Different Dreams (10 page)

“I'm fine here,” Malou answered, no longer wanting the separation she had caused.

“Good choice. I had a look at that bed earlier, and it appears that Stallings slept on pinecones.” He reached for a thick log and settled it expertly on the fire, then tucked the quilt up around Malou's shoulders. “There, that ought to keep you through the night. Need anything else?”

“Just you,” Malou whispered, but it was too late, for Cam was already out of earshot, striding out of the room.

It's for the best,
she told herself, wondering if she would have succumbed if Cam had not heeded her protest. But he had, she reminded herself, forcing her lids shut to seek inwardly for the sleep that would be a long time in coming.

Beyond the pool of light cast by the fire, Cam stopped and watched, marveling at how controlled Malou was. Only seconds after breaking off one of the most heated embraces of his life, she could calmly drift off to sleep while his heart was still thudding like a kettledrum. God, he couldn't deny it, though, watching her lids flutter
down on those sun-blessed cheeks. He wanted her. Badly. He issued himself a stern warning that in the future he would never again let
his
control come so close to slipping away.

Then each of them on their separate beds, in their separate darknesses, listened for several long, solitary hours to the rain pecking at the roof of the small stone house they shared.

E
ven before she opened her
eyes, Malou knew that she had not slept long enough. She burrowed farther underneath the quilt to escape the pounding sound that was dragging her toward consciousness. The creak of footsteps padding across the old wooden floor brought her fully awake. Her senses awoke before her mind did. They were alive with a pulsing awareness of Cam's nearness even before Malou had time to completely recollect where she was and who was with her.

The front door scraped open. Shielded by the high back of the couch, she listened, seeking to learn the identity of the insistent early-morning visitor knocking at the door.

“
Buenos días
, Señor Landell.”

Jorge Maldonado.

Malou was surprised to hear such respect and deference in Jorge's usually curt voice. Obviously, he had
brought the Mexican
peón
's fear of the almighty
patrón
with him when he crossed the Rio Grande. She was even more surprised though to hear his voice, in any tone, at such an early hour.

“Todo es—”

“You'll have to try English, Jorge,” Cam whispered.

Haltingly, Jorge began again. “Everything is done as you ordered.”

The statement came out with an oddly formal finality. Before Malou had time to puzzle over its meaning, Jorge was asking, “But, why do you sleep here? I came only by luck. Why do you not sleep at the ranch house?”

Malou was jarred by the question and strained for Cam's answer. It was a whisper even lower than the one he'd been using.

“We can't talk in here. Let's go out onto the porch.”

The heavy oak door swung shut, cutting off any further possibility that she might pick up another scrap of conversation. Malou quickly slithered out from beneath the quilt and into her clothes, which had dried by the fire, then went to the front window farthest from the door. Cam was wearing only the jeans he had found last night. A bit too large, they rode low on his hips. Hard juts of bone protruded on either side of his flat stomach. He was gesturing decisively, his hand pointed and chopping like an ax. Jorge was nodding deferentially. Then the Mexican hired hand pointed into the distance, his brown
finger snaking through the air. Malou followed it into a day sparkling with the rain's cleansing.

Finally, Cam nodded a couple of times, then shook Jorge's hand and patted him on the back. Jorge's stunned, then pleased reaction was the only part of the exchange that Malou understood. He was quite clearly honored and delighted by the simple gesture. Malou backed quickly away from the window when Cam turned to come back in.

“Sorry we woke you. How did you sleep?”

“Not bad,” Malou lied, forcing her gaze away from the rugged contours of his chest, his stomach. He seemed so cheerily unaffected, she would have to make an effort to appear equally unperturbed, both by the events of last night and by the peculiar encounter she'd just witnessed.

