“Damned careless of me, Don Luís. Please accept my most profound apologies,” he said with a devilish smile lurking in his eyes, not in the least bit sorry.
Mara bit her lip nervously, her laughter threatening to erupt as she watched a puddle of water form around Don Luís’s well-shod feet.
“You will forgive me if I do not linger,” Don Luís said frigidly, “but I merely came to claim that which is mine.”
He walked over to stand in front of Mara, his shoes making a squelching sound as he moved. A look of distaste and discomfort crossed Don Luís’s haughty features at the comical noise.
“The cross, if you please,” he said curtly, holding out his hand, palm up, for the treasured heirloom.
“Certainly, Don Luís,” Mara acquiesced with a slight smile as she lifted the heavy golden chain off her neck and over her head, then held it out to him.
Don Luís’s shoulders sagged slightly as he held the cross grasped tightly in his hands. Drawing a deep sigh, he glanced between the faintly amused-looking O’Flynns. Once more in possession of himself, at least as far as his bedraggled appearance would allow, Don Luís spoke in a soft, menacing voice that very effectively got across his message and wiped the humor from the O’Flynns’ eyes.
“You have your laugh, Señor O’Flynn, and play your little games, but remember,” he cautioned, “that you have not been paid as yet, and that I am the one you must hold out your hand to.”
“Now, now, Don Luís,” Brendan protested. “We were just having a spot of fun, nothing more than that. You do have the cross you’ve been hankering after. What harm was done in givin’ you a little surprise?”
“Sí, I have it now. But unfortunately,” Don Luís added, looking disconcerted for a moment as he searched carefully for his next words, “I still do not have my land.”
Brendan shrugged, his expression unconcerned. He said carelessly, “Well, I don’t know exactly what this business deal of yours is about, but all we have to do is to get Mara to ask Don Andres to agree to it. He’ll do anything for her, especially after tonight. So the way I see it, our business is concluded, Don Luís, and ’tis time to settle up,” Brendan told him as he held out his palm, rubbing his fingertips together suggestively.
Silently Don Luís stared at Brendan, trying to gauge the Irishman’s reaction to his next words. “I am afraid, Señor O’Flynn, that until I sell this cross, I am as destitute as you are. You English have a colorful phrase for it,” he said with an unsuccessful attempt at an apologetic smile. “To be out at the elbows, sí?”
Brendan’s smile faded, his lips tightening into a thin crack as his dark eyes stared in disbelieving anger at the Californian. “’Tis called being duped, gulled, and made an ass of. Damned if ye haven’t done a fine job of making me look blunt witted,” Brendan said in a tightly controlled voice, the knuckles of one hand showing white as he clenched it angrily.
Don Luís noticed his bunched fist and spread his own hands out in a placating manner. “I trust that we need not have a display of brute force, Señor O’Flynn, for I am but an old man and your strength is far superior to mine. Nor would it do to alert the other members of the household to our differences. It is also quite unnecessary,” he added quickly, lest the Irishman be beyond subtle reasoning, “for you shall be paid in full, this I promise you. You need only wait here until I return with the money, and then you will receive your payment and you may leave the rancho. It is that simple.”
“Nothing is ever that simple, Don Luís,” Mara said softly as she spoke for the first time. “And just how much longer a visit do you anticipate we will have?” Don Luís shrugged, but his smile came more easily as he turned his attention to the less-intimidating O’Flynn. “One never can be sure exactly, but within the week.”
“The divil take ye,” Brendan interrupted angrily, “if you think I’m going to sit around here any longer now that I’ve found out you’ve no—”
“And how much longer after that must we wait until you get your land?” Mara continued. “I gather that it all depends on Amaya wedding Andres? You needed me, posing as your niece, to get the cross. Now you can sell it to get the money to buy some land that Andres owns,” Mara summed it up.
Don Luís’s dark eyes shifted away from Mara’s direct gaze, settling on a painted saint hanging on the wall. He reluctantly confessed the difficult circumstances he had found himself in.
