Diana Palmer - The Savage Heart

“Nursing is a tiring profession, too, Matt. I spent my day sitting with a patient who had a leg amputated. He was knocked down and run over by a carriage. He’s barely my age.”

“Young for such a drastic injury.”

“Yes. And he was a baseball player.”

He grimaced.

“He wants to commit suicide,” she said. “I talk and talk, hoping I’ll dissuade him.”

He touched her cheek. It was cold from the winter wind. “I felt that way myself, once,” he murmured. “Then this pretty little blonde girl came and held my hand while her father dug bullets out of my hide. And soon life grew sweet once more.”

“Did I make you want to live?” she asked. “Really?”

He nodded. “My whole family was dead. I had nothing to look forward to beyond hating the white soldiers or trying to avenge my people. I was in such terrible pain. But the pain grew manageable, and I saw the futility of trying to fight a veritable ocean of whites. What is it you say, better to join than fight them?”

“If the odds are against you.” She liked the feel of his strong, warm fingers on her cheek. She stood very still so that he wouldn’t move them. “Is it so bad, the way you live now?”

He studied her face. “If I were a poor man, it might be. I have too many advantages here to feel sorry for myself.” His eyes narrowed. “Tess, try not to get too embroiled in the women’s movement, will you? Some of these women are very radical.”

“I promise not to go wild with a hatchet in any local bars,” she said demurely. “Does that reassure you?”

“Not a lot,” he said. “Your father worried about you.”

Her pale eyes became sad. “Yes, he did. I miss him terribly. But I couldn’t very well stay on at the reservation. The job was his, not mine.”

“They’d probably have hired you to teach, if you’d asked,” he commented.

“Possibly. Still, there was the persistent lieutenant. What a temptation he presented.”

His brow rose. “Temptation?”

“I was tempted to put a bullet through him,” she clarified. “I was at Wounded Knee, too, Matt. I know he shot women and children and old men.”

His hand slowly lowered. “You should go inside. It’s too cold out here for idle conversation.”

“You can’t imagine how you look when I mention the massacre,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. However painful the memories are for me, I know they’re a hundred times worse for you.”

He gazed down at her with his heart twisting inside him. She was pretty, but her attraction went so far beyond the physical. She had a soft heart and a stubborn independence that made his breath catch. She had, he mused, a savage heart.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked.

“I was thinking how you go headfirst into a fight,” he replied. “And how soft your heart is.” He became solemn. “Don’t wear it on your sleeve, little one,” he said softly. “The world can be a cruel place.”

She saw the lines in his hard face and reached up hesitantly to touch the ones between his dark eyes. He flinched and she jerked her fingers back.

“Sorry!” she cried, flustered.

His expression grew even more grim. “I’m not used to being touched. Especially by women.”

She laughed nervously. “So I noticed!”

He relaxed, but only fractionally. “I’ve grown a shell since I’ve been here,” he confessed. “And now I’m trapped in it. I’m rich and successful. But under it all, I’m still a poor ragged Indian—to people more shortsighted than you are.”

“I’ve only always thought of you as my friend.”

“And I am,” he said solemnly. “I’d do anything for you.”

“I know that.” She drew her old coat closer and smiled up at him, her gaze intent. “I’d do anything for you, too, Matt.”

As she turned away, he suddenly caught her arm and swung her back to him. The unexpected movement made her lose her balance. She fell heavily against him. His hand at her back steadied her, and she rested against him, breathing in soap and cologne and a faint scent of tobacco from the occasional cigar he smoked.

His eyes were turbulent, and the hold he had on her was new and exciting.

A little startled, she asked huskily, “What is it?”

His gaze roamed over her face, then stopped on her mouth. Her lips were full and soft and he wondered not for the first time in their long relationship how they would feel under his. The hunger he felt made his heart race.

“Matt, you’re scaring me,” she said all in one breath.

“Nothing scares you,” he returned. “You walked right into the thick of the wounded, even before the soldiers had stopped hunting the people who escaped the Hotchkiss guns. A young girl with her whole life ahead of her, completely blameless. You and your father were kind…and so courageous.”

The contact with his hard chest was making her knees weak. She bit her lower lip, trying to regain some sort of control over her wandering senses. Her hands pressed gently into the silky stuff of his vest.

“This is…unconventional.”

“Working as a nurse isn’t?”

She punched him in the ribs. “Don’t you start. I get enough guff from those old ladies in there.” She scanned the dark windows of the boardinghouse. Did a curtain move?

“They’re probably clutching the windowsills, dying to see what happens next.”

“What happens next is that you let go of me so that I can get in out of the cold,” Tess said with far more confidence than she felt. Her reaction to Matt’s closeness was surprising and a little frightening. She hadn’t thought herself vulnerable to any man’s touch.

His lean, strong hands moved down to her tiny waist and rested there while he continued to look intently at her.

“You aren’t like any other women I’ve ever known,” he said after a long, breathless silence.

“Do you know a lot of women in Chicago who shoot bows and speak Sioux?”

He shook her gently. “Be serious.”

“I don’t dare.” She laughed. “I have…I have my life planned. I intend to devote it to the women’s movement.”

“Totally?”

She fidgeted in his grasp. “Yes.”

“Have they convinced you that men are superfluous? Or, perhaps, suitable only for the purpose of breeding?”

“Matt!”

“Don’t look so outraged. I’ve heard members of the women’s rights groups say such things. Like the mythical Amazons, they feel that men are good for only one purpose, and that marriage is the first step to feminine slavery.”

“It is,” she said vehemently. “Look around you. Most married women have a child a year. They’re considered loose if they work outside the home. They must bend to the husband’s will without thought of their own comfort or safety. There is nothing to stop a man from beating his wife and children, from gambling away all they own, from drinking from dawn till dusk.... Oh, Matt, can’t you see the terror of this from a woman’s point of view, even a little?”

“Of course I can,” he replied honestly. “But you speak of exceptions, not the rule. Remember, Tess, change is a slow thing in a large society.”

“It won’t happen by itself.”

“I agree. But I also feel that it can’t be forced in any drastic fashion. Such as,” he continued coldly, “taking children away from their parents on the reservations and sending them away to government schools, making it illegal for them to speak their own language—” he paused, smiling now “—even making it illegal to wear their hair long.”

Her hands itched to touch his hair, as she had only once, in the early days of their relationship, when he was teaching her the bow. She searched his dark eyes, a question in her own. “Do you miss the old days?”