She could not even begin to count the times. It seemed that the whole of her past life had been here, that she had waited always as she waited now for a sight of the tall, dark figure who would be leaning against the station-wagon and who would stare at her coolly as he had always done, assessing, probing, watchful before taking her case and coldly kissing her cheek.
Meriel could see herself as she had been then, slim and uncomfortable, almost too thin, her hair almost invariably wild and windswept, her grey eyes wide and anxious, waiting with almost tearful anxiety for any sign that her appearance displeased Ramon, because she had learned at a very early age that the cold, handsome face of her stepbrother meant either despair or a kind of happiness. Ramon was the only one at the great house who would ever defend her and only his presence gave her any kind of security.
She was neither thin nor windswept now, however, she was grown up, no longer an anxious child. Only the wide grey eyes were the same. Her slender height was not ungainly now, her figure was a woman's figure, smooth-hipped and high-breasted, and her golden hair was smooth and groomed, her make-up as perfect as she could make it. She would not now be meeting her stepbrother in anxiety, watching for any sign of his approval. In any case, she knew now that there would be none, she had known that for almost seven years. As a child she had been vaguely bearable, as a person she was utterly unacceptable.
"At last you are back home on the llanos, Senorita Meriel."
The grating sound of the pilot's voice cut into her thoughts and she met his smile with one of her own.
"For a very little while only, Luis," she told him softly.
"I am sorry about… We are all sorry that you are here because of your great tragedy." He began hesitantly but she waved his sympathy away gently.
"Thank you, but I'll recover from it." She forced a smile and moved her hand to take in the great sweep of the plains. "It is still the same, unchanging, unending."
"Si, it remains the same, it can do little else." His dark eyes were suddenly dancing. "You are changed though, Senorita Meriel. You are—grown up—different." His dark, laughing eyes skimmed over her and she gave him an answering grin.
"Si, Luis. I am grown up and different. Also I have a very sharp tongue and a nasty turn of phrase."
"I'll try to remember, senorita," he assured her, bursting into pleased and mischievous laughter. "I hope that Senor Ortiga remembers too. I have often in the past heard his criticisms of you. You will tell him now where to go?"
"Yes," she answered flatly. She would. She was not going to be at the mercy of Ramon's tongue ever again, at the first sign of any criticism, any temper, any orders she would…
Her thoughts died away in her mind just as her words would have died on her tongue had she been speaking, because he was there. The plane had been steadily losing height as they had talked and now it swooped low over the small dry airstrip to turn and come in with the wind. Ramon was there just as he had always been, just as if this were so many years ago.
She could see him clearly, tall and lithe, leaning against the car, blue jeans moulded to his long strong legs, a blue checked shirt open at the bronze of his neck, his dark eyes narrowed against the sun as he looked up.
God! He was still the same! Her heartbeat changed like an instrument that moves to the rhythm of a remembered song, her skin tightened on her face and tiny pinpricks of alarm raced down the backs of her arms and hands. She was grateful for this advance warning, grateful for the chance to grasp her racing feelings and pull herself together. He could not see her as clearly as she saw him. She too had waited often for the arrival of the plane and she knew that to him she would be little more than a blur, a hazy impression.
She took deep, steadying breaths and won her small battle. As the plane landed she was in control of herself, the knowledge that there must be no sign of weakness when she met Ramon Ortiga bolstering up her courage and stiffening her resolve.
Luis taxied the plane in close with the expertise of many years of practice. The wing was almost over the car before he stopped the engine and turned to her with a grin.
"We are here, senorita. Welcome back to the llanos."
"Thank you, Luis. Thank you too for a very pleasant flight. Before too long you will be taking me back to Caracas, a few days at the most I expect." He nodded but didn't seem too impressed with her plans.
"I am at your service, Senorita Meriel. Whenever you wish, or whenever Senor Ortiga wishes," he added softly, his dark eyes twinkling. He grinned widely as she opened her mouth to make a sharp comment and shook his head.
