Time for the Twilight Zone theme again. Instead of arguing, Mark nodded. “Got it. You are Juan Pablo, I am Señor Madison.”
“Buenogood,” Juan Pablo rattled out in satisfaction as the jefe studied the quotation.
It was written in Spanish, although some words jumped the language barrier. At first the bottom line threw Mark, until he converted the 4,000 pesos to dollars. “About $350,” he said aloud. A similar job at his Philly condo had cost about that much. “Sounds reasonable.”
“Three hundred fifty dollars for what?” Face flushed from her walk from the orphanage, Corinne stepped into the room, a half-eaten orange lollipop in her hand. Surprised to see her this early, Mark checked his watch. It was midday; time flew, whether one was having fun or not.
“For the plumbing fix,” he explained, taking note of her skirt and blouse. It was the same outfit she was wearing when he arrived in Mexicalli and just as attractive as he remembered.
Juan Pablo cleared his voice. “There is much damage to the pipe, especially after Señor Madison tore off the key.”
Corinne popped the candy stick into her mouth and held out her hand. “May I see, por favor?”
Was that color creeping to the plumber’s face? Juan Pablo’s swarthy complexion made it hard to be sure, but the way he looked away from Corinne’s appraisal made Mark suspicious. With a slight sinking feeling, he watched Corinne switch the lollipop stick from side to side as she read through the estimate.
“Have you been talking to your cousin in Los Angeles again, Juan Pablo?” she asked upon reaching the final number.
“Pues …” The plumber gave her a sheepish grin.
She finished the candy and flicked the stick into the plaster-filled waste can. “All he’s doing is replacing the faucet and the pipe from the wall,” Corinne told Mark. “I checked on the Internet, and a simple faucet is only 460 pesos, tops. It shouldn’t take you over an hour to cut off the pipe where it comes through the wall, Juan Pablo, and join new PVC fittings. That should cost … what? About ten dollars—or a hundred or so pesos?”
She looked at Mark for confirmation, but he hadn’t had nearly the practice in peso conversion. With a chiding press of her lips, she handed the estimate back to Juan Pablo. “Assuming it takes you three hours, and that is really stretching it, you are charging us a little less than a hundred dollars an hour, according to this.”
“A little less than one hundred U.S. dollars?” The plumber scowled at the paper as if it were responsible. “Perhaps there is an error in my mathematics.” He nodded as if that were the answer. “I will hurry myself to return in one hour with the right estimation.”
Corinne shook her head. “We’ll give you half your estimation, and even then you will be earning wages equal to a Los Angeles plumber and not those of your peers. And that is only because we need it done by the weekend. If you cannot do it then, pues …”
She raised her hands as if there was nothing else to be done. “Then we will have to pay you Mexican wages for the job … which is what we expect,” she added, “if you want the contract to do the entire hacienda. After all, we are in Mexico and not Los Angeles.”
“Como no, señorita?” Folding the rejected estimate, the embarrassed Juan Pablo tucked it into the brim of his hat. “And I will return por la mañana, with the new key and the PVCs, no?”
Smiling as though Juan Pablo had just promised her the moon, rather than tried to swindle her—if he had, that is—Corinne gave him a nod of approval. “That would be wonderful. Hasta mañana, Juan Pablo. And give my regards to your wife.”
“That you can build on, señorita.” With a slight bow to her and Mark, the plumber made his exit, calling over his shoulder, “Hasta mañana.”
“Later, amigo,” Mark replied as he turned to Corinne. “Boy, I thought you were hard over the toilet brush, but—”
“Some of the contractors practice what I call creative math. It could be a genuine mistake, especially with converting the currencies, or it could be intentional.”
“Well, you were right on it.” A little flattery always helped, although she deserved every word.
“But that wasn’t my job. It was yours.”
Mark wasn’t certain which was worse, Blaine’s criticism ringing in his memory or the unspoken But I didn’t expect any better in her sigh.
“I wouldn’t have signed anything until I’d rechecked the math.” Okay, it was a little white lie. The price had sounded reasonable based on his previous experience. Very reasonable. “So I wasn’t as quick with the pesos as you. I’ve only been here two days. And it’s like the old ‘fool me once’ adage. Twice doesn’t happen.”
