Bandit's Embrace (The Durango Family) (28 page)

“A what?”

She smiled. “A
piñata
. It’s a big papier-mâché thing shaped like an animal or clown. It’s full of small trinkets and candy. We hang it up by a string, and a blindfolded child hits it with a stick, scattering the goodies.”

He knocked the ashes from the cigarillo. “Then every child gets something? No kid goes home empty-handed?”

She could not understand where this talk was leading, what this was all about. But she liked the sensitive, quiet man she saw coming out from behind the jaunty façade. “All the children dive in, grab for things. I suppose it’s rare that a child wouldn’t get some of the candy and treats.”

“Then it’s better than a Christmas tree.”

She looked up at him, baffled. “I don’t understand all this talk of Christmas when it’s the middle of May.”

He didn’t say anything, just stared into the darkness as if reliving some private memory. She had a feeling that if she knew what he was talking about, she would understand the man. And somehow she suddenly wanted to understand him, to unlock the puzzle of this big Texan. “Want to talk about it?”

He looked at her for a long moment, smiled ever so slightly. “You know, Aimée, with you I almost feel I could say things I never said to anyone.” Then regret, sadness, crossed his face. “It don’t make no never mind now. You’ve won. I’m going to go away. You won’t be forced to marry a common saddle tramp, and I’ll fix it with your papa so you won’t be sent back to that convent. I want you to be able to do whatever makes you happy.”

She folded her arms across her chest to keep from grabbing his arm. If she’d won, why did she feel so miserable? She had triumphed by doing something disgraceful. She had acted without honor. Honor was very important to both the Durangos and Falcons. “I told you I was sorry, Texas. I told you I’d be glad to teach you which fork to use at a fancy dinner.”

“If you don’t beat all,” he murmured. “First you try to embarrass me into turning tail and runnin’; then you try to talk me out of it.” He looked down at her, and for a moment she thought he would take her in his arms. She wanted him to. But instead he sighed, turned to look across the desolate landscape, smoked his cigarillo.

The suspicion came to her and she blurted it out. “It’s that Monique or Mona or whatever her name is! You’re planning on going away with her! I know you two know each other. I watched from the stairs the other day when she joined you in the library.”

She saw alarm on his rugged features, and he grabbed her shoulders. “What did you hear that day?”

She tried to pull away from him, but he held on. His big hands covered her bare shoulders as the deep purple French cambric slipped off them. His hands seemed to burn into her skin. “Enough,” she lied.

She hadn’t really heard anything at all, but maybe she could fool him into inadvertently telling her about the relationship he had with the redhead.

“All right, so I knew her a long time ago,” he said grudgingly, looking down at her. “I can’t change the past, but I am trying to change my future. Mona—Monique—deserves that same chance.”

“Liar!” She pulled away from him, looked up at him, jealous fury making her shake. “You planned this together! She heard the tale about the missing heir, figured you looked enough like Tony and wrote to you. The two of you made plans to meet down here, one of you going after the Falcon fortune, the other after the Durango wealth. You figure to have all that and each other.”

He chewed his lip. “I reckon it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to you if I told you our meeting below the border was sheer coincidence, that neither of us knew the other one was in Mexico until we met at the Falcon’s party?”

“Liar! You bald-faced liar!”

He stiffened. “When you call a Texan a liar, sweet, you’d better be ready to back your play. If you were a man, I would already have killed you for that.”

“And now the saddle bum talks as if I had soiled his honor!” She sneered, her hands resting on her hips. “You have no honor, Texas, no honor at all, or you wouldn’t have fooled those old people into believing you were their missing son!”

“I didn’t do it for the inheritance or the ranch, Amethyst. I did it because it would give me the money and the power to go searching for a violet-eyed girl I met at a stage station and couldn’t get out of my mind.”

She wanted to believe him, wanted to feel that the way he looked at her now was how he felt. She let her hands slide down her hips uncertainly. “Then why this talk of leaving? You’ve got it all, Texas—the money, the prestige of the name, and two fathers already planning the wedding.”

Bandit reached out, stroked her hair. “Something’s come up to change things. Once I said I would take you any way I could get you,
Aimée
. That’s not enough anymore. I love you too much to force you into marriage. And anyway, I’ve got to leave—go back to Texas.”

