The Peacemaker (10 page)

"Your hands are shaking."

She lifted her gaze from the pouring spout to Shatto's face. "I beg your pardon?"

"I said, your hands are shaking."

Her face blanched. She stared at him, her eyes as big and round as the rim of the coffee cup. It wasn't what he'd said that surprised her, it was that he'd said it in English—perfect, unaccented English!

Coffee sloshed over the rim of his cup onto the table. Quick as a cat, Shatto sprang to his feet and moved back, out of the way of the steamy, black flow.

"In-de-pendence!" the colonel roared.

Startled by her father's loud voice, she dropped the coffeepot and towel. There was a terrible clatter as it hit the table. Without thinking she reached out and caught it between her hands before it could topple over and spill its entire contents. Later, she would wonder what had come over her, why she had continued to hold on to the pot when it was burning her hands, but at the moment she couldn't think what to do with it—hold it, drop it or set it down.

Shatto crossed the space between them in a single stride, jerked the pot away, and set it on the table. When he turned back, he saw the way she was holding her hands. "You burned yourself, didn't you?"

She was too baffled by the fact that he'd spoken English to feel the pain. She ignored his question. "You speak English," she stated, repeating what was in her thoughts.

Shatto's hand reached out quick as a rattlesnake and grabbed her arms. "Give me your hands," he said when she tried to pull away. He turned them over and shook his head. Her palms were an angry red and growing redder by the second.

She leaned her head back and stared up at him. "I don’t understand. I thought—”

"It appears you thought wrong. What the hell were you thinking, holding on to that coffeepot like that?" he demanded.

Anger pushed the myriad questions she had out of the way. "I was
thinking
," she ground out, "that you had spoken English! I was under the impression that you spoke only Apache. It surprised me. No. It shocked me. You could have said something before ... to let me know."

"And missed your first attempts at sign language? Not on your life."

She gasped and was even more outraged when he raised dark mocking brows.

"You let me make a fool of myself!" She winced when he ran the pad of his thumb across her palms. "Don't! That hurts!" She tried to pull her hand back but he held on to her, refusing to let her go.

He cut her an impatient look. "Be still. I'm trying to see if it's going to blister."

Captain Nolan moved up beside them for a close look. "My God. You've literally branded yourself with the pot handle. Maybe I should get Doc."

"There's nothing he can do," Shatto said. "I've got some salve in my gear." He glanced across at Nolan.

"I'll go get it." Nolan was out the door in an instant.

"Do you have any water in here?"

Indy inclined her head toward her bedroom. "There, in the pitcher." She assumed he would go get it and bring it back. Instead, he put an arm behind her back and hurried her through the door.

"Maybe you should sit down on the bed. I don't want you to faint."

"I prefer to stand, thank you. And I assure you, I will not faint," she replied with firm conviction.

He poured water from the pitcher into the basin, then pushed her hands beneath the water line. Indy gritted her teeth but didn't cry out.

"The cool water will stop the burning from doing any more damage. It'll also relieve some of the pain by reducing blood flow through your hands." He glanced at her, his eyes penetrating through the long curling wisps of hair that had fallen around her face.

"I suppose next I'll find out you're not an Apache at all but a white man, maybe even a doctor."

"My grandfather was a doctor."

"How stupid of me. I should have guessed. And I suppose your father was a statesman."

"Independence Taylor! You're being rude and impertinent." The colonel stood in the doorway, his eyes hard as flint. "It was bad enough that you came to Bowie against my orders, but now you insult a military guest. You go too far, miss, and I will not tolerate it. I insist you apologize this instant."

Indy sucked in her breath, then stubbornly clamped her teeth down on her lower lip. She felt herself turning scarlet with humiliation and embarrassment. Tears smarted at the back of her eyes but she willed them not to come. Not now. Not in front of her father. And certainly not in front of Shatto.

"An apology isn't necessary," Shatto said, turning to confront the colonel. "If anyone should apologize, it's me for not telling her that I wasn't an Apache or that I speak English."

No one had ever stood up to her father for her, not her mother, not Justice. She wasn't sure what to think, what to feel; it was too new an experience, but one she knew she would never forget.

