Follow the Sun (50 page)

Kat lowered her arms, tilted her head to one side, looked him up and down with unmistakable distress, then quickly adjusted her expression and smiled widely.

“Hi ya, sweetcakes. “

She was still edgy around him, he realized, and she wasn’t going to take him seriously, no matter how much money he had.
It was time to do a little work on the hair
.

Nathan walked toward her calmly, putting what he hoped was a cocky smile on his face. “That outfit’s great, Katlanicha.”

“Two hundred bucks’ worth?”

“Two thousand.”

“That’s what my car cost.”

He reached her and halted, noting the darkening of her cheeks. Her complexion didn’t show a blush, but it took on a richer color, as if someone were mixing strawberries with the honey.

Her eyes flickered with tension but held his gaze. “Ready for dinner?”

“Is your hair dry?” he said softly.

“Oh, yeah …”

Nathan slid his hands into it, lifted it on both sides, and studied it as if truly concerned about dryness. “A little damp. Sit down and let me air it for you.”

He took one look at her sloe-eyed expression and knew he’d scored a direct hit. “Sure,” she squeaked, then cleared her throat and said, “
Sure.
”

She went to a cushioned bench by the gallery railing and sat down stiffly, tucking her skirt around her in a defensive way.

“Lean forward,” Nathan crooned. “Lean on the railing.”

Slowly, glancing over her shoulder with doleful wariness which reminded him of a worried puppy, she rested her forearms on the rail. Finally she faced forward and lowered her chin on her hands.

The mane of hair flowed down her back like a beautiful black river. Nathan didn’t think he had a hair fetish, but his body reacted that way.

He stroked his fingers through her hair, gathered it in one hand, then put the other hand underneath, palm up, at the base of her head. Nathan wove his fingers up into the black silk and pulled them along the underside, letting strands slip free until he was holding only a single lock when he reached the end.

Tugging it playfully, he brushed the feathery tip along one of her arms.

Kat trembled. “I don’t think you’re
airing
, I think you’re
daring
,” she murmured hoarsely. “And it’s not funny, okay?”

Nathan dropped the strand of hair, smoothed it into place, and silently cursed himself for pushing her too far, too soon. “I was just teasing,” he assured her. “Relax.”

“Just teasing.” She lifted her head, brushed a hand across her eyes, and sighed. “Jeez, I’m tired and crabby. Sure you want to go to dinner with me?”

“We’ll be tired and crabby together. Come on.”

When she turned to look up at him her eyes seemed ancient and sad and familiar in a way that made him feel desperate.

“Aw, Katie,” he whispered, the nickname coming to his lips so easily. “I’ve been waiting a long time, too.”

She erased her strange expression, stood up, and patted his shoulder like a pal. “Yeah, I made you wait while I primped. You must be starving for some dinner. Let’s go. We can cut through my room to the hall.”

Smiling crookedly, she breezed past him and into the house. Nathan frowned in bewilderment. He wasn’t certain what he’d been talking about, but he knew it had nothing to do with dinner.

N
ATHAN KEPT BROODING
about his strange words, and he was still puzzling over them as he lay in bed that night. The inn’s wide, soft four-poster was hard on his back, accustomed as he was to sleeping on the ground. So sleep eluded him.

Lost in deep thought, he lifted a hand to a streak of moonlight on his coverlet. Some things were eternal-moonlight, sunlight, souls. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more between him and Kat than their brief relationship warranted.

There’d been no shortage of women in his life; he’d broken hearts and had his broken in return, more than once. But he’d never felt anything like this before. Was it just a special brand of man-woman chemistry, wonderful but nothing mysterious? If so, then why did he keep saying things to her that he didn’t understand,
as if they’d been buried inside him long before he met her, just waiting to be said to her alone?

Listen, O Ancient White Fire! This woman’s soul has come to rest with me, and I will never let it go
.

Nathan was a very spiritual man, and he believed many things were possible. But as much as he was drawn to Kat, he wasn’t certain he believed that he’d known her before.

He groaned in dismay, laughed wearily, and sat up in bed, holding his head in both hands. If he’d been through this torment in another life, he damned sure wouldn’t have forgotten it. Nathan cursed in jovial disgust and got up, pulling the bedcovers with him. He’d sleep on the floor and pretend he’d once been a rug.

As he dropped the covers his ears picked up the sound of hurrying feet. Listening intently, Nathan gazed at the door that led from his room on to the gallery.

It was glass-paned and curtained with diaphanous white material that let him immediately identify the small, shadowy form that halted there. He had the door open before Kat knocked.

“What’s the matter?” he asked quickly.

She stood there half-hidden in moonlight, barefoot, still wearing her new dress because it was the only clean clothing she had. In one hand she held a book of local history they’d bought at a store on the town square.

“I’m sorry, I had to talk to you,” she said in a tear-soaked voice.

“Katie, what is it?” He drew her inside and shut the door.

She held the book up, her hand trembling. “My great-great-grandfather Justis never married Katlanicha. He couldn’t have. He had a white wife and family here.”

CHAPTER 6

N
ATHAN WENT
to a bedside table and fumbled with the switch on an old-fashioned globe lamp. When he finally had it working he pivoted to find Kat wiping her eyes and trying desperately to look calm.

“Katie,” he whispered sadly, and went to her with his arms held out. “It couldn’t be that bad.”

She leaned against him, her face burrowed into his shoulder, and he held her snugly, stroking her disheveled hair.

