Desperado

  “Yeah?” he prompted suspiciously.

  “You see, I couldn’t help noticing how tense you been lately. And I know a man’s got his drives—”

  “Drives?” Rafe sputtered out.

  “Yessirree,” Zeb said, nodding his shaggy gray head. “A man’s juices don’t never stop flowin’ when he’s yer age. Anyways, I jist wanted you ta know . . . Uh, gol-durnit, Hector falls fast asleep onct his head hits this here pallet. And me, well, I’m a heavy sleeper. Tarnation, son, what I’m tryin’ ta say is, you don’t need ta worry none about me hearin’ the bed ropes squeakin’ through the night. Jist go to it.”

  Rafe started to laugh, and his chest was still shaking when Helen slipped in beside him a short time later.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked, making a point of keeping her distance from him in the bed. Her nightly ritual always started out the same—prissy to the point of ridiculous—but by morning she’d be climbing all over him like grapevines on an arbor. And his arbor couldn’t stand much more. She always defended herself by saying she wasn’t aware of what she did in her sleep, but sometimes he had his doubts.

  He moved closer and whispered close to her ear. “Zeb had a man-to-man talk with me tonight.”

  “Oh?” she whispered back, her fresh breath fluttering against his lips.

  Shock waves moved in reaction down to his personal seismograph. It was registering about ten-point-five on his Richter hard-on scale.

  “Zeb said that a man’s got his ‘drives,’ and when the juices are flowing, a man and his wife should just ‘go to it.’”

  Her mouth curved into a smile.

  Blood roared in his ears, and his “scale” went up another notch or two. If a smile can do that, she’d damn well better not touch me.

  “What about a woman’s drives? Did Zeb mention those, too?” She shimmied a little closer, not touching, but near enough that he could feel her body heat. And he could imagine all the rest.

  “Do you have drives?” he groaned, closing his eyes against her allure.

  She didn’t answer, so eventually he turned on his side toward her and cracked open one eye. She was gazing at him with such longing he felt his defenses crumbling. Help!

  “Rafe, I want you so bad. Let’s make love.” She moved against him, one hand caressing his face, a leg thrown over his hip. Before he could see past the stars splintering behind his eyelids, she began to plant soft kisses on his bare chest.

  With a growl of surrender, he flipped her on her back and rolled on top of her tempting body, between her legs. The nightgown and his boxers were no barrier at all to the consuming passion that melded them together. He ground himself against her center and felt her dampness. He almost climaxed then.

  A soft cry filtered through the night air, then died. At first, he thought he or Helen might have moaned. But it was Hector whimpering in his sleep. His cry sounded just like a baby’s, a signal Rafe had heard over and over throughout the thin walls of his childhood homes in the L.A. projects. A call to responsibility, and distasteful duties, and neverending problems. Babies.

  With a jerk, he lifted himself off Helen and stood beside the bed. Drawing on his pants, he stared resolutely down at her, his trembling hands clenched into fists at his sides.

  “Where are you going?”

  “For an icy swim,” he said, panting. “If I don’t come back, you’ll know I’ve swum all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and I’m still rock hard and wanting you.”

  “Oh, Rafe.”

  “Save the ‘Oh, Rafe’s’ for later, babe. There’s gonna come a day of reckoning when I collect for every damn one of these days of abstinence. But not now.”

  “But what if our time never comes?” she murmured under her breath just before he went out the door. But he heard her.

  You wouldn’t do that to me, would you, God? Yo, St. Augustine?

  Rafe heard no God or St. Augustine giving him heavenly reassurance.

  He was on his own.

  Saved by the bell . . . uh, bear . . .

  The next morning, Helen and Hector sat at the rough oak table in the center of the cabin. She was peeling carrots she’d managed to salvage from Effie’s long-neglected garden out back. The vegetables and some wild onions would taste delicious cooked in the juices of the huge trout—at least eighteen inches long—that she planned to bake later that day.

