Naked Edge (3 page)

"Is she your next destination?"

He didn't bother to dignify Samantha's prying question with an answer. "We never agreed to be exclusive, Samantha--only safe."

She shoved the jacket against his chest, the earring still in her hand. "You're an asshole, you know that?"

"Did you enjoy what we just did?" He held out his hand for the earring.

"Yes." She dropped it onto his upturned palm. "You know I did."

"Then what more do you want from me?" He tucked it back in his pocket.

"More. Just more."

Hell, were those tears in her eyes?

"Sorry, Sam, but I don't have anything more to give you." He turned and walked out of the living room and down the hallway toward the front door.

"I know about your fiancee," she called after him, an edge to her voice. "I know what really happened."

Gabe felt his stride falter, but he didn't look back. He opened the door and stepped into the night, knowing he'd never come here again.

A cold wind hit him in the face, carrying away Samantha's scent, taking the hottest edge off a sudden surge of temper. He filled his lungs, walked down the icy sidewalk to his service truck, trying to put Samantha and her last salvo out of his mind and ignoring the pricking of his own conscience.

Why in the hell should he feel guilty? Samantha was an adult. She knew what she'd signed on for. He'd told her right up front that he wasn't interested in a relationship, and she'd told him all she wanted was good sex. So now she'd changed her mind and he was supposed to feel bad?

Well, he'd never liked breast implants anyway.

He climbed in behind the wheel, adjusted the gear on his duty belt so that it wouldn't jab him in the back, then shoved his key into the ignition. The digital clock on the truck's dash read 8:45--enough time to get in a few routes at the rock gym before it closed. He'd just turned onto Baseline Road when his pager went off. He pulled it out of its holster and read the LED display.

Flames on Mesa Butte. On-call officer please respond. Police request backup.

On-call officer. Tonight, that was Gabe. But what were the cops doing at Mesa Butte? That was Mountain Parks's jurisdiction.

He flipped on his overheads, pulled a U-turn, and sped east toward the butte.

KAT STARED IN disbelief and shock toward the open sweat lodge door, only to be blinded by a flashlight.

"Police!" a man's voice shouted. "Everyone out!"

Stunned, she shielded her eyes and looked to Grandpa Red Crow, who sat on her left closest to the door. He looked amazingly calm, beads of sweat on his wrinkled face and bare chest, an eagle-bone whistle in his hand, its piercing song abruptly silenced.

"Come on! Move it! Out!"

Grandpa Red Crow leaned toward the door, spoke to the man outside. "You are interrupting the
inipi,
a sacred Indian ceremony--"

The police officer reached in and grabbed Grandpa by the arms. "Come on, old man. Out!"

Wearing only gym shorts, a towel wrapped around his waist for modesty's sake, Grandpa was hauled roughly forward, whistle clutched tightly in his hand.

"No!" Kat shouted, her cry echoed by the dozen women who'd come to Mesa Butte to pray.

This can't be happening!

Oh, but it was.

No sooner had Grandpa Red Crow been dragged through the small opening, than the same cop ducked down and took hold of Glenna, an Oglala Lakota elder from Denver who was sick with ovarian cancer. Her eyes wide in her thin face, Glenna cried out in her native tongue, her towel slipping from her shoulders, exposing her damp T-shirt and skirt, as the officer pulled her through the doorway.
"Hiya! Hiya!"
No! No!

Then the cop ducked down and shined his flashlight into the lodge once more. "Are the rest of you going to come out, or do we have to drag you out one at a time?"

Pauline, a young Cheyenne woman and next in line to the door, looked to Kat, panic in her eyes. "What should I do?"

Kat swallowed her own fear. "I'll go, and you follow me."

She crawled around the edge of the fire pit toward the door, feeling trapped in some kind of nightmare. When she reached the doorway, she spoke the Lakota words she would have spoken when leaving the lodge at the end of the ceremony had it not been interrupted.
"Mitakuye Oyasin."
All my relations.

