Comanche Heart

  What if he was stupid? What if, no matter how he tried, his mind couldn’t make sense of the scribbles? Amy would see and know. He’d never again be able to stand proud before her. Years ago he had impressed her with his many skills, but those skills meant nothing here. Wouldn’t it be wiser not even to try than to risk revealing his inadequacies? She might never guess if he tried real hard to do good at everything else.

  Children’s laughter floated from the building. Swift imagined that laughter was being directed at him. Sweat filmed his palms. He could face a man on the street in a gunfight, but this was different. For the first time, he wanted to run. Pride wouldn’t allow him to. What would Hunter think if he found out? Swift could admit to many things, but never to cowardice.

  He walked slowly up the steps.

  Amy stood at the front of the classroom, her slender back straight, head held high, her voice ringing like a bell as she gave instruction on some arithmetic problems. When she glimpsed Swift, she turned in surprise, her eyes widening in question. Swift felt like a fly in the honey.

  “Good morning, Mr. Lopez.” She glanced at the children, and they chimed in, saying, “Good morning, Mr. Lopez.”

  It was small consolation that the kids didn’t seem wary of him anymore. Swift shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Tipping his hat, he said, “Mornin’.”

  “Did you have a specific reason for coming?” Amy asked, her gaze dropping to his gun belt, then drifting upward to his hat.

  Swift yanked the hat off his head and swallowed, shooting a glance at the youngsters. “I—” He cleared his throat. “I’ve come to—” He met her gaze. “Do you have room for a new pupil?”

  “Of course. For whom?”

  “Me,” Swift mumbled.

  “Who?”

  He swallowed again. In a louder voice he repeated, “Me.”

  “You?” She stared at him as if she didn’t believe she had heard correctly.

  “I want to learn my letters and numbers,” Swift said with more conviction. One of the children snickered.

  Amy didn’t look elated over his request. He shared her sentiments. But he had come. And he’d be damned if he’d back out now.

  “You’re a little old to be attending school, Mr. Lopez.”

  “I’m a late bloomer.” Swift strode to the coatrack. After hanging up his hat, he unfastened his gun belt, acutely conscious that everyone in the room was staring at him. He draped his guns over a hook and turned to face them. Flashing a grin, he said, “Maybe I’ll learn quicker since I’m older.”

  There were no empty seats near Chase or Indigo. Peter, the little redhead, returned Swift’s smile. Since there was an unoccupied desk behind the youngster, Swift headed in that direction. The desk was a problem. Once he folded himself into it, he wasn’t sure he’d ever get out. Thinking of Amy stuck in the window, he glanced up at her and grinned again. She narrowed her eyes on his swollen nose. Since he felt fairly certain she couldn’t read his mind, he decided grinning might be against the rules. He mashed his lips together and tried to look humorless.

  The silence began to feel uncomfortable. Swift wondered if Amy would ever regather her composure or if she was going to stand there staring at him all day. He stared back at her and slowly relaxed. He might not learn anything, but the view was breathtaking. He could think of several less pleasurable ways to spend his days. His gaze trailed from her face downward.

  After a moment Amy clamped a hand over the line of buttons on her bodice, as if she guessed where his attention had centered. She turned a very pretty pink, a nice contrast to her somber gray dress. “Well . . .” She looked nonplussed, as if she might have forgotten what she had been saying. Her eyes turned a stormy blue. He knew what that meant. When she got angry, her eyes never failed to look dark and turbulent. “Far be it from me to turn anyone away. If you really want to learn, Mr. Lopez, this is the place to do it.”

  She clearly had her doubts about his sincerity. Swift forgot that it might be against the rules to grin. He was enjoying himself more by the moment. To spend hour after hour flirting with Amy Masters and making her cheeks turn pink was about as close to the Great Beyond as a Comanche could get.

  Straightening her shoulders, Amy returned to her desk and searched frantically for her notes, which had been buried beneath the homework the children had just handed in. Arithmetic. But she couldn’t recall today’s lesson. Swift Lopez, in her classroom? Her throat tightened with unreasoning panic. He’d sit there staring at her all day, she just knew it. He no more wanted to learn numbers and letters than pigs yearned to fly.

