Cecily wasn’t beautiful, but she had a way about her.

She was intelligent, lively, outrageous and she made him feel good inside. She could have become his world, if he’d allowed her to.

Unexpectedly, Tate reached out and touched her soft cheek with just his fingertips. “I’m Native American,” he said quietly. “You’re not.”

“There is,” she said unsteadily, “such a thing as birth control.”

His face was very solemn and his eyes were narrow and intent on her. “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.

“You’ll tempt me once too often.” He bit off the words. “This teasing is more dangerous than you realize.”

“Nobody tops Diana Palmer…I love her stories.”

—Jayne Ann Krentz

MILLS & BOON

Before you start reading, why not sign up?

Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

SIGN ME UP!

Or simply visit

signup.millsandboon.co.uk

Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

Diana Palmer
Paper Rose

For Glenda and Doris, with love.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Prologue

Cecily Peterson twirled a beautiful red paper rose between her fingers, staring at its perfection with eyes full of shattered dreams. She was in love with a man who was never going to be able to return that love. Her life was a paper rose, an imitation of beauty forever captured in a medium that would not age, or decay, or die. But it was cold. It was dead and yet it had never lived. Tate Winthrop had brought her the delicate crimson rose from Japan. At the time, it had given her hope that he might one day learn to care for her. But as the years passed, and hope dwindled, she finally realized that the paper rose was making a statement for him. He was telling her in the nicest possible way that his feelings for her were only an imitation of passion and love. He was saying, without speaking one word, that fondness would never be a substitute for love. She remembered so vividly how their turbulent relationship began so many years ago…

Eight years earlier…

There was dust coming up the long winding road from Corryville, South Dakota. Tate Winthrop’s black eyes narrowed as he turned on the top rung of the makeshift corral fence to watch the progress of a beat-up gray pickup truck. That would be carrying the order he’d placed with the Blake Feed Company in town.

No sense in starting his young mare on the leading rein right now, he thought, climbing back down. The old jeans he wore clung close to his tall, powerful body. He was lean and fit, with elegant hands and big feet. His straight black hair, which fell to his waist when it was loosened, was braided and held by a black band at his nape. His mother’s grandfather had been at the Little Bighorn and later went with a delegation to Washington, D.C., for Teddy Roosevelt’s inauguration. One of the elders said that Tate resembled the old warrior in some ways.

He pulled out the barely touched Cuban cigar he’d placed in its carrier in the pocket of his chambray shirt and struck a match to light it between his cupped hands. The boys at the agency always wanted to know how he managed to get contraband cigars. He never told them anything. Keeping secrets was a way of life with him. They went with his job.

The truck pulled up onto the rise and came in sight of the small house and big barn, and the makeshift corral where a snow-white filly was prancing impatiently, tossing her mane.

A young, slender girl got out of the old truck’s cab. She had blond hair cut short and green eyes. He was too far away to see those eyes, but he knew them better than he wanted to. Her name was Cecily Peterson. She was the stepdaughter of Arnold Blake, the man who’d just inherited full ownership of the Blake Feed Company; and the only employee who wasn’t afraid to come up here with Tate Winthrop’s order. Not too many miles from the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, Tate’s ranch sat just outside the southern boundary of the Wapiti Ridge Sioux Reservation. Corryville itself sat on the Big Wapiti River, juxtapositioned between the Badlands and the reservation. Tate’s mother, Leta, lived on the Wapiti Reservation, which was just a stone’s throw from Corryville. Tate had grown up with discrimination. Perhaps that was why, when he could afford it, he’d bought a ranch outside the tribe’s boundaries.

Tate Winthrop didn’t like most people, and he steered clear of white women. But Cecily had become his soft spot. She was a gentle, kind girl of seventeen, and she’d had a hard life. Her invalid mother had died a short while ago and she was now living with her stepfather and one of his brothers. The brother was a decent sort, old enough to be Cecily’s grandfather, but the stepfather was a layabout and a drunkard. Everyone knew that Cecily did most of the work at the feed store that had been her late father’s. Her stepfather had inherited it when Cecily’s mother died recently, and he was apparently doing everything in his power to bankrupt it.

Cecily was just a little over medium height and slender as a reed. She would never be beautiful, but she had an inner light that changed her green eyes and made them like peridots in the sunlight.

He scoffed at his own fancies. She was just a child and his only contact with her was through the orders he placed at the feed store. It pleased him that she was interested in his ancestry, and not in any faddish way like some aficionados of Native Americans who dressed in buckskins and bought trinkets and tapes and tried to act as if they belonged there. He had no time for Sunday Indians from the city. But Cecily was another matter entirely. She knew something of the culture of the Oglala Lakota and she had a feel for its history. He’d found himself instructing her in little-known customs and mores before he realized it.

But her bond with him didn’t become really apparent until her mother’s death. It wasn’t to her stepfather or her stepuncle or any of the townspeople that she went the day her mother died. It was to Tate, her eyes red-rimmed, her face tear-streaked. And he, who never let anyone get close to him except his own mother, had held her and comforted her while she cried. It had been the most natural thing in the world to dry her tears. But later, he was worried by her growing attachment to him. The last thing in the world he could allow was for her to fall in love with him. It wasn’t only the life he led, dangerous and nomadic and solitary. It was the scarcity of pure Lakota blood left in the world. In order to preserve it, he must marry within the Sioux tribe somewhere. Not among his relatives, but among the other Sioux. If he married…

His mind came back to the present, to Cecily stopping the truck nearby and getting out. He deliberately didn’t go to meet her.

She noticed that with a wry smile and went to him. She brought an invoice for him to sign. Her hands were shaking a little with the usual effect he had on her, but she tightened them on the pen and paper as she approached him. Even in her thick-heeled working boots, he was far taller than she was. She had on a checked man’s shirt and jeans. He’d never seen her wear anything revealing or feminine.

She handed him the invoice without meeting his eyes. “My stepdad said this was what you ordered, but to check with you before I unloaded it,” she said.

“Why does he always send you?” Tate asked the girl deliberately as he scanned the list.

“Because he knows I’m not afraid of you,” she said.

His black eyes lifted from the paper and met hers. They were scary sometimes; like a cobra’s, steady and intent and unblinking. They’d made her want to back away when she first met him. They didn’t frighten her anymore, though. He’d been tender with her, more than anyone in her life had ever been. She knew, as most other people locally didn’t, that there was more on the inside of Tate Winthrop than he ever allowed to show.

“Are you sure that you aren’t afraid of me?” he asked in a soft drawl.

She only smiled. “You wouldn’t slug me over a messed-up order,” she said dryly, because she’d heard that he did exactly that once, when her stepfather had neglected to bring the feed he’d ordered in a blizzard and he’d lost some calves because of it.

She was right. He would never hit Cecily for any reason. He took the pen from her and signed the invoice before he handed it back. “That’s everything I ordered, all right.”

“Okay,” she said brightly. “I’ll unload it.”

He didn’t say a word. He put out the cigar, stuck it back into his pocket and followed her to the truck.

She gave him a hard look. “I’m no cream puff,” she scoffed. “I can unload a few little bags of feed.”

“Sure you can.” He glanced at her and a smile lit his black eyes for a few seconds. “But you’re not going to. Not here.”

“Tate,” she groaned. “You shouldn’t be doing this! My stepfather ought to be here. If he’s going to run the place, why won’t he run it?”

“Because he’s got you to do it for him.” He stopped suddenly in the act of reaching for a heavy bag of fertilizer and stared at her intently. “What happened to your throat, Cecily?” he asked abruptly.

She put a hand to it, feeling the bruise there. She’d had her collar buttoned, but it had been too hot to keep it that way. She didn’t realize that it would show.

He took off his work gloves, tossed them into the bed of the pickup with the feed and began to unbutton her blouse.

“Stop that!” she exclaimed. “Tate, you can’t…!”

But he already had. His eyes blazed like black diamonds in fire. His hands gripped hard on the fabric as he saw the other bruises just at her collarbone, above the tattered little bra she wore—bruises like the imprint of a man’s fingers. His jaw clenched hard. It infuriated him to see bruises on that pale skin. It was almost as bad to see the state of her clothes—he knew that she hadn’t had anything new for a very long time. Presumably her stepfather kept her destitute, and probably on purpose so he wouldn’t lose his mainstay. His eyes shot back up to catch hers and held them relentlessly. She was flushed and biting her lip. “I won’t embarrass you any more than this, but you’re going to tell me if those same kind of bruises are on your breasts.”

Her eyes closed and tears slid past the closed eyelids. “Yes,” she bit off.

“Was it your stepfather?” he asked shortly.

She swallowed. Since she couldn’t meet his eyes, she merely nodded.

“Talk to me.”

“He was trying to feel me…there. He was always trying, even when he first married Mama. I tried to tell her, but she didn’t want to hear. He flattered her and they both liked to drink.” She folded her arms over her breasts. “Last night he got stinking drunk and came into my room.” She felt nauseated from the memory. “I was asleep.” She looked up at him with the repulsion she felt showing in her eyes. “Why are men such animals?” she asked with a cynical maturity far beyond her years.

“Not all of us are,” he replied, and his voice was like ice. He buttoned her blouse with a deftness that hinted of experience. “You don’t even have a proper bra.”

She flushed. “You weren’t supposed to see it,” she said mutinously.

He buttoned her up to her chin and then rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. They were good hands, lean and dark and warm and strong. She loved the feel of them.

“You aren’t being subjected to that sort of lechery again.”

Her eyes widened. “What?”

“You heard me. Come on. Let’s get this unloaded. Then we’ll talk and make decisions.”

A short time later, he had her by the hand and all but dragged her into the house. He pulled out a chair for her, poured coffee from a coffeemaker into a cup and put it in front of her.

Stunned by his actions, she sat and stared around her. She’d never been in his house, and it was surprising to find that it wasn’t at all what it appeared to be on the outside. It was full of electronic equipment, computers and laptops and printers, a funny-looking telephone setup and several short-wave radios. There was even a ham radio set. On the wall were collections of pistols and rifles, none of which looked like anything she’d ever seen.

The furnishings were impressive, too. She remembered then the whispers she’d heard about this reclusive man who was Lakota but didn’t live on a reservation, who had a mysterious background and an even more mysterious profession. Unlike many Lakota who were victims of prejudice, nobody pushed Tate Winthrop. In fact, most people around Corryville were a little afraid of him.

