I frowned. I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t ever want to speak to her again. If I could possibly get away, I would’ve. But there wasn’t exactly a bus stop up the road…there wasn’t even a stagecoach coming through. I rubbed my face and watched the waves, willing myself back to calm. I had to think this through. Find my way. Strangling the woman who brought me here probably wouldn’t do the trick.
“I wished for adventure,” I muttered, feeling like an idiot. “To see the world and meet others from different cultures and ways of life.” Why had I ever shared something so intimate with Abuela? If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been thinking back to that conversation, right when I was holding the cursed lamp…
“You did not have much adventure in your life,” she said tentatively, “in your own time?”
“No,” I said. “We never went anywhere. There was never enough money or opportunity for such things.” I arched a brow at her. “I am no fine lady from a fine family, as you have guessed. My abuela ran a restaurant.”
“I see,” she said gently. “But I think your abuela must have been a very fine lady indeed, no matter where you lived. I can see it in you, Zara, despite our…differences. What else?” she asked, after silence settled between us.
“Love,” I admitted. “Real love. Apparently the curse of every girl who slips through time?” We shared a brief, wry smile before I recovered my anger again, remembering that she wasn’t my confidante. She was the one who made me come here. And she feared kidnappings! This was the Mother of all Kidnappings, wasn’t it?
“Anything else?” she prodded.
What was the harm? I thought wearily. I’d already told her the rest. “Family,” I said with a sigh, knowing I’d played right into her hands. I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Back home, in my own time, it was just the two of us. And after Abuela died—”
“You had no one,” she finished softly. “But don’t you see, Zara? You have the potential of claiming everything. Here. With us. This adventurous life you seek, learning about others, perhaps even traveling—maybe even as far as Monterey or Mexico. And love?” Her lips quirked. “Family? My children already are taken with you. All of my children.”
“No,” I said, rising, shaking my head in anger. “I want to claim all of that at home, in my own time.”
“But why must you go back?” she pressed, standing up too. “Who is waiting on you? You said yourself that it was only you and your grandmother…”
“I have friends! Employees at the restaurant who are counting on me! Probably looking for me right now!”
She blinked and wrinkled her brow at me in confusion. “Employees?”
“Yes!” I didn’t want to explain any further. I was out of patience. “You listen to me, Doña Elena,” I said, shaking my finger at her. “You got me here. Now you need to get me home.”
She stared back at me, lifting her chin, and I faltered. It was the practiced move of every Mexican matriarch I knew, designed to instill terror in everyone younger. And most of the older ones too.
“You listen to me, girl,” she said sternly. “You have been granted every wish your heart cried out for. But you are too foolish to recognize it yet. I have great faith in the One who brought me to Carlos and you to Javier, so I shall pray that your foolishness will diminish in time.” She waved her hand grandly.
“Javier? What if I was brought here to meet one of the Vargases? Or Captain Worthington? Or—I don’t know…someone else? What makes you so sure it was Javier who was to claim my heart?”
“Because he found you first, just as Carlos found me.” She looked down her regal nose at me.
“That doesn’t mean anything. It’s just what you choose to believe.”
“You are here to stay, Zara. The sooner you accept it, the happier you will be.”
I let out a cry of rage then, clenching my fists and narrowly stifling my desire to tackle her to the sand and fill her mouth with it. “Leave me! Go home! I just want to be alone!”
She stood there, stunned a moment. Maybe no one had spoken to her in such a way for a very long time, if ever. “We shall speak again of this,” she said curtly, pivoting to walk back toward her horse. “And I shall teach you more of the social graces of our own time, to help you adjust.”
“The only instruction I want from you is how to find my way out of here!” I yelled after her.
She ignored me as if I were nothing more than a spoiled toddler throwing a tantrum.
And then I sat back down on the sand and practically did just that.
