by Lyn Cote
Don Carlos made a sound as if he were annoyed. “Eduardo has always been of a dark nature. He sneers at life.”
“How long has he worked for you?” Quinn asked.
Don Carlos sat down at the bench. “When we were both still children, he came to our family as an orphan. He is two years older than I, the son of my mother’s oldest sister. My parents raised him as a member of the family.”
“But now he works for you?” Quinn asked. Ash finished pouring out three cups of coffee and sat down.
“Yes, Eduardo is family but he is related to my mother, and so not an heir of my father. He has long acted as my foreman at the ranch. I have often thought…” Don Carlos’s voice faded.
“Sounds just like a situation that can breed envy,” Ash said with a sideways glance at Don Carlos, “if a man has a jealous nature.”
Quinn could always count on Ash’s skill of sizing people up. He was rarely wrong.
Don Carlos pressed his lips together in a firm, displeased line. “I have done as my parents did. I have treated my cousin as family. But since his family had nothing to leave, he inherited nothing. I have paid him well, but he likes to spend it drinking, gambling, and visiting bordellos in Laredo or Santa Fe.”
Beginning to believe Don Carlos, Quinn sat down beside Ash.
“If damaging my or the señorita’s reputation was his intention, he has failed.” Don Carlos looked determined. “If Señorita Dorritt will consent, I will marry her. I don’t care what anyone believes. I know the truth.”
Silence hovered over and around them. Quinn chewed on Don Carlos’s intention to marry Dorritt, tried to choke it down. Couldn’t.
Then Don Carlos looked Quinn in the eye. “I believe you are my rival for the hand of la señorita. Is that true?”
In her small but neat room at the inn, Dorritt heard a soft knock on her door. Who was it? She got up from the bed where she lay beside a napping Alandra and opened the door. Her heart soared. “Reva, oh, my sweet Reva!” Dorritt threw her arms around her former maid. “Oh, how I have needed you.”
Reva hugged her back fiercely as if trying to communicate the same feeling with her intense response. “I was so worried.” Reva wept onto Dorritt’s shoulder. “I was so afraid I never see you again.”
Dorritt shed a few tears too and then drew Reva into her room. She glanced toward Alandra, who was deep in slumber and motioned toward the two chairs near the window. “Sit down. We can talk softly without disturbing her.”
“Is she Don Carlos’s sister?”
“Yes, how did you know?” Dorritt’s eyebrows lifted.
“Ash, my husband—” Reva blushed “—came back today and told us Don Carlos had brought you and his sister to San Antonio.”
“Where is Ash?” And Quinn?
“He is with Don Carlos and Quinn at Ash’s family’s place,” Reva said.
Dorritt found she couldn’t speak.
Reva nodded firmly. “I just heard Don Carlos says he love you and want you to be his wife. But Quinn love you and you love him. What are you going to do?”
Dorritt was caught by Reva’s declaration that Quinn loved her. She couldn’t reply.
“Well, which is it? Which man are you going to marry—Don Carlos or Mr. Quinn?”
Nineteen
Reva’s question pierced Dorritt’s heart like an arrow into a bull’s-eye. She sprang up from her chair and paced with quick, jerky steps to the door. What am I going to do about Don Carlos, about Quinn? “You know I have never thought to marry.” But my life has changed and I must also. But how can I let myself trust a man? What if I’m wrong?
Reva came and urged Dorritt back to a chair by the window. There Reva gripped Dorritt’s hands between hers. “Don’t put me off. I see you want to marry. You want to marry Quinn. And don’t you try to tell me different.”
With surprise, Dorritt gazed into the smooth caramel-colored face of her lifelong friend. She’d always thought of Reva as her friend first and her maid second. But now Dorritt realized that before she had always been the leader in every conversation. Reva’s direct words and honest contradiction revealed her own new confidence, her freedom from bondage. To Dorritt, it was startling and vaguely troubling. Have I without meaning to always disrespected Reva, just like everyone else? It was a dark and sobering thought. Among many others crowding her mind.
