I need someone more reliable than the breeze, she thought, putting the stool down in the salon. For good measure, she gave it a little kick. It worked on the stool, which moved, but the thoughts regarding one irresponsible but charming gringo would not. And now, she thought as she limped out of the room, I have a sore toe.
The following morning Mark was awakened by Soledad’s frantic rap on the salon door. “Señor Mark, it is after the rooster’s crow, and the supplies are here from Cuernavaca.”
Mark rolled over in the comfort of his new bed, with which his thoughtful benefactress had included a box of linens, and squinted at his travel alarm. Nine o’clock? He groaned, tossing back the covers in a sleep daze. He hadn’t set the alarm because the workmen usually got him up and moving by now. Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he struck something warm, round, and bristly. Its startled squeal impaled Mark’s sluggish senses. Before he could recover, the sliding door cracked open just enough for the intruder to make its escape.
“Soledad?” Annoyance strangled Mark’s voice. “How did this pig get in here?”
“Pues—”
Exasperation edged in. It always began with that word. “Never mind,” he called out, pulling on jeans over his boxers. As he stood, his right foot would not follow the lead of the left, wedging somewhere around the knee. With a grunt, Mark hopped around on one foot, trying to push out the object blocking his pant leg.
“Mark?” Corinne sounded uncertain from the other side of the door. “You’d better come see this.”
She was usually up and gone by now, but then they’d both worked late setting up and arranging the furniture. It was hard to keep the impatience from his voice. He wasn’t exactly Clark Kent à la Superman in a phone booth. “I’ll be” —a shoe popped out ahead of his foot—“right there.”
“Omigosh, they’re coming through the gate.”
And what was wrong with that? The courtyard was big enough to stack the supplies to one side and still use the other. “I said I’ll—”
A horrible scraping noise, akin to a log of chalk on a giant blackboard, blotted out the rest of Mark’s answer. Outside, someone chattered like an excited monkey in high-pitched Spanish over the roar of an engine.
“Ay de mí!” Soledad rushed past Mark as he emerged into the hall with Toto at his heel. She stopped, peering over Corinne’s shoulder through the open entrance as if she beheld a monster rather than a delivery truck.
Corinne bit her lip. The slow shake of her head sent a shot of panic through him. Soledad got hysterical over something as inconsequential as her boogses, but Corinne wasn’t as easily rattled.
“What?” Even as he said the word, Mark bolted to the door and looked outside in the direction of the commotion at the gate.
Or rather, in the gate. A giant delivery truck was wedged in the opening of the stone wall, and the intricate, hand-forged gates lay twisted off their inset hinges to either side of the bull-nosed vehicle.
Mark swallowed the oath that came to his lips. Waving his arms at the driver, he vaulted onto the patio. “Stop! Don’t!” A sharp stone gouged his unshod arch, stopping him short on the lawn. While he hopped toward the gate, throbbing foot in hand, the driver of the truck gunned the engine.
“No, no, no, no, no!”
Despite his pain-grazed protest, the behemoth on wheels pulled back through the opening. The screech of metal against stone riddled every nerve in his body, making his bruised foot complain even more. In seeming slow motion the truck broke free and rolled backward. It struck a gnarled cypress on the other side of the dirt drive that had guarded the entrance for at least a hundred years, meeting its match with a ground-shaking thump.
The driver’s companion bobbed up and down in fast forward, spitting Spanish at the driver of the truck. Aside from a few words, most of the phrases Mark had not learned in academic Spanish, so he had no idea what the guy was saying. All he knew was that now the little man was pointing at him and expounding with the same vigor.
Mark turned toward Corinne and, still holding his wounded foot, nearly fell over. “Will you tell him to wait until I get some shoes on?”
The sound of a thousand pistol cracks split the air, cutting through the rumble of the truck’s engine. Awash in another tide of disbelief, Mark swiveled in time to see the truck, trailer tipped as though finished with the entire scene. In its wake lay a pick-up-sticks pile of lumber and miscellaneous supplies, interwoven with the metal bands that once held the various sizes of wood together.
