“It grew. I’ve been with the tribe at Fort Sill. I don’t think about cutting it when I’m with them.”
“I didn’t mean the length.” She knew Pace didn’t often cut his hair. For most of her life she remembered it being long and free, Apache style. “I meant the color. Why is it all black? What happened to the white?”
She felt him tense then deliberately relax his shoulders, and Joanna wished she’d kept her mouth shut. She knew he was not ashamed of the dozens of white strands that turned his otherwise raven-black hair to salt and pepper, but she also knew he hated being reminded of how they’d gotten there.
Pace was a proud man, much too proud to suffer chains and imprisonment without bearing lifelong scars, inside and out. Joanna could only wonder about the wounds his soul bore since being chained and thrown onto the prison train with Geronimo and the others back in ‘86.
He’d agreed to the Army’s request to act as their translator when Geronimo and his small band of warriors, women, and children surrendered that last time. But when the surrender was complete and the Apaches boarded the train bound for a Florida prison, General Miles had ordered Pace’s arrest.
Pace had not gone peaceably. Jessie, Joanna’s aunt, Pace’s half-sister, had been there and seen Pace bloody, beaten, and chained. It was from Jessie that Joanna had heard the story of how the train had been stopped in San Antonio while President Cleveland decided what to do with the prisoners, for he had ordered Geronimo hanged in Arizona; Miles had, instead, promised two years’ imprisonment in Florida.
While awaiting word in San Antonio, the commander there had taken an extreme dislike to Pace and had him chained in the open to a tree—during a thunderstorm. Lightning had struck the tree. The iron bands around Pace’s wrists had attracted the lightning. Grandma Daniella, Aunt Jessie, and Serena, along with Uncle Blake, had freed Pace at gunpoint and escaped, but Pace had remained unconscious for days.
He wasn’t ashamed of the scars encircling his wrists, but he never let anyone see them. Except for yesterday, Joanna remembered, when he’d removed one of his wristbands for her to bite down on.
As far as Joanna knew, Pace was also not ashamed of the threads of white in his hair, another result of the lightning. After all, his mother and sister bore vivid streaks of white in their black hair. But Joanna saw no white in Pace’s now.
“Why is it all black?” she asked him again quietly.
He took his time answering. “Sometimes I don’t want to be recognized on sight.”
“So you cover the white? How?”
He shrugged. “Ink, boot black, stove black. Whatever’s handy.”
Joanna gave his hair a playful tug. It felt clean and natural. “You’re kidding.”
“Why? Do you think it just turned black again all on its own?”
“Well, no. Which did you use this time?”
“What difference does it make?” Irritation colored his voice.
“What difference? If it feels this clean and hides the white this good, we can make a fortune selling it to ladies to cover their gray hair.”
“Why would a lady want to cover her gray hair?”
“Vanity, Uncle Pace, vanity.”
His shoulders stiffened. “Don’t call me that.”
Hurt came first, but faded on a rush of memories. The way his touch had lingered after he’d bandaged her wound. The look in his eyes when she’d nearly shot him. He hadn’t been looking at the gun, but at her, half-naked and sprawled on the ground. He had not touched her nor looked at her as an uncle looked at his niece.
Joanna’s mouth dried out and a wave of stillness washed her insides. He’d touched her and looked at her as a man touches and looks at a woman. A woman he wants.
Her heart began to race. “All right,” she whispered.
Pace closed his eyes a moment and called himself every kind of bastard he could think of. What devil had made him say such a thing? And why had she agreed, for God’s sake?
“Just like that?” he demanded harshly. “No questions, no argument?”
She knew things weren’t that simple, but if there was the possibility for something more between her and the man she had always worshipped, she would not turn away from it. “Why should there be questions or arguments? You aren’t really my uncle. We’ve always known that.”
“I am your uncle. Forget I said anything. I didn’t mean it, Jo.”
“I think maybe you did, Pace.”
