Tallchief: The Homecoming (7 page)

T
he next afternoon Elspeth opened the door at the first knock. In her mind, while tending her herbs, she’d seen Liam Tallchief walking toward her, his heart questioning. Wanting to have Liam to herself, she’d asked Alek to take the children to the ice cream parlor. Loving a woman descended from a Scottish seer and a Native American shaman, Alek knew when her senses were prowling. She looked up at the man filling her doorway, his face masked in the shadows of the past. He looked so much like her brothers, but while their pain had been eased by love, Liam wore his scars like a silent cloak. “I’m glad you came,” she said simply. “Time for fresh applesauce cake and iced tea, and time to talk,” she added, sensing his need and noting the small wooden chest tucked beneath his arm.

Liam wore a clean, long-sleeved cotton shirt and the loose carpenter pants she’d seen his son gripping tightly.
She ached for him, a man alone and trying his best for his son. “Emily is baby-sitting, then. She’s got a way with children, especially the boys. She’ll be off again to college soon, and leaving a trail of broken hearts,” she said as she led Liam into her workroom, filled with Una’s loom and the herbs that would dye the Tallchief wool into colored yarn.

For what she must do, Elspeth chose the most familiar setting, the room layered with her weaving and her family’s past. Una’s journals stacked neatly on one shelf, waiting for Liam. Scents from the hanging lavender bundles curled around her, and she prayed that this lonely, scarred man would find peace. He looked surprised at the small table she’d prepared, applesauce cake cut on plates and served with iced tea on her woven place mats. She’d known he would come, when that quiet, troubled gaze sought hers at the Tallchiefs’. Michelle Farrell had him brooding, a strong woman tossed into the tempest of his life. Liam Tallchief had much to settle, and Elspeth would try. “Sit. Let’s talk,” she invited, aching for him as he noted the huge loom Tallchief had fashioned for Una, a weaver. “I learned from my mother and she from hers, and then some from Una’s journals. She was a woman alone, except for her love, in a strange, frightening country, and I think the journals helped. He loved her of course, though she wounded his pride.”

“You knew I was coming. I’ve heard you can—”

Elspeth shrugged, making light of the senses that prowled within her, telling her the future and of the past. Liam was silent, sipping his tea, the small chest at his feet. He met her eyes finally, after taking his fill of the room, cluttered with yarn and a spinning wheel and the massive loom. “It’s too much,” he said quietly.

“I know. The feelings are in you as they are in us, but we’ve had time to understand. It’s new to you.”

As tall and powerful as her beloved Alek, Liam ran a rough hand down his jaw. “I want this for my son,” he said unevenly. “I’m leaving the chest—for now. It was found with me. There are letters inside from your mother and other things. I’d like those things back, please. When you’re finished.”

“The letters seemed too private, a woman writing to another woman?” A woman who had raised and fought with her brothers, Elspeth knew that honor ran deep within Liam. “Who told you?”

He breathed deeply, sucking in the past and releasing into her keeping a scarred wound reopened, and pain ran through the shadows of his face. “Mary Cartwright. Wife of Reuben, who carried me home from my parents’ wrecked car and gave me to her—to raise as a son. You’re right, I don’t like women’s letters and for a reason. I found a letter from Mary after Reuben died—she’d hidden it. Mary was already gone, so was my wife—Karen died giving birth to J.T. I want more for my son than I had,” he said more strongly, emotion threading his deep voice. “
I had a son and didn’t even know who I was.
What I was.”

“None of it was your fault. You’ll find what you need. Give it time. You know you’re named for Liam Tallchief, one of the five children of Una and Tallchief.” And so Elspeth told Liam of how Elizabeth Montclair, an English noblewoman, and her hunting party had been trapped by the lawless on Tallchief Mountain. Forced by the outlaws to save her sister and herself, Elizabeth entered the tent and took the fierce, fighting man staked to the ground within her. It pleased the renegade band that an English lady would mount an unwilling man, a half-blood staked
to the ground, and let him pierce her virgin body. Furious that he had no choice and that she had taken his seed from him, Liam had hated her. Then she was safe back in England, away from the raw land. But the child she bore was his, and he claimed them both, pirating them back to Tallchief land. “She came to love him, and they treasured each other. But the taming wasn’t easy for both of them. She threw away her jewels to save his pride, and he gave her his heart.”

