“Be careful, it might burn your fingers,” Blue Thunder said, wanting to protect her from even such a tiny annoyance as that.
“I will,” she said, smiling softly at him. She was happy for the first time in so long, but her full happiness would not come until she held her daughter in her arms again!
When she took her first bite of the meat, she gave Blue Thunder a quick, puzzled look. “I have eaten rabbit often,” she said. “This tastes nothing like rabbit. It has the taste of . . . chicken.”
He chuckled. “I did not come across rabbits but instead sage hens,” he said. “That is why you taste sage hen, not rabbit.”
“Well, my word,” Shirleen said, laughing as she gazed down at the piece of meat held between her fingers. “I have heard of sage hens, but have never eaten one.”
“Do you prefer sage hens or rabbit?” he asked, pulling off a big bite of meat for himself.
“Sage hens,” she said. “It reminds me of the turkeys my mother cooked on Thanksgiving.”
“I will catch you a wild turkey one of these days,” Blue Thunder said, smiling as he enjoyed relaxed, inconsequential talk with this woman . . . a woman he now knew that he would love forever.
“I would enjoy that,” she murmured.
Thinking about a future that had Blue Thunder in it made her feel suddenly at peace with herself, except for one thing—not having Megan with her.
But she believed that this handsome chief would eventually find her daughter, for was there anything he could not do?
She smiled timidly at him as she took another bite of meat.
He returned the smile, awakening new feelings in Shirleen that she never knew existed!
Chapter Sixteen
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather . . .
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf.
—Swinburne
The sound of people talking somewhere not far away awakened Shirleen with a start.
She leaned up on an elbow and found Blue Thunder sitting beside her where she lay on comfortable pelts beside a slow-burning lodge fire.
The voices she had heard came from outside the tepee, a tepee she suddenly realized was not the one where she had been staying.
And why had Blue Thunder been sitting beside her as she slept?
And . . . how had she gotten there?
The last thing she recalled was falling asleep beside the campfire where they had stopped to rest before returning to the Assiniboine village.
Whose tepee was this? she wondered.
As she looked slowly aroun
d her, she saw that the buffalo-hide walls had been painted with scenes of the exploits of the person who lived there. She also saw quite a cache of weapons stored at the back of the tepee.
“I am very confused,” Shirleen said as she sat up, realizing that she wore the clothes she had worn on her journey to search for Megan.
She gazed into Blue Thunder’s eyes as the blanket that had covered her fell away. “How did I get here?” she softly questioned. “The last I remember is becoming so sleepy I could not keep my eyes open.”