The Last Honorable Man (6 page)

He surprised her. His expression warmed, not with anger, but with understanding. His mouth almost smiled, as if a weight had been lifted from the corners with the making of some great decision. He covered her hand on the steering wheel with his, lifted it, held her fingers lightly. His hands weren't smooth; she knew that from other times he'd touched her. But for the first time, she realized she liked their coarseness. Roughened hands were a sign of strength. A symbol of a man's dedication to a cause, be it chopping wood or plowing fields. She wondered how Ranger Cooper had earned his calluses.

“Okay then, don't trust the system,” he said, his voice a smooth contrast to his rough hands. “Just trust me.”

She stared at him, unsure what to say next. She couldn't trust him. He was
policía
—the worst of the worst in her country. But something about him tugged
at her, made her want to believe. Perhaps just her emotions, run away again.

“I've been doing a lot of thinking the last few hours, and there is one sure way to guarantee you can stay in America.”

“Eduardo was the only way.” Her voice sounded faraway, small.

“No,” he said. He paused. When she brought her eyes back to his, his chest rose and fell with a single deep breath before he spoke. “You can marry me instead.”

“¿
E
stas loco?
I cannot marry you!”

Elisa jerked her hand from the ranger's. The soft scrape of his callused palm on her fingertips shot a tingle of awareness up her arm. Or maybe that was just shock. A physical reaction to an emotional jolt.

Marry
him? He could not be serious.

But one look at his pewter eyes, glowing in the dim light, convinced her that he was serious. Deadly so. He did not just stare at her. He focused his entire being on her. He looked at her as though the rest of the world had faded away, as if nothing else existed except him and her and the moonlight and the ridiculously expensive car in which they sat.

The supple leather seat groaned as she scrambled away. Pulling her feet onto the seat, she jammed her back into the corner between the passenger seat and door and drew her knees to her chest. Even at this distance,
the ranger was too close, too sincere and much too intense.

“It wouldn't be a real marriage,” he explained as calmly as if he were showing her how to use a blender. “I mean…it would have to be legal. But it would just be a piece of paper between us. It wouldn't mean anything. Not really.”

She knew he was talking about…intimate relations, and decided not to respond to that implication. Sex with the ranger was the last of her worries. Too outrageous to ponder. “It would mean a great deal. It would mean I would be bound to you. Dependent on you.”

“Only for two years. After that the INS considers you a resident regardless of your marital status. You can divorce me and stay in the States. Legally.”

Elisa gulped in a breath. She could not spend two years with him. She could not spend two minutes with him without her pulse dipping and jumping like a monkey swinging through the trees.

“Why?” she asked. Her breath came out like a whisper. “Why would you do this?”

He closed his eyes a moment, and the light played off the broad brush of his eyelashes. When he looked at her again, the metallic glimmer of his irises had dimmed. Tarnished.

“I can't give back the things I took from you—the husband you deserve and a father for your child. But I can give you a home here, in the United States. A safe place where your baby can get an education. See a doctor. Live.” He swallowed. When he spoke again his voice was deeper. Rougher. “I can't give you back the love you lost, or happiness. But I can give you security. I can give you peace.”

Peace. The illusion again. The dream.

A cold knot of anger hardened inside her. “I'll take nothing from you. Not even peace.” She fumbled for the door latch, determined to get away.

Quick as lightning his hand flashed out, captured her wrist. “Because you hate me that much? Or because you're too proud to admit that you need help?”

She pulled once, experimentally, on her arm, but found the circle of fingers around her wrist as inescapable as the coil of a hungry boa constrictor around its prey. “It is not pride that causes my mistrust, Ranger, but self-preservation. You are
policía.
”

“I am a man trying to do the right thing.”

“And I am a woman trying to save my child. I cannot accept your help.”

“Because I'm a cop?”

“Because you killed Eduardo.”

“I didn't know he was there.” His voice rasped like a dull saw on hardwood.

“Tell me, Ranger. If I claimed I did not know the speed limit on the road outside was thirty-five miles per hour, and you found me going sixty, would you still write me a ticket?”

The ranger's eyes narrowed. Not in a glare, but as if he were in pain. “I made a mistake. But I'm trying to make up for it now. I won't hurt you.”

She looked pointedly at the hold he still had on her arm. Her fingers were beginning to tingle from the lack of blood. “You are hurting me now.”

