Page 63

“You have the blood of warriors in your veins,” the old man had said.

Tanner had laughed and said he had the blood of a drunk in his veins. The elder had grabbed him by the ear and told him he was a disgrace to the people and to his ancestors.

Then he’d sat him down and told him about his great-great-great-grandfather, told him the past his own father had omitted.

Turned out his great-great-great-grandfather had not always been a hero.

In his teens, he had been a boy who’d sought nothing but trouble.

“He was lost, the same as you,” the elder said. “His mother was dead. His father was a drunkard. He wallowed in self-pity. And then, because he had nothing better to do, he went on a vision quest. He was alone in the sacred hills for three days and nights, and when he returned, he pledged himself to the Sun Dance.”

“Don’t tell me,” Tanner had said sarcastically. “The vision quest and the Dance, a couple of stupid old customs, changed his life.”

“Only a man who questions without understanding that which he questions is stupid, Tanner,” the elder had said quietly.

Two months later, on his sixteenth birthday, Tanner figured he had nothing to lose.

He went up into the hills, alone. No food. No water.

At first, nothing happened. And then, on the third night, an animal came to him. It was a wolf, a sacred animal that symbolized freedom and courage, but the thing was, there were no longer wolves in the Black Hills.

A hallucination, maybe?

Whatever, the experience had left him a little shaken.

When he returned home, he pledged himself to the Dance.

And, when the time came, he danced. For four endless days and nights. He danced until he was bleeding, until he was exhausted, until the world was no longer real.

But he endured, unlike some of the men and boys who had begun the ceremony with him.

And after it was over, when he lay panting and almost delirious on the sacred ground, the elder had come to his side.

“From now on,” he’d said softly, “you will be known as Tanner Akecheta. Tanner the Warrior. Your great-great-great-grandfather’s spirit lives within you, young man. He would be proud to know you.”

It had been the turning point of Tanner’s life. Everything that came after—the academic achievements, his success on the football field, college, being selected first for the SEALs and then for STUD, had happened because of that vision, that dance, but he never talked about it or about his great-great-great-grandfather.

Why would he? It was all private, not to be shared and besides, who would want to hear these things? Only Chay, but he and Chay were like brothers.

He would certainly not talk about himself to a woman.

Except that was exactly what he’d just done.

He hadn’t told her a lot, but he’d told her more than he should have.

Tanner added wood to the fire.

Maybe it was the darkness closing in. Maybe it was the forced intimacy of a dangerous situation.

A musc

le knotted in his jaw.

Or maybe it was just her. Alessandra. There was a complexity to her that baffled him.

Not that he was interested in her in any significant way. Well, sexually, sure. What man wouldn’t be? As for the rest… It was just that she was—that word again—complex. He’d always liked puzzles, and that was what she was. A puzzle. The way she stood up to him. The faint Italian accent that materialized whenever she came close to losing her temper.

The resiliency that had gotten her through being kidnapped and held captive by a pair of brutes.