Dear Readers--
I'm delighted to announce that All of Me, Navaho Code Talker Chronicles Book #3 is a November 2025 release from BWL Publishers. Have you been waiting for the reunion of Kitty and Luke after their harrowing adventure in New York? Well, the wait is over! Here's Chapter 1:
Chapter 1
Summer, 1943
Riordan Railroad Station, Arizona Reunion
Luke Kayenta checked the delicate gardenia nestled between two rapidly warming bottles of Pepsi Cola. Was it foolish to bring the corsage, given the train’s tendency to be late in wartime? But it had called out to him. I am for her, the one you left in those other canyons, it had said.
He sensed Kitty Charante every day and deep in the night. He sensed her while waiting for mail deliveries. He caught the scent of her fingers, past all those fingers that had handled her letters between the city of New York and the small Dinètah trading post where they finally reached him. That scent she wore—Eau de Gardenia always intensified when they kissed.
His mother and sisters teased him about the corner of his sister Taswan’s window where he nurtured the small plant that had flowered in time to welcome her. It was where he kept the small stack of books, photographs, and drawings from Kitty and her family. Even his grandmother, who did not tease him as much, called it his shrine. Did their laughter signal approval of the correspondence across their cultures?
His nephews accepted the gifts of baseball cards and marbles from Matty and Dom, their counterparts in Kitty’s world. Maybe the children should have come here to the station to wait for her arrival with him. She was used to family all around her. Where was the train?
He stood, leaving the gardenia on the bench, and paced, a bad habit he’d picked up from White people. A Hopi woman, who had been scowling at him since he’d shared the shade beside her, stirred. “She is coming,” the woman said, in English, their common language.
Under his own shoes, Luke now caught the vibration she’d already felt. “You are right, Grandmother,” he said in the best Hopi he could manage.
She grinned, her eyes disappearing in the squint. “Come, lovesick newcomer. Help these old bones to rise.”
He obeyed, giving her his arm, grateful she had used one of the less pejorative terms her people had for his: newcomer. The Hopi had preceded the Diné into the American Southwest by many centuries. As for the “lovesick,” that was merely a statement of fact.
***
Kitty saw him from the window as the train slowed. Through the shimmering heat he stood in his full-dress uniform, with every button fastened, gleaming. His hat shaded his eyes. And a gardenia was somehow blooming in his hands.
“The war must be going badly if the Marines are letting them in,” the conductor said, behind her.
She turned. He shrugged. “Waiting for that gaggle, likely.” He gestured to the laughing woman, who lifted a baby as her two small girls waved from the train car window.
It was the family Kitty had invited to use her private compartment’s washroom an hour earlier, to place a Band-Aid for the older girl’s scrape. “Elbow’s the strongest part of you if anybody gets fresh,” she’d advised as she worked.
“I know,” the girl replied with a small smile.
“I don’t see anyone waiting for you, Mrs. Charente,” the conductor said now. “You’d best stay on. Flagstaff is a proper stop. You can telephone your party from there. Put it back, George,” he instructed the stooped porter, whose name was not George.
The train lurched.
The edge of her trunk bumped the smaller girl off her feet. The mother quickly transferred the baby to Kitty, then lifted the crying girl.
The conductor sighed hard. “Now, Ma’am, you don’t have to help these clumsy—”
“Stand aside,” Kitty ordered.
Even the crying girl went silent. The porter, a small barrel-chested man, turned, grinned wide enough for her to see his gold tooth. “No lasting harm done? Well, this way then, ladies and children,” he proclaimed brightly, hoisting the mother’s carpetbag on top of Kitty’s trunk.
The older sister blocked her way. Her pretty embroidered blouse was like her mother’s. Unlike her mother’s braid, the girl’s black hair was whorled around each ear. “You can’t keep our tiposi, White lady,” she warned.
Her mother’s breath caught.
Kitty laughed. “Don’t worry, kiddo.” She looked down at the still-sleeping infant. How long had it been since she’d allowed herself to hold a baby? Breathe, she told herself. You can do this.
The scowling girl came closer, tilted her head. “You don’t smell like iodine now. You smell good.”
“Thanks. How’s the elbow?”
“Better.” She pointed her chin out the train’s last window. “Is he your man?”
“Sure is. Isn’t he handsome?”
The girl frowned. “He is Diné. But my grandmother pets his arm. Look, Ingu! Grandmother pets a Diné!”
“Hush,” her mother admonished, her middle child now settled at her hip.
“My daughter is very young, Miss.”
“I have five years,” the girl protested. “My sister has three, but she can jump rope almost as good as I can.” She nodded toward the bundle in Kitty’s arms. “He cannot even sit up yet. But he likes to laugh.”
“Well. You’re all swell kids. Even him.”
