"How am I supposed to get on this horse?" She eyed the light padding intended as a saddle, the stirrups buckled short.
Peta was prancing impatiently. "I thought you said you could ride."
"I can once I'm up on the damn animal."
With a disgruntled sigh, Hazard slid off Peta and walked over to her. "I forgot to hire a groom to help you up. Sorry, my lady, we're so primitive here in the wilderness," he mockingly commented, and taking her around the waist, he lifted her neatly onto the slight saddle from the off-side. Unlike the white men, the Absarokee always mounted from the right.
"There's no bit," Blaze noted, looking down at him.
"Observant," Hazard remarked coolly.
"How do I control him, Mr. Black?"
"Use your knees, princess, or do you want me to lead him?" he sarcastically suggested.
"No!"
Shrugging, he swung up on Peta and gathered his reins. He expected he'd have to lead her before the night was over. White people rode, but no one handled horses like the Absarokee. When Absarokee children could first sit up, they were tied into a high-backed pack saddle and from then on became an integral part of the migrations of the tribe, riding their own ponies. By the time they were four, they could ride by themselves, and by seven they were accomplished horsemen. They also had callouses on their backsides from years on horseback. Hazard didn't recall Miss Blaze Braddock's being similarly endowed. And that rough twill would be hell compared to the soft leather of his fringed leggings. Not his problem, though, he noted, and kicked Peta into a canter.
Blaze struggled a little at first, but with Peta in the lead, the buckskin was more inclined to follow than choose its own route. She experimented with the light bridle, with knee pressure, and before too many miles discovered the horse she was riding responded to the merest touch. Hazard could have told her that. He'd trained it.
Hazard stopped once just before sunrise to water the horses at a small creek lined with quaking aspen. He'd started to lift Blaze down but she'd shaken his hand off her arm and slid down herself. They ate pemmican and bread in austere silence and resumed their journey soon after.
He didn't stop again until midafternoon. And he wouldn't have then except he'd noticed the clenched line of Blaze's jaw a half-mile back. She was in pain, he could tell, and he silently admired her stubborn courage. Only waiting to find a suitable campsite, he pulled up soon after on the bank of another bubbling stream bordered with flowering cottonwood and lacy pine. This time when he offered to help her down, she allowed him to, and he set Blaze very gently on her feet. Although he hadn't intended resting overnight, he said, "This clearing looks comfortable. We'll stay here tonight."
Hazard started the fire, cooked and served their supper, cut enough pine boughs to make an acta 'tse, an Absarokee-style lean-to, and laid out a soft mattress of ground cedar and sweet sage thick as a feather bed. He hadn't teased or scolded or bullied or said "I told you so," and for his kindness Blaze was close to tears. Damn, how could he be so patient and kind? And damn, why did she love him? And damn and bloody blast, why did he still love his wife? It wasn't fair! It was a great miscarriage of justice, for after nineteen years, when she at last found the man she loved, he was still in love with his dead wife.
She desperately wanted to know why he still felt that way, but it wasn't something you could just blurt out and ask. Even Blaze realized that some things were sacred; a person was entitled to his privacy. And if Hazard didn't care for her, certainly she couldn't make him care. What a waste, she thought, all those years cultivating all the graces one was told would charm a man. Not that she had exactly cultivated them. But she had listened anyway; she'd heard about them and, in her own uninhibited way, accepted some as practical means to an end. And now, when she'd found a man she could love so much that nothing else mattered in the world, she'd come up against a stone wall. A beloved dead wife of a stone wall. Why had no one written a Chapter on that exigency in the finishing-school texts?
Well, she had some pride, anyway, some respect for another person's feelings. Even if she wanted to know, very desperately, why he still loved his wife, she certainly wouldn't ask. "Why do you still love your wife?" she heard herself ask, looking straight at him across the small fire left after the supper had been cooked.
Hazard's eyes flared, then his lashes dropped.
He won't answer, Blaze thought. It's too painful. He still loves her too much.
My God, he thought, is she hallucinating? What prompted that question? And he said, "Are you all right? I know your bottom must be sore. Are you in pain?"
"Don't try to change the subject. I want to know."
He didn't answer for a moment, realizing she was driven by some demon. Finally, he said, "She's dead."
"That doesn't answer my question."
"Is it important? Because my people feel it's disrespectful to talk of the dead."
Her eyes, the color of stormy seas, were very large and strikingly intense. She nodded her head.
Persistence was her strong suit, he ruefully thought. Exhaling softly, he began to speak. "When someone's dead," he said very slowly, "you can't love them anymore. You can love their memory, or the pleasure they gave you or the joy in living they may have intensified. But you see, once they've joined the spirit world, the person you loved is gone. The grass still grows, the flowers still smell as sweet, the buffalo travel the land. Memories aren't the same as living, though. Do you think it's possible to love someone who's no longer alive?" He asked the question with a quiet curiosity.
It was Blaze's turn to pause for an answer. "I don't know," she said at last. "Why did you save the dresses, then?"
Hazard was seated on the ground very near the dying fire. Pulling up a handful of grass, he tossed it on the low flames and watched the smoke spiral up before he responded. "The dresses were part of the memories, part of my youth." And he drew from recollection, the raw enthusiasm of his adolescence, when ideals were a substitute for judgment, life was play, and the future entailed nothing more lively than horse raids and begetting children. It seemed a millennium ago.
