A Candle in the Dark (11 page)

Jiméne shrugged. “Once or twice, perhaps. Most of the time, I worked with
mi padre
. He was only
un labrador
, a—a—” He scrambled for the word. “A farmer. We were poor. My brothers and I had to help…”

He chattered on, oblivious of Ana’s silence as he moved about the clearing, lighting a damp, smoky fire and setting out a clay cooking jar.

Ana watched quietly while he clumsily prepared their meal, his talk fading to a meaningless buzz in her ears. It was so easy. It was always so easy. Men loved to hear themselves talk. She was skilled at getting them started, skilled at the subtle question, the turn in conversation, the interested murmurs. At Rosalie’s, she’d often worked to keep them talking even as they thrust into her, because it hid the fact that she didn’t move or respond at all.

There were some men who hadn’t minded a still body, but others felt they were paying for her mind and emotions as well, and those were the men she hated most. So she let them talk, and ridiculed them silently, and let them leave thinking they knew her, when it was she who held their secrets and not the other way around.

Ana sighed. When she got to San Francisco, when she ran her own place, she would only take the ones who didn’t talk. There, she would lay down the rules and make them understand they were paying only for her body, not her soul.

“… but that is not my dream. I would like to be rich, to live in America and send money to them all, to not have to worry. It is hard,
Carina
, to be so far away, to worry so…” Jiméne talked on, gesturing in between his sloppy measuring of the rice.

Ana watched him. He was like the others, telling her his dreams as if she cared what they were, as if she had a stake in his life. She knew what would come next. They all expected it; one intimacy traded for another. A man would tell her his dreams and suddenly believe she shared them. Soon he would ask something of her—a question, a favor, it didn’t matter. Soon he would be behaving as if she were a friend or a lover instead of a whore.

She waited for Jiméne to turn and look at her with those same, glowing eyes. The eyes that told her that, in his mind, they were already intimate. She prepared herself for it, letting her disdain build, knowing he would see it in her face when he turned to her. It was an old defense, one she had used a hundred times to dissuade men from getting too close. Disdain, mockery, ridicule—they all worked. They all made a man realize what a fool he’d made of himself. All made a man remember that she was only a whore, a woman whose time and body was for sale.

But Jiméne turned before she was ready, taking her hands in his before she could move.

“Ah, Ana, I will admit I want you, that I try to impress you. If you would let me, I would kill that
perro
who says he is your husband.”

His brown eyes looked bottomless in the darkness, full of a passionate yearning that made Ana uncomfortable. They were the eyes she’d expected. The look that asked for intimacy—begged for it.

“Tell me the truth,
mi amiga hermosa
. Tell me he is not your husband. Tell me and I will take you away from this. I will take you to a place where we can make love in the sunshine…”

Ana pulled away, wrapping her hands in her skirt. “Don’t be ridiculous, Jiméne.”

She got to her feet, turning her back on him and walking to the opposite side of the fire. Then, gathering her rough skirts, she sank onto the dirt.

Their silence seemed to intensify the jungle’s sounds: the soft pad of heavy animals over the swampy ground, the quiet splash of something sliding into the river. Monkeys chattered, the branches above their heads clattered and moved apart. The constant hum and clicking of insects rose from the shadows.

Across the fire, Jiméne stirred the rice in the earthenware pot sullenly, his eyes downcast. Ana wished suddenly that she hadn’t hurt him. Jiméne was the closest thing to a friend she had on this trip. It was true he was like the other men she’d known, but that was exactly why he was no real threat.

Ana looked over at him, feeling a familiar regret. Over the years she had wanted friends, but she couldn’t seem to let down the barrier protecting herself long enough to have them.

She often wondered if she would ever stop being afraid, wondered if she was even capable of having a friend. God knew she’d never been before. The fear that they would get too close paralyzed her, the memory of her mother froze her inside.

But Jiméne wasn’t dangerous to her; she could easily keep him at bay if she wanted to. There was no chance he’d get too close; she had no fear that he knew something about her just by looking in her eyes.

Unlike D’Alessandro.

