Midnight Rider (39 page)

She watched him strip away his shirt, her eyes fastened on the ridges of muscle rippling across his broad dark back. Thick cords and taut sinews bunched on his shoulders as his breeches slid down his long, lean legs, leaving his narrow buttocks bare, and making little shivers dart into her stomach. When he turned to face her, his shaft rode high and hard against his flat, ridged belly.

“Ramon…” she whispered when he bent to kiss her again, teasing her mouth with his tongue, sliding it across her quivering bottom lip. Then he was nuzzling her throat, nipping her ear, trailing hot, moist kisses along her shoulder. He stopped to suckle a breast, laved her nipple, licked it, then bit the end. He drew the full mound deeply inside his mouth, then moved to her opposite breast, showing it the same fiery attention.

Ramon moved lower, his lips hot and damp against her skin, and paused to ring her navel, raising goose-bumps across her stomach and the flat plane beneath. Carly gasped as she realized his intentions, started to strain against her bonds at the feel of his warm breath on the damp folds of her sex. Then he was parting her with his tongue, laving her gently, determinedly, nudging the plump bud at her core into aching arousal.

His tongue slid deeper, curled around her, then plunged deeply again. He slid his hands beneath her buttocks to lift her against his mouth then suckled the crown of her desire and stroked her with his tongue again and again. Carly's body trembled, tightened, her back arching upward until her limbs went rigid and she shattered in mindless release, biting her lip to keep from wildly crying his name. Bright lights swirled as the pleasure swept through her, so powerful it made her dizzy. Ramon came up over her, his hard shaft pulsing against her belly, his beautiful dark eyes on her face as he watched her spiraling down from her peak.

“You liked that,
querida.
No?”

She blushed again, felt the hot embarrassment in her cheeks.

“It is all right, Cara. I liked it too. Can you not tell?” He filled her then, his shaft as thick and hard as she had ever seen it. She struggled against her bonds, wanting to hold him, desperate to draw him deeper inside, only to discover she had already been released.

Moaning at the feel of his heavy length inside her, she wrapped her legs around his lean hips and pulled him deeper, until his hardness touched the end of her womb. The sensation was incredible, yet in that moment, all of her doubts came crashing in, all of her terrible fears. With a man as virile as Ramon, sooner or later, there would be children. Half Anglo children. Would he love them as much as children of his own blood? What would happen if he discovered she was raised in a Pennsylvania mine patch? How would he feel about their children then?

Or perhaps some other question would arise, and he would not accept her word. If he didn't believe her, he might send her and their children away, or worse yet, keep the children and banish her as he had done before. If he did, she could not bear it.

Her throat clogged with tears. She wound her fingers in his thick black hair to draw him nearer, opening herself to him, taking him deeper still. She clutched his shoulders and kissed him, a passionate, yearning kiss full of all the love she felt inside but knew she would have to deny. The wetness burned her eyes and began to slide down her cheeks. When this night was ended, her life with Ramon must end as well. This time she would listen to her uncle, maybe even marry Vincent. She would guard her heart and protect herself from the pain she could not endure.

Ramon thrust deep and hard, pounding with such force he lifted her up off the bed. Love and passion swirled together, a heady mix that heightened her arousal to a fevered pitch. She was squirming beneath him, arching upward to meet each of his heavy strokes, matching his frenzied pace with a driving need of her own.

Tonight he was hers. Tomorrow he would be gone. “Ramon…” she whispered again, clinging to him, burying her face in his shoulder.

“Te adoro, mi amor.”
I adore you, my love.

She sobbed against his shoulder, clung to him as if she would never let him go. They reached their peak together, their bodies slick with perspiration as a rising tide of pleasure washed over them. For a time they did not stir. She should make him go, she thought, the ache rising up, burning in her throat. She was afraid to imagine what might happen if her uncle found him here. Instead when he began to kiss her, began once more to grow hard inside her, she only moaned softly and gave herself over to his tender embrace.

It was almost dawn when she awoke, saw Ramon at the foot of the bed, dressed and ready to leave. For a moment the terrible thought struck that he had used her again, had only said he loved her so he could spend the night in her bed. Then she gazed up at him, saw the ravaged hollows in his cheeks.

