Warrior's Embrace (58 page)

Or a good stiff belt of whiskey. That’s the
way Mick Malone faced all his problems. Maybe she was her father’s
daughter after all.

“Call him back and accept.” She was saying
that with a smile? Was Deborah fooled?

“I will ...if you’re sure ...oh, my gosh,
Eagle Mingo. He has to be the catch of the century.” She gave Kate
a quick, sympathetic look. “Not that I can catch him.”

Kate forced a laugh.

“Of course you can catch him. You’re a
beautiful, desirable woman. Any man would have to be a fool not to
want you. And believe me, Eagle Mingo is no fool.”

Waka ahina uno, iskunosi Wictonaye.
Waka.

By all the saints, she was going to make a
fool of herself in front of Deborah.

“Look,” Kate said. “I’m going to take off
early. You’ll have the clinic all to yourself. Don’t wait till you
get home. Call him from here.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m absolutely, positively certain.”

o0o

Of course she was certain. That’s why she was
on her third glass of whiskey. Hell, why stop with the third glass?
Why not take the whole bottle?

With the bottle clutched in her hand, Kate
attempted to rise from her chair. The kitchen wavered, then tilted.
She caught the edge of the table.

“Whoopsy-daisy.” Hanging on to both table and
bottle, she waited for the room to stop spinning. Finally, it did,
but the furniture wouldn’t stand still. She held on to it anyhow,
crossing the kitchen inch by inch, and then navigating the
treacherous den. The damned furniture kept coming up to meet
her.

Her shins would be black and blue tomorrow.
If there was a tomorrow.

Collapsed in an ignoble heap on the sofa,
Kate contemplated the level of liquor in the bottle. There was
still plenty to provide total oblivion.

She tipped the bottle up and felt the sting
as the whiskey hit her throat. The front door banged open with such
a racket that Kate nearly fell off the couch.

“Whoops!” With parts of her on the floor and
parts of her on the couch, she giggled. “Damned treasherous
furnishure.”

“Holy cow.” Mark stared at her, dumbstruck
and, then he began to laugh. “You’re totally smashed.”

“Nope. Didn’t shmash a thing.” She waved the
bottle at him. “Wan’ a drink?”

“Don’t mind if I do.” He helped her up and
propped her on the sofa, then sat down beside her. “What’s the
occasion?”

“Shelebrashun.”

“You heard already?” He took a swig. “Eagle’s
going to nail those bastards to the wall if he finds out they
deliberately dumped carbon tet into Witch Creek.”

“Too busy danshing.”

“Who is?”

“The governor.”

“I see.” He saw far more than she was
telling. Everybody in Tribal Lands knew that Kate Malone had once
been the governor’s woman. Mark set the bottle aside and gently
pulled Kate to her feet. “No sense in letting anybody get ahead of
us. May I have this dance, Dr. Kate Malone?”

“Shertainly.”

“I dance a mean tango. Ever tango?”

“Tangled with Eagle ...long time ago.”

“If you had tangled with me, I’d never have
let you go.”

“Damn shtraight.”

She swayed, and he braced her with both arms
around her waist. Merciful saints, she felt good. Everything would
be perfect if they had music.

He began to hum.

“Love-ly. What ish it?”

“ ‘Moon over Miami.’ It’s the only song I
know well. I have to change the rhythm a little bit to make it
right for the tango, but, what the heck, I’m a multitalented guy.”
Grinning down at her, he watched the play of firelight in her hair.
“I guess you’ve noticed by now,” he added, hoping she had.

Kate didn’t answer, but leaned heavily
against him with her face pressed in the open neck of his shirt.
Her breath was warm against his skin, warm and erotic. Suddenly he
felt the moist tip of her tongue.

“Hungry Kate?”

“For you.” She put her hand in the opening of
his shirt and splayed her fingers against his skin. “Wan’
chou.”

Mark did a quick conscience check, and
discovered to his surprise that he had one. He wondered if he
wrestled with it long enough whether he could overcome it.

“Now,” she murmured. “ ‘Side the fire ...the
mishtical fire.”

Tears slid down her cheeks and burned his
skin, and he knew it wasn’t he that Kate wanted, but another, a man
who spoke in the dark, honeyed tongue of his ancestors.

