She could hear him shucking his clothes. “Take a look, Cate. Am I all that repugnant?"
She slit one lid. Her field of vision so narrow that whatever she saw would be screened by the heavy thicket of eyelashes. She had caught fragmentary glimpses of the male body when tending the wounded soldiers but never the exhibition of the complete masculine anatomy—in all its glory.
And those were the words that came to her mind when she viewed the six-foot-four-inch length of Law’s bronzed, lean frame. Broad, sinewy shoulders set above the hard torso that wedged at the narrow hips. Not a spare ounce of flesh. The scars and nicks that welted his muscle-roped body, rather than detract, only added to the fascination.
He planted his fist on his hips and threw back his head in laughter as her eyes widened when her gaze ricocheted to the thick yellow-brown hair at the crotch that curled as riotously as the hair on his head.
She would have bolted then, but where to? She grabbed her skirt and yanked it up over her thighs, inadequately trying to shield her virgin’s breasts with her free arm.
He came to her and, taking her arms, gently eased her to the soft mounds made by their clothing. "Why do the Anglos, especially you Yanquis, see such shame in the body?” he demanded. peering intently into her averted face, as if how she felt about what he was going to do made a difference to him.
But he did not wait for her reply. His hands cupped her face and turned it toward him as he tenderly brushed her closed lids and trembling lips with kisses that demanded nothing. He stretched out beside her, and his heat began to thaw her chilled body.
“What can I tell you to make it easier for you?” he whispered against her breast. His tongue traced the rose-brown aureole. She quivered along the length of her body, and he raised his head. “I’ve never taken a virgin before, Cate—only willing women—so I don’t understand this pain that women talk about. But I do know that it can be something that'll take your breath away, there’s not another feeling equal to it—if you’ll only meet me halfway.”
She understood then. He was giving her the chance to change her mind. It would be her decision. She met his gaze just as candidly. “Just don’t let me think,” she whispered.
And he did not. Her body, which before she had considered merely flesh, muscle, and bone, with only defects to her biased eye, became a thing of rare beauty worshiped before some pagan altar. His lips, his fingers, his eyes, his tongue—his words— they did homage to her; they did things to her that she could never have imagined. Through the long night he showed her things she had never suspected.
Only then, toward dawn, did he demand she return the pleasure. Half curious, half fearful, but totally stimulated by his lovemaking, she slid her fingers along his golden-brown length, causing him to gasp with pleasure. She had not known that the male physique could be so beautiful. This was what her body had been yearning for, had been made for. And she showed her gratitude in her loving of him. Later his breathing stopped in a sheer agony of suspension when her lips, made bold by her love for him, brought him to a shattering climax.
When they lay satiated in each other’s arms, only then did he permit thought to enter her passion-numbed brain. “Cate,” he said quietly, “my wish—beneath the Joshua tree—it was for you . . . you stubborn, irresistible woman.”
CHAPTER 20
Catherine prowled about the makeshift camp as uneasy as a cat. From afar there came every few hours the whoomph of cannon that made the rocky terrain vibrate beneath her feet. She trailed the women to the mountain stream, for the first time washing out her clothes—and Law's—one of his bandannas, a pair of red flannel longjohns, a faded blue cotton shirt. Was she not his woman now?
She blushed as she recalled the things she had done the night before. She had not known that the giving of pleasure was so great an aphrodisiac. Yet she felt no shame. Was she sinning, going to Law without the blessing of the Church? Surely as great as her love was it had God’s blessing. If not, then she would be held accountable for the sin, but whatever the price, it was worth it.
Toward evening the bark of muskets seemed closer, but Loco told her it was merely the echo of troops skirmishing outside the city below. Evening came, and still the men had not returned. She looked at the faces of the other women mirrored in the light of the smokeless campfire. Pale wraiths, she thought. Even Filomena. And herself. Sleep did not come that night, only the torturous waiting for what the sun would bring.
