by Amy Summers
David stared at her, not understanding. "They wouldn't take your California driver's license,….your tourist card...?"
She shook her head. "David, didn't I tell you? Armand has my purse and all my papers in his safe. I don't have anything I can use to prove who I am."
That hardly seemed credible. There had to be some way.
"There's not a branch of your personal bank here in town?"
She shook her head. "There's a branch of the bank my father uses, and they were very nice, but they can't do anything for me until I either provide ID, or get my father to call."
He snapped his fingers. "The consular agency. There's one right here in town. They'll help you."
She raised an eyebrow. "Will they? Not if Armand has anything to say about it. He's got someone inside the office."
David looked skeptical. He had learned to respect this Armand's villainy a little more than before, but this seemed ludicrous. "How do you know that?"
She flattened her hands against the polyester pants. "He told me so when I tried to leave the other day."
David shook his head. "I don't believe it. He was bluffing."
She shrugged, her eyes shadowed by a hopelessness he hadn't seen there before. "Maybe so. But I can't afford to take a chance."
He wanted to reach for her, take her hand. "We'll go to the consulate in Mazatlan," he offered.
She sighed, pushing her hair back with a weary gesture. ' 'No, it's much too far. Besides, Armand will probably have men watching it."
For once he didn't scoff at her supposition. He knew better, now. "Someone came by here about an hour ago."
Her eyes widened and she sat up straighter. "Here? What did he look like? What did he say? Did he mention Armand?"
He told her briefly. "I guess you're right. Your ex-husband is serious about finding you and the kids."
"Oh, he's serious all right. He made that very clear." Her eyes clouded and she looked into the distance. "I just don't understand why."
David could understand it. All anyone had to do was look at her. "He wants you back," he said huskily, looking away so she wouldn't be able to read the way he felt in his eyes. "What's to understand?"
She smiled at him and reached out, taking his hand in her own. "That's very sweet," she said softly, "but not quite accurate.''
Sweet. There was nothing sweet about what he was feeling toward her. Her touch ignited something inside him and he had a hard time keeping his breathing even. He couldn't answer. His gaze was riveted to her hand, her fingers laced with his, the nails pink and softly rounded. He felt suspended, somehow, as though he didn't need to breathe any longer, as though all he needed was her touch
She was looking at their hands, too, enjoying the way his long, tapered fingers curled around her shorter ones. His hands were big and strong. She was glad he was muscular and solid. She almost felt safe with him.
Not that she really was, of course. It was all an illusion. She hadn't met a man yet you could really count on. Look at Armand. She'd actually thought she was in love with him once.
Still, it wasn't fair to paint David with the same brush. He'd been gruff and strangely aloof, but he'd also been kind and honest—and the sight of him dozing in the chair a few minutes ago, near her two little ones, had truly touched her.
She could talk to David. He was Russ's friend. That almost made him family, didn't it? Not that she talked to her family all that much. She tried to let her parents think everything was all right so they wouldn't worry, but she could be straight with David. So she turned and looked into his eyes and went on.
"I know he wasn't really interested in having me back for romantic reasons because of one very simple fact. He had his girlfriend on board."
She suddenly lowered her eyes again. Despite everything, that had been a blow. She didn't want Armand, she didn't love him, and she knew he didn't love her any longer. And yet, somehow, for him to pretend that he did and at the same time have the girl he really wanted on board, had been a humiliating insult. It wasn't logical, and yet—there it was.
David was frowning. Things weren't making sense to him. "Why would he do a stupid thing like that if he were trying to convince you he wanted you?"
She laughed, shaking her head. "Because he is a very arrogant man. He thinks he can have anything he wants. He wanted me back, but he wanted his girlfriend, too. So he brought her along. He's sure he knows better than anyone else. So he does arrogant things."
David was studying her eyes, searching them. The more he heard about this man, the more he hated him. "Why did you ever marry him?" he asked softly, truly puzzled and disturbed by that very act. She was so wonderful. How could she have thrown herself away on such a creep?
Her eyes darkened and she pulled her hand away. "That was long ago and far away," she said evasively. “Back to the problem at hand. I know what I'm going to have to do. I'll call my father. He'll come through for me. He always does." She made a face. "Which is precisely why I don't really want to call him," she murmured, more to herself than to him.
"He'll wire you the money?" But of course. Her father was rich and powerful. He could get everyone moving with a phone call. There really was no problem here. For a moment he'd thought she would be staying longer, and a part of him had turned traitor and he'd been glad. But that was just a pipe dream, anyway. She was going. Rich people always got what they wanted.
"Sure. Or get the bank to give me what I need." She sighed. "The only thing is, 1 didn't tell them I was coming down here, or that I was going to see Armand again. They're going to be upset, first that I did it, then that I didn't tell them I was doing it. Now I'll have to go through all the explanations and hear all the little lectures." She shrugged. "Oh, well. Nothing comes free, does it?"
She pulled herself up off the couch and looked down at the capris, the polyester blouse with the bizarre parrot. This really wasn't her. She had to regroup and begin to feel like herself again.
