Bed of Roses (35 page)

He felt his eyes begin to sting. “They’ve probably given up on me by now. Lost hope that I’ll be back.” The moist glitter she saw in his eyes drowned her with compassion.

“Children are not like that," she tried to make him understand. “Children hope when there is no hope. I am sure that Ira, Jesse, Jenna, and Tucker—”

“No.” Sawyer gave her his back so she wouldn’t see the spill of his emotions. “If the news of Night Master’s death reached you all the way up here in La Escondida, then Synner has heard the news as well. Ira, Jesse, Jenna, and Tucker saw me that night, Zafiro. They knew who I was. And they have no way of knowing that the reports about my death are false.”

Zafiro longed to argue, but couldn’t. Sawyer was right. If his siblings had heard the rumor about his death, they’d have no choice but to believe their big brother was dead.

“I understand now,” she murmured. “I understand why you refused to take care of us when I first asked you.”

“Yes.”

“Something in your mind, or perhaps in your heart, it remembered the deaths of your parents and Minnie and Nathaniel. You felt you had not taken care of them, but you did not know why you felt that way. And so you had the same feeling about us. And again, you did not know why.”

“Yes. And there’s more. You. When I first came to La Escondida the sight of you taking care of your people caused me to slightly remember doing the same. I didn’t know why I remembered taking care of people, of being the sole means of support for them, but I remembered. Your caring for your men, Tia, and Azucar seemed familiar to me somehow.”

His ragged whispering tore at her. Her vision blurred as tears filled her eyes, but she would not let herself cry. It was Sawyer who needed to weep. To release all the grief he’d held inside for so long.

She touched his hair and felt its sun-warmed softness caress the tips of her fingers. “You have not mourned, have you, Sawyer? Since the night you discovered that your parents, Minnie, and Nathaniel had been murdered, you have not grieved.”

He kept his back to her. “It won’t bring them back, Zafiro.”

“No.”
Dios mío,
how she hurt for him. “No, it will not bring them back, but mourning their deaths will heal you, Sawyer. Only when you allow yourself to grieve will your pain begin to lessen.”

He didn’t answer her, but she saw his shoulders shake. He was trying to battle his sorrow. Still trying to keep it locked inside.

She walked around him, took his cheeks into her hands, and aimed her gaze straight into his. The harsh words she would tell him were almost impossible to speak, but she knew in her heart he had to hear them. “You try to be brave by holding in your feelings. But you are not showing courage, Sawyer. You are being a coward.”

Stung by her brutal accusation given in the face of his torment, he spun on his heel and headed for Coraje.

“I am not going back to La Escondida until I see you grieve, Sawyer!”

He untied the horse and mounted. “Fine. Stay here then.”

She watched him canter out of the meadow and out of sight, his black cloak and golden hair whipping behind him. With more calmness than she felt, she returned to the boulder and sat down to await his return.

Five minutes passed.

Ten.

Fifteen.

But she refused to believe Sawyer would not come back for her.

Her faith proved true.

Sawyer galloped back into the meadow, then tugged Coraje’s reins so quickly that the horse reared to a stop. “I came back to tell you that you aren’t the woman I thought you were, Zafiro,” he bit down at her. “I thought you had a heart, but you—”

“I do have a heart.”

He glared at her, needing to strike out at something, someone. “I am not a coward, damn you.”

“You have a lily for a liver,” she goaded him on, returning his glare with a good hard one of her own.

“Lily-livered,” he gritted out.

“That is what I—”

“It’s not what you said! You never say anything right! You’re insane, you know that, Zafiro Maria Quintana? Insane!”

Her feelings began to tremble, but she reminded herself that Sawyer’s pain was far worse than any injury he chose to deliver to her now. “And you are afraid. Afraid to face, deal with, and fight your grief. That makes you a coward. Your belly is all yellow, Sawyer.”

“Yellow-bellied.”

“Your whole body is yellow. Even your lily liver.”

Rage rattled inside him like rocks in a tin can. He flew off Coraje’s back and pulled Zafiro off the boulder, his fingers digging into the tender flesh at the backs of her arms. “Why are you doing this?” he flared.