“I was forced, against my better judgment, into deceiving you on this matter,” he began hesitantly.
Brendan’s flared eyebrows rose with incredulous disbelief. He snorted loudly, “To be sure, there’s nothing new in that.”
“I think, under the circumstances, Señor O’Flynn,” he continued, “you would have agreed with me that the deception was necessary if I was to enlist your help. The truth of the matter is that I was tricked into gambling my land away on a foolish bet. Unfortunately, I lost,” Don Luís told them stiffly. “You would not have been overly anxious to help me out of my difficulties when I had just won all your money, Señor O’Flynn. I could not let you know that I was without funds to pay you.”
“Well, well,” Brendan murmured sarcastically, “at least we’re finally putting the saddle on the right horse. You’re damned right I wouldn’t have helped you. Can’t you pay us with the money you won from me on the ship?” Brendan demanded, his chin thrust out aggressively. “You had quite a pile there.”
Don Luís shook his head sadly. “I am afraid that I gambled it away the other day when you and the others left for the merienda and I did not join you. I had gone over to see what I still consider to be my land, and…well, I met up with a few of my old vaqueros and we decided to play a few hands of monte. Some days one’s luck is just not with him.”
Brendan made a rude noise, his look close to murderous. “My luck sure as hell hasn’t been the same since I met up with you.”
“But my luck has changed, Señor O’Flynn, since I met you. It is true that I intend to buy back my land with the money from the cross, and that was my intention when I went to England with the hopes of bringing back my niece. I thought I would be able to recover everything. Then, when she would not even consider returning, well, I thought I had lost it all—my land, the cross, everything was gone. Out of my reach.”
He glanced between the O’Flynns. “When I first met you on board ship, it had never occurred to me to try and fool the Villareales with an impostor. At least,” he said with a slight smile curving his thin lips, “until I won all your money, Señor O’Flynn, and saw your beautiful companion. Then the plan struck me,” he laughed softly. “What else could I do but make use of such a providential opportunity?”
“And what happens after you buy back your land?” Mara demanded practically. “How do Brendan and I get out of here?”
“You shall reject Don Andres when he asks for your hand, and say you wish to return to England. The Villareales will never know that a deception has been played on them.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” Brendan grumbled. “There’s too many lies and deceptions going on around here to suit me. Someone’s going to get his lines mixed up and then there’ll be the divil to pay. I’ve never been one to overstay my welcome, and I’ve always preferred walking out on me own two feet rather than bein’ thrown out. At least we haven’t had any trouble with people being suspicious of us. It’s been the easiest role I’ve ever played.”
“You need have no fears of discovery,” Don Luís reassured him, even as he remembered the conversation with the Frenchman. After all, the man had only suspicions. What could he do? “Nothing must happen to make Don Andres suspect you. He will readily sell the land to me if he thinks I will soon become a member of the family by marriage.”
“To be sure, we’re not likely to be telling him we’re impostors,” Brendan said bitterly as he smiled mockingly at Don Luís.
“Good. Just remember that if all goes well, you will receive a large sum of money and be able to leave the rancho by this time a
week from now,” Don Luís reminded them. “I shall leave in the morning.”
With a slight nod he turned to leave the room, the cross tucked in concealment beneath his damp coat. He walked swiftly along the corridor.
“Damn!” Brendan spat as soon as the door closed behind the Californian. “Who would’ve thought that old slyboots could’ve taken us in? Have I straw in me hair that he took me for such a yokel?” Brendan demanded half in anger, half in embarrassment at being outmaneuvered by one he thought no match for his own chicanery.
“There’s nothing we can be doing about it, Brendan, so you’d better just accept it and enjoy your next week of leisure,” Mara advised him.
“Accept it, now? We oughta just pack up and leave. But first, we drop a friendly word of warning in Don Andres’s ear. I’d love to see Don Luís’s face when he returned to find us gone, a hostile Don Andres unwilling to sell his land, and Raoul behind bars for stealing.”
“You know we can’t. We still have no money, or have you forgotten that? Besides, I don’t want to travel with Paddy until he’s over his illness,” Mara told him, unwilling to be caught up in yet another of Brendan’s schemes.
