Comanche Heart (10 page)

“Amy, for God’s sake, what do you think I’m going to do to you?”

She tried to speak but couldn’t. He stepped closer, so close she could feel his shirt grazing the bodice of her dress. The friction, whether intentional or not, titillated her nipples, and they strained against the cloth of her chemise, aching. Amy broke the contact by flattening her back against the wall. He removed his hat and sent it sailing in a wide arc toward the door. The conchae, the
hated
conchae, went
kerchink
on the wood. Santos, the comanchero leader who had kidnapped her, had worn conchae on his pants. Most of his men had worn them as well. She couldn’t see the silver disks without breaking out in a sweat.

“Amy.” Swift’s lips grazed a loose curl at her temple. “Do you remember that day down by the river, when you taught me how to kiss?”

His grip relentless this time, he clasped her chin and forced her head back. His dark eyes held hers.

“You closed your eyes, wrinkled your nose, and puckered up like a cactus button.” His face drew closer. “It wasn’t until years later I found out that wasn’t the way to do things.”

His chest met hers, sandwiching her between him and the wall. She strained her head back, trying to keep distance between their mouths. “Swift, don’t . . . please, don’t.”

He bent closer until his breath mingled with hers, a warm mist, sweet from honeyed coffee.

“Do you remember, Amy?”

“Yes,” she finally admitted on a soft sob. “I remember. It was a foolish child’s kiss. That has nothing to do with now.” She managed to get her hands between their bodies until she had both palms against his chest. With all her strength, she shoved.

Pushed off balance, he staggered back, and she took advantage, darting from under his arm. She put several feet between them, whirled, and hugged herself so he wouldn’t see her shaking. Trying to keep her voice steady, she said, “It’s over between us, Swift. Whatever we shared was between two children. We’re grown now. Too much has happened. I’m sorry if you hoped differently. But that’s the way it is.”

He crossed the room and leaned a hip against her table, loosely folding his arms. The relaxed stance didn’t console her. Every time he so much as flexed, she jumped, terrified of what he intended to do. Knowing Comanche custom as she did, Amy was all too aware that he might carry her to the bedroom and force himself on her. No one who believed as he did would frown on him for using strength of arm. God help her, she had granted him inalienable rights to her body and her life, and the possessive gleam in his eyes told her he just might exercise both.

Studying her with relentless intensity, he asked, “Is this all because I rode with the comanchero? If so, I can explain.”

“Explain?” She ran a contemptuous gaze the length of him. “Do you think I don’t know the evil things you must have done?”

“That’s over and done.”

She pressed a hand against her waist. Since his arrival her stomach had taken to doing cartwheels, fluttering crazily, sinking to her toes one minute, surging into her throat the next. “Over and done? Just like that, you think you can erase it?” She stared at him, waiting. “Did your comanchero friends kill people, Swift? Did they—rape women? Did they? Answer me!”

Swift swallowed, determined not to let his gaze falter. “I can’t answer for what they did, Amy.”

“Then answer for yourself. Did you steal and kill and rape? Did you?” Her voice rose to a shrill squeak.

“I’m guilty of some of that, but not all.” A glitter crept into his eyes. “You don’t really believe I’d rape a woman. Do you? Deep down . . .”

“You’d rape me,” she countered. “Deny that, and I’ll put on a pot of coffee. We’ll have a nice little chat, catch up, just like you wanted. Swear to me that you’ll never touch me.”

Swift regarded her in silence, afraid for her in a way he never had been before. She looked as if an unexpected move from him might make her fly apart. Suddenly he understood what Hunter had tried to make him understand with the story about the raccoon. Amy was trapped here at Wolf’s Landing, terrified of anything or anyone that threatened to change her world.

“You can’t swear that to me, can you, Swift?” Her voice quavered as she spoke. “If I don’t honor my promise to you, you have every intention of making me honor it. Don’t you?” She stared at him, her pupils so dilated that her huge eyes shone nearly black. “Answer me. You’ve betrayed all else between us. Please don’t add lying to the list.”

