Warrior's Embrace (49 page)

“Good. Your spunk is back. Fight, Dr. Kate
Malone. Fight for what you believe in.”

“Is that what you do? Fight for what you
believe in?” He tightened his hold while his silence screamed
through the room. Kate pushed back the fear that threatened to
defeat her. “I believe in you, Eagle Mingo, in the courage and
wisdom of the man who defied his own people to help me build this
clinic, in the essential goodness of the man who helped Deborah
Lightfoot and her father face Hal’s disappearance.” She cupped her
face and drew it close. “And I believe in us ...in you and me
together ...on your blanket under the stars....”

As he drew her hips into his, he wondered if
there would ever be a time when Kate Malone would not bewitch
him.

“How about on your examining table in your
clinic, Dr. Malone? Don’t you think it deserves a proper
christening?”

“Eagle.” With her hands tangled in his hair
and her lips inches from his, she breathed his name.

Already they were flying.

o0o

Winston Mingo saw them through the window,
his son with the white medicine woman. The fears he’d held at bay
all summer came crashing around him. There was no mistaking that
look.

Dr. Kate Malone was more to Eagle than a
passing fancy, more than a summer affair. If he told Dovie, it
would break her heart. And Cole . . .

Now Winston understood his son’s concern, his
anger. With trembling hands he opened the door and went inside.
Without knocking. It was an open house, wasn’t it?

The bells over the door tinkled, and Kate and
his son moved apart. Without hurry. Without guilt.

Somehow that made Winston proud.

“I’m glad you came,” Eagle told him. “Kate,
this is my father, Winston Mingo.”

“Governor, you honor me.”

“Just Winston.” Dovie would kill him. He
might not tell her. “You have a fine clinic here, Dr. Malone.”

“Just Kate, please.” She smiled at him.

Kate Malone had everything his son
admired—grace, courage, intelligence. And she was the most
beautiful woman Winston had ever seen. Dovie would flail him alive
for that, too.

“Would you like a tour of the clinic?” she
asked.

She showed him the modern equipment and
talked enthusiastically about the need for accessible health care
in Witch Dance.

“Will you stay with us, Kate?” he asked.

“Do you mean, am I committed or am I just
passing through?”

“Yes.”

“Eagle asked me that the day we met.” Winston
didn’t miss the look that passed between them. “Yes, Governor, I’m
here to stay.”

Seeing the proud tilt of her head and the
stubborn set of her chin, Winston never doubted for a minute that
she would keep her word. A man could do worse than have
grandchildren from such a woman.

Winston stayed for punch and cookies. And in
that time, not a single person came through the door. He thought of
the old medicine man who shook his gourds and waved his turkey
feathers over the sick. He thought of all his people who had died
because they refused to travel to Ada to the modern facilities
there.

Eagle was right: There should be a way to
blend the old ways with the new. When Winston took his leave, he
had a new mission in mind, one he would carry through as quickly as
possible ...if he were not weighed on the path and found light.

o0o

The clinic bell was still ringing from
Winston’s exit when Eagle locked the door.

“Closed for the day,” he said, reaching for
Kate.

The sweet madness overtook them, and they
reeled against the walls and rolled on the floor. Eagle’s voice
lifted and soared with the dark beauty of his native tongue.
Impaled by him, impaled and dying the bright, exquisite death of
passion, Kate knew that she would never hear his voice without
wanting him.

“You will come to me tonight,” he said even
as they still lay tangled together.

“You could stay with me.”
Forever
,
she thought, pulling his face down to her aching breasts.

“The nights will soon be too cool to sleep
under the stars.”

“Will we sleep?” she said, laughing.

“Only if you wish.”

He began to move in her once more, and she
knew that she would go to him, galloping through the night on
Mahli, flying to him on the wind.

o0o

The first thing Kate heard when she returned
from Eagle’s campsite was the sound of the phone, ringing and
ringing in the cold half-light of early morning. She drew Mahli to
a halt, dismounted, and patted her neck.

“Wait here, old girl.”

There was no need to tie the mare. Eagle had
trained her well.

Kate took the steps at a run, the sound of
the telephone setting her nerves jangling.

