by Diana Palmer
Trilby sat quietly while Thorn cranked the car and came back to sit beside her. Naturally, she thought bitterly, it wouldn’t take him a half hour of sweat and muttered swear words to get it running, as it had Richard when he’d taken her and Teddy out riding. She held that competence against Thorn. It was just one more thing that set him apart from most men.
She waved as they sped off down the wide dirt road that led toward the mountains. She held her hat on, glad of the windscreen that kept the thick dust out of her face. The car her father drove was missing its windscreen. Teddy had accidentally knocked a baseball through it.
“Too fast?” Thorn asked, glancing ruefully at Trilby. “I’ll slow down a bit.”
He did, lifting his booted foot from the accelerator pedal. The car chugged along, so loud that conversation was next to impossible even if he’d been a talkative sort. He glanced out at the brownish hue of the land, where the grasses were dormant in autumn. The paloverde trees that dotted the landscape were glorious. He glanced at Trilby, wondering if she knew what they were. He pulled off the main road onto a smaller dirt one that led back to a secluded box canyon. As they drove, Trilby noticed that trees became more plentiful and the mountains loomed large and ghostly.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, delighted with the wooded canyon.
He pulled over, onto the side of the road, and cut off the engine. “Do you like it?”
“Why, it’s lovely,” she exclaimed. Her wide eyes were expressive. “I had no idea there were places like this in Arizona. I thought it was all cactus and sand.”
“You’d have known sooner if you’d ever agreed to come out with your father and brother,” he chided.
“I eat enough dust in the house, thank you, without going out in search of more during roundup,” she replied.
“Dust won’t melt you, sugar plum,” he said, with faint sarcasm.
“I hardly expected that it would, and please, could you refrain from calling me pet names?”
He turned in the seat to face her, idly rolling a cigarette while he stared at her. There were only the two of them in the world, in this beautiful wild place. Trilby was intensely aware of him as a man and was fighting not to respond to him. It was very easy to remember how it had been when he’d kissed her the night before. She was much too vulnerable to him, and he had a bad opinion of her. She must remember that, somehow. Her posture straightened as she fought not to betray the tingling excitement he engendered in her.
But he saw her discomfort and understood it very well. “You’re very stiff and formal with me, Trilby. Why?”
She met his searching gaze bravely. “It isn’t me that you’re interested in, Mr. Vance,” she said shortly. “I’m not completely stupid.”
She surprised him. That didn’t often happen with women. Sally had been pretty, but not particularly intelligent. Trilby was. “Then if I’m not interested in you, what am I interested in?”
“The water on my father’s property,” she said, without backing down.
He smiled appreciatively. “Well, well. And what makes you think that?”
“You need water. You don’t have enough, and we do, and my father won’t sell or lease any to you. That’s why,” she replied. “My father doesn’t even suspect that you might be playing up to me for ulterior motives. He thinks the sun rises and sets on you. So does the rest of my family.” She glared at him. “For myself, Mr. Vance, I think you’re a shipless pirate.”
He chuckled softly. “Well, that’s honest, at least.” He stuck the rolled cigarette in his thin mouth and produced a match to light it. Pungent smoke filled the air.
“I don’t really blame you,” she said after a minute. She fumbled with her cloth drawstring purse. “I suppose water is life itself out here.”
“Indeed it is.” He took another draw from the cigarette. “Are you up to a little walking?”
“Of course,” she said, glad to escape the confined space.
He came around and opened her door, carefully helping her out. The touch of his fingers made her heart jump. She moved quickly away from him and began to walk down the road. It was so peaceful. The wind blew noisily and there was a smell, a crisp, earthy smell, in the air. Her eyes found rock formations in the hills beyond. The trees were golden and magnificent against the faint reddish yellow of the maple leaves.
“What sort of trees are those?” she asked curiously.
“The golden ones? They’re paloverde trees. They have long strands of golden blossoms in the spring, and in the autumn they go glorious. I like them better than the maples.”
