Sun God (36 page)

Immediately enveloped by his warmth, she released a sigh of gratitude. It struck her that she was not only warmed by his physical presence. He was showing a surprising degree of warmth and understanding. Was he beginning to thaw? Maybe this shared experience—the two of them alone against the Apaches and the elements—had permanently stripped away his veneer of coldness, had taken the edge off his old anger.

She reached up and laid a hand on his jaw, signaling him to bend down so she could whisper something to him. When Luiz lowered his dark head, Amy put her lips against his ear and said, “Your plan worked perfectly. You’re so smart, so resourceful.”

She took her hand from his face and Luiz lifted his head without replying. When, half an hour later, she fell asleep on him, he sat there wide awake in the darkness, wishing her hair did not smell so sweet. Wishing she had not turned her face in so that her soft, moist breath was on his throat. Wishing he had not felt so pleased to hear her say he was smart and resourceful.

Gun raised, narrow-eyed gaze constantly sweeping the pitch-black forest, Luiz mentally steeled himself against the danger. Not the danger lurking out there in the darkness but the danger snuggled sweetly against his chest. He didn’t, he told himself, need nor want her approval.

A hint of a sardonic smile touched his lips. Would she still think him smart and resourceful come morning when he told her they no longer had a horse to ride?

They would have to walk home to Orilla.

“Y
OU DID WHAT?”

“I turned the paint loose.”

Amy’s voice rose sharply. “Do you want to die?”

“On the contrary,” Luiz went on in the same unruffled voice, “I want to live. That’s why I did it.”

It was early morning. The pair stood facing each other across a scrub juniper near the base of the mountain. At first light Luiz had gently shaken Amy awake. In minutes they had gathered up their gear.

“Let’s go,” he had said softly, and headed down through the dense thicket.

“Ready,” Amy replied, following. “Where did you leave the paint tethered?”

“I didn’t.”

Abruptly Amy had stopped. “Did you hobble him?”

“No.” He continued walking.

Frowning, Amy ran after him. She caught up and grabbed his bare arm, stopping his progress. “What have you done with the horse?”

Matter-of-factly, Luiz told her he had to let the horse go.

So now, as the June sun rose to take the chill off the morning, Amy said doubtfully, “You don’t want to die so you turn the horse loose? Forgive me if I’m a bit confused, but you’re not making a great deal of sense.”

Shifting the packroll on his back, Luiz calmly explained that there had been no other choice. The Apaches had closed in; he couldn’t outdistance them. They were firing at him. He managed to get the speeding paint around the bend of a projected foothill.

Temporarily out of their sight, he had wrapped the reins around the horn, dug his heels into the racing paint’s flanks, and tumbled from its back. While he slipped up through the trees to safety, the valiant paint continued around the mountain’s curve. The Apaches followed, thinking him still in the saddle. By the time they realized their mistake, it was too late.

“Sorry for this inconvenience,” Luiz concluded, “but I had to do it.” He shrugged wide shoulders.

Nodding, Amy said, “Yes, I can see why you … but how will we get home?”

“Walk?” he casually suggested, his slashing black brows lifting quizzically.

“Walk?” she repeated, staring at him blankly. “Walk? Do you know how far it is to Orilla?”

“As the crow flies, seventy miles. Over the mountains, at least a hundred.”

“And I’m supposed to walk one hundred miles?” Her hands went to her hips.

“Had you rather stay here?”

“I can’t walk that far! Nobody can.”

“You’re wrong, Mrs. Parnell. I can. I have done it before. Many times.” He turned to leave. “Coming?”

Glaring at him, Amy didn’t answer. Nor did she follow. Rooted to the spot, she watched him stride away as if he were off on a Sunday stroll. She wanted to brain him. He moved with loose-limbed quickness that swiftly put distance between them. In a matter of seconds Amy lost sight of him entirely as he reached the valley floor below and disappeared around a towering, suntinged pillar of rock.

Amy stood immobile for a few more seconds. All at once she was in wild flight, her heart thumping in her chest. Ducking low tree limbs, she crashed through the undergrowth, momentum propelling her rapidly down the steep incline. When her moccasined feet touched level ground, she started calling his name.

