After Eden

by Joyce Brandon

  In rapid Spanish he spoke and then turned away, leaving her there, unaware of what he had said or what it would mean for her. The four men closed in on her, and now she screamed, a signal for the other women to panic, and they did.

  Chaos reigned. Rough hands on her naked flesh, hurting, groping, squeezing her breasts, stroking her smooth white skin, filled her with violent energy.

  Screaming, slashing out like a wild cat, Rita fought them. There was much yelling and cursing until they subdued her—one man for each wildly flailing limb. Others followed beside them to fondle the quivering, milk-white flesh. They carried her in the most humiliating way possible—legs spread, arms outstretched, bucking and kicking all the way, her eyes glued closed to blot out some small part of the horrors that awaited her.

  Quickly they carried her up a long flight of stairs. She sensed the upward movement. They stopped, and she ceased her frantic struggles and opened her eyes, relaxing down into a swing between the men. The man holding her left leg knocked on the door before them.

  “Enter!” It was that cold, arrogant voice she remembered from the quad. Fear rippled through her in waves.

  They opened the door and carried her to the low bed in the center of the room. Bowing to the young man who was surely their leader, they swung her into the middle of the bed and dropped her like a rock. Ignoring her, they laughed and spoke in rapid Spanish to the tall, slender bandit who watched in silence, hands on hips, lips twisted in arrogant impatience. Rita scrambled into a more dignified position.

  Finally, still guffawing, the men shuffled out and closed the door behind them. A rifle leaned in the corner of the room opposite the door. Rita mentally measured the steps to reach it.

  They were alone. Rita’s heart beat so hard she could feel it, like a hammer at her temples, hurting her head.

  “Take your shoes off,” he commanded in English.

  “Take them off yourself! You savage.”

  He chuckled softly—the coldest, most frightening sound in the world—and Rita panicked. Lunging off the bed, she grabbed the rifle and brought the barrel up, aiming it at his broad chest.

  Smiling just as coldly, he walked toward her. “Do not pull the trigger,” he said softly, “or you will be very sorry.”

  Gritting her teeth, closing her eyes tight, Rita pulled the trigger. The hammer fell. Only a disappointing click broke the silence. Rita opened her eyes, screamed, and turned the rifle to grasp it by the barrel. With all the strength she could muster, she swung it at him.

  He caught the stock with one steely hand, jarring her all the way to her toes. Before she could save herself, he slapped her a hard, stinging blow to the cheek.

  Rita came at him like a tigress, and she kept coming at him; but slowly, methodically, relentlessly, he mastered her: he allowed her to fight him as long and as hard as she wanted, but always he hurt her more than she hurt him—until at last she went down and could not get up. They had not wasted time or breath for words. She lay on the floor, panting.

  “Crawl to the bed, gringa bitch. You have earned your reward.”

  “Go to hell!” she gasped.

  “Hell is reserved for gringos. I only make the reservations.” Panting, he began to disrobe. There was no fight left in her. For the first time, tears slipped down her cheeks. Her humiliation was complete.

  Tall, well built, slim-hipped, with heavy black curls running from throat to groin, he was a fearsome sight for a girl who had never seen a man without clothes. Her eyes widened. A hard knot of fear settled in her throat to burn there, choking off any words or screams. If she could have spoken, she would have begged him to spare her.

  With deliberate roughness he picked her up and tumbled her onto the bed. Dropping smoothly to his knees, watching her horrified face, he caught her ankles and pulled her toward him.

  “Scream if you like. It assures my men that you are receiving what you deserve, gringa.”

  Rita was bruised in a dozen places. By tomorrow she would be black and blue from the methodical punishment he had inflicted, but she didn’t care. By tomorrow she would also be dead. With the last ounce of defiance in her body, she coiled forward and spat in his face.

  With his left hand he grabbed her by the hair. With his right he slapped her across the face, back and forth. Finally, when he had reduced her to gasping, sobbing breathlessness, he let her drop back onto the bed. Only then did he wipe her spittle off his face.

