He had traveled with his father to Scotland, stared numbly at his brother’s coffin, watched as it was set upon the slab within the ancient Douglas vault beside their grandfather’s coffin. He had attended the inquest with his father. He had demanded full knowledge of his brother’s demise. He had been the power and the fury when his father had not had the strength. All of his rage, however, could not change what had happened. The stables had caught fire. David had died. Lord Douglas had been too broken to remain in Scotland. The estates had been left in the care of Lord Douglas’s distant kin, while father and remaining son had returned to Sioux lands.
Hawk had never imagined the grief that seized him at his brother’s death. Yet, that did not seem to compare with his father’s loss.
He had respected his father. His pride had made him determined to be a model son. He had even admired his father.
Yet now, finally, for the first time, he realized he loved him.
Watching his father grieve, Hawk thought that at last he truly understood the man who’d been a Scottish peer, yet had the courage to tell the world he had taken an Indian bride as his legal wife and would raise an Indian son along with a properly bred heir. And yet, in David’s pain, he never grieved for his elder son as his properly bred heir—he grieved for him as his child, for flesh and blood, for laughter, for love. Lord David Douglas, for all his wealth, position—and white skin—was a good man. A father who deserved the love Hawk had withheld from him while giving it first to his mother, then his brother. In trying not to become too white, Hawk realized, he had betrayed all that hisgrandfather had told him was important about being Sioux. He had given up the generosity that was demanded by his Sioux heritage. No matter what a man had, he shared. Hawk had failed to share the emotion his father needed most. Now he learned to do so.
He fell in love. She eased the pain of his loss. Her name was Sea-of-Stars, and she was so named for her eyes, which were brilliantly blue and very beautiful. Her mother was a white woman who had been captured at a very young age. Her father was the war chief Burnt Arrow. Her brother was Black Eagle, an old friend and companion who helped explain to him everything that had happened between the whites and the Sioux and the other Indians in the time that he had been gone.
Hawk married Sea-of-Stars and divided his time between his father’s home and his wife’s. They had a child, a son, and the boy was the delight of his life. Little Hawk, the Indians called him. The future Lord Douglas, another Andrew, Hawk’s father insisted with pleasure.
Hawk wondered about that future for his Indian son, and for himself as well.
But he didn’t have to wonder long.
Smallpox killed Sea-of-Stars, his father-in-law, and his son before the boy had been a month old.
Again, Hawk grieved. The pain had been so great that he had been blind to all else, even his father’s concern.
But he had been among his wife’s people when word had come that the white army was about to attack the Indian village along the river.
That day, he had fought the soldiers. He had been numb and cold with his grief, ruled by fury, determined only that no one else in the village should die. He didn’t care if he was killed in battle, and he was reckless in the extreme. The soldiers were turned back.
He collapsed. He had lost more blood than he had imagined. When he awoke, he was in his father’s house. David had sat by his bed, nursing him, demanding to know. “My son, you have experienced the grief of a father for his child. How could you wish that pain upon me?”
David had been right. Hawk had healed, a wiser, graver man. He spent long hours with his father, learning to deal with the grief for his own wife and son. Time passed, never erasing Hawk’s loss but easing his pain. Gold was discovered in the Black Hills, and one of David Douglas’s expeditions claimed one of the most productive veins.
More settlers—miners, sutlers, shopkeepers, wives, dance-hall girls, and the assorted children of one and all—began to move into what had been Sioux country.
When the seriousness of the situation escalated, Hawk found himself in an extremely troubling position. Boyhood friends were among the most violent of the hostiles, men he knew well. As a boy, he had ridden with Crazy Horse, who was near his own age. He had listened to the wisdom of Sitting Bull, who was considered not just a great war chief but a very great holy man as well.
He knew them. He understood them.
Such had been the situation when his father had gone east.
David had not yet come home. His body was due soon. In fact, Hawk had gone to Riley’s Trading Station early that afternoon with three of his Lakota cousins to find out when his father’s body would be arriving for burial.
And that was when he had first seen her. The stagecoach should have been long gone with the first of morning’s light, but a broken wheel had waylaid it.
He’d seen a vision of golden beauty and radiant youth bedecked in black and heard her claiming his inheritance.
She’d spent the night at the station, and she’d come downstairs into the kitchen when he’d been sitting at a back table with his cousins, talking with Riley about the army movements and the danger to hostiles that was forthcoming. He’d seen the coachman, Sam Haggerty, come in, heard him addressing her as Lady Douglas. Then she’d asked him how long it was going to take to reach Mayfair—the Douglas home in a valley off the Black Hills. And she’d very sweetly told him that she meant to keep the mine working, to live in the estate, to make it a home. And no, she wasn’t afraid of Indians. Lord Douglas had told her that she wouldn’t need to be afraid.
When old Riley himself would have stood and told her that she’d best be looking out for Lord Douglas, Hawk had dragged him down and hushed him.
One look at her, and he’d been determined to find out for himself just what trick she thought she played to call herself Lady Douglas.
And just what games she might have played upon his father. By God, she was young, a third of his father’s age if that! He tried to tell himself that David Douglas had been no man’s fool. Yet it plagued and goaded him that the elegantly beautiful young blonde woman might have seduced David into marriage and then…
Killed him.
Not with a gun or a knife but with those heavily lashed silver eyes. That perfect oval face, ruby lips, breathy laugh. Flashing smile. Perfectly rounded breasts. Supple, graceful, seductive movements.
She might well have caused him to have a heart attack. God knew, the mere sight of her could cause a heart to beat way too hard, cause a man’s breath to catch, the whole of him to harden like quickening steel off a blacksmith’s fire.
If she’d been about to claim to be his stepmother, he was damned determined she’d have other thoughts. And if she had somehow hastened David to his death, then…
