The Endless Sky (Cheyenne Series) (3 page)

      
She pressed her voluptuous breasts against his chest and gave a theatrical sigh. “I'd love it if you got savage, Chase.”

      
His fingers bit into her shoulders as he shoved her through the open door into the hallway. “No, you wouldn't, believe me, Aggie.” With that he released her and slammed the door in her face.

      
Stephanie stood rooted to the floor during the exchange. Still reeling from a brush with death, she could scarcely believe her ears. Old Mortimer Lodge's beautiful wife was having an affair with Chase! “Aggie, love?” she echoed in a huff.

      
“No time for indignation now, Stevie.” Chase seized her wrist once more and pulled her stumbling behind him toward the servants' entrance to the room as “Aggie, love” pounded on the locked library door, shrieking curses Stephanie had only heard hackney drivers on Boston Common utter.

      
Carefully shielding the body lying behind the desk from her view, he held the narrow door open. “We have to get out of here before someone hears her and finds the body.”

      
Stephanie picked up her skirts as they descended the narrow steps into the servants' quarters below. “Then...he's dead.” She really had little doubt. “Do you always carry a knife on your person when you pay a social call?”

      
“It comes in handy from time to time.” His voice was bitter. “I never know when I might want to scalp someone.” When they reached the bottom of the stair, he led her down a long, narrow hallway, stopping to check behind the doors along the way until he located one leading back upstairs. In a few moments he pulled her into an empty sitting room on the main floor of the mansion. A gas light illuminated the elegantly appointed interior, which had apparently been recently vacated. The aroma of expensive cigars hung in the air.

      
Closing the door behind him, he motioned for her to have a seat on a balloon-backed easy chair, then walked briskly over to where a cut-glass decanter of amber liquid sat on a serving cart. Pouring two matching tumblers, he offered her one.

      
She shook her head. ‘‘Father forbids me to touch spirits.”

      
A smile quirked his beautifully sculpted lips, then quickly faded as he shoved the glass into her hand. “No doubt he would also forbid you to attend knife fights. Take a sip. Father isn't here now and I don't want you fainting on me.”

      
She drew herself up, reminding Chase of the plucky girl who had befriended him so long ago. “I never faint,” she replied stubbornly.

      
“Drink it anyway,” he commanded, tossing off his much larger portion and reaching for a refill. After taking another swallow, he leaned one arm on the marble mantel of the fireplace and studied her with troubled eyes. Now he could see why she had looked so familiar back in the ballroom. Her hair, bleached a paler straw color by the sun when she had been a tomboy, now had darkened to a rich deep bronze. The freckles were gone but the stubborn chin and clear golden eyes were the same. Her cheekbones were just beginning to take on the elegant hollows of definition and her lips were pink and full. She had grown into a beauty.

      
Feeling his intent examination as the silence between them thickened, Stephanie took a quick sip of the pungent liquor for courage, then burst into a fit of coughing. Chase set his glass on the mantel and knelt beside her chair, massaging her back with one elegant long-fingered hand while the other one held her arm. She had forgotten how dark his skin was next to her fairness. A frisson of sexual awareness danced along her nerves, tingling where he touched her.

      
“Take another sip, slowly, then tell me how you got mixed up in that little episode in the library.” He guided the glass to her mouth and she obeyed. When the tip of her tongue darted out to cleanse the brandy from her lips he groaned silently.
Damn the little minx, she was far more tempting than all the Aggies on earth!

      
Stephanie felt the second taste of liquor hit bottom and was oddly soothed by it. She cleared her throat and began. “After losing my way while I searched for Father, I overheard two voices in the darkened hallway. One man was paying the other to sneak into the library and kill you. As soon as they parted, I rushed there to warn you.”

      
“I'm greatly in your debt. Most women would've swooned on the spot or run dithering for help that would have arrived too late to do me any good. You always were brave for a paleface kid, Stevie.” He flashed her a devastating grin.

