Sun God (21 page)

The one-eyed soldier grinned and bowed his silver head. “
Señora
Amy, thank you for having me. We will meet again,
sí
?”

“Indeed.” She turned to Luiz. “Good night,” she said, her heart pounding, fearing he would stop her. He didn’t.

She floated out of the room, almost lighthearted. It was all she could do to keep from running across the brick-floored corridor and up the wide staircase. Exercising a bit of the same control El Capitán practiced, she made herself slowly ascend the stairs.

She reached the heavy carved door of her bedroom and a smile of triumph lifted her lips and made her blue eyes sparkle.

But once inside, when she turned to throw the heavy bolt in place, her smile vanished and her eyes widened in disbelief. Foolishly she stared at the door, reaching out and running her hand over its surface.

The bolt had been taken off the door!

Horrified, she stood frozen in place, shaking her head, then quickly came to her senses. Any minute the man responsible for this high-handed deed would walk through the door. She had to leave. Now, before he came upstairs.

Amy whirled about. She raced across the carpet and into her dressing room. Hurriedly she snatched up a fresh nightgown and tossed it over her arm. She had to flee immediately to another room, one she could lock.

Racing against time, she dashed out of the dressing room, raced across the bedroom, and anxiously yanked open the door. And bumped squarely into the hard, ungiving chest of El Capitán.

Pressing her back inside with his lean frame, he closed the lockless door. His chill black eyes on her face, he plucked the filmy nightgown from her, opened his hand, and allowed it to flutter to the carpet.

He said, “There will be no locks between us save the one on your faithless little heart, Mrs. Parnell.”

“You son of a bitch! You took off the bolt! You cannot do this to me.”

“Ah, but I have.”

Luiz’s hands came up to the sides of her throat. With gentle pressure he tilted her head back, bent down so that his lips were nearly touching hers.

A hint of savage sexuality in his black eyes, El Capitán’s cruel, hot mouth brushed Amy’s, the scent of brandy on his warm breath.

He murmured, “Tonight you will make love to me in front of the mirrors.”

“I will not!”

“You will.”

She did.

I
T WAS LATER THAT
same night that Amy decided she had to escape. Leave Orilla. And him.

As she lay in the moonlight beside the sleeping El Capitán, her face still hot with shame, Amy began to make plans. She would have to wait until tomorrow. She longed to leap up out of his bed and flee this minute. But she knew it was out of the question.

If she so much as made a move to rise, those hard glittering black eyes would be on her, open and brimming with violence. She didn’t dare try it.

So she lay there naked in the night with El Capitán. Trapped by a bronzed hand lying possessively spread atop her stomach and a long leg hooked over hers, Amy tried to focus solely on her upcoming escape. It was near impossible.

The heat of his bare body burned her skin and made her constantly aware of his nearness and his power. And, try as she might, she couldn’t blot out the erotic pictures that kept rising in the darkness.

Amy shut her eyes tightly. It did no good. She saw the two of them reflected in the mirrored bath. Just as he had so arrogantly predicted, she had given in. After countless heated kisses and persuasive caresses, she had willingly allowed him to carry her into the mirrored bath and undress her fully. Then he had stripped off his tall gleaming boots and uniform.

He had made slow, exquisite love to her while he sat on a velvet stool with his knees spread wide, his bare brown feet on the deep carpet. Holding her astride his lap, her legs draped over his hard thighs, he had gently commanded her to open her eyes, to watch, just as he watched.

So aroused she would have obeyed any command, Amy had done just that. Watched. Everywhere she had looked—over his shoulder, behind her, to either side—she had seen a pale-skinned, wild-looking woman panting and tossing her head and eagerly grinding her hips and pelvis against a dark-skinned man of such physical beauty and superb animal strength the mere recollection was enough to set her pulses pounding, her bare belly to involuntarily contracting.

Amy winced in shock when the dark hand lying on her stomach began to move, to stroke gently. Her head snapped around. El Capitán was looking at her, those hot black eyes aglow.

“I—I thought you were asleep,” she murmured.

“Your desire,” he said in a low, soft voice, “awakened me.” He rolled a muscular shoulder up from the mattress as his long fingers gently raked down through the triangle of blond curls to intimately touch her.

