Elisa choked, almost spewing milk across the table.
Mami leaned over to pat her on the back. “Querida, take a deep breath.” She glared at Pap. “Ian, you have embarrassed la niña.”
“She’s not the one who should be embarrassed,” Pap said, impaling Del with a look. “What do you have to say, son? Are you going to honor your responsibilities and do right by this woman, or not?”
Del was trying. “Actually, Pap, that’s what we wanted to tell you. Elisa and I are—”
Mami raised her hands out to her sides and tipped her head to the heavens. Her smile lit up the room. “Of course they are getting married. They’re having a baby!” Tears flowing, she leaned over and kissed Elisa on both cheeks.
Elisa’s panic-stricken, dark eyes locked on Del’s like laser-guided missiles. He raised his eyebrows in defense.
“See how they look at each other?” Mami exclaimed, joy bursting from every word. “They are in love.”
Del cursed himself for losing control of the conversation. He should have known Mami and Pap would assume Elisa’s baby was his. What else would they think? He’d never brought a woman—any woman, much less one in her second trimester of pregnancy—home before.
Clearly, Elisa wanted him to straighten them out.
“Think of it, Ian,” Mami said, her hands clasped to her chest. “A grandchild. Our first grandchild.”
“Actually, the baby isn’t…” Del began, but hesitated. This was where he should do it. Tell his grandparents the baby wasn’t his. The marriage would be legal, but it wouldn’t be real. That Elisa only stayed with him because she feared for her baby’s life. That underneath the pleasant mask she’d donned for their benefit, she loathed the sight of him, and with good reason.
But looking at his grandparents now, he couldn’t do it. Satisfaction beamed from his grandfather’s face. Mami’s eyes shone with such unconditional love and acceptance that it made his chest ache. As a kid he used to wonder what he’d done to deserve that kind of love. To deserve them.
As an adult, he still didn’t know.
He did know they had faced a lot of sadness in their lives. He couldn’t shatter this moment of happiness, even if its source was only an illusion.
He met Elisa’s level gaze. Her nostrils flared. A warning? He sent a look he hoped she would recognize as a silent apology, and a plea…
“Actually, the baby isn’t your grandchild,” he finished the statement he’d started earlier, only not the way he’d originally planned. “It would be your great-grandchild.”
Elisa rose. Del held his breath, waiting for her to cut the hearts out of two of the finest people on Earth, but she merely turned her back on the table and took her empty glass to the sink.
“Ach, so it will. You were so young when you came to live with us that you’ve always been like a son.” Papi’s brogue was thicker than usual, choked with emotion. “And now we have a daughter, too.”
Judging by the way Elisa’s spine stiffened at Pap’s declaration, Del wasn’t so sure she agreed.
Chapter 6
“One hopscotch, two hopscotch, three hopscotch,” Del’s mother sang as she skipped her red checker across the board, stacking Elisa’s last black pieces beneath it as she went. “I win again.”
Elisa pulled her gaze from the baseball game playing out on the TV in the corner with the sound turned down, and frowned at the checkerboard.
“Don’t take it too hard, sweetie. You did good for a beginner. Del and Sammy have been trying to beat me since they learned to play in Bible camp three years ago, and they haven’t come as close as you did.” She looked toward the window. “Now where have those boys gotten to?”
“I’m here, Ma.”
The ranger’s voice, soft and heavy, fell on Elisa like a shower of tiny, electrified raindrops. It wasn’t like her to be so affected by something as mundane as a man’s voice, even if he had surprised her. Perhaps it was not the voice, but the sadness she heard in it. The humanity.
As she turned toward him, she rubbed the gooseflesh from her bare arms. She didn’t want to think of the ranger as human. Especially not after he had broken their agreement.
“Did Sammy come in with you?” his mother asked.
The shadow of his eyelashes fluttered on his cheek as he half closed his eyes. “No, Ma.”
“I’ll just go call him, then.” The ranger moved aside as his mother walked out. She laughed on her way past him, but it was an anxious sound. Her fingers twisted in the skirt of her cotton dress. “Boy’s prob’ly out chasin’ that old dog again.”
When Mrs. Cooper was gone, Elisa bent over the checkerboard and started picking up the pieces. She heard the shoosh of the ranger’s boots over the carpet. Felt the air compress around her as he drew up beside her. Watched her numb fingers give over the checkers without resistance when he gathered her hands in his.
In the place of the plastic game pieces, he put a steaming mug.
“From my grandmother. She says to drink as much of this as you can stand tonight, and tomorrow she’ll have a whole nutritional plan worked out for you.”
“You lied to them,” she said.
“Not exactly.” He sat on the floor, his long legs stretched out to one side and propped on his elbow, and motioned her toward the love seat. One by one, he set each checker in its place.
Incredulity spilled over her. “Then you misled them.”
He moved his first checker and gestured for her turn. “That’s what this marriage is about, isn’t it? Misleading people?”
“But these are your family.”
He sighed. “I tried to tell them the truth. I just…couldn’t. You saw how excited my grandmother was.”
Elisa contemplated the game a moment, then nudged a checker forward. “And when she does find out?”
“I’ve got two years to figure that out.”
