The Endless Sky (Cheyenne Series) (7 page)

      
After spending an exceedingly uncomfortable night sleeping on a straight-backed Louis XVI sofa, Chase was in no mood for Standish's imperious demands or the affected English accent.

      
“I say, you know I'm grateful you happened along, old chap, but Miss Summerfield and I simply must get back to the city. I shall need medical attention,” he averred, gingerly touching the bandage on his head. “Mamá will be beside herself thinking we've perished in the storm.”

      
“You might just perish yet if you try to ride back to town through this snow. If it clears by noon, I'll see if I can get us through in the sled. If not”—he shrugged— “you'll just have to let
Mamá
stew.”

      
“But—but surely you can see how damaging this could be to a lady like Miss Summerfield. Think of her reputation if it ever got out that she spent days without a chaperone locked up in your house,” Oliver said, trying another tack.

      
Chase raised one heavy black eyebrow. “Especially considering I'm in it.”

      
“Well, I didn't mean...that is...” Oliver's florid complexion grew waxy as he looked up at the tall, powerful man whose austere swarthy face bore obvious testimony to his savage origins. “What I mean is that being here with only three men is most improper. Of course, I could do the honorable thing and marry her.” He brightened suddenly at the inspiration. “Yes, of course I could!”

      
“Or
I
could.”

      
The words dropped like stones between them and the younger man looked goggle-eyed at Chase, as if the idea were beyond preposterous. “But you don't even know her!” Oliver protested. “Stephanie and I have been courting for some time now and I have always intended to offer for her,” he added righteously.

      
“I've known her since she was six years old,” Chase replied calmly. “Say what you really mean, Ollie, old chap. That I'm unfit to touch a white woman.” His voice was laced with an undertone of menace.

      
“Now see here,” Standish replied, gulping for breath and backing away from Remington, who remained standing by the hearth. “I never said any such thing, but now that you bring it up, you do have a libertine's reputation.”

      
Chase threw back his head and laughed. It was not a nice laugh.

      
“Don't you two gentlemen think as an interested party that I might have a vote,” Stephanie said, padding into the middle of the tense confrontation. Both male heads swiveled toward her in surprise, but before either could speak she continued, “My reputation is my own concern and I shall not be coerced into a marriage meant only to silence the wagging tongues of silly gossips.”

      
Flames shot from those dark golden eyes. Chase leaned against the basalt stones of the fireplace and crossed his arms over his chest, admiring her as she stood there with his robe dragging the ground around her feet, a pair of beat-up old house slippers many sizes too big for her sticking out beneath it. Despite being cinched tightly at her slender waist, it gaped open at the neckline. She clutched it closed with both hands as the rolled-up sleeves flopped around her elbows. A dim shaft of light from the hearth caught the bronze highlights in the silky hair that cascaded around her shoulders.

      
“Now, Stephanie,” Oliver temporized, hesitantly drawing nearer to her, “you must know that I have always held you in great esteem—as does Mamá.”

      
“But she might not after this little episode,” Chase interjected most unhelpfully.

      
Stephanie looked over at him. Smirking with typical male arrogance, one booted foot crossed over the other, he rested a broad shoulder against the mantel. “I ought to take you up on your gallant proposal and see just how long your bravado would last,” she spat. He only made it to aggravate Oliver and to assuage that infernal pride of his, not because he really cared about her...or did he? She studied him, suddenly wary as he pushed off from the mantel and stalked toward her.

      
“I might just surprise you,” he said softly, surprising the hell out of himself.

      
Essex chose that propitious moment to open the front door and stamp inside staggering under a load of firewood. “I believe the snow is stopping, sir,” he said to Chase, who began removing the heavy pieces of wood from his arms and standing them on the hearth.

      
By early afternoon the storm was over and a weak winter sun glistened on the new-fallen snow. The trio rode back to the city in an old sled pulled from the shed behind the house. It was not nearly so glamorous as Oliver's much lamented Portland Cutter, but it saw them anonymously home before anyone recognized Stephanie in the company of the notorious Chase Remington and looking for all the world as if she had spent the night in a lovers' tryst.

* * * *

      
Anthea was having a good day...at least as good as they ever were for her, lost in her isolated world of internal torment. Her once glorious golden hair was now faded to a drab gray, hanging limply around her shoulders. She refused to allow her maid to do more than simply wash and brush it, nor would she wear the constricting dress of a white woman, but remained clad in a loose night rail and woolen robe both day and night. It mattered little, for she had not set foot outside her lonely tower room in seven years.

      
When Chase entered, she sat rocking slowly in the heavy oak rocking chair that belonged to her maternal grandfather, Ellis Blackthorne Chase. Her only son was named for him. Chase knelt beside the chair and took her dry, veined hand in his. “Good morning, Mother,” he said in the Cheyenne tongue. “Verity tells me you slept well last night, but now you must eat your breakfast.” He studied the sagging hollows of her wrinkled cheeks and mouth, which were ravaged by scars from her nails, self-inflicted injuries. Sadly he realized that she was only thirty-nine years old. She looked seventy. When she did not respond, he stroked her hand, then just held it in silent communion, knowing she would acknowledge him in her own good time, if she could do so.

      
Finally, her pale eyes lifted and met his and she smiled. “Chase the Wind,” she said softly in her husband's language, the only one she had spoken since the madness overtook her the fateful night he had run away.

      
He smiled in return at her use of the Cheyenne name he had been given as a boy. “Would you eat for me, Mother?” he asked.

      
She shook her head and he knew it would do no good to argue. Sometimes she fasted for days. When he returned after living for three years with the Cheyenne, he had been appalled at her mental and physical deterioration and guilt stricken because he had left her behind.