“You are mad! I never—”

“Don’t lie to me, sweet,” he gently interrupted. “You want me. I felt the quivering of your belly beneath my hand.” His dark face lowered to hers. “It’s all right.”

Mesmerized by those gleaming eyes, Amy vainly tried to deny what they both knew was the truth. “I don’t want you. I don’t. I hate your hands on me.” She squirmed, her body already afire from his skilled touch.

El Capitán paid no attention to her denials. With one well-placed forefinger he continued tenderly caressing her while he looked into her eyes and murmured seductive endearments in perfectly accented Castillian Spanish.

Finally he said, “Kiss me, sweetheart, and tell me you want me.”

Amy shook her head. “No. No, I won’t. Never.”

His hard, handsome face came closer, so close his breath was hot upon her cheek. “One kiss. That’s all. Just one kiss,
querido.
”

Amy moaned, lifted a hand to his thick raven hair, anxiously drew his mouth down to hers, kissed him hungrily, and murmured against his burning lips, “I do want you. I do, I can’t help myself.”

“I know,” he said.

And made love to her again.

Amy didn’t get very far when she tried her escape the next day. El Capitán’s troops had been alerted that Mrs. Parnell would likely attempt to leave the ranch alone. It was not to be allowed. She must be constantly protected. If the lovely widow chose to go into the village, his trusted Lieutenant Pedrico Valdez would accompany her. If she tried to leave by herself, she was to be detained and brought immediately to their commanding officer.

It was just after two in the afternoon when Amy, furious and struggling, was brought against her will into the downstairs library by a couple of determined young Mexican troopers. Once inside, the soldiers released her, turned, and left, closing the heavy door after them.

The shutters were pulled and fastened against the sun, making the paneled, book-lined library quite dark. Amy felt a presence in that dim room and knew that it was El Capitán. The hair lifted on the nape of her neck and she blinked and squinted, trying to locate him.

From out of the shadows came that deep, sure voice.

“Over here, Mrs. Parnell. Behind the desk.”

“You won’t get away with this!” Amy said, her hands clenched, her heart hammering. “I am not your prisoner. I will come and go as I please, damn you!”

His voice came from the shadows. “Ah, but you are my prisoner. You will come and go only as I allow. And”—she heard the scraping of the chair legs on the brick-tiled floor—“you will be punished when you disobey me.”

Amy shuddered but bravely said, “Stay away from me. I will scream at the top of my lungs!”

“Go right ahead,” he said, circling the desk and moving slowly closer.

“I have some rights here!” she declared, wishing her voice would not quaver so.

“Of course you do.”

“I will tell Magdelena and Pedrico!”

“What are you waiting for?” He reached her and stood looking down at her. His white shirt was half open. His bronzed chest gleamed with a fine sheen of perspiration. When he carefully lifted the Sun Stone up over his dark head and put it into his trouser pocket, Amy swallowed hard. He had never looked more dangerous.

Fearfully she looked up into his black eyes. Heat radiated from them. Amy trembled involuntarily and whimpered helplessly when his long, powerful arms came around her and pulled her into his close embrace, crushing her against the hard length of him.

“What do you want of me?” she whispered brokenly against his shoulder.

“Everything,” he said.

Amy’s punishment for trying to run away was an hour in the hot afternoon darkness of the silent library with her cool captor. And just as always—against her will—his carnal punishment became her guilty pleasure.

Their perspiring bodies slipping and sliding sensuously together, the dueling pair made wildly abandoned love as if they could never get enough of each other. Finally sated, they lay entwined, their damp, limp bodies sticking to the soft black leather of the library’s old worn couch.

His hand stroking Amy’s long, flowing hair, El Capitán said in the dim silence, “It is impossible for you to elude me.”

Her cheek resting on his chest, the sound of his slow, heavy heartbeat beneath her ear, Amy replied softly, “I
will
escape you. And just when you least expect it.”

A week had passed since El Capitán and his troops had arrived to occupy Orilla. During that week Amy had not been off the ranch, save for the afternoon of her failed escape. She knew that if she did not soon go into Sundown, people would begin to wonder and worry about her.

