The Savage Heart
Diana Palmer
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author DIANA PALMER presents a classic romance about a woman with big dreams and a man who has nothing left to believe in…except her Tess Meredith and Raven Following grew up on the beautiful, wild Montana plains. But their friendship and love were doomed by Raven’s Sioux heritage…and his departure from the land of his people.In Chicago, he built a new life, haunted by thoughts of the lovely, spirited young girl he’d left behind. Until she arrived back in his world—bringing with her the past he’d tried to bury.But Tess had changed, too. She’d matured into a woman, and was determined to fight for her rights in society—and for the love of a man who felt he was savage at heart…
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author DIANA PALMER presents a classic romance about a woman with big dreams and a man who has nothing left to believe in...except her
Tess Meredith and Raven Following grew up on the beautiful, wild Montana plains. But their friendship and love were doomed by Raven’s Sioux heritage…and his departure from the land of his people. In Chicago, he built a new life, haunted by thoughts of the lovely, spirited young girl he’d left behind. Until she arrived back in his world--bringing with her the past he’d tried to bury. But Tess had changed, too. She’d matured into a woman, and was determined to fight for her rights in society-and for the love of a man who felt he was savage at heart….
Praise for the novels of New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Diana Palmer
“Palmer demonstrates, yet again, why she’s the queen of desperado quests for justice and true love.”
—Publishers Weekly on Dangerous
“The popular Palmer has penned another winning novel, a perfect blend of romance and suspense.”
—Booklist on Lawman
“Palmer knows how to make the sparks fly…heartwarming.”
—Publishers Weekly on Renegade
“Sensual and suspenseful.”
—Booklist on Lawless
“Diana Palmer is a mesmerizing storyteller who captures the essence of what a romance should be.”
—Affaire de Coeur
“Nobody tops Diana Palmer when it comes to delivering pure, undiluted romance. I love her stories.”
—New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz
The Savage Heart
Diana Palmer
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Dr. Nestor R. Carabjal, Dr. Winston H. Gandy, Dr. F. Stuart Sanders, Dr. David A. Bray and Dr. Michael J. Maloney. Thank you all, most sincerely.
—Mrs. James E. Kyle (AKA Diana Palmer)
Contents
Prologue (#u223fde3f-44ea-5f8f-b288-e7c36c869b32)
Chapter One (#u45137523-403e-5111-9f75-ba7793a144a2)
Chapter Two (#u92db6a1a-5151-541f-91da-4b84ccef617b)
Chapter Three (#u89e0ce1a-cd06-50ff-8e51-1c485918d3e5)
Chapter Four (#u0d3b8717-7af6-500a-94aa-fb89c90cf1be)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Montana Spring 1891
There was lightning in the distance where dark clouds settled low over the buttes. Spring storms, all lightning display at first, were common here, and Tess Meredith loved to watch them—especially now that she had a companion who seemed to have a legend about every one of these natural occurrences…and every unnatural one, too.
But even more than watching summer storms with her new and treasured friend, Tess liked to ride fast, hunt and fish, live in the outdoors enjoying nature and what she called “adventure.” Her father despaired of her ever marrying. Who would appreciate a young woman who had such accomplishments, not one of which had anything to do with traditional domestic occupations?
Today Tess looked quite different from the way she usually did and quite grown-up for a fourteen-year-old. Her blond hair was piled neatly on top of her head, rather than flying free; she was wearing a long cotton dress with a high neck, rather than rolled-up dungarees and one of her father’s shirts. Polished lace-up shoes replaced the scuffed boots she always wore. Her father had beamed when he’d seen her earlier. Of course, he wouldn’t say a chastising word to her on the subject of her dress or her unladylike pursuits. He was far too kind to do such a thing. It was the kindness in him, so deep and so sincere, that made him such a wonderful doctor, Tess believed, for many who practiced medicine had skill, but few had his way with patients.
She sighed and glanced over at Raven Following, the only man she’d ever known who treated her as an equal, not a silly child—or worse, a silly girl. He was a Sioux who had lived at Pine Ridge until about eight months ago. His shoulders, wide and powerful, did not move under the buckskins he wore. His long, thick black hair was braided and wrapped with narrow bands of ermine skins, and his strongly boned, handsome face was free of expression.
Looking at him, Tess was filled with melancholy and curiosity. What did Raven see? For he seemed to see all manner of things around and in the far distance that she couldn’t. Sometimes it was difficult for her to believe he was only six or seven years older than she.
“Are you scared?” she suddenly asked.
“A warrior never admits fear.”
She smiled. “Oh, pardon me. Are you nervous, then?”
“Uneasy.” His lean, graceful fingers held a stick that he alternately toyed with and used to draw symbols on the ground. Now he was idly moving it from hand to hand. “Chicago is far away from here. I’ve never been to a white man’s city.”
“Papa says you’ll be educated there and afterward you can get a job. He knows a man who will give you work.”
“So he has told me.”
She touched his shoulder lightly. He didn’t like to be touched, not since he’d been so badly wounded in the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, where the fury of the Hotchkiss guns of the soldiers had taken the lives of more than two hundred of his people, including his mother and two sisters. But Tess’s touch was different, and, she thought, tolerable to him, since she’d help nurse him through the agonizing recovery from having his body riddled with U.S. Army issue bullets.
“It will be all right,” Tess said, her voice gentle and, she hoped, reassuring. “You’ll like Chicago when you get there.”
“You are so very sure of that?” His black eyes were glittering with humor.
“Of course! After Mama died and Papa told me he was going to take a job doctoring on the reservations, I was scared to death. I didn’t know anybody out here, and I had to leave all my friends and relatives behind. But once I got to the West, it wasn’t bad at all.” She rearranged her skirt. “Well, it wasn’t too bad,” she amended. “I didn’t like the way the soldiers treated your people.”
“Neither did we,” he said dryly. He paused, studying her, finally looking intently into her clear green eyes. “Your father will be relieved when I am gone. He permits me to teach you things, but he grimaces when he sees you doing them.”
“He’s old-fashioned.” Tess laughed. “And the world is changing.” She looked at the distant buttes. “I want to help it change. I want to do things that women have never done.”
“You already do things that few white women do—skin a deer, track a doe, ride without a saddle, shoot a bow—”
“And sign and speak Lakota. All thanks to you, Raven. You’re a good friend and a good teacher. How I wish I could go to Chicago with you. Wouldn’t we have fun?”
He shrugged and began to draw symbols in the dust at his feet.
How graceful his hands were, Tess mused. His fingers were strong, yet lean, and his wrists were so finely boned, they appeared delicate beneath the long corded muscle of his forearm. He leaned forward, and her gaze traveled over his back. Tess winced. Beneath the buckskin shirt his flesh was puckered and pocked with scars, scars that would be there always to remind him of Wounded Knee.
It was a miracle, Tess’s father, Harold, had said, that Raven has survived. Half a dozen bullets had torn into his upper back; one had punctured his lung, causing it to collapse. And that was not the worst of his injuries. Harold Meredith had done everything his medical training had taught him and then some to save Raven’s life, but at last he’d sought the help of a practitioner from a tradition far different from his own: he smuggled a Lakota shaman into Raven’s bedchamber.
Whether it was Harold’s or the shaman’s skill—or the skills of both—they would never know. But soon the Great Spirit smiled, and Raven began to recover. It was a long and painful journey back to health, and through it all Tess was at Raven’s side.
“Will you miss me?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said, smiling easily. “You saved my life.”
“No. Papa and your shaman did that.”
Raven Following was not a demonstrative man, but now he took her small, white hand in his large, dark one and held it. “You did it,” he said firmly. “You saved my life. I lived only because you cried so hard for me. I felt sorry for you and knew I could not be so rude and thoughtless as to disappoint your hopes by dying.”
She chuckled. “That’s the longest sentence I’ve ever heard from you, Raven—and the only one the least bit deceitful.” Her eyes sparkled.
He stood up, stretched lazily, then pulled her up beside him. His gaze slid over her flushed face. She was almost a woman, and she was going to be very pretty, perhaps beautiful. But she worried him. She felt things so deeply…with such strong emotion.
“Why?” she asked suddenly. “Why, why?”
He did not need to ask where her thoughts had carried her. Without hesitation, he said, “Because of what the Lakota did to Custer, I think. I have reflected on Wounded Knee for several months now, Tess. Some of the soldiers who opened fire on us, on the children—” his body stiffened for a moment as if he might be hearing once again the wails of terror and screams of pain from those children “—some of those soldiers,” he went on, “were from Custer’s surviving companies.” He looked at her intently. “I was six when we fought Custer, and I remember how the soldiers looked there, on the battlefield. Many of the women had lost sons and fathers and husbands to those men. My own father died there. The women took out their grief on the bodies of the dead soldiers on the Greasy Grass. It was bad.”
“I see.”
“No. And it is good that you don’t,” he replied, his face curiously taut. “I teased you before, Tess, but truly I would not have lived if you and your father had not been so brave…and so swift.”
“We left for the battlefield the instant we heard there had been fighting and that many were dying on that frozen ground.” Tess shivered and tears filled her eyes. “Oh, Raven, it was so cold, so bitterly cold. I shall never forget it, and I thank God we found you.”
“As I thank the Great Spirit that you and your father rescued me and tended my wounds and hid me in your wagon until we were out of South Dakota.”
“Lucky that Dad was being transferred to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. It was easy to pretend we’d found you on the roadside in Montana near Lame Deer. No one ever questioned our story—well, not to our faces anyway.”
He smiled. “I was not so lucky in my decision to visit my cousins in Big Foot’s band, though, was I?”
She shook her head. “You could have been safe in your lodge in Pine Ridge….”
“And my mother and sisters, too.” His voice had trailed off. Now, suddenly, he shook off his enveloping grief. “Come,” he said, “let us go back. Your father will be wondering where you are.”