“I want J.T. to know love. How it feels,” Liam stated, emotion rumbling in his tone.

“You love him. He knows that.”

She could have cried when Liam lifted his pain-filled eyes to hers and said, “I’m not certain I know about love. How to give it.”

“Then it’s time,” she whispered, her heart bleeding for him.

“I have to be ready…inside. I can’t just read them.”

“You will be.” She hugged her mother’s letters tight against her, and fought damning the murderer who took her parents away too soon. “I’ll keep them for you, and we’ll talk again. Thank you. I loved my mother very much.”

“You’ll see to my son, if I’m late tonight? You’ll take care of him?” he asked, the desperation in his voice slicing through her.

“Aye, I will. Rest easy on that, Liam Tallchief, and do what you must,” she answered. The man had been too alone, fearing for his son’s safety over his own. “We’ll tend him well, if anything ever happened to you. He’s one of us, and so are you. When you claimed the name Tallchief as your right, we claimed you.”

“It’s the feeling,” he whispered. “That I am a part of a family. That I am not. That I have a heritage I don’t
understand. Not just the bloodline, but what goes with it. Storms move inside me and other needs I haven’t explored. You know, don’t you, that Reuben Cartwright made me what I am?”

Other needs,
Elspeth repeated silently. Michelle had raised those fierce needs to take and to claim, and, being a controlled man, walking in shadows, Liam wasn’t prepared for the urgent calling.

“Your past was cold and hard. You aren’t. You did what you had to do to survive, to provide for your son. When it’s time, we’ll have tea again, and I’m glad you’re not as ill-mannered as my brothers. Birk calls my teatime ‘torture and drinking grass.’ Thank goodness I don’t have to tend them anymore…. I want you to have this—”

She rose from the table and took a folded length of tartan sash from the shelf. “It’s the Tallchief plaid, blue and ‘dragon-green’ and vermillion for Tallchief. And I’ll have no complaining as my brothers did, when I finish your kilt. No crude comments about the cold wind blowing up your backside. You’ll be wearing it like the rest and tearing the heart from the ladies, just as they do, the beasts. J.T. will have one, too.”

On top of the folded tartan, Elspeth placed a small neat journal. “It’s Elizabeth Montclair Tallchief’s. You’ll find out more about our heritage, and you won’t be faced with your past just yet. Sometimes these things are better to ease into…when you are ready. I’ll do what I can to help you with that journey. You take your time, Liam Tallchief. I’ll see that J.T. is cared for.”

“A few hours on the mountain. By myself, then I’ll be back,” he said, holding the tartan very carefully as if he’d never been given gifts before. She nodded and promised herself that Liam would see more gifts—and love—coming his way. Softness and love and gifts hadn’t
been in Liam’s life, and his big hands trembled, his expression humbled.

After Liam had gone, Elspeth called Duncan. “Duncan the Defender, you are not to tuck Michelle Farrell under your wing. A battle is brewing between her and Liam and you are not to interfere.”

She listened to him rumble a protest, and smiled. Elspeth hung up the telephone and set her mind to the task of studying the letters from her mother to Tina Tallchief, Liam’s rightful mother. When the wreck occurred, Liam’s parents were coming to visit the Tallchiefs, to discover their heritage, just as their son would do now. Elspeth opened Una’s journals and held the letters close, trying to see into the past. “It’s the flint and the fire,” she said finally, too drained to move. “Liam’s time has come, and he’ll find more pain before he finds peace. He’s not a man who can burst into a new world, and each step will take him closer to more of what he has lost—a family torn apart by a selfish man. Liam is methodical, taking in one piece of the puzzle at a time. He was so humble accepting the Tallchief plaid, I could have cried.”

She ran her fingertips across the small tooled copper box—the mountain symbol and the stick man and woman—and the flints. “Aye, flint and fire.”

Liam made his way up Tallchief Mountain, across the tiny lush meadows filled with August sunflowers, the jutting rocks high above him. The path was worn, but he felt it call to him, driving him upward. A chipmunk chattered, running up the red bark of a pine, the scents of earth and woods circling Liam, coming inside him. Whatever rode him now was instinctive, and he shivered, tearing a wild rose from the briar, ignoring the slight burn
of the thorns. He sucked the clean air into him, felt it surge through his body, then tore away the shirt he’d worn for the lady called Elspeth.