Corinne hoped that was the case. If not, her worse fears about Mark Madison’s irresponsible approach to life and work would be confirmed. And that was the last thing she needed after the phone call she’d received just before lunch. The body of Antonio’s brother, Enrique, had been found above the village by some hikers. Because animals had gotten to it, there was no way to tell how the boy had perished without an autopsy. And his nearest living relative, the boy’s uncle, asked to have the body released for burial without one.
When she called to object, Mayor Quintana explained to her that it was the logical way. The body would have to be taken to Cuernavaca, where it would wait in line for who knew how long? There were deceased residents from the smaller villages who had been kept so long that they’d practically been forgotten. There was nothing more to be done, according to the alcalde.
“Señor Mark,” Soledad called from the kitchen. “Did you forget to ask about the furniture?”
“Aw, man,” Mark groaned. “Yes, Soledad, I forgot.”
Trying to follow the wisdom of the Serenity Prayer that hung over her desk, accepting what she could not change … at least for now … Corinne pushed the discussion to the back of her mind and switched to the one at hand. “Furniture? What furniture?”
“Nothing much,” he said in dismissal. “I thought I’d buy a desk with a file drawer and a bed and dresser for this place. A television would be nice. Soledad said one of Juan Pablo’s relatives owns a furniture store in Taxco.”
“A desk, bed, dresser, and a television.” Annoyance flared in her words. “And I suppose you’ll want a satellite dish, since cable hasn’t reached Mexicalli.”
“Only after I double-check the pricing.”
The wisecrack ate at Corinne’s already raw disposition. “Juan Pablo’s brother-in-law sells new furniture. As in, not in the budget.”
“So, I don’t want a furnished house. Just a few essentials. I don’t think that’s asking too much.” He lifted his hands and turned away. “Sheesh, I feel like I’m married,” he said, as if he’d contracted some flesh-eating virus.
“Not hardly.” Corinne could feel the serenity she’d struggled for slipping away. “But you do have some responsibility … not that you’re used to being accountable for anything you do.” A part of her cringed the moment the words were out, but it was too late.
Mark whirled about, electric gold flecks snapping in the brown of his gaze. “Okay, let’s get this straight. I don’t need your permission to do squat, Miss Pinch Penny.”
“Pinch Penny?” Anger was not the answer, but at the moment it offered more relief. Her resolve to remain patient melted in its path. “You wouldn’t know how to pinch a penny if your life depended on it.”
“If you mean that I don’t suffer from your missionary mania for self-righteous deprivation, you’re right.”
“Self-righteous?” Somewhere the word struck a chord of reality, but was choked by her tangled emotions. “I just want to get the most for the money we’ve managed to raise. So if good stewardship is a crime, mea culpa. And all this”—she flung her arms in a wide circle, nearly clipping Mark’s nose with the back of her fingers— “is not a mania; it’s a passion … a passion to help children, who, but for God’s grace, might have been me.”
Mark braved a step closer, so that she had to look up
to turn the full glare of her fury on him, and replied, “And if wanting some semblance of comfort while I’m stewarding”—he rested his hands on her shoulders—“is a crime, I’m guilty too. It’s the least I should have, considering I’m doing this work for free.”
Victory surged in Corinne’s veins. “Let’s get this clear,” she said, shoving his hands away. “You’re doing this because you were sentenced to community service for your third DUI. It was this or jail time.”
He didn’t flinch. “At least they have television in jail … and a bed.”
“We have an air mattress for a bed. And for entertainment, Father Menasco has a delightful selection of reading materials that he’s accumulated during his years.”
Mark stepped even closer, as if to stare her down. “You have furniture. Or do you get some special dispensation for being such a holy example for all of us?”
“It is used furniture, which”—she raised her voice, rising to the tip of her toes until she was almost eye-to-eye with the six-foot-plus ignoramus—“I paid for out of my own penny-pinching little purse.”