She started to protest, but his gaze was even and quiet, and she knew that it would be like talking to a rock. She gave in with good grace and smiled at him.
“Will we ever see you again after you go?” she asked.
“Of course. I’ll come back and visit from time to time,” he promised. “Don’t forget the things I’ve taught you.”
“As if I could,” she replied. She searched his black eyes. “Why do things have to change?”
“Because they do.” In the distance, the sky became misty as the threatening clouds released a curtain of rain.
“Come. The rain will overtake us if we don’t hurry.”
“One more minute, Raven. Please, tell me something.”
“Anything,” he murmured.
“What did Old Man Deer do when we sat up here with him last week?”
Raven’s body stiffened slightly and he glanced away. “He performed a ritual. A very sacred one.” He looked fully at Tess. “It was a way of protecting you,” he said enigmatically. Then he smiled. “And we will say no more about it now.”
Chapter One
Chicago, Illinois November 1903
The telegram read: “Arriving Chicago depot 2:00 p.m. Saturday. Tess.”
Matt Davis had read the telegram several times and cursed it several times more. Tess Meredith had no business moving to Chicago. Her father had died only two months ago. Matt hadn’t got the news until long after the funeral was over when he returned from working in another state. He’d written Tess right away, of course, and she’d written back. But she’d never so much as hinted that she had this in mind.
He’d visited Tess and her father many times and kept up a regular correspondence with them all through the years after he’d gone east to be educated, then changed his name to begin work as a Pinkerton detective. Raven Following had become Matt Davis and had changed in a hundred other ways, too, but never in his regard for Tess and Harold Meredith. They were all the family he could claim. And he’d looked forward to each visit with them more than anyone would ever know.
Tess at sixteen hadn’t been quite so outgoing as she had been two years before. She’d become somewhat shy, remote. Tess at eighteen had been a very different proposition. Mature, pretty—and more reckless than he remembered. Last year, he’d made another pilgrimage to Montana, which he combined with work on a case for his own new private detective agency, and the sight of a grown-up Tess of twenty-four had shocked him speechless. No longer the grinning fourteen-year-old sprite, no longer the shy sixteen-year-old or the reckless eighteen-year-old, Tess was mischievous, forceful, outspoken—and so beautiful that she made him ache. And she was driving her father wild. He’d confessed to Matt that she wouldn’t even allow talk of marriage…that she’d ridden her horse through town wearing pants and a shirt and carrying a sidearm…that she’d organized a women’s suffrage group in town…and that she’d actually attacked a local man with a pistol when he tried to get fresh with her. The aging doctor had asked Matt for advice. But, confronted by this new and challenging Tess, Matt, too, had been at a loss.
Now her father was dead and he was inheriting Tess, a legacy of feminine trouble he knew was going to change his life. It was a worrying and exciting proposition.
The train pulled into the station, huffing and puffing clouds of smoke. Wary of the cast-off cinders from the engine, elegantly dressed men and women began to disembark, porters came and went unloading baggage, but there was no sign of Tess.
Matt sighed irritably as he stared around the platform. Suddenly, a shapely woman clad in natty green velvet, wearing a Paris creation of a hat with a veil, and impatiently tapping a prettily shod foot, ceased to be a stranger to him. The years fell away and the elegant woman was again the girl with long blond pigtails he’d known so long.
At that very moment Tess spied him. All her elegant poise vanished, and she raced across the platform shouting his name, then hurled herself at him.
His arms swallowed her and he lifted her high, laughing as his dark eyes met her green, green ones through the misty veil.
“Oh, Matt, I’ve missed you so,” she crooned. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“You have,” he said, slowly lowering her back to her feet.
“Only because I have breasts now,” she said.
His cheeks went ruddy, he knew, for he could feel the heat in them. “Tess!”
She propped her hands on her hips and stared up at him. “It’s a new world. We women are done with hypocrisy and servitude. We want what men have.”
He couldn’t help it. He grinned. “Hairy chests?”
“Yours isn’t hairy,” she said belligerently. “It’s very smooth.” She looked at him soberly. “Does anybody here know who you really are, where you came from?”
Matt’s brow lifted just enough to make him look arrogant. “It depends on which version of my past you prefer. My banker is convinced I’m exiled Russian royalty. My old Pinkerton buddies believe I came here from Spain. The elderly Chinaman who does my laundry thinks I’m an Arab.”
“I see.”
“No,” he said, his eyes narrowed. “You don’t. You have the right to speak your native language and dress in clothing familiar to your forebears. A Sioux isn’t even allowed to participate in a native religious ceremony, not even the Sun Dance.”
He straightened the tie that so beautifully complemented his elegant vested suit. He wore a derby, his long hair contained in a ponytail that rested under the neck of his shirt. Few people in Chicago knew that he was Sioux. “Let people think what they like about me,” he said, refusing to admit that it disturbed him to reveal his ancestry. “I’m a mystery man, Tess,” he said gleefully. Then he sobered again and added, “Nothing will ever be the same because of Wounded Knee. Now it’s illegal for an Indian at a government school or holding a government job to wear his hair long or dress in native clothing or speak his own language.”
“And,” Tess added morosely, “you can’t even vote in your own country.” She brightened. “Just like me. Well, Mr. Davis-Following, we’re going to have to change all that.”
His onyx eyes regarded her somberly. She was delightfully pretty. But underneath the beauty, there was character and an independent spirit. “I’m sorry about your father,” he said. “I know you must still miss him.”
“Don’t get me started,” she said through stiff lips, glancing around her to stay the tears. “I’ve tried very hard to be brave, all the way here. Even after two months, it’s still very new, being an orphan.” Her small gloved hand went to his waistcoat pocket and rested over it. “Matt, you don’t mind that I came?” she asked abruptly. “I had no one in Montana, and one of the soldiers was pestering me to marry him. I had to get away before I gave in out of sheer exhaustion.”
“The same soldier your father mentioned in his last letter to me, a Lieutenant Smalley?”
“The very one.” She withdrew her hand and twisted the handle of her frilly parasol. “You remember the name very well, don’t you?”
“It’s hard to forget the name of a man who helped kill most of my family at Wounded Knee,” he said harshly.
She looked around them, finding people going their own way. Nobody paid undue attention to them. It would have been a different story back in Montana, where the sight of a young blonde woman with a full-blooded Sioux would have raised more than just eyebrows. Lord, she thought, everyone would have been glaring furiously at them—as they had in the past.
“I remember the way you were,” she said gently. “Dressed as a warrior, on horseback, with your hair flying in the wind and your arrows winging toward the center of a bull’s-eye.” Watching her watch Raven, her father had teased her that she was losing her heart.
Matt didn’t like remembering his past. “I remember you trying to skin a deer and throw up at the same time.”
She held up a hand. “Please, I’m a gentlewoman now.”
“And I’m a detective now. Shall we agree to let the past lie without further mention?”
“If you like.”
“Where are your bags?”
“The porter has them on the cart, there.” She pointed toward a steamer trunk and several smaller bags. She glanced up at him. “I suppose I can’t live with you. Or can I?”
He was shocked. Did she know more about the past than she had ever let on? He held his breath.
“I don’t mean with you,” she said, embarrassed at her own phrasing of the question. “I mean, you live in a boardinghouse, and I wonder if there’s a vacancy?”
He let out his breath and smiled with relief. “I imagine that Mrs. Mulhaney could find a room for you, yes. But the idea of a young single woman living in a boardinghouse is going to make you look like a loose woman in the eyes of the community. If anyone asks, you’re my cousin.”
“I am?”
“You are,” he said firmly. “It’s the only way I can protect you.”
“I don’t need protecting, thank you. I’m quite capable of looking after myself.”
Considering that she’d handled her father’s funeral alone and gotten here, halfway across the country, without mishap, that was apparent.
“I believe you,” he said. “But you’re a stranger here and totally unfamiliar with life in a big city. I’m not.”
“Aren’t we both strangers here, really?” she asked, and there was a deep sadness in her tone. “Neither of us has anybody now.”
“I have cousins in South Dakota and in Montana,” he replied.
“Whom you never visit,” she shot back. “Are you ashamed of them, Matt?”
His eyes glittered like black diamonds. “Don’t presume to invade my privacy,” he said through his teeth. “I’ll gladly do what I can to see you settled here. But my feelings are my own business.”
She grinned at him. “You still strike like a rattler when you’re poked.”
“Be careful that you don’t get bitten.”
She dropped him a curtsy. “I’ll do my best not to provoke you too much.”
“WHAT ARE YOU PLANNING to do here?” Matt asked. He’d arranged with the station agent to have her bags stored until he could settle Tess and send for them.
“I’m going to get a job.”
He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at her. “A job?”
“Certainly, a job. You know I’m not rich, Matt, and besides, it’s 1903. Women are getting into all sorts of professions. I’ve read about it. Women are working as shop girls and stenographers and in sewing plants. I can turn my hand to most anything if I’m shown how. And I’m quite an experienced nurse. Until Papa died—” her voice broke and she took a few seconds to compose herself “—I was his nurse. I can get work nursing in a hospital here. I know I can.” She abruptly looked up at him. “There is a hospital here, isn’t there?”
“Yes.” He remembered making a keen shot of her with both bow and rifle. She was a quick study, and utterly fearless. Had he started her down the road to nonconformity? If he had, he knew in his bones that he was about to regret it. Nursing was not considered by many as suitable for a genteel woman. Some would raise eyebrows. Of course, it would raise eyebrows, too, if she worked in a shop, or—
“The very notion of a woman working is—well, unconventional.”
Her brows rose. “What would you call a Sioux Indian in a bowler hat pretending to be exiled Russian royalty—traditional?”
He made an irritated sound.
“You shouldn’t debate me,” she muttered. “I was first in my class in my last year in school.”
