The Bride Tamer

by Ann Major

  Dios! She could feel Cash’s eyes burning her butt the whole way.

  The cutest butt in Mérida, he’d said.

  She whirled. Yes, indeedy, his alert tiger gaze was glued to her backside. He laughed and lowered his gaze.

  But Eusebio didn’t. The chauffeur’s expression was too keen and speculative for her liking.

  Behind Vivian, the glittering green Caribbean stretched to a cloudless horizon. Not that Cash was looking at the aqua sea or admiring the town of Progreso, which he had come to see.

  Hell, he had eyes only for her. With the sea breeze in her red hair and the white huipil blowing about her breasts, and her skirt whipping her hips and slim legs, Vivian was beautiful. But it wasn’t just her beauty that got to him. It was the way her cheeks brightened every time he touched her or glanced at her. Her every blush, her every downcast glance to hide her true feelings made him remember their kiss. No one had ever been so responsive to him.

  He was glad chance had forced her to come with him.

  Behind her, waves rolled lazily up to the beach. In the distance a few swimmers splashed in the surf. The dense warm air, cooler here than in the city, smelled of salt, and mariachi music drifted from an open-air bar. The beach town had a laid-back feel.

  He didn’t want to sketch. He wanted to romance her, to get to know her slowly, to talk over beers and fried fish, to dance together afterward.

  If only he wasn’t so acutely aware of the dark figure leaning against the hood of Isabela’s parked Suburban, watching them as they strolled the promenade along the beach.

  “Before the hurricane, Isabela used to let Miguelito and me use her beach house anytime.” Vivian’s blue eyes sparkled.

  Cash frowned with annoyance as he glanced from Vivian to the chauffeur. He felt increasingly guilty about not feeling more for Isabela—the last thing he wanted to talk about was her.

  “Can’t we talk about something else?” he said. “I wanted to know about the henequen plantations we passed getting here, but, no, all you would talk about, the entire twenty-two-mile drive to this beach, was perfect Isabela. Surely no living mortal is as perfect as you describe her.”

  “Oh, but she is,” Vivian gushed.

  “Then why are you so anxious to leave her and Mexico?”

  “Not because she hasn’t been incredibly generous to me and to Miguelito. I just need to find myself. To do my own thing.”

  “Are you lost?”

  She ran her hand through her hair and turned away. “Maybe ‘homesick’ is a better word. Or ‘unchallenged.’”

  “How about ‘unfulfilled’?”

  She blushed at the charged innuendo. “When I came down here, it was to study for three months. I thought I would finish my degree before I married. Maybe work a while. But here I am—trapped by fate and bad judgment.”

  “Because you’re a dedicated mother of a darling little boy.”

  “You think he’s darling?” she asked.

  He looked beyond her to the four-mile-long pier the natives had had to build to reach deep water because the Yucatecan limestone shelf declined so gradually into the Caribbean.

  “You chose well,” he said, after a moment, “to put him first.”

  “Back to Isabela,” Vivian began.

  “Stop—”

  “I feel so guilty being here with you…when she can’t be.”

  He grabbed her hand and pressed her fingers inside the warmth of his. “I don’t want to think about her. I’m perfectly happy here with you.”

  Again she blushed as if his touch and his words gave her too much pleasure. “Me too. Which is the problem…” She bit her lip.

  He felt a warm flush of pleasure at the revelation that she liked him, and he drew her closer. The wind made her beautiful red hair ripple like a multicolored banner, the sunlight changing it from shimmering copper to auburn to honey gold and then back to copper again. Why the hell couldn’t he forget seeing her naked or kissing her? Or how much fun it had been to tease her over breakfast?

  “No more talk about Isabela,” he whispered, letting her go but continuing to stare into her eyes.

  “She’s your future bride,” she whispered. “And she’s better to me than any sister ever could be.”

  “Right,” he agreed in a bored tone. “But since we’re here in Progreso, and she’s not, maybe you wouldn’t mind playing tourist guide and telling me a few things about the town.”

  “For instance?”

  “Where the hell is everybody?” Cash pointed to the empty street and the Caribbean. “I thought Progreso was a resort like Cancún.”

