I am afraid, she told herself, and she knew that deep down she really was. But she couldn’t think properly, couldn’t concentrate on what might happen to her as soon as the men stopped their horses.
It was as though she’d buried her fear. Laid it away beneath thoughts that were easier to bear. Insignificant thoughts like what her captor had eaten.
The noise of the horses’ hooves as they sped over the ground drummed into her ears, but in her mind she heard only one thing.
The sound of Sawyer’s voice.
One day a man will teach you everything you want to know and more, Zafiro.
Like a fist, sorrow bashed into her heart. Sawyer would not teach her everything she wanted to know.
She would never see him again. Nor would she ever see Tia, Azucar, Lorenzo, Pedro, or Maclovio. No one would find her. No one could save her.
Because no one at La Escondida could ride or shoot.
“Here!” she heard one of the other men shout, and the sound of his voice made her feel as though he’d poured ice water down her bare back. She began to shiver, and shiver by shiver her fear returned.
The men stopped their horses, and the animals panted wildly, their necks lathered with the white foam of exertion. One horse, a pretty chestnut mare, seemed to be in serious distress.
Zafiro wondered if she would die along with the abused horse.
Her captor released her suddenly. She slipped to the rocky ground, bruising her knees and cutting the palm of her left hand. The air jarred from her lungs, she remained on her hands and knees trying to breathe until one of the other men grabbed her arm and hauled her to her feet.
His handsomeness surprised her. Although not as handsome as Sawyer, his features were pleasing, his hair was a rich shade of dark brown, and his body was well built with muscle.
His cool green eyes roamed the length of her frame, finally settling upon her sapphire. He reached out to touch the large jewel, running his finger around its sides.
“I’ve never seen a sapphire like this,” he declared, and when he spoke Zafiro noticed his straight white teeth.
“I’ve never seen a woman like this,” another man said.
She watched the second man approach her and could not quell a shudder of revulsion. While the man who touched her sapphire was handsome, the man walking toward her now was the ugliest human being she’d ever seen.
He looked like a hog. A wide pug nose, thick lips, eyes like dark, round stones, and fat all over his face made him truly hideous.
She didn’t want him to touch her, but he did. Her stomach pitched when she felt his hand on her breast.
“I get her first.”
The man who announced his place in line was the man with whom she’d ridden, the man who’d caught her as she’d fled through the woods. He was the biggest of the three, as big as Maclovio.
The men would rape her. The big one would be first, then the other two would fight over who would be second.
She flinched when the big man pulled a button off her blouse. Then he pulled off two more.
Her mind blinded her to what was happening, and in her thoughts, her heart, her soul, she pondered the fact that she’d offered her virginity to Sawyer. He hadn’t taken it in the barn, the dirty, mouse-infested barn.
And now she would lose her innocence on a bed of rocks. To three men she didn’t even know.
She didn’t know when her tears began, but by the time she noticed them, her face was wet with them.
The big man pushed her back down to the ground, and while she lay there on the stones she watched him fumble with the fastenings of his breeches. The reality of her situation burst through the daze that clouded her mind.
And when he knelt on the ground beside her and began to lift her skirt, the instinct for survival jolted through her. Quick as a cat, she swatted at his face, her nails scraping into his filthy flesh.
His blood stained the tips of her fingers, and the sight of the red fluid incited fury within her. She’d never hurt anyone or anything in her life, but now, as she stared up at the three men who would ravish her, her entire body shook with the need and the want to kill.
Deep growling noises coming from her throat and sounding horrible even to her own ears, she kicked her captor in the groin, almost laughing with satisfaction when he screamed and doubled over.
Instantly, the other two men were upon her, one on each side, both holding her down. Somehow she managed to notice they’d opened their breeches.
Their straining man parts sickened her so thoroughly that she gagged. Valiantly struggling to control the desire to retch, she twisted her neck toward her shoulder and bit the hairy hand that held her there.
“Dammit! You bitch!” He drew back his hand, preparing to hit her hard.
But in the next moment the hand he balled into a fist burst into a mass of bleeding tissue and splintered bone, shattered by the sheer speed and force of a bullet.
All three men looked up from the woman on the ground and saw a black-garbed horseman galloping toward them.
Their eyes widened with recognition and shock, and for a moment they could do nothing but stare in abject astonishment.
Another explosion of gunfire, followed by a second carefully aimed bullet, instantly killed the man with cool green eyes. An expression of disbelief his final action on earth, he fell, a neat hole right in the middle of his forehead.
Zafiro almost lost the will not to retch when his body slumped over her. With his face pushed into her chest, she could feel his blood warm her breasts, but before she had time to push him off and run, the third thunder of gunfire blasted through the mountain air.
The man whose hand was destroyed died at once, his heart as shattered as his hand.
With one tremendous flash of strength Zafiro pushed the two dead men away and staggered to her feet. Just as she stood she saw the third man, the one who looked like a pig. He jumped onto his horse and rode as if the master of hell himself was after him.
Shaking so badly that she could barely stay standing, Zafiro turned and looked in the direction from where the gunfire had erupted.
What she saw nearly sent her to her knees.