He glared at her as they started to walk again down the broad sidewalk. Exquisite carriages drawn by horses in decorated livery rolled along the wide street, whose storefronts were decorated for the holiday season.
Tess caught sight of a store window where little electric trains ran against a backdrop of mountain scenery that had actual tunnels running through. “Oh, Matt, look. Isn’t it darling?”
“Do you really want me to tell you how I feel about iron horses?”
“Never mind, spoilsport.” She fell into step beside him once more. “Christmas isn’t so very far away. Does your landlady decorate and put up a tree in the parlor?”
“Yes.”
“How lovely! I can crochet snowflakes to go on it.”
“You’re assuming that she can find room for you.”
She gnawed at her lower lip. She’d come here on impulse, and now for the first time, she was uncertain. She stopped walking and looked up. “What if she can’t?” she asked.
Even through the veil, Matt could see plainly the expression of fear on Tess’s face. He was touched in a dozen ways, none wanted. “She will,” he said firmly. “I won’t have you very far from me. There are wicked elements in this city. Until you find your feet, you need a safe harbor.”
She smiled. “I’m a lot of trouble, I guess. I’ve always been impulsive. Am I trading too much on our shared past, Matt? If I’m in your way, just tell me, and I’ll go back home.”
“Home to the persistent lieutenant? Over my dead body. Come on.”
He took her arm and guided her around a hole in the boardwalk that looked as if a rifle had made it. Matt recalled reading about a fight between a city policeman and a bank robber recently. The bank was close by.
“Mrs. Blake told me that Chicago is very civilized,” Tess said. “Is it?”
“Occasionally.”
She looked over at him. “Now that you have your own detective business, what sort of cases do you take?”
“Mostly I track down criminals,” he replied. “Once or twice I’ve done other sorts of work. I’ve taken on a couple of divorce cases, getting evidence to prove cruelty on the part of the men.” He glanced at her. “I suppose you have no qualms about divorce, being modern.”
“I have a few,” she confessed. “I think people should try to make a marriage work. But if a man is abusive or cheats or gambles, I think a woman is more than entitled to be rid of him.”
“I think she’s entitled to shoot him,” he murmured, remembering vividly a recent case, where a drunken husband had left vicious bruises on a small child and her mother. Matt had knocked the man down and taken him to the police himself.
“Good for you!” Tess peered up at him through her veil. “You’re still wickedly handsome.”
He gave her a mocking smile. “You’re my cousin,” he reminded her. “We’re relatives in Chicago. You can’t leer at me, regardless of how modern you feel.”
She made a face at him. “You’ve become absolutely staid!”
“I work in a staid profession.”
“I’ll bet you’re good at it, too.” She eyed his waistcoat. “Do you still carry that enormous bowie knife around with you?”
“Who told you about that?”
“It was in a dime novel I read about you.”
“What?”
She bumped into him because he stopped so abruptly. “Don’t do that!” She straightened her hat. “There was a dime novel about you, didn’t you know? It came out close to a year ago, just after that case where you caught the ringleader of some bank robbery gang and shot him. They called you Magnificent Matt Davis!”
“I’m going to be sick,” he said, and looked as if he meant it.
“Now, now, it can’t be so bad to be a hero. Just think, one day you can show a copy of that novel to your children and be a hero to them, too.”
“I won’t have children,” he said shortly, staring straight ahead.
“Why not?” she asked. “Don’t you like them?”
He looked down at her evenly. “Probably as much as you do. Isn’t twenty-six about the right age to be called a spinster?”
She flushed. “I don’t have to get married to have a child,” she informed him haughtily. “Or a lover!”
He gave her a speaking look.
Odd, she thought, how that look made her feel. She swallowed hard. It sounded good at suffragist meetings to say such things, but when she looked at Matt, she thought of how it would be to have him as a lover, and her knees went wobbly. She actually knew very little about such things, except that one of her suffragist friends had said that it hurt a lot and it wasn’t fun at all.
“Your father would beat you with a buggy whip if he heard you talk like that!”
“Well, who else can I say such things to?” she demanded, glaring at him. “I don’t know any other men!”
“Not even the persistent soldier?” he asked venomously.
She shifted. “He never bathes. And there were crumbs in his mustache.”
He burst out laughing.
“Never mind,” she grumbled, and started walking again. “I’ll just keep my scandalous thoughts to myself until I can find a group of suffragists to join.” She looked at him from the corner of her eyes. “Do you know where they meet?”
“I never attend suffragist meetings myself. I’m much too busy with my knitting.”
She punched his arm playfully.
“I’m sure you’ll find them,” he said quickly.
“I expect they have a low tolerance for liquor, as well,” she mused aloud. “Do you have a hatchet?”
“Only Indians carry hatchets,” he informed her. “I’m a detective. I carry a .32 caliber Smith & Wesson double-action revolver.”
“You never taught me to shoot a pistol.”
“And I never will,” he said. He gave her a wry glance. “One day, the temptation might be too much for you. It wouldn’t look good on my record if you shot me. We’re here.”
Matt took her elbow and guided her up the steps of a brownstone house with long windows and a huge door with a lion’s head knocker. He escorted her inside, then paused outside a closed door and knocked.
“Just a minute,” a musical voice called. “I’m coming.”
The door opened and a tiny woman with gray-streaked blond hair in a bun looked way up at Matt and then at his companion.
“Why, Mr. Davis, have you found a wife at last?”
Tess flushed scarlet and Matt cleared his throat.
“This is my cousin, Tess Meredith, Mrs. Mulhaney. Her father has died, and she has no relatives except me. Is that room on the third floor still vacant?”
“Yes, it is, and I’d be delighted to rent it to Miss Meredith.” She smiled at Tess, a thousand unspoken questions in her blue eyes.
Tess smiled back. “I’d be very grateful to have a place to stay near Matt.” She looked up at him with sickening adoration. “Isn’t he just the sweetest man?”
“Sweet” wasn’t an appellation that had ever connected itself with the enigmatic Mr. Davis in Mrs. Mulhaney’s mind, but she supposed to a kinswoman he might be.
“He is a kindhearted soul,” she agreed. “Now, Miss Meredith, you can have meals with us. Mr. Davis will tell you the times, and there’s a laundry just three doors down run by Mr. Lo.”
Matt stifled a chuckle. “I’ll show her where it is,” he promised.
“Let me get the key and I’ll take you to your room, Miss Meredith. It has a very nice view of the city.”
She went off, mumbling to herself, and Tess lifted both brows as she looked up at Matt. “And what was so amusing about the laundry?”
“Don’t you remember? Whites used to call us Mr. Lo.”
She frowned.
He made an exasperated sound. “Lo, the poor Indian…?”
She laughed. “Oh, good heavens. I’d forgotten our jokes about that.”
“I haven’t,” he murmured. “You and I joked. Everywhere else being called Mr. Lo or ‘John’ most of my life was not funny.”
“Well, you’re anything but a poor Indian now,” she said pointedly, her gaze going over his rich paisley vest in shades of magenta and the dark gray suit and white shirt he was wearing with it. Even his shoes were expensive, handmade. For feet that size, she thought wickedly, they’d have to be handmade! She searched his dark eyes with a smile in her own. “You look filthy rich to me!” she whispered.
“Tess!”
“I’ll reform,” she promised, but hadn’t time to say more because Mrs. Mulhaney was back with the key.
Chapter Two
Chicago was big and brash, and Tess loved to explore it, finding old churches and forts and every manner of modern building. Lake Michigan, lapping at the very edge of the city and looking as big as an ocean, fascinated Tess, who had spent so many of her formative years landlocked in the West.
She rather easily got a nursing position at the hospital in Cook County. Her experience and skill were evident to a number of the physicians, who maneuvered to get her on their services. Since she wasn’t formally trained, however, she was classified a practical nurse.
The matrons who lived at the boardinghouse were less approving. They considered nursing a dreadful profession for a well-brought-up single woman and said so.
Tess took their comments with smiling fortitude, mentally consigning them to the nether reaches. They couldn’t really be blamed, though, considering their upbringing. Change came hard to the elderly.
Fortunately, she discovered a group of women’s rights advocates and joined immediately. She eagerly worked on every plan for a march or a rally aimed at getting the vote for women.
Matt kept a close eye on her. He often saw her as an unbroken filly that no hand was going to tame. He wouldn’t have presumed to try. There was much to admire in Tess, and much to respect.
TESS MADE A GOOD FRIEND right away in Nan Collier, the young wife of a telegraph clerk, who attended suffragist meetings with her. Matt had insisted that she not go out at night unaccompanied. It was the only restriction he’d placed on her, and since she didn’t consider it demeaning, she abided by it. And Nan was good company, too. She wasn’t an educated woman, as Tess was, but she was intelligent and had a kind heart.
As they grew closer, it became obvious to Tess that Nan had problems at home. She never spoke of them, but she made little comments about having to be back at a certain time so that her husband wouldn’t be angry, or about having to be sure that her housework was done properly to keep him happy. It sounded as if any lapse in what her husband considered her most important duties would result in punishment.
It wasn’t until the end of her first month in Chicago that Tess discovered what Nan’s punishment was. She came to a suffragist meeting at a local matron’s house with a split lip and a black eye.
“Nan, what happened?” Tess exclaimed, her concern echoed by half a dozen fierce campaigners for women’s rights. “Did your husband strike you?”
“Oh, no!” Nan said quickly. “Why, this is nothing. I fell down the steps, is all.” She laughed nervously, putting a self-conscious hand to her eye. “I’m so clumsy sometimes.”
“Are you sure that’s all it is?” Tess persisted.
“Yes, I’m sure. But you’re sweet to worry about me, Tess,” Nan said with genuine affection.
“Don’t ever let him start hitting you,” Tess cautioned. “It will only get worse. No man has the right to beat his wife, regardless of what she’s done.”
