After the Thunder (12 page)

The petty, accusing tone that came out of his mouth disgusted him.

It made her angry as well.

“Well, how could I know that you would put a death curse on Jacob?” she cried out, her calm voice breaking with passion. “I didn’t scream for you to do that!”

“So you didn’t.”

This time he sounded cold and distant. Uncaring. That was better. He must stay calm, at least on the surface, or she would draw him too close.

“Another reason I’ve come out here,” she said, and now she sounded as cold and hard as he had, “is to beg you not to make it all worse by using Jacob’s saliva.”

“Then you do feel responsible in some way.”

What an ass he was, what a pettish lout! Why was he engaging her like this when he’d come out of the cave to send her away?

He stopped in his tracks.

Already, though, he was too close. Close enough to look into her eyes in the moonlight. Close enough to reach out and touch her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Let me take back those words. The curse is not your fault. It’s nobody’s doing but mine.”

Tears welled in her eyes. Tears and trouble. Such trouble. Trouble as big as his own.

“No, it’s mine,” she said, in a way that threatened to tear out his heart. “In spite of what I said to you at first. Something’s wrong with me that draws men like Jacob to me, men who want to mistreat me. Other men, men who are good to me, well, I mistreat them.”

She was breathing hard and fast, but silently, as if scared of the sound. Perhaps she had run the last part of the way by the light of the moon. Her breasts were heaving beneath the dress she wore—a plain, cotton one buttoned to the neck this time. Beautiful breasts, high and full, calling to his hands.

“It’s something wrong with
me
that made you do black medicine. It must be, for you’re too good to have done it otherwise,” she said rapidly. “And I’m hoping you can tell me what it is.”

He stared at her, surprised, trying to assimilate what she’d just said.

“What do you mean tell you what’s wrong with you?”

Her tears spilled.

“Yes. You can see into my soul. You told me I degrade myself. Why do I? What is it?”

“There’s no evil in you if that’s what you mean,” he said. “You’re only human, Cotannah.”

She brushed her eyes clear and gave him a challenging stare.

“Then why did you put a death curse on Jacob?”

“Because you unsettle me,” he said, which was as close to the truth as he knew how to say it. “I put the curse on Jacob because you unbalance me so much, Cotannah, that I lost my mind when he called you one of his women.”

She collapsed. Her knees buckled, his words felled her like a blow from his fist.

“No!” he cried and ran to her, dropped to his knees to pull her against him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that, I shouldn’t blame you. I put the curse on him because I let my baser instincts take over. That’s all.”

He tried to force his hands to take her by the shoulders and keep her away from him instead, but his arms
ached
to embrace her—she was crying great, racking sobs, with her face in her hands. She wouldn’t let him hold her, though. She pulled back and lifted her head to fix him with her incredible eyes full of pain.

“What baser instincts?”

“Hate. Jealousy.”

“See? Such feelings aren’t natural for you. I unsettle you because there’s something wrong with me, isn’t that right?” she said brokenly. “I have to know. What’s wrong with me, Walks-With-Spirits? What’s bad in me that causes me to hurt people and people to hurt me? Tell me. Tell me now!”

The demand rocked him back to sit on his heels.

“Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. Tell me.”

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” he said, and need to make her believe him made a knot in his throat.

She glared at him, disbelief plain, her eyes shining with determination as much as with pain.

“When I was fourteen an evil old man ripped my clothes off and would have raped me. In Texas, a few years later,
bandidos
captured me and stripped me and handled me and forced their stinking tongues down my throat. They would’ve raped me soon.” She stopped and stared at him triumphantly.

He shook his head. “That doesn’t prove something is wrong with you.”

“Oh, yes, it does. Do such things happen to other women?”

“To some, I’m sure.”

“Not to very many. Not at two different times in their lives—now three, counting Jacob—and in different states, everywhere they go. I can’t stand it anymore. What’s wrong with me?”

“You’re silly and earthbound, you’re in turmoil inside. You’re squandering the strength of your spirit.”

