Cherokee Storm. Janelle TaylorЧитать онлайн книгу.
and urged him to plunge deeper ever deeper inside her. In her dreams, she not only touched his sex but fondled…even kissed it as it swelled and lengthened. It was her shame and her glory, and she had to accept her bold nature or believe herself to be a wicked and sinful creature.
Did other decent women have such dreams? Never had she longed so much for her friend Anna from the orphanage. She could have asked Anna anything, told her any secret, knowing that Anna would never judge her, never mock or reproach her. But Anna, dearer than any sister, was lost to her, and she was alone. There was no one to ask, least of all her father’s disapproving woman.
Oona might not have told Shannon’s father about seeing Storm Dancer with her at the spring, but that was her only kindness. No matter how Shannon tried to fit in, the woman remained as distant and disapproving as she had been the first night they’d met. She rarely spoke, rarely smiled, and almost never sat still. Even after supper, when Flynn would stretch out in his chair before the fire and smoke his pipe, Oona sewed or ground corn kernels into flour, or worked on her baskets.
Shannon had never seen a woman work so hard. After a full day of cleaning, cooking, washing, and tanning hides or smoking meat or fish, Oona would weave intricate reed baskets to sell at the store. The dyes she brewed herself from forest plants and minerals, and she decorated the containers with beautiful geometric designs, beads, and feathers. So tightly woven were the seams of Oona’s baskets, that some would hold water. Shannon had offered to help one evening and been firmly rebuffed.
Oona’s eyes had widened in shock at the suggestion. “Never. Two people cannot make a basket,” she said, making a hand sign that Shannon had come to understand would ward off evil. “Each basket has a spirit,” Oona whispered. “If two women try to weave the same one, the basket spirit will wither and die.”
“I could learn,” Shannon suggested. “You could teach me, and I could weave my own basket.”
“You are too old,” the Indian woman dismissed. “My mother taught me when I was a child.”
“I’m hardly in my dotage. Two of us could make twice as many baskets, and—”
Flynn stood up, frowned first at her and then at Oona, and walked out of the cabin without saying a word. All three dogs trailed after him. Oona uttered a sound of amusement and bent over the basket in her lap.
Shannon threw down her book, followed her father outside, and found him leaning against a porch post, tamping down the tobacco in his pipe. “Da, I mean Flynn, I—”
“Settle it between you. I won’t take sides between my womenfolk.”
“She hates me!”
“She doesn’t.”
“I’m not welcome here.”
“I don’t believe that.” He drew on the pipe until the tobacco glowed red. “Oona’s got her funny ways, certain. She won’t even let me touch her baskets until they’re done. Superstitious as a Galway Bay sailor.”
“I just want to be of help.”
“Aren’t you putting my accounts to right? And didn’t you find those playing cards I’ve been missing for over a year? I’ve had three customers wanting a deck, and couldn’t find them.”
“Cherokee play cards?” One of the hounds nosed her ankle, but she paid the bitch no heed.
He chuckled. “No, not them. Great gamblers are the Cherokee, but they prefer their own games of chance. I’m meanin’ His Majesty’s finest from Fort Hood. Only three days away by horseback. I get soldiers every couple months, pockets heavy with shillings. And they’ll pay dearly for fresh cards.”
“Da, when I was young,” she replied, “I remember you saying that a trader had to be fair, and he had to be friendly. But most of all, he had to be a good businessman. If you give away your profits to the Indians, the sale of ten decks of playing cards won’t save you.”
He sat down on the porch, let the dog curl around his ankles, and dug a piece of smoked meat from his pocket. He fed the treat to the hound and stroked the animal’s head. “Maybe I did say that,” he agreed. “I thought that way then, but after you and your mother left, I realized there was more to life than turning a coin. Family, and conscience, and friendship matter more to me now. Knowing I might be a better father to the babe comin’ than I was to you, that’s important.”
“You could end up old and poor, Flynn.” She sat down beside him.
“I’ve been poor before, and there’s worse things.”
“Worse than going to bed hungry? Worse than seeing your mother go into a pauper’s grave because there’s no money for a church funeral?”
“That too?” He sighed. “I didn’t know that useless uncle of yours denied her a proper burial. I’m sorry.”
“She wasn’t buried in holy ground, just a weedy field near the river.”
“Oh, child. How did you bear it and you only a little lass of nine?”
Shannon’s throat constricted. “She had a priest, Da. I ran to the church and brought one back when she was dying. Uncle whipped me for it later. Said I cost him money to pay the Father, but it eased her, I think—to have the last rites.”
Flynn stroked her hair with a rough hand. “She was a lady, your mother. She married me because…”
“Go on,” she urged, certain he would say they fell in love despite their differences.
“It’s no tale for you, darlin’. They were hard times.”
Not harder than the orphanage, she thought, but couldn’t say so. Better for her father not to know that she’d awakened one morning when she was eleven to find the girl next to her dead, her body frozen stiff and eyes staring. Better that no one knew that a rat had chewed her friend’s fingers to the bone.
“Your mother never went without food or a place to lay her head, after we married,” her father continued, unaware of her own dark memories. “You see, darlin’, the man she’d wanted had died before they could be wed and she thought she was with child.”
“My mother?” Shannon was shocked. How could that be true? No more modest woman ever lived. Could she have been intimate with a man out of wedlock? A man other than her father?
“It didn’t matter to me.”
“You mean…” Shannon’s breath caught in her throat. Was he going to tell her that he wasn’t her father? “What happened to the baby?”
He knocked out the remaining tobacco in his pipe and rubbed out the coals with the heel of one moccasin. “She got her courses the week after we were wed. She hadn’t been in the family way after all.”
Relief made her knees feel weak. “So there was no child?”
“No, and none for us for years. It was a mistake between us,” he said. “She never forgave me for not being him—the man she’d loved and lost.”
“She never loved you?”
“I like to think she did, after a fashion, after we wore smooth the burrs. She loved you, though. Never think for a minute she didn’t.”
“She shouldn’t have taken me away from you.”
“Ah, no, you can say that. But how can you tell a mother not to cling to her only chick? We made a mess of things, but you’re the best of us both.”
“And you care for Oona, don’t you?”
“God help me, I do. It’s been my fortune to have two women both better than me.”
She leaned close and hugged him. “I’ll try harder to get along with her.”
“Good girl. She’ll need you with the wee one comin’. She’s like a walnut, my Oona. Hard on the outside, sweet and soft on