Journey of the Heart (42 page)

But her blouse was open and off and her sweet breasts pressing against the light cotton of her chemise. Gabe reached out and cupped one. “You are so lovely,” he whispered.

“Ask me, Gabe,” Cait said softly, leaving forward into his hand.

“
Will
you marry me, Caitlin?”

“Tomorrow if you want, Gabe.”

“Even if I am just an old horse breaker?” he added, but she could see that he was only teasing.

“I can see I have to kiss you out of your foolishness, Gabe.” Her breasts were soft and warm against his chest as she leaned forward to kiss him, and as he felt her weight he grew even harder. Taking her by the waist, he lifted her off him.

“We have to stop, Cait.”

“Why, Gabe?” she whispered plaintively.

“Because….” He couldn’t seem to come up with a good enough reason. They had pledged themselves to each other, after all. “Because the first time should be special and on our marriage night, Caitlin. Because your father trusts me, and I owe him so much,” he finally was able to choke out.

“I want you, Gabe,” she said simply. “I am a grown woman. And what could be more special than here, in the shadow of the mountains.”

She slipped off her skirt and lay down beside him in her chemise and drawers and looked up at him trustingly. After pulling his jeans down, he lay down again, and slid his hand under the soft cotton chemise, running his thumb around her nipple until it began to get hard. She felt him against her thigh and shyly put her hand down, shivering as she felt him pressing against her hand. Then his fingers were against her belly, sliding down to where she felt an aching and a tingling. As he started stroking her gently, and then harder, she couldn’t believe the waves of pleasure that washed over her. She was home at last, lying with her love on the red earth of New Mexico, and she thanked God that she had finally found the place where her heart lay.

Gabe was tracing her face with his finger and dropping little kisses on her lips, when he felt something wet against his neck and jumped back. Cait’s eyes had been closed in ecstasy but they flew open at his movement. Dear God, was it a snake…? Her fear disappeared with her laughter, as she realized that Sky had pulled the reins away from the mesquite bush and was nibbling at Gabe’s neck.

“Oh, it’s fine for you to laugh, Cait,” said Gabe who had to chuckle at his own sudden terror. “Go away, Sky,” he said, swatting ineffectually at the horse. “Well, that’s decided it, Cait,” he said with a rueful smile. “He’s sort of broken into my mood, and I can’t say that I’m completely sorry. A bit frustrated, but I want you as my wife before we do this again,” he added as he looked down into her eyes and brushed her curls back from her face. “But, Lord, it had better be soon!”

* * * *

Elizabeth didn’t quite know what she had expected after she revealed herself to her brother, but it certainly wasn’t the distance he so obviously wanted to keep between them. It seemed that whenever she went in to visit him, he was sleeping, although several times she could have sworn that he had only just shut his eyes when he realized she had come in.

He recovered strength quickly once the fever was gone, and after a few days, Michael was able to get him up and help him onto the porch where he sat in an old rocking chair, watching the daily work go on around him. When she wasn’t helping with the chores, Sadie would join him and they would sit there quietly, hand in hand. Those times Juan felt a sense of peace and security fill him and he knew that Sadie’s love was healing him in a way beyond the physical, a way he could hardly articulate. Her love, and he had to admit, the feeling of having somehow come home, which Elizabeth Burke gave him.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to feel at home. A part of him didn’t want to have a family, after years of being alone. So he avoided Elizabeth, pretending to sleep as often as he could, not talking to her except with everyday commonplaces as ‘good morning’ or ‘thank-you’ for his breakfast or his dinner when she brought it in to him.

But one afternoon, when Sadie and Cait had gone for a ride and Michael was in town, Juan had gotten himself onto the porch on his own when Elizabeth came around the side of the house, wiping her hands on her apron, “Jonathan, you should have waited for me,” she said, hurrying up the steps.

“I am fine,” he said, lowering himself carefully into the chair. “I thought I would spare you. You’ve had enough trouble with me these past few days.”

“Let me go in and wash my hands,” said Elizabeth, “and I’ll bring us both some lemonade. I’ll be right back, so don’t you even think of closing your eyes,” she added with a quizzical grin.

But his eyes were closed when she came back and she put his glass next to him and said almost sharply: “Jonathan.”