She glanced at his taciturn face, wondering why she’d been hijacked into his house. He usually signed the invoice, unloaded the supplies, and when they talked, it was always outside. Not that he didn’t watch her like a hawk when he was in town and she was anywhere around. Over the past year, he’d always seemed to be watching her. And today he’d seen the truth of her miserable home life all too starkly.

He sat down and leaned back in his chair. He dropped his hat on the floor and stared at her intently.

He made an angry sound and took another draw from the cigar. “Did he have you last night?” he asked bluntly.

She blushed violently and closed her eyes. It was useless not to tell him the truth. “He tried to,” she choked. “I hit him and he…grabbed me. He was pretty drunk, or I’d never have got away, even if I got pretty bruised doing it. He’d always bothered me, but it wasn’t until last night…” She lifted an anguished face to his. “I hid in the woods until he passed out, but I didn’t dare go back to sleep.” Her face tautened. “I’d rather starve to death than let him do it,” she bit off. “I mean it!”

He watched her quietly while the smoke from his cigar went sailing up into the fan. He’d seen enough of her to know that she never shirked her duties, never complained, never asked for anything. He admired her. That was rare, because he had a fine contempt for most women. Especially white ones. The thought of her stepfather assaulting her made him livid. He’d never wanted so badly to hurt a man.

He flicked ashes into a big glass ashtray and didn’t say anything for a minute or two.

She sipped coffee, feeling uncomfortable. He was still almost a stranger to her and he’d seen her in her underwear. It was a new, odd uneasiness she couldn’t remember feeling with anyone else, especially with another man.

“What do you want to do with your life, Cecily?” he asked unexpectedly.

“Be an archaeologist,” she blurted out.

His eyebrows arched. “Why?”

“We had a science teacher just before I graduated. He was an archaeologist. He’d actually help excavate Mayan ruins down in the Yucatan.” Her green eyes almost glowed with excitement and enthusiasm. “I thought how wonderful it would be, to bring an ancient civilization out into the light and show it to the world like that…” Her voice trailed off as she realized how impossible that dream was. She shrugged. “There’s no money for that, though. Mama had a little savings, but he spent it all. She said he had no business sense, and I guess it’s true, because he’s all but ruined daddy’s business.”

“How long has your father been dead?”

“Six years,” she said. “Then Mama married him last year.” She closed her eyes and shivered. “She said she was lonely, and he paid her a lot of attention. I saw right through him. Why couldn’t she?”

“Because some people lack perception.” His black eyes narrowed as they measured her. “What sort of grades did you make in school?”

“A’s and B’s,” she replied. “I was good in science.” She had a sudden unpleasant thought. “Are you going to try to have my stepfather locked up?” she asked worriedly. “Everybody would know,” she added, feeling ashamed.

He searched her eyes, feeling the fear she had of public recrimination, the trial, the eyes staring at her. “You don’t think rape warrants it?”

“He didn’t,” she said. “But you’re right. He’s probably been sitting at home thinking about it all day. By tonight, I won’t stand a chance. Not even if I hide in the woods.”

He leaned forward, one elbow on the beautiful cherry wood of the table, and stared right into her eyes.

She felt nauseous. She folded her arms over her breasts and stared into space, shivering. It was the worst nightmare she’d faced in her young life.

“All right, don’t go into mental convulsions over it,” he said quietly. He looked as if nothing ever ruffled him. In fact, very little did. “He won’t touch you, I guarantee it. I have a solution.”

“A solution?” Her green eyes were wide and wet, and full of hope.

“I know of a scholarship you can get at George Washington University, outside Washington, D.C.,” he said, thinking how good it was that he’d learned to lie with such a straight face, and never thinking this lie might come back to haunt him. “Books and board included. It’s for needy cases. You’d certainly qualify. Interested?”

She was hesitant. “Yes. But…well, how would I get there, and apply?”

“Forget the logistics for now. They aren’t important. They have a good archaeology program and you’d be well out of reach of your stepfather. If you want it, say the word.”

“Yes, I want it!” she said. “But I’ll have to go back home…”

“No, you won’t,” he said shortly. “Not ever again.” He threw his legs off the chair and got up, reaching for the telephone. He punched in a number, waited, and then began to speak in a language that was positively not English.

She’d lived around Lakota people most of her young life, but she’d never heard the language spoken like this. It was full of rising and falling tones, and sang of ancient places and the sound of the wind. She loved the sound of it in his deep voice.

All too soon he ended the conversation. “Let’s go.”

“The truck, the other orders,” she protested weakly.

“I’ll have the truck taken back to your stepfather, along with a message.” He didn’t mention that he planned to deliver both.

“But where am I going?”

“To my mother on the reservation,” he said. “My father died earlier this year, so she’s alone. She’ll enjoy your company.”

“I don’t have clothes,” she protested.

“I’ll get yours from your stepfather.”

“You make this sound so easy,” she said, amazed.

“Most things are easy if you can get past the red tape. I learned long ago to cut it close to the bone.” He opened the door. “Coming?”

She got up, feeling suddenly free and full of hope. It was like one of those everyday miracles people talked about. “Yes…”

Chapter One

Present day

Washington, D.C.

Cameras were flashing all around Cecily Peterson. Microphones wielded by acrobatic television journalists were being thrust in her face as she walked quite calmly out of the fund-raising dinner that Senator Matt Holden was hosting.

Behind her, a furious tall man with a long braid of black hair was waiting for a tureen of expensive crab bisque to complete its trip down the once-spotless dress slacks of his tuxedo before he tried to move. The diamond-festooned blond socialite with him was glaring daggers at Cecily’s back.

Cecily kept walking. “Film at eleven,” she murmured to no one in particular, and with a bright little smile.

She didn’t really look like a woman whose entire life had crashed and burned in the space of a few minutes. Her life was like Tate Winthrop’s tuxedo—in ruins. Everything was going to change now.

She went to the big black utility vehicle that her date had driven her here in, to wait for him to join her. Her high heels were damp from the grass. She could feel her medium blond hair coming down from its high, complicated coiffure. The street and traffic lights were blurs of color to her pale green eyes because she wasn’t wearing her glasses and she couldn’t use contacts. She had on a black dress with tiny little straps, and the black shawl she was wearing with it didn’t provide much warmth. She couldn’t get into the vehicle without the key, but that didn’t matter. She was too numb to feel the chill of the night air anyway, or care about the busy Washington, D.C., street traffic behind her. She was furious that she’d had to learn the truth about her financial status and her supposed educational grant from that dyed blonde who Tate Winthrop was escorting around town these days. Her mind wandered back to a day two years ago, when everything had seemed so perfect, and her dreams had hovered on the cusp of fulfillment….

The airport in Tulsa was crowded. Cecily juggled her carry-on bag with a duffel bag full of equipment, scanning the milling rush around her for Tate Winthrop. She was wearing her usual field gear: boots, a khaki suit with a safari jacket and a bush hat hanging behind her head by a rawhide string. Her natural blond hair was in a neat braided bun atop her head, and through her big-lensed glasses, her green eyes twinkled with anticipation. It wasn’t often that Tate Winthrop asked her to help him on a case. It was an occasion.

Suddenly there he was, towering over the people around him. He was Lakota Sioux, and looked it. He had high cheekbones and big black, deep-set eyes under a jutting brow. His mouth was wide and sexy, with a thin upper lip and a chiseled lower one and he had perfect teeth. His hair was straight and jet-black; it fell to his waist when he wasn’t wearing it in a braid, as he was now. He was lean and striking, muscular without being obvious. And he’d once worked for a secret government agency. Of course, Cecily wasn’t supposed to know that; or that he was consulting with them on the sly right now in a hush-hush murder case in Oklahoma.

“Where’s your luggage?” Tate asked in his deep, crisp voice.

She gave him a pert look, taking in the elegance of his vested suit. “Where’s your field gear?” she countered with the ease of long acquaintance.

Tate had saved her from the unsavory advances of a drunken stepfather when she was just seventeen. He’d taken her to his mother on the Wapiti Ridge Sioux Reservation near the Black Hills, and there she’d stayed until he got her a scholarship and a grant and enrolled her in George Washington University, down the street from his apartment in Washington, D.C. He’d been her guardian angel through four years of college and the master’s program she was beginning now—doing forensic archaeology. She was already earning respect for her work. She was an honors student all the way, not surprising since she had no social life and could devote all her time to her studies. She didn’t need to date; she had eyes for no man in the world except Tate.

“I’m security chief of the Hutton corporation,” he reminded her. “This is a freelance favor I’m doing for a couple of old friends. So this is my working gear.”

She made a face. “You’ll get all dusty.”

He made a sound deep in his throat. “You can brush me off.”

She grinned wickedly. “Now that’s what I call incentive!”

He chuckled. “Cut it out. We’ve got a serious and sensitive situation here.”

“So you intimated on the phone.” She glanced around the airport. “Where’s baggage claim? I brought some tools and electronic equipment, too.”

“How about clothes?”

She stared at him blankly. “What do I need with a lot of clothes cluttering up my equipment case? These are wash-and-wear.”

He made another sound. “You can’t expect to go to a restaurant in that!”

“Why not? And who’s taking me to any restaurant?” she demanded. “You never do.”

He shrugged. “I’m going to do penance while we’re out here.”

Her eyes sparkled. “Great! Your bed or mine?”

He laughed in spite of himself. She was the only person in his life who’d ever been able to make him feel carefree, even briefly. She lit fires inside him, although he was careful not to let them show too much. “You never give up, do you?”

“Someday you’ll weaken,” she assured him. “And I’m prepared. I have a week’s supply of Trojans in my fanny pack….”

He managed to look shocked. “Cecily!”

She shrugged. “Women have to think about these things. I’m twenty-three, you know.” She added, “You came into my life at a formative time and rescued me from something terrible. Can I help it if you make other potential lovers look like fried sea bass by comparison?”

“I didn’t bring you out here to discuss your lack of lovers,” he pointed out.

“And here I hoped you were offering yourself up as an educational experience,” she sighed.

He glared down at her as they walked toward baggage claim.

“Okay,” she said glumly. “I’ll give up, for now. What do you want me to do out here?” she added, and sounded like the professional she really was. “You mentioned something about skeletal remains.”

