She repeated the words to herself as she recovered the blanket. Shaking it free of the pine needles, she realized her mistake too late. Her hairpins were lost to the forest floor. She hurried to fold, then roll the blanket tight. Setting it down at her feet, she made short work of finger-combing her hair into a single braid. The only tie she had was the ribbon of her chemise.
Please, Lord, forgive my weakness, and don’t let him touch me again. The words became her litany as she quickly opened his shirt and her gown.
She had just finished tying her hair when he came back leading the saddled horses.
“You ready?”
“You forgot your blanket,” she said, walking to where dark, sleek shadows revealed him and the two horses.
“You’re wrong again. I never forget anything that’s mine.”
She heard the warning and chose to ignore it. Domini handed over the rolled blanket and took the reins from his hand. She snatched her hand away from even his brief touch.
“Where are the gloves I gave you?”
“The gloves?”
“Yeah. Gloves. The one’s you’re supposed to wear to protect your hands.”
She struggled to remember the last time she had seen them. Not here, and not when they had stopped for the second rest he’d called. This morning then, when they had eaten.
“You left them behind in the woods when you went off for your bit of privacy, didn’t you?”
She listened for accusation. There was none. Nor did she hear disgust over losing his gloves after he had just claimed that he never forgot anything that belonged to him. That sensual shiver of awareness that never quite left her came again. She couldn’t stop it, or the thought that he would value and care for the woman he claimed the same way.
It puzzled her that he wasn’t angry over the loss of his gloves. Luke’s pay as a hired hand could not be more than the vaqueros who worked the hidalgo ranches.
“Luke, I’m sorry. I’ll find a way to replace them. Truly, I didn’t mean to leave them, but I was—”
“Scared and sorry you’d taken off with a man you didn’t know,” he finished for her.
“Yes. That’s true enough.”
“Guess this isn’t one of the times you’re lying.”
“I’m not lying. I wasn’t lying about what I said before. I don’t ever lie about things that matter to me.”
“Don’t you?” He dropped the blanket.
The question was meant to taunt her. He suddenly crowded her and she fell back against the mare. The horse sidestepped, tossing her head, but he ordered Devil to stand to block the mare on the other side.
He had meant the taunt. He’d never meant to put his hands on her. But he was taking her by the shoulders and hauling her up against him. His legs were spread, and he braced for her struggle. All he felt through the thick cloth beneath his hands was her trembling body.
“Gonna pull that knife on me now? Do you even want to?”
“Let me go, Luke.”
“No way, honey. There’s one lie I want to discover for myself.”
Domini closed her eyes. She didn’t want to hurt him. But she had to prove to him that with or without a knife she wasn’t helpless.
He lowered his head to cover her mouth with his, and Domini brought her knee up. Fast as she was, Luke was quicker. He wedged his leg between her thighs and rendered the move useless. His hand slid from her shoulder and caught hold of her braid, his grip tight enough to force her head back.
“There’s a lesson for you, Domini: I’m stronger and faster than you. If I had wanted to take that knife away from you, I would have. And if I wanted to take you, you couldn’t stop me. It’s as easy as this.”
With a sudden shove he freed and spun her to face away from him. Freedom lasted the time it took to draw a breath. He locked one arm over her chest so she could not lift her arms, and the other went around her hips. One booted foot pried her legs apart, once more wedging a space between her legs for his thigh. In seconds he had hauled her captive against him once more.
She brought her head back to slam his face, and he tightened his hold over her chest until her lungs screamed for air.
“Stop fighting me and I’ll stop hurting you.”
Panting like an animal left in the sun too long without water, Domini hung her head. She couldn’t even nod, much less speak. There wasn’t a part of her that remained unaware of the hard press of his body.
She had thought herself safe from the terror that had stalked her nights. Luke had tried to pry open the lid of the coffin she had buried in her mind, the coffin where every ugly, evil terror was hidden. His proving that she wasn’t safe at all wrenched open the coffin’s lid.
She had been seven when her father left, and in the years following when her mother had become too ill to work, she had taken to the street to beg. For almost a year until she turned twelve, she had managed to keep herself safe from serious harm.
How many times had she been warned not to beg near the cantinas? But there was one, where an old puta named Consuela plied her trade, that she felt safe at. Consuela bore the same name as her mother. Perhaps that was why Consuela looked after her, chasing the drunken vaqueros upstairs if they leered too close. Sometimes Consuela would point out a man who won at gambling and would be generous when Domini begged.
With her voice coarse from the little black cigarettes she liked to smoke and too much aguardiente, Consuela would laugh, then warn her that she was growing ripe and could no longer pass for a child.
Domini didn’t need her warning. She knew the camisa was too small to cover her rapidly developing breasts. Its cotton was thin from the poundings on rocks in the stream where the village washed their clothes and themselves. She had no other to wear. She had grown taller, too. Her skirt hem barely touched her calves, and the rebozo she wrapped around her head and upper body hid so much and no more.