      
At the old teasing nickname, she smiled in return and the years fell away...almost. Then he had been a rangy boy poised on the brink of adolescence, she a scrawny tomboy, but now they were no longer children. She could feel her heart pound so wildly it must surely sound as loud as the base drum in the Salvation Army band that played on the Common.

      
Chase stared mesmerized at the tiny pulse fluttering rapidly in the hollow at the base of her delicate throat. Earlier, when Ray was dancing with her, he had thought her a skinny schoolgirl. Now, watching the soft swell of pale breasts above the azure silk of her gown, he reconsidered.

      
“I'm not a paleface kid anymore, Chase,” she whispered, unknowingly echoing his thoughts.

      
Damn, this was Stevie Summerfield, a Boston heiress, an innocent. What the hell was he thinking! Removing his hands from her as if scorched, he stood up and paced quickly across the carpet. “I'd better return you to the party before you're missed.”

      
Stephanie watched him move, restless as a caged wild animal. She was confused by his abrupt withdrawal. “Yes, I...I suppose I'd better find Father...but there is something else I didn't tell you, Chase.” She hesitated, uncertain of how to broach the horrifying accusation—or even if she should. The light had been dim. Surely she had been mistaken.

      
“What is it?” he prompted.

      
“I...I believe I recognized the man who paid that sailor to kill you.”

      
“It was my uncle Burke, wasn't it,” he said tonelessly, without a hint of doubt in his voice.

Chapter Two

      
Chase brushed past his uncle's officious secretary and strode into Burke Remington's private office. Knowing it useless to protest, the sputtering Gibbs closed the door after the wild Remington boy. Chase looked contemptuously at the distinguished blond-haired man seated behind the immense mahogany desk. Burke calmly sipped from a cup of sweetened Darjeeling tea. The only thing betraying any emotion in his patrician face was a tiny tic at his graying temple—that and the narrowing of his ice blue eyes.

      
Smiling coldly, Chase tossed a bundle of bills onto the desk, saying, “Quite a shame, wouldn't you agree, Burke, that one cannot ask to see references when hiring a cutthroat? It'll cost you more than a couple of hundred to see me dead.”

      
Burke set his Havilland cup down in its saucer and rose, placing his well-manicured hands, palms down, on the desk. Leaning forward, he let the naked loathing he felt for this dark-skinned savage blaze from his eyes. “Are you prepared to prove that wild accusation?”

      
“No. I can't. Unfortunately, your assassin is dead. I was forced to slit his throat before I could make him talk. You must really be getting desperate, Burke.” He watched with satisfaction as the distinguished blond man's complexion turned waxy pale for a moment, but his big barrel-chested body remained poised over the desk. Even dressed in a custom-tailored wool suit and silk shirt, he exuded power...and menace.

      
“As usual, you display the same flair for the dramatic as your dear grandpapa...even if you are a trifle more bloodthirsty,” he added in a pleased tone of voice, watching Chase's jaw muscle bunch in fury when he gritted his teeth. “Oh, you do so hate being reminded of how much you're like old Jeremiah, don't you?”

      
“I've often been told I resemble my mother.” The blow struck home as Chase knew it would. Burke hated the fact that Anthea's classically chiseled features had been passed along to a half-breed bastard.

      
‘There is nothing of my sister in you.” Burke bit off each word precisely.

      
“Half my blood is Remington, no matter how much I hate it.”

      
“
You
hate it!” the older man roared, leaning farther over the desk as if ready to climb across and attack. “You insolent half-breed trash, how do you think I feel having a mongrel like you claim the Remington name!”

      
Chase's lips thinned in disdain. “I am the son of Vanishing Grass and Freedom Woman. I never wanted to claim the Remington name. It was your father who dragged me back here. I'd rather have gone to prison with my father's people than live in Boston.”