He looked around them before he spoke. “We had a tip,” he told her, “that a murder could be solved if we looked in a certain place. About twenty years ago, a foreign double agent went missing near Tulsa. He was carrying a piece of microfilm that identified a mole in the CIA. It would be embarrassing for everybody if this is him and the microfilm surfaced now.”

“I gather that your mole has moved up in the world?”

“Don’t even ask,” he told her, then, with a smile he added, “I don’t want to have to put you in the witness protection program. All you have to do is tell me if this DB is the one we’re looking for.”

“Dead body,” she translated. Then she frowned. “I thought you had an expert out here.”

“You can’t imagine what sort of damned expert these guys brought with them.”

Yes, she could, but she didn’t say anything.

“Besides,” he added with a quick glance, “you’re discreet. I know from experience that you don’t tell everything you know.”

“What did your expert tell you about the body?”

“That it’s very old,” he said with exaggerated awe. “Probably thousands of years old!”

“Why do you think it isn’t?”

“For one thing, there’s a .32 caliber bullet in the skull.”

“Well, that rather lets out a Paleo-Indian hunter,” she agreed.

“Sure it does. But I need an expert to say so, or the case will be summarily dropped. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a former KGB mole making policy for me.”

“Me, neither,” she said inelegantly. “You do realize that somebody could have been out to the site and used the skull for target practice?”

He nodded. “Can you date the remains?”

“I don’t know. Carbon dating is best, but it takes time. I’ll do the best I can.”

“That’s good enough for me. Experts in Paleo-Indian archaeology aren’t thick on the ground in the ‘company’ these days. You were the only person I could think of to call.”

“I’m flattered.”

“You’re good,” he said. “That’s not flattery.” Changing the subject, he asked, “What have you got in those cases if you didn’t bring clothes?”

“A laptop computer with a modem and fax, a cellular phone, assorted digging tools, including a collapsible shovel, two reference works on human skeletal remains.”

She was struggling with the case. He reached out and took it from her, testing the weight. “Good God, you’ll get a hernia dragging this thing around. Haven’t you ever heard of luggage carriers?”

“Sure. I have three. They’re all back in D.C. in my closet.”

He led the way to a sport utility vehicle. He put her bags in the back and opened the door for her.

Cecily wasn’t beautiful, but she had a way about her. She was intelligent, lively, outrageous and she made him feel good inside. She could have become his world, if he’d allowed her to. But he was full-blooded Lakota, and she was not. If he ever married, something his profession made unlikely, he didn’t like the idea of mixed blood.

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 my 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….

The sudden blare of a horn made her jump, brought her back to the painful present in the chill of the nation’s capitol, outside the exclusive restaurant where she’d just made the evening news by attacking Tate Winthrop with a tureen of crab bisque.

She stretched, hurting as she let the memory of the past reluctantly slip away. A car horn had separated her from Tate two years ago, too. He’d withdrawn from her at once, and that had been the end of her dreams. She’d helped solve his murder mystery, which was no more than a Paleo-Indian skull with a bullet in it, used in an attempt to frame an unpopular member of congress. Any anthropologist worth her salt would have known the race from the dentition and the approximate age from the patination and the projectile points and pottery that the would-be framer hadn’t realized would help date the remains.

Tate had involved Cecily, a student, and that had given her hope. But fate had quickly taken hope away with a blare from an impatient driver’s horn. From that moment on, Tate had put her at a distance and kept her there, for the two years of her master’s studies in forensic archaeology. Their close friendship had all but vanished. And tonight had shattered her world.

Her doctorate was a fading dream already. Since Tate had rescued her from her abusive stepfather at the age of seventeen and taken her to live with his mother on the Wapiti Ridge Sioux reservation, which was near the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, he’d acted in stead of a guardian. But he’d told her that she had a grant to pay for her education, her apartment, her clothing and food and other necessities. She had a bank account that it paid into. All her expenses had been covered for the past six years by that anonymous foundation that helped penniless young women get an education. At least that’s what Tate had told her. And tonight she’d discovered that it had all been a lie. Tate had been paying for it, all of it, out of his own pocket.

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 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.”

He drew in a long breath. His lean hands tightened on the wheel. One of them was artificial. Colby had lost an arm in Africa. He was a mercenary, a professional soldier. Sometimes he worked for various covert government agencies, sometimes he freelanced. She never asked about his frequent travels. They were companions who went out together occasionally, fellow sufferers of unrequited passions for other people. It made for a close friendship.

“Tate’s a damned fool,” he said flatly.

“I don’t appeal to him,” she corrected. “It’s a shame I’m not Lakota.”

“Leta Winthrop would argue that point,” he murmured with an amused glance. “Didn’t you lobby for sovereignty at that Senate hearing last month?”

“Me and several other activists. Some of the Lakota resent having a white woman plead their case, but I’ve been trying my best.”

“I know.”

“Thanks for your support.” She leaned back against the car seat. “It’s been a horrible night. I guess Senator Holden will never speak to me again, much less invite me to another political banquet.”

“He’ll love the publicity he gets from your exit,” he corrected with a chuckle. “And I believe he’s been trying to persuade you to assume the position of assistant curator in charge of acquisitions with his new Native American Museum project in D.C.”

“So he is. I may have to take it now. I can’t see going on with my studies under the circumstances.”

“I’ve got some cash in Swiss banks. I’ll help you.”

“Thanks, but no, thanks. I’m going to be totally independent.”

“Suit yourself.” He glanced at her. “If you take that job, it won’t get you any points with Tate. He and Matt Holden are bitter enemies.”

“Senator Holden doesn’t favor allowing a casino on the Wapiti reservation. Tate does. They’ve almost come to blows on the issue twice.”

“So I heard. And that’s not all I’ve heard. Holden is sticking his nose into a hornet’s nest in the Indian Affairs committee, and he’s had some public and all but slanderous things to say about the push for a casino at Wapiti.”

“There are other Sioux casinos in South Dakota,” she replied. “But Senator Holden is fighting this one all the way. Nobody knows why. He and Tate have had some real battles over this.”

“That’s just an excuse and you know it. Tate hates the man.” Colby pushed back a strand of straight black hair that fell into his eyes. Unlike Tate, his hair was short. “I know I said this before, but it bears repeating. You know Tate won’t like you staying with me.”

“I don’t care,” she said bitterly. “I don’t tell him where to sleep. It’s none of his business what I do anymore.”

He made a rough sound. “Would you like to guess what he’s going to assume if you stay the night in my apartment?”

She drew in a long breath. “Okay. I don’t want to cause problems between you, not after all the years you’ve been friends. Take me to a hotel instead.”

He hesitated uncharacteristically. “I can take the heat, if you can.”

“I don’t know that I can. I’ve got enough turmoil in my life right now. Besides, he’ll look for me at your place. I don’t want to be found for a couple of days, until I can get used to my new situation and make some decisions about my future. I want to see Senator Holden and find another apartment. I can do all that from a hotel.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Make it a moderately priced one,” she added with graveyard humor. “I’m no longer a woman of means. From now on, I’m going to have to be responsible for my own bills.”

“You should have poured the soup in the right lap,” he murmured.

“Which was?”

“Audrey Gannon’s,” he said curtly. “She had no right to tell you that Tate was your benefactor. She did it for pure spite, to drive a wedge between you and Tate. She’s nothing but trouble. One day Tate is going to be sorry that he ever met her.”

“She’s lasted longer than the others.”

“You haven’t spent enough time talking to her to know what she’s like. I have,” he added darkly. “She has enemies, among them an ex-husband who’s living in a duplex because she got his house, his Mercedes, and his Swiss bank account in the divorce settlement.”

“So that’s where all those pretty diamonds came from,” she said wickedly.

“Her parents had money, too, but they spent most of it before they died in a plane crash. She likes unusual men, they say, and Tate’s unusual.”

“She won’t go to the reservation to see Leta,” she commented.

“Of course not.” He leaned toward her as he stopped at a traffic light. “It’s a Native American reservation!”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “Leta’s worth two of Audrey.”

“Three,” he returned. “Okay. I’ll find you a hotel. Then I’m leaving town before Tate comes looking for me!”

“You might hang a crab on your front door,” she said, tongue-in-cheek. “It just might ward him off.”

“Ha!”

She turned her eyes toward the bright lights of the city. She felt cold and alone and a little frightened. But everything would work out. She knew it would. She was a grown woman and she could take care of herself. This was her chance to prove it.

Chapter Two

There was film at eleven. Senator Holden found it hilarious, and when Cecily phoned to ask him about the job at the new museum that he’d offered her, he told her so. He didn’t ask any questions. He accepted her application over the phone and gave her the job on the spot.

Early Monday morning, Cecily found a small apartment that she could manage on the salary she’d be making and she moved out of the apartment Tate had been paying for. She pulled out of her master’s classes and withdrew from college. From now on, she was paying her own way. And one day, she’d pay Tate back, every penny. For the time being, shell-shocked and sick at heart that she was nothing more than a charity case to him, she wanted no more to do with the man she’d loved for so long. No wonder he’d thought of her as his ward. She was obligated to him for every crumb she put in her mouth. But no more. She was her own woman now. She’d support herself. Maybe later she could finish her master’s degree. She had plenty of time for that. At least she had a job to see her through this difficult transition.

She was forced to use her small bank account to pay the deposit on the new apartment, to pay for movers to transport her few possessions and for enough food to keep her going until she drew her first paycheck. She was so sick at heart that she hated the whole world. She couldn’t even talk to Tate’s mother, Leta.

The new apartment was small, and not much to look at, but at least she’d be responsible for herself. Unlike the old one, it was unfurnished, so she started out with very little. She didn’t even have a television set. At least the new place was closer to the museum. She could ride the bus to work every day, or even take the metro if she liked.

Colby came by to help her unpack, bringing a pizza with him and a small boom box with some cassettes as a house-warming present. They munched while they unwrapped lamps and dishes, sipping beer because it was all he brought for them to drink.

“I hate beer,” she moaned.

“If you drink enough of it, you won’t care about the taste,” he assured her.

She gave the can a dubious stare, shrugged, closed her eyes, held her breath and drank heavily. “Yuck!” she said.

“Keep going.”

She finished half of the can and ate some more pizza. After a few minutes, sure enough, it didn’t taste half-bad.

He watched her grin and nodded. “That’s the first smile I’ve seen in days.”

