europe for further studies. Grissom’s older sister, Vivian, had convinced Spence to examine her—it seemed she frequently suffered from shortness of breath and a racing heart. She didn’t want to worry her brother, so she had batted those big blue eyes at Spence and convinced him to come to the house while her brother, father, and a husband she’d neglected to mention, were away.

  God, what a gullible fool he’d been. The woman had stripped down to nothing with the slow, sultry, skill of the most practiced whore and proceeded to claim it was he who caused her heart to race and her breath to catch, and if he would only examine her completely, from the inside out, as it were, she was certain she would be cured.

  Why he should suddenly think of Consuela and Vivian when confronted with a prickly kid like LaRisa Chee was beyond him. In fact, by the time he found the smoking car and lit up, he realized the entire scenario was ridiculous. He’d just been without a woman too long, that was all. There was absolutely nothing for him to worry about. There was no chance in hell LaRisa was going to try to seduce him. Not that prickly cactus.

  In the first place, she seemed more inclined to hate him than anything. In the second place, she wouldn’t have a clue as to how to seduce a man, even if she were so inclined. And heaven knew, he’d seen more bare flesh than most men his age; it had ceased to have an affect on him years ago.

  If that were true, however, why was he was just then realizing the train was moving? He glanced out the window to see that they’d left Philadelphia behind some time ago.

  They were on their way south, to Alabama. To Chee. Spence would hand LaRisa over to her father, and his business with her would be finished. When that happened, they would both be relieved. His business with all the Chiricahua would be finished. Spence was going home. Nothing was going to stop him.

  Meanwhile, he had four days to contend with. Four days virtually confined with LaRisa in the small compartment unless he chose to leave her there alone. He did, sometimes, but considered it extremely rude of himself.

  Not that she’d been the most congenial of companions, he thought sarcastically. Each time he checked the wounds on her back, he had to nearly threaten her to get her to cooperate, and she still refused to name her attackers.

  He wished heartily that he could simply have agreed with her that he didn’t need to treat the cuts on her back any longer, that she was fine. He didn’t want to see that smooth dark skin again, didn’t want to touch it and feel her muscles tighten and quiver beneath his fingers. Didn’t want to see the swells of her breasts and remember their shape, their, texture, the way her nipples responded to just a look. Didn’t want to know that all he had to do was turn her around and lower her arms to…Hell, he didn’t want any of it.

  He damn sure didn’t want to remember it once he had finished with the task, either. He had to come up with something to do with himself before he started having very inappropriate ideas about the daughter of his brother’s closest friend.

  He ended up teaching her to play poker.

  “Don’t let me know what you’ve got,” he warned.

  “I’m not stupid. I’m not about to show you my cards.”

  “You don’t have to show me for me to know if you think you’ve got something good. I can see it in your expression. You need to put on your Apache face.”

  “My what?” she asked slowly.

  “Now, don’t look at me like that. It was meant as a compliment, not a slur.” Spence shrugged. “It’s an expression we use at home for that look Pace and Serena get sometimes when they don’t want anyone to know what they’re thinking. There’s nothing harder to read than an Apache who refuses to reveal his thoughts.”

  “You mean like this?” She gave him her best blank look.

  He shook his head. “You’ll never make it. There’s too much anger in your eyes.”

  What he said was probably true. LaRisa could feel that anger in her soul. It had been there since the day they’d taken her away from her father. It would fester and burn until she was at his side again.

  As far as the cards went, she figured the anger in her eyes would keep her opponent from seeing anything else there.

  She was right. She won the first hand.

  “Well, damn,” Spence said.

  The white man, it seemed, did not enjoy losing.

  “Best two out of three,” he offered, certain the outcome had been a fluke. Beginner’s luck.

  She took the next hand, too, and had him going for three out of five. They were playing for match sticks. By the time Spence threw down his cards in disgust and made his way to the smoking car for a cigar, LaRisa was ready to go into business for herself.

  Spence was left begging for a light.