CHAPTER 19
I saw her when my tears finally seemed spent, and I was breathing in that hiccupping sort of way after a Big Cry. That wolf-dog, coming around the point, sitting down for a second, checking out the whole beach, and then turning back to me. I looked up the hill, worried that one of the guards was still there, ready to shoot at it, but Doña Elena had apparently given my custody over to whatever fates had brought us both here, to this place and this time, and honored my request to be alone.
Who knew? Maybe after the last of that conversation, she’d decided to go and fetch the lamp from the safe after all, eager to send me home. Or maybe she was hoping a kidnapper would swoop in and take me away…
The dog was a welcome distraction. At least I thought she was a dog. She had to be a blend, since she was too small to be fully wolf and too big to be fully dog. I couldn’t have said why I didn’t fear her. She just seemed tame, a guardian of sorts for me. She paused about thirty feet away, sidling back and forth, lifting her nose to the air to smell me, I supposed. My gelding, a quarter mile beyond, caught the wolf-dog’s scent and whinnied nervously, ears perked forward, but the dog didn’t seem to be on the hunt.
She was looking at me. “Come here, sweet pup,” I crooned, lifting my hand, palm up. “Come, my centinela,” I said, making a sound of invitation with my lips, wishing I had a treat of some sort to offer her. My guardian, my sentinel. “Centinela,” I repeated to myself. “Shall I call you that?”
She moved ten feet closer, then sat down on her haunches, again lifting her nose to the air.
“Come, sweet girl. You’re so pretty,” I said, getting up.
My movement sent her skittering away again. She loped back and forth in an arc, keeping distant. I knelt again, lifting my hand, palm up. After a moment, she ventured closer. Twenty feet away. Fifteen. Ten.
She was beautiful. Gray and white with patches of black and the brightest blue eyes. “Hello, Centinela,” I said softly. “Did you sense I needed a friend right now?”
She took another step, and then another. Just five feet away from me now, close enough that I could see sand clinging to her furry legs.
Three feet. Two. Her nose twitched. Then those bright blue eyes cast beyond me. The wolf-dog tore off, back up the beach toward George Point, and as I glanced back, the first gunshot rent the air.
“No! Stop!” I cried.
It was Javier, sliding from his saddle, aiming with his revolver across his forearm this time, even as he judged the growing distance between him and his prey. He squeezed off a second shot.
“Javier! No!” I screamed, holding my breath until I saw he had missed again.
He shoved his revolver in his holster and turned toward me, his face a mask of fury. He trudged down the sandy dune. “What were you thinking, Zara? That animal is dangerous!”
“No, she’s not!” I said, picking up my skirts and making my way toward him as fast as he was coming toward me. “She’s tame! A pet for someone!”
“Well, she’d better get off my land before she becomes a pelt to trade.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“I would!”
We stood there, face to face for a moment, both panting.
“What happened here?” he finally asked. “Hector came riding for me. Said you and my mother had some sort of spat, and she left you behind?”
“Yes,” I said. “By my request. I was fine! Fine,” I repeated. I turned away from him, ba
ck toward the sea. Doña Elena’s little top hat rolled across the sand toward us, as if begging me to put it back on. “I didn’t need you to ride out here for me.”
“Obviously you did,” he said, coming around me to enter my line of vision again. His white shirt was unbuttoned one more than usual, flapping a little open, giving me a generous view of the smooth, golden-brown expanse of his chest. I hurriedly looked to the water. “Because if I hadn’t,” he went on, “that wolf would’ve been having you for supper!”
“Wolves don’t attack people,” I muttered tiredly. “That’s a myth.”
“Oh no? They have no trouble attacking my sheep and cattle.”
“Well, that one wasn’t going to attack. We were becoming…friends.”
He let out a wondering laugh and came further around to face me. “Who are you, Zara? A girl who just appears on my shore, who plays the guitar like an angel, breaks the noses of her attackers, and charms wolves—”
“Dogs,” I corrected. “I think she’s a dog.”
