The Pride of Hannah Wade (40 page)

This murdering savage had defiled his wife, ruined his name, and tainted his career with scandal. Everyone in the whole territory and beyond knew of his shame and his failure to avenge the wrong. The stories would never stop as long as, this Apache lived. He swatted the rolled newspaper against his leg with increasing force, the thwacking sound eventually penetrating his consciousness even though the stinging slap of it did not. Stephen ceased the motion and eyed the guard.

“Why hasn’t the territorial marshal arrived to take this prisoner away? We are not operating a prison here.” He wanted the Indian out of his sight, removed to some distant point where his presence would not be a constant reminder of the degradation to which Hannah had submitted.

“I don’t know, suh,” the guard answered uneasily.

“Has he had any visitors?” Stephen again directed his gaze at the shadowy figure squatting on his heels
against the back wall of the cell, leaning his shoulders against it, as silent and as motionless as a coiled rattlesnake, but without the warning rattles.

“A few’s come by t’look at him, suh—the ladies mos’ly.”

“My wife?”

“Yes, suh.” The tap-tapping of Stephen’s newspaper started again. “She been here.”

“If he makes any attempt to escape, Private, you shoot—and you shoot to kill. I don’t want his kind loose among our women again.” Stephen warned.

“He jes’ sit there, suh. We bring him his food, he don’t move, an’ don’t say nothin’.”

“Just remember your orders.” Stephen wheeled away, driven by the raw anger that pulsed through him.

When he found himself turning onto Suds Row, he stopped for an instant, breathing in the lye-strong air. He knew of only two releases for the wild energy he felt: violence or passionate sex. The latter could be found here. He set out again, ignoring the ragtag children who stopped their play to stare at the white officer in their midst.

At the canvas dwelling where Cimmy Lou lived, he ducked through the opening, and felt the rush of blood in his system. All of his urges were intensified by the sight of the full-breasted woman stacking bundles of neatly folded laundry. She barely paused in her work, her profile a black cameo for him to admire.

“What’re you doin’ here, Majuh Wade?”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you, Cimmy.” He crossed the tamped-earth floor to the table where she was separating the laundry into piles.

“It’s Miz Hooker to you.”

“That isn’t what you want.” He smiled with certainty.

“You don’t know what I want.” She whirled around to face him, her arms akimbo, and his glance was
immediately drawn to the thin blouse stretching tautly across her breasts. “Then tell me what it is you want and I’ll get it for you.” He began unbuttoning the front of her blouse, undeterred by the slap of her hands in an attempt to stop him. “A new dress, a new gown, jewelry, a hat—just ask for it and it’s yours. I need you.” Stephen didn’t bother to unfasten the garment all the way, just enough to get his hands inside and feel those firm, round breasts. When she tried to pull away, he slid an arm around her waist. “I lie awake nights remembering what you used to do to me, and wanting it again.”

“Let me go.” She clawed at his hand. “You can’t buy me.”

“I did before—with all those gifts of Hannah’s old things.” Stephen denied her protest. “Now I’m offering you something new, something all your own.”

“No. I don’t want it.” She struggled wildly against his tightening arm, pushing and twisting to break free.

But Stephen laughed in his throat, aroused by the motion of her body writhing against him. “I like it when you fight me.” The roughness provided an outlet for the turbulent forces inside him. Gripping her under the jaw, he held her head still as he devoured her lips with a brutal hunger. “Meet me somewhere. Anywhere,” he breathed into her mouth as he felt some of the fight going out of her. “I’ll buy you anything.”

“I . . . don’t think I can. John T.—“ Cimmy turned her head. The sentence remained unfinished as her dark eyes widened with alarm, focusing on a point behind him. “John T.”

At the recognition in her voice, Stephen jerked his head around and found himself staring at the sergeant standing just inside the tent’s opening, a rigid figure with a rifle tightly gripped in his hand.

“S
ERGEANT”—
W
ADE TOOK A STEP TOWARD HIM.