A broad-shouldered man upon a coal-black stallion galloped toward her. His long gold hair whipped behind him like a gold banner, a striking contrast to the ebony hue of the cape he wore.
He held a gun in his hand, and she saw another hanging from his hip. Even from where she stood she could see the brutal fury in his eyes. It glittered like sun-washed ice.
The stallion stopped as soon as his rider tugged on the reins.
Zafiro watched the man dismount, his motions so fluid and easy that he seemed to be made of air. He tied his raven mount to the trunk of an oak and strode toward her, his black boots crunching into the mass of pebbles.
“Zafiro.”
She counted the buttons sewn down the front of his black satin cloak. Twenty-five.
Twenty-five diamonds.
She looked into Sawyer’s eyes.
And when she spoke it was with a voice stunned with amazement and awe.
“Night Master.”
Chapter Sixteen
Sawyer stared at the scarlet bloodstain on her blouse and in the valley between her breasts. More blood splattered her face. “They hurt you.”
She heard the dread in his voice, saw it reflected in his tawny eyes. “No.”
“But—”
“It is not mine.” She touched her bloodstained blouse. “It is theirs. The men you killed.”
Sawyer’s first impulse was to take her into his arms.
But he didn’t. Now that he knew she was all right, that he’d saved her from harm, the full impact of his remembered past slammed into him.
He turned away from her, not so much because he didn’t want her to see his pain. She’d sense it whether he tried to hide it or not.
But he didn’t know how to tell her about it. She’d ask; he knew she would. She’d pester him without mercy.
/> One part of him would welcome her curiosity, her concern, and the succor that might be had from her caring.
Another part of him shied from putting words to such agony, such grief, such guilt. It seemed to him that to voice such emotions would be to intensify them.
But a third part of him—an empty part he’d only realized existed since Zafiro had come into his life—longed to be filled with whatever emotions she spilled into it.
Only hours ago he hadn’t known who he really was at all.
And now he identified and admitted to three separate sides to himself.
“Sawyer?”
He felt her hand on his back. Her skin was warm, her voice was warmer.
“Sawyer, you are Night Master.”
Astonishment laced her words. He wondered if the caring he wanted from her could get past her obvious incredulity.
“Sawyer?” Zafiro moved around his black form, needing to see his eyes.
When she saw them she almost shrank away.
Never, not ever, in all the time she’d known him, had she seen his eyes express such profound misery.
She no longer saw the black cloak he wore. The glitter of the diamond buttons eluded her, and the gleam of his lethal guns dulled, then vanished.
There was another man behind the somber clothes. Not Night Master. Not the Sawyer Donovan she’d come to know either.
The other man was the real man. The man who’d been lost to him for so long.
In her mind Zafiro didn’t know what to do. Would he reject her concern? Would he continue to keep his thoughts locked away from her?
It was her heart that banished the notions. Her heart that brought a kind and caring smile to her lips.
Her heart that pushed her to curl her arms around his back and press the side of her face onto his shoulder. “Finally,” she murmured, “I am meeting the man I have longed to know.”
She looked up at him and saw him gazing down at her with an expression of hope, expectation, and yearning. “Not Night Master,” she clarified softly, her hands stroking the muscles in his back. “But you. The man I have not met yet. The man with all the memories. As I have told you about all the things I remember as a child, now you—”
“They aren’t only childhood memories,” he interrupted her. “It’s the others… The ones that…” When he stepped out of her embrace she made no objection. Confused did not begin to describe how he felt inside, she knew. Sawyer still felt the torment, more so now than before.
Biting back all the many things she wanted to say and ask, she watched as he crossed to where the two dead men lay. He stared down at them for a moment, shook his head, then walked toward the dead men’s horses.
He watched the little chestnut mare, ran his hand down her sweat-drenched neck, and picked up her reins. Leading her, he began to walk slowly all around the area.
“I remember the horse now,” he said. “The one I told you about the night I came to your room.”
“Yes,” Zafiro replied, realizing she was going to hear his stories in bits and pieces and not necessarily in proper sequence. “The horse with the strange markings. A white gelding, no?”
“With streaks of black in his mane and tail,” Sawyer added, still walking the ailing mare. “And a solid stripe of black down the front of his left foreleg. His name was Apple Lover, and he belonged to my father.”
Zafiro could almost feel the strain in her ears as she listened and clung to his every word. “Your father.” Sawyer handed the mare’s reins to Zafiro. “Yes.”
“Apple Lover.”
“Not my father’s choice of names. One of the orphans named the horse when my father bought him.”
Orphans? Zafiro repeated silently. Santa Maria, her bewilderment deepened steadily with each word he uttered!
“Can you ride, Zafiro? Ride the gelding over there and lead this mare along? Coraje won’t tolerate the gelding and won’t be able to leave the mare alone.”
Zafiro looked at the other horse, a big Appaloosa who was biting at small clumps of grass growing in the rocky ground. “Yes.” She approached the Appaloosa and took hold of his reins, while Sawyer saw to the task of divesting the dead men of their guns and other weapons. “Will you bury them, Sawyer?”
Sawyer thought about how the men had abused Zafiro. “No.”