  Chapter Four

  Outside the town of Mount Vernon, Alabama, the Mount Vernon Barracks sat on a slight ridge amid more than twenty-one hundred acres of rain-drenched swamp and pine forest on the west side of the Mobile River, just twenty-five miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. Rain drizzled down miserably, gray and tepid. Seeking the protection of the black leather roof to keep from getting soaked, LaRisa scooted closer to Spence on the buggy seat—but not too close. She didn’t like touching him in any way. It made her think of warmth and comfort, the emotional kind, the kind she’d never had but always dreamed of. It puzzled her, infuriated her to feel those things in connection with this man. This white man.

  The air was thick and damp and hot. Steam rose from the horse’s back. Mud splattered up from his hooves as he pulled the buggy through ruts and puddles toward the gathering of brick buildings and wooden shacks behind the encircling brick wall ahead.

  “I don’t see any sentries,” LaRisa noted with surprise.

  “Oh, they post one now and then.”

  “Now and then?” Anger and sorrow flowed through her, but bitterness rang in her voice. “Are my people so cowed, then, that the white man no longer needs guards to keep them imprisoned?”

  “You mean, why don’t they just walk away?”

  “Well, why don’t they?”

  “The same reason you didn’t flee Carlisle, even though you had no guards. You would only have gotten caught. Some do leave Mount Vernon, though. A few here and there, but not many. I’ve heard of one or two turning up at the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico every year or so. But for the most part, they stay put. They know that if a noticeable number turned up missing, the Army would be after them before they got far.”

  LaRisa swallowed a sharp retort. What was the point? She would soon live among the prisoners again. Spence was right. If many left, the Army would only follow. Damn them. Damn them all to hell for treating her people this way!

  She forced a deep breath, stared at the wall ahead, and thought of her father. She craved his warmth and comfort. His wise counsel. His wide, loving smile. Would he have any of those things left to give? Her worry for him grew.

  “You’ll have to get used to the rain.” Spence’s voice startled her. “And learn to be glad of it. The minute it stops, the air gets so thick with mosquitoes you’re sometimes afraid to open your mouth for fear of swallowing one.”

  She let his words roll past her. She was nearly strangling on anxiety. Would her father recognize her? Would he approve of her? Was he worse? Was he still alive?

  Eight years, she thought, her rage tempered by fear of what awaited her at this place called Mount Vernon.

  Spence guided the buggy through the gate in the brick wall surrounding the barracks. At a shout, a big tall man in civilian clothes approached.

  “Uncle Matt?” she said softly.
Then, forgetting for a moment her fierce anxiety, she grinned. “Uncle Matt!”

  “Good God, girl, is that you?” Matt reached to lift LaRisa down.

  “Be careful of her ribs.”

  Matt paused, then offered her his hand and helped her down. “What’s wrong with your ribs?”

  LaRisa smiled and shook her head, daring Spence to contradict her. “Just a little accident. I’m fine. Really.”

  Matt led her to the covered porch of a long brick building. “Let me look at you.”

  LaRisa looked at him, too. The years had added lines to his face, around his eyes, his mouth. But those eyes that could be both compassionate and fierce were just as she remembered, as was the familiar scar on his right cheek and the necklace of bear claws around his neck.

  He held her shoulders and gazed at her. His smile turned bittersweet. “I’d almost forgotten your mother’s eyes, and her smile, but I see them in you.”

  For a girl who had to fight the distance of time to remember her mother, no words were ever more welcome.

  “But heaven help us, you’ve sure got your father’s stubborn chin.”

  Reality intruded, and with it, anxiety, dread, fear. “How is he? Take me to him.”

  Matt looked to Spence, nodded, then led LaRisa out from underneath the shelter. The rain had leveled to a slight drizzle as LaRisa picked her way along at Matt’s side, her skirts held up to keep them from the mud and water. She glanced around at the place where her father and her people had lived these past years and felt a painful tightening in her chest. Even the rage that never entirely left her couldn’t overcome the feeling of despair. The place was appalling, the people miserable.

  While the officers and soldiers obviously lived in the brick buildings and sturdy log houses with thin cloth covering the windows, the Apaches packed themselves into tumbledown wooden shacks with dirt floors. Dogtrots. Two rooms with an open breezeway between them. Through one nearby doorway she saw several Apache men squatted on the floor making bets over which cockroach would reach the wall first. At the next house two small children ran squealing out into the rain, trying to catch a scrawny rat, laughing too hard to do more than tumble over each other.