He got in beside her and impatiently reached for her seat belt, snapping it in place. “You always forget,” he murmured, meeting her eyes.
Her breath came uneasily through her lips as she met that level stare and responded helplessly to it. He was handsome and sexy and she loved him more than her own life. She had for years. But it was a hopeless, unreturned adoration that left her unfulfilled. He’d never touched her, not even in the most innocent way. He only looked.
“I should close my door to you,” she said huskily. “Refuse to speak to you, refuse to see you, and get on with my life. You’re a constant torment.”
Unexpectedly he reached out and touched her soft cheek with just his fingertips. They smoothed down to her full, soft mouth and teased the lower lip away from the upper one. “I’m Lakota,” he said quietly. “You’re white.”
“There is,” she said unsteadily, “such a thing as birth control.”
His face was very solemn and his eyes were narrow and intent on hers. “And sex is all you want from me, Cecily?” he asked mockingly. “No kids, ever?”
It was the most serious conversation they’d ever had. She couldn’t look away from his dark eyes. She wanted him. But she wanted children, too, eventually. Her expression told him so.
“No, Cecily,” he continued gently. “Sex isn’t what you want at all. And what you really want, I can’t give you. We have no future together. If I marry one day, it’s important to me that I marry a woman with the same background as my own. And I don’t want to live with a young, and all too innocent, white woman.”
“I wouldn’t be innocent if you’d cooperate for an hour,” she muttered outrageously.
His dark eyes twinkled. “Under different circumstances, I would,” he said, and there was suddenly something hot and dangerous in the way he looked at her as the smile faded from his chiseled lips, something that made her heart race even faster. “I’d love to strip you and throw you onto a bed and bend you like a willow twig under y body.”
“Stop!” she whispered theatrically. “I’ll swoon!” And it wasn’t all acting.
His hand slid behind her nape and contracted, dragging her rapt face just under his, so close that she could smell the coffee that clung to his clean breath, so close that her breasts almost touched his jacket.
“You’ll tempt me once too often,” he bit off. “This teasing is more dangerous than you realize.”
She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She was throbbing, aroused, sick with desire. In all her life, there had been only this man who made her feel alive, who made her feel passion. Despite the traumatic experience of her teens, she had a fierce physical attraction to Tate that she was incapable of feeling with any other man.
She touched his lean cheek with cold fingertips, slid them back, around his neck into the thick mane of long hair that he kept tightly bound-like his own passions.
“You could kiss me,” she whispered unsteadily, “just to see how it feels.”
He tensed. His mouth poised just above her parted lips. The silence in the car was pregnant, tense, alive with possibilities and anticipation. He looked into her wide, pale, eager green eyes and saw the heat she couldn’t disguise. His own body felt the pressure and warmth of hers and began to swell, against his will.
“Tate,” she breathed, pushing upward, toward his mouth, his chiseled, beautiful mouth that promised heaven, promised satisfaction, promised paradise.
His dark fingers corded in her hair. They hurt, and she didn’t care. Her whole body ached.
“Cecily, you little fool,” he ground out.
Her lips parted even more. He was weak. This once, he was weak. She could tempt him. It could happen. She could feel his mouth, taste it, breathe it. She felt him waver. She felt the sharp explosion of his breath against her lips as he let his control slip. His mouth parted and his head bent. She wanted it. Oh, God, she wanted it, wanted it, wanted it…
She pulled the shawl closer as a tall, lithe figure cut across the parking lot and joined her at the passenger door.
“You’re already famous,” Colby Lane told her, his dark eyes twinkling in his lean, scarred face. “You’ll see yourself on the evening news, if you live long enough to watch it.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Tate’s on his way right now.”
“Unlock this thing and get me out of here!” she squeaked.
He chuckled. “Coward.”
He unlocked the door and let her climb in. By the time he got behind the wheel and took off, Tate was striding across the parking lot with blood in his eye.
Cecily blew him a kiss as Colby gunned the engine down the busy street.
“You’re living dangerously tonight,” Colby told her. “He knows where you live,” he added.
“He should. He paid for the apartment,” she added in a sharp, hurt tone. She wrapped her arms closer around her. “I don’t want to go home, Colby. Can I stay with you tonight?”
She knew, as few other people did, that Colby Lane was still passionately in love with his ex-wife, Maureen. He had nothing to do with other women even two years after his divorce was final. He drank to excess from time to time, but he wasn’t dangerous. Cecily trusted no one more. He’d been a good friend to her, as well as to Tate, over the years.