“Hello,” she said, breathless. She placed her
hand over her pounding heart.

The woman at the other end of the line was
crying. “Kate, you have to come to Boston. Something terrible has
happened. Clayton . . .”

The line went dead. Kate jiggled the
receiver.

“What? Who is this?”

Her only answer was silence.

“Don’t expect too much, Kate.”

Exhausted from her long flight across the
country, Kate stood in the hospital corridor and listened to Dr.
Wayne Epsmith’s report on Dr. Clayton Colbert.

“The bullet went in close to the heart. We’ve
done what we can to repair the damage, but . . .” Wayne Epsmith
shook his head.

“Is he going to die?”

“With this kind of damage, the odds are not
in his favor, Kate. You know that.”

As a doctor, she did. As Clayton Colbert’s
friend, she didn’t want to know. She wanted to sit by his bedside
and hold his slack hand and watch the machines do his breathing and
hope that tomorrow everything would be better.

She wanted to believe in miracles.

“I’m sorry, Kate.” Dr. Epsmith put his hand
on Kate’s shoulder. “I know how much Clayton meant to you.”

He used the past tense. As if the bullet had
already done its job.

She couldn’t even say thank you for fear of
breaking down. Her eyes were red and puffy, for she’d cried all the
way from Oklahoma to the Hudson River. She’d barely been able to
get from Logan Airport in one piece.

Inside the ICU cubicle, Clayton lay against
the pillows, his face drained of the rich copper tints of his
heritage. Kate stood silently by his side, not yet willing to make
her presence known, wishing she could spare him this final
humiliation: Her golden idol had turned to clay. The man she
respected and revered above all others, the doctor who had taught
her to save lives, had tried to take his own.

The previous night after the line had gone
dead, she’d tried frantically to reach him. She called his house
and got no answer. Then she called the hospital, expecting him to
be on duty, expecting him to laugh and say the phone call was a
sick prank.

Instead, she talked to Melissa Sayers
Colbert. “He’s asking for you, Kate. He keeps calling your name,
over and over.”

“Why? Why did he do it?”

“Because he loved” —Melissa became
hysterical, sobbing and keening into the phone. Kate hung on to the
receiver, her knuckles turning white— “me. It was me he loved.
Clayton loved me.”

“Of course he did, Mrs. Colbert. He always
spoke of you in glowing terms.”

“He did?”

“Yes. Always,”

Now, looking down at his pale face, Kate
whispered, “Why, Dr. Colbert? Why?”

His eyelids fluttered open. One hand lifted
feebly toward her as he tried to focus his eyes.

“Ka—”

“Shhh. Don’t talk. I’m here.” She took his
hand, scared by the cool, boneless feel of it.

He closed his eyes once more, and his chest
heaved with his shallow breathing.

“I talked with your wife,” Kate said. “She’s
right outside in the waiting room. She hasn’t left your side since
they brought you in.”
Why? Why?

“The ...clinic . . .”

“It’s wonderful. We had a beautiful open
house.”
Just the two of us, three counting the
governor.

“The house . . .”

“Don’t worry about the house. I’m not much of
a housekeeper, as you well know, but it’s still in passable
condition. I’ll go on a real cleaning spree when I get home; then,
when you come back to Witch Dance, that house will shine from top
to bottom.”

Clayton Colbert was dying, and she couldn’t
seem to stop her meaningless chatter. She was a doctor. She’d have
to get used to death.

Brian and Charles floating away in the water
came to her mind.
No
. She’d never get used to death.

“They’re ...yours, Kate. My will . . .”
Clayton felt himself drifting away. He couldn’t go. Not yet. He
clung to Kate’s hand. It was warm and full of strength. If he could
just hang on, her energy would flow through him. “I want you . .
.”

“Please, Dr. Colbert . . .”

“...to have them.”

Silent tears flowed down her cheeks, and
Clayton knew: Kate loved him, loved him in the purest, most
beautiful way.

He didn’t have to die after all.

Melissa came in and kissed him. Her lips felt
dry and cold. Beyond his wife’s head he saw Kate, his beautiful
Kate with hair like a halo.

“I love you,” he said, but she didn’t seem to
hear.

