Maverick took off his gun belt and hung it from a willow branch high on the lodge wall—a deliberate gesture to show he was unarmed. He sat down on a flat cedar stool beside the fire ring, rested his forearms on his knees, and looked up at her.
"You don't have to stand there like you're waiting for an executioner," Maverick said gently.
Hesper did not move. Her fingers remained tightly knotted in the fringe of her sleeves.
"I know what my father told you," she said.
Her voice took Maverick by surprise. It was not rough or harsh; it was low, rich, and clear, with a melodic, sorrowful rhythm that sounded like music played on a cedar flute.
"Your father told me a lot of things," Maverick answered. "Most of it sounded like a man trying to talk someone out of a horse trade."
"He told you I was ugly," she said, her voice unyielding, though there was a tremor of suppressed tears beneath the surface. "He told you no man in this valley would look upon me. He told you that you were buying green grass and clear water with a bride who has no face."
"He did," Maverick admitted. "And I told him that talking about his daughter that way was a disgrace."
Hesper went rigid. "He spoke the truth. The warriors who came before you begged for land just as you did. When they demanded to see what lay beneath this skin, they turned their horses and rode away in terror. One of them spat upon the ground before my father’s fire."
Maverick felt a knot of anger tighten in his chest. "Then they were fools, and they weren't men."
"You have not seen me yet, white man."
"My name is Maverick," he said firmly. "If we're going to share a fire, you can call me by my name."
She stood motionless for a long moment. Then, with sudden, jerky movements born of bitter defiance, her hands rose to the braided horsehair cord at her throat.
"See what you have chained yourself to," she whispered, her voice breaking. "Look upon your bargain, Maverick Cole, and see if your stomach is stronger than the others."
She jerked the knot loose.
With a sweeping motion, she pulled the heavy buckskin veil over her head and cast it onto the dirt floor between them.
Maverick did not look away. He forced himself to keep his eyes steady, watching her face in the warm, amber glow of the fire.
What he saw took the breath clean out of his chest, but not for the reasons Lobo Negro had promised.
Hesper was not hideous. She was stunning.
Her features were high-cheekboned and aristocratic, carved with the classical, haughty beauty of the mountain Apache. Her eyes were immense, dark as obsidian pools, fringed with long, thick lashes that glistened with unshed tears. Her hair fell down her back in a midnight cascade of loose, shimmering curls that reached her waist.
Yet across the left side of her face lay the mark that had defined her existence.
From the corner of her left eye, running down across her cheekbone to the edge of her jaw, was a wide, jagged scar—the puckered, silvery-white tissue of a terrible burn. The scar had contracted the skin slightly, pulling down the outer corner of her left eyelid in a subtle, permanent slant and tracing down her throat before disappearing beneath the collar of her tunic.
It was a severe wound, the remnant of an ancient agony. But it had not destroyed the woman beneath it. It had merely marked her, like an ancient oak split once by lightning that had stubbornly refused to fall.
Hesper stood with her chin lifted, her eyes blazing with fierce, defensive shame, waiting for him to recoil. She waited for him to look down, to grimace, or to turn his eyes toward the doorway.
Maverick sat completely still.
He did not flinch. He did not blink. He looked at her scarred cheek with the calm, steady gaze of a man who had seen men broken by cannon fire and horses torn by barbed wire, but who also recognized enduring courage when it stood before him.
Slowly, Maverick reached up and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his flannel shirt. He pulled the collar aside, baring his right shoulder and chest to the firelight.
Across his collarbone ran a thick, hideous purple furrow where a jagged piece of shrapnel from an exploding wagon had torn him open ten years before, alongside three distinct white pockmarks left by buckshot.
"A man who’s spent his whole life getting kicked by the world doesn't expect perfection, Hesper," Maverick said, his voice softer than she had ever heard a man speak. "You've survived a fire. I've survived a few myself."
Hesper stared at his scarred chest, then looked back up into his eyes.
She saw no mockery. She saw no revulsion. She saw only a quiet, lonely man who looked at her as if she were a human being.