Treasure of the Sun (23 page)

The heat in her expanded, pushing out her relaxation, her sense of comfort. She let them go reluctantly, for the replacement was something she didn't recognize. It came from within, and that surprised her. Where had this coil of feeling been hidden? Cautiously, she explored it. It grew with the touch of his hands on her. It grew with the touch of her hands on him. It fed on tactile sensation. It fed on the sight of his face and body. It fed on his pleasured sounds. It fed on the scent of his hair, on the nip of his teeth on her nipple and the slow apology of his tongue on the tingling place.

"Don Damian?" She blinked, bewildered by the fright in her voice.

He understood. ''It's normal, love. As inevitable as the tides, as pure as a mountain stream."

"I don't think-" His fingers entered her; the heel of his hand massaged her. A spasm struck her, blinding her, pushing her towards some danger in the dark.

"You're fighting it." He removed his hand; she opened her eyes in relief and protest. "Stop fighting it. I won't let you go alone." He swept a kiss back up her body, his face intent, monitoring her every respiration and reaction.

With an effort, she groped for his wrist and squeezed it.

"There's something happening in me. This won't work."

He listened as if she told him a profound truth, serious, encouraging. "This is like laughter or tears or a good sneeze. It's physical, natural." Wetting his thumb in his mouth, he rubbed it across her lips. "You said you trusted me. Trust me now."

She searched his face, seeking reassurance and finding it. "All right. But hurry. I don't like this anticipation."

Chuckling in a kind of choked pleasure, he lay between her legs again. "I don't have to hurry." With his hand, he rubbed himself against her. The touch of him brought her knees convulsively tight against his hips. His eyelids drooped as he entered her, stretching her.

She must have made a sound, for he halted and considered her. She stared at him in appeal; he nodded in encouragement and said, "You're hurrying to me. Keep coming, beloved. Only a little farther."

Slowly, he thrust inside, driving a spur in her flesh. The pressure of his groin against hers made it worse, or better. His withdrawal tempted her to cry out; his return brought the cry to her lips.

She didn't know what this was, but he said it was natural. He said to trust him. He said . ..oh, God, what had he said? She couldn't remember, only knew his body carried a madness. She clutched at his back with slippery hands; she wrapped her heels tight against his buttocks. She wanted to push him out; she tried to keep him in. The spiral of heat became a conflagration.

Damian incited it. Damian comprised it. Damian.

The spasm took her, and this time there was no resisting. Her body took over, performing a ritual both sacred and spontaneous. She clenched her teeth, clenched her hands. She pushed her heels against the mattress, pushed herself against him. Breathlessly, she sought the heat and found it in Damian.

She heard him groan her name, felt his body strain and shudder in response to hers. Felt a moment of panic--or was it excitement?-as her body lifted again, produced a brief convulsion and relaxed into an almost oblivious stupor. Almost oblivious, except for the surprise that burst like a bubble in her mind. "Why didn't somebody tell me?" she murmured.

"This bed is too small," she pronounced without opening her eyes.

He grinned. It had taken her an hour of recovery to form the words, an hour in which she'd remained close and unprotesting. "I like it. I may buy it and take it back to the hacienda for us to sleep in."

She didn't respond in any way. That didn't surprise him.

She'd succumbed to more than he'd hoped for this night. Later, he promised himself, she'd give him all; for the moment, he'd let her rest. With stirring guilt, he worried about her. After all, she'd just been attacked by someone with a knife, then attacked again, by himself. Different intentions, yet possibly too much for such a delicate woman. In his own actions, the element of self-indulgence niggled at his conscience. His hands on her hips, he eased her down towards the middle of the bed. "Scoot a little bit, querida, so I can rest on the pillow and take the weight off of you."

She wiggled cooperatively, and he sighed with renewed delight. He shifted until they were as comfortable as the tiny mattress would allow. A wisp of her hair straggled over her forehead, and he brushed it back. "You're so beautiful."

As if she were exhausted, she closed her eyes again. As if the sight of him recalled too much. As if she weren't ready to face him. Yet her voice teased as she complained, "You're so heavy."

Reluctantly, he separated them, his hands lingering, and he squeezed beside her. "Perhaps I won't take this bed home with me," he conceded. "Are you all right?"

"I'm all right."

She said it quickly, defensively, and he winced. "I should never have taken you with such-"

"Vigor?"

"Vigor may be the word," he admitted, pulling the sheet over them. "I have only one excuse I can offer."

"I don't want any excuses," she protested.

He wanted to give his excuse while she was spent, while that ingenious brain of hers was at rest, and so he ignored her. "All the emotions I've lived through today have unbalanced me. First I was furious with you for running away from me. I rode like hell. It rained on me. I had to walk miles when Confite threw a shoe. I left him at the Estradas with their promise to send him on, and they outfitted me with one of their pathetic parcels of horseflesh. I arrived in Monterey, and when I pounded on your door, I heard you scream. I broke in and saw some bizarre person escaping out the window. You were bleeding from the throat and I thought you'd been killed. By the time I'd stopped the bleeding and could go after that man, he'd disappeared."

"I didn't run away from you," she said flatly.

Leaning up on one elbow, he looked down at the face on the pillow. The serenity had disappeared and been supplanted by aloofness. It made him angry, to see her withdraw behind such a bland facade after an hour such as they'd spent. He taunted, "Is that all you can say? I tell you my tale of woe, and all you do is deny that you were afraid of me?"

