The Beloved Woman Page 7

  “Ah. It was my ‘haute society’ that convinced you.”

  “Dammit, you twist my intentions. Let’s go back to the point. Will you be my wife?”

  “What kind of benefit would you get out of marrying me?”

  “If anybody could teach me manners, you could. That’s what I’d get. In return, you’d get to stay in Gold Ridge. If you’re betrothed to a white man, the governor might exempt you from the removal.”

  She laughed dully. “So you’ll marry the Blue Song daughter out of duty. Well, sir, I won’t marry just to have a roof over my head. Besides, you’re addled for even thinking of marrying an Indian.” Sarcasm tinged her voice. “You want to be an important man, you want to move in important circles. Marrying an Indian would make you scandalous in polite society.”

  “Not up north. That’s where I’m heading eventually. Gonna put some Gallatin gold into New York investments.”

  “Blue Song gold,” she corrected him. “Taken from Cherokee land.”

  “You’ll never forget that,” he said grimly. “So be it. Then look at things this way—if you want to have a say in how the gold’s spent, marry me. We don’t have to tie the knot until you get accustomed to the idea.”

  “How noble of you,” she said dryly.

  “Not the least bit. And I don’t give a damn what polite society thinks of me. Never have. I just don’t want to feel like a backwoods hick when I have to deal with nabobs. You can learn me everything I need to know.”

  “Teach you.”

  “See? It’s already workin’.”

  “I’m not going to marry you.”

  “I figured you’d say that at first. You think on it, gal. You got nobody but me.”

  He stood, held out a hand, and watched her take it reluctantly. After he helped her to her feet he swept a predatory gaze around the woods. One hand came to rest on the pistol in his belt. “We best get back to town. I’ve killed my share of the trash roaming these woods. Like to avoid killing any on the day I proposed marriage to you.”

  “How very sentimental.”

  His mouth curled in annoyance. “I don’t think you want sentiment, Katie. Neither do I. But I think we could be happy together.”

  Her eyes went dead. “I would never be happy with a man who uses my rightful inheritance to hold me in bondage.”

  “You marry me, the land and the gold will practically be yours. I think I’m doin’ what your folks would want.”

  “And after you decide that you’ve soothed your conscience toward me and improved your social graces enough, you’ll send me on my way.”

  “You’ll probably worry me to death before that happens. Then you’ll be a wealthy widow.”

  “I doubt the Georgia courts would let me keep a white man’s estate.”

  Justis knew she was right. He also knew that there was no sense in talking to her anymore today about the subject of marriage. She looked exhausted and angry.

  “Enough for now,” he said as gently as he could. “I’ll walk off a little ways. You say your farewells. Say ’em good—I don’t want to bring you back here again. This part of the country will be even more dangerous when the army starts rounding up Cherokees.”

  Katherine watched him lead the horses away. Marry him? Teach him to be a gentleman and at the same time share a bed with him? Somehow, she didn’t think he’d be a gentleman in bed if being one meant that he’d have to curb the virility that had earned him a Cherokee name such as The Stud. What frightened her, what made her clench a fist against her stomach, was that she wanted him because of it.

  Slowly she turned and faced the valley. Sorrow welled up in her, pushing aside all other thoughts, making her feel half crazy with grief. This land held her family, it was part of her blood. It was all she had left.

  She made a silent, sacred promise to herself. Nothing must ever take this land away from her. Even if she never saw it again, it would always be waiting.

  Justis Gallatin would not keep it, or her.

  THE SOUND OF silence was a warning to Amarintha. After years of training herself to accept it, she knew with out consciously paying attention that the judge’s pen had stopped moving on the papers that lay atop his desk. The silence meant that he’d finished his work for the day. The squeak of his chair reverberated through the parlor as he reared back.

  “Sweet baby, you’re going to ruin your eyes staring out that window like a cat watching a bird. What is it, another good fight going on at the square?”

  “No, Daddy, not this afternoon.”

