by Anne Stuart
Maddy’s full attention was caught now. The sulky beauty at the far end of the table probably wasn’t as old as she was, and the look in her glittering black eyes was intense dislike. She stared at Maddy, not even sacrificing a regal incline of her intricate coiffure to welcome the interloper into the fold. The stream of Spanish she directed at Jake was rapid and rich with invective, and of all the words Maddy could make out only gringa and puta, meaning bitch or whore. Maddy had little doubt who Soledad was referring to.
Jake ignored her. “And this is Miss Allison Henderson of the United States.”
“Not according to her,” Richard pointed out cheerfully.
“No, according to her she is Maddy Lambert, daughter to El Patrón.”
The simple words were like a bombshell. Soledad’s expression darkened to one of intense rage, the two older ladies looked both pleased and doubtful, and Doc merely laughed.
“I didn’t think Sam had a daughter,” he said with an almost indiscernible slur. “I’ve been with him almost ten years and he’s never mentioned one.”
“There was the son, of course,” Richard mused, staring at her curiously. “I remember when he died. Suicide, wasn’t it?”
Maddy stood there and accepted the blows stoically enough. Stephen had been dead for seven years; surely by now it would stop hurting.
“No, it was a drug overdose,” Soledad said in her charmingly accented Spanish. “And I am certain that if Samuel had a daughter he would have mentioned her at the time. You are not my husband’s daughter, señorita. So then, who are you?”
Jake watched all this with unblinking concentration, and Maddy wondered dismally why she would have thought he’d come to her rescue. “Her passport says she’s Allison Henderson. So that’s who I expect she is. Carlos said she’d been seen with Ortega down in La Mensa. She must be part of one of his grandiose schemes.”
“And you let her in?” Soledad shrieked. “She’ll probably murder us in our beds. She’s part of Ortega’s gray-shirt death squad, and you welcome her with open arms. ….”
“I wouldn’t have called it open arms, would you, Allison?” he mocked. “Besides, she’s unarmed. I checked.”
“How thoroughly did you check?” Soledad said in a shrill voice. “She should have a body search. I, for one, do not intend—”
“Enough, mi alma,” he drawled, the endearment an insult. “She can do no harm as long as she is watched. And I, for one, would prefer to have her within reach, rather than out in the hills meeting with her gray-shirt confederates.”
“Are you certain the young lady isn’t Mr. Lambert’s daughter?” Mary Margaret or Margaret Mary murmured hesitantly.
Jake’s sudden gentle politeness was a painful revelation. Maddy had seen that gentleness years ago, had been the recipient of it in another life. “Nothing is certain in this life, Mary,” he replied softly. “And take comfort in the fact that Allison is a lot safer here than anywhere else in San Pablo. At least here I can protect her.”
“You don’t think she’ll send messages to General Ortega?” one of the young soldiers demanded.
“If she’s working with them I have little doubt that she’ll try,” Jake said. “It will be up to us to make sure that she doesn’t.”
Maddy was beginning to get a little tired of standing there with the bunch of them discussing her as if she wasn’t in the cavernous room. She felt almost faint with hunger, and her rib was aching abominably. Without further hesitation she crossed the distance to the table and sat down in the only seat next to her elegant little stepmother on the rough bench.
Soledad pulled back with an expression of distaste, as if Maddy were a diseased bug, she thought with forced amusement.
“I do not want this woman bothering Samuel,” she announced. “He is not strong, he does not need to be plagued with people like this … like this …” She supplied a Spanish word that Maddy was just as glad she didn’t understand.
“Jake is giving me no choice in that matter,” Maddy said sweetly. “Don’t worry, mi madrastra.” She could feel real delight that part of her Spanish had included a translation of Cinderella, and the word for stepmother had lodged itself in her recalcitrant brain. The pale, furious expression on the woman’s face was almost worth the fright and aggravation of the last few hours.
“Don’t you dare call me that, puta,” she snarled.
