Harvest of Fury (19 page)

“Where's your Apache brother?” Frost asked abruptly.

“I don't know. He went to Mangus before Christmas.”

“Maybe he got killed along with a lot of the old devil's family,” suggested Frost.

Talitha stared into eyes the color of an ice storm, refusing to flinch. “Who knows?”

Sipping his second cup of coffee, he said lazily, “My dear, I'm sure everyone will excuse us if we retire early. I was so eager to see you that I've traveled without much rest.” He smothered a yawn and beamed at the embarrassed or stony faces surrounding him.

Talitha didn't want to argue in front of the others, to make the twins or the men feel they must protect her. Now the dim nightmare, shoved back and repudiated, was horrifyingly real, as inescapable as the man who rose gracefully to his feet. Talitha felt both frozen and consumed with flame.

“Please,” she said. “Could we walk outside for a little?”

His dark eyebrows lifted, but he bowed and offered her his arm. “I'm yours to command. In reason, of course.”

They passed through the courtyard where peach blossoms glowed softly in the moonlight, went through the storeroom, and moved past the corrals and along the hillside. With a deep breath, he turned her to face him.

Talitha cried desperately, bracing her hands against him, “Didn't you get my letter?”

“Your letter?” In the silver light his hair was burnished and his eyes like crystal. “What letter, love?”

Whether he had or not scarcely mattered. “Shea is dead. Last summer, during Sibley's retreat from New Mexico. There's nothing you can do to hurt him now. I want a divorce.”

“A divorce?” He watched her quizzically. From his coolness, she was sure he'd gotten her message. He sighed in pretended hurt. “It would seem I've failed to win you, sweet, though I know you've many times been raptured in my arms.”

“Raped is more the word,” she said bitterly. “And I hate you more for that.”

“Because I gave you pleasure?” He shook his head chidingly. “However, I've come to expect ingratitude. And I haven't the slightest notion of letting you out of our bargain.”

“You want to be a power in the territory. Wouldn't it look better for you to use your influence for a quiet divorce than for me to ask for one and explain publicly how you threatened me into it? And how you began your Arizona career as a scalp hunter?”

He laughed. “My dear, that last would just make me a hero! Except for paying bounty, what's Carleton's Indian policy except extermination? I'm afraid nothing you say can hurt me or help you, because, dear love, you can only be granted a divorce by the territorial legislature when it finally convenes, and you may be sure its members will be slow to anger me.”

She believed him. Despairing revulsion made her physically sick. Was there no way, no way at all, to be free of this man who had shadowed her life for the past ten years, returned from the dead to force marriage?

If he were really dead—That answer, the only answer, made her straighten. Frost shook his head, smiling into her eyes. “No, Tally. No. I took the precaution of telling my good friend, the new chief justice of what will be Arizona's Supreme Court, that my wife, though I love her dearly, is erratic to the point of—alas! madness.

“I hope, naturally, to be able to control her, but if I should disappear, he's promised to personally investigate. Would you like the distinction of being the first woman hanged in Arizona?”

Speechless, she stared at him. He smoothed her cheek, then let his hand trail down the pulse of her throat to curve under her breast. “Of course, if the judge decided you were mad, he might put you away for life in some asylum; but I rather imagine, sweetheart, that a person of your spirit would prefer the noose. That's over quickly.”

He walked her back to the house. She was glad no one was left in the kitchen or
sala
as he drew her through them, to the room that had been Shea's.

Frost had his freighting business to see to, and that required a trip to Sonora and Governor Pesqueira to insure duty-free transit from Guaymas. On the way back, Frost investigated the placer mines along the Colorado River above Yuma.

“The country around La Paz is swarming with miners, lots of them from California,” he told Talitha on his return. “Trouble is, there's not much water for washing out the dirt, and dry-washing's so slow only Mexicans and Indians will do it. No, where the experienced old prospectors like Walker and Wickenberg are heading is into the mountains in about the center of the territory;”

“Why don't you try your luck?” Talitha asked.