“Do not look at me that way,” he said. “I meant each of the words I said and a hundred more I did not speak.”

Carly bit her lip, relief so strong she sagged back against the pillow.

“You were crying in your sleep. Do you remember?”

“No.” Her heart squeezed, knotted up inside her.

“You begged me to leave. You said you could no longer trust me. That is the way you feel?”

Her fingers knotted in the sheet. “In some ways I would trust you with my life. In others…”

His jaw went hard. Dark turbulence gathered in his eyes. “For weeks now, you have held my life in your hands, yet
I
did not trust
you.
I tell you this now. From this day forward, I will be the husband to you I should have been before. I give you my solemn vow. No matter what happens, no matter who would speak against you, I will not doubt you again.” He turned away from her and started across the room.

“Where are you going?”

He paused and his eyes fixed on her face. “When I came here, I meant to take you with me, but you are not ready to leave. You are more afraid of me now than you were that first night in the mountains. But I am no longer afraid of you, or of what I feel for you. I will win you, Cara. And the next time I claim you for my wife, I will never let you go.”

A sheen of tears rose in her eyes as she watched him at the window. With a last soft glance in her direction, Ramon swung a long lean leg over the sill, ducked his head, and jumped to the ground below.

Carly watched him slip into the darkness, her heart aching inside her breast. But the words he'd said would not leave her. Was it possible to put her faith in him again? Did she dare to hope that things might work out between them? He had wanted her to come home, to return with him to Las Almas, the only real home she'd had in years.

It was what she wanted, she realized, more than anything else in the world. And yet she was afraid.

Exhausted, she lay back on the pillow, listening to the silence, then later the sounds of the awakening rancho. An hour passed. Her uncle rode out with his band of armed men, and her fears for Ramon overrode those for herself.

Had he gone to Llano Miranda? She prayed with all her heart that if he had, her uncle would not find him and that he and the others would be safe.

*   *   *

Two days later, Captain Harry Love, Fletcher Austin, Jeremy Layton, and at least thirty men stormed the pass at Llano Mirada.

Angel de la Guerra watched them come, riding like a windswept fire up through the wagon trail at the rear that was meant to be used for escape. They had taken out the guards, picking off some of them quietly before they started in, taking out the others with a well-placed gunshot as they thundered past on their lathered horses. The women screamed and raced inside their small cabins, hoping to shield their children from harm.

Tomasina Gutierrez stood at her husband's side, firing a long Sharp's rifle, while Santiago cocked and fired a Remington army pistol in each of his powerful hands. Pedro Sanchez, Ruiz Domingo, Ignacio Juarez, and a dozen others fought on horseback, aiming their rifles and firing, then riding to a different position and firing again. Miranda Aguilar crouched behind the watering trough, shooting the heavy Navy Colt's .36-caliber that Ramon had given her and taught her to use. Her fourth shot took out a beefy man astride a buckskin horse, who hit the dirt and rolled to a bloody stop just inches away from the hem of her red cotton skirt.

Amazingly, they fought back the first wave with the loss of only the rear guards and four of the men, forcing the vigilantes to retreat to the edge of the camp.

“They will not wait long before they return,” Angel said, crouching beside Pedro Sanchez.

“No. And we cannot hold them long once they do.” He turned to Ruiz Domingo. “Get the women and children into the forest. Tell them to scatter and hide as best they can. It is the men they are after. We will hold them as long as we can, then ride out. We will meet in the cave at Arroyo Aguaje.” A plan they'd made at the start, should the stronghold ever be taken.

They wasted only a moment with silent farewells and looks that said they knew their chances were slim. Instead each man set to his task and when the vicious Hounds hit again, they were ready. They held them for longer than they had imagined, two solid hours of beating back wave after wave of riders and an endless hail of flying lead, their forces gradually thinning as men and horses slipped off quietly into the heavy brush and towering granite boulders that lined the canyon.

A moment of silence hung in the air between rounds of rifle fire as Pedro Sanchez, Ignacio Juarez, Carlos Martinez, and three other men, all that was left of the defenders, crouched in the rocks above the rear entrance to the stronghold.

