Whitefeather's Woman (11 page)

A weighty sigh billowed out of John. It reminded Jane of a distant breaking wave.

“Still do by times.” His voice sounded hushed and weary.

Another question occurred to Jane. She wondered if she dared ask it.

“Is this the first time you've brought someone else here with you?” How she wished his answer was not so important to her.

“Yeah, I suppose it is.” He sounded as surprised as she felt.

Jane took a step closer and slipped her hand into his. “Thank you, John.”

She wasn't certain which gift was more precious to her—the fact that he'd brought her here, or the fact that he'd never brought anyone else.

 

If he'd ever guessed that sharing his special place with another person would heighten his own enjoyment of it, John might have brought someone with him long ago. But he was glad he'd waited until now.

Until Jane.

John doubted anyone born and bred under the Big Sky could adequately prize the natural grandeur of this spot. And that included him.

Perhaps being an outsider had its advantages, after all.

Today, John saw his special place through Jane's fresh eyes. Supped deeply from the shared cup of her newfound delight. And got dead drunk with simple happiness.

They let the horses wander to graze while they sat on the crest of the hill and helped themselves to the contents of Ruth's basket. Stuffing slices of cold meat and cheese into bread rolls for improvised sandwiches, John and Jane washed them down with a single shared bottle of sarsaparilla.

They talked about the party, Jane coaxing John to tell her more colorful stories about the Kincaids. Afterward they nibbled on Mrs. Dillard's justly famous cherry turnovers.

“Would you mind very much if we postponed teaching
me to shoot until another day?” Jane brushed the crumbs of pastry from her skirt.

“I guess not. Why?”

“This may sound silly to you, but it seems to me as though gunfire would be sort of an…abomination out here. You know—like screaming cuss words at the top of your lungs inside some great cathedral.”

“I don't reckon that's silly at all.” John stared off toward the Crazy Mountains. “Anyplace this beautiful has to be a little bit sacred. I know I feel the Great Spirit here, more than I do anywhere else. And there is something blasphemous about the sound of gunfire.”

Jane seemed to read his unspoken thoughts. “How long have you been coming here?”

He sensed her gaze upon him, but he could not turn and meet it. Surely it was enough that he answer her question. “Since I was a boy. Not long after my family was killed. I reckon I found peace here.”

“I think I have, too,” whispered Jane.

Was it being in this place that made it less painful for him to speak of his family? John wondered. Or did it just get a little easier every time? Like a tainted wound painfully pierced, the poison could now seep out.

What canker gnawed at Jane's soul? If he pushed to find out, John feared he might push her away forever. Yet if he failed to purge the poison, any changes he prompted in Jane would have no more substance than an early morning mist. They would burn away as soon as the harsh sun beat down on them.

“What do you say we wander down to the creek?” He nodded in its direction. “We can give the horses a drink and wash Mrs. Dillard's cherry filling off our fingers.”

Jane broke off a cluster of pink sand verbena and inhaled
the perfume of its tiny flowerlets. “That sounds like a fine idea.”

After leading their horses down to the creek, they shed their boots and bathed their feet in the cold, clear water. John tried to teach Jane to skip smooth, flattened stones across the surface, but she preferred to toss fat round ones in a high arc and laugh at the wet plop they made when they hit.

John found himself laughing, too. There was something contagiously ticklish about the sound.

By and by, they ambled back up to the crest of the hill and sat listening to a concert of meadowlarks.

“Don't they have a beautiful song?” Jane sighed.

“Ha!” John's laughter burst out of him. “The Cheyenne say meadowlarks mock people with their song. ‘Boogeyman, big nose!'”

Jane grinned. “I suppose it does sound a bit cheeky.”

“Look. Red-tailed hawks.” John pointed up with one hand, while the other rested on the grass between him and Jane, inviting her touch.

They watched a pair of the great birds soar in big, easy arcs across the wide tracts of western sky. When John felt the cool, smooth touch of Jane's hand on his, he did not look down at first. In case he had only imagined it.

Her hand grew warmer as it rested against his, until he could deny the sensation no longer. An odd lightness swelled in his chest—fulfillment like the kind he felt whenever a wild maverick gave him its trust. No question, he had made great strides today in the gentling of Jane. Ruth would be pleased.

John couldn't quite decide if he was.

Perhaps the combination of their breathtaking surroundings and his progress in winning Jane's confidence were enough to account for the way he felt. Yet when John
remembered that he was only readying her for another man, he tasted a worm in his golden apple where none should be.

