by Tory Cates
The story both saddened and uplifted Malou. She fingered the old quilt, knowing a bit now about the woman who had pieced it together and about the man who had never stopped loving her.
“Want to have a look at what we were originally aiming for?” Cam asked.
“Sure,” Malou agreed hesitantly. Something was not right. She knew prudence would dictate that she leave immediately and cut off any further involvement with Cameron Landell. But two factors propelled her back into the claret-colored SUV: her concern for the troop of monkeys she was trying to save and sheer, unshakable curiosity. Curiosity about Jorge’s cryptic words and about Cam and what he was up to out here.
The drive that had been such an arduous ordeal in the rain was a matter of minutes in the sun-sparkled day. Though she hadn’t thought it possible, the surrounding country was even lovelier than it had been the day before. A terrible feeling of missed opportunity, of a paradise lost, swept through Malou as they bumped off the rutted road back onto the smoothly paved highway. She wondered what she should have, could have, done differently. She glanced over at Cam. He drove with one hand draped casually at the apex of the steering wheel. His free arm rested on the open window. His gaze was intent as he looked out with a keen eye over the ranch he now owned. His concentration on the passing countryside was so total that Malou felt free for the moment to scrutinize him. The longer she looked, the more lost she felt. At the instant she saw Cam turning toward her, she quickly cut her glance away, out to the awakening spring.
The landscape was a muddled green blur, however, for Malou was still seeing Cam’s sun-etched profile in her mind. It galled her to notice that her pulse was fluttering and that her stomach felt as if she were looking over a thousand-foot drop. It piqued her even more to have to admit to herself that her motivation for coming with Cam was not simply concern for the troop. Curiosity was a factor, but not of the sort she’d originally thought. Deep in her heart of hearts, she was forced to own up to the fact that she was curious about what might or might not develop between her and Cameron Landell. And there he was, she thought with a final stab of irritation, sitting over there with no thought on his mind other than the value of the latest chunk of land to come into his possession. She seamed her mouth into a tight line as the car surged forward with a sudden burst of speed.
Cam had felt her gaze on him as he’d stared out at the land he owned. He’d been attempting to force himself to take the all-consuming interest in it that he usually took in his property. But instead of carefully evaluating the parcel in front of him, his mind saw only torturing images of the woman beside him gilded in firelight and dressed in a nearly transparent cotton dress. But what really tortured him was wondering what might have happened if he had pushed past her resistance last night. Pushed just the tiniest bit.
He had known she was watching him. Was he imagining it, or did her gaze actually feel warm against his skin? For as long as he could stand it, he continued looking out the windshield; then, ever so slowly, he turned toward her. She had instantly jerked away to glare out the window. Cam had chided himself for letting his imagination—and, he had to admit it, his hopes—get the better of him. He had felt her frostiness, seen it in her posture and in the hard line of her mouth. Her interest lay strictly with those infernal monkeys she wanted him to sponsor a retirement community for. As if he could outrun his quashed hopes, Cam had jammed his foot against the accelerator and the car had leaped forward. The drive was grimly silent for the next couple of miles until they approached the real entrance to Stallings’s ranch.
“Now this is more like it.” The sight cheered Cam a bit. The front gate was a massive structure built of enormous, smooth river-bottom rocks. They passed beneath it into a world of neatly mowed and fenced pastures full of sleek quarter horses feeding in the shade of enormous live oaks. The road twisted back past a water tank seemingly large enough for a small town, then over a sturdy bridge. On the far side of the creek were endless miles of plowed field. They turned up a gentle rise that led to the main house, situated at its peak. It looked like a cross between a Southern plantation and a feudal baron’s fortress, with thick stone walls fronted by graceful, sweeping porches. Malou immediately envisioned a lawn party being held on the thick grass in the shade of the oaks.
“Maybe Mr. Stallings wasn’t such a liar after all,” Malou suggested.