“I’m getting through it,” she assured him. “I start work next Monday. I can’t wait.”

“I wish I could be around to hear about your first day, but I’ve got another overseas assignment.”

She suspended the pizza at her mouth. Putting it down, she said worriedly, “Colby, you’ve already lost an arm…”

“And it will make me more careful,” he told her. “I lost it because I got drunk. I won’t let that happen again.” He glanced at the can. “Beer doesn’t affect me these days. It’s just a pleasant diversion.” He looked at her. “I’m through my worst time. Now I’m going to help you through yours. When I get back.”

She grimaced. “Well, don’t get killed, okay?”

He chuckled. “Okay.”

During Colby’s absence, she celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday with a cupcake, a candle and a card from Leta, who never forgot. Tate apparently had, or he was holding a grudge. For the first time in eight years, her birthday passed unnoticed by him.

She was now firmly entrenched at the museum and having the time of her life. She missed college and her classmates, but she loved the work she was doing. Acquisitions would be part of her duties as assistant curator, and she got to work in her own forensic archaeology field, Paleo-Indian archaeology. She didn’t really miss forensics as much as she’d expected to. It was almost as exciting to have access to rare collections of Folsom Clovis, and other projectile points, which were thousands of years old, along with bola stones, chippers and other stone tools and pottery fashioned by long-dead hands.

Her new phone number was unlisted, but Tate called her once at the museum. She put the phone down, gently but firmly. He didn’t call again.

Senator Holden did. “It’s my birthday Saturday night,” he said. “I want you and Colby to come.”

“He’s out of town. But I’d love to.”

“Great! We can talk about some new projects I’ve got in mind.”

“We can?” she asked, grinning because she knew how much he loved the museum; it had been his idea to open it. He was a fanatic in the field of Native American culture. He wasn’t Sioux, but his mother had taught on the Wapiti Sioux reservation. Like Cecily, he had an affinity for the Lakota nation.

He chuckled. “I’ll tell you all about it on Saturday. Six sharp at my house. Don’t be late. It’s a buffet.”

“I won’t eat for days,” she promised.

When she hung up she realized what she’d said. She did eat more frugally than before. She spent more frugally than before. Her surroundings weren’t lavish. But she wasn’t having to depend on anyone’s charity. She was twenty-five and self-supporting. It felt good.

Cecily phoned Leta to let her know that she planned to fly out to Rapid City and drive over to the Wapiti Ridge Sioux Reservation near Custer State Park in South Dakota for the tribe’s annual celebrations. There would be a large contingent of Lakota at the three-day September event, and native dancing and singing as well. She’d already bought her plane ticket and reserved a rental car. She wasn’t going to back out of the event just because she and Tate weren’t speaking. Anyway, there wasn’t a chance that Tate would go now.

“Tate hasn’t called recently,” Leta mentioned when they’d discussed the event. “I phoned to see if he was at his apartment, and that Audrey Gannon answered. She told me he was out of the country on some job for his boss, Pierce Hutton.”

Cecily felt a lump in her throat. She swallowed before she replied. “I didn’t know she was living with him,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“He’s secretive, isn’t he, baby? I guess he must feel something for her,” Leta replied irritably. “She hates what he is, she hates the reservation and she was barely civil to me when I told her who I was. If he’s as crazy about her as she says he is, she could turn him against his own people, even against me.”

“Surely she wouldn’t,” Cecily tried to reassure her.

ely she would. She’s against native sovereignty.” There was a hesitation. “I’m glad you’re coming out here. I miss seeing you. Since you went to live in Washington, I hardly get to have you out here at all.”

“I miss you, too,” Cecily said warmly.

“I need something to lift my spirits,” Leta continued. “We’ve just lost the hope of getting an ambulance and a new community clinic, because the funds that were budgeted have disappeared.”

“Disappeared? Where to?” Cecily said.

“Nobody knows,” Leta said. “Tom Black Knife, you remember our tribal chief, says it’s probably a math error. I’m not so sure. There are some real suspicious comings and goings around here lately. Especially since the paperwork for the proposed casino was sent off. I guess you haven’t been able to get Senator Holden to listen to you about our side of the story?” she added, a curious inflection in her voice.

“Matt Holden is one hundred percent against the casino, despite all my pleading,” Cecily said sadly. “Not that I haven’t bombarded him with information. I’m going to his birthday party. Maybe I can waylay him there and do us some good.”

“Yes. His birthday. He’s inflexible when anything goes against his principles,” Leta murmured.

“You sound as if you know him!” Cecily teased.

There was a long pause and when Leta spoke, her voice was strained. “I know of him. Everybody here does.”

“Why don’t you come to Washington later in the year and talk to him personally?” Cecily asked. “You can stay with me.”

“What, in that fancy apartment?” she said, distracted.

Cecily winced. “I’ve…moved. I have a new place. It’s smaller, and a little shabby, but it’s homey. You’ll like it. I have a sofa that folds out into a bed. I can sleep there and you can have the bedroom.”

Leta paused. “I’d love to see you. But I don’t know about getting on an airplane. I’ll have to think about that. You and Tate and I could go on the town, if I did. It might be fun, at that!”

Cecily hesitated. “Tate and I aren’t speaking, Leta,” she said tautly.

“Why not?”

“I found out who’s been paying all my expenses.”

“It’s some foundation, isn’t it?” Leta asked in all innocence. “What would that have to do with you and Tate not speaking? So, who’s really behind it?” she added in a teasing tone. “Is it some gun runner or maybe one of those international terrorists we read about?”

Leta didn’t know that Tate had been supporting her! Well she couldn’t discuss it on the phone. Time for that when she flew out to South Dakota.

“I’ll tell you all about it when I get there,” Cecily promised. “See you soon.”

“Okay. Take care, baby.”

“You take care, too.” She put down the receiver. Leta was going to be hurt that her “children” were at war. She frowned, remembering what Leta had said about losing some tribal funds. She wondered what was going on at Wapiti.

Saturday came and Colby was unexpectedly back in the country, so she asked him to go with her to Senator Holden’s birthday party. He agreed, but he sounded solemn. When he came to pick her up, she could see how tired he was.

“I shouldn’t have asked you,” she said gently, knowing better than to ask him what was wrong.

He shrugged. “It beats sitting at home, thinking.” He smiled wanly. “I’m bad company. But I’ll give it a shot.”

They left Cecily’s apartment and drove to the Senator’s residence.

Cecily stared around her at the elegant company of politicians, millionaires and other guests assembled in the huge ballroom of Senator Matt Holden’s Maryland home. Her upswept medium blond hair was neatly done and her knee-length black cocktail dress, while off the rack, was tasteful. But her pale green eyes were restless. She felt vulnerable without her glasses. She hadn’t wanted to bother with them, since Colby was driving. And she hated the worry of trying to wear contact lenses. Besides, who did she need to see, anyway? She and Colby had arrived just in time to wander through the buffet and nibble at the delicious spread. There was everything from caviar to champagne.

Now that they’d finished eating, she wished he would hurry back with the coffee. She was uncomfortable among people whose casual conversation centered around investments, foreign travel and upcoming appropriation bills. She didn’t travel in monied circles. As she studied the people around her being offered drinks by a white-coated, white-gloved waiter, she grinned to herself thinking that her usual companions these days were skeletons. She glanced at the tureen in the waiter’s hands and had an attack of conscience.

She draped her small evening bag over one shoulder and wandered quietly through the room of guests, nodding and smiling politely at people she knew mainly from the nightly news. She was in glittering company, but she was a stranger, alone in this packed gathering. She’d have been more at home in her office at the museum. Or on the reservation with Leta.

It was an unusually quiet cocktail party, she thought, and conversation was muted and somber around her. Recent turmoil in Washington, D.C., had thrown a shroud over the celebration of Senator Holden’s birthday. Holden was the senior Republican senator from South Dakota, a fiery, difficult man who made enemies as easily as he ran the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, of which he was chairman. He had his finger in plenty of political pies and some private ones. His most recent private one was private sector funding for his pet project, the newly created Anthropological and Archaeological Museum of the Native American where Cecily now worked.

She spotted Matt Holden and her eyes began to twinkle. He was a handsome devil, even at his age. His wife had died the year before, and the husky black-eyed politician with his glimmering silver hair and elegant broad-shouldered physique was now on every widow’s list of eligibles. Even now, two lovely elderly society dames were attacking from both sides with expensive perfume and daring cleavage. At least one of them should have worn something high-necked, she mused, with her collarbone and skinny neck so prominent.

Another pair of eyes followed her amused gaze. “Doesn’t it remind you of shark attacks?” a pleasant voice murmured in her ear.

She jumped, and looked up at her companion for the evening. “Good grief, Colby, you scared me out of a year’s growth!” she burst out with a helpless laugh.

Colby only smiled. “Here’s your coffee. It’s not bad, either.”

He handed her the cup and sipped from his own. She wondered why he’d been out of the country at the same time as Tate, and why. Then she shut Tate out of her mind. She wasn’t going to think about him tonight.

“You never did say where you went,” she told the lithe congenial man at her side.

He mentioned a war-torn country in Africa, then murmured, “And you didn’t hear that from me.”

She sobered quickly. Everyone knew about the strife and the terrible aftermath of surreptitious bombings. It was all that people talked about. “Those poor people.”

“Amen.”

She glanced up at him. “I suppose you were involved somehow in the capture of the suspects?”

He only smiled. He would never talk about assignments. Colby wasn’t a handsome man, especially with all the scars on his lean face. His thick, faintly wavy short black hair was his best asset. Still he did have a dangerous magnetism that Cecily knew didn’t go unnoticed by the ladies. Unfortunately he was too stuck in the past to even look at another woman twice. His wife of five years had left him two years back and found someone else; someone who was at home more, already had two children of his own and didn’t risk his life for his job. His benders since her departure were legendary. Cecily’s intervention with the Maryland psychologist had saved him from certain alcoholism, but he still teetered dangerously on the edge of ruin. A pity, she thought, to love someone so much and lose them and be unable to let go. Just like herself mooning over Tate, she thought with bitterness.

“Seen Tate lately?” Colby asked carelessly.

She stiffened. “No.”

He looked down at her with a wry grin. “It was a boring banquet, anyway. You made all the news shows that night, and I hear one of the bigger late-night television hosts did a monologue about it!”

