Rio Grande Wedding (17 page)

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Authors: Ruth Wind

BOOK: Rio Grande Wedding
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Coffee. She needed coffee, fast. And a good walk, maybe. She scowled, running her tongue over her teeth. And her toothbrush. Ugh.
She started the coffee and leaned against the counter, glaring at the machine while she waited for Alejandro to emerge. When he did, with his hair wet-combed straight back, and his jaw shaved and his blastedly gorgeous chest bare and damp, she brushed by him abruptly and went into the bathroom. She scrubbed her teeth with the same violence she'd used on her hair, washed her face until it stung—
And she could still feel the brush of his breath on her neck. Could feel the ghostly image of his shin against the back of her leg. Felt the imprint of his hand on her hip.
I have been awake a long time.
“You idiot,” she said into the mirror. He was honorable in such an old-world way that a jaded American like Molly had a hard time even recognizing the depth of it when it was right under her nose. She thought of him carefully keeping his body turned away from her, thought of his rush to the shower.
A cold shower?
With a slight sense of giddiness, she took off her robe and her gown. She washed her breasts and arms and private places, then dusted a musky talcum powder over her body. Then, naked below her loosely tied robe, she went to find him.
He leaned on the kitchen sink, an unusual brooding expression on his face, one he quickly hid when she came into the room. “Ah,” he said, smiling. “There you are. Do you wish my good coffee, or this machine kind?”
Molly swallowed. It had been one thing to imagine, in the privacy of the bathroom, seducing him. It was quite another to actually do it.
To her despair, she found she didn't have the courage.
Brightly she said, “Well, the machine kind is already made.” She opened a cupboard, embarrassingly aware of her nakedness below the robe, and took out two mugs.
He was quiet as she poured first his, then her own. Her skin flushed under his gaze, and she wanted, more than breathing, for him to kiss her. Touch her.
He brushed his hand over her hair, down her back. “You never wear it like this,” he said. “Why?”
Molly stirred sugar in her coffee. “Too much trouble.” She lifted her head to smile, stupidly and brightly, once again, and halted.
Alejandro, bare to the waist, held his coffee in one hand. In his other, he grasped a fistful of her hair. His eyes were far beyond liquid as he stared down at her—they were lava. Molten. For a moment, he only looked at her, then in a gesture both considered and primal, he lifted the small fistful of hair to his face and rubbed it across his mouth.
Her hips went suddenly fluid.
“I am trying, Molly, to be strong.” He swallowed and put the cup down on the counter, then took hers and put it down, too. With one hand, he drew a line from her throat down to the opening of her robe, which was lower than she had believed, low enough to reveal the obviously naked swell of a breast at the opening. “I do not think you wish me to be strong any longer.”
“No,” she whispered.
His eyes closed for one moment, then he let go of a breath, as if he'd held it a long time, and bent down to touch his lips to hers. They kissed, lips to lips, that gentleness of greeting, and then he pressed closer, a heaviness to his breath, and backed her into the counter. The kiss ignited, pushing from one second to the next far beyond civility or gentleness or greeting into a roaring expression of passion, for her and for him. Their teeth clicked at the urgent connection, and Molly lifted her hands to his licorice-black hair, taking it in her fists, pulling him closer.
He hauled her against him, as if by pressing close they would meld, and she cried out, wishing for more. He broke the kiss and lifted his head, the dark eyes grave.
Molly thought of his face that first day, the way it had struck her, like an arrow through the heart, and even then, she had known this time would come. She put a hand on his cheek, wordless as she stroked the high arch of bone below his eye, let her thumb drift to touch his chin, cleanly shaven.
He held her gaze as he moved backward, then covered her throat with his hand, his touch light as he slid his palm downward, flat between her breasts, then lower still, using his wrist, then his other hand, to untie the robe. It hung open but covering her breasts, for a long, long moment. “I ached, all night, to touch you,” he said. “To see you.”
