The Endless Sky (Cheyenne Series) (40 page)

      
The gray began to tire at last and the white, growing red with blood now, made one final desperate leap. As they went down, rolling on the earth, a scream ripped from her throat and suddenly she was no longer watching from above. She was in their midst, feeling the feral heat, smelling the metallic stench of blood. The white's powerful jaws suddenly found an opening and clamped on the gray's throat. She heard the sound of bones snapping as the victor shook its victim, breaking its neck and ripping out its throat.

      
Then suddenly the white wolf released its foe and turned to look at her with glittering black eyes...Chase's eyes. She knelt, arms outstretched, waiting for him to come to her but he did not. Instead he turned and bounded away, vanishing in the thick mountain timber. She scrambled to her feet and ran after him, crying out his name over and over...

* * * *

      
Chase looked at the faint pink line on the eastern horizon where the sun was trying to climb over the jagged peaks of the Big Horns and invade the corduroy-ribbed interior. He reined in the big dun gelding and scanned the world of white below him.

      
“How the hell did she make it through the pass?” His voice echoed in the cold still air. The storm should have stopped her. As he'd ridden through it he had prayed every prayer he knew, to the Powers of his people, even to the Christian God. Chase had never been able to believe in the stern and wrathful deity of Jeremiah Remington. The mystic sense of unity between man and nature linked together by forces of creation in Cheyenne myth far better suited him. Yet in his desperation to save Stephanie, he was willing to plead for all the help he could get, white or red.

      
After several hours, he had fully expected to find her frozen body lying beside the horse she'd stolen. But he had not. With no trail to follow he had begun cutting circles until the sudden blizzard abated. By luck he'd come across the trail a little over an hour ago, clear of the pass, heading south toward the middle fork of the Powder River. But the wind-driven snow had obliterated it before he could catch up to her.

      
If she died out here, he had killed her surely as putting a knife in her heart. He had no excuse for kidnapping her. The rash selfish act had endangered his people and now might cost Stevie's life. The latter hurt him more deeply than the former, and guilt over that fact added to the gnawing despair in his soul. As he had ridden through the freezing black night he had castigated himself ceaselessly for the love he could not kill, the love that would not die with her but lived on as long as he did.

      
“What a bleak and lonely mission you've charged me with, Mother,” he murmured, “trying to save our people even when I know their way of life is ending, when I wish only to die.”

      
He leaned forward, looking out across the vast undulations of mountains and valleys spread before him in the dim light, praying for some trace of her. Then he saw it, a faint wisp of smoke against the bluffs. Was it a trick of the air at sunrise? He murmured a prayer to the Everywhere Spirit and kicked the dun into a gallop. When he saw the small figure huddled beneath the mound of robes, lying so still beside the faint embers of the smoldering fire, his heart twisted with dread.

      
“Stevie!” He leaped from his horse and ran to her, cradling her in his arms. She lay cold and unresponsive. Frantically he buried his face against her neck and felt the faintest hum of a pulse. She was alive but almost frozen. Frantically he chaffed her hands and face, breathing his warm breath against her cold cheeks and fingers. She stirred and murmured something drowsy and incoherent, then drifted into unconsciousness again.

      
Chase could see this exposed place would offer no shelter if another storm blew up. Looking at the western sky, he knew that was a distinct possibility. He gathered her in his arms and kicked out the small fire, grateful at least that she had been able to build it. Its warmth and signaling smoke had saved her life...or at least he prayed it had. Now that he'd found her, he could not chance leaving the sign for an enemy to follow.

      
“Can you hear me, Stevie? You have to wake up. Help me. You can't sleep or you'll never wake up again.” The low urgency of his voice brought a faint murmur. He thought she whispered his name but could not be certain.

      
“I'm going to put you up on my horse. You have to hold on. Can you do it?”

