Nightway (33 page)

“I believe you.” Did she believe him? Or was it possible it had been deliberately planned to make sure Hawk would be alienated from her?

“I never wanted to hurt you or embarrass you,” Chad offered huskily. “These last few days have been torture being so near to you and not being able to hold you in my arms and kiss you.”

“It won’t happen again, Chad,” Lanna stated.

“I don’t blame you for feeling that way, darling.” He tried to turn her into his arms, but Lanna resisted.

“No,” she said firmly and pulled free of his grip.

He called her name but she ignored the summons as she hurried from the room. She wasn’t running away from Chad. She was running after Hawk. But she didn’t intend to explain that to Chad.

Outside the house, the sun was so brilliant it hurt her eyes. She had to shield them against the glare until she reached the shade of the trees on the lawn. When she reached the open ranch yard, Lanna paused to scan the premises for a glimpse of Hawk. There was no sign of him.

By one of the buildings, a cowboy was loading something into the back end of a pickup. Lanna crossed the yard to the truck. The man might have seen Hawk when he left the house and noticed where he had gone.

“Do you know where I can find Hawk?” She was slightly winded when she stopped beside the lowered tailgate. The cowboy turned his head. Lanna felt the quiet speculation in his look, but she didn’t care what this older man was thinking. “Have you seen him?” she repeated insistently.

“I saw him going into the barn a minute ago,” he admitted, gesturing with his hand to indicate the building he meant.

“Thank you.” She tossed the phrase to him as she started in the direction of the barn.

She slipped through the narrow gap where the wide sliding door had been pushed ajar. The dim interior smelled of stifled air, horses, and hay dust. At the far
end, the other set of double doors was pushed wide open to let in the sunlight. Hawk was leading a haltered horse through the opening into the barn. By the time Lanna had crossed the length of the concrete passageway, he was tying the lead rope through a steel ring on the wall. A Western saddle with its blanket and pad were propped on the floor a few feet away. Hawk didn’t even glance at her when she reached him, his expression a mask.

“Hawk, I want to explain what you saw in the study,” she began.

“Why?” He ran a currycomb over the horse’s back, dislodging the dust. “It has nothing to do with me.”

The flat indifference of his voice warned Lanna that he wasn’t going to make it easy for her. Somehow she had to make him understand, and she didn’t know how to start.

“It wasn’t the way it seemed,” Lanna protested, wishing he would at least look at her while she was talking.

But Hawk’s attention remained on his task. “I’m sure the two of you are just friends.” There was no special inflection on the last phrase to make it a jibe, yet it stung just the same.

“That isn’t what I was trying to say at all. I mean, yes, we are friends. Chad has been good to me. He’s helped me a lot these last couple of weeks.” In her agitation, Lanna knew she wasn’t saying what she really meant.

“You were just thanking him for all he’s done,” Hawk said smoothly. Hooking the currycomb on a nail in the wall, he reached down to pick up the saddle blanket.

“I didn’t kiss him because I was grateful,” she denied as she watched him smooth the blanket over the horse’s back. The severity of his sharply male profile was
making it difficult for her. “Will you at least look at me when I’m talking?” Lanna demanded in angry frustration.

He turned to face her, a hand resting on the striped blanket. “What are you going to tell me?” The enormous amount of patience in his eyes seemed to emphasize his total indifference to the discussion. “That you struggled but he forced you to kiss him?”

“No!” She reacted as if he was silently taunting her, although there was nothing on the surface to indicate he was. Hawk turned away to pick up the saddle pad. “If you give me a chance, I’ll tell you the way it was.”

“What’s between you and Chad isn’t any of my business.” He positioned the pad on the blanket. “I stay out of his way, and he stays out of mine.”

“I’m going to tell you, just the same,” Lanna retorted in a choked voice. “Chad is a very handsome man, sophisticated and charming. I doubt if you can appreciate what I’m going to say, but a woman is flattered when a man like that appears interested in her. It builds up her ego, even if he is married. Besides, I wanted to see if he would kiss me even if he had a wife. You don’t slap a man’s face for that.”

“With sufficient flattery, I suppose you’ll hop into bed with him.” Lifting the saddle, he swung it onto the horse’s back and settled it into place. “Of course, you’ll have to tell Carol to move over. She does like the taste of the forbidden, so maybe you and Chad can talk her into a threesome.”