She was certain the news had spread that Quintano and his soldiers were headquartered at the ranch. If she failed to put in her weekly appearance in town, ugly gossip might spread as well.

Much as she hated to do it, Amy went in search of the arrogant El Capitán. It was midmorning. She found him alone on the west patio and hesitantly approached.

He sat, his long legs stretched out before him, staring broodingly into space.

Amy cleared her throat.

His dark head swung around and for a second he stared right through her. Then he nodded, came to his feet, and said, “To what do I owe this honor, Mrs. Parnell?”

“I’ve come to ask if I might go into town this morning.” She hated herself for sounding like a frightened child begging a stern parent for permission.

“Why, certainly you may. I’ll have Pedrico drive you. How long do you plan to stay?”

At his prying, Amy’s temper quickly flared. “How should I know how long I’ll stay! Am I to account for every minute of my days?”

El Capitán smiled, causing the white scar on his cheek to contract. “No. I suppose every minute of your nights will do, Mrs. Parnell.”

Amy glared at him. “You are disgusting and despicable and depraved.”

“And what does that make you?”

“Damn you to eternal hell!”

Of the silver-haired Pedrico, Amy asked the questions she would never have dared put to El Capitán. Minutes after Pedrico helped her up onto the high seat of the umbrella-shaded buckboard and they headed down the palm-lined drive toward the tall ranch gates, Amy sighed and relaxed for the first time in a week.

Touching the aging man’s forearm, she said simply, “Please, Pedrico. Tell me all you know.”

The gentle, one-eyed man nodded.

He told Amy of how he had searched in vain for the young, injured Luiz after her brothers had left the boy for dead, deep in the Mexican desert. He told of finding the clothes and the boots with the silver initials.

“But no Luiz,” Pedrico said, shaking his silver head as if he still could not believe it.

He continued his search for over two years, riding in and out of small Mexican settlements, asking questions, studying faces, looking endlessly for Luiz, knowing somehow that he was still alive. But, alas, the boy had vanished into the air.

Finally he had given up all hope of ever finding him. He supported himself working in gold mines and on cattle ranches and in cantinas across Mexico.

Nodding, Amy listened intently as Pedrico said, “And when Mexico was invaded by the French, I joined Juarez’s army of liberation.”

He fell silent. Amy prodded, “But El Capitán? Why do you follow him? Pedrico, he is not the same Luiz we knew long ago. He is a cold, callous man who—”

“
Señora
Amy,” Pedrico interrupted, fixing her with his one good eye, “I would give up my life for El Capitán Quintano! You do not know what it was like. We owe everything—our very lives—to him.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

Pedrico turned his eye back to the horses. “Our brave but untrained detail was cut off from the main forces. Lost and scattered. Afraid and unsure where to turn.” He shook his head and began to smile. “Then, just when we were surrounded by the French and all seemed lost, a mighty warrior rode down from out of the hills. An Indian with a white scar down his face and long scars across his back. It was El Capitán!

“He commanded us to form a line behind him, and his presence was so compelling, we did not hesitate. We fought through enemy lines back to rendezvous with the main army. It was not until he had led us to safety that I realized El Capitán was Luiz Quintano.”

“And did he tell you where he had been all those years?”

“No,
señora
, and I did not ask him. El Capitán is a very private man.”

“Yes. He is.”

Amy listened politely while Pedrico continued singing the praises of a man he knew to be honorable and fearless. It was more than evident that Pedrico’s loyalty to El Capitán Quintano was unshakable.

Amy inwardly sighed.

She was doomed to live in her private hell while those around her were blind to her torture. Pedrico and Magdelena and even old Fernando looked at El Capitán with admiring eyes. They welcomed his presence on Orilla and were eager to please him.

And she was far too proud to admit what had happened—what was continuing to happen—between her and the cold-hearted commander. She couldn’t tell anyone that she was being held sexual captive in her own home.

Amy lifted troubled blue eyes to the scattering of small, square adobe buildings on the near horizon. She took a long, deep breath, pinched her cheeks to bring out their color, and prepared herself to meet and visit with merchants and old friends who must never guess the truth.