Wild Sierra Rogue (11 page)

“Te quiero,
Mah-gah-reeta.
Hoy.”

For whatever reason, and she didn't wish to study on it, he wanted her. Now. She wanted him . . . now. And the musicians departed. So had Carmelita and the waiter. Margaret and Rafe were alone.

Margaret smiled into his eyes. “I want you, too.”

Rafe carried her into the small darkened room where she had napped the day away, then laid her on the cot. She rolled to her side, making room, and he stretched out next to her. Her greedy fingers went to his chest, her every action a celebration. She hummed low in her throat at how the flesh-toasted cross felt in relation to chest hair soft as a sigh.

It was the same as she remembered it . . . from long ago. “So very, very nice.”

“I'm pleased you approve,” he said silkily. “The cross was a gift from my sister. María Carmen.”

Of course, Margaret didn't correct him.

He dispensed with her hairpins, murmuring, “That's better.”

Their lips met, their arms winding round each other, and her fingers now furrowed through the thick hair at Rafe's nape. Trailing kisses to her ear, he whispered, “I have gone loco for the need of you.”

Her passions climbed to an even higher level, as he continued kissing and caressing her. The scent of him filled her senses richly, deliciously, with overtones of sandalwood cologne, not at all cheap. Her head lolled backward as he sipped from her throat and drew the drawstrings of her blouse below her breasts.

“They . . . they aren't much,” she said worriedly, as he eased back to gaze upon the muted sight of her. “Not like they used to be.”
Not like Olga's.

“For me,” he said, echoing a reference he'd made about himself, back at his ranch, “big things come in small packages,
querida.”

His head dipped to take a crest into his mouth; her fingers tangled in his hair, she pressed him to her. He suckled and laved and caressed, laved and suckled and stroked, giving each breast its share of attention. Both peaks grew hard as pebbles. Her woman-place became heavy, aching for surcease. Never, not even in her wildest dreams—not even in her recollections of the night his hands had sought her hidden places and she'd encouraged him onward—had she imagined the preamble to coitus could be this . . . stimulating.

A low growl issued from Rafe's throat as he groaned, “You're amazing. I thought you'd be an icicle. But you are hot as the most blistering day of July. I like the surprises of you.”

His praise thrilled her, left her feeling as if she were the world's most special woman, which was a wonderful feeling for a woman long ignored and much too insecure about her appeal. Her qualms vanished. Enraptured, she kissed him, but he took the aggressive role, his tongue slipping into her mouth.

“I'm going to undress you,” he whispered when he dragged his mouth away; his toes traced her ankle.

“Yes, do.”

“And you will do the same for me?” he asked.

Strip him? Cowardice and inexperience reared, now that she was on the brink of experiencing the Big Secret, yet she whispered in return, “With pleasure.”

“I wish to kiss you. Everywhere. But first . . .” He took her hand and guided it to the warmed silk of his trousers; he made her fingers fasten around the abundance of him. “Know your power,
cariño.
This is what you do to me.”

“Oh, my.” In the shadow of the Alamo she'd wanted to explore his flesh as he explored hers, but she'd gotten no further than his chest when a constable had shouted them apart. There was no one to stop them tonight. “You are finely made.”

A world of wonders fit him. He was rigid and hard—so very hard, like a brick. Hot, hot like a kiln. And he was large, very large. She ached to have him in her, yet her curiosity begged appeasing. “Do you hurt?”

“Very much.” He nuzzled her neck. “You will make it better.”

Ever inquisitive, she found herself much in awe of how the male appendage functioned. Olga, when newly wed, had been a wellspring of information about sex, but the intricacies of physiology were sadly lacking. When Margaret tried to get to the bottom of a list of questions, Sister Ninny had gotten all flustered and Victorian-acting. Charity, too, had expounded on the beauties of passion, but, like Olga, she was no scholar and didn't reckon on matters in a studious fashion. Passion was one thing, a fertile mind another. “I wonder how it gets hard like this.”

“It is you,
amorcito.
Just being around you does it.”

“Rafe, you're exaggerating. I've been in your company numerous times, and I would have noticed if you'd gotten this way. Only the blind would miss it.” Blind.
Don't think about Olga's affliction.
“Aren't you going to say something?”

