by Maddy Barone
Another thing to appreciate about this amazing man.
“So after your folks passed on, where did you live?” he asked.
“I remember everybody talking about where Inez and I should live. We come from a big family. My dad had two brothers and three sisters, and my mom had four sisters. Almost all of them live here in Dallas, so we know them well. After the accident, all of us kids were smothered with love from the aunts and uncles, even Eduardo, who was already a married man then. I think all of them were ready to take us, but it was decided that we would live with our grandparents.”
“Your family sounds like mine, big and loving.”
“Yes. I can’t imagine life without them.”
His hand covered hers where it lay at her side on the grass. “Is your grandfather still alive?”
“Yes, after Abuela passed, he went to live with Eduardo and Carmen. He’s ninety years old now, but he’s still the head of our house. Sharp as a tack. His manners are old-fashioned, especially toward women. Sort of courtly, you know? But every now and then he cuts loose, and you can tell he’s a Marine.” She chuckled. “You and Brutus should meet him sometime. He fought in the Pacific at the end of World War II. He doesn’t talk about his service very much, but every now and then he will, particularly to a fellow Marine.”
“I’d like to meet him. He sounds like quite a character.”
“He is. He takes a lot of pride in the family history too.” She turned her head to cast him a quick smile. “My great-great-grandfather was Ricardo Ybarra. I suppose you’ve never heard of him.”
“No, I don’t think I have.”
“He was an outlaw on the border between Texas and Mexico back in the mid-nineteenth century. When he was a little boy, he and his mother were captured by the Comanche, and he lived with them until he was in his late teens. Then his father, Don Alejandro, got them back from the Comanche, but he never truly was assimilated back into Mexican culture. They say he was wild. The family stories — which might, or might not, be true — say that he kidnapped the wives and sisters of wealthy Texans and held them for ransom at his hacienda south of the Rio Grande. He was so handsome that all the ladies fell in love with him, but he left them strictly alone, with dueñas —chaperones— so their reputations weren’t ruined.”
“Romantic story, even if it’s not true.”
“Very,” she agreed. “He fell in love with one of those captives and married her. But he never entirely reformed.” She laughed. “I don’t know if that’s something to be proud of, or ashamed of. Quite the colorful family history, huh?”
He turned his head to smile at her. “That’s nothing. My family believes we’re descended from werewolves.”
Her mouth fell open before turning up in a grin. “Werewolves? I thought you were Native American.”
“Lakota,” he confirmed. “Supposedly we’re part of a family line called the Wolf Clan.”
“I didn’t know that Indians had werewolf stories. You learn something new every day, don’t you?”
He was still staring into her eyes, and she stared back into his, mesmerized by their beauty and their intensity. He raised up on one elbow and leaned over her. “We don’t tell anybody else that story. Please don’t repeat it.”
“I won’t.”
The moment stretched, each of them staring at the other in silence. After a long pause, he whispered, “I’d like to kiss you.”
Her stomach fluttered. “Please do.”
Embarrassment swept through her when she heard the breathy note in her own voice. Just as she opened her mouth to make a lame joke about being so polite, his lips touched hers so lightly she almost didn’t feel them. He lifted his head to smile down at her. Easing out a slightly shaky breath, she smiled back. He did it again, with a little more pressure. She wasn’t even aware that he had shifted until she felt the warm weight of his chest lightly pressing against her breasts. He was holding himself above her with a hand on either side of her head. The weight sent heat bubbling through her veins. With a wordless moan, she wrapped an arm around his neck to pull him closer.
The feel of him, so warm and so male, pressing into her most sensitive places was utterly intoxicating. The taste of his mouth spun a cocoon of sexual haze around her that she enjoyed too much to want to tear away from it. She lost herself in him, glorying in her body’s response, and glorying in his unmistakable response to her.
The sexual haze was shattered by a shocked cry of outrage. “Tia Isabel!”
