Warrior's Embrace (40 page)

She stood on shaky, uncertain legs. Clenching
her fists by her side, she faced him.

“If you’re going to call me names, use
English, please.”

“
Wictonaye
...wildcat.”

“I’ve been called worse.” Would God forgive
her if she left right now? Would He give her the healing touch and
allow her to save lives if she forgot about her lust and focused on
her mission?

She spun around, then felt his hand on her
arm.

“I’ve been rude. It’s not my way”

“Nor mine.” She grinned. “Except
sometimes.”

“You tried to save my life, and I don’t know
your name.”

“Kate Malone.”

“Thank you for saving my life, Kate Malone.”
His eyes sparkled with wicked glee. She’d never known a man of such
boldness ...nor such appeal. “I’m Eagle Mingo.”

“Next time you decide to play in the river,
Eagle Mingo, be more careful. I might not be around to rescue
you.”

She marched toward the bluff, thinking it was
a good exit, until he appeared beside her, still naked as sin and
twice as tempting.

“You forgot your shoe.” He held out one of
her moccasins.

“Thanks.” Lord, did he expect her to bend
down and put it on with him standing there like that? She hobbled
along, half shoeless.

“And your picnic basket.” He scooped it off
the ground and handed it to her. Then, damned if he didn’t bow like
some courtly knight in shining armor.

If she ever got home, she’d have to take an
aspirin and go to bed. Doctor’s orders.

“Good-bye. Enjoy your” —her eyes raked him
from head to toe, and she could feel her whole body getting hot—
“swim.”

She didn’t know how she got up the bluff, but
she didn’t draw a good breath until she was safely at the top. He
was still standing down there, looking up. She could feel his eyes
on her.

Lest he think she was a total coward, she put
on her other shoe, then turned and casually waved at him. At least
she hoped it was casual.

And then he waved back. Facing full front.
She might never recover.

o0o

“Did you enjoy your picnic?” Dr. Colbert
asked when she got back.

“Hmmm.” It was the best she could do.

“I’m glad. There are some wonderful sights
around here.”

“I’ll say.”

Dr. Colbert picked up her bird-watching book
and thumbed through. “We have magnificent birds here too. You’ll
soon learn all their names.”

All she needed to know was one name. The name
of the most magnificent of them all. Eagle.

Home.

Eagle sat quietly on the redwood bench under
a silver maple tree and took it all in. Nothing much had changed.
The sprawling house with its wide verandas and tall windows was
still the domain of Dovie Mingo. It had been Winston’s wedding
present to his wife. Built of cypress and glass with an eye for the
view, it faced the mountains, which were stained pink and purple
now by the setting sun. The house was grand in scale and built to
endure because Winston had said that’s how his love for Dovie was,
magnificent and sweeping with an endurance that would last their
lifetime and beyond to the Great Spirit world of
Loak-Istohoollo-Aba.

The ravages of wind and rain and time had not
dimmed the house’s grandeur, and it sat now, weathered and
graceful, in its wide sweep of pasture in the shadow of the
mountains.

Through the open windows Eagle could hear the
low, singing murmur of his mother’s voice as she directed her two
youngest children in the clean-up after their family meal.

“Not the pots too! Can’t they wait until
morning?” Star’s wail of protest was tempered by the knowledge that
she was engaged in a battle she would never win. “This is Eagle’s
first day home.”

Eagle didn’t hear Dovie’s soft rebuke, only
the firm tone of her voice. Then the unmistakable sound of his
brother Wolf’s laughter.

“Hey, sis, what’s all the fuss about? You’ve
got me.”

They’d been mere children when he left, and
now they were rowdy, raucous teens, full of the raw energy and the
high, bright dreams of the young.

“I don’t want you, toad breath,” Star
said.

“Yeah, well, that’s what you’ve got till we
finish these dishes. Shake a leg, squirt blossom, or we’ll be here
all night.”

The argument in the kitchen was like the ones
that had been waged years before. Nothing had changed except the
names and the players. When Eagle was a teen, he and his brother
Cole had been the ones bickering over the dishes. Dovie had always
been a stickler for order. No matter what was taking
place—weddings, births, homecomings, natural disasters—she always
insisted that everything in the house be put in its proper
place.