“I fell down the steps,” Nan repeated, but she didn’t quite meet Tess’s eyes. “Dennis gets impatient with me when I’m slow, especially when those rich friends of his come over, and he thinks I’m stupid sometimes, but he…he wouldn’t hit me.”
Tess had seen too many victims of brutality to be convinced by Nan’s story. Working as a nurse was very informative—too informative sometimes.
She patted the other woman’s shoulder gently. “Well, if you ever need help, I’ll do what I can for you. I promise.”
Nan smiled, wincing as the motion pulled the cut on her lower lip open. She dabbed at it with her handkerchief. “Thanks, Tess, but I’m okay.”
Tess sighed. “Very well, then.”
The meeting was boisterous, as often happened, and some of the opinions voiced seemed radical even to Tess. But the majority of the members wanted only the right to be treated, at least in the polling booth, as equal to men.
“The Quakers have always accepted women as equals,” one woman said angrily. “But our men are still living in the Dark Ages. Most of them look upon us as property. Even the best men think a woman is too ignorant to render an opinion on any matter of public interest.”
“Yes!” came cries of assent.
“Furthermore, we have no control over our own bodies and must bear children again and again, whether we’re able or not. Many of our sisters have died in childbirth. Many others are so overburdened by children that they have no energy for any other pursuit. But if we mention any sort of birth control, especially abstinence, men brand us heretics!”
There were more cries of support.
“We cannot even vote,” the woman continued. “Men treat us either as children or idiots. A woman is looked down upon if she even shops for her own groceries!”
“Or if she works away from the home!” another added.
“It is time, past time, that we demanded the rights to which any man is legally entitled at birth. We must not accept being second-class citizens any longer. We must act!”
“Yes, we must!”
“Yes!”
They were all in agreement that they should march on city hall as soon as possible. A date was set and leaders designated.
“I can’t go,” Nan said with a long sigh. “Dennis will be home all day.” She barely repressed a shudder. “I wouldn’t dare leave the house.”
“You could sneak away,” a woman standing nearby suggested.
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Nan said quickly. “He doesn’t even like me coming to one of these meetings each week. I have to be so careful to make sure he doesn’t know how involved I am. So it’s best if he isn’t home when I creep off for a rally or an added meeting.” Her thin shoulders rose and fell as if they bore a heavy burden. “He works an extra job away from the telegraph office on Mondays and Thursdays, and he’s real late getting home, so I can get out and he doesn’t know.”
What a horrible way to have to live, Tess thought. She wondered, not for the first time, what sort of home life poor Nan had. Men could be such brutes!
TESS WAS STILL FUMING about Dennis’s treatment of Nan when she got home. Matt was on his way out, and she met him on the front steps. He looked gloriously handsome in his expensive vested suit. She remembered how his hair used to look hanging straight and clean almost to his waist, and wondered if it was still that long. Since he hid his braid these days, she couldn’t judge the length.
“You work all the time,” she accused gently, smiling.
“I’m addicted to fancy gear,” he teased. “I have to make enough to support my expensive tastes.” His large black eyes went over her, in her neat skirt and blouse under a long overcoat. “Another meeting?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the friend who goes with you?” he asked, frowning when he noted that she was on the street alone.
“On her way home in the carriage I hired,” she explained. “It lets me off first.”
He nodded. “You be careful,” he cautioned. “You’re a daisy back east.”
“I can still shoot a bow and arrow.” She winked. “Skin a deer. Track a cougar.” She leaned closer. “Use a bowie knife.”
“Stop that.”
“Sorry. It slipped out.”
He glowered. “I don’t use it. I threaten to use it.”
“There’s a difference?”
“There certainly is. A very big difference, miss.”
“I’ll reform,” she promised, smiling. There were deep lines around his mouth and nose, and dark circles under his eyes. “Poor Matt. You’re tired to death.”
“I spend long nights watching people I’m hired to watch.” He studied her face under the wide-brimmed felt hat she was wearing. “You don’t look much better.”
“Nursing is a tiring profession, too, Matt. I spent my day sitting with a patient who had a leg amputated. He was knocked down and run over by a carriage. He’s barely my age.”
“Young for such a drastic injury.”
“Yes. And he was a baseball player.”
He grimaced.
“He wants to commit suicide,” she said. “I talk and talk, hoping I’ll dissuade him.”
He touched her cheek. It was cold from the winter wind. “I felt that way myself, once,” he murmured. “Then this pretty little blonde girl came and held my hand while her father dug bullets out of my hide. And soon life grew sweet once more.”
“Did I make you want to live?” she asked. “Really?”
He nodded. “My whole family was dead. I had nothing to look forward to beyond hating the white soldiers or trying to avenge my people. I was in such terrible pain. But the pain grew manageable, and I saw the futility of trying to fight a veritable ocean of whites. What is it you say, better to join than fight them?”
“If the odds are against you.” She liked the feel of his strong, warm fingers on her cheek. She stood very still so that he wouldn’t move them. “Is it so bad, the way you live now?”
He studied her face. “If I were a poor man, it might be. I have too many advantages here to feel sorry for myself.” His eyes narrowed. “Tess, try not to get too embroiled in the women’s movement, will you? Some of these women are very radical.”
“I promise not to go wild with a hatchet in any local bars,” she said demurely. “Does that reassure you?”
“Not a lot,” he said. “Your father worried about you.”
Her pale eyes became sad. “Yes, he did. I miss him terribly. But I couldn’t very well stay on at the reservation. The job was his, not mine.”
“They’d probably have hired you to teach, if you’d asked,” he commented.
“Possibly. Still, there was the persistent lieutenant. What a temptation he presented.”
His brow rose. “Temptation?”
“I was tempted to put a bullet through him,” she clarified. “I was at Wounded Knee, too, Matt. I know he shot women and children and old men.”
His hand slowly lowered. “You should go inside. It’s too cold out here for idle conversation.”
“You can’t imagine how you look when I mention the massacre,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. However painful the memories are for me, I know they’re a hundred times worse for you.”
He gazed down at her with his heart twisting inside him. She was pretty, but her attraction went so far beyond the physical. She had a soft heart and a stubborn independence that made his breath catch. She had, he mused, a savage heart.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked.
“I was thinking how you go headfirst into a fight,” he replied. “And how soft your heart is.” He became solemn. “Don’t wear it on your sleeve, little one,” he said softly. “The world can be a cruel place.”
She saw the lines in his hard face and reached up hesitantly to touch the ones between his dark eyes. He flinched and she jerked her fingers back.
“Sorry!” she cried, flustered.
His expression grew even more grim. “I’m not used to being touched. Especially by women.”
She laughed nervously. “So I noticed!”
He relaxed, but only fractionally. “I’ve grown a shell since I’ve been here,” he confessed. “And now I’m trapped in it. I’m rich and successful. But under it all, I’m still a poor ragged Indian—to people more shortsighted than you are.”
“I’ve only always thought of you as my friend.”
“And I am,” he said solemnly. “I’d do anything for you.”
“I know that.” She drew her old coat closer and smiled up at him, her gaze intent. “I’d do anything for you, too, Matt.”
As she turned away, he suddenly caught her arm and swung her back to him. The unexpected movement made her lose her balance. She fell heavily against him. His hand at her back steadied her, and she rested against him, breathing in soap and cologne and a faint scent of tobacco from the occasional cigar he smoked.
His eyes were turbulent, and the hold he had on her was new and exciting.
A little startled, she asked huskily, “What is it?”
His gaze roamed over her face, then stopped on her mouth. Her lips were full and soft and he wondered not for the first time in their long relationship how they would feel under his. The hunger he felt made his heart race.
“Matt, you’re scaring me,” she said all in one breath.
“Nothing scares you,” he returned. “You walked right into the thick of the wounded, even before the soldiers had stopped hunting the people who escaped the Hotchkiss guns. A young girl with her whole life ahead of her, completely blameless. You and your father were kind…and so courageous.”
The contact with his hard chest was making her knees weak. She bit her lower lip, trying to regain some sort of control over her wandering senses. Her hands pressed gently into the silky stuff of his vest.
“This is…unconventional.”
“Working as a nurse isn’t?”
She punched him in the ribs. “Don’t you start. I get enough guff from those old ladies in there.” She scanned the dark windows of the boardinghouse. Did a curtain move?
“They’re probably clutching the windowsills, dying to see what happens next.”
“What happens next is that you let go of me so that I can get in out of the cold,” Tess said with far more confidence than she felt. Her reaction to Matt’s closeness was surprising and a little frightening. She hadn’t thought herself vulnerable to any man’s touch.
His lean, strong hands moved down to her tiny waist and rested there while he continued to look intently at her.
“You aren’t like any other women I’ve ever known,” he said after a long, breathless silence.
“Do you know a lot of women in Chicago who shoot bows and speak Sioux?”
He shook her gently. “Be serious.”
“I don’t dare.” She laughed. “I have…I have my life planned. I intend to devote it to the women’s movement.”
“Totally?”
She fidgeted in his grasp. “Yes.”
“Have they convinced you that men are superfluous? Or, perhaps, suitable only for the purpose of breeding?”
“Matt!”
“Don’t look so outraged. I’ve heard members of the women’s rights groups say such things. Like the mythical Amazons, they feel that men are good for only one purpose, and that marriage is the first step to feminine slavery.”
“It is,” she said vehemently. “Look around you. Most married women have a child a year. They’re considered loose if they work outside the home. They must bend to the husband’s will without thought of their own comfort or safety. There is nothing to stop a man from beating his wife and children, from gambling away all they own, from drinking from dawn till dusk.... Oh, Matt, can’t you see the terror of this from a woman’s point of view, even a little?”
“Of course I can,” he replied honestly. “But you speak of exceptions, not the rule. Remember, Tess, change is a slow thing in a large society.”