“Flat line,” someone said. Melissa flung
herself across his chest, but he didn’t feel a thing. He was
already floating, floating toward the light that was as bright as
his Kate’s hair.

o0o

Melissa Sayers Colbert stood beside the open
grave, watching Clayton being lowered into the ground, wretched and
broken in her grief, holding tightly to the hand of the woman
standing beside her. Leaves fluttered down from the oak tree and
landed, golden, on the casket.

“Dr. Colbert would have liked that,” Kate
Malone murmured. “He always found beauty in nature.”

Melissa didn’t know. There were many things
she hadn’t known about her husband, things she’d learned from the
woman beside her. Kate Malone.

Her nemesis. Her comforter.

He would have liked being buried in Witch
Dance with Muskogean words spoken for him, Kate had said, but
Melissa couldn’t bear the thought of having him so far away. She
had to take comfort where she could get it, and the familiar words
of the Episcopal priest made the sight of Clayton’s bronze casket
disappearing into the dark hole bearable.

Keening in her agony, Melissa flung herself
outward, toward the grave. Kate’s hands stayed her. Kate’s arms
sustained her.

“Everything is going to be all right. Shhh
...everything is going to be all right.”

But it wasn’t. She’d killed her husband. She
knew that as surely as if she’d pulled the trigger. The scene in
the study replayed itself—Clayton with his head bowed, defeated,
and she, oblivious of his pain, taking her pleasure any way she
could get it.

“No,” she whispered. “No.”

Nothing in her life would ever be all right
again. Clayton was gone from her forever.

Without knowing she was in the arena, Kate
Malone had won. And even that didn’t matter anymore.

“Will you take me home?” Melissa sounded as
old and tired as she felt. “I want to hear about Witch Dance. I
want to know what Clayton had for breakfast and whether he read the
paper in the morning or at night. I want to know what he did when
he was walking the land, what he said, how he looked, how he acted.
I want to know everything about him.” Oh, the wasted months. The
wasted years when she’d stayed behind in Boston while he was
roaming carefree over the land he loved. “Make him live for me
again, Kate. Please.”

Kate took Dr. Colbert’s widow to their Beacon
Hill house and told her every moment of Clayton’s last summer. In
doing so, she relived her own summer, the soaring beauty of the
land and the scorching passion of Eagle Mingo. It all rolled over
her like the tide, with the same force, the same inevitability. The
deep velvet nights with the stars hanging so low, they burned the
skin. The muted mornings, as soft as pastel gowns, stitched and
laced and beaded with love rituals. The thunder of horses’ hooves
in the bright indigo days with the two of them racing along the
river while the call of the winged ones echoed off the hills.

Her summer had a name, and its name was
love.

Wrapping her arms around herself, wishing
they were Eagle’s arms, she leaned toward the fire. Melissa’s voice
was nothing more than a muted counterpoint to her thoughts.

Love
. She was in love with Eagle
Mingo.

Had he found her note on the clinic door? Did
he miss her as terribly as she missed him? Did he want her as
desperately?

“Clayton had a deep tribal affinity,” Melissa
was saying. “I guess I never realized that.”

Kate knew someone else whose tribal affinity
was even stronger, someone whose very being shouted
Chickasaw
.

“I tried to make him over,” Melissa
continued. “I tried to make him forget everything he ever believed
in, everything that was Chickasaw.”

Shivers skittered along Kate’s spine. Could
Eagle ever forget he was a full-blood?

“In the end, I think that’s what killed him.
He could never buy back the dignity I took away.” Melissa covered
her face with her hands and began to sob. “If I could have him back
for one more day, one more hour . . .”

Speaking soothing words, Kate gave her hot
tea and a sedative and put her to bed. Then, exhausted both
physically and emotionally, she leaned against the bedroom door and
closed her eyes. She needed about twelve hours sleep and then a
week to absorb all that had happened. But one need overrode all
others: to see Eagle and tell him she loved him.

Witch Dance

Winston couldn’t find his way through the
snowstorm. He kept stumbling and falling, and the wind was taking
his breath away. An avalanche started high in the mountains and
tumbled downward with terrifying speed. He took the full blow on
his head.