Bed of Roses (27 page)

Sawyer smothered the sound with a kiss and continued caressing her. Her body stiffened for a moment, then began to tremble. “That’s it, sweetheart,” he murmured, his lips still pressed to hers. “That’s it.”

The bliss he fostered within her body was even more powerful now than it had been in the barn. Starting at the core of her womanhood, waves and waves of sensations coursed through her, the feelings so intense that she felt her eyes fill with tears.

Only after many long moments did the fierce ecstasy begin to wane. Only after long moments could she think clearly, dwell on anything but the absolute joy Sawyer had given her.

“You all right?” he asked when she opened her eyes and looked at him. “You look like you’ve been crying.”

“I did. I mean, I have. But I did not do it with purpose. The tears, they came all by themselves.”

“I know I didn’t hurt you.”

She heard a tinge of worry in his voice, and his concern felt warmer than sunshine. “No, you did not hurt me. I think the tears were happy ones. This is the very first time I have ever cried happy tears.” She snuggled next to his chest. “You have made me happy, Sawyer. Not only tonight, but on many other nights and days too. I…I hope that I have made you happy too. That you have liked to be here with me as much as I have liked you being here.”

He thought for a moment. If he hadn’t found his way to La Escondida, where would he be right now?

Wandering, that’s where, just as he’d been before stopping at the convent.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed being here with you, Zafiro.”

Contentment ribboned through her. “Sawyer?”

“Yes?”

“Your mood, it is a good one right now?”

He ran his hand over the gentle curve of her hip. “Yes.”

“All right.” Zafiro sat up. “Do you remember anything about guns?” she blurted. “Any reason why my father’s pistol made you feel such pain? I have been wanting to ask you, but was waiting for you to have a good mood.”

Her reminder about the gun quickly darkened his disposition. “I don’t want to talk—”

“But you must, don’t you see? You must! It is the only way that you—”

“How the hell can I talk about something I don’t remember?”

She leaned down to him, her breasts flattening against his chest, her hands cupping his cheeks. “Please,” she whispered. “Please tell me whatever little thing you remembered.”

He couldn’t miss the genuine interest and concern in her startling sapphire eyes. But how could he explain something he couldn’t understand himself? “Zafiro, I don’t remember enough to tell you. If I did, I could—”

“But you remember pieces and bits.”

Her backward expression tempered his emotions. “Yes, I remember bits and pieces.”

“Tell them to me, Sawyer. I do not ask this because my nose is big, but only because I want to try to help you as you have helped us.”

Her ridiculous referral to her nose further softened his mood. “You aren’t being nosy.”

She nodded.

He nodded back.

“Well?” she asked.

Sawyer urged her back to his shoulder, and when he felt her warm breath wisp across his chest, he closed his eyes and began to speak in an even, hushed tone of voice. “You know about the house.”

He waited for the heinous feeling to come to him, the feeling he always had when thinking of the house. But he felt another feeling instead, that of Zafiro’s arm as she slipped it around his waist. The sweetness of her action helped him continue.

“I see a house with white curtains,” he said. “In the yard, flowers are growing and children are playing. A man is on the porch, and he’s soon joined by a beautiful older lady whose voice sounds like music. She kisses the man on his cheek, then calls to the children.”

“The children,” Zafiro said, “they are little ones?”

“Some are. A few are older.”

“Could the lady be their mother?”

Sawyer pondered her question for a long time. “You know, now that you ask, I don’t think so. She’s a very pretty woman, but she seems too old to have such young children of her own.”

“Maybe she is watching them for her neighbors.”

“Yes, maybe she is.”

Is?
he repeated silently.

Was.
Not
is. Was.

He stopped for a moment then, struggling to quell the familiar horror that finally returned to him. “I see the house in another way too,” he continued, his voice cracking. “Inside the house, a man, a woman, and two children are lying on the floor in their own blood.”

“They…they are the same man and same woman you see on the porch?”

“Yes.”

Zafiro tightened her hold around his waist and tried desperately to understand his fragments of memory. “And the gun, Sawyer?” she asked softly. “When you held my father’s gun what did you remember? What did you think?”