  She lay there, crying quietly, hopelessly. And, looking back on it, Rita understood that something must have stirred in Mateo Lorca; not kindness, but perhaps a grudging admiration. Had her futile attempts to fight him, a man with twice her strength and ten times her endurance, perhaps reminded him of his own past—that first year when he had reportedly fought the gringos alone, on their terms?

  A lamp hung in the center of the room, casting a golden glow over her flesh, softening the bruises that would look stark in the light of day. His voice was harsh. “Too bad you demanded that I break you. Such purity of line should not wear bruises. Too bad you are a gringa.”

  Was it regret that caused him, unexpectedly, to lie down beside her and close his eyes? Or tiredness? He too had ridden all those punishing miles she had ridden. Was he human after all? Could his tireless young body be responding to the drudgery of riding to and from the wagon train?

  His breathing was as uneven and weary as her own. Thankful for the reprieve, she allowed her exhausted body to relax next to his. Rita closed her eyes. Amazingly, sleep claimed her.

  She woke by degrees. Her consciousness returned, but not her ability to move. A burning sensation drew her attention downward. A warm, feather-soft touch teased her thighs. A pulse quickened in her loins, a feeling so delicious, so incredibly heady, that she didn’t breathe lest it stop.

  She must be dreaming. Her heavy lids would not open.

  A dog howled outside. That helped to place her in time and space. Then she realized that she was not dreaming. Someone was caressing her thighs, moving up her hip, pausing at the cleft between her legs, barely touching the sensitive inner flesh, moving slowly to her breast, lightly caressing the swollen peak. Warm fingers rolled the tight little bud of her nipple, and a shaft of heat spread down to her throbbing womanhood.

  Slowly she regained the use of her sleep-drugged limbs. “No, please,” she whispered, opening her eyes to look at the young man whose hand fondled her breast.

  “Hush,” he said softly. He leaned forward, and his lips brushed against her cheek until they found her mouth. His breath mingled with her own. His lips were hot, searching, his tongue soft and probing. She tried to push him away, but her hands had no strength. His hand found her breast again and caressed it until she squirmed beneath him. His leg nudged her thighs open, and by then her hips were already arching against him, already hungry for whatever he was about to do.

  But he did nothing. He continued to kiss her. Clumsily his hand groped her thighs. When she should have protested, she was too weak, too defeated. He took her breast into his mouth, and she cried out softly. Let him do what he would. There was nothing she could do to save herself. There never had been.

  The warmth of his mouth, the teasing movements of his tongue, stirred a response in her young and vital body, a reaction that seemed as inexorable as he. Breathless, her lips parting for his exploring tongue, she turned toward him.

  In spite of her pain, or perhaps even because of it, all her responses seemed heightened, her nerve endings too close, to the surface. Suddenly she remembered what he had said earlier, that since he had mastered her, it was his right to take her.

  He positioned her carefully, holding her thighs apart with firm hands.

  Silver shafts of moonlight illuminated the floor and bounced off it to light the bandit’s quarters. Her slitted eyes opened, saw his handsome yet completely ruthless face, and then closed, but too late. As long as she lived she would carry the memory of his dark face, his lithe warrior’s body, poised with inexorable intent in the V
of her thighs—his darkness against her fairness, his hardness against her softness.

  Panting, she tried to retreat, but his dark hands held her as easily as if she were a doll. He pushed into her. Surprised by the burning little pain, she tried to squirm away, but he held her tight, and, slowly, the pain seemed to subside, turning into an itch that needed to be rubbed against, touched. Her soft inner parts burned with desire.

  With that terrible male wisdom available even to the youngest man, this bandit seemed to know that her body quivered with the same hunger as his.

  Moving awkwardly at first, the bandit slowly found a rhythm he liked. Clinging to him, Rita half cried, half sobbed. Her body felt beyond her control. She tried to hold back, but it came out of nowhere: a vast, bottomless gorge. One second it was not there; the next she was teetering on the brink, her mouth opening to scream as the tension from his body coalesced in her belly, and the earth dropped away from her.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  For a long time she lay quietly. When she spoke her voice must have startled him. Even to her ears it sounded rich and sultry. No bitterness marred its perfection.

