Any feelings of tenderness that might have been touched in him by her beauty were stilled by the painful reminder that David, the late Lord Douglas, was dead.
Hawk had received word from Henry Pierpont, his father’s beleaguered but ever-proper attorney, who had been informed by the president of their Maryland bank that David had died of apparent heart failure in Baltimore just two weeks ago. Henry hadn’t mentioned anything then about a bride—for either his father or himself. It appeared that this woman did believe she was married to—or widowed by—his father. Yet she had said the name Andrew. His own.
Just what exactly had gone on between this absurdly young woman and his aging father? He couldn’t begin to fathom it. David had always been dignified to the extreme, a proud man, a wise one. He had deeply loved only two women in his life, and he had married them both. He had been in reasonably good health when he had traveled east, in full control of all his faculties.
Then how…
The woman who lay before him must have been incredibly persuasive. And yet, though she seemed convinced that she was the widow of Lord Douglas, she apparently knew nothing about her late husband’s life—or her late husband himself, for that matter. She hadn’t even known that his name had been David, not Andrew.
All she’d needed to know, he figured, was that his father was titled with a British peerage and had obtained a land grant in the Black Hills, in one of the few areas not considered Sa Papa, or Holy Land, by the Sioux, where he had also discovered gold.
Again, he longed to shake her. How could anyone appear so fragile and innocent yet fight like a cougar and have the instincts of an alley cat! She lay there, still silent, her breath barely causing a slow but constant rise and fall of her breasts.
She would come around all right. He rubbed his chin, feeling his irritation grow along with an unbidden rise of desire within him. His robe was not adequate cover for her. Whatever had he been thinking to strip away her clothing and dunk her in the tub? It had been her insistence that she needed to bathe that had triggered his action. And perhaps he’d been goaded by her greed, which was so great that it had apparently led her into what was still—despite the ever-encroaching army and the wave of white immigrants—basically Sioux country where few men dared to tread. She’d come here, so she’d deserved to discover the perils that awaited the unwary. Whites were often waylaid, robbed, raped, abducted, murdered—scalped.
And he hadn’t taken it so far as to scalp her.
Yet.
All right. He wasn’t going to scalp her.
Yet no matter what his fury regarding his father, she disturbed him, and he suddenly wished he’d confronted her in a white man’s court of law. Once he’d seen her, however, at Riley’s, where he’d been with his cousins while her stagecoach was being repaired, his temper had taken control. There she’d been, claiming to be Lady Douglas, when he’d never seen her before, heard of her—or even imagined that a Lady Douglas could possibly exist. He’d been so damned determined to torment such an impostor, show her the dangers of the deceitful charade she played, force the truth from her. It seemed somewhat ironic now. Had he been so convinced that he could certainly not fall for the wiles of such a fortune hunter himself?
Wiles be damned. She was simply a well-built female, and the robe was falling open, allowing him far more of a view of her breasts than he wanted. His own fault, however…
He’d have to be dead not to be attracted to her himself.
He drew part of the robe over her breast. It fell back. Something within him quickened, and he muttered a sound of self-disgust, walking from the bedside to find the shreds of the black mourning dress she had been wearing. He searched the skirt for pockets and found one. It contained several gold coins, a small mirror, and a brush. He tossed those items impatiently at the foot of the bed, then searched the skirt again. In another pocket, he found what he sought.
Papers.
He drew them out, studying them with a fierce frown.
She carried a marriage license. It appeared to be a proper and fully legal document stating that Skylar Connor had been wed, by proxy, to Lord Andrew Douglas by the Right Honorable Magistrate Timothy Carone in Baltimore a little more than two weeks ago.
The exact date of his father’s death.
He stared at the marriage license in his hand and then at the appendix behind it. His own signature was scrawled upon it. He frowned, reading further. The appendix was a proxy agreement. He didn’t remember signing the paper—didn’t even remember seeing it before—but it was indisputably his signature upon the paper.
But then he had been so impatient and irritable right before his father had started on his journey back east. When something pertained to the Scottish estates or Maryland property, Hawk had told David he must do as he saw fit because the property was his own. He was aware that his father had put many of his holdings into their joint ownership, determined there would never be any doubt that his Sioux son was now his legal heir. Itwas quite ironic. One of the first things his father had ever taught him was to read every word of a written contract.
He never read through a paper when his father asked for his signature. He’d still considered his father’s property to be just that and had thought that David should manage it as he saw fit.
Too late, he realized now that such an attitude had actually been selfish on his part. He had cared when it came to the Black Hills or their home here on the Western frontier.
But he had not been able to see beyond the Black Hills and the surrounding countryside because the situation here had been growing more and more tense since the end of the war.
So did this mean that the wily vixen on the bed was indeed Lady Douglas? Had he—taken a wife?
Could it be legal?
He groaned softly. Lately his father had been urging him to marry again. Insisting he needed a wife. A white wife. Hawk had had long, passionate discussions with his father regarding the future of the native man in the West, but indisputably, no matter how passionately he had argued against his father’s statements, he’d known they would eventually prove true—as true as the endless tide of white settlers and army who continued to come west in wave after land-hungry wave. David had not been without some influence in Washington, and even before his most recent trip, he had wearily assured his son that in the end the government would not honor any treaty. Whatever lands the Indians were given, the whites would take back. Americans considered it their “Manifest Destiny” to move from “sea to shining sea,” to occupy the whole of the North American continent. If they could, they’d push back the Mexicans and the British in Canada. That might be difficult to do in light of world opinion. But to exterminate Indians…red men…
It was a damned frightening possibility. Coming closer and closer.
Hawk knew that it had been his father’s love for him that had convinced his father he must marry a white woman. Live a white life. So what had David done? Pretended to a young gold digger that she was marrying a man on his last leg only to fall prey to her before bringing her west?
Because he hadn’t wanted to see his son exterminated.
