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The Savage Heart
Diana Palmer
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author DIANA PALMER presents a classic romance about a woman with big dreams and a man who has nothing left to believe in…except her Tess Meredith and Raven Following grew up on the beautiful, wild Montana plains. But their friendship and love were doomed by Raven’s Sioux heritage…and his departure from the land of his people.In Chicago, he built a new life, haunted by thoughts of the lovely, spirited young girl he’d left behind. Until she arrived back in his world—bringing with her the past he’d tried to bury.But Tess had changed, too. She’d matured into a woman, and was determined to fight for her rights in society—and for the love of a man who felt he was savage at heart…
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author DIANA PALMER presents a classic romance about a woman with big dreams and a man who has nothing left to believe in...except her
Tess Meredith and Raven Following grew up on the beautiful, wild Montana plains. But their friendship and love were doomed by Raven’s Sioux heritage…and his departure from the land of his people. In Chicago, he built a new life, haunted by thoughts of the lovely, spirited young girl he’d left behind. Until she arrived back in his world--bringing with her the past he’d tried to bury. But Tess had changed, too. She’d matured into a woman, and was determined to fight for her rights in society-and for the love of a man who felt he was savage at heart….
Praise for the novels of New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Diana Palmer
“Palmer demonstrates, yet again, why she’s the queen of desperado quests for justice and true love.”
—Publishers Weekly on Dangerous
“The popular Palmer has penned another winning novel, a perfect blend of romance and suspense.”
—Booklist on Lawman
“Palmer knows how to make the sparks fly…heartwarming.”
—Publishers Weekly on Renegade
“Sensual and suspenseful.”
—Booklist on Lawless
“Diana Palmer is a mesmerizing storyteller who captures the essence of what a romance should be.”
—Affaire de Coeur
“Nobody tops Diana Palmer when it comes to delivering pure, undiluted romance. I love her stories.”
—New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz
The Savage Heart
Diana Palmer
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Dr. Nestor R. Carabjal, Dr. Winston H. Gandy, Dr. F. Stuart Sanders, Dr. David A. Bray and Dr. Michael J. Maloney. Thank you all, most sincerely.
—Mrs. James E. Kyle (AKA Diana Palmer)
Contents
Prologue (#u223fde3f-44ea-5f8f-b288-e7c36c869b32)
Chapter One (#u45137523-403e-5111-9f75-ba7793a144a2)
Chapter Two (#u92db6a1a-5151-541f-91da-4b84ccef617b)
Chapter Three (#u89e0ce1a-cd06-50ff-8e51-1c485918d3e5)
Chapter Four (#u0d3b8717-7af6-500a-94aa-fb89c90cf1be)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Montana Spring 1891
There was lightning in the distance where dark clouds settled low over the buttes. Spring storms, all lightning display at first, were common here, and Tess Meredith loved to watch them—especially now that she had a companion who seemed to have a legend about every one of these natural occurrences…and every unnatural one, too.
But even more than watching summer storms with her new and treasured friend, Tess liked to ride fast, hunt and fish, live in the outdoors enjoying nature and what she called “adventure.” Her father despaired of her ever marrying. Who would appreciate a young woman who had such accomplishments, not one of which had anything to do with traditional domestic occupations?
Today Tess looked quite different from the way she usually did and quite grown-up for a fourteen-year-old. Her blond hair was piled neatly on top of her head, rather than flying free; she was wearing a long cotton dress with a high neck, rather than rolled-up dungarees and one of her father’s shirts. Polished lace-up shoes replaced the scuffed boots she always wore. Her father had beamed when he’d seen her earlier. Of course, he wouldn’t say a chastising word to her on the subject of her dress or her unladylike pursuits. He was far too kind to do such a thing. It was the kindness in him, so deep and so sincere, that made him such a wonderful doctor, Tess believed, for many who practiced medicine had skill, but few had his way with patients.
She sighed and glanced over at Raven Following, the only man she’d ever known who treated her as an equal, not a silly child—or worse, a silly girl. He was a Sioux who had lived at Pine Ridge until about eight months ago. His shoulders, wide and powerful, did not move under the buckskins he wore. His long, thick black hair was braided and wrapped with narrow bands of ermine skins, and his strongly boned, handsome face was free of expression.
Looking at him, Tess was filled with melancholy and curiosity. What did Raven see? For he seemed to see all manner of things around and in the far distance that she couldn’t. Sometimes it was difficult for her to believe he was only six or seven years older than she.