In the gray light of predawn, Pace found a small waterhole and stopped. There had been water during the night, in the valley they’d crossed, but that had been hours ago, and there was no guarantee he’d find more any time soon. In any case, he would have to find a place to spend the day before it got too much lighter. Joanna wasn’t going to last much longer in the saddle.
He peered over his shoulder at her and cursed himself. Her face was pasty gray with pain and exhaustion. “We’ll rest for a few minutes. Can you take my arm and slide down?”
Rather than answer, Joanna took his arm. “Give me your foot.”
Pace pulled his foot from the stirrup and moved his leg back so she could brace her foot on his. Then she bit her lower lip to keep from groaning, and swung down off the horse. If Pace hadn’t kept a hold on her arm, she would have slid to the ground. Her legs were numb.
He winced at the pain she tried to hide. Frustration ate at him, because there was nothing he could do to help her. They couldn’t have stayed in the cave any longer, as Juerta would have surely found them. They’d had no choice but to head out.
Still, it killed him to see her in pain.
At the same time, he had to admire her grit for not whining, as most women he knew would have done. But Jo was a Colton; Coltons didn’t whine. Not even the women. Especially not the women, he thought with a wry twist of his mouth as he remembered how his youngest sister, Jessie, had organized and effected his escape from the Army back in ‘86 when he’d been imprisoned with Geronimo and the others.
LaRisa, the newest woman to join the Colton clan, by way of marrying Pace’s youngest brother, Spence, was no exception, either. She had badgered and bullied Spence into returning to medicine when he’d given up. She gave up everything she held dear—her people, her way of life—to stay by Spence’s side. No whining from LaRisa, by God.
Courageous. That was the word for the Colton women. Pace’s mother had survived capture, torture, and rape at the hands of Apaches. She’d made it through the resultant pregnancy that left her with half-breed twins—Pace and Serena—with her head held high, her spirit intact, and, at the same time, found her lifelong mate in Travis Colton. Travis had not overlooked her past, he had accepted it, just as he had accepted her twins and raised them as his own.
Angela, Joanna’s mother, had also survived capture by the Apaches. She’d survived, indeed, triumphed, in her marriage to a total stranger, Matt Colton. She’d lived through another kidnapping and the loss of the child she’d carried, and gone on to give Matt the daughter that would be the joy of his life—Joanna. Courageous? No soul was more so than Angela had been when she threw herself in front of Matt and took the fatal bullet meant for him.
A picture of Serena floated through Pace’s mind, joking that when she and Pace had left the womb together, she’d gotten all the looks and all the brains. Who else but Serena could have reached through Matt’s despair over losing Angela and brought him back to life, could have given him hope for the future, could have taught him how to love again? If not for her, Matt would have drank himself to death or been knifed in some back alley of Tombstone all those years ago.
Pace bit the inside of his jaw and swung down from the saddle. How long had he hated Matt for marrying Serena? It had been fourteen years since Pace had turned his back on his stepbrother. Fourteen years of foolishness. Fourteen years for Pace to understand and admit that no other man on earth would have been good enough for Serena.
Who else but Matt would have understood both her white blood and her Apache bloo
d? Serena had always sliced her loyalties neatly down the middle. She, as well as Pace, had grown up in both cultures, white and Apache, spending part of every year with their grandfather Cochise. What other man would have understood the Apache part of Serena’s heritage, would have honored it, nurtured it?
Pace had done his best to keep Serena and Matt apart. In hindsight he could only be grateful that he’d failed, for Serena would be only half alive without Matt.
How do I tell them I finally understand? How do I make up for all the years? For despite Serena’s happiness, there was a shadow in her eyes. Pace and Matt’s estrangement hurt her. It hurt their parents. It hurt the whole family.
What none of them, except perhaps Serena, understood, was that the person Pace had hurt the most over the years was himself. He’d denied himself the brother he’d always admired and respected, denied himself his parents, Spence, Jessie, Jo. Denied himself of the pleasure of watching his sisters’ children grow up. Denied himself the land that was part of his very bones.
