But she could not stay there and play Brant's whore.
And that was what she was―despite the wedding ceremony performed by Iron
Eyes. Her gaze fell wryly on the healing scar on the back of her hand. Just how
long would Brant use her before he turned her over to someone else? After all,
hadn't he told her Colin has asked only that he find her?
She would be damned if she would wait there for
Brant's return like some sacrificial lamb. Some way, somehow, she would get
word to Colin, or if that failed, make her way to him if she had to walk every
mile of the way. The prospect of cheating Brant of his reward money brought a
spiteful smile to her lips.
Anne whirled and crossed to the mound of clothing
beside the bed. The skirt was still serviceable. But the blouse―Anne held
it up before her, noting with a muttered oath the rent from neckline to hem.
Well, there was nothing she could do for it now, with no needle or thread.
She'd just have to keep the rebozo wrapped tightly about her.
When she was dressed and her unruly hair tied back
at the nape of her neck, she slipped from the room. She paused at the landing,
her hand gripping the cold, polished wooden railing with uncertainty. From
below came the loud, coarse laughter of the saloon's first customers, already consuming
the fiery mescal and spending their money at the monte tables though it was
still some hours away until evening.
If she could but get past the saloon without
attracting attention. Then she had only to make her way to the Cathedral.
Surely the padre there would help her. Could find a place for her to stay until
she could get word to Colin.
Yet she had hardly descended the last step when the
bar doors swung open and a beefy
vaquero
reeled into the hotel lobby.
Too late, Anne shrank back against the wall, hoping he had not noticed her.
"Aye, aye, aye," he said thickly, lurching
at her. "
Mira
la
novilla
!"
Her hands pushed against the leather-vested chest,
and the rebozo she clutched before her dropped open. "No!" she
gasped. "I'm not what―"
The red-rimmed eyes of the
vaquero
widened at
the display of the creamy globes of flesh. The moist red lips, almost lost in
the food-stained beard, grinned like a weasel's. "
Qué
pasa
,
mujer
?
You entertain the others upstairs―why not me?"
Anne closed her eyes against the powerful reek of
alcohol and stale sweat but opened them when the large hands seized each breast
brutally. She shoved at him with all her strength. "I'll call the manager
if you don't―"
The
vaquero
smashed her up against the wall with
an obscene laugh, showing two missing teeth. "Him?" He jerked his
head toward the hotel's counter where the little man with wire-rimmed glasses
cowered. "He is paid to find you
putas
." The
vaquero's
hand groped for her crotch. "You spread your legs for them,
puta
,
you spread them for Angel."
"She spreads them only for me, Angel."
It was Brant's voice―steely and razor-edged with
danger.
The
vaquero
turned slowly, and Anne looked
past his shoulder. Brant stood in the center of the lobby, legs slightly apart.
Behind him were Rafael and Ezra. And at the barroom doors men in tall beaver
hats and sombreros stood.
But Anne's gaze was fixed on Brant. He wore a
nut-colored shirt, matching the pale-brown of his eyes that gleamed lethally
beneath the black, wide-brimmed hat. There was a deceptive casualness to his
stance and the way his hand rested easily by his side―near the pistol at
his right hip. She noted with a detachment born of shock the way the black
pants, tucked into high-topped boots, molded the muscle-corded legs.
"Ah,
señor
―I do not see
su
marca
on her."
The reckless slant of Brant's lips told Anne the
fight had nothing to do with her now. It was more than the challenge between
two men for possession of a woman. It was the primeval urge to conquer, to
kill. The scent of blood already permeated the air. Excitement electrified the
spectators. Here was Death. Raw. Crude. But holding each person there as
spellbound as the chilling, glassy-eyed fix of the cobra.
"Gentlemen," the manager squeaked.
"Can't this matter be settled outside?"
As if the bearded
vaquero
before her suddenly
sensed the deadly intent of the man across the room from him, he tensed.
"You first,
indio
." His voice when he spoke was terse and
thin-edged. "I follow."
Brant nodded, turning back indolently toward the
hotel door. The man called Angel moved then with an incredible speed that
seemed nothing but a blur to Anne. Stepping to the side, his hand whipped at
his gun. There was a deafening explosion. The stench of the gunpowder clouded
the room.