"We had better get out before his temper surfaces, I think."
He lowered the steps and she moved, waiting for no assistance, but she was a little too late. As she stepped down, strong hands came to her waist and she was lifted the rest of the way and found herself turning pale-faced to meet the dark watchful eyes of her stepbrother.
"Welcome home," the deep voice said wryly. "I was beginning to think that you had decided to stay in the plane and return to Caracas."
"Hardly," she said coldly. "I do know my duty after all."
"Yes," he countered, "when you have been reminded of it. Now that you have renewed your acquaintance with Luis perhaps we could go?"
Her grey eyes met the dark eyes of Luis Silva as he came back from putting her luggage in the car and she saw the rueful, "I told you so' written across his face. She had been met with criticism as usual but her sharp tongue and nasty turn of phrase that she had boasted of seemed at this moment to have deserted her. For the time being she could think of nothing to say to Ramon, as he continued to hold her lightly but firmly by the waist.
"A good idea," she said flatly. "The sooner I see Manolito the better and the sooner he is well and recovered the better too. I am too busy to linger for long in this place."
She pulled away and turned to the car, suddenly annoyed that he had brought the old station-wagon, dusty and dented as usual.
"Why do you continue to drive this contraption when you're knee deep in money?" she said crossly. "It's uncomfortable, ugly and bone-breaking."
Evidently, the Venezuelan side of him was uppermost today because he grinned as he slid in beside her.
"You imagine that after seven years it is the same one?"
"It looks the same to me. Dirty, scratched and dented."
"It is, I think, the fourth," he assured her quietly. "I realise that it is not a thing of beauty but it is essential for the work that it does. It is a rough ride to the hacienda and I have the choice of this or a Land Rover. I prefer this. I do not like change. The dents may be familiar but they are quite new, I assure you."
"It's filthy!" she said crossly, drawing the skirt of her green silk dress around her.
"I remember when you were only too happy to see it," he said softly. "I remember when you leaned out at the side and let the wind blow your hair into a greater state of wildness. You never complained then."
"I was too young to recognise discomfort," she reminded him tartly, "and I am no longer wild."
"That I can see, pequena," he commented wryly, his eyes leaving the track and skimming over her face and figure. "Your hair is controlled at last."
"I am also controlled!" she said sharply. "And I am not a little girl either," she added in a tight voice, her face flushing at his small but well remembered endearment.
"I can see that too," he told her softly, lapsing into silence as he normally did when he had said everything that he intended. He was not a man to hold pointless conversations and she could tell after a quick glance at his face that he was slipping back into his usual aloof manner, the burst of humour over.
Meriel clenched her hands and kept silent too. Not one word had he said about her mother, not one word of explanation about his outrageous conduct in barring her from the funeral. She was here because he needed her help, here because he could not cope with Manolito. No doubt he would never recover from the astonishment that the realisation of that had brought.
No doubt he would not even have bothered to inform her of the accident and her mother's death if he had been able to cope with Manuel as he coped so coolly with everything else. The bottled-up anger grew and exploded into words when they had gone only a very little way.
"I hate you, Ramon! Do you know that? I hate you!"
"I know it." He never ever looked at her, keeping his eyes on the difficult track, his hands dark and capable on the wheel.
"You suffer from no remorse, do you?" she stormed on. "You have not one bit of regret in you that you failed to get me here for the funeral."
"No." Short and to the point, his answer drove her further.
"You didn't want me here because I don't fit in, because I'm not an Ortiga. No doubt I would have been an embarrassment at such a gathering as a funeral where my blonde hair and my inability to keep a cold straight face would have stood out so oddly beside the Ortigas!"
