“Shall we go in and see Mr. Montego, then?” she suggested. She was curious to meet the son to whom Lalo Montego had left so little.
They entered the shadows of the barn. It took her several seconds to adjust her vision to where she could even make out shadows within shadows.
The place smelled as only a barn could smell: a not totally unpleasant mingling of hay and straw, of animal and animal dung. There were no animals in immediate evidence, though. Alyssa assumed the horses were kept in the separate stable complex. Whatever animals lived here on a permanent basis (cows?), were obviously now out to pasture.
“Over here,” Ramón guided.
She wasn’t sure of her coordination in strange surroundings and followed slowly. Luís took up the rear.
Ramón led the way to a far stall. At first, Alyssa couldn’t see Adriano Montego at all.
“My God!” she exclaimed when she finally did see him curled up in a battered ball on a compressed pile of hay against the wall.
Ramón and Luís exchanged nervous glances of which Alyssa was intuitively aware.
“But, then, if he was killing bulls, he undoubtedly deserves his present condition, doesn’t he?” she ventured in an attempt to put Ramón and Luís more at ease. In actuality, she wasn’t at all sure that killing a few dumb animals should have really warranted beating Adriano quite so badly. “Still, I suppose the most humane thing would be to get him a doctor.” She turned to Ramón. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Of course,” he said. The last thing he wanted was a dead Adriano Montego in the hacienda barn.
“You know of a doctor who would be discreet?” Alyssa continued, trying to assuage whatever her foreman’s continuing obvious fears. She had knelt by Adriano’s body, afraid he was already dead. Her immediate fears had been somewhat lessened by the pulse evident at the base of his throat seen without her even having to touch it.
“Luís, go get Leandro!” Ramón commanded. He turned to Alyssa and explained, “Leandro isn’t a real doctor, but he knows enough to tell us if we’ll need Dr. Santos from town.”
Alyssa wasn’t at all sure she was willing to risk Adriano’s diagnosis to someone medically unqualified. Still, she had asked for someone discreet, hadn’t she? She didn’t want trouble to come from this, if it could, in any way, be prevented.
“Mr. Montego can’t stay here,” she said, thinking of very little else to say under the circumstances. Luís had already left the barn, en route to fetch Leandro—wherever it was Leandro might be that he hadn’t been summoned already. “Shall we take him to a bedroom in the house?”
“I think it would be best to wait,” Ramón said. He didn’t know how badly Adriano was hurt, but he didn’t want to take any chance of making him worse by moving him. If only he had gotten back to the hacienda earlier, he might well have stopped things from having gone this far.
Damn—Adriano should have known he was playing with dynamite when he killed those bulls! If he knew nothing else, he had to know how these men idolized those animals. Bulls were these men’s lives. To kill one of the bulls, let alone five of them, before even one of them could meet its natural end amid the pomp and circumstance of the corrida de toros, was sacrilege. Adriano Montego was lucky he wasn’t dead. He might well have been if Ramón hadn’t arrived when he did.
“Yes, of course, you’re right. We mustn’t move him,” Alyssa said, wondering whatever had possessed her even to suggest doing so. How many first-aid courses had she taken in her life wherein it had constantly been drilled into her as to just how dangerous it could be to move any victim before qualified medical help arrived on the scene?
CHAPTER TWO
Leandro Galba turned out to be the local self-trained veterinarian. That made Alyssa, when she found out, a little uneasy. The general consensus of Ramón and Luís seemed to be that they would trust the diagnosis any day of a man who handled the bulls, over the diagnosis of Doctor Santos from town.
Alyssa became even more worried when Leandro pronounced his verdict of Adriano Montego’s condition: “Actually, he looks a whole lot worse than he really is.”
Alyssa was sure that had to be wrong. As far as she was concerned, no one could possibly look like Adriano now did and not have broken bones, internal injuries, or both.
“What I prescribe is plenty of bed rest somewhere a bit more conducive to comfort than this barn.”
