San Antonio Rose

by Fran Baker

  Rafe stepped back, reading between the lines but determined to do it right this time around. He wanted to make love to her. Long, slow, drive-her-out-of-her-mind love. But he didn’t want her watching the clock, worrying about getting home to Tony the way she used to worry about getting back to the house before Big Tom discovered she was gone. And he knew now that what he felt for her would keep.

  “Up you go.” He opened the car door and gave her a hand as she climbed in.

  She rolled the window down to say good-bye and saw the troubled expression he wore. “What’s the matter?”

  “I just realized I don’t even know my son’s full name.”

  “Anthony Thomas.”

  Rafe’s heart spread like an eagle’s wings within his chest. “Anthony for my father?”

  Jeannie nodded, sensing and sharing his soaring jubilation. “And Thomas for mine.”

  A barrio church bell began ringing the three-o’clock Angelus, heralding her next revelation.

  “I had Tony baptized in Houston,” she said softly.

  To put it mildly, he was stunned. “But you’re not a Catholic.”

  “Oh, yes, I am.”

  “Since when?”

  Her eyes warmed to his. “Since I took instructions while I was staying with my aunt.”

  Caution wagged a finger in the face of Rafe’s joy. “And how did Tom the Baptist react to that?”

  Jeannie was tempted to tell him that he’d sounded just like Big Tom then, but she hated to end such a promising day on such a sour note. “All that matters now is how much he loved Tony.”

  He smiled in grim resignation. “You’re right.”

  “See you Sunday,” she said, as she turned the key in the ignition.

  Rafe delayed her departure by cupping her neck and drawing her head through the window, claiming her mouth in a kiss that made her heart dance a fandango. Jeannie’s hand crept up to cradle his jaw, her fingers detaining him in return.

  The church bell chimed its last when he finally drew back with a whispered. “Vaya con Dios.”

  Nine

  “If you were such a good friend of Grandpa’s, how come you never came to see him when he was sick?”

  Not the sort of greeting he’d expected from his own son, Rafe thought ruefully as he carried the saddle he’d brought to Bolero with him into the barn. And definitely not a good way to start the week. Still, it was a fair question and it deserved an honest answer.

  First, though, he set his saddle, horn down, on the floor. Then he straightened and looked at Tony, who had followed him into the barn but had stopped just short of stepping into the empty stall where Jeannie had suggested he store his riding gear. And finally he gave that tough little cuss the answer he was waiting for. “Because nobody told me Big Tom was sick.”

  “You could’ve called.” The boy’s blue eyes studied him with open defiance, and his jaw was set in a small, rebellious line that the man recognized only too well.

  Rafe raked an impatient hand through his hair, wondering where he should go from there. No sooner had he parked his car in front of the bairn and begun unloading the truck when Tony had come up from behind and thrown down that gauntlet about his grandfather.

  Anger flared in him as the realization that Big Tom had given him one of the most contemptuous Judas kisses since the Last Supper. Without stopping to think who he was really hurting, and with the distinct advantage of a ten-year head start, he’d turned Rafe’s own flesh and blood against him.

  It was a bitter pill, and one that didn’t go down easily. But it was either swallow hard or spew the same kind of poison at his son that the narrow-minded rancher had.

  Rafe’s throat convulsed, yet he managed to say calmly, “I’m sorry now that I didn’t call.”

  “You should be,” Tony declared before rounding on his boot heel and heading for the barn’s sliding door. He paused there and turned back, firing his parting volley in a high, pained voice that carried clearly along the concrete passageway connecting the stalls. “Grandpa was really lonesome for his friends before he died.”

  Rafe seriously considered going after Tony and telling him exactly why Big Tom had spent his last days on earth with no one but his daughter and his grandson to comfort him. Outside of giving him the momentary satisfaction of striking back, though, the only purpose that would serve was to put him on Big Tom’s level. And he had no intention of sinking that low.

