Susan Johnson

  But he’d also seen a red eagle ride a black cougar over the men with fire spears. And he’d heard the animal apparitions tell him: The gold metal will bless your clan and bring it prosperity. Listen and learn and when the time comes, follow us. We give you these for your power. And when Hazard woke atop Wolf Mountain all those years ago, he’d found beside him a red eagle feather and a tuft of black cougar fur.

  “Bala-ba-aht-chilash (good luck),” Rising Wolf offered.

  Hazard accepted the wishes with a nod. “To the gold now. We’d better get it on the packhorses. The sun’s rising over the horizon.” Rising Wolf planned his trips so he arrived early, before Hazard left for the mine. It didn’t take long to load the saddlebags since Hazard had rigged up a pulley to lift the heavy leather bags up the rugged cliff above the mine entrance.

  “Are you coming home for the summer hunt?” Rising Wolf asked carefully, filling the painted leather bag with coarse gold dust.

  “I was planning to, but …” Hazard paused. “Probably not now … with the woman.”

  “You could bring her along.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  Rising Wolf looked at Hazard closely. The women in Hazard’s life since Raven Wing had all been for pleasure. Why not bring this one along? “We’re all used to yellow eyes in camp,” he noted. “No one would care.” Rising Wolf smiled faintly. “Except the girlfriends waiting your return, of course.”

  “Everyone would assume she’s a paramour,” Hazard protested.

  “And she’s not,” Rising Wolf quipped. “Or at least not all the time,” he added facetiously.

  “Not at all anymore,” Hazard insisted, casting his smiling friend a quelling glance.

  “Knowing you, Dit-chilajash, treading such a fine and virtuous line may prove difficult.”

  “I don’t need anyone worrying about my love life, Rising Wolf,” Hazard admonished. “Just keep your mind on the gold.”

  “The question is,” Rising Wolf jocularly observed, “will you be able to?”

  Hazard didn’t deign to answer, but that in itself was an answer.

  Ten minutes later the gold was all packed and they began hoisting it and loading the horses. It took considerable time before the string of ponies were all packed and Rising Wolf was making his way up the isolated mountain trail known only to the Absarokee. Along with the gold he took with him the fascinating impressions his acute eyes had gathered about Dit-chilajash and his beautiful hostage.

  Chapter 10

  “Who was that?” Blaze asked when Hazard returned to the cabin.

  “My ba-goo-ba, my brother,” he translated.

  “Do you come from a large family?”

  “I was an only child. None of my brothers or sisters lived to walk.”

  “But if he’s your brother …” she questioningly said.

  “It’s the custom in our tribe to address male relations of your wife as ‘brother’ and treat them as such.”

  “You’re married?” Blaze asked, her voice not quite concealing the shock.

  “Not now.” Hazard said the two words very slowly as if unsure of the reality of his statement.

  “What does that mean?” From her seated position on the bed where she had watched the sun rise, she stirred suddenly, all the lethargy of early morning precipitously banished by his short but uncertain reply. Long bare legs flew out of the covers and in one swift shifting impulse she was standing, face to face with Hazard, the light wool blanket clutched around her like a royal cloak. When he didn’t answer, neither her question nor her sharp look, Blaze murmured in a saccharine voice, “Not now? How convenient. Maybe yesterday. Maybe tomorrow, but not now.” Her glance sharpened. “I should have known. Another lecherous man of the world. I suppose all that titillating gossip I heard about you in Virginia City—the stories about Lucy Attenborough, Allison Marsh, Elizabeth Krueger, and so on and so forth, failed to mention your marital state because, after all, the double standard operates in the Wild West just as surely as it does in the East. For some reason I thought, out here in the undisturbed majesty of nature, those deceits hadn’t corrupted. More the fool me,” she exclaimed with a short, unpleasant laugh.

  “She’s dead,” Hazard quietly said, very much against his will. Absarokee custom rigorously avoided any mention of the deceased. They have gone to their father, Ah-badt-dadt-deah, and like Him were sacred. But Hazard knew Blaze would continue her diatribe until he answered, so he reluctantly uttered the words.