“So did I,” she whispered. He pushed away the fabric covering her breasts. For one agonizing moment, she worried that her breasts would be too small, too ordinary, too pale, but then he made a low, pleased sound, and those long-fingered elegant hands lifted, cupped the soft weight.
“Touch me,” he said, and bent to take her mouth in a deep, bruising kind of kiss, a violence of need she welcomed with a violence of her own. She opened her hands on his body, and met his kiss even as her greedy palms explored the whole of his back, the muscles and spine, and touched his waist, and lightly skimmed over his bruised ribs. With a low groan, he shoved the robe from her shoulders and pulled her next to him, chest to chest, arms entangled, brushing, exploring, even as he kissed her and kissed her and kissed her. His member thrust aggressively against her belly, and she rubbed against it, lost in the glory of the fury the contact brought out, the need.
As if both acted with one mind, they broke apart and joined hands and moved to the bed in the back room, flooded with sunlight that poured from the eastern sky in buckets, bucketsful of liquid, gold light. Alejandro stopped her when she would have lain on the bed. “Wait,” he said urgently. She saw him swallow, and his eyes burned as he skimmed her panties from her body, then pulled her hair around her shoulders, over her breasts. “I thought of this so often,” he whispered, touching her nipples through her hair. “So many colors. Sunlight and clay and roses.” He cupped her breasts in their cloak of hair, lifting them, in no rush.
Her breath came in quick, shallow pants, and her legs were made of tissue, but it was devastatingly erotic to stand naked and pagan in the sunlight while a man who was still mostly dressed touched her as if he had never dreamed of anything so beautiful. And again she knew, even as the moment burned through her that she would never forget—never—the way Alejandro made her feel right now.
She lowered her lids against the brilliance of light melting over her, and gasped softly as he bent his head and suckled her breast through her hair, lingeringly, as if there was nothing he would ever have to do but this. He suckled her neck, and kissed a line between her breasts, knelt and lingered over her belly, putting the side of his face against it for a moment, his hand on her hips. He kissed her thighs, pulled back and looked at her sex, brushed his fingers over the hair.
It made her dizzy. She steadied herself by grasping his shoulders, and the reflected red of sunlight beneath her eyelids burned all else away as he grasped her hips and kissed between her legs. She cried out, pleased, but doubly hungry, and her body began to shiver. With arms made fierce by need, she pulled him up and they fell together on the bed.
“Take off your pants,” she said, and grabbed them by their hems. He laughed when his hands were not quick enough, and Molly helped him, hauling clothes from him with a boldness that was not like her.
Or maybe it was. Maybe this was truly the Molly that lived inside the shell all these years, a Molly who could stand naked, draped only in sunlight and hair as she gazed down at her lover.
She made a sound of pain at the revelation of him, all of him lying on that bed as she remembered. She used her fingers to touch what her eyes admired—the shelf of collarbone and triangular swath of hair across his chest. She brushed the bruises, purple and yellow, on his side, and the smooth, flat, copper belly and the dark weight of his aroused sex growing out of its silky nest.
“I've never seen a man who was so beautiful,” she whispered, and with a sense of reverence, she knelt over him and kissed his throat, and his chest, and his chin, expressing with her hands what she could not say—that never had God made a man more perfect than he. Never.
He touched her hair, pulled her to his mouth, breathing softly,
“Dios,”
before he kissed her, the power in his arms fierce and unyielding as he guided her to mount him. It made her briefly shy, and she protested, but he touched her waist, her lips, and she remembered that his leg would be too weak for a more traditional sort of joining. She closed her eyes against her shyness, at the sense of being utterly exposed as she let him guide himself into her.
The shock of pleasure was so deep, so intense that she cried out, even as he groaned, low and rich in his throat, and Molly's shyness disappeared as she threw her head back, and felt him, responded to his subtle movements, began to move.