Eagle and Cole had thought they were doomed
to carry on the chores forever, and had sat together in the barn
loft, smoking a forbidden pipe and planning their revolt, when the
unexpected had happened. At the age of forty-two Dovie had given
birth to a baby girl.

“Who’d have thought the two of them were
still doing it?” Cole said. He took a long draw on the purloined
pipe, then passed it to his twin.

“I thought the equipment quit working when
you got old.” At the age of fourteen, Eagle considered anything
over thirty ancient.

A year later, when Wolf was born, Dovie and
Winston proved once again that everything was indeed in perfect
working order, and that they enjoyed making it work.

Now a sophisticated fifteen, Cole and Eagle
discussed this new turn of events over their first taste of
alcohol—a bottle of cooking sherry clipped from their mother’s
kitchen cabinet.

“Papa’s as bad as that old stallion,” Cole
said, and Eagle voiced his hearty agreement, but there was a
certain element of awe and pride in their voices.

Remembering now, Eagle smiled. Judging by the
evidence, Cole had inherited his father’s prowess. His young wife,
Anna, was ripe with child, and he already had two fine sons—Clint,
secretive and stoic even at seven, and Bucky, exuberant and wild
with the joy of childhood, racing around on his sturdy legs,
defying his tender age of three by being as surefooted as one of
the antelope that roamed the Arbuckle Mountains.

“Daddy! Daddy!” Bucky yelled as he raced
around the yard. “Watch, Daddy!”

He lunged for the black Lab, and boy and dog
went down in a heap. The Lab licked Bucky’s face, then dog and boy
were up and running again. It was hard to tell who was chasing
whom.

“Watch, Daddy! Watch!”

With his arms held up toward the sun, the
child spun round and round, ending in a dizzy tangle against
Eagle’s legs.

“Whoa, there.” Laughing, Eagle lifted the
child.

His nephew. Issue of the brother whose very
soul was twined with his own. As the soft little arms went around
his neck, there was a blooming in Eagle’s heart ...and something
akin to envy.

“You’re dizzy, little sport. Time to slow
down.”

“Daddy?” Bucky put his dimpled hands on
either side of Eagle’s face and cocked his head to one side.

“No. I’m Uncle Eagle.”

“Unca Eaga?” Bucky puckered his brow and
looked from Eagle to Cole, then back again.

Cole laughed at his son’s puzzlement. “That’s
your uncle Eagle, son, the best man in Witch Dance besides your
daddy. Give Uncle Eagle a kiss.”

With the trust inherent in children, Bucky
pressed his rosy mouth against Eagle’s, then squirmed out of his
arms and gave chase to the dog once more.

“‘Bye, Unca Eaga,” he yelled, his laughter
lifting high and bright as a kite toward the fading sun.

“You should see your face,” Cole said. “You
look like you did that day you brought home the trophy for the
debate team.”

“I never knew that holding your own flesh and
blood would feel like that.”

“Remarkable, isn’t it?” Cole wrapped his arm
around his wife’s thick waist. “It makes a man proud. Two sons
already and another on the way.”

Anna smiled at her husband, never daring to
suggest that the child she carried might not be a son. She loved
her tall, handsome husband with an adoration that bordered on
worship and took every opportunity to show it.

If he let himself, Eagle could envy that
too.

“Now that you’re back, it won’t take you long
to catch up,” Cole said.

Inseparable as children, Eagle and Cole had
done everything together—ridden their first horse, climbed their
first tree, bagged their first deer. They’d even broken their arms
at the same time, the left ones, fractured when they’d fallen from
the barn loft in an ignoble heap, drunk on their mother’s cooking
sherry.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you to carry
on the family name,” Eagle said. “At least for a while.”

“You always were a visionary.” Cole leaned
down for Anna’s kiss, then watched as she waddled off toward the
house. “You build your bridges: I’ll make sons.”

Winston Mingo didn’t miss a single nuance of
the exchange between his sons, not Cole’s triumph at having finally
bested his twin brother at something, nor Eagle’s sense of having
sacrificed too much for his vision.

“Speaking of building, Dr. Colbert is
building a new clinic.” Winston said, watching his sons’
reactions.