“He won’t like it,” he said.
She let out a long breath. “What does it matter now?” she asked wearily. “I’ve burned my bridges.”
“I don’t know why that socialite Audrey had to tell you,” he muttered irritably. “It was none of her business.”
“Maybe she wants a big diamond engagement ring, and Tate can’t afford it because he’s keeping me,” she said bitterly.
He glanced at her rigid profile. “He won’t marry her.”
She made a sound deep in her throat. “Why not? She’s got everything…money, power, position and beauty-and a degree from Vassar.”
“In psychology,” Colby mused.
“She’s been going around with Tate for several months.”
“He goes around with a lot of women. He won’t marry any of them.”
“Well, he certainly won’t marry me,” she assured him. “I’m white.”
“More of a nice, soft tan,” he told her. “You can marry me. I’ll take care of you.”
She made a face at him. “You’d call me Maureen in your sleep and I’d lay your head open with the lamp. It would never work.
In a private room down the hall, a tired but delighted Cecily was watching her husband with his brand-new son. Cecily had thought that the expression on Tate’s face at their wedding would never be duplicated. But when they placed the tiny little boy in his father’s gowned arms in the delivery room, and he saw his child for the first time, the look on his face was indescribable. Tears welled in his eyes. He’d taken the tiny little fist in his big, dark hand and smoothed over the perfect little fingers and then the tiny little face, seeking resemblances.
“Generations of our families,” he said softly, “all there, in that face.” He’d looked down at his wife with unashamedly wet eyes. “In our son’s face.”
She wiped her own tears away with a corner of the sheet and coaxed Tate’s head down so that she could do the same for him where they were, temporarily, by themselves.
Now she was cleaned up, like their baby, and drowsy as she lay on clean white sheets and watched her husband get acquainted with his firstborn. “Isn’t he beautiful?” he murmured, still awed by the child. “Next time, we have to have a little girl,” he said with a tender smile, “so that she can look like you.”
Her heart felt near to bursting as she stared up at that beloved face, above the equally beloved face of their firstborn.
“My heart is happy when I see you,” she whispered in Lakota.
He chuckled, having momentarily forgotten that he’d taught her how to say it. “Mine is equally happy when I see you,” he replied in English.
She reached out and clasped his big hand with her small one. On the table beside her was a bouquet of roses, red and crisp with a delightful soft perfume. Her eyes traced them, and she remembered the first rose he’d ever given her, when she was seventeen: a beautiful red paper rose that he’d brought her from Japan. Now the roses were real, not imitation. Just as her love for him, and his for her, had become real enough to touch.
He frowned slightly at her expression. “What is it?” he asked softly.
“I was remembering the paper rose you brought me from Japan, just after I went to live with Leta.” She shrugged and smiled self-consciously.
He smiled back. “And now you’re covered in real ones,” he discerned.
She nodded, delighted to see that he understood exactly what she was talking about. But, then, they always had seemed to read each others’ thoughts-never more than now, with the baby who was a living, breathing manifestation of their love. “Yes,” she said contentedly. “The roses are real, now.”
Outside the window, rain was coming down in torrents, silver droplets shattering on the bright green leaves of the bushes. In the room, no one noticed. The baby was sleeping and his parents were watching him, their eyes full of warm, soft dreams.
Don’t make that mistake again,” he said in a voice so quiet it was barely audible. He looked as if all his latent hostilities were waiting for an excuse to turn on her. “If you throw that cup at me, so help me, I’ll carry you over and put you down in the punch bowl!”
“You and the CIA, maybe!” Cecily hissed. “Go ahead and try…!”
Tate actually took a step toward her just as Colby managed to get between them. “Now, now,” he cautioned.
Cecily wasn’t backing down an inch. Neither was Tate. He’d gone from lazy affection and indulgent amusement to bristling antagonism in the space of weeks. Lately he flew into a rage if Cecily’s name was mentioned, but Colby hadn’t told her that.
“You have no right to make that kind of insinuation about me,” she said through her teeth. “I don’t get jobs lying on my back, and you know it!”