His gaze dropped guiltily to where his broad hand circled her wrist an instant before his fingers uncoiled with the force of a broken spring. Shouldering the car door open behind her, Elisa left him without looking back.

She made it halfway down the winding drive before she heard footsteps behind her. The ranger paced her,
making no attempt to catch up, but not letting her go, either.

She hurried her gait. Gooseflesh prickled her skin, but not from fear. The ranger wouldn't hurt her, not physically. She wasn't sure when she'd come to believe that, but she knew it now. Felt it soul deep.

The danger he posed to her was emotional. He threatened her sense of self-reliance. He exposed her weaknesses.

For years she'd taken care of herself and many others. She could take care of herself now. Herself and a baby.

At the entrance to the Randolph estate, she grabbed the iron gate, rattling it angrily when it refused to yield.

The ranger stepped up behind her, close enough she could feel his moist body heat mingle with the dry heat of the night. “It's secured. Won't open without a code.”

A code he had, but would not share, no doubt.

Panic rose up in her throat. She was a prisoner here, as she had once been in San Ynez. Glancing up, she hooked a foot on the lowest bar and started climbing.

“Hey, hey!” he said behind her, a moment before one thick arm encircled her waist. “What do you think you're doing?”

“Leaving,” she said kicking her legs futilely as he pulled her off the fence. Her blouse was hooked on a wrought iron prong. When he reached to free it she landed a solid blow on his thigh.

He winced, tightening his grip on her waist and capturing her flailing legs between his thighs. “Let me help you, God damn it.”

Weakly she crossed herself, automatically muttering an appeal for his forgiveness for the transgression of cursing. Her shirt ripped free of the fence, exposing the
rise of one breast. The ranger stumbled backward, still holding her.

“You want to help me, Ranger?” she cried. “Help me escape.”

He spit a strand of her hair out of his mouth and set her on her feet, turning her toward him. “So that you can pick cotton in the sun all day with a baby strapped to your back? Or scrub someone else's floors on your hands and knees and pick up some rich kid's hundred-dollar toys while your kid plays with a stick in the dirt? Because those are the realities of life for a female illegal alien in this country. And that's if you can find work at all. Work that doesn't require you to be flat on your back, that is.”

He spoke quickly, and she struggled to keep up with his meaning. By the time she realized what he'd implied, his gaze was brushing up and down her length with the weight, and heat, of a physical touch. Suppressing the tremor his imaginary caress provoked, she pulled out of his grasp and willed her rubbery legs to hold her. The short struggle had robbed her of her strength.

“You're pretty,” he said, his voice softening, almost cooing. “You'll do all right at first. But that kind of work has a way of taking a toll on a girl. Ages her. How long do you think it will be before you're turning twenty-dollar tricks in the cab of some redneck's pickup to pay for baby food?”

Elisa put every bit of the strength she had left into her swing. He raised his forearm, blocking her fist an inch from his cheek, but momentum carried her body forward. She crashed into his chest with an audible grunt.

He held her there, not tightly as a prisoner, but supporting. Steadying her cheek against his shoulder.

She lacked the strength to pull away, and suspected he knew it. “Bastard,” she breathed against his hot skin.

An amused smile pulled at one corner of his mouth. “I thought you didn't swear.”

“I do not take the Lord's name in vain.”

He eased her away. She swayed, but managed to stand. “Good for you,” he said. “My grandmother is going to love you.”

“I have no intention of meeting your grandmother.”

“You don't have the strength to walk, much less run away. Maybe it's time to rethink this escape plan of yours.”

He was right, not that she would admit it out loud. She was in no shape to strike out on her own, penniless and friendless in a foreign land.

That didn't mean she was going to marry him.

It did, however, require her to swallow some of her pride. Maybe if she let him help her in some other way, he would leave her alone and forget this crazy marriage idea.

Gazing up at the determined lines of his face, she licked her lips. “Perhaps you could help me. I need to purchase transportation and pay for food and lodging until I can—”

His lip curled. “You won't marry me, but you'll take my money? What is Eduardo's death worth to you? Ten thousand dollars? Twenty?”

