Black Raven's Pride

Always and forever. The words were in his heart when he entered her again, loving her fierce cries as he plunged deep inside her. Their release was sweet and he lay over her, their bodies still locked together.

Then suddenly Nick’s dreams shifted. Another scene unfolded, and Nick’s heart began to drum against his chest, anger and pain gripping him. He was standing in the center of his old room, trying to accept the fact that Eden was really gone. The note she’d left for him was balled up in his fist, the words branded in his mind. I made a mistake. I’m sorry. There’s life and there’s love, and we’ll never be able to make the two come together.

Black sorrow filled him and, with a sharp, angry cry, Nick jackknifed to a sitting position, coming abruptly awake. He got his bearings slowly as he looked around the bunkhouse and tried to focus on the present.

Back then he hadn’t understood what had happened. Afterward he’d wondered if it had been his stand on children, but if Eden had loved him enough, she would have understood. They’d both lived through so much pain as kids on the pueblo that it had seemed inconceivable to him that she might have felt differently from him on that issue.

They’d known each other well as children, but he wondered now how well they’d really known each other as adults. One moment they’d had an entirely new life waiting for them. The pueblo and the sadness in their pasts would have eventually been nothing more than a memory for them. Yet she’d vanished without explanation, taking a piece of his heart.

The love he’d felt for her had been real but the closeness he’d wanted and had thought they’d shared had only been an illusion. It hadn’t been anything said or left unsaid that had split them apart. What had really come between them was that there’d been another man in Eden’s life.

He took a deep breath. The gut-wrenching pain he’d felt fifteen months ago had not diminished with time. He’d simply filed it away mentally, banishing it to a spot where he could handle it. Now, understanding the depth of her betrayal, a coldness settled over his steel-encased heart.

Naked, he walked to the window and stared out at the stars. He would never again allow anyone to come as close to him as Eden once had. Gone forever was the boy who’d thought love could conquer all, and the faith that had allowed him to give his heart.

The only thing he would do now was protect her. As a cop it was his duty—and as a man who’d once lover her it was his debt of honor to the past they’d shared.

Chapter Three

It was shortly after eight the following morning and Nick was on his second cup of coffee. All night long he’d lain awake, unable to stop thinking about Eden. At one time in his life, she’d been the world to him. But now everything was different except for the way she could make desire twist through him. And, as always, she’d turned his life upside down.

The letter Eden’s grandmother had written to her mentioning Tall Shadow had disturbed him deeply. He’d only been a young boy, but he remembered how his father had hated the nickname, thinking that it made him sound like some kind of big boss the pueblo was required to look up to. His father had chewed out Martin, the ranch foreman, for using it, and he’d given orders that he was “Paul” on the ranch. Any ranch hands referring to him as Tall Shadow would be stuck with cleaning out the horse stalls permanently.

Lost in thought, Nick almost didn’t hear the phone. On the third ring, he picked up the receiver, half expecting to hear Captain Mora’s voice telling him he was needed to go on duty earlier than his originally scheduled shift.

Instead, it was his brother, Jake. “Nick, I need to talk to you. Can you come over this morning?”

“Sure.” Nick had moved into the empty bunkhouse several months ago. He’d told his brother and his wife Annie that he wanted to give them more privacy, but the truth was that he’d felt out of place there. “Is something wrong?” he asked Jake.

“You could say that,” Jake answered, his voice hard. “But I’d rather discuss this in person.”

“I’ll be there in five minutes.”

Nick put his coffee cup in the sink, then walked over to the main house, which was less than a hundred yards away. Jake’s tone had put him on his guard. Whenever Jake sounded this cool and reserved something major was brewing. And on top of whatever was going on, Nick knew he’d also have to tell Jake about the letter, and what Tall Shadow had been accused of doing years ago.

From the second Nick stepped into the main house, the large two-story adobe structure they’d both grown up in, he felt the tension in the air. Annie gave him a quick “good morning” as she met him by the door carrying nine-month-old Noelle in her arms.

Nick gave his niece a kiss. “Hey sweetpea.”

The baby smiled and so did Annie. “You’re so good with kids, Nick. Why don’t you hurry up and get married?”