  He chuckled. “Too bad.” After a moment she heard him shift his chair again. His pen began scratching once more, putting wayward lives to rights, sentencing people to pay for their crimes, wielding more power than a knife or gun in a town where the law needed to be merciless to be respected. The judge was infinitely respected.

  Amarintha renewed her concentration, and once again her fingers dug viciously into the piece of needlework that lay forgotten in her lap. Rage slipped through her veins like mercury, fueled by suffocating desperation.

  She was going to lose her only chance to escape this hell if she didn’t get Justis away from that pretty, red-skinned bitch.

  “I’m just watching Justis Gallatin parade his squaw around the stores,” she said casually. “How can he dote on her so? She doesn’t look the least like a white woman. Her skin is coppery and her eyes are almost slanted, like a cat’s. That hair of hers is blacker than sin—no white woman ever had hair that black. She draws stares everywhere she goes. You know that he took her to the Methodist meeting on Sunday, don’t you?”

  “The man has a right to squire her anywhere he pleases.”

  “But it’s not proper. She acts as if she thinks she’s going to stay here after the rest of her people are carried off. She couldn’t, could she?”

  “Not unless Mr. Gallatin can get an exemption for her from the governor.”

  “You ought to send a letter to the governor, just to make certain that he understands the situation.”

  The judge stopped writing again. A small muscle twitched in Amarintha’s neck. “Now, sweet baby, why are you so interested in whether or not Justis Gallatin likes that lady?”

  Amarintha swiveled on the settee and quickly smiled. “I just like to stir up trouble, Daddy, you know that. It’s my favorite pastime.”

  His dark, suspicious eyes always seemed unnatural to her because they contrasted so starkly with the white hair and the fair complexion mottled by age marks. The pouting look she gave him finally eased their shrewd scrutiny.

  He winked at her. “I’ll write the governor about Mr. Gallatin’s lack of good judgment, and in two weeks, when the stockade’s finished, off his Indian lady will go.”

  She clapped in delight and blew him a kiss. “You chastise the lawless, Daddy, and I’ll chastise the fearless.”

  Laughing with admiration, the judge drew a heavy gold watch from his vest pocket and checked the time. “I’m done with work for today,” he said. “Pull the parlor drapes, sweet baby.”

  Amarintha set her needlework aside and went to the windows, taking the usual amount of time to close the heavy damask coverings, subduing the usual brief swell of nausea, then pivoting gracefully toward her father, who had, as usual, begun to undo his trousers.

  “Coming, Daddy,” she said with a smile.

  JUSTIS HAD A fine mahogany desk in his office at the mine, and bookcases full of books he’d never read, and a map of the United States on the whitewashed walls. His desk was furnished with an astral lamp so rare and the oil so costly that when it arrived from Boston, people had come out to the mine just to see it.

  The lamp cast its bright light on the paper, ink pot, and pen that Justis shoved across the desk to Sam. It wasn’t that Justis couldn’t write, but Sam could write with the kind of beautiful penmanship that made important people take notice.

  Sam, Charleston born and raised, was the perfect business partner for a man who had neither the delicacy nor the patien
ce to be eloquent. He spent nearly a minute writing a date and salutation on the letter, then tapped his fingers on the thatch of light brown hair along his forehead and said solemnly, “Let’s try again.”

  Justis twirled the tip of his hunting knife into a mangled block of wood that he held cupped in one hand. He had stared down the barrel of guns without flinching, but now a sheen of perspiration coated his forehead and his palms felt clammy.

  After several seconds of listening to his abject silence, Sam said carefully, “Why don’t you just outline the points you want to make and let me put them in final form? Then I’ll read the letter back to you.”

  Justis ground his teeth together. Frustrated by his lack of expertise in a matter that meant so much, he stabbed his knife into the desktop. “It has to be perfect. I’ve gotta make sure Katherine gets to stay.”

  “I know, friend, I know. Tell me what you want to say.”

  “That Katherine Blue Song deserves to be left alone. That she’s a fine lady and can do a lot of good here in Gold Ridge. Tell the governor that she knows how to doctor people and how she sewed up a cut on Noah’s arm this week. Tell him that she graduated from the Presbyterian Academy for Young Ladies in Philadelphia. Tell him that she speaks French, for God’s sake.”

