Desperado

by Sandra Hill

  Before she gave up her dreams for deep sleep again, she thought, That’s the nice thing about dreams. Blankets can dance and puppies talk.

  Moments later, she entered a new dream. This time, she was holding a baby in her arms. “Oh, sweet baby!” she cooed.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” the baby growled in a deep voice. It must be a boy baby.

  Helen looked down at the black-haired infant, and tears filled her eyes. A child to love! She would never be lonely again. Her dream come true. She ran her fingers through its surprisingly thick hair and cradled it closer. The infant’s mouth clamped over her breast, rooting.

  Whoa! This baby has some suction power. And teeth.

  Teeth?

  Her eyes shot open. “Oh, baby!” she exclaimed.

  “You called?” Rafe grinned and slid himself up her body. Lying on top of her, with elbows braced on either side of her head, he began to lower his mouth to hers.

  She realized that her breasts were full and taut, pressed against his chest. Her legs parted and rubbed sensuously against his furry thighs. The fire had died down to embers, and dawn light filtered through the cave opening. Obviously, this “dream” had been going on for some time.

  “What have you been up to, Rafe?” she chided with mock seriousness.

  “Exploring.” He nipped at her bottom lip. “You wouldn’t wake up. So, I started without you.”

  “Oh. Did I miss anything special?”

  “Probably. I guess I’d better start all over again, huh?”

  And he did.

  “I don’t suppose you swabbed the decks yet?”

  “No, but I did raise the flag.” He ground himself against her to demonstrate.

  “Some flag!” she remarked dryly.

  “Some prow!” he countered, rubbing his crisp chest hairs across her breasts.

  “Man the gunwales, matie.”

  “Anchors aweigh.”

  “Is that a whale on the starboard?”

  “No, it’s a tongue hard-on.”

  “You fool!”

  “Just call me Captain Hook.”

  “Who said you get to be captain?”

  “Well, I’m steering this boat right now.”

  “Can I steer later?” she asked sweetly, cupping his “hook” in both hands.

  “Aye-aye, Tinkerbell,” he choked out.

  They stopped clowning around then, and this time their lovemaking took on a slow, poignant character. Helen understood without Rafe saying the words that he fully intended that this third time would be the last until they were back in modern civilization with birth control protection.

  So, he cherished her body with gentle caresses and lingering kisses. And kept murmuring, “Last time, last time, last time . . .”

  She basked in his expert ministrations, stifling her contrary thoughts, “In your dreams, in your dreams, in your dreams . . .”

  He and St. Augustine had a lot in common . . .

  A few hours later, Rafe was outside saddling the horses.

  They’d already eaten breakfast—a hearty meal of fatty bacon, undercooked beans, stale bread, and God-awful coffee. A Sunday brunch at the Beverly Wilshire couldn’t have tasted better.

  Helen was still inside the cave, gargling and meditating, no doubt, but Rafe didn’t care today. Nope, he was feeling mellow, and he couldn’t stop smiling. Hell, he even caught himself whistling one time until F. Lee gave him one of those “don’t-you-dare” looks. Translated, “If you whistle, I get gas.” Rafe stopped whistling.

  When Helen came out finally, carrying a saddlebag with their provisions, she was smiling, too. And he stopped smiling.

  She’d combed her unruly red hair back into a ponytail, tied with a strip of cloth. She wore the ugly green gown over her camouflage pants because they’d both agreed that they couldn’t continue to avoid the mining camps on the way north. Her fresh scrubbed face gazed up at him adoringly as she walked closer, marred only by the whisker burns on her cheeks and the puffiness of her lips. He saw a dark bruise on her neck and another on the soft inner skin of her upper arm. There were lots more under the concealing dress—he knew because he’d examined every delicious one of them earlier—and just as many on his own body.

  His heart skipped a beat, then seemed to swell inside his chest with love for this woman. She was so beautiful.

  He loved her. And she loved him. A miracle.

  But one thing became alarmingly clear in that instant when she smiled at him. There was no way Helen had accepted his decision not to make love again.