Tate’s black eyes narrowed. He looked formidable, but Cecily wasn’t intimidated by him. She never had been. He glanced at her hands, which were clenched on her cup, and then back to her rigid features. It had infuriated him to be the object of televised ridicule at the political dinner, and Audrey’s comments had only made things worse. He was carrying a grudge. But as he looked at Cecily, he felt an emptiness in his very soul. This woman had been a thorn in his side for years, ever since an impulsive act of compassion had made her his responsibility. In those days, she’d been demure and sweet and dependent on him, and her shy hero worship had been vaguely flattering. Now, she was a fiery, independent woman who didn’t give a damn about his disapproval or, apparently, his company, and she had done everything expect leave town to keep out of his way.
I saw him with her last week, at a coffeehouse near my apartment. They were holding hands. She’s captivated him.”
“The Lakota Captive.” Leta made a line in the air with her hand. “I can see it now, the wily, brave Lakota warrior with the brazen white woman pioneer. She carries him off into the sunset over her shoulder…”
Cecily whacked her with a strand of grass she’d pulled.
“You write history your way, I’ll write it my way,” Leta said wickedly.
“Native Americans are stoic and unemotional,” Cecily reminded her. “All the books say so.”
“We never read many books in the old days, so we didn’t know that,” came the dry explanation. She shook her head. “What a sad stereotype so many make of us-a bloodthirsty ignorant people who never smile because they’re too busy torturing people over hot fires.”
“Wrong tribe,” Cecily corrected. She frowned thoughtfully. “That was the northeastern native people.”
“Who’s the Native American here, you or me?”
Cecily shrugged. “I’m German-American.” She brightened. “But I had a grandmother who dated a Cherokee man once. Does that count?”
Leta hugged her warmly. “You’re my adopted daughter. You’re Lakota, even if you haven’t got my blood.
Cecily let her cheek fall to Leta’s shoulder and hugged her back. It felt so nice to be loved by someone in the world. Since her mother’s death, she’d had no one of her own. It was a lonely life, despite the excitement and adventure her work held for her. She wasn’t openly affectionate at all, except with Leta.
“For God’s sake, next you’ll be rocking her to sleep at night!” came a deep, disgusted voice at Cecily’s back, and Cecily stiffened because she recognized it immediately.
“She’s my baby girl,” Leta told her tall, handsome son with a grin. “Shut up.”
Cecily turned a little awkwardly. She hadn’t expected this. Tate Winthrop towered over both of them. His jet-black hair was loose as he never wore it in the city, falling thick and straight almost to his waist. He was wearing a breastplate with buckskin leggings and high-topped mocassins. There were two feathers straight up in his hair with notches that had meaning among his people, marks of bravery.
Cecily tried not to stare at him. He was the most beautiful man she’d ever known. Since her seventeenth birthday, Tate had been her world. Fortunately he didn’t realize that her mad flirting hid a true emotion. In fact, he treated her exactly as he had when she came to him for comfort after her mother had died suddenly; as he had when she came to him again with bruises all over her thin, young body from her drunken stepfather’s violent attack. Although she dated, she’d never had a serious boyfriend. She had secret terrors of intimacy that had never really gone away, except when she thought of Tate that way. She loved him…
“Why aren’t you dressed properly?” Tate asked, scowling at her skirt and blouse. “I bought you buckskins for your birthday, didn’t I?”
“Three years ago,” she said without meeting his probing eyes. She didn’t like remembering that he’d forgotten her birthday this year. “I gained weight since then.”
“Oh. Well, find something you like here…”
She held up a hand. “I don’t want you to buy me anything else,” she said flatly, and didn’t back down from the sudden menace in his dark eyes. “I’m not dressing up like a Lakota woman. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m blond. I don’t want to be mistaken for some sort of overstimulated Native American groupie buying up artificial artifacts and enthusing over citified Native American flute music, trying to act like a member of the tribe.”
“You belong to it,” he returned. “We adopted you years ago.”
“So you did,” she said. That was how he thought of her-a sister. That wasn’t the way she wanted him to think of her. She smiled faintly. “But I won’t pass for a Lakota, whatever I wear.”
“You could take your hair down,” he continued thoughtfully.
She shook her head. She only let her hair loose at night, when she went to bed. Perhaps she kept it tightly coiled for pure spite, because he loved long hair and she knew it.
“How old are you?” he asked, trying to remember. “Twenty, isn’t it?”
“I was, give years ago,” she said, exasperated. “You used to work for the CIA. I seem to remember that you went to college, too, and got a law degree. Didn’t they teach you how to count?”
He looked surprised. Where had the years gone? She hadn’t aged, not visibly.
I didn’t know you involved yourself in political issues.”
