by Day Leclaire
“Rafe is a man who briefly lost control of his life a long time ago. When he regained that control, he swore never to lose it again.”
“When was this?” she asked in confusion. “He never mentioned—”
“I’m not surprised. Perhaps someday he will. In the meantime, what you need to understand is when you love someone, you gift her with your heart and your body, even your soul. You are forever connected to that person, and therefore vulnerable. You can’t control what that person may choose to do with your gift.” He smiled, a sad, wise smile. “You’ve discovered that for yourself, haven’t you?”
The first hint of hope dawned in her gaze. “You think Rafe loves me, don’t you? But he denies it because it would mean giving up control.”
“I can’t answer that,” Donald admitted. “Only he can. But I do believe he needs you. And I think you may be the only one capable of reaching him.” He lifted a snowy eyebrow. “If that’s what you want.”
It didn’t take any thought. “It’s what I want,” she said without hesitation.
Her father smiled, giving her a quick hug. “In that case, you have a suitcase to pack and a flight to schedule.”
She gazed at him in wonder. “Yes, I believe I do.”
Rafe stood outside, staring up through the tropical foliage at a midnight moon. His thoughts were consumed by Ella. Always by Ella. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, cursing himself for a fool.
“I wish you’d put that thing out,” Shayne said, approaching from the direction of the house. “It’s going to ruin your health.”
He shrugged. “Death is inevitable.”
“Maybe so,” she said, linking arms with him. “But you don’t need to hasten its arrival.”
He dropped his cigarette butt to the ground and extinguished it beneath his boot heel. “What keeps you up so late, hermanita?”
“I’m worried about you. You’ve been so distant. So closed in. And I wondered if it might not have something to do with this.” She caught his hand in hers, running a finger over the crude wedding ring he still wore. “You’ve never explained its presence, you know.”
“There’s nothing to explain.”
“But you’re married, aren’t you?”
He hesitated briefly before giving a curt nod. “It need not concern you. The marriage is a temporary measure.”
“Your ring has a familiar design.” She glanced at him from beneath her lashes. When he kept stubbornly silent, she prompted, “It’s made from a ticket to the Cinderella Ball, isn’t it? My ticket?”
He didn’t bother with pointless denials. “Yes, it’s yours.”
“And who wears the other?” When he didn’t answer, she closed her eyes. Moments later her breath caught. “Oh, dear heavens. You married Ella, didn’t you?”
“As I have said, this does not involve you,” he said quietly. “All that matters is I have put an end to them, Shayne. Soon there will be no more balls to tempt you.”
“I don’t care about the balls. I care about Ella. How could you?” she demanded. “How could you do that to her?”
“There was no other option.” He thrust a hand into his pocket, dragging free the crumpled pack of cigarettes. Only one remained. He lit it, drawing the acrid smoke deep into his lungs. “I married her. And I left her, taking with me her hopes and her dreams, leaving behind pain and despair.” He tilted his head to one side, his expression colder than the icy peaks of Mt. Everest. “It was a fair exchange, don’t you think?”
“Why, Rafe?” Shayne unhooked her arm from his and swiveled to face him. “Was it really necessary to hurt her?”
“It was the only way.”
“But to hurt Ella, of all people.” For the first time in years, he saw temper flash in her dark, liquid gaze. “I think I hate you for that, Rafe.” Without another word, she turned and stormed back to the house.
“It’s all right, mi pequeña.” He lifted the cigarette to his mouth and drew an uneven breath. “I would expect no less.”
Early in the afternoon of New Year’s Day, Ella pushed open the door exiting the Juan Santamaria International Airport in Costa Rica. Instantly, she found herself surrounded by a pack of young boys.
“Carry your bags, Señora?” the first asked, hefting a piece of her luggage.
“You need Tico money?” requested the next.
“Taxi?” offered still another.
She glanced from one eager face to the next and smiled. “Yes, please.”
