A Wild Red Rose (16 page)

“Oh, I so hoped to get to know you better over dinner. We have a nice, clear consommé, cold lamb salad, and pears with cinnamon-chocolate sauce for dessert. I’ll send you a tray. Perhaps, the soup will make you feel better.”

“Thank you. You’ve been very kind.” Despite raising a sneaky, lying son who had taken Renee Niles Bouchard Hayes for a ride, literally, she liked the woman and felt no desire to be rude.

At a wave of Madalena Beck’s hand, a Hispanic maid appeared to escort the guest back down the long hallway illuminated mainly by the votive candles burning in red glass containers before the statues of primarily female saints. They passed into another wing and entered a room across a smaller, more intimate courtyard where she could see Clint and his mother sitting together, sipping their wine before the fireplace, through tall doors with small glass panes. The décor of the bedroom was Spanish Colonial: heavy carved bedstead, massive dresser, and a smaller table with two wooden chairs. She drew the striped drapes, shutting out the touching family reunion, and threw herself on the wide bed. By blanking out all the deceptions of the last three months, she finally slept. Renee Hayes possessed one great survival skill. She was good at burying the ugly and the hurtful to save herself.

****

The maid woke Renee when she knocked on the door and brought in a tray laden with not only the food, but a pot of mint tea. No sense in punishing herself for stupidity by not eating at all. She’d need her strength in the morning when Clint got around to explaining himself and would most likely end up saying, “It’s been fun, Tiger. I’ll get you a ticket home when I drive over to the airport.” The last year or so she’d heard that sort of statement a lot from men, but none that she’d fallen for like Clint Beck. She had no intention of waiting for that to happen. Better to be the leaver than the one left. She asked the maid for a telephone book and the use of a phone.”

“
Si, senora
. May I bring you anything else?”

“No, thank you.” S
enora
, proof again she’d gotten way too old, was much too often married, to be a
senorita
—the kind of fresh young woman the Becks would want for their son, the Bean Prince, whatever that meant.

Renee polished off the wonderful meal to the last crumb. She used the portable phone to call home since she’d turned her father’s cell to a lump of melted black plastic that morning. Let Clint foot one more bill. “Daddy, I’m sorry but I have to ask you for another plane ticket.”

Jed Niles didn’t question her reason. “You got it, sugar. Just tell me where to send it. Anytime, anyplace, anywhere, I want to be there for you like I should have been years ago.” In the background, someone turned down the TV and moved around the room in Tara-on-the-Teche, Mrs. Parker perhaps. She didn’t ask, didn’t want to know.

“Thanks, Daddy.” She gave him the information. Then, she placed her dishes in the hallway so she wouldn’t be disturbed again, and striping down to her Walmart undies, tried to get back to sleep.

She did doze, but voices in the courtyard woke her. Going to the drape-covered doors, Renee peeked through a gap in the curtains. Clint and his mother sat nearby on the edge of an old well. Right about now, she wished she could push him in.

Small lights in iron brackets glowed among the trellises of well-watered climbing red roses. An outdoor kitchen constructed between two wooden doors on the far end of the courtyard indicated the family gathered here for barbecues and celebrations. Renee imagined the place strung with colored lights, a mariachi band playing in one corner while their guests danced. The feast prepared would be straight out of Mrs. Beck’s cookbook. Safe in the shadows, she put her ear to a glass pane.

“Manuela said she ate her dinner and drank the tea. That’s good after all the upsets she’s had. I’m worried that she asked for a phone, though,” Clint was saying.

“Clinton O. Beck, what have you done to that poor young woman?” Madalena said with a shake of her head.

“Mama, if you had seen Renee three months ago, you’d be telling me I was the one in danger.”

“Ah, so she is like Brandy and Ginger and Bess. You find Ginger in an alley, bring her home, and she gives birth in my house the next night. You tame Brandy, and when you leave for school, she won’t let another man touch her. Bess eats more than she was ever worth and I must bottle feed her baby. Always, I am the one stuck with them.”

“You’re going to bring up that old cow, too. Renee is not like Brandy and Ginger or Bess. I was just a kid then, but all of them needed a second chance. You complain, but I know where I got my soft side.”

“Yes, always bringing home the needy. Your father won’t be pleased with you.”

