Whitehorse (29 page)

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L
eah opened her eyes. The inside of
Roy
's truck felt like an oven. She couldn't breathe. "I must have dozed." She cleared her throat and sat up, looking beyond
Roy
to the porch where Johnny's grandfather had been sitting. He was gone.

"The old man has agreed to let you see Johnny,"
Roy
said. "But you must swear to tell no one of his location. He only does this because he knows what you mean to Johnny."
Roy
opened the door and stepped back. "It's a long journey. You'd better start now if you want to get there by dark."

She followed
Roy
toward the corral at the back of the old man's property. Ben Whitehorse, whose face looked as aged as the dilapidated barn, stood by a swaybacked paint horse with one brown eye and one blue. Ben had bridled the horse, if one could call the rope braid wrapped over the horse's muzzle and looped around its withers a bridle. There was no saddle.

Roy
helped Leah to mount, then smiled up at her. "Let the horse take you. He knows the way." He pointed to the low mountain that seemed to Leah in that moment as tall as the Sierra Blanca. "The mountain spirit rides with you.
Yalan."

Stepping back,
Roy
slapped the horse on the rump and the animal moved down the path toward the trees. Leah looked back as Ben Whitehorse lifted his arms toward the sky and began chanting softly in Apache.
Roy
raised his hand briefly, then turned and walked toward his truck.

The path climbed sharply up the hillside, forcing Leah to lean slightly over the horse's withers and grasp its mane with both hands to steady herself. Occasionally fir and piñon and cedar trees formed a low canopy overhead, so she had to lie low or risk getting scraped from the animal's back.

The rocky thread of ground curved like a snake's back through crevices of boulders that rose up to form cathedral-like pitches over her head. More and more the path inclined until the horse was forced to scramble for footing, lunging itself upward while Leah closed her eyes and gripped her legs tightly as possible, remembering what Johnny had told her once about riding bareback.
Hold his heart between your knees. Become one with the animal and he with you. Trust him and he will take care of you.

The earth to her right disappeared, dropping sharply out of sight so it seemed to her that the horse balanced on thin air. Crows and eagles soared level with her and the trees below blurred into a green, indistinct cloud, interrupted only by the diminutive gray lines of highways and the clusters of buildings that represented Mescalero and Ruidoso. But even that disappeared as they wound around the far side of the mountain.

The horse's flesh turned hot and sweaty, soaking her jeans so they rubbed the insides of her thighs raw. The sun burned down on her and the reflection of it off the rocks made her eyes sting. The horse stumbled, going down on both front knees. She clutched its neck and looked over the lip of the ledge as stones bounced like rubber balls down the side.

They climbed for another hour. Then another. Until the sun disappeared over the western mountains and shadows of rocks painted strange shapes on the trail. Her legs cramped, as did her shoulders. Having clutched the reins and mane so fiercely for so long, her hands ached with a numbness that shot hot pain up her arms.

A moment passed before she realized they had stopped climbing. Its head down, the horse made a grunting sound and blew through its nostrils.

The mountaintop formed a mesa of sand and rocks and scrubby wind-twisted trees. Before her burned a campfire, and just beyond that stood a small inipi covered with heavy colorful blankets to allow no light and air inside the brush structure.

Leah slid off the horse, wincing as her feet hit the ground. Carefully as possible she straightened, massaged the small of her back and took a couple of unsteady steps before being certain her legs would hold her.

The wind whipped over the mesa edge, scattering brown grass and kicking dirt around her ankles as she moved toward the primitive structure. "Johnny?" she called softly, glancing toward the campfire, where glowing coals were mounded around rocks the size of tennis balls.

The opening of the inipi had been covered with a blanket. Going down on her knees, Leah drew the flap aside and did her best to peer into the dark room. Steam rushed over her face, robbing her of breath.

"Johnny?" she whispered, crawling through the opening and into the dark, wet heat.

Naked, his skin beaded with water and sweat, Johnny sat near the glowing, steaming stones in the center of the sweat lodge, his back to her, his head fallen forward so his hair partially covered his face. He did not acknowledge Leah's presence. His eyes closed, he rocked back and forth, silently chanting.

Leah moved around the confined space until she was sitting across from him. The steam rose up from the stones so thickly that she felt suffocated. Her eyes stung and her clothes clung to her skin as she did her best to see Johnny's face in the fog.

"Johnny?"

He continued to sway. His lips moved.

"Johnny?" Leah touched his scraped and bruised cheek and his swaying stopped. Slowly, his head came up and his eyes opened. He stared at her, emotionless, as if his soul were someplace else. A niggling of uneasiness centered in her chest, causing her voice to tremble. "Are you okay? God, Johnny, I've been worried out of my mind."