Chapter Seven
It wasn’t the voice that jolted Dusty out of the moment, but the sudden rigidity in Isabel’s body beneath him. Lifting himself off her, he balanced himself in a push up position and looked down at her. The expression of guilt made him want to swear. With her kiss-swollen lips and flushed cheeks, the guilt made her look like a child caught in wrongdoing, which really pissed him off. There wasn’t one single thing wrong with Isabel Ybarra kissing him. He leaned down to give her one last quick kiss, then rolled off her and up to his feet in one lithe movement.
Two kids stood just inside the fence, staring with condemning eyes. Maybe not kids. They were around nineteen or twenty, and they looked alike, so probably brothers. Isabel’s nephews, from what they had called her. Behind him, he heard Isabel struggle to get to her feet. Dismissing the intruders, he turned and helped her up. The comfort and shelter he wanted to offer weren’t needed. It was neither passion nor embarrassment that flushed her cheeks now, he saw. It was anger.
Isabel spoke between clenched teeth. “Ricardo! Pablo!” The names were followed by a torrent of furious Spanish that he couldn’t entirely decipher, but he caught phrases that told him Isabel declared herself an adult, not needing anyone’s permission to do what she wanted to in her own backyard.
One of the boys made a weak response, waving at the building. A curtain at a top floor window twitched. So, one of the upstairs neighbors had probably gotten an eyeful. Dusty shrugged that off. He and Isabel had been fully clothed and had barely been touching. It was only a kiss, not a make out session.
Only a kiss, or more truly, a set of kisses — but, hell, he’d gotten a lot more pleasure out of that than he’d had from an hour of sex with any of his ex-girlfriends. Isabel was quite a woman.
Watching her tear into her nephews, who had gone from swaggering male outrage to puppyish whimpering, gave him another kind of pleasure. He liked a woman who knew how to stand up for herself.
She seemed to be closing her tirade. One of the boys, the one with the curly hair, said something he almost caught. Isabel’s retort was something about the boys being welcome to tell their father what they’d seen. Her brother wasn’t her keeper. Maybe that’s what she said. He was going to have to brush up on his Spanish.
The boys turned to slink away, but not without giving him sulky glares. Still flushed, Isabel turned to him.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said.
He grinned. “Actually, I enjoyed it.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m still sorry.”
“Don’t be. You showed me you’re a passionate woman. I like that.”
Her gaze fell before flashing back up to his. “Would you like to come up?”
Was she offering to continue what her nephews had interrupted? “I would like that, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
The flush that had faded from her cheeks flared back, and she stepped back, looking up but not quite meeting his eyes. “Well, thank you for taking me to the game. It was fun. And thank you so much for all your work on the fence.”
He stepped into her space and put his hands on her hips. “Isabel, I really would like to go upstairs with you. If you were another kind of woman, we would be there already.”
“Another kind of woman? What kind? A floozy?”
He stifled his urge to laugh at the old-fashioned word. “No. If you were a woman I didn’t care about, I would take you to bed, and it wouldn’t mean a thing.” That probably didn’t sound the way he meant i
t. He lifted his hand to brush the backs of his knuckles over a lock of her hair. “I’m not sure exactly what I feel for you, but it’s different. I think it could be something really special. When we go to bed, I want it to mean something.”
Her mouth formed an O. “When we go to bed?” she echoed, in a dazed voice.
“Let’s not rush this. I don’t want to wreck it.”
Her eyes sharpened. “I thought it was the girl who was supposed to slow things down.”
This time, his chuckle escaped. “I guess. But you’re not a girl. You’re a woman. I want to get to know you better. There is no way I’m walking away from you until we know what we can have, and whether or not we want it. Okay?”
“Okay.” She shot him a grin. Shaky, but sassy. “You’ve signed up for two more months of knitting classes. I guess we can use that time to get know one another.”
He mentally slapped his forehead. Knitting. What had he gotten himself into? Pretending to leer, he said, “If our hands are on our needles, they won’t be on each other.”
“Dusty!”
“What?” He made innocent eyes at her. “I might need some one-on-one tutoring, though.”
