Desperado (10 page)

“Even when you're hog-tied, cheek-to-cheek, with a man?”

“
Ooohm
. Meditating soothes me.
Ooohm
. My body is out of synch.
Ooohm
. Don't break my concentration.
Ooohm
. You're upsetting my rhythm.
Ooohm, ooohm, ooohm . . .
”

He gritted his teeth. Really, she was going to drive him bonkers if he didn't set a few ground rules. “I'll give you some rhythm, honey.” He undulated his hips, back and forth, against her ass.

She gasped.
“Ooohm, ooohm, ooohm . . .”
Her chants resumed, but her voice wobbled.

Good!
“Helen, sweetheart, how about concentrating on this.”

“Ooohm, ooohm, ooohm . . .”

“Picture my tattoo pressed against your tattoo . . .”

“Ooohm, ooohm, ooohm.”

“. . . and we're naked.”

“Oh-oohm.”
Her voice faltered again.

This was fun. Shaking up Prissy Prescott was a piece of cake. “My hands are suddenly free. I'm reaching behind me to touch your—”

“Well, I'm done meditating for today,” she interrupted matter-of-factly.

He smiled to himself, then yelled out, “Hey, Sancho, time to get up and water some trees. How 'bout untying my hands?”

Helen ground her teeth at his indelicacy.

Dawn was creeping over the hill now, casting bright orange streamers of light through the misty sky. It was going to be another scorcher.

“Yo, Sancho! My teeth are floating here.”

Sancho rolled over and opened his bleary eyes. Groaning, Sancho favored him with an ancient Mexican hand gesture.

“You know, Helen,” Rafe remarked as Sancho took his good old time coming over to untie them, “I'm usually in a bad mood in the morning, before I have my first cup of coffee. But I'm feeling real good. Today, we're gonna get free from these bozos. And we're gonna become gold prospectors and find tons and tons of gold nuggets. You can be my
señorita
, and I'll be your desperado. Don'tcha just love it?”

Helen didn't say a word. She was probably giving him an ancient Mexican hand gesture in her head.

Yep, this day was starting out real good. He'd shown Helen who called the shots here. From now on, she'd better think twice about annoying him. Life was good.

But a short time later, as he and Sancho emerged from the woods, Rafe wasn't too sure. His hands were still bound, and he'd been forced to suffer the ignominy of Sancho undoing his pants so he could relieve himself.

“Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug . . .”

He closed his eyes wearily.

“Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug . . .”

Opening his eyes, Rafe glanced disgustedly toward the stream where Helen was gargling like a fountain. Pablo stood guard over her with a raised revolver after having apparently released her ropes. A temporary reprieve, he suspected.

“Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug . . .”

Pablo was watching her with a rapt expression of ecstasy. “Oh, I can't wait till she gargles me,” the dope kept muttering.

“How soon till the hanging, do you think, Ignacio?” Sancho
asked as he packed up the camping gear, obviously willing the hours away until Rafe's demise so he could get his turn at being corkscrewed and gargled by Elena.

“Take off the Angel's pants,” Ignacio ordered Sancho suddenly.

“Wha-at?” Rafe cried out.

“Your trousers,
señor
. I have decided I like them. We weel trade, for now. After the hanging, I weel take mine back, too.”

Rafe sneered with distaste at Ignacio's filthy leather pants with their heavy embroidery and fancy fringe and bell-bottom legs that fit over the boots. “No, thanks.”

“Elena says I would look good—
mucho macho
—in your trousers,” Ignacio enlightened him coldly.

Rafe narrowed his eyes accusingly at Helen. “Mucho macho?” he mouthed.

She smirked. “Did you tell Pablo that gargling was a sexual trick?”

“Take off his damn trousers,” Ignacio roared, pulling out his blasted pistol and aiming it at Sancho, who was balking at his order.

“Listen, Ignacio, your pants look about a size forty-four. I have a thirty-four-inch waist. Besides, I'm more a jeans kind of guy.”

Ignacio raised his gun.

With Sancho's help, Rafe shucked his duds. Luckily, Ignacio couldn't fit them over his fat butt. So, a short time later, they rode off toward Sacramento City, but Rafe wouldn't forget what Helen had tried to do to him.

