by Martha Hix
Margaret hadn’t been asked in. It might have been nice, being spared the sun—she’d forgotten how sweltering a Texas afternoon in October could be. But no. The host hadn’t invited her inside. A gracious gesture on his part might have shown some refinement. Amazingly, Rafe did have class and breeding in his lineage, but Margaret saw him as a throwback to a darker age, of a stripe most often seen on a wanted poster.
His domestic fiddled with a rusty hasp to open a weathered and creaking gate leading into a courtyard. The moon-faced woman cast a surly nod her way. “Mr. Delgado will be with you in a little bit.”
Intent on getting the upper hand with Rafe—she figured he was the guitarist nearby—Margaret raised her voice. “Did you not give your employer my message? Tell him to be quick about it. I’m in a hurry.”
“The great Eagle is a busy man,” was the woman’s contemptuous reply. She took her leave.
Could he have earned such loyalty? Margaret wondered, doubting it. Anyway, who gave a care? She had enough on her mind without mulling Rafael Delgado’s character—he, whose greatest claims to fame were seducing vulnerable women and outwitting dumb animals.
She glanced in the music’s direction, seeing closed shutters. She dreaded confronting Rafe. Always, she’d gotten the impression he saw the worst in Olga when he looked at Margaret. “Why worry?” she said sotto voce. “Any physical resemblance is now just in passing.”
Weary from the arduous trip south, as well as from her general state of ill health, she searched for a place to sit down and make a few observations. She’d pictured his home being a veritable museum to his matador days, but there was nothing in sight relating to that faded renown. Amazing.
The patio of terra cotta tile was built in the courtyard manner, a small fountain in the center. Climbing rosebushes grew on a trio of trellises. Two hide-covered chairs circled a wrought iron table, but the setting didn’t invite her invasion.
The table had been set with stemmed goblets, a bowl of fruit, and a bucket of champagne. Black silk material, probably some sort of thin robe, lay across the back of a chair. In front of it, a single rose rested atop a china plate. No doubt about it, the offing held seduction. Forced or otherwise.
Rafe never changed.
Just as she shook her head in disgust, something moved on the flagstones. Fawn-colored, small. A rat!
Margaret shrieked, backed away. The beastie quivered and quaked, began to cower. Heart beating twice as fast as the guitar tempo, Margaret murmured, “That’s not a rat. It’s a dog.” Her father once described this breed indigenous to northern Mexico. “And you’ve scared the little thing half to death.”
Yes, and don’t you know Rafe got a thrill from your shriek. She crouched down to extend a hand. “Little doggie, can we be friends?”
The mite tottered forward. And, surprisingly, she crawled into the cup of Margaret’s hand. “Why, you’re old!”
Margaret scratched the muzzle gone white with age. She couldn’t picture Rafe Delgado as master to an ancient canine, especially a tiny one. Brutes like Rafe tied in with beasts, such as Alsatians or wolfhounds. They kept piranhas in their fishbowls. They stood up to two-ton bulls. A delicate dog such as this commanded a gentle hand.
“Little one, I’m not going to start giving Rafe undue credit.” Margaret stood and held his pet at her heart. “I’ve known him eight years. He’s a degenerate and a satyr and a bum. And then there are his bizarre political activities. Or, were.”
The one word best describing him was too awful and horrible even to whisper to a dog, though Margaret did shudder. Trying to get a look in the closed windows while pacing up and down the flagstones, she groused, “Where is he?”
Rafe didn’t deign an appearance.
“I ought to abandon this project. If only I hadn’t made Papa several promises.” Margaret didn’t renege on promises. “But if he knew the whole ugly truth, he wouldn’t put so much faith in Rafe,” she confided to the pint-sized dog now licking the cushion of her thumb. “I’d love to fill Papa’s ears, but I promised Olga not to tell her awful secret. Which doesn’t mean I am thrilled at asking for help. My father is convinced, you see, no one knows the Copper Canyon better than Rafe.”
Margaret didn’t dispute Rafe’s knowledge of that area of the globe. Yet . . . “Haring off to Mexico, especially with him, ranks one peg ahead of prancing nude through Central Park.”