As if he could not bear to be so far apart, he reached for her, pulling her down into his kiss, and somehow, somehow, they found the exquisite rhythm, breaking and falling and tumbling together, dust motes on a river of sunlight, hair and mouths and deep cries. Molly found tears washing from her eyes and did not halt them, for they were tears of joy and freedom. And love.
Oh, love. Spent, they folded together, and Molly let the tears wash from her eyes down her cheeks to his chest, felt the gentleness of his big strong capable hands, and knew beyond the faintest doubt that she had only been waiting, all of her days, for this man to come into her life and set her free. In a rush of gratitude, she lifted her wet face and put her hands on his face and stared down at him for a long moment.
“
Gracias
,” she said softly, and kissed his wide, generous mouth, watched his eyes with their long black lashes close as if in pain. “
Gracias
,” she whispered again.
Wordless, he kissed her fiercely, pulled her tight against him, breathed into her hair.
Chapter 11
F
or a long time, Alejandro simply held his saint close against his body, unwilling to release the spirit he had momentarily captured. He wrapped his long arms around her naked shoulders and breathed in the smell of her hair, scattered over his chest and chin.
He had wished to make love to her all night long—no, before that. Since the first time they kissed—but he had not known it would shatter him so. He had expected bashfulness, slowness, an exploration of tiny moves to bigger ones, a long slow night of learning.
Instead, it seemed he had always known her, as if they were old lovers, come together again after a long, long time of waiting. He had known exactly where to touch her, how, when, and it seemed she had known how to return his gestures. Only the smallest of moves and they realigned in new harmony.
A vision of her, head thrown back as she mounted him, burned through his veins and stirred in his newly spent organ, and in response, he pulled her up close to kiss her, and touch her, his need flaming all over again. He lifted on one elbow over her and touched the tracks of tears on her face, wondering if she wept over remembering her husband or in release, that release she had thanked him so earnestly for. Her thanks made him feel hollow for a moment, and that hollowness came back as he looked at her, filled with a pained sort of wonder at her beauty, at the dazzling, blinding sense of love he felt toward her.
He loved too soon, too fast, too deep, and kissing her had been too much. But he had learned well to hide his true feelings, and he did it now, with a quick, wicked grin that spoke in a language that was less dangerous—desire. Women loved to be desired fiercely, and he could give her that, give her that which she most needed. “My blood is still boiling,” he said, and kissed her, hoping she tasted lust instead of the worship he could not help offering.
But he could not help moving in that sacred place, adoring her taste and her breath, her soft skin and surprisingly vigorous cries, loving the sweetness of her need, the fury of her climax, could not help kneeling at the altar of his Saint Molly, who had not saved him at all, but made him fall to a purgatory where he could not speak his heart.
 
Josefina stirred from a light sleep to find her uncle back again at the side of her bed. He did not see her wake up, and so she could watch him for a minute, trying to decide why he seemed so different tonight. He wore a red shirt that was new and very nice with his black hair, which was clean and shiny even in the low light. He was very handsome, she thought, and not just because he was her uncle. She was not as deaf as grown-ups always thought, and she heard the women talk about him. Sometimes they said things she did not strictly understand, but she knew what they meant.
But now, he was even more than handsome. He made her think of something just out of reach. He had his guitar in his hands and was tuning it softly, and he looked happy in a way she couldn't remember ever seeing. Not a big-grin kind of happy, but as if he was listening to something beautiful inside him.
Josefina thought of kind Molly, who had brought her dolls and books, and had strong hands, like a mother. She hoped it was Molly that made her uncle look this way.
“Will you play me a song, Tío?” she said, yawning.
He jumped up, his face blazing now, and came over to take her hand, which he put to his mouth and kissed.
“Hija!
Do you feel better?”
Josefina considered. Coughed once, to check. “It doesn't hurt so much now.”