“I want you, too, babe, but you’d never
respect me in the morning.” She was crying outright now, her tears
wetting the front of his shirt. “It’s all right, Kate.”

He picked her up as if she were a child and
carried her into her bedroom.

“Wait right here,” he said when he laid her
on the bed, though she was in no condition to go anywhere.

Her bathroom smelled like her, light floral
fragrances blended with an exotic musky scent. Leaning against the
lavatory he looked at his pinched face in the mirror.

“Dr. Grant, you noble son of a bitch, you
deserve a medal for this ...or a head examination.”

He found a pink washcloth, wet it with cold
water then tenderly washed her face.

“Feels good.” She caught his hand and guided
it down her throat. “Don’t shtop.”

“If I don’t stop now, I never will.” The
bedsprings creaked when he stood up. “I would get you out of those
clothes, Kate, but there’s only so much temptation a man in my
condition can bear.”

“What condition?”

“I’ll tell you about it tomorrow ...when
you’re sober.” Pausing in the doorway, he looked back at her,
disheveled and dewy with desire. For somebody else. “That is ...if
you still want to hear about it.”

Softly, he closed her door.

Hal Lightfoot was proud of his office. Only
twenty and already he was an executive.

He balled a wad of paper and hurled it
over-handed toward the wastebasket. It landed on the floor with the
other wads of paper.

When he got up, the old swivel chair squeaked
and threatened to topple. He kicked it with his steel-toed boots
and sent it flying into the wall. The rusty rollers on the bottom
made a scratch against the painted concrete walls, but nobody would
ever see. Nobody cared.

The basement was his domain. So what if his
office was a forgotten closet he’d cleaned out and furnished with
castoffs he’d rescued from the garbage heap? And what if his title
was one he’d made up? Maintenance engineer. It sounded a hell of a
lot better than janitor.

Besides, he knew things, things that would
advance him quickly up the corporate ladder.

If he played his cards right.

He gathered his dust mops and rags and was
headed up the stairs, when a scene outside the basement window
caught his attention. The governor and Lacey Wainwright were
standing beside the garbage heap, which was exactly the place they
belonged. In Hal’s opinion, all the big-shot bastards who thought
they were better than everybody else belonged right out there on
the garbage heap.

He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but
it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Everybody knew about the
scandal Kate Malone had stirred up.

Now, there was a piece of work. That bitch
had a lot coming to her, and she deserved every bit of it.

That pompous asshole Wainwright who thought
he was such a hotshot manager would be telling the governor that he
didn’t have any idea how the rusty barrels got out there and leaked
toxic waste into Witch Creek.

In a pig’s eye.

And Mingo would look at him with those eyes
blacker than the pits of hell and tell him he spoke with the
sente soolish
.

Hell, he could tell that Mingo a thing or
two. And might have if he didn’t still remember the humiliation of
that summer night in front of Kate Malone’s clinic. Hatred boiled
in him at the thought of that meddling witch.

And Wainwright. He hated that piece of shit,
too. Driving around Tribal Lands in his gold Cadillac as if he
owned the whole damned place. Chicago white trash was what he
was.

Still, he could be useful to Hal. He
fortified himself with peyote then leaned against the wall until
the thundering of the white buffalo was a distant echo.

As he went up the stairs with his mops and
rags, Hal remembered a saying of his grandfather’s: Be careful when
you hunt for the rattlesnake that he does not find you before you
find him, for the bite of the rattler is death.

Hal knew how to be careful.

o0o

Kate’s head felt as big as a watermelon.
Movement set off jackhammers behind her temples that caused her
eyes to come unfocused.

“You’ve done it now, Katie Elizabeth,” she
said.

Her sins had caught up with her. She’d never
make it to the front porch for the morning paper, let alone to the
clinic. Picking up the phone, she dialed Deborah’s number. Even the
distant ringing of the phone set off minor explosions in her head.
Fortunately she didn’t have to endure more than one ring.

“Deborah?”

“Why are you whispering, Kate?”

“Shhh. Not so loud.” Thinking fast, she made
an excuse. “Mark’s still asleep.”