“He never is.”

Renee let the curtain drop back. While she took a small bit of consoling pleasure that seventy-year-old Mrs. Beck regarded her as young, being Clint Beck’s pity case felt worse than being his practical joke. Renee went back to the bed and burrowed into the covers. She missed Clint’s hot, hard body next to hers, but by damn if she would ever tell him so.

****

“I’m getting chilled, Clinton. Let’s go back inside and continue this discussion. I believe you haven’t the slightest idea what you have taken on this time.”

“Nothing I can’t handle,” he argued as they retired to the large living room. Clint opened the damper in the fireplace and started a small blaze. He knew his mother enjoyed watching the flames in the cool of a desert evening. He poured more wine, hoping to mellow her out.

“What you have taken on is a family. Renee is obviously pregnant and probably hoping you will marry her.”

Clint choked on his wine. “Why do women keep saying that? She denied it just this morning when we were in line at Walmart.”

“All the signs are there, son. You say she hasn’t been feeling well. And her breasts are so swollen.”

“They’re always big like that. She has implants, Mama. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“She is glowing—and showing. How long have you been together, Clinton?”

“About three months. I know Renee has put on a little weight since we met, but we spend most of our time driving around in the Nelle.” Frantically, he tried to explain away that popping of the jeans earlier in the evening.

“In all those three months, has she asked you to stop at a drugstore for feminine hygiene products? Has she asked you to buy her tampons?”

“Mom, jeez—God forbid that last one! We stop at drugstores all the time. She buys cosmetics and fashion magazines. Maybe Renee has a prescription for those birth control pills where a woman doesn’t get a period anymore.”

Clint Beck knew better. Didn’t he have her purse with the diaphragm case hidden in the Nelle. Hadn’t he been using condoms religiously?

“I am sorry, son. She appears to be more than three months along to me. This cannot be your child. If it was, I would expect you to do the right thing by her immediately. I am old-fashioned that way, as you know. As it is, the decision is yours. Do you care enough about this woman to marry her? Can you raise another man’s child and not feel deceived or resentful? Exactly how brave are you, Clinton O. Beck?”

Lena folded her arms and waited for an answer, but her son stalked off to his room without giving her a reply. Whose child did Renee carry if truly pregnant? One of the wannabe bull riders who frequented Bodey’s camp, or Bodey himself cheating while Eve recovered from childbirth? The man did have a reputation on the rodeo circuit no matter how much he claimed to have reformed. Could Clint raise a child born with black curls and Irish blue eyes knowing who the real daddy must be? Did he have that kind of heart, that kind of courage? Did he love Renee enough to accept both her and the child? Clint asked himself these questions all night long.

Chapter Fifteen

Renee woke to the sound of mockingbirds quarreling over territory in the courtyard. The hacienda was beautifully antique and that applied to its plumbing also. She’d made the trip down the hall to the bathroom twice in the night and passed other rooms where people tossed and turned as much as she did.

No matter how gracious Madalena Beck could be, she probably spent the evening worrying that her only son would marry this pathetic loser. As for Clint, she’d never known him to miss a night’s sleep to anything except sex, but maybe he felt a tad guilty about his deception.

Renee rooted through the oversized Walmart bag a servant delivered to her room. She shook out the seventies-style top with its wild swirls of colors and tied it behind her neck and loosely at the waist. Made of polyester and spandex, the blouse had no wrinkles. Unfortunately, it clung to that definite bulge she’d developed sitting on her tush all day in the Nelle. When had it grown from a little extra pooch of flesh into a noticeable belly?

Still, she wished she owned skin-tight lime green cropped pants to go with it, and ice-pick heels and dangling earrings, so Lena Beck could see the kind of person Renee Hayes was—not a woman who had lost everything and needed care and a home—but a bad, bad girl who could take care of herself.

Sighing, she pulled up the cotton underwear and a pair of too snug blue jeans left partly unzipped and pushed her feet into her scuffed boots. Leaving the silver cuff bracelet on the dresser with the greatest reluctance, Renee set out to find her hostess and Clinton O. Beck.

She heard conversation at the far end of the hall and by taking another right angle passage she ended up in a long, narrow kitchen gleaming with sub-zero refrigerators big enough for caterers to use, stretches of granite countertops, and a professional range with an option for grilling indoors.