  “It is, but on a smaller scale. Cancún is more for foreigners. This is for Mexicans.”

  “Hell, it’s a village compared to a real Mexican beach resort,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t say that in the summer when all of Mérida is here.”

  “Well, nobody’s here today.”

  Her deep blue eyes seemed to speak to him. “Nobody but us.”

  Quickly she averted her eyes. “Puerto Progreso was built in the mid-nineteenth century to ship henequen to the rest of the world. There? Do I sound like a proper tourist guide?”

  “Keep going.”

  “The henequen plants—you saw them growing—produce strong fibers that can be used in twine-and rope-making.”

  “I read synthetics have largely destroyed the industry.” His eyes caressed her.

  “Hence—Progreso is a lazy beach town.”

  “The hotels are so small,” he said, wondering if he couldn’t send Eusebio on some sort of errand.

  “Intimate,” she corrected. “It’s the middle of the week and not yet high season. Isabela loves it here. You should see her….”

  Vivian began to repeat her monologue about what a perfect wife Isabela would make.

  He nodded. “But Isabela isn’t here.” His gaze skimmed her mouth. “You are.”

  She licked her lips and cast a sideways glance toward Eusebio, who was watching them.

  “You don’t have to use Isabela to erect a wall between us,” he said.

  “I would never forgive myself if I ruined her chances.” She broke away from him and moved quickly toward the SUV.

  Eusebio smiled, and Cash watched the way the loose, white huipil shivered around her waist as she ran. Her black skirt fluttered against her knees, shaping itself against her hips. Since he’d seen her naked, it wasn’t hard to imagine her naked with the green Caribbean sparkling beyond her.

  Botticelli’s vision of Aphrodite stepping out of the sea sprang to mind. Vivian was a far more glorious depiction of Venus than the master’s rendition. At least Cash thought so.

  Vivian. Venus. God, what he would give to be able to rip those awful, embroidered, handmade rags from the perfection of her body.

  He wanted his wife in sleek, figure-fitting, designer gowns…. In the finest jewels. She would be a queen.

  Wife? The truly crazy notion slammed him like a fist to his solar plexus, and he stopped, watching her as she climbed into the SUV. Even when she hung her head out the open window and smiled at him, he stayed put.

  Her white smile warmed him. But the warm quickening that that sweet little smile caused was just physical, he told himself as he began walking toward her again—just something he needed to fill his loneliness.

  Why then did he feel as if his world had shifted? As if he could finally see light at the end of a tunnel instead of perpetual darkness.

  He wanted her, not Isabela.

  He wanted her despite the fact that she was a poor divorcée, a nobody. Despite the fact she scarcely had any formal education. She was a poor girl and the mother of a sweet, trusting little boy.

  She was completely unacceptable to his family. What would Jake, his brother, the ambitious senator, make of her?

  Hell, who gave his cold family the right to make the rules he lived by?

  When Vivian beat on the side of her door like it was a drum and called to him to hurry, he felt himself in
the grip of something that felt an awful lot like destiny.

  Leo believed fate was stronger than human will. Cash was too rational to entertain such an idea. But what if a rational man struck a compromise with the gods?

  Cash had come here for a bride. Why not Vivian?

  Why the hell not?

  Nine

  It is strange how life goes along in a familiar pattern, and then it changes—sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly. For Vivian that afternoon with Cash in Progreso was such a day.

  One minute she was standing on the Malecón with Cash, determined to be loyal to Isabela and resist him, and in the next she was in the Suburban smiling at him until his dark face lit up and his fierce grin thrilled her to the point of insanity.

  Suddenly her spirits were rocketing higher than the sun. Her loneliness and her lack of fulfillment, her desire to escape Mexico and become somebody on her own, and even her fear of what she felt for him, were all eclipsed by something grander and more mysterious.

  She didn’t stop smiling until he swung his tall frame into the back seat beside her. Cash asked her about her uncle and New Orleans, and she found herself talking easily about the fact she’d grown up with “two daddies.” She spoke of her old interest in archaeology, and in the Mayans, and of her more recent work with the Mayan villagers. She said maybe on their way home they could stop at one of the villages where she worked and he could meet the people.

