`Can't I come with you this time?'
Diego looked round distractedly from where he was packing papers into a black leather briefcase. `It is better if you stay here where it is quiet and peaceful.' His courteous dismissal, one of many in the weeks since her accident, flicked a dangerously raw nerve and Laurel's head reared back angrily.
'And where I won't run into your mistress, is that it?'
The fastenings on the briefcase snapped shut and
Diego crossed the room to her, his expression unread-
able as his eyes roved quickly over the excited pink of her cheeks.
'It is business, not romance, that takes me to Mexico City,' he told her with a dryness born of long-suffering patience.
Had he told her that before? Laurel suppressed the instinct to cover her ears with her palms, as she had so many times lately. Was it possible for a blow from a falling coconut to disorientate her senses to the point of madness? Or was it their unnatural mode of existence, with Diego behaving more like a concerned brother than a husband and lover? That their relationship had been a normal one before the accident was patent to her. Whenever he came near, her body quickened to the rhythm of remembered passion between them, to a man who had plumbed every depth and scaled every height with her.
'Diego?'
Her whispered mention of his name brought Diego to a halt in the process of giving her the light kiss on the forehead she had come to expect on his departure, and he looked quizzically down into her face.
'Don't you think I might get better quicker if—if we—' Her breath came in an impatient sigh. 'Surely we had a normal relationship before the accident? In fact, I know we did.'
His eyes narrowed on her upturned face. 'How do you know that?' he asked tersely.
'How? Because I feel it,' she shrugged. 'You're my husband, and I—I want you to make love to me. Is that so wrong?'
He was silent for a moment, then he sighed heavily.
querida, it is not wrong.' His voice softened to a
kind of tenderness. His hand left her shoulder to stroke
lightly against her silver hairline. `Do you not think that I, too, want to make love to you? It hasn't been easy, Laurel, to be so close to you without coming to your bed.'
'Then why?' she cried, twisting out of his grasp but staying within his orbit. `You're being too careful. Physically I'm fine, so why—?'
`We will see when I return.'
Like a child being offered a delayed treat, Laurel fumed silently, but she knew Diego well enough now to know that he would not be swayed once he had made up his mind.
But at least he had kissed her on the lips when he left, she reflected later in her own room. Usually he gave her a fatherly peck on the forehead, and the same on his return. And a father was far from what she needed right now. She wanted a husband, a lover, to make her forget the nagging doubts and worries that beset her whenever she was alone. That she had no family to worry about her Diego had told her, but surely she must have had a past with friends, acquaintances, other family members? No one had enquired about her as far as she knew—but then maybe she had dropped all prior ties when she married Diego. And he would tell her nothing, content to wait until her memory returned of its own accord, whenever that might be.
The woven tapestry of the colourful bedspread was rough under her fingers when she sat on the huge bed which seemed even more enormous at night when she was alone. Swinging her feet up, she lay back against the downy pillows and stared up at the scrolled ceiling. She knew every twist and turn of the plaster intimately, she thought wryly, from all the hours when she had
lain probing a memory that refused to budge apart from a few disjointed flashes of illumination.
Did Diego have a mistress in Mexico City? From somewhere she knew that many Mexican men thought nothing of supporting in luxury women not their wives. And Diego was a passionate man—that much was obvious from even a casual inspection of his dark, expressive eyes, the smoothly muscled body that evoked visions of his sensual nature. Few women would be able to resist him, any more than she herself could when he was near her. All her senses then were alert to his attractions, only to be stifled by his courteous rejection of her advances. However courteous the rejection, it still hurt down in the secret recesses of her woman's body.
But she didn't have to accept the chaste life forced on her by the convent which Diego had told her had educated her. She was married, with all the urges of a normal woman in love with her husband.
Her mind furiously awake, Laurel began to plan.
