With a groan, he released her from the savaging kiss. His expression was dark and bemused.
“Now do you understand why I need your kisses?” she asked softly with a sly little smile.”
He nodded, an amused smile briefly appearing. He lowered his head again, his mouth whispering against hers “Do you understand . . . this giving of myself, it is a sacred gift to honor you. This is love. But lust is part of love. Does that end your questioning? Yes?”
Her throat choked with the truth that welled up from her heart. She had never thought to know love such as this. Love such as this happened to other people. The lucky, the wise, the gifted. But not her, Alessandra, granddaughter of the DiGregorios, poor Italian immigrants. She could only nod.
“I continue my worship of you?” His smile was part humility, part vital male, triumphant in its element.
“I don’t know,” she said, a teasing inflection creeping unbidden into her voice. It was the first time she had felt safe enough with her sexuality to do so. “You weigh more than a bear. And you are so big . . . there.” She nodded at his groin.
Instantly, his eyes flared with concern.
She giggled. Then, more seriously, aligning her hands with his swarthy face, “Man, I want nothing held back. Heaven and earth are here with you. Now.”
A fleeting look of surprise sparked in his fathomless eyes. But they were also her lover’s eyes, the windows of his soul brimming with love and smoldering with lust. In slow fistfuls, he slid up the hem of her black woolen dress. His thick finger slid aside her underwear, and gently rimmed the folds of her entrance. “You are wet . . . for me.”
She shuddered violently. “I want to feel both pleasure and pain,” she whispered. “Do you understand?”
The flame’s light from the fireplace glinted in his eyes. “First one, then the other.” His lips, warm with life, found the convergence of her collarbones. While his tongue moistened the pulse beating at the hollow of her throat, his finger circled deeper inside her.
She closed her eyes and, tilting her head back, sighed. “Two . . . I want two fingers.”
Caution reflected in the set of his lips. Taking his time, he inserted two of his fingers, stretching her into exquisite discomfort. Before she could recover, he pried her thighs open with one knee. Feeling his erection swelling, pushing, against her thigh, she fumbled free with one hand the white sash of his loose cotton pants. “Now,” she breathed, “Now. I need you now!”
She put her arms around his neck and prepared herself for the greater discomfort, the pain she sought, as he sank into her. An outcry escaped her lips. His mouth smothered it. Oh, his lips, his kiss, were so disconcerting, so sweet and giving compared to the harsh, punishing rendering of her flesh-petaled entrance. She held onto him, tilting her hips to draw him farther into her. Her body arched with the exquisite pain. The heat of his flesh sizzled through her muscles, her bones, her blood. The weeks of torturous aching in her body erupted in a hot, viscous juice that sluiced down her thighs, lathing her and him. “Agghhhhhhh,” she let out in a smothered groan.
His nostrils flared, smelling her sexual excitement. His glittering eyes closed to hooded slits. Then he drove into her, and she screamed out, her throat raw with withheld emotion. Her fearful gaze met his heated one.
He fisted his hand into her hair, drawing her head and mouth back to his. He paused, his eyes wide with alarm, then resumed oh so very slowly. “Ssshh,” he whispered gently against her lips. “I do not want to hurt you. But you must say stop.”
“No, no,” she gasped. Barely able to control her quivering limbs. She wanted him to hurt her. She wanted to feel the pain that would signal she was alive. Her pelvis drove upward to take him deep into her again, and her nails dug into his broad back. She was rewarded by the shock of pleasure in his eyes.
His breath came in harsh, short puffs that warmed her face. His tongue stroked her lips, limed her cheekbones, traced the ridge of each brow, as his thick member stroked her inside, repeatedly taking her to edge with his concrete control, only to withhold and bring her gasping raggedly back to the brink. Time after time.