"Come on! Hurry it up!" the officer shouted.

She lifted her head and crawled forward another step, only to feel a fist close in her hair, the cop yanking her painfully upright, her towel falling into the mud. She tried to stand, but her weight came down on her right leg, which had been out of its cast for only a few days and was still weak. Her ankle twisted, and she lost her balance, falling forward, clutching at the hand that held her hair, trying to keep it from being ripped out by the roots.

"What the hell are you doing?" A familiar voice, footsteps.

"Let go of her! You can't just manhandle people like that!"

"They're resisting." The cop released her.

Scalp still burning, Kat landed on her hands and knees in cold mud, her heart slamming, tears of shock and rage and pain blurring her vision. Unable to stop her trembling, she looked up--and felt as if the breath had been knocked from her lungs.

There, striding toward her, was Gabriel Rossiter, the park ranger who'd saved her life. This time he was dressed in his full ranger uniform--dark jacket with a silver badge on the front, gun on his hip, heavy boots on his feet. From the way he walked, she could tell he was angry.

"It looks to me like they're doing what you asked them to do, so why don't you stand back and give them some room?" He knelt down before her, his face cast half in golden light from the fire and half in shadow. "How's your leg? Are you able to stand?"

Kat nodded, confused to see him here, horrified to think that the man who'd saved her life, the man she'd thought about every day for the past three months, the man she'd just remembered in her prayers, could be a part of this ... this desecration.

"You know her?" the cop asked. Lantern-jawed and clean-cut, he had a military look about him. "Better get her out of here before she gets herself arrested."

The ranger didn't answer. "I'll help you up."

Strong hands grasped her arms, lifting her out of the mud and holding her steady until she got her footing. Her gaze met his, and for a moment all she could do was stand there, looking up at him. He was taller than she remembered, her head only reaching his chest. And he was a lot angrier.

He picked up her muddy, wet towel and handed it to her. "I'm sorry, Katherine, but we have orders to put out the fire and clear the butte."

"Why?" Icy November wind blew through her damp hair, piercing the wet cloth of her skirt and T-shirt, chilling her to the bone.

"I'm not exactly sure why." He glanced about. "Apparently, the fire violates land-use codes that the city has suddenly decided to enforce."

Land-use codes?

She started to tell him that federal laws protecting Indian religious freedom trumped city land-use codes, but the cop had knelt down before the sweat lodge again.

"I guess all we got here are squaws," he said, panning his flashlight over the women inside, a degrading tone to his voice. "Must be the braves's night off. Either that or the old guy has himself a harem. Come on! Move it!"

Inside, Pauline sobbed.

"No! Let me! She's afraid of you!" Outraged by the cop's insulting comments and his bullying manner, Kat turned to help, but the ranger caught her with a strong arm around her waist and drew her back against him, the contact startling.

He spoke quietly, his breath warm on her chilled skin. "You'll only get yourself arrested. Let me handle it. Go back to your car and warm up."

But right now Kat didn't care about being cold, and she wasn't about to leave the other women behind. Shivering hard, she wrapped her wet, muddy towel around her shoulders, stepped back and watched as the ranger bent down and spoke to the cop.

She couldn't hear what he was saying, but after a moment, the cop stood, glaring at him. "Fine. Do it your way, Rossiter, but it's on your head."

Then the cop stepped away from the sweat lodge, making room for the ranger, obviously furious at him for interfering.

The ranger squatted down before the sweat lodge door, hands in his pockets. "It's all right. No one's going to hurt you. Come on out."

Kat recognized the soothing tone of his voice, and despite her anger, she knew he meant what he said. She leaned nearer to the sweat lodge door and called out. "It's okay, Pauline. You don't have to be afraid. This one won't hurt you."

She saw the top of Pauline's head and stepped back to make room for her and the other women, looking beyond the firelight, searching for Grandpa Red Crow and Glenna. And then she saw.

