Morgan's Rescue (22 page)

     
Somehow, a small miracle of healing had occurred between them, she realized humbly. The kiss they'd shared had broken open the old, infected wound. And her reaching out to touch him and ask his forgiveness had somehow allowed him to find that forgiveness in his heart. A new light shone in his eyes, and his very gait had changed. Pilar couldn't define it exactly, though she sensed a great weight had lifted from his too-long-weary shoulders. She bit her bottom lip. If only she had the courage to tell him the whole truth of what had happened eight years ago.

     
C
ulver prodded the small fire with a twig. Near dusk, they'd made a lean-to of huge, thick palm leaves. He'd dug a deep hole, and Pilar had started a fire. Luckily, a snake had slithered across their path earlier, and he'd killed it, so chunks of meat were now roasting in the flickering flames, slowly turned by Pilar. The two of them had been soaked to the skin by the thunderstorm, and though the rain had long since stopped, Culver knew their clothes would never completely dry in the perpetually high humidity.

     
They sat close together, as the lean-to's tiny dimensions dictated. After adding a few more still-damp twigs to the fire, Culver glanced at Pilar. Her hair was in mild disarray about her face, framing her haunting, jaguar's eyes—eyes that had communicated to the depths of his soul with just one look. The taste of her kiss still lingered hotly in his memory. Her cheeks were high with color, and he sensed she hadn't forgotten it, either.

     
Darkness was falling. Culver watched as the thin smoke rose and caught in the palm-leaf roof above them, swirling and separating until only slight wisps escaped the shelter. No one should be able to detect their presence—at least for tonight. Tomorrow, Culver knew grimly, was another situation altogether. Tomorrow, by nightfall, they would reach Ramirez's fortress. With every mile closer, the danger to them increased exponentially.

     
"Did you ever marry?" Pilar asked softly. She looked up from the skewer of meat she held over the fire. Culver's eyes sharpened on her, his expression quizzical, and she realized he probably hadn't expected her to ask personal questions of him. Yet, to salve her own conscience, she needed to know. If she died, she wanted to know what had happened to Culver in these intervening years.

     
He gave a one-shouldered shrug and prodded the fire with a stick. "No. You married," he added, his voice flat, filled with resentment.

     
"Yes, I married Fernando."

     
"Were you…happy?"

     
Unable to bear his burning gaze, Pilar looked down at the fire, continuing to slowly turn the meat. "Fernando was a dear friend," she whispered tremulously. "He…was generous."

     
"Rich?" Culver didn't mean for his voice to sound hard. He wanted to know of Pilar's past. He saw how his spat-out query had struck her. She winced, unable to look up at him.

     
"Yes, Fernando was rich." With obvious effort, she lifted her chin and eventually met his gaze. "He was rich from the heart, too, and that was why—well, why I agreed to marry him."

     
It wasn't unusual in this culture, Culver knew, for an old man to take a young wife. He was sure Fernando had been more than satisfied in the bargain. Too, marriages here were often arranged, though he had a hard time picturing that for Pilar, with her independence. His mouth compressing, he asked, "Was Fernando a friend of your father's?"

     
"Yes, he worked at the Spanish consulate as assistant to my father. They were the closest of friends."

     
"I see." So it had been an arranged marriage. Culver stared down at the dark brown leaves and twigs that covered the ground beneath them. Pilar's father had undoubtedly betrothed Pilar to Fernando when she was a young girl of ten or eleven. The agreement would have been that when she reached a certain age, they would marry. Had that age been twenty-one?

     
His mind raced with these potential new answers to his old questions. By South American custom, Pilar would have had to give up her independence and marry Fernando whether she wanted to or not. Culver had crashed into her life when she was twenty-two. And he'd taken her virginity, no question of that. Virginity was a virtue highly prized by South American men.

     
Perhaps Fernando had demanded Pilar's hand in marriage when she'd come off their mission. Though Pilar was independent by the standards of a South American woman, her Quechua blood also made her a product of her culture. She couldn't operate completely outside it and survive. Her fling with him had been exactly that—a wild, untrammeled instant out of time.
Her opportunity to explore her curiosity about a man's touch.
Maybe Pilar hadn't meant to give him her virginity. Maybe she'd been as carried away by the moment as he had—to her later regret.

     
Culver wasn't sure if Pilar had ever loved him. She had been young and naive. He'd had enough women over the years to know that that much hadn't been an act. And she definitely had been a virgin when she'd come into his embrace. Perhaps Pilar had fallen in love with him—the sort of girlish, romantic love that was lucky to last beyond two or three months.

     
He knew his own feelings had been deep and real, more than a passing infatuation. Though, to give her credit, he'd been so overwhelmed by the intensity of his emotions at the time that he hadn't stopped to think about long-range plans. He'd felt then as if life stretched out forever before them. Serious decisions had seemed miles away, so he hadn't talked of love and marriage. As he glanced at Pilar's sad features now, his heart twinged with that old, never-forgotten love. Pilar's fault in this might have been nothing more than youthful ignorance, he realized now. He'd been the sorry fool to love her honestly, to the depths of his soul. Pilar hadn't had the experience to recognize what he was giving her—and what it meant to him. How could she? Fernando might have gotten her body, but had he touched her soul? Culver knew that when he and Pilar had kissed back there on the trail, he had tapped into her soul as surely as he had eight years ago.

