In that world, she and Néstor were impossible. They always had been.
“If you want me, I will make it happen,” he said softly. “I will move heaven and earth. Nena . . .” He paused to brush tears from her cheeks with tender fingertips. Salty tears dripped onto her lips anyway. His face was so calm, so sure, it made her want to shatter. “I have spent the last nine years saving money to buy land. To build a house. I have enough, Nenita. I will build it for us.”
It was what he had dreamed of when they were children: his own rancho, his own house. Them, together.
But to Papá, Néstor would always be a vaquero. He would never be good enough. Papá would never allow it. She had said as much, cruelly, that night they spent in the jacal. She could not say it again. She could not tell him he was delusional, for was she not as well? Did she not envision a small house all their own on Los Ojuelos land or near it, her rising with the sun to make coffee for him in their own kitchen?
It felt so real, yet it remained just out of reach.
“Nena,” he murmured, his voice low and husky. “Look at me.”
She sniffed and turned her face to him. He touched his nose to hers, gentle and tender. His forehead leaned against hers. His hand rose to the back of her neck and rested there, warm, solid.
Tomorrow, the reality of returning to Los Ojuelos would crash around them. It would destroy them. Even if she were not to marry and stayed on Los Ojuelos, it was impossible to imagine being near him and not feeling this way. Not wanting to be with him every moment of the day. Not wanting to kiss him whenever she saw him.
“I swear I will make it happen,” he breathed. “If you will have me, I will make it happen.”
A sob caught in her throat. He believed so passionately that it was possible, and it simply wasn’t. “But what if you can’t?” she said.
“Do you trust me?” he asked, brushing away tears and tucking loose locks of hair behind her ears. His fingertips light and loving, his eyes never leaving hers as their foreheads touched.
She nodded once. “I do.”
Hope lit his features from within. “Then don’t cry, mi nena. We’re together, and we’ll always be,” he said. “That alone is a miracle. You are my miracle.”
When he brought his lips to hers, their touch was a promise. An oath sealed.
She closed her eyes and kissed him back, pliant in his arms as he drew her close to the warmth of his body. His chin was rough with stubble, grazing her skin. His hands were firm on her back, on her hips, on her breasts. His touch always awakened a part of her that wanted him everywhere at once.
There were a hundred ways this could go wrong, a hundred paths that led to both of them being hurt. A hundred reasons to resist, to pull away, to say again that it could never be and they should cut their losses now. That she had been wrong to kiss him when she did. That he was right to pull away. That even though she wanted him in ways she had no words for, even though there was no man she could love the way she had loved him—innocently, fiercely, angrily—it could not be.
But how could she, with his hands tangled in her hair? With warmth unspooling low in her belly as he explored her body? As his reverent kisses moved down her throat to her collarbone? She did not want to resist. She did not want anything but to be present in this moment, to take it, to take him as the world around them fell away.
Nothing mattered but this: reaching for his shirt and pulling it gently over his head, drawing her hands down his warm chest, relishing the unexpected softness of his skin. Helping him with the buttons of her own shirt.
“Your hands are shaking,” she said. Her voice was more breathless than she anticipated.
His smile was shy, almost bashful, as he kissed her again. He pushed away the fabric of the shirt, slipping it off her shoulders and exposing her skin to the deepening twilight.
He pressed a kiss to the base of her throat, then another lower, and lower, rolling her body gently down to meet the ground, shifting his weight so that he was above her, his knees on either side of her hips. Then he returned to her lips with a breathless, bruising kiss.
“Nena,” he crooned against her mouth. “I am yours. Command me.”
No matter what happened when they returned to Los Ojuelos, she would always have this night. She wanted to always have a part of him.
She reached for his hips and pulled him hard against her. His groan sent a trill of pleasure through her.
“I want all of you,” she said.
25
N?STOR
N?STOR TOOK THE first watch. The moon was but a sliver; its light was pale compared to the brilliance of the stars. He gazed up at the dark sweep of the sky, his body relaxed, his mind blissfully quiet.
Nena slept to his right. She was curled up on one side, her knees pulled into her chest. Her clothes had been haphazardly put back on. Even in exhausted sleep, even smudged with dirt and sweat from days on the road, she was more lovely than any woman he had ever seen. He wanted nothing more than to hold her close and fall asleep with her against him, his face burrowed in her hair. There would be other times for that. Other nights where they could be consumed by each other, where he would stroke her until she whimpered with pleasure, again and again. A lifetime of nights.
But tonight, he stayed alert. He wasn’t sure he could bear to wake her to take her turn on watch, not when she slept so peacefully.
Luna stamped a hoof, startling him to attention. After Nena had fallen asleep, he pulled his boots and clothes back on and brought the mares into the circle of salt. Now Luna raised her head, her ears flat against her skull.
A chill fell over him, as if he had been caught in a cold breeze. A shiver seized his shoulders; an ache twinged in his healing shoulder.
Only there was no breeze.
The night was still. Until moments ago, it was warm, filled with the rhythmic chirrup of crickets. Now, it was silent.
Too silent.
Néstor rose, every hair on his body standing on end. He reached for his holster—swiftly abandoned when Nena had reached for his trousers—then decided against it. He reached over Nena’s sleeping body to the small bag of salt. He held it tight in one fist as he stood over her, as he scanned the night around them for any sign of movement.
Something shifted to the left of their small campsite. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of long, muscular limbs, pacing like a wolf on all fours, then vanishing into the darkness.
His heart tumbled over itself.
To the right, another body moved. When he turned his head and stared into the darkness, willing it to reveal its secrets, there was nothing. His pulse galloped in the hollow of his throat. He swore he had seen something. He swore that in the starlight, it had looked gray.
Was it his mind playing tricks on him? Was it merely panic silencing the sounds of the night, or was there something to fear? He wanted to reach for his guns, to feel their weight in his hands, but in his gut he knew they were useless. He had shot a vampire, once, twice, three times, and still it continued attacking him. He had nothing but the salt in his hand and a prayer that what he saw was a trick of the night on his eyes.
That prayer died a swift death.
For there the form was again. Closer. Doubt fled his heart: it was there, a gray torso with ribs protruding like a starved animal. Another. A third. The glint of metal as starlight caught on the collars around their necks.
They were watching him.
He knew this with the certainty of the hunted. His pulse was the only sound in the utter, complete silence.
The predators circled. They paced back and forth, one to the left, the other to the right. Circling. Patient as vultures around a dying bull.
But they remained several paces back from the salt boundary. They did not move forward closer to it.
But neither did they move back.
Nena murmured in her sleep and shifted, oblivious to the danger that stalked mere meters away from them.