She left nothing to chance. In the three days following Diego's departure she had prepared not only the house, but herself for his return. The gleaming silver on the table was reflected in the sheen she had coaxed into hair too long exposed to the harsh rays of the sun, the white linen cloth was echoed in the purity of the bodice-high dress against the even tan of her skin, her nails were shaped and coloured to match the low centrepiece of soft pink roses.
Making a last-minute check of the table with Juanita, she turned shining eyes to the housekeeper. 'As soon as Señor Diego arrives we'll have drinks in here. Will that
give you enough time to put the finishing touches to dinner?'
Juanita beamed. 'Si, señora. The Señor always tells me he must take me to Mexico City to show his French chef how to make enchiladas the right way.'
'Then I know you must cook them perfectly, because Jules is a fantastic chef.' The telephone rang in the hall, and Laurel abstractedly paid little attention when Juanita went to answer it.
Everything would be perfect for her seduction scene; soft lights, good wine and her husband's favourite Mexican meal. Smiling wryly, she corrected the drooping angle of one rose and reflected that most wives required no special preparations to make their husbands desire them. Except perhaps the ones who had to wrest him from the arms of a mistress....
'The telephone, señora,' Juanita said from the door, her face showing the sympathy she felt. 'Señor Diego.'
'Señor—?' Laurel stared blankly at her. 'Oh. He wants me to pick him up at the airport?'
'The call is from Mexico City, señora.'
Disappointment welled up in Laurel's throat so that her voice was unnaturally strained when she picked up the receiver.
'Diego, you're not coming until later?'
Even through the disappointment, his attractively husky tone had the power to stir her. 'I am sorry, querida, it is not possible for me to come at all tonight.'
'But why? Everything's all ready ...'
'I am sorry, Laurel,' he apologised again, sounding remote now, 'but something has come up here that needs my attention. I will be with you on Sunday afternoon at the latest.'
'Sunday?' she queried, aghast.
'I have meetings tonight and a day full of them tomorrow.' His voice became lightly amused. 'Your countrymen regard work as something that takes precedence over weekends or vacations. And for this particular business deal, I must go along with them, however much I—I might want to be with you.'
'I see.' Laurel bit hey lip. 'Then I can expect you on Sunday?'
'Certainly. If there is any change, I will call you again.'
The remainder of the short conversation was lost to Laurel as her mind turned over the possibility that for some reason Diego didn't want to come home. That thought was only a step away from the speculation that there was a woman he was reluctant to leave in the City. One he might have told about the wife who was now agitating for marriage in all its fullness.
No, it couldn't be so, she told herself as she instructed the mournful Juanita to serve dinner for one. Latin men were notorious for their strong sense of family, their ultimate loyalty to the women they made their wives. It really was business that had kept Diego away from her.
But his phone call the next evening postponing his return until Tuesday sent the sparks of suspicion flaming anew in her brain.
'I am sorry, Laurel,' his soft voice insinuated in her ear, 'but mo
re meetings are necessary on Monday. If I stay here until Tuesday evening to take care of normal business, I will be free to spend a full week at .'
'Don't bother on my account,' Laurel snapped in her disappointment, adding childishly before slamming
down the receiver: 'Enjoy the weekend with your mistress ! '
If he called back to refute the allegation she would tell Juanita that she would speak to no one, not even the Señor. But there was no return call. Proving, she told herself as she paced the luxurious blue bedroom carpet, that she had struck home with her conjecture.
So what was she supposed to do? Sit home and wait for her Latin husband's return from his mistress? Desperately she longed to be free of that humiliation, but there was nothing she could do about it. She was - virtually a prisoner of her lost memory. She wouldn't know where to go or who to contact if she left the understated luxury of .
Her dreams, waking or sleeping, were punctuated by visions of the woman Diego was spending the weekend with in Mexico City. Always the woman was voluptuously dark, the antithesis of herself. But why, if Diego preferred that type of woman, would he have married her? She had the Nordic fairness of cooler climes, her figure slender while women of his own race possessed the abundant curves presumably desired by Mexican men.
