Merline Lovelace (19 page)

“I’ve brought your shawl,” she told her daughter. “Let’s walk outside.”

With a last look at the sleeping patient, Suzanne followed her mother along the upstairs hall. Sounds of boyish laughter came from behind one door, low murmurs from another. They were all here, crowded but comfortably housed by the accommodating McCormacks.

All except Matt and Ying Li. Colonel McCormack had found the couple temporary shelter with the widow of a trooper in the tent city outside the fort. There, Suzanne had learned, rumors were already starting to circulate about Ying Li’s previous occupation.

Rumors Julia had heard as well. That became evident soon after she and her daughter listened in companionable silence to the bugles announcing first call for evening retreat. Both women took comfort in the familiar notes, which they’d heard so many times at so many different posts over the years.

“I’m afraid Matt and Ying Li face some difficult times ahead,” Julia commented when the bugle’s call had faded away.

“I’m afraid so, too.”

“He seems an honest, hard-working young man.”

“He is. He’ll honor his debts. So will I,” Suzanne added, thinking of the trail of promissory
notes she’d strung along the Cheyenne-to-Deadwood road.

Her mother hesitated, then probed gently. “Is that what you feel for Mr. Sloan? An obligation you must repay?”

“No! At least…”

Suzanne drew in a slow, fluttering breath. She’d had plenty of time to dissect her feelings for Jack during the long, desperate hours by his bedside, many opportunities to relive their brief time together. She knew so little about his past, only the tales spun about him by the penny presses and the sparse, horrific details he’d shared with her about his parents’ deaths.

Not that she needed to know more. He called to something in her no one else had ever touched. Something deeply, wildly, gloriously female.

“I suppose I do feel some measure of obligation,” she admitted. “I certainly imposed my wishes on him from the moment we were left stranded in the road. To aid Matt and me, Jack changed his plans. Not very graciously, but he did change them.”

“From what you’ve told us, you left the man little choice in the matter.”

“It was the oddest sensation, Mama. As if I knew deep inside that I couldn’t let him ride away. The feeling grew stronger each hour we were to
gether. I wouldn’t have given myself to him otherwise.”

Behind her calm facade, Julia’s heart pinched. Suzanne had told her what had happened between her and Sloan, but repetition didn’t make the hearing easier. Her baby, her child, the dainty, delightful daughter who’d been the center of her life for so many years, had all but seduced a hard-eyed stranger. A gunfighter, no less.

And he’d let her, the bastard!

Just the thought roused the passion of Julia’s Creole heritage. Swift, hot rage coursed through her, made all the more potent because she couldn’t give it vent. She’d learned long ago that recriminations would change nothing when it came to dealing with her strong-willed daughter.

Although usually polite and well-behaved, Suzanne had earned her share of scolds. In each instance, she would look up at her mother with the most sincere regret in her brown eyes and apologize prettily for having worried or annoyed or angered her. In a small, solemn voice she’d promise to
try
to be good, but both mother and child knew the vast distance between trying and actually doing.

For that reason, Julia had gone against the urgings of her own heart and sent her daughter back East for schooling. Suzanne needed to appreciate the dictates of polite society as well as the army
rules and regulations governing all aspects of life at frontier posts. Not that those two years in Philadelphia appeared to have altered her daughter’s basic disposition.

Nor, Julia admitted wryly, had she really expected it to. Only two weeks home and Suzanne had insisted on taking the stage to Deadwood. In the course of her short journey, she’d managed to become entangled in the lives of an overgrown farm boy, a Chinese saloon girl and a shootist, not to mention a band of scruffy road agents.

Now here they all were, descended on Fort Meade like a flock of long-necked, nip-tempered geese. How long they would stay was anyone’s guess, although Andrew would have to depart soon to deliver his prisoners and resume his duties at Fort Russell.

Thinking of her husband, Julia smothered a sigh. Andrew’s jaw had clamped shut when Suzanne revealed what had happened between her and Sloan, and had yet to unclamp. It would be a miracle if he didn’t carve out Sloan’s liver before he rode south. He, or Lieutenant Carruthers.

How like Suzanne to lose her heart to a man like Jack Sloan instead of Richard Carruthers! The handsome young cavalry officer would have made a perfect husband for a girl who could recite the rhyming rules of horsemanship before she’d learned her ABCs. In the two short weeks since
Suzanne’s return from Philadelphia, the lieutenant had been smitten. His ardor had cooled in the past few days, but it was still there, carefully banked.

