Comanche Woman (16 page)

Bay laughed. “Of course not. Do you want the women of the village to think you less than a man?”

Long Quiet shook his head. “If we were in Texas I’d have been thought less a man if I
didn’t
offer to help you carry such a large load of firewood.”

Noting the obvious differences in customs had made them awkward with each other, and she’d found an excuse to leave him.

A few days later she’d been sent to gather plums to be dried for pemmican. She’d nearly filled her basket when he’d come along with a deer slung across his pony. He slipped off his mount and watched her work for a while. Before long, Bay found herself saying, “It must have been difficult for you, growing up like you did, to know where your loyalties lay.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, with a white father and a Comanche mother, and drifting back and forth like that between two peoples who hated each other, how could you know where you truly belonged? It must have been hard having parents who were so different and—”

Long Quiet cut her off with a wave of the purloined plum in his hand. “I belonged with my parents, and I don’t think I ever much noticed the differences between my mother and father. They certainly never let their differences keep them from loving one another.”

“It sounds almost like a fairy tale,” Bay said, smiling dreamily as she picked plums and dropped them in the basket she’d brought along. “Where’s your mother now?”

“She died of pneumonia when I was six.”

“I’m sorry. And your father?”

Long Quiet spit out the pit and swallowed the last of the plum before he said, “My grandfather killed him.”

“Oh, my.” She’d just lifted the basket of plums into her arms and had to juggle not to drop it. His hands covered hers to steady her. They felt good, strong and sure. He didn’t seem in any hurry to let her go, but she stepped back, and then, because she wanted to know, asked, “Why did your grandfather kill your father?”

“My grandfather, Stands Tall, hates all White-eyes. Because my mother had died the previous year, he had no way of knowing my father was his son-in-law. After he’d killed my father, Stands Tall took me captive. That was when he learned the truth—that he’d killed his daughter’s husband.”

“How sad! If only he’d known.” Bay felt tears misting her eyes, but since her hands were full, there was no way she could wipe them away. Long Quiet’s thumb reached out and caught a salty drop. She felt a tingling deep inside when he raised his thumb to his mouth and licked it away.

Long Quiet took another plum from her basket and tossed it in his palm. His eyes were on her, but his thoughts were focused on the past. “I wonder if it would have made a difference if he’d known,” he mused. At Bay’s shocked expression, he continued, “Stands Tall was a far-seeing man. He realized years ago the danger of allowing the white man a foothold in
Comanchería
. He knew there would eventually be a battle for the land. He was right. It’s already begun.”

Bay had remained silent, unable to contradict the truth of what he’d said, unable to soothe his troubled look with a clever answer. But he hadn’t let the subject rest, coming back to it in later days, worrying it like a lone wolf haunts an aging buffalo.

It wasn’t until their conversation yesterday that she’d finally known what it was that bothered him. She’d been sent out to harvest pecans. It wasn’t difficult work, but she had to do it on her knees or bent over, and after a while, her back ached. She’d just stopped for a rest and was stretching a knot out of her back muscles when he’d ridden up.

“Are you stiff?”

“A little.”

“Let me help.”

“I’ll be all right. I—”

But by then his hands had slipped up under her poncho and his thumbs had found the clenched muscles just above her waist and were working their way up to the ache in her shoulders. It felt so good she forgot about objecting. Bay’s eyes were closed and her chin had dropped to her chest. She was immensely enjoying the strong, certain touch of his hands on her skin.

She could hear the grin in his voice when he said, “I couldn’t do this to a Texas woman.”

“What?”

“You’d be all laced up in a corset and there’d be several layers of clothes between your skin and my hands.”

Bay had flushed, but when she’d started to pull away he’d said, “Don’t. I won’t tease you anymore. I can feel how tense you are. Let me help.”

It did feel good. And this wasn’t Texas; it was
Comanchería
. “All right,” she agreed with a sly glance over her shoulder, “but only if you tell me how you learned so much about white women’s clothes.”

“When I was seventeen, I left
Comanchería
and lived for a while among the White-eyes. I went to the white man’s school and learned much about his ways.”

“Standing Tall allowed it?”

From the corner of her eye Bay saw that Long Quiet’s lips had compressed in a straight line. “It was not by my choice that I went, or his either.”

“Oh.” When he didn’t offer any further explanation, she asked, “Where did you go to school?”

“In Boston.”

She grinned in disbelief and turned to face him, breaking contact with his hands. “I went to school there, too!”

“I know.”

“What?”

“I saw you once,” he admitted.

“You did? When? Where?”

“At a cotillion. I even asked you to dance.”

“No! I would have remembered.” She searched his face, trying to imagine how he would have looked without the braids, with his bronzed chest covered by a stiff white linen shirt and silk vest, and with kerseymere trousers covering his long legs. His next words jerked her back to the present.

“You only had eyes for one man that evening.”

“Oh. Jonas.” She said the name sadly, as one would speak of the dead.

“I believe that was his name.”

“Jonas wanted to marry me.”

“And you?”

Bay dropped to her knees and began harvesting pecans again, collecting them on the piece of buckskin that lay nearby. In a moment Long Quiet dropped to his knees to join her. Knowing he was still waiting for an answer, she said, “Yes. I would have married Jonas in Boston, even without my father’s permission, if he hadn’t been called back home to Louisiana by his father’s illness. But it hardly matters anymore, does it?”

