Sandra nodded. “She has studied the maps in your library. She had no problem saddling a horse and slipping away. But I saw her, and I followed her.”
He leaned back. Under normal circumstances, he shouldn’t have said or done anything that might encourage Sandra to spy on her mistress.
But these weren’t normal circumstances. “What did she do?”
“She went to see Mr. Pierpont.”
“Ah.” He wondered if Skylar had discovered that she would have inherited the house and most of the surrounding property if he had sought an annulment.
“What then?”
“She went to the telegraph office. Then she rode home.”
He nodded, tapping his pen against the blotter on his desk. “Thank you,” he murmured absently.
Sandra nodded. “Do you want to know what she said?”
He frowned. “In the telegram?”
“No, to Mr. Pierpont.”
“You know what she said to him?”
Sandra smiled broadly. “I stood outside his window. She said she had come to find out if she could have some kind of allowance of her own. Mr. Pierpont told her that she had to speak to you. She said that she didn’t really need very much. He said that he was truly sorry, but that she still had to speak to you.”
“Well, good for old Henry!” Hawk mused. Henry had drawn up the papers for his father to arrange a proxy marriage for him. But at least now Henry seemed to have discovered a new loyalty.
Not that there was actually anything wrong with Skylar’s receiving an allowance for her personal expenditures. He just wanted to know what she so obsessively needed the money for. It had something to do with someone back east. A lover? No intimate affair had been consummated, but that didn’t mean that she hadn’t been involved with someone else.
He looked up at Sandra, smiling. “Thank you again.”
“It’s important, the information I’ve given you.”
“It may be.”
She smiled again. “Then I’m pleased. I won’t let her hurt you.”
“Sandra—” He hesitated. He was aware that she cared about him. He had found her, orphaned as a girl, on the plain. She’dliterally been alone, seated in the middle of a small Sioux camp after a Crow raid that had taken the lives of all the others in the band. His father had gladly taken her in, giving her small jobs at first and seeing that she was tutored in English and history. She had white blood, possibly Oriental as well, and David felt she should learn about a variety of cultures and make her own choice as to which she would like to live in. She had liked Mayfair, and as she grew up, she had taken on housekeeping chores and became a part of the family. She’d loved his father and was equally fond of him, and he returned her affection. He was just uneasy about the way her affection for him seemed to be shifting. “Sandra, she is my wife. She isn’t going to?—”
“You didn’t want her. Your father found her because she’s white. You can’t trust her.”
He hesitated in midbreath.
It was true that he couldn’t trust Skylar. It was equally true that…
She was his wife. The wife he hadn’t wanted. The wife who obsessed him. And somehow, he’d break down the barriers between them. Find out what had happened in the past. And just what the hell she was up to now.
Find the woman he had touched that first night he’d made love to her…
“Sandra, Skylar is my wife.”
Sandra smiled. “But you keep your own bed.”
“Many white couples keep separate rooms.”
Sandra smiled. “Because most white men tire of their wives.”
“Sandra, you’re mistaken.”