  Amy at last found her notes. Clutching them in one hand, she turned to face her class. Swift’s gaze slid slowly from her breasts to her waist, then lower. Fury welled within her. He had come to torment her. And if not for that, to further his cause with her. Well, she’d nip this nonsense in the bud. She would give him so much homework that he’d be up half the night finishing it. He’d very quickly decide this was her territory and, unlike her home, inviolate, unless he was willing to go through a great deal of self-sacrifice.

  Somehow Amy waded her way through the arithmetic lesson, seeing to it that each age group understood the instructions and were busily doing the problems. Then she advanced on Mr. Lopez with her arithmetic book. Her determination to bowl him over flagged a bit when she realized he couldn’t recognize any number, except those he had come across in a poker deck. Determined not to soften, she dragged over a desk and sat down.

  “I guess we’d better start at the very beginning,” she said sternly, determined not to let the wary expression in his eyes get to her.

  He leaned her direction to look at the pages of the book. When he saw the enormity of what he was undertaking, he whispered, “Shit!”

  She sent him a reproving look. He glanced around at the other students and apologized.

  “This is a schoolroom,” she reminded him. “Remember that always.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Swift met her accusing gaze and grinned. “So start teaching me, Miss Amy.”

  Amy didn’t know how, but he managed to make those harmless words carry a sensual undertone. She embarked on a quick lesson, showing no mercy as she gave him in-class and after-school assignments, one of which was to write the numbers one through twenty 100 times. Given the fact that Swift had never held a pencil, she figured that alone would take him until sometime next week. Feeling for the first time that she had the upper hand, she allowed a slight grin to settle on her mouth.

  “What’s she trying to do? Have you reading the New Testament within a week?” Loretta asked that evening as she bent over Swift’s shoulder while he painstakingly drew his letters. “A hundred times the first day? You’ll be up all night.”

  Swift flexed his cramped fingers, staring at the ugly-looking J he had just finished. “I’ve gone without sleep before. This much work is good. I’ll learn fast.”

  Loretta made a disapproving noise. “I think she’s trying to discourage you, that’s what I think. That isn’t at all like Amy. She’s usually such a dedicated teacher.” She patted his shoulder. “Not to worry. I’ll talk to her, Swift.”

  “No. This is between her and me, Loretta.”

  “But—”

  “No,” he repeated more gently. “Would that be fair? Who can she go to for help? You, Hunter, the marshal? It’s our war. Let us fight it.”

  “But this is different. You have as much right to learn as anyone else, and she’s deliberately making it impossible.”

  “I’ll survive,” Swift assured her. “And I won’t quit. Let me handle this in my own way. Once Amy realizes I really want to learn, she’ll teach me. But she has to realize it by herself.”

  Amy crawled out of bed and went to the window. Rubbing a dry place on the steamy glass, she peered through the night at the Wolf home at the other end of town. A dim glow of light still shone through the parlor window. She grinned and marched happily back to bed. He would never get all that homework done, not in a ni
ght. And he would never admit to failure in front of the whole class. Mentally brushing her hands clean of Swift Lopez in her classroom, Amy snuggled deep in the down and closed her eyes. Sleep claimed her almost immediately.

  Drifting in black mists, Amy’s mind plummeted her into the past. Only not into the past. Wrists tied to the spokes of a wagon wheel, she found herself gazing across her classroom instead of flat grassland. Frantic, because she knew the comancheros would soon start coming, she fought to free her wrists from the rawhide.

  “Help me, Jeremiah,” she called. “Chase, Indigo, someone!”

  Cruel hands settled on her thighs, the fingers biting. She threw her head back. Swift smiled down at her, eyes gleaming.

  “Swift, no. Not you!”

  “You’re mine,” he said, laughing at her frenzied attempts to escape his hands. “I warned you, didn’t I? You promised to try. You won’t give me too much homework again, will you, Amy!”

  Pain slashed through her. She threw her head and screamed, her only defense against the agony. . . .