      
Without waiting for her response, he lifted her across the dun's withers. Somehow although still semiconscious she hung on as he swung up behind her and rode up the sharp rise of the western mountain.
Please let my memory be good.
Then he saw the partially concealed opening of the cave. “Now if a bear hasn't decided to hibernate inside, I'll have you warm and dry in a few minutes, Stevie,” he murmured to her as he carried her up to the opening.

      
Stephanie felt the prickle of pain in her face, hands and feet, like the sting of tiny needles at first, gradually building to a stark agony. It felt as if her bones were being smashed by a great mallet. She had been having nightmares about blood and death, wolves and Chase. Chase was here, holding her—or had she dreamed that, too? Her head was muzzy and her eyes refused to open, so heavy were the lids. Then she sensed his presence. He was touching her and she was naked beneath the covers. He must have removed her clothes and now he chaffed her arms and legs, moving over her body. His hands felt warm and strong. She opened her eyes and blinked. They were in a cave. The leap of firelight danced over the walls and gave off sensuous lovely heat, but not half so sensuous or lovely as his touch against her bare skin.

      
“Isn't this where we started?” she asked, light-headed, the words slurred.

      
His expression was tense. ‘‘You're awake at last. I've been trying to revive you for half an hour. The fire's finally begun to warm the air.”

      
“It feels heavenly. Where are we?”

      
“Not far from where I found you. I remembered this cave, which fortunately wasn't occupied. We had to have shelter before the next storm blows in.” As he spoke he continued massaging her cold limbs. He could feel her shivering in spite of the warmth provided by the extra furs and robes he'd brought along. She was practically buried in them and still he could not break the chills gripping her.

      
He cursed beneath his breath as he pulled off his wet buckskins and climbed under the robe. Pulling her against him, he placed her between the heat of his body and that of the fire. “Damn you for running away, Stevie. What the hell made you think you could find your way through hundreds of miles of mountain wilderness in the dead of winter?”

      
His soft breath against the sensitive skin of her neck set off alarm bells in her head, breaking through the comforting lethargy her brush with freezing had wrought. The crisp abrasion of his body hair rubbed against her delicate skin, tickling, enticing. In spite of his angry accusations, she could feel the pressure of his erection against her buttocks. She was back to full consciousness now, growing warm—altogether too warm!

      
“I wasn't certain I could find my way out...but I had to try, Chase.” She felt utterly vulnerable—not only to him as they lay naked beneath the covers, but to herself, to the cravings of her hungry young body which had known lust but never love. If he took her now she could not lie to herself. It would not be rape. She ached to turn into his arms and beg him to hold her, to love her.

      
He could feel the awakening awareness in her body and the answering leap of his own flesh which he could not have subdued even if he wished it. Chase admitted to himself that he did not wish it. He sighed into the silk of her hair, dyed a rich dark hue by the firelight, the color of winter molasses. His fingers stroked the gleaming masses and her tense shoulder beneath. “I want you, Stevie...and you want me,” he murmured.

      
‘That's why I tried to escape, Chase. This is wrong.’’

      
“Maybe it is—by your laws—but not by mine.”

      
‘That's right. I'm merely a slave, yours to do with as you wish.”

      
The words stung. “You know better, Stevie. You ran because you knew I wouldn't have to force you the way a warrior takes a captive.” He turned her on her back and raised his body above hers, pressing her into the soft furs. His mouth came down in a fierce, life-affirming kiss as he moved his lips over hers, waiting for her to open to him, his tongue teasing along the seam until she complied. Then he probed the delicate recesses, tasting, savoring, letting the bittersweet memories of all their impassioned kisses of so long ago replay in his mind.

      
Groaning, Chase buried his fingers in her hair, holding her face framed between his hands. He continued to savage her mouth, his body growing taut as a bowstring at full draw, ready to release the power of an arrow. His back arched up and his hips ground into hers in an uncontrollable surge of long-denied passion.

      
Stephanie was lost in the hot rich passion of the kiss. For her, too, it evoked wondrous memories of a far happier time so long ago. But when he arched his back and bucked his hips, the power of his hard phallus scalded her. She felt her hands embracing his flexing shoulders and knew she was about to press her nails into the bunched muscles and urge him to drive deep inside her.