Anne looked unbelievingly from her bloodsplattered
clothing to Brant, who stood still with knees slightly bent. The smoke curled
upward from the pistol in his right hand. At her feet the
vaquero's
body
jerked spasmodically, then went limp. She screamed then, a deep guttural scream
that encompassed all the horror she had experienced since the raid at
Adelsolms. The terror, the pain, the fear poured forth in scream after scream,
to be silenced abruptly by the sharp slap of Brant's palm. Anne's head jerked
backwards.
"Cover yourself," Brant told her harshly.
Carelessly, he stepped over the body, pulling her
after him up the stairs. The door slammed behind them, and Anne faced him,
stunned. Until she met the murderous glint in his eyes. She backed to the door.
"You little bitch, you don't care what trouble you cause, do you? Or who
get's killed, as long as you get your way." He advanced on her.
Anne's arms crossed protectively before her as if to
ward off another blow. Brant laughed softly. "You paraded yourself
downstairs for the customers, sweet...so you can damn well do the same for your
husband!"
He tore the rebozo from her. And when Anne tried to
bolt, he jammed his knee between her legs, pinning her against the door. His
mouth fastened cruelly on hers, and his fingers dug into the soft skin of her
shoulders. Her senses swam. Everything about her protested, and yet she did not
pull free. What was the use, she wondered dimly, to fight him? He always won.
Her knees buckled, and Brant swung her up in his arms.
But when he lowered her to the bed, Anne rolled across
to the other side, springing to her feet. "No, Brant Powers! You'll not
have me so easily. I'll not be your whore!"
He moved around the bed to her. Yet she held her
ground. Her hands clenched into fists. "You'll have to rape me," she
told him when he stood looking down at her with a smile that held no warmth.
"A man never rapes his wife, Anne. Now spread
your legs for me."
XVIII
With the same mixture of fascination and repulsion
with which Anne had spied upon the voodoo rites of Barbados she now watched
Brant as he tossed his pistol on the night stand and casually began to shed his
clothing.
In the waning light of day his tattooed face
resembled the painted one of the obeah doctor, and as he came toward her in
purposeful strides Anne could not restrain a shudder. "Damn you!" she
whispered when he took her in his arms. "I'll make you sorry you ever laid
eyes on me!"
Brant laughed ruefully and tilted her face up to
him. "That you've already done, Annie."
She fought him then. Biting, scratching, snarling
like one of the Texas panthers. And all the time his mocking face danced above
hers. He was merciless, pinning her to the bed, shoving aside her entangling
skirts. Anne opened her mouth to scream, and his lips clamped over hers. Her
head twisted from side to side but there was no escaping the cruelty of the
kiss that seemed to drug her like an opiate. And when her struggling ceased, he
took her. It was a cold, violent act that in no way resembled the passion of the
night before. Anne lay there without flinching, affording Brant as little
pleasure as possible, as his body ruthlessly claimed possession of hers.
However, against her will her traitorous body slowly
responded to the demands of his. No words were spoken. None were needed. There
was only the rise and fall of the two of them on the waves of raw desire. Their
breaths came in ragged gasps; their entwined bodies drenched with sweat as
their passions mounted toward violent consummation. And through it all there
were always Brant's whispered words of sex―in English and Spanish and
Comanche, drumming in Anne's ears like voodoo drums, drowning out all thought
of everything so that there existed only the two of them.
Afterwards there was always the tenderness that
Brant displayed, holding her close to him, as if gentling a mustang he had
broken. This, above all else about him, Anne found astonishing. It was
something to which she had been unaccustomed. But instead of the passiveness
that follows the release of passion's culmination, she felt instead' a growing
anger―at her body's betrayal, at the woman she had become.
She shut out the sulfurous eyes that watched her and
visualized instead the twinkling clear-green eyes of Colin. But when she tried
to summon the rest of his face, it receded in the well of tears that slowly
filled her eyes. "Colin," she half-whispered, trying to bring back
all that was lost to her.
Abruptly the heavy weight at her side was gone as
Brant rolled to his feet. His eyes ran over her sprawled nudity with a grim
contempt, and when he spoke there was a deliberate coolness that was more frightening
than icy rage. "You and the so-called gentleman you fancy deserve each
other, sweet."
Anne exulted in this momentary triumph. "Unlike
you," she threw back at him as he drew on his pants, "Colin's enough
of a gentleman that he'd never try to rape me."
Brant looked down at her with a thin smile.
"Why should he? When you've made it so easy for him."
