7.
JULIANA VELASQUEZ
YOU’RE a defiant she-male, Juliana Velasquez.”
She looked at him and smiled.
When Hawk had found a whiskey bottle and a glass, he removed his shirt and sat back in his chair. While he rolled a quirley from his makings sack, the girl wrung out a cloth in the pan, sat down beside him, and began dabbing the wound with the cloth.
The kitchen was lit by only the dying fire beneath the javelina, the meat hissing and dribbling grease onto the coals with a smoky sputter. The girl’s hands worked gently. Hawk could smell her rose water perfume.
“I didn’t know you had left,” she said as she wrung the cloth out in the pan, casting him a sidelong glance before dabbing again at the wound. “I rode up to go fishing, and you were gone. And then . . . a month later . . . you return.”
Hawk splashed whiskey into the glass and winced as the cloth caught at his torn flesh. “I had business up north.”
Truth was, after two months here in the hacienda, enjoying the mountain quiet, he’d gotten antsy and had ridden north to check the Wanted posters in Cartridge Springs. There he’d learned that the freight office and bank had been hit, a young mother and her son left to die on the boardwalk.
No point in informing Juliana of such grisly business, however. She knew nothing of him besides his name and that he used to be a lawman. That was enough. It was best for her that way. Best for him. He probably wouldn’t be here long.
He thought he’d take to the peace and quiet, and maybe even decide to stay here forever. But hunting the Shadow Nielsen bunch had whet his appetite for the hunt, and Bedlam was too quiet, too far off the killing trail.
“You should tell me when you go,” the girl gently chided. She looked at him crossly, then rose, dropped the cloth in the pan, and disappeared into a pantry. She reappeared a moment later, holding a long white tablecloth out before her, and ripped it in half. “Will you be leaving again?”
Tossing one half of the cloth onto the table, she folded the other lengthwise and sat down beside him. He sipped the whiskey and looked at her, his agate-green eyes standing out against his Indian-dark face. “I’m not the one, Juliana. Not the one for you.”
She ripped a swatch from the long cloth, balled it up, poured whiskey over it, then touched it to his side. Hawk jumped at the liquid burn, nearly dropping his cigarette. She glanced up at him, a devilish light in her eyes. Holding the whiskey-drenched cloth over the wound, she drew the longer cloth around his waist.
“Do not think I have to go—how do you say?—soliciting for a man’s attentions. I have had many young men try to spark me. There is one now, a rich prospector’s son. He comes down from Vernal Peak once each month for supplies, says he wants to take me to San Francisco in California.” She tied the cloth around Hawk’s waist, not looking at her hands, but staring into his eyes, the corners of her mouth turned up slightly. “A very handsome man, big shoulders, broader even than yours.”
Hawk snorted. “Broader than mine. Well, then, that’s the boy you wanna hogtie.”
Her brows furrowed slightly with annoyance. “I cannot help it if you are too soft in the head to know a good woman when you see one. If you are more interested in going north and doing God knows what . . .”
Hawk drew deep on the quirley. She was fishing again, trying to find out who and what he really was. She had some vague idea that he was a pistolero, or an outlaw who rustled or robbed or both, staying one step ahead of the law.
Let her entertain her romantic fantasies. Aside from satisfying his natural male cravings, he had no time for women—even a young woman as beautiful as Juliana Velasquez, who’d dressed so alluringly this evening.
As she knotted the cloth around his waist, jerking it taut with more vigor than necessary, she glanced up at him seductively. “Tonight, I would like to stay here . . . with you . . .”
Hawk took her wrists in his hands. “If you get your heart broke, Juliana, it’ll be your own fault.”
She dropped her eyes thoughtfully.
After a time, she nodded. She lifted her eyes again to his. Pulling one of her hands from his grasp, she reached up and touched her fingers to his broad, angular face. She rose up slowly, moving her head toward his, parting her lips.
He leaned toward her and closed his mouth over hers. Her lips were soft and ripe, her tongue shyly probing. After a time, she pulled away, lowered her hands to his naked shoulders, stout as wheel hubs, and ran them slowly down his bulging, powerful arms, gently prodding the tough skin with her fingertips.
“If my heart is broke, the fault is mine.” Her brown eyes flashed whimsically. “If your heart is broken, the fault is yours.”
Hawk laughed. He grabbed her shoulders, kissed her, stood, picked her up, and slung her over his shoulder like a feed sack. She gave a startled cry and laughed, wrapping her arms around him.
“Gideon!”
“We’re off to the ogre’s chambers, princess!”
“Oh!” She clutched him tighter. “Your side!”
“You wrapped it so damn tight, one of my lungs is closed!”
Laughing like a drunken lord, Hawk grabbed his rifle in his free hand, then walked out of the kitchen and through the sitting room, running into furniture. The sun had set, and the hacienda’s cluttered, high-ceilinged rooms were dark as caves.