Enough, he thought as he monitored the horse’s intake of water. Fourteen years of self-imposed exile and torture was more than enough. When he got Joanna home, he would find a way to make amends. If he had to swallow his pride…what was losing his pride, if it meant regaining his family?
Judging that the horse had had enough water, Pace tugged on the reins and led him to a small patch of grass. He dropped the reins, knowing the well-trained buckskin would stay put, and went to see about Jo.
He had trouble pigeonholing her with the rest of the women in the family. Maybe because, as the hours wore on, he had trouble thinking of her as family. But she was. Joanna was Colton through and through. As a child, she’d been fearless, adventurous, stubborn as a fence post. That was how he knew her best—as a child.
The woman was new to him. She had certainly fulfilled the promise of beauty that had been blatant in the child. Was she as strong and resilient, as courageous, as his mother? As Serena? She didn’t look it. As he squatted beside her, he saw again the unnatural paleness making her skin look almost transparent, the lines of pain around her mouth and eyes, the dullness of those green eyes that normally sparkled. She looked like she’d been dragged through a knothole backwards.
And if he said that aloud, she’d probably knock at least one of his teeth down his throat, if she was anything like the women who had raised her. She must be. How else…
“You never did tell me how you got away from Juerta.”
She made a face. “Not very well, obviously, or we wouldn’t be in this fix.”
Pace eased the blanket off her shoulder. He couldn’t check her bandage without halfway undressing her, but he placed his hand over it. Feeling no moisture seeping through, he grunted in satisfaction.
“You did all right for yourself. I’m just curious as to how you managed to get away at all. You said you were locked in a room.”
“That wasn’t a room.” The fire of anger put color in her cheeks as she hiked the blanket back over her shoulder in defense against the chill in the air. “It was a cell. I waited until he started in, and I smashed his head in the door.”
Strips of skin. I’ll peel off strips of the bastard’s skin, slowly, an inch at a time.
He gave Joanna’s shoulder a slight squeeze as dawn lightened the sky. “Good for you.”
Less than a mile from the waterhole they came up over a rise, and Pace drew to a halt with a curse. On the horizon, tall black clouds boiled and seethed over the jagged peaks of the mighty Sierra Madres, the Mother Mountains. If the mountains didn’t hold the storm and drain its wrath, Pace and Joanna were in for a good drenching.
What had Pace swearing was the flat, grassy plain that stretched for at least twenty miles between the rise upon which he and Jo sat and the dubious shelter of the mountains. There would be no way to hide their tracks. The grass was tall, and would flatten out beneath the horse’s hooves, leaving an unmistakable trail.
Riding double as they were, they couldn’t hope to maintain their lead on Juerta that they’d managed to gain through the night, and there was no place to hide out there in that twenty-mile stretch of nothingness.
“What are we going to do?” Joanna asked, looking over Pace’s shoulder and understanding the problem at once.
Pace turned and looked down their back trail. Nothing moved, but he wasn’t fooled. Juerta would close in on them long before they could cross the flats.
He tugged his hat down on his head and faced forward. “We’re going to pray that storm rolls down off the mountains and sends rain like there’s no tomorrow, and we’re going to see just what this buckskin is made of.”
Out on the flat plain a few minutes later, Pace urged the horse into a trot. Joanna gritted her teeth against the jarring gait, knowing they needed speed, yet must still conserve the horse’s energy.
After what seemed like hours, but was probably no more than twenty minutes, Pace nudged the horse into a cantor. When sweat flecked the animal’s hide, Pace pulled him back down to a trot for a time, then a walk.
Joanna was beyond exhaustion, but she did not complain. She knew they had no choice but to keep up the pace.
And so it went through the morning as the sun climbed higher and all hint of the chilling night disappeared beneath the burning rays. Walk, trot, canter, trot, walk, trot, cantor, trot, and on and on. Joanna had long since pulled the blanket from around her shoulders and folded it over the cantle, giving herself a cushion between her stomach and the hard frame of the saddle.