Why was it that the heart rarely followed where the mind led? If Julia had wanted proof of that inescapable fact, she needed only to look to her own tumultuous past. Suddenly, she felt every one of her thirty-four years.

“You say you couldn’t let Sloan walk away,” she said to her daughter. “Are you so sure you can hold him even after all you’ve been through together?”

“No, Mama.” Clutching her shawl, Suzanne met her mother’s troubled gaze. “I’m not sure at all.”

“Then perhaps you shouldn’t try.”

“I
will leave Fort Meade today.”

Bright Water made the announcement in the kitchen, where the McCormacks and their guests had congregated for breakfast. It was a noisy gathering, with the children giggling and squabbling at their end of the scrubbed oak table, the men discussing Colonel Garrett’s departure later that morning and the women dishing up bowls of honey-sweetened mush. Bright Water’s calm pronouncement cut through two of the three lively conversations.

Dismay clouded Suzanne’s face. Setting a bowl of mush on a wooden tray, she swiped her hands on the towel wrapped around her waist.

“It is time,” her friend said firmly, preempting all arguments. “I will leave when the colonel does, so I may ride with his troop until we find my people’s trail.”

“You’ll ride with me until we find your
people,
” Andrew Garrett corrected her. “Lieutenant Carruthers and his men can escort the prisoners south while we make a slight detour.”

“More than slight, I think. The band will have traveled many miles now.”

“We’ll catch them.”

A smile fluttered in Bright Water’s heart. He was a good man, this stern-faced long knife. He’d held the respect of her mother’s uncle, Chief Spotted Tail, and had risked his career to help her father avenge Walks in Moonlight’s brutal death. Despite the sorrows he’d endured during the war the whites had fought with each other so many years ago, he’d found peace in the vast, untamed land of the Sioux and Arapaho. And great joy since he’d taken Suzanne’s mother to his bed.

Bright Water could only hope that Suzanne would find the same joy with the man she’d taken into her heart…and her bed. That her friend would yield the precious gift of her maidenhood to such a one as Jack Sloan didn’t surprise Bright Water. Suzanne would ever reach out and snatch at what others might walk away from.

Just to look at her now, her lips pressed tight, her eyes stubborn, softened the smile in Bright Water’s heart.

“Do not frown so,” she said. “We do not lose
each other, Suzanne. We merely walk different paths.”

“But this one takes you so far away!”

From the children’s end of the table, Sam piped up. “Didn’t you study your maps at that fancy school you went to? Wind River’s a lot closer than Philadelphia.”

“I don’t recall asking your opinion in the matter,” his sister snapped. Unfazed, the boy dug his spoon into the sweet, steaming mush.

“It would be best if we all left today,” the colonel said. “I don’t like leaving you and Sam and your mother here, Suzanne. We’ve burdened our host and hostess enough.”

“You mustn’t think such delightful company could ever be a burden,” Mrs. McCormack hastened to assure him. “We hardly know Suzanne’s here, she’s spent so much time caring for her…Ah, her…”

“Her patient,” Julia finished calmly, ignoring the red that crept into the woman’s cheeks. She couldn’t, however, ignore the way her husband’s eyes narrowed. The mere mention of the gunman in the colonel’s presence was enough to kill all conversation on the spot.

As it did now. An ominous silence fell, broken after an awkward moment by the scrape of Andrew’s chair. Pushing to his feet, he nodded to the tray.

“Is that for Sloan?”

“Yes.” Suzanne eyed him cautiously. “I was just getting ready to carry it upstairs.”

“I’ll take it.”

“He’s weak as a spring lamb, Colonel.”

“I’ll take it.”

She threw an agonized look at her mother. Julia shook her head. Both women knew the confrontation had to come sooner or later, but Suzanne had hoped for later. Much later. When Jack could at least defend himself.

Chewing on her lower lip, she surrendered the tray.

When the door behind him opened, Jack had one arm hooked around the bedpost and one leg in his pants. Bright pinpricks of light danced before his eyes. Fire streaked down his leg. The mere effort of rolling to the edge of the mattress, grabbing hold of the post and hauling himself out of bed had drenched his nightshirt in sweat.

Damn fool inventions, nightshirts, he thought irritably while he waited for the room to stop spinning. The shirttails flapped about his knees. Cold air speared up under the hem and raised goose bumps on his butt. He didn’t know where his long johns were and wouldn’t have the strength to fetch them if he did. Just crawling into his pants made his chest hurt like a son of a bitch.

