TWENTY-SIX

WITH THE HACIENDA owner alive and well, we had no need to flee. The “medical emergency” quickly evaporated.

My desire for Marina intensified, so I visited her rancho. Small but comfortable looking, the casa had three rooms, a tile roof, and a pleasant garden. She was not around, but I could see her horses in the distance. They grazed in the field. Good stock, they were not purebloods—certainly not of Tempest’s champion lines—but the kind of tough, wiry ponies vaqueros favored.

The sun was high and oppressively hot, as I made my way toward a fragrant frangipani tree beside a pond a hundred paces from the house, its boughs festooned with flamboyant flowers and blossoms.

I leaned under its shaded canopy. Enjoying a cigarro, I thought about Marina. The woman had been on my mind since I first laid eyes on her. I’d gone so long without a woman, thinking about Marina’s secret places stirred my desire. Something in her eyes bespoke a sensual hunger that no man had sated, never even brought to full arousal, never truly challenged. Before the day was out, I would rouse her longing from its lair and uncage her savage beast.

Water splashing in the pond distracted my thoughts. Peering through the bushes I saw the naked back of a woman in the water. She had the rich brown coloring of an Aztec, long unbraided black hair flowing down her back . . . the woman of my desire.

I watched in secret as she enjoyed her swim. Annoyed with each other, two birds shrieked and flapped excitedly. Marina tensed and looked my way. I ducked down and watched her through lower bushes. She gave no sign she had spotted me and relaxed in the water once again, lifting her face and upper body to the sun. My eyes savored her nakedness. I dared not move, afraid of causing her to stop. She lazily scooped handfuls of water in a slow and sensual rhythm over her ample breasts and roseate nipples, exuberantly erect in the cool water. The fires of lust levitated in me, desperate to be quenched. I quietly moved closer.

When she emerged from the pond, I came out from the bushes. Wrapped in a white lightweight cotton covering, the thin flimsy cloth only accentuated the lavish curves beneath.

“So, you have been spying on me.”

I grinned. “I was just in the same area at the same time you were.”

“Then why were you hiding behind the bushes?”

“At first, I didn’t want to scare you. Then I couldn’t help but look. I’ve hungered for you from the first moment I saw you.”

I didn’t wait for her to respond but quickly pulled the thin covering from her body. Stepping forward, she slapped the right side of my face, hard. My right cheek burned hotter than the hinges of hell.

Blinking back tears, I saw that her right hand held a beautifully crafted brass-and-ivory–handled dagger with an ornate four-inch hilt. A twelveinch blade, honed razor-sharp, scintillated like Satan in the noonday sun.

“What is that for?”

“In case you think to rape me.”

“Rape you? Señorita, I don’t rape women. After I am through making love to them, they bless me for sharing my manhood with them, despising me only when I leave, cursing only my departure and my agonizing absences.”

She stood there naked before me, knife in hand. Staring at me, perplexed, she made no attempt to cover her private parts.

I held up my hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I will make you a deal. If my lovemaking is not the best you have ever had, you may cut off my cojones, my garrancha too, and feed them to your pigs.”

She shook her head slowly, as if she was trying to puzzle out my soul. She finally said, “You are very sure of yourself, señor.”

“No woman has ever complained.”

She laughed at that one, and I gave her a boyishly charming grin.

“And how many women have you taken to bed?” she asked in a challenging tone.

“I didn’t count them, but,” I patted my crotch, “I’m told that I have a cannon for a garrancha . . .” The behemoth bulge, even beneath my “lay brother’s” robes, was embarrassingly obvious but confirmed my assessment, “. . . and cannonballs for cojones.”

She started laughing as if she knew something I didn’t. No woman had ever laughed at or derided my machismo before, and my vanity was pricked. I flushed with anger.

“See for yourself, woman!” I slipped off my robes and dropped them to the ground.

She gasped at the immensity of my member.

“¡Dios mío!” she cried out, crossing herself and looking away.

In the back of my mind I prayed that our sainted padre would not happen by. Who knows how many Hail Marys, Our Fathers, and countless other acts of contrition he would sentence my benighted soul to. We were both hopelessly compromised: Marina, her knife pointed at me, and me bare naked with my member at a raging right angle, an angry flag posted at half-staff yet arrogantly erect in a gale-force wind.

I quickly pulled off my boots. I didn’t have to force the knife out of her hand. With a sudden turn and a shockingly swift throw she stuck her knife in the frangipani tree, impaling two gaudily fragrant frangipani flowers. She then fell into my arms as eagerly as I collapsed into hers.