Soledad came up behind him, his Dockers in her hands. “Dios mio! look what those fools have done to your gate.”
Mark shoved his feet into the shoes. “And they are going to pay,” he growled. He marched forward to meet a short, stocky man, with a scowl as dark as his hair, coming through the gate. “What are you do—Qué hacen ustedes?”
But when the driver answered in rapid Spanish, Mark realized his mistake and held up his hand. “En ingles, por favor.”
“I deliver,” the driver said, shoving his thumb at the broad, hairy expanse of chest showing through the open neck of his sweat-stained shirt, “you”—a thick-knuckled forefinger addressed Mark—“paint.” It then swung toward the side of the truck where the paint and rust that covered the rest of the cab had been scraped off by the gate to reveal gray metal.
“Oh, no.” Mark shook his head. The truck clearly needed a paint job long before today. Besides, it wasn’t his fault if the idiot had no depth perception. “Es su error.”
The driver stared at Mark, long and deliberate, as though deciding whether or not to take the disagreement to a physical level. From behind, his companion babbled something about being in the oven. Although the night cool still lingered, Mark felt as though the temperature had been turned up to noonday hot as the man nodded in agreement. When the driver reached down into the top of his mud-stained work boots, the hair prickled at Mark’s neck.
“Are you sure you want to do that, amigo?”
Mark emphasized the amigo part. Without appearing as though he wanted to duke it out, he tried to subtly assume a defensive martial-arts position. He’d worked his way to a brown belt, but hadn’t kept up the discipline, much less used the training, once he’d broken up with the pretty instructor.
Instead of pulling the anticipated blade from his boot top, the man produced an invoice and unfolded it with a snap. “Sign. I go.”
“Usted rompió el camión,” the chatterbox injected, jabbing an accusing finger at Mark from behind the bigger guy.
Mark had seen the type—the kind that starts a fight and then backs off to watch.
“He says that you broke the truck,” Corinne translated at his shoulder, giving Mark a start. To his further surprise, he noticed she was leaning on a baseball bat as though it were a cane.
“I got that.” Much as Mark didn’t want any kind of physical confrontation, a part of his pride was pricked that she obviously thought he needed her protection.
“Would you like me to take care of this?” She cut him a sidewise glance, a hint of a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
If those blue eyes worked on the deliverymen the way they did on Mark, she’d have them paying for the paint job. “Be my guest, señorita. I hate kung fu fighting before breakfast.”
The conversation that ensued was too fast for Mark to understand. At least he didn’t think he understood. Surely they weren’t talking about baseball. Corinne smiled a lot, occasionally swinging the bat pendulum style from her waist and motioning with her head toward the orphanage. No, they were talking about the hospital. Was she asking the driver not to put him in the hospital?
Gradually, the driver’s fierce look dissolved into a nod and, at the mention of rosarios—prayers—a grin. He dug into his pocket and produced a paper bill.
“Para el equipo de béisbol para los niños.”
That much Mark understood—baseball equipment for the kids. Was that why she’d brought out the bat? His wounded ego wavere
d with uncertainty.
“Gracias, señor. You are a generous man,” she told him, pocketing the bill in her skirt pocket.
“And Mark and I will pray for your speedy recovery and ask for prayers for the same at the orphanage chapel.” Corinne nudged Mark. “Go on and sign the paper.”
“We haven’t checked to see if everything is on it,” he pointed out.
Corinne laughed, a lyrical sound made to distract from the whisper she gave him from behind her hand. “Some things must be taken on faith or fist,” she whispered, reaching out to take the invoice.
So she had thought he needed her protection. “Hey, I’ve had martial-arts training. All I needed was help with the translation.”
She ignored him. “All I need is a pen,” she said through a smile, making a pretense of signing the invoice with her hand. “Una pluma?”
“Oh, sí, señorita.” As though he couldn’t do enough for the señorita, the driver hastened to the cab for the pen she requested.