“It’s all right to move him, then?” Alyssa asked, anxious for verification that the veterinarian had, indeed, said Adriano was likely to remain among the living.
“Oh, it’s quite safe to move him,” Leandro assured. Then, seeming to sense Alyssa was dubious, he added: “Of course, if you would prefer to call in a second opinion, I’m sure Dr. Santos in.…”
“I see no reason for a second opinion,” she said, trying to pretend that idea hadn’t even crossed her mind.
“Well, if you find he’s not improved by tomorrow.…” Leandro let the sentence purposely hang, insinuating by doing so that Alyssa could still summon Dr. Santos if she wanted.
That had all taken place over twenty-four hours ago. If Adriano Montego hadn’t yet regained consciousness, at least he was looking better.
Alyssa, who had momentarily taken the chair beside his bed, took another opportunity to give him the once-over. She felt her cheeks grow hot as she remembered how she’d been so reluctant to leave the room when Mara had begun undressing him for bed.
“You’ll want to step on out, for a minute, my dear,” Mara had instructed Alyssa, upon realizing the younger woman hadn’t been any too quick to make an exit. “I’ll take care that the young man is properly made ready for bed; not something to be attended by a proper young lady like you.”
Alyssa had wanted to stay, even though she had been embarrassed when caught trying. She told herself her desire to stay had been nothing more than natural curiosity. What else could it have been, since Adriano had hardly looked like God’s gift to women with his swollen eyes and split lip? Besides, Alyssa had never seen a naked man. Not in the living flesh anyway. There had been a couple of nude scenes in movies, but those just weren’t the same thing.
She wondered how many women, at twenty-six, still hadn’t seen an on-the-spot naked man. She wondered how many hadn’t gone a bit farther than just the seeing. There had been a few times in her life when she’d been tempted to step over the boundaries of innocence and arrive on the next plateau. She had been kept from it solely because she hadn’t had all that many opportunities. Despite the rumors, girls’ schools weren’t the best places to get practical experience in the facts of life. Not the private schools she had been cloistered within, anyway. The one located closest to a boys’ academy had been the one she had attended in Switzerland. The boys, though, had been across the lake; and, the faculties of both schools had, by the time Alyssa arrived, long since learned every possible ploy their charges might come up with to get together. Those same faculties had known how to run expert interference.
As for Ty…well…he had tried a couple of times to get fresh, but he had been easily put off. After all, he’d been brought up to respect women of Alyssa’s ilk and to vent his animal lusts elsewhere. Quite frankly, though, Alyssa had always suspected he was much too genteel to have animal lusts. Admittedly, she was just as genteel, but she imagined her lusts smoldering just beneath the surface, just waiting for some special man to come along and fan them into full-fledged flames.
Those thoughts made her blush redder. She was back daydreaming something she used to, a good deal of the time, when younger. What young woman didn’t dream of her knight on horseback? It was quite all right and healthy for a young girl to fantasize such things. On the other hand, it was hardly all right for healthy twenty-six year old woman to continue harboring such flights of erotic fantasy.
The focus of her attention went back to the man on the bed. If her mental computations were correct, she figured he was about two years her senior. The swelling and discoloration on his battered face had
gone down far enough to show that he was a recognizable twenty-eight—and attractive as hell, if you liked dark, brooding, good looks on a man.
He had black hair, fairly short but pleasantly tousled to hang a curtain of confused strands over his forehead. He had black eyebrows that almost, but not quite, came together. His eyelashes were long and lush, resting on his cheeks now that his eyes were shut. His mouth showed indication of being full and sensuous even without the additional bee-stung look caused by his split lower lip. He had a decidedly square jaw that managed to escape being overly blockish with its deep chin-cleft so deep as to leave Alyssa wondering how he possibly shaved within its inner crease. And, he obviously was a man who had to shave regularly or show the effects. Since the time she’d brought him from the barn, his face had grown noticeable stubble. The hair on his arms and along the visible top of his chest grew atop an intricate display of well-delineated muscles.