With my lay-brother’s robes for our sacred bed, we dropped to the ground. She spread her legs wide as paradise.

My garrancha—hard enough to cut diamonds—was furnace hot, thrumming and throbbing like her vibrating knife. Hovering over her own beauteous blossom, however, I was racked by a desperation I had never before felt, and agony of lust so painfully urgent it frightened me.

I had kissed women before but never like her. They weren’t kisses so much as a tumbling into an abyss. I had never known lips so soft and a tongue so hot and inventive and lithe. I could have kissed her forever and never enjoyed consummation . . . that was how deeply I felt.

I did enter her though, and her flower was lava hot between her legs. I felt her body respond, even as my mouth devoured hers, my tongue ramming at hers as if simulating the ramming of my cañón. The bodily tremors increased in intensity and frequency, and I accelerated the power of my stroke to accommodate her pumping, gyrating hips.

The deeper, harder I probed, the more the black fuzzy bush between her legs tickled my lower pelvis. Penetrating deeper, harder, my pelvis palpated her prickly pear, rotating, revolving on and around her clitoral star like a planet orbiting a black yet blazingly hot sun, until running amok, I crisscrossed and crosshatched the little orb, driving her maniacally mad. Rubbing and scraping my pelvis against the heated seed of her now trembling frangipani, I ground at it until not only her budding sprout flowered, but her whole being burgeoned and blossomed, exploding ecstatically into gaudily hued flowers of flamboyant fire.

I was erupting now as was she. All the previous spasms were put to shame by a climactic collective fireworks, an infinite succession of demented detonations blasting us apart, freeing us, as if all the harpies in hell and the demons in our souls were fighting to get out, bringing us ineffably closer together.

None of this slowed or softened my garrancha. He had been so long without a woman—and so embittered by prison—I only worried he might never go down again. He and his flowery friend came again and again. Was it a thunderous thousand-gun salute to heaven’s gate or a colossal cannonade from the jaws of hell? I could not say, but my garrancha and his friend were making up for lost time and making their presence known. They clearly had a joint mind of their own. It was as if Marina and I had no say in the matter.

Shuddering with me as the spasms racked her—in time, in tune, with mine, over and over and over—she clenched me tighter, kissing, biting, gnawing, chewing at my lips, like she would never stop, could never stop. Fingernails clawed at my back, thighs, hips, haunches, ass, reaching into the crack of my ass, down to my cojones.

Only once did she make me stop that afternoon, to “cool her frangipani off,” she said.

Leading me by the hand into the pond, we gently rubbed each other all over, particularly our tender and much abused . . . friends. She wanted to kiss my manhood, “make it better,” she said, fearing she had injured the little bird.

When she took my manhood in her mouth, teasing and torturing its tender underside with her tantalizing tongue, laving and sucking on its hell-hot muzzle, my inconsiderate male part punished her tender caresses with alabaster bursts of blazing cannon fire, milk-white against the nutbrown softness of her cheeks and lips as she gasped for air and my fusillades erupted volcanically out of her mouth, after which I quickly returned for more artillery practice.

Eventually, I returned the favor. Whether I feasted on her fatal flower at heaven’s gate or my tongue stroked and probed the yawning jaws of hell. I could not say. The caressing and kissing, driving and pounding would not stop, could not stop. We continued on and on, through the afternoon, even into dusk.

I’d like to say I taught her the way of a man and a woman, but the best I can say is I fought her to a draw. She was indeed a bruja, a witch, because for the first time in my life, a woman had me as much as I had her. It was as if our hips and loins, blossom and balls, indeed had lives, wills, and desperate desires of their own. If I had any concern at all, it was to question whether we would ever stop, whether anything on earth could interrupt what we had started, wondering in all sincerity whether death itself could penetrate and part our ecstatic embrace.

When at last we did lie still, in each other’s arms, quiet, exhausted, spent, innocent-yet-knowing in our nakedness, we said nothing for a long time. When I at last broke the silence, I did not even know I had spoken.

“It has been a long time?” I asked her.

“Yes, a long time, not since that bastardo husband of mine got shot with his pants down, but even then he was nothing like you.”

“Un hombre duro?” A hard hombre? I asked.

“Un hombre nada.” As a man he was nothing.

As she spoke, her eyes were closed. Opening them, she rolled on top of me. “You were wrong,” she said, as she pulled me back inside her. “Your manhood is bigger and harder than a cañón.”

Miraculously, my much abused amigo had returned to his duro stature. And we returned to our desperate dance.