Dorritt wilted into her chair. “Quinn was there, Reva. There when I arrived in Don Carlos’s carriage in the plaza and he didn’t talk to me.” Dorritt’s disappointment pooled cold and clammy in the pit of her stomach. “He has never spoken of love to me.” Even when he kissed me.
Reva sat down opposite her again. “The whole time he was with our wagon train, I watched Mr. Quinn. He stayed near the stock, did his work. But he always had one eye on you.”
The new Reva had opinions and stated them. Dorritt felt as if Reva was leading her across a precariously swaying bridge, not following her as she always had before. Her maid…no, her friend…was pulling, forcing, her take one step after the other. Dorritt hung her head. “Just being attracted to me, watching me, doesn’t mean that he wants…that I am…that we…”
Reva sat and sighed. “You’re right. In some men that watching you could mean a lot of different things. But not with Mr. Quinn. I study him and it wasn’t just that he always looking toward you, but how he looked at you. He got deep feelings for you.”
Dorritt examined each word Reva said, held each up to the light of honesty. But he has never revealed these deep feelings to me. Dorritt’s hands fisted and she pressed the two fists tightly together, knuckles to knuckles. “I have deep feelings for him.”
“Well, I’m not the one you should be telling.” Reva had the nerve to sound amused.
If I do, will it matter? Dorritt reached over to the nearby bed and smoothed the stray hair from Alandra’s cheek as she slept—looking so innocent, untouched by life. “You may be right,” Dorritt whispered, hearing the words but not really feeling them. “But it is not easy to change the way a person, the way I have thought all my life.” The way Quinn has thought all his life.
“I know you right about that.” Reva poked Dorritt’s arm. “Ash had to change his way of thinking. Do you think it was easy for Ash to ask me to marry him in front of everybody like that? That it was easy for me to say yes with you standing there looking like someone about to kill you?”
“Reva, I wanted you to be free. You just never told me that matters between you and Ash had gone that far.”
“I know you want me to be free, but how could I tell you? Ash never say before that night that he wanted to marry me.”
“He hadn’t?” Hope flickered in Dorritt’s heart, a tiny bright spark. Could it be the same way with Quinn and her—he felt but hadn’t put those feelings into words?
“No. Ash liked me, but he kept thinking maybe he’s too old for me. And maybe I wouldn’t want to marry him. But then your stepdaddy tried to make me marry Josiah. That made Ash speak up right quick. And now the same thing’s happen to you and Quinn.”
Dorritt blinked. “What? I don’t understand.”
“You do too.” Reva shook her head at Dorritt. “Eduardo kidnapped you and now Don Carlos want to marry you. That’s just like your stepdaddy trying to make me marry Josiah. You’re going to marry either Mr. Quinn or Don Carlos. Two men who see you, see how fine a woman you are. Now you’ve got to make up your mind which man you choose.”
Quinn had appeared in Dorritt’s life just when she needed him, a gift from God. And he occupied the deepest, most secret place in her heart. But right there beside it was her fear of allowing any man to control her life. Bondage—that’s what marriage had always meant to her. And now Don Carlos had offered her his heart and his name. And he was a good man, a settled man, while Quinn the wanderer remained silent. Everything was so mixed up. Dorritt looked at Reva, who had just been freed from slavery because Ash had redeemed her. Reva didn’t feel enslaved by marrying. Instead she’d become free. I
t was easier for Reva to marry—
“I know what you’re thinking—it easy for me. You thinking I married Ash because he bought my freedom—”
“No.” Dorritt didn’t want to cast a shadow on Reva’s happiness, her marriage. Agitated, Dorritt popped up again and looked out the window. “Facing this decision is hard for me. But you’re right. My life, my situation has altered.” Still, the word altered had the power to start cold liquid fear dripping into the pit of her stomach. Was she brave enough not just to love, but to also marry, to trust a man, to give up her independence?
Dorritt gripped the wooden sill, looking out the window. “My situation is much more complex than a simple decision of which man to marry, Reva.” Dorritt thought about her last conversation with Quinn and his quick rejection of her suggestion he buy land in Texas. Would Quinn be able to change the way he thought? The way he lived? Invisible bands tightened around her breast, making it hard to breathe. Why did everything have to be so complicated?
