Bride of Fortune

by Henke, Shirl

  “Do you think the reeds will work?” Angelina asked. She stood in the doorway, a worried frown creasing her normally smiling face.

  Mercedes had inserted small lengths of hollow reed in each of the punctures, hoping to let the poison drain out before the outer skin healed over. “I have read that doctors employed the practice on battlefield injuries with some success. If a bullet hole can be made to drain, why not the piercing from an animal's teeth?” She wrung her hands, then turned from Angelina back to Lucero, feeling his forehead for the heat of fever.

  “I've steeped cherry bark. As soon as he awakens, we can spoon it down his throat. Let us hope it will prevent the fever.”

  “Thank you, Angelina,” Mercedes replied softly. She then added, “Where is Rosario? Is she all right?”

  “Since you would not allow her in here, she has remained by Bufón's side. Her presence seems to calm him. It's amazing that he is alive, but I have stopped the bleeding with yarrow and laid spider webs on his wounds. I think he will live.”

  “He saved my life. If I'd blundered onto that cat's lair in such close quarters, he would probably have killed me before I could’ve done anything.” But much as I love my pet, I'd give his life and my own for yours. The thought sprang suddenly into her mind as she gazed down at the pale, still form of her husband.

  “You are exhausted,” Angelina said. “I'm going to draw a hot bath and dish up a bowl of hearty lamb stew for you. Then you must rest. Lupe and Baltazar can take turns watching over the master.”

  Mercedes shook her head. “I'll stay with him through the night. If the fever rises, he must be cooled at once.”

  “At least let me bring you food. You will do the no good if you fall into a faint from hunger,” the old cook admonished. Without waiting for a reply she turned to the door, adding, “I will send Baltazar up with a tray. You will eat.”

  Mercedes watched through the night, dozing on the large cushioned chair beside the bed. Near dawn she awakened to the sounds of moaning. He tossed restlessly in short jerky motions beneath the sheets, then called out her name. His voice was low, raspy and hoarse. She placed her hand on his forehead and found it burning hot.

  The fever had begun.

  Summoning Baltazar, she sent the elderly servant to fetch buckets of cool water from the well. Then she unfolded several large white bed sheets to use as soaking cloths. Through the day and into the following night Baltazar and Angelina assisted her in placing the sopping wet cool sheets across her husband's long body, covering him from neck to feet, holding him down when he thrashed in feverish delirium.

  He spoke in brief disjointed phrases about the ghastly brutality of war which he had lived through, interspersed with bits about a woman named Lottie that made no sense at all. He also called for someone else—Luz, a Mexican woman's name, she was certain. Mostly he called for Mercedes. His voice was so weak and breathless that much of what he said was too garbled to be intelligible. The old cook and valet said nothing to the patrona about the fact that he spoke in a polyglot of languages—English and French as well as Spanish.

  Mercedes was the only one who recognized all three but even she could make little of his fevered cries, other than to recognize how often he invoked her name. He never mentioned Innocencia. But who were Lottie and Luz? Probably some soldaderas he had taken up with when he rode with the contre-guerrillas. Still, some sixth sense, some repressed fear of what he might reveal caused her to dismiss the servants once the ravings began to grow stronger.

  “Patrona, you cannot hold him down. He will lash out unaware and injure you,” Baltazar protested, his austerely lined face haggard from lack of sleep.

  “We have bound his wrists and ankles. The linen ties will hold,” she said stubbornly, pushing them from the room. “Fetch more cool water and bring it to me. That is all I need.” Her voice was firm, set. They obeyed. She closed the door, then collapsed against it for a moment, more frightened than she had ever before been. Could Lucero have become so used to speaking English and French during the past four years that he would lapse into it this way? Or had she made that savage surrender on the ground to a total stranger?

