She gave a mental shrug. If he was down on all women because of one, that was his problem. She wasn’t going to waste energy trying to win or placate him. But a compelling tension vibrated between them, rousing a sweetly fierce awareness she hadn’t experienced since the classic affair between worshiping student and married professor who regarded his seductions as necessary rites of passage for favored initiates. She just hadn’t found young men very interesting, and though she had somewhat desperately had a few encounters, they had been neither physically nor emotionally fulfilling.
Shea attracted her so strongly she was sure he had to feel some of it. Damned if she’d let him see it and reinforce his apparent contempt for women. She couldn’t keep from stealing a glance at his hands, though, and almost recoiled in shock.
What had happened to them? The tanned, capable hands with long sensitive fingers were ridged with white scars. She remembered, from childhood, hearing him play the grand piano that had belonged to his grandmother Christina. Patrick had loved to listen though he’d been scornful, almost frightened, when Shea had mentioned studying music in the East. At his father’s insistence, there’d been one year at the state university and then Viet Nam. Since then, after that four-year Mexican hiatus, he’d gone back to the university, and had made, Tracy remembered, at least one trip to Israel. But Patrick had never mentioned this damage to Shea’s hands, just that he’d been wounded in Cambodia.
There was a lot she’d like to know about this cousin of hers, distant in more ways than one, but his reserved manner didn’t encourage launching into a series of “Do you remembers?” And she was tired, not so much from the flight as from the hour-and-a-half taxi ride to the Houston airport at morning rush hour.
Settling back between the two men, knees to one side of the gearshift, Tracy was amazed at how relaxed she felt—safe for the first time in months, protected. For in spite of Shea’s aloof behavior, there was a rocky steadfastness about him, a certainty that exacted trust. And there was no doubting Geronimo’s ebullient, admiring good will. She was tired of being on guard, tired of fending for herself, and if that was weak, she didn’t care.
It wasn’t only the comforting physical presence of two men she’d known in childhood, but seeing again the purple marching mountains in every direction as they proceeded down the Santa Cruz Valley on the Nogales highway. The massive Santa Catalinas rose to the north above Tucson, the Rincons were east, and to the west, against the Tucson Mountains, gleamed the white walls of San Xavier del Bac on the Papago Reservation, one of Padre Kino’s missions. When Apaches had forced Christianized Pimas to flee their mission at Tumacacori farther south, the Indians had carried their saints and sacred vessels in their burden baskets to this White Dove of the Desert.
A ribbon of green showed the track of the Santa Cruz River through the broad flat valley, defined by the Santa Ritas to the east and smaller, scattered ranges to the west.
Except for that slim fringe along the river, the country looked parched and dead in spite of its being March. “Has it been a dry year?” she asked.
“Mighty dry. We’re a long way from that average eighteen inches at the ranch and of course Tucson’s under its average of eleven.”
Spreading beneath the highway and sprawling in all directions stretched acres of white stuccos topped with what seemed from this perspective to be overlapping red tile roofs.
“Green Valley?” gasped Tracy. “It’s grown like crazy.”
“Crazy is right,” Shea said grimly. “And getting more so. Some big pecan growers pumped lots of precious water to get groves established, but they’re selling to developers who’ll root out the trees and pack in all the fake Mediterranean villas they can on the acres they’ve gotten zoned for building. People use less water than agribusiness, of course, but I wonder what they’ll do when there isn’t any.”
“What this place needs is a few good Apache raids,” Geronimo said. “Let me tell you, in the good old days, we were a damned efficient check on urban sprawl.”
“Which part of you’s bragging?” grinned Shea. “You psyched them out in the Army, Sanchez, but I happen to know you’re three-quarters respectable vaquero stock. And besides, I’m everything you are,” Shea reminded.
“Sure. But the proportions are a little different.” Geronimo squinted balefully at the flat-topped low ridges on their right. “Those damn mine tailings!”
“Don’t bitch, Sanchez. Can’t you see Duval’s revegetating them?”
“I’ve seen more sprouts on a bald man’s skull!”
