Her face was small and her eyes large. From what Longarm could see, she was uncommonly pretty.
He guessed her age at nineteen or twenty, something in that general vicinity anyway.
She came over and sat on the flat rock close by his side as casually as if they’d been fast friends since childhood, never mind that his childhood was probably twice as far back in time as hers had been. Angelica seemed entirely at ease in the company of a stranger in the middle of the night.
“Are you, uh … I mean” Shit, he didn’t know what-all he wanted to ask.
Angelica smiled. “You are Long Arm,” she said. God, he could spend the rest of the night just sitting and listening to her voice. It was like hearing fine music for the first time.
“Yes,” he agreed, that being about the only thing he could think of to say at the moment. There was something about this girl Angelica that had him as tongue-tied and nervous as a schoolboy at his first church social.
“Thank you for coming here. It is late, and I know you are tired. Forgive me for calling you.”
Longarm frowned. Calling him? Damned if that was so.
Angelica smiled. Longarm felt something inside his chest spin around in circles, and there was a hollowness in his belly that he hadn’t noticed before now.
“No,” the girl said calmly, “you did not hear in your ears. Only in your heart.” As if that explained something.
“You, uh-“
“Yes. It was I who called you here. I and this wolf who will help you when the spirits decide the time is come.”
“Wolf,” Longarm repeated slowly. He looked down beside his feet. There wasn’t a wolf anywhere around. Just this big white dog. He wasn’t sure what kind of a dog it was, except that it looked like the furry, heavily muscled dogs he’d seen up in the north country. The Canadians liked to use those dogs to haul sleds and sledges and such during winter. But those dogs were mostly dark-colored and smaller than this one. Otherwise this dog had the right shape and coat texture. He reached down and the dog licked his hand, its tongue warm and wet, and he scratched behind its ears, then again at the base of its tail. It liked that just fine, pointing its muzzle high and wagging its tail while he scratched. “Wolf,” Longarm repeated.
“Yes,” the girl said agreeably.
“Not a dog.”
“No, Long Arm. A wolf. A spirit wolf.”
“Uh, huh.” Hell, he wasn’t going to argue the point with her. It was commencing to look, though, like the girl was a tiny bit daft. Mighty fetching to look at. But her basket seemed to be a couple pecks shy of full. Angelica laughed. “Something funny?” he asked.
“You.” She laughed again. It sounded something like little bitty silver bells tinkling. Or that was the impression he got. “You think I am touched by the spirits.” He didn’t say anything. “I am, of course. But not in the way you think,” she said.
“How are you … touched?” He figured it would be safe enough to use her own word for it.
Angelica smiled and laid her fingertips gently on his wrist. “I have been given sight and knowledge of things that are not of this world and of some other things that are.”
“And these things will help your tribe, I take it?” Longarm asked.
“If they would be of harm, Long Arm, I would turn my face from them and throw away the gifts the spirits have given to me.”
“You could do that?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And you called me here so’s I can help you help your tribe or, uh, somethin’ like that?”
“Yes. See? You do understand. Even though you do not know how you have come to understand this.”
“It’s confusing,” he said.
“When you accept the truth of it, it will no longer confuse you,” the girl told him.
The dog—wolf, if she preferred—lifted its head, its ears pricked, and bounded to its feet. It acted like it was straining to hear something far away to the north, something perhaps in the Piegan camp that lay in that direction. The girl stood too. “We must go now, Long Arm.”
“But I thought-“
“It is enough,” she said. “We have met. We will talk more at another time.”
He looked at her and felt an almost overwhelming impulse to grab her and kiss her and press her onto the ground where he could take her with the scent of crushed grass and wildflowers surrounding them.
The girl gasped and shivered so violently he could see it. “No,” she said quickly. “Not that.”
“What?”
“Not … what you are thinking. You tempt me, Long Arm. Please do not … do the thing you wish.”
“No,” he said, embarrassed to’ve been caught at being so randy. “Not without you wanting it to happen.”
“But do you not see? That is what frightens me. I do want this to happen. And it must not. Not ever.”
“I don’t underst-“
The dog huffed, a sharp exhalation of breath that was not an audible bark but which caught the attention as if the slight sound had been as loud as a howl.
Without another word of goodbye or of explanation Angelica spun away, the diaphanous cloth of her robe swirling.
The dog bounded swiftly away to the north and the girl ran after it, her movement so light and smooth that the appearance was as if she floated, even though Longarm knew damn good and well that she was just running over the hills.
Once more the two, the dog and the girl, looked ghostly and pale in the starlight.
And once more a chill chased its tail up and down the length of Longarm’s backbone while he watched them fade out of sight.
“Jesus,” he muttered aloud as he stood and took a moment to compose himself before starting back down the hill toward Tall Man’s lodge.
Lordy, but he did hope Tall Man and Burned Pot were done having at each other. He didn’t think he could take much more in the way of temptation. Not all in one short night, he couldn’t.
Chapter 18
Longarm shed his clothes—most of them anyway; he wasn’t quite accustomed to this business of sleeping naked while others were close by and watching—and crawled under the blanket on the buffalo-robe bed he’d been given.
The interior of the lodge was warm and cozy after the cool of the outdoors, and Longarm was tired. Tall Man was snoring softly, and Burned Pot might have been asleep as well. For sure she had quit squealing, which Longarm found to be of considerable relief. He stretched, yawning, and wriggled around in search of comfort so he could doze off and … His eyes snapped wide open.
He could feel something moving down by his waist. Sliding underneath the blanket. Finding flesh.
A hand. Someone was feeling around beneath Longarm’s blanket.
Longarm blinked. Whoever it was wasn’t content to just feel. That someone was sliding into the bed with him now.
But who …
“Longarm.” The voice was a whisper, warm and faint in his ear. Yellow Flowers. He was sure of it. Pretty much had to be Yellow Flowers because as far as Longarm knew, she and Tall Man were the only ones in the lodge who spoke English. And it damn sure wasn’t Tall Man who was climbing into bed with him.
“Yellow Flowers?”
Her response was a gentle kiss beneath his ear and an even more gentle squeeze of his cock.
“What are you …?”
“Tall Man woke me when you left. He was ashamed. He enjoyed the body of Burned Pot and did not think of your needs. He told me to wait for your return and to make you comfortable.”
“But …”
“It is all right, Longarm. Our ways are not all like yours. This that Tall Man gives is not wrong to us. It is but a way to make a friend and honored guest welcome and happy in our home. Allow me to pleasure you, Longarm. I am not so pretty as Burned Pot, but I am woman the same as she.”