White Dove's Promise

Her eyes still wet with grateful tears, she raised up on tiptoe and kissed his dirty cheek. “Then thank you for being a stubborn man, Jared Colton.”

“Kerry! Is Peggy all right? Is there anything broken?”

Stunned by the brief, intimate contact, Jared watched Kerry turn away to answer Enola’s frantic question. Moments later, he felt a nudge in his rib cage and looked around to see that he was now bracketed by a grinning brother and cousin.

Gray, who was only a year younger than Jared, said, “Well old cousin, looks like you’re certainly the hero at this little gathering.”

His description of the crowd around them as “a little gathering” was quite an understatement. It seemed like half the townsfolk were swarming around them like bees.

Jared slipped off his hard hat. The night breeze felt cool against his sweating head. Pushing his fingers through his wet hair, he said to Gray, “Hell, I didn’t do anything but crawl into a hole.”

Bram punched him affectionately in the shoulder and chuckled. “Looks to me like Kerry WindWalker thought you did more than that.”

Jared glanced back around to see that she and her young daughter had been swallowed up by the crowd. It was just as well, he thought.

“The only thing you saw was a woman grateful to get her daughter back,” Jared said, aiming the statement at both his brother and cousin.

Bram was about to make another comment on the subject when one of his deputies approached with a question for his boss. The moment Bram turned his attention to the deputy, Jared used the opportunity to make his own escape.

“I’m going home,” he told Gray. “Tell Bram I’ll deal with getting some of this heavy equipment back to its rightful owners.”

Gray slung his arm around Jared’s shoulders. “Will do,” he assured him. “You go get some rest.”

“Yeah. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” Jared told him.

As Jared slipped through the crowd, several people called out to him, a few even stopped him to shake his hand, pat his back and offer him congratulations on a job well done.

Normally, Jared would have hung around and lapped up all the attention and praise. It wasn’t often a man was handed the chance to do something as meaningful and worthwhile as saving a child’s life. And it warmed him that people appreciated his efforts. Yet he didn’t linger in the crowd. Instead he continued toward the quiet, dark spot where his truck was parked.

By the time Jared climbed into the vehicle, bone-weary exhaustion had overtaken him. He drew in a string of long breaths, then rested his forehead against the steering wheel for several moments before he finally started the motor.

As he pulled away from the scene, he glanced toward the activity still going on around the excavation site. Rescue workers were already starting to move away the fire trucks and other recovery vehicles which had been needed during the long hours. Some yards away from the commotion, he spotted Kerry at the back of an ambulance with Peggy in her arms and talking happily to Jenna Elliot.

Thirty minutes later as Jared fell into bed, he was still holding that happy image in his mind.

Kerry waited patiently at the back of an ambulance while a petite, blond-haired, blue-eyed nurse named Jenna Elliot checked Peggy over for any sign of injuries.

Kerry had never met Jenna before, but she knew of her family. Her father was a powerful businessman and politician in Black Arrow, and though corruption had been linked to his name, he was still an influential man. However, from the moment Kerry had walked up to the ambulance with Peggy, Jenna had seemed sincerely compassionate and caring. She also seemed to be casting more than a few furtive glances at Sheriff Bram Colton, too.

“Your daughter seems to be perfectly fine,” Jenna said to Kerry as she handed Peggy back to her. “However, if it would make you feel at ease you could have her pediatrician check her over, too. But I’m sure you don’t have any worries. She seems like a very healthy little girl.”

“And very adventurous,” Kerry added jokingly. And she could joke now, thanks to Jared Colton, she thought as she turned to go home, clutching a sleepy Peggy in her arms.

Jared Colton. Of all the men in Black Arrow, Kerry wouldn’t have thought of him as a hero. Eight years ago, before she’d left for Virginia, he’d been a frequent diner at Woody’s Café where she’d worked as a waitress on the evening shift. For a man that was part Comanche, he’d done a lot of talking. Most of it directed at the adoring females who’d always seemed to flock around him. But Kerry hadn’t forgotten the small part of his glib tongue that had been aimed at her.

