The Desires of Her Heart Page 27

  “Could you be happy with me as your wife, even knowing I had loved another man?”

  Quinn remembered how Dorritt demanded that he be honest with her. But he had been unable to tell her he loved her because he had nothing to offer her. The memory of turning away from her scored him like razor-sharp claws.

  Don Carlos replied, “A woman can love more than once in her lifetime. A man dies and his widow remarries. Does that mean she did not love her first husband? No. Does that mean she loves her second husband less? No. Quinn is a good guide and vaquero, a good man. But if he lets you go, after time passes, I will still want you for my wife. Because in the end, it all comes to this—Estoy enamorado de ti, I love you.”

  The sword plunged into Quinn again. He bit his lips to hold it in and tasted his own blood. I love you, Dorritt, but…. Then Dorritt came to his side and he lay very still with closed eyes. He heard Reva’s voice, “You go on back to the inn to rest now, Miss Dorritt. Ash is waiting to walk you there.”

  Dorritt replied, “Quinn still hasn’t regained consciousness. I’m worried.” Her low voice curled around his heart.

  “He’s weak and needs care and time. He’ll be all right. Don’t you worry. Now go sleep.”

  Quinn heard Dorritt leave and in spite of the fever still burning his face, he felt colder than he had before. Reva came over and felt his head. He played possum, not wanting, really unable, to talk to anyone. Then he felt himself sinking into unconsciousness again.

  When he opened his eyes again, it was very quiet. Still dark with a little candlelight.

  “So you finally come back to us,” Reva said, standing over him.

  He tried to speak, but his lips stuck together. Reva left and was back with a dipper of water. She lifted his head and trickled water into his mouth. When the dipper was empty, she brought another. The water revived him and he could think again. “Dorritt?” he asked and then regretted it.

  “Your lady is at the inn getting some sleep. She’d stay here round the clock if I didn’t make her go to the inn at night.”

  Your lady. “How is Don Carlos?”

  “He’s hurt pretty bad. The surgeon had to dig out the ball and it was in deep and lodged in the collarbone. It was nasty. The doctor won’t tell us what his chances are. Just says he needs careful nursing. And he’ll get that. How’re you feeling?”

  “Rough.”

  Reva felt his forehead with the back of her hand, her cool hand. “Your ball went straight through, so we just had to clean the wound. The surgeon put a couple of stitches in it and then Dorritt and I fomented it, to draw out the poison. We’ll do that again come morning. For both of you.”

  Quinn couldn’t stop himself from speaking—the puzzle came again. “Juan didn’t finish me off.”

  Reva pulled over a chair and sat at his bedside. “Tell me about it. Ash didn’t know too much.”

  “It was another ambush, but I had already figured out Eduardo…would try to finish me off and then his run would be less dangerous. Eduardo isn’t very clever. I just thought where would I…be most exposed to attack and that’s when I’d stop for water. So near the next creek, I hunkered down under cover and…waited them out.” He panted slightly with the exertion of forcing out words. But I have to tell someone, make sense out of this. “When I didn’t come and didn’t come, they finally broke cover. I hollered for them to put down their guns. They fired. I fired. I know I wounded Eduardo. But then I fell and…hit my head. I couldn’t move or talk for a time. And Juan came and struck me senseless with a rock. I can’t figure why Juan didn’t just shoot me.”

  Reva bathed his hot face in the vinegar water and Quinn listenend to the only other sound, Don Carlos’s labored breathing. “Señora, I can’t figure out why they didn’t just finish me off.”

  “Maybe Juan’s not a murderer. Or maybe God didn’t want you dead. He wanted you alive.”

  Quinn grimaced. He remembered asking God for help when he thought his end had come. But didn’t all men do that? How could God be so great he could create everything and yet be close enough to hear a man’s final words? It didn’t make sense. “God is far from us—beyond the sun.”

