Season of Storm (41 page)

Slowly, tentatively, a ripple of happiness nudged against her heart. "You still think it," she said. "You said you would let me go."

He grasped her arms and held her tightly to him, more tightly than she had ever been held—safe and secure. "Did I?" he rasped. "It's a lie. I can't live without you. I can't let you go. My grandfather was wrong. I have found my soul. You are my soul.

"Be sure it's what you want, Shulamith, because if you ask me to love you now, I will. And there'll be no going back. You're mine, and you'll be mine till we're in our graves. And I will never let you go."

He kissed her hungrily, and his body found hers with an urgency that raised her need to fever pitch, and her giving was free and open, and she would never be afraid again.

***

"You got it back!" Shulamith exclaimed in delight. "Is it all right?" She rushed over to take the robe from him and flung it out over the bed. The brilliantly coloured dragon glittered and postured as before. A faint discolouration—a kind of dulling—showed where the long smear of grease had been. Shulamith bent to examine it more closely. The tears in the delicate silk had been invisibly mended and the signs hardly showed. The robe had been cleaned and pressed.

"It must have been a painstaking job to mend it." she said. "It really is beautiful."

"It took an art restorer two months to do." Johnny was looking at her oddly as she knelt on the bed and examined every inch of fabric and embroidery. "You knew it had been damaged?" he asked.

"Mmm," she nodded absentmindedly. "Staff Sergeant Podborski showed it to me. He wanted to know if it was mine. Did they pay for the repair?"

"The police don't pay for anything. My insurance paid. You never told me, you know," Johnny added curiously. "You told me they had it, but you didn't say they'd mutilated it."

She looked an apology at him. "I was afraid it would be too much for you to take, with everything else. Besides—"

"Besides?"

"I didn't know who it had belonged to, who you'd bought it for. I always thought you must have loved her very much. And I was afraid—well, you'd had enough that day."

Johnny tied the belt of his robe with a snap and walked over to her. "You were protecting me from the pain of losing a memento of another woman?"

"Yes, why not?"

He bent and kissed her. "No reason, Peaceable Woman," he said. "But for your information the last woman to wear this robe died probably two hundred years ago."

"
What?"
 

"It's a robe from Imperial China, from the Ching dynasty," he told her. "The dragon is a symbol of power. The flowers and birds are prayers for happiness or long life." His hand traced the shape of a flower. "Only the emperor or his courtiers were allowed to wear the dragon. This is a woman's robe, with a five-clawed dragon. Only a very favoured powerful woman close to the emperor would have been allowed to wear it. Perhaps a very beloved wife." He kissed her and smiled. "Like you.

"I bought the robe in Hong Kong. It reminds me of the decorated cloaks that were used among the Chopa for religious rituals. I meant to have it framed and hung."

Shulamith looked at him goggle-eyed. "It's a museum piece?" she demanded in astonishment. "It's an antique? I knew it was a work of art but—Johnny, I could have spilt coffee on it, or—" She began to fold it up in delicate haste. "Why on earth did you let me wear it?"

"Because when I saw you I knew that its proper place was on a beautiful woman. I wanted to see you wear it. Did you know that when you move the dragon seems alive? You bring it to life."

"I'm not wearing it anymore!" Shulamith declared firmly. "You must be crazy!"

"It was made to be worn," he said, "not hung behind glass. It belongs in life. There are other dragon robes preserved in museums around the world. I want to see this one on you." He held it up for her and looked at her with such certainty that she stood and obediently slipped her naked arms into its cool, silky folds. His arms encircled her and held her enwrapped.

"There is something about a dragon!" She rested her head against his shoulder. "I feel like an empress. It makes me feel powerful."

She felt the lightest of kisses on top of her head. "Do you feel happiness, too?"

She turned in his arms. "All the happiness in the world."

"There's something else I want to see you wear." He let her go, crossing to the closet again and pulling open one of the drawers that ran up one wall inside it. He took out a small golden circle and brought it back to her.

His slow smile made her weak at the knees as she held out her left hand. Johnny slid the wedding band back where it belonged and bent and kissed her hand. "Wife," he said, as though the thought gave him satisfaction. "Don't take it off anymore," he commanded softly, and she shook her head, and then he kissed her mouth to seal the renewal of their promise.

"Did you save my wedding dress, too?" she asked as they walked to the kitchen. The floorboard creaked as they passed his study, and she grinned at him. "I used to think that was a deliberate booby trap!" she told him.

"I wish," he said. "It's more of a jinx. Of course I saved your wedding dress." They made coffee and sat looking out over the gorge. The storm had died down; the rain was much gentler, but the wind still bent the trees.

"How's Wilf?" she asked as she got up to pick up her damp clothing from the floor and threw it into the passage to take to the laundry. "You know, you need that washer and dryer down here in the kitchen."

"Do we? Whatever you want. Wilf's getting around okay, but he's not as active as he used to be."

"Can he still paddle over to Oyster Island?"

"Yes, but not so often. He's down at his cabin. Would you like to visit him later?"

She nodded. "I'll dry my clothes."

Johnny said, "You know, if I hadn't been such a blinkered fool Wilf would never have been hurt. If we'd announced our marriage the police would have lost interest."

"Yes," she said sadly.

"That was one thing that helped to wake me up—by yearning after something I couldn't have I risked losing everything I did have. Wilf could have died that night. And you might be next. They'd already threatened to arrest you—"

"Was it
you
who tipped off the CBC, then?" Smith interrupted in amazement. "I always thought it must have been one of the witnesses." It hadn't been Lew. She had asked him point-blank.
 

He shook his head. "Not me. Hal checked around for me, and as far as he could gather, you're right. One of the witnesses, who apparently put two and two together when he saw our names connected in the news."

