Wild Splendor

She wanted to tell Sage that moments after he had ridden away on his beautiful chestnut stallion she had put Harold in his rightful place. She wanted to tell Sage that Harold would never humiliate her again like that. Soon she would stop this charade with Harold once and for all.

“Are you thinking, as you say, ‘clearly enough’ now?” Sage asked, his hand at her elbow urging her from her saddle. “You do not look as though you took much time to consider the clothes you would wear for a ride on horseback.”

His gaze swept over her as she slipped down from her saddle, seeing her as nothing less than beautiful in her blue satin gown, the magnificence of her breasts swelling from the top of it. He wanted to reach his hands out to her golden hair and run his fingers through its long ringlets, but refrained. The art of restraint had been well taught him as a child.

“The haste with which I left the fort did not allow my changing into somet

hing more appropriate,” she murmured, her cheeks heating up as she again felt his eyes roaming over her, stopping momentarily at her breasts. She had to wonder if he could see them heaving with the excitement of the moment.

She even wondered if he could hear her heart thundering wildly within her chest at being so close to this magnificently handsome man.

“This haste that you speak of,” Sage said, “will you regret having stopped to have conversation with a Navaho chief?”

Leonida smiled uneasily up at him. There was an ache in her heart that she could not quell. As she peered into the eyes of this Navaho chief, she was seeing his defeat, his future stolen away from him, his freedom stifled, just as though he were a wild horse taken from the prairie, tamed, and then placed in a pen.

The thought made her look quickly away so that he would not see the anger and humiliation for him in the depths of her eyes or the tears that she was fighting back. She was glad that the cloak of night hid her anguish.

“You look away,” Sage said, placing a finger on her chin and turning her eyes back to his. “Why do you?”

Leonida searched for the right words to say. “I—I feel suddenly awkward,” she quickly explained. “You see, I had no set plans for any destination tonight. I just needed to get away from the fort, to ride my horse and get a breath of fresh air.” She glanced at the campfire through the break in the trees, then smiled slowly up at Sage again. “I guess I should have seen the signs of the fire in the sky, which would have let me know of your campfire. But I didn’t. I just happened onto your camp.”

The clouds slid away from the moon, showing Leonida the disappointment in his face. Had he actually thought that she had come searching for him? In truth, perhaps she had, unconsciously.

“But now that I am here, I would love to stay and talk a while with you,” she quickly added.

As he tethered her horse to a tree, Leonida looked over her shoulder at the campfire. “Perhaps we could join the others at your camp?” she murmured. “I would enjoy seeing your sister again.”

To her surprise, Sage took her by an elbow and began ushering her in the opposite direction, away from the campsite. With parted lips and widened eyes she gazed up at him, half stumbling as he continued guiding her through the forest, stopping at a creek that spiraled like a silver snake in and about the trees.

“Sit,” Sage said, nodding toward the ground. “No one will disturb us here.”

Leonida’s stomach did a strange sort of flip-flop, and her heart skipped a beat as he gently pushed her to the ground, then sat down beside her. She smoothed her wrinkled dress with a hand as she stretched her legs out before her, feeling strangely at ease with this Navaho chief, even though she had only met him that afternoon.

Yet she could hear her father’s warnings flashing in her mind: not to trust so easily, always to be wary of Indians, no matter their reputation. Little was actually known of what made their minds work, and to most, they were still vicious, heartless savages.

Leonida’s own relationships with the Navaho Indians of this area had proven that the bigoted white people were wrong about them. That they were going to be forced to live on a reservation was an injustice she wished that she could right. But she was only one person, and a woman. The voice of a woman carried no weight.

“It’s quite beautiful here,” Leonida murmured, breaking the silence. “I’m so glad to be here instead—instead of back at the fort.”

She swallowed hard and momentarily closed her eyes, trying to blank out the anger that welled up inside her every time she recalled Kit Carson’s words, that it would be best for the Indians to be placed on reservations, that he saw no other choice but to force the Navaho to join the Mescalero Indians at Fort Sumner.

“It is a place of peace,” Sage said, leaning back on an elbow. As he stretched one long, lean leg out before him, the silver buttons on his trousers caught the rays of the moon in them. “But what Sage likes best of all is to sit on a knoll, watching the horses of my village feed, when others of my village like to sit down for smokes and gossip. Nature is where I would rather be than around a fire, speaking of others’ private lives.”

“I have never been one who enjoys gossip either,” Leonida said, smiling over at him. What he had just said made her ever more aware of how wrong it would be to imprison such a man within the confines of a reservation.

He was a man who inhaled freedom as though it were the very air that he breathed. To take it away from him would be the same as snuffing life from him.

Yet there was nothing that she could do to change what was to happen. She would try to absorb every moment with Sage, for it just might be the last.

“I did not think that you would be the sort to meddle in others’ affairs,” Sage said, returning her smile.

Those words stung Leonida to the core, for as badly as she wanted to meddle this time, she could not. Her words were powerless among men like Kit Carson and General Harold Porter.

She blinked her eyes to keep tears from splashing from them, then peered up at the heavens. Starlight, pale and cold, silhouetted the ragged oaks that stood tall and statuesque over her. She listened and enjoyed the sound of the water cascading over the stairs of stones in the cool stream, the rich bass of bullfrogs, and the rasp of crickets.

“I so love this time of night,” she murmured. “Just look at the stars. Aren’t they beautiful?”

She turned her eyes away from the sky and peered into the darkness. “And just look at the fireflies,” she said, sighing. “Their cold sparks are like the fires of miniature lanterns blinking off and on in the night.”