  She dropped the saddlebag at his feet and raised her lips to give him a fleeting kiss. “Good morning,” she whispered throatily, and walked over to her horse, hips swaying. She started whistling right off.

  Helen was a woman on a mission. And he was the target.

  He cringed. “Helen, we have to set some new ground rules.”

  “Oh,” she said, already in the saddle. “I thought you didn’t like rules.”

  “I don’t, but sometimes they’re necessary. Like now.”

  “You have a hickey on your neck.”

  He counted to five, silently, for patience. “Helen, I have five hickeys, and one of them in a place that would shock you.”

  “Really? Did I do it, or did you?”

  “Do what? Give myself a love bite there?”

  She grinned.

  “Stop changing the subject. This is serious. Last night was wonderful. Incredible. But it can’t happen again until we get back to the future. It just can’t.”

  “And?”

  “And I need your cooperation.”

  “I think I’ve been cooperative,” she said suggestively.

  “Helen, please. Help me here. This is going to be hard enough as it is, without you tempting me.”

  “Do I tempt you?”

  “All the time. That’s why we have to set some rules.”

  “Like?”

  “No sex.”

  “Define sex.”

  He gave out a loud whoosh of exasperation. “No intercourse. No naked bodies. No sleeping together.” He was getting aroused already, just thinking about what they wouldn’t be doing.

  She frowned, then smiled brightly. “I can handle that. There are other ways, you know.”

  He busied himself tying the extra saddlebag on his horse, trying not to imagine those other ways. He fought for the words that would convince Helen of his determination. Damn, he was a lawyer. Words shouldn’t be hard for him, but they were when the adversary facing him knew how to make his tongue get hard.

  “Helen, there aren’t going to be other ways, either. I know myself. It wouldn’t stop there.”

  “Can’t you control your sexual drive with women?”

  “I’ve got real good control, babe. With other women. Not with you.”

  He ignored her smile of satisfaction and tried to explain. “It’s like St. Augustine said, abstinence works, moderation doesn’t. In other words, a hard-on has no brain.”

  “St. Augustine said that?”

  “Not in those words exactly,” he said, grinning. “But he was right. Don’t start the horse to galloping unless you plan to take a ride.”

  She laughed. “I can’t believe you know the works of St. Augustine.”

  “Hey, I told you—my mother was a dictator. Other kids got Doctor Seuss for bedtime stories. We got the lives of the saints.”

  She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Wasn’t St. Augustine the guy famous for saying, ‘Lord, make me pure and chaste—but not quite yet?’”

  “So?”

  “No wonder he’s your favorite saint!” she hooted. “But back to your birth control problems . . . I don’t see why you couldn’t . . . well, you could always, uh . . .”

  “You want me to ‘leave before the gospel?’ Good old coitus interruptus?”

  She nodded. Her face was scarlet with humiliation.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Number one, I’d p
robably forget—you have a way of turning my brain to mush—or I’d say ‘to hell with it’ at the last minute—that’s also related to your turning my brain to mush. But, most important, the method’s not foolproof.”

  She pulled a face at him for his firm refusal. “Okay, so you’re saying no actual sex and no other sex and no sharing the same blanket. Any other rules?”

  “No touching.”

  Her eyes widened with shock. “At all?”

  “It’s gotta be that way, babe. And no kissing, either.”

  She cast him one of those wounded looks, one women use to make men feel guilty.

  He did.

  Laughter bubbled out from her lips then and continued until tears streamed down her face. Wiping them away, she nudged her horse into a slow canter, moving down the hill away from him. When he caught up with her at the bottom, she was still laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You. Oh, Rafe, I can’t believe you think that we won’t make love again for weeks, maybe longer. It’s impossible.”

  “Not if you cooperate.”

  She lifted an eyebrow in disbelief.

  “I’m stronger than you think.”

  “We’ll see.” Her mouth turned up in a Cheshire cat smile.

  “So, do you agree to the rules?”

  “Sure,” she said, blinking with exaggerated innocence.