“And I don’t think it takes much training to take on a guy who’s just had gallbladder surgery. But if you want to have at him, go for it.”
So that’s who was in the hospital. Mark regrouped his thoughts, not ready to roll over just yet. “You’re the one who’s so nuts about the money, Miss Penny Pincher. A paint job just adds to the cost … not to mention shorting us on supplies. Vendors do it all the time.”
“Faith, Mark. I know you put little stock in it, but sometimes we just have to rely on faith.” Looking as if she held the monopoly on that particular commodity, she took the pen the driver handed her and passed it and the invoice along to Mark. “Just sign the paper.”
“I’ll remind you of that when the bills come in and we are over budget.” Mark scribbled his initials on the shipping receipt.
All the while his ego shrieked with three aspersions cast at his courage, business acumen, and spiritual foundation. At least two of the three were misses. Yes, he believed in God and Jesus. But he didn’t believe that faith trumped a man’s own abilities and efforts. If a guy was careless, he missed sometimes. Other times, luck prevailed.
“Maybe you can charm Doña Violeta into paying them off—if his employer’s insurance won’t cover the paint job.”
So that’s what her superiority was all about. She was still miffed because his new friend had bailed him out with furnishing the salon. Never mind that the furniture was simply on loan—no way was he going to tell her that. Far be it from him to deprive her of her righteous indignation.
Pleased that he’d completed his business, the driver shook Corinne’s hand, avoiding Mark altogether. “Muchas gracias, señorita.” The rest of his parting words were lost to Mark’s distracted ear.
As the truck took off down the road, Mark picked up where he’d left off. “So it’s okay for your daddy to help you, but it isn’t okay if someone decides to help me? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
CHAPTER 16
Corinne could not believe her ears. She’d come out, armed with Soledad’s bat because the driver looked as if he were prepared to eat Mark alive and serve the leftovers to his excitable friend. Now Mark had the nerve to attack her for it?
“I said that it’s easy to be spiritual”—his inflection mocked her—“when Daddy provides everything you need. Anyone can lean on the kind of faith that provides one’s every wish.”
“Faith is anything but having one’s every wish met. Don’t confuse needs with wishes.” She swung the bat up onto her shoulder. “And don’t mix up wounded egos with faith issues.”
“And just what does that mean, Miss Penny Pincher?” He propped his hands on his hips, drawing her attention to the fact that he’d not had time to don a shirt.
“It means that I just saved your tush from a good thrashing.”
“From a guy just out of surgery?”
Corinne mimicked his stance. “I didn’t know that when I grabbed the bat. I thought the two of them were going to make mincemeat out of you.”
Evoking shades of a professional boxing match, a bell sounded from the gate, breaking the toe-to-toe, nose-to-nose challenge that held Corinne and Mark a heated breath apart. Wearing a straw hat with a lavender band to match her owner’s dark violet attire, Chiquita trotted through the gate pulling Doña Violeta in her upholstered cart.
“Children, children,” the matron chided, a smile showing beneath the veil of her hat. “Surely some spilled lumber and a broken gate are nothing to argue over.”
As though to object to the trivialization of the trauma, the stones at the entrance seemed to rumble, softly at first. Ears laid back, the burro chafed at Doña Violeta’s attempt to rein it to a stop as the rumble escalated into a landslide. Not about to be caught in it, Chiquita lunged forward, but Mark managed to catch her reins, diverting the donkey’s panicked bolt into a circular one as the courtyard wall disintegrated to either side of the opening.
As the dust settled, Corinne thawed from her frozen state and hurried to the cart, where the plucky little lady, unlike the last time, held fast to the rail.
“Doña Violeta, are you all right?”
Releasing the rail with one gloved hand to cover her heart, Doña Violeta nodded. “Indeed, I am fine, thanks once again to my Mark.”
Running a calming hand along Chiquita’s quivering shank, Mark managed a pained grin. “I think this donkey’s getting used to calamity.”