“Those others are oaks, aren’t they?”
“Some of them. That—” he indicated an enormous tree with a bent trunk “—is a cottonwood. A few decades ago, people used to strip off the bark and scrape the tree for sap. It’s sweet, you see, like a confection.”
“Oh,” she cried delightedly, “how clever!”
“And those are willows,” he added, gesturing toward a stand of sapling-type trees along the banks of the stream.
She looked around suddenly. “Is it safe here?” she asked quickly. “I mean, are there Indians near here?”
He smiled. “Plenty of them. Mostly Mescalero and Mimbrenos Apaches. There used to be a wealth of Chiricahuas, but when Geronimo was captured, the government shipped his whole band back East to Florida and kept them in a fort on the bay at St. Augustine for a long time. They finally moved them back out to New Mexico. Geronimo killed a lot of white people, but then, the white people killed a lot of Apaches, too. Gen. George Crook finally got him to surrender. Quite a fellow, old Nantan Lupan.”
“What?”
“Grey Wolf. It’s what the Apaches called Crook. They respected him. When he gave his word, he kept it. Odd for a white man. He did all he could to help the Apaches for the rest of his life, after Geronimo’s surrender. Geronimo died February of last year.”
“I didn’t know that.”
He glanced at her. “You Easterners don’t know much about Indians, do you? Apaches are interesting. They called the old Chiricahua chief Cochise, but his Apache name was Cheis. It means oak. God only knows how it got altered to Cochise. He was a wily old devil, smart as a fox. He led the U.S. Cavalry on a merry chase until the peace came. But Geronimo refused to give up and live at the white man’s mercy on a reservation. There were times, not so long ago, when just the name Apache could make a grown man tremble out here.”
She kept quiet, waiting for him to go on. She was fascinated with his knowledge of the Indians.
He smiled, sensing her interest. That pleased him. “Indians are not ignorant. I have two Apache men who work for me. One of them is Chiricahua. And he is,” he added dryly, “hardly the Eastern image of an Indian. You’ll see what I mean when you meet him. His name is Naki.”
“What does it mean?” she asked curiously.
“He’s actually called Two Fists, but Apache has glottal stops and nasalizations and high tones… I can’t pronounce his second name. Naki means ‘two.’”
“Are you…do you have any Indian blood?”
He shook his head. “My grandmother was a pretty little Spanish lady. They had a little girl. My grandfather got tired of the responsibility and deserted her.” He let that slip. He’d never told anyone else.
“Didn’t he love her enough to stay?”
He grew stiff. “Apparently not. My grandmother starved to death. If it hadn’t been for my great-uncle, the one who owned Los Santos, my mother would have starved, too. She and my father inherited Los Santos when my great-uncle died. I was eighteen when Mexicans raided up here and killed them.”
“Did you have brothers or sisters?”
“I was one of three kids; I had two sisters,” he said. “They both died of cholera.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I was just a kid at the time. I don’t remember much about them.” He smoked his cigarette as they walked, his head high. He walked without stooping, his posture perfect, like his clothing. For a
cowboy, he wore the suit very well.
“You said your grandmother was Spanish…”
“And you wonder why Mexicans attacked her daughter and son-in-law,” he guessed.
“Yes.”
“Don’t you know yet that most Mexicans hate the Spanish? It’s one of the reasons they’re fighting now. They’ve had Spanish domination since Cortés. They’ve had enough,” he replied simply. “But the people who killed my parents weren’t revolutionaries. They were just bandits.”
“I’m sorry. About your parents, I mean.”
“So was I.”
There was a wealth of pain in the words, and she remembered reluctantly how his expression had told her he dealt with the murderers. She turned her attention to the ground, looking at the sandy soil. “Does much grow out here?” she asked idly.
“The Hohokam, the Indian people who once inhabited this land before the time of Christ, were an agricultural people. They learned to grow corn in clumps, and to irrigate the land. They had a system of government and a religion that was far ahead of their time. They may have existed as a culture for thousands of years.”