“Maybe.” Del took his turn, and Elisa interpreted his strategy. He’d opened with a direct frontal assault. She would have expected no less. Countering with a flanking move, she said, “Your grandmother is very astute. Do you think she will not notice something is wrong before then?”
Del frowned in concentration, whether on the game or the discussion, Elisa could not tell. “We’ll just have to make it look real.”
Her stomach tumbled, imaging what it would be like even to pretend to be in love with him. She would have to talk to him, share long looks with him, touch him…
“It won’t be that bad,” he said, as if sensing the direction of her thoughts. “We don’t have to be together around them that much. Just holidays and such.”
“I would like to spend more time here,” she said before she realized she was speaking. In just a few short hours, she had come to respect the ranger’s grandparents. Rosario Cooper reminded her of home, and the elder women she had learned so much from in her village as a girl.
The ranger grinned over his next move. “They like you, too.”
“They do?” She hadn’t realized until then how much their acceptance meant to her. She still didn’t understand why. Like the ranger, they would be her family in name only. And only for two years.
With the weight of that knowledge rumbling through her like thunder down a mountain pass, she studied the checkerboard. The ranger had taken two of her men in a sneak attack. He was good. But she was better.
She proved it by winning their best three-of-five match in three straight games.
“I think I’ve been conned,” he said, falling backward and staring up at the ceiling.
His good-natured tone made her smile, just a little, even though she was still mad at him.
She folded the checkerboard and gathered the pieces. He sat up, opened the coffee table drawer where they were stored. When she slid the game inside, he nudged the drawer closed with his knee, took hold of her with his hand and turned her to him.
“Thank you,” he said simply.
She arched one eyebrow. “For beating you?”
“For not telling my grandparents the truth.” One corner of his mouth kicked up. “And for letting my mother win at checkers.”
Elisa pulled her hand away. “I am not without compassion.”
“No,” he answered quietly. “You’re certainly not.”
She wondered how he knew that. She certainly hadn’t shown him much of her softer side. Hadn’t seen much of it herself these last eight years.
Avoiding his gaze, she straightened the magazines on the coffee table, then when she couldn’t find anything else to fidget with, she settled herself on the love seat again. Something in the way he was looking at her evaporated her troubled thoughts like morning mist under the rising sun. But she gathered her wits, kicking off her sandals and pulling her feet up to the couch.
He’d opened a door, given her space to ask a personal question, and she did not intend to let the opportunity pass.
“What happened to her?”
“My mother?”
She nodded.
“She lost a lot of people she loved during her life, starting with her parents when she was just sixteen. I guess one day she just lost herself, as well.”
Dread knotted in Elisa’s chest. “Sammy?”
A darkness descended over the ranger’s features, like a candle suddenly snuffed. “My brother. Killed by a suicide bomber in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War.”
“He was a soldier?”
“We both were.”
Elisa tried to swallow and couldn’t. In San Ynez, the soldiers were even worse than the police. More corrupt. More violent.
The ranger’s grandfather had been a soldier, as had he and his brother. A legacy of violence.
And there was more, Elisa suspected from the degree of his mother’s devastation, though the loss of a child should be enough. “Your father?”
“Pilot. Drove an A-10—a tank killer—in Vietnam until he was shot down in ’68. Technically he’s still listed as MIA.”
“And the not knowing was harder on her than having a body to bury.”
Elisa was all too familiar with the plight of families left without closure. She’d seen too many of them in her country.
The ranger studied the carpet between his feet. Quiet surrounded the house—even the crickets had hushed for the night. “She thinks she still gets letters from him.”
The grate in his voice reminded her that he had lost much, too. A father, a brother, and a mother in a way.
“Sometimes when she gets upset at not hearing from him, I go and get one of his old letters out of the box she keeps upstairs and I read it to her.”
Elisa’s heart throbbed. Mesmerized by the story, by the depth of the emotion that resonated in its telling, she leaned forward.
He pinched his lips bloodless before he spoke again. “She never seems to notice that the envelope is already torn open or that she’s heard the words a hundred times before.”
Elisa reached out, but stopped short of touching him. Instead she rested her hand just beyond his splayed fingers. “You are a good son.”
“Am I?” Heat and light flashed from him like a small explosion. He leaned toward her, his palms supporting his weight on the table. “For letting her live in her goddamn fantasy world instead of shaking her back to reality?”
Elisa reared back, not just from his fury, but to make the sign of the cross and wing a quick prayer of forgiveness heavenward.
He rolled his head back and scrubbed his hands over his face, muffling something she suspected would require more than a quick prayer to be forgiven.
“You’re a real stickler on the swearing thing, aren’t you?”
“It is the way I was raised.”
A breath sagged out of him. “It’s the way I was raised, too. Guess I’d just forgotten.”
He stood and offered her a hand. “I’ll try to remember from now on.”
Once he had lifted her to her feet, he lingered with her hand in his. She wondered if he could feel the way her pulse spiraled at his touch.
“If you’re up to it tomorrow,” he said, “we’ll go into town, apply for a marriage license, get blood tests.”
Her pulse went from spiraling to bounding. Her stomach sank in on itself, but she held her ground.