“Maybe someday they’ll use them to pave water catchments the way they’re doing up by Black Mesa on the Navajo Reservation.”
“We should live so long,” grunted Geronimo.
The highway by-passed the old presidio of Tubac now, but Tracy glimpsed the adobes housing art galleries and craft shops, the steeple of the church. In Spanish, then Mexican days, the presidio’s tiny garrison, sometimes less than a dozen men, had tried to ward off Apache raiders, but the valley had been depopulated from the early 1820’s till the influx of American miners after the Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Tubac itself had been abandoned several times, its soldier-settlers and friendly Pimas refuging in Tucson, the region’s other military outpost.
“What’s happening at Rio Rico?” she asked, nodding at the roads of the old Tumacacori Mission.
“GAC Corp’s still pushing its Shangri-La.” Shea didn’t even glance at the roads. “Calabazas had its booms between its busts. First a visita for Jesuits, then a sheep and goat ranch run by a couple of Germans in partnership with the governor of Sonora. After the U.S. takeover, there was a camp there on and off, and a customs collector. Big building surge in the 1880’s with a classy hotel and such. Wonder how long Rio Rico will last?”
“You’re just full of optimism!” Tracy charged.
He shrugged. “When you see what’s brewing at the ranch, you’ll know why I’m so bright and cheerful.”
Turning off the Nogales highway, they followed Sonoita Creek along a bottom flanked by the Santa Ritas to the north and stretching into foothills and mountains to the south, fading into Mexico. Juniper and oak studded red earth and gray rocks ascending up the mountains. Giant black walnuts outlined whitetrunked sycamores and fresh green cottonwoods. Cattle browsed among catclaw and mesquite, and there was comparatively little cactus.
Red Mountain rose behind the little town of Patagonia. “A developer wanted to put in a big subdivision here,” remarked Geronimo. “But the sewage system is in such bad shape that the State Water Quality Control Board wouldn’t issue a permit.”
“Just wait,” grunted Shea.
They were getting into country now that Tracy remembered from riding over it. Her eyes feasted on the familiar stretch of the sparkling creek, running shallow in its wide bed, but life-giving here, of boundless importance. The valley broadened, bottom lands and gentle slopes guarded by mountains, and to the east were the jagged Whetstones, dark blue against the azure of the Huachucas.
Tracy’s flesh prickled and she was close to tears. It wasn’t only that she knew this country. The remembering went deeper than that. “I wonder,” she said softly, “how it looked to them.”
“Who?” frowned Shea.
“Socorro. Patrick O’Shea. Tjúni and Santiago.”
“After all they’d been through, I expect they were damned glad to find a place to stop.” Tracy thought Shea must resemble the Irishman for whom he was named, who’d fought for Mexico in the San Patricio Battalion, the one Mangus Coloradas had protected for Socorro’s sake and called “Hair of Flame.”
“Socorro must have been some lady,” said Geronimo. “There she was, brought up guarded and protected, and all of a sudden she’s alone in the cinder cones and lava flows, with her escort dead. Finds water. Lives off desert plants. And then she finds her redhead, just a husk of baked rawhide, and brings him back to life.”
“It’s strange how all those four who started the ranch had been the same a
s dead,” Tracy mused. “Santiago was the only person left after scalp-hunters hit, and he’d have died if Shea and Socorro hadn’t found him. Tjúni’s whole village had been wiped out. So there you had an Irishman, a Spanish creole, a Mexican vaquero and a Papago, all thrown together and depending on each other.” Tracy smiled at Geronimo. “And then your family came to work the cattle.”
He nodded. “Don’t forget Talitha Scott. She raised Socorro’s and Shea’s children after Socorro died so young, and she held the ranch together when Shea went off to the un-Civil War.”
He’d never come back to that yellow-haired girl who’d adored him since childhood when he’d ransomed her and her half-Apache brother, James, but Talitha had at last found love and peace with Marc Revier, a young German mining engineer who’d taught her to read and waited yearningly for her to grow up.
Surprisingly, Shea joined in. “The one I’ve always felt for was James. He didn’t fit with either Apaches or whites. When he became Fierro the raider, he must have known there was no chance for his people to shut out the whites.”
