Carla Kelly - [Spanish Brand 01] Page 12

  “Will you … is there room for you?” she asked.

  “I’ll sleep under the wagon,” he told her. “May I keep Trece tonight for my feet?”

  “Certainly you may. I could move some boxes in here—”

  “No need, Paloma.”

  He could tell she was not happy with him. Her face was close to his, so close he wanted mightily to kiss her. Why had he said he would not rush things? Could a man be too nice?

  “Your men will think there is something wrong if you are not in the wagon with me,” she whispered, her breath tickling his ear and sending shivers of a different kind down his spine.

  “I never worry about what my men think,” he assured her. “Let’s allow ourselves time. Good night, Paloma.”

  She sighed and lay down, tugging the blanket high on her shoulders.

  Marco walked around the diminishing fire, throwing on more scraps of wood. He saw that his men had made brush shelters, where they slept, two and three close together, absorbing one another’s warmth. He lay down under the wagon, his blanket doubled and Trece at his feet, just as he had hoped would happen when he bought the yellow runt in Santa Fe. After a few minutes of feeling sorry for himself, he closed his eyes and slept. He was used to cold and hard ground and snow.

  He was sleeping soundly, wrapped tight against the cold, when Paloma shook his shoulder. He sat up, alert, his head just brushing the underside of the wagon. He knew it was her without seeing her, because her hand went to his shoulder in such a gentle way.

  “Are you all right?”

  She shook with cold. “I’ve never been so cold in my life,” she whispered, looking around to make sure no one else was awake. “How do you stand it?”

  Maybe he was a fool. Paloma Vega had so little body fat that it was no wonder she shivered and shook. Well, that’s it, he thought, crawling out from under the wagon and shaking out a startled Trece. He took Trece to the nearest brush shelter. “Here, Andrés,” he whispered. “Have a dog tonight.” He heard his mayordomo’s low laugh.

  Wrapping his blanket around him, Marco helped Paloma back into the wagon and followed after. He shifted the kegs and boxes until he had created space just large enough for two.

  “Lie down, Paloma,” he whispered. “I’ll spread both blankets on top of us.”

  Her hair was long and soft and smelled of piñon pine, a favorite odor, part of his life since birth. But it was more than the fragrance of piñon. He breathed deep of her woman’s odor, so much more pleasant than a man’s smell. She shivered as he put both arms around her and pulled her close. Still she shivered, which began to worry him. He had seen men shiver like that until they died of cold. He pulled her tight against his chest and gradually he felt her relax as his warmth penetrated the core of her body.

  Marco slept for several hours, waking up as the night sky seemed to lighten because of the falling snow. All was silent in the clearing as the snow piled deeper. It was the kind of night that always filled him with contentment when he was sitting in his sala by his own fire, his feet up. Strangely, he felt some of that same contentment. Maybe it was the fact that someone needed him again. Whatever it was, he enjoyed the feeling.

  As he watched Paloma, she woke up. She looked at him, saying nothing for a long moment.

  “How strange this is, but I am too warm now,” she told him, her eyes on his. “I will take off my dress.”

  She removed it quickly, raising up and letting in the cold air, then covering herself again and moving back into his arms.

  He was warm, too. It was a moment’s work to remove his doublet, linen shirt and his leather pants, then pull the blankets over them again.

  “There now,” he said. “Go to sleep, Paloma.”

  Her skin was soft and he had trouble relaxing, until the gentle rise and fall of her shoulders let him know she was asleep again.

  It didn’t last long. “I am even warmer,” she whispered. She removed her chemise and cuddled close, naked.

  No fool, he kissed her. Her arms went around his neck and she returned his kiss. She was no expert, but neither was he, not after eight years on a fallow field. The rest of his clothes came off, Paloma helping.

  “We weren’t going to do this so soon,” he whispered in her ear as his hands roamed over her body. They lingered a moment on her ribs, then moved to her hips, with their better padding.