“And now I’m squandering the strength of yours.”

The bald words, said out loud, struck his heart. True. Yes, they were true, but at that moment he didn’t care.

He slid his knees apart, reaching for a closer tie to the earth beneath the damp grass, willing its strength and its wisdom to come into him through his flesh. His weak,
treacherous flesh that made him realize he needed to move away from her.

Instead he bent closer to her stricken face.

“If that’s true,” he said, “then it’s my fault. I’m letting you do it.”

“Why? Why would you? What’s this destructive thing about me …?”

Her words trailed away as she kept looking up into his eyes.

He was watching her face in the moonlight, the sensual movements of her lips, the shape of her high cheekbones. His fingertips tingled with wanting to touch her.

Her gaze dropped to his mouth in return, and he could feel it resting there, laying a heat like the sun’s across his lips.

“Cotannah,” he said, “you say that you think I’m a good person.”

Her eyes met his again, and she nodded.

“So if I am good and I have powers to know your heart, do you think I’d have come running to save you from Jacob if something was so evil in you that you deserved his bad treatment?”

The thought shocked her, he saw that in her eyes.

“I deemed you worth saving,” he said.

A cloud scudding across the moon threw a shadow onto her face. When it was gone, she was still looking at him solemnly, searching his eyes.

“You’d save any smaller animal from a bigger predator whether it deserved it or not,” she said.

“No. I’d let the laws of the Earth Mother prevail.”

She didn’t speak.

“Do you believe me?”

Her eyes told him that she wanted to, that she was beginning to believe him.

“Nothing is wrong with you, Cotannah,” he murmured, aching to give her comfort.

But aching more deeply to kiss her lush mouth.

“I want you to know how sorry I am,” she whispered. “Oh, Walks-With-Spirits, it was my fault you did the black magic because I made such a fool of myself with Jacob, and I want you to know that I am so ashamed, ashamed to the bottom of my heart. I had no right to lead him on and then yell for you to save me.”

His heart swelled with pride. With possession.

“I was happy to save you.”

Her dark eyes looked up into his for a long, breathless moment, and then he took her fragile shoulders into his hands because if he couldn’t touch her right then, he would have died of holding back.

“I was happy you did,” she whispered.

He also would die if he didn’t kiss her, the blood roaring like thunder in his head told him that.

So he bent his head and took her mouth with his.

Her lips were soft, so incredibly soft that he couldn’t believe it, and sweet, deliciously sweet beyond description. Tantalizingly, strongly sweet, with some tartness underneath, like sourwood honey.

He could not get enough of her, not ever. Slowly, slowly, he deepened the kiss, his whole body filling with wonder that her mouth had been created to meld perfectly with his, his mind longing to tell her so but his lips and his tongue refusing to pull away from her to speak, refusing to do any other thing, anything at all, but kiss her. He would kiss her, just this way, forever and ever.

But when the tiny little sound of welcome purred in her throat and she kissed him back, he began to kiss her in another way. He found the ripe, dark tastes of the warm mystery of her mouth, and he explored it slowly,
luxuriously, as the most wonderful treasure he had ever been given.

Her arms came around him, slipped up his back and stopped, splayed soft and warm on his shoulders. She smelled of lavender and of the woods she had just run through and of her own special scent, the scent of her skin and her hair. Her breasts brushed his chest, and desire began to build in him like heat before a summer storm.

He wanted her, he wanted to lay her down, right then and there, on the dew-dampened ground. But the more of her he tasted, the more of her he would want: He knew it already, knew he would never get enough.

He could not let his feelings become so entangled with hers now, not when his whole soul was unbalanced by the awful curse he had thrown. So he summoned all the will that was in him to savor the kiss, then to pull gently away, slowly, slowly.

Oh why, why, had she come back into his life? And why had he known that she would?

He looked into her eyes and took her face in his hands, his hands that were threatening to tremble at any moment. He cupped them around her face.

“I’ve wanted to do that since the moment we met,” he whispered. “Cotannah, I’d have died if I hadn’t kissed you.”