  All the little things, the inconsistencies in his behavior during the past months surfaced again, nagging at her. He liked honey on fry bread when he had always hated it in the past; he read in Anselmo's library late in the evenings when before he had boasted never to have opened a book since leaving his tutors; his responses in church were careful, not repeated with the careless rote boredom he had formerly exhibited, even during their nuptial mass. And what of his hands, those marvelously skillful ambidextrous hands? He could employ left or right with equal ease in a myriad of small tasks.

  Lucero had returned to her a better man than when he left, one who worked hard, cared for his daughter and was benevolent to starving peons. She and everyone else had come to accept that. But in the privacy of the bedroom, he was different. Mercedes blushed to remember her response to his touch. He had employed slow patience to win her surrender when she would not give it. After months of self-denial, she had finally surrendered. Was it because he was not the Lucero she had wed?

  As a bride she had known so little of her husband, other than fear of his cruel mockery and shame over the careless way he took her and then deserted her for his mistress. She really had never known Lucero Alvarado at all—until now. And even as she was coming to love him, she feared he might not be Lucero at all, but another man blessed with his beauty, freed of his flaws.

  “It cannot be,” she whispered as she gazed down on his flushed naked body. Now every inch of him was familiar to her, every long hard muscle, every scar, even the scent of him. It had not been so before when he came to her only in darkness and then only for brief painful couplings before leaving her alone, feeling aching and defiled.

  But now he was her mate, her love. She ran her hands gently over the crisp abrasion of hair on his chest, then down one long sinewy leg and back up. He was still too hot, too dry. Bending down, she tugged another wet sheet from the bucket where it soaked and smoothed it over his flesh, cooling and wetting him with life-giving water. All the while she worked, she prayed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nicholas thought he was drowning, attempting to thrash his way to the top of a pool of foul, stagnant water. Ice-cold water. His teeth chattered and he shook, causing a searing arc of pain to shoot across his shoulder and arm. Then he felt the warmth of another heartbeat, another body. Soft heat enveloped him, small smooth hands soothed him. He could feel her body fitted against his, perfectly familiar as no other woman's had ever been. The fragrance of lavender filled his nostrils as he drifted off into peaceful oblivion at last.

  Mercedes felt him relax. The chills that had wracked his body were over and he slept naturally for the first time in forty-eight hours. She had spent the second night lying beside him, at times throwing her own body over his to keep him from breaking open his stitches as he struggled against the linen bonds that held him fast to the mattress. When the chills began, she covered him with warm blankets, then stripped off her clothes and pressed her body against his to quiet him. Sometime during the night the fever had broken. She had removed the bindings from his wrists and ankles, and then she had drifted off to sleep herself.

  Scooting over in the bed, she sat up and studied the man sleeping so peacefully. His swarthy skin was pale from his brush with death but still bronzed against the white bed linens. A beard stubble shadowed his jaw, giving his face a piratical look. Those troubling wolf's eyes were closed, the thick dark lashes swept down onto the high, finely chiseled cheekbones. She reached out and touched his face, letting her fingers feel the raspy scratch of whiskers, trace the elegant contour of his thin hawkish nose, glide over the smooth arch of a heavy black eyebrow. Sleep made him look younger.

  Her hand moved lower, unconsciously seeking out the steady reassuring drum of his heartbeat as she pressed her palm against the hard slab of chest muscle. When her hand followed the natura
l pathway of the narrowing arrow of body hair that vanished below the covers at his waist, she withdrew it abruptly with a small gasp of recognition. She wanted him to make love to her, wanted to feel what she had felt lying beneath him on the hard rocky earth! He possessed her very soul now. Here she sat, completely naked in his big bed, gazing down lustfully on his equally naked body, caressing it while he slept!

  “Don't stop now, beloved. You were just reaching the best part,” his husky voice whispered. He chuckled when she gasped again and seized the edge of the sheet, pulling it up to cover her breasts. His eyes blinked open and he looked at Mercedes. She looked enchanting with her cheeks pinkened in embarrassment, her hair tousled and falling in tangles around her shoulders. Her amber eyes met his, darkening in accusation.

