“Must have belonged to some Mexican dandy,” Carson mused, buttoning the tight brown breeches that flared at the bottom to accommodate his boot tops—calzoneras, Santos called them.
“Some charro left them,” Santos replied. “People are always running off and leaving things around here.” He led the way from the bathhouse, even as Carson finished buttoning the fancy white shirt.
Aurelia remained upstairs for lunch, but Santos’s disposition did not improve with her absence. If anything, he became more irritated as the meal wound down.
They discussed the mine, the problems, the possible folks involved. Still, Santos’s spirits did not lift.
Finally, when Santos suggested siesta, Carson spoke up. “Silence doesn’t become you, partner. How ’bout if we step behind the barn and settle this?”
Santos glared at him, startled.
Carson shrugged. “As I recall, you always preferred to settle disputes with your fists.”
“What dispute?”
Carson studied him frankly. “Your notion that I took advantage of your sister; my contention that I did not.”
“There’s nothing to settle. You stay away from her, I’ll be satisfied.”
Carson laughed. “And tired. Both of us. You’ll get fed up with shadowing me, me with being shadowed. You think I’m fool enough to search her out in this big mansion of a house and—?”
“That’s enough.” Santos scraped back his chair.
“Wait up,” Carson called.
Santos turned, glaring at him.
Carson crossed the room. “I’m not much on siesta. I’ll sleep tonight—in the bunkhouse. Why don’t you show me those horses Aurelia bragged on every time I complained about my feet hurting?”
Santos held his gaze a minute, then seemed to relax. “Why not?”
By the time they reached the stables, Santos had eased up a bit. “Maybe I am overreacting,” he agreed. “But, damnit, I’ve been worried sick ever since Pia told me about that good-for-nothing mine superintendent taking advantage of her.”
Carson scanned the lavish adobe stables, outfitted with the finest equipment, spit and polished to the last bridle and bit. “And now a good-for-nothing Texas Ranger?”
“You know better than that.”
“Do I?”
“I didn’t know it was you out there. I mean, I hoped. Great God, I hoped. After Pia described the prisoner, I hoped it was you, but I couldn’t be certain. You didn’t give your name.”
“You warned me not to.”
They stood at the corral rail watching several Andalusian horses. “You up to a ride?” Santos asked.
Carson laughed. “I’m always up to a ride. It’s the walking does me in.”
“Same ol’ compadre,” Santos mused.
“Yeah,” Carson agreed. “And she’s your same little sister. Only she’s grown up.”
Santos glared at him, then turned back to the horses, changing the subject. “Figure since it’s to be a charro wedding, I’d better show you a few of the tricks.”
“You show me tricks on a horse?”
“Watch me.” Santos mounted a dappled gray stallion. Carson stepped into the ornately tooled saddle of the bay gelding the stable hand had saddled for him. They rode into the arena, the horses high-stepping as if on parade.
Again Carson surveyed the compound—the big adobe house looming behind a grove of silver-leafed poplar trees, outbuildings of undetermined use on either side of it.
“Beats the hell out of the San Saba River country,” he mused.
Santos grunted. “The first event at the charriada is called a cala de caballo. That’s where you ride hell-bent-for-leather, as you say in Texas, the length of the arena and draw your mount around on a coin.”
Carson grinned. “I suppose you use a peso. How ’bout we try it with a centavo?”
“Brag now. Later you will be crawling.”
For the next hour they raced up and down the arena, spurring their mounts, wheeling their mounts, taking turns at the various events Santos described as part of a Mexican rodeo.
By the time they dismounted for water and to let the horses catch their breath, Santos seemed to have ridden his anxieties out.
“This wasn’t how I figured you’d be spending your wedding night,” Carson teased.
The joke fell on deaf ears. Santos glared in return. Suddenly, Carson was struck with the true nature of the problem. Santos was not merely being overprotective of a younger sister; he was protecting her from an undesirable match.