“Are you scared?” she suddenly asked.
“A warrior never admits fear.”
She smiled. “Oh, pardon me. Are you nervous, then?”
“Uneasy.” His lean, graceful fingers held a stick that he alternately toyed with and used to draw symbols on the ground. Now he was idly moving it from hand to hand. “Chicago is far away from here. I’ve never been to a white man’s city.”
“Papa says you’ll be educated there and afterward you can get a job. He knows a man who will give you work.”
“So he has told me.”
She touched his shoulder lightly. He didn’t like to be touched, not since he’d been so badly wounded in the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, where the fury of the Hotchkiss guns of the soldiers had taken the lives of more than two hundred of his people, including his mother and two sisters. But Tess’s touch was different, and, she thought, tolerable to him, since she’d help nurse him through the agonizing recovery from having his body riddled with U.S. Army issue bullets.
“It will be all right,” Tess said, her voice gentle and, she hoped, reassuring. “You’ll like Chicago when you get there.”
“You are so very sure of that?” His black eyes were glittering with humor.
“Of course! After Mama died and Papa told me he was going to take a job doctoring on the reservations, I was scared to death. I didn’t know anybody out here, and I had to leave all my friends and relatives behind. But once I got to the West, it wasn’t bad at all.” She rearranged her skirt. “Well, it wasn’t too bad,” she amended. “I didn’t like the way the soldiers treated your people.”
“Neither did we,” he said dryly. He paused, studying her, finally looking intently into her clear green eyes. “Your father will be relieved when I am gone. He permits me to teach you things, but he grimaces when he sees you doing them.”
“He’s old-fashioned.” Tess laughed. “And the world is changing.” She looked at the distant buttes. “I want to help it change. I want to do things that women have never done.”
“You already do things that few white women do—skin a deer, track a doe, ride without a saddle, shoot a bow—”
“And sign and speak Lakota. All thanks to you, Raven. You’re a good friend and a good teacher. How I wish I could go to Chicago with you. Wouldn’t we have fun?”
He shrugged and began to draw symbols in the dust at his feet.
How graceful his hands were, Tess mused. His fingers were strong, yet lean, and his wrists were so finely boned, they appeared delicate beneath the long corded muscle of his forearm. He leaned forward, and her gaze traveled over his back. Tess winced. Beneath the buckskin shirt his flesh was puckered and pocked with scars, scars that would be there always to remind him of Wounded Knee.
It was a miracle, Tess’s father, Harold, had said, that Raven has survived. Half a dozen bullets had torn into his upper back; one had punctured his lung, causing it to collapse. And that was not the worst of his injuries. Harold Meredith had done everything his medical training had taught him and then some to save Raven’s life, but at last he’d sought the help of a practitioner from a tradition far different from his own: he smuggled a Lakota shaman into Raven’s bedchamber.
Whether it was Harold’s or the shaman’s skill—or the skills of both—they would never know. But soon the Great Spirit smiled, and Raven began to recover. It was a long and painful journey back to health, and through it all Tess was at Raven’s side.
“Will you miss me?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said, smiling easily. “You saved my life.”
“No. Papa and your shaman did that.”
Raven Following was not a demonstrative man, but now he took her small, white hand in his large, dark one and held it. “You did it,” he said firmly. “You saved my life. I lived only because you cried so hard for me. I felt sorry for you and knew I could not be so rude and thoughtless as to disappoint your hopes by dying.”
She chuckled. “That’s the longest sentence I’ve ever heard from you, Raven—and the only one the least bit deceitful.” Her eyes sparkled.
He stood up, stretched lazily, then pulled her up beside him. His gaze slid over her flushed face. She was almost a woman, and she was going to be very pretty, perhaps beautiful. But she worried him. She felt things so deeply…with such strong emotion.
“Why?” she asked suddenly. “Why, why?”
He did not need to ask where her thoughts had carried her. Without hesitation, he said, “Because of what the Lakota did to Custer, I think. I have reflected on Wounded Knee for several months now, Tess. Some of the soldiers who opened fire on us, on the children—” his body stiffened for a moment as if he might be hearing once again the wails of terror and screams of pain from those children “—some of those soldiers,” he went on, “were from Custer’s surviving companies.” He looked at her intently. “I was six when we fought Custer, and I remember how the soldiers looked there, on the battlefield. Many of the women had lost sons and fathers and husbands to those men. My own father died there. The women took out their grief on the bodies of the dead soldiers on the Greasy Grass. It was bad.”