A dozen squad cars were parked down below on the access road, lights flashing. Three fire trucks stood nearby. The butte seemed to swarm with law enforcement, two officers holding German shepherds on leashes.

Police? Firefighters? K-9 units?

All of this--to stop an
inipi?

Everything but the cavalry.

Fighting tears of rage with every breath, she spotted both Grandpa Red Crow and Glenna just beyond the firelight, talking with a uniformed officer. She might have walked over to them and tried to help, but then Pauline was there, trembling and crying, soggy towel around her shoulders, the other women emerging one by one behind her, their faces pinched with fear.

"Come." She met the ranger's gaze, then turned away, wrapping her arm around Pauline's shoulder. "Let's get dressed."

GABE WATCHED As Katherine limped, soaking wet and barefoot, through the snow, shepherding the other women around to the other side of a blanket that had been strung up between two saplings, her quiet dignity an indictment.

He'd arrived to find three fire trucks and most of the cops in the city parked along the access road to the butte, lights flashing. With that kind of response, he'd expected to find a frat party turned homicide or perhaps even arson. Instead, he'd found nothing more threatening than an
inipi-the
same kind of ceremony that had been going on up here every Saturday night since before Gabe had become a ranger.

He'd hiked up the butte in search of the officer in charge of this clusterfuck to try to minimize the damage, only to see Sgt. Frank Daniels--one cop he'd never liked--dragging a woman out of the lodge by her hair. In a heartbeat he'd gone from irritated to fucking pissed off. And then he'd recognized her.

Katherine had fallen to her hands and knees, her long hair wet and hanging to the muddy ground, tears on her pretty face, the shock and fear in her eyes making him want to punch Daniels in the face, to kick his balls into his throat, to drag him around by the short hairs and see how he liked it.

He turned on Daniels. "Do you want to tell me what in the hell you were doing?"

The son of a bitch shrugged, as if he had no idea why Gabe was angry with him. "We got an anonymous complaint that someone had seen flames up here and--"

"I know that!" Gabe glanced toward the blanket, making sure no gung-ho cop was about to intrude on the women as they changed into dry clothes. "What I want to know is why having a campfire without a permit merits the use of physical force. These aren't drug dealers, Daniels. They're unarmed, terrified women."

"I'm under orders to vacate that little hut--whatever they call it." Daniels jerked a gloved thumb in the direction of the dome-shaped sweat lodge. "If they resist, we have to take it to another level."

"It didn't seem to me that anyone was resisting, least of all the woman whose head you nearly yanked off." Gabe bent nearer, no longer masking his anger, his face inches from Daniels's. "This land is under Mountain Parks's jurisdiction. Knock off the Rambo act, got it? Now who the fuck is responsible for this mess?"

GABE PUT IN a call to his supervisor, Chief Ranger Webb, then spent the next ten minutes trying to undo as much of the damage as he could, assuring Police Chief Barker that Indian people had always used Mesa Butte for ceremonies with the knowledge of Mountain Parks. No, Mountain Parks had never required the medicine men who ran the sweat lodges to pay for a permit because sweat lodges constituted a traditional use of the land and were religious in nature. Yes, they occasionally got phone calls from concerned citizens who saw the fires and didn't know what was going on, but no one had ever filed a formal complaint. No, there had never been any problem with litter or property damage because the participants had always been careful to clean up after themselves.

Then Chief Barker fell back on city land-use codes, reading from his notebook. "It says here, plain as day, 'No open fires on city open space without a permit.' Do you boys over at Mountain Parks enforce the law or--"

But Gabe didn't hear another word. "Excuse me."

Katherine stepped out from behind the blanket, now bundled in a heavy fleece-lined denim jacket, hiking boots, and jeans, her towel rolled up and tucked beneath her arm, her wet hair hanging down her back. She walked with the other women toward several parked vehicles at the top of the access road, then split off on her own, heading toward a big, black Dodge Ram pickup.