She knew that should Law not return, Loco had been instructed by Law to take her to Guaymas, the closest destination that would afford her a modicum of safety. Yet she also knew she would not leave Law’s land. She was bound to it, by what she could not ascertain. But she loved the raw, primitive land as much as Lucy hated it.
Over the meager breakfast of tortillas and refried beans she calmly told Loco that she would not be going to Guaymas. “If anything, I shall return to Tucson to make whatever form of living I can.’’ She gave the old Indian a dry smile. “Perhaps even as a lavandera. I’ve become quite good at washing clothes on rocks since I’ve joined the Arizona Colonizing Expedition.”
Loco looked up at her from beneath his fringe of bone-white hair. He paused in eating the tortilla, which he noisily chewed. “The people there, they may not forget so easily the Anglo officer’s death.”
“If I were to try to teach their children, no—they would never forget.” She smiled. “But to scrub their clothes—it matters not who does that.”
“You love him much—Lorenzo?” the Indian asked, his faded brown eyes studying her.
“Very much.” she said simply. “To my soul’s everlasting irritation.”
Later that night, one of those fierce electrical storms peculiar to the Southwest rumbled through the mountains, reverberating over the camp like a clash of cymbals. Beneath the tarpaulin-covered wagon Catherine stirred as the first splatter of rain droplets pelted the thirsty earth. Her hand sought the reassuring hardness of Law’s body only to come up empty. Another night, and still the men had not returned.
Something guttural in her cried out at the void beside her . . . and the injustice of fate. Had she traveled so far, endured so much, to finally find what it was she sought from life . . . and lose it before she had ever had it?
Then suddenly lightning zigzagged across the black heavens and illuminated the ghostly horses and riders moving up through the sheered-rock defile. The wreath of yellow curls sparkled in the lightning’s silver javelin-like streak, and a cry of joy shot through her at the recognition. She was crawling from beneath the wagon, running, her arms open wide.
The lead rider watched the slender woman coming to him. So frail, so delicate . . . so strong, so determined. If he'd let her, she could make for him the kind of home he had never known. No, that was untrue. The home he had known before Frank Godwin arrived. And took Cristo Rey, took his mother for his own. His mother had been strong, but love had made her weak. Would love for this American woman make him weak? So weak that he forgot the need of his people, of Mexico?
Madonna, but he was tired! And the wound hurt! The warmth and softness of Cate’s breast would take all that away.
He leaned over and effortlessly swept the woman up into the saddle before him, ignoring the flash of pain when her buttocks brushed the bullet hole in his thigh. He wanted only to feel the welcome of her lips beneath his.
Catherine maneuvered about as he cantered the sorrel back to camp so she could see his face. “The battle—was it successful? Dear God, let it be. Let this be over. Maybe then . . . maybe . . . . “
His brows almost united in a straight line with the irritation he was feeling. “Pesquiera fled like a polecat! The governor had over four hundred men, and he retreated to Hacienda La Concepcion. Garnier controls Ures.”
The rain was landsliding now, the wind screaming, and the lightning exploding its fireworks across the sky. He dismounted and lifted her down, while the heaven unleashed its fury about the returning soldiers. The two of them sought the r
efuge beneath the wagon, and he pulled her into the folds of his huge serape. "You’re shivering,” he said.
"You'd think I would be used to the cold after the New England winters, but it’s a bitter cold up here . . . and I’m frightened. Law. I’m frightened of what you’ll tell me.”
He reached beneath the serape and withdrew a flask. “Drink some,” he told her. “It’ll warm you. And give you courage.” She shook her head. She would face this on her own. “You’re sending me away.”
He took a long swallow and shoved in the cork. “We’re going into guerrilla warfare, Cate. Deep into the valleys and the mountains of the Yaqui and Mayo rivers. Our headquarters will be in the jungles with our Indian allies, few though they are. You won’t like it. There will be mosquitoes and rain and a heat that’s nothing like Tucson’s. It steams you alive.”
“And where would I go?” she cried above the roar of the rain and thunder. "There’s no place for me but here, at your side!”
