Authors: Janet Dailey
Laredo’s voice called Ráfaga’s name as hurried footsteps approached the pool. Both turned their heads simultaneously as he emerged from the shade of the trees.
Laredo’s blue-eyed gaze flickered momentarily to Sheila. Tiny rivulets of water ran down her temples and neck from the wetness of her darkly golden hair. He carried two rifles. One he tossed to Ráfaga with a clipped explanation in Spanish.
With lightning-quick reflexes, Ráfaga caught the rifle and shifted it to one hand, grabbing Sheila by the arm with the other and shoving her forward. She nearly stumbled to her knees, but Ráfaga pulled her up sharply to hurry her along the path.
“Quit pushing!” Sheila protested and tried to wrench her arm away from his hard grip. Her shoes were back by the pond. It was impossible to gingerly pick her way over the uneven ground with his hand shoving her along. “I can’t run barefoot!”
Neither Laredo nor Ráfaga paid any heed to her protests. A mounted rider waited in front of the adobe house, holding the reins to two saddled horses.
“Juan!” Ráfaga gave Sheila a final push toward the house and the armed guard waiting there. He added a stern order in Spanish. It was obviously a command for the guard to stay with Sheila.
For a frightened second, the name Juan conjured up the image of Brad’s murderer, with his foul-smelling breath, yellowed teeth, and leering eyes. When she was able to check her forward movement from the last push, Sheila gasped with relief at the sight of the quiet, vaguely respectful Mexican who had taken his place. It was the man from the corral.
Lifting her clinging, wet hair away from the corner of her eye, she looked over her shoulder to the trio of
riders spurring their horses toward the canyon entrance. She stared after them, bewildered and curious.
“What is going on?” Absently, she murmured the thought aloud.
“Do not worry,
señora
,” he comforted in heavily accented English.
“What happened?” She looked to the riders, slowing as they neared the pass. “Where are they going?”
“Soldados
—soldiers,” he corrected himself. “Close to here.”
“Looking for me?” Sheila breathed in, her first ray of hope shining.
“Quien sabe?”
The guard shook his head. “We wait.”
“Yes, we wait,” she sighed anxiously. Hesitating, Sheila glanced to him. “Your name is Juan?”
“
Sí, señora
.” He nodded respectfully.
“There is another man named Juan, isn’t there?” she questioned warily.
“
Sí
—Juan Ortega.” His dark eyes widened expressively. “He is
loco
—bad.”
There were a few other, more forceful adjectives Sheila would have used, but she kept her silence. Instead, she concentrated all her thought in a prayer that the soldiers would soon come riding through the canyon entrance.
They must have found the car and Brad’s body, she decided. Perhaps her parents had notified the authorities to look for her when she hadn’t returned with Brad as she had told them she would.
Over an hour later, three riders appeared at the canyon entrance, the horses trotting sedately down the slope to the floor. Sheila’s hopes sank into the dust.
She abandoned her post of vigil and walked into the house. She remained in her room when Ráfaga and Laredo entered the house minutes later. There was no longer anything of hers in the room. Ráfaga had supervised the moving of her few meager belongings to his room that morning.
A handful of men entered the adobe house after Ráfaga’s return. Lying on the small cot, Sheila stared
at the ceiling, listening to the Spanish voices in the main room. Each time Ráfaga spoke, she immediately recognized the low timbre of his voice. She closed her eyes tightly, trying to shut out how vividly aware she was of everything about him. But it was hopeless.
When the evening meal was ready, prepared by Juan’s wife, Ráfaga called Sheila from her room. The men remained, refusing the offer of food but accepting coffee from Consuelo. Sheila could only pick at her food, too painfully conscious of the men looking on. She felt the piercing looks directed at her by Ráfaga, but she returned none of them, keeping her head lowered while she pushed the food around on her plate.
She would have retreated to her room again, but Ráfaga ordered her to stay. Her pride almost made her refuse, but Sheila realized that he wouldn’t tolerate any defiance in front of his men. Keeping silent, she helped Consuelo clean off the dishes and remained seated at Ráfaga’s side.
The discussion was obviously about something of importance, considering the serious expressions on the faces of everyone there. But Sheila couldn’t understand a word of it. Ráfaga made notes on yellow paper, but they were also in Spanish.