“Margarita . . . not now. Later.”

“But, Rafe—”

“Shhh. Be quiet.”

“I will not.”

“Mujer.
I am trying to make love to you.” His hand smoothed over her hip. “Hush, or you'll spoil the mood.”

“All I asked is how your you-know-what got hard. If you don't know, please don't worry about appearing stupid. I share your ignorance.”

No longer thrilled with her surprises, he uttered a string of curses while rearing back from her. “If you want to know how one goes soft, observe!”

 

 

The wind lowed like a mournful steer. A tumbleweed rolled end over end to crash against the train depot wall. That hot desert zephyr then burst, blowing Tex McLoughlin's Stetson off his head, all ten gallons of it landing on the steel tracks that glinted in the unrelenting sun. These were the tracks where the westbound train had departed ten minutes ago. Natalie Nash had not been aboard, either on arrival or at departure.

A piece of newspaper whirled across Tex's path. He glanced upward and to the right, to the parched and serrated peaks of Mount Cristo Rey, then to the left, in the direction of the flatter foreign land across the river. It seemed to reflect his emptiness, the loneliness of the desert.

A carriage pulled out, taking a quartet of men away. Apparently, they too had waited in vain for an arriving passenger. Tex had seen them here yesterday; today the one in charge had said in Spanish, “She betrayed me. Once more the bitch has let me down. She'll never do it again.”

The world was full of woebegone men, Tex decided, and glanced up the tracks, toward Alpine. “I shouldn't've listened to Maggie,” Tex said, grieving to the only other being in sight, a black-and-tan mutt who'd taken up with him this morning. “I should've stayed put in Alpine. And done what I wanted to, not what I was expected to do.”

For all his twenty-two years, Angus Jones McLoughlin had been the dutiful scion carrying the required baton. Gil and Lisette McLoughlin's surviving son would raise cattle and younguns on the Four Aces Ranch. This was how it was done in Texas. A man wouldn't even have to be too clever in the doing, since most ranches were money-making propositions already, the Four Aces a gold mine beyond compare; and even if it wasn't, the family fortune had been invested and reinvested. Wholly in lucrative enterprises.

So . . . at the proper time and with some retiring little woman at his side, Tex would branch out into politics, following in his father's footsteps. That's what you did, when you were a Texan with money in the bank and cattle on the hoof. He'd always felt he wasn't cut out for the highfalutin sort of life, though. He was a country boy and common cowpoke by choice. For Miss Natalie, though, he would change into anything she wanted, if she wanted.

“Money or nothing else don't matter,” he lamented to the cur. “She's gone, gone, gone.”

And all he had to remember her by was a heart full of pain and one small kiss, given just before the train had pulled out of Alpine. Though he barely knew the blonde beauty, he was positive no other woman would ever do for him. Tex was a man who knew his mind.

After spitting a particle of dust from his tongue, Tex reached down to give the mutt a scratch on the ear and to grasp his hat. “Duty calls. I've got to find my sister. And fetch our mother.”

He ambled toward the mount he'd rented from an El Paso livery, saying to the wayward wind, “Maybe I'll get lucky and Natalie will show up at Eden Roc.”

His luck, to his way of thinking, had never been that good.

 

 

The trip by wagon into the Chihuahuan Desert and toward the Sierra Madres couldn't be considered anything but a trial. While Rafe was glad to be back in Mexico, his mood was as black and sour as a grizzly bear disturbed in winter.

His aggravation wasn't necessarily because the wagon was too bogged down with Margarita's heavy steamer trunks, or because Tex McLoughlin had done nothing but pout like an offended schoolboy. It was because his sister sat next to Rafe on the spring seat and chattered like a damned monkey. She acted as if nothing had happened at Carmelita's, but Rafe had not forgotten, not for a moment. Losing his potency brought him great shame. It had never happened before.

“She might have had me under some magnifying glass,” he told himself for the tenth time in four days. Since Carmelita's, he'd made no further attempts at lovemaking, not even when she flirted with him at the quaint inns—
mésons
—where they took quarters. Had he gotten too old for the feats of a Don Juan? If that first gray hair he'd yanked from his scalp was an indicator, walking sticks and liniment were on the horizon.

