by Henke, Shirl
Lucero had frightened and fascinated her as a girl, then he had left her. Now all the fears and humiliations of girlhood were behind her. She had built a rich satisfying life in spite of the hardships she had endured. He should not have returned to spoil everything. If only he would accept what she had tried to explain, realize that she was a different person now.
And do what? Court her as if he were a youthful swain? That was absurd. He would never understand who she was or what she felt. Why did she want him to?
He desires you now. Yes, she could see that in those night-dark eyes. She had learned to recognize male hunger over the past years, even learned how to manipulate it to her own advantage. It had been that or give over Gran Sangre to soldiers, merchants, whatever men threatened to despoil it. Sensing that hunger in him had soothed her wounded pride, she assured herself, nothing more. Surely nothing more, for he was a ruthless war-hardened soldier. He was danger personified. Yes, he desired her. But did she desire him in return?
Trembling, she closed the door to her room and leaned against it in the darkness. After gathering her wits, she walked over to where a fat tallow candle sat on her dressing table. She struck a match and lit it, then sank down on the velvet cushioned chair in front of the mirror to stare into the haunted golden eyes of a stranger.
of Gran Sangre dismissed Baltazar for the night, after the servant laid out a maroon brocade robe. He quickly shed his formal clothes and slipped it on, then rolled a cigarette and lit it. The tart sweet smoke seared his lungs like a lover's scouring nails, the pleasure familiar and reassuring amid so much that was changed. Next door in the master suite, the master
Mercedes had certainly undergone a striking metamorphosis. He could still picture her standing before him in the big dining hall, so small and delicate for all her sweetly filled-out curves, announcing to him that she was a different woman. He took another pull on the tobacco and laughed aloud at the irony of the whole situation. His eyes shifted from the starlit Sonoran skies outside his bedroom window to the door separating his suite from hers.
“Yes, you're not the woman Lucero Alvarado married, beautiful Mercedes, but that's only fair, since I'm not Lucero Alvarado.”
He flicked the cigarette out into the darkness of the courtyard, tossed his robe onto the floor and sank naked into the soft feather mattress, where he lay staring at the ceiling as his mind moved back through time.
Chapter Three
What a bizarre twist of fate had brought him to this Sonoran stronghold. He grinned into the darkness, whispering, “The fortunes of war.”
He was Lottie Fortune's boy Nicholas, the illegitimate son of a New Orleans whore. Hell, Fortune was just a stage name the would-be actress made up, but Nicholas chose to keep it rather than use her real one. His mother had died when he was eleven. Then the madam had sent him to live with Lottie’s pappy Hezakiah Benson. The brutal fire-and-brimstone-breathing old Bible thumper had made his life a misery on that hardscrabble west Texas farm. He had run away to war, thinking it would be glamorous.
Glamour! His expression grew grim as he thought of all the vile sinkholes he had fought in since becoming a mercenary at the age of fifteen. There had been so many he'd lost count: the Crimea, the Austro-Italian border, North Africa...but none could compare to Mexico for utter savagery. He had sailed into Vera Cruz back in January of 1862 with the French invaders, full of absurd notions about getting rich on Hapsburg gold and retiring to live in luxury in a tropical paradise. One look at the bleak pestilent harbor, its beaches blackened by carrion-eating vultures, had immediately disabused him of that pipe dream. But then the French columns had moved inland. Orange, lemon and fig trees grew in the lush green highlands where poplars towered over sparkling streams and brilliantly colored birds sang.
The wealthy hacendados welcomed their imperialist saviors into homes that were virtual palaces, furnished with every luxury and staffed by hordes of Indian servants. As they drew near to Puebla, the small villages were picturesque and lovely with ornate churches and riotous banks of purple bougainvillea growing in the central plazas. The cantinas had decent whiskey for soldiers to slake their thirst and voluptuous sloe-eyed women to appease their lust.
