Chapter 19
When Teela awoke, it was barely dawn. The colors filtering through the trees, cypress, pine, and moss-laden oak, were both delicate and striking. Just as the sun set with majestic palette, it rose in splendor as well. Shades of gold and pink and mauve entered the sky, in hues both soft and vivid. Light dazzled through tree limbs, catching little dust motes that rode upon the air. Dew covered much of the earth, creating a diamond pattern against it. Morning kept the insects at bay. In the distance an elaborate spider web spanned two branches, as dazzling with morning’s moisture as if it were decorated with thousands upon thousands of precious jewels. The air was sweetly cool, clean, kissed with a breath of freshness. The sun would rise soon, hot and punishing, but for the moment the morning was completely and without doubt glorious beyond measure.
Morning…
She was awakening in a savage territory where the colors of morning and night were equally fed with the crimson of spilled blood. She had set out yesterday with over fifty soldiers. Every one of them must surely lie dead. She should be dead herself.
She half rose to discover that James had apparently awakened some time before her. He was dressed in a pair of form-hugging cotton trousers, probably homespun out of Cimarron, and his doeskin boots. Leaning against a structure pole of the hootie, he chewed a blade of grass, studying her reflectively.
She sat up uneasily, dragging the blanket of furs with her, meeting his gaze.
“Sleep well?” he inquired politely.
“Remarkably so. Amazingly so,” she added, her eyes faltering, “for someone who saw so many murdered not twenty-four hours ago.”
He made an impatient sound, tossing down the blade of grass. Three long strides brought him down beside her, balanced on one knee, his eyes intense as they challenged hers. “What did you call it when Mayerling went into Indian villages? War?”
“I called it murder as well, for that is what it was! That you all massacre one another with vicious brutality does not make it right for anyone! Don’t defend those warriors who want my hair because of my father’s actions. They are no better than he is!” she informed him heatedly.
He arched a brow at her slowly. “Perhaps not,” he said. “Perhaps not. Except that you must remember, the military has come here to remove or exterminate the Seminoles. We’ve never assumed to remove or exterminate the entire white race.”
She rolled away from him, frightened by passion and fury that seemed so alive within him still. “I’m sorry. If you wish to blame me for the war, I’m just too tired to listen.”
She was startled when the blanket of furs was suddenly ripped from her, leaving her naked and shivering on the bare ground. She was instantly very awake, leaping to her feet, quite ready to do battle with him again. “Tired, Miss Warren?” he inquired incredulously. “But you chose to stay here—”
“I was trying to leave when I was so nearly murdered yesterday!” she reminded him.
“Ah, but too late. I warned you time after time to go. I told you to stay at my brother’s house. I do vividly recall stumbling upon you on a battlefield and warning you to keep out of the warfare! Did you ever heed a word I said? Alas, no. So here you are now, my prisoner, preferable, I do pray, to being a hairless corpse on the trail. But, my dear Miss Warren, you may be too tired to direct a servant after a Charleston soiree. Seminole prisoners are never too tired to pay heed to their captors.”
The morning air was damp and cool. He knew her as no other human being on earth, and she had certainly stood her ground often enough with pride. But she was both cold and humiliated at the moment, and very resentful of the fact that he frequently didn’t even seem to consider that they were the same species.
“Go to hell, Mr. James-Running-Bear-McKenzie. Fill the air, the water, sea, space, fill it all with your violence and mockery and cruelty. You can’t force me to listen, you—”
“Coffee,” he snapped suddenly.
“What?”
“Coffee. Our women awaken and work, Miss Warren. Always. There is something to do. There has always been work, of course, but since your people came it is a harder life than ever our women lead. Preparing what food they can gather, what little can be grown, what can be hunted. And when the Seminoles are forced to run, the women pack what little they possess and carry it on their backs. They are forced to fight. To practice infanticide.”
“What has this to do with coffee?”
“I’d like some.”
“Good for you.”
A strangled sound escaped her because he was suddenly all but on top of her. He’d captured a wrist, drawn her close. His eyes seemed like twin blades of steely fire, about to slice cleanly through her.
