by Martha Hix
He toppled to the ground.
The girl, her screams piercing the air, seemed oblivious to the bullets whizzing over her head. She bent over Rafito and lifted his shoulders from the rocks.
The Arturianos held their fire momentarily, each man looking to el patrón for instructions. He held up a hand. His men backed their mounts, turned them, returned to Arturo’s side. “Go on,” he ordered. “Go to my office. I’ll meet you there. I’ll handle this matter.”
Cantú and the others did as ordered. With morbid interest Arturo walked Noche Negro forward, and watched his nephew and the girl. She worked tirelessly. With no regard to her own injury, or to the cough that wracked her thin body.
She jerked her blue shirt from her arms, leaving her torso in a camisole. She ripped the chambray into strips. She then tore Rafito’s trousers above the wound and lifted his injured leg, and wrapped the bandages with the speed of a vaquero as he hog-tied a calf. Next she addressed her efforts to the wound at his shoulder and neck.
And all the while Rafito was arguing with her, shouting for her to “get out of here.”
She paid no mind. Once the bandages were in place, she steadied her breath. She looked up. And never had Arturo Delgado seen as much defiance and loathing in a woman’s eyes. They weren’t a woman’s eyes. They were the eyes of a tigress.
Arturo found himself respecting her courage.
She got to her feet. “If you want us dead, all you have to do is pull the trigger. If you don’t, Arturo Delgado, be warned. You haven’t seen the last of us. And next time we’ll be better armed.”
She reached down and helped Rafito to stand, though he slipped twice. The wounds looked bad, probably mortal. Winding his arm around her shoulder, she led him down the gravel path. Arturo followed, watching as she made for the horses tied behind the mining engineer’s work shack. For a slender woman, she had the strength of five tigresses.
Arturo got a hardening in his loins from simply gazing upon the challenge of her. “You need a real man,” he called after her.
She ignored him.
“Tonta, don’t waste your time with trash such as Rafael Delgado. If he lives, he’ll drag you down with him.”
She kept to her path. And once they reached their mounts, Rafito made a puny effort to put his foot in the stirrup. Leaning down, she helped him. Afterward, she gave a mighty shove that helped him to the saddle; he slumped over it.
Rafito reared up to brush her jaw with his wavering hand. He said something. For a moment she leaned against his uninjured leg. Turning her face—and it was a beautiful face!—up to him, she shouted, “¡Viva los ciudadanos! i Viva Mexico!”
Long live the people. Long live Mexico.
Arturo didn’t care much for her Spanish. But he knew at that moment he must have his way with her. He licked his chops, contemplating the taming of a tigress.
“Go on to Eden Roc,” he said, knowing she didn’t hear him. “Let it work its magic on you.”
He turned his mount. A smirk accompanied his thought, Yes, I’ll give Eden Roc some time. Then I will deal with the tigress.
Part 2
Eden Roc
“I compare it to Homer’s Elysian Fields.
It is a blessed and happy harbor secluded at
world’s end.
Here a select few favored by myself
will enjoy the earthly paradise where
life is easiest for man.”
—Isaiah Nash in a letter to his daughter Natalie, 1872.
“Please say your Mexican heaven doesn’t include carrots or prune juice.”
—Natalie’s reply.
Twenty-two
December 1, 1897
At the walled retreat known as
Eden Roc
“Lisette, Netoc has found your children.”
Relief flooding, Lisette McLoughlin stepped toward Natalie Nash, who had translated for the gray-haired Tarahumara Indian. Netoc, wearing the pajamalike huipils that seemed to be uniform for the masses, turned to warm his hands in front of the great room’s fireplace, and Natalie took Lisette’s cold hands in her slender ones.
Lisette McLoughlin might have never known that her offspring, along with Rafe Delgado, were on their way to Eden Roc, if dear Natalie hadn’t arrived at the beginning of November. Several times she’d wondered why her sickly daughter had linked up with the man she openly hated, but considering the situation, Lisette refused to borrow trouble. She’d had enough, worrying about their whereabouts.