“They’re dead,” she returned. “They were murdered.”

He felt her words slash inside him like so many swords. “I know they’re dead!”

“You will never see them again.”

As if he’d turned around and around too many times, he felt dizzy. Unbalanced by the sheer force of his tumultuous emotions.

He pushed Zafiro away.

She staggered backward, but managed to remain standing.

And Sawyer’s scream shook the Sierra Madre Mountains. The noise sounded as if hell itself had suddenly erupted from inside the earth and was destroying every good thing in the world with fire and evil.

Then it stopped.

Sawyer sank to his knees, bowing his head so low that his chin touched his chest. Tears poured down his face so quickly that his shirt was soon wet with them. “Gone,” he whispered thickly.

“Yes, gone, Sawyer.” Her own face shining with tears, Zafiro knelt in front of him and gathered as much of his huge body as her arms could hold.

“They…they died.” He lifted his head and hid his face in the warm nest of her hair. “I couldn’t save them.”

“It was a tragedy you could not prevent, Sawyer,” Zafiro cooed. “It was not your fault.”

Sawyer wrapped his arms around her slender waist and squeezed her so hard that he heard her sharp intake of breath.

And then he began to sob, his frame shuddering so violently that Zafiro’s body shook as well.

She held him. Whispered caring words to him. She wept with him, kissed his hair, his tear-salted face, and she willed him to know that if her heart could somehow repair his broken one, then she would freely tear it from her breast and give it to him.

Dusk shadowed the meadow when Sawyer’s tears finally ceased, when his body finally stopped shaking. Zafiro still in his embrace, he laid down in the grass, in the flowers, and he turned to her, into her softness, next to her chest, where he could hear her tender heart beating a soothing sound that further eased him.

He felt her take a deep breath and knew she was about to speak.

But he was unprepared for the words she told him. “Sawyer, I love you.”

Chapter Seventeen

S
awyer raised his face from
her breast and looked into her eyes. The whisper-soft sheen of adoration he saw tinting those beautiful sapphire orbs echoed her declaration.

He didn’t know how to reply. To have gone from soul-wrenching grief to unmitigated surprise stole all reason from him.

But Zafiro saw no need for words. Surrounded by the fragrance of the flowers and the masculine scent that was Sawyer’s alone, she touched her lips to his.

Her gentle caress and the powerful caring Sawyer sensed flowing from her into him…

He couldn’t remember ever wanting anything or anyone as badly as he wanted Zafiro now.

A man in vital need of and too long deprived of the sweet succor she offered, he took her lips in a kiss that demanded everything she had to give. His fingers lacing through the wind-kissed silk of her hair, his right leg lying over her hip, he held her still and steady as he prepared to induce and accept her full surrender to him.

But what he sought, Zafiro had relinquished to him long ago. She gave what he craved with joyous abandon, smiling into his kiss and pressing her body into his so closely that to be any nearer to him would have been to be inside him.

Together and swiftly, they removed each other’s clothes. The grass and flowers were cool on their skin, and yet all they could sense was the fierce heat of their need for each other.

A low, feral sound rumbled from Sawyer’s chest when he felt Zafiro take his straining length into her hand and try to position it at the entrance to her body. Male instinct told him she needed no further preparation to accept him, but he would not join his body with hers until he was certain. He slid his fingers over her feminine mound and into the warmth of her womanhood.

He found her slick. Wet. She arched into his hand in silent supplication.

There would be pain, he knew, but there was nothing else he could do to ready her for it.

She was already so eager that even the slight touch of his fingers had set her thighs and belly to trembling.

He knelt between her thighs and lifted her legs, glad when she wrapped them around his waist. Tunneling his hands beneath her firm bottom, he raised her hips off the ground and positioned her so that the crown of his manhood kissed the dewy passage to the sweetness inside her.

He hurt to have her. His loins felt like sunbaked stone. But he hesitated, unable to rid himself of the regret of giving her pain. “Zafiro.”

Maiden though she was, she read the expression in his eyes as if words were written within them. He knew something she did not.