“Good. It is almost time for your dinner. I will play you something while you eat, eh?” He gave her that look that made her know, deep, deep down where no one could take it from her, that she was the most wonderful little girl in the whole wide world. “I worried,
hija
. So much.”
“I'm okay now.”
“So I see. Hey, your little dog is getting spoiled by the farmer! He took him to the doctor and got shots for him and everything. Did you give her a name?”
Josefina shook her head. “I couldn't think too good. Does she miss me?”
“Yes. She came to me and said, ‘Where is my Josefina, my little girl? I need her to love me and pet me and take care of me.”' He used a little-dog kind of voice, and Josefina laughed, which made her cough. Kinda hard for a minute.
“I need to play you a sad song, I think,” he said, and gave her a mock smile. “No more laughing until you get better.”
“No,” she protested. “Play flamenco!”
He grinned and winked at her. “Only if you promise not to dance.”
She laughed, which started her coughing again.. “Okay.”
 
Molly sat with Annie, allowing Alejandro and Josefina some time alone together. It was quiet in the ward, and they played a round of War with a battered deck of cards.
The music drifted down the hall like a siren song, exotic and seductive, making both nurses lift their heads and turn toward it. For a moment, they simply looked toward the sound, as if expecting the notes to somehow become visible. Then, as if inhabiting a single body, they dropped their cards and moved toward it.
Molly felt the excitement of the music in her chest and along the nerves on the back of her neck and a strange, hot prick of tears in her eyes.
At the open door of Josefina's room, both Annie and Molly paused, giving a moment's holy silence to the picture he presented, his hair so black against the red of his shirt, his lean body so right with the guitar cradled into it, his fingers flying. And that face, that face that had proved her downfall, was alight with zest and pure happiness in a way she had not yet seen.
Annie whispered, “I am
so
jealous.”
He caught sight of them and turned himself toward them a little, grinning as he finished with a dourish. Josefina clapped. “More!”
“Is that flamenco?” Annie said. “I heard it in Spain.”
He bowed.
“Sí, señorita.”
His gaze went to Molly. “I would like to see you dance,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows.
His eyes said so much more—that he would like to see her dance
naked.
For him.
A knock came at the door, and even before she turned, Molly saw the zest and pleasure drain from Alejandro's face, caught a quick look of terror on Josefina's face before she reached for her uncle's hand.
The sheriff, Kenny Wagner, an Anglo in his forties, stood there, a slightly apologetic expression in his eyes as he looked at Molly. Her heart clutched, hard.
“Alejandro Sosa?” he asked.
“Yes,” Alejandro said, putting down his guitar cautiously.
“We need to talk.” Wagner shot a glance toward Josefina. “Outside here if you wouldn't mind.”
Josefina screamed and clutched her uncle's hand. “No! You can't go!”
Alejandro kissed her, disentangled his hand as gently as he was able. “I will be right back,” he said. “Promise.”
Josefina looked at Molly. “Help him!”
She nodded, her throat too tight for words. In the hallway, she pulled the door tight and said harshly, “What's going on?”
“Sorry, Molly,” the sheriff said soberly. “I...uh... had a tip that I needed to talk to your friend here.”
“A tip,” she echoed bitterly. “I can just imagine where it came from.”
He had the grace to look abashed. “Yeah. Well. I gotta uphold the law.”
Molly glanced at Alejandro, and saw that his face was set in grim, sharp lines.
Instinctively, Molly moved to take Alejandro's hand. “Kenny, he's not my friend. He's my husband.” She lifted her chin. “We were married two days ago.”
Kenny looked down. “So I heard.” He pursed his lips. “You may not be aware that the laws governing immigration have changed somewhat in recent years.”
Alejandro's hand tightened on Molly's, and with a pain in her chest, she said, “In what way?”
“It doesn't matter if you're married. He has to go back and apply for permission, just the same as everyone else.”
“But...! That's impossible! He can't!” As if to hold him here, Molly gripped Alejandro's arm, suddenly aware of the warm scent of his skin. “I love him.”
