Free The Beloved Woman by Deborah Smith

breeze lifted specks of red-tinted soil and dried the tiny spots where Katherine’s tears had fallen. The already baked earth hinted that the coming summer would be dry and hot.
    Justis leaned against a tree and watched Katherine place dogwood boughs on the graves, her face composed now, her manner as formal as her black dress. After church he’d changed back into his comfortable trousers and white work shirt—and his regular boots, too, which made him feel a hundred times more human—but she still wore the solemn outfit with its high neck and long sleeves.
    She murmured Cherokee words over each grave, then added prayers in English. “I have to make certain that my family’s spirits are residing peacefully in the Dark Land,” she explained.
    “You still cater to the old ways. Jesse and Mary did too. I’ve seen ’em throw food to the fire when they sat down to eat supper—asking the blessing of the fire spirit, they said.”
    Katherine glanced up at him and smiled wistfully. “A part of me will always believe the old teachings.”
    “I like ’em, especially the Cherokee idea of the hereafter,” Justis assured her. “When you’re alive you live in the Sun Land, and when you die you go off to a village in the Dark Land, where you get to carry on just as if you were still flesh and blood. Nobody makes you fettle with angels or harps or any of that.”
    “Do you know where the Dark Land is?”
    He gave her a troubled look. “Toward the sunset.”
    “Yes. That’s one reason so many of the people don’t want to go west. They think of it as the Dark Land.” She paused, her expression tragic. “In a way, it is.”
    Justis took a deep breath. He might as well give her the news now. “The army’s settin’ up a stockade south of town. To hold the Cherokees for removal. It’ll be finished in a couple of weeks.”
    “I know.” She hugged herself. “I overheard some of the hotel guests talking about it the other night as they passed my door.”
    “Don’t worry about going to the stockade. I’m going to write the governor and ask him to give you an exemption. You’ll be my responsibility.”
    “A white man’s ward.” She smiled coldly. Then her shoulders slumped and she looked at the graves again. “I’m finished. You may do the rest now.”
    Justis climbed onto Watchman and touched a blunt gold spur to the stallion’s gray flank. Feeling sorry for her and not knowing how to say so, he tipped his wide-brimmed work hat in silent salute.
    “Step back, gal, so you won’t get trampled.”
    She walked down the slope a few feet and stood staring into the distance, her hands clenched together. While Watchman’s hooves destroyed the mounds of her family’s graves, she resolutely faced the ancient blue-green mountains. They had belonged to the Cherokees for centuries.
    Justis finally reined the stallion to a halt. Katherine continued to gaze into the distance. After studying the rigid control in her posture and the quiver of restraint at the base of her throat, he knew she was very near to crying again. He’d never seen a woman so determined to be strong, and it filled him with both respect and tenderness.
    He didn’t want to examine those feelings too much because he’d never felt them so strongly before, and they worried him. It was hard to care this much about a woman who had good reason not to care back. He had never belonged to anyone heart and soul, and he wasn’t certain that he wanted to now. But he knew withoutdoubt that he wanted Katherine Blue Song to belong to
him
that way.
    Justis sighed. He hoped that she’d come to feel something for him, even if it were only desire. He knew he could make her want him in bed.
    “None of the grave-robbin’ bastards around these parts will find your family now, Katie. You can count on it. If the greedy fools weren’t so convinced that Cherokees bury gold with their dead—”
    “Thank you,” she said in a small, sad voice. “I know you had to make