Much as he enjoyed her company, she was not the woman for him any more than he was the man for her. Maybe if fewer responsibilities had weighed on him, he could have tried to become the kind of fellow she needed—settled, civilized, a pillar of the white community. He did have responsibilities, though. Here, of all places, he must not forget them.

He might have shaken off her timid touch and stalked away. Only he couldn't bear to spoil the progress he'd made with her.

“We should be getting back.”

That broke the spell, but not too harshly.

Jane stirred, but her hand didn't budge. “I suppose we have to sometime.”

Though he tried not to, John found himself savoring the reluctance in her voice. She wanted to stay here, with him, far away from the world. Even at the risk of night closing in around them.

Beads of sweat, as cold as the water of a high meadow creek, broke on his brow. He had to get Jane ready to spread her wings and fly away with someone else before he started entertaining even more foolish fancies about the two of them. And he had to remind himself why they had no future together.

“If you'd like some more practice riding, I'm heading out to Sweetgrass for a little visit the day after tomorrow. Care to join me?”

“Sweetgrass—my, that sounds beautiful. Your Cheyenne family live there, don't they?”

John almost choked on a swallowed laugh. He'd see how beautiful Jane found the place if the women were dressing
a buffalo carcass or scraping hides. He hoped they would be. Jane's aversion to the Cheyenne way of life might prove a strong antidote to the unwelcome feelings she roused in him.

In the meantime, he'd promised Ruth he would prepare Jane for another man's courting, and he would keep his promise. No matter how much he enjoyed it.

He looked down at their hands. Hers like flawless carved ivory. His like supple, well-tanned moosehide.

“Before we go, I reckon only one thing could make this day better.”

“What might that be?” A slight hitch in her breath betrayed Jane's uncertainty, but her hand did not waver from his.

“If you let me kiss you.” Damn! He hadn't meant to say that. He was only going to ask her to walk around the meadow with him one more time. The word
kiss
had dropped out of his mouth somehow, and he couldn't bring himself to recall it.

“I…don't think I could do that.” Her voice trembled.

Disappointment slammed into John, a treacherous sneak attack by his heart on his reason. It counted big coup.

Then Jane's dainty little tongue flickered out, pink as the verbena flowers, and made a rapid circle of her lips. Like a skittish mare ready to try what John was asking of her.

Maybe she just needed a different approach.

“How about if I hold still and let you kiss me?” When good sense tried to assert its authority over him, passion bound and gagged it.

After a long, breathless pause that stretched his patience almost to the breaking point, Jane whispered, “I think I could manage that, if you promise to close your eyes and not move a muscle.”

Joy showered over him like a mountain waterfall. His heart sang as if he had won some rare honor.

“You have my word.”

John closed his eyes, wishing she hadn't made that a condition. He wanted to watch her approach.

Angling his head, he parted his lips just a little. If Jane was willing to try this, he wanted to make it easy for her. And for himself? His thoughts didn't dare venture too far in that direction.

Skirts and underclothes rustled as Jane gathered her courage for the attempt. Her hand parted from his with the merest suggestion of a squeeze.

Where her skin had rested against his, the late spring breeze now drifted over it, chilling him. Was that how his life would feel when she'd gone off to marry some respectable Whitehorn businessman? Colder for having experienced the warmth of her company?

She gave him no time to dwell on that disturbing thought, much to his surprise. He'd expected her to dither, approach, then retreat before finally making contact—if she did at all.

The sudden whisper of her breath on his face and the delicate pressure of her lips against his left John scrambling to rally his composure. He kept his promise to remain still, but it was a near thing.

Her hands found their way to either side of his face, their smoothness so provocative against the bristle of shaved whiskers on the crisp lines of his jaw. Her lips parted slightly and moved against his in a timid invitation. John prayed that his promise to stay still didn't extend to his mouth.

He let the tip of his tongue drift lazily out and glide over her lower lip. She froze for an instant, and John heard a subtle catch in her breath, but she did not back away. If
anything, her grip on his face grew firmer and their kiss deepened. John tasted the tang of sarsaparilla, mingled with the ripe sweetness of cherry preserves and the subtle flavor of Jane.

Though he had kissed a number of women over the years, receiving one like this was completely new in his experience. As new and wondrous as this foothills meadow had been to her.

His other senses sharpened and his spirit rose to soar with the red-tailed hawks. His hands ached to touch Jane. His body ached to become one with hers. Pleasure whetted a keen edge on that pang of desire.

One of Jane's hands crept higher and higher up the side of his face, grazing his ear before plunging into his hair. A sound rose unbidden in John's throat. Deep, soft and feral, it mingled a cougar's rich purr with a wolf's menacing growl. He was one with all the male creatures of the Big Sky—the stag, the pronghorn ram, the mighty buffalo bull scenting a desirable mate.

