An Indian Affair Read online

  She Didn’t Know What to Do

  If she continued to see Fox, sooner or later their mutual passion would burst out of control, but the thought of not seeing him any more was unbearable.

  She’d never felt like this before, and her experience with men was so limited that she was unable to determine how to handle it. She couldn’t become just another one of Fox’s lovers, but she couldn’t give him up, either. With him, she was alive in a way that was new to her. Up until the time she met him, her books and studies and quiet life had been sufficient.

  She hadn’t known what she was missing, like a person born blind who can’t appreciate the glory of a sun he has never seen. But now she couldn’t go back to that former existence.

  It would never again be enough.

  AN INDIAN AFFAIR

  Doreen Owens Malek

  –

  Published by

  Gypsy Autumn Publications

  PO Box 383 • Yardley, PA 19067

  –

  Copyright 1986 and 2012

  by Doreen Owens Malek

  www.doreenowensmalek.com

  –

  Originally Published

  as

  DESPERADO (1986)

  –

  The Author asserts the moral right to be

  identified as author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author or Publisher.

  First USA printing: 1986

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  For my godchildren,

  Keith Francis Malek

  and

  Stephen Baldwin Freiberger

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  About the Author

  New Releases by Doreen Owens Malek

  Chapter 1

  The Florida sun was losing strength, but still brilliant, as Cindy and Paula emerged from the restaurant in late afternoon. Cindy shielded her eyes, and then dropped her hand when they turned to walk down the street.

  “How far is it to your apartment?” Cindy asked, watching as her friend pulled a pair of sunglasses from her purse and put them on.

  “A couple of miles,” Paula replied. “The complex is right outside of town.”

  Cindy nodded. Paula had picked her up at the Clearwater airport a couple of hours before, and they had stopped for a bite in Council Rock before traveling on to Paula’s house.

  “When are you going to start the research?” Paula asked, rummaging in her shoulder bag for her car keys.

  “Monday, I guess.” Cindy smiled slightly. They’d spent the whole meal catching up on their social lives and had never discussed in detail the reason for Cindy’s visit.

  “So you’ve already contacted somebody from the university,” Paula said.

  “Yes, the department chairman is going to see me.” Cindy was a graduate assistant in the folklore department of the University of Pennsylvania. The subject of her master’s thesis was the legends of the Seminole Indians, and she’d come to northern Florida to research the topic in the section of the country where the Seminoles had lived for hundreds of years. Paula was a college friend who’d offered to have Cindy stay with her when she heard that Cindy’s work was taking her to the Tampa area.

  “What about your supervisor?” Paula inquired, glancing at Cindy.

  “I have to mail him my ideas and get approval of my outline, but I don’t think that will be difficult. He’s working in the field himself.”

  “Huh,” Paula replied skeptically, snaring her keys and then holding them aloft like a trophy. “Good luck to him. That egghead stuff you write all looks like nonsense to me.”

  Cindy was about to reply when a thunderous crash made both women spin around and then jump back. In disbelief, Cindy watched as the picture window of a hardware store fronting the street exploded into sparkling smithereens. Glass fragments flew in all directions as two figures hurtled through the window. Cindy and Paula both threw up their arms to cover their faces. Shards tinkled to the ground as the men who’d shattered the window tumbled to the walkway, almost at Cindy’s feet, rolling over and over, locked in combat.

  When the glass finally stopped falling, Cindy peeked through her fingers to see what was happening. One of the men was flat on the ground, face down, with his arms pinned behind him. The other was sitting astride him snapping handcuffs on his wrists.

  Cindy looked at Paula, who appeared remarkably undisturbed by the whole episode, observing calmly as the taller man hauled the captive to his feet. Cindy turned her head to watch also. The prisoner stumbled along unwillingly as the victor dragged him to a pickup truck parked at the curb and unceremoniously cuffed him to the rear bumper.

  Cindy leaned in to her companion and said in an undertone, “Paula, what is going on here?”

  Paula shrugged. “It’s just Drew Fox bringing in another one.”

  “Another what?” Cindy demanded, bewildered.

  Before Paula could reply the front door of the store flew open with a bang. An irate man, obviously the owner, started berating the tall man in a loud voice, to the vast entertainment of the small crowd that had gathered. The object of his tirade patted his shoulder reassuringly, speaking to him in a low, comforting tone. Mollified, the proprietor calmed down, and was even managing a small smile when a patrol car glided silently to a stop in the street, its blue light pulsating. The fettered prisoner looked on grimly, resigned to his fate.

  “Cheese it, the cops,” Paula muttered, and Cindy grinned. There was something amusing about this scene, which shouldn’t have been funny. But the nonchalant stance of the man who had initiated it all, lounging with his hands in his pockets and greeting the policemen affably as if he were the host at a block party, struck her as absurd.

  “Look at that guy,” she said to Paula. “You’d never think he just splintered a pane of glass with his head.”

