Bed of Roses

by Rebecca Paisley

  She drew away from him; her fingers trembled around her sapphire. “The nearest…village?”

  He saw the shock and hurt in her pretty blue eyes, and lowered his voice. “I told you I was leaving. Told you, but you didn’t believe—”

  “Azucar is on my rock!” Pedro shouted from across the yard, resisting Tia’s attempts to escort him into the house. “I do not mean to be disrespectful, Tia, but a soiled dove has no place on the rock that I am to build a church upon! Now, tell her to get off.”

  “I will get off when I am finished brushing my hair,” Azucar announced, shaking her brush at him. “Sawyer is back, and I am sure that he has brought gold with him. I must be beautiful for him when I go to his room.”

  “Broom?” Lorenzo asked from his spot on the cabin porch. “I will get you a broom, Azucar.” Turning, he reached for the broom that leaned against the wall by the door, but just as he took hold of the handle Maclovio burst out of the cabin and knocked him down on the porch.

  “Who ate all the apple tarts?” Maclovio demanded, holding the heavy silver sword the nuns had brought from the convent. In a drunken frenzy he lurched off the porch and began swinging and stabbing the sword at various objects in his path.

  One sharp blow left a gaping hole in the side of the woodshed, whereupon the door promptly fell off. Another vicious swing of the blade cut a swath through one of the rose gardens, and then Maclovio walked into the chicken coop.

  The feeble cage broke open, and the hens quickly squawked, flapped, and scooted their way to freedom.

  “Santa Maria, Maclovio, look what you did!” Zafiro started to race toward him, but stopped when Sawyer grabbed her arm.

  “Are you insane?” he barked down at her. “He’s a drunk with a sword! A combination like that could get you killed!”

  “What do you care?” she shouted back at him, struggling to remove her arm from his hold. “You are leaving! Now, let go of me before Maclovio destroys everything we have!”

  Sawyer saw that Maclovio was now using the sword to hack through a row of throw rugs that Zafiro had beaten clean earlier in the day. The rugs hung on a rope strung from oak tree to oak tree, and in only a few moments two of them were slashed beyond repair.

  He let go of Zafiro’s arm. “I’m going to knock him senseless,” he seethed.

  “Do not hurt him, Sawyer!” Zafiro cried when he began limping toward Maclovio. “Dios mío, please do not hurt—”

  “In his state nothing could hurt him!”

  When he saw Sawyer coming at him, Maclovio raised the sword and smiled. “At last we will fight, eh, Sawyer Donovan? I have been waiting for a very long time to smash your face, and now I will do it!”

  Knowing that his leg would prevent him from participating in a long fight, Sawyer realized he had precious little time to subdue the man. Gritting his teeth against the pain that flared through his thigh, he lunged toward Maclovio. His head rammed into Maclovio’s stomach while his hand yanked the sword from Maclovio’s grasp. He tossed the weighty blade into the nearby rose garden.

  Both men crashed to the ground. Stunned, Maclovio lay still, blinking up at the stars and smiling the ridiculous smile of a man thoroughly overcome by liquor. “Yes, Sawyer,” he slurred, “they came from all around to see me gentle the horses. Those were the days, my friend, but now…now they are over.”

  Sawyer staggered to his feet and glared down at the inebriated old outlaw, his anger quickly waning when he saw that Maclovio’s entire face was wet with tears.

  “You have gold now, Sawyer?” Azucar asked from her seat on the rock.

  He looked up and saw she was still brushing that dry and brittle-as-straw hair of hers as if it were the longest, most luxurious set of tresses ever to grace a woman’s head.

  And Tia, he noticed, continued trying to get Pedro into the house, a fairly impossible task as Pedro lay prostrate on the ground in front of a small tree that he swore was the True Cross.

  Snorting sounds then took Sawyer’s attention to the porch, where Lorenzo lay sleeping. The porch was hard, and Lorenzo’s head had fallen halfway into the hole where the missing plank had once been. But the old man was sleeping as soundly as he would have had his bed been made of a multitude of down-filled mattresses.

