Paper Rose. Diana Palmer

      Leta’s shoulders moved as if she were suddenly uncomfortable. “Yes, I know there’s friction between them. They don’t agree on any Native American issues, most especially on the fight to open a casino on Wapiti Ridge.”

      “The senator seems to think that organized crime would love to move in, but I don’t think there’s much danger of that. Other Sioux reservations in the state have perfectly good casinos. Anyway, it’s the tribes in other states trying to open casinos that are drawing all the heat from gambling syndicates.”

      Leta hesitated. “Yes, but just lately…” She caught herself and smiled. “Well, there’s no use talking about that right now. But, Cecily, what about your education?”

      Of course, Leta knew that Tate had enrolled her in George Washington University near his Washington, D.C., apartment, so that he could keep an eye on her. He worked as security chief for Pierce Hutton’s building conglomerate now, a highly paid, hectic and sometimes dangerous job. But it was less wearing on Leta’s nerves than when he worked for the government.

      “I can go back when I can afford to pay for it myself,” Cecily returned.

      “There’s something more, isn’t there?” Leta asked in her soft voice. “Come on, baby. Tell Mama.”

      Cecily grimaced. She smiled warmly at the older woman. She’d just turned twenty-five, but Leta had been “Mama” since hers had died and left her penniless, at the mercy of a drunken, lusting stepfather.

      “Tate’s new girl,” she said after a minute. “She’s really beautiful. She’s thirty, divorced and she looks like a model. Blond, blue-eyed, perfect figure, social graces and she’s rich.”

      “Bummer,” Leta said drolly.

      Cecily burst out laughing at the drawled slang. Leta was one of the most educated women she knew, politically active on sovereignty issues for her tribe and an advocate of literacy programs for young Lakota people. Her husband had died years before, and she’d changed. Jack Yellowbird Winthrop had been a brutal man, very much like Cecily’s stepfather. During the time she spent with Leta, he was away on a construction job in Chicago or she’d never have been able to stay in the house with them.

      “Tate’s a man,” Leta continued. “You can’t expect him to live like a recluse. His job involves a lot of social events. Where Hutton goes, he goes.”

      “Yes, but this is…different,” Cecily continued. She shrugged. “I saw him with her last week, at a coffeehouse near my apartment. They were holding hands. She’s captivated him.”

      “The Lakota Captive.” Leta made a line in the air with her hand. “I can see it now, the wily, brave Lakota warrior with the brazen white woman pioneer. She carries him off into the sunset over her shoulder…”

      Cecily whacked her with a strand of grass she’d pulled.

      “You write history your way, I’ll write it my way,” Leta said wickedly.

      “Native Americans are stoic and unemotional,” Cecily reminded her. “All the books say so.”

      “We never read many books in the old days, so we didn’t know that,” came the dry explanation. She shook her head. “What a sad stereotype so many make of us—a bloodthirsty ignorant people who never smile because they’re too busy torturing people over hot fires.”

      “Wrong tribe,” Cecily corrected. She frowned thoughtfully. “That was the northeastern native people.”

      “Who’s the Native American here, you or me?”

      Cecily shrugged. “I’m German-American.” She brightened. “But I had a grandmother who dated a Cherokee man once. Does that count?”

      Leta hugged her warmly. “You’re my adopted daughter. You’re Lakota, even if you haven’t got my blood.”

      Cecily let her cheek fall to Leta’s shoulder and hugged her back. It felt so nice to be loved by someone in the world. Since her mother’s death, she’d had no one of her own. It was a lonely life, despite the excitement and adventure her work held for her. She wasn’t openly affectionate at all, except with Leta.

      “For God’s sake, next you’ll be rocking her to sleep at night!” came a deep, disgusted voice at Cecily’s back, and Cecily stiffened because she recognized it immediately.

      “She’s my baby girl,” Leta told her tall, handsome son with a grin. “Shut up.”

      Cecily turned a little awkwardly. She hadn’t expected this. Tate Winthrop towered over both of them. His jet-black hair was loose as he never wore it in the city, falling thick and straight almost to his waist. He was wearing a breastplate with buckskin leggings and high-topped mocassins. There were two feathers straight up in his hair with notches that had meaning among his people, marks of bravery.

      Cecily tried not to stare at him. He was the most beautiful man she’d ever known. Since her seventeenth birthday, Tate had been her world. Fortunately he didn’t realize that her mad flirting hid a true emotion. In fact, he treated her exactly as he had when she came to him for comfort after her mother had died suddenly; as he had when she came to him again with bruises all over her thin, young body from her drunken stepfather’s violent attack. Although she dated, she’d never had a serious boyfriend. She had secret terrors of intimacy that had never really gone away, except when she thought of Tate that way. She loved him….

      “Why aren’t you dressed properly?” Tate asked, scowling at her skirt and blouse. “I bought you buckskins for your birthday, didn’t I?”

      “Three years ago,” she said without meeting his probing eyes. She didn’t like remembering that he’d forgotten her birthday this year. “I gained weight since then.”

      “Oh. Well, find something you like here…”

      She held up a hand. “I don’t want you to buy me anything else,” she said flatly, and didn’t back down from the sudden menace in his dark eyes. “I’m not dressing up like a Lakota woman. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m blond. I don’t want to be mistaken for some sort of overstimulated Native American groupie buying up artificial artifacts and enthusing over citified Native American flute music, trying to act like a member of the tribe.”

      “You belong to it,” he returned. “We adopted you years ago.”

      “So you did,” she said. That was how he thought of her—a sister. That wasn’t the way she wanted him to think of her. She smiled faintly. “But I won’t pass for a Lakota, whatever I wear.”

      “You could take your hair down,” he continued thoughtfully.

      She shook her head. She only let her hair loose at night, when she went to bed. Perhaps she kept it tightly coiled for pure spite, because he loved long hair and she knew it.

      “How old are you?” he asked, trying to remember. “Twenty, isn’t it?”

      “I was, five years ago,” she said, exasperated. “You used to work for the CIA. I seem to remember that you went to college, too, and got a law degree. Didn’t they teach you how to count?”

      He looked surprised. Where had the years gone? She hadn’t aged, not visibly.

      “Where’s Audrey?” she asked brightly, trying to sound nonchalant about it when her heart was breaking.

      Something changed in his face. He looked briefly disturbed. “She couldn’t get away,” he said in a tone that didn’t invite questions. “One of her friends was having a tea, and she promised to help. I flew out alone.”

      Cecily wondered if it was really because of a party that Audrey had stayed behind, or if his society girlfriend didn’t want to be seen on an Native American reservation. Tate had mentioned once or twice that Audrey had asked him repeatedly to get a conservative haircut. As if he’d ever cut his hair willingly. It was a part of his heritage, of which he was fiercely proud.