  “You were supposed to be asleep,” she said crossly, self-consciously running her fingers through her hair. It was a fright. She was a fright! After going without bathing for two days she felt sticky and filthy. A vile film pasted her tongue to the roof of her mouth. And yet he stared up at her with an intensity of desire that robbed her of breath. She could say nothing, do nothing but return the look and tremble.

  Nicholas sensed her embarrassment. Before she could wriggle from the bed, he seized her wrist. “Please, don't go,” he said. Then a stab of white-hot pain sucked the air from his lungs and he gasped out a surprised oath, looking down at the bandages swathing his right forearm.

  “The cat sank his teeth in deep. Watch that you don't jostle those drains or you'll really feel some pain,” she scolded, reaching out to check the wrappings holding the small pieces of reed in place.

  “What the hell have you done? My arm looks like a porcupine's back.”

  “So far the suppuration isn't excessive and the punctures are draining nicely,” she murmured with obvious pride in her handiwork.

  He smiled in spite of the pain. In her haste to keep him from moving his injured arm, she had let the sheet drop to her waist again. Two high-pointed breasts stood out to perfection from the angle at which he viewed them. He felt the stirrings of lust begin to override the abominable aching in his shoulder and throbbing in his arm. “You've saved my life, beloved,” he murmured, letting his arm drop onto her thigh where he could feel her trembling.

  Mercedes felt his eyes on her, willing her to meet his steady gaze. She could not, but rather looked down only to realize the sheet had fallen. When she tried to pull it back up, he held it fast.

  “Don't hide from me, Mercedes. We've known each other's bodies far too intimately for shyness now.” Even as he spoke the words, he knew they were not true. There was so much left unsaid after her surrender out in the desert. “Everything has changed between us, hasn't it?” he asked.

  She swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded, uncertain of what to say. Are you truly the man I married? she wanted desperately to ask but dared not.

  “When I saw you afoot and realized you could have been killed...I knew that I couldn't imagine life without you.” He studied her face warily as she continued to look away. Was she afraid of the passion she had finally felt or was it something else—something truly damning?

  “What did I say when I was feverish?” he asked abruptly. Her head turned in surprise and her eyes locked with his. He watched her nervously moisten her lips with the tip of her tongue before replying. God, had he revealed his identity—that he was not Lucero Alvarado!

  “Mostly it didn't make sense. You spoke of the war...and you called my name,” she replied, evading the implication of his question, and the fact that he had spoken in two foreign languages with which Lucero had scarcely a nodding acquaintance four years earlier.

  Neither of them said anything for a moment, but he did not relinquish his hold on the sheet covering her thigh. Then his hand began to move softly back and forth, caressing her.

  “You're lovely, Mercedes.”

  “I'm wretched-looking, unbathed, haggard and thoroughly disheveled,” she responded, unnerved by his scrutiny. What was going on behind those mesmerizing eyes? Did he suspect that he had said something incriminating while delirious?

  “You're the very best wife any husband could ever wish for,” he said quietly.

  Wife. Husband. The words sealed a pact between them. His hand slowly loosened, then fell away from her as he drifted off to sleep once more.

  They would never again speak of his feverish ravings.

  * * * *

  Nicholas mended quickly after the fever broke. He awakened that afternoon, voraciously hungry and, much to Angelina's delight, polished off a bowl of lamb stew. Rosario bounded in as soon as the tray had been cleared away.

  “Papa! They said you were getting well. I was awfully worried. Are you feeling better now?”

  He patted a space beside him on the bed and she climbed up amid the pillows surrounding him and gave him a hug. “I'm feeling much better. How is Bufón?”

  “Angelina says he will live even though he might run with a limp. You saved his life, Papa,” she said with pure adoration in her round dark eyes.

  “I'm glad. He saved your stepmother's life, you know.”

  She nodded gravely, “I don't ever want her to die—or you either.” She burrowed against his chest and held onto him tightly.

