No Other Man (4 page)

"It's all right, my dear. Truly. You needn't be embarrassed."

He wasn't kissing her anymore. He was staring down at her,
still looking amused while she desperately dragged in breath.

"Dammit!" she cried out.

"Sweet Jesu, I am sorry!" the older man protested.
"Oh, ma'am, so sorry. Hawk, we'd no idea you had the company of a woman
friend—"

The Indian interrupted, eloquent to a truly staggering degree.

"Captain, all apologies accepted. I should truly be embarrassed
that I did not hear your arrival."

"Damn you all, wait!" Skylar lashed out again
furiously.

"My dear! My dear! Don't you think these poor men are
suffering enough as it is? I should have heard them—"

"That's what worried us," the older man said.
"Why, Hawk, you can usually hear a pony snort a mile away."

"Ah, but then, I have been quite occupied, I
admit," Hawk said.

The captain laughed. "The Sioux men may be darned right
in their attitudes toward women, Hawk. Those boys know that being too close to
a lady can cloud the mind and steal the senses!"

"Indeed, I'm
humiliated."

"Hell, it proves you're human."

"Human!" Skylar managed to get in.

"Why
thank you, Captain," the Indian stated, another shift of his weight making
her gasp for breath again. "Perhaps I do have a respectable excuse. This
is Lady Douglas, Captain."

All the
while that he spoke, he stared down at her, still seeming to laugh down at her.

"Lady
Douglas!" the captain said, gaping suddenly. "I didn't know
that—"

"Yes!"
Skylar managed to assert. They weren't going to get the better of her this
time; she was going to make them understand. A feeling of triumph rising within
her, she stared at the Indian with victorious eyes as she cried out, "Yes!
Yes, damn you all, I am Lady Douglas." It was about time! She was going to
make these men realize that she was desperate to be rescued, make them realize
the situation. "Yes, my name is Skylar Douglas. Please, I—"

"Oh,
ma'am, we just didn't know, hadn't heard.. . Please, please forgive us! Hawk,
it's a matter of some importance, but I can find you within the next few days.
I am sorry. We're leaving."

"Quite
all right, my friend. Apology accepted. Of course, we would like to be alone
again...."

The
older cavalry officer pulled the younger man out, slamming the door hard.

"No!"
Skylar shrieked. "No!
We
wouldn't like
to be alone! No! Wait!" She slammed her fists against the Indian and tried
to kick, jab.

Bite.

She got
her teeth into his shoulder. He didn't blink an eye, but again, his fingers
came threading into her hair. Pulling.

"Don't bite!" he warned icily.

"Then let me up!"

To her
astonishment, he moved aside. She leaped from the bed, heedless that the robe
barely covered her. She raced after the soldiers.

She
threw herself against the door, fumbling then to find the latch to draw it
open. "Wait! Wait!" she cried out. "Please, you're not listening
to me. Won't anybody help me! My God, I swear to you that I am Lady Douglas.
Please—" She finished the plea with a shriek because she suddenly found
herself wrenched back into the room, away from the door, by the
English-speaking redskin they'd called Hawk.

Spun
around, she stared into his eyes again. She looked down. His long bronze
fingers held her wrist.

No.

The cavalry had come.

Help had been here!

"Help"
had watched her on the bed with this man.. .

She
looked wildly back to the door. "You have to let me by! They have to help
me. They're the cavalry. You're an Indian. My God, what's going on with them?
The entire world has gone insane!" She tried to shake free from his hold.
She could not do so. She slammed her fists against his chest, half laughing,
half crying. "Let me go! I've got to get to them; I've got to make them
understand . .."

She
broke off, hearing the hoofbeats of the men's horses fading away.

The cavalry had come.

And gone.

"Let me go. Please, let me go!"

"For what?"

"So I can get them to help me!"

He
released her, crossing his arms over his chest as he spoke to her next.

"They're not going to help you."