Ana closed her eyes, shivering slightly. No, Jiméne was nothing like D’Alessandro. She felt comfortable with Jiméne, and perhaps that was enough to start. Perhaps, if she really tried, she could make him the first real friend she’d ever had.

Ana took a deep breath. “Jiméne,” she said softly.

He looked up, his hand stilled over the pot. “
¿Sí
?” His voice was wary.

“Tell me about your family.”

“Why? You do not wish to hear.”

“But I do,” she insisted. “I really do.”

But when he started to tell her, Ana’s mind drifted far away.

After twenty minutes of toying with his bowl, Cain finally put it aside. He wasn’t hungry anyway, but if he had been, the unpalatable stew Ana and Castañeras had concocted would have destroyed his appetite. Half-cooked rice floated in a tasteless, watery broth, while chunks of tough and slimy pork bobbed like rotten wood. The only decent thing was the coconut—thank God they hadn’t had to cook it—and between gulps of brandy, he’d managed to get down a few bites of that, though it was the most he’d eaten since the one night he’d gorged himself on the ship, and now the chunks of coconut churned in his stomach uncomfortably.

He held the bottle of brandy to his lips and took a deep, comforting sip. His blood warmed, and his stomach immediately settled. In the last hours, with the aid of liquor, he’d managed to forget he’d ever seen the night jungle as threatening. Now it seemed to take on a comforting darkness, and he leaned back against the leaf-covered trunk and closed his eyes, listening to the sounds.

Jiméne’s voice floated to him, the rapid Spanish syllables blending and shifting. With part of his mind, Cain understood the words; Jiméne was busy making plans for the morning. They’d be setting off early, with the sunrise, since the boat had needed only minimal repairs.

Jiméne, Ambrosio, and Ruben sat close together, talking so quickly it sounded almost like music. The only-thing missing was the voice of a woman. Gentle, sweet, perhaps even singing…

Cain smiled and opened his eyes. There was the Duchess, of course. Not gentle, or even sweet, but there was a soft music in her voice that sometimes warmed the chill edge of her words. She was quiet now, just the way he liked her, and she sat across from him, carefully combing her hair with that gold comb she carried everywhere. Her eyes were hooded, the firelight cast reddish shadows on her hair, and the smoke softened her features so she almost looked as if she were smiling.

He knew
that
had to be an illusion, but Cain felt drawn to her all the same. She intrigued him, with her unassailable secrecy and her aristocratic demeanor. He’d watched her as they traveled the river, when she didn’t know anyone was looking, watched her widening eyes and the way her lips parted in wonder. But there was always that edge—that wall that never came down.

Suddenly he had the urge to see if he could dent it, to see if he could make her smile, or laugh, or tell him anything about herself.

Jiméne and the others were so involved in their conversation they didn’t even glance up as Cain lurched to his feet. Carefully, since the ground seemed to be coming up to meet him, he stepped to where she sat. She didn’t look up, just kept combing her long, thick curls.

“Hello, D’Alessandro,” she murmured softly.

“Hello.”

She looked up, surveyed him coolly. “Did you want something?”

“Thought you might need some help,” he said. “With your hair.”

“Thank you, no, I don’t.”

“I could—” Cain took a deep breath. “I could braid it for you.”

Her hands stilled, and when she looked at him, Cain thought he saw gentle mockery in her eyes. “I don’t think so.”

“No?” Cain smiled. He dropped down beside her, taking the comb from her stiff fingers. It glittered in the half light, the delicate scrollery and swirls reflecting the flame nearly as beautifully as her hair had. “Where did you get this? It’s beautiful.”

She licked her lips. For a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then, in a voice so quiet he barely heard it, she said, “It was my mother’s.”

“Was it?” He turned it over in his hand. “Looks Spanish.”

“Spanish?” She looked up quickly, and he got the feeling he’d surprised her. “She told me it was Russian.”

A small smile touched her lips. “But then, she told me everything was Russian.”

“Like the storybook?”

She stiffened. Cain cursed himself for asking the question. He saw the shutters come down over her eyes.

“What about you, Mr. D’Alessandro? Did you have a favorite storybook as a child?”