“I see.”
“No. And it is good that you don’t,” he replied, his face curiously taut. “I teased you before, Tess, but truly I would not have lived if you and your father had not been so brave…and so swift.”
“We left for the battlefield the instant we heard there had been fighting and that many were dying on that frozen ground.” Tess shivered and tears filled her eyes. “Oh, Raven, it was so cold, so bitterly cold. I shall never forget it, and I thank God we found you.”
“As I thank the Great Spirit that you and your father rescued me and tended my wounds and hid me in your wagon until we were out of South Dakota.”
“Lucky that Dad was being transferred to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. It was easy to pretend we’d found you on the roadside in Montana near Lame Deer. No one ever questioned our story—well, not to our faces anyway.”
He smiled. “I was not so lucky in my decision to visit my cousins in Big Foot’s band, though, was I?”
She shook her head. “You could have been safe in your lodge in Pine Ridge….”
“And my mother and sisters, too.” His voice had trailed off. Now, suddenly, he shook off his enveloping grief. “Come,” he said, “let us go back. Your father will be wondering where you are.”
She started to protest, but his gaze was even and quiet, and she knew that it would be like talking to a rock. She gave in with good grace and smiled at him.
“Will we ever see you again after you go?” she asked.
“Of course. I’ll come back and visit from time to time,” he promised. “Don’t forget the things I’ve taught you.”
“As if I could,” she replied. She searched his black eyes. “Why do things have to change?”
“Because they do.” In the distance, the sky became misty as the threatening clouds released a curtain of rain.
“Come. The rain will overtake us if we don’t hurry.”
“One more minute, Raven. Please, tell me something.”
“Anything,” he murmured.
“What did Old Man Deer do when we sat up here with him last week?”
Raven’s body stiffened slightly and he glanced away. “He performed a ritual. A very sacred one.” He looked fully at Tess. “It was a way of protecting you,” he said enigmatically. Then he smiled. “And we will say no more about it now.”
Chapter One
Chicago, Illinois November 1903
The telegram read: “Arriving Chicago depot 2:00 p.m. Saturday. Tess.”
Matt Davis had read the telegram several times and cursed it several times more. Tess Meredith had no business moving to Chicago. Her father had died only two months ago. Matt hadn’t got the news until long after the funeral was over when he returned from working in another state. He’d written Tess right away, of course, and she’d written back. But she’d never so much as hinted that she had this in mind.
He’d visited Tess and her father many times and kept up a regular correspondence with them all through the years after he’d gone east to be educated, then changed his name to begin work as a Pinkerton detective. Raven Following had become Matt Davis and had changed in a hundred other ways, too, but never in his regard for Tess and Harold Meredith. They were all the family he could claim. And he’d looked forward to each visit with them more than anyone would ever know.
Tess at sixteen hadn’t been quite so outgoing as she had been two years before. She’d become somewhat shy, remote. Tess at eighteen had been a very different proposition. Mature, pretty—and more reckless than he remembered. Last year, he’d made another pilgrimage to Montana, which he combined with work on a case for his own new private detective agency, and the sight of a grown-up Tess of twenty-four had shocked him speechless. No longer the grinning fourteen-year-old sprite, no longer the shy sixteen-year-old or the reckless eighteen-year-old, Tess was mischievous, forceful, outspoken—and so beautiful that she made him ache. And she was driving her father wild. He’d confessed to Matt that she wouldn’t even allow talk of marriage…that she’d ridden her horse through town wearing pants and a shirt and carrying a sidearm…that she’d organized a women’s suffrage group in town…and that she’d actually attacked a local man with a pistol when he tried to get fresh with her. The aging doctor had asked Matt for advice. But, confronted by this new and challenging Tess, Matt, too, had been at a loss.
Now her father was dead and he was inheriting Tess, a legacy of feminine trouble he knew was going to change his life. It was a worrying and exciting proposition.
The train pulled into the station, huffing and puffing clouds of smoke. Wary of the cast-off cinders from the engine, elegantly dressed men and women began to disembark, porters came and went unloading baggage, but there was no sign of Tess.
Matt sighed irritably as he stared around the platform. Suddenly, a shapely woman clad in natty green velvet, wearing a Paris creation of a hat with a veil, and impatiently tapping a prettily shod foot, ceased to be a stranger to him. The years fell away and the elegant woman was again the girl with long blond pigtails he’d known so long.
