Desperado

by Diana Palmer

  That was curious, Cord thought. She had a strange attitude toward possessions. She didn’t accumulate things. In fact, she was like him in her Spartan attitude toward home.

  “We’ll probably have kids who are pack rats,” he remarked absently.

  She forced herself not to react to the painful remark. She even smiled. “Speak for yourself. My kids are going to be neat freaks.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “When do you plan to have these mythical spotless children?”

  “About the same time you start your own family with someone,” she returned. “And God help her, the poor woman. She’ll be stuck at home while you’re off trying to get yourself blown up.”

  He didn’t react with amusement, as she expected him to. He looked very somber. “If I married again, I’d come home and raise purebred Santa Gertrudis herd sires. Maybe I’d do a little consultant work for Eb Scott in my spare time at his anti-terrorism school in Jacobsville.”

  “That’ll be the day,” she said absently.

  “You never know,” he replied. “I do dangerous work. I told Lassiter that maybe I did it to punish myself for Patricia’s suicide. Perhaps that was closer to the truth than I realized. I felt guilty.”

  She didn’t know how to answer him. He’d loved Patricia. She’d loved him. Maggie knew nothing of mutual love affairs. She’d never had one.

  “Marriage is a risk, even when you love each other,” she said, remembering her brief marriage with anger and pain. “Do it in a hurry and you pay the price.”

  His eyes narrowed coldly as a wave of unexpected jealousy racked him. Her husband had been abusive, but she’d rushed into marriage with the man just the same. “You’d know, wouldn’t you?”

  She blinked, coming out of her bitter reverie. “Yes, I would. Shouldn’t we go?” she added, turning away from him.

  Amazingly, she felt his warm, steely hands on her shoulders, staying her retreat. His breath sighed out against her nape. “If I’d known what he was doing to you,” he said carefully, “I’d have torn him apart!”

  “Why would you have bothered?” she asked. “You didn’t care where I went, as long as it was out of your life. You said so.”

  His eyes closed. The memory was agonizing. He’d said a lot of things, insulting things, that he hadn’t meant. He’d been shocked, ashamed, disgusted with himself. He took it out on Maggie.

  “I’m…sorry,” he bit off.

  “Oh, that’s great, we should call the news people,” she murmured dryly. “Another apology from Cord Romero. Wow! I’ll bet they’re wearing overcoats in hell right now.”

  He laughed softly. “I suppose they are. I’m not very good at apologies.”

  “You don’t need to be. You’re never wrong,” she agreed with a wicked glance over her shoulder. “Shouldn’t we go?”

  “Is there a fire?”

  She pulled away from his hands and turned toward him unflinchingly. “Broken mirrors can be patched, but they’re always distorted afterward. I think relationships are like that,” she told him quietly. “You don’t really like me. Gruber’s made threats and you’re protecting me, because it’s the way you’re made. But once the danger is all gone, it will be just the way it was before. You’ll tolerate me on the outskirts of your life.” She smiled sadly. “I’ve had years of that. I want a new start, somewhere else. I want,” she hesitated, averting her eyes, “I want to be free of the past.”

  “Running away isn’t the answer.”

  She looked up into his irritated face with real pain. “Yes, it is, Cord,” she said huskily, seeing dreams die as she remembered Stillwell’s threat and the information he had about her. “Sometimes it’s the only way there is.”

  He didn’t understand her attitude. They’d been growing closer, physically and emotionally, since his brush with death. She was taking giant steps backward, just when he wanted to begin again with her.

  “Why don’t you take one day at a time?” he advised.

  She laughed. It had a hollow sound. “It won’t help. Nothing will help anymore. Please, can we go?”

  “I’ll have a quick word with June,” he said.

  “I’ll take my case out…”

  “You will not,” he said firmly. “Wilson’s in the barn with one of his men, and June’s father and Red Davis aren’t here. There’s no one right outside the door. You’ll stay right in this room until I go out with you.”

