Jack managed a faint smile. “Twice was enough.” A vivid image of Candice Carter assaulted him. And with her image came a poignant yearning.
Shozkay regarded him with an attempt at sobriety. The jug was half empty. “It is not healthy to nave no woman—just like it is not healthy to have too many too often.”
“True,” Jack agreed, nodding thoughtfully now that the alcohol had lessened his grief a bit. As an Apache he had been raised to believe in sexual moderation. With both of his wives he had not been very successful at attempting to avoid excess. He had always, deep inside, believed that the reason for that was his white blood. Now he imagined having a white woman like Candice Carter for a wife. He would never be able to stay out of her bed. He made a sound, not exactly a laugh, with a hard edge to it.
“What is so funny—or so sad?” 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 thepindah. 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, disturbing sensation. 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.
