Bandit's Embrace (The Durango Family) (22 page)

She wanted to attack him with her fists again at remembering the soft sounds of passion coming from the French girl’s bedroom in the darkness. Amethyst had built the fire in him at the dance last night, and then Monique had put that fire out. Maybe, Amethyst thought, she had only herself to blame. She combed her hair the best she could with her fingers while Bandit saddled the stallion. There was no use asking; he was only going to lie to her.

“Here, sweet, let me help you up.” He stuck the cigarillo in his mouth, held out his clasped hands, boosted her into the saddle, and swung up behind her.

Amethyst glanced at the sun, realized it had been several hours. “What on earth will we tell everyone?” she wondered aloud.

He laughed gently and slipped his arms around her, nudged the horse forward as he smoked. “We’ll tell ’em the mare stumbled in a prairie-dog hole, that’s why you look like you’ve been drug through a brush heap backwards. I came along and found you.”

“You think they’ll believe that?”

“Who cares? After all, we are betrothed. Our marrying will save your reputation.”

He held her tightly against him and she relaxed, leaned back against his wide chest. Whatever was between him and Monique, she didn’t want to think about it. “Suppose that girl tells about you?” she whispered, almost to herself, as they rode slowly back to the ranch.

“Oh, I don’t think Mona would . . .” His voice trailed off abruptly as if he realized she’d been fishing for information.

So he called her Mona. Amethyst suddenly felt betrayed and jealous. She envisioned Bandit in the throes of passion in the other woman’s arms. Without thinking, she stiffened.

He kissed the back of her neck. “Stop frettin’,
Aimée.
No one’s going to tell. We’re just gonna get married and be one big happy family.”

And then it came to her. He intended to have his cake and eat it, too. He’d have Amethyst and the Durango ranch, along with Falcon’s Lair. And if Mona or Monique or whatever her name was, married Amethyst’s foolish father, she would be available for Bandit, also. Maybe the virile Texan planned to keep a harem.

Like hell he would! She didn’t say anything on the rest of the ride back. He was so confident, so smug. He knew she didn’t dare break the engagement and, of course, he wouldn’t break it either. The only thing that could be done was to have the two fathers decide to call the wedding off. Maybe they could be made to see that even if he was the lost heir, things had changed too much for this arrangement to work out.

Everyone seemed to be off taking a siesta when they rode up. Heartaches grazed around on the far side of the barn, her reins dragging.

“See?” Bandit said triumphantly, “they haven’t even noticed your horse has come back without you.”

He dismounted, caught her horse. As they stood there, Manuel came from the house. “Ah,
señorita,
you have returned from your ride?”

She brushed her hair back, trying to look very bored and casual. “Si, Manuel. I got thrown and señor Falcon assisted me. You can take the horses.”

Bandit handed the child the reins, and followed her as she walked hurriedly into the house.

Once inside, she turned on him. “You don’t have to come in,” she snapped. “You can go back to the Falcons.”

“Why don’t you clean up and join me in the library for a drink?” He winked.

“No, go home!” she said in exasperation. “I’m going to take a bath and enjoy a siesta for the rest of the afternoon.”

He winked, took the cigarillo from his mouth. “I’ll help you with your bath.”

“I’ll just bet you would! Fix yourself a drink and then go home.” She whirled and started up the stairs.

When almost at the top, she heard a noise in the hall below. Turning, she saw Monique come down the hall, pause before the open library door. Curious, Amethyst sneaked halfway down the stairs to watch. The redhead looked into the library.

“Why, Bandit, honey,” Monique said, “I didn’t know you were here!”

Amethyst took a deep, shuddering breath. Because she didn’t want to face the truth, she’d almost convinced herself her suspicions were mistaken. From where she hid on the stairs, she could just barely see Bandit as he came to the library door, put his finger to his lips in a gesture of silence. Then he jerked Monique into the library, and closed the door.

Stunning realization swept over Amethyst, and she collapsed in a heap on the stairway. Of course he’d lied to her. He and that red-haired woman were in this together! What was she going to do?

She would tell Papa and Señor Falcon about the plot. She thought about that a minute, shook her head, still staring at the closed library door. Even if she could get the two men to believe that an impostor had gone to all this trouble, it would hurt them both. What she needed to do was convince them that the sixteen years she and Tony had been apart had made it impossible for the marriage to work. Then she could quietly break the engagement without being sent back to the convent school.

Now just how was she going to do it? Her mind worked furiously while she watched that closed door. She needed a way to show everyone how terribly unsuited the Texan was for upper-class Mexican life. That done, maybe Señor Falcon would send him away somewhere.