Two pots of coffee had been drunk and the moon was high in the night sky before the meeting was concluded and the men left. Laredo was the last, tarrying for a few minutes to speak to Ráfaga alone, then nodding a good night to Sheila. While Ráfaga went over his notes, making additional notations on the side, Sheila removed the coffee mugs from the table.
Then she tried to steal silently from the room, wanting to be in bed and hopefully asleep when he came. But she was stopped before she had taken three steps toward her destination.
“Where are you going?” Ráfaga looked up.
“To bed. Where else?” Sheila answered defensively.
“Wait,” he ordered. “I will be only a few minutes.”
“I’m tired and I’d like to get some sleep.” She wasn’t
going to give in without an argument. “I don’t see any reason to wait for you.”
“I should not wish to disturb your sleep later.”
Her temper flared as she read between the lines of his reply. “My God,” Sheila gasped, “isn’t once a day enough for you? Do I have to endure it again?”
Using a rear leg as a pivot point, he swiveled the chair at an angle. An arm was hooked negligently over the back as his hooded gaze met the flashing resentment of her jewel-bright eyes.
“Come here.” Sheila’s first impulse was to ignore the command and walk from the room. Ráfaga interpreted the cause of her momentary indecision and repeated his words. “Come here.”
Her fingers curled into her palms, nails digging into the sensitive skin. Sheila walked to his chair, rigid defiance in every taut nerve even as she complied with his order. His hand gripped an arm stiffly held at her side and drew her closer to his chair.
“You endure my touch, do you?” he said with low mockery.
“Yes!” Sheila hissed in return, but a pulse was already hammering in her throat at his disturbing nearness.
“And you think that to make love once a day is enough, do you?” Ráfaga continued to taunt her, his dark eyes glittering and enigmatic, the aloofness of control in his saturnine features.
“It’s
too
much!”
“You think you would not enjoy it, hmmm?”
“I know I wouldn’t!” Already her senses were making a lie out of her denial.
With a biting twist of her wrist, he brought her against the chair, her legs brushing against a muscular thigh. Sheila steeled herself to ignore the searing contact. The grip on her wrist forced her to bend slightly to lessen the pain.
The breath was stolen from her lungs when his gaze shifted from her face to her breasts, straining against the confining material of her blouse and the knot that held
the front closed. His free hand lifted to the plunging vee.
Wildfire raced through her veins as his lean fingers slid inside her blouse to cup the underside of a breast, pushing the material aside to expose its creamy roundness. When his mouth touched the rosy nipple, Sheila gasped in protest and delight. Closing her eyes tightly, she tried to ignore the way he licked her nipple into pebble-hardness.
It was exquisite torture to resist his arousing sucking of her breast. Sheila succeeded in not giving in to the waves of desire stirring her senses until his hand moved down her stomach to slide intimately between her thighs.
There was a jelly-like quiver in her knees and she knew she was lost. Like a drowning person succumbing to an undertow, Sheila let herself be drawn onto his lap. Ráfaga undressed her with deliberate slowness before he carried her to the bedroom with her hands locked around his neck and her lips a willing captive of his possessing mouth.
It was a seduction cycle that repeated itself over the next two weeks with changes of opening and settings and dialogues. Sheila kept trying to control her senses, sometimes holding her betraying desires at bay for a while, but always—inevitably, it seemed—Ráfaga obtained the response he was seeking.
Each rehearsal of the scene improved the climatic end, leaving Sheila little to cling to but her pride. Everything else Ráfaga had taken bit by bit.
Her life before she was brought to the canyon seemed so long ago that it might never have existed. Often Sheila would awaken in the cool of the mountain night and find herself snuggled against Ráfaga, taking advantage of the warmth of his body heat.
In those sleep-laden moments, it seemed so natural to lie beside him. It was as if she had never slept alone.
Sheila stirred restlessly on the cot, disliking the thoughts that were disturbing her half-sleep. A hand
touched her arm and she twisted away from it, her pride needing to assert itself.
“No.” She halfheartedly protested Ráfaga’s light touch and the demand she thought it made.