  The boy was bent over a piece of paper from her tablet, diligently writing out the letters of the alphabet. His tongue peeked out between his lips as he concentrated. Although the eight-year-old could speak fluent English and his native Spanish, he’d never been taught to read or write. At Zeb and Rafe’s urging, she’d initiated two-hour daily lessons for Hector. She enjoyed the chore immensely.

  In fact, she was surprised at the satisfaction she derived from homemaking, too. Normally, Helen would have been offended at being relegated to caring for the tiny home and the cooking chores—a woman’s job—when she was more than capable of performing a man’s job just as well. But she loved every minute of her domestic duties.

  She cared for the log cabin as if it were a castle. The only furniture in the single room—about twenty feet square—was the massive built-in bedstead, which she’d come to think of as her torture chamber, and the oak table with matching benches. Off to the side were two homemade chairs—upended stumps with cut-off branches serving as tripod legs, and Effie’s prized, armless rocking chair.

  A cooking fireplace took up one wall. The only light came from the open doorway and two most unusual windows. There was no glass, but Zeb had cut out two windows in facing walls and filled them with colored bottles and glass jars, the area between their necks being filled in with clay. When she’d asked Zeb where he’d got so many pieces of glassware, he told her they’d previously held brandied fruit and pickles and liquor. It had been his wife’s idea, he’d added, and the result was a stained-glass effect when the sun shone brightly.

  Effie’s touch was evident in other areas of the primitive dwelling, as well: Her hand-stitched crimson calico curtains—was there any other color? Helen wondered; exquisite quilts; a few pieces of china displayed on a wooden shelf Zeb had built for that purpose; rag rugs thrown over the rough puncheon floor.

  Helen looked over and saw that Hector had been watching her closely. “I don’t ever want to leave here,” he said fiercely. “This is my home now.”

  “Of course it is, honey,” she said, patting his hand.

  “You and Mr. Rafe are gonna leave sometime, though,” he accused.

  “Yes,” she conceded, “but we won’t abandon you.”

  “When you go, I’m gonna stay with Mr. Zeb. He sez I kin call him Granpap.” His voice quivered with tears of uncertainty.

  “We’ll see, but it’s nothing for you to worry about now.” She corrected his work, then scooted him out the door. He and Zeb were going hunting for rabbits that afternoon.

  She checked the sourdough in a crock near the fireplace. Mary had given her a starter batch, and every day she added a little flour, sugar, and water to keep it working. With care, it would last forever. She also picked an arrangement of Effie’s wildflowers and put them in an empty whiskey bottle. The flowers and the colored light from the “bottle windows” created a warm, homey atmosphere for the cabin.

  Afterward, she ambled toward the stream, planning to help Rafe with the gold digging. He was standing thigh-deep in the icy water to the far left of the little valley, working alone. Zeb and Hector must have already left. Usually, a claim was worked by three adult men who could wash out eighty to a hundred pails of dirt a day, but they had to pace themselves here, knowing there were other chores to be done about the cabin.

  Many of the miners used more sophisticated methods of prospecting—long toms, or cradles, or sluice boxes—but they required at least a half-dozen men to share the labor. Simple panning—adding water to a pan of dug-up gravel and swirling it around so the water and lighter materials spilled over the top and the heavier masses, li
ke gold, sunk to bottom—was a centuries-old method of prospecting that still worked for the one- or two-man gold-digging operation.

  An unusually warm October sun beat down on Rafe’s bare back, which glistened with sweat. Occasionally he stopped swinging a pick against the outcropping of rock and he stood, arching his shoulders.

  Helen picked up a shovel and pan that Zeb had discarded nearby and scanned the area. She stepped into the frigid stream, boots and all, with her shovel and pan held up high.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Rafe asked, just noticing her.

  “I’m going to help you.”

  “No, you’re not. Don’t come any closer,” he warned. “Oh, no, oh, please, don’t do anything to get that T-shirt wet.”

  “Honestly, you have a one-track mind. In the middle of muscle-deadening work, you can still think about—” Her right boot slipped on a moss-covered rock, and her feet went out from under her. She landed flat on her back in the shallow water.

