Desert Dreams (24 page)

"I've had enough," a disgruntled voice said.
"I'm
goin
' after the woman."

"What makes you think you can?" Braxton
said. "No one's been able to find a trace of her."

Rafe smiled, though he wasn't sure if his lips had
responded. Good girl, you got away.

"I'll go back to town. Someone's bound to have
seen her leave."

"I'm with Hank." Another voice joined in.
"He don't know
nothin
'. If he did he'd have
talked by now."

Braxton watched as more than half his men moved toward
their horses. He pulled his revolver and fired into the air, and they halted.

"You can't kill all of us," Hank said.

"No, but I'll start with you." Braxton leveled
his pistol and shot Hank dead. The other defectors drew their weapons, and
Braxton's men drew theirs.

"We can all kill each other, or you and your boys
can put your guns down and let us go peaceably," one of the would-be
deserters said.

Braxton stared at him for a long moment, measuring his
intent and his determination. Satisfied he meant to fight to the end, and
knowing he and the men who had remained loyal to him were grossly outnumbered,
he
uncocked
his pistol and lowered it.

"Get the hell out of here then."

Nine of Braxton's thirteen remaining men mounted up
and rode off, and he could do nothing but watch in cold fury. Before the dust
had settled, he found an outlet for his anger. He walked over to where Rafe
Montalvo lay on the ground and kicked him hard in the ribs.

From her vantage point, Anne cringed but Rafe barely
moved. "You've got to do something. There are only five of them now,"
she said to Jose.

"Unless there are more inside the house. Besides
there is only one of me."

"I can help."

Her captor only snorted his dismissal and her anger
flared. He had cleaned his gun, and now he lay on the ground close by,
reloading it with a calm detachment that made her blood boil. "Are you
going to sit here and let them kill him?"

"I am going to wait until the time is
right," he said, his attention riveted on the pistol in his hand. "A
little patience goes a long way, senorita. You would do well to remember that.
I was once young and impetuous too, and I nearly got myself killed many times.
Now I am older—not old, mind you, but older—and I know better than to go
running into a situation without a plan."

When his words elicited no response from her, he
looked up, only to find that she was gone. He lurched forward, looking down
into the canyon below, and swore savagely as he watched her ride slowly into
camp, her gun drawn.

"He doesn't know where the gold is," Anne
said in a clear, strong voice. "I do. Let him go and I'll tell you."

One of them moved toward her, and she pointed her
pistol at him. "I wouldn't," she warned.

"I don't believe she'll shoot," another one
said.

Anne decided to prove him wrong. Leveling the pistol
at him, she pulled the trigger.

The man cried out as the bullet ripped through the
flesh of his thigh. He fell to the ground in a shower of curses, rolling
around, clasping his injured leg as blood began to seep through his fingers.

"Goddammit, she shot me!"

She screamed as she was grabbed from behind and hauled
down from her horse, but another shot rang out and she fell with the man who
had grabbed her. She stood quickly, turning to see that he was dead, his eyes
staring sightlessly at the sky.

Another man fell as Jose rode into camp, his pistol
blazing,
his
eyes on fire. She pointed her gun at the
man closest to her. He was about to fire at Jose, having completely discounted
her as a threat, and she squeezed the trigger and dropped him.

The man she had hit in the thigh tried to rise, and
Jose finished him off. With the next shot, he wounded the leader. She ran
toward Rafe. Braxton rose up, injured but not dead. He pointed his gun at Rafe,
and Anne screamed and lunged forward.

Rafe screamed too, but the sound ricocheted inside his
head. The blood pounded in his brain. He couldn't move. Helplessly he watched
as she hurled her body in front of him.

Two shots rang out. He tried to call out to her, to
stop her, but his head began to spin, and he passed out knowing that Annie was
dead and he had caused it.

Chapter 16

Rafe knelt on the ground.
The smoke from a burning wagon
filled the air and scorched his lungs. He held Annie's head while she vomited.

When he looked down, she was gone and there was a
knife in his hand. He moved it over the rabbit's carcass, peeling back the hide
with practiced skill.

"If your knife is very sharp and you are very
careful, you can remove the hide in one piece without nicking the inside layer
of skin," he heard Jose's voice saying.

His hands trembled violently, but he managed to hold
the rifle steady long enough to squeeze the trigger. A shot exploded, echoing
through the empty desert.

He walked through the tall brush around the burning
wagon. There was a body, a woman. He had to bury her. He rolled her over and
Annie's dead eyes stared up at him.

He was falling through dark nothingness, nothing to
hold on to, nothing to stop
his fall, nothing but cold darkness.