“I do not have the time to change that to ‘yes’ this morning.” His low, faintly accented voice was riddled with lazy amusement, confident of his ability to change her answer if he chose to. “Come. You must wake up and dress.”
Frowning, Sheila opened her eyes. The flame from a lamp cast a circle of light over the center of the room, but through the curtained window, she could see the sky was still black with night. Confused, she looked at Ráfaga, fully clothed, sitting on the edge of the bed pulling on his boots.
Making certain the blanket still covered her nakedness, Sheila propped herself up with her elbows. “It isn’t morning yet.”
His dark gaze flickered to her briefly. “It soon will be.” He tugged on the other boot. “Consuelo is fixing breakfast.”
Sheila listened and heard the confirming sounds of someone else in the house. “But why so early?” she persisted.
Ráfaga got up from the bed and glanced at her. “I am leaving at first light.”
“Leaving?” His statement took Sheila by surprise. She pushed herself into a sitting position on the bed, dragging the blanket with her, clutching it to her breastbone. “You didn’t say anything about leaving last night. Where are you going? Why?”
His mouth twisted with cynical amusement. “‘Where are you going? What are you going to do? When are you coming back?’” Ráfaga mocked her barrage of questions. “You sound like a wife cross-examining her husband. I did not realize you were so concerned about where I went and what I did.”
Sheila immediately regretted her impulsive questions. “I don’t give a damn what you do!” she snapped and swung her feet over the side of the bed.
“That sounds more like my lioness.” He laughed softly in his throat. “Scratching and spitting whenever she is not purring in my arms.”
Sheila tugged the blanket from the end of the bed and wrapped it around her before she rose to walk stiffly to the dresser. The blanket dipped low in the back, nearly to her waist, her sun-streaked hair curling loosely at the top of her shoulder blades. As she reached for her blouse and slacks, she heard Ráfaga walk up behind her.
“Why do you persist in covering yourself with that blanket?” he mused. “Do you think I do not already know every inch of you?”
“I have no desire to parade around naked in front of you.” Sheila tensed as his hands moved to rest on her shoulders.
He lifted aside the hair at the nape of her neck to let the searing warmth of his mouth explore the sensitive area. Sheila felt herself melting under his disturbing caress, but she knew too well her defenses wouldn’t last if she didn’t distract him, and quickly.
“I suppose you’re leaving to break some criminal out of jail,” she said with the harshness of accusation.
Her goal was accomplished as he raised his head, meeting the reflection of her gaze in the square mirror above the dresser. The arch of one dark brow was demanding, the sharpness of his dark gaze interrogating.
“Why do you say that?” His voice was almost too bland.
“Laredo told me that’s what you do.” And Sheila wondered if she wasn’t supposed to know. “I suppose you just go charging in there on your horses and take the guards by surprise.”
“The horses get us in and out of the mountains—no more.” Ráfaga stepped away from her. “Outside the Sierras, we must use other transportation.”
Sheila realized he had neither admitted nor denied that his destination was a prison. “Is that where you’re going?” she asked again.
He studied her with a sideways look for a moment.
“We are going to see if it is possible, and if it is, when the best time to do it would be. We will be gone three, maybe four, days at the most.”
“What are you going to do with me while you’re gone?” she asked with cautious unconcern. “Are you going to lock me in a room and post a guard at the door?”
“Is it necessary?” countered Ráfaga.
“I don’t know.” Sheila shrugged. “Do you think it is?”
His mouth thinned at her evasion. “Consuelo will be in each day to cook for you. You may leave the house only with Juan. He will be responsible for you. I have left orders that if you step outside the door, you are to be stopped unless Juan is with you. There will always be someone on guard, whether Juan is here or not,” he finished in a clipped, authoritative tone.
“What you are saying is that you don’t trust me?”
“Right,” Ráfaga agreed coldly. “I do not trust you.” He turned smoothly on his heel and walked to the hall. “Get dressed so that we may eat the breakfast Consuelo has prepared.”
“I’m not hungry,” she murmured obstinately.
Ráfaga paused at the door, a cynical twist of mockery to his mouth, deepening the grooves carved at the corners. “Poor Sheila. Who will you sharpen your claws on while I am gone? Perhaps you will find that you miss me.”