The question startled him, and it took a moment for Cain to realize what she was doing. He’d heard it before, the whore’s trick, the way of keeping men from encroaching on her privacy. The Duchess had learned it better than most. For a minute he’d almost believed she was interested, almost thought she wanted to know something about him as badly as he wanted to know something about her.

In fact, he still wasn’t sure she wasn’t interested. Cain stared at her, at the flickering of the firelight across her high cheekbones and smooth skin, at the tawny eyes that glinted gold in the darkness. She
was
beautiful. She’d probably been one of Rosalie’s highest-paid girls, one of the most compelling and most skilled.

Most skilled
. The words echoed in his brain. She was skilled enough to twist him up inside if he let her. He knew he should walk away from her now, away from her beauty and her tricks, and her icy stare. But he couldn’t move.

Cain swallowed and took a deep breath. Not knowing what possessed him, except that in spite of his warnings, he didn’t want to leave her, he held out the comb.

“Will you let me braid it?”

She bit her lip, looking uncertain, and then she nodded. “Yes, go ahead. If tomorrow is anything like today, it would be best.”

The sorrow he heard in her voice made him smile. It was as if she regretting pinning up her hair more than she dreaded his touch. Cain waited while she turned her back to him and took a deep breath, as if steeling herself for some arduous pain.

Cain touched the comb to her hair. He felt her stiffen, but he didn’t stop. Instead, he gathered the long tresses into his hands.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. Not this erotic shudder that slid through him when he touched it. Her hair looked like she’d just been made love to. It was thick, tousled, tangled in beautiful heavy curls. Cain clenched his jaw, suppressing an urge to bury himself in it, tormenting himself with the thought of wrapping its thick softness around him.

Christ, he was crazy. He’d barely touched her, and now suddenly he wanted her so badly he could barely stand it. Not that it mattered. She had made it very clear that she was more than uninterested in him. And the last thing he wanted was for her to brand him even more of a fool than she already had. But it was also clear that if he didn’t do something to take his mind off his desire, he would probably do something incredibly stupid. Like proposition her here, where the three Panamanians a few yards away would undoubtedly make him sorry to be alive if he so much as touched her—even if he was pretending to be her husband.

He glanced longingly at the brandy, and licked his lips, searching his mind for something to say as he began the braid.

“You looked lonely, sitting here,” he said finally.

“Did I?” She turned her head. A brittle smile curved her full lips. “I assure you I’m not.”

“Why not?” Cain gently tugged her head back around. His fingers moved skillfully through her hair. “So far away from home, with none of your friends—don’t tell me you don’t miss them.”

She paused infintesimally. “No. I don’t miss them.”

“Not any of the other girls?” he teased.

“No.”

“Not Rosalie?”

“Especially not her.”

“What about Davey?”

She shrugged. “Davey was only around when he was paid.”

He paused, then plunged ahead. “What about the man you killed? Do you—”

She tore away from him, twisting until her golden eyes fastened on his, yanking the braid from his hands so it flopped across her shoulders. “That is none of your business, Mr. D’Alessandro. I thought I made that clear that night at Davey’s.”

Her words sank into him like a stone. Cain’s grin was tight and forced. “Sorry,
querida
. I don’t remember much about that night.”

“Oh, yes.” She made a short sound of exasperation. “Well, that was the agreement.”

Stop
, he thought.
Walk away, leave her alone
. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t help himself. The drink—he prayed it was the drink—was affecting his mind. He leaned forward, unable to resist asking her, wanting to know something—anything—about her besides the fact that she’d read fairy tales as a child. “Did you tell me then what happened that night? Did you tell me why he put that mark on your cheek? Why you had to kill him?”

She turned away sharply. “No.”

“Who was he?” he pushed. “Did you care about him? Did you—”

“Perhaps you didn’t understand,” she said in the coldest voice he’d ever heard. “I don’t want you to know anything about me, Mr. D’Alessandro, and I don’t want to know anything about you. I need your help now, and I’m willing to pay for it, but that’s all I want from you.” She took a deep breath. “To be blunt, I don’t trust you. You drink too much, and I’m never sure what you’re going to say. I don’t like being surprised.”