  Immediately Blaze was contrite, feeling guilty about her false accusations. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, her blue eyes full of sympathy. “How did it happen?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” Hazard replied, his body rigid with constraint.

  “Of course. Forgive me.”

  An uncomfortable silence fell.

  Wrenching his mind from the circumstances of Raven Wing’s death—a memory that even now, after long years, still haunted him with remorse—Hazard tried to restore the equilibrium of his emotions with mundane talk. “Rising Wolf’s gone and I came in to ask you if you’d care to bathe today. I know you don’t like mountain streams, but the water in the pool isn’t so cool. The sun warms it.”

  “Do you bathe every day?” Blaze asked somewhat incredulously. She wasn’t immune to the desire for normal hygiene but with the easy life of socializing in Boston, daily bathing was hardly necessary.

  “It’s a custom with my people.”

  “In the winter too?”

  “In the winter too.”

  “It seems absurd,” she said with a small shudder. “Imagine, in freezing weather.”

  “No more absurd than some of your customs. The crinoline, for instance: seductive as it can be in a wind or, at maximum, following a pretty lady upstairs, it is hardly the most practical of guises.”

  “Touché,” Blaze acknowledged with mild distaste. “Let’s not argue nonsensically.”

  “Agreed. Would you like to bathe first?” he asked with a pleasant courtesy.

  “I don’t care to at all,” Blaze said, her voice identically pleasant but firm.

  Hazard’s lips came together in a straight line. “You’ll have to eventually.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Surely, Boston, even you can’t be that obtuse.”

  “Are you calling me obtuse?” she retorted with an unmistakable flush of anger.

  “I just have. Are you hard of hearing as well?”

  “I don’t care to be bullied.”

  He tamed his features, relaxed his voice. “And I don’t care to stand here arguing with a spoiled child. To be blunt, Miss Braddock, if you don’t bathe you will smell. And there’s no room in this cabin for an—”

  “Are you threatening me?” she broke in, her tone and pose haughty, spoiled, petulant. It was a novice’s mistake in dealing with Hazard.

  Muzzling all his preferred options, only dark brows came together in a scowl; his forbearance was extraordinary.

  “Will you kill me if I don’t bathe?” she provoked.

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Beat me then?”

  “Tempting,” he said with a saintly smile.

  “How many people have you killed? Quite a few, I suppose.” It was like a catechism now. And a challenge. “How many?”

  He stood very still, wondering if her foolishness or his control would break first.

  “How many? Tell me—lots?”

  “Enough.” His answer was the model of noncommittal evasion.

  “Put a number on it. I want to know how afraid of you I should be. How courageous you can be threatening a woman half your size.”

  Still he wouldn’t rise to her bait.

  “I won’t bathe, you bastard,” she asserted, tightening her hold on the blanket, and suddenly she looked like a plucky kitten, uncertainly fighting something much bigger and more daunting.

  “It’s not worth dying for, Boston,” he said, smiling a real smile at last, and his strong arm
stretched out and pulled her off balance. Falling toward him with a surprised look on her face, she was scooped up into his arms and held firmly against his chest.

  “Put me down,” she cried, struggling against his viselike grip. “Put me down this instant!” Her words were hissed into the sunny morning air, for Hazard’s long stride had carried them out the door and onto the path to the pool. “If you don’t put me down immediately, I’m going to hit you, dammit!” Her small hands curled into fists.

  Amused dark eyes held her fiery ones briefly. “As someone trained in raiding and warfare and, I might add, only recently returned from four gory years of beating the South into a measure of submission, forgive me if your threat fails to strike terror in my soul.” His mouth twitched with a repressed grin. “Very brave of you though,” he added, the mockery at her expense incensing Blaze’s already enormous sense of frustration. Hazard Black was the only man she’d ever met who refused to do her bidding. Not only did he refuse, but her insistence always seemed to fuel some private humor. Odious, contemptible man! How had she ever gotten herself into this incredible predicament?