"They
will.when they know what's really happening. That you've abducted me,
half—half—raped me! They'll save me from you—"

"They're
not going to help you and they're not going to save you from
me,
even if you are Lady Douglas.
Especially
if you are Lady Douglas."

She
inhaled deeply, her spine suddenly very straight and stiff. "Why not, damn
you?" she demanded. "Why won't they help me?"

He
caught her upper arms, pulling her back close to him. /\nd his eyes glittered
now with both amusement and fury.

'
'Because, my lovely little gold digger, Andrew Douglas is not dead. I am Lord
Andrew Douglas. Your dearly beloved husband."

"You're
a liar! Lord Douglas is dead. And you can't be
Lord
anyone! You're an—an—"

"Indian?" he suggested.

"Yes! A savage, painted
IndianV'

' 'That
I am. But I do assure you, I am also Lord Douglas."

She stared into his eyes.

Green eyes.

Oh, God, yes. They were familiar.

"Damn you, know it! I am Lord Douglas!"

Green
eyes. Eyes very similiar to a pair she had seen before. Set into an older face.

Green
eyes.

They faded to black.

Three

w
ho
the hell was she?

Staring
at her, Andrew Douglas, called Hawk by both his Sioux kin and white friends,
shook his head. She'd put up a hell of a fight—until his last words had struck
home with her.

Then
she'd passed out cold. Good thing. Now she lay against the bear-fur cover on
the bed, a creature of ethereal—and, thank God, silent—beauty.

Deadly
beauty, so it seemed, he thought bitterly. He still didn't understand the
particulars, but it seemed apparent that his father had met this woman. She had
coerced a marriage and had assumed she was marrying his father.

What had gone on?

And
what truth could he ever really know? His father was dead.

She
was going to tell him. Exactly what had
happened to her.

It was
difficult to keep his hands off her. He longed to shake her until he got the
truth out of her.

But he
managed to keep his distance and tried very hard to be analytical—something he
had gotten fairly good at over the years, being a man split between two vastly
dif-

ferent cultures. His years at West Point hadn't hurt the development
of his analytical abilities either.

So again. Who in God's name was she? Where had she come from?

Any feelings of tenderness that might have been touched in
him by her beauty were stilled by the painful reminder that David, the late
Lord Douglas, was dead.

Hawk had received word from Henry Pierpont, his father's
beleaguered but ever-proper attorney, who had been informed by the president of
their Maryland bank that David had died of apparent heart failure in Baltimore
just two weeks ago. Henry hadn't mentioned anything then about a bride—for
either his father or himself. It appeared that this woman did believe she was
married to—or widowed by— his father. Yet she had said the name
Andrew.
His own.

Just what exactly had gone on between this absurdly young
woman and his aging father? He couldn't begin to fathom it. David had always
been dignified to the extreme, a proud man, a wise one. He had deeply loved
only two women in his life; he had married them both. He had been in reasonably
good health when he had traveled east, in full control of all his faculties.

Then how...

The woman who lay before him must have been incredibly
persuasive. And yet, though she seemed convinced that she was the widow of Lord
Douglas, she apparently knew nothing about her late husband's life—or her late
husband himself, for that matter. She hadn't even known that his name had been
David, not Andrew.

All she'd needed to know, he figured, was that his father was
titled with a British peerage and had obtained a land grant in the Black Hills,
in one of the few areas not considered
Sa Papa,
or Holy Land, by the Sioux, where he had also discovered gold.

Again, he longed to shake her. How could anyone appear so
fragile and innocent, yet fight like a cougar and have the instincts of an
alley cat! She lay there, still silent, her breath barely causing a slow but
constant rise and fall of her breasts.

She would come around all right. He rubbed his chin, feeling
his irritation grow along with an unbidden rise of desire within him. His robe
was not adequate cover for her. Whatever had he been thinking to strip away her
clothing and dunk her in the tub? It had been her insistence that she needed to
bathe that had triggered his action. And perhaps he'd been goaded by her greed,
which was so great that it had apparently led her into what was still—despite
the ever-encroaching army and the wave of white emigrants— basically Sioux
country where few men dared to tread. She'd come here, so she'd deserved to
discover the perils that awaited the unwary. Whites were often waylaid, robbed,
raped, abducted, murdered—scalped.

