Blaze (34 page)

He didn't care that it worried her sick, his going into town. Her abduction was public knowledge. He had to be a marked man. Her father couldn't control everyone in town. She wondered sometimes how much control he had even over bullies like Yancy. Hazard didn't care that she was sick with fear, all for some dresses. Damn male possessiveness. As if a few inches of her leg showing were worth a suicide trip into Confederate Gulch. Blaze supposed he'd only be satisfied when she was properly covered in front of his friends. She had a mind right now to tear those damn dresses into shreds when he got back. It would serve him right for all the grief he was causing her.

She'd stayed out on the porch listening for a long time, thinking a dozen times she'd heard his footfall. But he didn't come and the chill night air finally drove her in.

She glanced at the small brass clock on the mantle.

:20. Good Lord, where was he? Damn you, oh, damn you, Jon Hazard Black, if you've gone and gotten yourself killed over some trifling dresses, I'll never forgive you. "Never," she breathed, her hands clenched tightly in her lap. She sat for the next hour in the armchair, stiff and nervous.

11:30. I should just go to sleep. That would be best. All this worry and he's probably rolling in the hay with Rose. Don't be stupid, Blaze Braddock. Here you're half in tears with fear and he's probably whispering sweet nothings in some whore's ear while they're all tucked in, cosy as two turtledoves in her fine warm bed.

I'll just go to sleep.

If I could.

Well, I'll pretend to sleep.

What was that? Loose gravel was tumbling down hill. That couldn't be Hazard. It sounded like horses. Was that a horse nickering? He'd walked into town. He wouldn't be traveling with horses.

She flew to the window.

Hazard!

Oh, sweet, good, dear, kind God, it was Hazard!

HE HAD a wide smile on his face when he walked into the cabin, and Blaze was running to him before he'd taken two steps inside the door. Throwing herself into his open arms, she clung shamelessly to him, her fear in his absence terrifying in its conjecture, the sweet joy of his safe return, instant delirium. She covered his face with kisses and he smilingly kissed her back, tasting the innocence of her delight. After long, blissful moments, Hazard gently pried her arms away and, holding her so he could see her face and read her reaction, asked, "Would you like to go to the summer hunt at Arrow Creek?"? His smile was infectious, his dark eyes warm with lazy affection.

"Yes," Blaze replied instantly. "Yes, yes, yes. When?" Now that Hazard was back, perfection had returned to her life—perfection and contentment and a happiness she had stopped trying to understand.

"No patience?" he teased.

She cast him a sparkling glance from under heavy lashes. "Remember to whom you speak," she reminded him with a vivacious smile, "when you mention patience. The woman who seduced you twice in this very cabin."

He laughed.

And she said "When?" again, a little more emphatically.

He took her face gently between the palms of his hands, bent his head down so he was at her eye level, kissed her mouth very softly, and said, "Now."

She squealed with delight. His hands fell away when she danced two small steps of elation, and she saw the blood for the first time. "You're hurt," she cried, reaching for his hands.

"It's nothing." He sidestepped to elude her. The palms of his hands were ripped from the rough shingles and his need for haste.

"There's blood!"

"Scratches, that's all," he explained, then added, "We should leave."

"If we don't leave here very soon"—it dawned on Blaze, looking at him squarely, at the bloody torn hands so plain to see, although Hazard denied the severity of the wounds—"might it make a difference in the state of our health? And damn you, Jon Hazard, don't lie to me."

Her deep blue eyes were watching him intently, and he discarded the notion of dissembling. "It might."

"Who's after you, as if I didn't know?"

"I may have killed him."

"Where?"

"At Rose's."

"May?"

"I left in a hurry."

"Can they find their way up here in the dark?"

"No, and at base, I don't think they'll risk your life to come up here at all. But—"

"What?"

"Suddenly I want to go home. No terribly rational reasons. Maybe I'm tired of people shooting at me. I need a rest cure. And you wanted to go anyway. You don't mind, do you?"

Mind? she thought. I wouldn't mind living on the Earth's most blighted square of space if you were with me. Mind? Going to see your home, your relatives, the way of life that made you the splendid man you are? All she wanted, now that he had safely returned, was never to have him leave her again. "No," she calmly said, instead, sure he'd be terrified at the real intensity of her need, "I don't mind at all."

Hazard packed two more sacks with clothes, food, and fur robes, carried them out, and arranged them comfortably on the horses. Coming back in, he asked Blaze what he probably should have asked sooner: "Can you ride?" And then looked at her in the context of a rider for the first time. Attired in one of his shirts, she wouldn't last an hour on the trail. The light cotton dresses he'd just brought back from Rose's were, ironically, no longer useful.

"Yes," Blaze replied simply. She'd spent most of her youth on horseback. It was the only pastime allowed women of her class that had any element of excitement.

"Traveling at night can be dangerous. The horses occasionally stumble."

"I'll manage." She smiled at his concern.

His dark gaze taking in the unsuitable shirt, he hesitated another moment, then walking over to the storage shelves, took down a doeskin envelope, large, flat, and tied with elaborate beaded bands in stark patterns of black and white. He placed it on the table. "Wear one of these," he said. "For riding," he gruffly added. And, turning abruptly, he walked back outside.