  As if reading her mind he said, “Just think, normally at this hour of the day you’d still be sleeping between satin sheets, with the curtains drawn, while the servants only newly roused from bed wouldn’t have even begun preparing your breakfast.”

  “Instead, I’m freezing to death on some mountaintop.”

  “It’s warm,” he said simply.

  “Speak for yourself.” In her present mood of fretful injustice, Blaze’s sense of tact, never very conspicuous, had entirely disappeared.

  “Would you like to get warmer?” he drawled, innuendo like fluttering butterflies after a rainshower. They’d reached the perimeter of the pool, the surface of the water at their feet silvery-smooth, as translucent as glass.

  “I thought you had newfound scruples,” she taunted him.

  “Old Coyote teaches us to accept human frailty,” Hazard blandly replied.

  “That sort of flexible thinking must be easy on one’s conscience.”

  “Realistic, I’d say. A quality you should develop. Daddy’s not here. Daddy’s money doesn’t count at the moment. You’re not insulated from the reality of the world any longer. And the sooner you accept it, the easier this will be for both of us.”

  “My, my,” Blaze purred, looking up through thick lashes into Hazard’s serious dark eyes, “aren’t our lectures on life just too, too interesting.”

  “You’re an unmitigated bitch,” Hazard whispered ever so softly. “And,” he went on, “if I hadn’t been schooled against taking advantage of a woman’s physical weakness, I’d very much like to beat some sense into you.” He wished she’d slap him. He was ready for the excuse to slap her back.

  But she didn’t. She only replied in a coolly scathing voice, one usually reserved for a servant, “I might expect something like that from you.”

  “No, Boston, you’re wrong,” he defended, his sudden inclination curtailed by the chill in her voice. “Although the notion is tempting as hell.”

  “If I—I were a man,” Blaze sputtered, incensed at the overwhelming self-confidence Hazard exuded, “I’d kill you.”

  “You wouldn’t get the chance. If you were a man, you’d be dead,” he remarked impassively.

  “Such certainty!” she angrily mocked.

  “You’re a pilgrim, a greenhorn, pet, and in this part of the country, greenhorns with big mouths don’t live very long.” Irritating as the angry woman was, the feel of her in his arms was doing disturbing things to his scruples. Only a steely determination kept him from bending down and tasting the hot fire of her full lush mouth. She tantalized him; even her unrestricted tongue intrigued him. She had a boldness about her which challenged him. Could it be that insolent daring, the inordinate tempestuous vitality that fascinated him? Or was it only the memories of her vitality translated into a sensual hunger that lured and charmed him, met his own with a burning glow?

  “You haven’t seen me shoot,” Blaze retorted, unknowingly interrupting Hazard’s heated memory just in time to save herself from his flexible human frailty.

  “Someday, then, we’ll have to test our skills and have a shoot-out. Would that appeal to your bloodthirsty nature, Miss Braddock?”

  “I hardly think you, of all people, should accuse anyone of being bloodthirsty.”

  “Where did you learn this charming ability to turn every conversation into a verbal brawl? You’d do well to enter politics, where name-calling’s evolved into a fine art. I’d bet my string of horses you’d hold your own with the best of them.”

  “I realize the favored feminine standard is the demure, the obedient, the shy. I suppose,” she said bristling, “you’re used to simpering, acquiescent women.”

  “The two need not be mutually inclusive,” he evocatively replied, and she understood that he preferred acquiescence.

  “I find that style of woman tepid as day-old tea.”

  “Delicately put, as usual,” he mildly replied, “but in the interest of abbreviating this acrimonious dialogue, since I do work for a living—you have heard of work, I presume, even in the rarefied altitudes of Beacon Hill—would you prefer bathing with or without this blanket?”

  “I choose not to bathe at all,” she persisted.

  “That, unfortunately, is not one of the options.”

  “I hope, Jon Hazard Black, that you burn in hell!”

  “I hope, Miss Braddock, that you can swim.” And so saying, he threw her out into the center of the calm pool.