“You better leave, suh.” John T.’s teeth were bared against the pain tearing apart his insides. He thought with odd clarity that now he knew how a mortally wounded animal felt before it went on a rampage. “You better leave, suh, before I kill you.”

After a split-second hesitation, Wade walked quickly past him and out of the tent. The moment he was gone, Cimmy Lou rushed to her husband. “It ain’t what yore thinkin’, John T.”

“I’m thinkin’ that all those things the major gave you, they weren’t for help in’ him, were they?” His eyes felt raw, like the rest of him. “I heard what he said. You bedded him.”

“It wasn’t like that. He—he forced me,” she insisted, and John T. turned away with a groan, fighting the desire to believe another lie.

“I’m a big enough fool, Cimmy Lou. Don’t make me
a bigger one,” he begged. “I think I knew all along what you were doin’, but I didn’t want to see.”

“John T., you gotta listen t’me.” She came around him so that she could see his face. He felt again the pull of her beauty; it was so magnetic that he could hardly blame anyone else for being entranced by it.

“A white officer. How could you do it?” he demanded brokenly. “I’m top sergeant. I could walk with my head up and be proud of who I was. They respected me. I’ve got an education, I’m supposed to be smart. But look at the fool you’ve made of me. Don’t you care what people think, what they say about you? Haven’t you got any pride?”

“It won’t happen again, I swear it. I’ll make it up to you.” She pressed herself against his length, her hands moving over his neck and shoulders in supplicant caresses. He felt the insidious heat of her body enveloping him in its age-old message. “Everything will be all right. You’ll see.”

The rifle slipped from the loosening grasp of his fingers and fell against the side of his leg, then onto the earthen floor. The minor distraction was enough to make him realize what was happening. He gripped her arms and held her away from him.

“Did you love him?” John T. demanded.

“No.” She strained toward him, but his arms were rigidly locked to keep her at a distance.

“Then why? Why did you do it?” He shook her, angered that she could be with another man without even having feelings for him.

“Because he gave me things!” Cimmy regretted the truth the instant it came out. John T.’s rough push shoved her backward.

“You suck a man dry, then move on, don’t you? You got all you could get from me and the major. Who’s next? There’ll be somebody ‘cause that’s the kind you are.” John T. was trembling with the hurt raging inside
him. “One of us needs to he put out of his misery. I just can’t figure out whether it should he you or me. As much as I’ve loved you, I swear that right now I could kill you, Cimmy,” he declared in an emotion-thick voice, and reeled out of the canvas dwelling, half-blinded by the tears he couldn’t cry.

She believed him. The panic of it raced through her nerves: she had lost control of him. She had to get away before he carried out his threat. Cimmy knew of only one person who could take her from this place. She ran from the tent shanty in search of Leroy Bitterman.

Out of breath and scared senseless, she finally found him scrubbing pots and pans in the company mess. She grabbed his arm and pulled him aside as she gulped in air. His wet, soapy hands gripped her sagging shoulders as she swayed against him.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” He sensed the panic in her.

“It’s John, T. He’s gone crazy,” she declared wildly. “He said he was gonna kill me. He will. I know it.”

“Is he after you?” Bitterman glanced toward the door as if expecting Hooker to come charging through it. “Where is he now? Do you know?”

Her head moved from side to side in a vague response. “I don’t know. The last time I saw him he was outside the trader’s store. I hid behind a building so he couldn’t see me. I don’t know where he went.”

“Did he have a gun?”

“No. Yes, his pistol.” Her hands clutched his shirt-front, twisting into the material. “You said we’d go away. Let’s leave now.”

“In broad daylight? We can’t. Don’t fo’get I can be shot fo’ a deserter.” His cunning mind was working fast as he considered the alternatives. “Is he after me?”

“No.” She shook her bowed head. “He don’t know ‘bout you. It was the majuh. He was tryin’ to get me back when John T. walked in.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky an’ he’ll shoot hisself an officer,” he suggested in a wry attempt at humor.