How could she demonstrate how unsuitable he was? She tried to think of a plan, but all she could think about was what might be going on behind that closed door. Was he kissing the redhead? Making passionate love to her on the sofa less than an hour after he’d made love to Amethyst and declared her the only girl for him?

She had to grip the banister to keep herself from running down the stairs, flinging open the library door.

She imagined the scene, then frowned. Somehow, it seemed familiar.
Oh, sí.
She’d played it in her head last night.

Amethyst decided she was going to have to be more clever than the pair in the library. She told herself that what she was feeling was righteous indignation, certainly not jealously. Just let them paw and pant all over each other in there while she planned her revenge. A brilliant idea had just come to her.

She gathered up her skirts, went up to her room. The Texan was proud, very proud. He wasn’t afraid of anything in this world as far as she could see . . . except maybe humiliation. If she could put him in a very embarrassing position, shame him in front of a crowd, he’d tuck his tail between his legs like a whipped hound and run back to Texas.

What Amethyst had in mind was a very special dinner party. When she got through with those two, both of them would light out for Texas and never be seen in these parts again. With a smile, she sat down at her rosewood desk, reached for pen and paper. This was going to be a dinner party everyone involved would never forget!

Mona smiled at Bandit as he closed the library door. “Well, Handsome, we didn’t get much of a chance to talk last night. I’ve missed you,
mon chéri.
I’ve missed you so much.” She went to him, put her arms around his neck.

“Now, Mona.” He laughed, shrugged her arms off, backed away. “Suppose Aimée or her papa should walk in and catch you doin’ that?”

She felt a catch in her throat.
Aimée
.
Beloved.
Mona had taught him that word and now he used it to refer to another woman. She shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant. “So what are we gonna do about this mess, Handsome?”

He reached for a slender cigarillo, struck a match on the sole of his boot as he lounged against a bookcase. “I’ll admit this complicates things some, Mona. Sure didn’t expect to run into you below the border.”

“I’m doin’ the same thing you are, Bandit,” she said, moving to the sideboard. “I’m tired of the sporting life and I’m running out of time. In another five years, no man would look at me twice.”

“Aw, Mona, that’s not true. You’re as beautiful as when you were the toast of Gun Powder.”

She watched him smoke, thinking maturity had improved him. He was even more virile now than when she had known him. “You were really the only man I ever cared for, Handsome, you know that.”

His rugged features softened. “We go back a long way, Mona. But it’s finished. Make old Durango a good wife. I sure as hell won’t tell him about you.”

Mona poured herself a drink from the crystal decanter on the sideboard, gulped it, made a face. “What eyewash! Sherry.”

Bandit smiled, and the corner of his mouth turned up in that devilish grin. “Don’t forget, ladies aren’t supposed to drink anything stronger than sherry.”

“Who the hell ever said I was a lady?” she scoffed.

“I’ll whip any man who says otherwise,” he promised softly, blowing smoke rings.

Tears came to her eyes and she blinked them away. “You was always square with me, Bandit, a real gent.”

He shrugged. “You looked after my mother.”

Mona cringed. “You know, I never told you this, but it’s been eatin’ at me. It was my fault Lidah ended up in a parlor house.”

“You?”

She didn’t like the hard look on his face. “Your mother was just a scared kid who’d been thrown out by her folks. The first time I saw her, she was scrubbing floors on her hands and knees in a saloon.”

“Better she should have scrubbed floors.” His voice betrayed bitterness, anger. “You know what it’s like to be a little kid whose mother works in a parlor house in a town like Gun Powder? The other kids used to gang up on me, chase me home if I went uptown.”

She twisted her hands together. “You say that now, but she was almost starving, Bandit, trying to support you by scrubbing floors.”

His eyebrows went up in surprise. “You mean, she already had me when she went to work at the Ace High?”

Now it was her turn to be surprised. “You didn’t know that?”

He shook his head, blew smoke. “No, I—I figured I was fathered by one of her customers. I never asked, and she never talked about it. I was afraid she didn’t even know which one.”

“You poor devil.” She went over, put a comforting hand on his arm. “Lidah never talked about your father. I think she was pretty bitter that he’d gotten her pregnant, then deserted her.”

He gave her a wry smile. “When will women ever learn that a man will say anything, promise anything, to get between a woman’s legs?”

She turned away. “We always hope things will be different, I suppose; that the next guy will really care.”

Bandit laughed. “When a man cares, he makes some kind of commitment. If a woman’s smart, she’ll wait ’til the guy’s got a gold ring in one hand and a preacher by the elbow in the other.”

