Honor Bound(26)

As she dished up a bowl of soup from the pan that simmered over the smoky fire, she realized that the identity of his father was still a mystery. Apparently his Anglo blood wasn't a topic open to discussion, which only made her more curious about it.

He wolfed down the steaming soup. Without his asking, she poured him a fresh cup of coffee. While hours ago her sole desire had been to put distance between herself and this dangerous man, she now sat down in a chair across the table from him. He looked up at her with an inquiring tilt to his eyebrows, but went back to eating without offering a comment.

He no longer seemed so ferocious. Was it the hushed atmosphere or the limited confines of the hogan that had mellowed him? It was difficult to feel terror for a man who would kneel at the bedside of his ancient, dying grandfather and speak with such gentleness.

Greywolf hadn't changed physically. His hair was just as jet black, just as rebelliously long. His eyes were still as cold as a pond glazed with morning frost. The muscles in his arms still rippled with latent violence beneath the sinuous, coppery skin. His expression remained just as aloof.

And yet he was different.

He wasn't so much frightening now as he was intriguing, and so very different from the men her parents often paired her with. They were cookie-cutter replicas of each other. They wore conservatively tailored suits that only varied in their shades of gray. All were upwardly mobile executive types who conversed at length on subjects like market analyses and growth indexes. Their idea of spicing up a conversation was to talk about their tennis game and the expense of maintaining a foreign sports car. So-and-so's recent divorce and so-and-so's hassles with the IRS could always be counted on as good cocktail-party topics.

How boring they all seemed compared to this man, who wore one silver earring and gulped down canned soup as if it might be his last decent meal for a long time, who wasn't embarrassed by sweat and dirt and the fundamentals of life, like dying.

Quite frankly, she was fascinated by Lucas Greywolf.

"You didn't tell me you were a lawyer." He wasn't given to chitchat. Aislinn knew no other way of commencing a conversation with him than to jump in feet-first.

"It wasn't relevant."

"You might have mentioned it."

"Why? Would you have felt better knowing that the man holding a knife on you was a lawyer?"

"I suppose not," she said wearily. He went back to eating his soup. Conversation closed. Information would have to be pulled out of him like a deeply rooted bicuspid. She tried again. "Your mother told me you went to college on a track scholarship."

"That must have been some conversation you two had." He finished the soup and pushed the empty bowl away.

"Well, did you?" she demanded impatiently.

"Why the sudden interest?"

She shrugged. "I just … I don't know. I'm interested."

"You want to know how a poor Indian boy bettered himself in the Anglo world, is that it?"

"I should have known you'd take umbrage. Forget it." Angrily she scraped her chair back and stood up, but when she reached for his soup bowl to carry it to the sink, his hand shot out and captured hers.

"Sit down and I'll tell you all about it, since you're so curious to know."

She couldn't possibly win an arm-wrestling match with him, not the way his fingers were biting into her flesh, so she sat back down. He stared across the table at her for several moments before he finally released her hand. His eyes smoldered with contempt. The degree of it made her squirm uneasily.

"I graduated from a school here on the reservation," he began. His lips were held in a firm, grim line which barely moved as he formed words with them. "I got the scholarship because an alumnus who scouted for the coach had seen me run in a track meet. So I went to Tucson and enrolled in the university. The athletics was easy. But I was woefully ignorant compared to the other freshmen. Dedicated as the teachers on the reservation had been, I wasn't prepared for college by any stretch of the imagination."

"Don't look at me like that."

"How's that?"

"Like I should feel guilty over having blond hair and blue eyes."

"I know someone like you will find this hard to understand, but when you're the outcast to begin with, you'd better be damned good at something. That's the only way you even come close to being accepted. While you and your crowd were enjoying the fraternity and sorority parties, I was studying."

"You wanted to excel."

He scoffed. "I wanted to stay even. When I wasn't in class or in the library or on the track, I was working. I held two jobs on campus because I didn't want it said that I had gotten a free ride just because I was an Indian and could run fast."

He folded his hands on the table and stared down at them. "Do you know what a half-breed is?"

"I've heard the word, yes. It's an ugly word."

"Do you know what it's like to straddle a line like that? That's a rhetorical question. Of course you don't. Oh, I earned a certain celebrity from track. I could run," he said reflectively, as though he could still hear the cheering from the stadium fans. "By the time I graduated with honors—"

"So you did excel."

He ignored her. "My name was so well-known that they even wrote an article in the newspaper about me. The slant of it was how commendable my accomplishments were … for an Indian." His eyes speared into hers. "You see, there's always that qualification: 'For an Indian.'"