by Georgina Gentry - Iron Knife's Family 01 - Cheyenne Captive
Summer’s stubborn streak came out and she stuck out her chin. “You will never get me out of this camp. Do you hear? Never! I have changed my mind and have fallen in love with Iron Knife. I will stay with the tribe and be his woman forever! It will be me sleeping in his arms at night and bearing his children, do you hear? It will be me! Never you!”
Gray Dove attacked her in a sudden fury and they went down screaming and clawing in the dirt. The area had been deserted until now, but as they fought Summer saw sleepy heads poking out of tepees to see what the noise was about. Furious with the sly Indian girl who had caused her so much trouble and struck the first blow, Summer was past caring that they were drawing a crowd. She clawed and fought in a way that belied her genteel upbringing and she saw surprise in the other’s eyes.
“I’ll teach you to hit me!” Summer shrieked, giving the other girl a good whack.
Over and over in the dirt they rolled while they scratched and bit. A growing crowd surrounded them.
“White bitch!” Gray Dove spat at her. “When I finish with you, you will be so ugly and scratched up, he won’t want you and will send you away!”
“Look out for your own face!” Summer warned as she slapped the other. She pushed the Indian girl down in the dirt and sat on top of her, pulling the black braids.
Abruptly, she felt strong arms around her, lifting her off the Arapaho girl but she went right on kicking and fighting. “Let go of me!” she yelled. “Let go of me!”
“Stop! Stop all this!” his deep voice ordered. “What’s happening here anyway?”
She looked up into Iron Knife’s surprised face as she struggled and he lifted her lightly off the ground.
“The white girl started it!” Gray Dove sobbed as she scrambled to her feet. “I was just walking past her and she wanted to argue and she finally hit me!”
“Well, Summer Sky?” He put her on her feet.
She hesitated, unwilling to discuss it in front of the crowd of Indians. “Send them away!” she pleaded.
For answer, he turned and gave a curt command in Cheyenne and the people drifted back to their tepees or the big campfire.
“Now, Gray Dove,” he said in English, “I’m warning you to stay away from Summer or I will see you run out of this camp. I know you well enough to know you must have done something to start this!”
The girl started to say something as she brushed her disarrayed hair back and obviously thought better of it. With an arrogant shrug, she turned and walked off.
“Now,” he commanded Summer, “I want to talk to you, you little vixen!” He took her arm and steered her to the top of a nearby rise covered with a grove of blackjack oak.
He sounded stern, but she saw his white teeth flash a smile as they reached the hill. “You shouldn’t tangle with Gray Dove. She’s mean and she outweighs you.”
“I gave as good as I got!” she answered proudly as she sat down on the grass in the bright moonlight. “If you hadn’t come to her rescue, I would have yanked her bald-headed by now!”
“You know, I believe you would have at that! Maybe I underestimated you, Summer Sky!” He laughed and sat down himself against the rough bark of a tree. “What was that fight about, anyway?”
“You mostly.” She ran a finger down a small scratch on her face and decided not to tell him the rest. What good would it do to worry him about what the Indian girl suspected about Angry Wolf? And she could never tell him of Gray Dove’s involvement in her escape because then he would realize a third person had reason to know the dead brave had followed Summer. He would worry that Gray Dove would tell and Summer was sure she wouldn’t. The Arapaho girl cared too much for Iron Knife to report him to the Council.
“Gray Dove thinks I should step out of the picture so she can have you.”
He sighed. “I have never been anything but honest with the Arapaho girl when she talked of marriage. I think she is too much a whore to be true to any man anyway.”
“Have you made love to her as you have to me?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“The kind every woman asks about a rival or wants to ask,” she said jealously.
He reached out and took her hand in his. “I have made love to many women, Summer. Surely you realized that?”
She felt tears well up in her eyes. “No, I suppose I didn’t think of it since you were my first man. I thought what we had was special.”
“It is, Summer, it is!” He kissed her fingertips. “I have made love to many women but I have never been in love with them as I am with you.”
She felt the need for reassurance. “Did you make love to the dance hall girl?”
His face became a cold, inscrutable mask. “Yes, I made love to her. She was my first woman, since you insist on discussing that which does not concern you. I did not kill her. I was almost whipped to death because they thought I had killed her.”
She caught the pain in his cold eyes. “And that is what happened to your back?”
He nodded very slowly and she knew he had never discussed that with anyone. “Yes, they whipped me.” His voice was low and angry. “They whipped me and hung me up like a dog in the town square where everyone could see my humiliation. The man most involved would not have stopped until he killed me but my mother came to my rescue with a shotgun.” He sighed and leaned back against the tree. “That night, Texanna and I fled the white village forever, leaving behind my sick little sister who was too ill to travel. We wouldn’t have made it if War Bonnet and his small raiding party hadn’t ridden in to grab us up off the street at the very last minute.”
“Your mother was a white captive like me?”
“Yes. My father, War Bonnet, stole her from a Texas wagon train. He was down there warring against the Comanche.”
She knew from the tone of his voice he was revealing painful things that he had never discussed with anyone before.