“Somehow, just from the little Lidah said about him, I think she really thought the man cared about her. I figured she would have at least told you about him.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, my mother spent most of her spare time at the bottom of a gin bottle when she wasn’t entertaining customers.” His voice was bitter.

Mona remembered the pretty half-breed girl with the pale blue eyes. “She was ashamed, Bandit, ashamed of what she was doin’.”

“Then why the hell didn’t she stop!” he exclaimed, turning to throw his cigar in the empty fireplace. “You never knew about the kids taunting me with dirty words about my mother. I was the only kid in town living in a bordello.”

“I suppose I should have realized what it must have been like for you, but you were always such a cheerful, cocky little scamp, nobody realized you were hurtin’ inside.” She bit her lip, suddenly faced with the reality of the past.

He didn’t answer for a long moment, and Mona saw that same, deep sadness in his eyes she had often seen in his mother’s. “I had to pretend I didn’t give a damn, that nothing mattered because it all mattered so much. If I was cocky, arrogant, no one knew how much it hurt.”

“She hurt, too, Handsome. I guess that’s why she beat up on you. She told me one time that every time she looked into your face, she saw his. But you two had to eat, and she wasn’t strong enough to scrub floors forever.”

“God damn it! Don’t try to make me feel her whoring was my fault!” Bandit almost shouted, and the anger in his face made her shy away. Then she felt foolish. This gallant cowboy would never use his virile strength against a woman.

“She loved you, Bandit, more than anything.”

“Did she?” There were tears in his eyes. “She never told me.”

Mona’s heart twisted in pain for the pair. “Sometimes we neglect to tell those we care for most how much we love them. Or maybe we take it for granted they know.” She thought about it a moment, looking at him; loving him. “Or maybe we’re afraid they would laugh if we said it.”

“Mona”—he ran his hands through his blond hair in obvious agitation—“did she ever give you any clue about my father? Anything at all?”

She shook her head. “Very little. I think he was her one and only true love. She wasn’t wanted at home anyway, a half-breed kid in a family of blonds; the product of a rape. Then she came up pregnant and unmarried, and I suppose that was just the excuse her stepfather needed to kick her out. She was just a kid, Bandit, and so she scrubbed floors until I found her.”

“I would rather have starved.”

“You were too young to make that decision.”

Bandit paced up and down before the fireplace. “I’ve spent my whole life wonderin’ whose blood flows in my veins. Everyone wonders about things like that.”

Mona sighed. “All I know is her name was Lidah. She said it was Czech for ‘Loved by all.’”

He stopped pacing and looked at her. “Very appropriate for a whore, don’t you think?”

She slapped him then, slapped him hard. “You do her wrong, Bandit. She was desperate, don’t you see? All I know is she met your father sometime in forty-six, and saw him through the summer of forty-seven. Then he stopped coming. I think he was just a kid himself, maybe from some fancy, snobbish family that didn’t want a half-breed girl in it.”

“He could have run off with her anyway, if he’d really cared about her.”

“I dunno. Maybe something happened so he couldn’t come back to claim her.”

He laughed harshly. “Like what?”

She shrugged. “If he was underage, maybe his family found a way to stop him. Or maybe he got sick and died. The Mexican War was just starting, maybe he was a Texas Ranger and got killed in it.”

“He could have given me his name,” the cowboy said very softly. “You know how much that would have meant to me, how humiliating it is for a kid to have it advertised to the whole world that his old man didn’t give enough of a damn to give a woman and child his name?”

Beneath the cocky, wisecracking façade was a deeply hurt, bitter man, she realized. “Oh, Bandit, I never realized how much you hurt. Didn’t she give you any clues?”

He swallowed hard, and for a long moment in the silence, she did not think he would answer. “Sokol,” he said finally. “When she was dying, she took my hand, managed to say ‘sokol.’ Something about the desperation in her face told me it was important.”

Mona furrowed her face in thought. “Sokol. Don’t think I ever ran across that before. Is it Czech?”

Bandit put his hands in his pockets, went over to stare out the window. “Who knows? Everywhere I’ve gone in the years since she died, I’ve asked if there’s an hombre by that name, but I’ve found nothing.”

She frowned, thinking. “Maybe it’s not a man’s name, maybe it’s a town.”

He shook his head. “Not in Texas. I’ve checked every map.”

“Maybe another state?”

“I can hardly go runnin’ around the whole country tryin’ to pinpoint a town that I don’t even know exists, can I now?” His tone dripped with sarcasm. “Anyway, what in blue blazes does it matter? If I found the town of Sokol or a family by that name, what would I do? Maybe it means nothin’ at all, just the loco ramblings of a dying whore.”

Mona winced at the pain in his voice. “And that’s your only clue?”

