The Abducted Heart (Sweetly Contemporary Collection) (18 page)

In her mind’s eye she could see Irene moving into Ramón’s arms, her head thrown back and a rapt expression in her narrow brown eyes. Despite the woman’s personality, despite what she had tried to do, there could be no doubt that she cared for Ramón. With the same nationality as his, the same language and customs and circle of friends, there could be little doubt also that she would make him a suitable wife. If she was strong-willed, well, so was he. She would not disgrace him by wearing the wrong clothes or choosing the wrong set of friends. Mingling his blood with hers would help to obliterate the American strain in his bloodline, which he so despised. Their children...

“So! This is where you have hidden yourself away.”

Startled, Anne opened her eyes to find Irene standing in the lounge doorway. The Mexican girl let the heavy panel fall shut and sauntered toward her.

“You will be happy to know, Señorita Matthews, that Ramón is looking for you. He sent me — me! — as a messenger to tell you he is ready to leave. But first there is something we must discuss, you and I.”

Anne got to her feet. Looking around for a waste basket, she disposed of the paper cup she still held. “I know of nothing,” she said.

Stepping around the other girl, she moved toward the door.

Irene swung around, her voice rising. “Don’t you? Don’t you indeed! Well, that’s too bad. I have something to say to you concerning this marriage, and you will listen.”

Anne pushed open the door. “I think not,” she said softly and went out, letting it fall to behind her.

She had not gone more than a step before the other girl came catapulting out of the lounge.

“And I say yes, you will listen!” she screamed. “You stupid little fool, what do you know of love, or of the deep passions of our race? What do you have to give a man like Ramón Castillo? There is no fire under your sweet paleness; you will bore him within a year. And then what? Your face will mock him with memories of his mother’s disgrace. You will find no happiness because he will have none. What good will all his money do you when you find your husband hates you? What can you do, except look elsewhere and bring scandal and tragedy down upon the Castillo house once more, as did that other pale American, his mother? We have long memories here in Mexico. Everywhere you look you will find someone who knows who you are, and what happened to one of your kind in the past. And so everywhere you will find your future, waiting.”

Frowning, Anne said slowly, “The future is fresh and new — it does not depend on the past. But I wonder how much you and your kind, with your pessimism and disapproving faces and dire warnings had to do with what happened to Ramón’s mother. There is also this: A woman pressured and scorned on all sides may have an affair, but she does not have one alone. There is always a man in it somewhere who must share the blame.”

Her face contorted, Irene cried, “My father was not to blame! He was a victim of that she-devil!”

“Oh yes! A victim who was, of course, lured aboard his own yacht at Acapulco?”

“How dare you!” she shouted, her eyes blazing and her fingers curling into claws as she advanced on Anne. “How dare you suggest such a thing!”

The need to strike out at her was plain in every line of Irene’s body. Anne stood her ground, determined not to flinch or move. What she had said was no more than the truth and she would retract not a word of it.

Just as Irene reached her, a man moved from the outer hallway to stand quietly at Anne’s side.

The Mexican woman halted as if she had stepped into an electric fence.

“I can see you delivered my message, Irene,” Ramón said, irony lacing his even tone. “My thanks. Anne, darling, are you ready to leave?”

“Yes, Yes, I am,” Anne answered dazedly, as she felt his fingers warm and firm at her elbow.

“Then all that remains is to pay our respects to our hostess and go.” With a nod in Irene’s direction that was considerably less polite than his tone, he swung around, and with Anne beside him, walked away.

A gust of wind lifted the tendrils of hair about Anne’s face as she stepped out of the car onto the front drive. The Castillo house loomed large and dark before them, shadows moving under the entrance arcade as the wrought-iron lantern left alight there swayed in the wind.

Anne shivered a little as she passed before Ramón into the house. It was not the tension of the impending storm which gripped her, however, but something far different. Ramón had said almost nothing on the drive home. How much he had overheard of the conversation with Irene she could not tell; she suspected it was no small amount. She had waited for him to make some comment, but he had not. She would almost have preferred him to lash out at her, condemning her for discussing his private affairs, for giving her opinion on matters which she was ill prepared to judge. Anything would have been better than the endless, nerve-wracking quiet.

The stained-glass lantern sprang to life in the entrance hall. Tonight there was no Maria waiting up for them; she had given up her nightly vigils in the last few days.

Ramón locked the front door behind them, then paused with his hand on the light switch, looking up at Anne who was already halfway up the stairs.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked. “I gave orders to have a percolator left ready in the library.”

Anne retraced her steps with a certain wariness. The coffee sounded lovely — it was the purpose behind it which troubled her.

In the study Ramón plugged in the coffee pot. There was only one cup and saucer on the tray, so while it heated he went to find another.

Anne moved to the french window at the far end of the room and, pulling aside the heavy drapes, looked out. The library was one of the rooms which opened out onto the central patio. The center square was dark and still within the protecting walls — then, as she watched, lightning flared. For a blinding instant it filled the patio with a yellow-blue glow, outlining the leaves of plants and trees and the forms of containers and statues with cool fire. Thunder, deadened by the thick walls of the house, followed within seconds. As if touched off in some way by the lightning, a reckless excitement gripped her. She could not possibly sleep in this kind of weather. Her headache was gone. Why shouldn’t she grasp at the last few hours remaining to her with the man she loved? What did it matter what he said to her? He did not realize the power he had to hurt her, nor would she allow him to guess at it, whatever he chose to accuse her of. And why shouldn’t she say what she pleased also? She had no reason to fear physical retaliation. To be banished would be the worst punishment, and one she must endure anyway. When she was gone, nothing she had said would make any difference.