When he frowned, she quickly changed the subject. “Tell me, did you try to find your father’s family when you were back east?”

He hesitated, as though he wanted to pursue his own question further, but then answered hers. “Yes, I looked for them.”

“And . . .” she prodded.

“I found them,” he admitted. “My uncle, my father’s younger brother, had inherited the family business.”

“And what was that?”

He grinned. “A rather large New York bank.”

“Oh, my.” Bay looked down at the pecans she’d just spilled on the ground and blushed a bright red. Bay was frustrated by the fact that each time Long Quiet visited her, she became unusually clumsy. She had no explanation for the phenomenon except that whenever he was near, her mind wasn’t completely on what she was doing. Fortunately, Long Quiet never seemed to notice anything amiss.

“What did your uncle say when he saw you?” she asked as they scooped up pecans.

“He offered me my father’s inheritance . . . and a job.”

Bay sat back and wiped the sweat from her brow. “You would have been rich! Why didn’t you take his offer?”

“I didn’t want his money. I always knew I would return to
Comanchería
.”

“How did you know that?”

“It’s the land of my grandfather, my home.”

“What of your father’s home?”

“My father had no home.”

“It would be more accurate to say he had two homes.” She forced him to meet her eyes before she said, “So do you.”

He was silent for a moment, as though unwilling to admit the truth of what she’d said. He picked up two large pecans and, holding them both in one hand, closed his fist, crushing them against one another. When he opened his hand again, the shells had cracked, and he offered the sweet nuts to her.

“A man cannot have two homes. I am Comanche, a True Human Being.”

She hadn’t argued with him, but somehow they’d started comparing the Comanches, who were wanderers, with the whites, who stayed in one place. Long Quiet understood the need of the white man to possess the land, and he understood the need of the Comanche to roam free. But which one was right? Could they ever reconcile their differences?

Bay wasn’t sure Long Quiet recognized the significance of the dilemma he presented. He talked around and around it, never seeming to come to the point. Until she’d realized that coming to the point would have meant making a final choice: Which side should he take?

And she was sure Long Quiet didn’t want to have to make that choice.

Over the past two weeks she’d come to feel like she’d known Long Quiet all her life. She would have called the two of them friends, although she wasn’t sure friends touched quite as much as they did. And he’d claimed her with his touch as surely as he’d claimed the stallion.

The fact they slept beside each other every night brought them even closer, so Bay felt the pain of his indecision as her own. Her heart went out to him, torn as he was between two peoples, bleeding for the wounded on both sides of the battle he foresaw in the future.

It didn’t take much soul-searching to admit that she found in his plight a mirror of her own inner battle—between what Rip wanted her to be and what she felt she could, or ought to, be.

The big difference was that a choice would eventually be forced upon Long Quiet by the inevitable conflict between two peoples; Bay could have gone on indefinitely walking the fine line between what her father desired of her and what she wished to be—if she hadn’t been captured by the Comanches.

Her captivity had curtailed her father’s plans for her life, but it hadn’t really solved her problem, only changed it. She wasn’t any closer now to knowing who Bay Stewart was than she had been three years ago.

Bay rubbed the pony’s nose again, then ran her hand down his sleek neck. All she knew was that she dreaded the thought of a future without Long Quiet.

Long Quiet stood unobserved and watched Bay’s easy familiarity with his pony. Two weeks ago it had been all he could do to get her to approach the animal. Things had changed since then. He’d wooed her in the only way he knew. He’d given as much of himself as she asked. He’d answered her questions. He’d touched her with gentleness. He’d dared to offer help in her woman’s work when he knew his Comanche friends would have scorned him had they but known of it.

The labors of the day had borne their fruit in the darkness. She had sought him out to touch, a little at first, and then more and more, until he’d awoken this morning to find them so tangled it was hard to know where one began and the other ended. He took a deep breath and exhaled. He’d done all he could. The rest was up to her.

“
Hihites
, Shadow.”

Bay jumped as Long Quiet stepped up beside her. He reached out to scratch the pinto’s other ear. “I wish you wouldn’t sneak up on me like that,” she chided.

He grinned. “I didn’t want to give you a chance to run away.”

Bay turned and looked at him. “I wouldn’t have run away.” Her hand stilled on the pony’s ear as their eyes caught and held. It was the pony’s insistent nudge that broke the spell between them. Confused, Bay turned her attention back to the pinto. She scratched its ear once again, then, conscious of Long Quiet’s hand so close to her own, dropped hers and moved away.

“I have something to tell you,” he said.

She stopped and turned back to him.

“Let’s go sit down where it’s cool, so we can talk,” he said, gesturing toward the late-afternoon shade of a nearby rocky butte.

Bay walked a little ahead of him. She settled herself with her back against stone that had barely lost the heat of the day and stretched her legs out in front of her. Long Quiet dropped down beside her, resting his forearms on his knees. His unfocused gaze instinctively searched the prairie for hidden danger in the clumps of spiny mesquite and catclaw shrubs. Fatigue bowed his shoulders and tightened the lines around his eyes and mouth. Bay thought maybe he hadn’t been sleeping well. But then, she hadn’t slept well the past two weeks, either.