      
“No!” She quickly lowered her arms and pressed them against the hard slab of his chest, trying to push him away as she turned her head, crying angrily, “You really are the white wolf in that dream—ripping the gray one limb from limb. You take what you want no matter who you hurt!”

      
Chase froze. He stared down at her, his eyes wide with incredulity. All the air seemed to leave his lungs, searing them. “What do you know of a white wolf fighting a gray?”

      
As he pulled away from her in shock, the hoarseness of his voice startled her. She turned her head and looked into his eyes, which burned like two black coals. The flickering firelight cast his harshly beautiful features in shadows, giving them a satanic intensity.

      
“I—I had a nightmare back there, when I fell asleep in the snow,” she began, uncertain of how to explain what was more hidden than revealed, an intangible figment of her mind as it prepared to die, obscured like wisps of cloud scudding across the moon.

      
He sat up beside her, pulling one robe about his body and offering her another. Disconcerted by her nakedness, she seized it and wrapped it tightly around herself, scooting as far away from him as she could on the narrow confines of the pallet.

      
“Tell me about this dream.”

      
His manner set her teeth on edge yet beneath the arrogant command she sensed confusion, even a strange desperation. “It's hazy now.” She rubbed her eyes and rested her head in her hands for a moment, trying to gather her scattered thoughts. “There were two wolves, huge and fierce looking, one pure white.” She paused to steal a look at him. His eyes were hooded now, glittering obsidian slits fixed intently on her. “The...the other was iron gray. They circled each other, then lunged, attacking with such savage violence it was incredible.”

      
He let her describe the dream sequence in a terse, halting narration, interjecting a few questions, asking her to dredge up more detail. When she reached the part where she recognized the wolf as him and followed after him, crying out his name, he felt the final shock of recognition. “How can you know these things?”

      
Frightened by his intensity, she replied, “I don't know anything. It was only a nightmare.”

      
“What you've just described so precisely is my medicine dream.”

      
Her eyes widened and she blanched. While living with the Cheyenne she had learned a great deal about their customs and beliefs. She had even dared to ask Red Bead once about the scars on his chest. “The vision you received during the Sun Dance?”

      
He nodded, looking at her strangely, with a trepidation bordering on fear. “When I left you in Boston it was the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life...until I met you again in Rawlins and brought you to my people. I'd always told myself that you could never belong here. You weren't destined to share my life because you were white.” A soft wistfulness wreathed his face. “Perhaps I was wrong. The Powers, for their own mysterious reasons, have cast our fates together.” Rising to his knees in front of her, he extended his hand, palm up.

      
Now it was Chase who looked utterly vulnerable.
He's afraid.
She was frightened, too, as she reached out and placed her soft pale hand in his much larger dark one. “I violate every ideal by which I've lived...yet I can do nothing else but come to you,” she said softly as he drew her up into his arms.

      
He dropped his robe and started to slip hers from her shoulders. She flinched. At once his hands grew still as he murmured into her ear, “What's wrong, Stevie?”

      
“I've never...that is...it's daylight and...”

      
“Phillips acted the gentleman and spared your sensibilities? He never undressed you?”

      
Unable to speak she shook her head, her hair shielding her face as she hung her head down.

      
Chase felt the anger churn deep inside of him, thinking of the perfunctory and cold way his beautifully passionate Stevie had been initiated into the marriage bed. He would make amends. Tipping her chin up with one hand, he held her close with his other splayed across the small of her back. Her cheeks were flushed and her lashes fanned down on them like sable brushes. He kissed the tip of her nose, her eyelids, temples, the soft indentations at the edges of her mouth, murmuring, “Proper Eastern gentlemen don't know how to make love to a woman. Don't ever be ashamed of your passions, Stevie. They're a gift of the most special kind, meant to be shared between a man and a woman.”