“Oh, I am awake, Lizzie,” he replied, opening his eyes and looking straight into hers. He smiled as he used the old nickname, but she could see that the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “It is only that I am not sure I want to be.”

“We have to talk, Jonathan,” she said quietly.

He almost winced when she used his name. “Do you think you could call me Juan?” he asked. “It has been so long since I have been Jonathan Rush….”

“All right, Juan. If you will call me Elizabeth.” They both sipped their lemonade in an uncomfortable silence until Elizabeth said painfully: “I thought that this would be so easy, once you knew who I was.”

“In a fairy tale, it would be, wouldn’t it?” he said. “We may have recognized each other, Elizabeth, but we don’t really know each other anymore. We’ve each lived a lifetime in between. And you want to make me remember things I don’t
want
to.”

“I started having nightmares when you came to the valley, Juan…. Of that morning. I hadn’t had any for years.”

“So I came and brought you bad dreams,” he said bitterly.

“No, no, I didn’t mean it that way,” she reassured him, putting her hand gently on his. “Just that your presence and the memories disturbed me too. It brought back all the horror I thought I’d laid to rest years ago. I think I can understand how hard this is for you. Harder than for me, since I have had Michael’s love for so many years. And before that, Thomas’s.”

“Thomas?”

“He was the officer who rescued me. He brought me to his sister’s in Santa Fe. We married four years later. He died in a Navajo raid,” she added, her voice low.

“I am sorry, Lizzie,” he whispered, turning his hand and holding hers. “So much loss for you.”

“Oh, but so much love, Juan,” she said with a catch in her voice. “Such a good life compared to what yours must have been.”

“I think the hardest part was the first year,” he told her after a long silence. “I kept hoping that God would somehow make Ma and Pa be alive again. Then they would come and rescue me,” he added. She looked up and what she saw in his face almost broke her heart. His eyes held all the pain of the young boy he had been but he was smiling his almost cynical smile. “Then, when I
knew
God wasn’t going to help me, well, I found a way to survive. I buried Jonathan Rush a long time ago, Elizabeth. I think it is too late to resurrect him now.”

“Do you remember that morning? It was beautiful, so cool and clear. And Pa was singing that song of
his,
‘Will you go out West, will you go out West, will you go out West with me?’ ”

His hand closed convulsively over hers. “Don’t, Lizzie.”

“Ma asked me to go for water and I wanted
you
to go. If you had, things would have been very different for both of us…but I went and all of a sudden I heard a crack and Pa stopped right in the middle of his song.”

“Those men did awful things to Ma, Lizzie,” she heard him say in a ragged whisper. “I closed my eyes and then one of them grabbed me.”

“And flung you over a mule. I saw it all, Jonathan. And I just stayed there, hidden by the creek bank. When they were gone, I finally got up. I pulled Ma’s dress down over her legs. I closed their eyes. It was all I could do for them….” Elizabeth’s voice broke. She didn’t dare look up at him again and the bones in her hand hurt where he was crushing them in his. She began to cry quietly, but continued through her tears. “We buried them the next day, Jonathan. Thomas said a prayer after we laid them to rest. They have been at peace for all these years. You know they would wish for you to be.”

“They never came, Lizzie, no matter how much I cried for them.”

“I know, I know,” she murmured as though she was comforting a boy of seven.

“Dios,”
he said, his voice breaking. “I haven’t cried once since then. What are you doing to me, Elizabeth?”

“I know that you cannot go on until you bury the dead, Juan. That much I have learned.”

He sat there, trying to hold it all back: the tears, the memories, the pain. But it washed over him like a flood. When he had been captured, he’d found that he couldn’t feel that kind of pain and survive. Even now, he wasn’t sure he could make it back to the surface. He wouldn’t let himself cry out, but the tears came and the waves of pain broke over him and he held onto his sister’s hand for dear life.

When he finally came back to the present, it was only to say hoarsely: “But it is all too late, Elizabeth….”

“Too late for what, Juan?”

“For me. For us. I can’t stay here after all that I’ve done.”

“Like save my husband and Sadie’s brother?”

“I could as easily have killed them,” he protested.

“But you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t. Because of Sadie. And because of you and Michael,” he added. “I admired both of you for your strength and I didn’t want to see you broken.”