Swift felt as if he stood on a precipice with someone nudging him to leap. He didn’t want to lie to her. But he could see the truth would terrify her, driving the wedge ever deeper between them. “I’ll never hurt you, Amy. You have my word on that.”

The skin across her cheekbones drew taut, the delicate muscle beneath twitching, until her face became a caricature of its beauty, skeletal and harsh. “Painless rape? Where did you learn that trick?”

Swift’s guts knotted. “Amy, for God’s sake. Why are you prodding me like this? You started in on me the minute I got here, and you haven’t let up since.”

Amy had no answer. The last thing she should do was infuriate him, yet she couldn’t let the matter drop. She had to know what he intended. She couldn’t bear the thought of spending an entire night wondering.

“Do you want a confrontation?” he asked softly. “For me to make threats? Is that it? So you’ll have a reason to hate me?”

“I’ve plenty to hate you for as it is. I’m asking for honesty, if you’re capable of it anymore. I want to know what your intentions are. I think I’ve every right to that. It is my life we’re discussing. Are you too big a coward to answer me?”

“All right, goddamn it, yes,” he said, pushing away from the table. His sudden movement made her jerk. “You want it on the line, Amy? You’re mine! You have been for fifteen years. No one forced you to betroth yourself to me. You knew exactly what you were doing. And you wanted to do it as much as I did. If you try to welsh on our agreement, I’ll force you to honor it. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it’s going to be.”

She braced herself, as if she expected him to hit her. Swift froze, his body taut, his skin clammy.

“Do you feel better now?” he asked hoarsely. “It’s out in the open. You know where you stand. I’m here, I’m staying, and you’d damned well better figure out a way to deal with it.”

She looked as if her legs might buckle. Swift yearned to reach for her but didn’t dare.

“Amy.” His voice shook with emotion, foremost regret because the last thing he had ever dreamed he might do was deliberately frighten her. “Do you know the safest place you could be right now? Come here and I’ll show you. Just three steps, and I swear to your God and all mine that nothing and no one will ever harm you as long as I’ve got life left in my body.”

She looked at his outstretched hand in horrified disbelief.

“You trusted me once. You can trust me now. Come here and let me prove it to you. Please. . . .”

“I trusted Swift Antelope. Swift Antelope is dead.”

Swift felt as if she had slapped him. He slowly dropped his arm and curled his hand into a fist. “If I were dead, honey, you wouldn’t have a betrothal promise hanging over you. You’re making this a lot harder than it needs to be, and you’re going to be the one who suffers for it.”

“Maybe, but I’ll go down fighting.” Even as she spoke she retreated a step, her voice thin and quavery. “Make no mistake in that, for I will fight you. With my last breath. I’d rather die than let a man like you put his hands on me again.”

Brave words, but they had no force behind them. Swift studied her, and he grieved over what he saw. What had happened to the Amy he had known—the courageous girl who had once stood alone, challenging sixty Comanche warriors with a rifle she wasn’t big enough to shoot? Even if it meant losing her, he longed to see that fire back in her eyes again, if only for an instant. As Amy was now, she was only a shell—a beautiful, untouchable shell—of the woman she should have been.

“A man like me? You know nothing about me.”

“I know you’re not the boy I loved! That’s all I need to know.”

“You can’t get rid of me quite that easy.” He strode toward the door and bent to pick up his hat. After he dusted it clean on his pants, he turned to regard her. “A betrothal promise is forever, Amy. I realize fifteen years is a hell of a long time, but it’s nowhere close to forever. You promised yourself to me by the central fire. Nothing and no one can change that. I’ll give you some time to get used to the idea, but not too long. The way I figure, too much time has been wasted already.”

He opened the door.

“Swift, wait!”

He paused and glanced back.

“Y-you can’t really expect me to honor a promise I made as a twelve-year-old.”

“Yes, Amy, I really can.”

He could see how badly she trembled, even from across the room.

“Even though you know I’d rather die?”

Swift ran his gaze over her. “I’m not too worried about you dying on me. You might wish you could, but wishing and doing are two different things. You can give it a try. We’ll see if you’re more successful than I was. But my advice is to spend more time getting used to the idea of marriage—just in case wishing yourself dead doesn’t work. It’d be a hell of a note to kid yourself right up until the last minute and find yourself being touched, despite all your wishing, by a man like me.”