Hare off she must in these times of political intrigue. Both President McKinley and Gil McLoughlin, wishing to save the lives of American boys, stood firm against the popular hue and cry of “¡Cuba libre!” With Papa embroiled in affairs of state—and with communication impossible into a spa rumored to be the Fountain of Youth—the family business of collecting a vagabond Lisette had fallen to Margaret’s reluctant shoulders.
“I’ve got to make a quick trip out of it,” she said.
Much awaited her return home. Her neat and well-ordered life, in a big city like no other on earth. A professorship, at long last. A tear spilled as she cuddled the Chihuahua under her chin. “And my two precious babies.”
She must return with all haste. What if I can’t? She froze at the mere thought. After all these years of fits and starts, she had to make something of herself this time around. It might be her last chance.
“You’re being ridiculous. You have plenty enough time to take care of family business. The rest will take care of itself.”
After being set to her paws, the Chihuahua lapped from a dish of water, licked her whiskers, and vanished through a trapdoor. Margaret tapped a toe, her irritation building as she whiled away more minutes, waiting for Rafe.
It was hard to believe she’d once thought the has-been matador terribly intriguing.
Two
Rafe scratched his chest while ambling on bare feet to the patio to face La Bruja. Her back to him, Ida Frances’s rosebushes framing her tall form, Margaret evidently hadn’t heard his approach, for she continued to sniff the blossoms.
She wore bustle and corset beneath a drab skirt of brown and plain white blouse with puffed sleeves. Whereas her mother and sisters were big-boned and filled out nicely, Margaret had become anything but the latter. Even viewed from the rear, her appearance shocked Rafe. He remembered her as shapely, near plump. There was a frailness to her now, as if she needed to be fattened on beans and tortillas and the fruits of amour.
Fruits of amour?
He couldn’t imagine Margaret relishing so much as a nibble of passion.
One glance beyond the patio walls told him the autumn sun would set in an hour or so. Merdo. He’d been keeping Margaret waiting, when he needed to get rid of her. And fast.
“I know you’re here, Rafe.” The last red rose of the Indian summer at her nose, she inhaled and hummed a note of sensory approval. “Are you surprised to see me?”
For a moment he stood struck dumb. In his memory he’d recalled her voice as a series of braying snorts. It was nothing like that, nor did it have Olga’s little-girl quality. There was a full-bodied richness to Margaret’s husky voice, showing intelligence and strength.
He remembered her strength.
Always, strong women put him off.
Still giving him her back, she asked, “Have you no courtesy welcome for me?”
“I don’t live by courtesies.”
“My, how thoughtless of me, overlooking your ill-manners.” She smoothed hair not as richly hued nor as lustrous as he remembered it. The café noir was now just brown.
He snickered. “I see you’re still wearing your hair in a bun. Like a schoolmarm.”
“I am a school—” She turned. Her mouth dropped at the sight of his gold-adorned, shirtless chest. Then, like an old woman’s, her lips puckered into disapproval; she favored her great-grandmother Maisie at this moment. “No decency . . .”
Whereas Rafe had been shocked, he turned speechless. Maybe he’d expected to find her features unchanged, or perhaps he’d been looking for a suggestion of Spain’s loveliest counte
ss. What he got was the awful truth.
Margaret’s complexion used to be peaches and cream, but it had faded to a waxy gray with her skin stretched across sharp bones. What happened to her once glorious radiance? All right, a semblance of her beauty remained, but Margaret looked at least a dozen years above her twenty-eight.
Hard feelings vanished. With typical gallantry toward a needy damsel, Rafe wanted to make everything right for her. Stepping closer, forcing a smile, he started to speak; she beat him to it, saying, “Speaking of hair, yours looks funny.” She smirked, not a pretty sight. “It’s all greased down on one side, and fluffy on the other. Sleep in a puddle of pomade, did you?”
No wonder the witch was skinny—she’d been living on sour grapes. Keeping a good distance from her, he rubbed some of the hair cream to the right side of his head. “State your business. I’m a busy man.”
“Yes, of course, you’re otherwise engaged.” With a blue-veined hand, she fiddled with the sole item of beauty connected to La Bruja, a cameo brooch. “At your toilette, to be sure.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you to pay more attention to yourself.”