Time stilled, but not the calculation in her opponent’s gaze. He was desperate, on the run. Her breath grew short with triumph so close, so—
“Your what?” the lips just a breath from her face demanded.
Distracted by them, Corinne did a quick mental backtrack and gathered steam. “I said that I paid for it out of my own Penny— with a capital P—Pinching Purse.”
She was tempted to poke back at him for emphasis, but somehow in the heat of the argument, they’d become too close. Toe-to-toe, chest-to-chest, eye-to-Adam’s apple.
Disconcerted, Corinne raised her head, her gaze locking in a dead heat with Mark’s. Like two storm clouds on the verge of collision, there was no backing away.
“So,” she began, the remainder of whatever it was that she’d intended to say evaporating as Mark pulled her against his sweaty, plaster-dusted body and lowered his mouth to hers.
Corinne heard thunder—or was that indignation pounding in her ears. She felt the lightning shooting through her from the fierce contact, leaving every nerve ending sizzling in its wake. Her mind raced for reason’s cover, but her body braved the tempest with shameful eagerness. The hands she placed on his shoulders to push him away curled into useless fists as the fury of the assault gave way to something far more disconcerting—tenderness. And then it was over.
Breathless, she pulled back and looked up into his eyes, where remnants of the storm still snapped and crackled.
“You need a man, lady,” Mark said, taking in a shaky breath.
A man? He had to be kidding. He was a man—definitely so— and he was the problem. The shredded bits of her fury came together, strengthened.
“But don’t look at me.”
“You?” Corinne spun away from him, rubbing her arms as if to rub off the aftereffects of whatever it was that had happened. “Believe me, Mark Madison, if I ever wanted a man, much less needed one, you can rest assured that it would not now or ever be you or … or … or anyone like you.”
Head lifted high, she spun on her heel and left the room, storming through the foyer to the patio steps. The man couldn’t handle a simple plumbing contract, and when it came to a woman’s needs, he sure as the dickens didn’t know what he was talking about. Hah! A man was the last thing she needed … particularly one like Mark Madison.
“Corina!” Soledad’s shout stopped Corinne short at the gate.
She turned, impatient. “What?”
“You not going to eat your lunch?” the housekeeper asked.
Lunch. The word doused her anger with a sheepish awareness from tip to toe. From there embarrassment took over. One of Soledad’s salads was why she’d come to the hacienda in the first place—lunch and a quiet retreat before she told Antonio that Enrique was not coming back. Suddenly there was Juan Pablo and Mark, and before she knew it, her emotions ran away with her, carrying her into a heated argument that boiled over into, of all things, the arms of Mark Madison.
Ignoring the sensory overload that drove her breath away, Corinne gathered it back. “Can you wrap it for me to take back to the office?” She started toward the hacienda entrance. “I really need to get back.”
As far away from Mark Madison as possible until she could determine what and how whatever happened happened.
Fool me once … Corinne stopped in her tracks, recognizing Mark’s words. Oh, just give it up, she told herself in frustration, whatever it is.
CHAPTER 7
What had he been thinking?
Or maybe that was the problem. No thought had been involved. He’d just kissed her.
Mark paced the floor of the salon, leaving footprints in the dusty coating left from his sweeping. It was Corinne’s fault, of course … all of it. She’d started in on him, just like Blaine, and driven Mark into saying things he shouldn’t have and then doing something he shouldn’t have.
“So,” Soledad said, startling him to a halt as she entered the room with a tray balanced on one arm and a folding chair under the other. “You and Corina have a disgust about what?”
Mark hurried to help her put the chair at the desk. He’d seen Corinne brush by the salon as if he weren’t there and heard her talking to Soledad in the kitchen. Undoubtedly filling the maid with her vile opinion of him. Not that he really cared, but he could have sworn Corinne had been crying. And now her protective bumblebee wanted to know why.
“With all due respect, it’s not any of your business, Soledad.”
Retrieving a damp cloth from her yellow apron pocket, Soledad motioned for him to sit down and wiped the rickety desk. “Pobrecita, she is so upset.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a little upset too. I have a right to some creature comforts.”