"Listen, I have to change out of these clothes. Do you have anything at all that I could wear?"
He rose to face her. "I don't think you'd fit into any of my slacks or jeans," he noted, glancing down at her slender figure. "But 1 might have a cotton sweater or a T-shirt you could wear."
He hesitated. No, he did not want to go in with her and start rummaging through clothes, watching her try things on. Down that road lay disaster. "Why don't you just go ahead and choose anything you like? I've got to go down and get things cleaned up for the dinner hour."
She thanked him and slipped back into the room where her children slept. He turned and walked down the stairs.
But the image of her stayed with him. He could still feel her warm hand in his. The line of her cheek, the way her eyes tilted at the corners, the curve of her mouth, all these things affected him in ways he'd never been affected by a woman before. More the way a beautiful strain of classical music made him feel, reaching in to twist his heart with its poignant beauty. That's what looking at Madison did to him. It twisted his heart.
He'd been captivated by her as he had never been by another woman in his life. Every masculine instinct he possessed told him to go after her, reach for her, woo her. And at the same time, knowing what he did about her and her background, he knew very well that giving in to that attraction would be like heading his car for the nearest cliff and driving over it. She was out of his league—far, far out. He would help her, but he would have to keep up his guard to do it. The best thing he could do for his own peace of mind was to stay as detached as possible.
Madison looked down at her sleeping children and sighed. It was always such a pleasure to look at them. Her heart swelled inside her, she loved them so. They were her pride and joy—and the proof that the last seven years of her life hadn't been wasted. She would fight tooth and nail to keep them. Armand must never, ever get his hands on them. Just the thought of them having to live with that man made her skin crawl.
When she thought about it, she realized that the last few
years had been a lull in her life. She'd been waiting for something and hadn't realized it at the time. Now she knew what it was. She'd needed to finish things off with Armand. She had to know if it was really over, or if he was still going to play a part in their lives. She'd been waiting for the last shoe to drop.
Well, it had dropped with a thump that had rocked the boat, capsizing it. That was over. No more regrets—she was going to go on with her life. And to that end she was anxious to get back home.
But for that to happen, she was going to have to call her father. She made a face, thinking about that. She dreaded the conversation she was going to have to endure. She'd called him with too much bad news in the past. This made her feel like a kid again, that same old bubbleheaded, ditzy blonde everyone had shaken his head over, calling Daddy to fix some new scrape she'd gotten herself into.
There was no hope for it—she had to do it. But first, she had to get out of these ridiculous clothes. She riffled through the bag that Rosa had sent and found a pair of black leggings on the bottom. They would certainly be an improvement to the chartreuse capris she'd been wearing all day. But there was no other blouse or shirt, so she went to David's drawer and began looking through his meager selection. She chose a dark blue cotton sweater with short sleeves and an open weave. It was huge, the shoulders drooping and the hemline hanging down below her hips, but it looked better than the parrot shirt.
It was time to go down and join David. She hesitated, looking at herself in the mirror. It was strange how much she liked him. Maybe it was because be was completely different from Armand. There was nothing sneaky about David, nothing calculating. There was a core of decency to him that couldn't be denied, despite the dangerous glint be sometimes had in his dark eyes.
She gave a little shiver of appreciation, thinking of that glint. The business with Armand had been a painful blow to her ego, but one smoldering look from David had been enough to build it right back up again. There was no denying the attraction that sparked between the two of them, even though David seemed hell-bent on blotting it out.
She slipped through the room where her children slept and went down the stairs. David was putting away the glassware, wiping off water spots with a white cotton cloth before he set the glasses in neat rows.
She sat down on a stool at the counter and smiled at him. "You asked me why I married Armand," she said simply. "I put you off because it's sort of a painful subject. But I decided I ought to get it out into the open. You've been a good friend to me. If you really want to know, I'll tell you."
David turned to look at her. He supposed it was really none of his business, but he didn't care. He wanted to know.
Throwing down the cloth, he leaned on the counter across from her. "Okay," he said softly. "Shoot."
She folded her hands in front of her and stared at them as she began. "My parents had two children, me and Russ. You know Russ. You know what a great guy he is. My parents have always been so proud of him. There was that one little lapse, when he insisted on going into the army, that nearly broke my father's heart." She threw him a quick grin. "But other than that, he's been their hero, forever and ever.”
David nodded. That was certainly the picture he got when he visited the family.
"Well, Russ was perfect. I was the defective one. I'd call it the black sheep, only I never did anything that put me behind bars or anything like that." She cast him a quick smile that had just enough heartbreak in it to give his heart a wrench. "But I was considered scatterbrained. Goofy. Not very bright. The girl most likely to fall in the pool at a party or sit on the cake at a picnic."
She made a face and David had to struggle to keep from grinning. Something told him she hadn't pulled those examples out of thin air.
"You get the picture, right?"
He nodded.