“At least he and Caterina left a child,” Tracy remembered.
It was Sant, a grandson of Caterina, daughter of Shea and Socorro, who had married Christina, granddaughter of Talitha and Marc, at last uniting the separated bloods in Patrick, Shea’s father.
The old house was hidden by huge trees except for glimpses of mellow adobe and broad veranda, but they didn’t turn in there, following instead a graded road that led back through a spine of hills, a road she didn’t remember.
“Where are we going?” she demanded.
Shea slanted her a frown. “Didn’t you know?”
“Know what?”
He let out an explosive breath. “Vashti never liked the old house. As Patrick got blinder, she kept yammering about how selfish he was to make her stay in a place she hated when he couldn’t see it anyway. For peace’s sake, he let her pick what she wanted and where, just so she’d drop nagging him to move to Tucson.”
“Oh.” Tracy, with a queer sense of bereavement, glanced over her shoulder at the compound with the family graveyard on the slope behind it, the corrals and barns and bunkhouses. “No one lives there?”
“My uncle does,” comforted Geronimo. “He’s foreman, though Judd’s the overall manager.”
Tracy frowned at the name, though she couldn’t have said why. She scarcely knew Judd, Patrick’s eldest son. Six years older than Shea, he’d been at college when she came to live at the ranch, and he’d never paid any attention to her on his visits home.
“It’s so strange that Patrick never mentioned it,” she murmured.
“Guess he didn’t like to think about it,” Geronimo offered. “Since he can’t see, maybe now it’s done, he doesn’t mind too much.”
Trying to imagine darkness, Tracy shivered and thought it would make it all the more important to be in familiar surroundings, using rooms and furniture intimately known.
“Patrick wouldn’t pave the road, though,” Shea chuckled. “Not that it bothers Vashti much. She’s learned to fly, and her friends mostly come in their own planes.”
Patrick had mentioned an airstrip and that Judd used a plane to patrol the ranch and attend to business in and out of the state. Shea swerved to avoid a snake and Tracy bumped against Geronimo.
“Sorry,” she apologized.
“Anytime, chica.”
“Watch him,” Shea warned. When he smiled, it changed his whole face, making it young, warming his stern masculine beauty—and he was beautiful, though it was not a word she’d ever before applied to a man. “The main reason we don’t have a phone is so his women can’t track him down.”
“You don’t live at the main ranch?”
He shook his head. “I’ve moved to El Charco.”
That, she knew, was the part of the ranch inherited through his mother. There was something unspoken, something mysterious, about the dead Elena, Patrick’s second wife. El Charco’s southern boundary was the Mexico border.
“You’ll have to come see us,” Geronimo invited. “I make the best Margarita you’ll ever drink.”
Shea frowned at him. “Sanchez, you know damn well our place isn’t set up for entertaining ladies.”
“Yeah?” Sanchez scowled. “Then how about—”
“Never mind,” cut in Shea. “Tracy’s here to see Patrick.”
What’s wrong with you—or is it me? Tracy wondered, hurt and a little angry. Lord above, cousin, you act as if you were the one who’d been raped!
The pickup cornered the side of a hill, opening up a far vista of Mexican mountains. Across a broad sandy wash, dominating a hilltop, a massive modern adobe two stories high was surrounded by adobe walls. A pool glinted in the rear courtyard. From this vantage point, Tracy saw the airstrip and hangar on a cleared expanse that covered the far end of the long flat hill beyond a tennis court.
She’d done a feature on similar airstrips in the Texas hills, and couldn’t repress a nervous laugh. “What a setup for smuggling drugs!”
Shea’s gray eyes flicked her with scornful rebuke. “Sensationalism may sell papers, but I hope you won’t worry Patrick with your melodramas.”
“Do you take scorpion juice in your coffee?” she retorted, giving him an edge of derisive smile, though inside she was smarting.
“Don’t fight, kiddies,” said Geronimo, getting out to open the gate. “Here comes the lady of the manor.”