“It doesn’t work that way. Not in my book anyway.”

“I thought Black Raven men never went by the book—unless they wrote it themselves.”

Nick laughed. “We only play by the rules when it suits us,” he said, following her to the library.

As they entered the room, he saw Martin, who’d been the ranch foreman for as long as he could remember, as well as a family friend. He was helping Jake remove books from a shelf, then searching each one.

“What’s going on? Lose something important?”

Jake came down the ladder that allowed him to reach the top of the highest shelf in the wood-paneled library. The ceilings in most of the ground floor rooms were ten feet high. “Our mother’s diary is gone,” he said flatly.

“Gone? You mean stolen?” Nick asked, his tone now as taut as his brother’s had been.

Jake nodded. “Precisely.”

That diary had already cost them their father’s life. Its loss now made Nick’s blood turn to ice. There was no telling what price getting it back would exact this time. The journal was a treasure trove of community secrets, since just about everyone had confided in Saya, their mother, and she’d written down all her private thoughts in that leather-bound book. Last time, as they’d worked to get it back, greed and jealousy over the contents of the diary had nearly claimed Annie’s life and that of her baby.

“Did you just leave it in plain sight?” Nick demanded, trying to suppress the anger in his voice. It was just like Jake to think it impossible that anyone would break in now that he was the head of the house.

“I wasn’t careless,” Jake snapped, sensing the direction Nick’s thoughts had taken. “Far from it. I’d intended to start reading it a little at a time each night, so I took it out of our bedroom nightstand and put it down here. I honestly thought mom’s diary would be safer in these bookshelves than in any drawer.”

Nick paced around the room, his thoughts racing. “Okay, so now we concentrate on getting it back. Any idea who’d want the diary? Before, it was used against our father, but now that he’s gone…”

“I don’t think this has anything to do with our family’s past this time. Those matters are settled,” Jake looked at Annie and his daughter, love and relief etched clearly on his face.

“But there are other families—and other secrets,” Martin said. “There’s a skeleton in almost everyone’s closet, if you look hard enough.”

“We have to figure out who in this community knew about that diary,” Nick said. “This house obviously wasn’t broken into by some stranger or you would have seen evidence of it before now. We have to backtrack, and check who’s been here recently.”

“Everyone knows about the existence of that diary these days,” Martin answered with a shrug. “It came out in the trial that convicted your father’s killer.”

“Then let’s narrow down the times when it could have been taken, and figure out who was around then. When was the last time any of you remember seeing the diary?”

Annie spoke first. “I was dusting in here last Wednesday, or Thursday. I would have noticed it missing then…I think.”

“You don’t take the books out every time you dust, do you?” Nick asked.

“No,” she admitted. “I stand on the ladder, and move the books back and forth. But I really think I would have noticed the diary missing. Jake showed me where he’d put it so he wouldn’t be the only one to know.”

“I’m no help on this,” Martin said. “I come in here at least once or twice every day, but I don’t pay much attention to what’s on the shelves. All I look at are the ranch’s business ledgers, the breeding records, and things like that.”

Jake took a long, deep breath. “Then I guess I was the last one to see it. I read the first few pages about a month ago, the day before Noelle’s naming ritual, to be exact. Then, I put it back on the top shelf, with the book jacket in place.”

“Tell me, who came to Noelle’s naming ritual?” Nick asked.

“Almost everyone we know stopped by that day—either before, during, or after. And any of the guests could have come in here,” Annie said.

“I came at dawn in time to see her presented to the sun,” Nick said. “If I remember right, my boss, Captain Mora, arrived right after that. After we all returned to the house, Elsie Mueller, the pueblo’s nurse practitioner arrived.”

Annie nodded. “Elsie helped us bathe Noelle, and was there when Blue Corn Woman and White Corn Maiden were thanked for bestowing a soul on the baby. After that, everyone else dropped by.”

“Think in specifics,” Nick persisted.

“Your uncle Thomas was here briefly with his girlfriend, Theresa Redwing. All the ranch hands came, too, even recent part-time help like Daniel Hawk.”

“I thought Daniel worked at the Cultural Center,” Nick said.