"There was nothing you could do," a voice
echoed in the tunnel. "There was nothing you could do."

"I couldn't move," he heard himself reply.

"There was nothing you could do."

Slowly, reluctantly, he woke up. He wanted to go on
floating in the tunnel forever. He wanted to be dead, never to wake up again or
feel the pain in his gut.

Why, Annie? Why? The question reverberated in his
mind, sending him back through memory. He was lying beside her in the grass,
caressing her breasts, kissing her soft, sweet lips.

He had to wake up, he had no choice. Though he tried
to resist, the light drew him like a magnet. He blinked, opening his eyes to a
shower of sunlight pouring in through an open, unadorned window. The light
intensified as it bounced off the white adobe walls that surrounded him.

Squeezing his eyes closed tightly, he tried to blot
out the memory of Annie throwing herself in front of a bullet intended for him.
Thoughts kept tumbling in his mind—that he would never see her again, that she
had died for nothing. She had died to save him, a dead man. How could he ever
live with that?

"Annie," he whispered through swollen lips.

It was another nail in the coffin that housed his soul.
He yearned for death more vehemently than he ever had in his life. Annie was
gone, gone forever.

Something tickled his hand. He brushed it aside, only
to have it return. He brushed it away again, but it persisted. When he tried to
move, pain sliced through his being, consuming him. Lifting his head with an
effort, he saw the woman sitting in the chair beside the bed, her body hunched
over,
her
head resting on the bed beside him. He
couldn't see her face, but the pale hair was unmistakable.

Maybe it had all been a nightmare, a terrible
nightmare. Or was he dreaming now, dreaming that Annie was alive? If he could
just touch her...

Despite the pain that made it difficult to breathe,
let alone move, he managed to lift his arm enough to lay his hand on her head.
She stirred and raised herself up. Her eyes were swollen and rimmed with dark
circles when she looked at him, but then she smiled and the signs of worry and
fatigue seemed to disappear.

She was real. Somehow she was alive. He had so many
questions, but he could feel his mind slipping away into the shadows.

Just as the darkness enveloped him again, he thought
she had to be the most beautiful woman in the world.

***

Rafe sat up in bed, his shoulders propped up by a
mountain of pillows. Annie dipped the spoon in the bowl of broth and raised it
to his mouth, her small hand trembling slightly.

She hadn't done what he'd asked. She'd promised to go
to New Mexico if anything happened to him. If she had, he would be dead right
now. And wasn't that what he'd wanted? To die?

The spoon touched his lips and he ate obediently,
though his eyes remained on her slightly flushed face. She looked tired, his
angel of mercy. When she smiled his heart lurched.

She'd told him she loved him, this beautiful, stubborn,
indomitable woman, and for a moment he let himself imagine it was true, that
all the years of brutality hadn't eaten away the fabric of his soul. For a
moment, he tried to forget there were things she didn't know about him, things
that would make her turn her back on him forever. She was light in an infinite
darkness, but he wondered if it wouldn't have been better to have never seen
the light than to have seen it, only to have it taken away. He'd lost so much
already, he didn't know if he could survive another loss.

"Where are we?" he asked.

"A deserted ranch house near San Juan
Bautista." She wouldn't meet his gaze, and he couldn't help wondering why.
She seemed embarrassed, even timid. His throat constricted with an emotion he
couldn't name and didn't want to explore.

"How—"

"We—"

"Who is we?"

"Jose
Carvajal
and
I."

She looked at him finally, and he could read her
emotions in her eyes. She cared about him, for some reason he couldn't
understand. He'd made love to her. He'd been the first. That must be
it-infatuation. She'd almost died for him, because... because what?

"He helped me get you away from those men and
bring you in here," she was saying, but, immersed in his own thoughts, he
barely heard her. "He said they knew about the gold."

She pressed the spoon to his lips again and he forgot
to eat. He was remembering it all again, that split second before the world had
gone black, when he'd seen Annie fall and thought she was dead.

Nothing made sense anymore. He'd wanted to die for
her, and she'd nearly died for him. It was more than he could bear to think
about, Annie dying for him. He wasn't worth it, not worth her life. Nothing was
worth Annie's life.

Annie's hand faltered and he gasped as the hot soup
spilled on his bare chest. Instinctively, he tried to jerk away, and the
movement caused a fiery flash of pain that blazed along his rib cage.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. Setting the bowl
down on the bedside table, she reached for a towel and caught the hot trail of
soup before it reached the white bandage around his midsection.