Captain Nolan returned minutes later and stopped short at the bedroom door. He peered nervously inside, obviously uncomfortable with entering a lady's bedroom. "Where's Colonel Taylor?"

"He said he'd be out back," Shatto stated without elaboration. His dark gaze lowered to Indy's, and though all he did was look at her, there was an unspoken promise that the scene between her and her father would not be mentioned.

She might have told him she was grateful, but stubborn pride wouldn’t let her. He didn't deserve a single word of thanks. It was a mean, unforgivable thing he'd done—letting her believe he was an Apache when he wasn't. He should have told her as soon as he'd halted the runaway team and come to the back of the wagon. It would have saved her a great deal of fear and despair. And if—for some reason—he couldn't tell her then, he could have told her when he'd come into the parlor with her father, as could have Captain Nolan. Instead, they had let her make an absolute fool of herself.

Smarting from humiliation and anger as much as from the burns, she pulled her hands from the basin. "Oh, my," she said, heaving a sigh at the bold red stripe that ran across her right palm. She started to turn away, but Shatto snagged her wrists.

"Put your hands . . . back ... in the water." His voice was low, dangerous, as if he might actually do her bodily harm if she didn't follow his instructions. She looked at the strong fingers circling her wrists and knew he could break them as easily as he could break a dry twig, although somewhere deep inside, she instinctively knew he wouldn't.

Captain Nolan stepped forward with the salve. "As soon as the colonel returns I'll talk to him about getting a striker to help out here for a few days. Or maybe Prudence would—"

"No!" Indy's chin snapped up and she pulled her hands out of Shatto's grasp. "I don't want a striker, or Prudence, or anybody helping me! I am perfectly capable of taking care of things, burnt hands or no!"

Captain Nolan was staring at her like she had gone crazy. Maybe she had, she thought, preferring that as an explanation to her emotional upheaval over any other. Her anger abated somewhat when she reminded herself that he was only trying to be helpful; he was a gentleman. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yell."

Nolan nodded his head with understanding, handed Shatto the salve, and left the room.

"You should feel some relief in a few seconds," Shatto said, startling her. Somehow, incredibly, in the midst of her panic over the captain's proposal, she had forgotten he was standing next to her. Did she detect a slight hesitancy before he bent his head to the task of spreading the salve over the burns? No. Must be her imagination. He'd pulled an arrow out of Captain Nolan's shoulder without a flicker of hesitation. If that didn't bother him, certainly a minor burn wouldn't.

His touch was light, but she winced all the same when he began smoothing it across her palm. It seemed odd that a man like him—more savage than civilized—was capable of such gentleness.

Indy tilted her head back and was startled to find his face so close to hers. She stared, fascinated in spite of herself, at the strong line of his jaw and chin, faintly beard-shadowed; the evidence—so plain to her now—that he was not of Indian blood. A muscle ticked his cheek near his mouth, drawing her attention there, to his lips, firmly set in concentration.

Her nerves quivered at his closeness and when she made a move to compose herself, her shoulder touched his arm. It was only a touch—sleeve brushing sleeve—but it made her senses spin like a top, and somehow she knew that no matter how hard she tried, she would never be composed in his presence. He was more man than she was used to—his masculinity too overwhelming for someone who had never experienced more than a friendly kiss. She felt an urgent need to get as far from him as she could, but was stopped from moving by that same magnetic power she had experienced before.

It was his breath warming her face and stirring her hair that took her out of herself to some far-off place. She closed her eyes for a scant second and imagined what it would be like to lean against him, to tuck her head beneath his chin and nuzzle her cheek into the front opening of his shirt against his skin.

"Feeling better yet?" His voice vibrated through her body and her mind like a small earthquake and jolted her back into reality.

She stiffened her spine and stood straight as a flagpole. "Yes, much better, thank you," she said in a tight, stilted tone. "I'd always been told to put butter on a burn, but whatever is in that salve is much better. What is in it by the way?" She hoped the chatter would help get her mind off him. It didn't.

