Paper Rose. Diana Palmer

      For Glenda and Doris, with love.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter Sixteen

      Chapter Seventeen

      Prologue

      Cecily Peterson twirled a beautiful red paper rose between her fingers, staring at its perfection with eyes full of shattered dreams. She was in love with a man who was never going to be able to return that love. Her life was a paper rose, an imitation of beauty forever captured in a medium that would not age, or decay, or die. But it was cold. It was dead and yet it had never lived. Tate Winthrop had brought her the delicate crimson rose from Japan. At the time, it had given her hope that he might one day learn to care for her. But as the years passed, and hope dwindled, she finally realized that the paper rose was making a statement for him. He was telling her in the nicest possible way that his feelings for her were only an imitation of passion and love. He was saying, without speaking one word, that fondness would never be a substitute for love. She remembered so vividly how their turbulent relationship began so many years ago…

      Eight years earlier…

      There was dust coming up the long winding road from Corryville, South Dakota. Tate Winthrop’s black eyes narrowed as he turned on the top rung of the makeshift corral fence to watch the progress of a beat-up gray pickup truck. That would be carrying the order he’d placed with the Blake Feed Company in town.

      No sense in starting his young mare on the leading rein right now, he thought, climbing back down. The old jeans he wore clung close to his tall, powerful body. He was lean and fit, with elegant hands and big feet. His straight black hair, which fell to his waist when it was loosened, was braided and held by a black band at his nape. His mother’s grandfather had been at the Little Bighorn and later went with a delegation to Washington, D.C., for Teddy Roosevelt’s inauguration. One of the elders said that Tate resembled the old warrior in some ways.

      He pulled out the barely touched Cuban cigar he’d placed in its carrier in the pocket of his chambray shirt and struck a match to light it between his cupped hands. The boys at the agency always wanted to know how he managed to get contraband cigars. He never told them anything. Keeping secrets was a way of life with him. They went with his job.

      The truck pulled up onto the rise and came in sight of the small house and big barn, and the makeshift corral where a snow-white filly was prancing impatiently, tossing her mane.

      A young, slender girl got out of the old truck’s cab. She had blond hair cut short and green eyes. He was too far away to see those eyes, but he knew them better than he wanted to. Her name was Cecily Peterson. She was the stepdaughter of Arnold Blake, the man who’d just inherited full ownership of the Blake Feed Company; and the only employee who wasn’t afraid to come up here with Tate Winthrop’s order. Not too many miles from the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, Tate’s ranch sat just outside the southern boundary of the Wapiti Ridge Sioux Reservation. Corryville itself sat on the Big Wapiti River, juxtapositioned between the Badlands and the reservation. Tate’s mother, Leta, lived on the Wapiti Reservation, which was just a stone’s throw from Corryville. Tate had grown up with discrimination. Perhaps that was why, when he could afford it, he’d bought a ranch outside the tribe’s boundaries.

      Tate Winthrop didn’t like most people, and he steered clear of white women. But Cecily had become his soft spot. She was a gentle, kind girl of seventeen, and she’d had a hard life. Her invalid mother had died a short while ago and she was now living with her stepfather and one of his brothers. The brother was a decent sort, old enough to be Cecily’s grandfather, but the stepfather was a layabout and a drunkard. Everyone knew that Cecily did most of the work at the feed store that had been her late father’s. Her stepfather had inherited it when Cecily’s mother died recently, and he was apparently doing everything in his power to bankrupt it.

      Cecily was just a little over medium height and slender as a reed. She would never be beautiful, but she had an inner light that changed her green eyes and made them like peridots in the sunlight.

      He scoffed at his own fancies. She was just a child and his only contact with her was through the orders he placed at the feed store. It pleased him that she was interested in his ancestry, and not in any faddish way like some aficionados of Native Americans who dressed in buckskins and bought trinkets and tapes and tried to act as if they belonged there. He had no time for Sunday Indians from the city. But Cecily was another matter entirely. She knew something of the culture of the Oglala Lakota and she had a feel for its history. He’d found himself instructing her in little-known customs and mores before he realized it.

      But