“Dammit, Hawk! Will you quit twisting everything I say and making it come out worse! I’m trying to get it through your thick skull that I kissed Chad mostly out of curiosity. I wondered if I would feel the same excitement that I did when you kissed me.”

“A kissing contest?” His mouth twisted, but there was little humor in its slant. Hooking the stirrup over
the saddlehorn, he reached under the horse’s belly for the cinch. “That’s a new line. You are very original.” He threaded it through the cinch ring and took up the slack.

Lanna waited, but Hawk never asked the question she expected. “Don’t you want to know what I found out?”

“Not particularly.” With the cinch tightened, he brushed past her to put the bridle on.

“There wasn’t any comparison.” Her voice was soft, almost humble. “I barely felt half-alive in his arms.”

“Too bad.” Hawk forced the bit into the horse’s mouth. The metal jangled as the horse chewed the bar between its teeth.

“Is that all you can say?” The pain of disbelief flickered across her expression.

“We all have our troubles.” He buckled the throat latch, then removed the halter. “But I never get involved in other people’s affairs.”

Lanna watched him gather the reins to lead the horse away. “Where are you going?”

“I have some fences to check.”

“Wait.” She reached out to lay a hand on his forearm. “I’ll ride with you. Let me saddle a horse.”

Hawk stopped and glanced down at the hand on his arm. It looked small and white against the faded yellow of his shirt sleeve. When he slowly lifted his gaze to her face, his blue eyes were opaque, totally emotionless.

“I ride alone,” he stated.

Lanna refused to take the hint. “You don’t have to ride alone this time. I’ll come with you and keep you company.”

“It wouldn’t be a good idea to be seen in my company,” he replied.

“I don’t care. Can’t you understand that it doesn’t matter to me who or what you are? I want to come with
you.” She threw aside her pride even as she faced him with quiet determination.

“I ride alone because that’s the way I want it.” Hawk moved his arm, shrugging off her hand.

“Don’t you need anybody, Hawk?” Lanna wondered in bewildered pain.

“What for?” He gave her another one of those blank looks.

It roweled her. “Will you stop looking at me like some damned—” She checked her outburst to search for another word.

But Hawk supplied the one she was going to say. “Like some damned Indian! That’s what half of me is! Which half did you want to ride with—the Navaho, or the white?” he challenged in a raw fury.

There was no justification for his attack. Lanna lashed out in self-defense, slapping his face hard. Her arm hadn’t completed its arc when she was grabbed and hauled roughly against him. Her arms were pinned to her sides in his steel vise, crushing her brutally to the unyielding wall of his chest. He grabbed a handful of hair, insensitive to the pain his yanking hold inflicted on her tender scalp.

Her gasping cry went unnoticed as he brutalized her mouth, raping and plundering with merciless anger. Her lips ground against her teeth, breaking the tender skin and leaving the taste of her own blood on Lanna’s tongue.

As violently as it was begun, it was ended. Hawk released her with a backward shove that had Lanna stumbling to regain her balance. Instinct lifted the back of her hand to her injured and throbbing lips.

“Go.” His eyes blazed with barely restrained fury. “If you hurry, you’ll be able to see Chad before he leaves and cry on his shoulder.”

Lanna felt the tears on her cheeks and impatiently
brushed them away. “You aren’t free, Hawk. You have condemned yourself to a life of solitary confinement.” Her choked voice wavered but remained strong. “You’ll never be free until you let somebody love you and learn to love them back. You have to trust and need others to really live.”

But her declaration appeared to make no impression on him as he pivoted and swung into the saddle. Lanna watched him ride to the open doors and duck beneath the crossbeam. The dappled buckskin danced eagerly into the sunlight, but Hawk kept the horse at a walk. Lanna shuddered.

For a week, Lanna rarely ventured out of the house. She had kept hoping Hawk would seek her out, but she hadn’t seen him at all, not even at a distance. A depression settled into her, growing with each passing day.

She continued to have her nightly cup of sassafras tea. Each morning Lanna would wake up feeling revived, but by midday the restorative powers of the tea had worn off, leaving her with even less interest in what went on around her.