Carson’s gaze once again swept the opulent compound. “I’m not a fit suitor for her, huh?”
“Suitor? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Me, my past, my future. I’m not a desirable candidate for your sister’s hand.”
Santos’s jaws went slack. “Hand? As in marriage?”
“I told you she’s special.”
“You also told me you hadn’t…”
“I didn’t take advantage of her, Santos. Believe me. But I may have fallen in love with her. There’s a hell of a big difference between the two.”
“There is no difference at all.” The big man swung and hit his friend on the chin, dropping him to the corral dirt. “A man doesn’t fall in love in four days. That’s called lust—and lust generally leads to assault.”
Carson lay there, rubbing his chin. “I ought to get up and fight you for that, but you’d whip my butt. Never could beat you, not even when we were just partners. Now that we’re going to be brother—”
“Don’t say it, Jarrett. Don’t even think it.” Santos reached a hand to pull Carson to his feet. “And it has nothing to do with who or what you are.”
“It can’t have anything to do with what you think I did,” Carson objected, “because I did not assault her. That’s what we’re both after Quiroz for doing.”
“Yeah,” Santos admitted.
Carson cocked an eyebrow. “What does it have to do with?”
“She isn’t your type, Jarrett. That’s what I told Pia. You are sane and silent; Relie is…” His words softened and drifted off.
“Aurelia is a romantic.” Carson supplied Santos’s own word.
“She wants a life of high society, filled with balls and tea parties,” Santos explained.
Carson slapped him on the back. “She may think that’s what she wants, but she doesn’t. You should have seen the way she took to life on the trail. Why, she went hungry and thirsty a lot of the time, walked all night, stumbling through brush, for the most part. Never complained. I was the one who complained.” He chuckled, remembering. “She stayed after me about it, too.”
“You’re sure you didn’t—?”
“I’ll swear it on any man’s Bible. I did not take advantage of Aurelia.”
The incident cleared the air. Santos calmed down, returning to the partner Carson had ridden many a trail beside, drinking from the same gyp-water streams and belly-rotting bottles of redeye, chasing the same cattle, even a few of the same women.
Then Aurelia approached the corral, giving Carson cause to wonder whether he would ever be able to pull off the disguise of a virtuous beau.
Although her womanly charms had driven him to the point of madness on the trail, displayed as they were now in tight-fitting leather pants and silk shirt, he felt his body flush with desire at the first glance.
Turning away, he found Santos glaring a warning that would not have escaped a man of the cloth. “You have my permission to pursue a courtship with her, Jarrett, but it must be conducted according to our customs. Which means getting the approval of her father,” he grinned, “and a few dozen other things, like dueñas and—”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way, partner.” Carson extended his hand, sealing his agreement with the man he considered his best friend.
But when Aurelia drew nearer, he knew there was definitely another way he preferred to conduct the business of courting this passionate woman.
“So you decked h
im out like a charro?” she commented, perusing Carson in a provocative manner.
Carson studied his toes, deciding it best not to see how Santos took that.
“He’ll pass,” Santos said.
She laughed. “Until they see him ride.”
“What do you mean, see me ride?” Carson questioned. “What did I do wrong?”
“Well,” she hedged, grinning. “You could use some work on your turns.”
“I’m rusty from all that walking we did,” he retorted.
“And your hair is a lot shorter. It looks—”
“Don’t say it,” he rejoined.
“It’ll pass,” Santos told them, obviously trying to divert their attention. “The police in Catorce are looking for a gringo with long hair and a shaggy mustache.”
Carson jumped when Aurelia’s fingers touched his now-nude upper lip.
“I liked it,” she protested.
He jerked away from her touch. “Angel,” he admonished, then bit his offending tongue.
“I warned you, Jarrett,” Santos growled.
The clang of Tita’s dinner bell saved Carson from further confrontation at the moment. Aurelia fell into stride between the two of them as they gave their reins to a stable hand and headed for the house.