“I was in bed reading this d-damned book.” she said, her chest rising and falling in a shallow, swift rhythm. “I had to come tell you about it.”

The book was entitled
Gold Ridge—The Early Years. A Newspaper History
. It contained the complete texts of the town’s first paper, a crudely typeset weekly called the
Gold Ridge Gazette
.

Nathan took the thick hardcover and tossed it on the floor, then hugged her sympathetically. “What’d you find, gal?”

“Well the paper started about three years before the Cherokees left, ‘cause it talks about how Gold Ridge was being built on land owned by the Cherokee Nation but how that was okay ‘cause the government was negotiating a treaty to make the Indians leave.”

Nathan kept caressing her hair and hoped she wouldn’t notice that he was wearing nothing but white briefs. He didn’t want her to move away.

He didn’t have to worry. She put her free arm around his bare waist and held him as if he were a life buoy in a stormy sea.

“Justis must have been a VIP around here,” she continued. “There was a list of big mines, and two of ’em were owned by the Gallatin Company. There was a Gallatin General Store, and a Gallatin Hotel, and even a Gallatin saloon. Justis was a gold miner. He came here to take gold out of Cherokee land, just like all the other settlers. I bet he was only interested in Katlanicha because he thought there was gold on her farm.”

Nathan kissed her forehead and tried to ignore the ugly pang of guilt about his own intentions. “There’s too much we’ll never know. It could’ve been different from how it sounds. I mean, if all he wanted was gold, then he didn’t have to stay with her out in Oklahoma and raise children with her, right?”

New tears slid over Kat’s black lashes. “I was givin’ him the benefit of the doubt until I came to the m-marriage part. The year after the Cherokees got kicked out, the year after great-great-grandmother and her family had to leave”—she exhaled raggedly—”Justis married a judge’s daughter named Amarintha Parnell.”

Her voice became bitter. “The judge was a VIP too. He owned a mine here. I guess Justis wanted to have a proper wife from a real good
white
family.”

Nathan felt so bad for her that he hardly knew what to say. “But ol’ Justis didn’t stay with Amarintha. You
know
that.” He tried to joke. “He couldn’t have loved some babe with a prissy name like Amarintha.”

Kat laughed. “Well, he might not have loved her,
but he sure did sleep with her a time or two, ‘cause six months later the paper ran a birth announcement. She and Justis had a baby girl.”

Nathan made an inarticulate sound of distress and then a soothing one. “It’s all right. Sssh. He must have divorced her later and married your great-great-grandmother.”

“Divorce? Back then? No.” She jabbed a finger toward the offending book. “The society column mentions two times
during the next fifteen years
when he came back to take care of his businesses and visit his wife. Course, the paper makes it sound respectable—like there’s nothing strange about a husband and wife not living together.”

She sighed. “Then Amarintha and the daughter died from some sort of fever that was going around. The paper listed their names in the obituaries.”

“Well, let’s see,” Nathan said hopefully. “Fifteen years later, that’d be 1853. Hmmm, Justis could have married Katlanicha
then.
”

“Yeah, after they already had three sons.”

“Who says they did? I only know about Holt, and he was just a kid during the Civil War. He could have been born in 1853.”

Kat patted his cheek in gratitude. “Harmonica man, you’re playing a happy tune, but it’s not workin’. Erica’s and Tess’s great-grandpas were old enough to fight in the Civil War. Erica says hers was shot as a spy—and he was old enough to leave behind a wife and a son.”

She shook her head. “So ol’ Justis had himself two families going at the same time—one nice and legal and white, the other one … the other one …”

Nathan ached with sorrow as she looked up at him in anguish. “Oh, Nathan, my great-great-grandmother was just his
Indian
wife, and back then that meant she wasn’t anything. People didn’t just think of my great-grandpa Holt as a killer, they thought of him as a bastard.”

Nathan swallowed a lump in his throat as she clung
to him, crying softly. “Kat, don’t set so much store by niceties. A lot of men—white and Cherokee—had more than one wife. Some Cherokee women had more than one husband, or several husbands one right after the other.

“Things weren’t real legal and neat, and nobody cared. Most likely nobody thought anything about Justis and Katlanicha’s arrangement. They were probably married in a Cherokee ceremony. That’s just as good.”

“But he used her,” Kat insisted. “He didn’t make her a legal wife under white law, under
his
law.” She clenched her hands against Nathan’s chest. “And I bet I know why he stayed with her.

“I read in one of my other books that out in the Indian Territory a white man could claim Cherokee land if he had a Cherokee wife.”

Nathan grimaced. She was right on that point. “Yeah, that’s the way it was. And here in Georgia, too, when this town was still part of the Cherokee Nation.”

“Justis had the best of both worlds—a respectable white wife and a profitable Indian one.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does!” Her eyes glittered with anger. “You don’t know what it’s like to want to have something to be proud of. I do! You wanna know why I never talk about my mother? She was from the reservation in North Carolina.
Her
people sold moonshine and stole cars!”

“So who cares?”

“I care!” She began to thump his chest for emphasis. “Growing up, I was snubbed by regular people who figure circus performers are scum, and now I’m snubbed by people who think lady wrestlers are tramps! And, hey, I’m a multiminority representative when it comes to getting insulted by confused bigots! Name your choice—I’m not only Indian, I’m Cuban, Mexican, Oriental, and Iranian—and once some jerk even called me a ‘whale-sucking Eskimo’!”