Whitefeather's Woman. Deborah Hale

ago, yet John never got used to the liveryman’s hostile suspicion of anything and everything to do with the native people of the Plains. John’s own parents and younger brothers had been massacred at the hands of white men, yet he didn’t treat all ve’ho’e with embittered distrust.

      At least not once he got to know them.

      He jerked his head toward the street outside. “Lady just got into town from back East. She needs to see Ruth and Caleb, and I’m the only one around to fetch her out there.”

      He felt in his pockets. Damn! He’d left his last penny on the table at the Double Deuce to pay for his sarsaparilla. “Can’t you just bill it to Caleb?”

      Lionel Briggs made a noncommittal gurgle deep in his throat and scratched the stubble on his chin.

      “S’pose I could.” His tone left no doubt that he didn’t much like the idea. “Don’t reckon as I’d have anything to suit, though.”

      John had swallowed as much as he was prepared to. He had never done violence to a white man in his life, unless you counted the time at residential school when he’d kicked one of his teachers in the shin. But he’d accepted the fact that some ve’ho’e would never alter their opinion of his people.

      He shrugged and turned to leave. “It’s your business if you want to turn away customers, Mr. Briggs.”

      “It is my business, and don’t you ferget it, Whitefeather!” the liveryman huffed. “Just ’cause you married your sister off to a rich rancher don’t make you the boss of me.”

      John did not look back.

      Out on the street again, he looked around for Hawkwing. The skewbald gelding had made his way over to a nearby water trough, and Miss Jane Harris had been powerless to stop him.

      Marching over to the horse, John climbed into the saddle and held out his hand to the troublesome visitor from Boston.

      Her nervous glance darted from his hand, to his face, to the horse and back again until it threatened to make John dizzy.

      “Grab hold and I’ll pull you up,” he snapped.

      She continued to hesitate. “I thought you were going to hire a wagon for us.”

      So did I. “Briggs claims he doesn’t have anything to suit.” John could hear the disdain in his own voice.

      Her lower lip, still swollen from the train accident, commenced to quiver. John wanted to throw his head back and howl, like a he-wolf at the full moon.

      He could read the thoughts running through her head as clear as the sign above the No Bull Meat Market across the street. She saw him as some heathen savage, just waiting for a ripe moment to ravish and slaughter her while they rode across open country with daylight waning.

      “It’s up to you.” John straightened in his saddle. “It’d be just as easy for me if you stay in town tonight and I send somebody from the ranch to fetch you in the morning.”

      When she darted an anxious glance farther up the street to the Carlton Hotel, John almost laughed aloud. The woman wasn’t only afraid of him, she was scared of everyone and everything about Whitehorn. Talk about your fish out of water!

      “I—I don’t have any money to pay for a room.”

      John softened his tone as he leaned down and offered her his hand again. In spite of some harsh lessons from life, he believed in second chances.

      “Well, that makes two of us, ma’am. Come on, now. I’m pretty near as harmless as Hawkwing, and only a bit more stubborn. We’ll make better time getting to the ranch if we ride across the range, anyway. You do want to get to the Kincaids, don’t you?”

      That did it. Her baby mouth set in an attempt at a determined line, which John found strangely comical. And even more strangely appealing. No question, she was prepared to wade through hell itself to reach his brother-in-law’s ranch.

      She extended her absurdly tiny hand up to meet his.

      Drawing her up off the ground, John set her on top of Hawkwing’s generous hindquarters. “Hang on.”

      For the first minute or two, she settled for clutching a handful of his coat. But as the horse’s pace picked up, she clenched her arms around his waist. John Whitefeather had never felt so uncomfortable on the back of a horse as he did on that endless ride out to the ranch with Miss Jane Harris perched behind him, clinging like grim death.

      Everything about the woman irritated him. Her small size. Her New England fussiness. Her barely controlled panic, so intense it was almost contagious.

      For the last twenty of his thirty years, John had struggled to tread the thin, brittle line between two races vastly at odds and often at war. Among his late father’s people, he had found a measure of acceptance, though always clouded by the necessity to prove himself and a personal sense of guilt for the crimes of the whites. Among his late mother’s race, he doubted he would ever find tolerance, let alone favor.

      Over and over, he had told himself he didn’t care. Until he’d almost come to believe it. His meeting with Miss Harris had ripped away those comforting illusions, and he wanted to hate her for it.

      “Is the ranch much farther?” she squeaked when they had been riding for a quarter of an hour.

      So, she’d finally worked up the nerve to make conversation. John heard her suck a breath in through clenched teeth.

      “Why? Did you hurt your…” he searched for a polite word, but found he could only think in terms of horses “… your rump in that train crash?”

      Her whole body stiffened behind him. “How dare you ask a lady such an improper question!”

      So, the quivering little rabbit had teeth, after all. For no sane reason he could think of, John found himself grinning. Luckily, she couldn’t see his face.

      He shrugged. “We can stop and stretch your legs if you like, but I’d just as soon not be caught out in open country when the sun disappears behind those mountains. Easy to get lost unless there’s a good moon. Lot of animals come out to hunt at night—wolves, wildcats.”

      He sensed her looking around, taking in the waving green grassland in one direction and the wooded foothills of the Crazy Mountains in the other.

      A shiver ran through her and she tightened her arms around his middle. “By all means, let’s keep riding.”

      John could tell he’d spooked her. A bucketful of ice-cold shame doused the spark of gleeful satisfaction within him. Some men found fun in baiting wild creatures, but he had never been one of them. On the contrary, he had a gift for gentling such animals—deer, pronghorns and especially wild mustangs.

      For all her show of Boston prudery, Jane Harris reminded him of a wounded doe. Beneath a tiny scrap of a hat that would be useless against the beating sun, she had hair of a sorrel shade, like a yearling just losing its protective spots. Her features were as delicate as a fawn’s, too, and she had the same enormous, liquid brown eyes. Those eyes held a restless wariness like a deer’s, as if ever alert for predators, yet powerless against them. He had never met a woman so vulnerable and so completely unfit for Big Sky Country.

      She provoked his pity as well as his resentment, and they were like twin burrs beneath his saddle. Truth be told, pity was the more nettlesome of the two.

      Little Miss Harris had landed in Whitehorn alone, injured and without a single belonging she didn’t wear or carry on her. What would she do, John wondered, when she found out Ruth and Caleb didn’t want her to work for them?

      Chapter Two

      Something was wrong. Jane sensed it from the moment John Whitefeather ushered her into the big, two-story house with a wide porch that wrapped around it like a protective embrace. Standing in the generously proportioned kitchen, dominated by a big cast-iron stove, she wondered why her new employers didn’t appear happy to