  She expected Rafe to be howling with laughter when she came up spluttering for air, flinging her wet hair back over her shoulders. But he was gawking, transfixed, at her sodden chest.

  Looking down, she saw her breasts clearly outlined by the clinging fabric right down to the nipples, which had hardened in the cold stream. “Now, Rafe,” she said, backing away.

  “Son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, throwing his pan and pickax up onto a boulder. “Even St. Augustine was never given this much temptation, I’ll bet.” He made a flying leap for her, and they both landed in the stream. The snow-cooled waters did nothing to stem his ardor or her fast-matching arousal.

  Like a madman pushed beyond his limits, Rafe kissed her lips and neck. His hands roamed frantically over her breasts, across her back, cupping her buttocks. “Touch me . . . Oh, please . . . Oh, yes, like that,” he pleaded, then almost screamed when she did.

  They rolled in the water, splashing, falling under, coming up laughing and kissing and trying to speak but only able to come out with disjointed words. When Rafe’s mouth closed over Helen’s breast, T-shirt and all, she keened and pounded on his back with her fists. “Damn you! Damn you for making me want you this much.”

  He stood, pulling her to him, grinding himself against her to show how much he wanted her. She wrapped her legs around his waist and licked at his ears while he walked up the bank, hissing out wicked words of retribution he planned to enact on her. Instead of dropping down to the grassy bank with her, as she’d expected, however, he stopped abruptly.

  “What?” she asked, drawing her head back to look at him. He was still carrying her with her legs wrapped around his waist.

  “Shhhh. Don’t move.” Backing away, he moved into the water and set her on her feet, drawing her over and onto the wide boulder on the other bank. Only then did she follow his gaze to the cabin, where a loud ruckus took place. A huge grizzly bear appeared in the doorway, their trout dinner in its mouth.

  “I don’t suppose you brought a gun out here with you,” he asked.

  She shook her head. “It’s in the cabin.”

  Rafe looked at the pickax in his hand. A lot of good it would do against a thousand-pound beast.

  The bear appeared again, and this time it was covered with flour and feathers from Effie’s goose-down pillows. Molasses dribbled from its snout.

  For more than an hour, they sat perched on the rock watching helplessly as Big Ben trashed the inside of the cabin. They could only hope he found enough to satisfy his hunger and didn’t come seeking human fare. Or that Zeb and Hector wouldn’t come back onto this dangerous scene.

  Finally, the animal loped out, stood on its hind legs, and let out a mighty roar, eying them across the too-short distance. The grizzly seemed to be considering whether to attack them when another animal roared in the forest—a similar but much shriller bellow. Probably its mate. The bear gave them one last glance and went down on all fours, trotting off into the sunset.

  Helen thought about their near lovemaking then, the incident that had been a prequel, so to speak, to this mind-boggling spectacle right out of a Disney wilderness movie. “Well, that was good for me. How about you?” she quipped.

  At first, Rafe gaped at her. Then he burst out laughing and pulled her to his side in a warm embrace. “Oh, sweetie, someday we’ll tell our grandkids about this.” Immediately, he stiffened at his foolhardy words. “I didn’t mean that,” he quickly amended, “about grandkids, I mean. I just meant that—”

  “I know exactly what you meant, Rafe,” Helen said tiredly.

  Maybe they weren’t meant to be together after all.

  Then again, maybe Rafe was all wet.

  Yeah, she liked that idea.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Family ties really are the ties that bind . . .

  By the following evening, everything was back to normal again. The cabin was relatively clean, and no one had been injured. Zeb said they should consider themselves lucky.

  Helen sighed, putting aside her uneasy thoughts, and continued to read, “And the redskin’s arrow went straight and true through the evil villain’s heart, ending his miserable life forever.” She put a slip of ribbon on the page to mark her place and closed the book, The Last of the Mohicans.

  “More,” Hector complained sleepily from across the table where he nestled in Rafe’s lap.

  “That’s enough for today, sweetie,” she said, putting the worn leather volume on the shelf, along with Zeb’s three other precious books, the Bible, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter, and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

  Rafe stood with the child in his arms and admonished gently, “Helen said no more tonight, and that’s that.”