“Go ahead,” she invited with a gesture. “Rub it in.”

“I can’t help myself,” he said with an involuntary chuckle. “I believe it’s the first time in American political history that an ex-CIA agent was baptized with a tureen of crab bisque right in the middle of a televised political affair.” Colby had to work hard not to crack a smile. He sipped his coffee instead. Before he met Cecily, he couldn’t have imagined any woman doing that to tall, handsome, elegant Tate Winthrop. “Matt Holden seems to have forgiven you,” he added.

She smiled wickedly. “He loved it,” she said. “Just between you and me, he thrives on publicity.”

Colby’s dark eyes went to Holden. “You might also have been invited because he likes embarrassing Tate,” he mused. “Talk about natural enemies!”

Cecily shifted from one leg to the other. Her high heeled shoes were getting uncomfortable. She didn’t go out much formally. “I know. Tate’s gung ho for that proposed casino on the Wapiti Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota to help raise tribal funds and support more programs for teens, to help cut down on alcoholism and violence. The senator, on the other hand, is violently opposed to the casino project on Wapiti. They’ve locked horns over that issue and several others involving Lakota sovereignty.”

Colby’s brows drew together. “Isn’t the senator Lakota?”

Cecily grinned. “His father was from Morocco,” she said. “He hasn’t got a drop of Lakota blood. But he looks it, doesn’t he? Maybe that’s why he gets the Lakota vote every election. That, and the fact that his mother used to teach at the Lakota school on Wapiti Ridge, or so I’ve heard.” Thinking about that, she wondered if Leta had ever met Matt in her youth. They were about the same age.

“Did he know Tate’s family then?”

“He may have known of them, but he ran for congress before Tate was even born, and he came to D.C. as a freshman senator the same year in a landslide victory.”

“You didn’t know him until this museum thing came up.”

“That’s true.” She smoothed down the narrow skirt of her dress and glanced with irritation at a mud spot on her black suede sling-backs. “Darn,” she said. “It was raining and I had to walk on the grass. I’ve got mud all over my shoes. They’re brand-new, too.”

“I’ll carry you across the grass on the return trip, if you like,” Colby offered with twinkling eyes. “It would have to be over one shoulder, of course,” he added with a wry glance at his artificial arm.

She frowned at the bitterness in his tone. He was a little fuzzy because she needed glasses to see at distances.

“Listen, nobody in her right mind would ever take you for a cripple,” she said gently and with a warm smile. She laid a hand on his sleeve. “Anyway,” she added with a wicked grin, “I’ve already given the news media enough to gossip about just recently. I don’t need any more complications in my life. I’ve only just gotten rid of one big one.”

Colby studied her with an amused smile. She was the only woman he’d ever known who he genuinely liked. He was about to speak when he happened to glance over her shoulder at a man approaching them. “About that big complication, Cecily.”

“What about it?” she asked.

“I’d say it’s just reappeared with a vengeance. No, don’t turn around,” he said, suddenly jerking her close to him with the artificial arm that looked so real, a souvenir of one of his foreign assignments. “Just keep looking at me and pretend to be fascinated with my nose, and we’ll give him something to think about.”

She laughed in spite of the racing pulse that always accompanied Tate’s appearances in her life. She studied Colby’s lean, scarred face. He wasn’t anybody’s idea of a pinup, but he had style and guts and if it hadn’t been for Tate, she would have found him very attractive. “Your nose has been broken twice, I see,” she told Colby.

“Three times, but who’s counting?” He lifted his eyes and his eyebrows at someone behind her. “Well, hi, Tate! I didn’t expect to see you here tonight.”

“Obviously,” came a deep, gruff voice that cut like a knife.

Colby loosened his grip on Cecily and moved back a little. “I thought you weren’t coming,” he said.

Tate moved into Cecily’s line of view, half a head taller than Colby Lane. He was wearing evening clothes, like the other men present, but he had an elegance that made him stand apart. She never tired of gazing into his large black eyes which were deep-set in a dark, handsome face with a straight nose, and a wide, narrow, sexy mouth and faintly cleft chin. He was the most beautiful man. He looked as if all he needed was a breastplate and feathers in his hair to bring back the heyday of the Lakota warrior in the nineteenth century. Cecily remembered him that way from the ceremonial gatherings at Wapiti Ridge, and the image stuck stubbornly in her mind.

“Audrey likes to rub elbows with the rich and famous,” Tate returned. His dark eyes met Cecily’s fierce green ones. “I see you’re still in Holden’s good graces. Has he bought you a ring yet?”

“What’s the matter with you, Tate?” Cecily asked with a cold smile. “Feeling…crabby?”

His eyes smoldered as he glared at her. “What did you give Holden to get that job at the museum?” he asked with pure malice.

Anger at the vicious insinuation caused her to draw back her hand holding the half-full coffee cup, and Colby caught her wrist smoothly before she could sling the contents at the man towering over her.

Tate ignored Colby. His eyes began to glitter as he looked at Cecily. “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 except leave town to keep out of his way.

She was still like an adopted daughter to his mother, but Tate couldn’t get near her now. He didn’t like admitting how much it hurt to have Cecily turn her back on him. All Audrey’s charms hadn’t been able to erase the memory of Cecily’s wounded, accusing eyes when Audrey had told her the truth about her so-called grant. He wished he’d never confided in the socialite. In the early days of their relationship, he’d been more forthcoming about the past than he should have been. It never occurred to him that Audrey would tell everything she knew to everyone who came within speaking distance. Amazing that he could be so easily taken in by a pretty face. Not that he hadn’t learned his lesson. Audrey heard nothing from him now that he wouldn’t mind having the media overhear. But the damage was done. It was standing in front of him with blazing green eyes and clenched hands. And to have Colby Lane, his friend, on the verge of an affair with Cecily…

“Why are you in town?” he asked Colby abruptly.

“I wasn’t needed any longer,” the other man replied with a grin. “Apparently my methods of interrogation were a little too…intense for some of our politically correct colleagues. They sent me home.”

“Marshmallows,” Tate muttered. “And did you see who was handling the investigation?”

“I did.” Colby finished his coffee. “Whatever happened to the good old days when the “company” handled overseas intelligence?” he wondered.

“Oh, no,” Audrey said in her husky voice as she joined them, ravishing in a red satin dress with a matching chiffon overlay. It looked like couture, and frightfully expensive. It probably was. She was dripping diamonds. “No shop talk,” she continued, pressing Tate’s arm to her breasts. She gave Cecily a cursory, contemptuous glance and transferred her blue eyes to Colby with a flirtatious smile. “Hi, Colby. Long time, no see.”

He smiled back, but his eyes didn’t. “I’ve been busy.”

“Too busy to come and see your best friend?” she chided. “We’ve invited you for dinner twice and you always have an excuse.”

Insinuating, of course, that she and Tate were living together, which Cecily already knew because of what Leta had told her. Cecily didn’t react visibly. Inside, she was slowly dying at the images of Tate and Audrey together.

“I’ve been out of the country for a week, myself, upgrading the security on one of our new oil rig projects in the Caspian Sea,” Tate replied. “We’ve had a few problems.”

“So I heard,” Colby said. “Brauer had friends, didn’t he?” he added, mentioning the German national who’d involved Tate’s employer in a kidnapping scheme. “I guess even from prison he can hire cleaners.”

Tate shrugged. “Pierce and I can handle it.” He smiled down at Audrey. “I’m not ready to cash in my chips yet.”

Cecily unobtrusively slid her free hand into Colby’s real one for comfort. Surprised, his fingers tightened around it.

“Well, it was nice to see you,” Colby said, reading the tiny signal, “but we need to leave pretty soon.”

At the coupling of their names, Tate glanced speculatively from one of them to the other. Everyone knew that Colby was still in love with his ex-wife, but he was holding Cecily’s hand and acting protective of her. He didn’t like that. Colby was teetering on alcoholism, and Tate didn’t want Cecily’s life ruined by him. He’d have to think of some way to handle this; for her own good, of course, he decided firmly.

“So you did show up, after all,” Matt Holden said shortly, joining the small group. He glared at Tate. “I’m not giving one inch on the casino issue, just in case you wondered,” he said without preamble.

Tate glared back at him. “You’re one man. You won’t stop progress.”

“Yes, I will,” Holden said in a clipped, hostile tone. “I’m not having organized crime at Wapiti Ridge, and if you don’t like it, you know what you can do.”

“Bull! There’s no connection to organized crime at Wapiti. That’s just an excuse. But you don’t own the governor or the state attorney general,” Tate told him. “And you have no influence whatsoever on the res.”

“Do you really want to be partners with men who’ll take eighty percent of the profit and shoot anybody who tries to stop them?” Holden asked. “I won’t have organized crime making a living at the expense of children’s food and clothing and housing!”

Tate took a step toward the man, who was a head shorter than he was, and his black eyes were every bit as intimidating as Holden’s. “That’s strong talk from a big shot Washington bureaucrat who rides around in chauffeured limousines and has his meals on china plates! What the hell do you know about children whose parents can’t even afford heat in the winter, who live on a reservation that hasn’t even got a damned ambulance to take injured people to the clinic?”

“I know more about it than you think you do,” Holden shot back. “Listen here…”

Cecily walked between them, just as Colby had gotten between her and Tate minutes earlier. She smiled at Holden. “My boss at the museum told me that you had a collection of projectile points dating back to the Folsom point,” she said. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of your showing them to me?”

Holden stood for a moment vibrating with unexpressed anger, but as he looked at Cecily, his rigid features relaxed and he smiled self-consciously. “Yes, I do have such a collection. You really want to see it?”

“Paleo-Indian archaeology is still my first love,” she replied. “Yes, I’d very much enjoy that.”

He took her arm. “If you’ll excuse us?”

Cecily didn’t look back. She went right along with the senator, apparently hanging on every word.

“Why do you do things like that?” Audrey asked snappily, glancing around to find some people still watching them in the wake of the very audible disagreement. “He’s a very powerful man, you know. And I think he’s right about casinos.” She tossed back her shoulder-length blond hair. “There shouldn’t even be any reservations in the first place,” she muttered, missing Tate’s angry stare. “We’re all Americans. It’s stupid to support a bunch of people who’d rather live with bears than in cities. They should just phase out the reservations and let everybody live together.”

Colby pursed his lips and glanced at Tate. He spoke a few words, softly, in a gutteral language that the other man understood very well.

