Gray Hawk's Lady: Blackfoot Warriors, Book 1 (13 page)

“Yes,
I do.”

He grinned. “Perhaps I do…perhaps. But know that I speak true when I say it is not safe to sleep here.

“Now,” he continued, having just mastered the secret of the buttons on his shirt. He shrugged the whole thing off and then held out a hand toward her. “
Poohsapoot
!
Come here!”

Genevieve gazed over toward him, and her eyes grew wide. She turned quickly away, although her mind insisted on replaying that image of his naked chest: those muscles, all that skin, his masculine nipples shimmering under the starlight. It all seemed to haunt her, though she looked elsewhere. And then there was his long hair, gleaming in strands over his shoulders…

She drew in her breath, and her pulse raced.

Gray Hawk noticed it at once. “What is it you fear, captive?” he asked. “Is it the grandfather bear? Torture? Me? Or,” he grinned, “does the white woman of no honor have other, more pleasurable things on her mind?”

Genevieve bridled and looked away from him. How dare he?

Yet what could she say, after all? All of the above? Of course not.

She remained silent.

She heard the sounds of tearing cloth, and, gazing back at him, she beheld him shredding his shirt, making neat, long strips out of it.

“What are you doing?”

He smiled. “I am making sure that my captive does not escape.”

She snorted. “Where would I go?”

“It makes no difference. You could do most anything, go most anywhere, and,” he paused and grinned, “I would make certain of your whereabouts. Now, come here.
Poohsapoot
!”

“No.” She folded her hands in front of her and sat her ground.

“
Poohsapoot
!”

“Humph!”

He grabbed her, pulling her up; all the while she wrestled against him, but in the end his strength won out over hers, and Genevieve found herself tied, bound and gagged. She couldn’t take a step, she couldn’t speak and she couldn’t pick up a thing; her hands were tied behind her back.

She swore the most unladylike oaths, but unfortunately they could not be appreciated. Her words came out only in mumbo-jumbo.

He smiled. His only reaction to her struggles was amusement.

Oh, what she would do to him.

She thought about it over and over, the contemplation of it pleasurable.

And just when she was beginning to gladden at the prospect of planning what course her revenge would take, she remembered that this was exactly what
he
was doing: seeking revenge. Oh, dear.

She quieted.

And this time when he slung her over his shoulder, she didn’t struggle.

She would conserve her strength. At least for now. She would need it.

This had not been such a good idea.

With her hands tied behind her back and her body flung over his shoulder like a sack, her hair teased his buttocks and her breasts rubbed against his back—his naked back. And in the dress she wore, with a good portion of her breasts most daringly exposed, it was the same as flesh meeting flesh. Hers all soft and feminine, his—

His body reacted accordingly, and he grimaced as his pants became too tight.

This would never do. This was not his intention. He must do something about this. He couldn’t even walk in a straight way at the moment.

He stopped and, pulling her off his shoulder, settled her onto the ground, her green dress flowing out around her and her hair falling to her waist like a cascade of fiery liquid.

She sat stiffly, as though any other position but this would cause pain, and he stared at her for a moment, finally squatting down beside her.

“I am going to untie your feet and let you run behind me. It is not good to have blood rushing to your head so much.”

She didn’t reply, but then he hadn’t expected her to. She was gagged. She just stared at him with her large, doe-brown eyes.

“I am going to tie one part of this strip around your waist and the other part around mine. I will need you to run behind me, not walk. We are in the country of my enemies, the Sioux, and we must hurry through it or risk death. We cannot travel during the day, only at night. Do you understand? There is also a party behind us. Therefore, we must hurry. Can you do it?”

“
Hmmmmmm
.” She shook her head and stuck out her chin, indicating the gag.

“
Saa
, Little Captive. I cannot take away the gag. I do not trust you not to cry out to gain attention from your people if they should come close to us. Nor would I expect you to act calmly and be quiet if another warrior was near. I have no weapons with which to defend myself or you. I cannot allow you to make a ‘mistake’ or to make a sound, however intentional or unintentional that mistake is.”

“
Ahhhhh
,”
she groaned.

“Come, we must hurry. Soon the moon will be rising, and then we will be exposed again. I cannot allow that.” He stood then, and, tying the cloth around his waist, he motioned her up.

And though he set a pace that might have been a little fast for her, he noted with some grudging admiration that she kept up with him all through the night.

Chapter Eight

She awoke to a sound of scraping.

She glanced around her with a start, not sure at first where she was.

Her bed beneath her felt stiff, grassy and unyielding; the wind whipped across her, making her shiver, bringing with it the smell of…blood? Rawhide?

She sat up quickly.

He
was there before her, not paying any attention to her, engrossed in…woodcraft?

What was the man doing?

A deer lay to the side of their camp—recently killed and gutted.

Ah, she put a label to the smell of blood. Beside him lay a spear, obviously hurriedly handcrafted. And though the point of it was of chiseled wood, not metal, it made no difference.

The blood on the end of it, the deer to the side of it, told its own tale. The weapon was deadly.

She wore no gag, and she rejoiced at the simple pleasure of having her mouth free to speak, though she said not a word, lest he become aware of it and take away her pleasure much too soon.

It was dusk. She had slept away the day here in their camp, which, tucked into a hillside, was hidden from even the most scrutinizing of views.

He apparently had not slept at all but had been working the whole time, making weapons, hunting.

“You could be of service by skinning that deer.”

