Apache Dream Bride. Joan Elliott Pickart

could feel the heat from his penetrating gaze. It touched a place deep and low within her, churning, swirling, causing a flush to stain her cheeks. She was pinned in place, unable to move, having to remind herself to breathe.

      This man, she thought hazily, was real. He was there. Denying his existence was foolhardy. There was no lingering doubt in her mind that he had been flung through time and space to arrive in the present from the past.

      She had somehow managed to dream about a living, human being, rather than a creation of her imagination. The potent powers of the Dream Catcher had then captured him and brought him to her.

      But why?

      The magnitude of what had taken place was too enormous, too overwhelming, to be chalked up to some weird cosmic glitch.

      Why had this happened to her and Dakota?

      “Kathy?”

      “What? Oh, my clothes. I don’t go outside like this. I wear this to sleep in, that’s all.”

      “And that image? Is that who you worship?”

      “Heavens no,” she said. “That’s Mickey. He’s not a god, he’s a mouse.” She paused. “Dakota, the only way that I can deal with all of this is to accept the facts as they stand and give it all a semblance of reality, even if it’s not reasonable reality. Oh, dear, I’m not making sense. What I’m saying is, until I have just cause to change my mind, I’m going to believe you were transported from 1877 to now through the Dream Catcher.”

      “You have the right to do what you wish.”

      “And you? What do you believe is happening here?”

      Dakota sighed. “I do not want to believe it. There’s no purpose to my being here. Yes, I was feeling lonely, alone, but there’s no life for me here in the future, in the white man’s world. I do not belong here, Kathy.”

      “We don’t know that, Dakota. If we accept this scenario as being the truth, as being what actually happened, then we have to move on to the question of why it occurred.”

      “The why is because you tampered with the powers of the Dream Catcher. The question is not why, it is how. How do we send me back to my own time? I don’t want to be here, Kathy, and I have no intention of staying.”

      “Dakota,” she said quietly, “maybe there is something important that you’re supposed to do here. Yes, all right, to be fair to you we should be trying to figure out how to send you back. But I truly believe we should also be considering the question of why you are here, what it all means.”

      “Mmm,” he said, frowning.

      “Will you think about both issues? Please, Dakota?”

      He stared at her for a long moment before answering.

      “Yes,” he said finally, “I will think about both. That will enable me to postpone, at least for a while, the bleak thought that we may never know the answer to either of those questions. We may never know.”

       Two

      Why?

      The question beat against Kathy in time with the water from the shower.

      Perhaps she was placing too much emphasis on that question, adding to the situation further complexity that didn’t need to be there.

      It could very well be that it was all a fluke, an unexplainable event that had been created by the powers of the Dream Catcher. There was no mysterious, hidden meaning and purpose to discover. It had simply happened.

      The magic of the Dream Catcher had interwoven with the thoughts she’d had just before falling asleep of wishing for a special man in her life. She’d dwelled on what was missing from her life, rather than counting the blessings that she had. Her musings had created the dream of seeing Dakota in the field of wildflowers.

      Back in time Dakota had been thinking similar thoughts, acknowledging his loneliness, yearning for a place to belong, a home that was once again his.

      Like a silken thread from a tapestry, the Dream Catcher had woven through her dream and onto Dakota’s thoughts, pulling them together, uniting them.

      But why?

      Oh, darn it, Kathy thought as she dried herself with a fluffy towel. She couldn’t seem to move past believing that there was an important and definite reason for what had happened.

      She stopped for a moment and stared at the bathroom door.

      What if she’d imagined the whole thing? She’d return to her bedroom, the pretty little Dream Catcher would be hanging on the wall and there would be no Dakota, because he didn’t exist.

      What was more terrifying? That Dakota was really there, or that he wasn’t, meaning she was slowly but surely losing her mind?

      “Fine, Kathy,” she muttered, “ask yourself some more questions to boggle your brain.”

      Dakota. If he was real, truly there, she was going to have to be very, very careful. For that one brief moment he’d had an unsettling effect on her. Man to woman. Like nothing she’d ever experienced before.

      That was not going to happen again.

      Dakota stood in Kathy’s bedroom, his eyes darting around. He felt claustrophobic in the small space and had to draw on inner strengths to keep from finding the way to the outdoors as quickly as possible. Even the windows were covered in some sort of hard, clear substance that he could see through, but which sealed the room further.

      He moved to the end of the bed to stare at the giant Dream Catcher where it lay on the floor, a frown on his face.

      The powers of a Dream Catcher were well known and respected by his people. He had, indeed, been carried far into the future to a place like none he’d seen before and was held captive there.

      He dragged both hands down his face, then shook his head.

      No, he didn’t want to believe that, because he did not want to be here. This was the white man’s world that offered him nothing but danger and a lack of acceptance. He would be feared and, therefore, hated.

      Dakota laughed, the sound harsh and short, having a bitter ring to it.

      It was no different for him in his own time. He faced danger at every turn from the soldiers who sought him. Indians of all tribes were feared and, thus, hated for the color of their skin and the way they chose to live their lives.

      He had told Kathy Maxwell that he wanted to go back to where he belonged. Belonged? He belonged nowhere, as everything he had possessed had been taken away and was no longer his to have.

      The white people were greedy and cruel. They’d claimed the Apache land for their own, sending the Indians to reservations like penned animals.

      But he hadn’t gone. Not Dakota. For many, many moons now, he’d been alone, roaming the land, hiding whenever he saw soldiers riding near. He’d not spoken to another living being in a very long time.

      Until Kathy.

      She was the first white woman he’d seen up close, and he’d been startled by the blue of her eyes. It was as though the gods had given her pieces of sky to see with. Pretty eyes. Eyes like the sky, hair like the sun. Very pretty. She would give a man fine sons.

      Kathy.

      Her name was moving easier through his mind now; and did not seem quite so strange. When he first beheld her, looked at all of who she was, which was the custom of his people, he had felt the shaft of heat streak within his body to coil low and tight. He’d wanted to join with her, man and woman.

      That thought must be ignored. The matter of importance was to find a way to have the Dream Catcher send him back to