Cam’s mind had turned back fully to evaluating the extent and value of the developments on the property. They did indeed seem pretty much as Stallings had represented them. Outside of the monkey ranch. “It’s a solid piece of property,” he allowed. “But the fact remains that I never wanted to own it. I never intended to even have to see this place, much less work it. All I wanted the Lazy S to be was collateral. Now I’m stuck with having to dispose of it as quickly as I can. And, since the market in this area is depressed right now, I stand to lose a bundle. I just hope I can make enough to cover the note on Landell Acres, or I’ll lose that too.”
“The house is lovely, though,” Malou added, beginning to genuinely understand the calamitous position Stallings had put Cam in.
“Yes,” Cam admitted without enthusiasm, “the house is lovely.” He parked the car. “Let’s go see if this lovely house has decent enough cell reception that we can get back to work.”
The interior was as baronial as the exterior had promised it would be. The entrance hall was two stories high. Thick exposed beams ran across the ceiling. Furnishings obviously selected by a decorator were clustered in groupings. One such grouping sat around the fireplace, which extended up the two-story wall. A second-story hallway overhung the magnificent room, opening onto the upstairs bedrooms. Though it was all quite splendid, the outsized scale of the place intimidated Malou a bit and made the warm humanness of the small stone house seem all the more inviting.
“All the families in the building I grew up in could fit in this place,” Cam said, pivoting around. Malou liked him for the comment, for the undramatic way he acknowledged his background. Her curiosity about Cam flared anew. How could she be so drawn to a man she was so suspicious of?
“It is fairly immense,” she agreed.
“Immense? It’s a damn castle.” He dumped his attaché case on the leather couch fronting the fireplace and stared off into the dining room with its twenty-four-place table. “I wonder if Stallings was happy here. For all its grandeur, I don’t get a sense of a life having been lived here, at least not a happy one.”
“Maybe he never got over losing his wife.”
Cam nodded. “I can understand that.” He seemed to be speaking to himself as he continued staring out past the dining room. “I can understand a love that would consume a life.” He caught himself and, returning his thoughts and words to the present, laughed as if disowning what he’d just said. “Of course, I’m speaking hypothetically here. The loves I’ve known would barely consume a lunchtime.”
Though Malou smiled and even helped gloss over his comment with a crack of her own—“I’ve had a few that would have been hard-pressed to stretch over a coffee break”—she knew that Cam had spoken from his heart. Knowing that he did have the capacity to care so deeply made Malou regret all the more the moment between them that had passed forever.
“Well, shall we scout out a human-sized room and get to work?” he asked with what struck Malou as a forced briskness.
She followed him through the dining room out into the kitchen, where a little round Mexican woman, her silver-streaked black hair pulled back into a braid, looked up in shock at their appearance.
“You must be Jorge’s wife,” Cam said to her startled brown face. “I’m Cameron Landell.” The look of shock did not abate until Cam tried a Spanish translation. All the worry lines changed course then, and her face was wreathed in pleasure. She smiled, revealing several teeth outlined in gold.
“I thought you didn’t speak Spanish,” Malou hissed.
“I don’t,” Cam answered under his breath, still smiling at Señora Maldonado. “
That was my patented Tex-Mex hodgepodge.”
“Seems to have done the trick.”
The woman put away her gold-rimmed smile and began rattling away in Spanish. Cam put up his hand for her to slow down and she obliged. He interjected a few words, then placed a friendly hand on her shoulder. “Muchas gracias, Señora Maldonado.” The woman beamed again in response.
Malou thought that if Cam were as skillful in dealing with all his employees as he’d been with the Maldonados, he must certainly have a contented and loyal force behind him. Cam set off again.
“What was that all about?” she asked as they turned down a wide corridor.
“She was apologizing for not having something ready to eat and promised that lunch would be early and dinner special. You are staying, of course.”
“Cam, I should be getting back to the station. Ernie will start to wonder what’s happened to me.”
Cam pressed his lips together. “I can’t for the life of me understand what Ernie’s opinion could mean to you one way or the other.”
“I have to work with him, Cam. He may not be the most scintillating human, but up at Los Monos, he’s the only human for miles.”
