The Wildest Heart

It had been unusually hot, and I woke up drenched with sweat, the covers sticking to my flesh. It was the sun that roused me, shooting golden arrows of light into my bedroom as if to remind me of the molten-hot, pitiless hours that lay ahead.

I got out of bed and splashed cold water over my face and body, and with its mild, pleasant shock, the uneasiness I had felt upon waking vanished.

I ate two slices of toast and a glassful of freshly squeezed lime juice for breakfast, conquered the slight feeling of queasiness afterwards, and went riding, as was my custom. My usual escort fell in behind me, and I wondered what they would do if I kept on riding, as far as my horse could take me. The mountains shimmered in a slight haze, and I remembered how cool and green the thickly forested upper slopes had been. Suppose I went back there, of my own accord this time? Just as my father had gone, when he needed to find peace—except for the very last time, when he had learned something that brought him death, in the end. It was this thought that turned me around and took me back to the house at last. To the comparative coolness of my bedroom where Marta awaited me, her usually smiling mouth turned down at the corners to show her disapproval of my crazy behavior. I was dripping with perspiration, my thin silk blouse clinging to my back, my face unnaturally flushed. She muttered to herself as she helped me change.

“Such madness! To go riding in this heat, under such a fierce sun. And for what? You will make yourself ill, and the Señor Mark will blame us for not taking better care of you.”

It was partly to mollify her and partly because I suddenly felt limp and drained of all energy that I agreed to take a siesta.

“Just this once, mind you,” I murmured drowsily as she pulled the covers of my bed back. “I will not make a habit of such laziness.”

And then, before I knew it, I had fallen into an exhausted sleep. I must have slept until after nightfall, for when I opened my eyes again the lamp on my dressing table had been lit, and Lucas was leaning up against the wall as he had been the very first time I set eyes on him, watching me with a wary, brooding look on his face.

At first I thought I was dreaming again. I had conjured him up out of my imagination. It was Lucas, and yet it wasn’t. He was dressed as an Apache warrior, naked except for a breechclout and knee-high moccasins, a medicine pouch suspended around his neck by a thin strip of rawhide.

I could feel my eyes widen, and then I met his narrowing, green-fired eyes, and my heart began to thud so loud and painfully I thought I was going to faint, and he would disappear again.

“Lucas?”

I know that my lips moved, forming his name, but no sound escaped my suddenly constricting throat. I could only watch him cross the room to me, his face shadowed now, moving with the same long, almost angry stride I remembered so well.

Even his voice was the same—still with that husky note to it, tinged by some emotion I had no time to fathom, as shaken as I was by my own feelings.

“You were sleepin’ so sound I didn’t want to wake you right away. Ro, I…” I never learned what he had been about to say. I sat up, the covers falling away from my naked breasts like the memory of everything I had heard and thought during the past few weeks, and all my firm resolutions. It is a frightening thing, and especially for a woman, to discover that she is capable of desire so strong that it can blind her to everything else. But that thought came later.

It was sheer, primitive instinct that made me hold my arms out, tugging his head down to mine, returning his kisses greedily, almost savagely. Not thinking.

I felt myself pulled off the bed and onto my bare feet; my knees were so weak that I could only lean helplessly against the familiar length of his body, my arms still locked around his neck. I rediscovered the feeling of losing my identity, of being carried beyond myself to some distant place where nothing mattered but wanting and fulfillment. This was what I had craved for, hungered for, yearned for, without shame or reason. This was lust, desire, love—how does one put a label on feeling?

I only knew that I was held fast in a net of my own making and could not have broken loose if Lucas himself had not shattered the spell that held me trapped and helpless.

He released me so suddenly that I felt myself flounder back against the bed. It was only pride, and the anger that came from rejection that kept me on my feet and facing him.

I did not know then that the harshness of his voice was meant to cover up his own indecision and frustration. I could only feel the pain and humiliation of what I took to be another form of rejection, as cold and as calculated to bring me to my senses as a slap in the face.

“What’s this I hear about you marrying Shannon next week? Have you gone crazy?”

“Is that why you came?” My head was spinning, and yet I heard myself laugh. “Really, Lucas, I’m surprised you wasted your time—not to mention the risks you are taking by being here at all. Did you think you could stop me from doing whatever I wanted to do? Just because…” My voice almost broke to betray me, but I managed to steady it, taking a deep breath before I added with calculated scorn, “Just because of a casual physical attraction between us?”

He made a movement towards me and stopped, his face going bleak and hard. ?

??Was all that your way of tellin’ me you’re going to marry Shannon after all?”

“After all what, Lucas Cord?” I walked away from him then, knowing that if I let him touch me again I would be lost. I walked to my dressing table and swung around, forcing him to turn too, to face me. The light from the lamp made his eyes look tawny green, narrow like those of a mountain cat about to spring, and I spoke quickly, before I had time to weaken, my voice sounding curiously strident for all that I spoke softly.

“Do you think that what happened between us gives you the right to question me? It filled some hours that would have been unbearably dreary otherwise—and then, since you no longer had a brother to marry me off to, you sent me back here for your share of the ransom money—or did your friend Montoya forget to give it to you? Is that why you came here? Well, if it was, then you have taken the trouble for nothing! You see, I know all about that letter my father wrote now! I also know that he destroyed it, and why. And I know… I know…”

This time, for all my efforts, my voice shook. Everything that I had read in my fathers journals, everything that Mark had so patiently tried to explain to me came back, filling my mind with revulsion.

“I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about!” Lucas’s voice was taut, his brows drawn together in a frown. “Rowena…”

“No—don’t! Don’t make it worse by saying anything, by lying any more than you already have done! You see, I’ve learned such a lot about you! Did you think to fool me and to use me as you’ve done all the other women you’ve wanted and had? I think you tried to kill Elmer Bragg because he knew too much—about the letter that was destroyed by my father’s own hand, about the codicil to his will that vanished on the night he was… did you kill him, Lucas? Did you put more laudanum in his glass when he wasn’t looking? Oh, God. He trusted you. And to think that I had actually begun to trust you too, that I could have thought I…”

“That’s enough!” He had crossed the room in two long, angry strides, to catch me by the shoulders. I tried to twist away, but he held me fast, his fingers tightening cruelly until I gasped with pain and shock. I felt the table edge cutting into the naked flesh of my thighs, and in spite of everything I was all too aware of his closeness, the slight, angry flare of his nostrils, the white tension lines around his mouth.

“Listen to me…” he said, and his voice was flat—colder than I had ever heard it. “I still don’t know what you’re driving at, but I think you’re trying to say I killed your father. And I think that something, or the lies someone’s been feeding you, has twisted your mind up so bad you won’t see the truth even if it’s put under your nose!”

“How dare you…”