He slanted a sideways glance at Helen, who was looking very pleased with herself. Then she started to whistle. It sounded like fingernails grating over a chalkboard.

Maybe the day wasn't going to turn out quite the way he'd expected.

H
elen took great pleasure in having turned the tables on Rafe. “Be careful you don't get a sunburn,” she called out once when they stopped to water the horses. Pablo had given her his extra hat, but there was none for Rafe.

He shot her a you'll-get-yours look, and said sweetly, “Howard Stern was right. Women's tongues are good for only one thing.”

“Pig!” she chided.

“Prude.”

“Lech.”

“Looney.”

“Chauvinist.”

“Femi-Nazi.”

“Ambulance chaser.”

“Nipples.”

“Huh?” Helen looked down quickly, relieved to see that her chest was well-covered with her camouflage blouse. She raised her eyes to Rafe's laughing ones.

He winked. “Just wanted to see if you were paying attention.”

By late afternoon, they were approaching Sacramento, and the closer they got, trivial personal squabbling faded in importance. The fantastic landscape convinced them both, like nothing had before, that time travel might really be possible.

“We should have passed Blue Valley Vineyard over there,” she whispered.

“And have you noticed, not one airplane has gone over the entire day?” Rafe added. “Hell, this has got to be a major flight pattern direct to McClellan Air Force Base. In fact, Interstate 50 should follow just about the same route we are, and we haven't seen one single automobile.”

He raised his face to the clear, cloudless skies. His thick, unruly hair lay sweatily against his neck and over his forehead,
but he was unable to brush it back because his hands were tied in front of him to the saddle horn.

After two days of not shaving and all the dust of their travel, he looked as much like a Mexican desperado as their captors claimed him to be. And Helen had to admit that, after this second day in the saddle, Rafe was handling his horse just fine, like a true Mexican
bandido
, considering the deep pain he must be in as a new rider.

“How's your blister?” she asked.

“Fine, although my ass feels like it's growing callouses.”

She clucked her disapproval at his language, but, even though Rafe continually ruffled her feathers, she couldn't deny her attraction to him. If her hands were free, she'd be tempted to wipe the perspiration from his whiskered face; however, since her karate exhibition, the bandits deemed her a danger, too.

They saw more people as they neared Sacramento—emigrants in wagons who had presumably traveled the overland trail across the plains, trappers coming down from the mountains, prospectors on horses or mules, traveling singly or in groups. Always, Ignacio kept their distance, making sure that she and Rafe couldn't make any contact with the passersby.

But even from that range, Helen could see that these were not actors in red flannel shirts and dusty homespun trousers. Huge beards covered their weathered faces, and they moved with the ease of men used to the saddle, not automobiles.

“We really have traveled back in time,” Helen concluded.

“I know,” Rafe agreed glumly. “I know.”

Even when they passed through the primitive mining town of Placerville, Ignacio refused to allow them to stop for fear someone would come to their aid before he could collect his reward.

They did stop to water the horses at a ranch in the Sacramento Valley that sported an incongruously modern sign,
“The Last Chance Ranch.” As they rode up the lane, leading to the ranch house, several riders—presumably the owner and his hands—approached, eying them suspiciously. Ignacio and Sancho rode forward to talk to them.

Pablo stayed behind as guard. The three of them pulled their horses to a halt near a corral fence by the house and waited. Pablo had a cocked pistol hidden under a blanket over his saddle horn. He'd been given explicit orders from Ignacio to shoot if Rafe or Helen made the slightest move to call for help or ride away. As insurance, Ignacio warned that he'd personally put a bullet through Pablo's head if he disobeyed the command.

Helen was tired and dirty and extremely fearful of their fate. But her attention was nonetheless captured by the lady standing on the porch of the ranch house. “Look at that woman!” Helen exclaimed. “Doesn't she resemble that
Vogue
cover model, Selene?”

The tall, statuesque woman, with dark hair piled atop her head, studied them with unwarranted intensity, almost horror. Despite being very pregnant, she was absolutely gorgeous.