  A wave of pity came over Sawyer, and the feeling intensified as he saw Zafiro chase several chickens into the dark woods. If she didn’t catch the fowl there would be no eggs.

  She and her people needed those eggs.

  God, they needed so many things.

  He resisted going soft, however, reminding himself repeatedly that if he stayed at La Escondida, not only would he be forced to deal with his loss of memory, but a loss of his sanity as well.

  Still, he reckoned he could perform one good deed for Zafiro and help her find her chickens. She and her companions needed those eggs. He’d stay and find her chickens, and then he’d leave.

  His walk through the woods went slowly because he could hardly see where he was going, but he finally approached the stream. Weeping sounds melded with the gentle rush of the water. With naught but the silvery moonlight to aid him, Sawyer looked around the area.

  There on the creek bank sat Zafiro, crying into the feathers of the two flapping chickens she held in her lap. She was the most pitiful sight Sawyer could ever remember seeing. Her small shoulders shook with her sobs, she made deep, choking sounds, and even from where he stood, Sawyer could see that her chickens were wet with her tears.

  He joined her at her spot by the water. “You’re going to drown those chickens if you don’t stop crying all over them.”

  She hadn’t heard him approach. The sudden sound of his voice scared her so badly that she jumped up off the ground, dropped her chickens, and almost fell into the stream. Her pulse pounding in her ears, she looked up at Sawyer.

  He was leaving.

  She’d lost her chickens.

  Maclovio had destroyed half of La Escondida.

  And Luis… The deep, cold knowledge that he was soon going to find her…

  Zafiro felt her knees buckle and would have fallen to the ground had Sawyer not reached for and caught her. “The danger,” she wept into his shirt. “It is coming.”

  “What?”

  “And my chickens are gone. Now we will have no eggs. The barn is going to collapse on Pancha and Rayo, the fences are all… Oh, Sawyer, what am I going to do? I try,” she said, sniffling, “but I cannot do everything all by myself!”

  When she began to sob again, her slender body quaking in his arms, Sawyer didn’t know what else to do but hold her. Gently, he rubbed her back, his fingers slipping through the midnight silk of her hair.

  “Your chickens are all around here somewhere.” He tried to comfort her. “They’ll probably come home when they get hungry enough. You know how chickens are—always on the lookout for grand adventures.”

  He glanced down to see if his silly chicken story had made her smile and saw that it had not. “Zafiro—”

  “I wish my grandfather was still here. He would know what to do. And my father, too. My father, he died when I was very small. I held his head in my lap when he died.”

  Sawyer’s sympathy toward her tripled. “I’m sorry. About your father.”

  She nodded miserably. “I was so little when he died that I do not have many memories of him. That is a very sad thing to me, so I understand how you must feel when you cannot remember your own father. Or your mother. You do not even know if they are alive. I am very sorry that you do not have your memories, Sawyer.”

  That she could grieve over his loss of memory when she had so many troubles of her own touched Sawyer very deeply. A while passed before he spoke again. “What happened to your father?” he asked gently.

  Zafiro slipped out of his embrace and turned to face the stream. For a long moment she watched the moonlight spill over the water like glitter pouring down from the sky. “A very horrible man shot and killed him.” Luis. His very name caused her to shudder, but she woul
d not tell Sawyer about him. What was the use? Sawyer was leaving.

  Her boots digging into the soft sand of the creek bank, she spun away from the water and trudged toward the path in the woods. “I will look for my chickens by myself,” she said when she heard Sawyer’s footsteps behind her. “You want to leave, and I will not ask you to stay.”

  As he followed her out of the woods and into the yard, he tried to feel relieved that she’d accepted his decision to leave. But worry pestered him like an itch he couldn’t reach. “Zafiro—”

  “You do not have to be my warrior in shining steel,” she said, stopping and turning to face him. “Go now. I will pray that you find your memories and much happiness, Sawyer.”