He waited, hoping she’d throw the challenge back in his face, but instead she only grew pale. With a sinking heart he walked out and softly closed the door.

 

After a poor night’s rest, Amy awoke just after dawn to the ring of an ax. Slipping from bed, she approached the window, wondering who would be in her yard chopping wood. Pressing her face to the glass, she peered out into the grayish gloom.

“Swift!”

Her fingers tightened on the window sash when she spotted him. His black, collar-length hair was wind-tossed and damp with sweat, but those who didn’t know better might think it was mussed from sleep and damp from washing his face. Naked to the waist, he afforded her a view of his sun-burnished upper torso. With every movement, muscle bunched across his broad back. Except for the gun belt strapped around his waist, he looked like a man who had just crawled out of bed to chop wood for the breakfast fire. A fire that people would assume was to be built in her stove.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she called, glancing anxiously toward town to see if anyone had seen him.

He didn’t seem to hear her. Infuriated, Amy grabbed her wrapper, shoving her arms down the sleeves as she dashed from the bedroom. When she threw the door wide and yelled the question again, he ceased swinging the ax and turned the full impact of his gaze on her, beginning at her toes and working his way up to her face, his interest lingering at several points in between.

“I’m chopping my woman’s firewood,” he explained with a lazy grin. “That is how you white folks do things, isn’t it?”

“I’m not your woman! And I don’t appreciate your parading about my yard half-dressed. I’m a schoolteacher, Swift. Do you want me to lose my job?”

He balanced a partially split chunk of wood on the block, stepped back, and rendered it in two with one mighty swing.

Sputtering, Amy ran onto the porch. “You get out of here. People will see you and think you’ve been here all night.”

“Now why didn’t I think of that?”

She watched him split another log, her temper rising with each report of the ax. When he continued to ignore her, she braved the yard barefoot, uncertain what to do once she reached him but convinced she had to do something.

“I said get off my place.”

“Our place.”

“What?”

“Our place. What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is yours. You know how it goes.”

“You don’t have anything but a horse.”

“He’s one hell of a good horse, though.” His eyes met hers, dancing with mischief. “My, my, Amy, you are a fetching sight in that nightdress. From a distance, I bet we look like we’re making eyes at each other.”

Amy felt heat rising up her neck. “Get out!”

He gave her a measuring glance. “You giving me the boot?”

She wanted to wrest the ax from him but didn’t quite dare. “Teaching is my life. Do you understand that?”

“Yeah, and it’s a hell of a waste.”

“It isn’t a waste. I like it. I love it!”

“Fine with me. Teach to your little heart’s content. They don’t have anything against married women teaching, do they?”

Amy stared up at him, legs quivering with rage. She knotted her hands. He noted the gesture and grinned, his laughing eyes daring her to strike him. Amy came close to accommodating him. Only the thought of what he might do in retaliation stopped her.

“The men on the school committee will terminate me on the spot if they think I’m engaging in—in improper behavior. Unlike you, I can’t steal for a living.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her, his grin widening. “Would you listen to yourself? Are you the same girl who helped me tug all the ropes coming from Old Man’s lodge one night and then hid with me in the brush to watch all his wives run to join him in his buffalo robes? Improper, Amy?”

Lips parted, she gazed up at him, unable to speak. It had been years since she had thought of that night. She and Swift had rolled in the grass, bent double with laughter, fighting to make no sound while Old Man tried to placate his wives. The memory hit her so suddenly and with such clarity that for a moment she nearly forgot why she was standing there. Looking into Swift’s eyes, she felt for a timeless instant as if she were floating, that there was no present, only yesterday, she a child, he a carefree young man.

“Do you think he ever figured out it was us who tugged the ropes?” Swift asked.

Amy blinked. Old Man had been slain in a massacre shortly after that night, murdered by border ruffians. Reality and all its harshness came sweeping back to her. With it came self-awareness. She was no longer a child, and Swift didn’t look at her as if she were. They both knew what Old Man’s wives had been hoping for when they ran so eagerly to his lodge.