"Dios!" He stood on the brakes, almost throwing her into the windscreen, and he had his hands tightly and cruelly on her arms before she could recover. "No," he rasped brutally. "I did not want you there! I did not want you to be brought to Venezuela in time to see the remains of the plane, a thousand pieces strewn across the savanna! I did not want you to be on hand for the necessary identification! Have you any idea what it is like when a small plane crashes at speed? Have you, Meriel?" He shook her, his lips tight and angry, and the picture he painted with such cruel words swam into her mind.
"Oh, God!" She was suddenly sick inside, nausea washing over her as she struggled out of the car to lean against the dusty side, her head in her hands, glad to feel the hot wind blowing at her face and hair.
The nausea passed and she let the deep sobs of shock and grief that welled up inside come to the surface. Turning away to face the dusty landscape and hide her face from his she sobbed quietly, racked with pain and unhappiness. It was only in the last few years that she had made any sort of peace with her mother, had had any chance of meeting her on equal terms, and her only comfort was that. Now, she would never see her again, and the ghost of the cruel past would roam through the hacienda with very little to remember that was good.
"Stop! Hush! Hush!" Ramon was beside her silently and swiftly, pulling her into his arms. "You will make yourself ill and it will do no good."
"I—I'm sorry." She struggled weakly but he held her fast, his hand smoothing her hair in an oddly comforting gesture that threw her far back into the past. "I should have realised that… Did Manolito go to the funeral?"
"Of course not," he assured her quietly. "He is a child. I would not let him suffer anything like that. For the time, I forgot that you were no longer a child. I tried to protect you from the—misery of it all." He sighed and released her. "I did not do the right thing I suppose but I saw you still as a girl. You are a woman and well able to face things. "I suppose I had forgotten. It has been such a long time since…'
He turned away and looked out across the tall, dry grassland, his dark eyes shuttered and cool.
"I'm sorry, Ramon," Meriel whispered. "I should not have said all that. Sometimes, my tongue runs away with me and—and I suppose that I'm a little bitter."
He turned to look down at her, much taller than she although she was not in any way small. For a few seconds, their eyes held and communicated without words and her face lost its pale grief and flooded with colour.
"Bitter? Yes, I suppose so," he said in an odd voice. "However, you are here, and there is Manuel."
"Yes." She bowed her head, ashamed of her outburst, ashamed that she had once again shown her inability to keep calm and indifferent to circumstances. Once again too she had thought of her own grief and only belatedly of Manolito. Ramon had thought of them both.
She was startled to feel his hands on her arms again and looked up into dark unreadable eyes. For a second he stared down into her face and then bent his head, kissing her lightly on the lips.
"Do not let your conscience trouble you so very much, Meriel," he said softly. "You always did have more feelings than common sense."
He turned back to the car and she followed, suddenly very weary and defeated. She was not an Ortiga. An Ortiga would have dealt with any problem coolly and systematically. She was her father's daughter, more English than Spanish, more emotional than sensible, countenanced but unacceptable.
"Once more you are windswept, pequena? he said softly and she lifted startled eyes to see him waiting with the car door open, an amused quirk to his lips as she hastily tried to straighten the unruliness of her bright hair.
CHAPTER TWO
THE hacienda was built on high ground, on the crest of a flat-topped hill. The floods that often swept the plains could never reach it and it had stood for centuries secure and cool, an oasis in a landscape of high, dry grasses, a fortress surrounded by greenery.
The rough stonework of the rambling house was mellow in the afternoon sunlight, the green, well watered lawns stretching out to the wide perimeter walls. It had withstood upheaval and conflict and the ravages of time and weather with the same fortitude that had been in the blood of the first Ortigas who had settled here from Spain and set up the line that was to continue unbroken.
From far away, Meriel saw it. As far as she knew it had never been given any name. To the riders and the workers it was simply the hacienda. To the Ortigas it was la casa or just home, for although their wealth was drawn from mining, oil and many other sources it was to this place that they returned, it was from the ornate polished desk in the dark study that the Ortiga wealth was controlled.