“Stay in the valley, Juan. Let us get to know each other again. Get to know my family. Raise one of your own.”

“So you have been talking to Sadie,” he said, attempting a smile. “But I can’t stay here with you indefinitely.”

“There is plenty of land now that….”

“Now that I’ve scared some people off and Mackie is dead,” he said ironically.

Elizabeth had to laugh. “Well, yes.”

“I just don’t know if it is possible to get back the past….”

“We can’t get anything back, Juan. I know that. But we can build something from today on and if we don’t try to do that, then don’t you think Ma and Pa’s deaths are wasted?”

He squeezed her hand again and then looked down as she winced.
“Dios,
what have I done?” he asked, only half joking as he stroked her red-and-white fingers. “All right, Lizzie, I will stay.”

It was a cool morning in October that Cait was married in the little adobe church of San Pedro by Father Luis. Both Michael and Elizabeth escorted her down the aisle to where Gabe waited, looking handsomer than Cait could have thought possible in a new black suit. The sun shining in the windows silvered his hair and Cait was reminded of the first time she had seen him. So much had happened since she returned home, and all of it had led her to the man who was waiting for her with a shy smile on his face. “Thank you, Ma, Da,” she whispered as they stepped away, leaving her there with Gabe who reached out and gently took her hand.

The ceremony was dreamlike for Cait, with only a few moments standing out: Gabe slipping the thin gold band on her finger, his feathery kiss on her lips, and her parents’ faces smiling at her as she walked back down the aisle, arm in arm with her husband. Then they were back at the ranch, greeting all their neighbors who were arriving for the feast.

It wasn’t until Ramon struck up a waltz that Cait had any time to herself with Gabe, and she went eagerly into his arms. They circled first, as was appropriate for the new bride and groom, and then Michael and Elizabeth joined them. “What about the not-so-newlyweds?” Jimmy Murdoch shouted, and Juan Chavez pulled a blushing Sadie into his arms.

“I wish they had let us have a party for them,” said Cait.

“Given Juan’s history in the valley, it’s probably just as well they eloped, Cait.”

“They look so happy,” she said, watching her uncle and new sister-in-law, who had eyes only for each other.

“They can’t be half as happy as we are, darlin,” said Gabe, smiling down on her.

Jimmy Murdoch’s raucous toasts were aimed at both couples, so it wasn’t until Gabe had pulled up the wagon with Night Sky tied to the back that Cait finally awoke to the fact that she was leaving home to begin her new life as Mrs. Gabriel Hart.

As they drove slowly down the road and over to the old Garcia place, she was very quiet. “You’re not having second thoughts, are you, darlin’?” teased Gabe.

Cait slipped her arm through his. “Of course not, Gabe,” she answered. “But I just didn’t realize how it would feel to leave Ma and Da behind.”

“We’re not far away, Cait,” said Gabe, giving her arm a reassuring squeeze. “And I’ll be over there every day, working the horses. Pretty soon, it won’t feel like much has changed at all.”

Her mother had prepared a picnic wedding supper for them, but neither did more than pick at the food. Cait finally wrapped it up, saying: “Maybe we’ll both have more of an appetite in the morning” and then blushed when Gabe winked at her.

“You go on upstairs, Cait. I’ll be right in after I take care of the horses.”

* * * *

She was sitting on the edge of their bed when he came up, dressed in a delicately embroidered nightrail. Her hair was down, framing her face with its dark cloud of curls. She gave him a shy smile and said: “I feel very silly, Gabe, considering how close we’ve come to making love, but I am nervous.”

“Don’t worry, Caitlin, we will go slow and easy,” he reassured her as he started to undress. She sat back against the bedstead and watched. She thought he might be about the most beautiful thing she had ever seen as he stood there, tall and long and lean.

He sat next to her and began to untie the ribbon of her nightrail and without even willing it, her arms were up around his neck. He slipped his own hands down and under the gown to lift it over her head. Then he pulled her down next to him so that they lay there, bodies barely touching and drew his finger down her cheek to her lips.

“This is the way it should be for the first time, Cait,” he whispered, and she nibbled at his finger, drawing it into her mouth as she placed her hand on his hips and pulled him closer. He was hard and soft at the same time and she loved the sensation of him pressing against her belly.