Marco and the Devil's Bargain Read Online Free PDF

Showing up early to a women’s gathering will earn you no kisses from Paloma.”
    Marco couldn’t help his own smile. He sat on Buciro in the gloom of night as the guards on the roof continued their steady pacing and his mayordomo closed the gate until morning. Marco’s heart was not easy, but Toshua was right.
    Why had he shown such weakness to a Comanche, por dios ? “I should take your advice.”
    â€œ I would,” Toshua replied. “I seldom give any.”
    Still, Marco had trouble setting the guards for the night, then walking around his own compound, as he always did after dinner. He could think only of his wife, and the trouble from the east coming her way. He sat for a long time in his office by the horse barn, just staring at a handful of complaints and a packet of new ordinances and laws that Lieutenant Roybal had handed over with a wry grin of his own before he left.
    â€œ We officers of the crown should have no illusions,” Marco muttered out loud, forgetting that Toshua sat by the fire. When the Comanche looked at him, Marco grabbed up a handful of paper. “If I threw this in the fire, no one would know or care, and the course of the empire would proceed in exactly the same way. What should I do?”
    â€œ You wait two more days, then ride to your sister’s hacienda, where I am not much wanted.”
    It had only been a rhetorical question, but it touched him that someone took him seriously. So my sister does not like you? Ride there anyway tonight, my friend, he told himself. He knew he could not ask Toshua to do that, but in the year they had known each other, he had learned to respect the Comanche’s instincts.
    He left Toshua in the office, already unrolling his bedding by the fireplace. For reasons unknown, he had claimed the office as his sleeping room. Marco looked back at the office, then thought of Toshua in the garrison at Santa Maria. For the first time, he realized that the view from the office commanded all the entrances to the Double Cross. He couldn’t help his rueful smile. “My friend, you would know instantly if I tried to leave tonight, eh?” he asked the wind. He decided he wasn’t desperate enough to find out what Toshua would do.
    He spent a long time on his knees in the chapel, then returned to the kitchen, no easier in his mind. Under his housekeeper Sancha’s disapproving eyes, Marco took a bottle of wine from its bed of sawdust in the storeroom.
    â€œ At least take a glass with you,” she said, giving him no chance to sneak away with his vice. She reminded him uncomfortably of earlier, darker days. He dared a look in her eyes and saw no sadness this time. Maybe things weren’t as bad as he thought.
    He went to the sala and sank onto the banco against the wall. With a frown in the general direction of the kitchen, he popped the cork and drank from the bottle. Trouble was, tipping his head back put him in a direct line with Paloma’s bloody sandals tacked on the wall, testimony of her willingness to walk to a dangerous place to return his dog. After a year, the blood had turned to vague dark splotches, but he knew what it meant. He had married a brave woman. What would she think if she could see him drinking from the bottle in the sala ?
    He turned a little, not wanting such a visible reminder of bravery, not when he was feeling so weak and powerless. “How in the world can I protect you?” he murmured, supremely dissatisfied with himself.
    Marco took another swig from the bottle, then looked down in surprise to see Paloma’s cat twining around his ankles. Chica had arrived on the premises after Sancha shrieked about a mouse in the pantry. He had seen his lovely wife chatting with Señora Chávez after Mass, and sure enough, soon after there was a kitten from the litter they had originally given to her when their barn cat died. Small world.
    Chica had a ball of yarn in her mouth, which she