Authors: Rosanne Bittner
He raised up on one elbow, still fondling the breast, running a thumb over the hard nipple he could feel through her blouse. “I’d love to get you pregnant, if you were my wife,” he answered. “I want you to have my babies, Georgeanne. I want you to help me run my own ranch someday. Somehow we’ll make that happen.”
Her eyes teared. “What can we do about my father? I’m so afraid of what he’d do to your parents, your ranch. I don’t want to be responsible for that, and I know you don’t either.”
Zeke closed his eyes and sighed, calling on all his strength and notions of honor to sit up and turn away from her. She was right. They couldn’t do this … yet. “Of course I don’t.” He sighed deeply, getting up and walking away from her. “I don’t know what the hell to do, Georgie. I’m afraid to tell my folks. They wouldn’t have any problem with you if they knew you, but they understand the trouble this could bring to the family—and to me. They’d tell me I should try to forget about you, but that would be impossible.”
He turned to face her, and Georgeanne noticed the
lingering swelling at the crotch of his denim pants, had felt that hardness against her thigh just moments ago, had wanted to feel him inside of her. She’d lived on a ranch long enough to know about mating, and she wasn’t afraid of it, not with someone as sweet and gentle as Zeke Brown. He was a year younger than she, but seemed older. He had awakened natural womanly desires she had given little thought to before meeting him. She quickly got to her feet, knowing that if he came back and lay down beside her again, she would not be able to turn him away. Their love had grown too fast, had become too strong, their need to mate almost unbearably painful.
“We both know why I can’t tell my father.” She walked over to her horse. “Maybe we should try to stay away from each other for a while, give ourselves time to think. There has to be a way for us to be together, Zeke.”
He walked up behind her, wisely not touching her. “My grandmother Abbie will be here in a week or so. Mother says she’s a very wise woman, and from what I’ve known of her, I think she is, too. She’s been through some bad times with my grandfather Zeke over the years, big challenges like what we’re facing. I have a feeling my grandfather would know exactly what to do about this, but he lived in a time when a man could deal out his own justice and make threats and defend himself however he chose. We can’t live that way anymore.”
She turned to face him, her eyes misty. “Men like my father can. Men with that kind of wealth seem to still be able to set all the rules. I love him, Zeke, but I don’t honor him. I’m not proud of how he behaves. I’ll never forgive him for killing my mother’s spirit. As far as I’m concerned he might as well have shot her himself. He’s different with me. He babies me, holds me up on a pedestal. If he knew …” She shivered.
“I know what he can be like, and it frightens me to think what he’d do to you if we told him we wanted to marry. Maybe I should just leave the ranch, and we could find a way to be together someplace else, in Denver or Colorado Springs. I don’t know.”
He dared to put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t do anything yet. Let me talk to my grandmother when she comes. Let’s try to get through the summer. I might go to college at Fort Collins. I was going to just stay here and take over the ranch someday, but if I’m going to marry someone like you, I’ll need an education, need to know other ways of expanding, making more money.”
She shook her head, turning to look up at him with a sad smile. “I don’t need a rich man, Zeke. You know that. Riches didn’t bring my poor mother any happiness, and my grandmother, sweet old woman that she is, always taught me that money means nothing. It’s love that counts, Zeke, and we have plenty of that.”
He took hold of her hand. “My grandmother would probably say that in a situation like this we have to be practical. That’s a favorite term of hers. She says Grandfather Zeke taught her that. Sometimes being practical means doing something that hurts.”
A tear slipped down her cheek. “I don’t want to be practical, Zeke, because that would mean we should end this and go our separate ways.”
They both felt an aching love, both knew they did not want to end this beautiful friendship that was turning into something much deeper. “Let me talk to my grandmother. We’ll take some time to be alone and think. No more riding together for now. When I want to meet again, I’ll leave a note for you, nailed to the tree here, like always. By then, if you’ve changed your mind—”
“I’ll never change my mind!”
His own eyes began to brim with tears. He leaned down and kissed her lightly. “I won’t either.” He turned away and leapt into his saddle without using a stirrup. “I love you, Georgeanne Temple. We’ll figure this out. I just don’t want to cause a ruckus right before my grandmother’s family reunion. This is real important to her. We’ll have to lay low at least until everybody has gone back home. You understand that much, don’t you?”
She mounted her own horse. “I understand.” She turned the horse to face him. “I wish I could be there. I’d love to meet your grandmother and your cousins and aunts and uncles.”