  Amy jerked awake, her breath coming in uneven little gasps, her hands knotted in the quilt. For a moment, reality and dream melded. As her surroundings broke the dream’s spell, she jackknifed to a sitting position, burying her face in her cupped hands. Oh, God.

  Amy hunched her shoulders, knowing the nightmare stemmed from guilt. It had been wrong to give Swift all that homework. She had a duty to teach anyone who came to her, and she was trying to drive Swift away. When she began letting her personal feelings influence her, she would no longer be a good teacher. And teaching was her entire life.

  Swift tipped his head, listening for the sound to repeat itself. Glancing from the table over at Hunter, who sat whittling by the fire, he asked, “Do you have big cats in this country?”

  “Cougars,” Hunter replied, not looking up from his work.

  “I think I just heard one.” Swift studied his friend’s profile, wondering how it was that he had detected a sound when Hunter hadn’t. “Did you hear it? Sounded just like a woman screaming. Enough to curl my whiskers, if I didn’t know what it was.”

  “It wasn’t a cougar.”

  “What in hell was it, then?”

  Hunter’s knife paused in its downward course along the wood. “It’s a sound we sometimes hear. Nothing to worry about, Swift.”

  “What kind of an animal is it?”

  Loretta stopped pushing her rocker to and fro, her blue eyes shifting from her darning ball to her husband.

  “It isn’t an animal,” Hunter said solemnly.

  Swift laid down his pencil, a tingle creeping up his spine. He glanced from Loretta’s worried expression to Hunter’s deadpan one, and then he shot up from his chair.

  “Don’t,” Hunter said, never looking up from his knife. “She is awake now, and the bad time will soon pass. It’s easier for her if we pretend the nightmares don’t come. She can’t help the screams, and it shames her to know everyone hears.”

  “Easier?” Swift curled his hands into fists. “I’ve never heard anyone scream like that. Shouldn’t someone be with her?”

  Hunter at last looked up, not at Swift but into the leaping flames. “You’ve never seen what it is she screams about, either. If you could be with her inside the dream, perhaps then you could help, but you cannot. And now the dream is over.”

  The next morning, Amy knew the moment Swift entered the schoolhouse. A different feeling touched the air, an electrical feeling, like that right before a storm, when the air seemed too thick to breathe, when all living things grew silent, waiting. Even the children quieted, which was phenomenal. She didn’t look up from her desk until his dark hand passed under her nose.

  “My homework,” he said softly.

  With tense fingers, Amy accepted the papers. Very quickly she leafed through, checking the assignments. All had been completed. Almost afraid to look up, but unable not to, she lifted her gaze to Swift’s weary countenance.

  His nose looked better today, but that was the only improvement. Even if his sleepless night hadn’t shown on his face, she would have known he had been up all night working simply because he had delivered the assignments. Even a sloppy effort, inexperienced as he was, would have taken hours. She was also quick to note he had come to school minus his hat and guns.

  “I think I did it good,” he said.

  Dry-mouthed, Amy nodded, her voice failing her. Swift waited a moment, as if he expected comment. Then he turned and went to the desk he had occupied yesterday. Amy took a moment to go through the work. Two-thousand six-hundred perfect letters. Tears stung beneath her eyelids. She leafed to the numbers. She knew without counting that he’d formed all two thousand. Swift, the Comanche warrior, the hunter, the gunslinger? He had humbled himself coming here yesterday, putting himself on the same level as children, but she had never expected him to go this far.

  Seeing no alternative, Amy met his gaze across the room and said, “You did everything perfectly, Mr. Lopez. I’d say you deserve an A-plus on each assignment.”

  “Is that good?”

  A few of the children giggled. Amy shot them reproving looks. “It’s the very best grade a student can get. It means better than excellent.”

  Swift straightened in his seat. There was no mistaking the prideful gleam in his eyes. Amy smothered a smile. Forming letters and numbers might seem like child’s play to her, but to Swift it clearly had been an almost impossible feat.