“You’re a prisoner, Miss Warren. Ah, but you can’t appreciate that luxury. We used to take prisoners. We didn’t seek to slay all women and children. We brought them back with us. Some grew to stay among the Seminole by choice. They learned our ways. Some even came to love their captors, and discover that they were not as savage as they might have imagined. In fact, many realized they had seen more viciousness and savagery in some of the finest drawing rooms in their own nation.”
“Let go of me.”
“I shall have to, won’t I, if you’re to make the coffee?”
“Isn’t coffee a white man’s luxury?”
“If so, we have been trading for it for a very long time, and I am a spoiled man in many things, and like coffee for breakfast. The basic structure for the fire is to the left of the shelter; the river water is fresh and sweet, and you will find the rest of the fixings in the haversack to the rear of the hootie.”
“So you say!” she hissed, ripping free her hand from his grip. She was shaking from more than the cold. This time yesterday she had thought never to see him again. Now he stood just inches from her, his bare chest brushing her naked flesh. She told herself that she absolutely hated him for his judgment and mockery; yet again, he had not failed her when her life had been in the gravest jeopardy. Nor did such complex emotions matter under circumstances such as these, for just his proximity was enough to make her heart race, thunder with such speed and fury against her chest that he must surely see its beat beneath the white wall of her flesh. “I won’t make you coffee!” she cried.
He pulled her flush against him. His fingers splayed into her hair at either side of her head. His lips found hers with heat and fever and force, his hands then sliding through the length of her hair, over her shoulders, down to her buttocks, cupping them. She tried to draw her fists between them. Her fingers pressed against the muscled barrier of his chest. He drew her down to her knees, whispering against her lips.
“I don’t want coffee anymore,” he informed her. She was pressed down. To the earth. The morning-fresh scent of it filled her. His scent swept into her, a part of him, his warmth, his vitality.
“Wait! I will make coffee!” she began desperately.
But his hands were all over her, his lips, his teeth. “Always too late, Teela,” he told her. “You ran for home when it was too late. You chose to obey me when it was far too late.”
Too late …
She had dreamed of him, night after lonely night. Longed for him, longed for this. His touch on her. She hadn’t imagined the moss- and pine-strewn earth as her bed, the sky was her canopy. The raw, rough feel of dirt against her back, the golden streaks of the sun shining down with an ever greater brightness on her nakedness. Hadn’t imagined how wild it could be, how lonely in a deep green glade, how she might hear the ripple of the nearby water one second and nothing but the heavy tenor of his breathing the next. He touched her everywhere. Leaves rustled beneath him. She twisted to elude him, to avoid complete surrender. To no avail. His teeth gnawed gently at her nipple as his tongue bathed it. “I make—very good coffee!” she gasped, clinging to his head, trying to dig her fingers into his hair. Stop him. Have more of him. Love him. Be free of him.
“But you do this better!” he hissed softly, rising above her.
She whispered the word no. Surely, she did. But he didn’t hear her. And she didn’t mean it. Her legs were parted; he was within her. The rising sun touched her flesh with a wicked heat that nearly matched that of his ardor. Again different sensations caught and filled her. The flight of a bird far above their heads, the increasing intensity of the sun. The feel of his hands on her hips, rough, urgent, his kiss, his stroke, the earth beneath them, soft, cushioned by the moisture of the nearby river, and hard cradling her against the momentum of their rhythm. Then all blended together, and it seemed that the sun’s rays had exploded inside her, liquid gold, warming and filling her body, radiating throughout it. She blinked, and the sun was still overhead. He was beside her, his weight eased from her, the scent and feel of him still touching her.
He rose abruptly, walked naked to the river, and plunged into it, walking and then swimming into the depths. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked up at the uncanny blueness of the sky. How was it possible to know such ecstasy and misery at one time? To long to be with him. To hurt and ache inside and feel so wretchedly hopeless?
A moment later, he was standing over her, river water dripping from his flesh.
“You need clothing,” he told her abruptly.
She arched a brow at him. “Imagine! Perhaps you should have thought of that last night, Mr. McKenzie!”