  “All right, Cord,” she agreed easily. She sat down on the arm of the sofa and waited patiently.

  “What, no argument?” he asked with mock surprise.

  “I don’t have a gun yet,” she reminded him.

  “Don’t hold your breath waiting for me to give you one, either,” he mused. “The one time I tried to teach you to shoot a rifle, you dropped the damned thing on my foot.”

  Because being close to him shook her up. Because her whole body had reacted with predictable delight. She couldn’t tell him that.

  “It weighed half as much as I do, and you didn’t hand it to me, you tossed it at me,” she replied. “I couldn’t even figure how to get the safety off.”

  She didn’t add that she’d since learned to shoot a pistol with quite good accuracy. Eb Scott had taught her, during their very brief engagement.

  “You were engaged to a professional soldier,” he remarked. “Eb should have taught you.”

  “Eb was busy saving the planet from evil,” she returned facetiously.

  “Do you ever regret not marrying him?” he asked abruptly.

  She shook her head. “We were good friends. It was never more than that.”

  “Then why get engaged to him in the first place?”

  Because you married Patricia, she thought, feeling the anguished pain all over again. Cord had walked into Amy’s living room with the petite blonde on his arm, ignoring Maggie, and announced that they were married. He had his arm tight around Patricia’s thin shoulders, and they were both beaming. Maggie had smiled with her heart breaking inside her. She smiled now. She wasn’t going to let him know.

  “He was a dish,” she said airily.

  He glowered at her for a minute before he went out the door and down the hall to the kitchen, leaving Maggie time to collect herself.

  Cord had a twin engine plane, and he frequently flew himself to cattle auctions and business meetings, but with the fiction of blindness, nobody would believe he could fly. So this time he put Maggie in the car with him and had Red Davis drive them to the airport to catch a flight to Spain.

  “Is this a safe way to travel?” she asked as the jet lifted into the air over Houston.

  “Relatively safe,” was all he’d say.

  They flew first-class, something Maggie hadn’t expected, to Madrid. She sat beside Cord in the area of a plane she’d never graced in her life. She always traveled coach, because she didn’t have the money to afford such luxuries.

  Cord had apparently arranged for them to change planes to travel to Spain from New Jersey. The flight was long and Maggie couldn’t sleep. She accepted water every time the flight attendants offered it. She got up and walked down the aisle, stretching her legs. She listened to music on the headphones. The movie—ironically, a disaster picture—didn’t interest her. Apparently it didn’t interest Cord, either, because he was plugged into a laptop computer and the Internet. Since he had the window seat, she couldn’t look past him at the aisle in a covert attempt to see what he was doing. He wasn’t inclined to talk, and she was. But eventually, she closed her eyes and, amazingly, fell asleep.

  He shook her gently when they landed at the busy Barajas Airport in Madrid. She opened her eyes, stretched and yawned, and eased into the aisle when the plane taxied in to its concourse. She tugged her carry-on bag from under the seat in front of her and waited for Cord to move out with his own carry-on, the laptop neatly tucked inside it. They immediately got on to a charter flight to Málaga, in southern Spain.

  After the flight, they walked up the long ramp into the concours
e and Cord stopped unobtrusively and nudged her in the right direction. She glanced around her at all the travelers and remembered her trip to Morocco with Gretchen, because many of the passengers were Muslim. It wasn’t unusual to see men in long robes and women with head scarves among the jeans and pantsuits of the other travelers.

  The walls had travel posters and she found herself reading them without hesitation or difficulty. That ability to understand Spanish brought back painful memories of her first years with Cord, when a shared knowledge of Spanish had given her a special place in his life. In recent years, it hurt her just to hear it. But now it all came back in a rush.

  “You don’t speak Spanish much anymore, do you?” Cord asked suddenly, glancing at her.

  “Not for years,” she confessed.

  “Not since you grew up,” he corrected. He searched her taut face. “You had the most unique accent,” he recalled with a smile. “Mexican mixed with a deep Southern drawl.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve still got it. They’d flog me here if I spoke Spanish, with my accent,” she agreed.