  Her emotions in a confused tangle, she pushed up from her desk. All else aside, she was first, last, and always a teacher. Swift wanted to learn. No man would slave all night on a whim. She could spurn him with no regret when he approached her as a suitor, but she couldn’t rebuff him when he came to her, minus his hat and guns, asking her to do the one thing God had put her on earth to do. It looked as if she had another student.

  Amy assigned Swift a much lighter homework load that day. When school was dismissed, he waited for the children to leave and then approached her desk. She grew still, not quite able to look at him, wishing he had left with the others and spared her the necessity of doing what she knew she must.

  “Swift, I, um . . .” She dragged her gaze up from her desk. “I owe you an apology. Yesterday I gave you way too much work, hoping you wouldn’t come back to school.” She waited a moment for him to speak, but he didn’t offer her an out. “I’m sorry, truly sorry. You can expect fair treatment from now on.”

  “I appreciate that.” His eyes warmed, not with laughter, but with another indefinable emotion. “It’s real important to me to learn my letters and numbers.”

  “I—I never realized. . . .”

  “Well, now you do.” He studied her a moment. “What you said about me not being in Texas anymore—it made sense. If I’m going to take care of you, I have to fit in here.”

  “It’s a great deal of work to embark upon when you have no guarantee of the reward.”

  He flashed her a slow smile. “But I do have a guarantee. Two, as a matter of fact.”

  “Two?”

  “You promised to marry me, and the other night, you promised to try if I’d meet you halfway. When I walked up those schoolhouse steps, I came my fair share of the distance.”

  “What is it you’re expecting from me?”

  “That’s for you to decide. And when is up to you, too. I won’t push you anymore, not like I did. I didn’t mean to make you feel like you were inside a jail.” He paused and cleared his throat. “You gave me your word to try, and I trust you to live up to it.”

  Over the next few days, Amy found herself heartily regretting her decision to allow Swift in her classroom, and she began despising her job with an intensity that she never would have dreamed possible before his enrollment. Swift applied himself to learning with the same tenacity he had once applied to Comanche warfare. Though she couldn’t for a moment doubt his sincerity, he was not a man with a one-track mind. His initial reason for acquiring knowledge had been to win her favor, and he
persevered in that quest with the same fervor as before.

  Because they were surrounded by children, Swift’s tactics became more subtle, but his effect on Amy was just as devastating. While she taught, his piercing gaze followed her. He never missed an opportunity to touch her. Once, when she leaned over his shoulder to assist him with his work, he turned his face so that his cheek grazed her breast. The contact took her breath. Sometimes she wondered if he truly needed her hand to guide his when he was forming letters or if he merely liked having her fingers pressed to his.

  Though the teacher in Amy had to admire Swift for his determination to learn, and though she felt a sense of pride in seeing him gain ground, she also resented his disruption of her life. Jeremiah, who sported a schoolboy crush on his teacher, had begun disturbing class, clearly jealous of Swift. Little Peter Crenton, who had an abusive father, came to school with bruises one morning and didn’t come to her for comfort, as he had always done in the past. Even the smaller girls began acting silly about things they never had before, trying to get their handsome schoolmate’s attention.

  On top of that, a delegation of mothers visited Amy one day after school, concerned about Swift’s questionable character and his influence upon their children. In addition to assuring the mothers that Swift’s behavior at school was exemplary, Amy found herself defending his right to an education, which left her emotions in a confused tangle by the time the mothers left, appeased. Was she risking her position as schoolteacher by keeping Swift in the classroom?

  Amy spent a great deal of time wondering why she had bucked the delegation of mothers. Was it that she was beginning to feel drawn to Swift? The thought terrified her. She didn’t begrudge him an education, but she couldn’t help wishing that he would attend school in Jacksonville, far away from her.

  On Wednesday, exactly one week after Swift enrolled in school, the monthly spelling bee fell due. Because Swift had no background whatsoever to arm him for such competition, Amy meant to excuse him from participating before the children chose captains and began dividing up into teams. The moment she announced that intention, however, a general grumble of “That’s not fair!” reverberated through the room. It had always been the rule that everyone in class had to participate in the spelling bees, and the children took exception to anyone getting off.