Often she pressed her fingers to her temples, uselessly trying to remember. Perhaps their marriage had been on the point of breaking up before the accident. That could explain Diego's reluctance to resume the intimacies of the relationship they had once had.
And then on Monday, when the circumference of her world encompassed only the azure sky and blue-green sea, remembrance was brutally forced on her....
'Señora! A visitor.'
Intent on capturing the cavorting outlines of the
gaily coloured birds fighting over the crumbs she had scattered over the balustrade, Laurel at first ignored the housekeeper's peremptory call for her attention. The watercolour paints Diego had suggested as a diversion for the times when he would necessarily be away had been a brainwave on his part. She loved the challenge of trying to capture the bright plumage of birds who had evidently never heard of still life compositions.
'Señora!' Juanita implored again. 'There is a visitor.'
'Don't bother,' a male voice interrupted from behind Juanita's sturdy figure. 'I'll speak to Miss Trent—Señora Ramirez! —myself.'
Laurel screwed up her eyes against the sun outlining the visitor's head and felt a familiar pang behind her temples. It was the flashing pain that prepared the sudden arrival of a scene from her past, gone before she could grasp its import. Yet this man, obviously an American, evidently knew her. He had called her—what? Miss Trent. Excitement brought a thin film of perspiration to her upper lip. Was it possible he could throw a knowledgeable light on her past?
'It's all right, Juanita,' she told the hovering housekeeper. talk with Señor—?' She looked perplexedly at the tall young man still haloed by the sun.
'Laurel! It's me—Brent! Don't tell me you've forgotten me so soon.'
When he stepped forward to face her at the balustrade, Laurel felt a pang of, disappointment. She didn't know the good-looking young man with his, straight fair hair and hazel eyes. Yet....
'Bring some coffee,' she told the disapproving Juanita, then wiped the paint from her stained fingers. 'I'm sorry, I don't recognise you.'
'You must be kidding! It's me, Laurel—Brent Halli-
day. We were engaged once, remember? Although I must say,' he cast a calculating look around the flower filled terrace and out to the Pacific view beyond, 'you knew what you were doing when you threw me over for Ramirez.'
`Th-threw you over?' she stammered, then caught sight of the still lingering housekeeper. 'Juanita, I asked you to bring coffee.'
'Si, señora,' the dark-skinned woman answered sulkily before moving off to the patio doors.
Laurel looked assessingly at the young American, then gestured with unconscious grace to the patio table near them. 'Please sit down. Juanita shouldn't be long with coffee. She's been a little protective of me since the accident,' she apologised, pulling out one of the wrought iron chairs and sinking on to its padded seat.
`Accident? What accident?'
Laurel laughed lightly, indicating the seat opposite. 'Yes. A stupid one. I was lying under a coconut palm on the beach down there,' she gestured backwards with her hand, 'and one of the coconuts fell and hit me.' She took off her sunglasses in deference to the umbrella shading the table area. 'Since then I haven't been able to remember a thing. Please do sit down.'
The man sank on to the chair as if his legs would no longer support him, and his face was whitely strained as he looked across the table into the sea-green eyes.
`You mean—you can't remember anything?'
'Not a thing. Well,' she corrected hastily, 'I do get the odd flash of remembrance, but nothing that means very much to me. A boat tied up at a pier, nuns singing in a chapel, that kind of thing. The doctors say it will all come back in time. But ' she hesitated. Would it be right to ask this man, who obviously knew her from the
past, about things which Diego and the doctors believed were better uncovered naturally?
'You really don't know me, do you?' he said wonderingly, looking round abstractedly when Juanita reappeared in double quick time with the coffee tray. When the Mexican woman had reluctantly departed again, he looked earnestly over at Laurel.
'That's incredible! We were going to be married! you can't have forgotten that, Laurel!'
Laurel was too stunned to speak for a minute or two, but her brain was busy as she poured coffee from the silver pot then handed his cup to him. 'Did I—marry Diego while I was still engaged to you?' She hoped not, because she liked the open-faced American.