Blaze untied the braided leather that held the beaded bands in place and folded back the supple doeskin. Inside, carefully wrapped in ermine, were three women's dresses. One of pale yellow doeskin, one of elk-skin and one in a fine white leather she didn't recognize. All were elaborately fringed and beaded. The white one was covered with hundreds of elk teeth, each suspended from delicate beaded ornaments of unusual pastel shades. Months of handiwork had been lavished on each garment; in some areas, the beadwork literally covered the leather.

It was obvious, what with the almost ritual packing, whose dresses these were. He'd saved them after his wife's death. How long had she been dead? How did she die? What was her name? And then an uncharitable surge of jealousy flooded her mind. Did he, she apprehensively wondered, both curious and dismayed, have children by his wife? It had never occurred to her, that he might have children; even the thought of Hazard's having been married seemed inconceivable. Yet he had been and he must have cared for his wife very much, she sadly reflected, to have kept the dresses with such ceremony.

I don't want to wear them, she morosely thought. Every time he looks at them he'll think of her. And being back with his people would only serve to revive old memories. Why should she wear them and renew those sorts of remembrances? I won't wear them, she petulantly decided, I simply won't. It was insensitive of him to even suggest it. Her ready temper flared. Imagine, wanting her to wear his dead wife's clothes, she reflected with smoldering sullenness. The nerve! Storming out of the cabin, she stood on the top step of the small porch and shouted at Hazard, who was a mere four feet distance, adjusting the half-hitch rawhide bridle on the buckskin's lower jaw. "I won't wear them!"

Startled, Hazard looked up. "What's wrong with you?"

"With me? What's wrong with me? Nothing's wrong with me! I just don't want to wear your dead wife's clothes!" she screamed. Jealousy, envy, fear of losing him, fear of never having had him, apprehension over the differences in their cultures, the differences in their experience and feelings, the suddenly real threat of Buhl Mining versus claims 1014-15, all contrived to generate the hysterical scream.

"You can't ride in that shirt," was all Hazard said, ignoring the hysteria, not wanting to discuss it at all. "You'll need them," he finished matter-of-factly.

"Go to hell," Blaze retorted, not in a practical frame of mind.

It had taken a small piece from Hazard's soul to take down that doeskin envelope. It represented not only a wife he'd once loved, but a youth so far removed from the present that the memories had begun to lose their fine edges. Years were merging, faces blurring, words spoken only half remembered. It hadn't been easy to offer the dresses; they were the last traces he had of Raven Wing, a reliquary to both her and his carefree youth, a time neither he nor his clan would ever see again.

Lord, he hated it when she screamed. He wasn't familiar with screaming women. A muscle high over his cheekbone twitched. "I wouldn't have offered them to you," he said, his voice cool, "if there'd been any other choice, believe me. And I dislike you screaming."

"I dislike being offered some damned holy, treasured keepsake of your wife's," Blaze shouted, an unde-finable sadness underlying her anger. How could she ever expect to become a part of his life? She was alien to everything in his world.

"What do you want me to say?" he asked gravely, his hands still now on the bridle leather. Necessity had driven him; she couldn't ride for two days in that shirt.

His feelings were too new for him to consciously recognize that his gesture had represented something more than necessity. It was a final relinquishing of Raven Wing's memory, of all she'd been to him, of all she personified of his youth. No woman had ever replaced her completely in the secret recesses of his soul, despite all the playing at love since her death. Until now.

But logic had ruled his life too many years and duty, as well, so he was no more aware of what the giving up of Raven Wing's dresses meant than Blaze did. They were objects, that's all, useful at the moment, he rationally noted, ignorant of the tenuous texture of emotions that prompted his decision.

"If you don't want to wear them, don't. I just want to go home," Hazard said. "Now." And suddenly he felt as though he'd been tired for a year. "Ride your bottom bloody for all I care," he added, jerking the last knot in the bridle. The abrupt wrench caused the buckskin to fling her head up in fear. Hazard's slender fingers soothed her, brushing down her nose, his voice a rich undercurrent of resonant endearments.

"I'll wear a pair of your trousers," Blaze insisted.

"Fine." He looked up, his eyes meeting her coolly over the buckskin's nose. "Whenever you're ready."

Turning in a huff, her back stiff in anger, Blaze reen-tered the cabin. She didn't look around when Hazard came in a moment later, but kept her back to him, intent on her struggle with the oversized waist on Hazard's blue cavalry trousers. When the door slammed again, she only muttered about odious men, odious men still in love with their dead wives.

She had to roll the pants legs up several times in order to walk, and she was still softly cursing Hazard's damnably cool indifference when she left the cabin not even looking around the room as she departed. "Fast enough for you?" Blaze acidly inquired, emerging onto the porch.

"You're the fastest woman I've ever known," Hazard replied, equally acidly.

"And you've known plenty." The remark was intended to be denigrating.

"Unfortunately, one too many," Hazard drily said, vaulting bareback onto Peta.

"In that case, why not leave me behind?" Blaze offered resentfully, standing motionless near the buckskin. "It'll save Daddy a lot of trouble."

"And lose my claim? Not on your life. Let's go."