After the Thunder (9 page)

She met the gaze of one and then the other with a saucy grin. They both grinned back at her. Didn’t they always? Men always smiled at her whether she was smiling at them or not.

Except for Walks-With-Spirits.

“You don’t seem to have a very high opinion of our marksmanship, Miss …” the taller one drawled.

His sparkling brown eyes looked her up and down. The other one did the same, but less obviously. She stopped, waited for them to come a few steps closer.

“I’m Cotannah Chisk-Ko. And, well, I don’t mean to insult your aim …” she said, glancing flirtatiously from one to the other, “… either one of you, but I couldn’t help noticing that all the animals are in danger for miles around, not to mention people.”

They were both taken aback by this honey-voiced criticism, but only for a moment.

“I’d say some people are in more danger than others,” one of them said, matching her flirtatious tone exactly.

“So, Miss Chisk-Ko,” the taller one said. “Looks like you’re in need of our protection.”

“I was thinking much the same thing,” she said, with a flashing glance from one to the other.

“Perhaps we might be so bold as to offer to escort you around the grounds today?”

“Might we take you over to the track to watch the races?” the other chimed in.

The restlessness in her heart, in her body and soul, eased just a little bit. These two would be the perfect distractions for the day. They were young and handsome and taken with her and within a few minutes she would have one or both of them swearing he was hopelessly in love with her. Yes, she would let them escort her over to look at Tay’s horse and soon she’d feel much, much better about everything.

“You might,” she said, “if you don’t require me to choose between you. I’m afraid that would prove completely impossible.”

They looked at each other, clearly startled and pleased.

“Miss Chisk-Ko,” the taller one said with a grin, “you now have escorts for the races. Would you care for some exhibition shooting until the horses begin to run?”

So they vied for her approval with the blowdarts and with silly remarks and with offers of candies and lemonade, and a few minutes later she slipped one hand into the bent elbow of each young man and they all began to walk across the race grounds in step, laughing and talking like old friends. They were cousins, Daniel and Robert Bonham, prosperous mixed bloods of a prominent family, she knew that by their name. Although they both appeared to be younger than she, they would do very nicely to amuse her today.

“Let’s go see my friend Tay Nashoba’s running mare,” she suggested, smiling sweetly at each Bonham in turn. “You gentlemen may want to place a wager on her—I hear she’s fast.”

“She is,” Daniel said. “She won a saddle and a knife and ten dollars for me the last time she ran.”

They continued laughing and talking until they reached the two sweetgum trees, but as soon as the Bonhams escorted her into the loose knot of people working around the horse, she fell silent. He was here. Walks-With-Spirits was here. She could feel his presence.

Then she saw him. The others all faded back, and she didn’t note their faces or who they were—he was all she could see.

He stood at the side of the magnificent bay mare, bent over, looking at her near hock. All the group went still, then, too, to hear his verdict on whether or not she was sound to run.

After a long moment, he straightened his tall body
with the fluid grace that was his only, the grace that looked so slow and easy but that really moved faster than the eye could follow. He stood for a moment, his head tilted toward the mare as if he were listening, or thinking, then he began murmuring to her in Choctaw, patted her rump and slid his hand down over the curve of her hip and her silky leg to the hock.

A trembling ran through Cotannah, a yearning to feel his hand move on her body in that very same way, a terrible need to know that sure, slow stroking of his palm on her skin. He did it again, and her breathing stopped.

The blood in her body stopped. The sun came warm through the moving leaves above them, the birds twittered and chattered high in the branches, the smells of frying bread and roasting meat floated on the breeze, and she stood there waiting with the others—not for his judgment of the mare’s condition, though—but for him to turn and look at her.

Maybe to smile at her as he had done when he held her in his ironbound arms.

But he dropped to his haunches and held the hock in both hands, feeling it gently all over with his long, brown fingers while he talked to the mare, and she replied, “Huh-huh, huh-huh,” from deep in her throat.

“She’s sound,” he pronounced. “Let her run. That’s what she loves.”

Immediately, the whole bunch of them sprang into action. Someone ran a brush over the already sleek hide, someone else picked up the pad and saddle and placed them on the mare’s back.

Walks-With-Spirits stood up and turned around. His fierce, bright gaze seized Cotannah’s so fast that she knew he had already known she was there. He had already seen her and had given no sign.

But now he stared at her as if she were at the center
of his universe. A great clutch of fear took her heart.

