Brave the Wild Wind

Chapter 20

JESSIE stirred the pot of beans one more time before she brought it to the table. Chase was already helping himself to the hot biscuits and fried rabbit. She’d made a suet pudding for later, just like Jeb’s, with the raisins, nuts, brown sugar, and spices she’d found.

They were making use of the supply shack on the north range. Jessie had pushed hard, trying to get home before the day was out, but it just hadn’t worked out that way. The sky had clouded up, and it had gotten dark early, with the ranch still three hours away.

She had kept her distance since that surprising kiss, and he hadn’t made any other overtures. Still, being so near him was disconcerting. She needed a distraction.

“Where did you learn to handle a knife so well?” Jessie asked tentatively.

Chase didn’t look up. “San Francisco. I met an old sea captain who taught me a few tricks so I could handle myself on the waterfront. That waterfront wasn’t the most sociable of places at night, or even during the day for that matter.”

“Why were you there?” Jessie prompted.

“I worked there for a few years.”

“Doing what?”

Chase looked up at last. “My, but you’re full of questions tonight.” He smiled at her.

“Do you mind?”

“No, I guess not. I was a dealer in a gambling house. It’s where I got my first taste of gambling.”

“You like to gamble?”

“You could say that.”

“San Francisco is a long way from Chicago. Had you always lived in Chicago before San Francisco?”

“I was born in New York, but my mother moved to Chicago when I was a baby. She was hiding, really.

Her first name was Mary, but she changed the last to Summers. She never did tell me what her real last name was.”

There was the bitterness in his tone that had been there before when he spoke of his mother. “Hiding from what?” Jessie asked hesitantly.

“I’m a bastard,” he replied nonchalantly. “She couldn’t bear the shame of it. She never let me forget it, either, or that my father hadn’t wanted her or me. I sometimes wonder, though. When she was drunk, she would let certain things slip that she denied when sober, like the fact that she hadn’t actually seen my father once she knew she was pregnant.”

“You think maybe he never knew about you?”

“It’s possible,” he replied. “I mean to find out, someday. But anyway, she brought us to Chicago and started a seamstress shop that did very well. She met Ewing through the shop. I was ten when he started bringing his mistresses there for fancy outfits. He was looking for a respectable wife, one with a child, and the widow Summers seemed ideal. She didn’t love him, though. And it wasn’t as if we needed his wealth, for we were doing fine. But she claimed to love him. That was her excuse, when all she really wanted were the luxuries his wealth could buy.”

“Was that so wrong? It couldn’t have been easy, raising you alone. Perhaps your bitterness stems from having to share her after all the years when it was only the two of you.”

“Share her?” Chase said. “I hardly ever saw her. She was always at social functions, on shopping sprees. She turned me over to Ewing completely.”

“You resented that?”

“I’ll say! Here’s a perfect stranger treating you like you were born to him, but with an iron hand. Beating you for the slightest wrong, the tiniest assertion of your own will.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I was only under his rule for six years.”

Jessie knew he was trying to make light of something that held terrible memories. He was frowning at some unbidden memory, and she left him to himself for a while.

“You left home when you were only sixteen?” she ventured a little later. “Weren’t you frightened? How did you manage, so young?”

“You could say I joined another family, the Army.”

“They accepted you that young?”

Chase grinned. “This was in ‘64, Jessie. They were taking anybody then.”

“Of course,” she gasped. “The War between the States. You joined the North?”

He nodded. “I signed up for the duration, a green kid learning the hard way how to be a man. I took off for California after that.”

“Why California?”

“That’s where my mother met my father.”

“So you went there to find him?”

He nodded. “But I didn’t find him. The Silvela ranch was sold when the gold rush started. So many years had passed, there was no one to tell me where the Silvelas had gone, but I figured they went back to Spain.”

“Your father was a rancher?”

“It was his uncle’s ranch, according to my mother.”

“A Spaniard,” she commented thoughtfully. “You must take after him.”

“I guess so.” Chase smiled lazily. “My mother was a redhead with bright green eyes.”

“But I gathered she was from New York. What was she doing in California?”