Maddy had enough of being called a whore. “Mamacita?” she murmured sweetly.
She couldn’t believe how fast Jake moved. One moment he was straddling the chair, seemingly at ease, in the next he was between the two of them. It took Maddy a moment to realize that his strong hand was clamped around Soledad’s delicate wrist and that her hand held a very nasty-looking little knife, raised in her stepdaughter’s direction. It was too small to kill without a great deal of expertise and luck, but it would have been undoubtedly painful.
A moment later the knife dropped on the table with a clatter, and Soledad’s wrist was freed. With a strangled sob she pulled away from the table, rushing from the room.
Jake leaned over and scooped up the knife, his arm brushing Maddy’s benumbed body. “I should warn you, lady,” he said softly, “that we have all reached the limit of our endurance. Soledad is not an unreasonable woman in the best of times, but tempers are very short indeed, and I would suggest you do your best not to goad anyone. For your own sake, as well as for the others.”
He moved away, and Maddy let out her pent-up breath. The others at the table were looking away, the two women studiously uninvolved, Milsom bored, Richard troubled, the two soldiers amused at the trauma. But no one was surprised that Soledad had pulled a knife on her. Maddy shivered.
“Are you hungry, Allison?” Richard said after a long, uncomfortable moment. “I could see if there’s anything left.”
Maddy opened her mouth, then shut it again, stubbornly.
“Allison?” Richard persisted, confused.
Jake was leaning against the wall, an amused expression on his dark face, looking for all the world as if he hadn’t just stopped her from being stabbed. “I think she’s not going to answer to that name. Are you?”
“My name is Maddy,” she said fiercely.
“And what if only Allison gets fed?” he countered.
“Then I’ll be very hungry.”
It was a battle of wills. Her meager determination and pride up against a seemingly limitless force on his side. They stared at each other for a long moment, and the rest of the table was silent.
Finally he moved away from the wall, heading toward the door, a wry grin on his face that didn’t quite reach his weary eyes. “See if there’s any food left for Maddy,” he said. “I’m going to see if Soledad is surviving. Ramon, Luis.” The names were tersely shot out orders.
“Sí, Murphy?”
“Watch her.” And he was gone.
CHAPTER FOUR
The room emptied swiftly. The two religious workers faded away with a reassuring smile and murmured words of confidence. “You can trust Jake, my dear. I know he seems harsh, but believe me, there’s no one I’d rather place my safety with.”
Maddy hadn’t been able to answer with more than a noncommittal smile as she industriously scarfed down the plate of red beans and rice that had appeared before her. At this stage she wasn’t about to trust anyone, even the good ladies themselves. If she had to find an ally in this armed camp, she needed one with more strength and daring than she possessed. While the ladies probably had their share of both, to be living in a war zone, they would hardly be likely to go against Jake on her say-so. Soledad was not worth considering. She’d be just as likely to turn her over to the crocodiles, and the doctor was far more interested in his bottle. That left Richard and the two teenage guards, and Richard had vanished with a guilty look on his swarthy face.
Ramon and Luis, Jake had called them. One friendly, the other not so, with their machine guns and their American T-shirts. It was a strained source of amusement to Maddy that t
he friendly one’s T-shirt read “Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out” and the glowering one sported Mickey Mouse. She stared at them idly over the empty plate. It would be up to the sympathetic one to get her to her father. Mickey Mouse wouldn’t let him, so she would have to wait until they were alone.
With a sigh she pushed back the empty plate, ignoring the still-hungry pangs of her nervous stomach. Her two guards were looking very official, standing there by the door. She would give them some time to become accustomed to her before she made her move. The one advantage to Latino machismo was that it made men underestimate the female of the species, and Maddy needed her young guards trusting and willing.