  There was something about Tony’s defiant expression that hit him where he lived, he acknowledged as he went back out to the car to get his saddle blanket and bedroll. He recognized that he’d probably had the same look as a boy, but it went deeper than bone. And while he wasn’t ready to say it and Tony wasn’t nearly ready to hear it, he was pretty damn sure that the word for what he was feeling right now was love.

  Jeannie would just die if she knew their son had confronted him like that, Rafe realized. She’d called him twice since she’d come to see him in San Antonio, once to tell him to bring his saddle if he still had it and the other time to ask if he’d be there in time for Sunday dinner.

  He smiled as he deposited the last of his gear in the stall and left the barn, remembering how excited she’d sounded on the phone. She dearly wanted him and Tony to get along. Hell, he wanted that too. But one thing he’d learned in the practice of the law was that an easy remedy was a rare commodity. And the harder a case was to prepare, the greater his satisfaction in winning it.

  Time and patience, those were the keys. Just as he had to build his legal cases with painstaking care, so he would have to build a loving relationship with his son. He closed the trunk lid with a decided slam, knowing he was in for the long haul.

  As for Jeannie—

  “The Studebaker!”

  Rafe spun around just as Jeannie came down the porch steps and started across the ranch yard. From a distance she looked about eighteen again. But as she got closer, he realized she looked better than that. She looked womanly and welcoming and good enough to eat.

  She wore a gauzy sundress in a hot peach shade that set her fluid figure off to perfection. The bodice crisscrossed over her breasts and tied behind her neck, leaving her back and shoulders bare. A kerchief hem flirted fashionably with her knees, while strappy sandals paid homage to her slender feet.

  An anarchy of waves, her hair rioted freely about her oval face. Subtly applied makeup deepened the smoky mystery of her eyes at the same time it highlighted the sensual promise of her mouth. A gold bracelet snaked around one wrist, and huge hoop earrings swayed to the enticing rhythm of her stride.

  “I can’t believe you still have it,” she marveled as she marched straight to the Studebaker and rubbed her palm along its smoothly painted rear fender.

  Rafe studied her stroking hand and found himself envying his own damned car. “I keep it in storage and only break it out for special occasions.”

  Jeannie looked up, her eyes the color of the creek at dusk. Much as a lover’s fingers would do, as his fingers wanted to do, the warm breeze tossed the loose waves of her hair. Her mouth, moist and peachy and tempting as all get-out, curved in a smile that sent his body temperature soaring a good twenty degrees.

  “I’m glad you consider this a special occasion.” Her voice was soft, as soft as the lips he would have kissed right then and there if a pickup truck hadn’t rumbled into the ranch yard and a cowhand hadn’t climbed out and begun loading bags of cattle feed into the back of it not fifty feet from where they stood.

  He settled for brushing a finger over the gold hoop in her ear. Then he issued her both a crooked smile and a casual invitation. “Wanna take a ride?”

  “I’d love to!”

  He cut around to the passenger side and opened her door. “Your chariot awaits.”

  “Where’re we going?” she asked before she got in.

  “To the fourplex.”

  She dropped her gaze to the dusty ground between her sandals and his boots, but not before he saw the disappointment that ha
d clouded her eyes. “I told you when I called that you were welcome to stay at the house.”

  He slid his index finger under her chin and eased it upward until he could see her face. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “What?”

  “Tony.”

  Jeannie made a moue of regret, whether in response to his lowering his hand or the boom he couldn’t even begin to guess. “You’d have your own room, of course.”

  It was ironic, Rafe thought, that after all this time and all he’d experienced he should have to be the one to say, “How long do you think I’d stay there, knowing you were just across the hall?”

  She leaned into him, a pale lily seeking the sun. “With branding starting tomorrow, Tony will be asleep by nine.”

  And with the delicate buds of her breasts quivering against his chest, he was hard-pressed not to bring them to full flower. “How would he react to finding me—a man he’s only met one other time—in his mother’s bed tomorrow morning?”

  “I’ll tell him who you are tonight.” Her warm breath swirled with his, rushing his senses, eroding his resistance.