  For several minutes Sam wrote methodically. Then he stopped to gaze solemnly at Justis. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. This oughta do it for sure. Tell him that I’m goin’ to marry her. In church. With a preacher. The whole shebang.”

  Sam’s fine-boned patrician features were schooled at hiding his reactions, but his mouth twitched with humor. “Has she agreed to even the first part of the she-bang?”

  “No. But she will.”

  “Should I elaborate for the governor?” Sam cleared his throat. “As in adding something such as, ‘Miss Blue Song is dear to my heart, the light of my life,’ et cetera?”

  “Hmmm. Sure. If that’ll make it sound good.” Justis glowered, then rose and paced the floor, aware that Sam was frowning at him.

  “Do you think she feels anything for you?”

  “Some gratitude for what I’ve done to help her. Some hate for what I won’t do. As for anything else—” Justis gestured vaguely. “She needs me in the way any woman needs a man.”

  “The lady is not exactly smitten with you, then. I say that only to help you see the situation as it really is, without undue hope.”

  Justis thought of the carefully fathomless expression Katherine kept in her eyes so much of the time. “She’s still grieving for her family. And she’s not the kind that craves a husband. See, there’s a lot of old-time Cherokee raisin’ in her—she was taught to be in charge of things. Cherokee woman in the old days, well, she didn’t take shit off any man. She owned the house and the children. She picked her own husband, and if she got tired of him, she’d just kick his butt out and marry another one.”

  Sam sighed. “You’d better accomplish something soon, partner, because if she doesn’t marry you, she’ll likely end up in the stockade with the other Cherokees, and then be sent west.”

  Justis stopped by a window and stared into the night. “I know,” he said wearily. “Tell me what you wrote to the governor.”

  Sam read the letter back. It sounded just right, formal and not embarrassingly desperate. Justis returned to the desk, bent over Sam’s elegantly drawn words, shook his hand several times to get the kinks out, then signed his name with as many curves and loops as he could manage.

  He hadn’t felt so worn out and worried since the back-busting days when he was a dock foreman down in Savannah. Now he had a good-sized fortune in gold and everything he could want. Except Katherine, and she might be the most difficult to gain.

  “I need a drink,” he said bluntly, and left the office with his work hat crushed in his hand.

  THE QUICK CLATTER of childlike feet on the hotel stairs made Katherine look up from her afternoon reading. The feet ran down the hallway to her door, and a fist rapped hurriedly.

  “Miss Katherine! Mr. Justis wants you over at the mine!” The high-pitched voice belonged to Lilac. “And bring your doctor’s bag!”

  Katherine flung the door open and looked down into wide brown eyes, pigtails, and a gap-toothed mouth. “Did anything happen to Mr. Justis?”

  “No’m, one of the miners got his leg split wide open. Mr. Justis says to let you have a try at patchin’ him.”

  Katherine realized that she had sighed with relief at hearing that Justis was unhurt. The fact that he had asked her to come doctor one of his workers amazed her. No other man would have trusted a woman with the job.

  She grabbed her satchel and followed Lilac out of the hotel to a rickety cart hitched to a bay pony. “Can you drive this contraption?” Katherine asked the tiny Lilac as they climbed in.

  “Like a li’l demon,” Lilac said, grinned, and slapped the reins.

  The Gallatin mine wasn’t far from town, and Katherine would have sworn that they reached it in half a minute, considering the way the pony galloped and Lilac drove. Along the way they took a back street that ran through the middle of the brothel section. Katherine had never seen so many brightly clad women run for their lives before.

  The Gallatin Mining Company was a small community unto itself, with cabins, sheds, barns, and a couple of saloons scattered around a square tunnel cut into the side of a hill. The thunderous, repetitive boom of a stamp mill sounded from a tall building near the mine entrance.

  Justis came out of a shed as Lilac pulled her pony to a stop. Katherine clutched the sides of the cart to keep from sailing onto the pony’s back. She caught a glimpse of Justis trotting toward her, his long, powerful legs swinging in an easy but purposeful rhythm.

