Navajo's Woman. Beverly Barton
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can do this, she told herself. Put aside whatever you feel for Joe and do what must be done in order to save Russ.
She turned to face the man she had once believed to be not only the person she would one day marry, but the hero of her heart. But Joe Ornelas was no hero. Not in her eyes or the eyes of his people.
Just the sight of him created unwelcome quivers inside her. Leftover mementos of a time when she had thought herself falling in love with him. Wasn’t it perfectly natural for her body to react in such a way? It was possible to intensely dislike someone and yet still find them devastatingly attractive.
Another uphill battle to fight, she surmised. Although she had stopped caring for Joe years ago, her body had not forgotten the pleasure of his touch. Her one regret had become her one comfort—that in the past, their relationship had not had time to reach the point of complete sexual intimacy, before he betrayed her.
Joe came toward her. Slowly. Hesitantly. She waited. Holding her breath. He was as handsome, as utterly masculine, as he had been the day they first met. She remembered so well when her father had introduced them—the young man he thought of as a son and the daughter he’d never known existed. Her heart had beaten a little faster. Her stomach had filled with dancing butterflies. Never before had she felt such an instant attraction to a man.
Don’t let those old feelings confuse you now, she cautioned herself. Joe isn’t here to help Russ. He’s come home to help Eddie. She didn’t dare trust him.
A warm August breeze caressed Joe’s long black hair. Several silky locks fell across his face. He brushed them aside with a sweep of his large, wide hand. A gray, short-sleeved cotton sweater covered his broad, muscular upper body and a pair of black jeans clung to his lean hips and long legs. The turquoise-nugget necklace with a circular silver center that he had always worn shone brightly against the coppery tan of his neck. Despite his years away from the reservation, he looked every inch the proud Navajo.
But this man wasn’t the Joe Ornelas she had known. He had gone out into the world, far from his roots, and experienced life as the white man lived it. He had become a part of the society into which she had been born and reared. There had been a time when he had thought he could never survive in the white man’s world, and she had been certain that she could never live the Navajo life. When they had first begun dating that difference had been the only thing she’d thought would ever come between them.
Joe halted several feet away from her. “Kate has lunch ready. Won’t you come back inside and eat with us?”
“Yes, of course, I will,” Andi replied. “I would never do anything to offend Kate. I know she’s as distraught over what has happened with Russ and Eddie as Doli and I are.”
“If I need to apologize—”
“You don’t!” Andi’s gaze locked with Joe’s, and for one timeless moment she felt light-headed. Breaking eye contact, she shifted her feet back and forth in the dry soil, sending tiny dust storms up and about her ankles.
“Both J.T. and Kate have mentioned several times over the past few years that Doli has been having problems with Russ.” Joe stood rigid as a statue, his hands tense, his expression guarded. “But I didn’t mean to imply that I thought he had killed Bobby Yazzi.”
“There isn’t much point in our having this conversation, is there? Even if you don’t believe that Russ is a murderer, you are convinced that however Russ and Eddie are involved with Bobby, Russ is somehow the one to blame.”
“Why must you put words in my mouth?”
“Are you denying that you think Russ somehow influenced Eddie, that he’s the one who got the two of them into trouble?”
“No, I cannot deny that I don’t think Eddie would be in this situation on his own. But that doesn’t mean I—”
“Why is it that you can so easily be judge, jury and executioner, when you don’t have all the facts?” Andi walked over and stood in front of him, then lifted her head and glared into his solemn eyes.
“Damn,” Joe cursed under his breath.
Andi trembled from head to toe. She balled her hands into tight fists as she held them on either side of her hips. With only the slightest provocation, she could easily pummel that broad chest, venting years of anger and frustration on his hard body. Joe had discovered her father’s crime, and without giving him the benefit of the doubt or trying to understand what had motivated Russell, he had arrested a good man for one forgivable error in judgment. Joe had judged Russell Lapahie guilty and unknowingly sentenced him to death. The fact that Joe had not been the one who pulled the trigger on the gun that killed her father did not make him any the less guilty of his execution.
And it didn’t help any more now than it had been five years ago that Joe felt guilty, that he was filled with remorse. She understood that Joe never meant to harm her father, but all the regrets in the world couldn’t change what had happened, couldn’t bring Russell back to life. And no matter how hard she tried, she would never be able to trust Joe. Never again. She had trusted him completely once, and not only had he betrayed her trust in him, but he had run away instead of staying and facing the consequences of his actions.
“Maybe it’s best if you and I don’t see each other again after today,” Joe said. “Any information I have, I can pass along to you through a third party. Kate or—”
“Wrong.” Andi glowered at him, her heartbeat drumming inside her head. “If you think, for one minute, that I’m going to let you go after Russ and Eddie alone, then you’d better think again. Wherever you go and whatever you do from now until the moment we find those boys, I’m going to be your shadow.”
“No, you won’t. I don’t need you or want you…” Joe hesitated, shifted mental gears, then cleared his throat. “You’ll just get in the way.”
“I don’t care what you want. I’m coming with you and that’s that.”
“No. J.T. and I can handle things. We are both trained for this type of situation. You are not. So just get any ideas you have of tagging along with us out of your head. You are not going.”
Andi punched him in the center of his chest with her index finger. “You just try to stop me.”
Chapter 3
I have no intention of giving Joe a choice in the matter! He’s not leaving me out of the search for Russ and Eddie. Andi was determined to be involved in every aspect of the hunt. She couldn’t trust Joe, not when it came to her brother’s life. The initial meeting at Kate and Ed Whitehorn’s earlier today had been less than productive. She’d found Joe to be as stubborn and unbending as he’d been five years ago, when his go-by-the-rules-at-any-cost attitude had destroyed her father.
Remembering Russell Lapahie still evoked a mixture of emotions within Andi, but foremost a great sense of loss. The man had been a father she’d barely known, and to this day she felt cheated by his death. Only six months before that fateful day when Russell had taken his own life, she had been living in South Carolina, the daughter of wealthy, socially prominent parents, with her life as a socialite all mapped out for her. She’d been practically engaged to a childhood friend, Tyler Markey IV, an up-and-coming young state senator. But everything had changed when her parents decided to divorce, the result of her father’s adulterous affair with a girl half his age. Distraught and filled with rage, Rosemary Stephens had blurted out to Andi that Randall Stephens wasn’t even her real father. At that moment, Andi realized why she’d always felt different, as if she didn’t quite fit into her parents’ neat little world. And it had suddenly made sense why she had never felt loved by the man she’d thought was her father.
“It happened while I was in New Mexico with friends, shortly before I married your…before I married Randall,” Rosemary had explained. “He was a handsome young Navajo man, and we were instantly attracted to each other. The affair lasted for one glorious week. He was so smitten that he asked me to marry him. But, of course, that was out