  When she hit the water the scream could be heard halfway to Diamond City. But a second later, she sank from sight and Hazard plunged into the water in a flat, racing dive, cursing himself for not taking the time to find out if she could swim. Slicing through the water in a few swift strokes, he reached the center of the pool where the water dropped deep enough for drowning. He dove under, sweeping downward with two powerful kicks. He saw her immediately through the crystal-clear water, grasped her by one flailing arm, and hauled her up to the surface. He lifted her, dripping and shivering, so her head and shoulders were above the water. Treading water in a slow pattern, he apologized for frightening her. “I’m sorry. It never occurred to me you couldn’t swim.” His breathing was normal even though he was kicking slowly toward shore, the few minutes’ exertion a trifle to a man in such superior physical condition.

  With water streaming down her face and hair, her lips trembling, Blaze sputtered. “Damn you—can swim—bloody—blanket—holding—my—legs—arms.” If looks could kill, he would have ceased to exist then and there. But then Hazard’s leather-clad leg grazed Blaze’s thigh and the fervent fire in her eyes changed to something quite different.

  Hazard, feeling the devastating shock, drew in a sharp breath. Instant need raced like flame along the sensual pathways of his mind and body.

  Blaze felt the rush of pleasure, felt the flaring desire spread from the tingling point of contact like molten sunshine. Closing her eyes for a brief moment of dazed weakness, she shivered in his arms.

  “You’re cold,” he whispered, feeling as though he must make love to her or die, his breath caught in his lungs. “Let me warm you.” His mouth was close suddenly, the words brushing against her cheek. Overcome by urgent desire, Hazard was no longer thinking, only feeling. His arms tightened, pulling her close, pressing her smooth, cool body against his.

  She felt him like a hard heat, a large and wonderful arousal only moments old, brought to life because he wanted her. Wanted her despite his cool, reasonable words this morning, wanted her so badly a touch brought him the same scorching passion. Her pale fingers circled, then gently gripped, his wide shoulders. Feeling the small weight of her hands, he trembled, and it gave her pleasure—fierce, unfettered pleasure that Jon Hazard Black could be reached after all. From now on, she languidly thought with renewed confidence, she had a weapon against this jailer of hers. The sense of power unfurled, radiated through her mind,
matching the enchantment she felt with Hazard’s arousal moving against her thighs. Testing her newfound power, like a nubile child-woman would a new pleasure, Blaze stirred her lower body softly back and forth over the rigid length of Hazard’s tense body.

  A shudder shook the shoulders beneath her hands. It was her first faint taste of ownership. She turned her face imperceptibly, yet he felt it and waited, breath held, while she turned slightly more toward his warm mouth, turned the few final degrees until her soft lips melted obligingly and tempting into Hazard’s. “I want you,” she whispered, her small tongue tracing an enticing path over Hazard’s bottom lip, “inside me.”

  Lust exploded in his brain—pure, unadulterated lust—and his mouth came down on hers, answering her request with an intense, driving fury, answering her in a hot, searing way that made her forget who had power over whom. She responded; all the nuances of her sensual longing and budding passion were delicious in their newness, a delicious, extravagant intensity she gloried in, for she was a spoiled young woman who believed that what she wanted she could have. And she had discovered in the just passed glorious, burning moment, that she could have Hazard Black anywhere, anytime, anyplace. It was victory—soaring, limitless victory. And sweet, redolently sweet, she decided with the tantalizing feel of Hazard beneath her hands. It was a sweetness one could become addicted to.

  Speed, haste, now was all Hazard could think of. He held her tightly, as if the imprint of her body were salvation, as if the austerity he’d practiced that morning were only prelude, atonement for what was to come. A normal man is expected to gratify his passions, he recalled Old Coyote’s words, the litany repeating itself insistently, his subconscious mimicking the fire racing through his blood. His hands released their hold and she found herself standing. Startled, she opened her eyes and blue surprise gazed into pitch-black eyes significant with unrestrained passion.