Night Flower (Gone-to-Texas Trilogy) Page 4

  “Leandro Velasquez, home from your foreign adventures at last. Whatever brings you to our parochial little celebration!” she asked, proud of her regained composure and erudite vocabulary.

  “I'm afraid you have the advantage,” Lee replied, a frown of concentration marring his chiseled features.

  Melanie looked up at the tall man, more muscular and mature than the reed-slim eighteen-year-old boy who had struggled to rescue a humiliated and terrified twelve-year-old from the clutches of a lecherous sailor on the Galveston waterfront. Lee was still wonderfully handsome to her infatuated eyes. And he doesn't even remember me! Smiling over sweetly, she said, “After that brute of a first mate almost squashed you like an insect, I'd think you'd be grateful to the girl with the scissors who saved your life that day on the wharf.”

  “Fleming's daughter,” he choked out. “But you were only a little girl—” He could sense her smirk even before it began to spread across the lovely face. “All right. I suppose that was four years ago, Melanie. You did grow up. Forgive me?” He doffed his wide-brimmed hat, revealing that splendid head of curling black hair. When he smiled, the blinding white slash in his dark face made her heart do a sudden lurch.

  “Well, since you do remember my name, not just my father's, I suppose I forgive you,” she said, returning the smile.

  “But I'd say your scissors did more damage to me than the first mate!” What a hellish week that had been.

  ‘‘Is that why you left as soon as my father arrived, not even saying good-bye?” she half teased, half challenged. How well she could still remember her devastation when she awoke that morning and her papa told her Lee was gone.

  Lee, too, recalled his judicious retreat but was unaware it had caused a young girl's heartbreak. “Let's just say discretion was the better part of valor,” he replied lightly.

  Melanie was saved from an angry retort by her brother's sudden arrival. Remembering his hero from early childhood in San Antonio, Adam catapulted into Lee's arms. “Lee! Aunt Charlee told us you were living in Mexico. I'm so glad you're home. Wait till you see where we live now! Our papa has the biggest ranch in Texas. You gotta come visit us.”

  Smiling, Lee set the boy down and knelt by his side. “Afraid I can't do that just now. Dulcia's waiting for me back in San Antonio, niño. We're going to build a pretty fair ranch of our own.”

  “Dulcia?” Melanie asked, already dreading the answer.

  “My wife. Didn't Charlee write Deborah? I was married last summer in Mexico City.”

  “Well, I hope you and your bride will be very happy in Texas, Lee. Adam and I promised to wait for Joe across the street. Maybe we'll see you after the ceremonies. I think they're about to begin.” She turned quickly away and shaded her eyes, scanning the crowd around the grandstands.

  With a nod, Lee gave Adam a final hug and rose. “I'd better find Charlee and Jim pronto. When you locate your friend, we'll be over by the right-hand side of the platform.” With that, he disappeared down the crowded street as she stared blankly after him.

  Chapter Three

  El Sueño Grande, May 1846

  Lee wiped the sweat from his brow and stopped to admire his handiwork in the clear noonday heat. The corral, with its sturdy high cross rails of oak, should hold at least fifty prime horses, culled from the wild mustangs he and his men had captured the past several months. Now, they would begin breaking the best of them for sale.

  With any luck, only one more trip out onto the open plains and he would have enough stock. He looked from the new corral to the rebuilt hacienda. The low-ceilinged, six-room stone-and-adobe structure he had built on the ruins of his parents' place was scarcely the grand mansion that would one day house his family, but it was a comfortable beginning nonetheless. Although Dulcia had made no protest when he brought her from Bluebonnet last week, he was sure it seemed primitive to her. At least here she was mistress of her own modest domain, with three house servants to see to her comfort. Still, he felt uneasy about her fragility in the face of frontier hardships. As he pictured his wife's soft features, another face floated in his memory, one with glowing, tanned skin and snapping gold eyes that mocked him.

  What the hell am I doing remembering that little hellion? he thought incredulously. Feeling an unreasoning surge of anger at the way his subconscious had conjured her up, he was further upset with the immediate comparison between her and Dulcia that some perverse self-punishing instinct caused him to make. Neither fragile nor modest, Melanie Fleming fit in splendidly in Texas.