“The way she told it, her mother had just died. It was only her and her father, and he lived more at sea than at home. He was captain of a tallow ship that made regular runs from the California coast to the East. It was the first time she had ever gone with him, and the Silvelas were one of the rancher families her father dealt with. Apparently Carlos Silvela, young and handsome, swept her off her feet. He did not promise marriage, though.

“She realized she was pregnant before her father sailed back East, and she told her father. He insisted on marriage, and I’ve heard several versions of what happened then. One was that my mother begged Carlos Silvela to marry her, but he wouldn’t. Another was that the uncle, the head of the clan, refused to give his consent, humiliating my mother by saying an americana was not good enough for his nephew. Then there was my mother’s drunken version, where she swore Carlos loved her and would have married her if he had known.”

“Don’t you know which is true?”

“No. But I’ll find out someday.”

“You’ll have to go to Spain to do that. Why haven’t you gone?”

Chase shrugged. “It seemed hopeless. I didn’t know where to start. Spain’s a big country. Also, I don’t speak the language.”

“Spanish isn’t difficult to learn,” she scoffed.

“I suppose you speak it?”

“Well... yes,” she admitted.

Spanish happened to be the only language John Anderson knew besides English, and Jessie had been eager for him to teach her everything he was capable of teaching. But she wasn’t going to explain that to Chase.

“Why didn’t you learn it, if it would help you find your father?” she pressed.

“I was too disappointed and angry in not finding my father where I thought he’d be. It had taken me a hell of a long time just to get to California. Then to find I had made the trip for nothing ...”

“So you just gave up?”

“I was twenty and restless, Jessie. I didn’t have the money to get to Spain, anyway.”

“That’s when you got a job dealing cards in San Francisco?” she concluded.

“Yes. I drifted back East after that. Thought I’d see a bit more of this country,” he explained. “I tried life on the Mississippi for a couple of years, but one too many boiler explosions and collisions made the river steamers unappealing. A big game down in Texas drew me there, and then I drifted to Kansas. They have some fancy saloons in the cow towns there, if you don’t mind the wild goings-on at the end of every trail drive.”

“You’re a gambler!” Jessie realized finally. “My God! Of all the shiftless, lazy things!”

Chase chuckled at her contempt. “It’s a living. I can take it or leave it. It’s made traveling easy. I just happen to have uncommon luck at cards. Why shouldn’t I take advantage of it?”

She calmed down a little. “Can you really make a living at gambling?”

“Enough to live quite comfortably in the good hotels,” he admitted.

“But what kind of a life is that?”

That hit a sore spot. “Let’s just say, a life with no ties. Now it’s my turn to ask a few questions, don’t you think?”

Jessie shrugged, reaching for the last biscuit. “What do you want to know?”

“You said you’ve only been happy with your Indian friends. Why is that?”

“They let me be myself.”

“I saw you looking and acting like one of them. You call that being yourself?”

“I looked like a girl, didn’t I?” Jessie threw back at him.

“You looked like an Indian.”

“But a girl,” she persisted.

“Yes, of course, but what has that—”

“It’s the only place I can be a girl—what I am. My father never let me, you see. He burned all the clothes I came here with and never let me buy a dress. Dresses weren’t appropriate for the things I had to learn to do. Nothing could remind him I was a girl.”

Chase hissed. “I thought you dressed like that by choice.”

“Hardly.”

“But your father’s dead now.”

“Yes,” Jessie replied without thinking. “But my mother is here.”

“But she doesn’t approve of the way you dress and act. You must know that.” And then he whistled softly. “Yes, of course you know it. I see.”

“It’s none of your business,” Jessie snapped.

“Anytime I hit a touchy subject, it’s none of my business.” He sighed. “I’m not judging you, Jessie. I don’t care how you dress. You looked mighty pretty, though, in that Indian dress,” he said nicely, trying to cool her temper.

But Jessie wasn’t having any of it. She got up, her eyes flaring. “I cooked, now you can clean up. I’ll be back.”

He sat up straight. “Where are you going?”

“Out back to wash.”