“Ah, but Miss Warren. I hadn’t seen you in some time. Foolish me. I had completely underestimated the enemy.”
“The enemy?” she challenged furiously, leaping to her feet. “Enemy! As if I might have brought any of this about, as if I ever attempted to seduce or flatter you, as if—”
He caught her, drawing her close, laying a hand across her mouth, yet doing so gently. “You are the enemy, Miss Warren, because you don’t know your own strength. Nor do you recognize my weaknesses.” The words, so softly, almost tenderly spoken, brought a string of tears to her eyes. Half sobbing, she laid her head against his chest. He held her, fingers gently moving through her hair. His body was wet and very warm, rippling with muscle. It was oddly comforting to be there, leaning against him, held against him, both naked and somehow vulnerable beneath the endlessly blue sky in a place so devoid of other men and women and creature comforts that it might have been the first design of Eden.
He lifted her chin, kissed her lips gently.
“I’ll make us some coffee,” he said huskily.
“I don’t mind making coffee.”
“I’ll build the fire.”
“I’ll get the water.”
In a few minutes, coffee was nearly on. He had expertly stoked a cooking fire within a circle of rocks. His coffeepot was, indeed, of European design. His coffee, however, was chicory, very strong and somewhat bitter. She sat by his side, looked longingly at the river as he hunkered down and set the pot on a wire-mesh camp stove above the flame.
“Want to go in?” he asked.
“Is it safe?” she asked nervously.
“Only a few alligators,” he said.
She shivered violently.
He smiled, looking downward. “Quite honestly, there’s no guarantee that ’gators will not be in any Florida waterway, but they are surely scarce here. And actually,” he added, “you’re not natural pray for a ’gator. He prefers birds and small mammals. With most wild creatures, you keep your distance, they’ll keep theirs.” He cocked his head. “Perhaps that’s something you should have learned by now.”
She smiled. “Are you, then, a wild creature?”
“Haven’t you made that determination, Miss Warren?”
She shook her head slowly, gravely. “I reserve my judgment until I have weighed all that I have seen as fairly as I may.”
He lowered his head. She thought that he smiled ruefully to himself.
“Want me to protect you from the wild things in the water?”
“Would you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you afraid of the water?”
“No.”
“Do you swim?”
She hesitated. “A little. Years ago, when I was very young, my father used to take me to the creek by my home. It’s been awhile.”
“You’ll remember.”
“You’ll come with me?”
He nodded, reached for her hand, and drew her along with him.
It was wonderful. The water was so beautifully clear and refreshing. Fed by underwater springs, James told her. She could see beneath it, shake out her hair beneath it, plummet down and rise up. At first she stayed near James, not venturing out where the water was deep. But she did remember, and it was wonderful to swim. She wanted to explore, to feel the coolness of the water, the heat of the sun. She didn’t think that she had ever felt such a sense of freedom.
And she was a captive. So she had been told.
James, surely far more accustomed to such sweet and natural freedom, tired of the water more quickly than she. “Come in!” he called her.
Treading water, she smiled and shook her head.
“Miss Warren!”
“No!”
She dived under again. She nearly shrieked, inhaling a lungful of water, when she felt something tug her foot. She kicked madly for the surface, and when she broke through it, she spun to see that it had been James.
She might have remembered how to swim, but he was an expert at it. “I called you to come out!” he snapped.
“And I wasn’t ready!”
“You forget that I am the captor here, and you my prisoner.”
“A pity, then, for prisoners must attempt escape at all costs,” she said, still treading water.
“And if there was danger in the water?”
She arched a brow. He was lying. “What, sir, you now resort to scare tactics?”
He smiled. “Look down.”
She looked. Good God, he wasn’t lying. There were two massive creatures swimming beneath him. She shrieked, throwing herself at him, though to what avail she didn’t know, for he was treading water as well. Indeed, her impetus sent them both hurtling downward, right toward the monstrous animals.
