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She reached for his hand and held it still on her stomach. “I am with child already,” she said, and wondered why that confession didn’t cause him to withdraw his hand in surprise, or worse yet . . . in disgust.
“I already knew,” he said, smiling into her eyes as their gazes met and held in the fire’s glow.
“You . . . did?” she gasped. “How could you?”
“I was not certain, but I believed that you were,” Thunder Horse said, sitting up beside her. He stroked her belly with his hand gently, almost meditatingly.
“How could you?” she asked, aware of his gentleness and his acceptance of her baby.
“Many times when you were not aware of it, you have rested your hand on your belly as women with child often do,” he said softly. “I saw this with my sister. She was oh, so protective of her baby before he was born. All women who want to have a child are.”
“And it doesn’t matter to you that I am carrying another man’s baby inside my belly? I do love you with all my heart and want to marry you,” she blurted out, her eyes searching his.
&nbs
p; “Everything about you I love,” he said thickly, slowly smiling. “Even the child that will be born of your other love.”
“I loved my husband, yet not with passion,” she confessed. “It was a gentle love. He . . . my husband . . . took me in and married me when my parents were killed. He wanted children so badly. But he didn’t even know that I was with child before he died. I only realized it myself on the journey from Kansas to Arizona.”
“I shall love the child as though it was born of our union,” Thunder Horse said. “It will be my child. I shall raise it and protect it. I shall teach it everything the young braves of my people learn. We shall hunt together.”
Jessie was almost in tears, she was so happy and grateful to have found such a love as Thunder Horse’s. She sat up and flung herself into his arms. “I love you so,” she sobbed. “Thank you for loving me.”
He held her for a while longer; then they lay back down and loved again, this time slowly, leisurely, yet still with a passion they could only find together.
Chapter Twenty
Reginald rolled and tossed on his bed, fitfully throwing his blanket from side to side as another nightmare held him in its grip. This one was worse than any he had had before.
In his dream he was in the sacred cave.
The paintings of Indians along the cave’s walls began turning into living beings, jumping from the walls, yet they weren’t full Indians at all. They were bones that suddenly came together into hideous skeletons.
Howling and shrieking, they began running after Reginald, the click-clack-clack of the bones like something straight from hell.
There were skeletal remains of eagles flying around his head, squawking and clawing at him.
He awakened in a sweat. Panting, with sweat rolling from his brow, his eyes wide, he sat up and looked wildly around him.
He was in his room, where the moon’s glow shone through his windows onto his bed.
Trembling, he closed his eyes as he recalled this newest nightmare. It had all seemed so real—the bones, the skeletons, the birds, all running after him, grabbing, clawing.
“I can’t take any more of this,” he cried, leaping from the bed. He yanked off his nightgown and hurried into his clothes and shoes, then put on his eyeglasses and ran from the room, only to find Jade standing there, her eyes wide with wonder.
“What are you gawking at?” he shouted, doubling a fist and knocking her to the floor. “Mind your own business, do you hear?”
He didn’t stop to get a firearm. He had only one thing on his mind—to go to the Indian village and plead his case there. He went out to the stable, hitched a horse to his buggy, and headed out for the Indian village.
Surely the Sioux would listen to reason.
He would promise to do anything if they would only make the nightmares stop. If they didn’t, he would surely go insane.
He rode onward until he reached the outskirts of the village and was suddenly stopped by a sentry.
“What are you doing here?” the sentry asked, raising his rifle as he gazed angrily and with suspicion at Reginald.
“Please let me speak with your chief,” Reginald pleaded. “It is of the utmost importance.”