Without warning, Jane jerked away from him. Later John would understand that his growl of arousal had spooked her—like a doe sensing the approach of a predator. At that instant he only felt the unpleasant shock of his body slamming into icy water from a great height.

Promises and control fell before a surging stampede of passion.

He groped for Jane, capturing her in a powerful, insistent embrace. His lips sought hers, true as an arrow from the bow of a skilled hunter. One hand closed around the sweet curve of her hip, the other tore away her bonnet and liberated her hair from its prison of pins.

As those honeyed brown waves rippled through his fingers, he moaned with delight. He had never touched anything to match the texture of Jane's hair. Soft as brushed
fleece, but smooth and luxurious as a mink pelt at the end of a cold winter.

Intent on sating his senses with the woman in his arms, John did not immediately notice her struggle. Her hands fluttered against his shoulders in the mildest of token protests. Only when he surrendered her lips for the conquest of her tempting ivory neck did she gasp out his name and two words.

“Please. No.” They sounded more like wavering reluctance than true resistance.

For a moment his Cheyenne ears refused to make sense of the English words, just as they strained to hear Jane sigh his true name in the language of his father's people.

In the end, no harsh moral teachings from the residential school made John Whitefeather rein in his renegade desire. For he had seen again and again how the teachings of the white men often differed sharply from their practice. The deeply held honor code of the Cheyenne did not allow for such hypocrisy. A man who forced his attentions on a woman brought untold shame upon himself.

John thrust the woman away with greater force than he had clutched her to him. “I'm sorry, Jane! That was wrong.”

He couldn't bring himself to meet her eyes, for fear of what he would see reflected there. He would not look at her at all, in case the sight of her kiss-swollen lips and tumbled hair prove too tempting even for the honor of a warrior.

Instead he marched down the hill and plunged into the frigid waters of the creek, purging himself of the demon lust.

For now.

J
ane felt as though she'd been consumed by a white-hot flame, then doused with a bucket of cold water to put the fire out. As she readied herself for bed that night, she sensed embers still glowing among the sodden ashes, ready to blaze again at the slightest stirring.

If John's formidable silence on their ride home was any sign, he had no intention of rousing more trouble. His absence at supper had confirmed it. Living all his life on the Montana frontier, maybe he had never heard of Miss Pandora and her box. If he had, he might understand the futility of trying to dam the flood of emotions his kisses had unleashed in Jane, or pretending they would slow to a trickle if he ignored them.

The very first night she'd arrived at the ranch, Jane had noticed her bedroom window looked out over the foreman's cabin. Tonight, as the Big Sky gradually ripened from indigo to purple to black, she perched on Marie Kincaid's trunk and watched jealously for a glimpse of John.

Had she been wrong to kiss him? Jane asked the evening star glittering just above the horizon. Better than most
women, she knew a man's control over his passions was tenuous at best. How often had Emery repented striking her, claiming he'd been driven to it by some behavior of hers? Since coming to Whitehorn and making the acquaintance of John Whitefeather and Caleb Kincaid, Jane had grown skeptical of Emery's excuses.

Today with John had been different. She could accept a measure of the blame for his behavior. What she couldn't decide was whether there'd been anything so very wrong with it.

It wasn't as though she'd never been kissed by a man. Emery had kissed her even before they'd become engaged, and many times after. They had all been pretty much alike, though perhaps becoming less gallant and more demanding as time went on. None had been anything like the two very different kisses she'd shared with John this afternoon.

She had enjoyed the first one so much. Scouting unexplored terrain in her newfound spirit of adventure. Taking fresh delight in each discovery.

But her reckless exploration had wakened a slumbering wild creature. He had overwhelmed her, intent on sating his hunger. That was not what had frightened Jane, though.

What
had
made her gasp out that protest? The one that had stopped John as surely as a bullet and sent him hurtling down the hill to throw himself into the icy creek. Had it been the feral she-creature within herself, stretching sleek-muscled limbs and snarling a challenge to her mating partner?

Now that dangerous but beautiful beast prowled restlessly within Jane, vigilant and hungry.

A light flickered on in the foreman's cabin, and Jane thought she saw a rustle of movement through the window. Grabbing a candle and the ewer from her washstand before she had time to think better of the impulse, she dashed
down the stairs to fetch hot water from the kettle Ruth always kept simmering on the back of the stove.

Ruth glanced up from her evening beadwork as Jane surged into the kitchen. “I thought you'd gone to bed hours ago, dear. Is anything the matter?”