Two of the boys peeled off, scurrying to take care of her needs. The third gathered the rest of her bags. “You come this way,” he urged.
“Perhaps I should help you—”
He shot her a look of such indignation, she murmured a quick apology. “Come, Señora,” he repeated, jerking his chin in the direction of the curb.
She followed, feeling guilty at allowing a child barely ten years old to carry so much luggage. But glancing down the sidewalk, she realized it seemed to be the practice here. School-age children littered the area, all offering their assistance to arriving tourists.
Bright sunlight assaulted her eyes and she slipped on a pair of sunglasses and jammed a floppy straw hat onto her head. After living for so many years in Nevada, protecting her eyes and skin had become a habit.
“I need to take a cab or a bus to the town of . . .” She pulled a copy of Rafe’s marriage application from her purse and swiftly scanned it for the information she needed. “I need to get to the town of Milagro. Do you know where that is?”
“Sí.” He raised his voice, signaling to one of the boys who’d initially greeted her. “Diego! Ve, trae a Marvin.”
The boy who’d offered to exchange her money returned just then with a young man in his early twenties. “You wish to buy Tico money, Señora?” the latest arrival asked.
Tico, she remembered Rafe explaining, meant Costa Rican. “Oh, yes. Please.”
The transaction went smoothly, although she couldn’t help wondering if Rafe would consider it a foolish risk to use a moneychanger instead of a bank. No doubt she’d find out when next they spoke. By the time she’d tucked the thick wad of colones into her wallet, Diego showed up with the taxi driver in tow.
“Marvin, he take you to Milagro,” Diego said.
A wide grin split the cabbie’s face. “Sí, no problema. I live in Milagro.” He signaled the boys to load her luggage into the trunk of his dusty orange cab. “I get you there very fast.”
“Thanks. I’d appreciate that.”
Tipping each of the boys who’d helped her, far too much if their enthusiastic reactions were any indication, she climbed into the back of the taxi. They pulled around the circle fronting the airport and onto a highway heading away from San José. Ella leaned forward.
“Diego said your name was Marvin. That’s not a Tico name, is it?”
“Is Norte Americano.” He glanced in the rearview mirror, his dark eyes bright with amusement. “Mi madre give me this name. It makes las turistas laugh when they hear it so they remember and hire me again”
She returned his smile. “And does it work? Do you get more business than the other cabbies?”
“Two times as much,” Marvin boasted.
The highway narrowed as they continued toward the mountains. “How far is it to Milagro?” Ella questioned. “Will we be there soon?”
“Not far. Two, three horas. Más o menos.”
“Three hours!”
“Es problema?” He looked in the mirror again and stomped harder on the accelerator. “For you, Señora, I drive muy rapido. Very fast. But most the roads, they are dirt and gravel. We go very fast, very slow so we miss all the holes. Okay?”
“No! That’s not what I meant.”
“It is not the roads that worry you?”
“No, not really.” Although right at this moment, they did. But only because he spent more time looking in the mirror at her than at the road in front of them. “You can slow down. I don’t mind.”
“It is t
he money that worries you?” he guessed shrewdly, his foot easing a fraction from the accelerator. “The price of my taxi?”
Ella sighed. “I guess we should have settled on a fare before we left the airport.”
“No problema,” he claimed, in what she was fast realizing must be a stock reply. “You give me all your colones and I drive you to Milagro.”
For one horrible, stomach-churning moment, all her worst nightmares about a woman alone in a foreign country sprang to life. Then Marvin began to chuckle.
“You’re kidding, right?” she asked, the faintness of her voice a dead giveaway.
His grin widened. “Sí.”
“Thank heavens.”
“Is good joke, yes? Very funny.”
She returned his smile. “Hysterical.”
“I no charge you much. I have to go to Milagro anyway. We share a ride. Okay?”
“Thanks, I appreciate that.”
“See those mountains?” He pointed in front of them toward a purple range of toothy crags. “We go there. I tell you all about them. You like that, yes?”
“I’d like that, thanks,” she confirmed.