He gestured impatiently with his hand. 'You sent my ring back, said you'd fallen for this Mexican guy.'
'Diego,' she agreed softly, watching her fingers as they moved the spoon in her cup to dissolve the sugar. Thoughtfully, she lifted the cup to her lips, unconsciously provocative as she sipped at the strong brew. 'I'm sorry. I guess I must have fallen in love with Diego the minute we met. He's very—'
'Rich?' Brent Halliday inserted snidely, and she stiffened in momentary shock. What was he implying? That she had been the kind of girl who fell for any man providing he was well equipped with worldly goods? Yet how was she to know that she hadn't been a girl like that? One who had an eye to the main chance for money and the power brought in its trail?
'He's rich, yes.'
'And he's a powerful man in Mexico. Yet he let your father rot and die in one of his country's lousy jails! What kind of a man is that? It seems to me that....'
Laurel no longer heard his indignantly raised voice.
Things were happening inside her head, roaring tumultuous things that had suddenly breached the dam of her forgetfulness and come flooding into consciousness with all the force of a tidal wave.
Her father ... Dan Trent ... a rugged, lined face whipped to a healthy tan by the ocean breezes he loved. Another Dan interposed himself as an image on her brain ... a grey-faced Dan surrounded by the drab walls of a prison. A Mexican prison, where a man was judged guilty until proven innocent ... bottles of liquor on a side table, a toast to the bride and groom ... 'May your marriage be as perfect as your mother's and mine was.' ...
The heavy iron chair scraped wildly across the terrace as she leapt to her feet and screamed 'Daddy!' once before darkness rushed towards her. Blissful, enveloping darkness.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LIGHT filtered dimly into the room when Laurel opened her eyes reluctantly. Juanita, sitting on a straight-backed chair beside the bed, leaned forward anxiously to scan her face, and Laurel essayed a smile intended to be reassuring. Instead, Juanita's plump features dissolved into weeping anguish.
'Oh, señora,' she sobbed, clutching at the slender arm nearest to her, 'I should not have let the man come in. And if I had known he would hurt you, he would have h
ad to kill me first! Perdon, señora.'
Laurel summoned up a voice that seemed reluctant to leave the harsh dryness in her throat. 'It's—all right, Juanita. He didn't come to hurt me. The things he—told me brought back my memory with too much of a rush, that's all.'
Juanita's hands lifted to her face, and the eyes staring from between them were agonised. 'But Señor Diego—he will be very angry with me. He will say I should have sent the man away.'
'No, he won't. I'll—tell him that Brent gave you no choice.' Laurel's eyes narrowed on Juanita's brown orbs. 'Have you been in touch with Señor Diego?'
The housekeeper nodded vigorously. 'Si, señora. You understand I was not able to speak with him personally, but José would give him a message at Señora Francisca Beaudry's apartment, where he was transacting business.'
Business! Like a flash from some half-forgotten
dream, a vision of Diego's head rising from Francisca's tear-stained face shot painfully across her brain. She could well imagine the type of business he was transacting with the sultry beauty, whose widowhood hung around her like an added attraction.
'I would like to sleep for a while now,' she lied to the agitated housekeeper, who rose reluctantly from the bedside.
'I do not like to leave you, señora. Señor Diego—' 'I'm going to be fine now, Juanita. I just need peace to rest for a while.'
'There is nothing I can bring for you, señora?'
'No, gracias. Just see that I'm not disturbed.'
But her thoughts went on long after the anxious housekeeper had gone from the room. Like the pieces of a scattered jigsaw puzzle, memories were falling into place. Tears welled up in her eyes when she remembered that Dan was dead—killed by his incarceration in a Mexican jail. Yet ... the night when they had gone to watch the divers at the El Mirador Hotel, she had noticed a tiredness about his face, and it had held the grey of illness when she had visited him in the prison. He hadn't been well then, but she had put it down first to the long haul from California to the Mexican Riviera, then the unnatural confinement in a sunless prison.
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