“I would love for them all to meet you. We’ll see how things go. Maybe you could sneak away and come meet them. The problem is, my folks don’t even know about us yet. Give me some time to decide how to tell them and my grandmother.”
She nodded. “I’ll be thinking about you, Zeke.”
“I’ll sure as hell be thinking about you.”
In my bed at night, embracing a pillow instead of the woman I want to make love to
. “Thanks for understanding.”
She rode closer, leaned over to kiss him one last time. They reached out and embraced once more in a hot, hungry kiss before Georgeanne quickly pulled away and turned her horse, riding off in the direction of the Temple ranch. Zeke watched her until she was out of sight, feeling a frustration inside at not being able to have her.
Margaret and Morgan met Abbie and the rest of the family with two wagons. Abbie’s heart swelled with love at her being surrounded by all these descendants of the precious love she had shared with Zeke Monroe. She sat amid luggage and straw in the back of a buckboard, holding LeeAnn’s youngest, her namesake, little Abbie, on her lap. Abbie’s brother, Lonnie, sat curled next to his grandma at her left, and on her right was Lance, Margaret’s youngest. Matthew sat across from her beside Wolf’s Blood’s stepdaughter, Emily. The two were nearly the same age, and they chattered about silly things, the way children do. Abbie studied Matthew, nine, a very dark child who did not at all look as though he belonged to his blond-haired mother.
The grandson of Winston Garvey
, Abbie thought. How chillingly strange. She was grandmother to a boy whose grandfather had violated her in the worst way … yet she could find only love in her heart for Matthew. He could not be blamed for his paternal heritage. He would never know that Joshua, the man he now called father, was really his own uncle, a half brother to Charles Garvey, fathered by Winston Garvey and a Cheyenne woman the man had raped. What ironic twists life could take.
LeeAnn and Joshua rode in the same wagon with Abbie, and when she glanced at LeeAnn, she realized
her daughter had noticed her staring at Matthew. She saw the lingering pain in LeeAnn’s eyes. The woman would never quite forgive herself for abandoning the family and marrying a man who was a hated enemy of her own father. Nor would she forget the hell she suffered as Charles Garvey’s wife.
In the other wagon rode Jennifer, with Wolf’s Blood’s Apache daughter, Iris, and Wolf’s Blood’s sister, Ellen, who with her husband Hal had accompanied Margaret and Morgan to Pueblo to greet the family at the train. Two more grandchildren, Ellen’s eight-year-old Lillian and four-year-old Daniel rode with their mother in the second wagon. Ellen and Hal owned a small ranch next to the old Monroe spread.
Margaret and Morgan’s son Zeke had brought extra horses, which thrilled young Hawk. He rode with Zeke and with Zeke’s younger brother Nathan. Jason and Swift Arrow also rode with them, and Margaret and Morgan each drove a wagon. Dan rode in the seat beside Morgan, and beside Margaret sat Dan’s wife, Rebecca.
So … here they all were. Abbie’s eyes teared at watching them, and she felt a tug at her heart at the sight of eighteen-year-old Zeke, sixteen-year-old Nathan and fourteen-year-old Hawk, all dark, handsome young men, all big and strong like their grandfather Zeke, good riders, boys turning into men. If only they could have had their grandfather with them longer.
This was not going to be easy, coming back to this place with the whole family in tow. So many years away … so many memories. She could almost see Zeke himself riding with his grandsons, laughing with them, racing against the wind. How could the memory of him still be so vivid, after eight years? How could the ache in her heart still be so fierce?
“Come out of that wagon, white woman!”
Abbie turned around to see Swift Arrow riding beside her. “What on earth do you mean?” She let out a quick scream when Swift Arrow reached over the side of the wagon and thrust one arm around her waist, lifting her onto his horse with a strength that surprised her, considering his age. All the children and grandchildren laughed when he kicked the fine Appaloosa gelding Morgan had brought for him from the ranch and headed away from the rest of them at a gallop. Abbie swung a leg over the horse’s neck and perched herself in front of Swift Arrow, clinging to her husband’s arm as he held her fast. She thought how age had not changed him so much. He was still solid, had always been a strong, vital man.
“You are embarrassing me, Swift Arrow!” she shouted. “I’m fifty-seven years old!”
He only laughed. “Does it not feel good to ride free this way? You are not so old, woman, that you cannot still do these things.”
“I didn’t mean that I was too old for riding. But we’re acting like children!”