      
“I hear Vanishing Grass call me sometimes,” she said at last. “Soon I shall journey on the Hanging Road to the Sky to join him.”

      
“I will miss you, Mother,” he said simply.

      
She nodded. “But then you will be free.” Before he could protest she added, “And so will I.”

      
With a pang he accepted that. There was nothing more to say, no way to explain to her all the complications of his white life, least of all about his confusion over Stephanie.

      
His heart ached for the father he had so little time to know. When Vanishing Grass had been cut down by Blue Coat bullets, Chase was only a small boy, but the memory of a tall, handsome man with a wide smile remained with him. He knew his mother remembered far more, so he spoke to her as he always did when he visited, of his more recent time with her husband's people. He told and retold her of his great-aunt Red Bead and Vanishing Grass's brother, Stands Tall, the uncle who had been his mentor during the years when he proved his manhood and became a Cheyenne warrior. The stories seemed to comfort her even though they both knew that way of life was coming to a close with the passing of every year...and they were both prisoners thousands of miles away.

      
Finally, when he felt her drifting off to sleep, he stood up, gently placing her hand on the wide armrest of the rocker. Chase covered her with a blanket. These brief periods of lucidity when she recognized him were becoming more and more infrequent as her mind drifted deeper into its own tortuous labyrinths.

      
Would it have been different if I hadn't run away and left her?
The question had tormented him ever since he was brought back here to find her locked away in the tower. The worthless
veho
doctors declared her raving mad. Burke wanted her moved to an isolated sanitarium run by a friend of his. Chase was grateful that the old man had refused to allow it. It was the first time Jeremiah had ever done something Chase had wanted.

      
Once she recognized her son, grown so splendidly tall and handsome, Anthea had joyfully cried and held him, speaking to him in Cheyenne. Chase knew then he could never leave her again, no matter what had happened in the past.

      
And now he had another woman to trouble him. Stevie. He had been summoned to Jeremiah's office the day after he returned from the country house. Thankfully, the old man had not learned about his overnight adventure with her, but he had learned that she was acceptable marriage material for the august Remington name. He announced that her father would countenance the match as well, reminding Chase none too gently that it was a major concession, considering his tainted Indian blood and wildly profligate ways.

      
Of course, neither of the old men had bothered to consult either him or Stephanie. Such was the way of dynastic marriages between wealthy families. The custom was little different among his father's people, although if either bride or groom were unwilling, the Cheyenne never forced the issue. Jeremiah at least had the good sense to do likewise. He had laid his cards on the table and left the next move to his stubborn grandson.

      
And Chase had, for the first time in his life, done something Jeremiah wanted. He had called on Stephanie Summerfield. Even though he told himself it was madness, that he was Cheyenne, that he did not belong in the
veho
world and would not remain there, that he would only break her heart, he could not stay away. In the past week he had escorted her to a ball, taken her ice skating in the park, even dined with her sour old father, Josiah. She was Stevie, the beloved companion of his childhood, refreshingly bright and without artifice in a world of vapid debutantes and jaded matrons who possessed the morals of alley cats.

      
He headed toward his room for a few hours of studying before class. His professors were growing restive with his absences and missed assignments. Time to apply himself sufficiently to pass the term. In fact he found many of the subjects fascinating, particularly military history and the natural sciences. Closing the door, he began to shrug off his jacket when a sultry feminine voice interrupted.

      
“Do get comfortable, Chase darling,” Sabrina Remington purred in her slow Virginia drawl.

      
Chase turned, tossing his jacket across the bed, then folded his arms across his chest and scowled. “What the hell are you doing here, Sabrina? Burke will flay you alive if he catches you.”

      
She raised her milky shoulders, scandalously revealed through the sheer ice blue silk of her peignoir, then shrugged dismissively. “Burke is hardly interested in me,” she replied, tossing her thick mane of deep brown hair back, a preening gesture that accentuated her heavy breasts, the dark nipples indiscreetly peeping through the sheer fabric.

      
“Well, I'm not interested either. Find someone else's bed to sleep in.”

      
“Oh, my, my,” she cooed, placing one tiny beringed hand on her chest, stroking it consideringly. “That's right, you're practically engaged now, aren't you?” She glided over to him with a swish of her hips. “Some pallid little schoolgirl. I hear she's a veritable bluestocking. Must be something of a wallflower. Odd, I never fancied you to be smitten by the marriage bug.”

      
He smiled nastily. “Observing how splendidly you and Burke rub on, I could be forgiven for entertaining doubts about the institution,” he said dryly.

      
“Oh, marriage is splendid if a woman needs a rich husband. Burke leaves me to find my own divertissements in return for being seen with him at his important political functions.”

      
His eyebrows rose sardonically. ”A marriage made in heaven.”

      
“And what about yours? Is she pretty, Chase?” She ran her fingertips up and down the taut biceps in his arm, then leaned toward him, pressing her breasts against him.

      
Chase uncrossed his arms and set her away from him, looking at her with disgust, not only for her but for himself. She'd stalked him like a hungry tigress from the day Burke brought his young bride home from Washington two years ago. Chase had taken her to bed just to cuckold Burke. But the satisfaction had not overridden the guilt.
I’m no better than the rest of the Remington clan.

      
“It's over, Sabrina. I told you that six months ago.” That announcement had provoked a screaming, vase smashing, clothes ripping tantrum. “Why the sudden renewal of interest in me after telling me I was a boring college boy too stupid to appreciate what the gods had gifted him with, hmm?”

      
“Perhaps I'm curious. After all, this Stephanie Summerfield must be—”

      
“Stephanie is none of your concern,” he said through gritted teeth as she grazed by him, her heavy attar of roses perfume wafting around him in a seductive cloud.