The sound of the door opening brought his head up. Clenching his teeth against the pain that speared into his lung, he studied the man filling the door frame.

So this was Garrett. Cold-eyed, stiff-spined and more intimidating than Jack would admit in his blue uniform with its gold-braided epaulets and brass buttons. Beneath all the braid and brass, he showed the weathered skin of an experienced plainsman…and the friendliness of a Comanche all set to lift a scalp.

“Going somewhere, Sloan?”

Cursing silently at being caught bare-assed, Jack hung on to the bedpost, shoved his other leg into his pants and dragged them up. Sweat stung his eyes by the time he got the tails tucked in.

“Suzanne said you’re taking your prisoners south today. I have a little business with Parrott before you go.”

“What kind of business?”

“He took something that belongs to me.”

The cavalry officer moved into the room and deposited the tray on the bed. Beside a napkin-covered plate lay a long-barreled pistol.

“This what you’re talking about?”

Relief shimmied down Jack’s spine. He’d felt naked without the Colt, lost, like a man with no name, no past.

“That’s it.”

“I heard your father carried that gun in the War Between the States.”

Jack lifted his gaze. Gray eyes met blue, held.

“Suzanne tell you that?”

“Among other things.”

The hair on the back of his neck prickled. He’d been anticipating this interview since he’d regained his senses yesterday. So, apparently, had Garrett. His voice low and dangerous, the officer made his feelings plain.

“The bullets you took trying to save Suzanne are the only reason I don’t skin you whole.” He let that sink in before adding, “I might do it yet, if you’ve got any fool notions of marrying my stepdaughter floating around in your head.”

A muscle flexed in the side of Jack’s jaw. He knew damned well he wasn’t fit husband material. He didn’t need this starched-up horse soldier driving the point home with all the finesse of a dull-edged sword.

“I’m not a man to run from his responsibilities, but I’m letting you know straight out that I don’t look to make Suzanne a widow before she’s a wife.”

“Good. I suggest you tell her that.”

“I have.”

“Tell her again.”

“I will, but in case you haven’t noticed, she doesn’t listen real well.”

Garrett didn’t bother to answer. Turning on his heel, he marched to the door.

Suzanne was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “Did you leave him in one piece?”

“I did. This time.”

Making no effort to disguise her relief, she hooked her arm in his and dragged him into the parlor.

“Tell me what you said to him.”

She drew him to the horsehair sofa and perched beside him. Andrew stretched out his leg, stiff from old war wounds.

“I told him he’d better not think about laying another hand on you. Not if he wanted to keep it attached to the rest of his arm.”

“Indeed? And what, may I ask, did he say?”

“He agreed as how it was best all around for you both to go your separate ways.”

“I see.” Her toe tapped the carpet. “Have you thought about the possibility I may be breeding?”

Andrew winced. “I’ve thought about it. So has Sloan, judging from our conversation a few minutes ago. He claims he won’t walk away from his responsibilities, but…”

Anger built, hot and swift. Jack wasn’t going to walk away at all. Not if Suzanne had any say in the matter.

“But?” she echoed dangerously.

“Do you want your child to carry the name of a killer, poppet?”

As fast as it had built, the steam went out of Suzanne. “Oh, Colonel, he isn’t the man the penny presses have painted him. I couldn’t…I couldn’t ache for him so if he was.”

Andrew looked down into her brown eyes and felt a knife twist in his gut. He’d held this girl’s small, cholera-ravaged body in his arms, lifted her onto her first pony, taught her how to handle a Sharps carbine with the same deadly accuracy as her derringer. He’d walk through fire for her, and the idea that she’d given herself to a man like Black Jack Sloan punched a hole right through his heart.

“I’m not saying Sloan didn’t have good cause to strap on that Colt,” he conceded, “but he’s a shootist by choice and by profession.”

They’d had this discussion several times in recent days. Suzanne argued Sloan’s cause as fiercely now as she had each time before.

“If it’s by choice as you say, Jack can choose another profession after he settles matters with Charlie Dawes.”

“It doesn’t work that way. A man like Sloan doesn’t just put his reputation on the shelf and forget about it, even if it’s more legend than fact. You saw what happened to Bill Hickok.”

