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“I will gladly do those things,” White Fire said, nodding. “But I have many things to do in my life before I can again sit with you as I sit with you tonight. I must do everything I can to protect my woman against the evil of her father. I must, at all cost, get my son back. These things take time and careful planning.”
“I wish you well and much happiness,” Chief Gray Feather said. He yawned and stretched. “The hour is late. Go. You will find the lodge that was yours three winters ago still standing. I have not allowed anyone to live in it. It is as you left it when you went to live with whites. I had hoped, even then, that you would return to us. So much inside my heart tells me that you belong here. It is a beckoning of sorts, a whisper in the wind.”
Chief Gray Feather rose to his feet as White Fire held Flame’s hand and she moved to his side.
The chief walked them to the entrance flap. Then he turned and went to sit by his fire again as they went on to White Fire’s wigwam.
Once inside, White Fire and Flame found a fire already burning in the fire pit. They found luxurious rabbit-fur blankets, woven from long strips of cottontail pelts, lying beside the fire.
“The blankets are beautiful,” Flame sighed as she sat down on one of them. “They are so soft.”
“They were made for me when I was an everyday part of the Chippewa’s lives,” White Fire said, recalling when Song Sparrow had brought them to his lodge and laid them at his feet.
Regret again filled his very soul to have hurt Song Sparrow so deeply by his rejection. But she would have to learn how to accept life as it was, not as she wished it to be. No one had control of their own fate. More than once fate had been unkind to Song Sparrow.
* * *
Song Sparrow stood in the dark shadows of night beneath a giant elm tree. As the brisk breeze fluttered the entrance flap that hung at White Fire’s lodge’s door, she could get an occasional peek of him and the flame-haired lady.
When she saw White Fire cover the white woman with his body and kiss her, she stared for a moment longer, then turned and fled into the forest, sobbing.
* * *
“Did you hear something?” Flame asked, drawing her lips from White Fire’s.
“Nothing but the thundering of my heart,” he whispered against her cheek, his hand sliding up inside her skirt. “Flame, Flame . . .”
Flame soon forgot having heard something that sounded like sobs as White Fire again covered her lips with his mouth and kissed her hard and long, while his fingers stroked her woman’s center. All was lost to her now except for the ecstasy that was building within her.
“Undress me,” she whispered against his lips. “Let me undress you.”
She closed her eyes and shivered sensually as White Fire unfastened her skirt and slowly slid it down across her hips, past her thighs, and then on past her ankles. He tossed it aside.
And before removing her blouse, he bent low and kissed the warm, wet place at the juncture of her thighs, the red tendrils of hair there soft against his lips.
Flame gasped at this forbidden way of loving her.
Chapter 23
Small in the worth of beauty from the light retired.
—Edmund Waller
The eerie cry of a loon sounding across the river outside the wigwam awakened Flame. Everything so unfamiliar to her, she leaned quickly up on an elbow and looked around her.
The soft glowing embers of the fire soon revealed the interior of the wigwam, and then White Fire, who still slept soundly at her right side. His body and face were now washed free of the body paint.
Swallowing back the fear that had crept into her heart upon her first awakening, Flame sighed. Then she stretched out again beside White Fire on the luxuriously soft rabbit-fur blankets. Smiling, deliciously content, at least for the moment, she became lost in deep thought.
It had been interesting the prior night as she and White Fire had lain together after making love. He had opened up to her and told her things about the Chippewa that until now he had not spoken about.
He had told her that the Chippewa called themselves Anishinabe, meaning “first or original man.”
Each band of Chippewa had its own chief, just as Gray Feather led the tribe that had befriended White Fire. This position was handed down from father to son, along with the example of leadership. If a young man did not show himself to be of good character and good sense, he would never be respected by his people. A chief like Gray Feather, who had no son, would hope to marry his daughter to a worthy candidate. It was no wonder White Fire’s friend had tried to convince him to take Song Sparrow as his wife.
Snuggling close, White Fire’s flesh warm against hers, Flame knew that he would have made a wonderful chief, for he had all traits expected of a chief and a leader.
Closing her eyes, she relived the sensual moments th
