by Brenda Novak
“Cierra?”
Jumping to her feet, she grabbed her rag and the polish and tried to squeeze past him to go to her room, as he’d requested, but he stepped in front of her, blocking the way.
Assuming he expected an apology or an explanation, she scrambled to offer one. “I—I am sorry. I just want…perfect.” She gave him a hopeful smile. “You comprende?”
He stared at her until her smile wilted and her cheeks began to burn. She’d used a pencil to put up her hair so she could keep it out of her way while she worked. Maybe he thought she’d been presumptuous in taking it from his kitchen drawer without asking.
Pulling it from her hair, she held it out to him. “Is this it? Is this why you are angry?”
“I’m not angry. And why would I care about a pencil?”
When she had no answer, he shook his head and his gaze lowered to her clothes.
Painfully aware that they didn’t fit her very well, especially since she’d lost weight, Cierra bent to dust the dirt off her knees. “I will wash up,” she promised.
Taking her hand, he put back the pencil and closed her fingers around it. “You deserve better,” he said gruffly, and walked to the living room.
* * *
THE CABIN SMELLED FANTASTIC, so fantastic Ken couldn’t concentrate on the game. Tony Romo was launching a pretty convincing attack against his former teammates, and yet he cared more about what was going on in the kitchen. And Brent seemed just as restless.
“Hey, can you quit it?” Ken asked. “I’m trying to watch the game.”
Looking at the football he’d been tossing back and forth as if he hadn’t even realized he was doing it, Brent threw it aside and Ken tried once again to focus on the drive the Cowboys were putting together. They’d already marched down the field to the thirty-yard line; a field goal could win the game. But it was no use. Inevitably, his thoughts wandered back to Cierra.
“Do you think she’s okay in there?” Clearly Brent was preoccupied with the same thing. It’d taken Cierra all of twenty-four hours to win his undying loyalty. But Brent was an easy sell. He always had been. He was Russ’s biggest champion, wasn’t he? The only person Russ hadn’t chased away over the years.
“She’s fine,” Ken said. And it was true—at least while she was here. But how long could he look out for her? She wasn’t like a stray dog. He couldn’t keep her forever. What would happen when he ran out of work for her to do? And how come she was wandering around the mountains of Idaho, penniless and homeless, in the first place?
She was proud, beautiful, capable. It didn’t make sense that a woman like that couldn’t provide for herself…somehow, even if she was an illegal alien. Heck, she could find a man to take care of her if she wanted. What had brought her to America on her own? Had she gotten involved in drugs and wound up homeless? Been tossed out on the street by an abusive husband or father who’d enticed her here? Been kidnapped in Mexico, smuggled into the States and sold into sexual slavery, from which she’d recently escaped?
He recalled her bold assertion that she was no prostitute. He couldn’t imagine a former sex slave coming up with that. But she didn’t seem the type to do drugs—or smuggle them, either.
The wind whistled through the eaves. Brent must’ve heard it, too, because he gazed toward the picture window, which looked out onto the front porch. “Another storm’s coming in.”
“I can hear it.” The impatience in his tone surprised him. But he didn’t want to talk about the weather. He didn’t want to talk at all. “Are you watching this game with me or what?”
Obviously offended by the sharpness of his words, Brent glared at him. “I’m sitting here with you, aren’t I?”
That hardly answered his question, but he had no right to take his bad mood out on his little brother. He wasn’t even sure what had made him so irritable.
Blowing out a sigh, Ken got to his feet. “Right. Yeah. Forget it. I’m just pissed that the Jets are losing. Want a beer?”
Reluctant to forgive him that easily, Brent shrugged. “I guess.”
“I’ll grab one,” he said, and escaped to the kitchen.
Cierra had stopped cleaning, but she was cooking. She’d nearly died from hypothermia yesterday, yet he couldn’t get her to rest. She insisted that she “owed” him so many hours, as if it’d cost him a huge amount to give her a few meals and a place to stay.