"So the new provos never talked?"

"No," he agreed. "The new provos were very shamed by what happened to Wilf. And what you said to them in the hospital also cut deep."

Shulamith glanced involuntarily at her hands. "I hope they've learned from it." She looked at him. "My father could have died, too."

"Yes," Johnny said. "I'm sorry. Did I ever say that? It was a stupid venture from the start."

"I can't complain about how it's changed my own life, though." She leaned across the table to kiss him. "And if you hadn't been in my father's room that night Jake wouldn't have sold the band the timber rights." She smiled. "And you and I might
never
have met."
 

"Yes, we would," said Johnny. "I'd been looking for you too long not to find you."

Their eyes met. Shulamith took a breath and looked away. "But under other circumstances you wouldn't have let yourself fall in love with me," she pointed out. "You'd have been thinking about your lost heritage and your children's."

"Maybe," he admitted. "But I'd like to think—" he reached out to touch her cheek "—that one way or another I'd have learned the lesson I had to learn in time."

She looked steadily at him. "You won't regret it if they do change that law? If one day it happens that marrying a native woman would give you back your heritage?"

"I've stopped regretting that part of my life, Shulamith. Over these past few weeks I've proved I can help my people as much from the outside as I could have from the inside.
They
accept that—they always have. But I could never see it. Because they didn't count me as one of them, I took it as rejection. But I'm not one of them. Legally and every other way.
They
see that and always have. I was taken away when I was eight. I can never belong to that life, and they know it. I've always known it, too. I just wouldn't admit it to myself."
 

She reached out to him, and he took her hand in a grip that was both fierce and tender. "You're my future," said Johnny Winterhawk.

The coffee in their cups had grown cold, and Smith got up to make fresh. "What I don't understand is why you never told me all this before. You say you knew you loved me way back when, but..."

"I tried," said Johnny emphatically. "You convinced me you didn't want to hear it."

She whirled so fast that the sleeve of the dragon robe dragged a spoon to the floor. "
When?
You never!"
 

''I came back from Amsterdam to tell you I loved you. To ask you if you'd be willing to try to make our marriage a real one."

"But you didn't ask—you didn't even
hint,
" Smith wailed.
 

He said dryly, "You were very sure that night that you didn't love me, you know. You informed me you'd only thought you loved me because you thought I loved you."

"But you never said a word! Why didn't you ask?"

"I asked," Johnny said, as though the memory still held pain. "I took you in my arms, and I asked for you. You said, 'I can't,' and you cried, and you asked me to go away."

"Oh, Johnny," she said sadly. If only she'd known. "I had no idea. I thought...at first I thought you came to me for comfort—because of the Cartier Commission report."

"I did."

"And I thought the comfort you wanted was to take me to bed, to make love to me."

"That, too."

"But that was all you wanted! You'd told me before that it was only physical, the special connection we had. You said you never wondered if it might be love."

"Yes, I know I did. And then I heard your song in Amsterdam. And I kept hearing you telling me about all the lovers you'd have to wake up to say goodbye. You'd written that song to me, and there was a yearning in it that must have been meant for me, once. I didn't want to accept that I'd lost that, destroyed it for the sake of giving a heritage to children that I wouldn't want to have unless they were yours.

"That's when I came to terms with it—in Amsterdam. Up until then I'd convinced myself that even though I loved you I had to give you up. So I went from feeling I had to give you up to fearing I'd lost you through my own stupidity. I came you that night knee deep in that fear. I guess what you said played right into that."

She smiled. "So it was all the fault of my song?" she teased.

Johnny pulled her into his lap. "You're a poetic genius," he agreed. "What happened to the song you were working on the night I got back from Amsterdam? Did you write it?"

"Ah!" she said, kissing his cheek. "That's now 'Like a River in Flood'! It's going to be Cimarron's second single release! And we've got CBS so excited they want to do a video of Cimarron! Johnny, she's going to be a huge success!"

The coffee was ready, and she got up to pour. The beautiful square sleeves of the dragon robe were a liability, and she was terrified of spilling something on it.

"And what about poetry?" asked Johnny. She told him about the literary quarterlies and about the Canadian anthology. "The same publisher is looking at a possible book of poems all by me. I'm going to call it
Songs of Love and Loss."
She looked into his dark eyes and saw how proud of her he was and wrapped her arms around his neck. "I'll have to call the next one
Winning."
 

He pulled her down on his lap to kiss her. "It's lucky we get second chances, isn't it, Peaceable Woman?"

She kissed him on his forehead between the two black falls of hair and then on his sensuous mouth.

"It's a good thing my father interfered, though I hate to say it." she said. "Or we'd never have had our second chance."

"Your father be damned. I'd have been around a lot sooner if he hadn't approached me about the house he wanted built." He touched her lips. ''I thought that was your signal to me that you needed time, that you wanted to use your father as a go-between. So I waited. It wasn't till I saw your face at that damned party that I realized what he'd done."

"What would you have done if he hadn't interfered?" she asked in surprise.

"I was going to get you out here to visit Wilf. If necessary I would have had Wilf fake a relapse just to keep you here a day or two." He smiled lazily and stroked her arm. "And I would have made the best damn love to you I know how."

Shulamith looked into his smiling eyes and took a deep breath. "And you do know how," she said softly.

He clenched his jaw and swore softly. "Peaceable Woman, we're going to have to get you a new name more suited to you. Something like Fire Woman, for example." He stroked her hair from scalp to ends, and she shivered appreciatively.

"To describe your hair and your body," he whispered, and pulled her face down to meet his mouth, "and your nature."

When he let her lift her lips at last she was trembling with need.

"Wilf," she whispered. "We were going to—"

"Tomorrow," said Johnny. "There's always tomorrow."

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