Fierce and primal, they mated with pure animal instinct. Their feral, clamoring desires united into a rhythmic and intuitive dance. Faster, harder. Now, now, now. Her gasps gave way to a groan that became a scream of sharp, shuddering relief. At some point later, he threw back his head and howled his conquest. With that, she experienced that most extraordinary expression of souls communicating; that deeply spiritual and wickedly sexual joining. The sacred and the profane. She was rooted in her willingness to be unmasked and vulnerable. No expectations. No rules.
Their mating had been long years even in coming, for this was more than mere sex or lust now. This was the expression of love. At long last, love. At long last, she and Man created that Marriage Vase that was the rapture of the heart. At long last, with Man’s guidance, she transcended her body, transcended the boundaries of time and space. And at long last, she experienced that profound feeling of awakening. Awakening to Life. Her final shattering release came with an incoherent scream. Man plunged twice more, deep, deep, and fell upon her with a barbaric, guttural shout between clenched teeth.
* * * * *
Alessandra thoughtfully determined to be realistic about the situation in which she found herself. She wanted no illusions about what she was getting herself into.
She loved an Indian born in a simple mud and straw building like those that had housed his people for centuries, since the 1300’s. She loved a man unable to read, who could write only his name. A man poor and unworldly and without political connections. She loved a man who belonged to the family from which the Taos Tribe drew its most important member: its spiritual leader.
And she loved a man who would soon take another woman for his wife.
So Alessandra asked herself with brutal honesty: Am I willing to live in this far outpost of the world, cut off from everything familiar, for this man? Am I willing to share him with another woman? Am I willing to wait for him to come from her arms to mine? Am I willing to fall to third or fourth, or farther back, in line for a share of his affections as his wife gives him the children I never can?
And the answer to all of these was an unhesitating but painful ‘yes.’
Thus, the quality of this love was bittersweet. This love filled her in the way that pregnancy with Jeremy had filled her. Completely, so intensely it had to be diluted. Sorrowfully, she realized that joy and pain were one with love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. The pain of being truly alive.
But love endured all things.
* * * * *
Walking to the Plaza took Alessandra that much closer to the Pueblo, that much closer to her beloved. But with only weeks to go until Christmas . . . and, after the first of the year Man’s wedding, she knew she would not venture into the pueblo itself. Mud Woman deserved that much respect, at least.
According to Peg, preparations for the wedding would be afoot. Alessandra didn’t want any part of that ceremony to blight the joy the gods had allotted her shortened life. Astonishingly, she felt no guilt. Colors seemed sharper, people more important, as if for the first time she breathed in harmony with life’s song. Before Man, her life had been colorless, flat, one dimensional.
She could and would not return to that.
So her guarded steps took her no further than the post office where she knew Brendon’s monthly letter with its accompanying bank draft awaited her. She turned over the thicker-than usual envelope, sighing at the man’s perfect penmanship. Some unaccountable premonition squeezed her chest. She tore open the envelope with trembling fingers. Tickets for train passage to Washington fell out. Quickly, she scanned the letter.
My dear Alessandra (he never called her that), your father and I are both highly concerned for your health. Word has reached us from reliable sources that you have been actively campaigning against the Bursum Bill in the most inclement weather. Considering your close call with pneum
onia several months earlier, your father and I feel we need to assure your physical and mental well-being. As you are without funds, enclosed are tickets for your immediate return.
Shocked, she reread the letter. She should have anticipated this and the real message between the lines: Return . . . or forfeit financial support.
Mechanically, her body took her back along the snow-speckled road toward home. Her mind darted, retreated, dashed, faltered, and rambled dizzily in the labyrinth of consequences. If this . . . then this. Or this . . . ? What if . . . .
Logic dictated she could not survive in this far-flung outpost without the ability to provide for herself. The grand sacrifice Peg had made for love by settling in Taos had not included giving up her family’s cereal and banking fortunes. Most of Taos’s Anglos had outside sources of income.
And then there was Man. Could she really bring herself to wait on the sidelines for a turn to participate in the game of life? Yet only hours before she had been so certain she could. How could she be so fickle?