“It won’t happen by itself.”
“I agree. But I also feel that it can’t be forced in any drastic fashion. Such as,” he continued coldly, “taking children away from their parents on the reservations and sending them away to government schools, making it illegal for them to speak their own language—” he paused, smiling now “—even making it illegal to wear their hair long.”
Her hands itched to touch his hair, as she had only once, in the early days of their relationship, when he was teaching her the bow. She searched his dark eyes, a question in her own. “Do you miss the old days?”
He laughed shortly and let her go. “How can I miss something so primitive? Can you really see me in buckskins speaking pidgin English?”
She shook her head. “No, not you,” she said. “You’d be in a warbonnet, painted, on horseback, a bow in hand.”
He averted his head. “I’ll be late. I have to go.”
“Matt, for heaven’s sake, you aren’t ashamed of your heritage?”
“Good night, Tess. Don’t go out alone. It’s dangerous.”
He strode away without a single look over his shoulder. Tess stood and watched him for a moment, shivering in the cold wind. He was ashamed of being Sioux. She hadn’t realized the depth of it until tonight. Perhaps that explained why he rarely went home to South Dakota, why he didn’t speak of his cousins there, why he dressed so deliberately as a rich white man. He hadn’t cut his hair, though, so he might retain a vestige of pride in his background, even if he kept it hidden. She shook her head. So many of his people had been unable to do what he had, to resign themselves to living like whites, and the policies forbidding them their most sacred ceremonies and the comfort of their shamans were slowly killing their souls. It must have been easier for Matt to live in Chicago and fan the fires of gossip about his true background, than to go to the reservation and deal with it.
She recalled the way soldiers and other white men had spoken to him when he lived with her and her father, and she bristled now as she had then at the blows to his enormous pride. Prejudice ran rampant these days. Nativism, they called it. Nobody wanted “foreigners” in this country, to hear white people talk. Tess’s lip curled. The very thought of calling a native American a foreigner made her furious. Out west, one still could hear discussion about eradicating the small remnant of the Indian people by taking away all their remaining lands and forcefully absorbing them into white society, absorbing them and wiping out their own culture in the process.
Did no one realize that it was one hairbreadth from genocide? It turned Tess’s stomach. She’d always felt that the government’s approach to assimilating the Indians was responsible for the high rates of alcoholism, suicide and infant mortality on the reservations.
She turned away from the cold wind and went inside the boardinghouse, her mind ablaze with indignation for Indians and women. Both were downtrodden by white men, both forbidden the vote.
The two old ladies who lived upstairs, Miss Barkley and Miss Dean, gave her a cold stare as she tried to pass quickly by the open door to the parlor where they sat.
“Decent young ladies should not stand in the street with men,” Miss Dean said icily. “Nor should they attend radical meetings or work in hospitals.”
“Someone must tend the sick,” Tess said. “I daresay it might do you both good to come to one of our meetings and hear what your sisters in life are bearing because society refuses to accept women as equals!”
Miss Barkley went pale. “Miss…Meredith,” she gasped, a hand at her throat, “I do not consider myself the equal of a man, nor should I want to!”
“Filthy, sweating brutes,” Miss Dean agreed. “They should all be shot.”
Tess grinned. “There, you see, Miss Dean, you and I have much in common! You simply must come to a meeting with me.”
“Among those radicals?” asked Miss Dean, scandalized.
“They aren’t,” Tess returned. “They’re honest, hardworking girls who want to live life as full citizens of this country. We are a new type of woman. We will never settle back and accept second-class citizenship.”
Miss Barkley was red in the face. “Well, I never!”
Miss Dean held up a hand. “A moment, Clara,” she told her companion. “Miss Meredith presents some interesting arguments. These meetings are open to anyone?”
“Certainly,” Tess said. “You may go with me next Tuesday, if you like, and see what they are about.”
“Ida, don’t you dare!” Miss Barkley fumed.
“I should have gone, were I twenty years younger,” came the reply, and a smile. “But I am too old and set in my ways, Miss Meredith.”
“Tess,” she corrected.
The older woman’s eyes twinkled. “Tess, then. I hope you achieve your goals. My generation will not live to see it, but perhaps yours will eventually gain the vote.”
Tess went to her own room, happily having diverted them from any discussion of her surprising interaction with Matt. It wouldn’t do to have people in the boardinghouse speculate about the two of them. She refused to do any speculating on her own, either. She buried Matt’s odd behavior in the back of her mind and got ready for bed.
Outside the wind was blowing fiercely; snowflakes struck the windowpane. She closed her eyes, hoping for a heavy snowfall. She always felt curiously happy, often content, too, on snowy days.
Chapter Three
Saturday’s march was lively. It was held after dark with torches to light the path of the marchers. More than four hundred women showed up, carrying placards. Tess marched between two women she knew vaguely, but she missed the company of her friend Nan.
“Isn’t this exciting?” the girl beside her asked. “We’re bound to win with such large numbers of us demanding the vote now.”
Tess agreed, but less wholeheartedly. She’d learned one terrible truth in her young life, and that was the bullheadedness of government in the face of demands for change. Regardless of how just the cause, the people in power in Washington were avid in supporting the status quo. Roosevelt was keen on creating a safe place for wildlife and showing pride in the American spirit. But he was also a believer in Manifest Destiny, and a manly man. Tess wondered if he shared the same attitude toward women that most men of his generation harbored—that women were created only to keep house and bear children and look after men.
Demonstrations inevitably attracted spectators; Tess glanced around at them. A man waving a flag that read Up With Labor stepped from the street into the ranks of the women, bringing a small body of cohorts with him.
“This is not your group!” one woman yelled at him.
“This struggle is also the workers’ struggle!” the man yelled back, and kept marching. “We support your cause! Down with oppression of all kinds!”
“You see?” one of Tess’s companions grumbled. “We cannot even hold a rally without having a man step in and try to lead it. Well, I’ll just show him a thing or two!”
The small, matronly woman turned in the throng with her placard held like a club and beaned the advocate for laborers with it right on his bald spot.
He yelped and dropped the banner, and the few men and women who were in his group started attacking the women’s rights marchers.
Tess stood very still and gave a long sigh as she heard the first of many police whistles start to sound. The authorities had looked for a way to break up this march, and the communist had given it to them. The small scuffle became a melee.
As she tried to move back from the combatants, Tess was aware of a newcomer who didn’t seem to be part of either group. He was tall and young, expensively dressed, and he carried a cane. He seemed to be looking straight at her. While she was wondering about the odd incident, she was suddenly knocked down and all but trampled as the fighting accelerated.
She never lost consciousness, but she heard a metallic sound through the commotion of loud voices. She rolled to avoid being stepped on, and as she did, her arm was hit a mighty blow. It throbbed, and even though the light was dim, she could see that the sleeve of her jacket and blouse seemed to be ripped through.
Two policemen were on either side of her when she looked up again. One of them, kindly and older, assisted her to the sidewalk. Muttering about people who couldn’t live and let live, he left her on the stoop of an apartment house. Two small boys played with a hoop and gave her curious stares.
She wished that she could open her blouse and look at her arm because it felt wet as well as bruised under her torn jacket, but to do something so indecent in public would start another riot. She wondered how she was going to find the carriage and driver Matt had insisted on hiring to take her to and from the hospital and her suffragist meetings as soon as she’d received the nursing position and found the group of women she wanted to join. Her driver, Mick Kennedy, was a prince of a fellow, and she’d asked him to wait a number of blocks away from the demonstration for her. Now the streets were in such an uproar and she was feeling so very disoriented that she wasn’t sure precisely where he was or how to find him.
As luck would have it, Mick Kennedy found her. Worried by what he’d seen on the fringes of the demonstration, he’d hitched his team to a streetlamp, plunged into the crowd, and spent the last fifteen minutes or so searching for her. He was visibly relieved to find her.
“Hurt in all this, were you?” At her nod, he added, “Some mess, I’ll say. Shall I get you back to your boardinghouse?”
“Oh, yes, thank you, Mick.”
“Well, now, just take me arm and I’ll have you back there in no time, or me name’s not Mick Kennedy!”
In short order they were out of the crowd, and Mick was helping Tess into the carriage. His fine team was swiftly under way, drawing the impressive black carriage through the thinning crowd.
By the time they reached the boardinghouse, Tess’s arm was much worse.
“Shall I help you up to your door, ma’am?” Mick offered.
“No, thank you. I can manage.” She smiled, then made her way slowly up the steps.
Mrs. Mulhaney met her at the door. At the sight of Tess, dirty and disheveled, her hat askew and her hair coming down, she exclaimed, “Why, Miss Meredith, whatever has happened?”
“A man from the workers’ party infiltrated our ranks and provoked one of our number to violence.” Tess groaned. She leaned against the wall, wincing and nauseated, as she regarded the staircase with uneasy eyes and wondered how she was going to get to her room.
“Is my cousin Matt in this evening?” she asked suddenly.
“Why, I’m sure he is. I haven’t seen him go out. You wait here, my dear. I’ll fetch him!”
Mrs. Mulhaney rushed upstairs and quickly came back down with Matt, who was shrugging into a jacket as he walked. He eyed Tess with an expression she was too wounded to contemplate.
“Are you hurt? Where?” he asked immediately.
“My arm,” she said, breathing unsteadily. “I was trodden on, and I think it may be cut, as my sleeve is.”
“Can you send for Dr. Barrows?” he asked Mrs. Mulhaney.
“I can—and shall. At once. Can you take Miss Meredith to her room?”
“Yes.”
Without another word, Matt swung Tess up in his arms and climbed the staircase as easily as if he were carrying feathers.
She clung to his neck, savoring his great strength as he covered the distance to her door.
“Who did this?” he asked under his breath.
“There was a riot,” she explained. “I don’t know who did it. Several people were fighting, and I seem to have got in the way. My arm throbs so!”