“I guess he just hasn’t worked very hard to endear himself to me. I resent his insinuations.”
“Primatologists aren’t famous for their social skills,” Malou admitted. “It’s one of the reasons we do what we do. We prefer the company of the lower primates.”
Cam stopped and looked at her thoughtfully.
Afraid that she’d exposed too much about herself in explaining Ernie, Malou moved briskly away toward the office at the end of the hall. “This must have been where Mr. Stallings worked,” she said brightly as they entered the room. It was by far the homiest room in the house.
“The rest of the place was probably just for show,” Cam observed, picking up a gold-framed photo that showed a young and handsome Mr. Stallings with a shy, willowy woman by his side. “But this was the old man’s lair.” A large partner’s desk sat in the middle of the room with a console phone on each side. “No worries about phone lines,” Cam said, pulling out a comfortably upholstered swivel chair and seating himself at the smaller half of the desk. He gestured toward what had obviously been Stallings’s chair. “Be my guest.”
Malou, feeling like a child playing in her father’s office, seated herself in the high-backed chair. A cozy intimacy wrapped the two of them together as they sat facing one another across the double-sided desk. A window behind Malou let in streams of morning light that played across Cam’s dark hair, lighting it up with highlights of red as he bent his head over the pile of contracts he pulled from his case. Malou had to forcibly prod herself into action as she turned back to the phone and picked up where she’d left off yesterday, working her way down the list of foundations and other possible grantors. Soon they were both absorbed in their tasks, each one conducting their phone business without self-consciousness.
The low-slanting morning sunlight had long since climbed away from the office’s east window when Señora Maldonado timidly knocked on the frame of the open door to tell them that lunch was ready.
It was a light, tasty, and swift affair of quesadillas and a glutton’s array of fruit from the bountiful Rio Grande Valley. And then they were back at work.
The afternoon sun was already beginning to cut into the west window when Malou paused long enough to realize that the day had been amazingly productive and that Cam had been responsible. She had caught his sense of urgency as he machine-gunned his way through stacks of papers and a volley of concise calls. It was no longer any mystery to her why Cameron Landell had risen so far, so fast. The man was indefatigable. And so handsome. Her appraisal was sabotaged by that observation. By the thick fringe of lashes shadowing his hard-planed cheeks. By the seductive intensity that wrapped his features in an aura of contained energy. She marveled at how, even sitting at a desk, Cam exuded a sense of motion only barely leashed.
Cam glanced up and caught Malou watching him. Amusement at her embarrassment crept over his face for a few seconds before he turned back to his work. Trying not to sound as flustered as she felt, Malou made her next call.
Her voice had been honed to a rasp by the time Señora Maldonado appeared to shyly announce dinner.
Two places were set at the end of the banquet-length table. They swam in a pool of candlelight. A crystal bowl of red hibiscus complemented the sprightly colors of the Mexican place settings gaily painted with birds. A carafe of white wine cast an amber gleam across the linen tablecloth.
Cam held Malou’s chair out for her with a courtly flourish that added a light note to the gesture. He exchanged a few words with Señora Maldonado, who had appeared with a cart laden with domed serving trays, then excused herself.
“I told her we could manage ourselves if she wanted to take the rest of the evening off,” Cam explained as he lifted the lid from a steaming tray. Prawns grilled in butter lay curled up against one another in a succulent pink line. Cam transferred several to Malou’s plate, then added rice pilaf and marinated vegetables.
“Señora Maldonado mentioned that Stallings had sent her to a cooking school in Mexico to be trained. They certainly did a superb job,” he concluded, finishing off a prawn.
“Mmm,” Malou murmured, her thoughts elsewhere. They’d been drawn again into that dangerous zone that had Cameron Landell at its center. A cooking school in Mexico was the last thing on her mind as candlelight glanced across Cam’s buttery lower lip.
“Turn up any promising prospects?”
It took Malou a second to process the words formed by those mesmerizing lips. “Oh. Prospects. Yes, actually I did. Won’t know anything firm though for a week or two, which is breakneck speed for foundations.”