  A surge of empathetic warmth filled him. She had been alone and frightened, deserted by her mother in death, then taken away to an alien place by strangers. He understood what it meant to be a child afraid and alone, only he had never had anyone to worry about him, anyone who loved him...until now.

  Stroking her shiny black curls, he said softly, “We'll never leave you, Rosario, I promise.”

  That is how Mercedes found them when she brought his medicine.

  During the next few days as his strength increased, a new tension grew between Nicholas and Mercedes, subtly different than the intense sexual antagonism of earlier when he had teased and stalked and she had held herself rigidly aloof. He knew he had revealed something during his delirium. Yet she had chosen to ignore it. He had always considered that it was only a matter of time until Luce's wife would realize that she was sleeping with an impostor, but he had hoped it would be after she was expecting his child, when she would be powerless to speak out. But that was before he met her...and fell in love with her.

  A foolish thing to do, certainly nothing he had ever planned to do, falling in love with his brother's wife. But he knew sure as the summer rains came that he would never give her up as long as he drew breath. Perhaps even though she did intuit his charade, she returned his feelings. But the scars Luce had inflicted on her were deep. She guarded her heart and had feared to yield her body until the savagely fulfilling sexual encounter they had shared last week. Perhaps her own response had frightened her almost as much as the thought that she had freely given to him what she had never given to Luce.

  Before he had been patient, playing a waiting game, taunting her, teasing her untried body, arrogantly assured that one day she would surrender. They had moved past that point now. She had slept in her bed the past week, insisting he needed to rest without risk of her brushing his injured shoulder and arm. At first he was too weak to protest, but now he had mended well enough.

  Determined, he threw off the covers and swung his legs over the side of the mattress. Until now Baltazar had been helping him walk. Today he would go outside under his own power. He stood up, grateful when the room did not tilt as it had the first time he tried to stand up the day before yesterday. Gingerly he made his way across the floor, holding onto furniture until he reached the window facing on the courtyard.

  He called out to Lazaro, who was working at the well, to draw him a warm bath, then sat down on a chair to begin unfastening the bandages over his wounds. As he worked, Nicholas was flooded with memories of two days earlier when Mercedes had taken the curious little reeds out of the draining punctures. He had flexed the injured arm, making a fist even though the exertion caused him to wince in pain.

  They had been sitting side b
y side on the narrow wooden bench in the courtyard. “Are you certain it doesn't hurt that much?” she had asked dubiously. The flesh around the drains looked slightly pink but that was from healing, not suppuration. “There aren't any streaks of red.”

  “I'm relieved to hear it,” he said dryly, “since I've no wish to have you sawing off my arm.”

  Her head shot up, a look of horror in her eyes. “You've actually seen that on the battlefield?”

  His expression was flat as he choked back the memories. “I've held men down while it was done to them. Sometimes I think it would’ve been a greater mercy to put a bullet in their brains than to maim them for life.”

  “You'd hate that—not being perfect, wouldn't you?” she asked hesitantly.

  Amusement replaced the opaque look in his eyes. “Father Salvador would scarcely concur that I'm perfect, but I do thank you for the compliment.” With pure pleasure he watched her blush.

  “I scarcely meant...oh, you know well enough what I meant,” she said, flustered, then returned to her work.

  “Ouch! Watch what you're doing,” he groused as she fumbled removing the last drain.

  “Serves you right for making me nervous,” she replied.

  “Do I? Make you nervous, Mercedes?” he murmured low, leaning nearer to her, crowding her backward on the narrow bench. He could smell the lavender fragrance in her hair, the sweet essence that was Mercedes.

  She leaned away, holding the small tweezers up like a miniature weapon. He could sense her trembling. The small pulse fluttered at the base of her slender golden throat. The sun was warm on them and he could see the dampness dewing her skin...imagine it trickling between her breasts below the modest neckline of her camisa. He reached up with his good arm and lightly touched his fingertips to her collarbone, tracing a pattern on the silky skin, then moving higher to brush that pulse in her throat. He took his fingertips from her skin and touched them to his lips, tasting her.