Follow the Sun (56 page)

“Happy?” he asked.

She said something in Cherokee, smiled, and went back to Drake’s side.

“Kat says you’re giving us a five-year grace period,” Tess told Nathan. “Why?”

Kat clamped her hands together and wondered how Nathan would explain. She didn’t want her cousins to think she was in cahoots with him, maybe trying to get a share of the Blue Song gold. They must never find out about her bargain.

“I have a lot of interest in your heritage,” he explained calmly, nodding to Kat as if she could confirm that.

“So the Gallatins and the Chathams have always feuded?” Erica asked.

“Yep. From Justis and Nathaniel during the Civil War to Holt and Eli to Dove and Micah.” Nathan shrugged and looked at Kat too innocently. “Who knows? We might be the ones to end the feud.”

“Why are you doing all this excavation work?” James asked in a quiet, authoritative voice. “What do you expect in return?”

“Nothing. I like Kat. We’re friends. I don’t have anything against any of you folks. But mining this land is something I have to do for my family, just as you’ve got to take care of your family’s interests. I’ve got a mining lease that’s legal. The transaction was even recorded in the courthouse records up in Arkansas. You can’t fight it.”

“Oh, we can,” Jeopard interjected pleasantly. He held out a hand to Nathan. “But thanks for helping my brother in Surador.”

Kat pressed her fingers to her temples and watched
as Nathan shook Jeopard’s hand. What was this—a soap opera? Their lives had crossed one another’s in such unusual ways before they’d all reached this common ground. Had Katlanicha foreseen this? Is that what the medallions were about?

“What does your medallion say?” she asked suddenly, turning toward Tess. “And did it mean anything to you?”

Tess smiled, and Kat noticed how Jeopard’s hand strayed subtly into hers. “It said, ‘A bluebird should follow the sun.’ It brought me home to Jeopard.”

Kat swallowed the lump in her throat. Tess’s medallion had brought her to Jeopard; Erica’s had brought her to James. “I bet when Grandpa Sam figures mine out it’ll say something dumb like ‘Buy two, get one free.’ ”

The smiles around her, including Nathan’s, only made her feel worse.

W
ITH A FEW
more Cherokees, they could start a village.

Everyone changed into casual clothes and came back to work on the excavation. It made Kat’s chest swell with pride, watching her cousins and their men enjoy the discoveries as much as she had.

But it made her uncomfortable, too, having them so close to her and Nathan, having Nathan’s necklace hidden under her shirt, trying not to look at him or touch him in any way that would reveal their true relationship.

Echo and Drake wouldn’t talk about it to the others, and even they didn’t know about Kat’s bargain. What happened between a man and a woman was nobody’s concern but their own. Echo had said solemnly. She and Drake, whom Echo now called
Colanneh
, the Raven, had agreed.

Nonetheless, Kat found that being around Nathan that day was difficult. The air always seemed a degree
or two warmer between him and her, the emotions shimmering like an invisible web.

Heat. Lord, August was so sticky. Fanning herself, Kat left the homesite and walked past Nathan’s truck to an ice chest Jeopard had bought in Gold Ridge. She got a soft drink, started to open it, then noticed a curious rock sticking up from the leaves a dozen yards away.

It had a rough square shape that made her wonder if it had been chiseled. Her drink in one hand, Kat traipsed over, still limping but not badly.

She reached the odd rock and saw that there was a large circle of similar rocks under the leaves. “Hey, guys!” she called, and putting her fingers to her lips, pierced the air with a whistle. “Look what I found!”

Then she stepped into the center of the circle, and the whole world gave way.

Cool. Damp. Close. Like a wet grave. Those reactions ran through Kat’s mind as soon as she stopped falling. She looked up and found the top of the hole only a dozen feet overhead, but it might have been a mile.

Shaking, Kat laughed when she saw that she still held the soft drink can. She dropped it and hugged herself. This was no ordinary hole; it had carefully constructed rock walls. Under her feet—oh no, her injured ankle hurt like hell—the walls had caved in long ago, making a jumble of rock and mud.

Boots crashed through the leaves aboveground, followed by a louder crash as Nathan threw himself on his stomach at the edge of the hole. “Katie!”

“I’m okay.”

“Get against the wall. I’m jumping down.”

