Against the Wind (12 page)

Her eyes felt gritty and tired, and she closed them, listening to the cacophony of the night, the hum of insects, the chatter of the night birds, the distant sound of an occasional human voice and the soft swish of the wind through the trees. The smell of the air was damp and sultry, perfumed by the overgrown flowers from the garden
below and strangely sensuous. And there she was, half dressed, lying like a trussed chicken in Jake Murphy’s bed.

It was too ridiculous to worry about. Hunching up, she rested her head against her arms, closing her eyes in sudden weariness. Tomorrow everything would make sense. Tomorrow she would see her father, tomorrow Jake would apologize profusely, and tomorrow she’d be on her way, back to La Mensa and eventually L.A. Wouldn’t she?

There were no guarantees, but she couldn’t allow herself to panic. Despite Jake’s threat she knew quite well she wouldn’t see him until tomorrow. She’d have a relatively undisturbed night’s sleep, if she could just ignore the uncomfortable position. The thick cotton cover was hot, but the mosquitoes would be worse. Ignoring the brightness of the dim light bulb, she willed herself to sleep.

Willing herself to sleep did her as much good as would winning the Irish sweeptstakes in her current situation. An hour later she was lying there, eyes wide, staring at the bare light bulb, when she heard the hushed mumble of conversation, the quiet scrape of the door.

He didn’t look like a man who’d just killed a teenage boy. But looks could be deceiving. Jake moved closer to her in the dimly lit room, his face impassive. “Still awake?”

“Did you kill him?”

He smiled, a wry, self-deprecating smile, and held out his hands. They were cut, bruised and swollen, but their significance was momentarily lost on Maddy. “No, I didn’t kill him.”

“What happened to your hands?” It came out sounding
far too concerned, but Jake ignored it as he began unbuttoning the loose khaki field shirt.

“I thought I told you. A minor problem of discipline.”

“You beat him up?” She was horrified.

“Better than killing him.” Jake dropped the large, ugly-looking gun on the table beside the bed. “He deserved far worse.”

“For God’s sake!” she cried. “He’s just a kid!”

“Old enough to know better.” The knife clattered to the table beside the gun, the shirt was tossed in the corner, and he began undoing his belt.

“All he did was fall asleep. You didn’t have to hurt him.”

Murphy dropped the belt on the floor, then sat down on the bed to remove his boots. “I didn’t hurt Ramon. I sent him to bed.”

“But then … what happened to your hands?”

He turned to look at her, and in the dim light his eyes were cool and distant. He said only one word. “Enrique.”

There was no reply she could make to that. He’d risen again, his hands on his zipper, and she let out a small shriek of protest. He ignored it, stripping his pants off, flicking off the overhead light and climbing into bed with her.

She lay very still, waiting for the assault she knew would come. There was no way she could fight him, no way she could stop him from doing what he wanted. She lay there, rigid, waiting.

She had a long time to wait. The tropical darkness closed around them like a velvet shawl, warm and soft and silent. He made no move, no sound as the minutes ticked by, until finally Maddy realized that he wasn’t going to touch her, wasn’t going to do anything more than fall asleep beside her.

Slowly, bit by bit, her tensed muscles began to relax. He lay very still, his breathing even, but she knew he was as wide awake as she was. His body jerked suddenly, then was still again, and the silence lengthened.

“Jake,” she said softly, half convinced he was asleep.

He wasn’t. “What?”

“Do you remember the night of my birthday? When you picked me up at the country club? I was with Eric Thompson, and you took me away from him and drove me home in my VW and kissed me.”

There was a long silence from the man lying beside her, and she waited. “Lady,” he said finally, wearily, “stop trying to convince me. Anyone could know about that night.”

“But how? I never told anyone.”

She could feel the shift of the mattress as he turned to look at her, and in the murky darkness she could feel his eyes on her. “But I did,” he replied.

There was no answer she could make to that, none that she cared to make. Clearly the high point of her adolescence was nothing more than a locker room joke to him. He probably wouldn’t even believe her when her father recognized her. He must have some deep-rooted need not to know her. The thought was little consolation in the lonely darkness of the night.

The scratching sound brought her suddenly, rudely awake, and she jerked, the rope catching her arms painfully. She could tell that the man beside her was similarly alert, waiting, listening, for that sound to come again.