"I sort of played up the image while I was still in high school. I mean, it got me out of a lot of pressure. They didn't expect much from me, and I didn't do much that amounted to anything." She sighed, shaking her head as she thought back. "A lot of wasted time, I know. But I was so..." She gave a self-deprecating laugh. "Whoops, I guess I shouldn't fall into that trap myself, should I? The point is, once I turned twenty, I was sick of being the feebleminded member of the family. I tried every way 1 could to prove to them that I wasn't really like that. But it seemed that their minds were made up. I was a ditzy blonde, and that was all there was to that song."
She looked at him and shrugged. "And then I met Armand. If you saw him now, it would be hard to explain what it was about him that appealed to me at the time. He was an older man, successful, respected. He fell in love with me right away. And everything changed. All of a sudden I was different in everyone's eyes. I had stature."
David frowned. He didn't get it. "Because of that sleaze-ball?" he growled.
She shook her head. "Oh, no, you're getting a very false impression of what Armand is like. He's very handsome, very charming. And very presentable."
"Presentable—what the hell does that mean?" And yet he knew, didn't he? Presentable was everything that he himself wasn't.
"It means he's all right," Madison said. "Don't you understand? He's socially correct. He has money and culture behind him. His mother went to school in Switzerland with my mother. When I was with him, people looked at me with an admiration I'd never seen before. It was wonderful, heady, like drinking champagne."
"But it was based on his reputation, not on anything you'd done."
She laughed at him. "What do we have here, a closet feminist?"
He shrugged, his smile tight. "What can I say? I'm a man of my time."
"Well, you're right, of course. But I didn't see it at the time. He was utterly devoted, showering me with attention. Our wedding was gorgeous. The honeymoon was..."
She hesitated and he studied her face, trying to read the signs.
"Some slight hints of what was to come surfaced during the honeymoon," she said softly, staring at her hands again. "But I told myself things would smooth over. We needed time to adjust to each other."
She looked up, her eyes wide. "I was in love with him. I can't pretend I wasn't. And I wanted it to work. We had an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Greece. We spent a lot of time on his yacht, sailing to the Greek islands." She smiled. "That part was lovely. We usually had friends along. It was an enchanted time." She paused, closing her eyes for a moment. "Then I had Jill, and everything changed."
"He didn't want children?"
She shook her head. "It wasn't that, really. At least, he said he wanted them. But while I was pregnant he began to... stray, shall we say? And once he developed the habit, he didn't seem to be able to break it."
"I see." He hated Armand more all the time.
"I began to have to face that the marriage was falling apart. I got pregnant with Chris by mistake, and that made me determined to try to salvage something. But we drifted farther and farther apart, and finally I left."
"Before Chris was born?"
She nodded. "He didn't contest the divorce. At the time he seemed glad to be rid of me." She held her arms as though she were cold, and the sweater slipped down off her shoulder. She pushed it back right away, but David had caught sight of something dark and ugly.
"Hey," he said, frowning. He rose and came around the counter to where she sat. "What was that?"
She pulled the sweater tight up to her neck with two hands. "Nothing," she said quickly, but her eyes had that haunted look again.
"The hell it was." He forced her hands away and pulled the neck until her shoulder and upper arm were exposed. Large, angry bruises appeared in two areas, bruises that conformed very closely to those that would be made by the fingers of a man's hand.
David stared at the bruises for a moment, white rage almost blinding him. "Did he do this to you?" he asked, his voice like metal against rock.
"David—"
"Did he?"
She closed her eyes and nodded.
His hand tighten
ed on the sweater. "I'll kill the bastard," he said with low menace.
"David—" She pulled the sweater back again. "It's not really as bad as it looks." She gazed up at his face, hard as stone, full of anger, and she put a hand on his arm. "It's not really your problem, you know," she said softly. "Forget it."
He turned his face away, inarticulate with fury. He wanted to damage Armand badly. How any man could touch a woman like this, hurt her... The very idea violated something deep inside him.
"David." Her hand was still on his arm. He looked down, his eyes wary. She smiled, feeling very warm toward him. He was a special guy. "Are you seeing anyone seriously right now?" she asked softly.
He stared at her, thrown off course by her question. "What?"
"Do you have a girlfriend?"
He frowned, unable to see what that had to do with. "No. No one serious."
Her smile became more mischievous at the edges, her silver-blue eyes sparkling. "Then why won't you kiss me?" she asked softly.
He stared down at her, his vision blurred. All he saw was her golden hair, her red lips. Reaching out, he touched her cheek with the palm of his hand, as though he were touching a treasure he was afraid he might break.
She was so honest, how could he do anything else but tell her the truth?
"Because if we start something," he said, his voice low and husky, aching with his need for her, "I'm going to have to finish it."
She reached up and put her hand over his, holding him to her. Her other hand lifted and flattened against his chest. "I could risk that," she whispered.
"Madison..." He pulled her toward him, his pulse beating in his ears. "I'm not one of your upper-crust country-club lovers. I'm too rough around the edges for you, and you know it."
"I think I can handle it, David," she murmured, her lips only inches from his. "Try me."
He'd resisted a lot in the last few hours, but there was no way he could resist this. He'd been breathing in her seductive beauty like the air around him. He'd been reveling in it, tasting it, feeling it. But that had been a dream, and this was reality. And once again, she exceeded expectations.