  Hector made a whimpering sound of protest and nuzzled Rafe’s neck. Rafe laid the boy on his pallet near the fireplace, where he fell instantly asleep. Returning to the table across from Helen, he sipped the last of his coffee. Zeb continued to rock back and forth in Effie’s chair, puffing on an unlit pipe—she’d managed to convert him from the revolting chewing tobacco—and the only sounds in the cabin were the creak, creak, creak of his rocker, and the occasional hiss and crackle of the fire.

  “This isn’t a very exciting nightlife for a hotshot lawyer,” Helen said, wanting to break the silence.

  Rafe yawned widely—it had been another grueling day digging for gold—and propped his elbows on the table, bracing his chin. He regarded her tenderly. “I like it.”

  “Did you watch a lot of TV when you were a kid?” she asked, forcing her mind in a different direction.

  “Nah. I told you, my mother was a tyrant. She always worked, sometimes two jobs a day, and—”

  “What kind of jobs?”

  “Cleaning houses mostly. In Beverly Hills.” He chuckled. “We got the neatest hand-me-down clothes,” he recalled, wrinkling his nose at her. “Gucci loafers. Polo shirts. Versace jeans. Even a leather bomber jacket from Tom Cruise one time.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah, we fit in swell at the local public schools. The other kids wore chic de Levi, and we sported designer duds. That went over real big.”

  “That’s probably when you first learned to fight.”

  “Yep.”

  Her lips twitched with amusement. “Tell me more about your mother.”

  “She’s about five-foot-zip. Wears polyester slacks—though all us kids have tried to break her of that—with sweatshirts. Her feet hurt from standing all day, so she’s never without her thick-soled orthopedic shoes. She’s a ball of energy, always has to be doing something. She yells a lot, but not in a mean way—”

  “Maybe she had to yell. A sort of survival skill to be heard over all you children.”

  “Probably. Anyhow, my mother had a way of saying our names that could be heard blocks away. When she yelled, ‘RA-FAY-ELL SAN-TEE-AGO!’ I ran like hell or got my bottom whacked.”

  They exchanged a smile.

  “And your father?”

  His face tightened. “My fath
er came and went as he pleased. Stayed long enough to give my mother another baby, then zipped off into the sunset. I think it’s the only time I ever saw my mother cry . . . when my dad walked out. He’s dead now, but I heard a few years back that the bastard had a wife and family in Mexico, too.” He swallowed with some difficulty, then added flatly, “He was a son of a bitch. We kids were glad when he left.”

  Helen fought back tears. She wanted to reach across the table and take Rafe’s hand, but somehow she knew he would take the gesture for pity. “Tell me about your brothers and sisters.”

  He rolled his shoulders in hopeless resignation. “I’m the oldest. Juanita is next. She’s thirty-three, a teacher in one of the project schools.” Grimacing, he added, “Juanita and I don’t get along. She was always beating up on me, as a kid, and she still rags on me, as an adult. Anyhow, she’s got three kids she’s raising herself. Her husband got killed in a drive-by shooting five years ago.”

  Before Helen had a chance to react to that horrifying news, Rafe went on, “Antonio is next. Tony’s a police detective upstate. He’s thirty-two and single. Women think he looks like Adam Levine, and he bleeds that for all it’s worth.”

  “Next?”

  “Inez is thirty, a police officer for L.A.P.D. Not the most popular job these days,” he noted, obviously referring to the continuing bad press police got these days. “She’s single, and, like me, plans to stay that way.” Helen tilted her head in inquiry, and he explained, “She got stuck with lots of the babysitting, like I did.”

  She frowned, beginning to get an image of Rafe’s family that was contrary to what she’d always imagined. “Hmmm. You give the impression of having been a rebel . . . a gang member . . . and yet your brothers and sisters have law-and-order careers.”

  He shrugged. “Some of us do, but we all went through some rocky times, too. My mother earned every one of her gray hairs.”

  “Okay, that’s three. You have five other siblings, right?”