Captive (21 page)

“I want my daughter by the morning, Mrs. McKenzie,” Warren said firmly. “And that’s final.”

He spun around, striding away toward his ship.

Despite herself, Tara was shaking.

Why in God’s name had Teela run so recklessly into the interior? Tara paused, angry for a moment that Teela’s behavior was going to hurt James. He had a tremendous inner strength; it allowed him to walk with his head high and steady between two warring peoples. He still managed to do so, even with the hostility increasing daily. But since his wife and daughter had died, he’d had his share of anguish. He didn’t need it increased with a man like Warren on his heels.

She let out a shaky breath, her anger replaced with a twinge of guilt. Teela couldn’t have known that her stepfather would instantly cry abduction if she ran away. She had just fled his tyranny, pure and simple. And James could be very far away by now.

Tara turned to walk back in the house and paused again, smiling. She was ringed there by her three protectors; Rutger, Robert, and Jeeves.

“You handled him with good McKenzie courage!” Robert applauded her.

“I was quite proud, ma’am,” Jeeves agreed.

Rutger swept off his cap to give her a bow.

“I wish I felt I’d done something!” Tara said, shaking her head. “What if something horrible does befall Teela? What if Jarrett doesn’t find her? Warren will be lobbing cannon fire on this house by tomorrow night!”

“Jarrett knows the land out there like the rooms in this fine home, Mrs. McKenzie,” Rutger assured her. “He’ll find the girl.”

“Oh, I think that Master James will have found her long ago, Mrs. McKenzie,” Jeeves said knowingly. “In fact, were I a gambling man, I’d bet on it.”

Tara frowned at him, wondering at his certainty.

“Tara, we’re not without political pull here,” Robert
Trent reminded her, a handsome smile curving his lips. “If Warren becomes too difficult, we can do more than fight him. We can put some military pressure on him from above that will curl his toes. And speaking of which …” Something caught his eye and he stepped past her. “Rider coming, from the direction of my house!” he said with surprise.

“Oh, God, now who?” Tara murmured.

“More military,” Jeeves murmured.

They all stared at the rider coming closer in the night.

“Ah, the military!” Robert said, and laughed. “The
good
military. What a fine scenario, eh, Tara? We’ve got good military and evil military, good Indians and savage killers. Oh, God, but what a wretched war! And still, Mrs. McKenzie, this fine fellow riding so hard upon us may just be the trick to save us all from a very nasty situation, eh?”

He grinned at her, stepped past her, and hurried from the porch to greet the man who raced so hard to reach them.

Michael Warren strode aboard his ship, saluting to naval captain Julian Weatherby. Weatherby saluted sharply in return.

There were forty-two men aboard the sloop
U.S.S. Lysandra,
not counting Warren and Weatherby: twenty-five of them the remnants of two companies of regular infantry while the remaining seventeen were navy. Most of the navy ships on patrol around the territory of Florida were stripped down to skeletal crews in order to provide General Jesup with the manpower needed to solve the Indian problem. Michael Warren and these men were to meet up with several other companies of regulars and Florida militia to join in the pincer campaign Jesup was determined must come about before the year’s end. Warren knew, however, that he had time on his side. As usual, coordinating movement in the territory was frustratingly difficult. Government policies seemed to
change daily, from the official attitude toward the Seminoles to the pay and rations for the soldiers.

They’d made a serious mistake in Washington when they’d tried to exchange the soldiers’ whiskey ration for sugar and wheat. Enlistments had dropped off sharply, and complaints within the ranks rose bitterly.

Nothing would happen too quickly toward the grand movement Jesup was planning. Skirmishes would continue, especially since Osceola and Alligator and Wildcat were in the near vicinity. But Jesup’s grand scheme would take time. And Michael Warren could take some time with it.

Captain Weatherby eyed Warren suspiciously after his proper salute. Weatherby didn’t like Warren, and Warren knew it. Weatherby was a Southern salt, not Floridian but right out of the Louisiana bayou. He fit into the swamp waters as if he were a ‘gator himself. And he’d had too much time to meet up with the Indians. He liked a few of them. He was too quick to sympathize with their plight.