“Okay. The mountains, they are made of volcanoes. You know about our volcanoes? It makes good soil for las fincas. These are farms. You understand?”
She nodded, doing her best to listen attentively. But the stress of the last several weeks had taken its toll. Only a dozen more sentences registered before exhaustion overcame her and she fell sound asleep.
The screeching of brakes brought Ella violently awake. Marvin jerked the wheel to one side to avoid a pothole, sending her tumbling from one end of the seat to the other.
Clipping the edge of a pit large enough to consume an entire fleet of trucks, they slewed precariously close to the edge of the gravel road. For a horrifying instant Ella stared out the window into a brilliant green abyss before Marvin brought the taxi back to the middle of the single lane. Struggling to right herself, she shoved the straw hat off her face and repositioned the sunglasses from the tip of her nose to the bridge.
“Ah, Señora. You are awake,” he greeted her. “This is good.”
“I—I must have been more tired than I’d realized.” Insomnia had a way of doing that, she’d discovered over the past two months. “Have I been sleeping long?”
“Long time, but that is good. We get to Milagro very soon now.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful.”
“See the coffee fields?” He waved his hand out the open window toward a blur of bright green they were passing at top speed.
She peered curiously at the tall bushlike trees, the first she’d ever seen. They climbed the hillside at an almost vertical slant. How anyone could possibly pick the bright red berries clustered among the shiny leaves, she couldn’t begin to imagine.
“You are visiting someone in Milagro?” Marvin asked. “I know ever’body. I take you there.”
“No problema, right?” she teased. “Actually, I’m here to see my husband.”
Marvin swiveled to stare, his amazement almost comical. “You have a husband in Milagro?”
“His name is Rafe Beaumont. Do you know him?”
The words had no sooner left her mouth than Marvin slammed on the brakes and jerked hard on the wheel in an exact reenactment of his earlier maneuver. With a painful squeal, the taxi skidded to a halt at the side of the road. He jumped out of the car, his Spanish coming in such a torrent, she didn’t have a hope of deciphering so much as a word.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” she demanded.
He pointed at the coffee fields on the opposite side of the road, then said Rafe’s name before launching into another irate deluge of Spanish. The way he practically spat out her husband’s name suggested Marvin might be even more ticked off with Rafe than she was. With a final exclamation of fury, he circled the cab and threw open the trunk.
This could not be good.
Ella bolted from the backseat just in time to see him dumping her luggage on the side of the road. “Hey, wait a minute! You can’t do that.”
Marvin set his chin at a belligerent angle. “Sí, I can do that.” He kept offloading her bags. “Y tambien...sí, I keep doing it.”
She grabbed the nearest bag and tossed it back into the trunk, reloading as quickly as he unloaded. “What happened?” she panted. “What did I say?”
“Lo siento,” he claimed, in what was clearly a lie. As far as she could tell, he didn’t look the least bit sorry at all. “I cannot take you to Milagro.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Is your fault, okay?” He stopped unloading and faced her, planting his hands on his hips. “Your husband. You no tell me who he is.”
“My fault!” She imitated his stance, fighting for breath in the higher elevation. “How was I to know it would make a difference? What does it matter if Rafe Beaumont is my husband? What did he do to you?”
“Not to me. Mi sobrino. My nephew. He fire Manuel.”
“And because of that, you can’t take me to Milagro?”
“Sí. It would be an insult to Manuel.”
“How would it be an insult?” she questioned in exasperation. He didn’t answer, simply went back to offloading her luggage. She hastened to switch tactics. “Look, you can’t just strand me here on the side of the road. No one knows I’m coming.”
Marvin’s head emerged from the trunk to peer at her. “Señor Beaumont? Does he not know?”
“I wanted to surprise him.” She pressed her advantage, small as it was. “What if no one else comes along to help me? Or what if the person who does come decides to rob me? Then it’ll be your fault.”