She remembered her first frightened and awestruck glimpse of the place when she had seen it as a child, a shy and unhappy eleven-year-old. For two years she had been at the centre of a battle as her Spanish-born mother and her English father had fought for custody of her, and Inez had won. She was cool and beautiful, and her calm manner, her aristocratic bearing had finally swayed the court. Her father had been too heated, too impassioned, leaving them with an impression of instability, making his statement that Inez had not one ounce of love in her for the child seem like the ravings of a hysterical mind. His love and compassion were the only threads to hang on to and Meriel's opinion was never sought. In any case, she was too afraid to speak. Her mother's cold, dark eyes were always on her and the words of duty that the beautiful lips spoke were drummed into her. Duty was a word that she was to hear often.
Within six moths of custody being granted her mother had remarried, her new husband, Francisco Ortiga, a very distant relative on one side of her family, and she had come happily to Venezuela bringing the bright-haired child with her. Even then, Meriel had known that the bitter battle over custody had not been a battle for love of her as far as her mother was concerned. Inez had merely wanted to win.
The marriage was not for love either. Francisco Ortiga wanted another heir, a back-up in case his only son Ramon should either die or be unable to continue the Ortiga line, for there was the inheritance, years of commitment to the name, lands and wealth, and Meriel soon discovered that this was the only source of passion in the luxurious, rambling house.
To Inez, the arrangement was ideal. She was once again in a land where her language was spoken, once again wrapped in the luxury she had left to marry an Englishman, and no emotion was expected of her, only duty.
To Meriel though it was like dying, and her grey eyes had moved from one face to another, from the cool, indifferent face of a stepfather whom she was never to address as anything but senor, to the surprised and disgusted faces of the various aunts, uncles and cousins who had travelled many miles to be on hand to greet the new wife and found her half-English daughter's Anglo-Saxon looks and ungainly thinness unacceptable, to the dark, resentful eyes of her new stepbrother.
For Ramon Ortiga had been twenty-two and his resentment had been many-sided. Inez was a usurper who had taken his mother's place too soon and Meriel was an unnecessary oddity thrust into his life with little warning.
His attitude had not mellowe
d either in the months that followed. He knew the reason for the marriage and he looked with displeasure on the fair-haired child who moved like a waif through the house, unable to be dynamic and businesslike, only haltingly speaking the Spanish tongue.
Finally, she had ventured out into the llanos, welcoming the wind and the silence, a silence that was peace, so different from the cool and brooding silence of the hacienda. Then she had her first brush with Ramon, for she had wandered a long way when he saw her.
The thunderous drumming of the galloping horse had frightened her badly, but nothing approaching her fear as the horse was reined sharply in and a wildly angry Ramon had slid from the saddle to confront her.
"What do you imagine you are doing here?" His deep voice was harsh, violent, and she had stared at him mesmerised.
"Answer me! What are you doing here?"
"I—I'm going for a walk."
"A walk!"
To add to her terror he had grasped her long bright hair in one hand, jerking her head upwards as he glared down at her from his intimidating height.
"This is not an English field, you stupid child! This is the llanos! Much further and we would have had to turn out the plane to find you—if el tigre had not found you first!"
"El—el tigre?" She stood uncomfortably in his grasp, her slender neck at an unnatural angle as his hard grip on her hair made movement impossible without further pain.
"Si! El tigre!" He bent his head and glared at her closely. "The jaguar!" he hissed. "A big hungry pussycat who would think a little girl a rare delicacy and would not care one little bit that she had shocking bright hair!"
"I can't help my hair!" she had cried, tears beginning to prick her eyes from panic and pain. "I'm English!"
"You are half Spanish," he had countered with dark narrowed eyes, but a little burst of misery had prompted her to defy him.
"I don't look it and I don't want to be! I didn't want to come here. I love my father and I don't like the gloomy house and the gloomy people in it!"
The Ortiga Marriage Page 2