  But remembering that showdown with Tony in the barn a few moments ago, he stuck to his guns. “I don’t think he’s quite ready to hear it.”

  Having exhausted her store of womanly wiles, not to mention the willpower of the man she’d been practicing them on, Jeannie gave up and got in the car. “I guess you’re right.”

  “I know I’m right.” Without further elaboration, Rafe closed the passenger door and cut around to the driver’s side.

  She waited until he was situated behind the wheel before she asked, “I take it you’ve already seen Tony?”

  “Just briefly.”

  “Well, what do you think of your progeny?”

  He couldn’t tell her what he really thought without beating a dead horse, so he opted for the easy way out. “I think he’s hell on wheels.”

  She laughed, exactly the reaction he’d hoped to elicit. “Like father, like son.”

  “Lord help us,” he muttered under his breath as he pulled away from the barn.

  Her smile faltered when he braked to a stop in front of the fourplex and cut the motor. “Do you need some help unloading the car?”

  “No, thanks.” He pocketed the keys and thumbed toward the back, where his suitbag hung. “That’s all I have to carry in.”

  “What day do you have to go to court?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “You’ll be back that night, though?”

  Rafe saw the glint of anxiety in her gray eyes and told himself that it was to be expected, given the way he’d just up and disappeared on her eleven years ago. It occurred to him then that Tony wasn’t the only one whose trust he had to win. There were a few chinks that he needed to repair in his foundation with Jeannie too.

  “I’ll be back that night with bells on,” he promised solemnly.

  She reached for her doorhandle. “Just gun the motor, and I’ll come running.”

  But this time, by God, they were going to do it right. This time they weren’t waiting till dark for fear of being seen together. And this time he was coming to her.

  “If you’ll wait for me,” he said as he opened his door, “I’ll hang my suitbag in the closet and then walk you back to the house.”

  Her smile came back, urging him to hurry.

  The two-and-a-half-room apartment, which had been sitting empty since its previous occupant moved on to the greener pastures of marriage, was a far cry from his loft, where he had every convenience at his fingertips. Here the kitchen consisted of little more than a teakettle and a hot plate, the bathroom was barely big enough to turn around in, and the bedroom was a virtual monk’s cell. But it was clean. And when he looked out the window and saw the woman waiting for him on the front stoop, he suddenly realized it was home.

  “And what’s this?”

  “Tony on his first day of kindergarten and me on my first day of college.”

  Rafe smiled at the photograph and rubbed his fingertips over it. “You look more like his older sister or his baby-sitter than you do his mother.”

  Jeannie laughed. “By the time I got him ready to go, all I had time to do was put my hair in a ponytail, grab my books, and jump in the car.”

  They were sitting on the living room sofa, waiting for Martha to call them to dinner and browsing through the picture album that chronicled everything from Tony’s first footprints—“So tiny!” Rafe had marveled—to his first birthday cake—“Such a mess,” Jeannie had moaned—to his first day of school.

  “It must have been rough,” he said now, “taking care of a growing boy and carrying a full load of classes all at the same time.”

  “It was,” she agreed, remembering those frantic days more fondly from a distance. “But I was determined to graduate from college in the same century I’d graduated from high school.”

  He grinned his congratulations and turned the page.

  She glanced at the picture and spotted trouble.

  Looking at the album had been an emotional experience for both of them. They’d exchanged proud “ah’s” over their son’s baptismal photographs and shared words of solace at the last snapshot of his first dog before it was hit by a car out on the highway. But whenever they came to a picture of Big Tom with Tony, as they had now, they lapsed into silence.

  Rafe flipped through the remaining pages without further comment, then closed the album. Jeannie replaced it on the built-in bookshelf, almost wishing she’d never gotten it out, and resumed her seat on the sofa.

  “I’m sorry.” He slipped an arm around her shoulders and drew her closer. “It just fries me to think that while I was trying to keep some client out of the pokey, a man who despised me was teaching my son to ride a pony.”