Before they stepped through the back gate, Santos touched Carson’s arm, drawing his attention. When Aurelia moved ahead a couple of paces, he growled at his guest.
“I don’t trust you nearly as far as I can throw you, Jarrett. Cross me on this, and I promise I will toss your carcass back across the Río Bravo.”
Chapter Eight
Aurelia awoke before dawn the next morning, overcome by anxiety. She had suddenly lost command of her life, and for the first time she could remember, she didn’t have the slightest notion how to regain it. The evening before had merely compounded the problem.
At Tita’s first call to dinner, she had left the corral and dashed upstairs to dress, returning to find Santos and Carson in the parlor sipping brandies.
Carson offered her one. Santos objected. She poured her own, then nearly choked on the fiery liquid at Carson’s unabashed perusal of her gown.
“I take it you approve of my metamorphosis.”
He bowed gallantly. “Most assuredly, ma’am. Yellow becomes you.”
She had worn a yellow silk dress with a light woolen rebozo to cover her shoulders. The mention of yellow reminded her of Pia’s wedding, of the yellow lace gown she would wear as Pia’s maid of honor.
Her head still reeled from discovering Carson to be the friend whom Santos had spoken of at such lengths. The friend who would stand beside her at her brother’s wedding.
Picturing Carson before the altar in the cathedral at Catorce gave her a queasy feeling. She supposed because she could not imagine him fitting in with eleven charros.
Yet he would, she thought, delighting in the way the trim calzoneras clung to his muscled thighs, at the expanse of his broad shoulders beneath the cropped jacket. He would look like one of them, and more. He would be the most handsome charro present.
It was her own desperate need to keep him from becoming one that confused her, that had led her to lash out at him at the corral, belittling his riding ability.
He rode superbly.
And he knew it. Her remark had not threatened his composure one whit; it had only heightened her own uneasiness at his transformation from cowboy to charro.
A transformation that threatened her in ways she could not interpret. Threatened, and at the same time exhilarated her.
Dinner progressed in a pleasant if awkward fashion. Santos escorted her to the comedor. Carson seated her, under her brother’s watchful eye.
Talk turned mostly to the situation at Catorce—settling the problem Aurelia and Carson faced with the Federales while not endangering the ongoing investigation at the mine.
When she learned Santos had been to Catorce, she asked about her parents, then was bitterly embarrassed at his reply.
“Mamá took to her bed over your kidnapping.”
“Kidnapping?”
He related Pia and Zita’s story, which embarrassed her even further. Hearing all this, Carson would think her the child Santos made her out to be. No one but a child would pull such a stupid prank.
“It wasn’t stupid,” Carson replied to her contention. “You saved my life, remember?”
She sighed. “There was surely another way.”
He shook his head. His warm eyes held hers, bringing the now-familiar sensations of comfort and strength combined with a deep sensual yearning. Carson opened his mouth, but after a glance at Santos, he closed it without speaking.
Santos cleared his throat and changed the subject. “We will leave for Catorce in the morning, but I have to return here in time to drive bulls to the feria at Guanajuato.”
For the remainder of the meal they talked bulls…raising them, fighting them. Aurelia listened and began to relax, enjoying the camaraderie between the two friends. As different as they appeared physically, the bond of friendship between them was evident.
But she had been lulled into a false feeling of easiness, she realized, for as soon as they left the comedor, Santos shooed her off to bed.
Aurelia turned on him with a ready lecture. “I am not a child, Santos Mazón, and I will not be dealt with like one.” She lifted her chin in defiance, but when she spoke, her voice trembled. “You have never treated me this way before.”
Santos eyed Carson, then took his sister by the arm. “Perhaps I have never had reason to—before. I’m sorry, Relie, but Jarrett and I have things to talk over, and you’ve had a rough few days. Say good night.”
Aurelia jerked her arm from his grasp, feeling her face flush.