Two weeks ago Netoc—belying his advanced age, an untiring long-distance runner like many of his strange and reclusive tribesmen—had left in search of the missing threesome. This had been the worst month of Lisette’s life.
“Angus, Gretchen,” she said in a quivering voice, using the German diminutive for Margaret, “where are they?”
Natalie hesitated before answering, “At a ranch not far from the village of Santa Alicia.”
“Tell me everything. Don’t hold anything back.”
Taking a sidestep, Natalie finger-combed a strawberry blond curl behind her ear. “Rafael Delgado was shot and nearly died, I understand. And—oh, Lisette, I’m sorry to tell you—but your daughter’s been ill. Don’t despair, though. A kindly rancher and his wife took them in. Apparently they’re recovering and plan to be here soon.”
Now that she knew her children weren’t dead, Lisette said a prayer of appreciation and thanksgiving, then let curiosity flow. “My daughter. What’s wrong with her? Is it her lungs?”
“Yes.”
Dying the thousand deaths of a mother for her hapless child, Lisette sank onto a chair. Be strong! She’d had years to adjust to Gretchen’s consumption; thus, she knew all the little devices of keeping her sanity. Using the best one, the change of subject, she asked, “Who shot Rafe?”
“Netoc doesn’t know.”
“Why didn’t Angus ride ahead to let me know . . . ?”
“I would imagine they saw no reason to send word. It would’ve done nothing but worry you. For all they knew, you thought they were still in the United States.”
“That’s reasonable.”
“Something else—They have Señor Delgado’s brother with them. Evidently he is a priest.”
Strange. She asked a foolish question, hoping her fears were ill conceived, “Does Netoc know if my husband sent them?”
Turning to the Indian who was brushing the sole of a crusty foot, Natalie posed the question. It didn’t take a translator for Lisette to understand he had no idea. Don’t be a Tropf. As surely as the sun rose in the east, she knew Gil McLoughlin had sent his children—when he was the one who ought to be on his way to Eden Roc.
Gil, shame on you! You know poor Gretchen is not well. And she’s had a relapse evidently. What if the caravan didn’t make it here? If they did make it here, could Gretchen hold up to the return trip? Lisette choked back her fury. Damn you, Gilliegorm McLoughlin, don’t you love me enough to come after me yourself?
She had a word with her rage. Well, he’s busy and he’ll be here in person, eventually. Enough! Since February of 1869 she’d been making excuses for her husband. She would be making no more excuses for Gil McLoughlin.
Natalie watched Lisette—her fair head bent, her lovely face a mixture of relief, joy, and pain—leave the great room of Eden Roc.
It was no accident that Natalie had been making overtures of friendship. Lisette was, after all, Tex’s mother, and Natalie’s plans for the McLoughlin heir remained many. Amazingly, being friends with the German woman had proved easier than Natalie could have imagined. Hence, she’d suffered along with Lisette during the awful days of not knowing what to expect, and not for totally selfish reasons, either.
As for her friend’s daughter, the Countess of Granada, Natalie equated the blind and pregnant Olga with royalty all right. She was a royal pain in the ass.
“Did you tell your lady about el grandero rico?” Netoc asked in his curious mixture of Tarahumara and Spanish.
“No. I saved Arturo for her children to explain.”
“You still love him.” Netoc, the lines of his face deepening, stepped to her. “He’s hurt you, yet you would take him back.”
“The question isn’t whether I’ll take him back. The question is—what is he going to do, should he get his hands on me?”
“I won’t let him touch you.” His straight gray hair swung from side to side, brushing his shoulders, as Netoc promised, “You must trust me, Natalie. My love will protect you.”
“Oh, Netoc, whatever am I going to do with you?”
His dark eyes snapped. “Make love with me?”
“No.” She turned to place another log on the fire. “No more of that.”
From behind, he pushed her hair out of the way to kiss her neck. His hands trailed to her breasts. She felt his hips grinding against her buttocks. Her fingers found and caressed his flaccid manhood. For all her adventures both in Mexico and abroad, for all the love she’d given Arturo, for all her wild and woolly romps with several leading swains of the stage and with many strangers in various locales, no one excited her as much as Netoc.