      
“Spare me your noble airs. You've been willing enough to spend the Remington millions carousing with your worthless college friends. Women, cards and whiskey. Red savages have quite a problem with whiskey, so I've been told. Can't hold their liquor worth a damn.” Burke smiled nastily.

      
“It isn't just the money, is it,
Uncle
Burke? You don't care about my inheriting half the old man's estate as much as you care that I'm Anthea's son and you—”

      
“I'll see you in hell—right along with that filthy savage who raped my sister and put a bastard like you in her belly.”

      
“My father didn't rape my mother. She came willingly to him. She loved him.”

      
“You're pathetic—just as ignorant as one of those greasy illiterate savages if you believe that.” Burke forced a pose of condescension.

      
“I believe my mother, and what gnaws at your rotten guts is that you do, too. She never lied in her life.”

      
“Anthea doesn't know lies from truth. She's scarcely had a lucid moment in the past seven years.”

      
“And we both know why, don't we,
Uncle
Burke?” There was a sinister undercurrent to the question.

      
The elder Remington stiffened, “I pray nightly for your death and I always have my prayers answered. After all, I am the Reverend Jeremiah's son,” he added darkly.

      
“You'll have to pray harder, then. Maybe you ought to get off your knees and try killing me yourself next time... Remember, the Lord helps those who help themselves.”

      
“I wouldn't contaminate my hands by touching you.”

      
Chase shrugged. “Yes, after all, I wouldn't want you to get any of that greasy Indian filth on them. But on my honor as a ‘filthy savage,’ I promise you'll pray for your own death before I finish with you.”

      
After Chase stalked from the room, Gibbs appeared at the door, Adam's apple bobbing nervously. “Are...are you quite all right, Mr. Remington?” he asked timidly as if half expecting to find his employer lying on his desk scalped.

      
Burke waved the little man out of the room impatiently. Shoving his teacup aside, he poured himself a stiff shot of expensive Scotch whiskey. He downed it neat, then stared out of the window, remembering the past...regretting it.

* * * *

      
As the driver reined in the matched chestnuts at the front entry of the forbidding gray stone building, Chase jumped impatiently from the sleek black brougham. He hated the Remington family mansion worse than a prison, which for him and Anthea it was.

      
Unwillingly, his eyes swept across the massive walls to the crenellated tower at the end of the east wing where his mother was held, quite literally, in the silken restraints which kept her from harming herself when one of her “fits,” as the doctors called them, overtook her. Most of the time she was quiet, engrossed in a solitary depression so bottomless little could draw her from it. Only when Burke or the reverend came near her did she display violence, screaming like a demented thing, frenzied and clawing at herself as if trying to rip open her own veins and drain her life's blood from them.

      
Anthea wanted to die. And Chase understood her reasons all too well. Yet there were occasions, although fewer and fewer this past year, when she was lucid enough to ask for her son. Wonderingly she would drink in the sight of him, her pale trembling fingers contrasting sharply against the dark bronze of his face when she touched him. They would live in the past when Vanishing Grass was alive and she was Freedom Woman. How illusive that freedom had proven for her...and for her only child.

      
His troubling reverie was interrupted when he entered the house and a butler announced in sepulchral tones that the reverend wished to see him in his study. Chase walked down the opulent carpeted hallway. A typical New England day in winter made lighting the gas lamps a necessity in the cavernous house. Gleaming cherrywood wainscoting complemented by French burgundy wallpaper lined the corridor. He paused with one hand on the inlaid ivory door handle as childhood memories once again assailed him.

      
Every time he entered this room he remembered the terrified six-year-old Cheyenne boy trembling before the tall
veho
who claimed to be his grandfather. Chase would never have believed it if his mother had not assured him it was so. He could not speak a word of English then and did not want to learn either. The whites were his enemies. Had they not attacked his village and killed his father? The tall, cold-faced old man with piercing blue eyes had done nothing to dispel his fears that awful day.