Chieftain (Historical Romance) by Nan Ryan Read Free Book Online

Everybody does.” He smiled and patted Shanaco’s bare shoulder. “If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know.”
    Shanaco had no intention of staying one day longer than was absolutely necessary. He appreciated the Indian agent’s overture of kindness and believed him to be an honest man. But as soon as he saw to it that the People were settled and were being treated fairly, he would leave.
    The prospect of spending the rest of his life on a reservation would be a slow death. He couldn’t wait to go back to his remote ranch in New Mexico where he was free to do as he pleased, when he pleased.
    Shanaco had been at the fort for little more than a week. Bored and edgy, he took a ride alone. It was a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon. Far away from the fort’s scattered buildings and the hundreds of tepees dotting the land, he rode up into the gentle foothills of the Wichita Mountains. At the crest of a hill, he stopped, dismounted and allowed his stallion to contentedly crop the patchy grass.
    In minutes theblack had roamed away. The stallion went over the top of the hill, down the other side and out of sight. Shanaco wasn’t concerned. He had trained the black himself. When he was ready to leave, all he needed to do was whistle and the stallion would come.
    Shanaco sat down beneath an elm, stretched his long legs out before him, crossed them at the ankles, leaned back against the tree’s rough trunk and lighted one of Double Jimmy’s cigars.
    For a time there was little sound, save the sigh of the wind and the cawing of birds. Then all at once he heard—faintly—the sound of laughter. A woman’s tinkling laughter. He turned his head to listen. The laughter soon grew louder, closer. Squinting, Shanaco looked down and caught sight of the most arresting woman he had ever seen.
    She was running barefoot across a meadow that was part dirt and part grass. Close on her bare heels was a huge silver wolfhound, barking his pleasure. The woman’s unbound hair and full cotton skirts were billowing out in the wind. Her fair face was flushed with exertion. Continuing to laugh merrily, she impulsively grabbed her long, bothersome skirts and yanked them up to her knees.
    The woman didn’t see him seated beneath the elm on the hill above. She was unaware of his presence. She believed that she was alone. So she bunched her skirts higher, exposing a pair of the palest, most shapely thighs Shanaco had ever laid eyes on.
    Hestared, disarmed by her carefree spirit and her natural beauty. And by that blazing red hair unlike any he had ever seen. After a brief moment in which he studied her with undiluted pleasure, she disappeared over a rise. One minute she was there. The next she was gone.
    Shanaco blinked.
    Had he actually seen her? Had a beautiful young woman with flaming hair and tinkling laughter and ivory thighs actually run past him? Perhaps she was a vision. Surely someone like that could not be real. Shanaco was enchanted. He wanted to leap to his feet and run after her.
    He didn’t do it.
    He sat perfectly still, hoping that she would come back. He waited, tensed, hardly daring to breathe. But she never returned.
    After several long minutes, Shanaco gave up. He rose to his feet and whistled for the stallion. In seconds the dutiful black came trotting toward his master. Shanaco climbed up astride the nickering stallion and rode back toward the fort.
    How, he wondered, could he find out who the redhaired beauty was? He might never know. He couldn’t ask. He’d get thrown back into jail for being too curious about one of the fort’s few white women.
    His jaw clenched tight, Shanaco cursed the fates that had put this beautiful red-haired woman here on the reservation where he couldn’t talk to her, much less hold her in his arms. Another time, another place, it would have been different. He would have seen to that. Had he been home at his New Mexico ranch when he saw her running across a meadow, he wouldn’t have