She stared at him with renewed respect. “How do you know all that?”
He chuckled. “McCollum,” he said simply. “It pays to have an anthropology professor for a friend. He’s very good at his job. He stays with me when he’s exploring ruins in the area. He comes several times a year when he’s teaching.”
“I like him. I didn’t realize he was an educator,” she said.
“Yes. He teaches anthropology and archaeology at one of the big colleges up North.”
“It must be interesting. Do you go with him when he looks for ruins?”
“When time allows.” He shoved one hand in the pocket of his slacks and slanted a look down at her from under the wide brim of his hat. “Do you like archaeology?”
“I know very little about it,” she admitted. “But it’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“Very.” He put out a lean, tanned hand suddenly and stopped her in her tracks. “Be still a minute. Don’t talk. Look there.” He pointed toward the bushes, and she felt her heart racing. Was it a rattlesnake? She wanted to run, but just as her feet got the message from her brain, a funny, long brown bird went scampering from under the bush to dart across the road.
She laughed. “What is it?” she exclaimed.
“A roadrunner,” he told her. “They hunt and kill snakes.”
“Well, bully for him.” She chuckled.
“Snakes are beneficial, you silly child,” he chided. “Bull snakes and rat snakes and black snakes don’t hurt anything. They eat rats and mice. And a king snake will kill and eat a rattler.”
“I don’t want to look at one long enough to identify it,” she informed him.
He shook his head. “Come on.”
He led her off the trail eventually, and into a shady area where a stream cut through the forest floor. Huge, smooth boulders ran up from the stream toward the mountains.
“This is an old Apache camp,” he told her. “It isn’t on the reservation, of course, but they still come here sometimes. Naki likes to camp here when he’s rounding up strays. He’s marvelous with horses.”
“Does he wear war paint and headdresses?” she asked innocently.
He glared at her. “He’s Apache,” he said. “Apaches don’t wear feathered headdresses like the Plains Indians. They wear a colored cloth band around their foreheads and wear their hair shoulder length. They don’t live in tepees like the Plains Indians, either. They live in a sort of round or oblong lodge called a wickiup.”
“Do people out here hate the Indians?” she asked.
“Some do. There have been times when we were allies with them, and even with the Mexicans, to fight off the Comanches when they tried to come south and conquer us.”
“Oh, my!”
“And the Confederate flag flew over Tucson once, during the Civil War,” he said, chuckling at her. “A lot of Southerners settled out here in Arizona. You should feel right at home.”
“I wish I did,” she replied quietly, and meant it. She stared down at the soil. “There aren’t any cacti right here.”
“Plenty out on the desert, mostly saguaro,” he told her, “and organ pipe. Those saguaro are huge and heavy. They have a sort of woody skeleton inside. One can kill a man if it falls on him.”
“What are the tall, thin ones?”
“Ocotillo,” he said. “Mexicans use it to build thorny fences.”
“We have prickly pear cactus in Louisiana,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Not in Baton Rouge,” she said, grinning.
He stopped walking and turned to look at her. “Do you speak any French?”
“Just a little,” she said. “Mama is fluent.” She searched his dark eyes. “Do you?”
“I speak Spanish fluently,” he said. “And a smattering of German.”
He didn’t look away, and neither did she. For moments that stretched with sweet tension, he looked down at her. Her lips parted as her heart began to race. He had the most decadent effect on her, she thought.
His dark eyes dropped, as no gentleman’s would, to her bosom. She caught her breath.
“Limits,” he murmured. “You Eastern women can’t live without them. Out here, a man sees something he wants and he just takes it.”
“Including women?” she asked huskily.
“It depends on the woman,” he replied. “My wife was like you, Trilby,” he added bitterly. “A hothouse orchid transplanted into hot, sandy soil. She hated it, hated me. She should never have married me. She wouldn’t have,” he added, with a cynical smile, “but she did like my money.”