“Which one?”
“The left one, just above the elbow. I didn’t even see how it happened. I rolled away from a very heavy man who was about to step on me. I remember a man with a cane looking at me before I fell, just before something stabbed at my arm. I think it might have been his cane. I wish I’d bitten his ankle.”
The mental picture of Tess with her teeth in a man’s ankle amused Matt and he chuckled softly.
“Here, open the door for me, can you?” he asked, lowering her.
She turned the crystal knob with her good hand and pushed the door open, trying not to notice the faint scent of his cologne and the warm sigh of his breath close to her lips. Matt shouldered into the room and carried her to her bed. He put her down very gently on the quilt that covered the white-enameled iron bedstead.
Wary of Mrs. Mulhaney’s return, he closed the door and then matter-of-factly began taking off Tess’s jacket.
She was panting, but not from the pain. “Matt, you…mustn’t!” She feverishly tried to stay the lean, strong hands that were unfastening her blouse.
His black eyes met hers with a faint twinkle. “Feeling prudish, Tess? You saw as much if not more of me after I was shot at Wounded Knee.”
“I was fourteen then,” she said, aware even as she spoke that it was a nonsensical answer. “And you mustn’t handle me…like this.”
“Where are all those slogans you were spouting about a woman’s rights?” He glanced down again at the buttons. “Don’t your more radical sisters even advocate free love?”
“I am not…that radical! Will you please stop undressing me?”
He didn’t even slow down. “With the best of luck, it will take the doctor a little time to get here,” he said as he worked buttons through the dainty holes. “I smell the blood.”
She started, having forgotten about Matt’s remarkable sensory powers, honed from childhood. If he’d ever been a child. Sioux males trained to be warriors from a very early age, learning the knife and bow and horsemanship as young boys, and getting a taste of battle by accompanying war parties as water carriers.
“Matt…” she protested, both hands going to the buttons to stop him.
He brushed her fumbling fingers aside. “I never imagined you to be such a prim woman,” he chided. “You and I know more about each other than many husbands and wives do.”
That was true. Intimacy had been forced into their relationship because she nursed him so long after his devastating wounds. Not that her father hadn’t had many qualms. It violated his sense of morality and decorum, but he had been unable to withstand her tearful pleas to be allowed to help.
“But this is…different,” she tried to explain.
His hands stilled for an instant while he looked into her eyes and saw the shyness there.
“I would do the same for anyone,” he said evenly.
She bit her lower lip.
He moved her hands aside very gently. “No one will ever know,” he said softly. “Does that reassure you?”
It was odd that she trusted him so much. The thought of any other man’s hands on her was sickening. But not Matt’s. They were immaculate hands, always clean and neat and so very strong, yet gentle.
The problem was that her heart reacted violently to the touch of those hands on her bare skin over her collarbone. She ached for him to do more than unbutton her clothing, though she couldn’t imagine what that “more” might be.
He pretended not to notice, and unbuttoned the last of the buttons on her blouse. Visible beneath it was a whalebone corset and, above that, a lace-decorated muslin chemise. At the sight of the dark points of her nipples through the muslin Matt’s hands stilled. A faint glitter claimed his dark eyes for an instant.
“You mustn’t stare at me like that,” she whispered.
His eyes lifted to hers. “Why not?”
She wondered that herself. While she was struggling for a rational reason, his eyes went back to her bodice and seemed bent on memorizing how she looked.
“Oh, this is very unconventional,” she protested weakly.
“And wickedly pleasurable,” he murmured. His hand slid from the buttons of her blouse to the edge of the muslin and she jumped as if his lean fingers burned her soft skin.
“You rake!” she gasped, catching his hand.
“All right.” He chuckled, letting her move his curious fingers back to the task at hand. “If I had any lingering doubts about your modern ideas, they’re gone now.”
“What do you mean?” she asked indignantly.
“All that talk about free love and liberated morals,” he chided. “You’re a fraud.”
She glowered, but she didn’t deny it. He lifted her and moved her arm gently to free it from the long sleeve of her blouse. It hurt dreadfully.
He whispered to her in Sioux, a tender command to be still. Once the arm was free, leaving her only in the sleeveless muslin chemise, he turned her arm gently so that he could see the wound. It was a long, deep cut on her upper arm, made not by a cane, but almost certainly by a sword. A sword concealed in a cane? Whoever had wielded it had meant to do damage, perhaps even more damage than he’d accomplished with this wound.
“This is deep,” he said angrily. The rent in her otherwise perfect white skin was sluggishly discharging blood. He took a cloth from the washstand, applied pressure, making her wince, and held it until the bleeding began to stop.
“I wish I knew who did it,” she muttered.
“No more than I do.” He held her hand above the cloth he’d placed over the wound and left her long enough to fetch a basin of water and soap and a fresh cloth. He bathed the wound gently, watching her posture go rigid as he performed the necessary chore. He put the basin aside to fetch a bottle of rubbing alcohol and some cotton flannel. “This is going to hurt like hell,” he told her.
She held her arm steady and looked at him with her teeth locked, then nodded.
The sting was almost unbearable. She made a sharp little cry and bit her lip as he flooded the wound with the alcohol.
“Sorry,” she said at once, pale but game. “That was shameful, to cry out like that.”
“Considering the pain, it was hardly shameful,” he said honestly. He covered the wound with another piece of clean flannel and went to fetch her lacy robe from the clothes closet. Gently, he enfolded her in it.
“No, Matt, it’s the only one I have! The blood will stain it!”
“Robes are easily replaced,” he said indifferently. “Put it on.”
And without argument she did so, docile, he supposed, because of the pain. He drew the front edges together, his knuckles just barely brushing the curve of her breasts above the chemise, and she gasped at the contact.
He hesitated, searching her eyes. Under his hands, he could feel the frantic whip of her heart; he could see the erratic beat of the pulse in her neck. Her lips parted and everything she felt was suddenly visible. A scarlet flush ran from her cheeks down her white throat to the silky white skin of her throat and shoulders and breasts.
Something was happening to her. She felt her breasts draw, as if they’d gone cold. Inside her, there was a burst of warmth, a throbbing that made her feel tight all over. Matt’s hands contracted on the lace of the robe, and if she wasn’t badly mistaken, they moved closer to her skin, the warm knuckles blatantly pressing into the soft flesh.
His eyes were on a level with hers, and her heart raced even faster as she saw the heat in them. They were a liquid black, steady and turbulent, unblinking on her rapt face. For seconds that dragged into minutes, they simply looked at each other in hot silence.
Just as his hands moved again, just as she felt the chemise give under their insistent but almost imperceptible downward pressure, footsteps on the staircase sounded like thunder, breaking the spell.
Matt stood up at once and turned away from her, leaving her to close the robe and fasten it frantically. Her hand went protectively to the flannel she was holding over the wound.
There was a perfunctory knock and the door opened.
The doctor glanced from one to the other. “Matt Davis? And this would be your cousin?” he added with a smile, closing the door behind him. “What happened?”
She told him in a jerky voice.
“I brought her some water and soap to bathe the wound and some flannel and alcohol to clean it thoroughly,” Matt said. “But it will need more tending.”
“Of course it will. Wait outside again if you don’t mind, young man,” he added, assuming, as Matt had meant him to, that Tess had done the treatment herself.
“Certainly,” Matt said formally, and went out of the room.
The doctor pulled the robe aside and probed the wound carefully. “What did this?”
She winced at the unpleasant examination. “A cane, I believe.”
“No, ma’am. More probably the point of a sword cane,” he corrected. “A nasty deep cutting wound, too. I’ll do what I can, but you’re going to be very sick for a few days, young woman. This wound will have to be carefully watched for sepsis. I’m to be called at once if you see red streaks on your arm…or a greenish discoloration around the wound.”
“I’m a nurse, sir,” she said in a strained tone. “My father was a physician.”
“Indeed!”
“I work in the Cook County Hospital,” she added.
“I thought you looked familiar. What a small world. And how fortunate that you knew what to do for this. I shan’t need to lecture you on how to tend it, shall I?” he added with a small chuckle.
He swabbed the wound with more alcohol, then began to take stitches while she recited the alphabet through gritted teeth.
“I have only a small amount of suturing material with me,” he explained. “That wound could do with a few more stitches, but I think the three I’ve made will hold just fine.” He applied a neat bandage.
“You’ll send for me if there are any problems,” he said, rising. “And you won’t work until the wound heals,” he added firmly.
“Yes, sir,” she said with a resigned sigh, wondering how she was going to earn her crust of bread. She still had a little of the nest egg her father had left her. Hopefully, she wouldn’t have to use too much of it. “You’ll send your bill?”
“My wife will,” he said kindly. “And now I’ll give you something to make you sleep.”
He left a bottle of laudanum with instructions on its use, gave her a polite nod and a smile as he snapped his bag shut and left.
Somber and quiet, Matt entered only minutes later. “The doctor said that he gave you something to make you rest.”
“Yes. This.” She indicated the cork-stoppered brown bottle.
“I’ll fetch a spoon.”
“Can’t I have it in water?”
“All right.”
There was a glass carafe near the bed. He poured water from it into its matching cup, mixed the drug for her and watched her gulp the bitter-tasting draft.
“If you have fever, and you probably will, you’ll have to be sponged down,” he said. “I’d prefer to stay with you myself, but it just wouldn’t be acceptable, Tess. You know that. Mrs. Mulhaney already has complained about your nursing and your work in the women’s movement. We don’t dare make matters worse.”
She felt very sick, and her arm was hurting badly. She looked up at Matt, only half hearing him. “I feel terrible.”
“No doubt.” He brushed wisps of hair back from her face. “I’m going to find someone to sit with you. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”
Her hand caught his, and she held it to her cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered wearily.