“Why are you dating Cecily?” Tate asked instead of answering the question he’d been asked in Lakota.

Colby looked nonchalant. “She’s single. I’m single. I like her.”

“I can’t imagine why you’d agree to be seen with her in public,” Audrey sniffed. “She has no breeding and she’s a social disaster.”

“Listen, she didn’t pour crab bisque all over me,” Colby said with a deliberately provoking glance at Tate. “She wouldn’t have poured it on you if you’d told her the truth from the beginning. Cecily hates lies. I can’t imagine that you’ve known her for eight years without realizing that.”

“She has the pride of Lucifer,” he returned. “She’d never have gone to college in the first place if I hadn’t paid for it. She’s self-supporting and able to take care of herself. It was worth every penny.”

“She is going to pay you back, now that she knows, isn’t she?” Audrey asked. “You don’t owe her anything, Tate. You were stuck with her, and you’re certainly not a relative or anything.”

“There are things about my obligation to Cecily that you don’t understand,” Tate told the woman. He drew in a short breath as he watched Cecily cling to Holden’s arm on the way out of the room.

“Like what?” Audrey persisted. “Don’t tell me you were lovers!”

“Of course not,” Tate said irritably. “And that’s all I’m going to say on the subject.”

“She’s not much to look at even now.” Audrey was also staring after Cecily and Holden. “He does like her, doesn’t he?” she drawled. “He could afford to keep her. They must spend a lot of time together now that he’s involved in that museum.”

That had just occurred to Tate, too, and he didn’t like it. Holden was years too old for Cecily.

Colby caught that disapproval in his face, but he didn’t remark on it. He held up his empty cup. “I need a refill. Excuse me.”

He left them together. Audrey leaned against Tate’s muscular arm with a soft sigh. “Why did you want to come to this boring party?” she asked. “We could have gone to the ballet with the Carsons instead.”

“I hate ballet.”

“You like opera.”

“There’s a difference.” He was still glaring at the doorway through which Holden and Cecily had vanished. “What does she see in him?” he wondered.

“Maybe he likes to dig up dead people, too,” she said with a contemptuous laugh.

Tate could feel the heat rising over his cheekbones. “I’m still trying to understand why you told Cecily that I paid for her education.”

She looked up at him innocently. “You never said I couldn’t. She’s too old to need a guardian, you know. It was only ever just an excuse to hang around you, getting in my…in our way. She’ll get over it.”

“Get over what?” he asked with a scowl.

“Her infatuation.” She patted his arm, oblivious to the shock on his face. “All young girls go through it. Someone had to show her that she has no place in your life now.” She looked up at him adoringly. “You have me, now.”

He went with her to the punch bowl, still frowning and feeling vague disquiet. Audrey was constantly in his face, getting the manager to let her into his apartment at all hours, even phoning him at work. She was possessive to a frightening degree. He didn’t understand why. She was someone to take around, but he wasn’t intimately involved with her. She was acting as if they were attached at the hip, and he didn’t like it. Her attitude toward Cecily chafed. “What makes you think she’s infatuated with me?” he asked conversationally.

“Oh, Colby told me once, when he was a little tipsy. It was before they started going around together,” she said airily. “He felt sorry for her, but I don’t. There are plenty of eligible men in the world. She isn’t very attractive, but she’ll find someone of her own one day. Maybe even Colby,” she added thoughtfully. “They seem very close, don’t they—even closer than she and Matt Holden. She might be just the woman to help him get over his ex-wife!”

Chapter Three

The annual Pow Wow on the Wapiti Ridge Sioux reservation in southwestern South Dakota was Cecily’s favorite event. She’d promised Leta that she’d show up for it, and she had, begging an extra day off past the weekend on the excuse that she was going to look into buying some handicrafts from the reservation for the museum. Tate wasn’t likely to be here. Colby had mentioned that he was abroad again, so Cecily felt safe, for the moment. It would have hurt Leta’s feelings if she hadn’t come, since Leta didn’t know why there was a rift between her son and Cecily.

She looked around at the beautiful costumes, many made of fringed buckskin and very old, some of more recent vintage. Most Pow Wows were held in the summer months. Then she reminded herself that mid-September was still summer, even if there was a nip in the air here.

She didn’t have a drop of Lakota blood, but she had closer connections to this branch of the Oglala tribe than most whites. Tate Winthrop and his mother Leta had given Cecily refuge when she was still in her teens. She and Tate still weren’t speaking after the crab bisque attack, but Leta was like the mother she’d lost.

“I see a lot more people here this year,” Cecily told Leta, scanning the colorful crowd while sitting on hay bales around a circle where a dance competition was being held to the throbbing beat and chant of the drummers.

“They advertised it more this year,” Leta replied with a grin. She was young-looking for fifty-four, a little plump but with a pretty face, dark brown eyes and braided silver-flecked dark hair. She was dressed in fawn buckskins and boots with beaded, feathered ornaments in her hair. One of the ornaments was a circle with a cross inside, denoting the circle of life.

“You look lovely,” Cecily said with genuine affection.

Leta made a face. “I’m fat. You’ve lost weight,” she added. Her eyes narrowed.

Cecily stretched lazily. She was wearing a simple blue checked shirt with a denim skirt and boots. Her long blond hair was braided and circled around the crown of her head. Pale green eyes behind large framed glasses stared into nothing.

“Remember what I told you on the phone, that I found out the truth about the grant that was paying all my expenses?” she asked.

Leta nodded.

“Well, it wasn’t a grant that was paying for my education and living expenses.” She took a harsh breath. “It was Tate.”

Leta scowled. “Are you sure?”

“I’m very sure.” She glanced at the older woman. “I found out in the middle of Senator Matt Holden’s political fund-raiser, and I lost my temper. I poured crab bisque all over your son and there were television cameras covering the event.” She turned her wounded eyes toward the dancers. “I was devastated when I found out I’m nothing more than a charity case to him.”

“That isn’t true,” Leta said gently, but a little remotely. “You know Tate’s very fond of you.”

“Yes. Very fond, the way a guardian is fond of a ward. He owned me.” She stared at the brown grass under her feet, grimacing at the memory. “I couldn’t bear the humiliation of knowing that. I guess he thought I wouldn’t be able to make it on my own. I wasn’t really very mature at seventeen. But he could have told me the truth. It was horrible to find it out that way, especially at my age.” She took a deep breath. “I quit school, moved out of the apartment and took the job Senator Holden was asking me to take at the new museum he helped open. He’s a nice man.”

Leta looked away nervously. “Is he?” she asked in a curiously strained tone.

“You’d like him,” she said with a smile, “even though Tate doesn’t.”

Leta’s shoulders moved as if she were suddenly uncomfortable. “Yes, I know there’s friction between them. They don’t agree on any Native American issues, most especially on the fight to open a casino on Wapiti Ridge.”

“The senator seems to think that organized crime would love to move in, but I don’t think there’s much danger of that. Other Sioux reservations in the state have perfectly good casinos. Anyway, it’s the tribes in other states trying to open casinos that are drawing all the heat from gambling syndicates.”

Leta hesitated. “Yes, but just lately…” She caught herself and smiled. “Well, there’s no use talking about that right now. But, Cecily, what about your education?”

Of course, Leta knew that Tate had enrolled her in George Washington University near his Washington, D.C., apartment, so that he could keep an eye on her. He worked as security chief for Pierce Hutton’s building conglomerate now, a highly paid, hectic and sometimes dangerous job. But it was less wearing on Leta’s nerves than when he worked for the government.

“I can go back when I can afford to pay for it myself,” Cecily returned.

“There’s something more, isn’t there?” Leta asked in her soft voice. “Come on, baby. Tell Mama.”

Cecily grimaced. She smiled warmly at the older woman. She’d just turned twenty-five, but Leta had been “Mama” since hers had died and left her penniless, at the mercy of a drunken, lusting stepfather.

“Tate’s new girl,” she said after a minute. “She’s really beautiful. She’s thirty, divorced and she looks like a model. Blond, blue-eyed, perfect figure, social graces and she’s rich.”

“Bummer,” Leta said drolly.

Cecily burst out laughing at the drawled slang. Leta was one of the most educated women she knew, politically active on sovereignty issues for her tribe and an advocate of literacy programs for young Lakota people. Her husband had died years before, and she’d changed. Jack Yellowbird Winthrop had been a brutal man, very much like Cecily’s stepfather. During the time she spent with Leta, he was away on a construction job in Chicago or she’d never have been able to stay in the house with them.

“Tate’s a man,” Leta continued. “You can’t expect him to live like a recluse. His job involves a lot of social events. Where Hutton goes, he goes.”

“Yes, but this is…different,” Cecily continued. She shrugged. “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, five 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.

“Where’s Audrey?” she asked brightly, trying to sound nonchalant about it when her heart was breaking.

Something changed in his face. He looked briefly disturbed. “She couldn’t get away,” he said in a tone that didn’t invite questions. “One of her friends was having a tea, and she promised to help. I flew out alone.”

Cecily wondered if it was really because of a party that Audrey had stayed behind, or if his society girlfriend didn’t want to be seen on an Native American reservation. Tate had mentioned once or twice that Audrey had asked him repeatedly to get a conservative haircut. As if he’d ever cut his hair willingly. It was a part of his heritage, of which he was fiercely proud. At least she didn’t have to worry about him marrying Audrey. He might be smitten, but he’d said for years that he wasn’t going to dilute his Lakota blood by mingling it with a white woman. He wanted a child who was purely Lakota, like himself. If he ever married, it would be to a Lakota woman. The first time he’d said that, it had broken Cecily’s heart. But she’d come to accept it. When she realized that she was never going to be able to have Tate, she gave up and devoted herself to her studies. 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 makeshift 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 women-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.

“She’s different since your father died,” Cecily commented, sitting down on one of the bales of hay, grateful for the diversion. “I’ve never seen her so animated.”

“My father was a hard man to live with,” he replied quietly. “If he hadn’t spent most of his life away on construction jobs, I’d probably have killed him.”

She knew he wasn’t kidding. Jack Winthrop had beaten Leta once, and Tate had wiped the floor with him after coming home unexpectedly and finding his mother cut and bruised. By then, he’d been in espionage work for some time. Jack Winthrop, big and tough as he was, was no match for the experienced younger man. It was the last time Leta ever suffered a beating, too. Jack became afraid of his son. Cecily remembered that Jack had never spoken one kind word about his only child. Oddly he seemed to hate Tate.