Their circumstances were dire, yet Pedro amazed the others by grinning. “They will be surprised, no? When they finally break through, only to discover most of the men have escaped.”

Ignacio smiled, too. “It is El Dragón they want most of all, and just like the rest, he is not here.”

Pedro pondered that. The others were safe, but if he and his
compadres
continued to resist, in the next fiery wave they were sure to be killed. If they gave themselves up, there was a chance they might be arrested, taken back to San Juan Bautista—before they were hanged. If that was the case …

“Take off your shirt, amigo,” Pedro said to Ignacio.

“What?”

“I wish to be ready. The minute the men begin to fire, we are going to surrender.”

“Have you gone loco?” Ignacio started to argue, but Pedro quickly explained his thinking and soon the younger man was nodding his agreement.

“It is a chance, at least,” Ignacio said. “Better than dying here. I will tell the others.” Stripping off his dirty white shirt and handing it to Pedro, he crouched in the tall, thick grasses, carefully picking his way through the dense buck brush and sage to each of the men defending the stronghold.

When the shooting began, they answered fire only for a moment, then Pedro began to wave Ignacio's torn and bloody white shirt on the barrel of his rifle. Carlos Martinez fell to a lead ball in the chest before the final shots ended, as did one of the other men. Pedro, Ignacio, and two other vaqueros were captured by the crowd of angry men, one of which Pedro recognized as Fletcher Austin, another who was the sheriff of San Juan Bautista, Jeremy Layton.

It was the sheriff who approached him, his rifle casually aimed at the middle of Pedro's chest. “Where is he?”

“Who, Senor Sheriff?”

“You know who we want—that bastard who calls himself the Spanish Dragon.”

Fletcher Austin pushed his way forward. “Let my men have a go at him, Sheriff. We'll make the greaser talk.” Austin jerked Pedro up by the shirtfront and punched him hard in the stomach, doubling him over, making him gasp for breath.

“Hold it, gentlemen.” That from the man named Harry Love, the leader of the vigilantes. “There is no need for further violence,” he said with his thick Texas drawl. He smiled wolfishly. “The others may have escaped, but not the man we came for. Gentlemen, may I present the infamous El Dragón.”

Pedro's stomach knotted. He scanned the crowd of angry men, then turned toward the sound of voices and the scuffling of stout leather boots. Powdery dust rose up as a man in black was dragged forward, his hands and feet bound, and tossed into the dirt at Pedro's feet.

The man was Angel de la Guerra.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

His beautiful wife lay sleeping, her pretty face framed by the burnished cloud of her hair. Her cheeks looked pale and her eyes were slightly puffed, as if she had been crying. A small hand was fisted beneath her chin and her petite figure curled into itself, making her look like a helpless child.

He moved closer to the bed, watching the way her chest rose and fell with each of her shallow breaths. Leaning forward, his hands framed her face, his long fingers soaking up the warmth in her cheeks. A heavy knot gathered in his chest as he bent his head and kissed her, a soft, gentle kiss that made her lips curve slightly upward. His tongue brushed the corner of her mouth in a gentle caress, then swept over her bottom lip, and she began to awaken. He smiled as her eyes slowly opened.

“Ramon…” she whispered sluggishly, “what are you…?” Then she sat bolt upright in the bed. “Ramon! My God, how did you escape? Uncle Fletcher said they were going to hang you!” She glanced frantically toward the door. “Dear Lord, you shouldn't be here. If he finds you here he'll kill you. You have to get away!” She swung her legs to the side of the bed and stood up, but Ramon simply caught her against him.

“Easy, Cara, give me a chance to explain.” Big twin pools of green stared into his face, and her cheeks looked even paler than they had when he had first come into the room. She made a soft little sound in her throat and her arms went around his neck. Ramon crushed her tightly against him.

“I was so worried,” she said, trembling in his embrace. “When my uncle rode in this afternoon, he said they had finally found the stronghold. He said they had captured El Dragón and four of his men, and that Captain Harry Love and Sheriff Layton were taking them to jail in San Juan. He said they were going to hang them three days from now in the square in front of the church.”