“Well, if anyone was askin’ me, I could’ve told ye ’twas a mistake to leave Dublin in the first place,” Jamie said, having been a silently suffering witness to the scene. “Damned fool idea comin’ to this heathen land. Nothin’ but trouble is all we’ll be findin’,” she predicted with an ominous look at the O’Flynns. “I’m gettin’ too old for all of these shenanigans of yours. Now get yourself out of here, Master Brendan,” she ordered.
Brendan cast a helpless look over his shoulder at Mara as he allowed himself to be dismissed by the diminutive Irishwoman. “Oh, well, what’s another week or so going to mean in our lives, mavournin? After waiting this long, I suppose it can’t be hurting us to wait a bit longer, now can it?” he sighed.
***
The next few days seemed to pass in a blaze of heat that beat down unrelentingly on the thick-tiled roof of the hacienda. At night there was some relief as the temperature dropped and a cooling breeze swept through the valley, but Mara felt the week would go on forever. She suffered through Brendan’s impatient waiting and her headaches, which seemed to plague both her sleeping and waking hours.
Don Luís had left the rancho the following morning as he had said, and gone as well was the American, Jeremiah Davies. The Creole remained, however, and Mara was receiving her fair share of attention from him; in fact, she felt as if he were courting her, for he seldom left her side, despite the hostility he received from Don Andres, who was still under Mara’s spell of enchantment.
As Mara sat within the cool interior of the eaves, she speculated on this change of tactics. She even had to admit that she found it rather enjoyable because for once she was being treated with respect by some man who found her attractive. As Mara O’Flynn, the actress, she had always been prejudged, expected to accept her admirers’ attentions without question or protestation, and ultimately to become their mistresses, receiving the lucrative benefits of such a position for the period of time she might be desired by her rich lover. She had been cast in a role that had been predetermined before she’d even been born. There were only two kinds of women in the world: good and bad. And there was no crossing over the rigid lines drawn by this narrow-minded society. Of course, it was easy enough to lose your reputation, but next to impossible ever to retrieve it or create a new one. Anyone who met Mara O’Flynn for the first time, she thought bitterly, would meet her with preconceived ideas of what an actress should be like, and she was never given the opportunity to prove that she might, in fact, be very different. It wasn’t her fault that she had to work for a living, that the misfortune of her birth and the selection of a profession had unfairly decided her fate. But they were all wrong, Mara thought defiantly, for despite the fact that she walked the boards of a stage, wore paint, and was considered fair game for any sporting blood of London who wanted a beautiful woman to grace his bed and participate in a discreet liaison, she had never had a lover, but then no one would ever believe that.
Mara smiled softly. For the first time in her life as a woman, a man was looking upon her as something special, not as an object for sale but as someone with feelings and a right to receive consideration. Mara’s smile drooped disconsolately as she remembered that after this week she would no longer be Amaya Vaughan, but Mara O’Flynn once again, and that would be the end of respectability. What would the Creole think if he knew who she really was? Could he accept her without doubting her? Or would he assume the worst? Mara wondered curiously. Would the softness she had seen in his eyes, replacing the hardness, change to contempt or, worse, to lustful desire without thought of love? He might still want her, but any thought of marriage would be out of the question, for hadn’t he come from an aristocratic French family in New Orleans? When he married, if he ever did, it would be to someone suitable, someone without a tarnished and questionable past.
Mara rubbed her forehead tiredly, a disgusted look curving her lips in distaste at her self-pitying thoughts. What a fool she was even to be contemplating marriage, especially to one such as he. What had happened to all of her fine ideals, her vows of seeking vengeance and keeping her heart her own? A few weeks of respectability had certainly gone to her head with some high-flown ideas.
Oh, the devil take it and everyone, Mara lashed out in silent defiance. If Brendan struck it rich, then they could do anything they wanted and not have to depend upon someone else ever again.
“Mara! Mara!”