  “That was your idea. I want you,” was her answer as she began her own tentative exploration of what, besides whiskers and a deep voice, made him different from her. She had a delicate touch and took her time as his breath came faster.

  He concentrated on the soft hair between her legs finally, pleased as she began to murmur and move a little. She was warm all over, no longer the shivering woman who had requested his presence in the wagon to take away the midnight chill.

  A tentative exploration of his own assured him that his wife was quite ready and decidedly willing. It may not have been the marriage bed of any bride’s dreams, but he already knew Paloma Vega was a woman who expected little. Only think how pleased she would be in a few weeks to keep herself warm—and him, too—in his bed at The Double Cross, with its mattress of clean wool and its soft sheets and Indian blankets.

  As he entered her to no complaint beyond a slight hesitation followed by a soft exhalation of breath, the last callus seemed to fall away from his heart. His wife’s legs wrapped tightly around him, Marco took his pleasure as the snow fell on the canvas top of the wagon and the stars and planets continued their own movements across the night sky.

  In the course of the universe, nothing had changed, Marco thought a few minutes later, as Paloma, truly his wife now, lay relaxed beside him. God was good to him again.

  Paloma said nothing, but Marco felt her eyelids moving against his bare arm, so he knew she did not sleep yet. He smiled in the dark at the fluttering sensation.

  “Wife, could you train that expensive dog I bought to sleep on a pallet beside our bed?” he asked, tracing the contour of her breast.

  “I can,” she replied, and he heard the humor in her voice. “Trece was no bargain, was he, if he does not warm your feet.”

  “I never made a better purchase, Paloma Vega,” he assured her.

  His eyes were closing when Paloma cleared her throat.

  “Hmm?”

  “I have seen your brand on … on—”

  “Buciro, my horse?”

  “Yes. Two crosses and an M?”

  He nodded. “The M is for Mondragón, of course. One cross is for my grandfather, and one for my father.”

  “Will you add another someday to represent you?”

  “I might, but two is enough. Everyone in Valle calls my hacienda The Double Cross, so I do, too. Is two enough?”

  Silence. He smiled.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In Which Paloma Is Worn Out by Adventure Again

  “You told me only yesterday that I could ask for whatever I wanted,” Paloma whispered in her husband’s ear at that time of early morning when the sun was gearing itself for another day. “I want you again.”

  Without a word, Marco obliged her. Now that she had some idea what was going on, Paloma gave herself to the sensation with more pleasure, enjoying the rhythm of love. When her husband moaned and pressed his face into her bare shoulder to silence himself, she kissed his sweaty hair. She wanted him to continue, but she was too shy to ask. It would keep. Obviously lovemaking was something Marco Mondragón was inclined to want from her, so the future looked rosy, since she found it pleasant, too.

  “I’m heavy,” he whispered finally, rolling off of her. “And look, it is light now.”

  “The better to see you with,” Paloma whispered back as he sat up, naked and peaceful, leaning against the apple keg in the crowded space. She admired the beauty of his body, well-muscled and strong, the body of a man who worked hard.

  Only weeks before the Comanches had come, Paloma sat in the middle of the little apple orchard, daydreaming. Her mother assur
ed her there would be a husband for her, someone noble and kind and capable, much like her father. She had dreamed about such a husband then. Fourteen was the age of marriage in New Mexico, and she was just three years away from that. After the Comanches destroyed her family, she tucked that memory away in her heart, knowing she should probably never seek it out again.

  Her eyes filled with tears, looking at her sudden husband, sitting there naked, his long legs propped up in the tight space, a smile on his face that she could only call satisfied. Her wounded heart began to heal as she realized she had put that smile there.

  “Why tears, my heart?” he asked simply.

  She told him about the apple tree and her dreams she had lost, only to find them again. “Mama said I would find a capable man,” she said after a long struggle. “I will love you all my days, Señor.”

  She could tell she had touched him. “Of that I have no doubt,” he said, after his own struggle. He reached for her again. “Come here.”