  “Now you must kill me,” she said simply.

  Shock that she knew and would actually say the words was quickly followed by flaring anger.

  “No one tells Mateo Lorca what he must do,” he said harshly.

  With a wisdom beyond her fifteen years, Rita remained quiet and let him wrestle with the problem. He came to it with surprising ease.

  “Your American brothers keep black slaves—I will keep a white slave.”

  He kept her for one month. She would never know what had prompted him to keep her or what had finally caused him to reject her.

  One morning she woke up—her body pressing to his for warmth against the chill desert nights—and found him staring at her as if he had never seen her before. For a split second she thought she saw tenderness in his black eyes, then fear, except she knew Mateo Lorca, for all his youth, could not feel fear any more than he could feel tenderness.

  That morning he did not make love to her. He told her to sleep. When she woke again he was bathed, shaved, dressed in a tight-fitting charo suit that was to become his trademark. Tersely he demanded that she dress herself—quickly.

  So incredibly handsome that she trembled to look at him, his face was closed, unreadable. A stab of fear pierced Rita’s heart. It was time. A month late, even crueler now, because she had begun to care, to hope. His cruelty must be more obdurate than even she had imagined. And more refined…

  After he had talked at length with his lieutenants, they left camp alone. All day as they rode she waited for him to execute her, but her pride was absolute. She would not show by word or deed that she cared. Silent, she rode beside him. An hour after dark they reached a small settlement. Mateo took her to the house of a middle-aged Mexican woman whom he called Tía Andrea and left her there without even a good-bye. No kiss. No words. The woman called him patrón. He spoke to this Tía Andrea in rapid Spanish, then, with as little ceremony as when he had taken her from the wagon train, he left her.

  Relief that he hadn’t killed her was quickly followed by outrage. When she recovered enough to ask questions, she learned that he had left money for her care and a ticket on the stage to her home, wherever that might be. But she couldn’t decide where to go. She had no home. She had relinquished that when she ran away from Tyler, her tyrannical older brother.

  Depression—and the fact that it took no effort to stay—kept her there. Two months after Mateo had left her, Tía Andrea asked her if she had decided on a name for the baby.

  “What baby?” Rita asked, frowning.

  “Your baby…the son of our patrón,” she said matter-of-factly. “It must be a very special name, because our patrón is a very special man…muy grande, muy bravo…”

  Tía Andrea waxed eloquently about the many fine qualities of the man who had kidnapped and abandoned her, but Rita no longer listened.

  It could not be! It could not! But even as she seethed with sudden, hot anger, she knew it was so. She was not blind, only stunned for too long by shattering events.

  She accepted the fact of her pregnancy on a Monday. On Tuesday she drank quinine, but Tía Andrea caught her and forced her to drink a glass of warm, soapy water. She wouldn’t have done it except compliance was the only way she could keep from hurting the stubborn old woman.

  Coughing, sputtering, she drank the soapy water and threw up and then lay on her pallet for a week, refusing to eat. Tía Andrea sat beside her and told stories all day long, all week long, about women who had given birth, about the joy of giving life, the innocence of tiny babies, the opportunity to give love and life to her own child. Wisely, she said nothing more about the man who had put this marvelous gift inside her. Finally, because she was young and hungry, because it was apparent that Tía Andrea loved her, but mostly because she herself needed someone to love, Rita relented.

  The pregnancy progressed normally, but Tía Andrea seemed distracted, torn by indecision. One day, late in Rita’s ninth month, Tía Andrea disappeared for hours and would not say where she had been.

  Two days later Rita went into labor. She was on the small, narrow pallet, breathing with the hard, drawing cramps, when a tall figure—lean-hipped, broad-shouldered, dressed in a tight-fitting charo suit—appeared in the doorway. Oh, God! How many times had she seen that sinister, familiar silhouette in her dreams and nightmares?