Carson had held himself back, but at the hurt in her voice, he stepped forward, extending a bent elbow. “May I escort you, señorita?”
Gathering her skirts in both hands, she stomped off. “Both of you can go to hell.”
Carson caught up with her, taking her arm. When she turned to protest, her eyes found his. They were the same warm brown she had grown accustomed to. They perused her with the same hungry look.
“I can’t very well escort you home,” he said, “since you are already here. How about to the staircase?”
Hesitating, she felt a heavy tension grow around her. Finally, she took his arm and let him walk her across the wide tiled foyer. Santos’s bootsteps echoed behind them.
“What is the matter with you two?” she hissed under her breath. “You are acting crazy, both of you.”
“I know, angel,” he whispered. “We’ll work it out.”
She stopped at the staircase and faced him with a smile. His lips looked strange, different without the covering of hair. She wanted to touch them, but she dared not. Not with Santos only a few steps away, one boot propped on the edge of the fountain.
“You had better work it out,” she said. “I don’t intend to ride all the way to Catorce with the two of you goading each other the whole time. It’s a wonder you are friends.”
When she took a step to ascend the stairs, Santos crossed the foyer. “Wait up, Relie.” She heard him dismiss Carson, who retreated to the parlor, where he leaned against the arched doorway and watched them.
“Whether you know it or not,” Santos told her quietly, “you’re playing a dangerous game.”
“What do you want me to do?” she snapped. “Turn myself in to the Federales? In case you have already forgotten, I apologized.”
“Not that game,” Santos said. “The one you and Jarrett are playing. He’s my friend, Relie, and—”
“Carson and I are not playing games. We tease each other—like you and I used to tease each other until you decided to take on the role of substitute father.”
“You don’t understand, Relie.”
“You’re right, I don’t understand. It’s you and Carson who are playing some sort of vicious game. I don’t understand why you are at each other’s throats. N
o,” she corrected, “why you are at his throat.”
He sighed. “You’re leading him on, Relie, and I won’t have it. Dressing like that, showing off more than the law allows.”
She stood on the second step up, he on the foyer floor, and they glared at each other eye to eye. At his words, she reached down and hiked up the neckline of her dress an inch or two. “Better?” As she spoke, however, her gaze strayed over Santos’s shoulder. She caught Carson’s eye.
He winked.
She stared, wide-eyed. He held her gaze.
“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered to Santos.
“I know, Relie. But the poor fellow thinks he’s falling in love with you, and I don’t want to see him hurt.”
Her mouth went dry. Her eyes held Carson’s. Santos’s words echoed inside her head. “Love?”
She caught her bottom lip with her teeth.
“Love,” Santos repeated. “He asked for permission to court you.”
“Court?”
“Great God, Relie, don’t you understand anything? He wants to marry you.”
“Marry…me?”
Carson’s gaze held her mesmerized across the distance. Santos’s words struck a chord deep inside her.
“But I…”
“I know, Relie. You aren’t ready for marriage. You want to go to Guanajuato. You want to go to balls and parties and have lots of beaus.”
“Marry?…” Her breath came short. She jerked her arms from her brother’s hold and turned to race up the stairs. He pulled her back.
“He’s my friend, Relie. Don’t come between us.”
She looked into Santos’s pleading eyes. Santos, her brother, whom she loved like no one else on earth. “I won’t, Santos. I won’t.”
“Then tell him.”
“Tell him what?”
“That you aren’t ready. Tell him your plans.”
She stared at him, gripped in a nightmare she had not envisioned, but one she instinctively knew had been born in her own scheming mind. “How?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. But you have to do it. He won’t take it from me. I tried. You have to tell him.”
“How can I?” she retorted, knowing as the words formed and left her mouth that she was reacting like the child he thought she was, like the child he wanted to keep her. “How can I tell him something of that nature with you always at his side?”
Silver Surrender--Jarrett Family Sagas--Book Two Page 12