She tried to concentrate on her task as she cleaned
the spill, but she couldn't help remembering the feel of his chest against
hers, the texture of the hairs that curled sparingly across his breastbone. The
need to touch him, to kiss him, to assure herself he was real nearly
overwhelmed her. She had almost lost him.

"What happened?" he asked, his voice thick
with emotion. "I thought you were dead, Annie. Braxton wasn't dead. I saw
you jump in front of his bullet."

"Jose shot him and Braxton's bullet went
wide."

"You could have been killed, Annie. Why would you
do something so foolish?"

"I couldn't let him shoot you." She turned
her head away from the pain and desolation in his pale eyes.

"Promise me you'll never do anything like that
again," he said.

Anne picked up the bowl and turned to face him again.

"Promise me," he repeated.

She reached for the spoon, but he grabbed her wrist.

"Promise me."

###

After dinner, Anne returned to
Rafe's
room, stopping before the door at the end of the dark corridor. She shifted an
armload of sheets to one side so she could knock with her free hand.

Whoever had deserted this place had left behind most
of their worldly possessions. Jose said they'd probably been greenhorns from
the East who gave up and went back home.

For some reason it made her sad to think of it,
although she could certainly understand. This was a savage, unforgiving land, a
place where only the strongest flourished, and everything, even the men and
women, had to be prickly in order to survive. Sometimes even that wasn't
enough.

If ever a man had thorns, it was Rafe Montalvo. Yet
he'd almost died. He knew this land and its hazards, yet it had nearly devoured
even him.

He'd been hurt pretty badly. His chest and arms were bruised
and cut. Patches of skin had been scraped off his legs. According to Jose, he'd
bruised his ribs. It would take him a while to recover, but recover he
would—this time.

He could have been killed. In the darkness of the
night while she'd tended him, she had realized she couldn't stand by and watch
him die. She couldn't endure another episode like that.

She also believed that he cared for her in his own
way. Maybe it would be enough. Maybe she would be able to convince him to give
up his quest for vengeance, to just walk away.

When there was no answer to her knock, she pushed the
door open and stepped inside.

Rafe sat on the bed, his back to the door. His torso
was bare, except for the bandage wrapped around his ribs, stark white against
his sun-darkened skin. She walked around to face him, clutching the towels to
her chest like a shield.

"You must be feeling better," she said with
a smile.

He didn't move, didn't respond. His gaze seemed fixed
on some distant object he could see through the window. A steely tension
radiated from his body, and she took a step back from its impact.

"I brought you some clean sheets. If you'll sit
in the chair..."

When he turned to glare at her, the fury in his eyes
took her breath away. She wanted to touch him, to say something, to ask why he
was so angry suddenly, but she dared not. Violence simmered just beneath the
surface calm, and she didn't want to be the one to unleash it.

And then he gazed out the window again as if nothing
had happened, his indifference more devastating than his anger.

Shaken and confused, she put the linens on the bedside
table and began untucking the sheets. When the time came, she had no doubt he
would move to the chair and allow her to complete her task. Maybe then he would
tell her what was wrong, why he was so angry.

"Leave it," he said, without turning around.

"But the sheets were on the bed when we brought
you here. You've bled on them—"

Without warning, he swung out with his arm, knocking
the sheets and the lamp from the nightstand. The lamp shattered and kerosene
went everywhere, all over the floor and the bedding.

"Leave me alone!" he growled.

"What's wrong with you?" She didn’t know
whether to flee or stand her ground.

"You should have let me die," he said
quietly. "You promised you'd go to my brother if anything happened to
me."

"And you promised nothing would happen to
you."

"I lied."

"So did
I
." Her
eyes widened as a thought struck her. "Is that it? Are you angry because I
injured your stubborn male pride?"

"Leave me in peace, Annie. You've done enough for
me. Now I want you to leave me the hell alone."

She started at the sound of the door opening, though
Rafe hardly seemed to notice. Jose stepped into the room, shoving Carlos
Delgado in front of him. The smile vanished from Jose's lips as his gaze fell
on Anne.

"
Buenas
tardes
, senorita
," he said with a nod of his head.

Anne looked from the Mexican to Rafe. "What are
you going to do?" she asked, a cold dread clutching her heart.

"Leave us," Rafe said, without looking at
her.

"I will not. I want to know—"

"Get out, Annie. Now."

She shivered under the deadly chill of his voice but
refused to back down. Was he capable of killing an innocent boy to avenge his
wife's murder? She didn't want to believe it, but the merciless glint in his
eyes chilled her to the marrow.

"If you do this," she said, her voice
trembling, "you'll be no better than El
Alacran
."

"Jose," Rafe demanded, "get her out of
here."