Tallchief: The Hunter Read Online Free

possibly try to destroy that?” she stated harshly to the shadows. “Well, Adam Tallchief certainly ruined my peace and harmony, just like he always did.”
    She impatiently rubbed the headache brewing in her temples. “He’s got me talking to myself. I don’t want to think about Adam. I simply want to finish this contract and leave.”
    Determined to forget Adam’s fierce expression, those slashing gray eyes, Jillian firmly sat at her computer. It hummed and waited to be fed, but Jillian’s mind had locked on Adam. He brought with him the sense of storm-tossed seas, of faraway exotic places, and a fresh painful lash of the cruel past.
    She stared at the cabbage roses on the screen and couldn’t remember what she had planned, arranging the many layers of the graphic advertising collage. An image of Adam stalked through her mind, hacking at her creativity; she saw him as an eighteen-year-old boy, determined to testify against her brother, refusing both her offer to runaway with him and the marriage she knew her parents would support. At fifteen, she’d adored him. A “mature” seventeen-year-old, he’d dismissed her. At sixteen, her feelings for him hadn’t changed and, for just that month before her world came apart, Adam Tallchief was her boyfriend, the high school senior dating a lowly sophomore.
    Jillian turned to the windows, seeing past the rain, back to when Adam’s tender kisses turned to hot, hungry ones, his tall lean body shaking with desire against hers. He’d touched her gently, with reverence and never improperly, and filled with dreams, she’d known he would be her husband, her lover.
    She slowly opened a desk drawer and removed a small box. The ring he’d given her the night of the prom was tarnished, just as was the image of how she had later flung it at him. The small silver circle had bounced off his cheek and had fallen untended to the floor. She remembered the pain in those gray eyes, the stiffening of his tall, rawboned body, the clenching of his fists at his sides as she had slashed at him, “I hate you, Adam. If you don’t want me, all I’m asking is that you don’t testify against Tom.”
    “You don’t believe me,” he’d stated softly, as if she’d just knocked the wind out of him with a physical blow.
    “Absolutely not. My brother is not a thief, and I believe him. He says he didn’t do any of those things,” she’d hurled at him.
    Now, with the silence quivering after Adam’s departure from her home, Jillian settled into her thoughts. The silver ring on the tip of her finger was not costly, and represented just one dreamy month with Adam Tallchief. He’d been so tender and protective, and she’d dated him, despite her parents’ objections—that had been her first rebellion.
    Looking back, she suspected that Kevin O’Malley was a handy fix-up for her parents’ shaky finances, and a rebound for her broken heart. Unfortunately, Adam’s tender treatment hadn’t prepared her for the rough marital sex that Kevin preferred. With a five-year marriage ending in divorce, Jillian believed that she was frigid, as he had claimed.
    Twenty-two years ago she’d been a girl, loving Adam. Now she was a divorced, successful sales executive turned graphic artist, and she hated him. But not enough to hurt the Tallchiefs. Resting in the box was the reason Adam’s aunt Sarah had called her: two feathers—one each from a dove and a hawk. “Give these to him when he’s not fighting to survive,” Sarah had said. The old woman’s trembling fingers had smoothed the feathers lovingly, as though they’d reminded her of someone long ago, dear to her heart. Jillian had not been able to refuse the dying woman’s request to safeguard the feathers for Adam.
    Jillian touched the two feathers bound by an old ribbon, strange things for Adam’s aunt to give her for safekeeping. Adam had loved Sarah and she had loved him in return.
    “He’s a drifter and he’s probably lost everything of