“What’re we gonna do?” It was not his light remark that began to calm her; it was a sense of returning power. She was regaining control of the situation. She had drawn Bitterman into it, involved him to the point where the problem wasn’t hers, but his.

“First I’m gonna find out where he is and what he’s doin’. You wait here till I come back.” He pressed her backward against the rough adobe-brick wall and gestured for her to stay there.

The moment she was alone, Cimmy began plotting where she would have Bitterman take her and what she would do. The thought kept coming back to her that miners in Silver City were paying seven dollars for a clean shirt. She could wash a lot of shirts in a day’s time. It would really be something to be able to buy her own fancy dresses and not be beholden to any man for them. Instead, the men could buy her jewels. She held out her hands, visualizing the sparkling rings she would wear.

The door opened and Bitterman slipped inside. “I found him. He’s at the trader’s, sittin’ at a table with a bottle of whiskey an’ workin’ on gettin’ drunk. Like as not, he’ll pass out. That gives us time. You go home, pack all yore things, an’ meet me behind the stables right after the midnight call.”

“What if John T. comes home an’ catches me?”

Bitterman grinned, the action stretching out his thin mustache. “You can handle a drunk. Git goin’.” A slap on the rump sent Cimmy Lou on her way.

Two soldiers with rifles at the ready followed Cutter inside the Suds Row shanty. A momentary pause allowed his eyes to adjust to the change from brilliant sunlight to the interior shade; then his glance settled on the uniformed figure sprawled across the bed. A vague
sense of relief filtered through him as Cutter crossed the one-room shack. His boot knocked over a whiskey bottle standing on the earthen floor by the bed. It fell with a dull clunk and rolled underneath the bed frame.

The reek of alcohol was strong as he stared at the slack-mouthed, sergeant, a heavy beard stubble adding its black shadow to the already dark skin. Hooker’s uniform was ringed with salty sweat stains and trail grime, unchanged from the day before. Cutter gripped his limp shoulder and shook it hard.

“Hooker! Hooker, wake up!” A low groan was the only response. “Come on, John T. You missed roll call.” Cutter straightened, his mouth tightening with grim impatience, and motioned to one of the black troopers. “Get me that bucket of water.”

It was half full, and he poured it all on Hooker’s face and handed the empty bucket back to the soldier as Hooker came sputtering to life, sitting bolt upright. Almost immediately, he groaned and leaned forward to cradle his head in his hands.

“My head.” The heavy dullness of a hangover was in his voice. “What time is it?”

“Bitterman didn’t answer at roll call this morning,” Cutter informed him. “And two horses are missing from the stable.”

“Roll call?” John T. frowned and focused his bloodshot eyes on the sunlight coming through the door of the tent. “Why didn’t Cimmy Lou wake me?” He looked around. “Where is she?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

“Oh, God, I remember.” John T. buried his face in his hands, his head moving from side to side in mute pain.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” “Cimmy?” He lifted his head to look around again. “Where’d she go?” Something akin to fear was in
Hooker’s expression as he staggered from the bed to stumble to the door. “Cimmy Lou?!”

“Find some hot coffee, Grover.” Cutter snapped the order to the private, troubled by Hooker’s odd behavior and more than a little impatient that a woman like Cimmy Lou was the source of it, and went after him.

No clothes boiled in the iron kettle and no fire burned beneath it. All up and down the line, the enlisted men’s wives were busy with the day’s wash-except here. John T. reeled around, looking lost. He grabbed the arm of a large-boned woman at the next fire.

“Bess, have you seen my Cimmy?”

“Ain’t seen hide nor hair of her this mornin’.”

He came back to the tent shack and Cutter stepped aside to let him in, then followed to watch John T. search the place wildly, throwing clothes in every direction. Private Grover came back with the cup of hot coffee. As John T. sank onto a crude bench in silent despair, Cutter took it to him.

“Drink this.” He fitted John T.’s limp hands around the tin mug.