She had her back to him when he entered the room. Apparently, she hadn’t heard his approach, which gave him a second to watch her. She was tired, as he’d guessed. She’d dragged a chair over to the stove so she could sit in between stirring whatever she’d put on the burner, and she kept rubbing her temples as if she had a headache.
The floor creaked beneath his weight and she tried to hide her fatigue by jumping to her feet and shoving the chair back under the table. “You are hungry, yes? It is almost finish.” She spoke with more cheer than she could possibly feel, considering her fatigue and the headache.
He walked over to peek into the frying pan, which contained ground beef mixed with onions, eggs and other things he didn’t immediately recognize. “Smells good.”
“Empanadas. You have tried?”
“No.”
“You will like. Soon you will eat.”
Going to the cabinet, where he’d lined up his vitamins, supplements and protein powder only a few hours earlier, he found the Tylenol and shook a couple of tablets into his hand. Following a particularly rough football game, he took four to help with the aches and pains. But she weighed half of what he did.
Together with a glass of water, he handed them to her. “Swallow these. They’ll stop your headache.”
“Oh. Sí. Ouch.” She tapped her skull with one finger and smiled to let him know she understood and appreciated the kindness. “Gracias.”
He’d come in to ask her to level with him, to tell him exactly where she was from and what had brought her to Dundee. But knowing her situation would create a commitment of sorts, which was why he hadn’t insisted on the truth so far. Why get any more involved than he already was? If she was an illegal alien, as he suspected, he’d have a duty to report her. But he didn’t want to do that. It was Christmastime, for crying out loud. And maybe there was a good reason she’d left her own country. He didn’t want to judge.
“Better,” she said, even though the painkiller couldn’t have worked yet, and put the glass in the dishwasher.
“Right. Everything’s fine with you, perfect.” If she could convince him of that maybe he wouldn’t ask questions. Was that what she thought?
He knew she’d correctly interpreted his tone when a hint of wariness entered her eyes. But that only heightened his curiosity. Why was she so cautious, so secretive about her past? What was she afraid of? Deportation? Or was it something worse? He couldn’t say, but she definitely didn’t believe she could trust anyone—including him. “Sí. I am fine,” she said stiffly.
This was getting him nowhere. He couldn’t even decide how hard he should push her, which added to his frustration.
Heading to the fridge, he got the cold beer he’d promised Brent, but didn’t return to the living room. His new housekeeper wasn’t someone life had chewed up and spit out. No doubt she’d hit a rough patch, but she didn’t fit the drug addict/sex slave scenarios he’d concocted. She wasn’t crazy or emotionally broken or undesirable. Just the opposite seemed true. So why was she in her current predicament?
“Cierra?”
No answer. She’d gone back to stirring the food as if it required all of her attention.
“Cierra,” he repeated.
She didn’t face him, but at least she responded. “Yes?”
“Look at me.”
Setting the lid on the pan, she turned but there was no mistaking her reluctance to confront him. “Soon, you will eat.”
Another attempt at diversion. She knew he hadn’t been about to ask for dinner. “Someone, somewhere, must be looking for you,” he said.
Her
knuckles whitened on the spatula in her hand but she shook her head. “No. No one.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Why not?”
He stepped closer, couldn’t help testing her. She’d certainly kept to herself and out of his way so far. But she seemed to understand that he was challenging her and stood resolute, almost defiant, as she stared up at him. It was that fearless quality, along with her stubborn pride and her work ethic, that made him admire her, although she had nothing other than her beauty, not even a decent set of clothes, to suggest she should be admired.
“A woman like you…she doesn’t get forgotten, doesn’t go unnoticed.”
“A woman like me?”
“A woman as beautiful as you.”
She wasn’t flattered; she knew he was merely stating a fact. Her only reaction seemed to be worry. “I will leave. Soon.”
“I’m not asking you to leave. I just want to know who’s looking for you.”