He laughed, taking her chin in his hands. It was late afternoon, and no one else was in the house. “So eager to be rid of me, darling?” He kissed her till she had no breath and carried her to Shea's room.

Halfway through his lovemaking he paused, gripping her shoulders, shaking her till she opened her eyes. “This must be where Shea took you. Right in this very bed. Do you ever think of that?”

She did. She thought of Shea and tried to armor herself against her husband's ardent, practiced wooing. But when that failed … Sometimes when Frost caressed and kissed and teased till the building need within her was savagely released, in that wild-mad moment while that throbbing drummed through her, softening thighs and loins—sometimes in that shamed pleasure she remembered Shea.

Black pupils spread over Frost's cold eyes, leaving only a narrow rim of light gray. “So you do,” he whispered. “I don't like other men, even if they're ghosts, in my bed. Keep your eyes open. Call me by name.”

“You damned” devil!”

He thrust so cruelly that she smothered a scream. He laughed deep in his throat as he battered her, holding her up for his lunging, till she thought she must be riven in half. She was almost senseless when he cried out, pumping into her, then collapsed with his arm across her, pinning her down. When she roused from her painful half stupor, full of revulsion at the smell and stickiness of his juices on her, she tried to slip out of bed.

His arm tightened. “Stay.”

“I—I need to wash.”

He raised to sniff along her loins like some silvery beast of prey. “Exciting,” he murmured. “My odors deep within you, that makes me part of you. You're my proper sheath, Talitha, my soft, warm scabbard.” His tongue and hands caressed her.

“Please …”

“But I'm being very gentle, love. There, you barely feel that, don't you? Ah, you're quivering. You want more. Like that. And this …”

He was gentle, he soothed her as a careful bridegroom might coax a virgin, but he wouldn't let her escape. When the mounting, trembling hunger crested into explosions, he entered her again, piercing into that thick, honeyed sweetness, varying his rhythms, lifting her at last into frenzy.

“Call my name,” he commanded softly, pausing as she gasped, involuntarily straining to be quenched.

She looked up at him, becoming aware, bitterly humiliated yet craving the end. “I need encouragement,” he murmured. “Tell me you want me. Tell me how it feels. Call me Judah.”

The fire in her smoldered down. Sick with frustrated desire, mortified at what he could do with her, she said coldly, “Shall I call you Judas? Shall I tell you how I hate you more all the time and detest myself?”

He slapped her, splitting her lip over her teeth. She arched her neck, burying her teeth in his wrist. He swore and knocked up her head. She felt him rigid as steel within her, fought with maddened ferocity.

Again he rammed; and hammered deep within her, stifling her cry of agony with his hard mouth. There was no pleasure for her this time, only savage pain. But when he finished, he did sleep, and she was able to creep away, bruised, aching, but, most unbearable of all, soiled and scented with him.

Supper preparations were beginning. Sewa was rocking on Cat's old hobbyhorse, a work of art lovingly carved by the vaqueros, while Cat, curled up among a number of felines on the blanket-spread
banco
, the adobe bench built into the wall, read aloud from one of Marc Revier's old gifts, a book of Aesop's fables versified by Edmund Waller.

Though she loved to read, she had resolutely ignored the tempting pile of books Frost had brought her from Washington: Kingsley's
The Water Babies
, Christina Rosetti's
Goblin Market
, George Eliot's
Silas Marner
, Tennyson's
Idylls of the King
, and several novels by Dickens.

For Sewa there had been an elegant doll with a china head and real hair, dressed in a richly trimmed taffeta gown with matching pelisse, hat, and parasol. Cat, under cover of proclaiming that Sewa was too little to play with such a doll, arbitrarily put it high up in the niche in their room along with Talitha's Judith doll, named for her mother, brought up by caravan from Chihuahua and given her long ago by Shea.

“Now why do you suppose the willful little creature's so set against me?” Frost had wondered idly after that cavalier disposal of his gifts.

