The Darkest Heart by Brenda Joyce Page B

Shozkay was too perceptive.
    Jack didn’t want to tell him, but he had been alone for too long with no one to talk to. He pulled a fistful of grass from the ground and clenched it. “I hate the white man’s whores.”
    “The few I have seen were ugly, fat, and dirty,” Shozkay agreed.
    Jack threw the grass away. Candice was beautiful, slim except for her voluptuous breasts—and clean. His loins tightened with the memory of her.
    “So you have not taken a white wife.”
    Another derisive sound.
    “Why not?”
    “Why not?” Jack laughed. “A breed like myself?”
    “I see,” his brother said. “Do not go back to the
pindah
. We are your kind. Stay here.”
    “I can’t,” Jack said, guzzling from the jug.
    “Your second wife has moon-eyes for you.”
    “No.”
    “Then there is someone?”
    “No,” Jack gritted, then looked his brother in the eye. “Yes. Maybe. Ahh, she is white. You don’t understand.”
    “Tell me.”
    “There’s nothing to tell. To her I am not a man but something less—a half-breed.”
    “Then make her change her mind,” Shozkay said.
    Jack looked at him. He drank again. The advice echoed, disturbing him.
    “Can one woman defeat Niño Salvaje?”
    Jack met his gaze. “Maybe,” he said softly, “this one can.”
    “I don’t think so,” Shozkay replied.
    “How is your wife?” Jack asked, abruptly changing the topic. But he couldn’t shake the words:
Then change her mind
.
    “Ahh …” Shozkay grinned broadly. “Very impossible. I have to beat her twice a day.”
    Jack laughed with real humor. Shozkay had married one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Her name was Luz. She was not from their tribe, but a Chiricahua Apache. Although usually when a warrior married he joined his wife’s people, to provide for her family, it was not unheard of for an elder son or a single son to remain in the band of his birth and uproot his wire from her own kin. Shozkay had done just that.
    Luz was very tall, just a head shorter than her husband, and willowy. Her face was oval, her hair jet black. She had green eyes. Her grandmother had been a white woman. Although she had initially shown Shozkay that she was interested in him, she had rejected his subsequent advances, and he had courted her furiously for six months before he had dared allow his kin to send gifts to her family for her hand.
    Luz had returned the gifts—which was an unequivocal rejection—but Shozkay had persisted, and the next time he had sent gifts, they had not been returned.
    They had been married four years. Jack had never seen two people as close. Sometimes the way they looked at each other amused him. Sometimes it gave him a strange, disturbingsensation. He and Chilahe had never shared the depth of emotion that his brother and his wife had. “She is a good woman, Shozkay,” he said softly.
    “Yes.”
    Jack smiled. “Maybe you had better beat her three times a day, heh? To make her better.”
    They both chuckled at the absurdity of it.
    Jack had to focus hard to find his bedroll, even though he knew he should have been able to locate it blindfolded, or without the nearly full moon to see by. But that was the problem. He was having trouble with his vision. He chuckled aloud. He and Shozkay had drunk several jugs of
tulapai
. They were both going to think they were dying in the morning, but right now he didn’t give a damn.
    After a thorough search of the area to the southeast of the camp, which he determined was where he had laid his gear, he finally found the spot.
    Shozkay had offered him his
gohwah
. So had Hayilkah, and numerous others, including the dead brave’s family. But Jack had refused. There was nothing he liked more than sleeping in the starlight, especially when the air was mountain fresh and slightly cool, like now. He lay on his blanket and fell right into sleep.
    He had a wonderful dream. A woman was pressing her bare, soft breasts against his back, kissing his neck, his ear. The