Touch a Wild Heart

by Vella Munn

  A woman falling in love didn’t drag skeletons out of the closet when she wondered if, for the first time in her life, maybe she wasn’t going to be alone anymore. Maybe Magadan kept things from her, but tonight she wasn’t going to question that. What she had to realize was that as a businessman Magadan was aware of the extent of Lou Dye’s ruthlessness. What would it do to Magadan’s feelings for her if he knew Lou’s blood ran in her veins?

  No, Chela told herself. That was her secret. Her father made a lie of everything she believed in. She hadn’t been able to reconcile that in her own heart; she couldn’t find words of explanation for Magadan.

  “You’re quiet,” he said as he released her shoulders and took her hand.

  Chela started to answer, but something about his hand stopped her. His fingers were cold, and he was gripping her so tightly that it was painful. “Am I?” was the best she could offer.

  “You were thinking about something,” Magadan said, his voice deeper than she remembered it being. “Will you share it with me?”

  “No,” Chela said. She knew she heard the quick escape of Magadan’s breath.

  Again they walked in silence, closer this time because their fingers were locked around each other. Chela tried to make her thoughts go back to her surroundings, but they wouldn’t leave the ramification of conversations toyed with, touched, and then put back in hiding. Secrets were more blinding than any night.

  Suddenly Magadan stopped. He whirled on her and brought her fiercely into the circle of his arms. “God, you feel so good!”

  What’s wrong? Chela asked inside, alarmed. What are you thinking, Magadan? But she didn’t ask the questions pulsing through her. Instead she surrendered herself to the man’s strength. She felt small and fragile and vulnerable in her stockinged feet and delicate dress with the top that allowed the night air to toy with the swell of her breasts. The woman who clung to Magadan wasn’t the one who trod through the orchards. She felt like one of the women she’d observed from afar but never thought she’d understand. It took more than a hand placed on a man’s arm to make a woman feel protected. It took a body that blocked out the world, quick breaths on her hair, a masculine chest beating against hers.

  Suddenly hungry, Chela groped for Magadan’s neck and drew him down to her aching lips. His mouth was both gentle and commanding, touching and satisfying some nerve, some aching essence that had hurt so long Chela didn’t know there was any other way to feel.

  Tonight she understood that there was an alternative to loneliness. She wasn’t alone anymore. The orchard had always been Chela’s friend. She’d been content to share it with Spanish-speaking migrants, quick-learning children, even Anglo foremen. But that brand of sharing wasn’t anything like what was happening tonight.

  Tonight Chela realized that the orchards had insulated her from what was washing over her, threatening to throw her to her knees when she least expected it. The orchard was her friend, it wasn’t her lover. There lay the difference.

  And Chela needed a lover, a man to sense the source of the hungry, aching cry within her and satisfy that cry. She needed arms around her, lips caressing hers. Tonight, at least, Magadan was that man.

  “I’m going to make love to you, Chela. Here.” Magadan kissed her again, a kiss that stripped away everything else. He left her alone, holding on to a branch for support while he went into the supply shed. A moment later he returned with a blanket tucked under his arm. Chela studied his dark outline as he shook out the blanket and spread it on the ground between two trees, then he took her in his arms. “It can be good for us, Chela. Better than anything either of us has had before.”

  Only honesty could make it better was the thought that sliced through Chela’s mind. Quickly it escaped into the night and was lost.

  “I’m shaking,” she admitted, clinging to him. “Why?”

  “So am I,” he laughed. “I don’t think either of us knew this was going to happen.”

  Chela didn’t ask him if he was talking about tonight or something larger. Instead she found the buttons on his suit jacket and undid them. She draped the jacket over the tree branch she’d used to support herself earlier and then turned to his tie.

  “I hate those things,” he said when she gave up trying to figure out how it was knotted. “It’s a costume I can do without.”

  “How many costumes do you have? Who is the real you?” Suddenly she stopped him with a hand on his mouth. “Don’t answer that tonight.”