She smiled at him, her vision still hazy from the kiss. “You wanted to kiss me when I was sitting a rearing horse that was about to come down on your head?”

He laughed and ran his big hands over her hair, smoothing it back from her face with slow, deliberate motions that she wished never, ever would stop. She leaned her head into his hands, a new, deep-souled feeling of peace flooding through her. Home. As soon as he kissed her she knew she had come home.

“You truly don’t remember, do you?” he said. “You fulfilled my prophecy but you don’t remember it, and that makes me feel quite forgettable, myself.”

She laughed, too.

“What in the world are you talking about?”

But she almost knew. Suddenly, a frisson of memory ran through her mind but she couldn’t quite catch it.

“On the contrary, Cotannah Chisk-Ko,” he said, slowly as if quoting the words, “someday you will seek me out.”

The words rang in her head like so many cool, short strikes of the clapper in a silver bell. Then she knew, and her blood leapt in her veins, brought her hands to his shoulders again to cling to him.

“You!” she cried. “I cannot believe it’s you. You stole me in the Stealing Partners Dance when I was waiting for Tay!”

His wide, topaz eyes, bright in his dark face, were probing hers in the moonlight.

“You were wearing a hat and it was dark,” she said defensively. “I never saw your eyes or your face that night.”

How, how could she not have known when now she knew that she had found her man? How could she have forgotten that she’d seen him before?

A great confusion of feelings began rising in her, just as they had done on that long-ago evening when her heart had been so heavy and he had taken her hand and led her to dance like a feather in the wind.

“I knew you on the Texas Road,” he said.

“You should have told me then!”

“No. You have to learn to look at other people instead of only yourself.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Think about it.”

But she didn’t even care. What she wanted to know was how that first encounter with him had happened.

“Where did you come from that night?” she demanded. “And how did you know my name, even then?”

“I asked someone.”

“Why?”

He shrugged.

“I saw you the minute I walked onto the dance ground. You looked so full of life, so full of spirit, so full of feelings of every kind, that I wanted to kiss you then.”

“I was crazy in love with Tay, or at least I thought I was. You taunted me about that. You were making rude, judgmental remarks to me, even then,” she said, laughing.

She made her hands into fists and pounded him gently.

“So I should have recognized you on Race Day when you told me I was degrading myself!”

He held her gaze, but a slight confusion, almost a chagrin, shadowed his eyes.

“Well!” she said, teasing him. “Maybe you have the grace to be a little bit embarrassed by your bossiness.”

He grinned, such a lopsided, bad-boy grin that she wanted to kiss him again.

“I make rude, judgmental remarks only to make you think,” he said.

“I am thinking now,” she said. “I’m thinking all the time, and I’m going to change my ways, so you don’t have to say rude things to me anymore.”

He laughed.

“If you really mean that.”

“I do.”

They stared at each other through the thick silence that fell them.

“That’s good to hear,” he said. “It’s a great relief to me, Cotannah. The strong life forces in you have been rushing in every direction and opposing each other—it’s enough to make you explode like powder in a gun.”

She looked at him for a long while without speaking.

“That’s true,” she said.

“So listen to your spirits inside and the ones outside you to know what you should do to send them all in the same direction.”

“Is that what you do?”

“Yes.”

“And are you happy?”

Surprise flickered in the back of his eyes. It made her heart turn over.

No one has ever asked him that before. No one has ever cared
, Cotannah thought.

“Most of the time,” he said slowly.

He’s so vulnerable, really, so alone
.

“When are you not happy?”

The surprise in his eyes changed to resentment.

No one ever questions him or passes judgment on him. It’s always the other way around
.

“You have said some very personal things to me,” she said. “Turnabout is fair play.”

“When I’m … lonely,” he said, at last.

“Your friends Basak and Taloa are always with you.”

“Sometimes I …” He looked at her straight in the eye. “All creatures at some times need their own kind,” he said. “That’s a new thing I’m learning lately.”