Sun God (4 page)

Amy sighed unhappily.

Nothing had changed. Five years had passed and everything was the same. Tonatiuh still regarded her as a worrisome child. It hurt badly. Especially when only this afternoon she had been so certain he had seen her in a totally new light. She had thought … hoped …

“I’ve a fine idea, Amy,” Tyler Parnell whispered, his lips so close they were touching her ear.

She pulled back a little. “Which is?”

His arms remaining firmly around her, he said, “I’ll grab a glass of champagne and we’ll take a stroll in the moonlight.”

“No,” she said quickly. She looked again at Luiz and promptly changed her mind. She gave Tyler Parnell one of her most flirtatious smiles and said, “Yes. Let’s do.”

Seconds later the pair walked outside, Parnell’s arm possessively around Amy’s waist, a glass of chilled champagne in his hand. From across the large ballroom, Walter Sullivan saw the couple leave. His big hand tightened on his liquor glass and his blue eyes clouded with concern.

Baron Sullivan, on the opposite side of the room, stood easily charming a circle of enraptured females. He also noticed Tyler and Amy’s departure, and his blue eyes shone with satisfaction.

But most telling of all were the tortured dark eyes of a heartbroken young Indian.

A
T NOON THE NEXT
day, everybody said that old Esau’s barbecued beef was the most tender and the tastiest he had ever cooked. Accepting the compliments with beaming pleasure, the black man straightened his shoulders and held his white head high with pride.

Even the ladies returned for seconds of the spicy, succulent beef, shading their fair faces with dainty parasols and cheerfully exclaiming that they would never be able to get into their fancy ball gowns come evening. The big, brawny men came back to the steaming barbecue pit again and again, unbothered by the broiling sun or the fit of their clothes.

Amy Sullivan, exhibiting the fine manners she had learned in New Orleans, pretended a pleasure she did not feel, an appetite she did not have. Knowing how much her good-hearted father wanted her homecoming to be perfect in every way, Amy, holding a plate of beef and potato salad on her lap, ate sparingly and laughed and gossiped with the girls and ladies on the big shaded east patio.

But Esau’s beef was tasteless to the disappointed young woman. She had hardly slept and she felt tired and out of sorts. She wished desperately that she could snap her fingers and all the guests would magically disappear. Or that she could set her plate aside and flee to the cool privacy of her room.

It had been just more than twenty-four hours since she had stepped down from the train. And in those twenty-four hours she had been unable to forget, even for a moment, the sweep of Tonatiuh’s thick, dark eyelashes, the curve of his full, smooth lips, the touch of his warm hand.

Amy’s restless gaze once again did a slow, thorough sweep of the rolling lawn beyond the patio. Her father, standing directly in front of Esau’s smoking barbecue pit, was holding court with the governor, Senator Calahan, and a neighboring rancher, young Doug Crawford. A few feet away, lounging indolently against the stone wishing well, Lucas and Tyler Parnell were sipping bourbon. Tyler kept casting lascivious looks in her direction. A shiver of distaste skipping up her spine, Amy quickly looked away. After last night’s stroll in the courtyard, she hoped she never again found herself alone with Mr. Tyler Parnell.

A deep male voice suddenly blending with all the feminine ones drew Amy’s attention to the far end of the patio. Baron, in a blue cotton pullover shirt open halfway down his chest and a pair of tight buckskins, was crouched on his heels between two seated, smiling women. One was the plain, unmarried daughter of a merchant, the other the pretty eastern-bred bride of Sundown’s bank president. Both were obviously charmed.

Amy shook her head and continued her search but failed to find the one face she most wanted to see. She spotted Tonatiuh’s father, Don Ramon, graciously escorting someone’s elderly mother toward the hacienda from the lower lawn. The frail old woman was clinging tenaciously to his bent arm and Don Ramon was gallantly accommodating his steps to the slowness of hers.

“Will you excuse me, please,” Amy said, setting her plate aside and rising to her feet. She went to meet the approaching pair.

“May I be of help?” she asked sweetly.

“Ah, Amy, how thoughtful you are,” Don Ramon said as Amy fell into step and gently took the old woman’s free arm. “It’s Amy Sullivan, Mrs. Cassidy,” he said. “You remember Amy.”

The old woman’s watery eyes blinked up at Amy and Amy read the confusion there. “Who? Who’d he say you was?”