  He chuckled. “People are more tolerant these days. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard someone from Russia speak it.”

  That amused her and she laughed.

  “That’s better,” he said gently. “You were looking a little fraught there for a while. I shouldn’t have ignored you on the way over.”

  Her face closed. “I don’t need babysitting.”

  “Don’t you?” He looked around them, as if he were searching for someone. “I phoned my cousin before we left the States. He offered to send a man to pick us up, but I told him we’d rent a car and drive up. I don’t like the idea of a stranger meeting us—he could be anybody.”

  “Do they have rental cars here?” she asked, feeling lost.

  He chuckled. “They have them everywhere. Come on.”

  He let her lead him to passport control and then onto the ground floor where the rental car counters were lined up. He waited with the suitcases while she filled out the form and got the key. Then she led him out into the scorching summer heat of Madrid.

  “Cousin Jorge lives north of Málaga,” he told her. “Picasso was born in Málaga,” he added. “Jorge has a big farm—they call them ganaderias here in Andalusia. Jorge still raises fighting bulls for the corrida, the bullfighting ring. A Romero from Ronda, not related to us, was the father of modern bullfighting. Jorge has fewer bulls now, and since he’s a bachelor, when he dies the ganaderia will have to be sold.”

  “It’s a shame,” she remarked.

  “Life goes on,” he said without sentiment. “You’ll like him. He can tell some incredible stories about the old days of bullfighting, when my grandfather was a matador.”

  “I like history.”

  “So do I.”

  “Andalusia is the home of the flamenco,” Cord told her. “It has been traditionally performed by gypsies, and it varies in style depending on the area where it’s performed. There are Roman ruins everywhere—there’s even a small one on Jorge’s ganaderia,” he added with a smile. “Nearby is the Costa del Sol, the playground of millionaires, and the famous ‘white’ towns. Farther along the coast is Gibraltar, still a British possession, and across the Straits of Gibraltar is Morocco. To be more specific, Tangier,” he reminded her.

  She grinned. “I loved Tangier. I’d love to see more of it.”

  “You’ll probably get your chance later,” he said mysteriously.

  “Do they drive on the wrong side of the road here?” she worried as they reached the rental car.

  “They do not. They drive on the right side, here and in Gibraltar,” he added, smiling at her surprise. “There were too many wrecks when other Europeans had to switch sides of the road in Gibraltar, so they made it conform to Spain and Morocco’s driving rules.”

  “Thank goodness!” she exclaimed with relief.

  She didn’t tell him that the most exciting thing about the upcoming drive to Jorge’s home was sharing it with him. She’d never been so happy, despite the potential danger that surrounded the trip.

  The countryside was exquisite, dotted with olive groves and cypress, with ancient buildings in the inhabited areas and cattle and horses grazing in picturesque pastures along the winding road. There was no real traffic outside the city, and Maggie relaxed a little as she drove. She didn’t drive in Houston, preferring cabs to the difficult ownership and expense of a car.

  Eventually they came to a wrought-iron gate with the name “Romero” on a painted board beside it. Cord got out and opened the gate. She drove the car through, and then he shut it again. Minutes later, they drove up between fenced pastures to an elegant arched home that resembled adobe structures Maggie had seen in Texas. The house was white with a red-tiled roof, and two shaggy dogs sat on the front porch next to a white-haired man leaning on a cane.

  “Cousin Jorge was my grandfather’s brother’s son,” Cord informed Maggie as she stopped the car. “Which makes him my cousin.”

  “He’s very elegant, isn’t he? He looks like an aristocrat.” Maggie commented as the elderly gentleman made his way down the steps to greet them.

  “He’s a card,” he replied, smiling. “You’ll see what I mean when you get to know him.” He got out of the car and let the old man come to him, hugging him warmly. They exchanged greetings before Maggie was introduced. The old man took her hand to his lips with a flourish.

