Savage Courage

“You see, I ache to be among my Apache people,” she explained. “Please? Will you take me?”

She desperately wanted to mention the name Fawn; to ask if he knew her, yet now that she could, she was afraid to know. If she discovered that her search had been for naught, that her dreams meant nothing and that her mother wasn’t alive after all, she would be devastated.

As long as she had hope, she felt she could go on. But if she discovered that her mother didn’t exist, it would break her heart.

Yes, she would delay the knowing awhile longer.

Storm was stunned by her request. What courage she possessed! It made him admire her beauty all the more, but nothing would change the plans he now had for her.

Not even the fact that he felt something for her even though they had just met.

No woman had raised this sensual heat in him before. This daring beauty was the first.

But he must remember why he was taking her with him. It was for vengeance, not to have someone to fall in love with!

“Ho, I will take you,” he said, hiding his smile of victory.

“Thank you, oh, thank you,” Shoshana said, her excitement causing a hot blush to rush to her cheeks. She gazed down at the chain as he studied it. “But how can you free me?”

“A key must be somewhere in this cabin,” Storm said, turning and wincing when he saw the bloody scalps still hanging from the rafters.

“I already searched and didn’t find one,” Shoshana said wearily. “I hope you can.”

“I will look until I find it,” he said, giving her a look over his shoulder. How fortunate it was that her scalp had not joined the others. Her hair was as black and as thick and beautiful as any he had eve

r seen.

Surely upon Mountain Jack’s return, he planned to rape, then scalp her.

Realizing that lingering at the cabin for much longer might endanger them both, Storm looked high and low for the key.

He didn’t find it inside the cabin.

“I shall look outside,” he said, walking toward the door. “He would not leave it where you could find it easily.”

Shoshana sat back down on the floor before the fire as Storm stepped out into the moonlight.

His gaze swept slowly over everything, then fell upon a small shed that hugged the cabin not far from the front door.

He went there. It was dark, so he could only feel with his hands.

He smiled victoriously when he found several keys on a ring which hung from a nail on the wall beneath a layer of old pelts.

Smiling, he took the ring of keys into the cabin.

“Perhaps the one we are looking for is here,” he said, setting his rifle against a wall.

He knelt before Shoshana.

One by one he tried the keys, then smiled into her lustrously dark eyes as the chain finally fell away from her wrist.

“Thank goodness,” Shoshana sighed. She rubbed her raw wrist and smiled at Storm as he unwrapped the chain from around her waist. “Thank you so much. Had you not came along, I . . . I . . . am not certain what my final fate would have been.”

“But I am here and you are free,” Storm said as he grabbed his rifle, amazed that the lie about her being free slipped across his lips so easily . . . lips that never lied.

He felt guilty over what he was planning to do with her, when she was so sweetly sincere about thanking him for having freed her.

But he must block everything from his mind except the vengeance he had waited so long to achieve.