They weren’t disappointed. Someone was at the door, turning and twisting the knob, and Maddy realized with sudden surprise that Jake had locked it when he’d returned
last night. She lay there, unmoving, waiting, as she felt Jake sit up and reach for his gun.

And then the voice came. A soft, quiet, slightly drunken voice. Definitely pleading, definitely female. “Let me in, Jake. I’m so frightened and lonely. Please, darling. I don’t want to be alone. Let me in.” And definitely no one but Soledad Lambert.

The moon had risen, illuminating the small bedroom and Jake’s wary figure. He sat there, motionless, and then his hand left the gun, and he sank down in the bed again.

“Please, Jake, let me in. No one’s ever found out about you and me, you know we’d be safe. Please, baby. I need you so much. I don’t want to be alone tonight. I—I can’t be alone tonight. Please, Jake. Just one last time.”

Maddy turned her head then, to look directly into Jake Murphy’s moon-silvered eyes. She said not a word, her contempt visible enough in her dark eyes and the curl of her lip. He met that gaze, without repentance, without apology, as the eerie, pleading voice came again.

“Please,
mi amor
. I know you’re in there. Don’t shut me out, baby. Let me in.” Her voice was getting louder, rising drunkenly, and the soft scratching on the door was turning to a pounding.

Jake sat up again, pushing the covers aside, when another voice joined Soledad’s. “Come on, Soledad,” Richard Feldman’s light voice said. “Come back to my room. Jake’s asleep. Leave him alone.”

“But I don’t want to go with you,” she said petulantly. “I want Jake.”

“But Jake doesn’t want you, Soledad,” he said gently. “You know that.”

“Of course he wants me. He’s just afraid Sam will find out. But Sam wouldn’t care. He’d want me to be taken
care of.” The pounding began at the door again, louder this time.

“He’s asleep, Soledad. Come back with me. I have some brandy in my room, and it’s very quiet there. You’ll be able to sleep.”

“But I don’t want …” Her voice trailed off down the hall, as Richard Feldman obviously led her away. El Nabo he might be called, but he was good at diverting drunken women, Maddy thought with gratitude.

She turned back to Jake’s still figure. “You bastard. You conscienceless, miserable basard. To sleep with his wife, while all the time he trusted you, treated you far better than he ever treated his own children, loved you …”

“I don’t owe you any explanations,” he broke in harshly. “And I’m not about to give them to you. You have no right to judge me, lady. It’s none of your damned business.”

“You can’t even defend yourself,” she said in a bitter voice. “I don’t understand how you can call yourself his friend.”

“I’ve heard enough,” he said, and before she realized what he was doing his mouth stopped hers quite effectively, silencing the angry, bitter words as he kissed her. His body half covered hers, and with her arms tied she couldn’t dodge or avoid him. His strong hand caught her chin, holding her head still for the driving onslaught of his kiss, his tongue dipping deep into her mouth, plunging, plundering, hurting and destroying the last tiny bit of hope she had left. And for the first time that day tears came to her eyes.

He couldn’t have known. The moonlight wasn’t enough to illuminate the room, and the tears that spilled silently down her cheeks didn’t touch him. But suddenly
the kiss softened, the hands gentled on her, the lips coaxed and teased and healed. And without any more thought she was kissing him back, reaching for him with her mouth while her hands were held back, seeking him out with her tongue, calling him to her in the only way she could. And suddenly it was magic again, like nothing had been since a hot August night fourteen years ago.

And yet the magic was different. An older, more mature feeling was sweeping over her, one that held the depth and promise of eternity. This wasn’t a childhood crush fondly remembered, this wasn’t a nostalgic trip back to adolescence. This was real and now and overwhelming. There was only the rough cotton sheet between his naked body and hers. Her shirt had come up to her waist in her sleep, and she could feel him, hot and hard and wanting against her. And she accepted that wanting, as she accepted her own, with a sudden sense of destiny.

But destiny and Jake Murphy had different plans. A moment later she was released, and he fell back on his side of the bed, not touching her, his breath coming heavily in the silent darkness. They lay there without a word, and Maddy could feel her pulse racing through her body, feel the tight constriction of her nipples against the soft cotton shirt. And she waited.