  Magadan had action, not words, on his mind. Chela was fascinated by the sure way he was able to undo her belt and pull the dress over her head without tangling her hair. He unfastened her bra without making her turn away from him. He removed both her panty hose and underpants before taking her in his arms again.

  “We keep winding up like this, don’t we?” he whispered against her ear. “No matter what happens, we wind up in each other’s arms.”

  That’s because it’s the only place I want to be, Chela thought, but she didn’t say the words aloud because she knew that they represented too much of a surrender. What was happening between them was still too new. Things could happen at any moment to shatter their fragile relationship. All she could ask for was perfection tonight.

  Magadan seemed to share her thoughts. He undressed and pulled her down onto the blanket with him. He wasn’t in a hurry; instead he seemed to need to explore her body, commit her outline to memory.

  Chela shut her eyes, completing the darkness that the night had begun. She held on to Magadan with hungry fingers and locked her lips over the animal moans that built every time he explored a new inch of flesh. Her breasts, shoulders, waist, stomach, no longer belonged to her. They were now part of Magadan, claimed by strong warm fingers that made her as willing as a newborn kitten.

  But no kitten felt the sensations Chela was feeling. When he kissed her, she could no longer deny the sounds inside. Her deep groan, accompanied by her spine arching toward him, told him everything he needed to know. She was his. Completely.

  “You do things to me,” he whispered. “Things that scare me.”

  Magadan was scared? That seemed odd, Chela thought; the man was always in control, wasn’t he?

  She didn’t have time to answer her question, though. She was in the act of surrender; that was the only thing that had any meaning. She wanted, needed Magadan. Her hungry body sought his under the dark sentry of pear trees. The ground accepted the twin, weights of their bodies joined by lovemaking.

  No human was within miles to observe what was taking place. And the night creatures who watched kept well their secrets.

  Chapter Ten

  Chela stayed away from Hidden Valley Orchard until midafternoon. She had no reason to return to the scene of last night’s lovemaking, but something, some kind of force, drew her there. Despite the glow that remained with her after Magadan brought her home, Chela slept little and went through the day restless and upset. Being with Magadan had been able to erase, for the space of several perfect hours, the meeting with her father.

  In the reality of day, Chela realized there were things that couldn’t be denied. Last night, in Hidden Valley Orchard, she had touched base with the past. It was here that her father’s roots remained. Right or wrong, she had to learn how much of herself was there as well.

  The orchard looked even better by day than it had at night. The two years during which Chela couldn’t bring herself to come here had been kind to the trees. Although work still needed to be done, trimming and the installation of both an effective watering system and overhead sprinklers resulted in trees that now bore enough fruit to rival competitive orchards.

  Whoever had taken over the orchard once her father’s bankruptcy was settled hadn’t wasted time or money bringing the orchard back into the mainstream of cultivation. But that wasn’t Chela’s concern. She needed to know what it had been like when her father had owned the orchard. If the rumors of his total disregard for workers’ rights and welfare were as blatant as she bel
ieved. If he had really been so unfeeling as to ignore the health department’s regulations regarding water and sanitary facilities at the adjacent barrio.

  It seemed impossible that the man, who was despite it all her father, could have believed he could continue to fly in the face of authority, refuse to pay his bills, cheat his employees. Those rumors had grown and persisted until they were accepted as fact; even Chela didn’t try to deny their validity. What she needed to learn, if possible, was why.

  She hardly believed she’d find any workers who’d been here two years ago, but maybe those who lived and worked here now carried the thread of the story. Maybe they knew how much the new owner had done, how much damage he’d had to undo.

  Pedro Cruz, who was the foreman here but came to another orchard to take English writing classes, might supply at least some of the answers. The sunbaked older Mexican had lived here as a legal for enough years to understand the politics and power plays that took place in the pear industry. In fact Pedro had been here long enough to have known Chela’s mother. His was the only name in authority she’d heard connected with Hidden Valley Orchard.

  Chela found Pedro working with a section of irrigation pipe near the supply shed less than thirty feet from where she and Magadan had made love last night. The man’s face threatened to crack into a thousand tiny splinters when Chela called out to him.