“Apparently we made things unnecessarily rough on ourselves. According to Jorge, this isn't the main ranch house at all. We turned off too soon. This”—he circled his hand around to take in the stone house—“is just some shrine Stallings maintained to his wife for the past half a century. She died giving birth to their first child here, and Stallings just closed the place up and moved. Not long after that he made his first big oil strike and built a new house, the house he wished he could have built for his wife. Anyway, he never remarried and kept this old place just as it was, with everything maintained and in working order.”

The story both saddened and uplifted Malou. She fingered the old quilt, knowing a bit now about the woman who had pieced it together and about the man who had never stopped loving her.

“Want to have a look at what we were originally aiming for?” Cam asked.

“Sure,” Malou agreed hesitantly. Something was not right. She knew prudence would dictate that she leave immediately and cut off any further involvement with Cameron Landell. But two factors propelled her back into the claret-colored SUV: her concern for the troop of monkeys she was trying to save and sheer, unshakable curiosity. Curiosity about Jorge's cryptic words and about Cam and what he was up to out here.

The drive that had been such an arduous ordeal in the rain was a matter of minutes in the sun-sparkled day. Though she hadn't thought it possible, the surrounding country was even lovelier than it had been the day before. A terrible feeling of missed opportunity, of a paradise lost, swept through Malou as they bumped off the rutted road back onto the smoothly paved highway. She wondered what she should have,
could
have, done differently. She glanced over at Cam. He drove with one hand draped casually at the apex of the steering wheel. His free arm rested on the open window. His gaze was intent as he looked out with a keen eye over the ranch he now owned. His concentration on the passing countryside
was so total that Malou felt free for the moment to scrutinize him. The longer she looked, the more lost she felt. At the instant she saw Cam turning toward her, she quickly cut her glance away, out to the awakening spring.

The landscape was a muddled green blur, however, for Malou was still seeing Cam's sun-etched profile in her mind. It galled her to notice that her pulse was fluttering and that her stomach felt as if she were looking over a thousand-foot drop. It piqued her even more to have to admit to herself that her motivation for coming with Cam was not simply concern for the troop. Curiosity
was
a factor, but not of the sort she'd originally thought. Deep in her heart of hearts, she was forced to own up to the fact that she was curious about what might or might not develop between her and Cameron Landell. And there he was, she thought with a final stab of irritation, sitting over there with no thought on his mind other than the value of the latest chunk of land to come into his possession. She seamed her mouth into a tight line as the car surged forward with a sudden burst of speed.

Cam had felt her gaze on him as he'd stared out at the land he owned. He'd been attempting to force himself to take the all-consuming interest in it that he usually took in his property. But instead of carefully evaluating the parcel in front of him, his mind saw only torturing images of the woman beside him gilded in firelight and dressed in a nearly transparent cotton dress. But what
really tortured him was wondering what might have happened if he had pushed past her resistance last night. Pushed just the tiniest bit.

He had known she was watching him. Was he imagining it, or did her gaze actually feel warm against his skin? For as long as he could stand it, he continued looking out the windshield; then, ever so slowly, he turned toward her. She had instantly jerked away to glare out the window. Cam had chided himself for letting his imagination—and, he had to admit it, his hopes—get the better of him. He had felt her frostiness, seen it in her posture and in the hard line of her mouth. Her interest lay strictly with those infernal monkeys she wanted him to sponsor a retirement community for. As if he could outrun his quashed hopes, Cam had jammed his foot against the accelerator and the car had leaped forward. The drive was grimly silent for the next couple of miles until they approached the real entrance to Stallings's ranch.

“Now this is more like it.” The sight cheered Cam a bit. The front gate was a massive structure built of enormous, smooth river-bottom rocks. They passed beneath it into a world of neatly mowed and fenced pastures full of sleek quarter horses feeding in the shade of enormous live oaks. The road twisted back past a water tank seemingly large enough for a small town, then over a sturdy bridge. On the far side of the creek were endless miles of plowed field. They turned up a gentle rise that led to
the main house, situated at its peak. It looked like a cross between a Southern plantation and a feudal baron's fortress, with thick stone walls fronted by graceful, sweeping porches. Malou immediately envisioned a lawn party being held on the thick grass in the shade of the oaks.