“No one.” She threw her spatula aside. “The man who wanted to marry me is dead, okay?”
Ken was doing exactly what he’d told himself not to do—digging into her past—but what she’d revealed demanded a follow-up. The man who’d wanted to marry her was dead? “When?”
“It has been three weeks.”
Then why did she show so little emotion? Hadn’t she cared for him? “Where? In Vegas?”
“Sí.”
“How’d he die?”
“A…stroke?”
Ken had expected an accident or a gang shooting, the type of death more common to younger men. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard of someone under thirty dying of a stroke. “Was it some…rare disease that caused it?”
“He had a bad heart, and—” she struggled to remember the word “—diabetes?”
“I’m sorry to hear that. How old was he?”
“Seventy-four.”
Ken made no effort to conceal his surprise or his disgust. “No…”
Her eyes flashed with anger. “Sí.”
“You were going to marry a seventy-four-year-old man? What are you, twenty-five? That’s sick!”
Moving toward him instead of away, she lost the demure expression she’d adopted the past twenty-four hours—that of a housekeeper staying in the background, doing her work—and pounded a finger into his chest as if she was every bit his equal. “It is easy to judge when you have always had everything, is it not?” she snapped, and presented her back to him as she once again resumed cooking.
CHAPTER SIX
“WHAT DID YOU DO to her?”
Ken looked over at his brother. They’d eaten dinner and were back in front of the TV, but since the game was over, they were channel-surfing, looking for a movie or some other show to entertain them. “Who?”
“Cierra.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, but he did. During dinner, Cierra had been far friendlier to Brent and had positively beamed when he complimented her cooking. But, other than to set a plate in front of Ken, she’d barely acknowledged him.
“I think she’s mad,” Brent explained.
Reclining his chair, Ken crossed his feet at the ankles. “She’s tired. And too proud for her own good.”
Brent punctuated his response with a laugh. “And you’re not?”
Ken clicked to a different station. “It’s not the same thing.”
“Sure it is. And maybe pride is all she has. Did you ever think of that? Why else would she guard it so fiercely?”
For once in his life, Brent had made a profound statement. Ken knew that comments like this stemmed from his little brother’s sympathy for Russ, and his bitterness over the fact that Ken didn’t share that sympathy. But just because he expected people to eventually get control of their lives didn’t mean he had no empathy for their struggles. He was tired of being disappointed, that was all. How many chances did a person deserve? How many had Russ already wasted?
“She’ll be fine in the morning.” Tossing his brother the remote, he got out of his chair. “I’m ready for bed.”
“What are you going to do about her?” Brent asked before he could leave the room.
Ken hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“She needs help.”
“I know she needs help. What do you think I’m doing? I don’t typically have the average homeless person move in with me, even at Christmas.”
Lowering his eyes, Brent fidgeted with the remote. “But…this might not be a quick fix. I’m worried that you’ll run out of patience. You’re always so big on getting everyone to quit enabling others. And it’s not like I can do anything for her. I’m just a starving student. I’ll be heading back to school after the holidays.”
They weren’t really talking about Cierra, or not entirely. They were back to Russ again, the one subject they needed to avoid. So how did he respond? Most of his life he’d spent trying to figure out where caring and helping crossed the line to become detrimental to the recipient—and he still didn’t have all the answers. “Dundee’s fairly small,” he said. “We’ve got to be able to find the place she was supposed to go. Now that I’ve gotten settled, I’ll head to town in the morning and get it sorted out. Want to come along?”
Brent frowned. “I do. But I’ve already arranged with Gabe to paint that extra room in Mom’s photography studio. It’s a surprise for Christmas. Do you think you can handle it alone? Or maybe wait another day?”
Ken didn’t want to wait. There was something about this woman that threatened him in a way he couldn’t define. Maybe it was fear that he’d become even more responsible for her than he already felt. Or that he’d be tempted to enjoy more than her cooking and cleaning… “No, it’s fine.”