He hesitated. Clearly it went against the grain to leave a woman in such a precarious situation. “I cannot take you. It is a matter of honor. Comprende, Señora?”
“No! I don’t understand.”
“You are his wife. His honor is your honor.”
“Whatever Rafe has done has nothing to do with me, honor or no honor.” She folded her arms across her chest. “And consider one more thing. If you think you had trouble with my husband before, it will be nothing compared to the trouble you have with him after this.”
Marvin launched into another incomprehensible tirade. Finally, he calmed enough to say, “I go to Milagro and send someone for you. It is best I can do. You wait here.”
She glared at him, though with her sunglasses concealing her eyes, it lost most of its effectiveness. “Where would I go?”
“You wait here,” he repeated. “Someone come very soon.”
He climbed back into the cab and gunned the engine. Skidding away from the side of the road in a thick cloud of dust, he promptly dropped his rear wheel into a pothole. This one didn’t appear quite large enough to swallow entire trucks, but it was sufficient to bring the cab to a grinding halt. Once again Marvin jumped from the vehicle, roundly cursing his fate and, if she didn’t miss her guess, her, as well.
“It’s your own fault,” Ella told him. She pulled off her straw hat and used it to swipe at the dust clinging to her white sundress. To her dismay she only managed to transform the accumulated grime from ugly brown speckles to uglier brown streaks. Damn! “You shouldn’t have left me behind. It’s . . . it’s divine retribution.”
He scowled at the buried wheel, then at her. “You push, okay?”
She stared at him for a full minute. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
His chin poked out again. “I do not kid with you. You push the car or I forget to send help from Milagro.”
“I don’t believe this.” She tossed her hat in the direction of her luggage. “Buster, you just lost yourself a really good tip.”
“Okay, but you push.”
A big, fat raindrop plummeted from the sky, splattering in the dusty road midway between them. They both looked up at the same instant. Thick black clouds roiled above them, blotting out the brilliant blue sky. A chilly wind caught at her loose hair whipping the ebony strands across her throat and
face. For an endless moment neither of them moved.
“Uh-oh,” Marvin understated their predicament.
“That does it.” Ella crossed to where her luggage had been dumped and seated herself on the largest of the suitcases. She removed the sunglasses she no longer needed and dropped them into her purse. Then she fixed Marvin with the steely gaze she’d learned so well from Rafe. “I’m not moving until you agree to take me to Milagro with you. If I’m going to get soaked, so are you.”
He stared at her, his mouth dropping open. “Madre de Dios! La Estrella!”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“La Estrella! You are La Estrella.”
“No, I’m Ella Beaumont.”
“Sí, sí. Señora Beaumont.” He bobbed his head up and down and beamed as though she were the answer to all his prayers. “La Estrella. Lo siento, Estrella. I did not know it was you.”
She regarded him with deep suspicion. “Who is this Estrella person?”
“It is you. You are la profecía.”
“The prophecy?”
“Sí. The prophecy.” He slanted a nervous glance skyward. “Hurry, please. The rain come very hard. We must go.”
Ella gnawed on her lower lip. She didn’t have a clue what had just happened, but she’d be a fool not to take advantage of it. “Load my luggage first.”
“And then you push, yes?”
“You won’t leave me?”
He covered his heart with his hand. “My word of honor, Estrella.”
By the time the luggage had been returned to the trunk, it had begun to rain in earnest. Within seconds, she was soaked through, her hair plastered to her neck and the side of her face. Great. Now she’d show up on Rafe’s doorstep looking little better than the proverbial drowned rat.
Marvin climbed behind the wheel of the taxi and peered back at her. “Push, Estrella. Push!”
Flattening her palms against the filthy rear panel, she obediently shoved with all her strength. The wheel spun, kicking up a stream of mud and grit that covered her from head to toe. Just as her strength gave out, the cab bounced free. With the abrupt loss of support, Ella fell forward, plunging into the mud and water choked pothole. With a shriek of frustration, she scrambled out the other side, minus one sandal.