The ranger’s gaze met hers, solid as rock. “We’ll be married before the week is out.”
Elisa woke as she had each morning at the Cooper farm, enamored with the crinkle of fresh linens under her cheek, the smell of freshly brewed coffee tickling her nose—not that she could have any—and the warmth of golden sunlight flowing through gauzy curtains.
Not to mention the sight of a large, half-naked male laboring outside her window, which was about as close as he’d gotten to her since their discussion over checkers in the den four nights ago.
The ranger tended his grandmother’s vegetable garden before the heat of the day set in. Wearing only jeans, boots and a leather belt with a silver buckle the size of a soup ladle, he knitted the limbs of a leggy tomato plant into a wire cage, mounded a burm of soil around the base of a flowering pepper plant and checked an ear of yellow corn for insects.
Even at this hour, exertion and the Texas heat had him sweating. His bare torso shone like a new bronze statue. Muscles bunched like mountains of pure stone in his shoulders and taut flesh played over an abdomen hammered flat as a platter. When he squatted to finger the frothy topside of a carrot plant, his thighs tested the seams of the denim that encased them.
He looked at home there among the rows and patches, she realized, and that was the appeal of watching him. He looked like a man who lived by his hands instead of his gun. A peaceable man, capable of coaxing life from a handful of seeds and a square of dry soil, of nurturing tender green shoots into sturdy stalks. A man with the patience, and the strength, to wait for the time to reap the bounty of what he had sown.
Not at all like the reckless policeman who took an innocent life by mistake. The impulsive repentant who, out of guilt, offered marriage to a stranger. Committed himself to raise another man’s child.
This was a new ranger. One who read his dead father’s old letters again and again as if they were new to comfort a mother who lived in the past. One who mourned a lost brother. Father.
One who promised her that her baby would be all right with such sincerity that she almost believed he could make it so.
Restlessly Elisa pushed the covers aside and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She took her iron tablet with a cup of Mami’s miracle tea in the kitchen, but passed up the spinach and tomato omelet the elder Mrs. Cooper pressed on her.
Each of the last three days, she’d eaten with the elder Coopers and Del’s mother while he worked in the garden or tended livestock. In the afternoon she watched baseball with Mami. Mami was a die-hard fan, and Elisa was surprised to learn she enjoyed the game, as well.
Each evening she’d taken supper with them while Del again found chores to do. And after sunset, she’d displaced the family dog, Murphy, who she was told was named after a famous soldier, Audie Murphy, from the easy chair in the family room and curled up with a book borrowed from the floor-to-ceiling shelves. She had half hoped the ranger would join her there, as he had the night they had played checkers, and tried to deny her disappointment when he had not. That night, he had opened up to her, shared something of himself.
The single draught of information left her thirsting for more.
Her nerves quivered as she padded out of the house toward the lot of tilled earth where he worked.
She was tired of waiting for him to come to her. She needed to know more about the man she was to marry, and there were things he needed to know about her.
Before four o’clock this afternoon, when the ceremony was to begin.
Hunched over in a row of green peas, Del watched Elisa’s long, tanned legs swing toward him one enticing step at a time. Her calves were firm, tapering into fine ankles. Slender, with lots of definition to the bone.
He’d always been an ankle man.
>
“Don’t touch that crabgrass,” he ordered, pulling his gaze away from her ankles when she bent over next to him. Without looking up, he nudged her away with his knuckles. Her skin looked soft and white and thin as paper next to his dirty hand, but he recognized the illusion. Underneath she was strong as a jungle cat.
His paper lioness.
“I want to help.”
He pinched the offending weed by the root and yanked. “You’re supposed to be taking it easy.”
“If I took it any easier, I would be comatose.”
He craned his head back, squinting against the sun’s glare. “Did you just make a joke?”
She pulled her shoulders up defensively and cocked her jaw to the side. “I do have a sense of humor.”
He didn’t. Not with Elisa standing over him, her glossy black hair combed back and secured with a braided headband, her golden skin glowing and her cheeks blooming like pink roses. Especially not with the way the sun behind her shone through the white cotton shift she wore, outlining the plump of her breasts, a waist narrow despite her pregnancy and hips with just enough flare to tempt a saint.
And Del Cooper was no saint.
He wasn’t much of a comedy fan, either. But he doubted Elisa would have come looking for him without reason. She had something on her mind.
He stood, brushed the dirt from his knees. “Come on, then. Let’s go someplace cool and you can try to make me laugh.”
Murphy trailed them to the barn. Del stretched out on some old bales of straw. Elisa settled on the wooden grain bin in her typical perfect posture, her fine ankles and knees together, back straight and hands folded in her lap. Dust motes sailed aimlessly by and a dozen starlings swooped and chattered in the rafters while Del waited for her to speak her mind.
“What I have to say is not funny,” she finally admitted.
“I didn’t think it would be.” He plucked a piece of straw and popped the end in his mouth.
“Perhaps we should not get married this afternoon.”
“Why not?”
She studied one thumbnail intensely. “We still do not know about the baby. If it will…be all right. If there is no baby, there is no need to be married.”
The Last Honorable Man Page 8