“So be it!” he said, lifting a hand in exasperation. “Charms wolf-dogs to eat from her hand.” He stared at me, as if he couldn’t decide whether to throttle the truth out of me or take me into his arms. “Who are you?” he whispered, lifting a hand as if to touch my face.
“I’m no one,” I muttered, stepping away from him. “Just a traveler making her way through. I’m sorry I upset your mother. As soon as I can find other accommodations, I will—”
“Wait, I was not suggesting that you needed to leave.” He grabbed my arm, turning me gently back toward him. But there was no threat in his action, only concern. “You’ve been weeping,” he said, a little shocked. He lifted his hand to my cheek, gently urging me to look up at him. “What made you cry? My mother?”
I met his eyes. “There’s just so much, Javier. So much I cannot tell you.”
“Cannot, because you don’t know?” he asked, gentling his tone. “Or cannot because you do not wish to?”
“Both,” I whispered.
He leaned closer to me, his thumb tracing the curve of my cheek. “So all of your past is not truly forgotten. Some of what you hold back is a secret. Do you not yet trust me?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “But I cannot tell you, Javier. I simply cannot. I’d understand if you need me to go.”
“No, that can’t be the answer,” he said huskily. “All I know is that you are unlike any woman I have ever met, Zara Ruiz.” He shook his head slightly, as if in wonder. “And I hate it that my mother made you cry. What was it? What tore such a terrible rift between you? Did she guess your secret?”
I wanted to tell him then. Just let it all spill out. But it was one thing to share my secret and another to expose his mother’s too.
I cast about for what I could say. “Your mother…believes I shouldn’t try to return to my own home. It’s as if…it matters not to her. She thinks I should only be content to be here, with y-your family.”
His handsome eyes lit up with surprise and a flash of bitterness. “It was not her place, Zara, to say such things. Of course you must wish to regain your memory. It must drive you nearly mad to not remember.” He paused. “But would it be so awful, truly? To remain here with…us?”
I sighed and looked down to the sand then back into his eyes. “We argued about that, Javier. It’s not the right…time for me to be here. With you.”
His hands dropped away from me, and he stepped back as if he’d been struck. He swallowed hard. “I see.”
Part of me silently screamed no, aware that I’d hurt him. But part of me was relieved. When he was touching me, looking so caring and concerned for me…that was a sort of pull I didn’t need right now, when I was thinking about how to get home. I’d gotten caught up—so caught up in this time, with these people, that I’d started to forget that I didn’t belong here at all.
He rubbed the back of his neck and stared at me with big puppy-dog eyes, making him look all kinds of sexy. I hurriedly glanced to the waves again.
“So that is what made her angry?” he asked. “Angry enough to leave you and take both guards with her? Because you refused her? Refused…us?”
“No. I asked her to leave,” I muttered. “I wanted to be alone.”
He huffed a laugh. “Except for your wolf-dog.”
I smiled and glanced sidelong at him. “Yes, except for Centinela,” I said. “She was welcome.”
He shook his head, silently chiding me for going so far as to name her. “And then I intruded.”
“Yes,” I said softly, crossing my arms, wanting to forget that moment he touched my face so tenderly.
I could feel him staring at me. “But that still doesn’t explain your tears.”
“I was angry,” I said with a shrug. “Sometimes I cry when I’m angry.” Like when I want to kill someone.
“That is an odd reaction,” he mused.
“Is it?” I asked. I’d cried when I was angry for as long as I could remember, which invariably made me angrier, because I didn’t want to cry. It had been especially bad in elementary school. The bullies always thought they had the upper hand. It was part of why I’d agreed to learn self-defense, I mused, wanting to know how to take someone down if they were attacking me. Now I was confident that I could face anyone in a dark alley and not dissolve into tears. But when someone wasn’t physically attacking me, if I was just emotionally angry…I dissolved into tears, nine times out of ten.