“And if it didn’t, Mark could just use his raw brawn or black belt prowess to save the day.” Corinne couldn’t help herself. The man’s ego was only exceeded by his luck.
Doña Violeta extended an imperious hand to Corinne. “If you would please to help me down, I would love a cup of tea and a prayer to thank God for our blessings.”
“Blessings?” Mark and Corinne echoed, incredulity in sync.
The older lady tucked back her veil, her face a mirror of calm in the midst of a storm of chaos. “But of course,” she said, taking Corinne’s offered help to step down from the cart. “Now the gate is wide enough for all your delivery trucks to get through, no?”
Mark snorted. “You could pull the Titanic through it.”
“And the gate can be widened. The art of iron working still exists,” Violeta reminded them.
Her brightness reminded Corinne of how much more optimistic she needed to be. But then, Doña Violeta had not had Mark Madison to deal with.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Mark said as he finished tying Chiquita to one of the original hitching posts, a lion’s head with a ring through its mouth. “Just as soon as I get this mess under control.”
“But you’ll join us for tea?”
His simmering gaze softened as Doña Violeta plied his arm with her frail hand, and for a moment, Corinne thought the lady would have her way with the irate Mark.
“I’d love to have tea with you, Doña Violeta, and thank you for your generous loan of the furniture.”
His benefactress brushed away the notion that gratitude was due with a sniff. “Nonsense.”
Loan? Corinne’s breath caught on the word and whooshed out as she quickly looked down … up … aside … anywhere but at Mark. It should have occurred to her that even Doña Violeta would not make such an extravagant and inappropriate gift.
Still, Mark could have told her.
“But,” he went on, “I really have to call to find out why the workers from Cuernavaca aren’t here. They should have shown by now.”
“No worry lines,” Violeta chastised, brushing away the furrows on Mark’s brow. “I have enough for all three of us. And Mark … God is in control, even when it seems like He is not.”
Mark smiled in return affection. “I’ll try to remember that.”
“That’s all He asks.” With that, the matron turned to Corinne. “Now, about that tea …”
Tea was as far from Corinne’s mind at the moment as recognizing that God was in control was from Mark’s. But her upbringing prevailed.
“Tea is good,” she said, cuppi
ng Doña Violeta’s elbow to steady her as they climbed up on the patio. “And Soledad always has water on the pilot, so it should be ready in a jiff.”
“A jiff ?”
Corinne’s peeve dissolved in a smile. “Muy pronto,” she explained.
She was glad that she and Soledad had stayed up and put the house back to order after the furniture had been brought in and set up. Doña Violeta approved of the arrangement, even if Mark’s bed had been left unmade.
While Soledad prepared the tea, Corinne gave Doña Violeta a tour of the progress to date, watching to see if the older woman’s impression was the same as hers. It was futile at first. For all the feedback on Violeta’s face, she might as well have kept the veil of her hat down. But as they left the ballroom with its hanging wires and rutted walls, the señora broke her pensive silence.
“And the workers from Cuernavaca did not come as promised this morning?”
“No. Unless they thought the supplies weren’t here and there was no need,” Corinne suggested.
“Perhaps.” Something in the way the older woman said the word suggested that she had her doubts. Did Doña Violeta know something, or was she, like Corinne, merely suspicious of contractors hired outside the village?
Soledad not only had tea waiting for them in the kitchen, but fresh-baked pan dulces. “Nothing but the best we have for our Doña Dulce,” she said, helping their guest into a chair at the kitchen table. “And now I will be outside, if you should need me.”
“Nonsense, Soledad. You baked the treats. You must share them with us.”
Soledad stiffened. “You are a gracious lady, but—”
“Sit,” Violeta commanded with an old-world authority that superseded even Soledad’s. But it was the same old-world tradition that prohibited a servant from taking bread with those of the noble class.
Uncertain as to what to do, Soledad sought out Corinne with her gaze. Even though Corinne was a modern woman, it had taken considerable persuasion to convince Soledad that she really was welcome to the same table with her employer.
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