Tears of shame pooled in Elisa's eyes. She closed her fist again, but could not muster the strength to lift it. Instead she turned and rattled the gate. A feral cry rose in her throat when it still refused to open. She went wild then, kicking the heavy iron and pounding the bars until one of her knuckles split. She lifted one foot to climb and felt herself lifted from behind, gently turned.

She lashed out as violently at the man who held her as she had at the gate that imprisoned her. Her hair whipped around her face like the limbs of a sapling in a tropical storm. Her cry became a keen, then a wail.

He held her to him gently, cupping her head and back, but letting her arms and legs fly free. Letting her strike and pound and kick. When her strength waned and she was reduced to tangling her fists in his shirt and tugging, he lifted her into his arms and carried her back to the carriage house.

Exhaustion claimed her before he reached the door, but when he tucked her into a wide bed with a tartan plaid comforter, she roused enough to see that her catharsis had drained him as much as her. All the color had leached from his face, and his eyes were as pale as white gold. He looked empty inside, his energy, his life force gone. Even his voice sounded hollow when he spoke.

“I'll pull together all the cash I can get my hands on.” His fingers were cool when they pushed a strand of hair from her cheek. “As soon as the banks open Monday.”

 

The bells at St. Thomas, the Catholic church down the road, had yet to announce the 9:00-a.m. mass and already the thermometer in Del's garden read a hundred degrees. Carefully pushing aside a thorny limb in the bed of yellow roses that lined the south side of the carriage house, he lifted a trowelful of soil from around the roots of the largest bush and shook a tangle of earthworms from the jar he held into the shallow hole. He smiled as the critters burrowed deeper into the earth. According to Pete Miller at Miller's Feed and Seed, the worms would aerate the soil and Del would have roses blooming until Christmas this year.

As he gently evened out the loose dirt, a shadow fell over him. He had to give the woman credit. She could move without making a sound. Not many people could sneak up on a Texas Ranger.

“You are a gardener.”

He shrugged without turning. “I putter.”

“I would think Mr. Randolph would pay someone to tend his plants.”

“He does. Around his house. But the carriage house is my home. I take care of what's mine.”

Just as he would take care of her, if she would let him.

Wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, he bit back last night's bitterness. Today was a new day, and he had new plans.

He troweled up a new clod of dirt, shook out a few more worms. “How are you feeling?”

“You mean, am I going to go
loco
and attack you again?”

“No. I mean
how are you feeling?
” Meticulously, he checked the leaves of the rosebush for black spot. The rich scent of mulch mingled with the sweet smell of the roses and something sharper. Soap and shampoo. Vanilla and almond. Her unique female scent.

“I am…better.”

“You want to talk about what happened last night?”

“No.”

Good. He wasn't sure he wanted to talk about it, either. Talking wasn't his strongest suit. Especially talking about a fit of rage so strong it nearly turned a willful, prideful woman into a raving banshee.

She'd scared the hell out of him last night and made him realize he couldn't force his will on her, not without breaking her, and he couldn't bear to see such spirit
crushed. From now on he planned a more subtle approach.

“Where are my clothes?” she asked, changing the subject smoothly.

“In the dryer. If you didn't hear them tumbling, then they're probably done.”

“Thank you for the loan of something clean.”

Well that was a change. A truce? He turned to ask, and found the woman was right behind him. How she'd gotten there without him hearing her move, he couldn't guess. He shifted so that he could see her.

She stood before him in a pair of gray sweatpants with six extra inches of length billowing around her ankles and a Dallas Cowboys football jersey so large that the neck hole spilled over one shoulder. He'd left the shirt out for her because it was cropped at the midriff. He hoped it wouldn't swallow her.

He'd been right. And he'd been very, very wrong. The midriff shirt hung to her waist, leaving her delicate navel exposed and highlighting the way the sagging sweats barely clung to the swell of her hips.

Del's mouth dried up as if she was standing there in a scrap of black lace. He forced his gaze up to hers.

Her eyes widened, pinpointed on the side of his neck. “Did I do that?”

His hand automatically raised to the raw, stinging furrow her fingernail had left in him last night. “I don't think you were aiming for me, if it's any consolation.”

“It's not.” Her hand raised next to his, hovered a second and then traced a path just below the wound.

Inexplicably, the pulse in Del's jugular jumped to meet her fingertips.

“I am sorry,” she said, running her fingers back the
way they had come and brushing the underside of his jaw with her knuckles.