He could never be good enough for a princess like Summer. His Comanche blood made him inferior. And there was damn little he could do about it. He’d had that bitter lesson pounded into him over the years. A man couldn’t fight against blind prejudice.
Nobody could. His mother had tried.
His ma’s people were nothing to sneer at. They came from good English stock, moving from Tennessee to Texas in search of a better way of life. Charlotte Calder hadn’t found the good life, though. She’d suffered plenty as a Comanche captive, and then later, because of him. The Comanches had been bad, but her own folks had been even crueler. If she’d been willing to abandon her son, if she’d shown proper remorse for bearing a bastard child and inflicting him on the white world, then she might have been forgiven. But she’d held her head high and tried to ignore the insults and slurs, the contempt, the hurt of being shunned. And then she’d made the hardest sacrifice, turning herself into a whore in order to feed and clothe her bastard son.
Involuntarily Lance’s fists clenched with the old rage. Sometimes as a kid he’d hear her crying at night, and he wanted to punch his fists through a wall, or take out his knife and carve out the innards of the bastards who held themselves so high and mighty above her—his savage Comanche blood at work, Lance thought without humor.
But his savage instincts hadn’t been enough to save her. He hadn’t been able to protect her when she most needed him. Bile rose in his throat at the twenty-year-old memory, when he was almost eight.
She was hanging out laundry in the yard behind their small cabin when the three white men caught her and dragged her into the house. Her scream of terror and pain brought him running from the woods where he was checking his traps, sent him bursting into the cabin. She was sprawled whimpering across the bed on her back while a bearded frontiersmen pumped away between her legs.
He remembered the smell most, the stench of unwashed male bodies and filthy buckskin. He remembered the largest man’s hateful laugh as he raped his mother. Remembered his own violent, impotent rage.
He flew at the giant’s back, but one of the others caught him and held his scrawny, writhing body.
“Lookee here, will ya?” his captor taunted. “If it ain’t the puny little breed. Don’t get so riled, breed. We’re just havin’ us a little fun with yer ma. She don’t mind. She’s used to having them Comanche bucks fuckin’ her. Ow! Shit, the little savage bit me!”
He fought with every ounce of strength he possessed, trying to kill all three of them, while his mother sobbed and pleaded with them to leave her son alone. Only the powerful fist that finally caught him across the face had silenced him.
He’d come to in a daze to find his mother rocking him, her tears wetting his face. He’d cried with her, cried for her pain, for her shame, for his own shame in being unable to save her. She tried to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but he knew better.
She’d taken Tom Peace as her protector after that. As her permanent lover. She needed a man who was strong and powerful enough to keep away the scum who thought she deserved to be raped because she’d once been a Comanche captive—and because she’d kept her half-breed son.
Lance squeezed his eyes shut at the memory. He’d hated Peace for that, when he should have been grateful his mother had someone to protect her. He should have been grateful to Peace for teaching him to fight and to defend himself and to kill when necessary, too. Instead he’d been bitter at his own failure. She’d died before he was old enough to help her much.
She’d never complained about her lot, though. She’d even done her best to make him see that he should hold his head high, too.
You shouldn’t pay them any mind, my love. I’m proud of you, and that’s all that matters.
Deep down, though, he was ashamed of what he was. And ashamed of being ashamed. No matter what his mother said.
He’d tried to believe her. As a kid, he’d tried not to care what whites thought of him. He’d learned to bottle up the rage and not let himself feel the hurt. But that didn’t ease the lonely feeling of never belonging anywhere.
That loneliness had carved an emptiness inside him. He wasn’t a part of any place. He’d gone in search of his Comanche father, trying to find somewhere to put down roots, but he hadn’t belonged to that world either. The savagery, the killing, had been too fierce for him to live with himself. So he’d come back to Round Rock, thinking maybe he could fill the emptiness here.
He didn’t want all that much. A piece of land where he could raise good horses. A woman who stood beside him and looked at him with pride. Some friendly neighbors who didn’t act as if they wanted to spit on him when he passed by. Not much, but he wanted it.
He wanted it to bad, he could taste it.
Lance cursed softly in the silence. He was setting himself up
for a hard fall, letting himself hope too damn much. There was no way Summer would ever agree to become his wife. Not even to save her precious sister. And even if she did agree, only because he’d given her no other choice, there was no way she would ever see him as a husband to be proud of. He was a fool for even allowing himself to hope.
Round Rock was hardly large enough to be called a town, but it boasted a supply store and a combination livery stable/ stage stop, since it was directly on the road north from Austin to Dallas. Many of the locals still called the settlement by its earlier name of Brushy, after the creek that ran through the county.
In ‘48, when Brushy/Round Rock was first established, Tom Peace had given up rangering in order to start the livery stable. In his will, he’d left the business to Lance Calder.
Summer eyed the livery now as the buckboard approached. The rough log building was faintly illuminated by moonlight, while a glimmer of yellow shone between the chinks in the shutters, indicating that someone was home.
Her ranch foreman, Dusty Murdock, drew the team to a halt and turned to her. “You sure you want to go through with this, ma’am?”
“No…but I don’t think I have any choice.”
“I could maybe try to talk to him for you. He used to consider me a friend—at least, as far as he let anybody be a friend to him.”
She tried to smile. “I appreciate the offer, but I doubt in this case he would listen to you.”
“I’ll wait for you, then.”