Something told her it might be interesting to see how the men who had beaten him had fared. It seemed unlikely that a man in Adriano’s superb physical condition would have stood idly by while pounded senseless.
He groaned; in direct response, she scooted closer to him and the bed.
He rocked from side to side but not enough to change his supine position. Finally, the rolling stopped.
He opened his mouth, licked his lips, and twisted his face into a grimace when his tongue slid over his injured lip. His eyes fluttered, then opened, revealing large, ebony pupils that immediately seemed to suck Alyssa into their depths.
“Where am I?” he asked.
Alyssa smiled. She had heard that trite line so often in movies that she had come to suspect no one would actually ever use it in reality. “Resting, in that I’m afraid several of my men became a bit overwrought when they discovered you were shooting my bulls and decided to use you as a punching bag.”
“Stupid fools!”
“Granted, they may have overreacted just a bit, but I’m a little loath to criticize them too thoroughly since they were responding to the destruction of my property, weren’t they?”
“Except that I didn’t kill your damned bull!” His dark glance nailed her to her chair as firmly as a stick pin pinioned a bug to corkboard.
“I suppose there are always two sides to any story,” she said, magnanimously. She didn’t want him to think she was automatically accepting his tale over the one told by the men who worked for her. Though, she couldn’t imagine Ramón a liar, and he had said the men had done what they had done because Adriano Montego had killed another bull. “Why don’t you tell me your side of the story?”
“I was on my way to make a courtesy call on you, as it happens,” he said. “I heard a shot. I rode over to find the dead bull. Your men appeared and jumped to false conclusions, then jumped me.”
“Well, you must understand how they might well have come to the conclusion they did, right? I mean, the circumstantial evidence against you must be obvious, even to you.”
“Even though I wasn’t carrying a gun of any kind at the time?” he challenged. His effort at sarcasm curled his lips and obviously caused him pain.
“No gun?”
“Your bull was strangled to death, was he?”
Just because he wasn’t found with a weapon didn’t mean he hadn’t had one. Hearing the approach of the riders, he might well have found someplace to hide the weapon he’d used for the distasteful deed. Despite the temptation to confront her uninvited guest with that ready possibility, Alyssa didn’t do so. Since Ramón wasn’t there to hear her confront Adriano, she decided, momentarily, to give Adriano the benefit of a doubt.
“If that, indeed, turns out to be the case, I’ll owe you an apology,” was all she’d concede at the moment.
“Why? I didn’t see you laying into me with your pretty fists.”
“Yes, but my men were acting on my behalf,” she reminded.
“And, did your men do much damage? If it’s as much as it feels like, I must be in sad condition, indeed.”
“Actually, as I understand it, your wounds are superficial, if decidedly painful at the moment.”
“Says Dr. Santos?”
“Well…,” Alyssa began and then stopped. She wondered how she would confess that she had turned him over to a veterinarian. “In truth, I was so afraid you might be seriously injured that I had to look closer to home than Dr. Santos.”
“That would mean Leandro Galba? Yes?”
She was about to launch into how she had been assured of Leandro Galba’s qualifications, when Adriano surprised her.
“Actually, I’ve long had my suspicions that Leandro is the better of those two doctors,” he said. He tried smiling but failed because of the pain that the stretching caused his battered lips.
Alyssa was relieved. It gave her something to quote if he ever decided to bring any of this into a court of law. She didn’t know how the courts moved in Spain on cases of assault and battery, but she suspected a judge and jury might be a little concerned about anyone who called in a veterinarian rather than a qualified doctor. But, if the victim admitted to the veterinarian’s expertise, well, then.…
“Do you suppose I could have some water” he asked, interrupting her train of thought.
She reached for the pitcher and glass which Mara had put by the bed earlier. She tipped the pitcher, filled the glass with water, and handed the result to Adriano.
He sipped, managing—if with a good deal of difficulty—to get the glass emptied and passed back to her.