“Bandit, you’re so stubborn you wouldn’t move out of the way of a prairie fire, you’d make it change direction. Now, all of a sudden, you’re ready to turn tail and run. Why?”

He avoided her gaze. “I told you.”

A thought crossed her mind. The memory of the dinner-table conversation came back to her with startling clarity. “Texas, I saw the look on your face when Señor Muñoz was talking about those three
americanos
at the stage station. They have something to do with it, don’t they?”

He laughed a little too carelessly, kicked at a rock. Once again he was the arrogant, wisecracking Bandit from Bandera. “Naw! Whatever made you think that?”

She put her hand on his arm, felt the tension of him through the fabric. When he looked down at her, she had an urge to put the tip of her finger in the deep cleft of his chin. “Would you believe, Texas, that I’ve gotten to know you well enough to tell when you’re lying?”

She saw discomfort in the pale eyes. “Sweet, the less you know, the safer you’ll be.” His arm trembled beneath her hand, telling her he was fighting some kind of inner battle.

“Texas, are you in trouble?”

He shook her hand off. “I’ve had nothin’ but trouble since the day I was born. My mother didn’t want me, my old man never came to claim me, give me his name.” He sounded weary and bitter. “You know why I’m a drifter, Aimée? I have a hunger to know who I really am. I’m lookin’ for a man or a town or a street named Sokol so I can unlock the mystery of my past, put down roots—belong, really belong. No one ever really wanted me.”

And it seemed the most natural thing in the world to say, “Texas, I want you.”

He took her in his arms, hugged her to him, looked down at her. “No, you don’t. You feel sorry for me. It ain’t the same. I’m Texas proud, Aimée. I don’t want a woman to feel sorry—”

Her lips cut off his words as she stood on tiptoe, kissed him.

With a groan, he pulled her hard against him, kissing her feverishly, covering her face, her eyes, and then her lips. “Why do you make my goin’ so tough for me, sweet? I know this can’t work out. The Durangos are blue bloods and I’ve got no more pedigree than Señor Falcon’s pinto stallion.”

“And like the horse, you’re a little wild and untamed,” she whispered. “I think that’s what attracts me to you.”

He swung her up in his arms, carried her deeper into the shadows of the trees. “I can’t help myself, Aimée. You break down all my noble intentions! I want you so much! ”

And she wanted him, too. She felt the dewy warmth spreading through her lower body as he lay her on the soft grass in the shadows. And this time, she did reach up to put the tip of her finger in the cleft of his chin. He lay down next to her, leaning over her on one elbow. He caught her hand as it traced along his square jaw, kissed her fingertips.

She giggled in spite of herself, as he nibbled the tip of each finger. Surely he had been joking about going away. The way he was looking down at her, he would never leave her side. “Texas,” she whispered, “oh, Texas, make love to me!”

He gathered her into his arms, protectively cradling her against his broad chest, and she took a deep breath. He smelled slightly of tobacco and shaving soap. She had never felt so safe, so secure as she did now. Without a mother or any girls of her own age on the big, isolated ranch, hers had been a lonely childhood.

His lips brushed along her eyelids in gentle, butterfly kisses, nibbled at the edge of her mouth. Her breasts seemed to swell and strain at the delicate camisole under the purple cambric. His hands caressed them, pushed the bodice down and fumbled with the ribbons lacing it.

Now he pulled the camisole to free her breasts. Both his big, hot hands covered them completely while he kissed the cleft between them. “Forget-me-not,” he whispered. “I’ll never smell that perfume without seeing a girl with violet eyes dressed always in lavender.”

It sounded so final, so sad. But she brushed the thought from her mind, turning her body so that her nipple was offered up to his mouth like a sacrifice on a moonlit altar. His lips felt hot and wet sucking there as his hand caught the other nipple between his fingers, stroked it into a peak of hardness.

She gasped at the sensation, felt the heat spreading through her lower body, reached to touch him. His maleness swelled hard and hot, pulsated against her fingers. She opened his trousers, held it in her hand. He was built big. In her mind’s eye, she saw Don Enrique’s virile pinto stallion topping a mare, nipping at her neck as he mounted her and rammed hard, dominating, mating her.

