Bride of Fortune (24 page)

      
“Hello, Mercedes.” He waited expectantly, knowing everyone surreptitiously watched them, waiting to see what she would do.

      
Her throat collapsed and her mouth was drier than the clouds of dust kicked up by the horses' hooves. He looked hard and dangerous. She could still conjure up the image of him standing in her doorway after smashing it in. “You're late. Rosario and Angelina hoped you'd return yesterday,” she finally managed to blurt out.

      
A sardonic smile creased his face. “And you, of course, hoped I never would.”

      
“Don't expect me to deny it,” she replied acerbically.

      
He laughed and stepped closer, his arm snaking out with amazing speed to clasp her about the waist and pull her to him. “For the benefit of our audience,” he murmured low as his lips came down on hers.

Chapter Ten

      
Mercedes stiffened at the sudden assault as his mouth took hers savagely. She could taste the salty tang of male sweat as his tongue plunged inside her lips and thrust across her teeth, brushing her tongue. Then abruptly he withdrew, raising his head and looking down at her with hooded eyes. She would have fallen if he had not been holding her up. His musky scent was tinged with tobacco and leather. The male smell permeated her senses as she held onto his biceps, bemused and breathless. The look of predatory hunger on his face was no longer masked. She could feel it arc between them like a lightning strike.

      
He took a lock of her hair in his fingers, brushing it from where it lay plastered by perspiration to her forehead. “You've been working too hard. Your nose is sunburned.”

      
Mercedes suddenly realized how dreadful she must look in an old muslin
camisa
and faded blue skirts, her leather peasants sandals caked with river mud, her hair ratty. “Your mother continually reminds me of my failure to maintain a proper degree of ladylike pallor.”

      
“I didn't intend that as a chastisement.” He released her, yet stood close, waiting to see if she would back away.

      
She did not. “Your father said mucking about in the dirt with peons was beneath an Alvarado.”

      
“As I'm certain you noted, my father could be something of a pompous ass as well as a lazy son of a bitch.”

      
She smiled in surprise. “I never expected you to say a word against your boyhood idol.”

      
His teeth gleamed whitely in a rakish grin. “Boys do grow up sooner or later...just as girls do.”

      
The sexual overtones of his words and his demeanor were unmistakable. Why did he not just go to Innocencia and have done with it?
He wants you
, an inner voice taunted. Ignoring it, she changed the subject. “You got the black stallion and his herd?”

      
“All safely penned up for the winter. No one, not even the Juaristas, will find them.”

      
“I only wish my project were as successful,” she said, looking out to where the peons hacked at the unyielding wall of spiky cacti and gnarled chaparral. “We've been digging for over a week and we aren't halfway there yet.”

      
“You need a more effective way to clear the brush.”

      
She looked at him crossly. “A well-directed lightning strike would be very helpful but I don't think you're in any position to arrange it.”

      
He threw back his head and that rich deep laugh again rumbled. “No, but my vaqueros might be able to do the next best thing.”

      
As Lucero walked across to the cluster of horsemen and issued instructions, Mercedes called Rosario to her. Bufón bounded beside the child. The three of them watched while he mounted Peltre and the others rounded up their horses from the riverbank. Then the men set to work with reatas, roping the big squat clumps of prickly pear. The ropes bit into the cactus, impervious to its lethal spines. Wrapping the reatas around their saddle horns, they spurred their horses, pulling up giant clumps of earth along with the plants.

      
“Oh, look! Papa and his men are making the ditch so much faster,” Rosario said, ignoring the dust clouds billowing around them.

      
Bufón ran out to the horsemen, chasing the great bundles of brushy roots as they bounced along the ground, barking excitedly at the wonderful new game. Mercedes and Rosario laughed at his antics as he veered off course, darting after jackrabbits, lizards and small rodents displaced by the uprooted vegetation.

      
Within a few hours the riders had cleared a channel over fifty yards long. Juan directed the course of their labors and his men followed behind with their shovels, deepening the ditch easily through the loosened earth. The vaqueros accomplished more by late that afternoon than the peons had in a week of backbreaking work afoot. They would clear a path to the fields within another day.

      
Everyone returned to the house that evening, coughing from the dust, too exhausted to talk except for Rosario, who rode in her father's arms, chattering excitedly about her lessons.

      
“Father Salvador is cross sometimes, but he is ever so smart. Already I've memorized the alphabet. He says soon I shall be writing my letters.” Nicholas cocked an eyebrow in surprise, looking across at Mercedes, who rode beside him.

      
“I convinced him that your daughter would make a good pupil...unlike her father,” she said, daring him to object, yet certain that he wanted this for Rosario as much as she did.

      
“I'm astounded the old...er, that is, the good father would take to teaching a child.”
Especially Luce's child
.

      
Rosario piped up, “He does say I'm his cross to bear in old age—but he says you were awful wicked when you were a little boy, Papa.”

      
Mercedes hid a smile.

      
When they reached the house, Mercedes took Rosario from Lucero and looked up at him. “Our crops would’ve died for certain without the irrigation. Thank you.”

      
He nodded. “What is a husband for?” His eyes locked with hers, his meaning clear as the promise for that night. Then he rode toward the stables.