He’d been doing that a lot lately, watching,
weighing, judging. Cole’s expression darkened, and Winston shifted.
Only part of his discomfort was due to Cole’s reaction. No matter
what he did these days, it seemed that he couldn’t get comfortable.
Dovie had sewed a cushion for his chair, even though he had told
her the rain would ruin it. But she’d shushed him, and every
morning he saw her checking the weather before she marched outside
and arranged the bright red cushion in his favorite outdoor
chair.

Eagle leaned forward, excited at the news
...as Winston had hoped he’d be.

“He’s moving back, then?” Eagle asked.

Clayton Colbert had left tribal lands twenty
years earlier and had never come back except for summer vacations
with his blue-blooded Bostonian wife.

“No, he’s helping a young protégé of his,
Kate Malone.”

“A white woman,” Cole said. “We don’t need
her.”

Her skin was like lilies, creamy and cool to
the touch. Eagle remembered it well. Too well.

“It seems to me that we need every clinic we
can get,” he said, “...and every doctor.”

“We have a hospital.” Anger curled through
Cole like smoke.

“Only one,” Winston reminded him. “And it’s
too far from Witch Dance for convenience.”

“What does convenience matter if we lose
sight of who we are? They’ve come here in droves with their white
skin and their holier-than-thou attitudes. They’ve raped the land
and corrupted our young, then gone back to their posh lives,
convinced that they’ve done their duty on the
reservation
.”

Twelve years had been too long to stay away.
Eagle was seeing a brother he didn’t know.

“How do you know Kate Malone is like that?”
She’d been sobbing like a child when he carried her from the river,
then defiant as a wildcat when he’d questioned her commitment.

Kate Malone with hair bright beyond
imagining. He’d wanted to touch it. Only the certain knowledge that
doing so would be like crossing a bridge, then blowing it up behind
him, had stilled Eagle’s hand.

“Because she’s not one of us,” Cole said.

“Embracing new ideas and new people doesn’t
necessarily mean we must lose sight of the old ways.”

“You sound awfully passionate for someone who
hasn’t been around in twelve years.” Cole turned his fierce
scrutiny toward Eagle. “Or is your defense personal?”

Having a twin was like having a second soul,
a second conscience. Cole had always been able to ferret out his
secrets. Though why he should keep his encounter with Kate secret
was a mystery to him.

His silence damned him.

“You embrace her, Eagle. I have family
duties.” Cole stalked toward the house without looking back.

Disquieted, Eagle left his seat on the
redwood picnic table and walked to the fence to look out over the
pasture. The stallion that had been a gangly colt when he left
flung up his head and flared his nostrils, catching Eagle’s scent.
Restless, the stallion trotted around the enclosure, his mane and
tail flying out like flags as he increased his pace. In the last
rays of the dying sun his polished coat gleamed as black as patent
leather.

“He’s magnificent,” Eagle said as his father
came up beside him.

“He’s still yours. So are the three mares.”
Winston nodded toward a paint, a sorrel, and one beautiful mare so
startlingly white, she looked like a ghost emerging from the
shadows that gradually darkened the land.

Eagle whistled, never dreaming he’d get a
response. The white mare whinnied, then tossed her mane and
cantered to the fence.

“You remember me, don’t you, Mahli?” Eagle
stroked her silky muzzle.

“You always did have a way with horses.”

“It’s one of the things I missed most while I
was away—the horses.”

“Mahli will be receptive soon. If I were you,
I’d breed her to the black.”

Winston was not a man to speak about issues
closest to his heart until he’d had time to let his instincts kick
in. He talked instead of horses and ranching and Eagle’s immediate
plans.

“I’ll take a few weeks off—perhaps the entire
summer—before I open offices. The land is calling to me in a voice
as seductive as a woman’s.” Eagle smiled. “I’m going to set up camp
at the Blue River tonight.”

“Dovie will be disappointed. She’d expected
you to stay at the house, at least for a while.”

“I’ll make my peace with her.”

“Good. I don’t want to get on your mother’s
bad side.” Winston smiled, recalling the many times he’d gotten on
Dovie’s bad side and ended up sleeping downstairs on the couch. His
bones were too old and stiff for that now. Besides, he still liked
the feel of Dovie’s soft body curled against his. He slept better,
somehow, just knowing she was there.