But she wanted to know.

And there was only one way for her to learn.

She tightened her legs around his waist.

And whispered to him.

“I love you, Sawyer.”

He folded her words into his heart, and with one sure, swift stroke he took her from her maiden’s world and made her a woman in the most intimate of ways.

“Sawyer.” His name burned from her throat on a heated breath as she struggled to understand and conquer the sharp pain his penetration had caused.

After a moment she convinced herself that it was not
her
pain she felt, but
his.
He would pour it inside her, and she would gladly take it into herself and never let it hurt him again.

She smiled up at him, telling him with her eyes that she wanted the full circle of his lovemaking.

“Zafiro.” This time when he spoke her name, his voice thrummed with the sound of relief. Lowering his body gently down to hers, he slanted his mouth across hers and groaned when she slipped her arms around his neck and locked her feet together behind his back.

He began to move within her, slowly at first, but then with faster, steadier strokes when she moved restlessly beneath him.

She cried out his name, but his mouth swallowed her voice even as his body consumed hers.

Nothing or no one could have prepared her or helped her to fully understand the exquisite sensation of being so sensuously possessed by a man. Holding a part of Sawyer inside her, squeezing him as he plunged in and out of her, went far beyond mere physical pleasure.

Her emotions danced and flickered like a handful of sparkle upon a sunlit breath of breeze.

He murmured something to her, his lips moving upon hers. She couldn’t understand what he said, but the sound of his husky voice increased her excitement, deepened her need, and heightened her yearning for the full burst of pleasure to come.

And as she tried to match the rhythmic pumping of his hips, she realized that her actions delivered to Sawyer the same wonderful bliss that his offered to her. Amazed and delighted by her discovery, she concentrated on harmonizing with his motions, relying on her instincts and his guidance to tell her what to do.

“Oh, God,” Sawyer murmured. Her innocent, slightly tentative attempts to please him flooded his loins with glorious sensations he knew he could not contain. Wishing he possessed further strength to continue fostering her own rising pleasure, but knowing that his wish was not to be granted, he relented to the powerful force of his release just as he felt the first tiny flutters of hers.

Their shared ecstasy brought them together in full awareness, and they felt the world they knew fall apart. Clinging to each other, savoring and memorizing each tingle of bliss, each deep shot of pleasure, they floated in another world, one their passion had created especially for them.

And when at last they left that world of exquisite sensual joy, when the last sparkle of rapture faded away, Sawyer slipped to the ground. With a gentleness that belied his earlier and almost savage demands of her, he gathered Zafiro into his arms.

And he thought about how right it felt to have her there.

“Y
ou were right,” Zafiro murmured
to Sawyer as she lay within the warm, comforting shelter of his brawny arms. “No one could have explained this to me. What it is like when a man and a woman join their bodies in such a way.” She pressed a graceful trail of tiny kisses up his chest, over his throat and chin, and finally to his mouth. “Thank you, Sawyer Donovan. Thank you for showing—”

“No." He touched a finger to her lips to silence her. “I’m the one who should thank you. You were made for loving, Zafiro. Made to be cherished and taken care of. If it were possible I would stay and be the man to love, cherish, and take care of you.”

His last statement hurled her straight into the bitterness of reality. “When will you leave?”

The squeak in her voice made him hurt. But he could not ease her sorrow. He had to leave La Escondida and return to Synner. “Tomorrow.”

“You will take Coraje with you. He is faster than your mule, and no one but you can ride him anyway. We will keep the Appaloosa and the little chestnut mare.”

There it was again, he mused. That squeak in her voice. He hurt for her again. “Zafiro, I—”

“You are better now.” Loath to continue discussing his departure in the morning, she changed the subject. “About your parents. Your brother and your sister.”

“I’ll always miss them.” He looked into her eyes, then peered up at the full and glorious moon.

He found the moon lacking. Zafiro’s eyes held beauty that far surpassed the glowing orb of night.

Joining his gaze with hers again, he toyed with a tendril of her ebony hair. “My parents. Minnie. And Nathaniel. And I’ll always wish I could have been there to…to keep them safe.”