Paper Rose

“There are things about my obligation to Cecily that you don’t understand,” Tate told the woman. He drew in a short breath as he watched Cecily cling to Holden’s arm on the way out of the room.

“Like what?” Audrey persisted. “Don’t tell me you were lovers!”

“Of course not,” Tate said irritably. “And that’s all I’m going to say on the subject.”

“She’s not much to look at even now.” Audrey was also staring after Cecily and Holden. “He does like her, doesn’t he?” she drawled. “He could afford to keep her. They must spend a lot of time together now that he’s involved in that museum.”

That had just occurred to Tate, too, and he didn’t like it. Holden was years too old for Cecily.

Colby caught that disapproval in his face, but he didn’t remark on it. He held up his empty cup. “I need a refill. Excuse me.”

He left them together. Audrey leaned against Tate’s muscular arm with a soft sigh. “Why did you want to come to this boring party?” she asked. “We could have gone to the ballet with the Carsons instead.”

“I hate ballet.”

“You like opera.”

“There’s a difference.” He was still glaring at the doorway through which Holden and Cecily had vanished. “What does she see in him?” he wondered.

“Maybe he likes to dig up dead people, too,” she said with a contemptuous laugh.

Tate could feel the heat rising over his cheekbones. “I’m still trying to understand why you told Cecily that I paid for her education.”

She looked up at him innocently. “You never said I couldn’t. She’s too old to need a guardian, you know. It was only ever just an excuse to hang around you, getting in my…in our way. She’ll get over it.”

“Get over what?” he asked with a scowl.

“Her infatuation.” She patted his arm, oblivious to the shock on his face. “All young girls go through it. Someone had to show her that she has no place in your life now.” She looked up at him adoringly. “You have me, now.”

He went with her to the punch bowl, still frowning and feeling vague disquiet. Audrey was constantly in his face, getting the manager to let her into his apartment at all hours, even phoning him at work. She was possessive to a frightening degree. He didn’t understand why. She was someone to take around, but he wasn’t intimately involved with her. She was acting as if they were attached at the hip, and he didn’t like it. Her attitude toward Cecily chafed. “What makes you think she’s infatuated with me?” he asked conversationally.

“Oh, Colby told me once, when he was a little tipsy. It was before they started going around together,” she said airily. “He felt sorry for her, but I don’t. There are plenty of eligible men in the world. She isn’t very attractive, but she’ll find someone of her own one day. Maybe even Colby,” she added thoughtfully. “They seem very close, don’t they—even closer than she and Matt Holden. She might be just the woman to help him get over his ex-wife!”

Chapter Three

The annual Pow Wow on the Wapiti Ridge Sioux reservation in southwestern South Dakota was Cecily’s favorite event. She’d promised Leta that she’d show up for it, and she had, begging an extra day off past the weekend on the excuse that she was going to look into buying some handicrafts from the reservation for the museum. Tate wasn’t likely to be here. Colby had mentioned that he was abroad again, so Cecily felt safe, for the moment. It would have hurt Leta’s feelings if she hadn’t come, since Leta didn’t know why there was a rift between her son and Cecily.

She looked around at the beautiful costumes, many made of fringed buckskin and very old, some of more recent vintage. Most Pow Wows were held in the summer months. Then she reminded herself that mid-September was still summer, even if there was a nip in the air here.

She didn’t have a drop of Lakota blood, but she had closer connections to this branch of the Oglala tribe than most whites. Tate Winthrop and his mother Leta had given Cecily refuge when she was still in her teens. She and Tate still weren’t speaking after the crab bisque attack, but Leta was like the mother she’d lost.

“I see a lot more people here this year,” Cecily told Leta, scanning the colorful crowd while sitting on hay bales around a circle where a dance competition was being held to the throbbing beat and chant of the drummers.

“They advertised it more this year,” Leta replied with a grin. She was young-looking for fifty-four, a little plump but with a pretty face, dark brown eyes and braided silver-flecked dark hair. She was dressed in fawn buckskins and boots with beaded, feathered ornaments in her hair. One of the ornaments was a circle with a cross inside, denoting the circle of life.

“You look lovely,” Cecily said with genuine affection.