She pressed herself to flat stones and felt water trickle along her neck. Nathan rolled over the lip of the hole and dropped lithely beside her. They were chest to chest in the small area.

“Kitty Kat, I thought you’d lost one of your nine lives,” he said gruffly, his hands stroking her head,
cupping her face, then running down her arms as he tried to examine her in their narrow confines.

“I just hurt my ankle some.” She wound her arms around his neck and he drew her close. Kat rested her head on his shoulder and wanted to cry, her emotions jarred free by the fall. “I need you,” she whispered raggedly.

He brushed his lips over her hair and curved one hand over her head protectively. “I need you, too, gal.”

“
Nathan
,” a voice called in soft warning.

They looked up to find Drake peering at them anxiously. The others were coming. Quickly Kat stepped back as best she could. Nathan’s fingers slid down her arm and he squeezed her hand in a silent good-bye.

Soon everyone was clustered around the hole. Nathan called up, “I’ll put her on my shoulders and y’all lift her out.”

“I’ll do it,” Drake said, and dangled a long arm the size of a tree toward them.

Kat laid her hands on Nathan’s shoulders tentatively, as if she hadn’t grown accustomed to caressing the ruddy skin under his T-shirt, as if her fingernails hadn’t left marks in that skin at times.

“Can you climb onto my shoulders with your bad foot?” he asked.

“Us Flying Campanellis never forget how.”

She scrambled up his body as if he were a ladder, almost smiling when her foot wedged a little too close to his groin. He muttered under his breath, “Wanta be a teddy bear the rest of your life?”

No
, she thought with a fervor that shook her. She wanted to be in his arms, away from everyone else, being doctored in his Cherokee ways and soothed in his other ways, ways that men in every culture knew—or ought to know.

Drake pulled her upward as if she were a feather. James grabbed her around the waist with hands that had once crushed quarterbacks in professional football, but held her delicately. Jeopard caught her legs
and deftly swung them out, his easy grace making her feel as if she were Ginger and he were Fred in a strange sort of dance.

The men put her fanny-first on the ground and she sat there looking up expectantly as Erica and Tess hovered over her. “I haven’t had so much fun since I tag-teamed with the Russian Roulette Brothers.”

They laughed with relief.

“There’s something down here!” Nathan called.

Kat was nearly the first one back at the opening. “You okay, sweetcakes?” she called, facedown at the edge of the darkness.

“Yeah.”

“Sweetcakes?” Tess repeated.

“Sweetcakes,” Erica mused.

“Aw, I call everybody that.”

Nathan was on his knees, scooping mud from around the jumbled rocks. “It’s a half-dry spring. Must of been a couple of feet deeper before it caved in. I think there’s something wedged here, if I can just get it, there. Huh! A couple of spoons.”

The sweetcakes business was temporarily forgotten as everyone crowded closer to the edge. “What are spoons doing in the bottom of a well?” Erica asked.

“Unless the Blue Songs dumped them there for a reason,” James suggested. “Cherokee families hid what they could before the army came. If they were in a hurry they would have dumped things down the well.”

“Get me a shovel!” Nathan called. “And a bucket!”

Tess and Erica nearly collided as they ran to get one. Kat started to rise, favoring her ankle. Nathan glanced up at her, said something jovial in Cherokee, and Echo put a restraining hand on her shoulder.

“He says, ‘Make the hummingbird keep her bent wing still.’ ”

Kat eyed him, then chuckled with helpless devotion. “Okay, you bossy gopher.”

From the comer of her eye she saw Jeopard studying
her expression. Kat looked up at him, and he smiled quickly, as if to put her at ease.

A thread of alarm trickled down Kat’s spine. What would her cousins think if they realized that she loved the man who was going to tear up their land and steal their gold? She didn’t want them to hate her or think she wanted the gold.

“Hey, Chatham,” she called to Nathan in an ugly voice. “Don’t slip any of our spoons into your pockets.”

He stopped examining the blackened, corroded silverware and stared up at her as if she’d just threatened to bury him in the well.

“Are you serious?”

“You better believe it. The silverware’s not yours just because it came out of the ground.”

The slow tightening of his face and body assured Kat that she’d accomplished what she’d intended—she’d made him forget about being nice to her.

“I don’t want anything but what’s due my family,” he said in a soft, lethal voice.