“Am I causing you a major inconvenience by being here?” he asked, slipping deeper between the sheets. The heaviness of his eyelids disclosed that he was tiring quickly.
“The hacienda has enough spare bedrooms so that I don’t think I’ll soon be pressed to remove you from this one,” she said, deriving a sudden satisfaction from her role of Florence Nightingale.
“Nine of them, as a matter of fact,” he said, managing a faint grin. “Bedrooms, I mean. My father, your benefactor, managed to use each and every one of them.”
Alyssa wasn’t really all that sure of a proper response to that—if there even was one. As it turned out, any response would have been superfluous, since Adriano drifted suddenly into sleep.
Alyssa sat for a few moments more by his bedside, wondering how much his facial features would be altered once all of the swelling was down and his split lower lip mended.
Once again, she made mental comment as to how Adriano Montego was one attractive man. She got up and left the room, closing the door behind her.
In the hallway, she passed two young girls, both of whom were loaded down with linen. Over the preceding few hours, most of the servants had begun to resurface from the woodwork into which they’d seemingly disappeared. Alyssa acknowledged the girls with a nod of her head, determined she would eventually have to gather all of the household staff for a more formal introduction once she was more settled in.
Then, again, maybe not. It wasn’t as if she was planning to stick around, was it? It wasn’t as if her knowing, or not knowing these people was of any great importance. If she sold the property, as her mother advised her to do, it was probably best if she didn’t get close to any of them.
She was halfway down the stairs when she heard the knock on the front door. Mara, as usual, managed to materialize out of nowhere to answer it.
“Mara, how are you?” the man, still outside, said by way of friendly greeting. He was an older gentleman, quite distinguished in demeanor.
“The Señorita Dunlap is upstairs,” Mara said. “If you would like to come inside while I go get her.…”
“Mara?” Alyssa called to her.
Mara turned, as did the man parenthesized by the doorway.
“Is it someone for me?” Alyssa asked. She couldn’t imagine what kind of business the man could have with her.
“Señor Joaquín Hidalgo to see you, Señorita,” Mara informed.
“Señorita Dunlap?” he queried. “I’m one of your neighb
ors and hope I haven’t chosen an inopportune moment to stop by.”
“You say your name is Hidalgo?” Alyssa wondered why his name rang inner bells. The idea that she actually knew him, or even some distant relative of his, seemed highly unlikely.
“Joaquín, please,” he insisted. “I was driving by and thought I’d stop to welcome you. If it’s an inconvenience, however.…”
“Of course not, Señor Hidalgo.…”
“Joaquín, please,” he, again, requested.
Suddenly, Alyssa remembered. In the flesh and blood, here was the one man her mother had insinuated was once Lalo Montego’s only true friend. Once had been the key word, in that Karen had, also, insinuated that Lalo had done something quite dastardly to destroy the friendship; although she’d never been persuaded to go into any detail.
So, what was he doing there, now? Had he really only stopped on a neighborly visit?
“Won’t you come on through to the courtyard, Joaquín?” Alyssa invited.
Simultaneously, she wondered how many Spanish taboos she was about to break. She had read all of those stories about how unmarried women in Spain never entertained gentlemen without duennas in attendance. Surely none of that archaic formality, though, could possibly apply to Alyssa. It seemed absurd that she might somehow assume that it did. She was an American, and, thus, definitely removed from Spanish mores. Also, she was owner of the hacienda. That surely removed her from the necessity of any chaperones, even if she had been Spanish.
That Joaquín had arrived in the expensive Mercedes sports car parked outside, and not by horseback, was evident by his exceptionally neat appearance. He wore a white turtleneck sweater, blue blazer, and pressed, complete with creases, dark blue pants.
Alyssa led him to a table in the courtyard and motioned for him to sit.
He was dark-complexioned, had black eyes, gray-streaked black hair, sensuous lips, and what looked like a very good body. Alyssa found the total package decidedly handsome.
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