Her eyes sprang open, as he'd hoped they would, and she said, "I'm not afraid of you."

"You're afraid of something."

"I'm the bravest woman I know." She looked startled when the words left her mouth, but she insisted, "Well, I am."

"I didn't argue with you."

"I held my own in a law firm made up of immoral predators. I buried my father and held my mother in my arms as she died. Without the support of my family and with barely enough money, I sailed around Cape Horn to California. I didn't even have a guarantee that Tobias would still be here or that he would marry me, but I came. I buried Tobias, too, and lived through the sorrow. And tonight, I talked to that thing in the room with me. I questioned him. I found out what he wanted. I didn't panic until-"

Her eyes grew big; her skin blanched. On her face was etched the memory of death. Snatching her close, murmuring meaningless sounds of comfort, he rocked her. She burrowed into his chest. She shivered and clutched at him; she thrust a knee between his and he wrapped her in his legs. She sought comfort, oblivious to anything but his warmth, and he responded as if she were a frightened child.

"I was so afraid," she murmured. "My head was so thick and fuzzy, I couldn't think. I was afraid, and I wasn't in control. When that . . . that monster pulled that knife on me, all I could see was Tobias and the blood. I thought I was going to be slaughtered, and all I could feel was regret."

"Regret?" he rumbled.

"Regret that I hadn't ... " She struggled, tiny movements of protest, as if she didn't want to say the things buried in her soul. "Regret that we didn't .. ."

Soothing her with the stroke of his fingers in her hair, he whispered, "Querida, I don't understand what you mean."

"I just regretted that I hadn't given you what you wanted." "And learned what I could teach you," he reminded.

She shook her head fretfully, but he ignored it. A crisis had shown her what all the words in the world couldn't express. He said a prayer of thankfulness: that his Catriona had been saved for him, that his prize had come from this evening's outrage.

In tiny increments, the shivering eased and her limbs relaxed. "You can't sleep yet," he murmured, his lips by her ear. "You must tell me about him."

"Who?" she mumbled.

"Your attacker."

That she remained slack proved a tribute to his lovemaking, yet he feared she was already too deep in slumber to respond, and his restlessness demanded that he get his answers tonight. "Catriona. Tell me. Was he tall?"

"Mmm. Medium."

"Spanish? American? Indian?"

She tried to roll away from his interrogation, but the tiny bed offered nowhere to go. "Sounded Spanish. Sounded hoarse. Sounded rich."

That startled him. "How does someone sound rich?"

"Oh, please, Don Damian." Opening her unfocused eyes, she flung her arm out and smacked him in the chest. "Do we have to do this now?"

"I can't sleep. Humor me."

"After all that, you can't sleep? Does this activity energize you? Because if it does--"

"No, no. Normally, I'm the same as any other man." Humor crept into his voice. "I make love, I roll away, I sleep."

"And tonight?"

"Tonight I want a cigar. I always have a cigar after."

"Then have one."

Irritation slammed into him, and to restrain himself from shouting at her took a Herculean effort. He'd sacrificed one of the pleasures of his life for her, and it frightened her. Even now, even after this night, she refused to acknowledge his dedication to her. He kept his refusal to a clipped, "No."

She said nothing, but she was awake, he was awake, and they lay together, pretending repose. He felt her resistance collapse, and she murmured, "Don Damian? What did you want to ask?"

"Only a few questions," he soothed. "How does one sound rich?"

"Educated," she said glumly. "What did he look like?"

"Like he wore a mask and a scarf and a hat pulled low over his hair."

"Did he give you any clue as to his identity?"

She said nothing for a long, telling moment, and he held himself in patience. "This person knows you very well."

His first reaction was distaste and denial. "Me?"

"He knows me, too, but it was you he spoke of, you he was intimate with. Or so it seems."

"What did he say?"

"He's known you for years. He's familiar with your habit of protecting your servants." Her voice didn't quiver when she said that, but he wondered what was masked behind the simple statement. "He knows your interests."

"Was there some identifying-?"

"Don Damian, I know you think I'm stupid, but if there was anything I could tell you about this person, don't you know I would?"

She sounded exasperated, but he ignored that to say, "In time of great fear, it's hard to remember things you see or hear. My questions could unlock impressions you didn't even know you'd received. If you think of anything you could tell me, any clue-"

"You'll be the first to know."

She turned on her side away from him, and he knew she was irritated. He'd implied she was incompetent; surely the cardinal sin for his sensible darling. Snuggling tight against her back, he pulled her close and held her as she drifted off to sleep.

He was happy it had turned out this way. The night in her room at the hacienda, he'd been positive, he'd known he could sweep her off her feet and into his arms.

He'd failed. She was too proud and stubborn and, he realized now, too distrustful of her emotions to give herself to him. Tonight had been different. Tonight they'd felt emotions that were undeniable.

He had misled her about her safety. He'd suspected that the man who'd murdered Tobias was nothing more than a criminal drifting through California. Perhaps an American criminal like Mr. Emerson Smith. But he'd arrived only just in time, and the villain hadn't been Emerson Smith, or an American, or any person recognizable to Katherine.

The only other reality he'd considered was that he'd frightened Tobias's killer with his vigilance. He'd believed that and insinuated to Katherine that she had no need to worry. Thanks to his wishful thinking, she'd been terrorized and her throat cut; Reproaching her for stupidity was nothing more than his own guilt lashing out at the nearest object. Lashing out at the person he most wanted to protect.