“Matter? No.” Jane hoped the wavering candlelight would obscure the guilty blush that flamed in her cheeks. And that Ruth would attribute her breathless voice to the rapid descent she'd made from upstairs. “I just felt the need of a sponge bath after my ride today in the hot sun.”

“Go ahead.” Ruth bent her dark head over her beadwork. “There's plenty of water.”

For some reason, her bland words sounded charged with cryptic meaning.

“Thank you for letting your brother teach me to ride.” Jane half filled her ewer with steaming water from the kettle, then topped it up with cold from the hand pump at the sink. “I hope you won't mind if he takes me out to Sweetgrass the day after tomorrow.”

She hoped John's invitation still held, for she was curious to see this other side of his life. Not to mention braving new experiences. Ever since the death of her parents and her brother, she had sought a refuge. She'd endured her engagement to Emery in the hope that she would not lose another home when Mrs. Endicott finally passed on. Looking back, Jane could see that her sanctuary had been little better than a prison. Few of the terrors from which she'd hidden could have been worse than the one locked with her behind those protective, restraining walls.

“Of course you can go to Sweetgrass.” Ruth set her beadwork aside. “In fact, I have a few things I want to send with you. I'm glad to see you willing to get out more these days. I know this place must seem mighty different than
where you came from, but it's tamer than it used to be. It'll keep getting more so as the years go by, I reckon.”

As Jane left the kitchen, clutching the heavy water-filled ewer to her chest with one hand and balancing her candle in the other, she heard herself say the oddest thing.

“I hope it stays a little wild, at least.”

Back in her bedroom, she set the candle and her basin on top of the clothes trunk. Then she filled the basin with warm water, pushed her curtains wide open and began to strip off her clothes in front of the window.

New England propriety protested as Jane carefully unfastened every button down the front of her blouse. In hopes of deterring her, it raised the specter of Mrs. Endicott's face if she could see what Jane was doing. But the imagined look of scandalized horror only made her giggle.

What if Floyd Cobbs or one of the other cowboys should see her? That loathsome possibility made Jane pause and shoot a furtive glance out her window.

No. Two big barns and a grain silo hid the cowboys' bunkhouse from her window. The only man who might see her was probably mending harness or dealing himself cards in a solitary, monotonous game of patience. Never once sparing a glance out his window at the woman he'd made achingly aware of her own body for the very first time.

The white blouse slipped from her shoulders, and Jane suddenly remembered the scars on her shoulders. From this distance, John would not be able to see them…if he was watching. As she reached behind to unhook her skirt, her bosom strained against the confines of her tight corset, two creamy mounds swelling over the top of it. Not certain why she felt compelled to do so, Jane swayed her hips to send her skirt sliding over the bleached knoll of petticoats and puddling in a wide circle around her ankles.

As she bent forward to pick it up, she stole a glance through her eyelashes at the foreman's cabin. Was it only her wishful imagination, or was someone staring up at her through its window?

Untying her petticoats, Jane let them sink over the curve of her hips and down to the floor under their own starched weight. Then, with sinful deliberation, she unfastened each hook down the front of her corset, letting the fullness of her bosom push the two sides farther and farther apart. When only a single hook at the base remained secure, she reached both hands up to the back of her head and began pulling out the pins she'd so hastily shoved into her hair while John had plunged into the creek.

She remembered a story she'd read many years ago in a richly illustrated picture book, about a princess in a tower. She'd often envied the princess her safe tower. Now she wasn't so sure.

Was John watching her now, as the prince had watched Rapunzel? Remembering how he had liberated her hair only a few hours ago? Did he see how her bosom strained against its confinement? And did he yearn to scale the timbers of the ranch house so he could free it, too?

That thought provoked a quick flutter of panic. Or was it excitement?

Tossing her hairpins on top of the trunk, Jane lazily shook out her light brown hair until it cascaded over her shoulders, veiling her bosom. Then she loosed the lowest hook on her corset and let it fall away.

No one could see her below the hips, but if he was watching, she wanted her intended audience left in no doubt that she was fully unclothed. Untying the ribbon that held up her fancy laced drawers, she lowered them with a shimmy of her hips. Then she kicked off her shoes
and stockings and began to wash herself with warm water from the basin.

Closing her eyes, she imagined John standing behind her wielding the washcloth. Letting rivulets of warm water course over her breasts, down her neck. Grazing the sensitive flesh on the inside of her upper arms, across her shoulders. Though the temperature of water was quite warm, goose bumps rippled over Jane's skin where the wet cloth had passed. The pink crest of each bosom grew firm and thrust itself out.