She bit her lip. Like Black Jack Sloan, Wild Bill
Hickok had been a favorite of the Eastern press. Was still a favorite, two years after his death. The frontier dandy had scouted with Custer, served as sheriff of Ellis County and toured with Bill Cody’s Wild West Circus. Suzanne had met the flamboyant frontiersman any number of times when Andrew was posted to Fort Riley, Kansas, and Hickok served as marshal of Abilene. She’d been in Philadelphia when papers across the country had trumpeted the news that he’d been shot in the back of the head while sitting at a poker table, holding pairs of aces and eights. Already folks were calling it the Dead Man’s Hand.

“Hickok turned in his badge and went up to Deadwood to try his hand at gold prospecting,” Andrew reminded her. “But his reputation with a gun so worried the swindlers who preyed on the miners that they hired McCall to gun him down.”

“I know that.”

She met his gaze head-on, her chin set in a way he recognized all too well.

“I also know that you risk taking a bullet or an arrow or a spear every time you lead out a column of troops. Violence is as much a part of your life as it is Jack’s. You can’t get away from it, any more than he can.”

She had him there. Andrew was a soldier to his bones, West Point educated, bloodied by war, survivor of the hell called Andersonville. He knew
that men had battered one another with rocks and clubs long before they learned to forge steel into swords or mix gunpowder.

His years on the frontier had reinforced that brutal but fundamental truth. In a land as vast and untamed as this, soldiers and civilians alike packed iron. A good number had dropped a man. Like Sloan…and Andrew himself.

He wasn’t ready to surrender the field to Suzanne yet, however.

“You say you ache for Sloan. From what I can see, I’d say he’s got the same ache. But physical want isn’t enough to change what he is or bridge the differences between you.”

“It certainly seems to have done the trick for Matt and Ying Li.”

“You can hardly cite that pair as an example.”

“No? Then how about you and Mama?” A gleam slid into her eyes. “I seem to recall her telling me that it was plain, unvarnished lust that drew the belle of New Orleans to a Yankee spy.”

“I’ll have no impertinence from you, miss.”

Her hand whipped up in a smart salute. “No, sir!”

Much as it pained Andrew to dim the sparkle in her eyes, he’d never been less than truthful with her. “Sloan’s plans for the future don’t include you, poppet.”

“Well, I’m glad you two settled that matter to
your satisfaction. I hope you understand it hasn’t been settled to mine.”

Which is what Suzanne intended to inform Jack after she left the colonel to prepare for his journey and made her way upstairs. Her intentions took a sharp turn, however, when she rapped on the door and entered a moment later to find him sitting on the bed, white-faced and bare-chested. He was struggling to get an arm into the shirt he’d asked Suzanne to purchase for him at the sutler’s store, along with new long johns and a wool jacket to replace his bloodied leather vest.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“What does it look like?”

The bad-tempered snarl reassured her as nothing else could have. If he’d regained enough strength to sit up and snipe at her, he wouldn’t, he
couldn’t,
succumb to his wounds.

Clucking, she helped him pull on his shirt but refused to fetch his boots from downstairs, where she’d taken them for cleaning.

“You don’t need them,” she said sternly. “You’re not leaving this room.”

“The hell I’m not.”

“Do try to exercise a grain or two of common sense, Jack. You’ve been flat on your back for almost a week. You haven’t eaten anything but the
little we could force down your throat. You take one step and you’ll fall flat on your face.”

“Then I fall flat on my face.”

He wrapped a fist around the bedpost and strained to haul himself up.

“Oh, for pity’s sake! Here, lean on me.”

The moment her arm slid around him, the gentle, nurturing instincts Suzanne had nursed for the past week fled. Her hand skimmed over the bandages, the hard ribs, the taut skin. Just the feel of him against her scattered the ashes of the fear that had haunted her night and day and filled her blood with a wild, sweet singing.

This was what she’d tried to explain to the colonel, to her mother, to Bright Water. This instant, all-consuming fire was what tied her to Jack. Would always tie her to Jack.

Even when he insisted on pushing her away.

“I want you to ride out with your stepfather this afternoon,” he said gruffly. “Go back to Cheyenne with him and your mother.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’m on my feet. You don’t have to hang around and nurse me.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she repeated. “Not yet.”

“I know I owe you. You and your mother and Bright Water. But…”

“You’re wasting your breath with these argu
ments, and from the way it’s rattling around in your chest, you haven’t much to spare.”