Paper Rose

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.

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