The Beloved Woman Read Free Page B

raptly, then said in a slow, thoughtful tone, “I guess I’ve rescued myself a real lady. The kind that makes a man want to fight dragons for her.”
    A shiver ran down her spine. Had she discovered some remarkable brand of backwoods cavalier, a white man and gold miner who fancied himself a crusading knight? He leaned forward, spit on his fingertips, andbegan cleaning her face. She drew back so quickly, her head thumped the coach’s wall.
    “Sir!”
    “Easy, gal, easy. Katie Blue Song, full of vinegar.”
    He pulled a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, took her chin in one hand, and went on about his cleaning while she sat in transfixed silence.
    “You and those drovers,” he murmured, shaking his head. “I never saw a woman defend herself with so much courage before. Not a squeak, not a tear, just laid into ’em. Weren’t you scared at all?”
    “Certainly.” The heel of his hand brushed her cheek; his fingertips outlined every bone in her face, or so it felt. Katherine had never cast her gaze down before any man before, but now she did it to keep from studying him with the same fascination he directed toward her.
    “I’ll be damned,” he said in his low, breath-stealing way. “I knew that Jesse and Mary had three pretty daughters, ’cause I saw ’em each time they came home from the mission school up in Tennessee. But I never figured the fourth one was the prize.”
    In her mind’s eye Katherine saw the slow, easy journey of a man’s hand along the length of her bare stomach, and then lower. She knew exactly whose hand it was.
No
. There was no way that could come true.
    She twisted her face away from Justis Gallatin’s touch. “If you’re really a friend of my father’s, why are you trying to trifle with me?”
    “When you’ve got a lot of gold, you don’t
trifle
with women,” he told her solemnly. “You lure ’em into wicked, wicked sin, just like the dime novels say.”
    “You have no manners or education, but you do have a lot of gold. So you think gold gives you the right to do as you please.”
    He sat back, propped one foot on the opposite knee, and smiled calmly. “Done some mining. Done all right atit. Now I’m trying to get respectable. Or at least learn to
act
respectable.”
    “You’ve mined Cherokee land—stolen from it—just like all the other white men.”
    He looked out the window, and his jaw worked a little. She could almost see the tension rising in him, and it made the coach feel much too small for the two of them.
    “Your pa’s one of the best friends I ever had … have,” he said finally, still staring out the window. “I’ve mined his land, but I’ve put half of the profits aside for whenever he wants to claim ’em.”
    Shock sliced her breath in two. Her father had never been interested in large-scale mining, and especially not with a white man as partner. He and her mother had scooped gold out of the creeks occasionally—Cherokees had traded gold among themselves for centuries—but they had kept the locations secret. They knew that showing them to white men would only cause trouble.
    “My father would never willingly help a white man find Cherokee gold,” she told Justis Gallatin.
    “Times have changed, I keep tellin’ you. Your father changed.” He gestured impatiently. “Look, gal, it wasn’t no big deal, all right? I set up a dredge on a little bitty creek in the middle of the woods. Closed the operation down when the vein ran out three years ago. ’Cept for some piles of dirt, you can’t hardly tell anybody was there. Now I got me a big mine in the hills east of town.”
    “Not far from a little spring surrounded by laurel?”
    He looked at her cautiously. “Yeah.”
    “My parents were the only people who knew about that spot! They led you there. Admit it.”
    He swore under his breath. “All right. But half the profits from that mine was … are theirs too. Waitin’ to be claimed.”
    Katherine tried not to raise her voice, but