“Get out, get out!” she cried, but he was laughing, holding her close in his arms, treading the water for them both. She hadn’t seen him laugh so easily in a long time. No, she hadn’t seen him really laugh so ever before. He was changed, entirely. He was a young man. A very handsome one. The curve of his smile was completely charming. Her heart slammed against her chest. So monsters were about to eat them. It was all right, because James was smiling, and no monster could come upon them that was a greater evil than the warfare that stretched before them.
“You’ve never seen them before?” he queried. “Sea monsters? No! Why aren’t you moving? Don’t you care in the least—”
“Tara never mentioned them to you? Why, she is crazy about the beasts.”
“I’m beginning to think that you’re all mad beasts!” He arched a brow but still smiled. “They’re sea cows, as gentle as can be, and just like ’gators, they inhabit many of our waters. They’re rather like … well, they’re mammals. They’re like dolphins.”
Teela shuddered. “Damned ugly dolphins!” she whispered vehemently.
“All right, my love, so perhaps they’re more like cows in appearance, big and squat and hardly graceful. Never fear them, though. They wouldn’t dream of feasting on any kind of meat, and certainly not human flesh.”
He had leaned back, a strong and accomplished swimmer, able to backstroke with her weight half atop his chest, her arms still clinging around his neck. As he moved, she tentatively ducked her head into the water, watching the sea cows swim on by. There was a mother and a baby, so it seemed. Swimming together, oddly graceful despite their funny faces and heavy bodies. The mother was a good eight to ten feet long, mottled gray. The baby was perhaps four feet and a slightly softer color.
Teela surfaced, lying her head against his chest, feeling the ripple and movement of his muscles as he swam toward the shore.
“How odd,” sh
e said softly.
“What is odd?”
“That it can be so hard to tell sometimes by appearance what to fear—and what to trust.”
“Fear everything,” he warned her. “Trust no one.”
“You trust your brother.”
“That’s different. He’s my blood.”
“White blood.”
“Teela—”
“You’re lucky.”
“I’m lucky?”
She nodded earnestly. “You share that blood and something very special with your brother. I never had that with anyone. I loved my father, and he died so young. I loved my mother, and I lost her, too. Then I had Michael Warren.”
He had reached a point of the river where he was standing, she realized, but he still leaned back, holding her. He smoothed back a piece of her wet hair. “Perhaps you don’t realize, Miss Warren, how quickly you have made friends here.”
“Friends …?”
“Both my brother and Tara adore you. Robert Trent would defy the wind for you, and young Harrington is head over heels. Joshua Brandeis as well. Of course, the later three would certainly desire much more of you than friendship …” His voice trailed away, a slightly bitter note to it once again. He shrugged. “Unless, of course—”
“Don’t you dare accuse me—”
“Accuse you? I’ve told you to save us all grief and marry Harrington!”
She tried to kick away from him; his hold around her tightened, his arms enveloping her. Then suddenly he was whispering fiercely, words tumbling out with passion and fever. “Listen to me, and listen to me well. Don’t ever think that I don’t desire you more than anything in all the world, or that I do not dream of holding you in my arms, feeling, breathing the sweetness of your flesh when you are away. Don’t think I don’t long to kill any man when I watch you dance with him, laugh with him. The jealousy in my heart and blood is like something alive and dark and terrible, ready to riot, tear me apart. Yet I say to you with all truth that yes, I wish you to wed Harrington, because I wish life, peace, and happiness for you. And God, yes, sometimes I’m bitter, so sorry, so damned sorry that I can’t say, yes, my father was a white man, a rich white man. I can’t buy my place in the white world and turn my back on these people. They are mine. It is their plight, my plight. My world is starvation, and yours is a night dining on fine china to the sweet sounds of violins. Mine is running, yours is dancing. Mine is the rough earth, while yours is a feather bed. You cannot survive without your world. I must survive without it.” She pulled back from him, amazed at his words. Amazed at his fever. He had almost said that he cared for her. That he wanted her. For more than just the passing of a frantic night, a fleeting, heated passion. She stared at him, at the emotion in his eyes, the harsh, rugged beauty of his features, and she wanted to cry out with an agony greater than death. “And what if I cannot survive without you?” she asked.