He slowed the horse, waiting for the others to catch up. Abbie looked at him, and they kissed. It was then she saw his eyes were wet. “What is it, my husband?”
He took a deep breath, made a sweep with his arm. “All this land, such big country, but not big enough for Indian and white man to share. It has been so many years since I was last here, Abbie. Do you remember? Once the Cheyenne roamed all this land, from down along the Arkansas almost up to Canada, and now we are confined to that little piece of land in Montana, while the Southern Cheyenne are living on an even smaller parcel of land in that hot, dry Indian Territory.” He met her eyes, studying her lovingly. “But it was not just white settlement and soldiers that drove me to the north. Do you remember?”
She studied his handsome face. “I do. But at the time I truly was not aware of the real reason you left and never returned, never rejoined the Southern Cheyenne. I never realized how deeply you cared.”
He touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “I have loved you since only a few weeks after Zeke first brought you to our Cheyenne village, when you were only sixteen summers. He was a lucky man, and I, too, am lucky to have you for whatever years we have left in this life. Do you know why I pulled you out of that wagon and decided to remind you whose woman you are now?”
She turned back around and leaned against his chest. “Why?”
He settled both arms around her, and his horse dropped its head to graze quietly. “Because here, in this land called Colorado, here you were Zeke’s woman. Here you will feel the memories, feel his presence. Here you will be surrounded by Zeke Monroe, my brother, who loved you as much as it is possible for any man to love a woman. For the next few weeks I will lose you to that memory, but I do not mind so much. I know that you need this.”
She ran her hands along his powerful forearms. “I also need you, Swift Arrow. When the memories become too painful, I will need you to hold me like this, remind me that I am still alive, still a woman with needs, still loved, that I am not alone after all.”
He turned the horse. “Look at those two wagons full of children and grandchildren. Look at those fine grandsons who ride near to us now, so handsome and proud. I have no children or grandchildren of my own blood, and that is a loneliness that will never leave me. I know that your heart will always belong to Zeke, but I am grateful that I can relieve some of my own loneliness through his children and grandchildren, and in
your arms. I am grateful to have this much. I love you and yours as much as Zeke would have. I would die for any of you, as he would have.”
“I know that, Swift Arrow. And I am grateful in turn to have a little bit of Zeke with me, through you; yet I love you only for who you are. And there were times all those years ago when I knew I
could
have loved you as a wife, if I had not already loved and belonged to another.”
He leaned around to see her face, frowning. “This is true?”
She kissed him again. “This is true.”
His eyebrows arched, and a teasing look came into his eyes. “Then it is a good thing you never said so to me or to Zeke. Just think of how we might have fought over you. Oh, that would have been a bad one! And Zeke with that knife of his … I think perhaps I would have been scattered all over Colorado.”
Abbie laughed. “I think perhaps you are right.”
The rest of the Monroe brood caught up with them then, and they began teasing the two about behaving like young lovers.
“I think our uncle is feeling like a young warrior again,” Margaret called out to Swift Arrow.
“I
am
still a warrior!” Swift Arrow reminded her, raising a fist.
“Grandma, are you all right?” Matthew called to Abbie.
“Of course I am,” Abbie answered with a smile.
“But you are too
old
to be riding off like that,” Wolf’s Blood teased.
Abbie’s mouth dropped open, and she faced her son. “Too
old?
I can do anything now that I could do forty years ago! I’ve been riding horses since I was a little girl, and I’ll have you know I’ve shot three Crow Indians, had an arrow dug out of me and given birth
to seven children out here with only your father to help. I’ve fought outlaws, dug a bullet out of your father, come out here on a wagon train, lost my entire family on the way. I’ve lived with Indians, cleaned and dressed buffalo hides, made pemmican—”
“Wait! Wait!” Joshua protested. “Save all of that for when I can write it all down! You’re supposed to start at the beginning and give me all the details, remember? I’m going to make you famous, Abbie.”
Joshua had told her on the train that he wanted to write a book about her. Abbie waved him off and the others laughed.
“She
should
be famous,” Dan added. He, too, was smiling, and Abbie thought how, in spite of his blond hair and blue eyes, when he smiled, he seemed so very much like his half brother, Zeke; his mannerisms, the sound of his voice. “I like Josh’s idea of writing a book about your life.”
“Mother is made of the stuff it took to settle and tame this land,” Margaret said. “I wish I had her strength.”