Amy smiled. “Why, Grandma Cassidy, it’s me. Amy. Walter Sullivan’s daughter.”

Grandma Cassidy frowned. “Walter’s daughter? Walter have a daughter? I thought Walter had boys.”

Don Ramon exchanged glances with Amy over Grandma’s gray head. They got the old woman into the big house and Amy, asking that Don Ramon please wait, took the aged guest to her room, helped her into bed, and pulled the drapes against the sun. Grandma Cassidy was snoring by the time Amy tiptoed out.

Don Ramon was waiting in his walnut-paneled study. Hands clasped behind him, he stood before a tall bookshelf lined with leather-bound volumes. He turned and smiled when Amy entered. “You are a sweet and considerate young lady, Amy.”

“No,” she said, truthfully, “I’m not. I only wanted to speak with you.” She lifted her skirts of pale-yellow cotton and anxiously crossed to him. “Where is he, Don Ramon? Why isn’t he here at the barbecue?”

Don Ramon continued to smile easily. He shrugged and said, “Luiz was not feeling well this morning. He asked that he might be excused. I told him he could be.”

“He’s sick? Why didn’t you say so! May I go up and check on him? He might need something.” She turned to leave. Don Ramon caught her, gently drawing her back.

“You misunderstand. Luiz is not ill. He went for a ride. He will return soon. Do not trouble yourself.”

“A ride? Where? Where did he go?”

“I did not ask. He did not say.”

Amy sighed. “I wish … I wish … Oh, Don Ramon, I don’t know what I wish!” And the forlorn expression that came into her lovely blue eyes was identical to the one he had seen the night before in the dark eyes of his son. She turned and walked away, dejected, and the sensitive Don Ramon, looking after her, wished he could help, but knew that he could not.

The
don
, continuing to smile, stayed on in the quiet study. He sat down in his favorite easy chair, thinking of Luiz and Amy. He was afraid a full-blown romance was about to blossom between them. All the signs were there.

His smile disappeared and he sighed wearily. While he would be pleased if one day the two should marry, how would
the patrón
feel about such a union? Although Walter Sullivan seemed genuinely fond of Luiz, he might be bitterly opposed to having a mixed-blood son-in-law.

They were both so young and so innocent. They knew nothing of life and its treachery. He hoped they would wait until they were both more mature to choose a life’s mate. Luiz was only seventeen, and Amy had just turned sixteen.

The
don’s
green eyes closed and he grinned sheepishly. Ah, what hypocrites are we who have grown old.

Happy memories rose as his thoughts turned back twenty years to another party, another June, another sixteen-year-old beauty.

He had not wanted to go that evening. Had strongly considered sending his regrets. But as a late June dusk settled over Mexico City, Don Ramon Rafael Quintano, dressed in evening clothes, stepped down from a gleaming carriage before the Chapultepec Palace.

In his white-gloved hand, the
don
held a gold-engraved invitation. After presenting it to the presiding butler, he was ushered down a long corridor and to the wide landing directly above a gigantic marble-floored ballroom.

More than one feminine heart pounded as the slim, handsome Spaniard stood, arrogantly scrutinizing the glittering crowd. But his was the heart that pounded the heaviest when his green-eyed gaze came to rest on the most beautiful young girl in the room.

She was tall and slender and her straight, coal-black hair reached to well below her waist. She wore a long emerald-green wrap-around robe trimmed in bands of gold and tied up on one shoulder in the Aztec fashion. Golden armlets caressed her bare, slender arms. A heavy gold chain around her throat supported a large gold disk that rested in the valley between her breasts. On her slender wrists were bracelets of gold and jade, and on her feet were sandals encrusted with precious gems.

As if she were a mystical witch commanding that he come to her at once, Don Ramon Quintano descended the marble steps and walked straight toward the exotic young beauty. Her black, almond-shaped eyes held a strange, almost frightening light, and her ruby lips were so darkly red they appeared to be stained with wild berries.

When he reached her, Don Ramon realized that he was trembling. His host, Presidente Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, standing beside the unusual beauty, made the introductions.

Don Ramon looked into the dark hypnotic eyes of the young Aztec goddess, Xochiquetzal, a hereditary princess and direct descendant of the first Xochiquetzal.

Don Ramon, an educated man, knew exactly what the name meant. Precious Flower. The personification of beauty and love, goddess of the flowers. Never had he known anyone whose name fit so perfectly.