The rest of the day she sat at the kitchen table. A bottle of gin she had procured from one of the stalls at the Mexican Market sat before her. Untouched. She didn’t bother to light the candles against the nightfall that stalked into the little adobe.
Despite the many alternatives she had mentally explored, their corridors had ended abruptly at the same place. The vision frightened her. She had to return.
She consoled herself with what she had to look forward to. The most important, her reunion with Jeremy. At least she would have him until he went off to The Citadel come September. And she was determined to win back what the government was robbing from the Pueblo Indians. Namely, most importantly to them, their holy shrine, Blue Lake. She would most likely stand a better chance of succeeding there on her own turf. Between that and re-establishing her art career, surely she could stave off the heartbreak of losing Man.
No, no, it’s too much. Not now, not with happiness in my grasp.
Then another thought intruded, the most frightening yet.
She sprang from her chair, scraping it backward. In the darkness, she groped for the wall peg where her coat hung. Blindly, she ransacked first one pocket, then the other. Retrieving Brendon’s wadded letter, she carried it back to the table. She located a book of matches, lit the candle, and ironed out the linen paper’s wrinkles.
“. . . your father and I feel we need to assure your physical and mental well being . . .”
As vivid as the day it had happened, a scene played like a moving picture film on the screen of her mind. As a wide-eyed bride, she had accompanied Brendon and her father - and mother-in-law to the posh, upstate Albright Private Sanitarium. Rain had wept against the administrator’s office windows, stripped with iron bars.
“A nervous breakdown,” her father-in-law had explained.
Her mother-in-law sat docilely in the shadows. The administrator had mouthed an unctuous reassurance. Her father-in-law had briskly signed admittance forms. Her mother-in-law had compliantly countersigned.
Had that wife become a handicap to her husband’s political career? Were the O’Quinn men really capable of such callous disregard?
Alessandra’s heart pounded so hard she couldn’t catch a breath. Again she sprang up, this time knocking the chair over. She let it lay. Panic set in as she paced the room, striding in and out of the magical circle the candlelight cast on the blue-painted floor. Her hands clutched, relaxed. The unheated room grew cold as a frigid wind howled down off Mystery Mountain.
Her insides were colder.
At last, in the absolute darkness of pre-sunrise, her pacing halted. Limbs heavy and limp, she knelt unsteadily and with shaking hands kindled a fire in the kiva. Her back to the fire, her skirts hoisted, she forced herself once again to think like a man, from a man’s perspective, logically with distracting emotion set aside. God knew, she had been thoroughly baptized in that sensible point-to-point process. That rational, reasoning, analytical approach that had denied, devalued, degraded her wholly instinctive, intuitive and non-reasoning feminine premise of life.
All right, I’m a woman nearing forty. What skills can I trade upon?
She spoke French fluently, a language hardly in demand in an area predominantly Spanish/English/Tiwa speaking.
Her art degree? Highly unlikely to be of use, not with every other Anglo in the area an artist, and many quite renowned.
She thought of Bert Phillips. For a while, the artist had worked in Taos’s newly created Carson Forest Reserve as its first forest ranger. But the Forest Service didn’t hire women.
My God, I never truly realized how little I’m worth. The Indian women have better survival skills. At least they can skin a deer, catch a rabbit, weave clothing, and forage for themselves.
The candle guttered. She barely took note. Her mind continued to select, review, discard. Beyond the challenge of providing food for herself, there was still the matter of her treasured little adobe’s rent.
She turned her roasted backside to the room’s cold draft and braced her palms against the fire’s warmth. She simply could not go to Peg, could not become another one of the generous woman’s freeloaders who came and went when arguments broke out, as they always did with the volatile heiress.
So what am I to do?
She was back where she started. An inexperienced, nearly forty-year-old woman.
Then, as dawn’s first wave of faint light spilled over the two-foot thick windowsill, she knew. The answer had been right there before her all along. She was not inexperienced. She crossed to the hutch, dug out the box of stationary, then located her old red Parker pen.