The look she gave him was reproachful. “First you give me the best kiss of my life, then you draw back, and now you want more? That’s not nice, Dusty. A woman who did that would be called a tease.”
He winced. “You’re right. Habit. Sorry. Um, no double entendre here, but I probably will need some extra help. With the knitting.”
“Oh, yes. You should practice this week. You have enough yarn to make another dishcloth.”
“I guess I could do that.” Careful to make it light, he brushed a kiss over her lips before stepping back. “I’ll call you one night this week, and I’ll see you on Saturday.”
“I look forward to it.”
He watched until she had closed the door to the stairwell leading up to her apartment, and waited a little longer until he saw the light in her kitchen come on. When she brushed the curtain aside to wave at him, he waved back. As he drove away, he wondered what kind of an idiot he was to have not followed her upstairs and made love to her all night.
*
Dusty crossed the dayroom to the table Brutus had snagged. He carried a cup of coffee in one hand and the bright pink bag from Dos Hermanas in the other. Brutus gave the bag a dubious glance. So far today they had gone over the ambulance for preventative maintenance, inventoried the medical supplies and equipment, and attended a training session. Just a regular day on the job, but it didn’t feel like a regular day to Dusty. He felt … happy?
Brutus noticed. “You look like a man who spent the night in satisfactory activities.”
“Nope.” Dusty thought about it and reconsidered. “Isabel and I had a great time at the game.”
“And then you went home to bed – alone — like a good little choirboy?”
Dusty laughed. “Well, I don’t know about the choirboy part, but I slept alone.” And he had slept well, with no nightmares or dreams about Iraq. “Isabel and I are going to take it slow.”
His friend raised one eyebrow.
“Just don’t want to screw it up, you know?”
“Yeah,” Brutus drank coffee. “That’s good. I liked her a lot. So did Denise. No offense, man, but it seems like every girl you dated in the past couple years has been younger than the last one.”
That was true. “You’re the one who told me to find a woman that I could trade war stories with on a date.” He moved his coffee mug in little circles on the table, watching the brown liquid swirl inside. “I had one of those dreams about Iraq Friday night.”
Brutus’ eyebrows came down a little. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah, fine.” He shrugged casually, but let Gunnison see the truth in his face. “No nightmare since. I think it’s Isabel, knowing that she made it, that kept them away.”
“Then I’m twice as glad that you found her.”
“Me, too.” Dusty stopped moving his cup and watched as the swirling slowed. “She is special.”
“Agreed. I’ve met some of the girls you gone out with, and some of them were pretty nice, but Isabel is real, you know? She’s a good lady.” His craggy face split in a grin. “And I knew you liked her. You never brought any other girl to Rick’s.”
Dusty thought about his previous girlfriends. “I don’t know if any of them would’ve appreciated Rick’s the way Isabel did. Hey, thanks for coming out and helping with the fence.”
“No problem. I liked her sister and her brother-in-law too. Her nephews, well, I’m not so sure about them. They worked on the fence, but you could tell they didn’t like it. They didn’t work any harder than they had to, either. Mouthy little bastards.”
“About twenty years old, one with straight hair and one with curly hair? I think I met them yesterday.” Dusty hid a smile in his coffee. “They showed up while I was kissing Isabel good night, and I don’t think they liked seeing their aunt kissed. It would have done your heart good to watch her lay into them. They started out like snarling pit bulls, but by the time she was done, they had their tails tucked between their legs.”
“Ha!” Brutus saluted him with his coffee cup. “I knew I liked that woman.” He drank and set the cup down, his face sobering. “Have you met her upstairs neighbor? The guy who just got out of jail?”
“No. Have you?”
“Yeah. You know I’ve got nothing against ink.” He flexed a brawny arm covered with tattoos. “But that guy’s tats aren’t just art. Those are prison tats, gang tats. It’s nice of Inez and Isabel give him a second chance, but I don’t think he’s worth it.”