“Maybe Mr. Stallings wasn't such a liar after all,” Malou suggested.

Cam's mind had turned back fully to evaluating the extent and value of the developments on the property. They did indeed seem pretty much as Stallings had represented them. Outside of the monkey ranch. “It's a solid piece of property,” he allowed. “But the fact remains that I never wanted to own it. I never intended to even have to see this place, much less work it. All I wanted the Lazy S to be was collateral. Now I'm stuck with having to dispose of it as quickly as I can. And, since the market in this area is depressed right now, I stand to lose a bundle. I just hope I can make enough to cover the note on Landell Acres, or I'll lose that too.”

“The house is lovely, though,” Malou added, beginning to genuinely understand the calamitous position Stallings had put Cam in.

“Yes,” Cam admitted without enthusiasm, “the house is lovely.” He parked the car. “Let's go see if this lovely house has decent enough cell reception that we can get back to work.”

The interior was as baronial as the exterior had
promised it would be. The entrance hall was two stories high. Thick exposed beams ran across the ceiling. Furnishings obviously selected by a decorator were clustered in groupings. One such grouping sat around the fireplace, which extended up the two-story wall. A second-story hallway overhung the magnificent room, opening onto the upstairs bedrooms. Though it was all quite splendid, the outsized scale of the place intimidated Malou a bit and made the warm humanness of the small stone house seem all the more inviting.

“All the families in the building I grew up in could fit in this place,” Cam said, pivoting around. Malou liked him for the comment, for the undramatic way he acknowledged his background. Her curiosity about Cam flared anew. How could she be so drawn to a man she was so suspicious of?

“It is fairly immense,” she agreed.

“Immense? It's a damn castle.” He dumped his attaché case on the leather couch fronting the fireplace and stared off into the dining room with its twenty-four-place table. “I wonder if Stallings was happy here. For all its grandeur, I don't get a sense of a life having been lived here, at least not a happy one.”

“Maybe he never got over losing his wife.”

Cam nodded. “I can understand that.” He seemed to be speaking to himself as he continued staring out past the dining room. “I can understand a love that
would consume a life.” He caught himself and, returning his thoughts and words to the present, laughed as if disowning what he'd just said. “Of course, I'm speaking hypothetically here. The loves I've known would barely consume a lunchtime.”

Though Malou smiled and even helped gloss over his comment with a crack of her own—“I've had a few that would have been hard-pressed to stretch over a coffee break”—she knew that Cam had spoken from his heart. Knowing that he did have the capacity to care so deeply made Malou regret all the more the moment between them that had passed forever.

“Well, shall we scout out a human-sized room and get to work?” he asked with what struck Malou as a forced briskness.

She followed him through the dining room out into the kitchen, where a little round Mexican woman, her silver-streaked black hair pulled back into a braid, looked up in shock at their appearance.

“You must be Jorge's wife,” Cam said to her startled brown face. “I'm Cameron Landell.” The look of shock did not abate until Cam tried a Spanish translation. All the worry lines changed course then, and her face was wreathed in pleasure. She smiled, revealing several teeth outlined in gold.

“I thought you didn't speak Spanish,” Malou hissed.

“I don't,” Cam answered under his breath, still smiling
at Señora Maldonado. “That was my patented Tex-Mex hodgepodge.”

“Seems to have done the trick.”

The woman put away her gold-rimmed smile and began rattling away in Spanish. Cam put up his hand for her to slow down and she obliged. He interjected a few words, then placed a friendly hand on her shoulder. “
Muchas gracias,
Señora Maldonado.” The woman beamed again in response.

Malou thought that if Cam were as skillful in dealing with all his employees as he'd been with the Maldonados, he must certainly have a contented and loyal force behind him. Cam set off again.

“What was that all about?” she asked as they turned down a wide corridor.