Leta made a face. “I’m fat. You’ve lost weight,” she added. Her eyes narrowed.

Cecily stretched lazily. She was wearing a simple blue checked shirt with a denim skirt and boots. Her long blond hair was braided and circled around the crown of her head. Pale green eyes behind large framed glasses stared into nothing.

“Remember what I told you on the phone, that I found out the truth about the grant that was paying all my expenses?” she asked.

Leta nodded.

“Well, it wasn’t a grant that was paying for my education and living expenses.” She took a harsh breath. “It was Tate.”

Leta scowled. “Are you sure?”

“I’m very sure.” She glanced at the older woman. “I found out in the middle of Senator Matt Holden’s political fund-raiser, and I lost my temper. I poured crab bisque all over your son and there were television cameras covering the event.” She turned her wounded eyes toward the dancers. “I was devastated when I found out I’m nothing more than a charity case to him.”

“That isn’t true,” Leta said gently, but a little remotely. “You know Tate’s very fond of you.”

“Yes. Very fond, the way a guardian is fond of a ward. He owned me.” She stared at the brown grass under her feet, grimacing at the memory. “I couldn’t bear the humiliation of knowing that. I guess he thought I wouldn’t be able to make it on my own. I wasn’t really very mature at seventeen. But he could have told me the truth. It was horrible to find it out that way, especially at my age.” She took a deep breath. “I quit school, moved out of the apartment and took the job Senator Holden was asking me to take at the new museum he helped open. He’s a nice man.”

Leta looked away nervously. “Is he?” she asked in a curiously strained tone.

“You’d like him,” she said with a smile, “even though Tate doesn’t.”

Leta’s shoulders moved as if she were suddenly uncomfortable. “Yes, I know there’s friction between them. They don’t agree on any Native American issues, most especially on the fight to open a casino on Wapiti Ridge.”

“The senator seems to think that organized crime would love to move in, but I don’t think there’s much danger of that. Other Sioux reservations in the state have perfectly good casinos. Anyway, it’s the tribes in other states trying to open casinos that are drawing all the heat from gambling syndicates.”

Leta hesitated. “Yes, but just lately…” She caught herself and smiled. “Well, there’s no use talking about that right now. But, Cecily, what about your education?”

Of course, Leta knew that Tate had enrolled her in George Washington University near his Washington, D.C., apartment, so that he could keep an eye on her. He worked as security chief for Pierce Hutton’s building conglomerate now, a highly paid, hectic and sometimes dangerous job. But it was less wearing on Leta’s nerves than when he worked for the government.

“I can go back when I can afford to pay for it myself,” Cecily returned.

“There’s something more, isn’t there?” Leta asked in her soft voice. “Come on, baby. Tell Mama.”

Cecily grimaced. She smiled warmly at the older woman. She’d just turned twenty-five, but Leta had been “Mama” since hers had died and left her penniless, at the mercy of a drunken, lusting stepfather.

“Tate’s new girl,” she said after a minute. “She’s really beautiful. She’s thirty, divorced and she looks like a model. Blond, blue-eyed, perfect figure, social graces and she’s rich.”

“Bummer,” Leta said drolly.

Cecily burst out laughing at the drawled slang. Leta was one of the most educated women she knew, politically active on sovereignty issues for her tribe and an advocate of literacy programs for young Lakota people. Her husband had died years before, and she’d changed. Jack Yellowbird Winthrop had been a brutal man, very much like Cecily’s stepfather. During the time she spent with Leta, he was away on a construction job in Chicago or she’d never have been able to stay in the house with them.

“Tate’s a man,” Leta continued. “You can’t expect him to live like a recluse. His job involves a lot of social events. Where Hutton goes, he goes.”

“Yes, but this is…different,” Cecily continued. She shrugged. “I saw him with her last week, at a coffeehouse near my apartment. They were holding hands. She’s captivated him.”

“The Lakota Captive.” Leta made a line in the air with her hand. “I can see it now, the wily, brave Lakota warrior with the brazen white woman pioneer. She carries him off into the sunset over her shoulder…”

Cecily whacked her with a strand of grass she’d pulled.

“You write history your way, I’ll write it my way,” Leta said wickedly.