The thought irritated him. He didn’t like remembering Sally. Trilby brought it all back.
“You…loved her?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said harshly. “I loved her. But she wanted poetry and roses every morning and maids to wait on her. She wanted a gentleman to escort her to social functions. She hated my roughness, hated the loneliness. She grew to hate me. Everything about me,” he added, averting his eyes. “I don’t need telling that I’m a savage. Sally told me twice a day.”
Incredible that she should pity him, she thought, watching his rigid features grow even harder. How terrible, to love someone who hated you…
He looked down and caught her compassionate stare. It made him furious that she should feel sorry for him. It made him more furious that he’d begun to like her, to enjoy her company. She was a tramp, and he was letting himself be drawn into her sticky web. He was a fool!
He threw the cigarette down in the dirt and reached for her.
“I don’t need your pity,” he said curtly, staring at her mouth. “Not when you’re more contemptible than I’ll ever be!”
His mouth bit into hers, twisting, hurting her. She gasped and tried to fight him, but he was much too strong. His arms were like vises, his mouth tasting of tobacco and pure man. He used his body like a weapon to humiliate her. His lean hands slid quickly to her hips and ground them against his thighs.
The intimacy was staggering to a woman who’d barely been kissed before. Her body seemed to flush all over at the shock of feeling the changed contours of his body against her stomach. She cried out, furiously outraged and embarrassed by the unspeakable liberties he was taking, beating at him with her fists and trying to kick him.
Surprised at her show of fury, he let her go. She stood glaring at him with a red face, her hair escaping from its tidy bun, her gray eyes blazing. She reached up and struck him across the mouth as hard as she could.
“You savage!” she cried, shaking all over. “I knew…you were…no gentleman!” she raged.
“And you’re no lady, you Louisiana tramp,” he said, without flinching from the blow. His eyes were like death as he looked at her. “If I were a little less civilized than I am, I’d throw you down in the dusty road and ravish you where you lay.”
Her face went even
redder. Her mouth trembled, tears formed in her eyes at the blatant insult. To think that dear, courtly Richard had never done more than touch her hand, and this savage had—had…
“You lay one hand…on me…and I’ll hit you with a tree limb! How…dare you?” she choked, almost sobbing with rage. “I shall…tell my father!”
“Do that,” he replied calmly, “and I’ll tell him about the affair you’re having with my married cousin!”
She stared at him as if he’d gone mad. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s too late to lie about it,” he told her, his voice cold with contempt. “Sally saw you and Curt kissing each other. She told me, several weeks before she died.”
Her face went from red to deathly white. She faltered and almost fell. His hand shot out to steady her, but she threw it off, hating him.
“That is a lie,” she whispered, shaking. “It is a vicious, unfounded lie!”
“Why would my wife lie to me?” he drawled. “And she’s dead now. How convenient for you. She can hardly contradict you, can she?”
She swallowed, and then swallowed again. She thought she might faint. She knew there wasn’t a drop of blood in her face. His expression told her that arguing with him wasn’t going to change his mind. He’d decided that his wife’s lie was gospel. Nothing she said was going to convince him that she’d done no more than talk to his cousin Curt.
She lifted her hobble skirt with trembling cold hands and started unsteadily back toward the car.
He followed her, opening her door with overblown courtesy.
She didn’t look at him as she got in. She couldn’t bear to. She sat like a statue as he cranked the car and turned it back toward home.
It wasn’t until he pulled up in her front yard that he spoke again. “There’s no use playing the martyr with me,” he said carelessly. “I know what you are.”
“If I were a man, I would shoot you through the heart,” she said, choking. She was shaking with outrage and temper. “When I tell my father what you’ve accused me of, he probably will shoot you! I hope he does!”
He raised both eyebrows. “You can’t possibly mean to actually confess to him?” he asked insolently. “You’ll destroy his illusions.”