She wandered into the living room with no special purpose in mind. Katheryn was arranging a bouquet of bronze and white mums in a crystal vase, adding sprigs of fern. Seated in a chair by the fireplace, Carol was finishing another one of her letters to her son, Johnny.

“Hello, Lanna. We wondered where you were.” Katheryn paused in her task long enough to glance up. “Chad called to say he would be arriving on Thursday.”

“That’s nice,” she murmured.

“He asked how you were. I assured him that you were taking it easy.” She snipped off the end of a flower stem. “There isn’t a great deal to do here. I hope you aren’t becoming bored, Lanna.”

“No, I’m not bored.” It was closer to being indifferent. She watched Katheryn expertly arranging the bouquet and realized how useless she was. She did absolutely nothing. The cook fixed the meals and washed the dishes. The housekeeper made the beds and cleaned the house. Katheryn and Carol added the odd touches, like the flowers, while she sat around letting everyone else wait on her. “I’m certainly not contributing very much. All I do here is make work for everyone else. I should be doing my share to help.”

“Nonsense, Lanna. You are here to rest,” Katheryn reminded her. “I’m not going to let you lift a hand. Chad would be furious if he heard you suggest such a thing.”

Sighing, Lanna turned away. She didn’t have the energy to argue. She had offered, so her conscience was eased. She strolled over to the window and gazed outside at the long shadows the trees cast on the ground. There was a rustle of paper as Carol put aside her stationery.

“Would you like to go riding, Lanna?” Carol suggested. “We would be just in time to watch the sunset.”

“If you want to.” Lanna shrugged. She didn’t really care, but she knew Carol was making an effort to entertain her.

“It will take me fifteen minutes to change. How about you?” Carol tossed the challenge with a bright smile.

“Fifteen minutes,” Lanna agreed.

It took her less time than that because it didn’t matter what she wore. There was no one she wanted to impress. Even if she saw Hawk, it was unlikely he would pay any attention to her. It was only in her dreams that he came to her, Lanna was still absently amazed to discover she dreamed in color. She hadn’t
been aware of it before, but she had also rarely remembered what she dreamed.

All the way to the barns, Carol chattered incessantly. Sometimes the blonde’s bubbling personality made Lanna absolutely weary. Yet she knew Carol’s intentions were the best. She was trying to cheer her up and persuade her to take an interest in something. It wasn’t Carol’s fault that Lanna wasn’t receptive to her attempts. She knew the cause. She hadn’t seen Hawk for days.

Three days of dust, sweat, and stink had accumulated on Hawk. He’d slept outside the last two nights. Not because he had ridden so far from the headquarters of the ranch that he couldn’t have trailered his horse back with one of the other riders. He had stayed out deliberately to be out of sight of the house lights. But he hadn’t slept any better on the hard, cold ground with a blanket of stars above him than he had in the bunkhouse.

The conflict within himself hadn’t been settled. He wanted Lanna as much as he ever had—if not more—because he had been without her. Yet his anger was still very real. Her honesty kept reaching out to him. She had admitted she wanted Chad to kiss her, had even explained her reasons—which should have given him immense satisfaction. But every time he pictured her in Chad’s arms, it seared him raw all over again.

So he was back, wanting her and knowing he wouldn’t go to her. The People didn’t believe in repressing sexual urges. By the same token, they believed too much sex was a bad sign. They believed in witches, too. Lanna had certainly bewitched him, Hawk thought with a wry grimace.

Reining the horse to a stop at the barn door, he
swung out of the saddle. His joints were stiff as he led the bay horse inside the barn and tied it to the wall ring. Untying his bedroll from behind the cantle, Hawk carried it over to the wall and leaned it against it, then returned to uncinch the saddle. The stirrups slapped against his legs when he hauled the saddle off the horse. The sound of footsteps absently drew his gaze to the opened barn doors. When Tom Rawlins appeared, Hawk ignored him to set the saddle, horn down, on the floor.

“What are you doing here?” Rawlins demanded in a baiting tone.

“Taking care of my horse,” Hawk answered with the obvious, rather than understand the actual question the foreman was asking.

“I thought you were helping with the roundup.”

“You
hoped
wrong.” Hawk changed the verb with emphasis.