Reva got up and hugged Dorritt from behind, resting her chin on Dorritt’s shoulder. “You are a smart woman. I know you make the right decision.”
Dorritt patted Reva’s hand around her waist. When Reva said she must return to Ash, Dorritt led Reva down the stairway and outside. There in the cool shade under the front porch, Dorritt took Reva’s hand. “I need to speak to Mr. Quinn alone. Can you arrange that?”
“I don’t want anybody to see you coming with me.” Reva looked concerned. “But I come for you tonight after everyone asleep. I come to the back door here and take you to our jacal. Quinn’s staying with us.”
Dorritt squeezed Reva’s hand. As Reva walked away, Don Carlos appeared walking across the plaza and stepped in from the blinding sunlight and met her there. “Señorita, where is Alandra?”
“Asleep.” A jumble of emotions flocked around Dorritt’s heart. She fell silent with guilt. This man loved her. This man wanted to marry her. And tonight she was going to sneak away to see his rival. “I should check on her.” Dorritt turned away.
Don Carlos stopped her with a gentle hand on her elbow. “If you need anything, you will tell me, no?”
No doubt if she asked him to, Don Carlos would take her to Quinn himself. But she could not ask this of him. It struck her as a cruelty to do so. So she merely nodded, hoping she didn’t look as guilty as she felt.
Dorritt watched the last golden rays of the autumn sun finally dip below the horizon. Then she slipped downstairs and out the back door of the inn. Over her head and shoulders, she wore one of the dark shawls that had belonged to Don Carlos’s mother. Ash, along with Reva, waited in the shadows for her. She looked up at him in surprise.
Ash pulled at the brim of his leather hat. “I decided I should be your escort too, señorita. We don’t know what Eduardo might do if he came upon you two women alone.”
At the memory of Eduardo clapping his hand over her mouth, overpowering her, Dorritt shivered in the warm evening air. She nodded and Ash led her and Reva swiftly and quietly through the back ways of San Antonio and then along the river to his family’s land. When they reached their hut, Ash motioned for her to wait just behind him, obviously shielding her from view. Had Reva and Ash kept her coming a secret? That possibility tightened her nerves more. Then Ash called, “Quinn.”
Dorritt waited, nearly holding her breath. Ash stepped aside, and there was Quinn in front of her. And he did not look happy to see her. Only wearing his buckskin breeches and moccasins, he held himself stiffly and his eyes were stormy. But even his air of remoteness tempted her nearer; she moved toward him.
“It’s time you talked things over with Miss Dorritt.” Ash said no more, but walked past Quinn into the jacal.
Night sounds and a warm breeze sighed around Dorritt. By the light of the crescent moon and of stars piercing the ebony sky, she drank in the sight of Quinn, so lean, tall, and confident. As always, he ignited all her senses, sharpening every sound, every breath. “We need to talk.” It was difficult to say those few words. She kept her features deceptively composed. When he didn’t reply, she cleared her throat. “I didn’t know that you had been kidnapped at the same time that I was.” Would this start him talking?
“I should have protected you.” Quinn’s voice sounded rusty, as if he hadn’t spoken much that day.
Dorritt shook her head, still moving closer to Quinn. “That’s not what I meant. I feel responsible for your being kidnapped. If you had not been a threat to Eduardo’s plot, he would not have bothered you.” She halted in front of him now.
Quinn dismissed this with a wave of his arm. “What Eduardo did is not your fault. And he is going to pay—”
Dorritt interrupted, taking his upper arms in her hands. His skin was warm and his muscles hard under her palms. “I don’t want to talk about Eduardo now. In fact, I think when he kidnapped me, he did me an unexpected favor.”
Her words and her touch visibly took Quinn aback. His hand rose but stopped in midair. Had he nearly caressed her cheek? “What do you mean by that? He frightened you, made your family worry. He tried to ruin your reputation.”
