Spanish Serenade by Jennifer Blake

a trap at their first meeting. It could well appear that the trap had closed.
    Lifting her skirts, she took a step into the darkness. Charro straightened from where he slouched against the doorframe. “Wait, señorita,” he said, an urgent sound in his voice. “You don't know what you're doing. You'd fare better facing a band of Tejas country Apache in war paint than going out there.”
    “That may be,” she said over her shoulder, “but I have to go.” Without looking back, she moved away into the night.
    She couldn't find him. She circled the hut, moving a few yards at a time before stopping to listen, then taking another few steps and listening again. Returning to the place she had started, some hundred yards from the front of the hut, she turned in a slow circle, her every sense alert for movement. She probed the shadows under the scattered trees and scanned the rocks silhouetted against the night sky. She even breathed the soft night breeze for a scent. There was nothing. Nothing moved, not a night creature, not a tree branch. The very light of the stars in the velvet-lined dome overhead seemed stationary and unblinking.
    Long moments passed. Finally, Pilar began to walk again, straight ahead. She penetrated farther and farther into the darkness, until she began to wonder if she could find her way back to the hut. But as she paced, the first inkling of a suspicion came to her. It grew inside her, formed partly of instinct and partly of acquired knowledge of the man she sought. She walked on another step, and another. She slowed, stopped.
    She stood unmoving, almost without breathing. When the silence had stretched to its greatest depth, when the stillness around her was near unbearable and the darkness seemed to be closing in, ready to smother her, she knew.
    “If you touch me I may well scream,” she said. “Not, you understand, from surprise or even fear, but from sheer vexation.”
    “Who would hear? Or hearing, come?” he answered from so close behind her that his warm breath disturbed the hairs on the back of her neck.
    “No one, of course. But I would hate to waste the energy when I have so little left.”
    “You have my sympathy. But that was what you came to offer me, wasn't it?”
    “In part. For the rest, I wanted to explain about Vicente.”
    The choice of words was wrong; she knew it the instant they left her tongue. She expected violence, an explosion of wrath and denial. Instead, she felt him receding from her, leaving her.
    She swung around, crying out, “Wait! I know I've involved you in something far bigger than I expected, but I give you my word I didn't intend it. And I swear that I never meant that Vicente should be caught in it. Please believe me.”
    “I believe you. If it were otherwise, you would never have been left at my mercy. Assuming that Don Esteban would value you as an accomplice, of course. There is the possibility that you have merely been deserted.”
    “I assure you—”
    “There is also the chance that I am meant to use you for my retaliation, meant to injure you, brand you, ravish you in the wildness of my rage. The temptation to return the transgression committed against my sister must be strong, must it not? More than that, it would serve to blacken the polish on the country legends, so that there would be less hue and cry if my body were to be found hanging at some remote crossroad.”
    The even, expressionless sound of his voice as he laid the potential in the situation bare sent a chill to the core of Pilar's being. She opened her mouth to refute it, but his words continued without pause, relentless in their logic.
    “The situation is not quite the same. My sister was seduced away from her home by a mad attraction to Don Esteban's son, in addition to a head full of romantic ideals inspired by Shakespeare's tragedies and a family inclination toward self-sacrifice. She meant to heal the rift, you see? When she discovered the depths of her error, she was