Then came Puebla and the Cinco de Mayo. The republican victory against crack French troops had been an omen of things to come, even though the imperialist forces eventually carried the day, marching the next year all the way to Mexico City. But every inch of twisting mountain and jungle terrain, so lushly beautiful, was ever so deceptively treacherous. Without warning, Juarista guerrillas swarmed from behind rocks and trees. With guns and machetes they attacked the invaders in swift deadly forays, then melted away as quickly as they had come.
The money had been good at first. It still was when the imperial treasury was moved to shake loose some of its hoard of silver, but far in the hinterlands pay periods were as irregular as the soldiers. Most of the troops lived off the land, which was well and good when they chanced upon a wealthy hacendado with a corral full of blooded horses and a cellar full of aguardiente which they could liberate at point of bayonet. After all, it was at the request of just such pro-monarchist conservatives that the invaders had come to establish Maximilian on his throne. But in recent months the army had encountered only republicans, small farmers and villagers with little to give. Some contre-guerrillas looted the churches. Even though he was not religious, Nick had refused to do that. He had a small cache of money hidden away in Tampico as a hedge against the future. He bided his time, waiting to see what would develop.
Nicholas Fortune had a bizarre love-hate relationship with Mexico. It was the most marvelous country he had ever seen and Nick had seen many around the globe by the time he had reached his twenty-ninth birthday. Yet for all its exotic tropical lushness and stark desert beauty, Mexico had been bitterly rent by war. The scars were everywhere, especially inside the people who had been born, lived and died between pronouncements, revolutions and occupations. People like Don Lucero Alvarado.
He drifted off to sleep, remembering the day they first met. It was in what had once been a sleepy village in the state of Nuevo Leon.
* * * *
Fall 1865
“Why the hell do they keep coming back? Damn, they're out of ammunition—half of them don't even have machetes.” Nick had watched as two of his men rifled the bodies of the dead Juarista officers. He scoffed. Officers, hell, just like he was an officer. They were guerrillas and he was a contre-guerrilla. But he had been paid in gold to lead this band of cutthroats. The rebels had little beyond the few bits of gold in their teeth, and that Lanfranc and Schmidt were quickly chiseling out.
His question had been rhetorical, one he'd asked himself many times in recent months, but the stoop-shouldered older man standing next to him answered it anyway. “They'll fight till the last man jack of 'em is dead, Capt'n.”
Captain. What a joke the “commission” was. He had been “promoted” by Colonel Ortiz back in Monterrey last week. The colonel was having such an excellent time with the beauteous wife of the alcalde that he decided to send Fortune and a small band out on the reconnaissance mission he himself had been assigned to lead.
Sean O'Malley sent a thick brown stream of tobacco juice flying across the sandy reddish soil, then continued, “Men with a cause, sure 'n they're the most dangerous kind. Buckos like you 'n me, we fight fer our pay. Makes us no niver mind what country, what king, but this is their home, where their fathers lived for centuries, where their wives and children live. They may be poor but Juarez is one of their own and they chose him, not the likes of some fancy-britches Austrian archduke.”
Nick grinned at Sean. “You may be a mercenary, but beneath whatever uniform you wear still beats the heart of an Irish patriot. And don't tell me if the emperor was English instead of Austrian that you'd be standing here beside me.”
O'Malley shrugged his brawny shoulders. “I lost me home and the girl I loved back in thirty-seven. Nothing there but a price on me head and lobst
erbacks in every village pub, but I understand why it is a man fights this kind of war even when he's outnumbered and outgunned.”
Nick sighed and inhaled his cigarette. “Yeah, well, I don't. All I know is I liked it better when I could fight soldiers with rifles, not boys and old men with machetes.”
“Time to get out, boyo?” O'Malley cocked one shaggy gray brow at Fortune and studied his superior officer with shrewd blue eyes.
“And go where? Do what? Fighting is all I know. I have no home—never had. That's why I joined the Legion when I was seventeen.”
“Sure and it may have slipped your mind, Capt'n, but yer not in the Legion anymore,” O'Malley said with a glint of humor as he inspected Fortune's well-worn buckskins. Few of the imperial irregulars made any attempt to impose military discipline or wear uniforms.