  “I know how you think. But no, God’s right here. I didn’t think that for a long time. Miss Dorritt always pray that if we trust God, He would give us the desires of our hearts. But I thought they were just pretty words, not for a slave like me. And when we heard that we were going to Texas, I say maybe we can be free in Texas and find men with honor there. But I didn’t really believe my own words. And I know Miss Dorritt thought that idea of men with honor was crazy. But then I met Ash and he bought my freedom and married me. And that was my desire—to be free and married to a good man.”

  Quinn thought about all this. The fever burned like the noontime sun in the desert. Did God really care enough to do that? Was God close, not far away?

  “And I think you better stop telling Miss Dorritt you can’t love her. And get busy and propose. Or you’ll lose her to Don Carlos,” Reva scolded.

  He winced at the pain her words caused. “He has more to offer her—”

  “If you think that matter to Miss Dorritt, you’re loco. She would be happy in a jacal with the man she loves. She’s been rich and she wasn’t happy. You better get enough guts to claim Miss Dorritt and be quick about. I think that’s why God didn’t let them kill you. You have another chance now to make Miss Dorritt happy. You are the desire of her heart, and I don’t think you should be so stubborn.”

  Don Carlos moaned and Reva turned to him.

  Quinn stared at the shadows on the ceiling. If only his mind wasn’t mush, he could figure out what to do.

  Six days later, Don Carlos insisted on going home. With the help of Don Carlos’s outriders, Ash had just finished bathing both men, who’d been propped up on chairs. Trying to avoid their bandages, Ash had doused them with buckets of warm soapy water and several buckets of cold rinse water. Quinn felt almost human. His fever had broken last night and he had been able to eat something like a normal breakfast. Ash dried and helped Quinn pull on a clean pair of breeches over a fresh bandage and set him back on the chair. Then he helped Quinn into a clean shirt. Quinn still wasn’t supposed to walk without help, and his hip ached with a pain that nearly brought tears to his eyes if he moved wrong.

  Ash went over to help one of the outriders, who was dressing Don Carlos so he could be carried out to the carriage. “Señor Quinn, I want you to come to my hacienda too,” Don Carlos said. “You will receive much better care from my servants than here.”

  “Yes, and Miss Dorritt is going to the hacienda too to keep Alandra company. She already insisted that Quinn must come too,” Ash announced.

  “She did, did she?” Quinn’s voice came out gruff, but hearing these words lifted his heart. Dorritt still wanted him. His mind had been busy over the past six days, trying and trying to make sense out of his escaping death. He’d survived when he should have died. And that meant something. “I need to talk to Miss Dorritt before we go.”

  The room went very still.

  “I’ll take you to her,” Ash said. “And by the way, Don Carlos has offered me the job of being his foreman in Eduardo’s place. And now that I’m a married man and ready to settle down, I took it. Reva and me will be at Rancho Sandoval too.” Ash grinned.

  “Good. That’s good news.” Quinn thought of all the years Ash had been his companion. And it made what he had to do easier.

  “Come on. A little sun will be good for you.” Ash helped Quinn stand.

  Light-headed, Quinn leaned against Ash and let him support his right side so that he didn’t have to put weight on the right leg. Outside, Ash left him on a chair under the covered porch of a nearby building. Even with constant pain, it was good to be outside in the sun and see men walking around and feel the fresh breeze on his face. Quinn couldn’t recall ever feeling this weak. Or hopeful. Or uncertain.

  Then Dorritt was walking toward him and her beauty made his lips numb. His h
eart moved inside him as if trying to go to her even if he couldn’t. He tried to push himself up.

  “No!” she called out and hurried forward. “Don’t try to stand.”

  He let himself relax back onto the chair and she was there, touching his face, checking for fever. Her soft palm tempted him. He longed to turn his face farther into her softness and kiss her palm. “I’m better,” he mumbled. Ash brought a chair over for Dorritt and then walked away.

  “You are one strong man, Quinn.” Dorritt fussed with his shirt collar and lifted his wet hair over his right shoulder. “But you still need to heal.”

  Her touch nearly made him forget to say the words he’d nerved himself to speak. First he had to see if she’d changed. “How is Don Carlos doing—the truth?”