“Luiz, wait!” she called. “I’m coming. Wait for me. Please!”

There was no response. She was immediately apprehensive. Dear Lord, he had gone off and left her! What would happen to her now? She could never find her way out of these mountains.

Out of breath, Amy reached the tall column where he had vanished from sight. Anxiously she raced around the sandstone monolith, shouting his name.

“Luiz, don’t leave me! Wait, I can walk. I can, and I—” The words died away in her throat and she came to a quick stop.

Six feet from her, El Capitán stood leaning against the smooth granite scarp, his long, bare arms crossed over his chest, a moccasined foot raised and resting flat against the smooth stone upthrust. His dark head was turned her way, the long white scar on his cheek tinted pink in the early-morning sunlight.

Amy released a breath of relief, smiled tentatively, and hurried to him. “I can walk home if you can,” she offered hopefully.

His black eyes regarded her with apathy. He pushed away from the sandstone spire, lifted his bare arms, and straightened the vivid blue headband around his temples.

“Let’s go.”

It was a long, hard morning for Amy.

Determined not to gripe, she gamely followed her mute companion over a nonexistent trail through the most rugged country in all Texas. While the sun climbed high in the cloudless sky and the heat became brutal, she labored up treacherous rocky ridges, peering nervously over sheer drop-offs but keeping her fear to herself.

Without complaint, she crossed deep, sand-bottomed gulches that left her moccasins filled with the fine, gritty sand that got ground under her soles and in between her toes. She picked her way through slashing arroyos filled with tons of loose, heel-bruising gravel. She disregarded the sharp cactus thorns that snagged at her doeskin pants and pricked the flesh beneath. She ignored her long, worrisome hair when it blew into her eyes and caught on tree limbs, pulling painfully at her tender scalp. She uncomplainingly swatted away the deerflies that bit her face, neck, and arms.

She did not ask for a drink of water, even when her throat was so dry it ached and she felt as if her body were growing dangerously dehydrated.

Stumbling up over a ledge of craggy ocher stone at mid-morning, Amy was struck by the knowledge that the tall, lean man she hurried to keep up with did not appear to be hot or tired or thirsty.

Furiously mashing at a blood-sucking insect feasting on her left forearm, Amy squinted at El Capitán, twenty feet ahead of her up the trail. The heavy packroll on his back seemed to be no burden. His wide shoulders were erect; his bare, bronzed arms hung loosely at his sides. The firm muscles of his buttocks stretched and pulled with neat precision beneath his tight buckskin trousers as he moved steadily upward with the sure-footed grace of a great cat.

As if he could feel her eyes on him, El Capitán abruptly stopped and turned about. Standing there above her on a great jagged wall of the mountain, he quietly observed the slender, struggling woman approaching him.

Her face was shiny with perspiration and flushed red by the harsh sun and the strenuous exertion. Her long blond hair was an impossible mass of tangles that fell into her eyes and clung damply to her hot cheeks and neck. She was slapping madly at a vicious black deerfly that had attacked her gleaming throat. Grass burrs clung to the legs of her borrowed buckskins and she was favoring her left foot.

“You all right?” he inquired as she neared him.

Amy had to swallow two or three times to make enough saliva in her dry throat so she could speak.

“Splendid,” she said, tossing her hair haughtily from her eyes. “And you?”

For all his seemingly casual attitude, Luiz was a man who missed nothing. He knew she had gone well beyond her endurance but was too proud to admit it. It was a quality in her he grudgingly admired while at the same time it annoyed him.

The slightest hint of a sardonic smile touched his lips and was gone almost at once. He said, “I’m a little tired.”

He stepped forward, reached for her, and easily swung her up into his arms. Amy was far too weary to put up any protest. It felt so good to get off her tired, bruised feet, she sighed and her head sagged to his shoulder.

Luiz carried her up the steeply slanting mountain of rock to a shadowy cupped-out crater on its northern face a hundred feet below the summit. He ducked in out of the bright sunlight, lowered Amy to her feet, and unceremoniously announced, “We will stay here through the hottest part of the day.”

“Don’t do it on my account,” she said, swaying tiredly on weak legs. “I’d just as soon continue.”