“The side benefits are better with the contre-guerrillas,” Nick replied grimly. “All the gold we can loot—or dig out of dead men's teeth.” He dropped the cigarette into the dust and ground it beneath his boot heel.
“Heard we'll be getting a few new men from General Marquez's old command. Sparkly white uniforms 'n all that,” the older man said as their sentries signaled the approach of friendly forces.
“At least if they're dressed in uniforms that match each other's, we'll know they aren't rebels,” Nick replied as his eyes scanned the narrow opening at the mouth of the canyon for riders.
His men had just finished a fierce hand-to-hand fight with a band of Juaristas they had stumbled upon in this brushy area. Stunted pines and desert elderberry bushes grew densely across the jagged landscape. In the distance the Sierra Madres glowed like coals of fire as the sun set against them. It had been a long, bloody day and it was not over yet. The rough low-lying terrain would make them sitting ducks for enemy snipers.
Fortune was about to give orders to mount up when a shot whizzed past his ear. He dropped instantly to the ground as he barked out the command to take cover, rolling himself into a patch of mescabean, returning fire all the while. Years of fighting experience had taught him every tactical trick in the book and a few that weren't. Some of the Juaristas had taken a lesson from the same school. He knew the rebels had his reinforcements pinned down at the opposite end of the road and were using the advantage of height, firing from the steep, tree-covered sides of the canyon. His only chance was to get his men out of the slaughter pit.
“O'Malley, Schmidt! Here!” He signaled them to follow him, running for the copse of paloverde where their horses were tethered.
The three seasoned veterans reached their mounts as the rebels fired sporadically, unwilling to waste precious ammunition on chancy shots. Leaning low on his big gelding, Fortune yelled out orders in English, which all of his motley multinational band understood but few of the Mexican enemy did.
“Grab a mount and scatter into the trees. Make for the opening of the canyon. Try to link up with the imperials after dark!”
What followed was a repeat of dozens of earlier skirmishes. They split up in twos and threes, riding and firing, fending off machete-wielding rebels until darkness fell. Once fighting became impossible after sundown, the Juaristas would evaporate. Nick would round up the remnants of his men in the morning and try to track their attackers, who were probably from a small village nearby.
He sent O'Malley, who had managed to stay with him, in search of stragglers while he looked for the men from Marquez's command. Fortune had heard stories about the Tiger of Tacubaya, Leonardo Marquez, a Mexican national who had deserted the republican government of Juarez and joined Maximilian's imperial forces. Marquez had earned his nickname with a reputation steeped in blood. At Tacubaya he had ordered the wholesale massacre of the town, including women and children. He took no prisoners, unless for his own amusement, flinging them from mountaintops and using them for bayonet practice, but his favorite sport was burying them up to their necks in sand, then stampeding horses over them.
Nick was not looking forward to riding with men who had participated in the general's idea of a good time. But, hell, all of them had done things in this war that they were not proud of, and stories were distorted and exaggerated in the retelling. He was scarcely the man to cast the first stone, he thought wryly.
Suddenly he felt a prickling begin at the back of his neck and move lower, centering between his shoulder blades. Nick knew someone was drawing a bead on him from the shadows. How the hell had he let someone slip up behind him? Getting careless can get you dead, he thought as he slid from his gelding and rolled toward the black chasm of the arroyo at the side of the trail.
Silence. Whoever it was had not wasted a bullet. He slid his knife from the sheath strapped to his thigh and hunkered soundlessly in the darkness, waiting. Then he heard a faint rustling noise over to his right, the soft shifting sound of sand trickling down the steep embankment. A grim smile slashed his face as he circled around to the left.
Nick's adversary was crouched with his back against the trunk of a tree, peering toward the lip of the arroyo where he had vanished. Although his hat brim hid his face in shadows, the uniform of an imperial guardsman was plainly visible. Fortune drew his .44 caliber Remington and cocked it. “That flashy gold braid may impress the ladies in Monterrey but out here it'll only get you shot,” he said in French.
