Free The Borrowed Bride by Susan Wiggs Page B

walking off with long, angry strides.
    She opened her mouth to call to him, but no sound came out. He rode off on the motorcycle just as Gary arrived to take her to town, then to take the eagle into the wild and let it go.
    One passenger into the wild, one back into her cage. The thought struck Isabel like a blow in the dark, and she gasped.
    “Something wrong?” Gary asked.
    Everything, she thought.
    “Where does the race end?” she asked suddenly.
    “Huh?”
    “The race. I want to see the end of it.”
    “Same place it does every year. But I thought you had to meet somebody.”
    “Gary,” she said, “I need to see the race.”
    He grinned. “Okay by me.”
     
    Her hands, clutching the door handle, were like ice as the truck bounced off-road and uphill. When the terrain became impassable, Gary parked and they got out. Tall grass swished and sighed in the breeze. Gary went around to the bed of the truck and opened the eagle’s crate.
    “Is she all right?” Isabel asked.
    “I think so—ow! Her talons work just fine.” Gary set the eagle on a large rock. The bird perched there, looking haughty and fierce, the breeze ruffling her feathers. Slowly, her wings unfolded.
    Isabel held her breath. Fly, she thought. Fly. You can do it.
    The bird let the wind sift through her feathers, then folded her wings back up.
    “Not ready,” Gary mumbled, clearly disappointed. “I brought my camera and everything.” He scooped up the bird and began to climb the hill. “We’ll have the best view of the race from Warrior Point,” he said over his shoulder.
    The cold numbness froze her hands once again, and no matter how hard she tried to drive the dark memories out of her mind, they came at her, as steady and inevitable as the tide.
    She knew exactly where Gary was heading.
    Because she had stood there and watched her father die. Her memories were as sharp and clear as slides viewed through white light. Her father and his friends were drinking beer. Not a lot—just the usual amount for an afternoon. Her mother laughed with them when her father teased his wife about her concern for his safety.
    He kissed them both goodbye, his wife on the lips, his daughter on the top of the head. Isabel saw mirth in his eyes, but something else, too, something too subtle for her to grasp. Now she realized it was a restless hunger. A deep dissatisfaction.
    Her father had never held a steady job. Running off on dangerous adventures seemed to be a way of proving himself. Defining who he was—not some reservation idler, but a man.
    She understood none of this when she was a girl. She understood only that she had seen her father die.
    A group of observers had gone out to the point, Isabeland her mother included. Isabel was standing, holding hands with her mother. The riders appeared in an explosion of dust and thundering hooves, pouring down a near-vertical gully, leaping a narrow, deep chasm before swinging in a hairpin curve down the side of the mountain.
    Only, instead of making the hairpin curve, her father went over a cliff. Isabel stood in disbelieving silence, staring down at his broken figure and the unmoving horse beside him. She remembered one other detail of that moment in time. Her mother—quite deliberately and quite without malicious intent—dropped Isabel’s hand.
    Isabel’s mother completely shut down. She had moved to the city and willingly surrendered Isabel to a foster home.
    From that moment onward, confused and angry, Isabel pretended that the past did not exist. She eradicated from her character all Native American values and sensibilities.
    Until Dan.
    The thought of him drew a gasp of anguish from her.
    “We’re almost there,” Gary said over his shoulder.
    “I know,” she muttered.
    Dan had filled her with his passion and pride and vitality. She had been afraid of the tribal part of him, and perhaps she still was, but he had awakened her to the ancient songs and rhythms she had never quite been able to banish