Pushed beyond logical thought, infuriated by the way
Brant always managed to get the last word, Anne's hand shot out for the pistol
on the night stand. Leveling the pistol at the upper half of Brant's torso that
gleamed like polished mahogany in the room's dimness, she said, "You're
taking me out of here―now. To Houston."
Surprise flickered briefly in the brown eyes. But he
shrugged into the faded, blue flannel shirt before answering her. "If you
fire that, I won't be taking you anywhere. Of course, you can try and make it on
your own," he told her, nodding toward the door where filtered up the
muted laughter of the early revelers. "If you think you can make it past
them."
Uncertainty played on Anne's face, and in that
moment of distraction Brant jerked the pistol from her hand. She sprang up at
him, fighting for the pistol, and he shoved her back on the bed. Her eyes, like
shards of smoked glass, glared up at him. "I should have killed you when I
had the chance!"
Brant's laugh was more of a sneer. "Then you
should've primed the pistol first." At the door he paused and looked back
at her. "If you want me to take you to your lover, you can damn well wait
'til I'm ready."
Anne felt as if she personally knew each of the people
in the plaza below. From the wrinkled old man who sat dozing on the bench beneath
the shade of the stucco portals to the fat duenna garbed in black who escorted
her young charge to the matins at the cathedral every morning. There were the
bloodcurdling yells of the
vaqueros
reining in before the saloon that told
her evening was near, and the gleeful shouts of the street urchins and the
hawking of the street vendors that awoke her each morning.
In the last four days, as she paced the hotel room
like a heretic his cell, she had come to recognize the sounds and sights of the
plaza. Even the smells-the tortillas the old woman fried in the iron stove she
pushed on her wooden cart, and the fresh scent of goldenrods and wild roses
that the barefoot girl pedaled at the corner. These were all the diversions
afforded to Anne.
There were times when she thought she would lose her
mind. Grudgingly, she admitted she missed the distraction of the verbal fights
she shared with Brant... and missed the way their bodies had fought―and
Anne sensed that Brant, too, fought his desire for her. But the way their
bodies at last joined in a truce of passion, on this she did not dwell. For
Brant had not returned to the room since that night she had whispered Colin's
name.
That he came back to the hotel each evening she had
no doubt. Several times she had recognized his sorrel gelding hitched to the
post in front of the hotel, indicating he spent his nights in some other room.
And she could not help but wonder if he slept alone at these times or if
perhaps even Celia shared his bed―but this she doubted, feeling that
Rafael would never permit his sister's stubborn waywardness to go that far.
Brant's few notes, written in his heavy scrawl, were
impersonal, telling her little. That the boy Pepe would be bringing her meals
to the room and to stay put (that Anne intended to do, not wishing to suffer
the same consequences of her last sally from the room). But the time would come
when she would make her way to Colin. Until then she would wait, bide her time.
But the waiting was grating on her nerves.
For at least the fifth time that day she impatiently
drew the calico curtain across the dusty window and stalked to the other side of
the room. She flung herself on the bed, hands beside her head, and stared
listlessly up at the cracked ceiling, willing her thoughts to other places. To
the cool blue-green tide that rolled in to ripple at her toes buried in the
warm island sand. To the tall arching palms that swished with the trade winds.
And to her mother and father and the gaiety of the plantation home. She could
almost taste the sweet fruit punches that Delila would make and hear the rhythmic
song of the slaves at evening, when the slamming of the door broke her
dreamlike concentration.
Jerking to a sitting position, Anne faced Brant.
There were tired lines about his mouth and the shadow of beard stubble across
the square jaw.
"Where have you been?" she demanded,
suppressing the sudden, unfamiliar feeling that gripped her. After all, she
told herself, who wouldn't be glad to see someone after six days of looking at
the walls?
Brant's lower lip flattened in a grim line. He swung
about, hand on the door, and Anne cried, "Wait!"
One dark brow cocked. Brant looked back at her. "Well?"
She lowered her lids, unable to meet his piercing
eyes. "Don't go," she whispered.
"I've been riding for forty-eight hours
straight, Anne, and I don't feel like putting up with a bitching woman."
She raised her gaze to the frowning face.
"Please. I'm not used to being alone―this long a time."
Over the hawklike nose the black brows drew
together. Damn, had he expected her to throw herself at him in joy? he asked
himself. If he'd been cooped up like this for a week, he'd be ready to kill the
first person he saw ...especially the person responsible. Brant studied the
eyes that shimmered, as fathomless as gray mists on a winter sea. Despite all
she'd been through, despite the mute entreaty in those arresting eyes, there
was still a brave stubbornness to the tilt of her chin. Brant knew a fleeting
moment of remorse.