She glanced at him wryly. “Of course you didn’t. You don’t know a lot about me.”
He scowled as he turned his attention to the circle and watched his mother dance, resplendent in her beautiful buckskins. No, he didn’t know a lot about Cecily, but he did know how devastated she’d been to discover he’d paid her way through college, absorbed all her expenses out of pity for her situation. He was sorry for how much that had hurt her. But over the past two years, he’d deliberately distanced himself from her. He wondered why…
“I had dinner with Senator Holden last week,” she said conversationally, deliberately trying to irritate him. “He wanted to point me toward some special collections for the museum.”
He stared at his mother in the circle, but he was frowning, deep in thought. “I don’t like Holden,” he said curtly.
“Yes, I know. You’ll be delighted to hear that he returned your sentiment,” she said with a chuckle at his scowl.
At least she was good at archaeology, she mused, even if she was a dismal failure as a woman in Tate’s eyes.
“She’s been broody ever since we got here,” Leta said with pursed lips as she glanced from Tate to Cecily. “You two had a blowup, huh?” she asked, pretending innocence.
Tate drew in a short breath. “She poured crab bisque on me in front of television cameras.”
Cecily drew herself up to her full height. “Pity it wasn’t flaming shish kebab!” she returned fiercely.
Leta moved between them. “The Sioux wars are over,” she announced.
“That’s what you think,” Cecily muttered, glaring around her at the tall man.
Tate’s dark eyes began to twinkle. He’d missed her in his life. Even in a temper, she was refreshing, invigorating.
She averted her eyes to the large grass circle outlined by thick corded string. All around it were make-shift shelters on poles, some with canvas tops, with bales of hay to make seats for spectators. The first competition of the day was over and the winners were being announced. A woman-only dance came next, and Leta grimaced as she glanced from one warring face to the other. If she left, there was no telling what might happen.
“That’s me,” she said reluctantly, adjusting the number on her back. “Got to run. Wish me luck.”
“You know I do,” Cecily said, smiling at her.
“Don’t disgrace us,” Tate added with laughter in his eyes.
Leta made a face at him, but smiled. “No fighting,” she said, shaking a finger at them as she went to join the other competitors.
Tate’s granitelike face had softened as he watched his mother. Whatever his faults, he was a good son.
Tate practically raised you from what I hear. You love him, don’t you?”
Her face closed up. “For all the good it will ever do me, yes,” she said softly.
“He won’t have the excuse of pure Lakota blood much longer,” he advised.
“I’m not holding out for miracles anymore,” she vowed. “I’m going to stop wanting what I can never have. From now on, I’ll take what I can get from life and be satisfied with it. Tate will have to find his own way.”
“That’s sour grapes,” he observed.
“You bet it is. What do you want me to do to help?”
“It’s dangerous,” he pointed out, hesitating as he considered her youth. “I don’t know…”
“I’m a card-carrying archeologist,” she reminded him. “Haven’t you ever watched an Indiana Jones movies? We’re all like that,” she told him with a wicked grin. “Mild-mannered on the outside and veritable world-tamers inside. I can get a whip and a fedora, too, if you like,” she added.
The hell of it is that my son, my only child, has to turn out to be,” he added with a return of his old spirit, black eyes flashing, “the one man in Washington, D.C. who hates my guts!”
“You weren’t too fond of him, either, if you recall,” she pointed out.
He glared at her. “He’s hot-tempered and arrogant and stubborn!”
“Look who he gets it from,” she said with a grin.
He unlinked his hands as he considered that. “Those can be desirable traits,” he agreed with a faint smile. “Anyway, it’s nice to know I won’t die childless,” he said after a minute. He lifted his eyes to her face. “Leta can’t know any of this. When and if the time comes, I’ll tell her.”
“Who’s going to tell him?” she ventured.
“You?” he suggested.
“In your dreams,” she said with a sweet smile.
He stuffed his hands back into his pockets. “We’ll cross that bridge when the river comes over it. You’ll be careful, do you hear me? I’ve invested a lot of time and energy into hijacking you for my museum. Don’t take the slightest risk. If you think you’ve been discovered, get out and take Leta with you.”
“She’s afraid to fly,” she pointed out. “She won’t get in an airplane unless it’s an emergency.”
“Then I’ll come out and stuff her into a car and drive her to the airport and put her on a plane,” he said firmly.
She pursed her lips. He was very like Tate. “I guess you would, at that.
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