Warren didn’t have that problem himself. He’d seen the face of his enemy, and his enemy was a heathen, an enemy of God.

“Did they find your daughter, Major Warren?” Weatherby asked politely. He knew the answer. Warren wanted to smack that phony worried expression off his face.

“They’re not going to find her too quickly,” he growled. “It’s as clear as day that half-savage red man has taken off with her.”

Weatherby arched a brow. He shook his head. “I’ve known James McKenzie a good while, Major. Doesn’t seem likely to me he’d be forcing anyone anywhere. The man’s still grieving for his wife, for one.”

“He can kidnap and grieve at the same time, can’t he?”

Warren was the superior officer here. But Weatherby was a stubborn man.

“Can’t see it, Major.”

“Don’t you go feeling sorry for the redskins, Captain. You’ll find a knife in your throat for your efforts.”

“I just know James McKenzie. He’s an honorable man.”

“Honorable man or no, Captain, if I don’t have my daughter back by morning, he’ll be one dead Indian.”

“Half Indian,” Weatherby corrected.

“You will follow orders, Captain!” Warren reminded him.

“Yes, sir, I’ll follow orders, Major,” Weatherby said.

He watched Warren head for his cabin. He spat on the deck. “In a pig’s eye!” he retorted after him. He wasn’t going to get himself and the navy boys killed because Warren wanted to take after James McKenzie into the swamp. McKenzie didn’t want to kill anybody. But if he was pursued, he damned well might join up with old Philip’s son, Wildcat, or Alligator, or worse. He might just join up with Osceola, and then there’d be hell to pay, all right.

Weatherby was a military man. He didn’t mind going to war, even when he’d parleyed with his enemies and made a friend or two among them. But he’d be damned if he’d outright commit suicide just because Michael Warren was one of God’s great asses!

He started to head off for a good night’s sleep himself, but he paused, listening to Warren talking to his men on deck.

“When you see a little cockroach, boys, you don’t pause. You don’t think, ‘why, that’s just a
baby
cockroach.’ No, boys, no, you don’t! You take a look at the ugly little thing, and you know it’s going to grow up to be a big hideous old cockroach—just bigger, faster, and harder to kill.

“Or think on a young rattler! Not much venom when it’s small. But it’ll grow up to be deadly. Well, Indians, especially Seminoles, are just the same. We chase them into swamps, and they just get tougher. Little ones still have that rattle on their tails. They will grow up to be big and deadly. So when you see a little rattler, you can’t
think that it’s just small and insignificant. Remember that it will be one big monster to sink its fangs into you later down the road. You’ve got to squash it. God’s own justice, you’ve just got to squash it out when you see it, and boys, you can’t listen to that claptrap you hear about good Indians. The only good Indian is a dead Indian. The so-called ‘Spanish’ Indians ain’t good, and the Negro Indians ain’t good, and not even any of those half-breed Indians who talk as good as you or me is any good. If I don’t have my daughter back when the sun comes up tomorrow, for the love of decent white women everywhere, we’re going in, men. We’re going in to battle that savage!”

A cry went up on deck. A battle cry.

Weatherby winced. Warren’s men on board must still be a little green if they could let out a holler like that. Give them time. Let them hear a few Seminole war whoops in the midst of battle. Those injun cries were enough to make a man’s hair stand on end.

Weatherby was a fairly religious man himself. He looked up to heaven. “Lord, I don’t mind dying when I must. But if you’re going to lead me into death, don’t let it be with a man who seems to keep his brains where he sits … in his pants, if you know what I mean, Lord!”

He turned around to head for his cabin. It looked like tomorrow was going to be one damned bad day.

The dawn was barely a promise against the darkness when James awoke.

When he first opened his eyes, he lay very still, feeling her against him. Soft and feminine, so warm. He closed his eyes again. Once this had been life. Waking every morning while holding a woman in his arms, breathing in her scent, savoring the softness of her. There was a comfort, and a strength in that comfort. He missed Naomi. It had been gut-wrenching anguish for a long, long time. Then a dull ache that just never seemed to go away. He had thrown himself passionately into the plight that had assailed his people. The Seminoles and
their allies. The Negros who had run for freedom, the “good” Spanish Indians, the Hitichi- and Muskogee-speaking peoples who were all just grouped together as
Seminoles.
The full-breeds, the half-breeds, the little children who were already appearing in rags, thin and ill.

