The Last Honorable Man

by Vickie Taylor

  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.

  He wasn’t. God help him, but if it took the sharp point of hatred out of her eyes when she looked at him, if it allowed her to touch him like that, light and stirring, he wasn’t sorry a bit. The pulse in other places besides his jugular leaped.

  Realizing he was reading more into her touch than she’d meant by it, he took a step back—right into the rosebush.

  “Ouch! Sh—” He bit back the rest of the curse, grabbing the thorny branch before it attached itself to any more of his anatomy. By the time he’d detached the bush
from the seat of his jeans and turned back to Elisa, she had her lower lip pulled between her teeth. One giggle escaped as he stood gaping at her, then another.

  He rubbed his backside, and she laughed outright. The sound was like champagne—full of sparkles and bubbles and potent enough to get a man drunk just listening to it.

  Then the nine-o’clock bells called the faithful to service at St. Thomas, and the moment ended as unexpectedly as it had begun.

  A new wall of guilt crashed down on Del. He felt as if God spoke to him through the bells. He had no right enjoying Elisa’s laugh, much less her touch or the way she looked in his old clothes. She was another man’s woman.

  At least she had been.

  Elisa cocked her head, listening to the deep, chiming melody with her fingertips pressed to her pursed lips. When the bells quieted she asked, her eyes hopeful, “There is a church near here?”

  He nodded, regret burning the back of his throat. “Half mile down the road.”

  “I would like to go.”

  He angled his head in capitulation. “Sure.”

  He couldn’t sit with her, couldn’t risk being seen with her, but he could drop her off, circle around and sneak into a back pew where he could keep an eye on her.

  It had been a long time since he’d bent a knee in prayer. Maybe it would do him good.

  He had a lot to ask forgiveness for.

  “This does not look like a bank,” Elisa said, twisting in her seat to peer at the four-story white granite building Del had pulled up to.

  “Isn’t.”

  She frowned. “Then why have we stopped here?” Yesterday, after church, he’d taken her shopping and bought more than she needed—more than she had ever owned—to take with her when she left. At his insistence, she had picked out two summer shirts, matching shorts with soft elastic waists and a shift dress that would accommodate her expanding midsection for some time. To her surprise he’d added a bathrobe, a baggy sweatsuit, a pair of knit pants, two blouses and sneakers along with a wide assortment of toiletries and underwear.

  Surely she couldn’t need anything else.

  He wiped his palm over his left thigh, a sign she’d learned meant she wouldn’t like what came next. “I made you a doctor’s appointment. Figured you’d want to make sure everything’s all right with the baby before you took off.”

  Her palm immediately covered her abdomen. Her face tensed. “‘All…all right’?”

  “Relax, it’s just routine. She’ll check you out, maybe even let you listen to the little one’s heartbeat.”

  “You don’t think anything is wrong?”

  “I’m sure it’s not. You’re just a little…thin, is all. She’ll probably give you some vitamins or something.” His smile was wide, bright, reassuring and totally false.

  Thin? She tried to remember how many full meals—much less healthy ones—she had eaten before she took up with the ranger. Other than the mango and bananas that grew plentifully in San Ynez, fruits and vegetables were hard to come by, fresh meat almost nonexistent. Mostly she lived off dried beans and canned meat. Food that could be packed quickly and carried easily from camp to camp.

  Inside the office building, Del spoke quietly to the nurse at the front desk. The woman’s hair was bleached white, and she wore pink scrubs with teddy bears floating in clouds and looked at Elisa sympathetically.

  Elisa stared at her feet self-consciously. She sat in a chair in the waiting area and picked up a magazine. Seconds later she had forgotten about the nurse and was engrossed in an article titled The Healthy Pregnancy. The article was illustrated, and the women’s swollen bodies fascinated her. Would she really look like that soon? For all her education, she was woefully ignorant about what was happening to her own body. That ignorance made her uncertain, vulnerable, and she was too much the survivor to accept vulnerability. She devoured that article, then another, on breast-feeding, but the more she read, the more she realized she needed to learn.

  She started when the ranger touched her on the shoulder.

  “Sorry,” he said, handing her a clipboard. “But they need some information from you.”

  She scanned the form, her stomach twisting.

  “I explained that you, uh…might not know some of the information. That you haven’t had much medical care lately.”

  She filled in the blanks she knew—childhood illnesses, vaccination history and hereditary conditions in her family—and left the rest blank, except for the date of conception. Her cheeks heating, she scribbled in a date and handed the clipboard to Del just as a second nurse, this one in surgical greens, pushed open a door and called her name.