She had learned to run very fast. Barefoot, skirt flying, she’d escape down the back alleys from hands that pawed or offers to sell herself.
But in the darkness one night she had been chased and caught. The vaquero young and strong, holding her until she could not breathe. His voice slurred and reeking. “I fought the others for you, niña. Now you pleasure me.”
She had learned the futileness of pleading, the despair of being too small, too weak from hunger to fight him for long.
She had been forced to swallow her bile and the taste of sour wine coating his tongue. And she had been praying to the Virgin, who had not been listening to her prayers of late, that she would die before he raped her, when he used his knife to slice through the only clothes she owned.
She opened her mouth to scream, scream as she had that night, but no sound came from her lips.
“Domini?” Luke repeated her name, as he had for the past few minutes. His hold on her had already eased, and he did not understand why she continued panting as if still fighting a battle. Her heart raced beneath his hand, and even with the layers of clothing separating their bodies, he felt the icy chill of her skin.
“Domini, talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”
He knew he wouldn’t see her eyes when he slowly turned her to face him, but now he didn’t need to. Her body was rigid. Her eyes would be glazed with some terror only she could see.
His lesson had triggered some nightmare for her.
He knew the signs of terror. He’d been awakened by them too many times to count.
There were two bottles of whiskey stashed in his saddlebags. He thought of the times he’d used liquor to ease the icy fear until his mind blurred enough so he could sleep again.
And he remembered all the times he had wished there was someone who cared enough to hold him until the fear retreated.
With a gentleness that he wasn’t aware he had been capable of, Luke drew her into his arms, slowly rocking her body against his.
Her head was tucked beneath his chin, and he rubbed against the bl
ack silk of her hair. With easy, circling motions he caressed her rigid spine, willing her to lean against him, willing himself to find the words that would lead her out of the darkness that still held her in its grip.
Cursing himself was a waste. He couldn’t find anything vile enough to call himself for having done this to her.
But you didn’t know.
There was no comfort in the excuse his mind supplied, because he should have known. The moment she had pulled that knife on him and he had seen her eyes, he should have known.
He wished she would cry or yell, do something, anything to break the terror holding her. He held her a little closer, sweeping his big hands up and down her slender back, rocking her harder against him.
I only lie a little … they learned to leave me alone … the nuns were my refuge … The fragments came rushing from his mind as he heard them battering at the walls he had built around himself.
But no matter how guilty he felt, Luke knew he would never allow anyone to get close to him again.
Not even a woman who made him ache with wanting, and feel deep remorse for sending her fleeing into her own dark corner.
He held her and stroked her. He repeatedly called her name and made the same soothing noises he used to calm any wild creature he found caught in a trap, and freed. He never touched the traps set to fill a man’s belly with food or to gain fur to keep from freezing. But he freed animals caught to line some man’s pockets with gold.
He had had enough of man’s greed to last a lifetime. One man especially. The man he was going to deliver this vulnerable woman to.
Domini warmed to the slow strokes of his hands. She sank against his heat and strength, envying them, wanting and needing them for her own. Her breathing grew more even, the racing beat of her heart slowed, and the terror began to recede.
It made no sense that she should feel safe in Luke’s arms, not when he so easily and quickly had sent her spinning into the past. But safe and warm was exactly what she felt.
The rough sound of his voice murmuring her name, and the same meaningless sounds she used when a child needed comfort, told her more than any apology he could make. She couldn’t blame him. He didn’t know.
You didn’t tell him.
No, she did not tell him, and she had no intention of telling him.
“Luke, you can let me go. I’ll be all right now.”
He heard her, but still held her, unwilling to let her go. Then the very soft, calm tone of her voice hit him. He stilled and slowly lifted his head, wondering if she had a steel core that kept her back rigid.
“Tell me—”
“You said we had to get away from here. We’d better mount up and ride.”
Calm and cold. Her slight step back forced him to drop his arms to his sides. “Just like that? You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“I’m tired, Luke. And I hurt. You caught me off guard. It’s a mistake that won’t happen again.”
“Damn right it won’t! I’m the one who held you while your mind ran off to who knows where. I don’t need your silence to punish—”
“I’m not trying to punish you, Luke. That’s not my place to do.” With a long sigh Domini turned away. “It was no more than a bad memory. You didn’t know, so you have nothing to be punished for. End of the matter.”
“Then you’d better mount up, honey, ’cause we’ve got a hell of a long, hard ride before I get shed of you.”
She couldn’t deal with his hostility now. She shrugged, although he couldn’t see her, and scooped up the fallen reins of the mare. She was strong. It had taken her a long time to understand that. She had survived more than Luke could ever imagine, more than she could at times believe.
She looped the reins over the mare’s head, smoothing the leather alongside her neck. Holding the knot with her left hand, she grabbed hold of the saddle horn. Her body wanted nothing more than to sink to the ground where she stood, but she forced her right hand up to grip the cantle.
“Give me your foot,” Luke ordered. He thought she would refuse, but she lifted her left foot from the ground to where his cupped hands caught it. “Let go of the cantle and horn. Hold my shoulder for balance.”