She blinked. “Pardon?”

He pointed to the deer at the side of the camp. “The hide needs to be removed from the deer.”

She fluttered her eyelashes twice. “Surely you are not saying that you wish me to…”

“Skin the deer? Of course I am. It is woman’s work.”

Genevieve pouted, but it was all that she did. Had she been back in England, she would have fainted. But here and now, in this place, she had to content herself with a disdainful look at him, as though that alone would put him in his place.

It didn’t work.

He didn’t notice.

After a while, he gazed up at her and motioned her toward the deer.

She bristled. “Mr. Gray Hawk,” she said at last, “I take this as an affront to my womanhood. I know we come from different cultures, and I understand perfectly well that the women in your camp are all slaves, catering to and bending to the will of the men. But this is not so in my society, and I will not stoop so low as to do your bidding. I daresay, if you want the deer skinned, either do it yourself or find some
slave
to do it.”

Gray Hawk gradually ceased his work as she spoke, and Genevieve was glad to see that her tirade had found its mark.

She was just about to congratulate herself on the brilliance of her oratory when he said, “I would not want to hear what my mother and sisters would say to you if they heard you call them slaves. But very well,” he said with a smirk that caused her a slight bit of apprehension. “I shall call
you
‘slave’ from now on, rather than ‘captive.’ Now, slave, skin the deer.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“
Aa
,
yes, go ahead. I would like to see you beg.”

“Sir?”

“You and your kind keep promising to beg, but you never do. What I am saying, slave, is if you do not wish to skin the deer, you will have to beg me to do it for you.”

“What? Why, I never heard of such a thing.”

He peered at her. “You have now.” He motioned her forward. “Go ahead.”

“Why, I would never—”

“That’s just the trouble.”

“I beg your…”

He shook his head, jerking it slightly to the left. “I do not see that you contribute much, if anything, to your society.”

“Why, I—”

He held up a hand. “Your menfolk do all your work: sewing, polishing, cleaning, cooking. I see you, the woman, doing nothing. No wonder the white race is a dirty, unkempt race with their men smelling worse than a bog during the hot days of summer. And no wonder they do not bring their women with them when they come here to our home. Who would want to support a woman who does nothing all day long?

“Not that I blame them.” Again, Gray Hawk held up a hand when she would have spoken. “How could a woman ever take pride in herself, in a job well done, if her menfolk constantly take away her joy in the creation of the home?”

“Mr. Gray Hawk, you—”

“Tell me I am wrong.”

“You
are wrong.” She said it easily, though she didn’t believe it quite so quickly.

She’d never heard such a point of view before, and though she dismissed it instantly, something in what he said made her stop and think.

It wasn’t true, was it? All her life she had been brought up believing that it was the right of the upper class to do no work; that to do labor, even the task of something as simple as dressing oneself, meant to lower oneself; that only servants and the lower dregs of humanity toiled.

But now that he mentioned it, his words brought back a feeling of puzzlement that she’d experienced several times as a child. And she wondered, hadn’t she observed, when she was young, that those men and women who did the least had the most bitter personalities? Hadn’t she seen it just recently in their own Mr. Toddman? Hadn’t she witnessed a change in him that bordered upon criminal?

Could it be because, as Gray Hawk said, these people did not contribute? Was there some connection between lack of doing and no actual worth to society?

Surely it wasn’t so. The life of toil was an unpleasant one, at best. The servants, the people who labored, were seldom happy people. Or were they?

She shook her head as though to clear it. Why was she debating such things? Here and now? She, a Blackfoot captive, sitting in bonds of servitude, out on a lone stretch of prairie, had suddenly taken to philosophizing.

She looked up at Gray Hawk and found his gaze still upon her. He nodded his head toward the deer, which caused her to lean forward and say, “I am not dressed to do such a job. I will spoil my—”

She caught his glance as he gazed down at her dress. She too looked down.

She groaned.

Her dress was wrinkled, dirty and torn, and in places it gaped open, exposing to the air, to his view, to anyone’s casual glance, a look at her chemise.

Embarrassment overwhelmed her, and she made a stab at arranging her clothing, pulling it this way and that to bring it into order. She moaned. It didn’t matter. Nothing she did helped keep the garment in place. The pieces gaped back open.

She hadn’t noticed the state of it until now; she’d been too caught up in her own fears to see it, and she wondered abstractedly how the rest of her appearance looked. Gingerly, she brought her hand up to her hair.

She grimaced. She couldn’t even pull her fingers through the mass of it for all of the tangles.

What did it matter?

She rose then and discovered that she could barely walk. Her legs, every muscle in them, scarcely obeyed her commands, so stiff were they from running.

She stumbled over toward the deer. “I want you to know that I have never been reduced to such a low state as this,” she said to him. “And I would see that you understand that…” She looked to the ground, all around the animal. “Mr. Gray Hawk, I haven’t a tool to—”

“Here.” He threw her a sharp stone, carefully chiseled. The object landed at her feet.

She picked it up, looking at it as though she had never before seen a rock. And in truth, she hadn’t. Not like this. This stone had been carefully made into a knife.

She glanced at the deer, then at the “knife,” then back at the deer.

She slumped her shoulders.

“Take a part of the hide in your hands along the backbone,” he suggested, “and run the knife under it. It will tear apart from the meat more easily that way.”

She gazed at him, then back at the deer.

She picked up a handful of the carcass, held the knife to it, stabbed it under the hide.