And as Bandit sucked her breast, his maleness throbbed in her clenched fist and she stroked him.

“Sweet,” he warned, “don’t . . . I might not be able to control what happens if you keep doing that.”

A drop of his seed smeared her hand and she reached up, rubbed it across her breast. “That marks me as yours, doesn’t it?”

He ran a hand under her pleated underskirt, beneath delicate lace, to stroke between her legs, then rub a moist smear across her breasts. “You’re wet enough to want me, sweet. That marks you as mine.”

He reached to pull off her lace underclothes, slid down to kiss her mound again and again, nibbling and sucking at the nub of her pleasure until she was almost in a frenzy, gasping and digging her nails into his shoulders. “Oh, Texas, I can’t stand any more of this!”

Without a word, he rolled over onto his back, pulled her atop him. “Unbutton my shirt,” he commanded. “I want to feel your skin rub against my chest.”

She did as he bid and impulsively sat astraddle his big body, leaning over to nip at his nipples while he flinched and gasped.

“Now ride me, sweet.” His hands reached up to grasp her breasts, pull them down to his eager mouth.

She slid down onto his maleness, feeling him hot and hard and throbbing deep within her. With a groan, she arched her body backward, taking him within her to the hilt although the size of him almost hurt her.

Then he grasped her breasts, pulling her down to run his tongue over every inch of their roundness.

She gasped at the feel of him deep within her, her soft velvet interior trembling, quivering, trying to lock onto his maleness. She seemed to feel him deep inside, almost beneath her navel.

Then his big hands gripped her waist, moving her up and down on the dagger of his manhood, and she was helpless in his grasp as he rammed into her, overwhelmed by the waves of sensation he was creating within her.

-She reached out to pinch his nipples, felt him tremble, shudder deep within her. It wasn’t enough for her. She wanted him to impale her very being. “More! Give me more!”

“Sweet, I might hurt you!”

“I—I’ve got to have more, Texas! Got to feel you deep inside. Hurt me if you can!”

And with that challenge, he grasped her waist and bucked under her, threw his own muscular drive behind his manhood, ramming hard. Hard. Hard.

She gripped his sides with her knees, riding him, knowing now why men didn’t want their women to explore the sensation of riding astraddle. When she came, she toppled over and he wrapped his arms around her, slipping his tongue deep into her mouth to stop her moans of pleasure from being heard, so loudly did she cry out.

Dimly, she heard him gasp, hesitate, ram deep within her one more time. Then he seemed to shudder all over as her body coaxed, no, demanded that he give up his seed to her depths. For a long moment, they strained, locked together, her velvet sheath squeezing him, sucking every precious drop from him as they mated. Then they collapsed into each other’s arms, gasping for air, both covered with a satin sheen of perspiration.

She held onto him very tightly, put her face against his, but she didn’t move off him. “I never knew it could be like this.”

“I . . . I never did either.” He sounded incredulous as he stroked her hair, held her so close she could feel his big heart pounding against his rib cage. “I wish . . .”

He sounded so wistful, she looked down into his eyes. “Texas, what do you wish?”

“I wish I believed in miracles,” he said softly. “If I did, I’d pray that I really was a Falcon, that I could hold you in my arms forever.”

“Texas, I believe in miracles. I believe that Someone up there is looking after us all, and will finally set things right, that justice will prevail.”

He laughed cynically, moved her, and rolled over so they lay on their sides, still wrapped in each other’s arms. “It’s all so ironic.” He laughed. “That I should be stepping into Tony Falcon’s boots. It may be the devil’s work, but it’s not justice.”

That was something she didn’t understand. “Why is it ironic?” She lay her head on his powerful arm, enjoyed the feel of his stroking her hair, which had fallen from its pins, spread across his arm.

“Then again, maybe it is justice, a cruel justice—to be able to see what that boy’s life should have been if he had been allowed to grow up where he belonged.
Sí,
maybe it is an ironic justice that I want his life so badly, yet I’m not going to be able to have it.”

“You’re talking in circles, Texas.”
Was he drunk? Was he loco?

He sat up, shrugged. “No matter. I’ve had my glimpse of heaven in the few days I’ve had with you. If that’s all this cowboy gets, whether it’s cruel justice or not, it’s been enough to last a lifetime.”