The coldness in his voice froze solid all thoughts of arguing with him. With silent acceptance of his decision, Zafiro simply nodded.
“Up you go now.” Sawyer lifted Zafiro into the saddle. He then adjusted the stirrup straps to the length of her legs. “We’ll go slowly. You’re not used to riding, and the mare is close to exhaustion. She’s nearly been ridden into the ground and is going to need a lot of rest and good food if she’s to survive.”
“Shouldn’t we let her stand still for a while then?”
“No.” Sawyer returned to Coraje and untied the stallion’s reins from around the tree trunk. Murmuring soft words to the agitated horse, he mounted. “She’s got to keep walking so she doesn’t get chilled and her muscles don’t cramp.”
Impressed by the knowledge she never realized he had, Zafiro nodded again, then gently urged the Appaloosa toward Coraje. “We’re going back to La Escondida now?”
Sawyer kneed Coraje into a languid walk. He knew Zafiro was overcome with curiosity to hear what he’d remembered about his past, knew that she didn't want to wait until they’d reached the hideaway.
But he wasn’t going to delay their return. “You know they’re worried, Zafiro. Your people. Every one of them was frantic over your abduction.”
She realized Sawyer was right. Tia, Azucar, Maclovio, Pedro, and Lorenzo were probably completely panicked. She hadn’t thought of that. Sawyer had.
His concern for them caressed her heart.
“Small world,” Sawyer said, keeping his eyes straight ahead, but knowing Zafiro could hear him plainly as she followed along behind. “I’ve met you. Years ago. I remember that now.”
She couldn’t miss the nervousness in his voice. He wanted to tell her everything, but wasn’t certain how or where to begin. Instead, he was speaking whatever thoughts came into his mind, and he was struggling to keep from surrendering to the grief and horror his returned recollections had brought to him.
He was trying to be brave.
“Zafiro?”
“What? Oh. Yes.” She recalled the night he’d stolen the gang’s gold. How he’d smiled at her. “Yes, you stole our gold. But because you thought my eyes were pretty, you swore not to steal from us again.”
“And I never did.” Sawyer guided Coraje down a steep slope, over a large area covered with thick brush and huge gray rocks, and finally into a cool glade of juniper.
Two fat rabbits scampered out of his path, startling Coraje.
Sawyer quickly brought the stallion under control. “I’m not going to be able to stay at La Escondida, Zafiro.”
His sudden announcement nearly caused her to fall out of the saddle.
“I have to go back,” he continued, swiping at a few juniper branches as Coraje walked past them. “I’m from Synner, Texas, and I have to go back.”
“Synner?” Zafiro repeated absently.
She couldn’t concentrate on the name of the town, couldn’t remember if she’d ever been there.
“Zafiro?” He knew his news had shocked her, but he wasn’t going to keep the truth from her. “I left brothers and a sister there, Zafiro. It’s been months. Almost eight months since…since I left them.”
Zafiro made no answer. She couldn’t. Too many things to think about crowded her mind, each vying for her full attention.
His father’s horse, Apple Lover. Who were the orphans who named the oddly marked steed?
His father. Was the man still alive?
The brothers and the sister in Synner. How many? What were their ages? Who had he left them with?
She waited for him to tell her more, but he said nothing else. Watching his black satin cloak ripple behind him in the
breeze, she followed him out of the juniper woods and into the meadow where she’d first seen the men who had captured her.
He passed the berry patches and took Coraje up the hillside in which the entrance to La Escondida was carved. As they entered the hideaway his name whispered through her senses.
Sawyer.
The loss of his past had brought him to her.
The return of his memories would take him away.
With as much patience as she could muster, Zafiro allowed her elderly charges to fuss over her. Their happiness and relief over her safe return even overcame their persistent awe over Sawyer’s earlier revelation of being Night Master, and each of them took turns hugging and kissing her.
“I am fine,” Zafiro assured them for the hundredth time. She’d bathed and donned clean clothing and now felt close to normal again as she sat at the table in the great room and allowed Tia to finish tending to the bruise on her face and the scratches on her hands and knees. “Sawyer arrived before anything bad happened to me.” At the mention of Sawyer’s name everyone save Lorenzo began talking at once.
“I am so proud of my Francisco,” Tia said. "Imagine a little boy so smart that he thought of a way to dress like Night Master and save our Zafiro!”
“When he came out of the barn dressed as Night Master, I could not believe what I was seeing,” Maclovio said. “He—”
“And you should have seen him tame Coraje, chiquita,” Tia added. “The stallion—”
“All this time he has lived with us under our roof, and we did not recognize him,” Pedro declared. “We—”
“And to, think that the legendary Night Master yearns for the night when he can share my bed!” Azucar exclaimed.
Lorenzo rose from his chair and hobbled over to the window. “Where did Night Master go?”
Zafiro wondered the same thing. After their arrival into La Escondida Sawyer had instructed Maclovio to see to the two new horses and had then ridden into the forest.
He’d been gone for over an hour now. Zafiro realized he probably needed to be alone, but she could not help but wish he would hurry and come back.
“There he is!” Lorenzo shouted, the power of his own yell nearly making him lose his balance.
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