He immediately loved and desired her. And he was sure, by the look in those awesome black eyes, that she desired him as well. The prospect of waiting for weeks, even months before he could possess her brought instant suffering to the romantic Latin.

But the goddess Xochiquetzal was not like the other sheltered young women present in the palace that night. She did as she pleased. She answered to no one. She followed no rigid restrictions of protocol or custom.

And so, shocking her hosts, she calmly took Don Ramon’s hand and silently led him away. Out in the garden, the sixteen-year-old goddess turned to the smitten Spaniard, put her slender arms around his neck, and lifted her beautiful face for his kiss.

He kissed her and when their heated lips finally separated, she said, “I have seen your arrival in the stars. And in the smoking mirror as well. We are to marry, this much I know. But—” she sighed “—I cannot promise we will be together always.” Those black eyes flashed at him as her slender body molded itself to his.

“Does it matter?” he managed huskily. “I want you forever or for as long as you will be mine. Marry me tomorrow,
mi querida.
”

“No,” she said with calm authority. “It must be tonight. The old
padre
awaits in the palace chapel. Come.”

While hundreds of guests danced on in Chapultepec’s ballroom, Don Ramon Rafael Quintano and the Aztec goddess Xochiquetzal, were married in a quiet ceremony in the palace chapel. Afterward, Xochiquetzal ushered her bridegroom up the marble stairs to a large, luxurious bedchamber.

There, in the bright Mexican moonlight that streamed in through the tall palace windows, the bride unselfconsciously took off the gold-trimmed emerald gown, her bracelets of gold and jade, her golden armlets, and the jewel-encrusted sandals.

Naked save for the gold medallion, she lifted the heavy gold disk and told the bridegroom, “This, my husband, is an exact likeness of the magnificent Stone of the Sun that once adorned the Great Temple of Huitzilopochtli in the central square of Tenochtitlán. The face you see in the center represents the Sun God.”

Don Ramon nodded but remained silent.

“The four lesser gods around the Sun God are the gods of earth, wind, fire, and water.” She allowed the gleaming disk to fall back to her breasts. “Our son will be called Tonatiuh in tribute to the Sun God.”

She stood naked and beautiful, so surprisingly bold her jealous bridegroom suddenly suffered a new kind of pain. His heated eyes admiring her bare loveliness, he wondered at her virtue. But then she smiled and came to him. She took her husband’s hands in hers. She turned them up and kissed both palms. Then she placed one on her bare left breast. The other she drew down between her legs.

“Yours are the only hands that have ever touched me, Ramon. We Aztecs are a moral people. I am a virgin. Just as your coming was foretold in the stars, so it was ordered by the gods that I come to you untouched. I have never even kissed a man. Will you teach me how to love you?”

Her happy husband drew her protectively into his close embrace. “
Sí
, my precious flower. I will teach you. My own, my love.”

The next day the newlyweds fled the hot, steamy city. For the remaining long, lovely months of summer, the pair honeymooned in seclusion on Mexico’s emerald coast. When autumn came, Don Ramon took his bride far, far north to live on a small Spanish land grant, a wedding gift from his family.

Don Ramon built his bride a small adobe home and took her to visit their nearest neighbors, a big light-haired Texan, Walter Sullivan, his wife, Beth, and Sullivan’s younger sister, Meg.

The Sullivans were friendly and made the Quintanos welcome.

For a time the Quintanos were happy, even in that lonely, desolate land. But the living was not easy. Don Ramon had little luck on his small rancho in that barren place. Don Ramon’s bride, the lovely Xochiquetzal, could not even coax maize to grow in such parched soil, much less the flowers and greenery that she loved.

Worse, the goddess failed to become pregnant, and she wept bitter tears each disappointing month. A year passed, then two. Three.

One blistering August day in 1838, Don Ramon returned to their modest home at the end of a tiring day to find his beautiful wife aglow with happiness. She told him that he was going to be a father in the spring. They drank Madeira from silver goblets and made love as the sun went down.

At sunset on April 17, 1839, Xochiquetzal went into labor. Her frightened husband said he would ride at once for the doctor. She stopped him. She would need no physician. He pleaded to at least summon
Señora
and
Señorita
Sullivan. No. She wanted no intruders sharing the experience. He, her husband, would deliver their child.