  Paula chuckled in response, and the two women watched as the police took charge of the prisoner and led him away to the patrol car. As soon as it pulled away, the crowd began to disperse and the tall man sauntered over to them, pushing his hair back from his forehead.

  “Hi, short stuff,” he said casually, talking to Paula but looking at Cindy.

  “You’re out of date, Fox,” Paula replied dryly. “My brother stopped calling me that when I was twelve.”

  “You still look pretty short to me,” Fox observed, smiling just a little with his eyes, which remained on Cindy’s face.

  “Everybody looks short to you,” Paula said.

  “Are you ladies all right?” he asked. “Some of that glass came pretty close to you.”

  “We’re fine,” Paula replied, for both of them. “But I can’t say the same for you. You do realize that you’re bleeding?”

  Fox blinked, surprised, and put his hand to his head again. It came away stained red.

  “I thought my hair felt wet,” he said. He pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans and tied it around his head like a bandanna.

  “Oh, very good,” Paula said. “Nice and sanitary. Why don’t you come by the emergency room tonight? I’ll tape that up for yo
u.”

  Paula was a nurse who worked the night shift at Lykes Hospital. “I just might do that,” Fox replied, still watching Cindy.

  “I’m surprised to see you jumping through windows again, Drew,” Paula said. “It reminds me of the old days. I thought you’d long ago graduated to international criminal types.”

  “I was doing a favor for Sheriff Tully,” Fox replied. “That joker escaped from his jail. I chased him into Barney’s store from the alley out back.” He glanced at Paula, then his gaze returned to Cindy. “Who’s your friend?”

  “I’ve missed you too, Fox,” Paula observed acidly, and he grinned.

  “Andrew Fox,” he said to Cindy, extending his hand. Cindy grasped it.

  “Lucinda Warren,” she replied, her fingers lost in his big palm.

  “Lucinda,” he repeated. “Sounds like the princess in a fairytale.”

  “Everybody calls me Cindy,” she responded softly. She was mesmerized by his green eyes, which swept over her face, taking in every detail.

  “But I’m not everybody, Lucinda,” he replied, continuing to hold her hand. He towered over her, his big, compact body at ease, and yet somehow alert, as if he were ready for anything at any moment.

  He’s Indian, Cindy thought, gazing up at him in mute absorption. She could see it in his straight, midnight hair and in the dusky skin, a combination of copper and terra cotta, which complemented his high cheekbones and strong, prominent nose. His other features were European, however: light eyes and a finely molded, thin-lipped mouth. It was an arresting combination, a harmony of opposites that made him, not handsome, but unforgettable.

  “What are you doing in town?” he asked, his tone muted, intimate.

  “I’m researching my master’s thesis at Gulf Coast University. I’ll be staying with Paula for several weeks.”

  He accepted this without comment and then released her hand slowly. As he let go, his two middle finger curled around hers possessively, and then fell away. He turned to Paula, as if remembering suddenly that she was present.

  “Say hello to Johnny for me when you see him,” he directed. “I’ll try to stop by the hospital tonight for some T.L.C.” He smiled wickedly.

  “Don’t forget,” Paula advised him. “That gash looks pretty bad; you shouldn’t neglect it.”

  “I’ll live,” he said lightly. He looked at Cindy again and said, with a slight inclination of his dark head, “Welcome to Florida, ma’am.” Then he loped back to his truck and swung up into the cab, slamming the door shut behind him in one economical movement. Both women remained looking after him until the truck roared away into the distance.

  “Kind of unsettling, isn’t he?” Paula commented, with a sly, sideward glance.

  “What was all that about?” Cindy countered, ignoring the question. “What was he doing chasing that man, and handcuffing him, and then turning him over to the police. Is Fox a cop, too? Is he a plainclothes detective or something?”

  “Whoa, there,” Paula said, laughing. She took Cindy’s arm and steered her in the direction of the parking lot where her car awaited them. “One thing at a time. First of all, Fox isn’t a cop; he’s a bounty hunter.”

  Cindy stopped walking. ‘‘A bounty hunter! I thought they only existed in Westerns.”

  “Well, Council Rock has at least one. Fox goes after and apprehends fugitives, prison escapees, some bail jumpers.”

  “People waiting for trial who flee jurisdiction and forfeit their bail?” Cindy asked, falling into step alongside Paula again.

  “Right. In return for bringing them back he collects a fee, which is a percentage of the set bail.”

  “I see. So the higher the bail, the more money he makes.”

  Paula nodded as they approached her car. “That’s why I was surprised to see him chasing down that guy today. He looked like a petty crook, and Fox doesn’t usually waste his time on them. But he was doing it for Sheriff Tully. He’s another Seminole, and they’re pretty tight.”

  “I thought he was Indian,” Cindy said softly, as Paula unlocked her door and walked around to the driver’s side.

  “Half,” Paula corrected. “His mother was a tourist from up North. But in his mind, his attitudes, his approach to life, Fox is all Indian.”