He touched the necklace he wore. “This belonged to her, and before that, my grandmother. Supposedly, the Apache who raped her put it around her neck to protect her. And then there’s this.” He reached into his pocket, took out a coin, flipped it to her. “Lidah put this coin in my hand as she died, closed my fingers over it. Whatever it was she was trying to say, she never got it out.”

Mona turned the small item over and over in her palm. “I don’t think this is a coin, maybe a religious medallion of some kind.”

“Who the hell knows?” He caught it as she flipped it back to him, slipped it in his pocket. “Wouldn’t that be a laugh, though? I always figured a customer paid her with it, or some gambler gave it to her as a lucky piece.” He laughed without mirth. “Didn’t bring her much luck, did it?”

“Whores never have much luck, Bandit.” Mona blinked back tears; feeling sad, bereft. “We worry about ending up old and sad and lonely.”

“Is that why you decided to marry Aimée’s father?”

Mona nodded. “I always wanted to be a lady, did you know that? One of them fancy high-tone ladies I saw driving along in their fine carriages when I was a poor Irish druggist’s daughter in New Orleans.”

He looked at her thoughtfully, and she knew he was remembering that first night—all the nights, over the years, that they had comforted each other. “You’ll always be high class to me, Mona.”

“That’s one thing I always appreciated about you, Handsome.” She laughed. “You always treated me like I was a real lady, never asked me how I got into this business.”

“I reckon I figured you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“No woman ever expects to end up in a whorehouse permanently.” She smiled wistfully. “I was making deliveries for Pop’s drugstore, to the elegant parlor houses in the French Quarter. I didn’t see anything except the girls had pretty clothes, good times. It looked better than being one of a dozen kids in two rooms over a pharmacy.”

She thought about her other secrets. No, she wouldn’t tell him that it had been she who had casually told Lidah, one lonely Christmas Eve, about the matches. A druggist’s daughter knew things like that, knew that old-fashioned lucifer matches and fireworks were two things that contained yellow phosphorus.

“I hope you manage to pull this off, Mona.”

“Thanks, Bandit. I need a second chance bad.”

“So do I, Mona. You know, I wouldn’t tell anyone but you this, but a few weeks ago, I got so down and out, I ended up on my knees in a church, beggin’ for a miracle.” He looked a little embarrassed, chagrined. “Stupid, huh?”

“Not so stupid. Looks like you may get your miracle.” She went over, put her hand on his arm. “You deserve it, Handsome. Oh, you may have charmed a few ladies out of money, you may have branded a few cows that weren’t yours; but by God, you got honor, and that’s more than a lot of fine gentlemen can say. You deserve a break.”

She turned away so he wouldn’t see her face, and took a deep breath before she asked what she really wanted to know. “You gonna marry that little brunette?”

“If she’ll have me.” He sounded sad, uncertain.

Mona turned, looked up at him. He had a deep cleft in his chin that made women want to puta fingertip in it. “If I marry her old man, we’re gonna end up controlling two of the biggest fortunes in Mexico. Not bad for a pair like us. Once in a while, do you suppose we could still meet somewhere in secret? You know—”

“Mona, I’d better make something clear.” His voice was as cold as his eyes. “I’m not marrying her for her money. I’d take her if she didn’t have a dime, but I don’t think she wants me.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “So the Bandit has finally fallen in love! And she’s paying you back in spades for all the women you’ve loved and left.”

She saw the startled expression on his face as if he were realizing for the first time how much she cared for him. “Both these marriages can work if we give them a chance, Mona.”

She couldn’t control her anger now. “So that’s how it will be? I’m supposed to be faithful to that fat old fool, thinking about you in her arms? Spend the rest of my life treating you in the polite, detached manner I’d use with a son-in-law?”

“We’re both going to be honorable about this, Mona. And you’d better stop treating Aimée like you were Cinderella’s wicked stepmother and she was Cinderella.”

Aimée. Beloved. Jealous pain clutched her heart and she tried not to imagine him in bed with the girl, whispering endearments to her. Mona had been Bandit’s first woman. But Amethyst was going to be his last. “I didn’t know when I taught you a little French you’d use it on another woman. I was hopin’ that just once in a while, we could—”

“No, Mona, don’t even think it.” He turned back to look out the window. “I don’t know whether this is a miracle or just a lucky break, but we’re going to behave honorably. We’re gonna spend the rest of our lives pretending our pasts never happened. We’re lucky to get a fresh start. Most people never do.”

Tears came to her eyes, and she tried to blink them away, not wanting to humble herself. “That’s easy for you to say. You get the girl you love. Does she love you?”