“Texanna must have loved him very much,” she whispered. “And did he love her, too?”
“He loved her so much that he never took a second wife.”
Summer thought a minute, puzzled. “But if they loved each other, why had she left him in the first place to go back to the whites?”
“She didn’t leave willingly. I was a small boy and the band was camped near the Red River. Most of the men were gone hunting when the Texas Rangers rode in and recaptured us. She fought like a she-bobcat but she was heavy with the baby that was due soon and the white men took us away by force.”
“Did you both never try later to escape?”
“We tried.” He sighed tiredly. “But all during that next five years, we never made it. I might have made it alone but I wouldn’t leave her behind to deal with the hostile whites by herself. Her family decided she had gone insane from living with the Indians and threatened to put her an asylum and her children in the orphanage. After that, Texanna quit trying until the night we ran for our lives after the whipping.”
There was a long silence and Summer could read by the pain of his face that he was reliving all the hurt and humiliation of his miserable life in civilization.
“. . . she was wearing a red dress,” he muttered.
“Who?”
“The dance-hall girl.” He shook his head as if to do away with the memory. “It was almost exactly like the one you had on when I took you from the wrecked stage that morning.”
Things became suddenly clear to her. “And you thought I was that same kind of woman, one who sleeps with men for money?”
He nodded and looked into her eyes. “I knew from living with the whites that only whores and easy women wore a dress like that. Where did you get it, anyway?”
She smiled. “I traded for it in Fort Smith. I knew everyone would be on the lookout for a rich girl dressed all in blue so I traded with a dance-hall girl. Then I sold all my jewelry to get enough for my passage to San Francisco. Father had not given me much money to start with. I think he knew I might run away.”
“You had
a reason for going to this place called San Francisco?”
“No,” she said, smiling. “I don’t know a soul there. It just seemed like it was far away enough that Uncle Jack—”
“Who is this ‘Uncle Jack’?”
“A relative. One of those very strict preachers. Father was trying to get me out of Boston for a while until the gossip died down and he thought Uncle Jack was a logical choice. The old man was due to pick me up in Fort Smith the next morning, but I caught the 3:30 a.m. stage out instead.”
“You did something to anger your father?”
“My goodness, did I ever! It started out as a small protest over suffrage for women.”
“What?” His face showed his puzzlement.
“You know, the right for women to vote!”
He laughed heartily. “You must think me a fool! Even having had only five years in the white school, I know that women cannot vote.”
“That’s exactly what I mean!” she snapped. “I had been reading the Lily, the suffragette newspaper, and decided I should do my part. So I organized and led the other girls from Miss Priddy’s Academy to demonstrate for women’s rights at the Boston State House.”
“This alone angered your father enough to send you away from the family?”
“I’m afraid there’s more.” She giggled in spite of herself. “Someone at the capitol called the police and they came to talk to us, rather condescendingly, I might add. The police sergeant told us to behave like well-brought-up young ladies and go home. When I decided they weren’t going to take us seriously, I lost my temper and hit the sergeant over the head with my parasol.
“Parasol?”
She smiled at the memory. “That’s an umbrella. Then the other girls followed my lead and started hitting the police and screaming. To make a long story short, they hauled us all off to jail. All that is but Maude Peabody. She had chained herself to a door and forgot to bring along the key.”
Iron Knife looked at her in disbelief. “You spent time in the white man’s jail? No wonder your father was angry!”
“That wasn’t what made him the maddest!” Summer chuckled at the memory. “We were out within an hour, as soon as Father could reach his lawyer. That is, everyone but Maude who was still back at the State House, chained to the door while the police tried to cut the chain. What made him furious was that someone notified the newspapers and the reporters were at the jail when Father arrived.”
“I can imagine a great chief was not happy at having the story in the newspapers.”
“Well, I think more than that, Father thought he had enough power to keep it out of the press, but he didn’t after all. It was spread over the front pages and Father was furious, especially when the papers told about the bloomers.”
“Bloomers’?” He looked confused. “What is this word, bloomers’?”
She blushed in spite of herself. “It’s a type of ladies’ undergarment, sort of like pants with lace on them, and they show under a shorter than usual skirt.”
He looked so serious that Summer had to smile. “Bloomers’ seems a strange name for ladies’ undergarments.”
“They are named for Amelia Bloomer, the famous suffragette, and have become the badge of protest by those of us who fight for women’s rights!” Summer felt a trace of sadness now as she remembered the scene that night at the supper table, her father raging as always, her bratty little sister, Angela, looking pleased and smug that Summer was in trouble. Summer’s twin brother, David, had tried to come to her defense and been shouted down.
Her mother had said nothing as always, but Summer sensed that she was secretly amused and delighted at Summer’s defiance. Priscilla Van Schuyler hardly ever said anything anymore, going about lost in a fog of sherry and laudanum. She had always been almost a remote stranger to all the children. Priscilla seemed to prefer her self-induced haze, almost as if living in the real world hurt too much.
“And then what happened, Summer?” Iron Knife’s voice brought her back to the present.
