Witch Dance Read Online Free PDF Page B

appeared beside her, still naked as sin and twice as tempting.
    “You forgot your shoe.” He held out one of her moccasins.
    “Thanks.” Lord, did he expect her to bend down and put it on with him standing there like that? She hobbled along, half shoeless.
    “And your picnic basket.” He scooped it off the ground and handed it to her. Then, damned if he didn’t bow like some courtly knight in shining armor.
    If she ever got home, she’d have to take an aspirin and go to bed. Doctor’s orders.
    “Good-bye. Enjoy your” —her eyes raked him from head to toe, and she could feel her whole body getting hot— “swim.”
    She didn’t know how she got up the bluff, but she didn’t draw a good breath until she was safely at the top. He was still standing down there, looking up. She could feel his eyes on her.
    Lest he think she was a total coward, she put on her other shoe, then turned and casually waved at him. At least she hoped it was casual.
    And then he waved back. Facing full front. She might never recover.
     o0o
    “Did you enjoy your picnic?” Dr. Colbert asked when she got back.
    “Hmmm.” It was the best she could do.
    “I’m glad. There are some wonderful sights around here.”
    “I’ll say.”
    Dr. Colbert picked up her bird-watching book and thumbed through. “We have magnificent birds here too. You’ll soon learn all their names.”
    All she needed to know was one name. The name of the most magnificent of them all. Eagle.

 
     
    Chapter 4
    Home.
    Eagle sat quietly on the redwood bench under a silver maple tree and took it all in. Nothing much had changed. The sprawling house with its wide verandas and tall windows was still the domain of Dovie Mingo. It had been Winston’s wedding present to his wife. Built of cypress and glass with an eye for the view, it faced the mountains, which were stained pink and purple now by the setting sun. The house was grand in scale and built to endure because Winston had said that’s how his love for Dovie was, magnificent and sweeping with an endurance that would last their lifetime and beyond to the Great Spirit world of Loak-Istohoollo-Aba.
    The ravages of wind and rain and time had not dimmed the house’s grandeur, and it sat now, weathered and graceful, in its wide sweep of pasture in the shadow of the mountains.
    Through the open windows Eagle could hear the low, singing murmur of his mother’s voice as she directed her two youngest children in the clean-up after their family meal.
    “Not the pots too! Can’t they wait until morning?” Star’s wail of protest was tempered by the knowledge that she was engaged in a battle she would never win. “This is Eagle’s first day home.”
    Eagle didn’t hear Dovie’s soft rebuke, only the firm tone of her voice. Then the unmistakable sound of his brother Wolf’s laughter.
    “Hey, sis, what’s all the fuss about? You’ve got me.”
    They’d been mere children when he left, and now they were rowdy, raucous teens, full of the raw energy and the high, bright dreams of the young.
    “I don’t want you, toad breath,” Star said.
    “Yeah, well, that’s what you’ve got till we finish these dishes. Shake a leg, squirt blossom, or we’ll be here all night.”
    The argument in the kitchen was like the ones that had been waged years before. Nothing had changed except the names and the players. When Eagle was a teen, he and his brother Cole had been the ones bickering over the dishes. Dovie had always been a stickler for order. No matter what was taking place—weddings, births, homecomings, natural disasters—she always insisted that everything in the house be put in its proper place.
    Eagle and Cole had thought they were doomed to carry on the chores forever, and had sat together in the barn loft, smoking a forbidden pipe and planning their revolt, when the unexpected had happened. At the age of forty-two Dovie had given birth to a baby girl.
    “Who’d have thought the two of them were still doing