  The squeak in her voice and the glimmer of desperation in her wide eyes seemed to reach out to him as if with hands and fingers, for he could almost feel the trembling caress of her despair.

  Shoving his fingers through his hair, he turned, walked a few feet away from her, and saw something shining within the mass of red roses.

  The sword.

  He retrieved the great weapon. Its fine hilt felt cold and hard in his hands.

  Was it really the sign he’d required of heaven?

  He didn’t know. But something—whether it was a damn set of infuriating coincidences, his own maddening conscience, or the power of a higher being—something had brought him here in the first place and taken him back when he’d tried to leave. No bewildering or painful emotion he possessed disputed that fact.

  Holding the sword out in front of his chest, he turned the blade and watched moonbeams frost the steel with silver.

  Finally, at last long, someone is here to make sure that no harm comes to us.

  As he held the sword, Zafiro’s statement came back to him.

  She didn’t understand. Didn’t know.

  It wasn’t that he wouldn’t keep her and her charges from harm.

  He couldn’t. If he tried, he’d fail. Some deep-down horrible place inside him knew that he would.

  But hidden away from the world as Zafiro and her companions were, what harm could come to them anyway? he asked himself. The two most dangerous beings around the place were Jengibre and Maclovio, neither of whom posed any real threat to Zafiro or the rest of her charges.

  Still holding the sword out in front of his chest, Sawyer deliberated. Maybe he could make a few chivalrous repairs around the place, he mused. And perhaps he could get Zafiro some livestock from somewhere and teach her to breed the animals so she and her charges would always have fresh meat.

  Yes, he could do those things. And then she could take care of herself. Herself and her gang.

  Maybe he could be her knight in shining armor after all.

  Smiling as broadly as a man could with a realization that he was probably going to regret his actions and a leg that felt as if it were about to fall off, he faced Zafiro again, held the sword against his chest, and bowed.

  “Sir Sawyer Donovan, milady. Your knight in shining armor.”

  Chapter Six

  After a full week’s worth of rest, Tia’s doctoring, and several hearty meals of venison—thanks to Mariposa’s deer-hunting skills—Sawyer’s physical condition was much improved. Despite Tia’s insistence that he was much too young to tackle heavy chores, he began preparations for all the many repairs needed around La Escondida.

  He found an array of tools in the barn, all of which Ciro and the men had once used to build the hideaway. Some of the instruments were too old to be of use, but most of them needed but a bit of cleaning and sharpening.

  Still, he could use a few new things, namely a big sack of nails. He knew he could probably find the things he needed in one of the nearby villages, but with no money and nothing with which to barter, he stood no chance of obtaining new tools.

  If only Zafiro would consent to sell her sapphire, he thought. The money from the sale would not only buy the things that would facilitate making the repairs, but a great deal of other needed items as well.

  But if Zafiro had wanted to sell the sapphire she’d have done so a long time ago. He would make do with the tools he’d found in the barn and think no more about it.

  The first thing he did was fell trees. He found the task exceedingly difficult. Not only had he not yet recovered the wholeness of his strength, but the old outlaws would not stay out of the forest. The men welcomed a chance to break their monotonous routines and help with the work, but when one towering oak almost fell on Lorenzo, Sawyer refused to continue his work until Zafiro had locked the men in the cabin.

  “You could give them some little job to do, Sawyer.”

  “Keeping them out of the woods is for their own good.”

  Zafiro was far from finished with the conversation, but first she took a moment to admire her handsome adversary. Standing in the woods beside Sawyer as he stripped leaves and bark from a long, thick branch, she watched cords of muscle bulge and relax in his arms and coil beneath the skin on his chest like big, thick snakes. Not even the scars left by his injuries detracted from the magnificence of his body.

  Cool though the forest was, she warmed as if standing in the blistering sun. “Do you know something, Sawyer? Watching you work without your shirt on makes me feel very hot. And I do not understand why.”

  He snapped up his head so quickly that a sharp pain ripped down his neck. “I thought you said Azucar told you about lovemaking.”