“What do you mean?” He leaned forward. “You think he’s dangerous?”
Brutus shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe he’s okay, but when he came in yesterday afternoon he was followed by three other guys. They were arguing. It sounded like the three guys were threatening him. My Spanish is pretty good, so I understood it when they said he would pay. I hate to think that Isabel or any of her family could get mixed up with that.”
Dusty nodded slowly. “Did anyone else hear? Manuel?”
“I don’t think so. They were on the other end of the fence at the time. Those guys probably thought I wouldn’t understand them or they wouldn’t have made such an open threat. I kind of debated about whether or not I should say anything. I decided I should keep my nose out of it, but I like Isabel, and I think someone should warn her.”
“Thanks. I’m going to be giving her a call tomorrow. I’ll mention it then. Or maybe tonight.”
Brutus watched him open the small shopping bag and take out his second attempt at knitting a dish cloth. “Holy hell. What is that?”
Dusty couldn’t blame him for not recognizing it. He had knitted only about three inches far, and the dishcloth was about eight inches wide at the bottom and nearly ten inches wide at the top. Somehow he had gone from having forty stitches to fifty stitches on the needle. He would have been more disappointed about it if it hadn’t given him a valid reason to call Isabel. He held it up.
“It’s a dishcloth.”
Brutus’ face was dubious. “If you say so.”
Dusty repeated what Isabel had said several times during the class on Saturday. “Dishes won’t care what it looks like. It will wash the dishes just fine.”
“Oooooo-kay.”
Dusty smiled at his dishcloth with some pride. He might have the wrong number of stitches, but he didn’t have any holes. He couldn’t wait to tell Isabel about it. Maybe he could drop in to her place tomorrow and have her tell him how to fix it. He sobered a little. And he would check out her neighbor too.
Chapter Eight
“Hello, Isabel?”
At the sensual sound of Dusty’s voice through the phone, a curl of pleasure spiraled through her. She could never match that tone, so she tried for warm welcome. “Hello, Dusty. It’s good to hear your voice.” An understatement. “I was hoping you would call tonight.” Another understatement. S
he had hovered near the phone last night, and finally gone to bed disappointed.
“Sorry. I was going to call you on Monday from work, but we ended up going out on two separate calls. And on Tuesday I decided I didn’t want to look like I was stalking you. But it was hard to stay away. In fact, I’m dying now. Can I drop by tonight?”
She glanced quickly around her apartment. The dirty supper dishes sat piled in the sink, greasy evidence of fried pork chops liberally slicked the stove, and the garbage can was overflowing. “Well …”
“No, really, I need help with this dishcloth. Somehow I’ve gone from forty to fifty stitches and I have no clue how.”
The plaintive note in his voice made her laugh. “Well, if it’s a knitting emergency, that’s different. Give me an hour.”
“Great! See you around seven.”
Isabel whipped the kitchen into shape in less than twenty minutes. Usually when she came home from work and planned to be in for the night, the first thing she did was take off her bra and her leg. Now she put both back on to take the garbage out. After a quick shower, she looked at her clothes, trying to decide what to wear. She finally settled on a T-shirt and shorts. The shorts showed where her stump met the prosthetic, and she decided she didn’t care. If Dusty wanted to date her, he should see what he was getting.
Dusty showed up exactly at seven o’clock. As far as she could tell, he didn’t even notice her leg. He held up the fuchsia store bag with a grin. “I brought the dishcloth,” he announced. “I sure hope you can help.”
She opened the door wider and waved him in. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She brought him over to the couch and sat beside him. “Ah. I see the trouble. When you start a new row, you have your working yarn held in front of the needle instead of in back. Remember where the yarn is if you’re going to knit?”
“To knit, yarn in back. To purl, yarn in front,” he recited.
“That’s right. When you hold the yarn in front and knit, it creates an extra stitch.” She smiled at him over his dishcloth. “So now you have a choice. You can either continue knitting with fifty stitches, or you can rip it back a couple of inches to the place where you have only forty stitches.”