Once or twice, when the full implications of her performance struck home, she barely restrained the urge to jerk her curtains closed. Then she reminded herself she was perfectly safe. John could not touch her, except with his eyes.

More important, he could not pull away from her.

True, he might stop watching, but she didn't have to know that. And if he had seen every garment removed, every intimate swipe of the washcloth, he might understand this was her strange way of expressing repentance.

She was sorry she'd asked him to stop kissing her.

 

“I reckon Jane's ready to get married now.” John stared into the black, bitter well of his coffee cup and saw his future.

Ruth stopped sweeping the floor of his cabin. She insisted on giving the place a thorough cleaning every now and then, usually when she felt she had reason to corner and question him. His absence from supper last night and breakfast this morning had likely brought on this domestic fit.

About all John did in the place was sleep, or in the case of last night,
not
sleep. The endless hours he'd spent in his lonely bed, writhing and burning with a need he dared not satisfy, had given him a grim foretaste of hell.

“So soon?” his sister asked in surprise. John scowled and shrugged. “That lady from Bismarck could be coming anyday, right? Except for a few hard cases, I can't take weeks to gentle the mustangs. If I did, Caleb would soon go back to letting the cowboys bust them the hard way.”

“You must have potent medicine,
hestatanemo.
” Ruth pulled a handful of dried sweetgrass from her apron pocket, strewed it around the floor, then swept it into a pile. “To make such a highstrung creature ready to marry after only one party and a horseback ride.”

He wasn't certain what to make of Jane's mysterious transformation, either. Not that he planned to admit it to his busybody little sister.

“I didn't claim it was all my doing. I reckon Jane's always had more spunk than any of us gave her credit for. With or without me, she might have been ready for courting now if you hadn't thrown those first three suitors at her head so fast.”

“I suppose….” Ruth didn't sound convinced.

John wasn't sure how much he believed his own explanations. He had spent half the night trying to fathom that sensuous performance of Jane's. And the other half hotter than the inside of a sweat lodge as he recalled every inviting movement. Every button unbuttoned. Every hook unhooked. Every pin unpinned. Even calling it to mind hours later made his loins ache in his tight denim trousers.

All this time he'd thought Jane's nervousness around strange men was on account of too much prudish modesty about her body. He'd sure ciphered that wrong.

Now he wondered if an old fusspot like Amos Carlton might be man enough to handle a woman like Jane.

“Well.” Ruth whisked a small mound of sweetgrass and dirt into her dustpan. “When Caleb gets back from Miles City and you and Jane have made your visit out to Sweet-
grass, I'll see if we can set Amos to start courting her. Maybe she could stay with Brock and Abby for a spell once Mrs. Muldoon gets here. That way she'd be closer to town for Amos to come calling.”

Hearing Ruth talk so casually about Amos courting and marrying Jane gave John a tormenting headache.

“Who said we're going to Sweetgrass?”

He wasn't sure he could look Jane Harris in the eye again. Much less make that long ride by her side. Then be her sole companion and interpreter for a whole day with his people.

“Sounded to me like Jane's got her heart set on going.”

Ruth shoveled ashes out of the rugged stone hearth that took up most of the west wall of the cabin. Her tone told John that Jane wouldn't be the only one upset if he canceled their plans.

“Besides, I have some cloth and needles and beads I wanted to send to Walks on Ice. And a tonic I brewed for the children who were sick.”

“Why don't
you
go, then?”

And leave him alone in the ranch house with Jane for meals? That, or go eat in the bunkhouse. Neither of those choices appealed to John, either.

Ruth shook her head. Not just a busybody, but stubborn too.

“Caleb's been away a few days and I'm anxious to see him when he gets back. Someday you'll meet a woman who's special for you. Then you'll understand.”

John got up from his little table by the window. The one he'd been sitting at last night when he'd spotted Jane removing her clothes. He couldn't bear listening to his sister go on about a “special woman.” The Kincaid men
had enjoyed more than their share of luck in love. John knew better than to expect the same for himself.

“Is this place clean enough for you yet?” he snapped, jamming on his hat. “I can't sit around all day. I have to go see if those shiftless
ve'ho'e
cowboys are getting any chores done while Caleb's away. Then I have horses to work.”

“What's got the devil hanging over you this morning, Night Horse?” grumbled his sister, rolling up the fleece rug John kept in the middle of the floor. “This needs to be aired and beaten. I'll send Jane out in a while to wash your window.”

“Don't bother.” John stalked out the door, muttering to himself. “It's plenty clean to see through.”

Never one to pass up a chance at having the last word, Ruth called after him, “Can I tell Jane you still plan on taking her out to Sweetgrass tomorrow?”