“You didn’t like your father much, did you?” Cecily remembered.

“He wasn’t a likable man.” He sat down beside her.

She felt the warm strength of him and closed her eyes briefly to savor it. He hardly ever touched people, not even his mother. In all the long years she’d been part of his life, he’d never touched her with intent. Not to hold her hand, kiss her even on the cheek, brush back her hair. That one time, when she’d flown to Oklahoma to help him with his case was the closest they’d come to intimacy, and that was anticlimactic, even if she had lived on it for weeks afterward. She’d ached for any contact at all, but that wasn’t Tate’s way. Yet she’d seen him holding hands with Audrey that day in the coffee shop. Nothing had ever hurt so much. It was an indication of the attraction he felt for the gorgeous socialite.

She smiled as she watched Leta doing the intricate steps of the dance inside the circle. All the women were wearing buckskins, a feat of endurance because it was almost ninety degrees in the South Dakota September sun.

“That was a nasty crack I made about you and Senator Holden at his birthday party,” he said after a minute. “I didn’t mean it.”

It was the closest he came to an apology. She was tired of arguing, so she took the olive branch for what it was. “I know.”

The mention of birthdays reminded him that he’d deliberately ignored Cecily’s this year. It wasn’t a pleasant memory. He shifted on the hay, staring at his mother in the circle. “Do you like the job at the museum?”

“Very much. I’ll be in charge of acquisitions, which is one reason I came out here. I want to exhibit some Oglala pottery and beadwork.”

He didn’t look at her. “How did you get to know Holden?”

“He’s good friends with a member of the faculty at George Washington University,” she said. “I ran into him in the hall one day. He knew me from one of the hearings…” She stopped, because this was part of her life she hadn’t shared with Tate.

“Hearings?” he prompted.

She folded her hands on the warm fabric of her skirt. The sun was beating down on her uncovered head. “It was a public hearing on Native American sovereignty. I went to speak in favor of it before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, speaking for a committee from the Wapiti reservation. Holden is the chairman of the Senate committee.” She kept her eyes on the circle of dancers. “It was Leta’s idea,” she added quickly. “She said Senator Holden was impressed by anthropology graduates, and I was the only one they could dig up at such short notice.”

“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. “He’s really stubborn on the issue of a casino on the Wapiti reservation. We’ve pointed out the benefits to the tribe time and time again, but he won’t give an inch,” she recalled. “We could build a bigger clinic, buy an ambulance and train and hire an EMT to drive it. We could fund recreational programs for teens to keep them from drinking and getting into trouble. We could have prenatal programs…”

He was staring at her openly. “When did you talk to him about that?” he asked.

“I’ve been a thorn in his side for months,” she said easily. “I’ve left him e-mail messages, put notes under his door, left voice mail, sent tapes of the poverty on the reservation through the mail. He knows me very well indeed. But most recently I got him to listen to me over a nice dinner at the local cafeteria between Senate sessions,” she recalled. “He’s afraid of organized crime. He seems to have some suspicions about the motives of the tribal chief who’s so determined to get the casino approved by the state government for Class III gambling.”

“Tom Black Knife,” he said, nodding, because he knew the tribal chief, and there had been some gossip about the way he earmarked tribal funds. Not a lot of money was going into the reservation’s projects right now, and nobody seemed to know exactly where the money was going. Some was even missing, if Tate had understood a random comment one of his cousins had made earlier today. Tom was a good man with a kind heart, the softest touch on the reservation. Odd that his name would be connected with anything as unsavory as embezzlement. “But Holden is overlooking the benefits of the money the casino would bring in. Several Native American tribes have instituted casinos and had to fight state government all the way to get them. There are other casinos on Sioux land right here in our own state, but Holden is fighting our proposed compact with everything he’s got. Holden’s opposition hurts us in South Dakota, because he has powerful political allies in Pierre and no scruples about using them against us. One of them,” he added darkly, “is the state attorney general herself!”

“I know,” she said. Her pale eyes gazed into his dark ones. “But I’m working on the senator.”

He didn’t even blink. “Working on him, how?”

Here we go again, she thought with resignation. Her eyebrows lifted. He was acting as if she’d already seduced the man! On second thought, why not live down to that image? She leaned forward avidly. “Well, first I smeared him with honey and licked my way down to his throat…” she began earnestly.

He cursed sharply.

She laughed helplessly. “All right, it was just dinner. But he really is a very nice man, Tate,” she said.

He gave her a hard glare. “Listen, Cecily, going around with a man old enough to be your father isn’t the way to fight your hang-ups.”

“My hang-ups?” She glared at him. “Do feel free to elaborate.”

“You have friends instead of lovers,” he said curtly.

“I’m a modern woman,” she said coolly. “That means I have the right to decide what I do with my body. Some women, I might add, advocate using men only for breeding purposes. I myself think they’d be more useful as house pets.”

His black eyes twinkled. He waved to his mother who was just dancing past them with an ear to ear smile. “All the same, I don’t like seeing you with Holden.”

“I don’t particularly care what you like,” she said and smiled sweetly at him.

He hated that damned smile. It was like a red flag. “Listen, kid, you don’t know beans about some of the political superstars in Congress, and Holden is an unknown commodity. He guards his privacy like a mercenary. I don’t like him and I don’t trust him. He’s too secretive.”

“Look who’s talking!” she exclaimed. “You could probably topple governments with things you know and don’t tell!”

“Sure I could,” he agreed. “But I’m not shady.”

She just looked at him. It was a speaking look.

“Maybe a little shady,” he conceded finally. “A man has to have a few secrets.”

“So does a woman.”

He smoothed a hand down the buckskin leggings on one of his powerful thighs. “I hope you aren’t going to let what happened to you in Corryville ruin the rest of your life,” he said without looking at her. “You should go around with men your own age.”

She met his narrowed eyes. “I had my share of dates when I started college. It’s amazing that every single one of them thought he was entitled to my bed in return for a nice dinner and some dancing. And you know what I got when I said no? They told me I wasn’t liberated.” She threw up her hands. “What does liberation have to do with rejecting a man with bad breath who looks like a lab rat?”

“You won’t get around me by changing the subject,” he continued doggedly. “Holden isn’t the sort of man you need in your life and neither is Colby Lane.”

The silence beside her was thick with suppressed anger. Colby was ex-CIA, too, now a mercenary who did freelance work for various organizations, including, so rumor had it, the government. He was almost as tough as Tate. But he had a few more visible flaws. Tate was his friend and he couldn’t miss the fact that Cecily and Colby were close—even Audrey had pointed it out to him. But he didn’t like having Cecily dating the man, and Cecily knew it by his very silence.

She held up a hand before he could continue. “I know he’s had his problems in the past…”

“He can’t keep his hands off a liquor bottle at the best of times, and he still hasn’t accepted the loss of his wife!”

“I sent him to a therapist over in Baltimore,” she continued. “He’s narrowed his habit down to a six-pack of beer on Saturdays.”

“What does he get for a reward?” he asked insolently.

She sighed irritably. “Nobody suits you! You don’t even like poor old lonely Senator Holden.”

“Like him? Holden?” he asked, aghast. “Good God, he’s the one man in Congress I’d like to burn at the stake! I’d furnish the wood and the matches!”

“You and Leta,” she said, shaking her head. “Now, listen carefully. The Lakota didn’t burn people at the stake,” she said firmly. She went on to explain who did, and how, and why.

He searched her enthusiastic eyes. “You really do love Native American history, don’t you?”

She nodded. “The way your ancestors lived for thousands of years was so logical. They honored the man in the tribe who was the poorest, because he gave away more than the others did. They shared everything. They gave gifts, even to the point of bankrupting themselves. They never hit a little child to discipline it. They accepted even the most blatant differences in people without condemning them.” She glanced at Tate and found him watching her. She smiled self-consciously. “I like your way better.”

“Most whites never come close to understanding us, no matter how hard they try.”

“I had you and Leta to teach me,” she said simply. “They were wonderful lessons that I learned, here on the reservation. I feel…at peace here. At home. I belong, even though I shouldn’t.”

He nodded. “You belong,” he said, and there was a note in his deep voice that she hadn’t heard before.

Unexpectedly he caught her small chin and turned her face up to his. He searched her eyes until she felt as if her heart might explode from the excitement of the way he was looking at her. His thumb whispered up to the soft bow of her mouth with its light covering of pale pink lipstick. He caressed the lower lip away from her teeth and scowled as if the feel of it made some sort of confusion in him.

He looked straight into her eyes. The moment was almost intimate, and she couldn’t break it. Her lips parted and his thumb pressed against them, hard.

“Now, isn’t that interesting?” he said to himself in a low, deep whisper.

“Wh…what?” she stammered.

His eyes were on her bare throat, where her pulse was hammering wildly. His hand moved down, and he pressed his thumb to the visible throb of the artery there. He could feel himself going taut at the unexpected reaction. It was Oklahoma all over again, when he’d promised himself he wouldn’t ever touch her again. Impulses, he told himself firmly, were stupid and sometimes dangerous. And Cecily was off-limits. Period.

He pulled his hand back and stood up, grateful that the loose fit of his buckskins hid his physical reaction to her.

“Mother’s won a prize,” he said. His voice sounded oddly strained. He forced a nonchalant smile and turned to Cecily. She was visibly shaken. He shouldn’t have looked at her. Her reactions kindled new fires in him.

He reached down suddenly and caught her arms, pulling her up with him, deliberately closer than he needed to. He drew her a step closer, so that he could feel the whip of her excited breath against his throat. His fingers tightened on her arms, almost bruising them. Time seemed to stop for a space of seconds. He didn’t even hear the drums or the chants or the murmur of conversation around them. For the first time in memory, he wanted to crush Cecily down the length of his body and grind his mouth into hers. The thought shocked him so badly that he let her go all at once, turned and walked toward the circle without even looking back.

Cecily stared after him and her legs shook. She must have dreamed what just happened, she told herself. It was years of hunger for Tate that had made her mind snap. Besides, he wasn’t even attracted to her. Yes, she thought, moving toward Leta like a sleepwalker, it had only been a dream. Only another hopeless waking dream.