I almost itched for a physical fight now, and my knife. My Krav Maga instructor had taught me how to use my pocket knife well—how to disarm someone threatening me with one. I wished I’d taken it that night I’d gone to the beach. A bit more of home, my past, to remember it by. A bit more protection in a land, a time, in which I felt crazy-vulnerable.
“I will try not to make you angry,” Javier said beside me, bringing me back to the present. “I don’t like to see a woman cry.” He sighed. “Did I make you want to cry the other day when I said I’d keep your golden lamp?”
“Yes.”
“You cried?”
“A little. But mostly I plotted how to break into your safe.”
He laughed at that. “Did you try?” He turned to face me, a look of wonder etched into his expression again.
“I haven’t had the chance yet. But I will.”
His smile broadened. “I suppose that next you’ll remember that you’re a bank robber and have never met a safe you couldn’t crack.”
“Why, yes,” I said. “That is indeed my next surprise for you.”
He reached up to tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear. “You’re not really a bank robber, are you? That isn’t your secret?”
I smiled. Was that a hint of true fear in his eyes? “No,” I said. “That’s not on my list of talents, as much as I wish it were.” I reached out to take his big hand in both of mine. “Please, Javier. Will you please give me my lamp back?”
“Why? Why do you need it? Unless you are leaving…” Concern tightened the muscles at his cheek and jawline.
“I’m not leaving. Not yet. It just would make me feel better, having it in my room. Please?”
“Just as soon as you tell me your secret,” he said, tipping up my chin and looking over my face as if he meant to sketch it later. “That’s when I shall give you back your golden lamp.”
I swallowed hard, feeling angry tears prick behind my eyes. “Javier…”
“Zara,” he returned, leaning closer, “those are my terms. Are you ready?”
He leaned closer still, searching my eyes. Ready for another kiss? I thought madly. Or for me to tell him?
“I can’t, Javier, I just can’t.” I said, wrenching aside and striding angrily away to grab the little hat. Why did he have to press me on it? Why did he have to make me feel all that I was feeling for him, confusing the issue?
I might’ve been sent here for some weird reason, but I wasn’t a foolish, googly-eyed, romantic chica, ready to accept some crazy fairy tale that it was for lov
e. I was smarter than Doña Elena on this front. Wiser.
I was a self-made woman. Making my way through a somewhat challenging life. Fairy tales didn’t come around for girls like me. They came to girls who grew up in Beverly Hills or Palos Verdes. Girls who got a shiny new BMW on their sixteenth birthday, girls who had handsome boys hanging around them all the time, not just when they flew through time.
I trudged up to my gelding, lifted my hand, and smiled again as he turned to me for a good scratch of his long nose before I grabbed hold of the reins. But then, as I studied the stirrup, I bit my lip. I’d never mounted a horse in a corset without help; I could barely breathe, let alone move well enough to attempt it.
“May I assist you?” Javier asked, leading his mare up to me.
My first instinct was to say no, to find a way on my own. But I knew that would be idiotic. I might be trying until sundown and have to walk all the way home. And he would never leave me alone. He’d stand back and watch me flounder in the fallout of my own stubborn pride.
“Yes,” I said primly. “Thank you.”
He bent to offer me his interlaced hands. I lifted my skirts slightly, set one boot in his hands, and reached for the saddle horn with the other.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Ready,” I said.
“Up you go,” he said, lifting me neatly into place.
I busied myself with arranging my skirts, trying to ignore his warm hand as he settled my boot in a stirrup and then looked up at me. “Good?”
“Yes, thank you,” I said, taking the reins from him.
His mouth twitched, as if he held back a smile, wanting to keep toying with me. As we set off for home, I wondered just how long I’d be able to hold out against Javier and his longing looks and angsty questions.
I have to get that lamp and get the heck out of here, I thought. I just have to.
Because day by day, I was falling deeper and deeper, like the tide pools buried by the sands of time.
Three Wishes (River of Time California Book 1) Page 19