The Savage

His eyes narrowed uncertainly. “I can dress them myself.”

“I know. But you’ve done so much for me, I want to do something for you for a change.”

“I don’t want you fussing over me,” he replied with typical male offended dignity.

She gave him a feminine smile that was almost coquettish—the familiar Summer that he’d thought vanished after the hell she’d been through the past month. “Sometimes even the strongest man needs fussing over. And I want to take care of you.”

With that wifely statement, Summer turned and walked away, leaving Lance to stare after her.

He staked out the horses, letting them graze on the tall buffalo grass, while his gaze strayed to where Summer sat beside her sister. She had her back to the tree trunk, her knees drawn up, her face raised to the sky. Her eyes were closed, though, her expression relaxed and peaceful.

A quiet ache of longing filled him at the sight, so powerful, it made his chest hurt. Did she really want to take care of him? To shield him from the hurt her sister had dealt him? Only his ma had ever cared enough about him to protect him like that. Summer seemed willing to try, even if it was only to repay a debt of gratitude. But…would her generosity last once they got back to civilization?

Lance stroked the roan’s neck absently, wishing it were Summer’s neck he was caressing. She’d been wrong when she’d thanked him for his patience. He was impatient as hell—with the lack of privacy, with being unable to touch her, to hold her, to bury himself in her sweet warmth.

His sexual satisfaction could wait, though. He might be denied Summer’s presence in his bed, but it was a pain worth enduring. She had obligations elsewhere right now. He wouldn’t hold her to her marriage vows for a while longer. He wouldn’t push her to choose between himself and her sister.

Her sister’s reaction bothered him, of course, but if he tried, he could forgive Amelia’s invectives. She wasn’t in her right mind after what the Comanches had done to her.

What worried him was whether she would ever get over her ordeal. Amelia always had been half-afraid of him, even before her captivity, yet he didn’t know how Summer would take it if her sister held on to such stark terror and hatred of him.

For now, though, he could put up with Amelia’s ranting. He was a grown man. After all these years he was hardened to the slights white women offered him, no matter how much they cut. It was enough that Summer sympathized with him, enough that she had taken his side against her sister.

As long as he was on his side, he could bear anything life threw at him.

Amelia’s manner toward Lance only grew more hateful as they traveled farther south. She seemed to blame him for everything the Comanches had done to her. She wouldn’t acknowledge his name, referring to him as he or him, her frightened tone suggesting he was some sort of monster. She screamed at Lance every time he so much as looked at her, and pleaded with Summer to make him go away.

Knowing the horror Amelia had endured, both Lance and Summer tried to make allowances, but it was hard.

On the fourth day, they reached Deek’s Trading Post on the Red River. Amelia wouldn’t look at the burly trader when he came out to greet them, or even acknowledge his existence. Deek was the first white man to see her after her degradation, and apparently she couldn’t face him. Finally, though, after much pleading, she allowed Summer to persuade her to enter the trading post, where she could bathe and change into white women’s clothing and sleep in a real bed.

She shrieked when she saw his Comanche wife, Topusana, but Summer, appalled by her rudeness, finally lost patience and gave her shoulders a hard shake. Amelia collapsed in a fit of sobbing and allowed herself to be supported into the spare guest room, where she fell immediately into an exhausted sleep.

Supper was a sober affair, even though Deek tried to liven it up with his tall tales and jokes about their trials in Indian Territory. When Lance sparingly related the events of the past month, Deek seemed to know just when the danger had been understated and prodded Lance to confess more of the details about the rescue and the knife fight afterward.

At the conclusion, Deek raised his glass of whiskey in a salute to Lance. “The Comanche’ll be making legends about you, ya know. What you did was nigh impossible. I’m damned proud of you, boy.”

Lance smiled somewhat cynically, but watching him, Summer thought nothing Deek could have said would have pleased her husband more. And indeed it pleased her, too, hearing someone she respected give Lance the praise he deserved.

Deek’s friendship was obviously good for him. She had never seen Lance so relaxed, so at ease, than at this moment. All his defenses seemed to be down, all his smoldering hostility banked. When occasionally he met her eyes across the table, the affectionate intimacy in his look included her.

The feeling warmed her so much that she hated to leave just now, yet she needed to check on her sister and be there if Amelia was awakened by nightmares. After a polite interval, Summer bid the two men good night and retired to the spare bedchamber, leaving them to discuss Lance’s plans to deliver Fights Bear’s horses.

When she emerged the following morning, it was to find Lance dressed in the garb of a Texas mustanger—buckskin trousers and boots, blue chambray shirt and leather vest, red bandanna and tall hat. His appearance seemed strange after the past month of thinking of him as a Comanche warrior, but he looked almost as dangerous with his side guns strapped to his hips.

Amelia pretended not to notice the transformation in him. Both she and Summer, however, looked vastly different. Gone were the calico shirts and deerskin skirts of the Indian woman. Instead they were gowned as genteel ladies, which included the usual layers of underwear—corset and camisole, drawers and crinolined petticoats—beneath their voluminous skirts.

Amelia seemed less pitiful, less broken, in her new attire. She had stopped weeping and held her shoulders straighter, and her freshly washed hair had been combed into a simple coiffure beneath a wide-brimmed bonnet.

Summer, in her coffee-striped traveling costume, put her older sister in the shade, though. Her complexion was no longer pure ivory, but tanned by the sun—a crime for a well-bred lady—yet Lance thought she looked more beautiful with that golden-honey hue.

They set out early, without their Comanche escort. Amelia wanted to return immediately to the Truesdale ranch, to her late husband’s family, and wouldn’t listen at all to Summer’s gentle warning that they might not be welcome.

The return journey to Fort Belknap took two full days instead of one, but other than Amelia’s verbal attacks on Lance, it was fortunately uneventful. The endless miles of prairie grassland interspersed with patches of scrub timber assumed a monotony that was heartily welcome after the difficulties of the past month.

The tension rose in all of them, however, as they approached the Truesdale ranch, perhaps Lance most of all. It scared hell out of him to think Summer might lose her past easiness with him once she was back in civilization, and worse, that she would have to face much of the scorn and rejection his mother had faced.

Summer was more worried for Amelia than herself. The Truesdale boy had said her in-laws would take her back, but Summer wasn’t at all certain of their reception.