“He must have known the danger involved.”
“Yeah.” She heard the reluctant smile in Lance’s voice. “I didn’t want to listen to him. Didn’t want his help, either. I figured I had only myself to depend on, and I was determined to prove I didn’t need anybody else. I was a hardheaded, fool kid back then, but Deek managed to knock some sense into me that time. Locked me in his storeroom and kept me there till I agreed to let him help. He probably saved my life. I likely would have died out here on my own, or at the very least been taken captive by another band. Deek found my father’s camp without much trouble.”
“And your father took you in?”
“Yes. Kills Something accepted me as his son. Children are cherished in the Comanche culture, especially boys. As long as I was willing to adopt their ways, they were willing to let me stay. In fact, my father was glad to get me back. He was away from camp hunting buffalo the day the white soldiers came—most of the village was, or I never would have been taken from him.”
“That must have been when the frontier regiment rescued you and your mother.”
“Yeah,” Lance said dryly, “they rescued us, if you could call it that.” His tone turned grim. “The soldiers destroyed the village, killed dozens of women and children. They would have killed my mother, too, except they saw her blond hair and figured she might not be a Comanche. Real smart of them.”
“It must have been terrible for you.”
“I don’t remember anything about it. I was just a baby then. All I know is what Ma told me—and the stories I heard later from my Comanche kin. They had a bad time of it that winter. With all their stores and shelter destroyed, they nearly starved. My father had his revenge on the white man in the next battle, but he never forgot what they’d done. He never forgot me, either. He said he looked for me every time he went on a raid.”
She caught the wistful note in Lance’s voice and frowned. “You sound almost as if you regretted being rescued.”
“Maybe I did. At least I would have belonged somewhere if I’d grown up Comanche. The whites sure as hell didn’t want me back. And it might have been easier on my mother if we’d never returned to civilization.”
“Easier?” After experiencing life in a Comanche camp, Summer couldn’t believe anything could be more difficult than living as a Comanche captive. “You can’t mean that.”
“No?” He gave a bitter laugh. “The Comanches weren’t any crueler to her than the whites were. In fact, her own people hurt her worse. At least my father took her as his wife when she got pregnant with me. He didn’t have to do that for a slave. Her people only turned their backs on her. Made her into a whore.”
Summer turned her head sharply to stare over her shoulder at him.
“You look shocked, princess. You didn’t know my mother was a whore?”
“No,” she replied unevenly, disturbed as much by Lance’s accepting tone as the revelation itself.
“No, I guess you wouldn’t have been told. It wasn’t a tale fit for a lady’s ears.” Lance pulled the brush through a lock of her hair with more force than necessary. “But it’s true. It was the only way she could support herself and a half-breed kid. She tried to fashion bonnets for sale, take in laundry and sewing and such, but nobody would give her work with me around—and she had to feed us. But she wouldn’t give me up. She paid a steep price for keeping me.”
Summer found herself trying to swallow a sudden ache in her throat. “She…must have been a brave woman.”
Lance’s fierce gaze softened, grew distant. “She was the bravest person I’ve ever known, man or woman.”
She watched him for a moment, groping for something comforting to say. “I can only imagine how difficult her life must have been.”
His mouth curled at the corner. “No, you can’t, princess. You can’t begin to imagine. You never had to face one tenth of the hardships she had to.”
Lowering her gaze, Summer turned back around. He was right. She’d never experienced anything like the difficulties Charlotte Calder had endured.
“I hated the whites who’d forced her to live like that,” Lance went on in a low voice, remembering. “Hated myself for being the cause of her shame.”
“But you were just a child,” Summer murmured. “Surely she didn’t hold you responsible.”
“No,” he agreed. “She didn’t blame me.”
Lance fell silent as memories of aching loneliness washed over him. He could still hear his mother’s voice trying to soothe his youthful fury, trying to calm his hatred. Don’t you worry for me, my love. I chose you over respectability, and I’ve never regretted it for an instant. Not for a single instant. He tried to shrug off the memory.
“I guess after a few years it got a little easier for her. She took up with a ranger and became what they call a ‘kept woman.’ You knew Tom Peace. You thought him a fine, upstanding citizen.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know…” Summer faltered.
“No, his choice of mistresses wasn’t something that would be talked about in polite company. And that was before he moved to Round Rock. But my mother was his woman for years. I guess she was thankful to have to service only one man instead of countless strangers. And she was grateful that he put up with me.”
“Did he? Put up with you, I mean?”
“Yeah. He taught me how to defend myself from people who wouldn’t let me be. How to use my fists and shoot a gun. That’s all I ever let him do for me. I didn’t want his charity.” Lance’s fingers tightened around the brush as he recalled those early years. Tom Peace had tried to be a father to him, but he’d been a wild kid hell-bent on self-destruction and revenge.