  Admittedly, Lee had been shocked at how she had changed since their first encounter when she had been a twelve-year-old child. Even then, he had thought the daughter of Fleming's octoroon mistress would grow into a striking woman. But her exotic beauty combined with earthy sensuousness had surprised him. Frequently over the past months, as he had slaved and sweated rebuilding his parents' dream, Lee had found Melanie haunting his imagination, causing him to wonder how she would respond to his touch. Scarcely the way a proper criolla would, he was absolutely certain of that!

  Angrily, he pulled his disloyal thoughts back to Dulcia, his gentle and patient bride who adored him. If she did not return his ardor in making love, that was to be expected from a woman with her upbringing. A lady did not behave with abandon. He felt a renewed surge of guilt for his wayward thoughts, especially now that she was pregnant.

  Smiling ruefully, he recalled the evening when she had told him he was to be a father. It was the month after he had gone to Austin for the statehood hoopla. She had been so shy, yet proud about becoming the mother of his child. Of course, he had taken her agonizingly embarrassed plea to be relieved of conjugal duties with as much good grace as was humanly possible.

  When in Mexico City, he had been disillusioned with the morality of upper-class men who kept mistresses, thinking such a practice decadent and insulting to the women who bore their names and their children. He had even recalled Rafe Fleming and his illegitimate daughter, feeling sorry for Deborah's plight when she was forced to accept such a stepchild into her home. Now, faced with eight months of enforced celibacy, he was less inclined to be so puritanical.

  “That's the only reason I've even given Melanie Fleming a thought, dammit,” he muttered beneath his breath. Just then, hoof beats coming from the direction of the ranch house interrupted his ruminations.

  “Charlee tells me that congratulations are in order. That you and Dulcia are going to have a niño at year's end,” Jim Slade's voice called out as he swung effortlessly from his big buckskin horse.

  “I figured once the women started talking, all Bexar County would know,” Lee replied smiling. “I only hope we have a boy like Will.”

  Jim's eyes lit at the mention of his son's name; but he grinned and said, ‘This time I'm hoping for a little Texas hell cat like Charlee.”

  Lee's face sobered. “Charlee takes so well to frontier life. I worry about Dulcia sometimes.”

  “She'll adapt. Look at Deborah Fleming. All the way from Boston, and Rafe couldn't ask for a better rancher's wife,” Jim reassured his love-struck young friend.

  Recalling his earlier uncomfortable thoughts about Deborah's stepdaughter, Lee murmured, “I suppose Dulcia will learn. I'm only glad we have the house furnished and a cook and maid to help her during her confinement.”

  Charlee had told her husband in no uncertain terms what she thought of Dulcia’s ideas about “women's confinement” during pregnancy. Jim wanted to get off that subject quickly! “Some great corral,” he improvised, striding over to run his hand along the sturdy oak railing.

  “It'll be full of prime horseflesh in a few more days.” Lee could not restrain the note of pride in his voice.

  “You still working that blue roan stallion?” Jim asked.

  “Sangre Azul,” Lee said, eyes alight. “Yes, he's almost finished his formal education. I expect he'll be as much a one-man horse as Polvo.” He indicated Jim's impressive buckskin.

  “Blueblood,” Jim translat
ed the name his friend had given his new stallion. “You sure that time in Mexico City didn't turn you into a criollo snob, mano?” He was only half teasing.

  Lee's face became serious. “Hardly that. God knows the political corruption in Mexico is causing chaos, and the fine aristocrats who head the government and the army are the cause of it. You heard any news from San Antonio lately?”

  Jim's brow creased with concern. “We're really going to have us a war, Lee. That ass Taylor's moved from Corpus Christi down to the Bravo, claiming it's American territory.”

  “Which, of course, was never settled between Texas and Mexico,” Lee said in disgust.

  “Well, as Sam wrote me from Washington, President Polk wants California, and that means all the land above the Bravo or Rio Grande, whatever they call it—everything between here and the west coast is up for grabs.”

  “I guess our senator knows his president's game,” Lee replied bitterly.

  Jim grinned grimly, “Sam Houston knows everybody's game. Never be deceived. I only hope someone takes charge in Mexico City and is willing to negotiate before this thing gets really nasty. Tejanos and Californios are going to get caught in the crossfire. Already, Governor Henderson has responded to Taylor's request for rangers to act as scouts for his inept dragoons. Jack Hays has formed up a company and headed out to join Taylor on the Bravo, where he's set up a fort across from Matamoros.”

