Nan Ryan (39 page)

Virgil nudged Noche forward
, and the responsive mount needed no further reining. The intelligent stallion knew where his master wanted to go. Given his head, Noche immediately began to ascend the rocky face of Brizna Peak.

Trusting his well-trained stallion to get them safely to the summit, Virgil wound the long leather reins loosely around the saddle horn. He slipped his arms under the princess’s and wrapped them snugly around her trim midriff.

She sighed, laid her own hands atop Virgil’s, and marveled that she had no fear of riding horseback up a hazardous mountain trail at night. Less than a week ago she would have been sick with terror. But that was before she met Virgil Black. In Virgil’s arms, she had never felt safer.

His noble heart pumping, lungs expanding, the stallion labored up the steep stony slope. The trail spiraled into and around impassable cracks. It went up, up, up over five hundred feet of steep-sloping solid, slick rock. If the stallion took a misstep, if he started sliding, they would fall to their deaths below.

Muscles straining, sharp hooves dislodging loose rocks, Noche carefully ascended the dangerous serpentine trail almost to the top. The tired stallion halted when he had walked as close to the top as he could. The rest of the trail up was a dark, spiraling path cut between a corridor of giant boulders too narrow for him to navigate.

Virgil swung down and reached for the princess. She stood close behind him in the thick darkness while he unbitted the black and loosened the saddle cinch. From behind the cantle, he unstrapped a blanket, tossed it over his left shoulder.

Then he reached behind him, took the princess’s hand, and drew her along after him up the pitch-black path, cautioning as he went: “Turn sideways here” and “Duck your head” and “Watch it, there’s a chasm here you must step over.”

When bright moonlight greeted them, the princess knew they had reached the summit. Once at the top, Virgil immediately knelt and spread the blanket at the center of the smooth mesa. The princess, experiencing none of her usual aversion to heights, stood close to him, mesmerized by the incredible 360-degree view from this lofty lookout.

“Virgil,” she murmured, “we’re up so high. We must almost be in heaven.”

He rose, stood up behind her, clamped an arm around her waist, and said truthfully, “As near as I’ll ever get.”

Spread out far below, the lights of El Paso and Juarez twinkled like glittering diamonds tossed out on a bed of black velvet. Dark looming mountains marched north to south, their towering monoliths the natural western boundary of the sister border cities.

Virgil gave her a few minutes to enjoy the spectacular scenery, then he said, “Come. There are some things I want to say to you.”

They moved to the spread blanket, sank down to their knees, and sat back on their heels, facing each other.

The princess reached out to touch him, but he stopped her. “No, don’t. Don’t touch me. If you do, I won’t be able to think.” She nodded, understanding, and placed her hands on her suede-trousered thighs.

Virgil drew a long breath and said, “First of all, you’ll never know how terribly sorry I am that … that …”

“You mistook me for the Queen of the Silver Dollar.”

“Please, sweetheart, don’t prompt me. And don’t interrupt. For once let me do the talking and you keep quite, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, contrite.

He started over. “You have no idea how sorry I am for the indefensible mistake I made in apprehending you. You tried to tell me who you were, but I wouldn’t listen. I was arrogant and intolerant and cruel. You have every right and reason to hate me. I’ve done you a terrible injustice and I wish there was some way I could right all the wrongs, but I—”

The princess could keep quiet no longer. “There is a way.”

“There is?”

“Yes. You can truthfully answer one question for me.”

“Fair enough.”

“Do you love me? Even a little?”

“I do,” he said without hesitation. “I love you, Your Highness. I love you and I’ll never stop loving you.”

“Oh, Virgil,” she said, lunged up onto her knees, and threw her arms around his neck. “I love you, too. I love you so much it hurts.”

“I know,” he said, putting his arms around her. “I know, sweetheart. Unfortunately, the fact that we love each other changes nothing. No matter how much I love you, you’re still leaving tomorrow.” He pressed her close against him. “Aren’t you?” He held his breath, hoping she might say no, knowing that she wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

Against his shoulder, “Yes. Yes, I am leaving tomorrow. I have no choice. You understand, don’t you, my love?”

Virgil exhaled heavily, lifted a hand to stroke her hair. “Sure I do, baby. Sorry, I mean, Your Highness.”

She pulled back to look at him. She gazed into his tortured blue eyes and said, “Make love to me.”

She saw the muscles in his smooth tanned throat constrict. With difficulty, he spoke. “I can’t do that. I can’t make love to a royal princess.”

“I
am
a princess, but I’m a woman first.” She tightened her arms around his neck. “Your woman. Make love to me, Virgil. Please.”

“Jesus, I can’t resist you,” he said truthfully.

“Don’t even try,” she replied, unbuttoning his white shirt. They quickly shed their clothes and stretched out naked on the blanket beneath the twinkling stars. There was a trembling in the princess’s pale thighs and a quivering in her breasts when Virgil laid a gentle hand on her stomach. He studied her through the long black lashes that curved down to his olive cheeks. His passionate eyes aflame with love and longing, he gazed at her, knowing—in that instant—that for as long as there was the breath of life in him, his heart would belong to this ginger-haired princess who could never be his.

The princess laid a pale hand on his dark chest and softly said his name, shattering the last remnants of his self-control. He swept her into his arms and kissed her. They kissed and sighed until both were anxious and ready for total possession. Virgil put his hands to her narrow waist, stretched out on his back, and lifted her astride his hips.

He said in that flat Texas twang she so adored, “I want to lie here below and look at your beautiful face while I make love to you.”

He took her hand, drew it to his lips, kissed its soft palm, then drew her slender fingers—one at a time—into his mouth and gently sucked and licked them until they were wet. Needing no instruction, she wrapped her gleaming fingers around his throbbing erection and guided the smooth hot tip up inside her.