"How old were you when you married?"
Absorbed in recall, Hazard didn't reply until the question was repeated. "Seventeen years"—he smiled faintly—"as you yellow eyes say. We say seventeen snows or winters."
In the glow of the fire his heritage was purely traced on his face and form. His dark hair fell forward with his head bent slightly down, and his black eyes stared into the flames as if the answer to her probing questions were centered in their red-hot iridescence. The smooth texture of his skin was darker in the shadows of the evening, his leather-clad body at home here in his country.
"Were you happy?" Blaze braced herself for the answer, wanting to know and not wanting to know.
"Yes."
The quiet reply hurt more than she'd imagined. "What happened?"
"She died."
"How?"
"By her own hand." His voice held a curtness that hadn't been there before. Rising Wolf had finally pried his fingers from Raven Wing's cold wrist and led him away. No one else had dared. "And now," he went on, shaking away the unwelcome image, "the inquisition is over."
Even Blaze, nervy and impetuous, didn't have the audacity to continue.
"I'll sleep on the outside," Hazard mildly remarked, as if he hadn't divulged anything unusual, when, he had, in fact, made the mysterious dead wife even more mysterious.
How had she died, Blaze wondered, her eyes unconsciously arrested in widened surprise.
"We leave at sunrise; we've another long day ahead of us." The words were moderate, explanatory, calm, and he was waiting for her to precede him into the pine-bough shelter.
The mystery would have to wait for another time, Blaze thought, and made to move. She gasped in pain and fell back down. She'd been sitting quietly since Hazard had lifted her down from the buckskin and had half forgotten the extent of her soreness. The rough fabric of Hazard's trousers had rubbed her skin raw in the course of their day on horseback. Hazard was at her side in an instant, lifting her into his arms, his touch gentle. A moment later he had carefully placed her on the sweet-smelling bed. "We're both too stubborn," he murmured, gazing into her cerulean eyes gleaming wetly from the shock of the pain. "I'm sorry, bia. I should have noticed sooner that you were hurting."
"It's my own fault," Blaze conceded, warmed by his apology. "I could have said something."
"Not the indomitable Miss Braddock," he teased, his smile flashing against his bronzed skin.
"You're looking at the least indomitable woman in the world right now. I'm not going to be able to walk for a week."
"I can take care of that."
"This is one time your self-assured arrogance sounds sweet as a heavenly chorus."
"I brought some salve along." His grin was benign, "… just in case."
"Very smug men," Blaze sweetly replied, "have always annoyed me." But her smile was the kind that could charm tarantulas away from a four-star meal.
"And obstinate women, me." Hazard's slender hand brushed the corner of her smile. "With one notable exception," he softly added.
"I suppose I should have worn one of the dresses."
"There's nothing like leather between you and a horse," he agreed. "I brought the dresses along in case you changed your mind. But," he went on hurriedly, aware of Blaze's sparking glance, "we'll get you your own just as soon as we reach the village. I didn't intend the dresses to be hurtful. They were simply all I had handy."
"Really, no deep ulterior meaning attached?" The hope in Blaze's voice was naively poignant.
"None, I swear. Maybe you'd rather wear trousers." He recalled the few times he'd seen her before she became his hostage, and she'd had trousers on two times out of the three. "We could have some made for you. Although"—Hazard paused, then determinedly continued—"you decide… dress or trousers. But they should be leather. At least for the long rides. Otherwise—" He grimaced. "Oh, hell, we'll just have to put together a wardrobe for you. You decide what you want."
"Do Absarokee women wear trousers?" Blaze asked, recognizing his resolute effort to be tactful and mediatory.
"No."
"Would it bother you if I wore trousers at the summer camp?"
It took him a moment to consider. "You're entitled to wear what you wish." He was being excessively accommodating for, in fact, he would be the brunt of much joking if Blaze wore trousers. "I won't presume to—"
"But no women in your clan wear trousers."
He shook his head.
"If I can move tomorrow, I'll try on one of those dresses," she said, smiling, "and save you from embarrassment."
He grinned suddenly like a small boy. "I can take care of myself, Miss Braddock. You needn't sacrifice for me."
"It's no sacrifice. They're gorgeous dresses, but…"
He waited and softly repeated the conjunction when she didn't go on.
"Do you mind?" she whispered low. "I do want my own dresses when we reach camp."
"You'll have them," he quietly declared. "As many as you want." The Absarokee were the most resplendent of the Plains tribes, priding themselves on their appearance and dress. "And what we can't buy, we'll have made," Hazard promised, intent on having his woman lavishly clothed. It didn't strike him until much later that night, cradling Blaze as she breathed trustfully in his arms, that he'd thought of her as his woman and meant it.
THE salve proved as miraculous as Hazard knew it was. Blaze woke feeling wonderful, and it wasn't exclusively due to the salve. Several other factors contributed to her extraordinary sense of well-being. The morning was fresh, warm, sundrenched. And most important, she awoke in Hazard's embrace. He'd held her gently all night, afraid to move lest he wake her, conscious that she was exhausted after the long hours on the trail. He was used to not sleeping; when out on raiding parties, there'd often be many days without rest when pursuit was in-tense. In those circumstances, one simply swung over to a fresh mount in the herd just captured and continued riding.