The Wildest Heart

“Where is he?” I cut across their private quarrels, and while Luz only stared at me uncomprehendingly, Montoya nodded slightly as if he had heard something he expected.

“I could not persuade Lucas that it would be more sensible for him to remain here and have his hurts attended to. But I do not think he will attempt to go further than his cabin. You know where it is?” His eyes flickered over me consideringly. “I do not advise you to go out tonight. The storms here come up suddenly, and are all the more violent for that reason. The gullies become rushing watercourses. Perhaps you should wait.”

He understood—Luz did not.

“What are you talking about? Rowena, where are you going? I thought that you and Ramon…”

“Ramon and I will not be married after all,” I said baldly. “And I feel the need for fresh air.”

“But it’s raining!”

“Not too hard yet. Myself, I can understand that there are times when one needs to travel, feeling nothing but the wind and rain and motion. It is so with you tonight, eh? Chato is outside. He will saddle you a horse, if you tell him I said so.”

I whirled and almost ran out of the room, hearing Luz’s petulant voice behind me. “I do not understand! Where is Rowena going? What is the matter with everyone tonight?”

I felt driven. I let the door slam behind me, and as I crossed the hall I saw Elena looking down at me, but she said nothing, and neither did I. I went outside, and in the dark night the rain was merely a dampness. Chato moved forward from the shadows, and I found myself wondering if he ever slept.

“Montoya said you would saddle me a horse. A good one.” His flat face betrayed no surprise. Perhaps my air of self-assurance convinced him that I was speaking the truth. He brought me a little, fleet-footed mare I had ridden before, and as if he knew where I was going, gave me directions. I wondered if he too had been watching from concealment when all the high drama had taken place earlier this same evening. And then I stopped wondering. I was riding, and although the mare tossed her head nervously at every flash of lightning and its answering rumble of thunder, she did not falter.

It was unbelievable, to think that only a few hours earlier there had been an orange moon in the sky, and the clouds, if there had been clouds, had blended with the shadowy outlines of mountain peaks, so that I had not known they were there. I remembered everything I had been told about the sudden, violent storms that could come up without warning in this country; the cloudbursts that could make every canyon or gully a watercourse, sweeping all before it. But at the moment I was not thinking of any danger to myself. Indeed, I hardly thought at all, or questioned why I was out here, with the rain beating against my face and drenching the few thin garments I wore.

Felice, my mare, seemed to know where she was going when I turned her towards the mountains that loomed forbiddingly ahead. The thunder seemed much louder here, reverberating against rocky walls; and the rain came down harder. But I had ridden this way before with Ramon, and all that Felice needed was a slight pressure of my knees, a light pull on the reins. We guided each other, and every now and then the lightning, like a giant torch, lit the countryside ahead of us.

I lost all sense of time, and sometimes, I thought, even of direction. But Lucas, I remembered, had ridden Felice before, and I had a feeling she knew where she was supposed to take me.

I do not know how long it took. I let the mare choose her own pace, and merely leaned over her neck, my hair clinging wetly to my face and shoulders. I must have been a little crazy, or suffering from shock, although I did not realize it then. There was a time when I didn’t even know why I was out there in the rain and the wind, nor where I thought I was going. I would escape at last—if I did not find Lucas, or he did not find me, I would find my way out of the valley and be free. I had let myself become too involved with the twisted lives of the people here, I had to find myself again.

My thoughts were hardly coherent, I can see that now. And in the state I was in, I still wonder how I found my way to wherever I thought I was going. I remembered, even in my half-dazed state, what Julio had said to me on that day when I had first seen the valley.

“My brother has a cabin up there. A place he goes to when he wants to be alone.” And I had wondered, at the time, why someone as brutish and unfeeling as Lucas Cord seemed to be would want to be alone. Then, I wanted nothing more than to be rid of his presence in my life. Now, I was running to him—or away from everything he had brought me to. I could not be sure which it was, until I found myself driving my horse up the narrow, steep-sided canyon that seemed to cut its way up into the highest mountain peak.

Twenty-Seven

I thought I saw a dim orange glow high above me, but the lightning was too close and too fierce for me to judge properly, and the thunder, echoing against the narrow, rocky walls seemed to surround me and split my eardrums open.

“Lucas!” I screamed his name frantically and uselessly between cannonlike explosions of sound, and I thought I heard the noise of rushing water as my mare, as frantic and frightened now as I had become, seemed to stumble and then scramble for balance as she headed for the least steep portion of the rock-encrusted walls. I had lost the reins, and clung tenaciously to her mane, feeling how the suddenly ominous onslaught of the rain seemed to beat angrily against my face and body. I had never known such rain before. It was almost a solid sheet of water that attacked me viciously.

Felice stumbled, almost throwing me, and then her hoofs, frantically searching, found a foothold and started up a seemingly unscalable cliff. In a sudden flare of whitish light, I saw, for the first time, the water that swirled as high as my ankles, and kicked my feet from the stirrups as a wall of water roared down the wash towards us.

Only my most primitive instincts drove me on. Without conscious thought I jumped free of the struggling, terrified animal under me, and found myself clutching at an outcropping of rock, pulling myself upward; unmindful of the way my fingers were cut and scraped, I grasped and scrambled and pulled myself upwards, cursing the sodden wetness of my clothes.

I don’t know how I managed it—clawing my way up the rock face of the canyon wall with my body clinging to it, using my hands and my feet, and feeling the rocks tear into my flesh and the water suck greedily at my ankles.

I heard myself cursing, using words I didn’t realize that I knew, while the wind and the rain seemed to snatch away my breath, and the water, rushing like a riptide, came higher, pulling at me.

My grasping hands found a stunted tree that seemed to grow straight out of the side of the cliff. I found it and clung, and felt the water tug at me forcefully. And I screamed his name again.

“Lucas!” Lightning flooded everything with a blinding glow of white fire, and I screamed once more before the thunder came on its heels, making me cower, flattening myself against the cliff. I heard the high, whinnying scream

of my mare from somewhere below me and did not dare look down, although my senses told me what had happened. She had been swept away by the water, and soon, when my hands were too cold and too numb to keep holding on, I too would be carried down the wash like a piece of debris… a floating log smashed against my thigh and I screamed again, despairingly, my hands still clinging, clinging with all the strength that was left in me.

And then just when I had lost hope, I thought I heard his voice from somewhere above me, and screamed his name again, with all the force and breath left in my lungs.

“Lucas! Oh, Luke—hurry, please!”

This time, I heard his voice clearly, almost disbelievingly, because it did not seem possible

“Rowena? Jesus Christ… what…?” And then, “Hang on, do you hear? Wait.”