If only he were enough . . .
“I was your first man. You were my first woman. You are my only woman.” His tongue flicked against her ear. “Remember when we were both young? Remember when we made love under the waterfall? Go with me to the waterfall, my beloved.”
She turned in his arms. “I can’t make it all the way out there. Take me. Here. Now.”
And he tried.
Afterward, she cried in her heart. Running her fingers across his aged face, she kissed him and promised him it was all right, and she railed against this horrid Eden Roc, this piece of hell on earth, that made the young out of the old—except for the Tarahumaras. To them this awful place sapped their life force.
Isaiah held a different opinion. “The Fountain has nothing to do with it. They swill too much of their corn beer and then run their legs off, that’s what sends them to early deaths,” was what her father claimed. “Amazing little buggers, they could run all the way to hell. And probably do.”
Netoc had gotten to be an old man, though he could still run like the gazelles of Africa. He’d yet to have his thirty-fifth birthday. He, an elder in his tribe, was more than five years Natalie Nash’s junior.
“Young man. Young man!”
Alongside the locked gates to Eden Roc, a towheaded youth slept soundly in the gate house’s wicker chair, a blanket tucked around his legs.
Cranky Margaret, the Chihuahua dog riding shotgun, secured the buckboard’s hand brake. Tied to the rear of the wagon were Penny and Diablo. A crisp dry twilight approached in the Sierra Madres, as Margaret stood to shout, “Don’t just sit there snoozing!”
“ ’Rita, I don’t need help.”
“Behave!” The term “terrible patient” must have been coined in Rafe’s honor, she complained to herself. Left to his own devices, despite the plaster-of-paris cast that came clear up to his hip, he might give the Mexican hat dance a try. “You said you need to relieve yourself, and—”
“If you wouldn’t get embarrassed, I could hang—”
“Rafe Delgado, we’ve got to get through the gate anyway. And I’m trying to get help. So you just sit tight.”
Once more, now that they had arrived at the health retreat, Margaret wondered why her brother was never around when she needed him. Tex and Xzobal, on horseback, had taken a small detour for the Texan to get a first look from the piney precipice to the canyon floor. Margaret had yet to see it. The whole area, she supposed, held a distinct beauty, though she was too tired to appreciate it.
Addressing herself to a more pressing situation—the sway of the wagon, thanks to movements from its bed—she begged the passenger who was shoving his pile of blankets aside, “Please lie still, Rafe, please!” Then insisted to the sleeper, “Wake up, laggard! We need help. Señor Delgado mustn’t climb out on his own.”
“Oh, yes, I can.”
“Don’t move a muscle, or you’ll tempt the fates all over again!” Margaret made certain he sat tight by pointing her Colt percussion at his forehead. His was not the face of a happy traveler. “Rafe, this hurts me more than it does you.”
“Rather doubtful.”
“You’ve forced me into this.” The little dog, for a better vantage point, put his front paws on the lower slat of the wagon seat and his nose between the slats. Margaret glanced furtively at the gate house, seeing that the sleeper still snoozed. She wilted on the seat again and twisted around to face Rafe. “The doctor warned me if you overdo it, the consequences will be—”
“You weren’t too worried about consequences last night.” A lopsided grin pulled at Rafe’s haggard face, as he alluded to the lovemaking they had at long last been able to complete. He managed to wiggle into a seated position. His voice a whisker that tickled her insides, he lifted a hand to her shirt-clad arm. “Do you need me to remind you of our evening?”
He slipped his fingers into the crook of her elbow; her gaze slipped to his telltale bulge. She got a rush from recalling what they had shared under the moonlight and those blankets. In spite of the grave state of their collective health, she’d learned something. Stroking him there brought her almost as much pleasure as it gave him.
Sir Colt shook like a leaf. She placed the .44 on the seat next to Caballo, then took another look at Rafe. “I don’t need reminders of how well-suited we are in the man-woman way.”