  She lied, and Rafe damn well knew it. St. Augustine, you’d better send down some heavy-duty ammunition. I’m a man in deep, deep trouble.

  Sex and danger . . . what a combination! . . .

  Four days later, they made their way down the final stretch to Rich Bar, the northernmost town on the Feather River, a mining camp that had been established earlier that year on rumors of a lake of gold.

  Helen’s nerves were strained almost to the breaking point. Rafe had proven formidable in his efforts to resist making love with her. Among other things, he forced her to sleep on the other side of the fire every agonizing night, darn him.

  It hadn’t been easy for Rafe, either. Several times, the howling of wolves had awakened Helen in the middle of the night. She would open her eyes to find Rafe staring hungrily at her across the fire, white-lipped with restraint.

  But it was the grueling travel that took its greatest toll on them both. Neither had anticipated the rough terrain as they climbed higher and higher into the mountains on their route north.

  Riding hard each day, they passed through such colorful camps as Rough and Ready, Lousy Level, Helltown, Gouge Eye, Dead Man’s Bar, Whiskey Flat, and Slumgullion Gulch. They recognized a similarity in them all: Gaming houses and brothels popped up like mushrooms after a rain in every mining town, all with canvas tents, rough plank buildings, and the everlasting crimson calico.

  The miners who endured the backbreaking labor of panning gold under the hot sun all day long could be seen using the same pans over a campfire at night. And often the entrée du jour was rattlesnake, or “bush fish,” as the delicacy was called, with a side of those neverending beans.

  They camped by late afternoon each day so that Rafe could pan for gold in the many streams they passed—streams that were crowded almost hip to hip with gold-hungry prospectors. Thus far, Rafe had managed to accumulate a small bag of gold dust, worth about fifty dollars. Not much, but encouraging.

  More than once, they’d been forced to seek other camping sites because of mutterings about a dirty Mex trying to steal the gold that rightly belonged to true-blooded Americans. On a few occasions, Helen had wanted to take a stand and fight off the bigots, but Rafe insisted they pick their battles wisely, not ones in which they were so outnumbered.

  “Besides, I’m used to it, babe,” he said over and over.

  Helen wanted desperately to fight for him, to wipe away all the hurts he’d suffered over the years—still suffered.

  For now, she could only think about the dangerously narrow trail they were traveling. They were proceeding down the five-mile trail to Rich Bar—a narrow path along a steep incline with a dangerous precipice on one side. One misstep of their horses, and they would fall hundreds of feet down the almost perpendicular cliff into a dun-colored canyon.

  Rafe kept throwing out encouraging words behind her. “Just a little bit longer, honey. Don’t give up. You’ll be okay.”

  She couldn’t even turn to glare at him. Not that she was able to answer anyway, her jaw was clenched so tightly.

  “Just stare straight ahead,” Rafe advised. “Don’t look to the side.”

  So Helen concentrated on the tiny valley ahead of them, only eight hundred or so yards in length, and a mere thirty yards wide. The Feather River, Las Plumas, meandered along at its base, hemmed in by lofty mountains of beautiful fir trees.

  Finally, they reached the bottom of the trail, which emerged at the edge of the small town. A gloomy atmosphere pervaded the dismal camp. Little sunshine ever reached this deep recess in the tall mountains.

  Miners right and left put down their tools and gaped. She wasn’t sure if it was shock at the sight of two new travelers, or that rare commodity—a woman.

  Helen was shaking so badly she couldn’t dismount. Rafe came up quickly and pulled her off the horse and into his arms.

  “Damn, Helen, I’m sorry. I never would have come if I’d known it would be this dangerous.” He was holding her tightly, one hand at the nape of her neck, pressing her face against his heaving chest, the other hand making wide sweeps across her back. “Stop shaking, honey, please. It’s okay now.”

  It was the first time in four days that Rafe had embraced her, and she clung to him with embarrassing fervor. Even when her shivering ceased, she wrapped her arms around his waist, relishing the feel of his warm body.

  She drew away slightly. “I love you, Rafe.”

  “I know, honey. I love you, too.”

  “But right now, I hate you, too.”