He looked down at her before turning his gaze up at the darkened board bottom of the wagon. But he still saw the intelligent eyes, the warm, giving mouth. "Our headquarters, in San Marcial, will be only a day’s ride from Guaymas. You’re going back to the States, Cate, where you belong—on the first U.S. vessel out of Guaymas.”
“No,” she said with a calm assurance that he always found amusing. She leaned over him, her hands splayed on his chest. “If you’re trying to diplomatically tell me you no longer want me as your—at your side. I’m quite capable of keeping up with your expedition—or guerrilleros, as you now term yourselves. And I will. I can fend for myself if I have to, but I will not be driven away.”
He sighed. “I fully believe you could convince Maximilian to give up and return to Austria if you had half a chance to talk to him. You’re so damn logical, Cate.”
She put her fingertip on the full bottom lip, and he felt that familiar rush of heat whenever with her in close proximity. ‘‘Dear God, I wish that were so, but it isn’t. I can’t be logical about you. And there’s only one person I want to convince. Not Maximilian, but you. Law, I came to the Arizona Territory with an empty cup, and you have filled it. I will not return to that arid life I led before.”
“Then let me fill your cup again.” He laughed . . . laughter that died away at the passion shining in her eyes. He rolled her over on her back. His leg half-covered hers, his fingers freed the breasts of their constriction so that his mouth could taste the sustenance it hungered for. His questing hand slid beneath the band of her skirt to entangle in the soft, dark down. She moaned as his fingers found that tiny knot of flesh. His lips deserted the tumescent nipple his teeth tugged at to silence her wild murmurs of ecstasy. It was not the time to make love, with nature’s elements shrieking in protest about them, with the wound throbbing at his thigh. But there was a greater throbbing inside him that had to be silenced.
He shoved the skirt up past her arching hips. He could hear her urgent breathing, hear his own ragged breath drumming in his ears. He had to have her. Now. He had wanted to court her with the patience and tenderness she deserved. But those noble thoughts were lost in the haze of compelling need. He thrust inside her, forgetting his pain, ignoring her own whimper of pain. He shoved deep. Deeper. Faster. Harder. And she cried out as her body answered. They moved in unison. Slamming. Pounding. Driving toward that ultimate fusion.
By ridding himself of his seed, he would rid himself of her, his need for her . . . this great ache that consumed him whenever she looked at him with those eyes that burned with wanting. A final explosion. The blaze of colors. The temporary suspension of time and place. And Cate’s sweet, sweet lips, moving . . . giving . . . wanting again.
CHAPTER 21
Impatiently Law sat while Catherine, kneeling beside him, bandaged the wound. “You should have told me last night,” she reprimanded him. “It could have gotten infected.”
He grinned down at her from the camp stool which he straddled. “You sound like a schoolmarm . . . Miss Cate. Besides, if I had let you attend the wound, then I wouldn't have discovered what a truly astonishing woman you are.”
Blushing, she grinned, a grin that faded as she began to shiver, the second time that morning a spasm of coughing had seized her. Law held out the flask from which she had so recently poured its fiery contents on his ulcerated flesh. “Drink,” he commanded. “It sounds as if you need it worse than my leg does. You must have caught a cold in last night’s rain.”
She hesitated, not liking the bitter, burning liquid. But the adamant set of his lips, beautiful lips with their easy grin, she thought, told her he would most likely make her drink the mescal if she did not comply. She took a tentative sip and found that after the initial burning, it did set off a pleasant warming once it reached the stomach.
As the brigade moved out that day, traveling southwest toward the rendezvous with General Morales’s Juarista troops, the chills abated, although she experienced periods of exhaustion and sapping weakness over the days that followed.
From Tucson's grassy Santa Cruz valley the terrain had changed to low brown hills, then a cholla wasteland, and finally rock-strewn canyons. Now the landscape was altering again as patches of green valleys and tree-mantled mountains painted the horizon. The farther south the brigade traveled, the more thickly grew the trees beneath the warmer, more humid sunlight, and vines began to drop like snakes from palm and mahogany branches intertwined overhead, reminding her how her life was intertwined with Law’s.