“I'm sorry.”
“No!” The word was as fierce as any utterance she'd made in all her life. Wildly, she searched her memory for something, anything that might help.
Alejandro said gently, his hand on her back, “Molly, it will be all right.”
“No,” she said again, and found herself very near tears.
In a rush, Molly said, “You can't take him. He's setting up my farm for me. No one else can do the work the way I want it.”
“Molly, don't make this harder, all right? I'm willing to cut some slack here if you cooperate, but if you draw some line in the sand, you're going to tie my hands, understand?”
“No, I don't understand. What do you mean, slack?”
“I'll let him stay till the little girl is out of the hospital if you'll agree he goes home then and applies for legal entry.” He looked at Alejandro.
“But my farm! We've made plans!” She couldn't seem to remember what they were and her words stuttered and stopped as she struggled with them. “He's...drawing. And there will be roosters.”
The sheriff smiled over her head. “Not more than one, I hope.”
“No,” Alejandro said, amusement in his voice. “Only one.”
Molly looked up at him and found him smiling. Didn't he understand how serious this was?
“You see why she needs help to make a farm.”
Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely hear. “Yes, you see, I can't do it myself.”
“I understand that.” His lips worked. “Fact is, though, the law says he can only stay here to do a job if there's no one else to do it. Plenty of folks could help you set up a farm.”
“But—”
The blue eyes, usually so genial, went hard. “Take it or leave it, Molly. If you want to make it rough, we can go that road.”
“No, sir,” Alejandro said, his hands on Molly's shoulders. “Thank you.”
They shook hands, an act that, for some reason, made Molly completely crazy. What was there to be friendly about? Still, she held her peace until the sheriff put his hat back on and left them.
“Why did you agree?” she asked.
The affability was gone. “There was no choice. You do not want to be arrested. I do not wish to go until Josefina is better.” His expression was grim. “This has been too much trouble for you. For that, I am sorry.”
“It hasn‘t—”
From the room came Josefina's cry. Alejandro held up a finger. “Let me comfort her. I will be right back.”
“No, stay with her. I have something I need to do.”
“Molly—”
“It won't hurt you or me, I promise. I'm going to see my brother.”
“He is only acting as he feels is best for you.”
“No,” she said bitterly. “You're wrong about that.”
 
Filled with a sense of betrayal, she stopped first at the station, but the woman behind the desk told Molly that Josh was out.
“Out? Do you have any idea where?” Molly said with veiled impatience, knowing the woman knew exactly where the deputies were at any given moment. “I really need to see him.”
The woman languorously wheeled her chair from her computer to a log on the desk. Blinking prettily, she said, “Sorry, Molly. I don't show a location.”
Molly bit back a retort, took a breath and said, “Thank you.”
Glancing at her watch, she saw it was midafternoon. Josh might have stopped off to get a late lunch. She stopped at the Navajo Café and hopped up on a stool at the counter, glad to see a familiar face. “Hi, Maureen,” she said to the waitress. “Have you seen my brother today?”
Maureen didn't look up from her task of dividing a pie into serving sizes. Molly leaned forward, half smiling. “Maureen? Are you daydreaming?”
The woman looked up, met Molly's eyes and kept cutting.
Molly bit her lip, tried one more time. “May I have a cup of coffee, please?”
The waitress put down her knife, stalked over to the coffeemaker, poured a cup neatly and settled it in front of Molly, all without a word. She went back to her pie, put it in the safe and went into the kitchen to fetch an order.
Molly's heart felt as if someone were stepping on it. Sipping coffee, she glanced over her shoulder at the sparse, midafternoon crowd, and was surprised by an expression of dislike on a woman's face. Tiny Moran, in her flowered dresses, had taught Sunday school to Molly as a girl, brought her treats when she was sick. Before Molly could wave or smile, Mrs. Moran looked away.

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