Worthless to the ladies, what could he do with the rest of his miserable life? What was his purpose? Paying respect to Hernán's sacrifice, that was his purpose.

How to accomplish it, that was the question.

 

 

On the fifth morning of their journey to Eden Roc, about three hours after they had left the village of Moctezuma, Rafe drove the wagon onward, Margarita beside him, her brother snoring from a makeshift bed atop the trunks. Thank God for those snores. Rafe didn't know how much more of Young Siegfried's bellyaching he could take.
And if I never hear the name Natalie Nash again, it will be too soon.

“Would you like one of these?” Margarita asked and offered a tin of cookie crumbs.

“No,” was his cross and terse reply.

The skinny witch—buttoned to the throat in her usual garb of brown gabardine—hadn't stopped eating since Juarez. At the rate she was going, she'd reach the city of Chihuahua and the two hundred-pound mark at the same time. At least she'd gotten some color back in her complexion. And she'd done a lot less wheezing and coughing.

“My goodness,” she commented and dabbed her mouth with a handkerchief, “the terrain does provide intriguing sights. Roadrunners, cactus, white sand. And more roadrunners, cactus, and white sand. On occasion, and with cause for celebration, we find wide fissures in the earth. Arroyos.”

“We're not down here for the landscape.” He did, however, for lack of anything better to do, launch into a catalog of the city of Chihuahua's attractions.

Evidently unimpressed with the travelogue, she replied, “Yes, but I really do think we should have taken the train. It's much more expedient.”

“I've lost count of the times you've told me that.”

Her single-mindedness never ceased to amaze him. Nor was he unaware of her acute curiosity. When she said, “You never have told me
exactly
why you're running from your uncle,” Rafe rolled his eyes.

“Because I—”

Unanticipated, the wagon gave a sudden lurch to the left; traces and harnesses pinged, horses whickering and screaming at the unexpected movement. Baggage slipped. Tex gave a shout. The cookie tin as well as Margarita's bonnet went flying, though she grabbed the tin as if her very existence depended on it. Rafe somehow got the team stopped and the brakes set. He twisted around and gave a look downward, confirming what he suspected. “We've lost a wheel.”

He and Tex hopped to the ground, Rafe giving Margarita assistance. An inspection of the total situation provided bleak news. Several spokes had splintered, were broken. There were no tools to repair it, since Margarita's collection of steamer trunks had prevented bringing them along. The weight of her possessions had no doubt put too much strain on the wheel.
There'd better be gold in those damned trunks.

“I'll saddle one of these nags and go for help,” Tex offered.

“Do it. Keep to a southerly path, and just before you reach that next squat range of hills, you'll run into the village of El Sueco.” To ease everyone's mind, Rafe added, “We're not too far from Chihuahua city.”

Rafe started to hoist himself to the wagonbed. “I'll get the wagon unloaded and jacked up.”

Margarita dabbed her forehead with her handkerchief. “None of us is doing anything until we've had a bit of refreshment. Rafe, get my green tru-”

“Refreshment?” Rafe snapped and put his foot back on the ground.
“Por el amor de Dios,
we're in trouble, woman! It's at least a four-hour trip to the nearest village. We're not taking time out for tea and bonbons.”

She rolled her eyes and waved a hand. “Oh, you. Don't be such a crab. I've got some wonderful Swiss chocolates that I've been saving for a special occasion, and . . .” She grinned at her brother, who had gotten his saddle from the wagonbed. “Dr. Pepper.”

“Well, shuckums, Sis, why didn't ya just say so?” Tex dropped the saddle. “Where're they at?”

“The green trunk.”

Young Siegfried leapt upon the wagon and hoisted the trunk as if he were hoisting a basket of feathers, setting it on the ground as if it were a casket of rubies and diamonds. Or perhaps his adored Natalie. Since Rafe had nearly broken his back putting that trunk into the wagon, it was all he could do not to stomp off. It was no fun getting old. And weak.
You're not so old, Delgado. He's just younger and bigger.