"Ezra and Rafael are meeting me here for
supper," he said finally. "Do you want to eat below with us?"
Anne's eyes narrowed in suspicion of Brant's
unexpected gesture of generosity, but she was too afraid he would withdraw the
invitation to question him further. "I'd like that very much." Her
hand slipped up to the blouse she had so poorly mended. She had only learned
since Delila's death how much she had depended on the woman's beloved ministrations.
"The blouse is ..." she hesitated, and Brant said, "Still
displays too much of your charms."
Anne glanced up, expecting to find bitterness etched
on the rugged face, but there was only wry humor. "I'll have Pepe find
another blouse when he brings the hot water." Brant rubbed his stubbled chin
with the palm of his hand. "And a razor."
"You're going to bathe―here?"
"Uhmm,"he told her, flinging himself on the
other side of the bed. "And what's more, you're going to scrub me."
Anne sprang to her feet, hands on hips, and glared
down at him. "I will not! I'll not be both your maid―and your whore.
Sweet Jesus, waiting on Pa-ha-yu-quosh was better than this!"
Brant's hand shot out for her wrist, dragging her
down across his chest. The heavy lidded eyes regarded her narrowly. "You
little hellcat. I should've left you there."
"But your greed couldn't pass up Colin's
reward!" she hurled back.
"It's not Donovan's money I want."
Anne shrank beneath the intensity of the desire she
read in the dark depths of his eyes. "You've been paid," she
whispered. "Three times now. My debt is more than cancelled."
"You're not in Houston yet, sweet," he
said lightly, surprising her at his abrupt change of mood.
"If you're threatening―" Anne broke
off at the light knock at the door.
"
Pásale
," Brant said.
It was Pepe with two buckets of water .There was a
rapid flow of Spanish between Brant and the boy, and when the boy left Brant
said, "Fill the tub."
Anne wanted to argue, but knew that Brant would make
good his threat, leaving her there while he ate below. And she had to get out of
that room, if only for a few precious minutes. She pushed away from him and
went over to the buckets. She could feel his gaze on her as she rebelliously
sloshed the water into the hipbath that stood in the corner.
After the buckets were empty, she turned to find
Brant calmly removing his shirt, as if the two of them had lived together in
the intimacy of marriage for years. When his naked chest gleamed in the
candlelight, shadowed by the brown, wiry curls that snaked down the taut,
corded stomach, and his fingers worked at the buttons of his pants, Anne
whirled about. A hot flush crept up her neck to cover her face. "Do you
have to behave so crudely?"
"I keep forgetting," he mocked, coming up
behind her. "You've never seen a man naked before."
Anne shivered, afraid he would take her in his arms,
but he moved past her, sliding into the hot water with a grunt of pleasure.
"It's not that," she spat at his back. "There's such a thing as
respect."
"For those who earn it. Scrub me, would
you?"
Her eyes carefully averting the naked loins that
shimmered beneath the water's steam, Anne sullenly took the tallow soap he
handed her and began to rub his back. With an effort, she diligently
concentrated on the sun-browned skin, noting the various nicks that marred it.
Some scars were fresher than others. Above the right shoulder blade was a
puckered seam, and she wondered when and how he had taken that bullet.
There was a quietness in the room, broken only by an
occasional splash as her hand cupped the water to rinse away the lather. The silence
grew until it was as tangible as the skin beneath her fingers. The tension
snapped when Brant caught her hand in his. Anne's breath sucked in at the
daredevil look in his eyes. "There's more to me than my back."
Why did the shared intimacy with the man bother her?
She remembered having to pick lice from Pa-ha-yu-quosh's scalp and the chilling
way he had grinned when he indicated he wanted her to perform the same task on
the hairy nest around his swollen penis. But she had merely considered it a
distasteful chore, treating it with the same distant dislike as she did the
menial job of plucking chickens.
And with Otto―she had, following her husband's
example, kept their sexual encounters on an impersonal basis, divorced from
the reality of daily life. That had been difficult, though. For, unlike Pa-ha-yuquosh,
who cared nothing for her feelings, she had had to hide from Otto her revulsion
at his clumsy, warped attempts at lovemaking. Had had to hide the light of love
that surely must have sprung to her eyes the night Colin came to Adelsolms; had
had to hide those treasured dreams that sustained her those long desolate
months of marriage to him.