The stocky housekeeper jerked upright, her brow a continuous knit of consternation. “Qué? What kind of creature?”
“Me,” Mark clarified, her misinterpretation bringing a hint of a smile to his lips.
Looking over her shoulder, as if fearing that her Corina had the same radar hearing that she possessed, Soledad lowered her voice. “But of course, the man of the house should be comfortable.”
At least one of the females in charge agreed with him.
“Corina is not herself this day. She is very upset. Ay de mí,” Soledad sniffed, digging into her big apron pocket for an embroidered handkerchief. After blowing a loud honk into it, she put it away, but her dark eyes were glazed with emotion.
Something told Mark it had nothing to do with his disgust with Corinne. He put his arm around the housekeeper. “What is it, Soledad?”
“That Enrique.” She shook her head. “He was always running off to the hills. I knew it would finish badly with that adventurous one.”
“Enrique?”
“Antonio’s brother, who went lost before you coming here,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “And my pobrecita, she is gone to tell ’Tonio his brother will not be coming back. But first she must put together herself.”
Kicked in the belly by the news, Mark sat down on the chair. “Aw, man,” he lamented. “I didn’t know.” He thought she had just overreacted out of superiority. The fact was, she was just a better businessperson than he; but then, who wasn’t?
“So you go say that you are sorry for making her cry.”
Mark’s head shot up. “Say what? I didn’t make her cry. I just—” He stopped speaking as Soledad planted her hands on her hips.
“I just acted like a jerk,” he finished. A displaced and very uncomfortable jerk, but a jerk.
But she was such a goody-goody …
“So you will say I am sorry and take her a rose.”
Mark blinked in disbelief as the housekeeper produced a rose wrapped in tissue from the same apron as the dishcloth. “Have you got a rabbit in there too?”
Soledad burst into a giggle. “Oh, Señor Mark, you are so silly. I put no rabbit in my apron. In the pot, yes, but in the apron, no, no, no
.”
Mark took the flower, wondering just how much Soledad knew about his and Corinne’s “disgust.” Part of him rebelled at the idea of crawling to Corinne with a rose in hand, yet there was another, more subtle side of him that wanted to apologize. He hardly recognized it.
“I’ll go in there now. Maybe I can—” Mark blinked in disbelief. Either a small white pig just trotted through the foyer, or he’d been sober way too long. Besides, wasn’t the hacienda ghost a Spanish doña or a murderous Indio? “Soledad—”
A startled shriek came from the direction of the kitchen, followed by the scraping of furniture. “Mark!”
Flower in hand, Mark raced to the kitchen with Soledad on his heels, only to meet a pink-eared swine making tracks away from Corinne, who brandished a chair.
“Vete! Vete ya!” Soledad shouted. “I will not have creatures in my house!”
Instead of exiting out the open patio door, where a young man stood waving his straw hat at the animal, the pig veered into the salon.
“I will get my broom.”
As Soledad ran off to fetch her weapon of choice, Mark and Corinne tried to corral the animal in the salon. It scattered Mark’s piles of dried plaster debris as it raced around the room. In an attempt to head it off, Mark stepped into its path, waving his hands. Instead of being dissuaded, the pig made straight for him, slowing from a run to a panting trot until it had Mark’s back to the wall.
“Corinne, the chair.” Why hadn’t he grabbed the broom?
But to his astonishment, instead of attacking him, the pig pulled the blossom of the flower that Mark still held. Dumbfounded, he watched as the pig dropped at his feet, exhausted and chewing.
“Wait, I think I know this pig.” Even as he spoke, he couldn’t believe he heard himself right. But the pig was just about the same size and coloring as his travel mate in the swine truck.
At Corinne’s snort of amusement, Mark shot her a dour look.
“You see one white pig, you’ve seen them all,” she teased.
A knock dragged Mark’s attention from the snouted visitor to the foyer where the Mexican youth stood, hat in hand. “Perdonamé, señor,” he began, shifting his nervous gaze to the ceiling as if the rest of his words were written there. “I … bring … your … peeg.”
Fiesta Moon Page 7