Mara glanced up in alarm when she heard the childish voice and saw Paddy running across the courtyard to where she was sitting.
“What are you doing out of bed, Paddy?” she demanded as he jumped up on the bench beside her, a thick hunk of freshly baked bread spread with jam held in one hand. The jam began to drip over the edge where his small teeth had made inroads into the lightly browned crust. Around his mouth was a dark purple stain.
“Where did you get that?” Mara asked enviously, thinking of the dull tortillas she’d eaten at breakfast.
“Jamie made it for me special, ’cause I’ve been sick,” Paddy informed her importantly, a slight croak still evident in his voice.
“And aren’t you supposed to be staying in your room? I don’t want you getting sick again,” Mara fretted, feeling the heat even in the cool shadows of the corridor.
“I’m tired of staying in my room. Jamie’s so cross, and Papa keeps snapping my head off if I even say anything, and you haven’t been in to see me either. You’re always with him,” Paddy complained sulkily as he watched the approach of Nicholas Chantale, his large brown eyes reproachful.
Mara followed his glance, her pulse quickening slightly as she met Nicholas’s green eyes. “Paddy,” she whispered quickly, “remember to call me Amaya.”
Paddy smiled, causing Mara to frown, for it was an exact imitation of one of Brendan’s devilish grins.
“Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t,” he said before taking a big bite out of the bread.
Mara glared down at his bent head, itching to give one of his dark curls a yank, her look promising retribution if he misbehaved. As Nicholas paused before them, Mara looked up, her face wiped clear of anger. She smiled. He’d been out riding, and the scent of horses and leather mingled with the sweat trickling down his chest, where a triangle of skin and dark hair was revealed by his opened shirt.
Nicholas stared down at Mara, his mouth curving slightly at the image of cool perfection she created in her pale green gown of shot silk, the softly luminous color reflected in the soft pinks of a single rose pattern running across the material. Nicholas glanced around and, walking over to a rose bush, plucked a single bud from one of its thorny branches. There was a gleam of anticipation in his eyes as he bent over Mara, one booted leg planted beside her on the bench. He leaned behind her and, with gentle fingers, tucked the blossom into the thick coil of hair against her nape.
Nicholas transferred his gaze from the pink bud to Mara’s mouth, and said softly, “A Castilian rose whose beauty has been surpassed only by your loveliness.”
Mara stared up into the deep green eyes, every nerve in her body conscious of the muscular thigh clad in buckskin that nearly touched her shoulder. Had she dared, she could have reached out and caressed it. Mara touched the rose instead, but something of her thoughts must have shown in her eyes because his hard fingers reached out suddenly, closing over hers. He held her hand softly against his lips. Then, with a provocative look, he pressed her palm to his hard cheek. “I prefer it against my cheek in this manner.”
“You’re very gallant this morning,” Mara remarked when he’d released her hand. It tingled more from the touch of his lips than it had when she’d slapped him.
“If you allowed yourself to know me better,” Nicholas responded lazily, his green eyes looking into Mara’s warmly, “then you’d discover that I can be, under the right circumstances, very kind and loving.”
Before Mara could think of a proper response, Nicholas became aware of Paddy sitting silently beside her. “I don’t believe I’ve met this young man, although he looks familiar.” He stared down at Paddy who squirmed under the tall man’s penetrating eyes.
“This is my cousin Brendan’s son, Padraic. Say hello to Mr. Chantale, Paddy,” Mara instructed, but was totally unprepared for his startling response.
“I don’t like you,” Paddy said in a childishly small voice, his small jaw stuck out pugnaciously.
Nicholas was just as surprised by the unprovoked attack, but after a second’s silence he started to laugh, the deep, rich sound filling the courtyard. “I wonder how many people would have given their fortunes to say that to my face as easily as this little fellow did?”
Paddy glanced in worried suspicion between Mara and this threatening stranger who seemed to be able to please her and had even kissed her. In childish fury he threw what was left of his bread and jam against Nicholas’s chest, the sticky confection leaving a bluish purple stain against the fine lawn shirt.
Laurie McBain Page 20