  Bracing herself with a breath, she straightened her back and walked toward the nurse. Del followed.

  Elisa stopped, shaking her head. “No.”

  He glanced toward the exam room door where the nurse waited, then back to Elisa. “You sure?”

  “This baby is my responsibility.” She watched him hook his big hands in his belt and remembered those big hands tending his yellow roses with such loving care. “I take care of what’s mine,” she mimicked his words, turned them to her own meaning to keep him in the waiting room where he belonged. This was a private matter.

  Dr. Marsala was Indonesian. She had a large nose, soft voice and gentle hands. The pelvic exam was completed efficiently and painlessly, and Elisa was prepped for the big moment, the sonogram where she would first see her baby.

  “Are you frightened,” the doctor asked as she spread warm gel on Elisa’s abdomen.

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Marsala smiled. “Good. If you had said no, I would have known you were lying.”

  A computer blinked next to the examination table, and the doctor tapped a series of commands on the attached keyboard. The gray display on the monitor wavered, then stabilized. Elisa’s name and the date appeared at the bottom of the picture.

  “What you’re going to see is live video of your child. Or at least live video of sound waves bouncing off your child’s mass.”

  “Will you be able to tell if it’s healthy?”

  “We can detect some conditions at this stage, but mostly we’re just looking at the fetus’s size and shape to give us an idea how it’s developing.”

  The doctor pressed a flat wand lightly into the goo covering Elisa’s stomach. Compared to the warm gel, the plastic was cold. The muscles in her abdomen rippled in reaction. Undeterred, the doctor concentrated on the computer monitor, studying gray and black masses as she moved the wand over Elisa.

  “There,” Dr. Marsala declared, smiling and pointing at a blob on the screen. “There’s the sac.”

  Elisa couldn’t make anything of the picture, but she smiled, too. Her heart accelerated.

  Slowly Dr. Marsala moved the wand down and to Elisa’s left, then back. Then again. “There we are. I can’t tell if it’s a girl or boy in this position, but there’s the head, the chest.” She outlined a vaguely human shape on the screen with her free hand. “See the little legs and arms forming?”

  Elisa’s breath stalled as she stared at the tiny being growing inside her. This baby is her responsibility, she’d told Del, and for the first time she was beginning to understand what that meant. To understand the commitment. The joy and the grief, the love and the fierce protectiveness this child brought out in her.

  “Is it okay?” she asked, choking back the emotion. “Is the baby healthy?”

  The doctor moved the wand to the right a fraction. Her smile remained frozen in place, but she drew her brows together.

  Elisa’s fingers dug into the sides of the bed. “What is it? What’s wrong with my baby?”

  Chapter 5

  Del had seen Elisa in noble-jungle-princess mode, cool, aloof and wearing her pride like a crown jewel. And he’d seen her as the warrior queen, full of passionate fury and righteous indignation at the injustices done her.

  The Elisa who’d walked out of the women’s center with him fifteen minutes ago clutching a grainy blac
k-and-white printout from her sonogram and a pack of vitamins was neither.

  This was the vulnerable Elisa. The one he’d caught a glimpse of in the cemetery chapel before she’d realized he was there, and again on her knees on the side of the road, purging her stomach over a steel guardrail.

  This was the Elisa who haunted his sleep. Who shredded his gut to bloody ribbons with a single look and left his soul in tatters every time she referred to him as “Ranger” instead of by his given name.

  This was the Elisa he couldn’t let walk away. Despite her insistence she could take care of herself, sending her off alone would be like throwing a kitten into a junkyard full of rabid dogs.

  The problem was he didn’t have any choice. Even if she wasn’t an American citizen, she still had rights. He couldn’t hold her against her will. They were almost at the bank, and he couldn’t think of any way to keep her from leaving him once they were done there, other than driving his Land Rover into a tree, which didn’t seem like a smart plan, given her pregnancy.

  He clutched the steering wheel until his fingers cramped, then flexed the digits, glancing at Elisa from behind his aviator sunglasses. She was still staring at the sonogram picture as if it was the key to the mystery of life.

  In a way it was, he supposed. The first look at a new life. He couldn’t tell butt-from-backside in the picture, and still a flutter of emotion rippled through his chest at the sight of it. He couldn’t begin to imagine how Elisa must feel, seeing her baby for the first time. Knowing that little being was growing inside her.

  Judging by her rounded shoulders and the pinched lines at the corners of her mouth, it must be overwhelming.

  “You look wiped out,” he said, noting how thin and colorless her lips looked. “Maybe we should put off this bank thing for a few hours. Go home and have lunch, get some rest first.”