Captive Read Free

prayed that he wasn’t taking her to where many of her own gender awaited. Seminole punishment included scratchings with needles, often doled out by the women. Or she could endure ear and nose clippings and other maimings …
    She felt ill as they rode and rode, the sights and sounds and memories of the savage assault all weighing down upon her. Had any of the men lived? Did they lie in torment? Did they have a chance of survival?
    James was silent, anxious only to ride hard, so it seemed. Lush foliage was thrashed around them. Darkness had fallen, and she couldn’t have begun to tell in the pine-carpeted green darkness in which direction they traveled.
    At first she thought that he had merely brought herto a river to drink. Then she saw that a
hootie
, or shelter, had been thrown up hastily in the copse near the water. Cabbage palms created the roof, and warm blankets carpeted the floor space.
    He had come here alone, she thought, and she was grateful. Even when he roughly set her upon the ground, she was grateful. She didn’t want to face any other members of his tribe. She didn’t want to face him. How strange. She had lived long days and nights in fear, longing for just the sight of him.
    As Michael Warren’s stepdaughter, she had always been in danger of much more than a swift and certain death.
    Set upon the ground, she stiffened her spine. She walked to the water, fighting a new wave of hysteria and a flood of tears.
    “So you were leaving Florida,” he said suddenly from behind her. “Going back to graceful drawing rooms, fine company, and the elegance belonging to the life of such a well-bred young lady.”
    She gritted her teeth, stiffening her spine still further.
    “I wasn’t trying to go back to anything.”
    “You were just trying to leave—this wretched wilderness?”
    She spun around. Her lips trembled, her eyes were liquid and wild. “I was trying to leave the wretched battles and the horror and the—death!” she whispered. She gained some control. “Your friend meant to slit my throat.”
    His arms were crossed over his naked chest. Ink black hair streamed over his shoulders, a single band with no adornment wound around his forehead. “I’d have killed him very slowly had he done so,” he said in a low, smooth voice.
    “How reassuring,” she murmured. “I could have cheered on your efforts from heaven.”
    “Or hell,” he commented dryly. Then he asked furiously, “Why did you leave my brother’s house?”
    “I had no choice.”
    “Jarrett would never have cast you out.”
    “I had no choice,” she repeated stubbornly. Perhaps he understood.
    Perhaps he never would.
    He strode to her then, and she longed to back away. But there was nowhere to go except the river. And she wasn’t prepared. He was moving with his fluid grace and a startling swiftness. He was on her before she could have gone anywhere at all, even if she had determined to cast her fate into the water.
    His hands were on her arms, and she was against him again, against all the fire and vibrance and fierce, furious life of the man. And before she could struggle, he had her hand palm down upon his naked chest. “You left Cimarron,” he said huskily, “but not for home then, when you could have sailed right out of Tampa Bay. You forged across the territory! What then? Did sense come to you at last? Did you run from the war?” he demanded harshly. “Or did you run from this? Bronze flesh, copper flesh,
red
flesh?”
    She wrenched her hand away from him with all her strength. Dear God, but she was so emotionally entangled, and his passions and his hatred for her were all that seemed to rule him. “I’m not afraid of you!” she cried out furiously, fingers knotting into fists at her sides. “I’m not afraid of you, you—”
    “You should have been afraid,” he told her. “You should have been afraid a long time ago. You should have run back to the chaste gentility of your
civilized
Charleston drawing room