He was glaring straight into the center of her soul again, and he did not like what he could see there.

“Daniel! Robert!” Tay called. “Come here and see how she’s shod this time. I hired your Uncle Peck to be my farrier.”

Vaguely, Cotannah was aware that the boys said something to her and she nodded. Walks-With-Spirits flicked his light-colored eyes to one of them and then the other as they left her to go to Tay, then he fixed her again with his unrelenting gaze.

Finally, he bent and scooped up his skin bag of medicines that lay on the ground, stood up and stepped directly in front of her, once more looking straight through her with his burning topaz eyes.

“You degrade yourself by going from one man to another,” he said, “or I should say to two at one time.”

A cold shock raced through her like no other agitation she had ever felt, a shock that struck her to the very soul.

“You’re as bad as my brother, Cade,” she snapped.

He didn’t answer, only watched her for one more heartbeat with his eyes blazing pale in his hard, flat face. Then he stepped past her and was gone.

T
he next thing Cotannah knew, she was alone and wandering in the trees along the Kiamichi River, holding branches back from whipping into her face, pushing blindly through the brush with no idea where she was going. Sweat was running down the sides of her neck and her breath came hard and shallow, her legs felt tired and trembly and the agonizing stitch in her side was paining her so much that she wanted to cry out.

Except that her mouth felt so dry she’d never make another sound.

She’d never take another step, either. She burst out of the trees onto the low bank of the river and let her knees buckle; she sank to the ground into a nest of dying grass.

Something was wrong with her, she thought, as she stared dully out over the slow-moving river. Walks-With-Spirits had seen it.

Hot anger flared in her again, in spite of the state she was in. He was as bad as Cade—criticizing her, judging her! But that had been a truly weak retort to fling at him, since he didn’t even know who Cade was. He destroyed her ability to think, that was what Walks-With-Spirits did, because he had such unsettling powers.

Yet he thought she could do better in the way she behaved, that she was making bad choices.

The anger rose higher in her, brought a bitter bile into her throat. But now it was anger at herself instead of at him, unforgiving anger because she had let his remark cut her so deep.

He didn’t even know what he was talking about. Headmaster Haynes and his abuse hadn’t been a bad choice on her part—she had been a completely innocent child at the time, and she had never chosen to go to his office alone.

And she had not made a choice for the
bandidos
to kidnap her and strip off her clothes and run their rough hands over her body and press their stinking mouths to hers. None of that was her fault.

So Walks-With-Spirits could just come down here and jump in the river. He didn’t have the foggiest notion of what he was talking about.

She tried to blank the memory of his terrible face and of his awful, slashing words out of her mind.

You degrade yourself by going from one man to another …

Oh, just remembering what he’d said and the way he’d looked at her hurt so much that even her skin felt as raw as her heart. Why hadn’t she defended herself, why hadn’t she told him to mind his own business? He certainly didn’t want her, so why shouldn’t she go from one man to another as she pleased?

Degraded, he’d said. And he had, no doubt, meant depraved and disgusting, too. Well, that was just too bad; it was nothing more than his narrow-minded opinion. Besides, he didn’t know her; he’d never spent time with her or talked with her enough to have the thinnest notion of what she thought, what she was really like.

That inexplicable sense of safety in his arms and
closeness with him afterward had been an illusion, some kind of hallucination caused by the danger. He was not only a stranger to her but a strange person, a peculiar eccentric whom no one really knew. A misfit, a crazy person, perhaps. She did not have to explain her behavior to him or to anyone else. The next time she saw him she’d show him for certain that his opinion meant nothing to her. He couldn’t tell her what to do, Cade couldn’t tell her what to do, and neither could anyone else.

Jacob leaned back against one of the huge trees and watched Cotannah in her rose-colored dress flitting from tree to tree and person to person in the dusky pecan orchard, talking and laughing with everyone, including those obnoxious young pups, the Bonham cousins. She hadn’t seen him yet, she had no idea that he had arrived or else she would be making her way toward him this minute—hadn’t she come running into town to see him the very morning after they’d met for the first time?

Of course, he had fouled up that day by letting the false medicine man be the hero.

He hated that thought, but it was true. However, he had gone away on business to let time pass and let that fact fade from people’s minds, including Cotannah. Now, a whole week and a half later, hardly anyone would remember. They were all talking about the horse races a couple of days ago, from what he’d already overheard this evening, and everyone he’d talked to since he arrived at Tay’s annual nut-gathering social had treated him just as respectfully as ever.