  “ ‘Remember the Alamo’ all over again. Only this time the Texians can really get even, with the U.S. Army backing them,” Lee said. His face was set in tight lines.

  “You sound like you're ready to join the Mexican Army,” Jim retorted angrily. “Jack Hays is an honorable man and a damn good Comanche fighter, I might add.”

  Lee waved dismissively. “Hell, I don't mistrust Hays, but there are plenty of Anglo rabble in San Antonio and all along the border who'd use any excuse to kill Mexican civilians, even those born on Texas soil. It's been so tense in the city the past months I haven't even taken Dulcia to visit her friends because of the drunken brawls and mob mentality of the ‘noble militia.’ If you ask me, we could use Hays right here in San Antonio to control the Texas volunteers for this damn undeclared war before they loot and burn an American city!”

  Jim knew what Lee said was justified. Incidents between the companies of Texians forming up to fight with Taylor and the Texas-born Mexican populace, the Tejanos, had grown alarmingly common.

  Jim said, “I fought with Houston at San Jacinto to free Texas from an invading army. I am sure as hell not going to march into Mexico and become the foreign invader. But Mexico's government, such as it is, has declared war on the United States; and now Texas is a state. If they come here, I'll fight again.”

  “But if they don't, you won't follow Taylor below the Rio Bravo,” Lee finished for his troubled friend.

  “Rio Grande in Texas,” Jim corrected Lee. “No, I won't follow Taylor anywhere. He's no General Houston.”

  Lee snorted in agreement. “History sure has played some dirty tricks on us, mano.”

  * * * *

  “I don't know why you persist in disliking the girl so, Charlee,” Jim said with irritation. “I know she's immature, but she's only seventeen.”

  Charlee swung up on her little paint filly's back with surprising grace for one who was eight months' pregnant. “Immature,” she snorted. “Spoiled rotten is more like it. Lee treats her as if she were made of porcelain.”

  Jim walked Polvo alongside his feisty wife's horse in a leisurely after-supper ride. Charlee insisted it helped her digestion. “You sure you're not just jealous of how he dotes on her, Cat Eyes? If you like, I could get you a covered buggy like hers; and you could use a screen so the eyes of the vulgar couldn't gaze on that delectable little belly,” he teased.

  “Speaking of vulgarity, Don Diego, you're pushing the outer limits,” Charlee replied with as much dignity as her expanded midsection allowed. “I might just get the vapors from being in such a delicate condition and tell you to go sleep in the guest bedroom tonight.”

  Jim laughed. “And deprive yourself? That'd be cutting off your pretty little nose to spite your face. As I recall, the day before Will was born you attacked me—”

  Charlee reached over to swat playfully at her tall husband, who continued undaunted, “We were on a picnic, right out in front of God and everybody.”

  “We were not!” she shot back in mock anger. “We were in a very secluded copse of willows down by the creek and nobody saw us...well, maybe the cat and the horses,” she amended as her husband laughed fondly.

  “I'm afraid it's just Lee's Hispanic gallantry, all polished up while he was under the civilizing influence of his uncle, away from Texas riffraff like us. He's only twenty-two, Charlee, and being a new husband and prospective father is a lot of responsibility to take on.”

  “Yeah, and considering her ideas about marriage, it sure isn't going to get any easier,” Charlee replied darkly.

  “Not wanting to appear in public while she's pregnant isn't an unforgivable sin, Cat Eyes,” Jim remonstrated.

  Charlee sighed. “That's silly, but if she wants to molder for nine months, that's her problem. It's the other that's unfair to Lee.”

  “You're not making sense,” Jim countered.

  Charlee sighed. “I don't guess I'm violating the sanctity of the confessional if I tell you about our conversation when she told me she was expecting—actually, I told her, after she asked a bunch of very euphemistic questions. Then, she was overjoyed.”

  “Well, that seems natural enough. She does love Lee in her own shy way.”

  “She loves him all right, as long as she doesn't have to make love with him. Her first question to me after she was sure she was pregnant was how soon she could tell Lee it wasn't safe for her to ‘submit’ to him.”

