Publisher's Weekly
The Texas desert is an apt setting for Ryan's ( Silken Bondage ) arid 19th-century romance with its cartoon villains and mystical tricks. Amy Sullivan and Luiz Quintano are exploring the delights of first love when their fathers, joint owners of a prosperous ranch, die within days of each other. Amy's brothers, unwilling to share the wealth with an ''uppity half-breed'' (Luiz is half-Aztec), whip him and leave him in the desert to die. Luiz's mother, however, is a goddess, who takes revenge by drying up the spring supplying the ranch's water. He returns triumphantly 10 years later as El Capitan and billets his Mexican soldiers on the ranch. Believing she had been complicit in his earlier torture, this ''master of loving'' makes Amy a ''sexual captive in her own home'' as they play out sexual domination/submission scenes (usually in a bedroom, but once in the stables, where they tie themselves together and mate like horses). Eventually, Luiz and Amy rediscover the affection buried under their considerable lust, and Amy reveals the secret she has kept for a decade.