  She did as he asked, pulling one of the blankets with her to sit in his lap. Shivering, she wrapped the blanket around them. Paloma listened as the beating of his generous heart returned to normal and closed her eyes, content. “I intend to be a credit to you, Señor,” she told him.

  “Marco,” he reminded her, kissing her own sweaty hair. “Let us not be formal, what with us bare, goose bumps on my rump and me leaning against an apple keg. Probably getting splinters.”

  She giggled. “We don’t even need a yellow dog.”

  They laughed together—a quiet, personal laugh reminding her of her own parents. They had often laughed like that over something she had no part in. It had puzzled her at the time, but now she recognized it as the intimate laughter of lovers. She told Marco, who just nodded, a slight smile on his face.

  “It’s been a while for me,’ he told her simply.

  She burrowed closer and kissed him. Her eyes closed and she slept again.

  She woke soon enough as he heard him sigh, “Paloma, that rump of mine is really cold. Let’s get up.”

  She stifled her laughter because she smelled a cooking fire now. The others were up and moving about. She shifted enough to peer through a small gap in the canvas, which gave that husband with the cold rump a good excuse to take a delicate nibble of her own posterior. Startled, Paloma gasped aloud, which made him laugh. The teamsters looked in the direction of their wagon and she felt her face flame.

  With as much dignity as she could muster, she wrapped the blanket around herself. “You are disgraceful,” she whispered, looking into his merry eyes. “Now I will never be able to leave this wagon.”

  He dressed quickly, his breath leaving little puffs in the air. “Too bad for you, Paloma. It’s a long way to my valley. I doubt a whole barrel of nothing but apples will be much better than a wagon of cabbage.”

  Marco left the wagon. In a few minutes, she peered through the canvas gap again, smiling to herself as he stood with his men, warming his hands around a silver cup that suddenly looked so inviting.

  Oh well, oh well, she thought as she dressed.

  She climbed out of the wagon with what she hoped was at least a shred of dignity. After dealing with personal business, she joined the circle and accepted the earthenware cup the cook handed to her, his eyes lively.

  Might as well leap into it. “Why on earth do you work for this disgraceful, rude rancher?” she asked no one in particular, then took a sip.

  It pleased her no end when Marco, in the act of drinking, suddenly spit out the hot liquid. Eyes merry, he wiped his mouth while his teamsters laughed. The cook stirred the beans, singing a little song. And there was traitorous Trece, going first to her husband for a pat before coming to her.

  “Paloma, you’ll do,” Marco said. He went to his own mount, leaving her standing by the fire with Andrés.

  The mayordomo picked up Trece. “He can stay with me at night,” Andrés said. He gave Paloma a slight nod, which had in it deference and something more. “Señora, you cannot know how long it has been since any of us have heard the master laugh that way. We love him, too.”

  He said it simply and she understood. Paloma, freed from embarrassment, chose her words carefully. “I will be welcome in his hacienda?”

  “You already are, Señora.”

  Without asking, Paloma took her turn gathering twigs and tending the fire at each of their camps on the long journey from middle desert floor to breathtaking mountain passes. She brought water to the horses without being asked and took over the bean pot on those days when the old cook was too crippled by the cold and snow to do more than lie in the food wagon and groan. Soon she was slapping out her own tortillas, which truly were better than his. When Andrés shot a deer, she took her turn with the cleaning, then did amazing things with a roast, apples, onions and sage found along the trail. She especially reveled in the admiration in the teamsters’ eyes as they ate. They were hard workers, too, and obviously not immune to what began to resemble cuisine on a journey that probably hadn’t ever featured such a concept before. She began to wish for chocolate to make a memorable mole, but there was none.

  “It may be that you will have to come on all my brand inspection trips,” her husband told her one evening as they all huddled close to the campfire, shoulder to shoulder, and ate. “We are coming home better fed than usual.”

  “You know I am not a woman to stand idly by,” she reminded him. “I will be happy to come on all your inspections.”