     
Now she was a widow with a child, but far too young in South American society to get the usual widow's respect. And men of this hemisphere probably were threatened by her independence, money and full-time career.

     
"Where did you go after you went home to
North America
?" Pilar asked, breaking the thoughtful silence that lay between them. Around them, monkeys were howling and screaming to one another. As the insects of the night began their songs, it were as if a musical surrounded them, soft and nonintrusive to the web of good feelings spinning between them as they huddled in the shelter of the lean-to.

     
"I recuperated in
Bethesda
,
Maryland
," Culver said slowly, rolling a twig between his thumb and forefinger, studying it critically in the coming darkness. "After that, I was sent to Europe to work undercover in
Spain
."

     
Pilar smiled softly.
"My father's home."

     
"Yes. I was stationed in
Madrid
."

     
Sighing, Pilar met and held his tender gaze. "I have always wanted to go to
Spain
, to see my father's hacienda, to visit where he was born. I heard so many stories, growing up, about how he used to escape from his nanny and ride the countryside around
Madrid
on his Andalusian gelding. His nanny, who was in her fifties, was poor at riding and would take him out only occasionally."

     
"So you have your father's love of horses." Culver suddenly felt aware of how much he didn't know about Pilar. Their time together eight years earlier had been concentrated, passionate and dangerous, leaving little time for talking or in-depth exploration.
Now he savored this moment more than he'd ever have thought possible.
They were safe. They were alone and without interruption. Stretching out so that his legs curved behind her, his head resting in the palm of his hand, he studied her in the failing light.

     
Pilar chuckled slightly. "My father said I had the blood of a caballero—a horse person—in me from a very young age."

     
"Did he take you riding as a child?"

     
"Often.
I loved it. He bought me a Pampas pony from
Argentina
—a Spanish mustang—and I took lessons at a riding academy in
Lima
when I was six." Smiling wistfully, Pilar said, "My father made a point of riding with me each Saturday. It was our time together, and I loved it." She sobered, looking out into the grayness. "I loved him so much. I miss him even more now—his counsel, his wisdom. . . ."

     
Fog was developing at the lowest level of the canopy. Culver watched it disinterestedly as he absorbed the tremor in Pilar's tone. Her eyebrows knitted as she leaned over the fire, tending to the skewer. One of the positives of South American culture, he thought, was the connectedness of families and how close extended families remained, whereas in the
U.S.
, the family unit had, for all intents and purposes, been dissolving rapidly.

     
"When Fernando died, did you feel alone?"

     
Pilar twisted to look at him. How peaceful Culver seemed, stretched out like a jaguar at rest. But he was lethal—to her volatile, vulnerable emotional state—as never before. "I felt like a ship without a rudder," she admitted. "I was in
Lima
, alone. My parents were dead, and I was an only child. The sole family I had left was here in the village—my grandparents. My father's family lives in
Spain
, and when Fernando died so suddenly, I thought briefly of moving to
Madrid
to be near them. I…I needed someone at that time. . . ."

     
Pilar didn't tell Culver she'd needed him, though it was true. It would have been cruel to say so. She fully realized what her decision to leave him at the hospital had cost him, and she didn't wish ever to inflict that kind of injury again. From that perspective, had their kiss been good or bad? She wasn't sure. It certainly had opened up a kaleidoscope of memories and yearnings she'd thought she had put to rest over the years. Evidently she hadn't.

     
"What stopped you from moving to
Spain
?"

     
With a shrug, Pilar picked at a rectangular piece of white meat with her fingers, delicately pulling a strip off and tasting it. Their meal was done. Picking up two small palm leaves to serve as plates, Pilar divided the meat between them. As she handed Culver his share, she said, "I cannot ever ignore my Incan blood, my ancestry as an Indian. Moving to
Spain
would be like dividing my soul from my body." She looked out at the jungle lovingly. "This is my soul, Culver. Here, in the forest, the womb of Mother Earth.

     
"My grandmother has helped me see the wisdom of staying, in terms of looking deep into my heart and understanding that my power, my strength, comes from the soil I was born on." She pulled a piece of snake meat apart and ate another bite.

     
"Because you are a
shamanka
jaguar apprentice?" he wondered aloud, chewing a bite of the snake, which tasted like fresh, grilled chicken.

     
"In part, yes."
She smiled a little. "As a
shamanka,
I would always have the capacity to walk in many worlds simultaneously, Grandmother said. Some know me as manager of a horse farm.
Others as a competing rider at horse shows.
I am a socialite to others, a rich widow,
a
woman without a husband. Then to others, I am a mestiza—or an undercover agent." She looked up, a smile playing on her lips. "Or a
shamanka
apprentice."

     
"You wear many hats," Culver agreed. For him, she was a friend, lover and confidante—the woman he wanted to make his wife.
The only woman.
Pilar would never know that, however, he thought, and an incredible sadness blanketed him.