“Well, I wouldn’t,” he told her, and shrugged out of the heavy packroll. After uncorking the canteen, he held it out to her. Eagerly she grabbed it, turned it up, and drank thirstily. And glared at him when he took it from her. Then shook her head wonderingly when he recorked it without taking so much as a sip.

“Aren’t you thirsty?” she asked, frowning.

“Not really,” he replied, although he was. He was unwilling to admit that their water supply was running dangerously low and that as May was the driest season in the Big Bend, they might have to travel for miles before they found a running creek.

Amy shook her head and sank wearily to the smooth stone floor. Scratching at a red, swollen welt on her neck, she watched idly as Luiz meticulously spread the blanket just inside the cavern’s opening. She continued to observe him as he then took several articles from the pack and laid them in a neat row beside the spread blanket.

But she blinked in nervous inquiry when, crouching on his heels directly before the cave’s entrance, he said softly, “Now come here, Mrs. Parnell.”

Amy swallowed and stared at him, but could not see his face, backlit as he was by the sun coming in the cave’s wide mouth. She tensed. What punishment was about to be executed? Now that they had escaped the devilish Apaches and he had her alone in this high, shadowy redoubt, was he determined to be a devil himself? Was he preparing to dole out that unique form of discipline he favored above all others?

“I said come here.” His voice filled the entire chamber, its deep timbre reverberating off the close rocky walls.

“No. I will not come there.” Amy spoke in level tones although her pulse beat erratically and her chest felt uncomfortably tight.

He continued to crouch there on his heels, forearms draped across his thighs, not moving a muscle, blocking the only possible route of escape. Filling the entire scope of her vision. Looming large and threateningly before her, like a dangerous predator with his trapped prey. His black eyes flashed like an animal’s in the dim light.

“You will. You’ll come to me,” he said, and his voice was an opiate as he softly summoned her. “Come. I am waiting.”

Drawn helplessly by that rich, persuasive voice and the strong sexual danger he exuded, Amy hesitated for a long breathless moment, fighting the magnetic pull radiating from him. The small cave grew quiet and close. So close she could hardly get a breath. Her hand went to her tight throat.

“I told you to come here.” His velvet voice shattered the silence. Amy exhaled loudly, then started toward him, fully expecting him to strip her clothes away and force her down onto the blanket.

Knee-walking across the shadowy space that separated them, she stopped when she was two feet away. Her eyes searching the unreadable mask of his hard, handsome face, she nervously sat back on her heels.

Luiz moved at last. He held out his hand to her. Licking her lips, Amy laid her hand atop his upturned palm. His strong fingers closed around hers and Amy felt an icy heat immediately envelop her. While a chill tickled her spine, jolts of searing electricity shot through her body.

She looked into the awesome eyes, feeling their power and their heat. And she waited.

A
MY WAITED. RESIGNED. EAGER
.

Waited for El Capitán to pull her commandingly into his arms and crush her to his hard chest. Waited for that cruel sensual mouth to hotly cover her cold trembling lips. Waited for those strong bronzed hands to sweep the clothes from her tense body.

Waited for the punishment.

Waited for the pleasure.

His black eyes glittering in the half light, El Capitán said softly, “I am going to make you feel better.”

Amy trembled. Knowing exactly what he meant, she simply nodded in helpless, halfhearted surrender.

And learned, once again, that the dark man who wielded such potent animal magnetism was ever a puzzling paradox.

He did not draw her roughly into his embrace and fiercely kiss her and strip her clothes away. Instead, he tended her as a loving parent might minister to a wayward but adored child.

He carefully sat her onto the spread blanket and Amy, legs stretched out before her, leaned back on stiff arms and watched from beneath veiling lashes, baffled by the mystery that was El Capitán Luiz Quintano.

She puzzled over it while he painstakingly plucked all the grass burrs and cactus stickers from the legs of her buckskins. In seconds, however, she was biting her bottom lip and trying hard not to laugh as he removed her moccasins and began dusting the gritty sand from her feet, getting them as clean as he could without water.

Her feet were incredibly ticklish and despite his stern, reproving glances, Amy laughed out loud when his long fingers dislodged sand from between her toes and he leaned over her lifted foot to blow the loosened particles away.