“She has good instincts. And how you have the face to bring Sewa gifts after you killed her father—”

“It would be as well for the future tranquility of our home if you forgot that,” Frost interrupted smoothly. He shrugged. “I've never known a female yet who could indefinitely resist presents. Which reminds me. You
will
wear my jewels, love. I had the sapphires made up especially to go with your eyes. And I want to see the diamonds sparkle between your breasts.”

Frightened with a sudden obscene dread, Talitha swallowed. “You never bring the twins gifts. Why do you try to win the little girls?”

He shrugged. “Because they're girls. Patrick and Miguel are too old to view me with anything but suspicion. Girl children do intrigue me, though. Didn't I try to buy you from Juh when you were five years old?”

And he'd kissed her when she was thirteen. Cat was ten. Talitha caught his arm. “If you ever try—if you bother either of the girls …”

“Jealous, love?”

“If you touch either of them, I'll kill you. I don't care what happens afterward. Do you understand? I'll kill you!”

He'd gazed at her in kindling desire. Taking her hand, he'd urged her toward the bedroom. “So long as you blaze at me like that, my sweetheart, no other woman can do more than tease my fancy.” But since that day, Talitha had kept the girls out of his way as much as possible, which wasn't hard, since Cat shunned him and imperiously swept Sewa along with her.

Now, full of brutalized pain, feeling indelibly sullied, Talitha stopped for a moment to look at the two children: Sewa, now three, wirily sturdy with a heart-shaped face, melting eyes, and honey skin; Cat, in a growing spurt that had started the first shy budding of her flat little chest, the faintest rounding of boy-thin hips. Except for Shea's blue eyes and a trace of his determined jaw, she looked as Socorro must have at her age—pointed chin, arched black eyebrows, a lovely mouth curved like a wing.

Pride was in every line of her. When crossed, she reacted with a haughtiness laughable in someone so young and small, but she was also tenderhearted, quick to love, swift to defend the helpless. From adoration for her, the rougher vaqueros eased their methods, at least in her sight.

She had raised and released as many foundling wild creatures and birds as had died in spite of her efforts, and orphaned calves had become hers to feed as soon as she'd grown enough to withstand their lusty tugging on the bottles. These calves, Talitha was sure, would never go to market, but die of old age.

She was finishing the poem in her sweet high child's voice that already had in it the timbre of femininity.

“
‘That eagle's fate and mine are one
,

Which on the shaft that made him die

Espied a feather of his own
,

Wherewith he wont to soar so high.'
”

Oh, K'aak'eh! James, my brother! Mangus Coloradas! …

A great wave of grief swelled up in Talitha, forcing past her usual, controls. The maimed hawk was dead, and Mangus the war chief. But where was her brother?

Her heart was wrenched for him as she remembered the little boy shielding his beloved black cat Chacho, insisting he didn't have hydrophobia. And there was his beautiful dappled gray horse Tordillo, killed to feed Apache women and children in a starving time. And K'aak'eh. Then Mangus.

Oh, James, oh, my brother, come back and live with, us, love us! Don't stay with those broncos whose time is numbered. Counsel them if you can, convince them they must go to reservations in the end, for the white man's road will blot out their trails. Do what you can to help them, only do not die!

But he might be already rotting in the earth, dead in some skirmish with the soldiers. Frost had passed the word among army officer friends that if they found a blue-eyed Apache, well grown for sixteen years, they should spare him if at all possible, since he was Mrs. Frost's half brother and could be released in her custody. Frost had even offered an unofficial reward if James was turned over to them alive. Talitha didn't think he'd let himself be captured alive, and she doubted that soldiers obeying Carleton's “black flag” tactics, where Apaches weren't allowed to surrender, would take time to check the color of Indian eyes.

James must have had half brothers and sisters among Juh's wives, but he'd never mentioned them, so Talitha had no idea of how close his ties were to the band now that Mangus, his foster father, was dead. All she could do was hope that he would come back, that he wouldn't pick death for himself as he had for K'aak'eh.

She went outside, forcing herself to walk straight while she was in sight of the house, though once in the concealment of the trees she moved slowly, trying to ease the aching soreness between her legs. She felt as if she'd been beaten with a sledge until she was pulpy, swollen.