  “Lovemaking?” She leaned her head toward her shoulder. “What does lovemaking have to do with my feeling so hot?”

  Apparently, Azucar hadn’t gone into much detail about what desire felt like, Sawyer thought. The old soiled dove had probably skipped explaining that important part and plunged right into the physical aspects of the act itself.

  So Zafiro didn’t know as much as she thought she did.

  Sawyer almost smiled. “Those warm feelings of yours have everything to do with lovemaking, Zafiro.”

  His voice had changed, she noticed. Had gone from a normal sound to a deep and husky sort of tone that made her feel as though he were touching her.

  Caressing her bare skin.

  She felt even hotter then and unbuttoned a few buttons on her blouse to cool herself off. “I… I will have to remember to ask Azucar about this hot feeling. She will know.”

  “I could tell you,” Sawyer offered. “Better yet, I could show you.” His gaze dipped down to her chest. Now that she’d unfastened a few of her buttons, he could see the soft swells of her breasts.

  “Sawyer, you are looking at my—”

  “I know.”

  “Stop it.”

  He didn’t stop it. “You didn’t mind when I did it before.”

  “But today you are making me feel so hot that I can hardly breathe.”

  She wasn’t exaggerating, he knew. Her chest was fairly heaving, and each time she drew in a breath the opening of her bodice stretched open even wider, revealing yet more of her charms.

  Sawyer’s own breathing became a bit labored.

  He wondered if she would let him kiss her. Wondered if she’d allow him to touch her.

  He wondered if there was anyone else around who might see what he was about to do, and began scanning the area for any would-be voyeurs.

  “I locked the men in the cabin, just as you told me to do, Sawyer,” Zafiro said when she saw him looking around the woods. “But you know, there are many things they could help you do if you would only let them.”

  Her announcement thoroughly dampened his heated thoughts and feelings. Damn those three old men! Even when they weren’t around they got in his way!

  He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm. “That tree would have driven Lorenzo into the ground like a mallet hammering a nail into butter. And what about Pedro’s so-called help? He could barely lift the ax in the first place, but when he finally managed to swing it toward the tree, he almost cut Maclovio in half. I need their help like I need a hole in the head, Zafiro, so keep them in the cabin whil
e I’m working. Keep Azucar away too, for that matter. A man can’t get much done while being ravished.”

  “Muy bien,” she flared, taking a seat on the tree trunk and casting him a good, hard glare. “Fine. But you are trying to do a lot of work for just one man.”

  “I need this exercise, Zafiro. I don’t want any help, got that? I want to do everything by myself because while I was lying in bed for all that time, I got weak.”

  “All right! Do every single little thing by yourself! But do not show me your tears when you have gone up the stream without a boat.”

  He stared at her, wondering why in the world she even attempted to use expressions that were not at all familiar to her. “I won’t come crying to you when I’m up a creek without a paddle. But I won’t be up a creek without a paddle, because even though the work I’ve stayed here to do for you is a lot, it isn’t impossible. Dealing with your three men is.”

  His last statement made her wonder if the time to talk to him again about helping her men with their forgotten skills had come. Irritated and impatient with them as he was now, he wouldn’t laugh as he’d done the first time she’d broached the subject.

  He’d shout. He might even leave, especially since he believed that he was staying only until he’d finished the repairs around La Escondida—a belief he’d made clear to her on numerous occasions since the night he’d agreed to stay.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t deeply appreciate his willingness to rebuild La Escondida. But broken fences, a shabby woodshed, a rickety barn, and a missing porch step were not going to kill anyone.

  She had to tell him about Luis. Had to somehow convince him to practice fighting skills with her men.

  “Sawyer, about my men…”

  “Yeah?” He watched her carefully, not caring for the look of hesitancy on her face. She was up to something, he realized. Something that was going to irritate the hell out of him. “What about your men?”

  “Well,” she began, then gave him what she hoped was a pretty smile, “they might be across the mountain, but—”