He said nothing. Did nothing. Not so much as a blink of his dark eyes to acknowledge her.

Leah moved closer, around the pit of stones, sank into the sand beside him so his wet gritty skin pressed against her own. She took his face between her hands and forced him to look at her. "Have you taken something?" she asked. "Johnny, are you on drugs? Please, answer me."

"Dolores is dead," he whispered.

"I know. I'm sorry. But hiding away here won't change the fact that she's gone."

At last some life came to his eyes and he focused hard on her face as sweat beaded on the tips of his lashes, then ran down his cheeks. His jaw became rock solid. His expression became fierce and savage as he wrapped his hand around her nape and roughly pulled her closer. "Johnny Whitehorse runs from nothing,
Sons-ee-ah-ray.
I'm more than ready to face the consequences of Dolores's death, and to tell all that I know. I came here because of you. To sweat
you
from my soul, and my heart. To sweat away the pain that I feel every time I think of you. To sweat away the love that has eaten away at my heart since the first moment I saw you those years ago riding your father's stallion, the wind in your hair and the sun dancing on your face. Foolish, isn't it, to think I could suddenly stop loving and needing you now when I couldn't do it the last twelve years."

Twisting his fingers in her hair, he drew her face up to his. "Now here you are, breathing life again into my spirit, and a hunger as hot as the desert wind. I want you. I
don't
want you. I need you. I
don't
need you. You are more complication than I need in my life. You're a ghost that haunts me, and if I could I would exorcise you back to your sky world and make you take your memory with you."

"I never stopped loving you," she said, and began unbuttoning her blouse. "There hasn't been a day that I haven't regretted what I did. The decision I made. I felt your pain every night that I lay in my bed and thought of you, and the life we might have had together. But I had no choice, Johnny. When my father learned of our relationship, he vowed to destroy your father if I continued to see you. I broke up with you to protect you—"

"You murdered me, Leah."

He cupped his hand over her breast, slidding his fingertips along the edge of her bra before flipping the strap off her shoulder. The masculine, musky scent of his sweating body roused a hunger in her that, over the last many years, had inspired vast fantasies, yet none had felt as overwhelming as this moment. How many nights had she nestled in her husband's arms thinking of Johnny Whitehorse, and what she would do if ever she lay with him again.

"For a very long time I wanted to destroy you, but in hating you so I destroyed myself."

"I'm sorry," she whispered, her voice sounding rough and low as she allowed the blouse to slide down her arms. The steam slid over her skin like hot velvet as she watched Johnny unhook the bra closure between her breasts and peel away the filmy material. Her head falling back and her eyes drifting closed, Leah caught her breath as Johnny lowered his head and took a taut, throbbing nipple between his teeth, gently at first, then almost painfully, sucking it hard, cruelly, causing her to gasp and whimper in her throat, at the same time acknowledging the sensation of heat igniting between her legs and mounting as he lay her back on the ground and stretched his big body out on hers.

He pressed kisses against her heated flesh, swirled his tongue upon the ridge of her ribs, grazed her skin with his teeth and breathed hotly against it until she writhed in both pleasure and pain and made soft keening sounds in her throat, until she lifted her hips and invited him to unsnap her jeans.

For a moment they clung insistently to her, until he tore them down her legs and tossed them aside. Wearing only the briefest panties, she lay sprawled before him, sweat and steam turning her pale skin as red as the embers heating the stones outside. On his knees between her legs, his black hair falling over his shoulders, he allowed her to look at his body, to acknowledge his massive erection that she had once been much too shy to openly admire.

Johnny Whitehorse was no longer a boy. The memory of his younger body did not do him justice—that body had not been honed of long bone and defined muscle that came from hours of working out—and though she once had felt the cravings of adolescent desire while in his arms, the hunger that streaked through her in that moment was beyond anything she had ever experienced.

"What are you waiting for?" she asked.

His black eyes narrowed and his lips curved sensually. He ran one hand down the length of his erection and she watched with caught breath as it swelled even more, causing Johnny's face to tense, his teeth to clench, and a low groan to rattle in his throat.

"Twelve years," he murmured, sliding the tips of his fingers up her thigh, to the elastic edge of her panties, dipping beneath to search out the sensitive place between her legs that had turned as hot and liquid as the steam pressing down on her. "For twelve years I thought of other men holding you, of touching you, of teaching you things I wanted to teach you. Of smelling you. And tasting you, and making your body desperate to be fucked. I've been with a lot of women, Leah. Some of them nice. Most of them not so nice. I'm not the same boy who got drunk on sangria and took your virginity with clumsy recklessness. But then, you're no longer a virgin."