“I can’t tell. You got mighty funny definitions of what’s due your family.”

He tossed the spoons up to her. “Take ’em. And leave me alone.”

“Can do.” Her throat tight with sorrow for them both, she left him in the old well glaring up at her.

T
HE MEN TOOK
turns digging, and by late afternoon the women had scrubbed over forty pieces of silverware, some bearing on their handles the still-legible Cherokee symbols for Blue Song. The heavy sterling was ruined beyond anything except sentimental value, but the cousins cried over the lost dreams it represented.

Then Jeopard’s shovel found other pieces of sterling—a tea set, a soup tureen, a tray so corroded that it broke in two when he handed it out of the well.

“I hope there’s no more,” Kat said, her throat raw as she watched Tess and Erica hug separate halves of the tray. “This is like a funeral.”

“Well, better find it all while you have the chance,” Nathan warned. He stood on the sidelines, watching, his eyes cold.

“We’ve got five years,” she shot back.

“Yeah. Consider yourself lucky.”

He gave her a commanding look that reminded her why they had five years, and she crumpled inside. Oh, he wanted her to think that he and she had a friendly agreement, that he cared about her so much that he’d postponed the mining.

But she wasn’t supposed to forget that he could change his mind if she didn’t do exactly as she’d promised.

I’m a slave, she thought again, and the gold nugget lying between her breasts made her chest move heavily, as if it could smother her.

S
HE AWOKE THE
instant she heard the soft rattle of the key in the inn’s old-fashioned door lock. Kat scooted up in bed, reached frantically for the night-stand, then remembered that she’d left the Beretta back in her tent.

But when the door opened, the faint light of a hall lamp fell across Nathan’s face—angular and harsh in the shadows. Kat groaned softly with relief, her heart still in overdrive.

“What are you doing here? My cousins have rooms on either side of this one.”

He shut the door, throwing the room into the deep ink of a moonless night. Kat quivered when she heard him lock the door. Then there was nothing but silence, a silence she listened to while breath pooled in her lungs.

Slowly he settled on the bed beside her, and she smelled the mingled traces of woodsmoke and a brisk,
fresh scent that told her he’d scrubbed himself in the stream after everyone left.

“We can’t sleep together tonight,” she murmured, almost begging. “If my cousins figure us out they won’t understand.”

“Who said anything about sleep?” His voice was soft and gruff, whether from leftover anger she couldn’t tell. “Lie back down.”

Kat shut her eyes, analyzed the emotions that were making her vibrate with awareness, and admitted that she wanted him in bed with her, no matter what.

She slid down and put her hands beside her head on the pillow. His fingertips grazed her shoulder, skimmed over the soft cotton of her T-shirt, then trailed down her arm.

Kat tilted her head back on the pillow and heard herself breathing faster in the stillness of the room. It was an incredible sensation, to lie there in total darkness, knowing that Nathan was beside her but feeling only the provocative caress of his callused fingertips, not knowing what part of her he might touch next, or in what way.

He covered her hand with his, simply letting his hand rest there quietly atop hers, and the sensation was so exquisite that Kat made a soft keening sound.

“I don’t mean to scare you,” he said grimly.

“That wasn’t fear you heard,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings today. I did it to make things easier in front of everyone.”

“That’s what I came here tonight to find out.”

His hand tightened, then slowly slid away. A second later she felt its pressure on her stomach, his blunt, scarred fingers incredibly adept as they eased her panties down to her thighs, hardly brushing her skin, setting off storms of sensation when they did.

Kat bit her lip to keep from shifting in blissful agony as his hand touched her stomach again. This time there was the seductive whisper of cotton on her skin as he
lifted her T-shirt, then the breath of night air scattering goose bumps on her bare stomach and breasts.

For a moment he stopped touching her at all, and it took considerable willpower for her not to reach for him. Then his fingertips surrounded her nipples with wetness from his mouth.

The combination was fire and ice as he rubbed them—just the tips, very slowly and very lightly—into peaks so hard they barely flexed under his caress.

“This woman is of the Blue clan,” he whispered. “Her name is Katlanicha. I am adopted of the Deer clan, my name is Tahchee. Draw near to listen. Our souls have come together. I am
da-nitaka
, standing in her soul. She can never look away.”