The absolute last thing he had imagined in his life was a night with a delicate white southern society belle. And now, quite impossibly, it had gone beyond that. Except that it couldn’t. It couldn’t because there was a war on. Because he was not a southern planter like Jarrett, he was the half-breed brother. He was not penniless; he would never be. But he might well become a hunted man at any time, and he slept in the woods more often than in a bed.

There was no life he could offer her, was he of a mind to do so. There was no life she could accept. Naomi had been born in the Florida territory, and she had lived on the land all of her life. She had been as natural as the earth itself, aware of the rattler, content not with silk and satin, but with the beauty of the wild orchid and the white wings of the crane. She had belonged with him here.

While Teela …

He stroked her back, admitting that he was mesmerized by the beautiful curves of her, the feel of her flesh, the fire of her hair. The emerald of her eyes, even the feel of her voice against his senses. He had never closed his eyes and imagined that he held Naomi again; he had needed no pretense. There had simply been an undeniable attraction from the beginning, and circumstances had only deepened what wild emotion ignited between them. Perhaps he had imagined that first night that he could touch her and still remain unscathed, uninvolved. He could not. She had wrenched him from his self-pity and grief. Only to cast him into a form of hell again, for she could not come with him into the swamps. She could not fight his battle. He invited her death to keep her anywhere near him at all.

A filtering of dawn’s color leaked into the cabin, and
the fire he had built burned very low. Between them they created a hazy pink light. It set the color of her hair afire, and enhanced the ivory color of her flesh. He moved his forefinger very lightly down her spine, then frowned, noting a small spot that seemed just a shade different from the smooth perfection of the rest of her skin. He stilled his finger as a shard of ice seemed to shoot through his body. Warren beat her. A trembling sensation seized him, hot, causing his vision to blacken. He prayed to the one supreme being, the Christian god, the Great Spirit, that in this hell on earth he might meet with Warren in battle and be victorious. He had never felt such a hatred in his life as he felt for Warren. Knowing Teela had merely deepened his passion. He wanted to protect her so desperately from the man. But while Warren might be vicious with her, he wouldn’t kill her. And she could easily die at any time in his company.

Still …

He moved his finger along her spine once again, touched the flesh of her shoulder. She didn’t waken, but she moaned slightly, rolling against him. She lay upon her back, her hair like a fan of fire beneath her and around her, curling over her breasts, down along her ribs, over her hips. After a moment, her lashes flickered. Her eyes opened, the lashes fell, rose again. She looked at him, still half asleep. There was something incredibly vulnerable in her eyes. Trusting … sensual. They closed once again. She sighed, still not fully awake.

He leaned over and kissed her lips. He rose and shifted his weight, coming between her thighs. He pressed his lips against her throat. Her breasts.

He never made love to her tenderly. Arousing as he awakened, seducing as he touched. She moved with him, writhed, awoke more fully. The hunger seized him, the hunger she created in him, a passion that could be slaked but never sated. Tenderness erupted into raw fever, swept them both into a maelstrom. In the end she was very much awake, shuddering violently in his arms, a soft cry tearing from her lips as the sweet, erotic surcease
of climax burst upon them. Shuddering, swallowing, she searched his face. Her eyes were on his again, very large, emerald.

She was definitely wide awake.

But even as he opened his mouth to speak to her, he heard a noise from outside. Hoofbeats against the dry earth.

He sprang from her, sleek and naked, going for his rifle where it had lain through the night just above his head, within easy arm’s reach.

“James!”

He eased, hearing his brother’s voice. But he had barely laid down his gun and pulled on his breeches before Jarrett was pounding on the door, then pushing it open.

Teela was not able to dress with such speed; in fact, all that she was able to manage before Jarrett had the door open was to pull the blanket to her chin and inch back into the shadows.

Her face was very pale, her hair pure fire against it. Her eyes were wide against her face, creating a fierce anguish in James as he longed to protect her. His brother, however, offered no danger. Yet he forced his heart to harden, wondering if she wasn’t just embarrassed to be discovered here with him—naked.