In the large bedroom at the top of the seven steps, he tossed the girl onto the bed. She bounced and laughed, breathing hard, the leather springs sighing. Hawk could barely see her; the room was dark as pitch.
“Damn,” Hawk said. “Matches. I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t leave me—it’s dark!”
“Sit tight, princess. The ogre will return.”
He returned to the kitchen, grabbed a whiskey bottle and his saddlebags off a chair back, then, as an afterthought, took a long fork and speared a haunch of the roasted javelina onto a clay platter. His stomach grumbling as the fragrant steam rose to his nostrils, he stumbled back to the bedroom. He threw his saddlebags over a chair, set the meat on a table, and lit a lamp, casting the room in dim light and dancing shadows.
He turned to the bed, and his breath caught in his throat.
Juliana lay naked there upon the multicolored quilt, propped on one elbow, her delicate shoulders awash in her raven hair. Her almond legs were curled, one slender foot resting atop the other, her toes flexing slowly. Her full, brown breasts slanted toward the quilt, the pebbled nipples jutting. Her brown eyes glittered seductively in the lamplight.
Hawk frowned. “You’ve done this before.”
“Only once,” Juliana laughed. “And it was awful!”
“What makes you think this will be any better?”
“Carmelita.”
Hawk had kicked out of his boots and was unbuckling his cartridge belt. He froze and jerked his head toward her, shocked. “Carmelita?”
Juliana stretched her long legs out, then brought her knees back to her chest. “She said if I didn’t seduce you, she’d give it a shot herself!”
“So much for pious old Catholics.” Hawk unbuckled the cartridge belt and slung it over the same chair on which he’d hung his saddlebags. He slid the chair to within a few feet of the bed, then unbuckled his pants.
Juliana looked at the two large revolvers jutting from their holsters. “Billy the Kid—that’s who you are!”
“Close.” Hawk peeled off his long underwear bottoms and kicked them under a table, then turned to the bed. Juliana’s eyes dropped to his jutting member. They stayed on it as he climbed onto the bed and knelt beside her.
“You sure about this?”
She shuttled her gaze from his member to his eyes, and back again, then cupped his balls in her hand. Her voice was high and thin, barely audible. “Por favor?”
As the night deepened and lobos called in the hills, a cool breeze pushing through the cracks in the balcony doors, Hawk fed pine and cedar logs to the fired clay-and-brick hearth. He and Juliana ate in bed, smearing their bodies in grease from the meat, and making love over and over again.
After one such bout, the girl lying belly down beneath him, a pillow under her thighs, Hawk pulled away and dropped his legs to the floor. Juliana arched her back and sighed, breathing hard, her skin glistening with sweat and grease.
She turned her head toward him. “Where are you going?”
“Hot in here.” As he moved toward the balcony doors, his right elbow knocked his cartridge belt and saddlebags off the chair. A long, blond braid and a carved wooden horse tumbled out of one flap, along with a dented coffee cup, a tobacco sack, and a box of .44 shells.
Juliana propped her head on an elbow as Hawk picked up the cartridge belt and draped it over the chair. “What are those?”
He glanced at her. She was gazing down at the braid and the wooden horse.
Hawk picked up the braid—a lock of his wife’s hair, which he’d clipped after cutting her down from the cottonwood tree in their backyard, before the ladies from their church had prepared Linda’s body for burial. The wooden horse—a black, rearing stallion—was the last piece his young son, Jubal, had carved before Three-Fingers Ned Meade had hanged the boy above Wolf Creek, west of their hometown of Crossroads, Nebraska Territory.
Holding the braid in one hand, Hawk scooped the horse off the floor with the other. He ran a thumb over each, then slid both back into the pouch. “Keepsakes.”
When he’d stuffed the other possibles back under the flap, he returned the bags to the chair, keeping the pistols angled toward the bed, and walked naked to the balcony. He threw open the doors, standing in the cool breeze that pushed against him and tousled his dark-brown hair. Turning, he added another small log to the fire, then climbed back into bed, crossing his arms behind his head and staring up at the beamed ceiling.
She scuttled up beside him, placed a hand on his chest, and gazed into his face. “Have I convinced you to stay?”
He ran his hand through her hair, caressed her smooth cheek with his thumb. He held her gaze but said nothing.
Her forehead creased with perplexity. “What is it you are searching for?”
“Peace.” Hawk lay his head back and returned his gaze to the ceiling. “A place in this world where my wife and children won’t be killed by madmen.”
In the berserk state that had overtaken him in the wake of his family’s demise, the irony of trying to find, or create, such a peace with his six-guns was lost on Gideon Hawk.
Juliana stared at him for a time, then glanced at the saddlebags hanging over the chair. Her own gaze darkening as she saw that he was lost to her now, glowering off into space, she gave a shudder.
She drew her body close to his, absorbing his warmth. She wrapped an arm around his waist, rested her cheek upon his chest, and closed her eyes.