The imperial officer whirled in his direction, his French Chassepot breechloader raised. “You speak French. Identify yourself at once,” he replied in Spanish.
“Captain Nicholas Fortune, General Ortiz's contre-guerrilla forces,” he replied in Spanish, for it seemed the soldier was not fluent in the language of his allies. There was something naggingly familiar about him. When the other man did not lower his rifle, Nick added in a low purr, “I wouldn't think of shooting that thing. Even if I miss, these woods are full of my men and you'll make a beautiful target in that parade ground costume.”
“A thousand apologies,” the imperial officer replied, lowering the breechloader and standing up. “You took me by surprise. That hasn't happened in a long time. Your voice...” He cocked his head quizzically to one side and the brilliance of the moonlight fell full on his face.
The face of Nicholas Fortune.
Nick, too, moved into the light now and the stranger hissed in amazement. “Who in the name of all that's holy are you?”
“I just told you,” Nick replied, sheathing his knife and holstering the sidearm. “Better question is, who the hell are you?”
“Captain Lucero Alvarado, late of the Imperial Guards, now assigned to General Marquez's command,” Nick's mirror image replied, clicking his heels smartly. “I was assigned to make contact with you but I had no idea...”
The two men walked slowly around each other. They were of an identical build, lean and tall, although Fortune had perhaps an inch in height over Alvarado. They stared into each other's dark eyes, trying to gauge the color.
“Amazing. Absolutely incredible,” Lucero breathed.
“We'd best skip the mutual admiration for now. These woods could be crawling with Juaristas,” Nick said dryly, motioning his companion toward the road. “Where are the rest of your men? You know how many survived the ambush?”
“We split up when they opened fire. There were six of us. Now, who knows?” he said, shrugging.
They searched for the horses. Nick's chestnut gelding was grazing peacefully a dozen yards down the trail. Lucero whistled and a superb gray stallion with the unmistakable bloodlines of the Andalusian trotted obediently up to him.
“I raised him from a colt,” Lucero said, noting the way Nick's eyes studied the arched neck and clean lines of the horse. “His name is Peltre.”
As he swung up on his gelding, Nick repeated in Spanish, “Peltre.” The name was perfect, for the stallion was indeed the rich silvery shade of pewter. “When we rode into the canyon, we passed a cave, about two miles from here. It's a good place to spend the rest of the night. We'll look for O'Malley in the morning.”
* * * *
F
ortune awakened with that old familiar itch that meant he was being watched. He lay on a hard rock surface that was faintly damp. The cave. At once last night's incredible events flashed into his mind. Without opening his eyes, he slid his hand beneath his blanket to feel the .32 caliber Sharps pepperbox hidden in his coat pocket for reassurance. Then he blinked.
“So you're finally awake. It's past sunrise,” Lucero said. He sat against the opposite wall, staring at Nick with hooded dark eyes.
“I've been in the saddle for three days, chasing those raiders we tangled with yesterday. I took my turn as sentry during the night,” he said, throwing off his blanket and sitting up. Alvarado's eyes followed his movements intently and Fortune was certain the man had been watching him in his sleep for some time. He felt uncomfortable about that yet could not keep his own eyes from returning the perusal.
“We have the eyes of a wolf, black with silver irises. The only other person I've ever known with them is my father,” Lucero said, “Don Anselmo Mateo Maria Alvarado.... And your father?”
“You're one up on me. I haven't the least notion who my father was,” Nick replied in a flat voice. He stood and walked to the mouth of the cave, studying the road that wound across the canyon below them, looking for riders.
He rolled a cigarette and lit it, inhaling deeply as Alvarado asked, “Did your mother have eyes like ours?”
Fortune laughed but it was a metallic sound. “No, she had blue eyes. Is there some point in this line of questioning?” he inquired curtly, knowing what Alvarado was leading up to but not liking it.
“Your mother...who was she?”
