Texas Woman

“I need you in my life.”

“I can’t promise you anything. I may not be able to give you what you want.”

“I will take my chances.” He gathered her into his embrace, bringing them together from breast to thigh. His hands stroked down her back until they reached her buttocks, and he gently coaxed her against him.

She sucked in a breath of air when she felt his arousal hard and hot against her.

“Relax, querida.”

“I can’t!”

One of his hands kept their hips pressed together while the other tangled in her hair, drawing her head back. He closed her eyes with soft kisses, grazed her cheekbone with his mouth, teased the edges of her lips with his teeth, and finally bit down gently on her lower lip, tugging on it until Sloan opened her mouth to him.

“This is madness,” she whispered.

“Then we are both mad.”

He took her mouth with passion, his tongue claiming her, ravaging, demanding. Sloan’s hands balled into fists as she fought the urge to return in full measure what Cruz gave to her.

A sharp gasp from the nearby darkness broke them abruptly apart.

Sloan’s eyes slowly focused on the confused, wide-eyed gaze of Tomasita Hidalgo. Sloan turned equally stricken eyes on Cruz, who swore vociferously under his breath as he stared back at Tomasita.

Nobody spoke for a moment, and Sloan looked back to Cruz to see how he planned to explain their behavior to the impressionable young woman.

“I intended to speak with you, Tomasita, to tell you that Sloan and I…”

“You do not owe me an explanation,” Tomasita said, her voice brittle. “I have eyes. I can see for myself what has happened here.”

“There is nothing wrong with what you saw, Tomasita. Sloan and I are married. We have been married for four years,” he said.

That statement prompted a gasp of horror from Tomasita. “But my father… your father… they promised… We are betrothed!”

“How can you know of that?” Cruz exclaimed. “If Mama has said anything to you-”

“Dona Lucia said nothing. I overheard Mother Maria speaking of it at the convent.”

“All this time you thought…” Cruz thrust a hand through his hair. “I had hoped you need never know,” he said.

He ground his teeth at the tragic expression on Tomasita’s face. “I did not mean… it is nothing to do with you,” he said, groping for words to lessen the hurt he could see in her pain-filled eyes.

“You are a lovely young woman,” he said. “But my father made the promise to your father without my knowledge. By the time I found out about it, I had long since committed myself to Sloan.”

“Then you never intended to marry me?”

“No.”

“Why did you not just leave me in the convent?”

“I promised my father I would see that you were well wed.”

“That is not necessary,” she said, her spine stiffened by pride. “I do not choose to marry at all.”

“That choice is not yours to make,” Cruz said. “You are under my protection. I will decide what is best for you.”

Tomasita looked from Sloan to Cruz and then backed away. “I think I will go to my room now.”

Sloan watched in dismay as the young girl made what, under the circumstances, was a surprisingly graceful exit. “She would have made you a much better wife than I,” Sloan murmured sadly.

“I do not love her.”

Sloan turned, and her heart rose to her throat at the fierce look of possession she found in Cruz’s deep blue eyes. “I’m not like Tomasita, Cruz. I could never let you make my choices for me. I make my own decisions. I always will.”

“Perhaps, Cebellina. We will see.”

Sloan’s eyes narrowed. “There is no perhaps about it, Cruz.”

“We will see how you feel in the spring, shall we?” he said. “Maybe you will change your mind.”

Sloan frowned. He could wait all he wanted. She wasn’t going to change her mind.

Until the incident in the courtyard, Tomasita had not intended to meet Luke Summers. But when Saturday came, she still had not stopped feeling angry with Don Cruz.

It had been embarrassing, of course, to find her supposed fiance in another woman’s arms. But it had been humiliating to discover that she had been kept ignorant of the truth about their betrothal, like a spoiled child who might cry if she cannot have her candy.

Meeting Luke Summers alone seemed a dangerous enough adventure to prove she was a grown woman and not the green girl that Don Cruz had apparently considered her.