The plaid unfurled in the breeze and he swung it under one arm and over the other shoulder. He pressed the woven length over his pounding heart, woven by a woman whose senses and heart told her more than her eyes—Elspeth Tallchief Petrovna had claimed him as one of her own, a brother to tend and love. She terrified him—a man of shadows. “Aye,” he whispered softly, testing the Tallchief word upon his lips. He knew that at last his son was safe, and should something happen to him, Elspeth would love J.T. as her own.

That terror lifted, he opened himself to feeling.

Who was he? Why did the Rocky Mountain sky seem bluer, more free than before? Why did his blood pound, his senses come alive?

He tore his shirt, pushing away the echoes of Reuben’s harsh, stingy training. Liam made a sash for the sweat upon his forehead, then scanned the highland meadows that must have called to Una, the Scots bondwoman captured by Tallchief.
Free,
Liam thought.
I’m free. This is what I am.
He listened to his heart, his senses alive, in tune with the mountain. A slight noise took his stare to the deer grazing in the meadow decked with daisies and sunflowers. A scent took him crouching beside a fragrant plant. In the tumbling stream, the rocks were round and dull in reds and blues, and fish waited to be caught. The sun stroked his body, the slight breeze curling around him, enveloping him. Lavender scents clung to the plaid draped around his body, and he smiled at the thought of his legs in a kilt. “Not a chance.”

But he was a father, too, and Liam’s head jerked toward Amen Flats and to the rented house where J.T.
would be napping under Emily’s care.
His son needed this—the scents and colors and the wonderful sense of freedom.

He walked slowly around the meadow, startling the deer, brushing his palm against the thick grass and taking into him what he had lost. Then, settling upon a rock, he opened Elizabeth Tallchief’s small journal, and let himself step into the past. “That fine beast of a man came after me and his son. He crossed the ocean, and he dressed like a gentlemen at court, but I knew what he was—a savage, set upon me and claiming his son. I could have killed him, and I dearly tried. Hard as flint he was, and angry, too, for me taking his seed as he lay staked upon the ground, and making our beautiful boy…. But one look at those fierce, stormy eyes and I caught fire, testing myself against him—”

Liam smoothed his big hand over the woman’s beautiful cursive writing, uncertain of the emotions riding him. Uncomfortable with reading Elizabeth’s story, for he had found too much in another woman’s letters, Liam forced himself to read on—to understand for his son’s sake. “When a man and a woman, equally matched, strike against each other, fire will fly—just as two flints strike sparks off each other. ’Tis a game, finding the strength of a man and challenging that truth. I am a woman used to having my way, and being captured by a man who had fathered my child was no easy matter. How I battled with him—that great hard man, Liam Tallchief, scarred by life. He did not yield to me, nor would I have him be less than he was. But in the end, he filled my heart, and a softness grew between us. I knew no other would make me feel so alive. No other could take my heart as Liam Tallchief. When he held our son and that gentleness came upon him, I knew—I claimed him with
a ring and marked him for my own. For his part, he gave me two flints, the tinderbox marked with the Tallchief symbol, and a love that burns true.”

Liam carefully placed the journal inside the folded tartan, treasuring both. The tinderbox design in his wooden chest matched that of the Tallchief brand, a mountain with a stick man and a woman. The cradle that Tallchief had made Una to replace the one she’d brought from Scotland, had those same designs. Liam, his namesake, had fought through guards, kidnapped the woman who had kept his son secret. He kept Elizabeth stewing on the voyage back to Tallchief land and—

Liam rubbed his hands over his face—He’d lost so much, his son had lost so much…. “Gentleness came upon him” was exactly how he felt when holding J.T. As if all the world settled into peace, wrapped in a child’s love.

The woman who had leaped into his mind and hardened his body was another matter. Michelle ripped peace from him and tore it apart with those slender, elegant fingers. He wanted to bury himself in her, taking her mouth—but those dreams were dangerous for a man who found more comfort in silence and being alone. Michelle wasn’t for him—and he didn’t believe in love, other than his son’s. All that he asked of life was to safely raise his son—more than that seemed too much.

His fist clenched upon his knee. What would he know of treating a woman as she deserved? What would he know of the soft sweet night talk that women were supposed to love? What did he have to offer a woman—the icy hard ways he’d learned too early?