She leaned back against the plaster wall, running a weary hand through her tangled mop of hair. The high, narrow windows let in a fitful light and no fresh air at all, and despite the coolness of the underground walls Maddy felt as if she were suffocating. Though perhaps the certain knowledge that she had unexpectedly become a prisoner added to the feelings of claustrophobia.
What had they done with her car? She was no longer so intent on rescuing her father. It seemed as if he had more than enough protectors to keep him safe from whichever side threatened him. At this point all she wanted to do was to ascertain he was safe and reasonably well and then get the hell out of Puente del Norte.
She closed her eyes for a moment. They felt dry and gritty from the trip, and oh so weary. She would have given anything for her purse and her contact lens case. Sooner or later Jake would have to take her to see her father. He couldn’t put it off forever, but in the meantime she would simply have to be patient. Probably by later afternoon, or early this evening, she’d see Samuel, and by tomorrow morning she’d be driving back down that rutted trail that passed for the Grand Pablan Highway, and be back in L.A. by the weekend.
It should have been a comforting thought. She had finally laid to rest the ghosts of her childhood, and if the dissolving of almost-forgotten dreams hurt, then what was new about that? Life hurt.
But how forgotten was John Thomas Murphy? She hadn’t been able to visualize his face when she was driving there, but once she had faced him there was instant recognition. And the past, fourteen long years ago, was no longer shadowy and forgotten. It was as real as if it were yesterday.
Her life had never been easy. Not being the daughter of Senator Samuel Eddison Lambert and his social, ambitious wife, Helen, who was herself the daughter of Everett Currier, one of the most powerful and least understood men in American politics. It hadn’t helped that Maddy had shot up to the height of five feet seven by sixth grade, and topped five nine by fifteen, and that she was awkward and skinny and shy. Even boarding school hadn’t helped. As happy as she was to get away from the rigid strictures of her parents’ life in the diplomatic circles of McLean, she missed her family, her friends, her life. And most of all she missed her older brother.
For years afterward she would tell herself that everything would have been all right if only Samuel Eddison Lambert hadn’t allowed himself to be talked into running for President. But everyone had wanted him to, from his wife to his father-in-law to his party to his constituents. Everyone wanted him to but his sixteen-year-old daughter.
She’d heard the results of the primaries up at her boarding school in Massachusetts. She’d watched her father make his speeches on television and hadn’t even noticed the ever-present shadow of his mandatory Secret Service protection hovering behind him. Her brother, Stephen, was in his first year at Harvard, and the two of them would meet on weekends with a pact to ignore the old man’s political aspirations.
“Besides,” Stephen had said, running a nervous hand through his shaggy hair, “you know this is Mother’s idea more than it is Dad’s. If it were left up to him he’d probably be working in the Peace Corps down in San Pablo or some god-forsaken place like that.”
“Maybe he feels he can help them better as President,” Maddy had offered.
“Maybe. But I know that I sure as hell don’t want to end up in the White House,” Stephen had said bitterly. “And I don’t want to be part of this damned campaign. I’d better warn you right now, Maddy, I’m not coming home this summer to be part of this circus. If he wants to make it to the White House he’ll have to do it without my help.”
And all her protests couldn’t move him. He’d ended up traveling cross country with a couple of his friends, out of reach of his parents’ demands, and by the end of the summer their lives had changed past recognition.
Maddy could never think back to that summer without a pang of pain and longing, a longing for a life that was no more, pain for all the waste. And a wry reflection that there was nothing like being almost seventeen and in love for the first time.
She first saw him in June. She’d been home for ten days, alone in the big old house in McLean, with only the household staff to keep her company while her parents were out in California, drumming up votes. Her mother had ordered her to fly out and join them, a perfect family for the delectation of the American voting public, but Maddy had refused. The last thing she was going to do was be put on display like a great gawky overgrown schoolgirl. After miserable years of skinny flat-chested jealousy she had just begun to develop, and she was even more self-conscious than usual. She welcomed the solitude of the big old house in early summer, dreading the return of what Stephen had rightly called a circus. Complete with omnipresent reporters, Secret Service men, her mother’s army of social secretaries, and the myriad of other human detritus that filled her parents’ life. She could only hope she’d get lost in the shuffle.