After supper, Tomasita told everyone she was going to her room to bed. Instead, she sneaked out beyond the walls that surrounded the hacienda and made her way to the river in the failing light. Her heart was beating crazily in her breast, and her breath was coming in short spurts because she ran practically the whole way. When she finally got where she was going, she realized what an unbelievably childish thing she had done.

The only sounds she heard were the water burbling lazily over stones and the wind rustling through the cypress trees along the banks. Otherwise it was deathly quiet.

She had worn a dark wool skirt and a white camisa, but had covered her head and shoulders with a dark crepe de chine shawl with fringe so long it reached her ankles. She stood shivering in the darkness, waiting for a man to arrive whom she had met only twice and who had taken liberties with her both times.

The total idiocy of her actions dawned on her at about the same time she heard the hooves of a horse plodding directly toward her.

“Holy Mary,” she whispered. “Protect this foolish woman!” She turned and ran as fast as she could back toward the hacienda, not caring who it was on the horse, praying to the Father above that it wasn’t someone bent on harming her.

She was still running when she felt a muscled arm snake around her waist and haul her from the ground. She tried to scream, but a callused hand covered her mouth, shutting off the sound.

She struggled like a wildcat, scratching, frenzied, frantic… until she heard the male voice in her ear crooning sweet, soft love words.

It was Luke Summers. He had come as he had promised.

Tomasita slumped in his arms, her head falling back against his muscled chest, her breathing becoming less tortured as her brain acknowledged that the danger was past.

She felt his moist breath on her ear as he said, “All through bucking, little mustang girl? I’m going to take my hand off your mouth now. Easy, girl. Everything’s all right now. Easy.”

Tomasita found herself gentled much as he might have gentled a wild mustang, with soft strokes and gentle words. She didn’t fight him when he lifted her farther into his lap.

She was not so naive that she did not recognize his heightened state of excitement. It was both thrilling and a little awe-inspiring to know he found her desirable as a woman.

His arms looped around her, holding her snugly against him. She could feel her breast pressing against his chest. It felt wonderful… natural…

“Let’s go over here a ways and see if we can find a comfortable spot,” Luke said. “I’m glad you came, Tomasita. I’m real glad you came.”

Tomasita didn’t say anything. She was too busy feeling things. Warmth. Excitement. Tension. Need.

He stepped down from the saddle in a lithe movement and lifted her down with him. He settled her in the grass along the banks of the river and sat down next to her. “I need you, mustang girl. I’ve been needin’ you for days.”

She felt his hands at her waist. They began to roam across her ribs and then upward toward her breasts. She quickly covered his hands with her own. “This is not right,” she protested.

While she was talking, his hands kept moving under hers. His fingertips skimmed her nipples, bringing them erect and sending shivers of sensation racing to her core. “You must stop. That feels…”

She moaned as he gently pressed her down into the grass. “What are you doing?”

“Loving you. Come on and touch me, mustang girl. I need to feel your hands on me.”

Before she could say anything, he had taken her hands and put them against his bare chest. When or how he had rid himself of his linsey-woolsey shirt, she had no idea. His skin felt hard and smooth under her fingertips.

He moved her hands where he wanted them-across his flat nipples, down the center of his chest to the crisp hair that grew in a line down to his navel, and down even farther, across the front of his trousers, where he was hard and heavy.

“Ah, mustang girl, you make me feel so good. Let me touch you. Let me make you feel as good as I do.”

Tomasita’s breath was coming in short spurts. Her whole body seemed alive with feeling. “Luke, Luke, I feel too much. I cannot breathe. I cannot-”

His hands gently palmed her breasts through the soft camisa and the sensation was so exquisite that she simply held her breath, hoping to prolong it. Then his mouth touched her through the cloth, wet and hot.

“Ahhh.” Tomasita grabbed handfuls of Luke’s hair as though to pull his mouth away, but instead she arched her back and held him there, her teeth gritted in an agony of pleasure. She moaned deep in her throat.

Luke nuzzled her bare skin above the cloth, then trailed wet kisses along her throat to her ear, and finally found her mouth.