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“Will you be quiet?” He took a threatening step towards me, but I sat up straight and faced him boldly.
“No! And why should I be? You’ve told me, too often, what you think of me. And there’s Luz, whom I’ve grown fond of. Since you’ve seen fit to meddle in my life, Luke Cord, why should I not do the same with yours? As your concerned sister, of course.”
He stood there and stared at me as if he could not trust himself to speak, and there was something in his face—a mixture of pain and frustration and rage—that suddenly made me ashamed of the game I had been playing. I had a weapon to use against him now that I knew where he was most vulnerable, but strangely enough I seemed to have lost the inclination to use it.
I forced myself to go on, keeping my eyes steadily on his. “Why, Lucas? If you love her, why won’t you do something about it?”
“Do something, you say? Do what?” The words seemed torn from him, as if he could not help himself. “Do you think that we could ever marry? That they would let us? My God—how could you ever understand how it feels to want and yearn for something you know you’ll never have?” I saw him turn away from me like a blind man and stand by the window, looking out, his fingers gripping the sill. “Elena’s like—I think I fell in love with her the first moment I saw her. Ever since then she’s been like a fever, like a sickness I can’t shake off! And yet I don’t want to shake it off either. Can you understand that? Can you understand how it happened? I thought, at first, that she really was my mother. That I was her son. It was natural for me to love her then, and I did without question. And then one day she told me. I was old enough to hear the truth, she said. It must not make any difference to me, or to our relationship, for she loved me even more than she did her own sons, and I—God help me, all I could think of was that she was not my mother—that she was a woman, and I wanted her. Nothing else mattered, do you hear? I could think of nothing else but having her—holding her in my arms, kissing her mouth, and hadn’t she told me that she loved me? ‘Much more than if you had been my son,’ she had said, and I read the meaning I wanted to read into her words. I… ah, hell!”
The sudden violence in his voice as he swung around suddenly to face me made me gasp.
“Why am I telling you all this? Why you? I’ve always known you judged me, an’ hated me. And I don’t even like you. But you know what? You do remind me of her in some way. The way your hair hangs so straight and heavy, and a certain look you get on your face sometimes when you get mad or stubborn. But you’ve got the damndest cold eyes I’ve ever seen, except when you’re angry.”
“Is that why you try to make me angry so often?” My voice came out as a mechanical whisper, and I had the strangest, light-headed feeling that I was on the brink of some frightening discovery that would change my life forever. I did not want to be changed, I did not want to feel helpless, to find myself completely incapable of either motion or protest as Lucas crossed the room to me.
He stood looking down at me with a baffled expression, as if he were really seeing me for the first time, and something in his eyes made me catch my breath.
“Why did you make me say those things out loud? What do any of our lives or our secrets matter to you? I think you play some game of your own, like the chess your father tried to teach me. If I love Elena, what is it to you? Marry my brother and leave this valley. Forget about the rest of us. For I do not think you care for anyone but yourself, Rowena Dangerfield.”
He had spoken to me in Spanish, his voice oddly harsh, and it was in the same language that I replied to him.
“Did you kill your father?” I couldn’t help myself, I didn’t even understand why I asked the question. He flinched visibly; but surprisingly, he answered me.
“So you’ve thought that too? Yes—you see, I can admit to guilt when it is deserved. It might be said that I killed my father, but not in the way that you’re thinking. I didn’t fire the guns that put the bullets in him, but I was the cause of his being on SD land that day. You want to know how it happened? You haven’t guessed?”
He gave a short laugh that wasn’t a laugh at all, a muffled sound of self-contempt, and contempt for me as well.
“How innocent you can look! And I could almost swear your mouth is trembling. Why, Rowena? You want to hear the truth, don’t you, so you can judge me for what I am?” With a lithe, violent movement he dropped his body onto the bed, holding me down against the pillow by the shoulders while his eyes looked narrowly into mine.
“Listen, then, and if you ever speak of this to me again, or tear at me with your questions, I swear I’ll kill you!”
His voice was soft, but there was a threat in it that held me still and silent while he went on speaking. “He found us together. No, we weren’t in bed, but I was kissing her, holding her in my arms, and her arms were about my neck. He walked in. Neither of us had expected him to return from Mexico that day so perhaps he came back so unexpectedly with a purpose. I’m only surprised that he was so calm. If I had been in his place I think I would have killed. As it was, he only walked up to her and struck her; and I would have killed him then, if she had not flung herself between us and told me to go. And he said—he said: ‘Yes, you had better get yourself out of my sight, before I forget myself, and leave my wife to me. For I was responsible for the death of your mother, and would not have your blood on my hands as well.’ And she kept screaming for me to go—to go quickly. Christ, I was so goddamn young then, I didn’t know what in hell I should do! But I knew that I was guilty of a terrible crime, and he had every right to kill me if he wanted to. I think I would have preferred it if he had! But all he did, when I hesitated, was to strike at me contemptuously, as one would a dog, with the butt of the gun he wore. I still carry the scar—you see? Among others, but this one is the mark of Cain.”
There was something so terrible, so despairing in his voice that I could not bear to hear more.
“But you left! You didn’t kill him!” I cried out, and felt his fingers bite into my flesh.
“I should either have stayed, yes, and killed him myself, or taken her with me. He used the whip on her, and then he left. He blamed her for everything; he said he would find Shannon and tell him where to find her, so that the feud would be ended forever. But Shannon’s men found him first, and they killed him from ambush, without giving him a chance to speak or even to defend himself. And if he had not been killed, I would have hated him forever for what he had done. As it was…”
“You killed the men who killed him. You revenged him! Even my father said it had been a fair fight, that you were justified.”
“I didn’t kill those two men for him. I killed them for me. You saw that at the very beginning, didn’t you? I killed them
, they didn’t kill me—an’ your father saved me from a hanging. He shouldn’t have, should he? Because then you wouldn’t be here.”
“You wanted to die?” My voice was an accusing whisper.
“I don’t know! Mebbe I did. I was so damned mixed up and confused I can’t remember any longer. An’ even after that…”
He didn’t finish it. He didn’t have to. I saw the look on his face and knew that he was thinking again of Elena. I don’t know what madness took hold of me then, or if it was something in the broth that Luz had brought up to me. I hated Elena and I hated him. For there had been Flo, and there was Luz—and perhaps countless other women he’d played with and used, while all the time, all the time it was Elena he craved. I said in a voice I hardly recognized as my own:
“Perhaps all you need is something else to think about. Another woman who is just as unattainable, and just as calculating,” and I put my uninjured hand up and touched the hair at the back of his neck, pulling his head down to mine.
I cannot remember now what it was I meant to prove. Did I mean to punish him for his earlier repudiation of me? Had I intended to show him that women too were capable of using their lips and their bodies to arouse a passion they intend only to use, never to fulfill? Or was it Elena’s sureness of him that I challenged?
Whatever I had meant to prove or to achieve was all forgotten when Lucas kissed me. Even now, as I write the words, I can feel the emotions that erupted from nowhere, to take possession of me, draining away my will.
It was not as if I had never been kissed before, or responded to a man’s lips. Todd Shannon’s kisses had left me breathless and dizzy, forcing a response from me. He was a man used to getting his own way, a man who had decided he wanted me, and showed it.