  He grimaced. “I don’t blame you, I guess.”

  “And do you know what the worst part is?”

  “What?”

  “We have to go back up that blasted trail to go home.”

  What if they were stuck in the past? . . .

  A week later, they were still stuck in Rich Bar, and Rafe was not a happy camper. “I hate beans. I hate red calico. I hate fleas and lice. I hate the song, ‘Sweet Betsy from Pike.’ I hate chewing tobacco. I hate celibacy,” were just a few of his complaints.

  She wasn’t feeling too jolly herself, for numerous reasons.

  No Pablo. Apparently, he hadn’t arrived yet, although his brother Carlos worked as a bartender at the Indiana House.

  No gold prospecting. Rich Bar had a law against claims for foreigners, and Rafe, being of Mexican heritage, was considered a foreigner. But they couldn’t leave Rich Bar for other diggings until Pablo arrived and they retrieved the precious harness and parachutes.

  No sex. This had become a particularly tense subject since they were pretending to be married and, therefore, had to share a bed at the Empire Hotel. Rafe claimed his jaw hurt from grinding his teeth all the time, and Helen had taken to ooohming almost twenty-four hours a day.

  No money. Their meager supply of gold, earned in Sacramento and replenished slightly with Rafe’s prospecting along the way, was fast dwindling with the exorbitant prices for lodging and food. Rafe had been forced to take a job dealing monte in a local gambling hall when his efforts to set up a law office failed because no one would hire a Mexican attorney.

  She was considering taking a job as a “waitress” at the Lucky Dollar Saloon, which pretty much amounted to letting a bunch of lecherous men ogle her in a revealing gown while she handed out overpriced drinks. That was why she’d asked Rafe to come now to the Indiana House for dinner.

  She studied him across the table, fiddling with his tin cup of coffee. He wore the usual miner’s garb of red flannel shirt with suspenders and homespun trousers. He’d shaved just before they left the hotel—God, she liked to watch him shave—and his smooth skin only ac
cented the dark circles of worry under his eyes and the bleak dullness in his eyes.

  She reached out a hand and covered his on the table.

  “No touching, remember?” he said huskily, raising his chin to look at her. At the same time, he turned his hand and twined his fingers with hers. Their gazes held, and the pulse in her wrist beat strongly against his.

  “Rafe, Jack Fulton asked me to work in the Lucky Dollar. The pay would be . . . well, phenomenal.”

  He tugged his hand out of their clasp. “Doing what? Corkscrewing?”

  She recoiled. “Waitressing.”

  “No.”

  “But, Rafe, we can use the money, and—”

  “No.” He glared at her icily.

  Helen knew Rafe’s pride was at stake. He wanted to be able to care for her himself. But pride could only go so far.

  “Maybe we should leave Rich Bar for a while and go somewhere else where I can file a claim. We could leave word with Carlos to tell his brother how desperately we need the parachutes.”

  “You know that’s not a good solution.”

  “You’re not working for a damned whorehouse.” His face was flushed with anger.

  “It’s not a whorehouse. It’s a bar, and there’s nothing wrong with being a waitress.”

  “Get real! It may be a bar, but what the hell do you think Rosalinda and Irene do there?”

  Rosalinda was married to Carlos. She and Irene were among the half-dozen females in the entire town of five hundred men.

  “They’re hookers, sweetie,” Rafe continued more softly, “and Jack plans the same for you, too. If not now, eventually.”

  Helen blushed. She’d suspected as much. “Then let’s go back to the landing site. I could probably make a parachute with some canvas material and lightweight rope.”

  “Are you nuts? No way am I jumping off a cliff with a homemade parachute. And neither are you.”

  She tapped her fingertips on the tabletop, deep in thought. “Rafe, have you ever considered that we might not be able to return to the future? What would we do if we couldn’t go home?”

  He pondered her question seriously for several seconds, then smiled. “We’d hit the sack so fast they’d think a tornado had hit town. We’d make love every which way, and then some. We’d set a new world record for multiple orgasms. We’d probably come up for air in about a week, then go down again.”