  Jim burst out laughing, then sobered. “Come to think of it, that isn't really very funny, is it? I can just imagine what you told her,” he added with a glint of devilment in his cougar eyes.

  “I was the soul of tact and patience,” Charlee replied primly, “but I don't think I convinced her. She's so young and full of claptrap and aristocratic pretensions, I'm afraid she's never going to make Lee the kind of wife he deserves.”

  “Well, if sheer devotion and youthful romance have any value, I wouldn't sell their chances short,” Jim consoled her, hoping that it was only Charlee’s inherent dislike of the snobbery she'd encountered from some of San Antonio's best Hispanic families that had shaped her judgment of Dulcia.

  * * * *

  “Oh, Gertrudis, I am so lonely for Leandro,” Dulcia practically wailed to her friend, the eldest daughter of the Sandoval family, at whose lavish estancia she stayed while Lee was gone hunting a last elusive bunch of wild mustangs.

  Knowing that San Antonio was a recruiting point for western militiamen who were forming very irregular companies of volunteers to ‘‘whip the greasers,” Lee had feared leaving his wife alone with a handful of elderly servants at El Sueño Grande. Since she had disdained to stay with Charlee and had made friends with Jim's cousins, the Sandovals, Lee had left her in Don José and Doña Esperanza's safekeeping.

  However, after two weeks of embroidery and gossip, Dulcia was restless. Her morning sickness had finally abated and she showed only the slightest evidence of being pregnant. Suddenly, after months of melancholy and crying spells, she wanted to see her husband. Lee's gentle charm and humor could lighten her flagging spirits.

  Gertrudis, a pretty, flighty young woman of eighteen, engaged to a neighboring rancher's son, was instantly sympathetic. “I know how difficult it must be, dear Dulcia, but in order to build his ranch, Leandro must chase the mustangs. My father did it and so did my Cousin James' father.”

  Dulcia still found it difficult to accept the fact that Jim Slade's mother had been a Sandoval, part of this proper and elegant family. “I know gentlemen work here in Texas, but must it be at such wild and dangerous things? Oh, Gertrudis, I wish to be there whe
n he returns. Don't you see, if I am here, he will wait and work those dreadful wild beasts before he comes for me. He said two weeks. It is that and past already. I know if he isn't at the ranch, he will be by the time I return home. I could have the servants prepare his favorite foods and have the house readied for him if I left today. Ask your mother to see if your father would give me an escort home. It isn't that far. Please?”

  Caught up in the romantic spirit, Gertrudis made one of her characteristic snap decisions. “Oh, posh, Mama and Papa will never agree to let you leave without Leandro's permission; but I could get Rosario and Lorenzo to escort us. They are very capable and very devoted to me. We'll have you at Great Dream Ranch for Leandro' s homecoming by tonight!”

  True to her word, Gertrudis got her father's vaqueros to hitch up Dulcia's rig; and the two women sneaked out immediately after the midday meal while the family was taking siesta. With their armed escort, they set out for El Sueño Grande.

  * * * *

  “When yew git done with her, I want me a piece,” the burly man called Griggs sang out to his companion, who was methodically cutting the clothing from a cowering Angelina, the Velasquez cook.

  “She be a mite old fer ya, Griggs, but since I had ta kill th' younger one, I reckon I'll share.”

  As the cowering old woman pressed her body against the cool masonry of the sala wall, Jake Sears continued to undress her with his bowie knife, oblivious to the carnage around him.

  In route to San Antonio from the open range to the northwest, Griggs and Sears planned to join one of the Texas volunteer companies they'd heard were forming to fight the hated Mexicans. When blind chance brought them to El Sueño Grande, they had seen what looked to be a prosperous little ranch owned by Tejanos. Few vaqueros were around, but two women worked in the yard around an open oven, baking bread beneath the canopy of a towering cottonwood.

  The old man at the corral had been an easy target, and even the two armed vaqueros they had encountered had fallen quickly to the Patterson Colts of the two seasoned rangers. By the time they had entered the house, they found Angelina and Serafina hiding in the armoire in the master bedroom. The younger housemaid had found one of Lee's old rifles and had fired it ineffectually, grazing Sears and infuriating him. He retaliated by shooting her at point-blank range with his Colt.