  They got into the car, and Paula started the motor and drove off, pulling onto the main road which led out of town.

  “You said he usually doesn’t bother with small time criminals,” Cindy went on, pursuing the subject. “He mainly chases the big ones, organized crime figures, people like that?”

  “Anybody with a big price tag attached,” Paula replied. “He’s the best at what he does, and the cops call him in on the toughest cases, the ones they can’t crack. He goes out of state a lot, sometimes even out of the country. He went down to Mexico a few months back, after some drug kingpin, finally tracked him to Guadalajara. Johnny told me about it. Fox must have picked up a nice piece of change for that one.”

  “He ought to buy himself a new truck,” Cindy commented, smiling. “The one he has looks like it’s about to disintegrate.”

  Paula shook her head. “He loves that old piece of junk, fixes it himself.” Paula craned her neck at an intersection and then gunned the motor. “Fox is hard to understand. Johnny says he has expensive equipment, a whole roomful of computers—some of them tied in to the government banks—to assist in his investigations. But he’ll drive that raggedy pickup until it collapses into a heap of rubble. He just doesn’t seem to care much about anything but his work.”

  “He sounds like an independent type,” Cindy said.

  “Oh, he is that, all right. He’s descended from a long line of renegade Seminoles who chose to stay in Florida and live as hunters and fishermen rather than accept reservation life in the West. His father and grandfather made their living from the land.”

  “What happened to his mother?” Cindy asked.

  Paula glanced at her quickly, then looked back at the road. “She left him with his father and went back North. His father’s family raised him.” She paused and added, “He’s illegitimate. The story goes that his mother viewed his father as a good time, a little distraction during her vacation. She discovered she was pregnant and had the child up North, returning just long enough to leave the baby here—deposit him on the Fox doorstep, so to speak. As far as I know they never saw her again.”

  “How horrible for him,” Cindy said softly, thinking of the green eyes, surely the stamp of his absent mother.

  “Yeah, I guess it must have been pretty rough, being a half breed in a Southern town, and a bastard to boot. He was pretty much of a hellraiser when he was a kid. My brother Johnny wasn’t supposed to play with him.”

  “Because of his background?” Cindy asked, dismayed at such prejudice toward an innocent child.

  “No. Because he was always in trouble. My grandmother used to call him ‘that desperado’ and told Johnny that she would box his ears if she saw him with Drew. Which only made Johnny anxious to tag after him at every opportunity.”

  “Desperado,” Cindy repeated, laughing. “Isn’t that a little dramatic?”

  “Well, she was Spanish, you know, given to colorful expressions in her native language. She also called my father ‘that gringo’ until the day she died, at which point my parents had been married for thirty years.”

  “Where is Johnny now?” Cindy inquired.

  “Up in Atlanta. My father got him a job when my parents moved there. It was during our junior year, remember?”

  “I remember. So you’re the only one of your family left in this area now.”

  “Yup,” Paula said, pulling into the driveway of an apartment complex. “I wanted to come back here when we graduated; this place will always be home to me. And Johnny looks Fox up every time he comes to visit me. They were great friends.”

  “Fox was raised by his father’s family, then?”

  “Until he was sixteen. He left home then, taking a number of lunatic jobs until he fou
nd his calling.”

  “Lunatic jobs?”

  “Jobs only a lunatic would take. He has a natural cunning and amazing agility, so he always wound up doing things nobody else would try. Johnny told me about some of his adventures.”

  “Such as?” Cindy asked curiously, as Paula pulled into a reserved parking space in front of an ultra-modern brick building.

  Paula sent her an arch glance. “He fascinates you, doesn’t he?”

  “Answer the question.”

  Paula chuckled, shutting off the motor. “Let’s see. He was a bonded courier for a while, those guys with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists and pistols in their shoes.”

  “Briefcases full of diamonds, you mean.”

  “Right. He got shot doing that, so he switched to something safer, high rise construction work, teetering on six inch girders five stories above the ground.”

  Cindy burst out laughing.

  “But that was too dull, I guess, because the next thing I heard, he was riding shotgun on armored trucks transporting government payrolls.”

  “Good lord,” Cindy said, shaking her head.

  “So you can see how his training and experience were perfectly suited to his current occupation. He can go his own way, work when he wants to, and slake his thirst for adventure at the same time.” Paula gestured expansively at the building before them. “El Rancho Desmond, the second floor of it anyway. Let me help you take your luggage out of the trunk.”

  Each of the women took a bag, and Cindy followed Paula up an exterior flight of stone steps. They passed the potted palms flanking the entrance and went through glass doors, which admitted them to the first floor landing. The air inside was blessedly cool. Paula led the way up an additional series of carpeted stairs to her apartment.

  “This is it,” she announced, unlocking the door and hefting Cindy’s suitcase over the threshold. “I was on a waiting list six months to get this place.”