Rafe furrowed his brow, squinting in the bright sunlight. “I met Sandra Selente—that's Selene's real name—at a cocktail party five years ago. She didn't look at all like this woman.”

“That figures!”

“What?”

“That you'd be cavorting with the rich and famous.”

“Cavorting? What the hell kind of word is that? And, I'll have you know, it was a barbecue. If it was for the rich and famous, I sure was out of place.”

“Hah!”

“Hah!” he threw back.

Before they had a chance to move closer and speak to the woman, she slapped a hand to her chest in dismay. Then she
spoke softly to a dark-skinned man beside her and rushed into the house.

They watered their horses under Ignacio's ever-vigilant eye. At one point, the owner—James Baptiste, they learned from Pablo—was arguing with Ignacio about his captives, telling him to release them. They heard Ignacio explain that Rafe was the notorious Angel Bandit, wanted for numerous robberies throughout California, and Helen was the prostitute Elena. Mr. Baptiste appeared dubious and walked up to their horses.

Helen saw Pablo raise his pistol under the blanket. He said in an undertone, “I weel shoot the gentleman if you misbehave.”

The handsome Creole addressed Rafe first. “Ignacio says you're the Angel Bandit. Is that so?”

Rafe hesitated, then nodded.

Mr. Baptiste's lips thinned angrily. “You killed an acquaintance of mine in Sonora last year.”

“I've never killed anyone,” Rafe asserted, despite Ignacio's hiss of warning. Wisely, Rafe clamped his mouth shut, refusing to say more.

Mr. Baptiste turned to Elena. “And you? Are you an accomplice to this man?”

“Yes.”

Throwing his hands out hopelessly, Mr. Baptiste walked off then, muttering, “
Merde!
They all deserve each other.”

“There will be other chances to escape,” Rafe assured her a short time later when they moved on. She certainly hoped so.

As they proceeded on their grueling ride toward Sacramento, she and Rafe couldn't stop pondering their remarkable adventure. They both accepted that somehow, someway, they had landed in a time warp, and they discussed the repercussions of their situation.

“This is the damnedest thing that's ever happened to me.” Rafe shook his head in confusion.

“And you think I bee-bop through the ages all the time?” Helen heard the shrewishness in her voice but was unable to control its stridency. Fear churned in her stomach, and Rafe's flippant attitude about the potential dangers they faced made it even worse.

“Rafe, aren't you worried about what will happen to us in Sacramento? I mean, they might really kill you if they believe you're this Angel Bandit guy.”

“I have a plan, hon. Trust me.” He winked.

“A plan?” She rolled her eyes, trying to imagine the leap of faith needed to trust this scoundrel. “And me . . . Well, what's going to happen to me? I sure as heck am
not
going to turn tricks in an 1850 mining town.”

He grinned.

“It's not funny.”

She saw him struggling to force a more serious expression on his face, but he couldn't stop grinning. The ass!

“The idea of you turning tricks just boggles the mind.”

The fact that Rafe considered her so sexually unattractive that she couldn't even be a hooker in a female-starved mining town shouldn't bother her, but it did. She felt like crying. She was hot and tired and afraid and homesick. And she sat fighting back tears because a vulgar, arrogant creep judged her lacking in some way.

“You're more the kind of woman a man keeps to himself.”

She jerked her head to attention.

“Sort of like a secret gift a guy hordes for himself.”

She should tell him to stop. Right now. But her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.

“On the outside, you're all cool professional. Flame hair skinned back. Kissable lips pressed into a forbidding line. Sultry voice turned shrill. Smoldering eyes cool. Every
sexy curve of your tempting body covered by sexless, drab clothing.”

“Oh, my God,” she whimpered, mesmerized by his wicked words.

“But your man—your lover—knows.
I know . . .
”

She gasped.

“. . . that underneath, when you let your hair loose on the pillow and part your lips, your voice is a hot whisper of invitation. Your eyes mist with desire. And every move you make in those loose military clothes,” he continued, inclining his head to indicate her garments, “well, I suspect that underneath there are five-foot-eight inches of pure ripe-to-be-turned-on woman, waiting to explode.”