  “It is a great pleasure to meet the most important woman in my cousin’s life,” Cousin Jorge said in passable English, and grinned.

  She laughed self-consciously. “I’m only his foster sister, but I’m very glad to meet you, too,” she replied.

  He gave her an odd look but he shrugged. “Please, come in. I have had rooms made ready for you…” He hesitated, both eyebrows coming together in a monstrous scowl. “You do not share a room?” he added suspiciously.

  Maggie burst out laughing. “Oh, that will be the day,” she burbled helplessly and didn’t dare look at Cord.

  The old man chuckled. “Forgive me. I do not, how does one say it, ‘move with the times.’”

  “Don’t you feel bad,” Maggie said easily, taking his arm. “I don’t move with them, either. Sad that we can’t say the same for some other people,” she added with a meaningful glance at Cord.

  When they were in the house, Cord took off the dark glasses. “I’m in disguise,” he told the old man somberly. “I was injured in an accident, and the man who did this to me—” he indicated the wounds on his face “—wants to try again. I came out of the country to throw him off the track.”

  “You must tell me all about it,” Jorge said with a smile. “I am no stranger to violence, as you recall. Come.”

  He led them out of the hall, into the living room. The interior of Jorge Romero’s house was immaculate, like something out of a designer magazine. The floors were marble, old, elegant. The wood was stained oak. The carved ceiling was a work of art. There were Persian carpets on the floors and silk curtains at the windows. The furniture was covered in silk as well, except for the deep, high-backed armchairs, which were leather.

  “Your home is beautiful,” Maggie remarked.

  “A bachelor’s home must substitute for a wife and children,” he informed her with a sad smile. “I lost my fiancée during our civil war here. She was a beautiful young girl whose smile lifted my heart. She was by my side in the thick of battle, and a bullet ended her life. I was never inclined to replace her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Maggie said with genuine sympathy.

  He shrugged and smiled at her. “We all have trials as we go through life. Mine have been less traumatic than those of many other people,” he explained. “Sit here,” he offered her a seat on the dainty little sofa. “And I will have Marisa bring us hot chocolate. You like hot chocolate?” he added quickly.

  “I love it,” she agreed with a smile.

  “That is good. As you drink coffee in America, we drink chocolate in
Spain. I am fond of it.”

  He excused himself and walked toward the back of the house.

  “I like him,” Maggie told Cord.

  “He likes you. I’m not allowed to sit there,” he added, standing over her with his hands deep in his slacks pockets. “It’s where his fiancée sat, when his father owned this house and Jorge was courting her.”

  “I’m flattered,” she replied.

  He searched her face quietly. “I wish we could share a room, Maggie,” he said quietly.

  She averted her eyes. “Don’t.”

  His indrawn breath was low and impatient. “You won’t let me in, will you?” he asked curtly. “You meet every overture with a mad dash for the door.”

  She studied her clenched fingers. “You said…”

  “I lied!” He turned away from her. “I’m going out of my mind.”

  She didn’t understand. Her green eyes followed him as he walked to the window and looked out.

  While he was brooding, Jorge came back, and very soon Cord’s outburst was lost in conversation laced with delicious hot chocolate served in dainty china cups.

  Jorge didn’t own a television. That evening, they all went out onto the wide, long front porch and sat in rocking chairs, listening to the cattle low in the distance.

  “This is wonderful,” Maggie remarked dreamily, closing her eyes. “It’s just like at Cord’s ranch, late in the evening.”

  “You live with him?” Jorge queried.

  “No. I’m staying there for a while,” she replied. “It’s rather complicated.”

  “She doesn’t want to tell you that we’re being targeted by the assassin I mentioned earlier,” Cord told the old man, despite Maggie’s attempt to hush him up. “He’s buying and selling little children into slave labor, and we’re trying to shut him down.”

  The old man became a stranger. He leaned forward, his lean face intent in the yellow light beaming out through the windows.

  “Three of my men were with me in the Republican army,” he told Cord. “We are old, but at your disposal.”