But before she could leave, he was up and facing her. “What did you tell Little Hawk about marrying him? You did give him an answer, didn’t you?”

“If you must know, I refused him. I won’t share the man I settle for. Little Hawk already has a wife.”

Chase let that sink in. “And if he didn’t?”

“I probably would have agreed.”

She went outside, and Chase stared at the closed door for a long time.

Sometime later, Jessie came in shaking her wet hair. It was loose and as black and glossy as sable. Without a glance in his direction, she walked to her saddlebags on the foot of her cot, got a brush, and sat down cross-legged on the shaggy fur by the fire.

Chase watched her as she began running the brush through her hair, but then he turned away, feeling edgy. He moved to his own cot, only a few feet from hers. He stared at the narrow thing, looked at hers, and realized it would be easy to push the two together. The thought made him edgier.

“Thanks for cleaning up the mess,” she said suddenly.

“Thanks for making dinner,” he returned.

They fell silent. She turned back to face the fire, giving him her profile. Chase couldn’t take his eyes off her. Absently, he began to unbutton his shirt. She was raising her hair to the heat, shaking it, swaying it, then brushing it. He became mesmerized by that floating black hair. It was so shiny, reflecting the fire. And when she leaned back, tilting her head back to shake her hair, the smooth contour of her throat enraptured him.

Chase didn’t know what he intended when he got up and started toward Jessie. He knelt behind her and gathered her hair in his hands, pressing his lips to the side of her neck. She tried to pull away from him, and he came to his senses and let her go.

Jessie scrambled to her knees to face him. “What—?”

“I want to make love to you.”

His eyes were smoldering as they caressed her face, her neck, her hair. All she could think of was that other night when he’d looked at her the same way. Funny, but that was all she could think of. Jessie moved toward him and let him gather her into his arms. One hand entwined in her hair, the other held her lower back, pressing her close to him. His mouth captured hers in a kiss that inflamed her, and it went on and on until she lost all sensation but that. His lips moved to her neck, and she groaned with the tingling they caused. He lowered her to the rug, and she tried to pull him down on top of her, but he held back, shrugging out of his shirt first. She devoured him with her eyes, watching the hard muscles that played under his skin, such darkly tanned skin. She ran her fingers through the hair on his chest, over those muscles that fascinated her so, down those strong arms.

Chase was watching her watch him. It excited him until he was so hard inside his pants that it was painful, and he quickly removed them.

Jessie reached out and touched the thick, hard shaft that stood so proud. He groaned, and she wrapped her arms around his hips, pressing her cheek against his hard belly. He jerked her upward, fastening his mouth on hers again savagely. She dug her fingers into his hair, and he undid her buttons, quickly removing her shirt. There was no bashfulness as she shed the rest of her clothes. There was only the heat of his eyes, and then his hot hands as he touched each place she bared.

When she was as naked as he was, she leaned back, ready to receive him. He knelt between her legs, but he didn’t give her what she craved, not yet. He leaned forward, running his hands down her sides, over her hips. When he laid his cheek against her belly, snuggling there, hugging her to him, she knew what he had felt when she’d done the same thing. It was unbearable.

“You’re so beautiful, Jessie.”

She believed him. She felt worshiped. She felt completely woman.

Chase kissed the inside of her thigh. Her legs were exquisite, not at all as he’d expected. The muscles were there, but her legs were soft and supple when she relaxed.

He slid his hands up to her breasts. They were so soft, so full, the nipples hard and pointed. He tasted them, licking her until she cried, “No more!”

Her fingers dug into his hair, and she pulled him up. Her mouth fastened to his with such urgency that he was lost in her. She arched to meet him, molding her skin to his wherever she could and he entered her.

She wrapped her legs around him, and he sank deeply into her. “Oh, yes! Jessie... Jessie.”

She exploded in a burst of ecstatic throbbing.

He had not moved once after entering her, and did not need to. Her fulfillment coming so quickly was enough to drive him over the brink, and he spilled his seed into her, his throbbing making her own pleasure go on and on.

Jessie floated off to sleep. Chase got up to fetch a blanket to cover them, then snuggled down next to her and slept a deep sated sleep.