Mixing English and Spanish—both she and Rafe were fluent in the other’s mother tongue—she said pointedly, “Unlike some people, I pride myself on being above vanity.”
“You don’t say, Santa Margarita. Nice ring to saint. But saints are kind, I’ve been taught. Your disposition might honey up if you left corsets to the well-padded.” With true sentiment, he added, “Those stays must be gouging your ribs.”
She yanked at something, mostly likely the corset hem. “Ever the charmer, aren’t you?”
It was always this way with them. Mutual dislike, mutual antagonism. Which was an awkward scenario for an hombre used to charming and being charmed by the ladies. Unappreciative women gave him the shivers. Thankfully they were few and far between. But what should he do about this one? Extend an olive branch?
A long time back she’d written a book. Rafe had a grudging respect for anyone diligent enough to put something like that together. Him, he got restless just reading one. “I’ve heard good things about Columbus and Isabella.”
“Christopher Columbus and the Catholic Kings,” she corrected, then waxed enthusiastic. “You know, 1492 was a pivotal year in history . . .”
On went the oration. A yawn threatened Rafe. Long-dead Moors, Jews, and Inquisitors had nothing to do with the business of bull-breeding, or of loving the ladies. Margaret did capture his attention, though, when woe blanketed her gaze.
“Anyway”—she sniffed—“it’s ‘Mortimer’ McLughlin’s book, not mine. Not really. Not only was I forbidden from using my own name, it missed being printed during the quatercentenary of the Great Discovery. Thanks to the court action against my plagiarist, the book wasn’t published until 1893.”
“More’s the pity.” Rafe started to ask why her nabob father hadn’t used his influence in the matter, but decided to leave well enough alone. He grinned, teasing, “So what brings you to my humble abode—praise for the landholder?”
Annoyed. She got annoyed, especially when he gave his shoulders a roll and his biceps a flex. Her teeth clenching and unclenching, she said, “Praise for the landholder? You never change do you, Rafe? Ever vain and pompous.”
“Do you really expect me to answer that?”
“I expect nothing. To me you don’t exist.”
“Which is why you’re here to praise me . . . ?”
“Maybe I should laud you. Let’s see now.”
They stood glaring straight at each other. Although he’d challenged her, it aggravated him no end when she tapped her fingernail on an incisor and looked him up and down, as if he’d been swinging from a butcher’s hook for days on end.
She said, “No visible deformities or epidermal eruptions. No bucked or overlong or missing teeth. Plenty of hair atop your head, as well as on that chest of yours. Ears that don’t wave in the breeze. And—correct me if I’m wrong—but from looking at those muscles you so love to flaunt, I’d say a lady wouldn’t need to hire a woodchopper, were you in her employ.”
¡Maldición! He longed to rattle the harridan’s teeth—like his uncle Arturo did the life from the slaves who worked his silver mines.
Continuing to damn him, she pointed out, “There is one thing I admire in you, Rafael Delgado. I’m glad you’re short. I wouldn’t like looking up to you.”
His vanity slashed, Rafe ordered himself to consider the source. He knew why she hated him. It wasn’t his height, which was a couple of inches above hers, and, besides, he was tall for a mexicano, anyway. She hated him because of Olga.
Olga was also the main reason he had no use for the McLoughlins.
If it killed him, he would fire the parting shot. His voice rife with innuendo, he pointed out, “Big things come in small packages, mujer.”
Bustle bobbing, Margaret stomped over to the table. Her forefinger and thumb picked up the Chinese kimono he’d purchased as a gift for the lovely and amenable Dolores of a hundred charms. As if it were beyond loathsome, Margaret made a big to-do as she dropped the silken mass to the table. Finished, she went into the gyrations women endured to seat themselves.
She skewered him with blue eyes. And they were the sad eyes of an unhappy, unfulfilled woman.
The McLoughlin triplets may have been identical (at least they’d started out alike), but he noticed for the first time that their eyes were different shades of blue. Charity’s snapped with a turquoise tint. And Olga’s were pale, weak. Warning himself off the subject of her, he honed in on her sister again. Fringed with thick ebony lashes, Margaret’s eyes were as blue as the summer sky of his home state. To Rafe, nothing was prettier than the summer sky of Chihuahua.