Instantly, he pictured the gun in his hand. “I… It felt cold. Looked…looked horrible in my hand. Staring down at it made me think of the four dead people in the house again.” He paused again, a mixture of panic and dread burning through him. “And then I remembered the crack of gunfire in a silent night. The explosion of guns. I—”

When he stopped speaking so abruptly, Zafiro raised her head from his shoulder and saw horrified disbelief in his eyes. “Sawyer, what is the matter?” she asked loudly. “What are you remembering now?”

“Dear God,” he rasped. “Dear God.”

“What?” Truly frightened for him now, Zafiro bolted upright into a sitting position, curled her hands around the muscles in his shoulders, and squeezed hard. “Sawyer, you must tell me! You must speak of this, do you understand? You cannot continue to bury these things inside you or you will never be free of them!”

He yanked her hands off his shoulders, sat up, and stood, uncaring that his swift actions almost jerked Zafiro’s arm out of its socket.

“Sawyer!” She crawled out of the bed and stood beside him. “What—”

He spun on his heel to face her, grabbed her upper arms, and shook her. “The people! The four dead people in the house! Don’t you understand? The gunfire! The blood! Can’t you see?”

“They were shot?” she answered. Gently, she pulled his hands off her arms to stop him from shaking her head off her shoulders. “They were shot and killed?”

She watched him lift his gaze from her face, over the top of her head. He stared intently, as if he could see the story of his past in pictures upon the log wall behind her. “Sawyer?”

His shoulders slumped; he exhaled every bit of breath from his lungs and sat back down on the bed.

Zafiro sat down beside him.

“I understand now,” he whispered raggedly. “I know what happened.”

His voice was filled with such indescribable pain that Zafiro knew nothing on earth could ease his torment. Prayers to heaven on his behalf swirled through her mind like hundreds of petals blowing in the wind.

“I killed them, Zafiro.” Sawyer bowed his head, and bringing her hand along with his, he held his face in his hands. “Whoever that man, woman, and two children were, I shot them down and killed them in that house.”

Though his pain was silent, Zafiro swore she could hear its chilling scream as it roared through him. She said nothing. Her heart and mind brimmed with horror and shock, but she said nothing.

She merely urged him back down to the bed. And when he turned toward her and buried his face in her hair, his huge body shuddering with his grief, she wept.

Time held no meaning for her as she continued to embrace and caress him. Indeed, when he fell asleep upon the cushion of her hair, all she knew for sure was that dawn had pinkened the sky.

Four people, two of them children. Her heart twisted at the thought.

He’d killed them. Shot them down and killed them in the house with the white curtains and the flowers in the yard.

Her grandfather and the gang had never taken a life. Had rarely even drawn their guns.

But Sawyer…

Having no more tears to cry, Zafiro wept inside.

The man she loved was a murderer.

Chapter Thirteen

Z
afiro thanked all the angels
and saints in heaven that Sawyer was bound to her with the handcuffs. If he hadn’t been, she knew he would have left her and La Escondida hours ago when he’d awakened in her arms.

As it was he was forced to take her along wherever he went. She accompanied him to the barn and to the corral, where he saw to the animals. She went with him to the garden, where he checked to see if the plants and Jengibre were faring well. She tagged along behind him when he returned to the cabin and grabbed a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a bunch of freshly picked carrots.

Now she sat in a secluded glade near the stream with him, a pretty spot she’d visited only on occasion because it was so far from the house. “Do you come to this place often, Sawyer?” she asked, knowing full well he wouldn’t answer her.

He hadn’t spoken a word all day. Not to her or to anyone else. He’d drawn into himself, shutting everyone and everything out of his thoughts and emotions.

The sole thing upon which he could concentrate was the realization that he had murdered four people.

And Zafiro knew in the heart of her soul that even if God Himself commanded Sawyer to talk about the murders, Sawyer would not comply.

She blinked back tears, as she’d been doing all day. Although she could only imagine the torment that boiled inside him, his pain had become her own. But she felt so helpless. So useless. Sawyer had done so much for her, and now—when he was in need himself—she did not know what to do for him.