Dorritt drew herself up. “I’m not concerned about my reputation.” Not in the way that I was before. She drew closer; it was as if the air around them was charged with her awareness of him. She didn’t have to touch him to feel his presence. Quinn refused to look her way, to make this easier for her. She wanted to shake him. Instead, she turned and walked toward the river, hoping to draw Quinn away from anyone who might be able to overhear them, wanting him alone to hear her. And if she could cause him to come after her, that would tell her something of his feelings for her.
Stopping, she spoke quietly, “Yesterday, Don Carlos took me to the highest rise on his ranch. He told me about his parents and how they fell in love in Mexico City and married in spite of family opposition and how they had come to that place nearly thirty years ago.”
She sensed Quinn following her and continued speaking into the darkness, “As I gazed over his acres, I began to see that I had still been thinking about my life, about me as I had lived and had been thought of in Louisiana. But Louisiana is the past. Texas is the future, my future. I cannot be bound by the old ideas, by the old me. And then I knew I must make a decision.” She turned to face Quinn. The sound of river water trickling over rocks was loud in the silence between them.
In the low light, Quinn halted behind Dorritt. She turned to face him. Not wanting to look at her beauty, which always made him weak, he stooped to sift through the earth and pebbles at his feet, fighting his desire to draw her into his arms. Dorritt was a danger to him, to what he knew as reality.
“And now you must make a decision too.” She put a hand under his arm and tugged him until he rose and faced her. She brushed her hand over his hair down to his cheek.
Her touch, each stroke of each finger, had such power over him. He tried to make sense of her words, but couldn’t. Close to her, he caught her sweet fragrance on the breeze. He straightened up fully. “What are you talking about? What decision?”
Her face burst into a smile, as powerful to him as watching a dawning sunrise. “That’s why I had to talk to you alone. You need to make a decision because you see—” she inhaled deeply, “—I have fallen in love with you.”
Quinn jerked as if he had been punched. “You, I—”
“Don Carlos gave me the strength to say that out loud to you. They are the words he said to me.” She clasped Quinn’s hand, drawing it up and pressing it to her heart. “I thought I would never hear those words from any man. But that was the old me, not the Texas me.”
His eyes lowered, Quinn tried to remove his hand from her soft palm. “Don Carlos will be a lucky man to have you for his wife.”
She didn’t let him pull free. “I love you, not Don Carlos. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” She paused. “Do you love me?”
Why had she said those words? Pulling free, he turned his back to her. “I can’t love you.”
She
moved around him and came face-to-face with him again. “That isn’t the question, Quinn. Do you love me?”
His heart pumped blood in great swells that washed through him. He looked over her head and wouldn’t reply. He should have gone after Eduardo this morning immediately after Don Carlos had arrived. He’d let his anger cloud his judgment. But no more.
She shook his arm. “Why can’t you tell me you love me?”
Her touch and nearness tempted him. Quinn grimaced, swallowing the words he couldn’t say. “I’m not for the likes of you.”
“That is not Texas thinking,” she objected, clinging to his arm. “I have already told you you could buy land. You could have your own ranch. You could breed cattle and your horses. And we could have a life together. A good one I think. I hope.”
Hadn’t they already covered this? Why did she think Texas was so different? She was wrong. A cloud moved and let faint moonlight flow down, lighting her face. Quinn shook his head, resisting the desire to bend down and taste her lips. “Everyone would look down on you because you had married a half-breed.”
“Not if I lift my chin proudly. And Don Carlos has Indian blood too, but because he has seven thousand acres, do you hear anyone calling him a mestizo?” Dorritt’s rich voice that always affected him rose. “If you make a success of your ranch, it will be the same for you. Or I should say we make a success of our ranch? I have run my stepfather’s plantation for almost ten years. I know how to manage land, how to run a plantation. A ranch can’t be much different, just cattle instead of cotton.”
“You’re talking crazy.” Very well, if she insisted, he would tell her all the reasons he shouldn’t love her. “I’m a half-breed. I’m unlettered. You’re a white lady, an educated lady. And we both know me—a leatherstocking—would never be welcome in an Austin settlement. And I’m nearly thirty. Life on the frontier is short. Both my parents were gone very young. I’m a bad bet all around.”