When Ramón entered the room she dropped the drape and turned with a smile. He placed the cup and saucer on the tray, then stood with one hand resting on the desk.

“I believe that I am indebted to you,” he said quietly.

Anne’s smile faded. “Indebted?” she said without comprehension.

“For defending my mother to Irene — and, just possibly, giving me a new slant on what I had been taught to think of as solely my mother’s indiscretions.”

It was the one reaction she had not considered. “I’m sorry if I interfered in something that was none of my business.”

“I imagine Estela told you?”

Anne nodded. “She seemed to think I had a right to know. Under the circumstances I could hardly tell her differently.”

“No, and I doubt if Irene gave you much more opportunity to deny any interest.”

Again she agreed with a shake of her head.

“You see? I’m not an unreasonable man. As I told you, I’m grateful for it. I have always been led to believe, you know, that my mother was in the wrong in what she did, and my father completely in the right. It never occurred to me to question it, I’m ashamed to say. There is always the possibility that the version I was given was the correct one — but at least I will no longer condemn the woman who bore me without an attempt to discover the facts. I owe her that much.”

“I’m glad,” Anne said simply.

“Because she was an American?” he asked with the lift of a sardonic eyebrow.

Shielding her expression with her lashes she answered, “Not entirely, although I suppose that is part of it.”

“And the rest.”

“I think,” Anne said slowly, “that I feel a certain — kinship — with her. Our circumstances were not the same, of course,” she went on quickly, “but I think I can understand how she must have felt, alone here, without friends or relatives, tied to a man she did not love.”

A stiffness settled over Ramón’s features. “Yes,” he said, “even I can see how that might make a difference.”

The bubbling noise of the coffee pot provided a distraction. Seeing that the coffee was ready, Anne moved to pour out the steaming brew. Ramón took the cup she handed him with a preoccupied air, as if he had forgotten that it was the main purpose for their being there.

As Anne took up her own cup, lightning flashed once more outside the window. As if drawn by the flickering light, Ramón pushed open the french window and stepped outside, his cup in his hand.

The cool wind which swept into the room carried the damp earth smell of coming rain and brought the sound of thunder nearer. Anne could not resist following Ramón out into the darkness of the overhanging loggia. Another pulsing flash of lightning picked out his tall shape leaning against one of the stone columns. It seemed natural to settle against the next in line. In silence that was neither easy nor uneasy, they stood drinking their coffee, staring out into the tumultuous blackness of the night.

At last Ramón spoke. “So you think my mother made a bad bargain?”

“It would seem so,” she replied.

“Not even a millionaire’s wealth could make living in this country bearable?”

“Mexico is a beautiful country. It could be a wonderful place to live, if two people loved each other. If they didn’t, all the money in the world couldn’t make them happy together, here or anywhere else.”

Her voice carried a strong note of defiance because she knew he thought of her as a gold-digger, but he did not take up the challenge. His face in a blue-white glitter of lightning looked pale and bleak.

Lost in thought, her eyes dazzled by the bright glow and the mutter of thunder in her ears, Anne was not aware Ramón had moved until he loomed up beside her. He took the empty coffee cup from her hand and placed it with his own in a nearby stone trough filled with pansies. When his arms closed around her, a shiver of surprise and abrupt awareness of the chill in the air caught her and then his lips, bitter-sweet with the taste of coffee, were on hers. He teased her mouth with genre, experimental kisses, trailing fire across the curve of her cheek to her hairline. His arms tightened, his hands moved over her back, drawing her closer against him. “Anne,” he murmured, his voice low and husky, his breath warm against her neck. “Por Dios, I want you so.”

She tried to speak his name but his mouth captured her parted lips as he crushed her to him. His fingers cupped her chin, dropping to the tender hollow of her throat, then to the soft curves beneath the smooth silk of her bodice.

“I thought I could keep away from you, but I cannot. Somehow you have crept into my brain and my blood. Stay with me, Anne, mi alma. I will give you anything you ask, only stay with me.”

He had spoken no word of love. He had said he wanted her, no more than that. And in return he was prepared to give her anything she wanted — except himself. Despite everything she had said, he was offering to bribe her with his money! It should have been funny, that he would offer the one thing he had so despised the other women he had known for finding attractive. It was not. It was only painful that he could still think she would accept such an offer.

“Ramón—” she said, her breath catching on the pain caused by speaking his name. Tears that seemed to rise upward from her heart crowded into her throat.

“Yes, querida?”

“Please,” she whispered, pressing her hands against his chest.

The muscles of his arms were steely with resistance. Beneath her fingers she could feel the heavy beating of his heart and the abrupt cessation of his breathing. Suddenly she was free.

An absurd feeling that she should apologize touched her. She wished she could see his face instead of the dark, shadowed silhouette he presented in the faint light from the library.

Without warning the tension within her snapped. She whirled, pushing through the french window into the house. She thought she heard him call her name, but she did not stop. She could not. She had to reach her room before the blinding tears came and she could not find her way.

Nine