Deborah Hale - Whitefeather's Woman

Did she dare bare her ugly past and risk turning him away forever?

“You know,” John murmured, “the first time you got me talking about what happened to my folks, it was almost like living it over again. I was angry at you for making me remember.”

She nudged her horse a little closer to his. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. What I’m trying to say is, I’ve thought about it since. Talked a little about it. Each time it gets a little easier, and I never would have found that out if you hadn’t made me speak of it the first time.”

Jane’s heart seemed to swell within her until she wondered how her small body could contain it. Here was something more she could give this man who offered her so much. She could give him balm for his wounded heart, because she, too, had known hurt and bereavement….

www.millsandboon.co.uk

After a decade of tracing her ancestors to their roots in Georgian-era Britain, Golden Heart winner Deborah Hale turned to historical romance writing as a way to blend her love of the past with her desire to spin a good love story. Deborah lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, between the historic British garrison town of Halifax and the romantic Annapolis Valley of Longfellow’s Evangeline. With four children (including twins), Deborah calls writing her “sanity retention mechanism.” On good days, she likes to think it’s working.

Deborah invites you to visit her personal website at www.deborahhale.com, or find out more about her at www.eHarlequin.com.

To my editor, the phenomenal Margaret Marbury,

who trusted me with John, Jane

and their wonderful story.

And to two of the most gifted writers

of American historical romance,

Cheryl St.John and Carolyn Davidson,

from their adoring fan.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

May 1897, Whitehorn, Montana

A frontier saloon was just about the last place on earth Jane Harris had ever expected, or wanted, to find herself. Why, Mrs. Endicott and her Ladies’ Temperance Society back in Boston would have been properly horrified. They’d have been more horrified still by the knowledge that Jane had stolen and sold a brooch of Mrs. Endicott’s to get here.

The jarring notes of a tinny piano pummeled Jane’s throbbing head, and the reek of raw spirits and tobacco smoke made the flesh at the back of her throat constrict. If she’d had anything to eat in the past twenty-four hours, the stink, the noise and her own overwrought nerves might have conspired to make her violently ill.

Perhaps it had been a harsh blessing that she’d run out of money for food back in Omaha.

“Kin I pour ya a drink, little lady?” bellowed the man behind the bar, his voiced laced with genial mockery.

Jane gasped, her heart hammering against her corset like the pistons of a runaway steam engine.

“N-no thank you, sir.” She raised her voice louder than she’d ever spoken in her life, to make herself heard above the “music” and the babble of voices. “I’d be most obliged if you’d point out the foreman of the Kincaid ranch to me. The gentleman at the telegraph office told me I might find him here.”

As she turned to speak to him, the bartender flinched. At the sight of her face, most likely. She’d hoped the bruises and cuts would have healed by the end of her long trip West. They must still have a ways to go if her appearance distressed a man who worked in such a rough establishment.

“Yep, ma’am. I seen him come in a while back and he ain’t left that I know of.” The bartender squinted through the haze of smoke around the cavernous room, with its sinister shadows and a huge, lowering buffalo head mounted behind the bar.

Raising a gnarled finger, he pointed to one particularly murky corner. “That’s John Whitefeather, over there. He don’t come in here much as a rule, but when he does it’s always off by hisself.”

Jane heard nothing after the bartender spoke the name. Whitefeather? An Indian! Her knees commenced to tremble beneath her skirts and petticoats.

Back in Boston, Jane’s sole dissipation had been reading Western dime novels from Beadle’s Library. Along with stories of legendary gunslingers like Jack Spade, they often featured lurid accounts of Apache atrocities. Were there any of that fierce tribe this far north? Perhaps she was about to find out.

“Thank you…sir. I—I appreciate your assistance.” As much as a condemned prisoner appreciated a deputy’s “assistance” to climb the scaffold.

Jane tried to smile at the man, but between her mounting agitation and the still-healing gash on one side of her mouth, she didn’t make a very good job of it.

Step by halting step, she crossed the saloon floor, painfully conscious of curious, predatory eyes following her movements. Had young Daniel felt this way walking through the lions’ den? Probably not, for Daniel had been a man and he’d had the Lord on his side. With the sin of her desperate theft weighing on her conscience, Jane was certain she’d left any slight protection of the Almighty far behind her in New England.

John Whitefeather sat at a corner table, all alone, his back to the wall, as though he did not care to turn it upon the denizens of the Double Deuce. The bartender’s pointing finger must have alerted the man that she wished to speak with him, yet he did not rise or otherwise acknowledge her approach.

Reason assured Jane that the Kincaids’ foreman was hardly apt to pull out a tomahawk and scalp her in the middle of a crowded saloon. But her tautly stretched nerves refused to unwind for logic. She stopped before his table and stood like a convicted felon in front of a hanging judge. For a wooden nickel she’d have turned and fled, but she’d been told the Kincaids lived miles outside of town. John Whitefeather might be her only means of reaching them.

For perhaps the hundredth time since stealing out of Boston, Jane wished she’d been able to spare the money for a wire to advise her new employers that she was on her way. Mrs. Kincaid might have come to the depot to meet her, or at least have sent her a less alarming escort to the ranch.

“A-are you Mr. Whitefeather, the Kincaid foreman?”

The man gave a slow nod. Jane sensed his gaze sweeping over her, but unlike the bartender, he betrayed no sign that her battered face affected him.

“What can I do for you, ma’am?” His voice, a soft rumble with a queer melodic inflection, was barely audible over the raucous hubbub of the saloon.

“I’m Jane Harris, Mr. Whitefeather.” She tried to sound competent and businesslike to convince him of her identity. Instead, her words came out stiff and prissy. “I’ve arrived from Boston to work for Mr. and Mrs. Kincaid, taking care of their boys.”