Her hesitation was enough to tell him that she was afraid to touch him. Not that he blamed her. Just as he was about to remind her that she was one who pushed for them to leave, he felt her hand grip his shoulder. With a small heave she rose high enough to swing her right leg over the saddle and sit. He fixed her foot in the stirrup, then handed her the reins.
She waited until he was mounted before she called him. “I just wanted to thank you for holding me.”
“Anytime, honey. The pleasure, as they say, was all mine.”
As she neck-reined the mare to follow Devil, she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that she had hurt him. Hurt him terribly. For she kept repeating what he said, but her mind kept replacing pleasure with pain.
What kind of pain could her terror bring to a man like Luke?
She looked up ahead to where the darkness hid him. And she knew. It wasn’t her pain at all. It was his.
It didn’t help her to feel certain she was right. Just as she had no intent of telling Luke about her past, she knew he would never share his.
He was a stranger who had offered to take her to meet Toma Colfax. She shouldn’t be feeling a terrible sense of loss. But it was there, sharp enough so that she could not ignore it.
She wondered if he would have listened. If he would have understood the terror of a twelve-year-old child about to be raped. Would Luke know the kind of desperation that had driven her suddenly to lie still and not listen to the drunken laughter accompanying the bites that had remained with her for weeks?
Would he think she had threatened him lightly with her knife if he knew how it came to be in her possession?
Domini didn’t think so. She didn’t believe Luke would still look at her with desire burning hot in his black eyes if he knew any of the truth.
She had paid dearly. Within two weeks her mother had died. No matter how many times she had been told that penitence had to be made, that sometimes God took retribution even on the children He loved most, for what He alone could foresee, Domini didn’t understand why her mother had to pay for her sin.
She was the one who had killed a man. No, he had not been a man, but an animal who preyed on those he thought weak.
It was not the words of a prayer that she sought comfort from, but a few lines from a poem that Sister Ignatius had taught her. Whatever my darkness is, Tis not, O Lord, of Thee: The light is Thine alone; The shadows, all my own.
As she eased back in the saddle to allow the mare to follow Luke’s horse up a steep climb, Domini thought she had the right measure of him. Luke was a man, not an animal. But what darkness he hid, and what shadows that he claimed, were not going to be hers to discover.
Secrets she had learned were a double-edged knife. You bled a little each time you kept one; someone else bled when you told.
The very devil of a dilemma. But then, Luke said he was taking her to meet the devil’s own.
Chapter 7
The trail grew steep, then steeper as Domini followed him in a climb down gullies and up their banks across open meadows into forest.
She decided that the forest here did not merely cover the land, it overwhelmed the earth. They had left the lodgepole pines behind and rode through dense spruce growth.
The heavy boughs closed out the moonlight, but in places she could make out wind-fallen tree trunks at least three or four feet wide that barricaded the forest floor and forced them to ride around.
She sensed an agelessness about the trees, growing undisturbed for hundreds of years, and at the same time she felt their similar impatience for intruders as Luke displayed when she trespassed his boundaries.
The mare’s breathing was less labored than her own.
Domini was beyond exhaustion, mentally refusing the
admission of pain. She tried to remember to move with the mare and not against her.
As the hours wore on, the first hint that night was retiring brought the hope that Luke would find a place to stop. Soon. Very soon.
A fine mist filled air too thin to fill starving lungs. As layer after layer of moisture collected and soaked her hair, skin, and clothes, she felt as though she had been wrapped in wet bed sheets and left forgotten.
This wasn’t the ghostly fog that rolled in off the ocean, yet a feeling persisted that the gauzy mist drifting over the land had a haunting presence all its own.
The crick in her neck warned her to stop craning for a look upward through green darkness to see daybreak. She was sure it would come soon. The night could not last forever.
It was minutes before she realized they halted a way back in the wood that broke to a meadow before them. Like a long-held breath slowly released a gray light filled the open space. Morning was creeping in as if uncertain of its welcome.
A memory rose of herself padding barefoot on unsteady legs down the hall to her parents’ bedroom, seeking the warm comfort she knew she would find, yet unsure of what place there was for her amid soft murmurs and even softer laughter. She need not have worried. Despite the long pauses and deep sighs, the murmurs and laughter went on as she was nestled between them in a bed filled with love.
Then Toma Colfax had come. Days later, her father had left him. It was the last time she ever saw him.
With a rough shake of her head Domini dismissed the questions she knew would follow. She simply couldn’t deal with them now.
She pressed the balls of her feet against the hard wood stirrup and slowly—both not to alarm the mare and not to cause cramped muscles one second more of agony than necessary—she lifted herself from the saddle until she could stretch her body straight up. She bit her lower lip, then clenched her teeth, but she wouldn’t cry out when Luke went as still as the trees surrounding them.
It was uncanny the way he remained motionless, as if he had taken root in one place, he and the horse he rode as though carved from the same rock.
Whisper My Name Page 7