“That’s about it, I’m afraid.” She shrugged. “He put me and my maid, Mrs. O’Malley, on a train to St. Joe and we came the rest of the way by stage. He said I could come home in six months or a year, when people in Boston quit laughing at our family. I bought Mrs. O’Malley a good bottle of sherry. Being Irish, she’s quite fond of a wee nip. When she passed out, I grabbed a bag and ran. You know the rest of it.”
“And now you will never go back to Boston in six months or even six years,” he whispered, snuggling her closer to him.
“No, I will stay here forever,” she agreed, putting her face against the hard muscles of his great chest and looking toward the camp.
It was mostly quiet now, for the hour was late, but she could see the great campfire and hear the drumbeat pounding for the few remaining dancers.
Somewhere, far away, a coyote howled in the autumn air and the stars hung like bits of glass in the velvet night. It was very warm for early fall, she thought as she smelled the crushed grass beneath them and held her beloved close. In all the world, there was noplace she would rather be tonight; no one she would rather be with.
“Summer, what are you thinking?” His breath was warm on her ear. “Are you regretting getting on that stage? Regretting me?”
“Never!” she declared. “Never!” As if to reinforce her words, she turned her face up to his and he kissed her closed eyelids ever so gently and then moved his lips down her face to her mouth. She opened willingly as he caressed its depths with his own and then she probed the velvet of his mouth deeply even as his manhood had probed the first time he took her.
His tongue went to flick the inside of her ear and she shivered uncontrollably. “Do you like that, Little One? Tonight, I am going to teach you many things and take a long, long time to love you!”
She felt a surge of eager wetness between her thighs and reached out to clasp his manhood with her hand.
“Not yet!” He pulled away from her. “After all, we have all night and there is more to it than that!”
“You’re right. We really do have all the time in the world,” she gasped. She stood, and looking around to see that they were alone, pulled the. deerskin shift off over her head. She stood there naked in the warm moonlight, partially covered by her long, blond hair hanging free almost to her hips. The moonlight gleamed on her proud, jutting breasts, but her flat belly shone concave and shadowy as did the soft place below.
He didn’t move from his place against the tree but she felt his hungry gaze on her body. “You were so eager to dance before,” he whispered. “Dance for me now—me alone now that no other man can see you!”
“Here? Now?”
“Yes, now!” he ordered. “You are, after all, my captive, my plaything. Entertain me now by dancing!”
Summer hesitated a long moment, listening to the steady beat of the far-off drums and then the rhythm became her pulse and she began to dance. In her imagination, she was a harem slave girl, ordered to please her master and, instinctively, she knew how.
There on a hillside in the moonlight she danced naked and unashamed, writhing and turning to the distant beat. She thrust her inviting breasts at him, moved her hands slowly down her thighs to tantalize him, sending a message of hot, savage blood calling out to his. Civilization was only a thin veneer she had stripped away with her clothing. Deep down, she was as savage as her mother’s English ancestors, dancing a ritual mating dance in the heart of a dark, Druid forest.
Rhythmically, she moved, swinging her hips at him, shaking her long hair so that it caught the silvery gleam of the moon, luring a man with her ripe body.
She might be his captive but she could enslave any man, and she knew it as she heard him breathe heavier. She danced closer, cupping her hands over her breasts, then reaching for him. Sweat broke out on his forehead as she twisted and writhed before him.
“Now, you dance with me,” she urged, holding out her hands to him. He stood slowly, not taking his eyes from her body
. Pulling off the shirt and leggings, he stood before her clad only in a brief loincloth.
Taking his hand, she pulled him out of the shadows and almost hypnotically he began to move to the slow drumbeat.
“I want to see your body as you see mine,” she whispered and moved close to pull away the loincloth and tossed it to one side. “ Now, dance with me!”
They danced without touching, only caressing each other’s body with their eyes. She reveled in the sight of his nakedness, his broad shoulders, narrow hips, and prominent manhood. He wore nothing but the gleaming earring and the eagle bone whistle. Summer gloried in his powerful, rippling muscles and the way his maleness paid tribute to the eroticism of her moves. It was a primitive mating ritual and she danced with abandon, making him hunger for her as she did for him. She knew she would only be sated when his thrusting dagger filled her aching void.
Reaching out to touch his erect hardness, she stepped backward out of his reach as he grabbed for her. She danced closer, touching his hard nipples and brushing her fingers lightly across the sun dance scars.
“Enough! I can’t stand any more!” He jerked her to him roughly and tangled one hand in her hair. He crushed her against him and his mouth forced itself inside hers.
She dug her nails in his chest and his other hand went to her small bottom and pulled her even closer. His hardness thrust at her belly and he tried to lift her from her feet so he could take her standing. But she guessed his intent and broke away from him, laughing coquettishly as she ran from him. “I think I have changed my mind!” she laughed as she ran.
But he ran after her, caught her, whirled her around. “You will not tease me like that!” he ordered, kissing her wildly. “I will have you now if I have to take you by force!”
“I don’t think you can!” She struggled, but not too hard. Her blood ran hot tonight and she wanted to be taken violently and conquered while she fought him.