Tender Deception: A Novel of Romance

BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY PATTI BECKMAN

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TENDER DECEPTION

A NOVEL OF ROMANCE

PATTI BECKMAN

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1982, 2012 by Charles and Patti Boeckman, Inc.

Published by Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidebooks.com

DEDICATION

To my wonderful husband, Charles, who is the hero of all my novels

CHAPTER ONE

The desert at midday had become a boiling cauldron. The lone figure stumbling in the vast expanse of barren sand and scrubby cactus amounted to no more than a crippled insect in a hostile world.

Blonde hair that had once been lank and silky was matted with blood. Delicate features had been smashed and bruised beyond recognition. Nothing remained to hint that the battered creature had once been a beautiful woman—or even a woman at all. It was a scarecrow, a bloody caricature of a human being.

Pain that had raged agonizingly through her body had been numbed by impulses released by a brain that had passed the point of endurance. Blankness now stilled the mind. Only a faint animal instinct of survival, glimmering like a half extinguished spark in the primeval brain stem kept her rubbery legs moving in their swaying, tottering motion.

She fell, sprawling as she had fallen countless times before in the past twenty-four hours, grinding sand into raw wounds. She lay utterly motionless. Above, in the cloudless blue sky, buzzards wheeled in a graceful ballet of death. They circled ever lower until the loathsome creatures settled on the sand with a rustle of black wings.

The natural harmony of the primitive setting was disturbed by a discordant note from the twentieth century. A rusty pickup truck appeared over a distant rise.

Henry Brownfeather gripped the steering wheel with work worn hands; the flesh had long ago hardened into horn-like calluses. He was pursuing a line of thin, faint tracks that snaked across the desert toward a mesa in the hazy distance. He slammed a heavy, booted foot on the clutch and rammed the floor shift from gear to gear with a rasping screech of metal to jockey the bouncing truck through arroyos and over sand dunes.

A day’s hard work doctoring his cattle had left a film of sweat and dust on his lined, bronze face. He was on his way home to the pueblo high atop the mesa. His mind was not on his day’s work or his driving. His thoughts wrestled with the problems of his family—his daughter, Raven, and his son, Luke, both of them grown now, and causing him sleepless nights.

When he thought about his children these days it was not so much with feelings of concern as bafflement. Especially the girl, Raven. She brought mixed feelings to his heart, ranging from pride to disappointment. Like so many of the young people these days, she had turned from the old ways to the white man’s culture. She dressed like the people in the city and spoke of things he didn’t understand. The change had come over her since she had gone to college in Albuquerque. At first he had been proud that one of his children would get a higher education, but it had made them strangers.

He preferred to remember when she was one of the brown urchins in the pueblo, chasing the dogs, playing the children’s games in a high, carefree voice, climbing on his lap when he came home from a hard day’s work. Now they had become self-conscious and awkward with each other. He felt a sullen resentment at the change, believing that she had grown to secretly scoff at the old ways of her people.

Luke, his son, was different. Luke made him angry sometimes, chasing around with his friends, driving the truck into town on Saturday nights to dance and drink beer. But Luke, he could understand. He could remember the wildness of his own youth. Luke did not have the complex, white man’s kind of thinking that had entered Raven’s mind. In time, if he didn’t break his fool young neck, Luke would settle down, marry, and be content to take his rightful place in the tribe.

Henry’s thoughts were interrupted when he caught sight of the buzzards. His truck bouncing by frightened them, and they took to the air with an awkward flutter of black shadows. He hated buzzards. He was certain they carried the spirit of death from the underworld.

He glanced briefly at the figure beside the dirt tracks, the dead or near-dead thing that had attracted the buzzards. It could be a neighbor’s calf down. His heavy foot hit the brake, causing the rusty old truck to come to a slow, shuddering halt.

He swung out of the cab, slamming the door behind him with a metallic bang. A frown crossed his stolid features. He crouched beside the prone figure, thoughtfully coming to grips with an unexpected situation that had been thrust upon him.

The creature sprawled before him was unrecognizable as an individual. But he could determine that it was a woman—a white woman. And that raised serious concerns. What was a white woman, so badly injured, doing alone out here in a remote desert area of an Indian reservation?

He contemplated the unconscious woman for several moments, his mind proceeding in a characteristically careful, plodding manner, laying out the situation like sticks in a row. His keen-eyed gaze left the unconscious woman and surveyed the area carefully. On one horizon rested the hazy outline of a far-distant mountain range, the sacred place where the ancient gods of his tribe’s ancestors lived. On another horizon was the flat-topped mesa, the home of his Pueblo tribe that had lived there in the adobe city high in the sky for centuries, even before Coronado had come with his clanking Spanish armor in quest of the seven cities of gold.

Except for the buzzards circling above and a brown lizard scurrying across the hot sand, there was no other sign of life. A dust devil whipped across the land, sucking up its funnel of dust and then faded away, leaving only an eerie stillness.

Henry Brownfeather stared at the woman again. He saw the gleam of gold and diamonds on her wristwatch, and on one swollen finger was a ring set with a large diamond. So, she was a person of wealth. And she was not the victim of a robbery.

