The Mom Who Came to Stay by Nancy Morse

Author:Nancy Morse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 1995-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

It was late afternoon, and the crowds were enormous.

Hundreds of families were camped around the dance circle, creating a scene reminiscent of the great encampments of the nineteenth century. As many as five hundred costumed male dancers were in the arena, with hundreds of women and girls joining in. For four days and nights, the people danced and feasted like in the old days, drawing a crowd of onlookers including tourists, visitors, interested government employees and a handful of anthropologists who journeyed to the Santee Sioux Reservation each August to observe the sun dance.

In a small arbor secluded from the crowds, a handful of men danced trancelike around a tall pole that was staked in the ground, their bared chests pierced with skewers that were attached by long thongs to the pole. Around and around they danced, hour upon hour, until the thongs tore loose from their flesh.

Trace took no part in the skin piercing, watching instead in solemn silence from the perimeter. He respected the patient courage of the dancers, but felt no particular need himself for such dramatic expressions of fortitude to show his devotion to a greater power. He needed no scars upon his breast to prove his courage.

It wasn’t a lack of devotion or courage that led him to turn away from the spectacle in the arbor and seek the purification of the sweat bath. It was his desperate desire for Jenna Ward, a desire that bordered dangerously on love.

The water was already boiling as he stripped himself of his shirt and jeans and underwear and bent to enter the lodge. The hot stones sizzled when he poured a dipperful of water over them. Within minutes the small, dome-shaped lodge was filled with a hot, vapory mist. The air was sweet with the fragrance of the spray of sage he used to cover himself.

He sat alone and cross-legged in the darkened lodge, his nakedness obscured in the steam that rose from the stones, recalling with bitterness the time he’d taken Sylvie to the sun dance. He couldn’t bear it if he saw the same thing in Jenna’s eyes, yet even as he thought it, he knew he never would. There was too much compassion and understanding in those sea-green depths. There were too many unspoken emotions that frighteningly mirrored his own.

It was all he could do to keep from admitting to himself that he had come to crave the very thought of her. Even the sound of her laughter was unforgettable, as vibrant as she was.

She wanted him, too, as much as he wanted her. She was far too ingenuous to hide it effectively. Yet something was stopping her, too, from giving in to the exquisite torment. He recalled what she had told him the night they stood outside her front door, about not being the kind of woman who did things halfway. He knew what she wanted. She wanted forever. Hell, who didn’t? In some crazy way, it was even easy for him to imagine forever with a woman like Jenna.

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