  “I understand.” Curling her legs beneath her, she nestled consolingly against his hard frame. “But you saw with your own eyes what good buddies they were and how much fun they had together.”

  Rafe checked the angry response that came to his lips. There was nothing to be gained by lashing out at Jeannie. She’d loved her father, warts and all. And as much as he hated to admit it, a part of him would always be grateful to Big Tom for the advantages and affection he’d given Tony.

  A very small part of him, he qualified silently before saying in a wry voice, “Yeah, they were a pair to draw to, all right.”

  “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” she quipped.

  “Cisco and Pancho,” he shot back.

  She laughed, a rich, smoky sound, and he felt the tension ease. He tightened his arm, telling her wordlessly that he wanted her closer, and she rested her head against his chest.

  The slowly rotating blades of the ceiling fan chased away yet another of yesterday’s clouds as they sat there, while the late-afternoon sunlight filtering in through the white wooden shutters promised a brighter tomorrow.

  Rafe’s thumb began making lazy circles on Jeannie’s bare arm. Her forefinger returned the favor, drawing loops and fairy rings along the muscular length of his thigh.

  “I want you,” he whispered roughly, stirring her hair with his harsh statement.

  She lifted her head and smiled up at him, saying softly, “You’ve got me.”

  His lips came down on hers. Moist heat flared along the curves of her mouth as he traced them with his tongue. She made a small yearning sound and met his tongue with her own, twining, and her sweet, sweet taste was a banquet after a long fast.

  One of his hands moved to cover her breast and massage it gently through the gauzy bodice. The other dived into her daffodil hair to comb and toy with the rebellious locks. Her fingers gave his silver earring a twirl before going on to explore the taut column of his neck and the supple muscles of his shoulders and back. Even when the kiss ended and they came up for air, their long-denied bodies continued to clamor for the ultimate closeness.

  “Ohhh, Cisco,” she breathed as the friction from the back of his knuckle brought her
nipple to a tight peak.

  “Ohhh, Pancho,” he rasped when she reached down and laid her open hand over his bulging fly.

  Their silliness gave way to seriousness then as they gazed deeply into each other’s eyes, drinking in the sights they’d sorely missed these last eleven years, drenching themselves in feelings too powerful to be voiced.

  Jeannie pulled her hand away and looped her arms around Rafe’s neck, tangling her fingers in the thick and silky waves of hair at his nape. His hands shifted to her back, his palms caressing her warm, bare skin as he drew her nearer. Moving of one accord then, they tipped their heads until their lips met again.

  Their loving reunion came to an end when, simultaneously, they realized that their thundering heartbeats weren’t all that they heard. Bootsteps, slowing from a loping run down the hall to a screeching halt in the living room doorway, broke them apart. And belligerent blue eyes fairly shouted disapproval when the startled couple looked to find their son standing there staring at them.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Tony announced abruptly.

  Ten

  Dinner was a disaster.

  Jeannie couldn’t fault the food. To the contrary, Martha’s pot roast was fork-tender and her mashed potatoes butter-melting fluffy. Her hot rolls were the yeastiest yet, perfect for dipping in the savory beef gravy, and her coconut cake could have won any bake-off hands down.

  No, it wasn’t the meal that made Jeannie’s tongue cleave to the roof of her mouth with every bite and her throat rebel against swallowing. It was the demeanor of her male companions. And it was the table conversation—or, more accurately—the lack of conversation among them.

  Rafe had tried to get the ball rolling. He’d asked Tony all kinds of questions about school, wanting to know which subjects he liked best, who his favorite teachers were, and what sports he played. But Tony, who could talk the leg off a chair if the spirit moved him, had turned into a monosyllabic wonder. And Rusty, not really loquacious to begin with, had literally eaten in silence.

  Jeannie had planned on this week being a turning point. The end to bitterness as father and son finally made each other’s acquaintance and began to form a bond. A rebirth of the sweet life as Rafe and she took advantage of this second chance they’d been miraculously afforded.