Too much puzzling about a thing made Henry Brownfeather weary. He was a man of action. There was only one thing to do. He could not leave the woman out here to die.

* * * * * * *

Reality came back to her in snatches, like shadowy glimpses through a dense fog. She was aware of brown, solemn faces looking down at her, then they dissolved. Another time she realized she was looking up at a ceiling the color of the earth. A touch of color, the red and brown zigzag pattern of a blanket on a wall beside her bed caught her eye, then faded away as the fog closed in.

Pain came back in acid waves that caused her teeth to grind. She would be freezing cold, shivering with a chill that shook the bed, and she would feel heavy blankets piled on her. Then, she would thrust the blankets away as fever raged through her body.

When the fever came, the grotesque figures and shapes of delirious hallucinations danced around her, taunting her.

Sometimes a different kind of face looked down at her through the fog—a white man’s face, his eyes thoughtful and compassionate. She came to associate the man’s face with a respite from pain. When he was there, something would prick her arm, and she became drowsy and comfortable, sinking into a deep, dreamless sleep from which she had no desire to return, but return she would, eventually.

Other times, she would look up to see the face of a lovely young woman who had hair and eyes as dark as midnight and hands that touched her gently, bathing her bruised body with tender care.

* * * * * * *

“How do you feel today, Lilly?”

The voice penetrated the fog, dispersing it. The kind face of the white man was in sharper focus. The beautiful dark-haired girl stood behind him, also looking at her.

“Well, I do believe you are with us today, Lilly,” the man smiled. “Your eyes are much clearer this morning. Do you think you can answer me?”

Her tongue touched her swollen lips. She made an attempt to speak and heard a croak. She swallowed hard and tried again. A strange, rasping whisper totally unfamiliar to her came from her lips. “Why do you call me ‘Lilly’?”

“Isn’t that your name? We found a gold locket on you with your picture. The locket is engraved,
‘To Lilly With Love,’
and the letter ‘J.’ We assumed that must be your name.”

The man held the heart-shaped locket for her to see. It brought a curious rush of emotion to her throat. A tear trickled from her eyes. She didn’t know why the locket made her want to cry. Her mind felt stuffed with cotton. She was becoming very weary. She didn’t want to think anymore. She closed her eyes and drifted back to sleep.

Once, she awoke and there was no one else in the room. She gazed around, her befuddled mind trying to find some familiar object. She saw a square window, and through it distant sunset behind a mountain range. The room was small, plain, bare. The walls appeared to be made of earth or clay. Except for her bed, there were some rustic, hide-bottom chairs with ladder backs and a table. On the wall was the blanket with the curious zigzag pattern. On the windowsill was a yellow flower in a pot that was decorated with a similar zigzag design along with other strange symbols. Nothing about the place was familiar to her; she was in an alien world.

Painfully, she reached up to touch her face and encountered gauze. Except for her eyes and mouth, her face was swathed in bandages.

A figure entered the room through the low doorway. It was the dark-haired young woman.

“Where is this place?” the injured woman asked in her hoarse whisper.

The dark-haired girl drew one of the chairs closer and sat beside the bed, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes intense and searching. “This is an Indian pueblo village, Lilly. You are in the home of the Brownfeather family. My father found you unconscious out in the desert over a week ago. My name is Raven.”

“A
week
ago?” She looked at the young Indian woman with a feeling of consternation.

“Yes. You’ve been in a coma part of the time, and delirious. But you do seem to be coming out of it now. Your fever is gone and you look much better. Do you feel like talking?”

“I—I think so.”

“Don’t tire yourself. If you start feeling tired, just close your eyes and go back to sleep. The doctor says you must rest a lot.”

“Doctor?”

“Yes, Dr. Glenn Marshall. He’s been taking care of you. He lives in town, but he comes to the village to take care of sick people when we need him. By the way, ‘Lilly’ is your name, isn’t it? That’s what we’ve been calling you.”

The injured woman frowned, struggling with her own confusion. “I—I’m not sure. It does sound kind of familiar.”

Raven looked at her curiously. “You’re not sure?”

“l—I feel kind of dazed.”

“That’s understandable. You were more dead than alive when Dad found you. Dr. Marshall said you were suffering from exhaustion and exposure, not to mention sunburn, shock, and countless bruises. Do you remember what happened to you?”

The woman shook her head.

“Maybe you can tell me your last name. If you have a family, I’m sure they should be notified.”

The woman could only look at her with a helpless expression, tears gathering in her blue eyes.

Raven patted her hand. She adjusted the blanket. “Well, don’t worry about it now. Dr. Glenn said it will all come back to you. For now, we’ll call you Lilly and let it go at that. Okay?”

She nodded, repeating the name to herself, knowing that it must be her name yet finding no clear link between it and conscious memory. “Lilly,” she thought. “I am Lilly. But ‘Lilly’ who?” A terrifying loneliness crept through her. It was as if she had awakened on a foreign planet with no knowledge of how she got here.

She slept restlessly that night, tormented by nightmares. Grotesque forms and faces, creatures from the dark underworld of her subconscious, leered at her in a procession of nightmarish episodes.