Too late, she realized that Deborah would
wonder how a telephone conversation would awaken him unless they
were in the same bedroom.

“Hmmm” was all Deborah said.

“Can you handle things by yourself
today?”

“Certainly. If there’s an emergency, I’ll
call you.”

“Thanks.”

Coward
, she said to herself when she
hung up. She hadn’t wanted to face Deborah today, hadn’t wanted to
see the glow of Eagle Mingo in her eyes. The hangover was merely a
convenient excuse.

“You’ll have to do better than this, Katie
Elizabeth,” she muttered as she slipped into her robe.

This was what living alone had reduced her
to: talking to herself. And sounding like her father in the
bargain.

Could that be a sign? Was somebody trying to
tell her it was time to get on with her life?

She might start by being more responsive to
Mark Grant. Blurred images came to her mind of herself licking his
skin. By all the saints, had she actually done that?

Holding her head together with the palms of
her hands and sheer willpower, she crept through the house and onto
the front porch to get the morning paper. Bending sent her into
such a swoon that she closed her eyes. Reaching blindly, she
encountered something soft and sticky.

A dead bird lay on top of her newspaper, its
neck broken and its wings ripped off.

Kate sank to her knees and stared at the
bird, horrified. How did it get there? She didn’t own a cat, and
birds didn’t fall out of trees in that condition.

She took the next leap in logic: Someone had
put it there. But who? And why?

She felt the bile rising in her throat, and
leaning over the porch railing, she heaved. The crisp early morning
breezes cooled her forehead and blew some of the cobwebs from her
mind.

She was being paranoid. There were plenty of
stray cats in Witch Dance. She’d seen them nosing around the
garbage cans behind the clinic.

“Poor little thing,” she said, picking up the
newspaper with the bird cradled inside.

A blood-smeared headline caught her eye.
“Governor Closes Witch Dance Tool and Die Plant.” Still kneeling,
she read the rest of the story.

“Governor Mingo personally investigated
claims that Witch Dance Tool and Die dumped toxic chemicals into
the creek that runs behind their property. Plant manager Lacey
Wainwright claims the toxic spills were accidental. At this
printing the governor has closed the plant, but says the closure is
temporary, pending further investigation.

“Clean-up efforts are under way, and until
they are complete, the entire area around the plant is
quarantined.

“Employees at the plant, angry at the
shutdown and temporary loss of jobs, charged ‘bleeding heart
environmentalists’ with scare tactics. Dr. Kate Malone along with
Dr. Mark Grant discovered the toxic wastes that led to the closure
of the plant.”

A recent photo of Eagle accompanied the
article. Kate stared at it, racked by visions of Deborah in his
arms. Her lover and her best friend.

Was there any justice in the world?

Sighing, she folded the paper carefully
around the small broken bird and carried the bundle to the garbage
can. When Mark asked, she’d say the paper boy forgot to
deliver.

No need to mention the dead bird. There were
other, more pressing things she wanted to talk about. Such as
whether Mark Grant would do her the honor of escorting her to the
dance at the Chickasaw Cultural Center.

o0o

Anna sat across the kitchen table from her
husband and tried to carry the conversation by herself.

“I might take a job,” she said.

Cole stared at her, silent. Clint’s brows
drew together as he watched his father, waiting. Then he forced a
bright smile.

“That’s great, Mom.”

Still, nothing from Cole. Two months earlier
he’d have wrapped his arms around her and cajoled her with
endearing words. “I can’t do without you at the ranch, Anna,” he’d
have said. “What would I do if my sweet hummingbird were not
here?”

Two months earlier Bucky and Mary Doe had
been alive. Anna wadded her napkin in her fist and tried not to
cry.

“Eagle said I could work in his office. His
secretary is swamped.” Her husband stared right through her. “I
know it’s not much, but it’s a start.”

Cole picked up his knife and sliced his roast
beef.

“Whatever you want to do, Anna. It’s no
concern to me.”

“No concern to you? I’m your wife!”

The knife clanked against his plate, and his
chair fell over as he stood up.

“Cole, where are you going?”

He didn’t answer. His boots echoed on the
polished wood floor as he made his way to the back door.