She’d heard them come in the night before. How could she have missed it? The glare from the television camera lights on the front lawn penetrated the darkness of her third-floor bedroom, and the babble of voices filtered through the pillow over her head. She turned on her radio to drown out the noise with music, but it was the hourly news report, full of Senator Lambert’s return to Washington, triumphant from his good showing in the California primary.
It was early morning when she woke up, hours before her family would awake and she’d be called upon to be The Candidate’s Daughter, hours before her life was no longer her own. She climbed out of bed, pulling on her moth-eaten old one-piece bathing suit that her mother had threatened to throw out more than once. She was straining the previously flat expanse of the top of it, and she pulled on one of Stephen’s outsized shirts and drew it around her. Wouldn’t you know, she told herself wryly, that after years of longing for a figure it was now a source of continual embarrassment?
Not that there was even that much to be embarrassed about. No one would have noticed, if it weren’t for her mother’s constant, seemingly sadistic delight in calling attention to it. Maddy leaned down and peered at her reflection in the mirror that was set too low for her height. Long, long dark brown hair, still in schoolgirl braids to keep it under control while she swam, a pale, pointed face, white teeth only recently freed from braces, large brown eyes still chained to glasses that she was too vain to wear. Not a sex symbol, certainly. And the endless arms and legs, the flat, bony body with its two embarrassing lumps didn’t help matters. With a sigh she grabbed her oversized prescription sunglasses and plumped them down on her small, slightly tilted and definitely freckled nose. It was a lucky thing she wasn’t going to run into anyone more threatening than the gardener at that early hour.
Even Georgia, their cook that year, wasn’t up. Maddy moved through the dark, silent kitchen like a ghost, straight out into the early-morning light, pausing long enough to shed the shirt and the glasses before diving into the cool clear water of the swimming pool. The chilly chlorinated smell surrounded her, waking her up completely, and dutifully she swam her laps, breast stroke, crawl, then flipping over on her back to float peacefully, alone in the world. Sometime, she promised herself, she’d live by the ocean and be able to swim in chlorine-free water every morning.
The house was still dark and silent by the time she climbed out of the pool and began
to dry herself off. It was after six by then. Georgia wouldn’t make her appearance for another hour. Maddy had developed a taste for coffee during the last year, fostered by Stephen’s indulgence, and it had now taken the place of her early-morning Coke. She’d have to rummage through Georgia’s sacrosanct appliances and make her own, risking the cook’s formidable wrath.
The smell of coffee assailed her nostrils as she reached the open french doors that led to the huge old kitchen. “Georgia, you saint!” Maddy cried as she swept into the kitchen, sans shirt and glasses, with only the too-small bathing suit clinging wetly to her body. “I was dying for some coffee. …” Her voice trailed off in sudden horror as she realized it wasn’t Georgia standing at the sink, a cup of coffee in his large hand.
“You’re not Georgia,” she said lamely, standing dead still, too astounded to do more than gape. And then she rapidly did a great deal, pulling Stephen’s shirt around her and plopping the dark glasses on her nose. Even through the darkness the prescription sharpened her gaze enough to get a good look at him.
“No, I’m not,” he said calmly enough, his voice a deep, rasping rumble. “I’m Jake Murphy, one of your father’s Secret Service men. And I presume you’re Madelyn? I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t scare me,” she said slowly. “I just wasn’t expecting anyone.” Not anyone like you, she added to herself. “And only my mother calls me Madelyn. I’m Maddy.”
He smiled then, a strangely sweet smile in a wary, secretive face. “Good morning then, Maddy. Would you like some coffee?”
If his presence had bemused her, his smile devastated her. “I’d love some.” She stood there and watched as he reached for a cup and proceeded to pour her some.