Ahead, over the mountains, the storm clouds darkened.
The buckskin had maybe five miles to go to the relative cover of the rocks and juniper of the foothills when dust appeared on their back trail. The cloud was large enough to indicate that the two groups of pursuers had reunited and now rode together.
And they were coming fast.
“Pace?”
“I see them,” he said.
Joanna’s nerves stretched tight as Pace held the horse to a walk. It was all she could do to keep from digging her heels into the buckskin’s flanks and urging him into and all out gallop, but the animal had carried them well and faithfully all night and well into the afternoon, and they couldn’t afford to run him into the ground and leave themselves afoot.
Joanna looked over her shoulder again, seeing that Juerta had closed the gap even more, and turned forward again to see a solid wall of rain sweeping down out of the mountains to greet them.
“Here it comes,” Pace warned. He pulled his slicker from the folds of the bedroll and passed it back to Joanna. “Put this on.”
“What about you?”
“What about me? You think I’m gonna wear the slicker and let you get drenched? Your grandmother would peel my hide.”
Joanna giggled despite herself. “She’d at least twist your ear.” She took the slicker, slid her arms into the sleeves that were much too long, and wrapped as much of the rain-repelling coat around Pace and over his legs as she could.
Surprised, Pace glanced back at her. “You’re supposed to be keeping yourself dry, not worrying about me.”
Instead of answering, Joanna wrapped her arms around him and pressed herself flush against his back to help keep him dry. Less than five minutes later, the wall of rain engulfed them.
One minute they were hot, dry, and thirsty; the next, they might as well have been swimming under water, the rain was so heavy. Thunder rumbled overhead. Pace urged the buckskin into a trot.
Joanna peered over Pace’s shoulder but could see nothing through the downpour. Suddenly the ground pitched up beneath the horse’s hooves, nearly unseating her. She squeezed her arms around Pace’s waist and hung on as they climbed into the hills hidden by the rain.
Pace both blessed and cursed the rain. It hid them from their pursuers and washed out their tracks, but left him as blind as it left Juerta. Pace couldn’t see farther than ten feet in front of the horse’s nose. But that ten feet was enough to allow him to spot a narrow trail t
hrough the drenched rocks and brush. He slowed the horse and turned onto it.
Before long, the trail split around a dead tree that leaned heavily to the north, its bare, bone-like branches low enough to need dodging if a man took the north fork. Pace took the south, both to avoid the tree, and because the south trail was mostly gravel and wouldn’t hold tracks as easily as the dirt trail would. He searched for anyplace that might offer concealment from those who followed.
The trail doubled back on itself, winding down the side of the hill, paralleling the main trail, the part before the fork. Beneath a rock ledge, the hillside had been washed away by time and rain, leaving room enough for a horse and not much more.
Pace wasted no time. He guided the buckskin beneath the ledge, ducking to avoid hitting his head. The sudden cessation of rain was shocking. “Get down and wait here,” he told Joanna.
Feeling the sense of urgency in the muscles across his back, Joanna didn’t argue. She slid off the horse, and at the last minute, took the folded blanket she’d been using to pad the back of the saddle. Having been beneath the slicker, it was the only dry thing they had, and she didn’t want it soaked.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m going to see if I can throw them off our trail. I won’t be long. I need a piece of your blouse.”
Beneath the slicker, Joanna was still relatively dry. She pulled the tail of her blouse free of her skirt and tried to tear off a piece, but the fabric held.
Pace swung down from the saddle. “Here.” He gripped the front of the tail in both hands and yanked.
The sound of tearing fabric sent a strange sensation down Joanna’s spine. She jerked her eyes to Pace’s face and caught him staring at her, his blue eyes dark and unreadable.
“Keep under cover, and keep your pistol in your hand. Juerta’s liable to pass on the trail right over your head. I’ll try to be back by then, but if I’m not, you sit tight, and nobody will know you’re here.”
Apache-Colton Series Page 189