  “Any of your teeth shook loose?” he asked, lifting her out of the cart.

  “Only a half dozen or so.”

  “Ever tend a busted leg?”

  “On a woman, yes.”

  “Men got the same bones?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “Good.”

  He led her toward the shed, where a crowd of men in canvas coveralls stood, watching her warily. Their consternation over the boss’s choice of doctors was overcome by the boss’s scowl, and they stepped back respectfully, doffing their hats.

  “Why didn’t you call a doctor from town?” Katherine asked Justis.

  “Last time one of my men got a leg busted, the doc didn’t fix it right. Man was crippled.”

  “I may not do any better.”

  “Couldn’t do any worse.”

  “Why, thank you, sir, for the confidence.”

  A pathetic scream tore the air as they reached the shed’s door. Justis blocked her way with an arm and looked down at her, frowning.

  “This is a bad thing for a woman to see. Maybe I was wrong to ask you.”

  Katherine thought of all the gory, pitiful sights she’d seen while training with Dr. Ledbetter. She patted Justis’s shoulder. “I doubt I’ll faint.”

  Then she ducked under his arm and went inside the shed.

  SHE WAS PLEASED with herself, exhausted but pleased, and more nearly happy than she’d been in several weeks. Katherine sat on a plushly upholstered sofa, her stocking feet tucked under her comfortably, the sleeves of her plain gray dress rolled up in very unladylike fashion.

  The nicest thing about today’s work had been seeing the respect in the men’s eyes when she left their comrade sleeping, his leg expertly set. She admitted that Justis’s proud smile had done more good for her feelings than anything else.

  “Here,” he said now, striding across the cabin that served as the mine’s headquarters with two glasses perched easily in one of his big hands. Katherine looked at the amber liquid they contained. “Brandy,” he told her.

  She took a glass, recalling the few times she’d sipped alcohol, just sweet sherry. It had made her feel too warm. “I can’t finish all of this.”

  “No hurry.”

  He sat down beside her and stretched his legs
out, propping one booted foot over the other—looking deceptively lazy, she thought. His eyes were shaded by thick lashes that gave them a languid droop at the outer corners, as if he’d just come from bed.

  He held his glass up. “A salute,” he said softly, his cheerful green gaze holding her uncertain dark one. “To you, Doc. For the best doctoring I’ve ever seen.”

  Ridiculous claptrap. All flattery, she told herself. Then she smiled so widely her mouth hurt. He clinked his glass to hers, and, watching her carefully the whole time, put the glass to his mouth and swallowed the contents in one smooth movement.

  Katherine sipped her brandy and liked the way it burned her throat. The rich scent and taste blended with the overtly masculine atmosphere of Justis’s office. She glanced at the various guns hanging on wall pegs, the quality desk and lamp, the bookcases filled with the classics, and the heavy, colorful rugs on the plank floor. It was a place of contrasts, like the man himself, a roughly built place that nonetheless had a compelling sense of style.

  Bought with Blue Song gold.

  “I’ll be going back to the hotel now,” she said abruptly, and started to get up.

  He caught the hand that held the brandy glass, then set his glass on the floor. With a graceful gesture he tilted her glass just enough to splash brandy on her fingers.

  “That liquor favors the color of your skin,” he murmured. “Makes me want to taste you.”

  She watched in dismay as he took the glass from her and drew her fingers to his mouth. “Please, let me go,” she whispered. With a regretful shake of his head he kissed her wet fingers, his lips sipping at her skin. They produced a taut, sucking sensation that traveled inside her, tugging pleasantly at the pit of her stomach.

  “I need to know something,” he said. His mustache brushed her knuckles. It was the most provocative thing she’d ever imagined. His eyes were half shut but alert as he studied her. “I need to know that you want me as bad as I want you, at least in one way.”

  She jumped a little and murmured a soft sound of distress. “I’m tired, Mr. Gallatin, and the past few weeks have left me more than a little confused. Now is not the time—”