They both gasped with growing elation as she slowly lowered her body on his, sliding sensuously down on that rock-hard phallus of pulsing male power. When he was securely inside her, stretching and filling her, she began the age-old rolling of her hips as if she had done this a thousand times before.

She hadn’t.

She hadn’t even been aware that lovers mated in this position, but she knew right away that she liked it very much. Her hands gripping his ribs, she leaned down for his kiss, then straightened once more. Rocking and grinding her bottom against him, her movements met by the rhythmic upward thrusting of his seeking pelvis.

They looked into each other’s eyes as they made love there on that windswept summit beneath the stars and above the glittering lights of the two desert cities. Both realized, as they surged and pressed and sought total fulfillment, that this divine coupling was much more than just a sexual union. It was spiritual as well as physical. It was that wonderful mating of soul and body experienced by only the lucky few who have known true love.

Both cried out when they climaxed together. The sounds of their ecstacy carried on the night winds to echo throughout the eroded towers, pinnacles, and rocks balanced on pedestals.

Collapsing atop Virgil’s slick broad chest, the princess stayed with him still inside her for a long peaceful time, reluctant to move, to release him, to let him go.

When her heartbeat had returned to normal and she could breathe easily, she began to talk, to tell him about her life in Hartz-Coburg. She told him about her arranged early marriage and said she had respected but not loved the duke. She had married out of duty. After the duke’s death, there had never been with another man in her life. She talked about her parents, the king and queen. She filled him in on anything he might wonder about and when she had concluded, she said, “Now, my love, it’s your turn. I know so little about you. Tell me about your life, your loves.”

“You are my only love,” he said.

She lifted her head, looked at him skeptically. “Now tell the truth. I would suppose that you’ve had lots of women before me.”

“Sure, I’ve had a lot of women,” he admitted. “But, I’ve never loved a woman until you.”

She liked his answer. But there was one last little thing she wanted to know. Walking her fingertips over his chest, she said, “Was one of the women you’ve … ah … had … the … the Queen of the Silver Dollar?”

“No.”

“No? You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

Virgil chuckled and admitted, “I fell asleep in her bed before …” He shrugged bare shoulders. “I swear to you that I never laid a hand on her.”

“Good,” she said, pleased, then laid her head on his chest and murmured, “Tell me about your parents.”

To her surprise Virgil needed no further coaxing. He spoke fondly of the brave Texas Ranger who was his father. He told her that Captain Charles W. Black had died a hero.

“I was just eight when he got killed,” Virgil said, “but I remember him well. He was a big, kind, easy-going man who was affectionate and brave and I was very proud of him.”

“I’m sure you were,” she said. “And your mother?”

“A pretty, high-spirited woman with an infectious laugh and a zest for living. I lost her, too. When I was ten.”

“I’m sorry,” the princess said, touched that he chose to say nothing unkind about the woman who had given birth to him.

When True had told her about Virgil’s mother deserting Virgil when he was a child, her first question had been, ‘Virgil told you about it?’ To which True had replied, “Lord, no, to this day Virgil’s never said a word about her, even to me. The bartender at the saloon where she left Virgil told me about it.”

Pretending she didn’t know the truth about the mother who had callously deserted him, the princess said now, “Do you look like your mother?”

“No,” Virgil said. “But I look a lot like my father.”

She detected a note of relief in his tone. She knew why. With a mother like his, he was glad to know that her lawfully wedded husband actually was his father.

They continued to talk easily, to reveal more of themselves to each other. To kiss and sigh and make lovely memories to store up and sustain them through a lifetime apart.

They lay in each other’s arms and vowed never to forget a single thing about this beautiful starry night together.

Sighing, gazing into the flashing eyes of her godlike lover, the princess said softly, “The poet said ‘There is a moment in every life which is never surpassed.’”

She sighed and hugged him when Virgil said, “This is that moment.”

43

At El Paso’s busy downtown
train depot, Virgil and the princess slipped out onto the wide wooden platform to be apart from the others. Under the broiling afternoon Texas sun, they stood looking into each other’s eyes, making strained small talk, painfully conscious that this was their final farewell.

Once they said good-bye, they would never meet again.

As much as he loved her, Virgil felt as if he hardly knew this stunning woman who, dressed once again in her own regal clothes, looked every inch the royal princess. Already it was nearly impossible to picture her in the those tight yellow suede riding pants she’d worn only yesterday.

And had eagerly shed last night atop Brizna Peak.

It wasn’t just the finery that made her seem a stranger. She was back amid all the trappings of royalty. The gleaming royal railcars awaited her on the tracks. And just inside the crowded terminal, her factor, Montillion, her lady-in-waiting, the baroness Richtoffen, and her bodyguard, Hantz Landsfelt, were at her beck and call.

Through the open terminal doors, came the first boarding call.

“It’s almost time,” the princess said.

“Yes, I … wait, I almost forgot.” Virgil reached into his pocket and withdrew a clear pint bottle. “
Una poco donacion
” he said, handing it to her. “A little gift.”

Curious, the princess took the bottle. “The white sands!” she exclaimed happily. “You
did
get me some of the precious white sand. You knew how badly I wanted it and you … you.… Oh, Virgil,” she looked up at him like an excited little girl, “you couldn’t have given me anything that would mean half as much to me.” She swallowed past the growing lump in her throat and said softly, “Thank you, darling. Thank you so much.”

“You’re very welcome, Your Highness.”

Clasping the glass bottle as if it were priceless, the princess dropped one of her spotless beige gloves.

“You dropped a glove,” Virgil said, stooping to pick it up.

He started to give it to her. She put out her hand to take it. But he withheld it. “I’ll keep it, sweetheart,” he said, tucking the glove into his shirt pocket, “So I’ll have something to remember you by.”