“Would you like a refresher?”
“After we’ve caught our breaths.” In her case, literally. She, too, had been on the verge of death, when they were taken in by the kindly folks at Rancho Gato. “Need I remind you that without a storehouse of strength, we can neither fight your uncle, nor see my vagabond mother to the port of Tampico?”
Near worship described the expression slipping into his eyes. “My adventurous warrior-woman aches for our escapades.”
She got a gummy feeling. Where were their escapades headed? It was suicidal for him to seek Arturo Delgado’s undoing, unless Rafe could bring himself to fire on that murderer of slaves and the human spirit. She understood why he couldn’t. He hadn’t recovered from shooting Hernán.
Beyond the showdown that might or might not come to pass, where were they headed? From Rancho Gato she’d sent word to Dean Acykbourn at Brandington College, telling him not to expect her in January. It had been a very rash move.
Never had Rafe so much as whispered about wanting her for ever-after. And he scoffed at her hints that she might yearn for more than a desperado’s life, and his reasoning had little—if anything—to do with her health. She’d discovered a traditional streak in herself. It was daft to expect a complicated man like Rafe to adjust to tradition, but she wouldn’t ride at his side without being more than the last in a long line of women.
You’ll never be more. You’re no longer young or beautiful or healthy, and he can have his pick of women. Once his strength returns, you’ll be somewhere in the middle of the queue.
He pulled her fingers toward him. “Climb back here, amorcito. Let me kiss and caress you. Let’s sip from the saucer of sin one more time.”
“If you’d like to discuss excitement, I’m pleased to oblige. I’m thinking about how exciting these past five and a half weeks have been. Since you took two bullets, one right through your thighbone.” Expanding on the more serious wound, she didn’t mention the hole beneath his collarbone that had festered. “I’m recalling what the doctor said. That if you don’t give yourself time to heal, you could be crippled for life. Now. If you don’t behave”—again she secured Sir Colt in her hands—“I’ll open another plug in your leg.”
She’d never put it this bluntly; Rafe paled. “To think I said you were sweet—I must have been out of my head last night,” he groused.
“I was sweet.”
“Sweet as the inside of a lemon,” he shouted.
“Hush, or that boy will hear you.”
Rafe got a pee
ved look. “You’re always giving orders. I’m tired of being laid up, at the mercy of a knuckle-wrapping schoolmarm. I want out of this wagon. I need to pee.”
How childish. He’d mastered the art of backsliding. Lately he’d much too often equated her with teaching, which he believed didn’t do justice to her abilities.
A chilled wind lifted her hair, reminding her that night would fall soon. She shouted in two languages, “Boy, do you make a habit of sleeping on the job?”
At last he opened his eyes. “Welcome to Eden Roc.” The youth, now yawning and patting his mouth, walked toward the wagon. “I am—”
“Lazy.” And an American, she decided. No doubt life had spoiled him, thanks to his sublime beauty. “Give us a hand and be quick about it. Then open that gate.”
“Hipólito! ¡Andele, rapido!” The gatekeeper glanced this way and that, looking past pines and oaks and quaking aspens. A rabbit dashed from a hiding place at his voice; Caballo didn’t fail to bark at the bunny. “Hipólito, where are you? Come back, little fellow. We need your strong arms.”
“Lazybones,” she contended while Caballo growled, “you ought to be reported for pawning off your work.”
“Why, you must be Miss Margaret McLoughlin.”
From the wagon came a nasty snigger. “Has your reputation preceded you, querida? Do you suppose he recognized you from your tone alone?”
She imparted a quelling look.
“All of us at Eden Roc have been awaiting your arrival,” the gatekeeper was saying. “Netoc said you were on your way.”
The Indian who’d snooped around their temporary refuge, Rancho Gato, must have been Netoc. At the time Margaret had advised against confiding in a possible Arturiano spy, but Rafe had insisted on Tarahumaran integrity.
“See, ’Rita, didn’t I tell you we could trust him?”