A low, mocking laugh came from the man beside her. “You aren’t going to seduce me into believing you either,” he drawled.

“Me seduce you?” she cried in a soft shriek. “You rotten, miserable—”

“Watch it,” he warned. “You should remember how I stopped your mouth a few minutes ago.”

She shut her mouth abruptly, and he laughed again, a slightly strained sound. “That’s right. Go to sleep. Your
virtue is safe with me.” And the bed creaked as he rolled over and away from her.

She stared at his turned back balefully for a moment. In the moonlit darkness she could see the smooth curve of his shoulder, the long brown hair dark against the whiteness of the small, lumpy pillow. He was close enough that she could reach out and bite him or reach out and kiss that smooth, tanned skin.

She lay very still. Tomorrow, she promised herself. Tomorrow she’d make him sorry. With that wistful thought she fell asleep. Leaving Jake Murphy to lie there, hollow-eyed, into the dawn.

He was up long before she awoke, moving silently around the shabby little room, staring out into the early-morning sunlight. It was still cool and damp, with none of the blazing humidity that would assault them later in the day. Jake leaned against the open window, barefoot, bare-chested, the khakis riding low on his narrow hips, as he stared unseeing at the garden beneath him.

He knew he was simply putting off the inevitable. Sooner or later he was going to have to face Sam Lambert, sooner or later he was going to have to let the woman sleeping in his bed go free. Events were crowding in on him, people and problems that could no longer be resolved were sweeping over the small fortress, and soon—today, tomorrow, or next week—it was all going to blow up in his face. And he was so damned tired of fighting.

He knew the moment she woke up. He could feel those warm brown eyes on his back, the eyes that yesterday had been uncharacteristically green. Colored contact lenses, he mused. He should have guessed. And for the twentieth time he wished things could be different. But he
knew they couldn’t. Once more he affixed a bland, uninformative expression on his face as he turned to greet her.

She was staring at him owlishly, the nearsighted eyes vague and surprisingly endearing. “I don’t suppose you feel like finding my glasses?” she said in an admirably caustic tone of voice. She blew it by yawning in the middle of her question like a small child, and the tousled dark curls framed her sleepy face like a halo. She was sitting up, the covers pulled around her like a shawl, and the ropes dangled uselessly from the bedpost.

“I’ll ask Carlos,” he said, moving across the room towards her. “Did you sleep well?” The ridiculously polite question amused him, but he waited patiently for her answer.

“I did. Once I got the ropes untied.”

“I figured you’d settle down once you managed it,” he agreed gravely. “No ill effects from your night?”

“None. And you?” She was matching him, cool for cool, and the thought amused him even more.

“Once Soledad was distracted I slept very well,” he lied, remembering the damnably disturbing feel and scent of the body that slept so soundly next to his. On an impulse he sat down on the bed next to her, catching her wrists in his larger hands. He watched her eyes skitter across his chest with an absurdly virginal shyness, her gaze coming to rest somewhere in the vicinity of his chin.

There were red marks on her wrists from the ropes, and he let out a soft curse as his thumbs gently rubbed the abrasions. There was no way he could or would apologize, but the touch of his hands on hers was a soothing repentance.

“Are you going to behave yourself today?” Stupid question, he told himself. She’d already proved that she
wasn’t about to let anything get in the way of what she wanted.

“I doubt it. When are you going to let me see my father?”

“Still at it? You’ll see El Patrón when and if he’s ready, and not before. In the meantime, I would suggest you be very demure. Neither Enrique or Ramon is too pleased with you.”

“And what about your mistress?” she demanded, pulling her hands away from him.

He smiled blandly. “Which one?”

“My father’s wife, of course,” she snapped back. “I didn’t realize there were any other wives for you to plunder, but then, I haven’t been here long. Ramon’s girlfriend, perhaps? Carlos’s mother?”

His laughter filled the room, suddenly lighthearted. “If you had ever seen Carlos’s mother you would never have such wild imaginings. No,
mi amor
, there is no one else to attack you but your supposed stepmother. Soledad won’t like the fact that you spent the night in my room, but she won’t do anything about it. If you’d been listening carefully to her wine-induced pleas you would have realized that anything between us is long in the past. Not that I need to explain to you, even if you were Madelyn Lambert.”