Cecily had planned to stay overnight and fly out the next morning, but when she and Leta went back to the small frame house in the headquarters village where Leta lived, Tate was sprawled in the easy chair watching the color television he’d given Leta last Christmas. She had good furniture and propane gas heat, one of the few houses to boast such luxuries. Tate made sure Leta lacked for nothing. It was a different story elsewhere, with elderly people trying to keep warm in fifty-below-zero temperatures with woodstoves in houses that were never tight enough to keep in the heat. The reservation was small and poor, despite the efforts of various missionary groups and some government assistance. Education, Cecily thought, was certainly the key to prosperity, but that was another difficulty that needed to be overcome. Native American colleges were springing up these days when funding could be had, places where the people could keep their traditions and their culture alive while learning the skills that would give them good jobs. It was one of Leta’s dreams to have such a place on the Wapiti Ridge.

“You still here?” Leta asked her son with a broad grin.

“I thought I’d stay until tomorrow,” he replied without looking at Cecily.

“I have to get to the airport,” Cecily remarked cheerfully, her eyes cautioning Leta not to contradict her. “I’m due back at work Monday morning.”

She and Leta knew that wasn’t true, but Cecily couldn’t imagine staying under the same roof with Tate. Not now.

“How about some coffee?” Tate asked his mother as he rose from the chair and turned off the television.

“I’ll make it,” Leta volunteered and hurried to the small kitchen to hide her glee.

Tate moved close to Cecily, an unusual thing for him to do. He never liked her closer than arm’s length. Having him so close now made her nervous.

“There’s a dance tonight,” he told her. “We’re going.”

“I think Leta’s had enough dancing,” she began.

He shook his head. “You and I are going.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “I wasn’t asked.”

Without counting the cost, he framed her face in his lean, warm hands and brought his mouth down gently on her shocked lips.

She made a sound that aroused and delighted him. He gathered her in, riveting her to the length of him while the kiss suddenly became hungry, demanding, intimate.

It was like falling. It was like having every single dream of her adult life come true. His mouth was hard and slow and exquisitely sensuous. She didn’t like knowing how he’d gotten the experience that made him such a tender lover, but the wonder of it erased the jealousy. She held to his hard arms to keep from falling down and tried to respond enthusiastically, if a little inexperienced. He tasted of heaven. She opened her lips a little more to tempt him, and her hands tightened on the hard muscles of his arms, trying to hold him where he was. Years of dreaming of this, waiting, hoping, and it was actually happening! He was kissing her as if he loved her mouth…

His head lifted. His black eyes told her nothing as they searched her face intently. His hands on her arms were bruising. “We’ll have supper before we go to the dance,” he said, his voice a little strained.

“What do you want to eat?” Leta called suddenly from the kitchen.

“Sandwiches,” he called back. “Okay?”

“Okay! I’ll make some.”

Tate’s eyes went back to Cecily. She was looking at him as if he were the very secret of life. He was in over his head already, he reasoned. He might as well go the rest of the way. His body throbbed all over with just that one small taste of her. He had to have more. He had to, and damn the consequences!

He bent, lifting her in his arms like precious treasure, and carried her back to the armchair with his heart threatening to push through his chest. He settled down in it, his hand pressing her cheek to his buckskin-clad shoulder as he bent again to her mouth before she could speak.

The seconds lengthened, sweetened. Cecily’s hands explored his long hair, his cheeks, his eyebrows, his nose as if she’d never touched a man in her life. It was delicious, taboo, forbidden. It was exquisite. She moaned softly, unable to contain the sheer joy of being in Tate’s arms at last. He heard the tiny sound and his mouth suddenly became demanding, insistent.

Kissing was suddenly no longer enough. His lean hand went to her rib cage and slowly worked its way up over one of her small, firm breasts. He lifted his head to search her eyes as he touched the hardness there, because this was difficult territory for her, with her memories of her stepfather. The man had all but raped her. Even therapy hadn’t completely healed her fears of intimacy after eight years.

She read that thought in his eyes. “It’s all right,” she whispered, worried that he was going to stop.

In fact, he was. He searched her bright eyes and smoothed his hand deliberately over her small, hard-tipped breast, but guilt consumed him. She’d never even had a lover. It wasn’t fair to treat her like this, not when he had no future to offer her. “You shouldn’t have let me do that, Cecily,” he said quietly.

He propelled her out of the chair and onto her feet, holding her firmly by the shoulders for a few seconds until he could breathe normally. “Go help Leta in the kitchen.”

“Bossy,” she accused breathlessly. The kisses had her reeling visibly.

“Thousands of years of conditioning don’t vanish overnight,” he mused. He searched her face with traces of hunger still in his eyes. “Do you still carry that week’s supply of prophylactics around with you?” he added wickedly.

She actually blushed. “I gave up on you and threw them out years ago.”

His eyes went up and down her soft body like hands. “Pity.”

“You said you wouldn’t, ever!” she protested.

One eyebrow arched and his lips pursed. He was trying to lighten the tension, but just looking at her now aroused him. “So I did. Eloquently, too.”

She was trembling. She wrapped both arms around herself to fight the emotion that was consuming her. She looked up at him accusingly. “You enjoy tormenting me, don’t you?”

He scowled. “Maybe I do.”

She turned away. “I’m flying out tonight.”

“No need. I’m not staying.” He went around her to the kitchen and kissed Leta goodbye where she stood at the counter making sandwiches.

“Make up before you go,” she pleaded with her son.

“I did,” he lied.

She touched his cheek sadly. “Stubborn,” she murmured, then she smiled. “Like your father.”

The mention of Jack Winthrop closed his face. “I’ve never hit you.”

She caught her breath and her hand came down. She gnawed her lower lip. “Someday,” she said hesitantly, “we must have a talk.”

“Not today,” he countered, oblivious to the guilt in her face. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

“You don’t like Senator Holden.” She said it abruptly and without thinking, just as she’d said he was like his father. He didn’t know who his father was. She still couldn’t bring herself to tell him.

He turned. “There’s no one I like less,” he agreed. “He’s wrong down the line about Wapiti Ridge and what’s good for us, but he won’t see reason. He doesn’t know a thing about the Lakota, and he couldn’t care less!”

“He grew up here,” she said slowly.

“What?”

“He grew up here,” she continued. “Before his mother was a widow, she came here to teach at the school. He had friends on the reservation, including Black Knife.”

“You never told me that you knew him,” he accused.

“You never asked me. I’ve known him for a long time.”

He stared at her curiously. “If he knows the situation here, why is he fighting us on the idea of the casino?”

“He hates gambling,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in many years,” she added, “not since he married that pretty white woman and ran for the senate the first time.”

“His wife is dead.”

She nodded. “I read it in the papers.” Her eyes searched his. “Cecily says you have a pretty white woman of your own.”

“Damn Cecily!” he said through his teeth, hating his own stupidity for touching Cecily in the first place and frustrated by the painful attraction he couldn’t satisfy. “What I do is no business of hers! It never was, and it never will be!”

“Amen to that,” Cecily said from the doorway, a little less confident because of his biting remarks, but calm just the same. “Why don’t you go home to Audrey?”

“I don’t understand this,” Leta said worriedly as she studied her son. “You keep saying you don’t want to be involved with a white woman…”

“Only with a plain white woman,” Cecily corrected. “Isn’t that right, Tate? But Audrey is beautiful.”

It was only then that he realized how Cecily must feel about his relationship with the other woman, as if he’d bypassed her because she was no beauty. It wasn’t true. He’d been responsible for her for years, even if she hadn’t known it until recently. He’d fought his attraction to her because it was like exploiting her, taking advantage of her gratitude for what he’d done for her. How did he explain that without making matters worse than they already were?

Leta could have wept for Cecily, standing there with such dignity and poise, even in the face of Tate’s hostility.

“It has nothing to do with beauty,” Tate said finally.

Cecily only smiled. “I’ll finish the sandwiches while you see Tate off,” she told Leta.

“Cecily…” Tate began hesitantly.

“We all act on impulse occasionally,” she said, meeting his eyes bravely. “It’s no big thing. Really.” She smiled, avoiding Leta’s probing gaze, and turned to the refrigerator. “Are you eating before you go?”

He scowled fiercely. She thought he regretted touching her. Perhaps he did. He couldn’t remember being so confused.

“No,” he said after a minute. “I’ll get something at the airport.”

Leta went with him and waited while he got his suitcase and carried it out to his rental car, which was parked beside the one Cecily had rented. The reservation was a long drive from the airport, so a car was a necessity.

“You two used to get along so well,” Leta murmured.

“I’ve been blind,” he said through his teeth. “Stark staring blind.”

“What do you mean?”

He stared out across the rolling hills that were turning golden as autumn approached. “She’s in love with me.”

It was a shock to hear himself say it. Until then, he hadn’t really considered it. But Cecily had lain in his arms as trusting as a child, clinging to him. Her eyes had been rapt with pleasure, joy glistening in them. Why hadn’t he known? Or was it that he hadn’t wanted to know?

“You mustn’t let her see that you know,” Leta instructed grimly. “She is proud.”

“Yes.” He touched his mother’s shoulder. “There are so few of us left who are full-bloods,” he said, wondering why Leta grimaced. Perhaps she’d hoped that he might marry Cecily one day, despite her pride in their heritage.

“And you won’t marry a white girl,” she said.

He nodded solemnly. “Audrey is costume jewelry. I wear her on my arm. She’s sophisticated and savvy and shallow. It means nothing. Just as the other handful meant nothing.”

Leta’s eyes fell to his chest. “That isn’t all.”

He sighed. “I’ve taken care of Cecily for eight years,” he reminded her. “Even without the cultural differences, I’m in the position of a guardian to her, whether she likes it or not. I can’t take advantage of what she feels for me.”

“Of course you can’t.” Leta linked her fingers together. “Drive safely.”

He pulled a small package from his jacket pocket. “Give this to her after I’m gone. It’s her birthday present.” He smiled ruefully. “We weren’t speaking, so she didn’t get it on her birthday.”

“She may not want it.”

He knew that. It hurt. “Try.”

She watched him drive away down the winding dirt road that cut through to the main highway. She knew that one day soon she was going to have to share a painful truth with him. Things were happening that he didn’t know about. Things that involved herself and Matt Holden and some vicious men in chauffeured limousines and the tribal chief. It was not a prospect she relished.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.