He bent one leg and propped his heel against the rough bark of the pecan’s trunk, and cocked his head to watch Cotannah while in his imagination he stripped her clothes off. Smiling, he shook his head in amazement.

The little minx was determined to be outrageous in
every way, wasn’t she? He knew a bit about ladies’ fashions from ordering for the new mercantile and who ever heard of a woman wearing a man’s faded work jacket made of that blue denim cloth like the Levi Strauss work breeches? And even more incredible, wearing it with a dress that fairly shouted to his shrewd merchant’s eye that it was made of the best quality silk?

What a bold little jade she was, just the kind he liked! The jacket was unbelievably alluring in its contrast to her lushly female form, plus she wore it unbuttoned halfway down and he’d caught glimpses of a positively indecent amount of smooth skin and swelling breasts where there should have been fabric of the dress.

Obviously, tonight she had chosen her costume just for him. It was a way for her to tell him that now was time. Time for him to give her a taste of what she’d been begging for ever since the minute she’d laid eyes on him.

“Jacob? I need to talk to you.”

Jacob nearly jumped right out of his skin. The voice was so close and so completely unexpected that he couldn’t immediately identify it.

He swung around to see Tay Nashoba standing at his shoulder. Damnation! The man had crept up on him like the unreconstructed savage that he was.

“Chief Nashoba,” he drawled, fighting to keep his voice steady.

Good God! That kind of a surprise could make a man’s heart stop beating!

Tay stepped out of the deepening shade behind Jacob and stood beside him, looking out at his guests, some sitting and talking, some tending the fire which would be welcome as soon as the sun went down, some gathering nuts, which was the ostensible reason for this big, annual get-together.

“People love to come to socials this time of year, don’t they?” Tay said, musing thoughtfully as if he’d never said he needed to talk to Jacob. “I think it’s because the coolness in the fall gives us new energy after the summer’s heat.”

Jacob bit back a sharp retort. He had to remember that this idiot was the chief and a great good friend of Olmun’s.

And he couldn’t appear too impatient, but yet he would. His screaming nerves demanded to know what Tay wanted.

“You said you wanted to talk to me?”

Tay’s manner changed abruptly.

“I’ve been hearing some rumors,” the chief said, “that you may have some friends among the Boomers.”

The soft-spoken words drenched Jacob’s spirits as if he’d stepped out of the house into a cold rain. His stomach tightened, and his blood pulsed faster.

“You can hear anything these days,” he said, fighting to keep his words slow and level while he shook his head sorrowfully, “anything at all. Me and the
Boomers
?”

“Right. That word has drifted to my ears from more than one source.”

How infuriating! How totally insulting!

“Well, your sources are wrong!”

Jacob clamped his teeth over his lower lip to stop more words from coming out until after he managed to calm down.

“Sometimes you talk progress and cooperation with the whites so vehemently that a person might interpret your views to mean you’d be in favor of giving up our holding land in severalty,” Tay said coolly. “Do you realize that?”

A fearful trembling tried to take him, but he fought it
off. He hadn’t been that obvious, surely! He was not that stupid, he was not!

He tried to take a deep, calming breath without being obvious about it. He had to soothe Tay’s suspicions and then somehow destroy them once and for all—why, his whole life’s freedom was riding on this deal with the Boomers. If he ever was to be free of Olmun’s dictates, he couldn’t let it come to light now.

“Chief Nashoba,” he said, turning his head to look straight into the chief’s piercing gray eyes. “Tay. You know I have enemies. That’s been true since the day I was born—people jealous of my position and my wealth will say anything to bring me down to their level.”

“I know.”

Jacob listened for a moment to the echo of the chief’s tone of voice in his head. Thoughtful. The chief was being very thoughtful now when only moments earlier he’d been hard and nearly decided.

He hid a smile behind his hand. Why had he worried? No more persuasive man than Jacob Charley ever walked the face of the earth. With a few more well-chosen words he could wipe this problem out of existence once and for all.

“Then it grieves me that you would give any credence whatsoever to such vicious talk,” he said, trying to sound sad instead of angry. “You know me as well as anybody in the Nation.”