Dios, when Margaret McLoughlin started looking attractive, he’d definitely been too long without a woman.
“Why did you come here?” he asked, weary of sparring.
She poked stray, wavy hairs back into the tight, dark bun at the crown of her head. “I’ll make this as brief as possible. I want to hire you. You’re to escort me and my bro—” She coughed. “Me and my fiancé to—”
“Fiancé? You’ve got a man?” Rafe had never figured her for a housewife. This was a woman of purpose, a person out to set the world afire, as he’d been when he first entered the plaza de toros. What had happened to her ambitions?
She took him wrong, took insult. “Yes, I have a man. A very fine-looking young man. Tall. Very tall. A Teutonic god, he’s been called. You’re old enough to be his father, I do believe. You are forty-five, aren’t you?”
Forty-five did it. His temper boiling like the water required for cocoa, he shouted, “¡Estoy como agua pa’ chocolate!”
“You needn’t shout. My ears work fine.”
Witch! Her novio must be a blind, deaf, and moronic Hun. On the whole, no able hombre would pick La Bruja for his own. Oh really? Rafe himself had had his eye on her, back in the beginning—back before she treated him to a large serving of her personality: colder than ice, romantic as a saddle sore, meaner than el toro with a garrocha stuck in his shoulder thews.
Keeping his voice even, Rafe asked, “What exactly do you want of me?”
“Help.”
“Tell me something I don’t know already.”
“My mother is at a health retreat in Mexico. It’s supposed to be the Fountain of Youth.”
The daughter, in his estimation, was the one in need of a miracle.
“My father wants her home. I expect you to guide me and Tex Jones to her.”
“Tex Jones?”
“My intended, of course. We must leave as soon as you can get your house in order.”
This sounded more like a demand than a job offer, which sat worse than greasy meat. “Anything I’ve done lately to make you think I’d desert my ranch to step to your tune?”
“You’ll do it. You’ll do it because you like money and I’m willing to pay you; though you ought to do it for nothing, since you’re in
debted to my father.”
The woman was loco in the head. If anyone was indebted in this situation, it was Gil McLoughlin to Rafael Delgado. There was the matter of a debt of honor. A debt unpaid. Back in ’89, back in Chihuahua, McLoughlin had promised to arm the revolution, if Rafe came to Texas and testified in Charity McLoughlin’s behalf. Rafe kept his end of the bargain. And several times in the ensuing years McLoughlin had called on his good nature. For some strange reason, Rafe had never been able to say no. There was no time like the present for a change.
“For Pete’s sake, don’t just stand there frowning at me. Say something,” she demanded.
“Since I am a snake in the grass, why do you insist on hiring me?”
“My father won’t have it any other way.”
Rafe lit a cheroot, tossed the match away, and as smoke curled from his mouth, he fashioned an O that undulated heavenward. “Ah, yes. Rafe to the rescue of a McLoughlin woman. Again.”
“My mother isn’t in trouble, not unless some fanatic gets to her, which I doubt. She’s discretion itself. Of course, we McLoughlins can’t be too careful, what with the Fourth Estate dwelling on our links to Spain.”
“And with Mexico being a powder keg of sympathy to the Cubans.”
“Exactly.”
That she and her father assumed he would line up at their sides—well, it chafed at a raw wound. There was a lot not to like in the moneyed McLoughlins. A rancher turned lawmaker turned statesman, Margaret’s father defended Spain against Cuba, while Rafe likened the island’s struggles to those of Mexico in the early part of this century.
Like his own family—the Delgados of Chihuahua—Gil McLoughlin and his dynasty represented factions Rafe had left his profession to renounce and fight against. Wealth. Inequity. Class distinctions.
Margaret jumped to stand and march up and down the patio, as if she were a Prussian general designing the charts of war. “Now, after we collect Mother, we’ll head for Tampico. She, Tex, and I will catch a boat from there. You’ll be free to do as you please.”
“Wait just a minute. Who’s to make sure I get back safe and sound?” Rafe goaded. “I’ve grown soft over the years. I’m no longer the great eagle of Mexico. I’m just another Mexican, who’s taken up the ways and language of a Texan.”