The hacienda staff gathered around a long table—maids, yardmen, a few cowboys—each having a second cup of coffee as they polished off a breakfast of warm tortillas, scrambled eggs, and crumbled chorizo sausage. Pots of Beck’s Texas-Style Salsa sat within easy reach. Renee recognized the brand. Clint often poured it right from the jar onto his eggs.

“Excuse me. Where could I find Mrs. Beck and Clint?”

The maid who had attended her the night before jumped up from the table. “Come, come. I show you. In the breakfast room,
senora
.”

Renee walked the length of the kitchen and through another door opening into a cozy room with a view of the rolling hills, the creek, and on the other side of the water, a small herd of well-bred horses swishing their tails under an oak.

A sideboard held a chafing dish of eggs, a covered dish to keeping the tortillas warm, the expected pot of salsa, and an iron skillet of sausage set on a trivet. Wedges of cantaloupe and honeydew melon fanned out on a plate in a sunburst pattern with a centerpiece of fresh strawberries. Half a carafe of coffee remained along with hot water for tea, but earlier risers had eaten and left.

Renee waited for her stomach to rebel. When it didn’t, she filled a tortilla with eggs and sausage and salsa, made a cup of tea, and heaped her plate with strawberries. Airlines barely fed their customers anymore, and she figured her father, tired of having to bail her out again no matter how much he denied it, had gotten her a ticket in coach. Might as well fuel up for the flight. Gobbling down her breakfast resulted in a belch she was glad Mrs. Beck had not observed.

Finished stuffing herself and hoping the food would stay with her, she wandered into the next room, a dining hall fit for royalty with its twelve high-backed, carved chairs and sweeping length of table ornamented with silver candelabra every few feet. Narrow windows set deep into the adobe walls allowed thin streams of sunlight to enter the room while the glass-paned doors to the left showed off the courtyard still in morning shade. Clint and his mother were neither here nor there.

Renee passed into the large living area where she had been greeted the night before and smelled the scent of ashes from a fire gone cold—still no denizens of Hacienda Hidalgo. She started down the long hallway toward the front door and stopped when she saw Madalena Beck, obviously in prayer before one of the religious statues. A vanilla-scented votive candle burned in the cut glass container and clusters of fresh red roses from the courtyard filled a nearby vase. Dressed in a bright yellow blouse and wearing white cotton slacks and sandals, Mrs. Beck seemed to glow in the dim hallway. The light from the votive candle glinted off her gold jewelry as she crossed herself. Renee moved in to say her good-byes.

“Ah, there you are looking much better than last evening and feeling better as well, I hope. Did you have breakfast?” Mrs. Beck asked most cordially.

“Yes, I do feel better, and I have eaten.” Renee suppressed another burp. “Thank you for the hospitality, but if you could ask someone to drive me to the airport, I’ll be catching a flight to Lafayette. I own a home in Rainbow, Louisiana, and it’s time I went back there.”

Lena Beck didn’t immediately call for a driver as Renee thought she would.

“I’ve heard of Rainbow. There is a shrine to Santa Maria Magdalena at Mt. Carmel Academy that I have heard often produces miracles. She is my patron saint, you know.”

Mrs. Beck nodded at the statue. “I’ve often felt she has guided my life. Once, she came to me in a dream and told me that I would have a son at last at the age of forty. I laughed about it with my husband the next day and started with morning sickness the next week. Last night, she chided me for making a poor judgment, saying I would lose something of great value if I didn’t repent of it. Renee, you are welcome to stay here as long as you wish, no matter what Clinton has to say this morning.”

“Again, thank you, but I must be going. Tell Clint I’m sorry I missed him.”

“Oh, he is waiting for you in the outer courtyard. I think he was afraid you might hot-wire the Nelle and leave without him.” Lena Beck gave a tinkling laugh.

“How does he know I can hot-wire a car? One of my old boyfriends taught me that in high school.”

“Perhaps, you talk in your sleep. I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I am sure you are very resourceful.”

Renee knew her face had gone red. She’d spent years learning to suppress the curse of the redheaded. But, she stood her ground. “I’m no Brandy or Ginger. I am not some pregnant, homeless tramp. I can take care of myself.”