“Ah, bureaucracy. If I added a hundred people to my organization, I’d cut efficiency in half.”
“What did you major in at school? Business administration?”
“That question,” Cam answered, his eyes gleaming, “is based upon the false assumption that I majored in anything at all. No, I got my degree in hard work, with special courses in being in the right place at the right time. Land development is a game people are either born with an instinct for or not. It’s not something you can pick up at school. Motivation helps. Real, bone-deep drive. That, I’d acquired by the time I was old enough to ride a bike. Not that I ever had one growing up.”
“Never had a bike?”
“No bike. No degree. What kind of Martian am I?” Cam asked with a slightly bitter laugh.
“That wasn’t what I meant. It’s just that, for me, a bike was my salvation. My way to get out of my house.”
Cam’s mildly affronted expression softened. “Yours wasn’t a happy childhood?”
“It wasn’t unhappy. Just sort of . . .” Malou searched for a word to describe her airless, controlled upbringing. “Claustrophobic?” she tried, hoping Cam would understand.
“And so you grew up reading about Jane Goodall and dreaming of escaping to the African savannah.”
“Pretty much,” Malou said with a chuckle. Cam’s perceptiveness bridged the gap that had opened up between them. It gave her the courage to voice her own insight. “And you grew up dreaming of escaping to the world I was running from.”
Cam’s laugh floated easily on the candle-warmed air. “I guess it was inevitable, then, that our escape routes would intersect.”
“Oh, predestined, I’m sure,” Malou quipped back, enjoying the ease that was enfolding them again. She tried to remember exactly why she’d been suspicious of Cam, but all the reasons suddenly seemed very distant and dusty with age.
“Shall we take our coffee out by the pool?” he asked, grabbing the pot off the warmer. Malou gathered up cups and saucers. As they left, Cam paused to snatch a bottle of Kahlua off the sideboard.
The evening was the silken deliverance of spring’s promise. The air caressed Malou with vapors of a thousand flowers. Malou closed her eyes and drank them all
in. “A person could get tipsy just breathing on a night like this.”
Cam relieved her of her burden, placing the cups and saucers on a small table between two chaise longues, then stood close beside her. “It is intoxicating.”
His voice was a growl that vibrated through Malou, striking chords buried within her deepest center. She looked up, and their gazes met with the same inevitability that had brought their lives colliding together. Malou felt herself teetering, a sensation that called to mind Cam’s shattering words about the imbalance between them. “You have too much to gain and I have too much to lose.” That was still true.
She dragged her eyes from his. “Oh, coffee,” she announced inanely, darting away toward the pot. “Can’t let it get cold.” She settled herself into a chaise, the giddy shrillness of her words still echoing tinnily.
Cam watched her bolt away from him like a frightened fawn and felt the nick of regret again, knowing he had caused her skittishness. He knew that, from a business standpoint, his entire involvement here was one long series of mistakes. The loan to Stallings had been a mistake, his promise to allow Malou time to save the troop had been a mistake, but he was committing the biggest mistake of all by being here with her tonight and feeling what he was feeling. Good sense demanded that he offer to take her back to Los Monos immediately and stop flirting with the danger that he was allowing to lick away at his control.
Yes, Cam told himself as he went to the other chaise and stretched out on it. They would finish their coffee, and then he absolutely must return her to the research station. He had far too much to lose in this situation.
“Cream or sugar or just a shot of Kahlua?” Malou asked.
“Just the Kahlua.”
She held the cup out to him. Her hair, silver in the moonlight, had curled again in the humidity into those elfin petals, Cam noted with an inward groan as he took the cup. Their hands touched beneath the saucer. It was only for an instant, but no more time was needed for Cam to learn again the velvet touch of her skin, its maddening effect upon him. His heart felt like a wild creature uncaged. He drank the coffee hoping it would steady him, would stop the infernal, adolescent pounding of his pulse. He breathed in the coffee vapors wanting the smell to drive away her scent.