His face was unreadable, but his fingers lightly caressed her cheek before he drew them away. “Try to sleep,” he said. “The laudanum should help.”
“Yes.”
He eased out the door and closed it behind him, his dark face taut with anger. It made no sense at all that someone should deliberately stab her, but that was the only logical explanation for what had happened. And he had a sick feeling that wounding her had not been the goal of her attacker. Far from it. She’d mentioned rolling away from trampling feet just before she felt the pain. Had he been aiming at another target on her body? If she hadn’t rolled over, would she be dead now?
He was being fanciful, he told himself. Tess had been in Chicago a very brief time. Why would anyone want to kill her? No, it had to have been some renegade, perhaps a disgruntled husband or son who hated all women and found an outlet for his anger in attacking a member of the women’s movement. But why Tess?
BY THE TIME MATT LOCATED an elderly woman who made her living caring for the sick and infirm to sit with Tess, the patient was long since fast asleep on her pillows, still in her clothing. Matt looked in on her briefly and then left her with the sitter, Mrs. Hayes, confident from his knowledge of the woman that she’d take good care of Tess. It was much too late for him to be sitting in the room, and Tess still had to be put into her night clothing, asleep or not. He didn’t like leaving her, but there was very little he could do for her right now. He daren’t risk her reputation.
On his way back to his own room, he was intercepted by a flustered Mrs. Mulhaney.
“Mr. Davis, two of my tenants are very, very upset by all this,” she said worriedly. “Please don’t think that I haven’t every sympathy for your cousin’s wound, but these suffragists do bring such things on themselves…marches and torchlight parades, and working around hospitals and living alone. It’s so scandalous!”
Matt had to bite his tongue to keep from making a harsh reply. Mrs. Mulhaney was a victim of her own advanced age and her upbringing. She wouldn’t move easily into the twentieth century.
“She’s my cousin,” he said. “I won’t turn my back on her.”
He didn’t smile. At times he could look quite formidable. This was one of them.
“Well, and I wouldn’t expect you to!” she said, reddening. She made an odd gesture. “I’m sure that she’ll be discreet in the future—I mean, I do hope that she’ll be all right. If there’s anything I can do…”
“I’ve employed a woman to sit with her,” he said. “She’ll be taken care of.”
Matt Davis made her feel uncharitable, Mrs. Mulhaney thought. Those black eyes of his could chill her bones. She often wondered about his background. There were so many rumors about his origins. He didn’t have an accent, so she discounted those who credited him with European ancestry. However, the thought occurred to her that he might have studied English so thoroughly that he had no accent. She’d seen an African at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and he spoke perfect English with a British accent!
“If there’s anything I can do…” she reiterated.
Matt only nodded and went into his room, closing the door firmly behind him. Mrs. Mulhaney hovered, but only for a moment, then rushed downstairs, trying to put the troubling Matt Davis and his beautiful maverick cousin out of her mind.
SUNDAY, MATT SAT with Tess and Mrs. Hayes for most of the day, not caring what the other tenants or Mrs. Mulhaney might think. Tess was much worse, and quite feverish, as the doctor had predicted. She was pale as death except for her flushed cheeks.
Mrs. Hayes spent a good deal of her time wetting cold cloths to put over Tess’s feverish forehead.
“My husband was shot once,” she confided, “in a riot. Acted just like this, he did, delirious and tossing and turning and saying all sorts of crazy things. Poor child. She keeps muttering about birds. Ravens.”
He was not going to tell her that he’d once been known as Raven Following, or about the superstitions of his people concerning that large black bird.
“Delirious, I suppose,” he said, his eyes on Tess’s drawn face.
“She’s been like this for most of the night and a good deal of the morning,” Mrs. Hayes said. She put another cloth in place. “I’ll keep this fever at bay, don’t you worry, Mr. Davis. This child will be fine.”
He didn’t answer. One lean hand reached down to touch Tess’s flushed cheek.
Her pale green eyes opened, and she looked up at him through a mist of fever and laudanum. “My arm…hurts. Where is my father?”
Matt hesitated. “He isn’t here,” he said finally. “You’re going to be fine. Try to sleep.”
“I can’t…sleep. The birds come. They tear at my flesh.” She shivered as she looked at him. “The bullets,” she whispered frantically. “They tore the flesh like giant talons, and the people lay there, in the snow…in the snow!”
Wounded Knee. The fever would accentuate the horrible memories.
“Crazed in the head.” Mrs. Hayes nodded. “Birds and bullets and snow. Poor thing. Where is her father?” she asked Matt when Tess had slipped back into oblivion.
“He died,” he replied bluntly, “just a couple of months ago. She came here because I’m the only family she has left.” It made him warm inside to say it that way. It felt so true. She was the only family he had, too. They weren’t related—well, not by blood, at least—a fact that he didn’t dare share with anyone.
“Well, it’s good that you have each other,” Mrs. Hayes said. She frowned as she studied Tess. “Odd that she hasn’t married, and her such a pretty girl.”
“Yes,” he said.
She glanced at him. “No beau at all?”
“No,” he replied, hating the thought of Tess with another man. He’d often worried about what he’d do if she ever decided to marry anyone else. The situation hadn’t arisen, though, thank God. “She’s never mentioned a special man.”
“Would she, to her own cousin?” Mrs. Hayes asked. “But, then, perhaps not. It is a shame, though.”
Matt changed the subject adroitly by asking what Mrs. Hayes thought of President Roosevelt. She was good for an hour on that topic, as it happened, and Matt was able to avoid any more discussion of Tess’s love life.
THE NEXT MORNING, after only a few hours of sleep, Matt shaved and dressed for work.
He went in to see Tess, who was sleeping and still looked feverish. “I have to go to my office,” Matt said reluctantly. “Take good care of her. She’s a fighter, but it won’t hurt to remind her that she is.”
“I’ll do that.” Mrs. Hayes frowned. “That arm’s bleeding,” she pointed out.
Matt felt his stomach do an uneasy flip. “I’ll call at Dr. Barrows’s office on my way,” Matt said with a grim sigh. “She’s probably tossed and turned enough to tear the stitches.”
“T’ain’t but three stitches,” Mrs. Hayes said curtly. “I had to retie the bandage early this morning. That’s why it’s opened again.”
“What?” Matt’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Good Lord, the cut’s almost four inches long! It needed more than three stitches! I’ll speak to him about that, as well,” he said. He nodded, took one last look at Tess, and went out the door. His stride was enough to make two gentlemen on the street step right back to give him room.
DR. BARROWS WAS ON HIS way out when Matt caught up with him at the office he maintained at the side of his elegant residence.
“Tess is restless and has torn the wound open,” he told the physician curtly. “And Mrs. Hayes says that there were only three stitches to keep it from reopening.”
Dr. Barrows fidgeted, his black bag right in his hand. “Yes, yes, I know, I had barely enough sutures for that many stitches. I was sleepy, and it was very late… I have plenty of sutures this morning, though, and I’ll attend to it. Is she feverish?”
“Very.” Matt’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll take it personally if she doesn’t improve,” he added, and with an almost imperceptible movement of his arm, his jacket drew back from the bright paisley vest to disclose a leather belt that held a long, broad knife with a carved bone handle.
The doctor was used to threats, and he didn’t take them seriously. But this man wasn’t like those he routinely dealt with. And he hadn’t seen a knife like that since a boyhood trip out to the Great Plains. One of the cavalry scouts, a half-breed, had carried something similar. It was a great wide gleaming blade of metal with which, a sergeant told him, that very scout had lifted a scalp right in front of his eyes.
His hand tightened on his bag. “Of course you will, Mr. Davis,” he said curtly. “But your cousin is going to improve. I’ll take excellent care of her!”
“I know you will,” Matt replied, and the very words carried a soft, dangerous threat that was only emphasized by the faint smile on his thin lips.
Dr. Barrows watched the tall man walk away, his eyes narrowed on that odd gait. Davis didn’t walk like a city man. Like many other Chicagoans, he wondered where the mysterious Mr. Davis came from. But it wasn’t a question he was keen to ask the man. No, not at all keen.
He pulled his pocket watch out by its long gold chain and flipped the case open with a practiced movement. He was already late starting his calls, but he was going to see Miss Meredith first thing. He should have gone home for the sutures Saturday night. He certainly would properly stitch that wound today!
Chapter Four
Sitting behind his huge oak desk in a swivel chair, Matt whirled toward the fair, younger man who had just entered at his call.
“Stanley, I want to find somebody,” he said curtly. “A well-dressed man with a cane who was at the women’s movement torchlight parade Saturday night. He’d probably be with the workers’ party people who muscled in on the women.”
“Yes, sir,” Stanley Lang said eagerly. Stanley was only twenty-two, a tall and gangly man who reacted with enthusiasm to any sort of job he was given. He was also the youngest of Matt’s six agents. “Do we have any identification for this man?”
“None,” was the deep reply. “He stabbed my cousin. I want his name.”
Stanley’s eyes opened wide. He’d worked for Matt Davis for two years, and he’d heard from the other agents that their boss never spoke of family. This was news indeed.
“Was he badly hurt?” Stanley asked.
“She,” Matt corrected. “She was stabbed in the arm. But I think the man meant to do her worse harm. I must know who he is.”
“Well, I’ll certainly do my best, sir,” Stanley returned. “And I hope your cousin will be all right.”
“So do I,” Matt murmured. He glanced up. “Get going, man.”
“Yes, sir, and thank you for the opportunity—”
“Out, Stanley.”
“Yes, sir, but I really do appreciate—”
“Out!”
Stanley withdrew at once with a wide grin and closed the door to discourage any flying objects that might come from that quarter. Matt Davis was known to throw things when he was in one of his black moods. Usually it was something soft. But one never knew.