  “I thought you said it was too far out here for you to drive,” Pedro said in his practiced English. “Have you come here to dig ditches with me?”

  Chela laughed away Pedro’s challenge. She wanted to touch his dry, leathery face to return natural oils to it, but to do so would take away Pedro’s character and the proof of how he earned his living. “I heard the orchard was back in production,” she said casually. “I came to see for myself.”

  “Let me finish with this,” Pedro said. “I’ll take you on the tour. It isn’t what it was before.”

  Chela squatted beside Pedro and watched silently as he rethreaded fittings on the thick white plastic hose, his small, powerful hands doing what she would have needed a wrench for. As long as she’d been coming to the orchards, she never grew tired of watching men giving their days in service to trees and the fruit they bore. “Is your son going back to school in the fall?” she asked. “He has magic in his hands like you do, but his brain— He asks questions I can’t answer.”

  Pedro looked up at her. His mouth cracked into a smile, but his eyes were deep and serious. “Pascal has a scholarship. Can you believe that? My son took a computer course and now he has a scholarship.”

  Chela blinked rapidly and rose to her feet. Pascal with his straight back and questioning eyes wouldn’t spend his life in the orchards. Someone, probably his computer teacher, had discovered his quick mind.

  “Keep him in school, Pedro,” she said, knowing she sounded like a teacher.

  “It’s a promise he already made. Come now. I want to get this pipe back in so we can water tonight. Pascal is going to be an aide at the high school’s Spanish class. You taught him English, and now he’s teaching Spanish to Anglos.”

  Chela walked beside Pedro, sharing his pride. It was the same kind of feeling she was starting to have for the orchard. Pedro would never know that her father had been responsible for Hidden Valley Orchard’s downfall. She could nod at his enthusiasm for what was happening to it now, share that with him. Unless Kohl made good on his threat to expose her.

  Chela jerked away from the thought and concentrated on what Pedro was telling her. The orchard, which was one of the larger ones in the valley, still hadn’t come back up to full production, but rot had been removed from the trees. In the fall some of the older trees would be removed to make room for new seedlings.

  “It’s costing thousands,” Chela observed when Pedro was through reconnecting the plastic pipe. They stood and gazed down an endless row, where in the distance a jackrabbit stared back at them. “The new owner must be a rich man.”

  “He doesn’t say much about himself,” Pedro explained. “When he first came, he didn’t have much knowledge of orchards. I thought that kind of man would take over a business he knows nothing about only if he has confidence in himself. He learns fast. He listens to what I tell him about what needs to be done and brings in biologists and people from the extension service. The man isn’t like many orchardists.” Pedro turned away from the rabbit and faced her. “He has great respect for migrants. He speaks their language. He tore down the old housing and put in cabins with running water and inside toilets. He made the health department very happy.”

  “Then he must be rich,” Chela repeated.

  Pedro smiled. “You know what he tells me? He says he was able to buy the orchard for almost nothing because of the bankruptcy. He says he was there to take advantage of Lou Dye’s misfortune. The land cost him little. That’s why he can spend money on improvements.”

  A chill touched Chela. Lou Dye—there was no escaping the name. “Does he say much about Lou, about why so many things went wrong when Lou Dye was the orchardist?”

  Pedro shook his head. “Joe Magadan talks about today and tomorrow, not yesterday.”

  For the space of a breath Chela thought she was going to scream. Magadan! The new owner was Magadan!

  “Are—are you sure that’s who it is?” Chela asked stupidly. Her legs, arms, everything, turned numb.

  “You know him?” Pedro asked.

  Chela nodded. “Oh, yes, I know this Magadan. Or I thought I did.”

  “There aren’t many Anglos like him,” Pedro was saying. “He doesn’t make mistakes that the migrants pay for with lost wages. He doesn’t call the immigration officers for a raid when it’s time to pay his workers. He says he doesn’t care whether a migrant is legal or illegal, just whether he does his work and has a place to live.”