  Her face drew down with worry. “He is going to have a long convalescence. The ball was deep and the surgery was dreadful. I wanted him to stay here until his fever has fully broken, but he wants to be home. And I can’t blame him. The day trip may tax him, but he will recover faster at home, I think. I hope. And his little sister was brought back today from friends and will go home with us.”

  Her words spoke of honest concern and friendship, not passion.

  Quinn cleared his throat. Now that the moment had come it was hard to get the words out, and this setting was hardly the right one—curious soldiers glancing at them while walking nearby and the sun beating down on the fort courtyard. “Will you…marry me?”

  Silence. His face burned as if the fever had returned. He waited in an agony of uncertainty. Had he waited too long?

  Then she took his hand. “Of course I’ll marry you. But why have you changed your mind?”

  Her hand in his gave him the courage to put the rest of what he was feeling into words. “I can’t really see my way forward. To marry and settle down was never in my plan. I just wanted to raise a few fine horses. But then I saw you in New Orleans—”

  “You saw me there?” She turned to him with wide eyes.

  “Yes, at the August horse race. You were there and dressed so fine and walking so tall. I had never seen a woman as special as you before. I couldn’t forget you, and then I saw you in Natchitoches, and found out that you were the daughter of the man who cheated me out of ten head of cattle and two mustangs. I had gone to the race looking for a horse to buy, but your stepfather said, ‘Why not gamble for the horse?’”

  She stared down but did not drop his hand. “I’m his step- daughter, not his blood.”

  This made him smile. “Yes, you are nothing like your stepfather.”

  “Tell me why you see your way to marry me now?” She kept her eyes lowered.

  The words flowed out of his lips, “Because they didn’t kill me. And Reva said I’d better stop being stupid and marry you. Because I said I wouldn’t believe in God being close unless I saw some evidence. I’m still wondering how a powerful God can be concerned about me. I’m not important. But only God could have saved me—I was unable to move or even speak and Juan could have killed me easily.”

  His words sounded paltry to his own ears, and yet he couldn’t stem their flow. “But if you are really sure you love me and want to marry me, I want it too. I still don’t want to settle near Anglos. And I still don’t know if I can be all that you deserve, but I’ll do my best. I can’t let you go. It’s that simple—I can’t let you go out of my life.” There, he’d said it all. He felt weak from all the words.

  Smiling, Dorritt squeezed his hand. “Yes, I want to marry you. And it will be hard to be separated from my mother, especially before the baby’s born, but it’s normal for a daughter to marry and leave her mother.”

  Quinn sat there with Dorritt’s hand in his, thinking that it had all been so easy and yet so hard. And he was still so weak that he didn’t feel up to traveling to Rancho Sandoval. And how would Don Carlos take his plans to marry Dorritt? Would he still welcome him now that Quinn was marrying the woman he loved?

  Dorritt rose.

  “Where are you going?” He didn’t like her leaving him.

  “I’m going to go get my mother and the priest and we’ll marry before we leave. I don’t know when we’ll be back here. We might as well marry while my mother can act as our witness.”

  He stared at her. “All right.” What else could he say? And of course now that the thing was settled, his tall lady wouldn’t hem and haw. She would manage everything just right. It’s one of the things about her he loved most.

  And the wedding took place right there on the steps of the Alamo church, with many soldiers looking on and little Alandra holding Dorritt’s hand. Mrs. Kilbride was there, weeping into her handkerchief while Jewell scowled and Mr. Kilbride watched from the jail window. The Kilbride slaves had also come to the wedding in the fort courtyard, standing at a respectful distance.

  Dorritt didn’t like to leave them, but she hoped her mother would look after them and protect them from Mr. Kilbride. Though slavery was against Mexican law, Dorritt knew there was little chance to free them. There was work to be done and not enough people to do it on the frontier. The Mexicans would say there was no slavery, but they kept the Indians uneducated and poor as peons working the land. So no one in charge would challenge Kilbride’s indenture papers. Changing this situation was too big for one woman. And Dorritt knew that.

  After a tearful farewell between Dorritt and her mother, Don Carlos and Quinn were helped into the carriage. Everyone else would ride on horseback to Rancho Sandoval. Reva sat proudly behind her husband.