  That he should come now, when she was fat and ugly, when her face was shiny with sweat sheen, filled her with a sudden despair and then shame. What did she want? That he should make love to her? A filthy Mexican?

  Wishing she could disappear or die, Rita turned to the wall. Her hair was uncombed, and her thighs were bloody. Damn him! Damn him!

  “¡Patrón! You came!” Tía Andrea was joyful.

  El Gato Negro embraced the thin, prematurely gray woman. “Of course, Tía Andrea. For you I will always come.” His voice contained the first note of tenderness Rita had ever heard from him.

  It was disgusting. While Rita gritted her teeth, hating them both for ignoring her, Tía Andrea gushed over her patrón for at least three minutes, thanking him profusely for coming. Desperately Rita tried to block their conversation from her mind, but she had picked up enough of the lyrical language to understand snatches of it. Finally, when she could stand it no longer, she turned over to watch the man who had abandoned her to this agony and fear.

  “There were no others…after me?” Mateo demanded, his dark cheeks flushing in spite of his control.

  “Oh, no! No one, patrón!”

  In Spanish that Rita could not follow, Tía Andrea talked long and rapidly. When she stopped, Mateo sighed. He answered her in Spanish.

  “I’m sorry, Tía Andrea. What you ask is impossible.”

  The woman’s ancient, seamed eyes clouded with sudden guile. This time she spoke English. “You are right, patrón. The child is a gringo. It should be raised as a gringo.” Heavily, she sighed and went to sit on the floor beside Rita, drawing his attention there.

  Mateo fell neatly into her trap. His anger flared into a white-hot heat. “The child is a Garcia-Lorca!” he said furiously. “No child of mine will be raised as a gringo!”

  “I will fetch the priest! There is no time to lose.”

  Tía Andrea was gone. They were alone.

  Heart pounding so hard that she was sure it shook the room, Rita sat up on her elbows and faced him. “I will not marry you!” she cried fiercely.

  Mateo smiled. Too late Rita realized that she had made it a contest—one she could not possibly win—one from which he would not withdraw. If she did not want it, then it must be done. To protect his child.

  With no knowledge of English, assuming that the bride’s tears were from the agony of childbirth, the priest performed the wedding mass and the marriage ceremony, ignoring both her cries of anguish and her sobs of protest. The baby was born two hours later and in moments form
ally christened Andrea de Mara Garcia-Lorca.

  Because he was fleeing from a posse, Mateo could not stay. Within moments of his daughter’s birth he was gone. He left money with Tía Andrea. While Rita convalesced and fell in love with her daughter, Tía Andrea found a small house near her own and fixed it up for mother and infant. It had a parlor, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. It was ample for their needs.

  When little Andrea was a month old they moved in. A strange contentment came over Rita. She no longer seethed with anger. The baby was beautiful—she had great dark eyes, a sweetly cherubic face, and a serene and loving disposition.

  They had everything they needed. Surprisingly, Mateo Lorca turned out to be a good provider. Rita floated through motherhood radiantly. It was unlike her to be so complacent. Her figure returned, and men cast admiring sidelong glances at her, but there was no yearning anywhere within her, and she was grateful for it. She had feared she was cursed because each time he had come to her, the fires had leaped into brilliance.

  Andrea was five months old when her father paid his first visit to their small home. Rita came back from the store to find him on the long sofa in the parlor holding his daughter. Her mouth dropped open, and she stopped. Through the door that opened into her bedroom, she could see his saddlebags draped over the foot of her bed. Apparently he had sent Tía Andrea away.

  “No, no!” she cried, moving to put her groceries down so she could snatch her daughter from his arms.

  Effortlessly stripping away her composure, his cool black eyes flicked over her. A shiver of anticipation defeated her protests. She stepped back. Andrea whimpered, but Rita could not take her daughter from him. With that one look he had reminded her that he was in control.

  Rita started to back out of the room. Balancing Andrea in one arm, he stepped between her and the front door and closed it.