“Dear Mrs. Atwood, I am familiar with your organization . . . .”
Chapter Fourteen
At fifty-seven, Mrs. Stella Atwood rivaled an electric generator in sheer energy and maintained a regime as militant as any master sergeant. Looking at her, no one would suspect this. Suffering from ill health since childhood, she was a soft, roly-poly woman with thinning brown hair and magnifying glasses prescribed by a San Francisco oculist. Yet Stella was a happy soul with a deep affection for her much older husband. Dr. Atwood had attended her when she was a young girl and had been taken captive first by her unique charm and later her ribald sense of humor.
She dropped the Appropriation Hearings of the House Committee report Alessandra had given her on the little jade-inlaid tabletop. They were taking tea in one of those tearooms in San Francisco’s Chinatown, an area she denounced as a poor imitation of the Old Chinatown, gone in the 1906 earthquake.
Disdainfully, she thumped the report with pudgy, beringed fingers. “These men in Washington! The assholes are like one of your infamous New Mexico snowstorms. You never know when they’re coming, how many inches you’ll get, or how long they’ll last!”
Alessandra laughed, at ease with this formidable president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. It turned out the two women had worked on the Organization Committee of the 1918 Women’s Suffragists’ March on Washington.
Except for that afternoon Alessandra had chained herself to the White House fence with some of the other suffragettes, which had pleased neither her father nor her husband, she had worked mostly behind the scenes, organizing the more minute but very vital details. She hadn’t realized it, but all along, her life had been about social reform.
That and the rediscovered skill as organizer had prompted her to change the destination of Brendon’s train ticket from Washington D. C. to San Francisco.
“Stella, do you recall the slogan we used for the Suffragists picketing?”
“Dearie, how could I forget? The cop on the beat that day threatened to shove his stick down my throat if I didn’t stop shouting it at him.” She grinned lasciviously. “I told him it was because women had too many men’s sticks shoved down their throat that they were shouting in the first place. Let’s see, it went, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.’ More tea? The Docto
r buys it here in Chinatown. Swears Green Tea’s good for the gout.”
“No thank you.” She set her delicate tea cup in its saucer. “That declaration is the reason I requested a visit with you. It’s time we expanded it to ‘. . . all men and women of every race are created equal.’” She leaned forward, her hands clasped so as not to betray her extreme agitation. “Are you aware of the Bursum Bill? Or the Indian Omnibus Bill?”
Stella shook her head. Her bird-bright eyes suddenly took on the rapacious glint of a soldier of fortune. “No. Do tell.”
For the next quarter of an hour Alessandra launched into her indictment of the Department of Interior. “. . . is taxing the Indians to run cattle on their own land, so that they are forced to sell them. As a result, the Indians of Santo Domingo Pueblo are compelled to take government rations . . . to expropriate the Pueblo Tribes’ land holdings . . . forest rangers cutting timber on Indian trust land that the Rangers say is overripe . . . .
“And so,” she finished breathlessly, “I am appealing to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs to hire me for two years to establish an Indian Welfare Division of your organization with the objective of defeating the Bursum Bill and ultimately changing the system of Indian management.”
* * * * *
By the time Alessandra returned to Taos, the Christmas season was upon the mountain village. Farolitos, candles set in folded brown paper sacks weighted with sand, lit every rooftop and pathway. Not to be outdone, stars twinkled as brightly overhead. The kivas’ burning piñon scented the evening air with that wonderful fragrance not to be found anywhere else. The air, dry and frosty, made her lightheaded.
It should be a marvelous time of year. Except she was alone. Perhaps, it was because the first time she had come to Taos, Henri had brought her. And Jeremy had been with her.
And now neither were in her world.
Nearly a full year had passed since her first arrival and her life was beginning another cycle. She had regained her health. Re-established her art career. Become a self sufficient businesswoman. And, most importantly, experienced the deep soulful healing that only great love can bring about. What would this new cycle bring?
Indian Affairs (historical romance) Page 23