And he hadn't taken it so far as to scalp her.

Yet.

All right. He wasn't going to scalp her.

Yet no matter what his fury regarding his father, she
disturbed him, and he suddenly wished that he'd confronted her in a white man's
court of law. Once he'd seen her, however, at Riley's, where he'd been with his
cousins while her stagecoach was being repaired, his temper had taken control.
There she'd been, claiming to be Lady Douglas, when he'd never seen her before,
heard of her—or even imagined that a Lady Douglas could possibly exist. He'd
been so damned determined to torment such an impostor, show her the dangers of
the deceitful charade she played, force the truth from her. It seemed somewhat
ironic now. Had he been so convinced that he could certainly not fall for the
wiles of such a fortune hunter himself?

Wiles be damned. She was simply a well-built female, and the
robe was falling open, allowing him far more of a view of her breasts than he
wanted. His own fault, however ...

He'd have to be dead not to be attracted to her himself.

He drew part of the robe over her breast. It fell back.
Something within him quickened, and he muttered a sound of self-disgust,
walking from the bedside to find the shreds of the black mourning dress she had
been wearing. He searched the skirt for pockets and found one. It contained
several gold coins, a small mirror, and a brush. He tossed those items
impatiently at the foot of the bed, then searched the skirt again. In another
pocket, he found what he sought.

Papers.

He drew them out, studying them with a fierce frown.

She carried a marriage license. It appeared to be a proper
and fully legal document stating that Skylar Connor had been wed, by proxy, to
Lord Andrew Douglas by the Right Honorable Magistrate Timothy Carone in
Baltimore a little more than two weeks ago.

The exact date of his father's death.

He stared at the marriage license in his hand and then at the
appendix behind it. His own signature was scrawled upon it. He frowned, reading
further. The appendix was a proxy agreement. He didn't remember signing the
paper— didn't even remember seeing it before—but it was indisputably his
signature upon the paper.

But then he had been so impatient and irritable right before
his father had started on his journey back east. When something pertained to
the Scottish estates or Maryland property, Hawk had told David he must do as he
saw fit because the property was his own. He was aware that his lather had put
many of his holdings into their joint ownership, determined there would never
be any doubt that his Sioux son was now his legal heir. It was quite ironic.
One i>l the first things his father had ever taught him was to read every
word of a written contract.

He never read through a paper when his father asked for his
signature. He'd still considered his father's property to
Ik
-
just that and had thought that David should manage it is he saw fit.

Too late, he realized now that such an attitude had actually
been selfish on his part. He had cared when it came to the Black Hills or their
home here on the Western frontier,

But he had not been able to see beyond the Black Hills and
the surrounding countryside because the situation here had been growing more
and more tense since the end of the war.

So did this mean that the wily vixen on the bed was indeed
Lady Douglas? Had he—taken a wife?

Could it be legal?

He groaned softly. Lately his father had been urging him to
marry again. Insisting he needed a wife. A
white
wife. Hawk had had long, passionate discussions with his father regarding the
future of the red man in the West, but indisputably, no matter how
passionately he had argued against his father's statements, he'd known they
would eventually prove true—as true as the endless tide of white settlers and
army who continued to come west in wave after land- hungry wave. David had not been
without some influence in Washington, and even before his most recent trip, he
had wearily assured his son that in the end the government would not honor any
treaty. Whatever lands the Indians were given, the whites would take back.
Americans considered it their "Manifest Destiny" to move from
"sea to shining sea," to occupy the whole of the North American
continent. If they could, they'd push back the Mexicans and the British in
Canada. That might be difficult to do in light of world opinion. But to exterminate
Indians... red men...