For the most part, Kerry had tried to keep the conversation between them cool and impersonal, but there had been times she’d felt him looking at her in the same way a red-tailed hawk would look at a juicy little field mouse. On those occasions she’d always scurried back to the kitchen, her head down so that no one might see the scarlet color stinging her cheeks. No man had ever made her feel so naked and vulnerable. And eight years later she could safely say that hadn’t changed. He still left her breathless and rattled.

“Kerry? Are you listening?”

At the sound of Enola’s voice, Kerry pulled her eyes away from a nearby open window and looked up to see her mother standing at the entryway to the small living room of the WindWalker home.

“Sorry, Mom. I was—lost in thought. Were you asking me something?”

Her forehead furrowed with a frown, Enola stepped into the room. A dishtowel was twisted between her hardworking hands.

“I was wondering if we should wake Peggy for supper. She hasn’t eaten hardly anything today. With everything that happened yesterday, she should get something in her tummy.”

“I know. But I think she needs to rest more.”

Enola moved closer to her daughter. “She’s been like a different little girl today. I doubt she’s said twenty words altogether. I couldn’t even get her to help me dig in the garden.”

Kerry didn’t need to be reminded that Peggy was still suffering emotionally from the horrible experience she’d gone through. Her daughter had hardly left her side all day. And though the paramedics had found her physically unharmed, Kerry realized her daughter had been traumatized.

“She just needs time to get over this, Mom. We all do.”

Enola briefly closed her eyes and Kerry realized her mother was still trying to deal with the guilt she felt over allowing Peggy to slip away unnoticed.

Rising from her chair, Kerry patted her mother’s shoulder. “I wish you would quit blaming yourself, Mom. None of this is your fault. Peggy has pulled disappearing acts on me before. It just so happened that this time she wandered farther off than she’d intended.”

Enola sighed. “She’s only three, Kerry. She doesn’t understand the dangers. She wants to see everything. Learn about everything. I should have known not to turn my back. Even for a second.”

Kerry shook her head. “Mom, that’s ridiculous. No child can be watched that closely. And maybe in the long run, this horrible experience has taught her not to stray from the house or yard.”

“I hope you’re right. But it’s heartbreaking to see my granddaughter so quiet and withdrawn.”

Looping her arm through her mother’s, she urged her toward the kitchen. “Peggy is brave. Like her grandmother and great-grandmother Crow. She’ll get through this. Now come on and let’s eat.”

The two women made their way back to the small kitchen where Enola had prepared pinto beans, corn bread and wilted salad. Inside the room, they were greeted with the aroma of cooked food joined by the scents of cut grass and sweet lilac wafting through the open screen door.

While her mother took a seat at the dining table, Kerry went to the cabinet to fill two tall glasses with iced tea. When a knock sounded at the front of the house, the two women exchanged glances.

“I’ll go see who it is,” Kerry said to Enola. “You go ahead and eat. It’s probably just another neighbor wanting to make sure Peggy is okay.”

Not bothering to hunt for her shoes, Kerry padded barefoot over the cool linoleum until she reached the front screen door. Since no one was standing directly in view, she pushed it open and stepped onto the porch.

“Hello Kerry.”

The deep voice hit her before she spotted him standing at the south end of the porch. Slowly she turned to see the man who had continued to linger in her thoughts today.

“Hello,” she said quietly as he walked toward her.

Although he was dressed casually in jeans and boots and a pale blue polo shirt, she felt sloppy in comparison. Her white shorts were stained with tiny splotches of blue paint and the red T-shirt topping them had been washed so many times it had turned the color of a half-ripe watermelon. Greeting her neighbors in such a getup was one thing, but letting Jared Colton catch her like this was quite another.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said as his eyes roamed appreciatively over her face, then lowered to her bare brown legs. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood this evening and I thought I’d check to see how Peggy is doing.”

There it was again, Kerry thought, that strange feeling of being exposed in front of this man. What was it about him, she wondered. She’d been around nice-looking men before. But none of them had affected her like this one. Not even Peggy’s father.

His dark bronze features were rough-hewn, but classic male. The strong, hawkish nose, carved cheekbones and black hair edging over the back of his collar were distinctly Native American. Only his gray eyes and the faint shadow of a beard hinted that there might be white blood flowing through his veins.