Brent stopped him again. “Ken?”
What now? Sometimes, Ken didn’t like seeing himself through his younger brother’s eyes. Brent perceived him as an authority figure, someone who was too old for his years, too disciplined, too unyielding. But Ken had had to be tough to survive, to be what their mother had needed him to be before she met Gabe. Brent had needed him then, too, although he didn’t fully understand the dynamic that had created the differences between them. “What?”
“What if it isn’t possible? What if you can’t find where she belongs?”
“I will.” Russ was enough of a challenge. With any luck Cierra would be staying somewhere else by tomorrow night.
* * *
HE FOUND WHAT HE WAS looking for so easily Ken almost couldn’t believe it. Assuming he’d have a long day ahead of him, he’d left Cierra at the cabin where it was warm before dropping Brent off in town, but the search had taken only two hours. For one, thanks to the steepness of the mountain, there hadn’t been as many turnoffs as he’d expected. He’d tried two or three, the ones closet to town, and eventually found the fork in the road someone had mentioned to her. Than, bam, the numbers she’d recited to him were there, affixed to a battered mailbox dangling from a wooden post.
Snow covered the driveway, left so long it’d hardened. Ice crunched beneath his boots as he made his way to the front door. But just because the walks hadn’t been shoveled recently—maybe never?—didn’t mean anything. The cabin was more of a shack, in poor repair, but that could be the very reason the owner needed to hire help. Perhaps he or she planned to clean it up….
Or…maybe this wasn’t the right place, after all.
It fit all the parameters he’d been given, but Ken hoped there was another house in the mountains surrounding Dundee with 11384 in the address because it didn’t appear that anyone was living here. A small, one-car garage leaned into the cabin. Assembled out of various building materials from bricks to corrugated metal to fencing material, it looked like a junkyard creation, a haphazard afterthought. And, judging by the snow piled against it, the door hadn’t been lifted in some time.
Heavy drapes, closed tightly over the windows, made the cabin itself seem dark and empty. There were no Christmas lights, no decorations
at all. But it was a remote location, a small outpost built on the same mountain as the property he’d just bought from Gabe. It didn’t really make sense to decorate when there wasn’t anyone around to see the result. He didn’t have any lights up, did he?
As soon as Ken raised his hand to knock, the curtain moved, telling him someone was home. Whoever it was had peeked out at him. But that same someone seemed reluctant to open the door.
Trying to be polite, he waited a minute or two before knocking again. Then he called out, “Hey, I know you’re in there. I’m not here to bother you or cause any trouble. I just need to talk to you about a young Latina woman who’s been looking for this place.”
“What’s her name?” a male voice responded.
Whether or not he’d be admitted seemed to depend on his answer. “Cierra Romero.”
There were several thumps and other noises. When the door eventually opened, Ken realized it’d taken so long because the gaunt, fifty-something man staring out at him had been busy shoving stacks of junk out of the way so he could reach the entry.
What kind of person barricaded himself inside his own house? Ken wondered. Then it dawned on him that he’d met this man before—many times, although he hadn’t paid much attention back then. Mr. Baker had been the janitor when he attended Dundee High School. According to town gossip, he’d been fired several years ago for cornering a female student in the bathroom and trying to feel her up.
Was that true? The question itself was enough to give Ken pause.
“My sister called me, said she was coming.” Deep-set, bloodshot eyes peered out of a skeletal face as Baker craned his neck, searching for Cierra in Ken’s SUV. When he didn’t see her, he did what he could to smooth down his hair, which was standing up as if he’d just rolled out of bed. “Where is she? It’s a cold winter. I could use the company.”
Company… The scents emanating from the cabin threatened to turn Ken’s stomach. Alcohol. Urine. And cats. Lots of cats. “She, um, she—” Somehow Ken couldn’t bring himself to divulge Cierra’s location. Not yet. He had too many questions that needed answering. “You mentioned your sister,” he said, changing gears midsentence. “Where does she live?”