That, more than anything, was why he was dancing in the water with a white woman in the middle of a summer day. He wasn’t an object, a thing to be bought and sold, but he wasn’t a thing to be pitied or ashamed of either. He was just a man. Holding a woman.
“Anna.” The memory of her came rushing back to him. This memory was harder to contain. He told himself it was because it was newer. He barely remembered his father, after all. “She was not that different from Karen at the gallery.”
“Are you sleeping with Karen?”
Now, that was a distinctive note of jealousy. “No. I gave up women a long time ago.”
She leaned back, way back, in his arms, until her head was half dipped in the water again. Then she pulled his face down until he had no choice but to look at her. “That comes as somewhat surprising news to me.”
Hell, she was beautiful. Just beautiful. The water had her yellow hair slicked back, and she had a teasing, flirting grin on her face. Her eyes, always so ice cold, held nothing but unresolved challenge for him. Like he was only halfway up the glacial wall he was climbing.
“Recently, I’ve thought about reconsidering that stance.” Careful not to lose his grip on her, he shifted to free a hand and stroke her face. Then he noticed her hair.
Trailing behind her in the water, it was wavy. All of it. He lifted her head out of the water a little and the wave didn’t stay in the water. It only got wavier as the water dripped free. “You have curly hair?”
She jumped in his arms, her hands flying to her head. The exact same motion she did every time she saw him. “Oh! Uh, well, uh...damn. The water.”
The light bulb was bright when it went off. She had curls. That she hated. At least now he knew why he thought she always looked a little off. She was just hiding her true self. “No, I like them.” He pulled her hand away from her hair and held it to his chest. She splayed her fingers out against his skin on contact.
“I bet it only makes you prettier.” But probably not as pretty as the pink-rose blush that started on her cheeks and went south. Suddenly, he was feeling a lot warmer in the water. “I’d like to see it all curly.”
“You’re doing it again,” she murmured, her eyes dropping back to watch her toes. “Changing the subject. You got married...”
When he was done with this subject, he’d show her changing. “Yeah. Anna. My ex-wife.” He forced himself to look away from the woman in his arms and think about the woman who would never be in his arms again. “She was the daughter of this wealthy collector. She worked at an influential gallery for a major player in the art world. She was, well, beautiful. Pale skin, black hair—like Snow White, but without the silly dress.”
He felt the shock pass through her body. “You were married to a white woman?”
Again, there wasn’t any pity, and absolutely no accusations. She was just surprised.
“Yeah. For about eight months.”
She nestled her head back into the crook of his neck and was silent. Maybe eight months wasn’t too long of a time. He wondered how long she’d been with the one her father had loved—the one she’d left to come here.
“And then it ended?”
“Yeah. Badly.”
“What happened?”
“It...I...” The guilt reared its ugly head. If he hadn’t been so convinced that she was his ticket to the big time, if she hadn’t been so convinced that he was her ticket out of Taos... “She wanted to own a piece of this Indian I was supposed to be, this brand image I’d built.”
“Is that who you are in that picture? The one in the gallery?”
“Oh, that.” Now it was his turn for his face to get hot. He never felt less like his brand image than at this exact moment. “Yeah. That’s me as a commodity. Jonathan Runs Fast. Serious Artist.”
She stilled, but just for a second before her chest was rubbing against his. She was laughing. “Which piece of you did I overpay in commissions for?”
Yeah, she owned a piece of him. No doubt, she considered it leverage of some sort. “The piece that waits for the first day of summer sun to come set the world free from the spring rains.” He’d thought of that bag from his spring spot, up higher in the hills, where he could look down on the prairie and watch the world wake up. “But don’t worry. I’ll get that piece back next spring.”
“Jonathan. I think I like Rebel better,” she murmured as she touched his reddening cheek.
God, he wanted to kiss her, but that would be pushing it right now. She’d get mad and flustered and accuse him of changing the subject again. “By the time I married her, I’d given away so many pieces that I didn’t have much left.” The emptiness had clawed away at him until his dreams were filled with nothing but grass and river, wind and sky. “I needed to come home, come back to this land and remember what it meant to be a Lakota again. What it meant to be a real Indian again.”