* * * *

      
Nicholas expended more energy grooming Peltre then he normally would have, especially considering the hellishly hard week he had just put in on the range. He needed the time to think and to cool down himself before he did something foolish. Mercedes had haunted his dreams nightly while he slept on the cold hard earth and had filled his head daily as he chased horses. The visions of her lithe golden body incited him to lust, just as her repressed desire and jealousy incited him to anger. And he had been angry that awful night. Killingly angry. He had come within an inch of doing what his brother would have—raping her without a thought of the ultimate repercussion for their relationship.

      
Never before in his life had a woman stirred his emotions so intensely. Since Lottie had shipped him off to Texas he had made it a point to remain aloof from any personal entanglements. Women were a commodity to a professional soldier, pleasure and divertissement to be bought like whiskey and tobacco, used and discarded the same as he tossed away empty bottles and cigarette butts. Innocencia was that kind of a woman. Mercedes was not.

      
He, Nicholas Fortune, had a wife and a child through the good offices—however unintentional—of his brother. The child he was finding amazingly delightful to deal with, but not the woman. She was a lady like none he had ever met before. He could still see her standing sweaty and sunburned when he rode up. Even wearing drab loose fitting
paisana's
clothing, no one could mistake her for anything else but the
patrona
. Every patrician feature, every movement right down to the regal tilt of her head bespoke generations of breeding. And pride.

      
Mercedes was proud and Luce had shamed her. That was what complicated their relationship now. She could not trust him. But even deeper lay the question that ate at him as he curried Peltre with long smooth strokes. Could a loner like Nicholas Fortune ever trust a woman like Mercedes Alvarado? “I have to control this obsession with her, dammit! She's my wife and she will come to me. I don't have to beg crumbs from the
patrona's
table!”

      
Finally he finished with the stallion and turned him over to the elderly stableman, then went to the bathing room to scrub off a week's worth of ground-in grime. As he dressed for dinner, all he could think of was how much he wanted to make love to his wife. An intimate dinner in the large dining room with only the two of them would fray his already taut nerves past the snapping point.

      
When he walked downstairs, Lupe greeted him shyly. “Dona Mercedes asks that you come to the kitchen.”

      
Surprised by the unusual request, he nodded and headed toward Angelina's fragrant domain as the smell of spicy rabbit stew filled the air. No
machos
tonight, glory be to God! He walked into the room and found Mercedes and Rosario sitting at the long trestle table by the courtyard window.

      
“Papa, are you going to eat with us? We missed you while you were gone.”

      
“I decided to eat informally while we were all working late outdoors. It's been easier. If you wish, I can have Lupe set the dining room table,” Mercedes said.

      
She was fresh from her own bath, her hair piled up on top of her head in damp ringlets, her skin glowing rose-gold from days in the sun. She wore a simple peach-colored muslin gown trimmed with white embroidery. He forgot all about food. “This will be fine for tonight,” he said, pulling up a heavy pine chair, crudely bound together with rawhide strapping.

      
They ate the hearty fare, exchanging bits of conversation about the stock roundup and the growth of crops, speculating on what the weather might be over the rest of the summer season, with occasional interjections from Rosario. It would have seemed to a casual observer that this was a happy family, comfortably ensconced in a familiar routine. But the promise of the night to follow created a subtle tension between Nicholas and Mercedes that belied the mundane words they spoke.

      
Outside in the shadows of the stable, two men held another sort of conversation.

      
“I say he has changed. Porfirio is right. We should do as the
gringo
asks,” the young vaquero argued.

      
The older man inhaled his cigarette, his eyes glowing in the darkness that surrounded his weathered features. “Oh, Don Lucero has changed, all right,” he said with a wry laugh. “You did not know him as a boy or you would recognize just how much he has changed.”

      
“I know
criollo
haughtiness,” the youth replied. “There was a day when he would never have ridden with us, sweaty and rope-burned as we are. Now he has slept beside us, shared our humble food and taken his pull at the jug of
pulque
when it was passed around the campfire. He has become a man of the people. The war made him see things differently. He left the army because he could no longer support the usurpers.”

      
“Don Lucero did not spend much time in the army,” the older man corrected his youthful companion. “He ended up a
contre-guerrilla
, the worst of the lot, cutthroats in imperial pay.” He spat in disgust, remembering the last time he had seen their handiwork in a nearby village.

      
“I don't understand. You said you liked the man he has become since he's returned to Gran Sangre,” Gregorio said in bewilderment.

      
“That does not mean I would trust him enough to approach him openly. Not yet. We need time to see if this man is as he seems to be.”

      
“We have no time to waste. I know Don Lucero will help us.”

      
“If he
is
Don Lucero...” Hilario replied speculatively. “If not, perhaps we can trust him more. Or perhaps even less.”

* * * *

      
When Mercedes realized her husband stood in the doorway to her room, she set her hairbrush down on the dressing table and turned to him. His hand grazed the smooth new wood of the door sash and he glanced at it, then quirked one eyebrow at her.

      
Mercedes recalled the knowing smirk of the carpenter who had come to refit the broken door. “I had it repaired,” was all she said.

      
“But you didn't relock it. Perhaps we're making some progress.” His voice was smooth as he glided into her bedroom.

      
“I've tucked Rosario in. She enjoyed the story you read her very much,” she evaded, nervously moistening her lips.