  She absorbed the relief in his eyes, mindful of what Father Damino had told her. “However long you might need me to do that,” she said for his ears alone.

  He swallowed several times at her soft words, and she found sagebrush across the road suddenly fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that she left the fire and gathered sage into her apron. When she returned to the fire, her husband was himself again.

  Paloma refused to be embarrassed when Marco shifted things around in her wagon, moving the apples into another, and the bigger boxes elsewhere, too, to make room for them both. In their nest of blankets they were almost comfortable, especially when she found herself more and more in a warm embrace.

  She was hard put to maintain her own silence on the night when she was practiced enough in lovemaking to understand what pleasure really meant. Her husband’s sigh of satisfaction was ample reward.

  “Now you know, wife,” he said, pulling her into what had become her favorite place, nestled close with her head resting on his chest and one leg thrown over him.

  She nodded, pleased with her body, but, womanlike, not totally. “I wish I weren’t so thin.”

  “That will change, when we reach my hacienda,” he said, his lips on her hair. “Do you like pork or beef better? What about eggs and cream?”

  “Oh, stop!” she whispered, poking him in an area she already knew was sensitive. “I like it all. You’ll turn me into a fat woman.”

  “There are no fat women in my valley,” he replied. “We all work too hard for that. You’ll just turn into a woman with curves here and there, and I’ll have to watch my back when my neighbors become envious.”

  They chuckled together over that, Paloma because she knew he was crazy, and her husband—maybe because he knew he was, too. How would she be sure? She hadn’t met his neighbors yet.

  Whenever they were both sufficiently awake, Paloma relished the moments when Marco talked to her of his hacienda, his servants, the church, and the wide valley, approached through narrow canyons. He spoke with such love for his home that she knew she would love it, too, even if for no more reason than he loved it.

  “You call it ‘your valley.’ Why is that?” she asked one night.

  “It is my valley,” he said simply. “After the Reconquista in 1692, the Mondragóns started moving north and east, always on the frontier, but not through the mountain passes yet. My great grandfather was given a land grant to claim that land on the edge of Comanchería for Spain.”

  “The valley is a buffer between the
Comanches and the rest of New Mexico?” She asked, her eyes closing in marital satisfaction.

  “We are.” He kissed her breast. “Not a place for the timid.”

  He told her of José, the rag picker, who carried himself like a hidalgo—a nobleman’s son—and Erlinda Grande, who was the valley matchmaker. “I have seen enough of her,” he whispered one night. “She might be disappointed in you, at first, because you weren’t part of her plan for me. It won’t last long, if you fix her a stew like the one tonight.”

  “They will know I am poor,” she said another night, before they slept.

  “There was nothing about you in Santa Fe that ever said poor to me,” he told her. “The way you comport yourself, your hands clasped in front of you, your head high. You never were poor, my heart, only a little down on your luck for a while.” He kissed her. “Your luck has changed.”

  After more days of travel, slower now, through the cold and increasing snow, she wondered about her luck, only until Marco woke and smiled at her. Or perhaps it was the day he picked her up to put her behind him as she tried to cross in front to the fire. His “Be more careful, chiquita,” was a caress more than a warning.

  His kindhearted regard gave her confidence to ask one night, after lovemaking, “Tell me about the Indians.”

  Her husband must have understood the offhand way she tried to ask. He gripped her shoulder tighter and spoke softly in her ear, as though soothing a child with bad dreams. “Let me tell you about them.” He put his leg over her this time. Maybe it was an unconscious gesture of protection. Whatever it was, it eased her heart. “Not too heavy? No? It is this way, Paloma, my own dove: there are Comanches, and I fear them. So much that I am extremely careful.” He caressed her shoulder. “There was one ranchero, a friend of my father, who declared that he feared not even the Comanches. He no longer lives in our valley, or any valley, for that matter.” He kissed her shoulder. “You already know what Comanches can do.”