“And you know me,” Tay Nashoba said, in his usual haughty way. “I would never bring grief and shame to your father without cause, for he is truly a fine man and a Choctaw patriot. But if I find proof that you are working for the Boomers to open our land up to white settlement, Jacob Charley, even my respect for Olmun will not stop me from bringing charges of treason against you.”

Now the chief’s voice wasn’t thoughtful at all; it was harder than flint. He meant what he said. He said it again.

“Betray the People, Jacob, and I’ll see you shot.”

And then the arrogant son of a bitch simply turned and walked away, as quietly as he had come.

Jacob’s blood boiled high, roaring in his ears until it blocked out the happy voices and laughter of the others at the social. All right. If that was the way the Principal Chief was going to talk to him, him, Jacob Charley, of the most prominent family in the Nation, then the Principal Chief would have to be taught a lesson.

Bedding Cotannah Chisk-Ko, the Chief’s houseguest, while she was under the Chief’s protection, entrusted to his care by her brother, the powerful Cade Chisk-Ko, would make a fitting insult. He grinned. Not that he wouldn’t have done it, anyway. But now he’d make sure the Chief would hear about it—even if he had to tell it himself.

Tay Nashoba needed to learn that he was not all-powerful.

Yes. And Cotannah’s brother, Cade Chisk-Ko, was another arrogant bastard, and it’d serve him right if his spoiled little sister was violated while she was under the protection of Cade’s best friend.

He smiled and turned to look for the glow of the rose-colored dress in the shadows thrown by the trees. Finding Cotannah was easy, even in the crowd and the dusk because her full skirts shone and glimmered like a blossoming flower and, of course, a gaggle of young men had gathered around her. He began strolling toward her. No doubt about it. This was going to be a pleasure in more ways than one.

A large, warm hand settled itself in the small of Cotannah’s back, nestling there as if she had invited it. Well! Daniel certainly was becoming much more forward. She laughed and touched Robert’s arm in appreciation of the joke he had just finished telling and then glanced over her shoulder, expecting to see his taller cousin looking down at her with his usual adoration.

Instead, Jacob Charley smiled at her.

“You remind me of a wild-vining rose tonight, Miss Cotannah, in your rose-colored dress,” he said. “How about rambling through the pecan orchard with me?”

He let his heated gaze linger on hers for a long moment then, abruptly, he looked straight at Robert Bonham.

“You will excuse us, I’m certain, sir,” he said. “Good evening.”

The younger man’s face flushed a deep, angry red, but he turned on his heel and strode away without a word. She was relieved to see the back of him, really, Cotannah thought—never in all her life had she met anyone with such a store of jests that were not funny in the least—but she wouldn’t let Jacob know that.

She pulled away from the growing pressure of his hand and frowned at him over her shoulder.

“And what makes you think you have the right to run off my beaux?” she demanded saucily. “You may have discouraged them forever.”

“That’s exactly what I intended.”

He captured her gaze with his and held it.

She launched a new attack, determined to get the upper hand.

“You sneaked up behind me when I wasn’t looking,” she complained with a pout of her lips, as she turned around to face him and took a few slow steps backwards. “I hardly think that is fair.”

“I won’t fight fair for you, my dear.”

He spoke softly, but his dark eyes were gleaming at her so hotly that it seemed inconceivable that someone—Tay, for instance, acting as Cade’s agent—didn’t notice and come over to interrupt them. After all, they were right in the middle of dozens of people. A quick glance, though, proved everyone oblivious. Neither Daniel nor Robert Bonham was anywhere to be seen.

But they could probably see her and it would do them good to see they had a rival for her attentions. And, if he were anywhere around, it would do Walks-With-Spirits good to see that she would decide her own behavior, totally independent of whatever criticisms he might make.

“I wasn’t aware that you would fight for me at all,” she said, tilting her head and batting her eyelashes at Jacob, “fair or foul.”

“With my last breath.”

He spoke in a tone of deepest sincerity, then he smiled and winked at her, rogue that he was. Good. This was exactly what she needed—a man bent on no more than amusement, just like herself.

“Why, Mr. Charley!” she gasped, pretending to be shocked.

Then she mirrored exactly his rascal’s smile.

“Did you do something foul to poor Daniel Bonham? One minute he was the one right there behind me, the next it was you.”

“I did not. I simply touched him on the shoulder, gave him a look, and he faded quietly away into the dusk.”

“You’re such a powerful man! Within only a moment, you have frightened both the cousins into deserting me!”