"An old Apache recipe of bear grease and a few herbs. Nothing out of the ordinary." He set the salve aside, then cradled her hands in his, palms up. Indy was startled at the contrast. His hands were nearly twice as large as hers and his skin was dark and rough where her's was soft and white.

"Your skin is going to draw tight as a bowstring, but once it blisters and breaks, it'll loosen up. Don't try to help the process along. It will be raw underneath and you'd be opening yourself up to infection. I'll leave you the salve. Use it until it's gone."

Indy nodded, not trusting herself to speak for fear of saying something stupid. She didn't like the effect he had on her; the way just being near him wreaked havoc on her emotions and made her senses spin out of control. She'd never experienced that kind of reaction before; it was unnerving and, she had to admit, a little frightening.

Captain Nolan came back into the room. "I'll go out back and tell the colonel we're ready to resume the meeting."

"That's all right, Captain, I'll tell him," Indy volunteered hastily. She hurried away before either of them could protest, desperate for the chance to go outside where she could clear her head.

She found her father outside standing in the shade thrown off by the building.

"Father? They're waiting for you." He took a step toward her. "I wanted you to know how sorry I am for my clumsiness. I didn't mean to cause such a disturbance. I promise you it won't happen again."

"You don't mean a lot of the things you do, miss, and yet you do them anyway. It's because you don't think. You never have." His innuendo was, she knew, in reference to her mother's and brother's deaths. He threw his cigar onto the dirt and ground it down with his booted heel. "You shouldn't have come to Bowie, Independence." His cold, gray eyes sent a chill down the back of her neck and as soon as he walked away, she moved out of the shade into the sun.

With a frown drawing his lips in the same downward arch as his mustache, Colonel Charles Taylor came back into the parlor. "I apologize for the interruption, gentlemen." He strode across the room and stood behind his chair. "If you'll take your seats we can get on with this. I have a meeting with the quartermaster a little later."

Nolan promptly sat down.

Shatto ignored the request and walked over to the hearth where he studied the books standing between two cone-shaped rocks that served as bookends. Mahan's engineering textbook was there, as he'd expected. He could recognize a West Pointer from a hundred yards. It was something in the bearing and behavior. He picked up the book and leafed through it. After a few moments, he returned it to the mantel and took his seat, blatantly disregarding the colonel's example of correct posture by crossing his arms in front of him and leaning back, balancing his chair on its rear legs.

Indy opened the back door, slipped inside and walked quietly across the parlor to her bedroom, careful not to bring any attention to herself as she passed the table where the three men were seated.

With only one small window for ventilation, her bedroom was unbearably hot. She sat down on the edge of the bed, wondering how to occupy her time while their conversation was going on. Then, she noticed the latest issue of Godey's
Lady's Book
lying on her bedside table. Prudence had lent it to her. She was about to reach for the book—a weighty two-pound tome—when she heard her father's voice and looked across the room at the door, thinking she must have left it open. It was closed, but there might as well have been no door at all for her father's voice sounded like he was sitting beside her.

"Captain Nolan and Sergeant Moseley have reported that you and your men were responsible for the safe return of the mail detachment."

"You lost three men, Colonel. I wouldn't call that getting your detachment back safely." The cold sarcasm in Shatto's deep voice made Indy shiver with apprehension. No one had ever spoken to her father in that tone before—no one would have dared. He must be seething with anger, she thought, imagining his red-faced scowl. She leaned forward, turning her ear to the door, expecting to hear his angry reply, but instead he seemed almost affable.

"We could have lost more, including Captain Nolan, but for your quick medical attention." There was a long pause. "Anyway, on behalf of the 1st Cavalry Regiment and the United States Army—thank you."

Indy couldn't believe her ears; thank you's came hard to her father. He almost never thanked anyone for anything—unless he wanted something . . . .

"The incident did serve a purpose, however, as it brought you to my attention. Captain Nolan has told me that you've lived with the Apaches for a number of years and you're familiar with their way of living and thinking. Frankly, I need a man like you to help me subjugate the hostiles in this area. Your knowledge and skills combined with your military background makes you eminently suitable to train my troops."