A smile broke through the woman’s wary expression. “You honor my family.”
As the train door opened, the heat hit Kitty with a force that rocked her stance. She was still getting used to the altitude change from New York’s sea level. This was a new challenge. But the baby nestled in her arms balanced her. Careful. Baby’s wiseacre sister was onto Kitty’s deep longing. The piney smell of his head only intensified it.
Luke Kayenta reached out for her.
She remembered his hands and their gentle strength. He eased her down the train’s steps, traded the baby for his gardenia with a shy smile.
He carried the baby back to his mother. The Pullman porter left her trunk on the platform and carried the young mother’s bag to the waiting flatbed wagon.
Luke followed, assisting the family’s grandmother. Happy squeals rose from the women. And did she even hear the baby’s merry chortle? So much for stoic, cigar-store wooden Indians she’d been told to expect.
Luke and the porter returned. “That was so kind of you, William,” Kitty said, loud enough for the conductor to hear that she knew the man’s actual name. “Thank you.”
The porter touched the brim of his cap. “Not at all, Miss Kitty. It’s my job, Ma’am.”
“Wait.” She looked up into Luke’s eyes. “Hey, partner. Got some change?”
Luke plunged his hand into his Marine dress pants pocket, then opened his palm. In the middle of the copper pennies gleamed a silver dollar.
William Marshall, Pullman porter, whose son graduated college first in his class, took a step back. “Oh, no. You already gave me an envelope for services rendered,” he objected.
“This is to thank you for helping with the bags of my friends,” Kitty insisted, nodding towards the women. She took up the coin from Luke’s palm. Why had she let her sister talk her into painting her nails? She flipped his silver dollar behind her while she still had sense of where William Marshall stood.
She heard it land in his palm. “Why, thank you, Missus. And Corporal, sir. You have yourselves a good visit, now!”
Even in her spectator pumps, Kitty had to look up to finally make solid contact with Luke Kayenta’s fathomless eyes. The sight almost robbed her breath. “So,” she managed, “How about a kiss?”
Luke smiled. She remembered how rare his smiles were. “I have many kisses for you, Kitty.”
“You think you could plant the first?”
The small drama had drawn the attention of every remaining passenger on the train. She would have been mortified if he’d hesitated. But he did not. He swooped on her mouth as if it were his ultimate destination over the months they’d been apart. Kitty didn’t remember anything but the taste of Luke Kayenta after that, except for the vague sense of her skirts flying in the train’s wake. As Luke gasped for air, he buried his nose in her hair and her neck. He spoke a little. Not in English, but in that deep, nasal, drawling language of the people he was born into. As she felt her breasts rise, react against that buttoned-up uniform, the evidence of his own desire tantalized her thighs.
When they finally finished the kiss, both the train and the wagon were gone. Only a beat-up green truck remained at the station.
Luke’s smile slid lopsided and his brow furrowed. “The silver dollar. It was for gas.”
“Oh. Well, we can walk.”
“But Kitty. I wrote to you, explained, remember? That we have many miles to go yet?”
She grinned. “Relax, Captain.”
“I am not a captain in the Marines, Kitty.”
“But you are still a member of the Office of Strategic Services? And that’s your rank there?”
“Well, yes. That seems a hard unit of government to be released from.”
“Then, in private, you’re still my captain, who well earned his rank. There have to be some rewards for your service! So, my captain, if you’ve got ration coupons, I can pay for gas.”
“You did not forget what I wrote in the letter, then, about distances here. You are teasing me. The women do that all the time. They say I am too serious.”
She touched the slight stubble at his chin. “Luke. I’m so glad to see you. And this gardenia. Thank you. It’s beautiful.”
“Saiah naaghai bikieh hozho, Yanaha,” he said quietly, formally. Kitty recognized the phrase from his letters. “Walk in beauty,” was the poor English translation of the complex philosophy of life balance he explained in his letters. And he used the name he’d given her, Yanaha: She Meets the Enemy. His voice, even deeper than she remembered, made the name soar. Those exotic Valentino eyes were exactly as she remembered. Where had he found a gardenia? Its scent drifted past the strand of pearls against her throat. She pressed her finger to his bottom lip. He drew it into his mouth. The sudden sensuousness of it robbed her breath. His arms closed around her again. She reveled in his familiar scent of corn and sage mixing with the oiled metal of his hidden firearm. There, encircled, she felt safe from the world and all its cruelties—from the petty aggressions of the railroad conductor toward the kind porter and the young Indian mother to the war itself.
“We need to go,” Luke murmured into her hair. “The sun will not wait for us to finish.”
“Finish what?” she teased him, now that she knew his other women did. But he had no snappy comeback. He did not even grin or call her a brazen hussy.
“Drinking each other in,” he answered her question.
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