  With little Alandra sitting in front of her, Dorritt was mounted on Jewell’s mare. Her mother had given Jewell’s mare as the family’s wedding gift to the newlyweds. Jewell had been cross about this but hadn’t made any public scene over letting the mare and Quinn’s foal go. Maybe Jewell was growing up a little. Maybe Texas was stretching her heart and mind. Or maybe life seemed a bit more uncertain with her father still in prison and their being kept in San Antonio.

  Leading one of her husband’s mustangs, Dorritt rode out of the town and turned back to wave to her mother and sister. Then she turned toward the southwest and her future.

  Epilogue

  That night

  With a feeling of unreality in the hacienda at Rancho Sandoval, Dorritt sat down on the edge of her bed back in the same elegant bedroom as before. And same as the first time, it was twilight and she’d just finished her bath. The servants had moments ago removed the tub. The tile floor was cool under her bare feet. And her wet hair was wrapped in towels. This is real. I am here at Rancho Sandoval.

  This is my wedding night. She drew the damp white linen towels from her hair and began to dry and finger comb her long straight hair. The dark wood door opened and her husband entered with the help of one of the servants. Her pulse jerked in her veins and her heart galloped while she sat so still.

  Quinn’s hair was damp. He’d wanted to wash the road dust from him also. He wore only his buckskin breeches. And though he favored his right leg, he moved silently; she did not even hear his bare feet padding on the tile. He did not walk to her, but to the window where he sat on a bench there, looking out while the servant left, closing the door behind him. “I can’t believe everything that has happened over the past week.”

  “Nor can I,” she whispered as if someone were eavesdropping on them. Her throat was thick and her voice felt unsure.

  “Don Carlos is a good man,” her husband said. “I will do what I can to help him while he is ill.”

  Don Carlos is a good man and so is my husband. I am Señora Desmond Quinn. And proud to be so. “I hate what Eduardo did and tried to do,” Dorritt said, moving to her husband’s left side on the bench.

  Quinn put his arm around Dorritt. “Don’t worry. Eduardo has a bounty on his head. He will not go free.”

  “Quinn, why did Eduardo try to wound his own cousin? Don Carlos was good to him.”

  “Some men despise goodness in others. And being treated good by someone he resented—” Quinn said, and s
hrugged. “That probably made Eduardo hate him more than if Don Carlos had treated him shabbily.”

  “What do you mean?” She gazed into Quinn’s blue eyes, seeing the righteousness there. His smooth tanned skin begged her silently to touch him.

  “Eduardo couldn’t show his anger out in the open. He depended on Don Carlos and hated him and hated himself for not breaking with Don Carlos.”

  She gave into temptation and stroked Quinn’s cheek. This is my husband. I can touch him.

  Dorritt could no longer think of Eduardo and all the evil he had been capable of. She stared at her husband, his long golden-threaded hair and bare chest silvered in the moonlight. She thought, I have married a beautiful man. An unseen force drew her still nearer to him. His skin was silk under her palms as she slipped them up his arms to his shoulders and then rested her cheek against his chest.

  He kissed the top of her head and ran his fingers through her hair from scalp to end. “We will help Don Carlos to get well.”

  “Yes. We won’t let Eduardo upset us. Or spoil what we’ve been given.” Then she whispered,

  “Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.

  Commit thy way unto the LORD;…And he shall bring thy righteousness as the light….

  Rest in the LORD and wait patiently for him:…For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth.”

  Quinn murmured, “That is about the Creator?”

  “Yes. He’s kept his promises.” To Reva and me. Thank you, Father.

  Quinn cleared his throat. “He kept me alive. So that we might have a life together.”

  She looked up into the honest blue eyes she loved. “Yes, God is faithful.”

  He lowered his lips slowly, slowly until she thought she might die if they did not claim hers soon. Then he was kissing her and whispering, “I love you, my bride.”

  Tears slipped from her eyes as she let his love envelop her. I am married yet both loved and free—the true desires of my heart.