Law at last led the brigade up out of the lowlands into the mountains, where the verdant foliage was less thick and the air not so steamy. She could almost feel the cooler air inflate her shriveling lungs, so that it seemed by the time they reached the Indian rancheria her spells of weakness and chills were waning.
The guerrilla headquarters, hidden in one of the many canyons that twisted and tangled through the Sierra Madre mountain range, afforded an unexpected view of civilization for her. The rancheria was a cluster of thirty or forty beehive-like brush wickiups peppering a tableland high in the mountains.
People were everywhere, mostly men, though a few children played before the wickiup doorways and several women with coarse Indian features talked and joked as they pummeled cornmeal with their metates. Yaqui and Mayo Indians, Mexican peones and bandits, American soldiers—even some Germans who had immigrated to the more lucrative Sonora mines after the first flush of the California gold rush had paled—these were the Juaristas who would liberate Mexico from the French invaders.
While Law and Tranquilino met with General Morales—a short but darkly good-looking Mexican—Catherine and Filomena were led off to a lovely evergreen-shaded knoll by a smiling, flat-faced Indian woman with bangs that covered her brows. Through rudimentary gestures and broken Spanish, Meija was able to make Catherine and Filomena understand that the women were to construct wickiups for their men. The Indian women would erect wickiups for those soldiers who did not have their own women or wished for more shelter than that offered by the pup tent some possessed. At a stream nearby, two women wove reeds that would form the thatching for the wickiup’s roof, and Meija tried to demonstrate how easily the weaving was accomplished.
Catherine would have liked nothing better than a drink of cool water from the stream, rather than the brackish water Law had offered her from his japanned canteen, and then a nap beneath the shady aspen. But she would not be less of a woman than the other soldaderas. While the soldiers fell out to rub down travel-weary horses, she began the task of erecting the wickiup. Actually, she had to admit that she was taking a great deal of pleasure in the work, for it would be the first home she and Law would share.
The actual construction of the wickiup went much more quickly than she had anticipated, and by the time Law emerged from General Morales's wickiup with the general and Tranquilino on either side, she was installing the baskets for dried food and cooking utensils along the inside walls.
She had thought how dirty and disheveled she had t
o look with the calico skirt and blouse Filomena had lent her stained with dust and sweat and her hair falling from its knot and trailing about her shoulders. But Law crossed to her and took her hand, saying, “You are muy hermosa, Cate. Much more beautiful, much more alive, than that stiff young lady I first met in Tucson.”
She knew she would never tire of hearing the flowery compliments on his lips. If only he would say that he loved her. She let him pull her inside the wickiup. Though it was but twilight, he scooped her into the cradle of his arms and, hunkering on one knee, lowered her onto the soft bedding of evergreens she had made. “Mi corazon, mi alma," he whispered, the true Latin lover now. “My mind has been diverted from its purpose all day long by thoughts of this time.”
She would have rained kisses on the fierce brown face, but he took her fingers, kissing each one softly, and next her palms, her right first then her left. She could not have imagined so much time could be given over to the bringing of pleasure to a loved one. Then he took the pins from her hair, scattering them carelessly on the floor. “Always leave your hair down, Cate,” he murmured, burying his face in the cascade of her dark brown tresses.
After that he could it seemed as thought a feverish hunger seized him. He did not take his eyes off her while he stripped. “I had not thought that the urge to possess you again, you above all others, would be so great.”
Why me, a woman a full five years older, a woman who wants all the things in life he does not . . . a house and children and a structured life?
Catherine stirred the ashes and lime into the boiling coconut oil. The bubbling mixture certainly did not look or smell like the rose-scented soap she had known in Baltimore, nor the coarser castile soap she had used at Cristo Rey. But the fact that she was making it was a triumph for her.
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