II
Vashti had the slim, disciplined, rather hard body of a woman successfully fighting weight and years. Skin pulled snugly over her cheekbones and a slight upward tilt of carefully tweezed eyebrows suggested a skillful face lift. Her eyes were such a dark green that only sunlight kept them from looking black and her silver-blonde hair was pulled sleekly back in a French knot secured with jade pins. She wore slim black trousers and a black silk blouse that molded a high, youthful bosom.
“Tracy, love!” Taking her shoulders, Vashti bestowed a light, brushed kiss on her cheek. “You’re looking marvelous, but a bit frazzled. Come see Patrick and then you must freshen up.” She ran her hand over Shea’s arm. “So good of you to fetch Tracy. Bring her things in, won’t you, and stay for lunch? We’ve held it for you.”
“Thanks, but we’ll just say hi to Dad and get along.”
He distanced himself from his stepmother so obviously that color mounted to her face, though she at once recovered, taking Tracy’s arm and drawing her through an atrium where an antique Mexican fountain splashed among cool greenery, into an immense living room that seemed even larger because the furnishings were few and massive. A fireplace molded in a flow of adobe curved from the ceiling to the opposite side of the wall in sculptured gradations. Tracy thought it resembled a cave but she sensuously enjoyed the smell of burning juniper.
Vashti indicated stairs on the other side of the room, polished tile, spiraling upward. “Can Patrick get up and down?” Tracy asked, ascending.
“Of course not, dear! He’s paralyzed.”
“Yes, but before—”
Vashti shrugged. “I had the house designed so that he wouldn’t have to leave the second floor. It’s simpler, and much more convenient.”
For whom? Tracy wanted to ask, but swallowed her criticisms. Vashti was going out of her way to be pleasant. Sniping between family members wouldn’t ease Patrick’s troubles.
Hesitating at the top of the stairs, she followed Vashti’s lead into a huge room that gave a breathtaking view of the Santa Ritas. Apart from that irony, Tracy saw nothing else but ran with a soft cry toward the great poster bed.
“Patrick!”
She embraced him as best she could, kissing his weathered cheek, trying not to cry. He lay like a felled oak, covered with a sheet up to where a plaid western shirt was unbuttoned down the throat. Many times she had gone to sleep against that broad chest, comforted and quieted by the steady pound of his heart.
Straightening, she looked down at him, relieved that apart from the sig
htless blue eyes, he didn’t seem much changed. Then he tried to smile. One side of his mouth moved but the other lay slack and the eyelid drooped. That half of his face was like a dead man’s. Yet there was something curiously young and vulnerable about it, too, an erasing of tensions and expressions shaped by the years.
“Tracy.” The word was slightly muffled. With his good hand, he stroked her face. “You’re feelin’ mighty pretty!”
He gave a muted chuckle and she remembered from her last visit that joking and profanity were his ways to deal with blindness. But how would he handle this?
His face changed at the sound of steps on the stairs. “That you, boy?” he demanded as Shea and Geronimo came in.
“How you doing, Dad?” Shea bent over his father. Tracy felt an oddly jealous twinge at the unmasked tenderness in his gaze.
“Hell, you can see if I can’t!” snapped Patrick. “You know dang well how I’m doing!” He glared at Geronimo with one sightless eye. “Hey, Ronnie, make me a drink, will you? You’re the only one puts in enough tequila.”
“It’s time for your lunch, dear,” Vashti protested.
“It’s time for a drink,” Patrick grunted. “Anyone else want one?”
“There’ll be wine at lunch,” Vashti said with a pained frown.
“We’ll drink with you, Dad,” said Shea, and moved over to the bar opposite the beehive fireplace, which was faced by several heavy leather chairs and a massive couch. Christina’s piano faced the window.
Patrick reached out. Quickly, Tracy took his hand. “You back for good, honey? Got enough breathing those exhaust fumes?”
“I can stay till you’re up and rambunctious again. I sublet my apartment and quit the paper, though they’ll buy some features.”
“I never could fathom why you wanted to take such a job anyway,” Vashti grimaced with a shake of her head that made jade earrings swing. “Poking into grubby places, meeting weird people—”
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