  Chela couldn’t concentrate on what Pedro was telling her. Magadan had kept secrets from her. This was it. But why?

  The answers weren’t in the orchard. She couldn’t ask Pedro why a man, her lover, wouldn’t tell her what he did for a living. There was only one person who could tell her the truth.

  Pedro must have wondered at Chela’s sudden departure, but she was too upset to find the words to explain away the glazed look in her eyes and the trembling in her fingers. She knew she shouldn’t be driving, but her need for answers was greater than her sense of caution. She wanted to get away from Hidden Valley Orchard, find Magadan.

  And, now, she thought she knew where to find him.

  So Magadan had taken over her father’s orchard. He had probably taken over the grand house in the east hills as well—that was why he’d never wanted her to come there.

  By the time Chela reached the house she hoped never to see again, she was barely able to command enough strength to keep her foot on the gas pedal. She pulled off to the side of the street and got out, aware of the contrast her battered, dusty Jeep made with the expensive cars parked behind shrub and fence-lined property lines. She could have pulled into the driveway herself, but because she’d never wanted to claim the two-story, shake-roofed house with its swimming pool and sauna, she didn’t.

  Although there was no sign of life from the house and Magadan’s pickup wasn’t in the driveway, she was sure this was where she’d find him. He now owned her father’s orchard. A businessman would see the advantage of taking over the house involved in the bankruptcy scandal at the same time.

  Chela walked along the brick walk until she reached the step leading to the front door. The house rose above her like some monster. She took a deep breath that came out sounding too much like a moan and reached for the doorbell. The chimes echoed throughout the interior, mocking her. “No one home. You’ll have to wait.”

  Chela turned around and sat on the step, arms locked around her upper body, sweating from the heat, cold within. Magadan might not be home for hours, but she’d wait. She had no choice.

  In the silence that exists in a wealthy neighborhood with acreage and well-tended trees
and hedges separating the houses from each other, Chela tried to come to grips with the ramifications of what Pedro had said. There could be many reasons why Magadan didn’t want her to know where he lived or what he did for a living. Keeping this from her might have been his way of decreasing the distance between them or deluding her into believing that they didn’t live in opposing worlds.

  It was also possible that in the process of taking over Lou Dye’s holdings, Magadan had learned things about Lou that no one except Kohl knew. A sudden chill tore through Chela. Did Magadan know who her father was?

  For two hours Chela’s brain pounded with unanswered questions. No matter which direction her tortured mind turned, there were too many questions and not enough answers. That was why she sat, unmoving, as the shadows stretched first across the lawn and then up the walk to touch her legs. If Magadan knew Lou was her father, then he must know how much she hated that fact. Perhaps he was holding his knowledge in reserve to use against her should his lips and arms and body no longer be enough to get her to do what he wanted.

  Chela didn’t want to believe that. Anything but that.

  She didn’t move when she heard the pickup pull into the driveway. Magadan, with his probing eyes and masterful hands that were teaching her what it felt like to be a woman, was coming toward her. He seemed to be walking slower than usual.

  Finally, when she felt his eyes on her, she looked up, arms still wrapped around her bent knees. Her hair had fallen down around her face. As she lifted her head, her hair clung to her cheeks and collarbone. “I’ve been waiting for you, Magadan,” she said in a voice so lifeless she didn’t recognize it.

  “I see that. Do you want to come in?”

  Chela rose. At least he wasn’t lying, trying to tell her that this wasn’t his home. “Yes.”

  She waited while he unlocked the front door and then stepped in ahead of him. He didn’t touch her, which saved her. She had no idea what would happen if he’d tried to kiss her. The door opened into a tiled entryway devoid of any furnishings. It wasn’t until they’d reached what Chela took to be the living room that she saw any wall decorations. Despite her numb state, Chela was able to make out twin paintings of antique cars in thin silver frames. The paintings were little more than stark outlines without warmth or personality. They were, she supposed, expensive but a mystery to Chela. She questioned why a man would want dark sketches of a metal machine when he could afford something with vitality in it. Were they Magadan’s or had her father left them behind?