MATT BROODED FOR HALF the day while he pursued his own pending cases, sending his agents out on various routine tasks. Most of his cases involved criminal activities of some sort. But one man had required an agent to follow a young woman—his wife, presumably—whom he suspected of infidelity. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, of which Matt had been an agent until two years before, had refused to accept cases that involved public or private morals. However, Matt had taken what business he could get when he started his own agency. He’d been amazed at how rapidly his clientele grew, and how wealthy he’d become in a relatively short time. Although he was able to be selective now, he also accepted cases on an individual basis, and his acceptance depended on his assessment of the client.
A rich widower wanted his daughter’s shady new boyfriend checked out because he suspected that the man was a gigolo. The girl was very young and innocent, and the man had a shady reputation. Matt had accepted the case because he felt sorry for the girl.
There were other assorted jobs on the books, none of the current ones very interesting. He leaned back in his swivel chair and remembered the exciting times he and the other Pinkertons had had chasing down yeggs, safecracking burglars who robbed banks across the country. They moved around like tramps, hiding by day and working at night. They used nitroglycerin to get into the safes and generally led the agency on a merry chase. One gang of yeggs was still operating and had achieved legendary status. Almost every Pinkerton man had some anecdote about the yeggs. One of the more ironic was that of a poor law enforcement officer whom a gang of safecrackers had taken with them at gunpoint when they went to blow up a safe at a post office somewhere out west. They’d tied him up in a canvas mailbag and stamped him for travel, leaving him otherwise unharmed.
Matt didn’t do much work on robberies anymore. He seemed to spend more and more of his time trapped in his second-floor office, dictating letters and talking to contacts and prospective clients. His men did most of the legwork now, and Matt missed the excitement of tracking down suspects, of extracting information. He must be getting old, he thought, to have allowed himself to get into such a rut.
He put the paperwork aside, still fuming about the attack on Tess. He didn’t like remembering how sick she looked when he left for work this morning, or how careless that doctor had been about her wound. Wounds brought on fever and infection and sometimes led to gangrene. He’d seen men die of it. He was worried and he was angry at himself for not checking the doctor’s work at the time. He could have punched that doctor for doing such a haphazard job. If Tess wasn’t better by morning, he was going to find another physician for her.
Why had Tess been attacked? He couldn’t answer that question. But he could make some reasonable assumptions. The assailant had to know her on sight. That narrowed down the possibilities. It could be someone from the hospital, which was highly unlikely, or someone connected with a woman who participated in the women’s rights rallies.
As he considered that last possibility, it began to make good sense. Tess had told him that she had a young friend who attended the meetings with her, whose husband disapproved of his wife’s involvement.
He shoved his chair back and stood up. Yes. That would be the most likely source.
He jerked open his office door in time to catch Stanley putting on his derby. “Stanley!”
“Yes, sir?”
“Hold on a minute. Before you go any further with your hunt for the man who attacked my cousin, I want to stop by my boardinghouse and check with her. I think I may have an easier way to find the culprit.”
“Yes, sir!”
Minutes later, Matt tapped briefly on Tess’s door and waited for Mrs. Hayes to admit him.
The older woman was chuckling as she shut him in the room with Tess and herself.
“Must have lit a fire under that pill pusher, Mr. Davis,” she mused, “because he treated herself here as if she were royalty. Looks better, don’t she?”
Indeed, Tess did look better. She was still feverish, but she was conscious and seemed aware of her surroundings.
“Matt,” she croaked, smiling through lips cracked with fever. “The doctor says my arm looks better. He put ten stitches in it this time.”
“Did he?” Matt asked with a faint smile. “Feeling up to a question?”
She nodded. Her lovely long blond hair was loose and hung over her shoulders like a cloud of gold. Matt stared at her appreciatively for a moment before he moved closer to the bed and looked down into her wan face.
“That young woman who goes to meetings with you, who is she?”
“You mean Nan?”
“Yes.”
“Her last name is Collier,” she said in a strained tone, wincing as she moved her sore arm. “Her husband, Dennis, is a telegraph clerk somewhere. Why do you ask?”
She didn’t know that she’d given him the information he wanted, without his having to pry it out of her.
“I wondered if you might like to have her visit you,” he said, lying through his teeth. “She’s the only real friend you’ve made since you came to Chicago.”
“That’s nice of you, Matt,” she said. Her tongue felt almost too thick for speech. “But I don’t think her husband would like it. He’s very angry that she comes to our meetings, and forbids her to attend more than one a week. She has to sneak out if she comes to more than that. I’m sure he wouldn’t approve of her coming here.”
Another wealth of information. He scowled as he saw her face contort.
“It must hurt a lot,” he said.
“My mouth is dry,” she replied. “Could I have some water, Mrs. Hayes?”
“Certainly, dear. Here you go.”
Matt took the cup from her with a smile. He lifted Tess’s head, his hand buried in that thick, silky blond hair, and he held the glass to her lips, watching them move weakly as she drank. Her hair felt soft, he thought, and her eyelashes were long and thick, too. Under them, her pale green eyes were the color of the leaves on the cottonwoods early in spring.
“Had enough?” he asked.
“Yes, thanks.” She smiled up at him, but the look in his eyes froze the smile. She couldn’t look away. Even in her weakened condition, Matt at close range was overwhelmingly attractive to her.
His face filling her eyes, his breath on her mouth, he eased her very slowly down onto the pillow. His eyes were black and unblinking. He hesitated there, the glass forgotten in his hand, as he searched Tess’s soft, shocked eyes.
“Mind that glass, Mr. Davis,” Mrs. Hayes murmured as she searched for her knitting needles. “I’ve already spilled one glass of water over her this morning and had to air the bedclothes.”
He stood up abruptly, putting the glass down on the bedside table with too much deliberation. “She does look better,” he said after a minute. His voice sounded hoarse. Tess’s heartbeat was visible at her throat.
“I told you so.” Mrs. Hayes chuckled. She took out her yarn and sat down in the rocking chair beside the bed. “Mrs. Mulhaney is fixing some nice chicken dumplings for supper this evening. Tess said she thinks she can eat something today.”
“Not too much,” Matt cautioned. “She’s still pretty frail.”
Tess smiled at him, all the fight gone out of her as the fever fluctuated. “Thanks for coming home to see about me,” she said. “When I get better, can I borrow your knife?”
The unexpected question threw him off balance. “Why?”
“I want to have a conversation with the man who cut me,” she murmured weakly. “You can hold him while I talk to him with your…your knife in my hand.”
“Tess, I’m shocked!” he lied.
She chuckled weakly and closed her eyes. “Isn’t he lucky…that I was on the ground and helpless?” she asked wearily. “I still remember how to throw people. You taught me, remember?” She murmured softly in Sioux and Matt smiled.
“There she goes, babbling again,” Mrs. Hayes said with a sigh, having failed to recognize that Tess was speaking another language.
Tess had reminded Matt that he’d once taught her how to throw him, unbeknownst to her father, who would have thought the close physical contact between them indecent.
“I never babble,” Tess denied with a sleepy chuckle. “Do I, Cousin Matt?”
“Only when you’re recovering from sword wounds,” he said dryly. He pulled out his watch, checked the time and slid it back into the watch pocket of his silk vest. “I’d better get back to work. I’ve used up my lunch break,” he added, leading the women away from the real reason for his presence. “I’ll check on you later, Tess. Take care.”
He smiled at Mrs. Hayes, put his hat back on and closed the door behind him.
“He’s a fine figure of a man,” Mrs. Hayes remarked as she began to cast on stitches for the woolly cap she was knitting. “Good to have around in an emergency, and that’s for sure.”
“Yes, he is, isn’t he?” Tess was still feeling the heat of that look he’d given her, and even in retrospect it was exciting. Matt was like a volcano. Only a very little fire escaped until an eruption was imminent. She wondered what violent passions he hid behind that calm face, and colored as she realized the track of her errant thoughts.
Mrs. Hayes glanced at her patient, put her wool aside, and stood up. “You’re flushed again. I’ll wet some more cloths. Poor child, you’ve had a terrible time of it.”
“I feel more fit, though,” Tess assured her companion. “Tomorrow, if the fever goes down, I’d like to get up a little, so that I won’t be so weak.” She smiled ruefully. “After all, I have to earn my living.”
Mrs. Hayes put another cool cloth on Tess’s forehead. “May I ask you something?”
“Of course,” Tess murmured.
“Why have you never married? Surely you’ve had many chances.”
“I’ve had one, but from a man for whom I had no respect, none at all,” she added, recalling the cavalryman in Montana with his studied arrogance and persistence. “I should have stayed single forever rather than marry such a bounder.”
“Wise girl. I married for love, but I was one of the lucky ones. My husband and I have three children living, out of the ten that I birthed.” She sat back down and concentrated on her knitting. “We’ve had hard times, but we always had each other when things got bad.” She smiled at Tess. “I don’t suppose you and Mr. Davis…?”
“Matt is my cousin,” Tess said evasively, and closed her eyes. She didn’t like remembering Matt’s views on marriage, as well as the mixing of races.
All the same, it was hard to put out of her mind the look in Matt’s black eyes when he came close to her. He was attracted to her; she knew that. But a man could be attracted and still not love. Physical attraction alone was never enough. She loved him. Nothing short of a love as powerful as her own being reciprocated would be enough. Tess closed her eyes. She might as well try to sleep. Lamenting the future was fruitless.
She concentrated on breathing slowly and evenly. Minutes later she drifted off into a restless sleep.
MATT VISITED FIVE TELEGRAPH offices before he found one with a clerk named Collier. He wrote a telegraph to one of his operatives whom he’d dispatched to an outlying town, mentioning that his cousin Tess Meredith had been wounded by an unknown assailant and that he wouldn’t be in the office for two days, and instructing the man to contact Senior Agent Riley Blair if he needed assistance before Thursday. Then he signed his name.
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