“Now you’re all beginning to embarrass me,” Abbie told them. She wondered at the hint of trouble she’d detected in Margaret’s last statement. There had been something there in her daughter’s dark eyes. Something was wrong. She would have a talk with Margaret as soon as they were settled in at the ranch.
The ranch. They would all sleep under the stars tonight, and by tomorrow noon they should be there. She could only hope Jeremy would come too, before some of them had to leave again.
They heard the cry then, and all laughter and talking ended for the moment as all eyes turned upward. The cry came again, a familiar sound anyone who’d grown up in this land knew, except that such things were usually heard closer to the mountains.
An eagle was circling overhead. Abbie’s heart nearly
stopped beating, and she felt Swift Arrow’s grip tighten around her. Even the youngest grandchildren fell silent.
“Father,” Wolf’s Blood said softly.
The eagle swooped down, gliding over their heads and flying off toward the mountain peaks on the western horizon.
“Dear God,” Margaret muttered.
Abbie could not find her voice. There had been another time when an eagle flew near her, when she had gone to the top of the mountain on which Zeke was buried. She had needed to know Lone Eagle was still with her, and he had come, in the form of an eagle, circling close enough for its wing tip to touch her cheek … and she had not been afraid. She had only been comforted.
It was nearly noon the next day when the family procession crested a low hill below which lay the main ranch house, the original log cabin Zeke had built for his Abbie-girl thirty-five years ago. This was where he had agreed to settle into ranching, to lead a white man’s life because it was best for his white wife, who had already given him two children and had lived in Indian camps until then, never complaining. Abbie could not help the quick squeeze she felt in her heart, the lump in her throat. She asked Margaret to stop the wagon, told them all to go ahead of her. She wanted to take her time and walk in, alone.
They all left her, and she stood staring at the cabin for a long time, noticing that Margaret and Morgan had added a couple of rooms. How many times had she waited down there, watching this very hill, looking for Zeke to come back to her after being out scouting, or rescuing a child or helping the Cheyenne in some way. And he had always—always—come back … until that
one time when he already knew he was dying … She glanced to a stand of trees several hundred yards behind the house, where a creek meandered across the property, where she knew the grass was green and purple irises grew. How many times had she and Zeke gone there to be alone, to make love in that soft grass, to say good-bye. Their last moments together had been spent there.
She walked down the hill, watching a herd of Appaloosas grazing in the distance, seeing more horses in a corral near the biggest barn. She remembered when the original barn burned down. Zeke had worked so hard to build this one. The horses outside were so beautiful, and those in the corral looked like thoroughbreds, a sleek black one especially beautiful. Morgan had done a wonderful job of continuing to breed fine horses, strengthening the herd Zeke had had to rebuild after the Comancheros who stole LeeAnn away also stole most of his horses.
What a day that was. She had seen Zeke Monroe in many battles, but never had he fought so viciously, or managed to keep fighting in spite of severe injuries, as on that day. It had devastated him not to be able to keep them from taking LeeAnn, and it had taken him months of searching to find her. He’d risked his life yet again to save her.
That was Zeke, and that fierce fighting pride was in all his children and grandchildren. Already young Zeke, Nathan, Hawk, Wolf’s Blood, Swift Arrow and Jason were at the corral admiring the thoroughbreds. The younger children were climbing out of wagons and running everywhere, Lonnie chasing chickens, his strong, chunky little legs making the boy too quick for LeeAnn, who held Abbie on one hip. Emily and Matthew were heading into the barn to go exploring, and Lillian and Danny went chasing after them. Jennifer and Rebecca
followed Margaret into the house, and Morgan, Dan and Joshua began carrying in luggage.
Abbie drew in her breath, praying for strength. It would not be easy going inside the house, seeing the mantel clock Zeke had bought her over thirty years ago still sitting above the fireplace, his mandolin resting in a corner of the main room. She could still hear him playing it, could hear his deep singing voice as he entertained her and the children with Tennessee mountain songs. In the main bedroom sat a brass bed, another gift from Zeke. He’d been so proud and happy to bring it to her. After years of sleeping together Indian-style on a bed of robes, he had decided his white woman deserved something better. It had never been easy for him to live the white man’s way, but he’d done it … for his Abbie.
She took another deep breath and headed toward the house. She was determined not to spoil this reunion by constantly crying and talking about the past, but her awareness of Zeke’s presence was almost overwhelming. Ever since seeing the eagle yesterday, she had felt him with her. How could he
not
be here? His heart lay in this land, and his blood ran in the veins of practically every person running about the barn and corral.