Turning her head away from him so he wouldn’t see her tears, she wiped her eyes dry. “You brought lunch out here. Are you hungry now?”

He picked up a pebble and hurled it into the stream. “I think we should eat, Sawyer. We did not have breakfast.” She handed him a carrot.

He ignored her hand and the carrot.

“Why did you bring all this food out here if you are not going to eat it? Was it just for me?”

For a moment he watched a sparrow fly from branch to branch in a nearby tree. When the sparrow finally flew away, he threw a twig into the creek and watched it float downstream.

Zafiro tore off a hunk of the bread. “Well, if all this food is just for me, then at least I know that even if you are not talking to me, you are still thinking about me.” She slipped a morsel of bread into her mouth. “Sawyer? I…I know you are horrified by what you remembered last night, but—”

The stiffening of his body, the hard, cold glitter that suddenly iced his eyes, silenced her instantly.

She felt utterly uncertain about the man who sat beside her. He looked like the Sawyer Donovan she knew, but he was not that man.

The Sawyer beside her now was a complete stranger to her. His eyes, his body…everything about him was cold and distant, as if he’d been frozen and taken away to a place too far to reach.

Zafiro picked up another carrot, a small, slender one, and slipped its thickest end into her mouth. “When I was a little girl, I used to smoke carrots, twigs, pencils…anything that looked like a cheroot to me,” she rambled nervously, the carrot waving up and down in her mouth as she spoke. “I did not light them though. I only pretended to smoke. Grandfather smoked sometimes. Once, he caught me with one of his cheroots in my mouth. He took it away from me and told me that smoking would make my hair smell bad.”

Talk to me, Sawyer. Please do not be this icy way with me.

“Will you try to find Maclovio’s whiskey machine today, Sawyer? I will help you if you want to go looking for it.”

Clicking the toes of his boots together, he scared away a bothersome fly that buzzed around his legs.

“Sometimes I have wondered what it is like to be drunk,” Zafiro continued. “Maclovio, he always seems to have a good time. At least he does before he becomes violent. He sings and he dances. He laughs at things that are not funny to anyone else. One day maybe I will get drunk. Just to see what is the feeling of being so silly and so happy.”

She slipped a small piece of cheese into her mouth and let it melt on her tongue before she spoke again. “I promised Tia I would take her to gather berries today, Sawyer. There are no more apples. The berries, they do not grow inside La Escondida, but the patch is very near. You will have to come with me when I take her.”

He wouldn’t go with her to pick berries, she knew. The task of having to bend and straighten with her so many times to gather the succulent fruit would deeply irritate him.

How were they going to remove the handcuffs? she wondered.

Trying to stay busy, she pinched off another bit of bread, rolled it into a small, tight ball, then threw it into the creek. Quickly, dozens of fish began to snap at it, their silvery fins looking like clusters of watered stars. “Do you want to feed the fish?” She placed another ball of rolled bread into the palm of his hand, saddened when he made no move to toss it to the fish.

She neither said nor did anything more. What was the use? He responded to nothing.

It was only when a low snarl hissed from within the grove of trees to her left that Sawyer finally reacted. Jumping up from the sandy shore, he forced Zafiro to her feet as well. His eyes narrowing, he peered into the dark area of the trees.

A mountain lion crept out of the shadows, then stopped and crouched low to the ground.

Zafiro shrank back toward Sawyer. “It is not Mariposa. That cougar looks like he is starving. Look at his bones, Sawyer.”

“He’s a she.” Yanking Zafiro along, Sawyer waded into the deepest section of the stream, where the water bubbled around his chest and up around Zafiro’s neck.

“She is very hungry,” Zafiro said. “I know she will wait for us to come out of the water, Sawyer. I have watched Mariposa wait for hours for a rabbit she knew was in a hole.”

Sawyer watched the great cat slink toward the bread and the cheese. The cougar sniffed at the bread and the carrots, then devoured the entire wedge of cheese. Licking its mouth, the animal then turned toward the stream and lay on its belly.

“We’re going to float downstream,” Sawyer said. “Just turn onto your stomach, keep your head above the water, and let the water take us along.”