  “You’d do that—even if I ruined your reputation in the market?”

  She went still for a moment. Then she told him about Mexico and how a thousand years of western civilization was but a thin veneer on top of ancient traditions.

  “So, the Mexican is never what you think he is or what he says he is,” she said in her best schoolteacher voice.

  Cash told her he wanted more than anything to meet her Mayan students. He suggested that perhaps she had a vocation for social work, and she said she found satisfaction in helping others, especially in teaching.

  “I enjoy working with them,” she said as they drove down the sandy lanes of the town.

  He told her of his own life. He’d been a lonely little boy who’d grown up motherless in vast houses. He’d known the servants better than he’d known his own father. Not that his father had been cruel; he’d simply been consumed by making money. Eagerly she listened as Cash told her about the projects he had built in Paris, Rome, London, and most recently Florence, of the proposal he’d lost in Manhattan.

  When they’d driven through the narrow back streets of the town as well as the main street along the ocean, she said, “Is there anything else you need to do or see?”

  He stared at her and said, “Most definitely.”

  She blushed. “Before we go to the beach house, I want to take you shopping at a store and the market.”

  “I’m not much of a shopper,” Cash said. “Besides, because of you, I bought everybody I know hats—that are probably too small.”

  She laughed. “I’ll shop, you watch.”

  He followed her into an open-air market and then to a small tienda across the street where she bought flowers and two disposable cameras. No sooner were they at Isabela’s beach house—built on three levels so it wouldn’t sprawl across the sandy lot—than she spread their picnic things out on a table in the back courtyard and began to take pictures of everything. First, she had to get shots of a pair of pink flamingos in the back gardens. Then she captured numerous angles of Isabela’s ruined mansion, but last and most lingeringly of all, she took pictures of him.

  “Why the camera?” he demanded between bites of banana when she said “smile.” He was on a break between sketches of the cantilevered pavilions over the pool, so he humored her with silly faces and big grins.

  “Pictures capture time. They help me remember special moments,” she said. “And pictures tell stories.”

  He jumped up and grabbed the camera from her. “Mind if I capture a precious memory or two?”

  She held up her hands, and he snapped a picture of her. Then she blushed, and he knelt and took five or six more. When she was thoroughly embarrassed, he seized her by the hand and led her over to Eusebio and asked the chauffeur to photograph them together.

  Later, after he’d sketched the outside, she unlocked the house and they climbed the stairs to the living and dining areas as well as the master bedroom, which were all on the top level.

  “Since salt corrodes metal and Sheetrock is so absorbent, Isabela’s father used concrete and stone as the primary materials in the construction,” she said, as if he couldn’t see this for himself.

  The second level housed four more bedrooms, with pavilions at each end of the house cantilevered like balconies over the pool. The glass had been blown out of all the windows; the rooms were vacant shells.

  “Hurricanes are terrible here,” she said as they made their way through the hauntingly exquisite ruin. “Violent and unpredictable.”

  “A force of nature. Like Mexico’s ancient gods,” he said huskily as they descended to the lower level.

  “When I am done,” he said softly, “the house will be more beautiful than before.”

  Excited and inspired, whether by her or by the place, he sat down on a bottom stair and began to draw. She watched him, fascinated as his dark hand skimmed over sheets of paper leaving deft, dramatic black lines. But finally the lure of the green water was too much. The sun would soon be down and her chance to swim lost, so she left him to put her suit on and go for a dip.

  Shedding her huipil and black skirt on the beach and exposing the red bikini underneath, she walked to the water’s edge. Never before had the wet sand beneath her toes felt so silky and warm. She scrunched her toes into it. Glancing back at the house she caught Cash watching her from one of the pavilions.

  Her body heated, remembering as bodies do, the wild, heady pleasure of his mouth on hers, the exact taste and texture of his tongue sliding inside her lips, the feel of his callused fingers on her skin as his arms wrapped around her. Other physical memories, like the lava heat of his body against hers, bombarded her.

  Isabela, why did you make me come here?

  Vivian was weak. She couldn’t look at him without remembering seeing him naked, without remembering his kisses. To distract herself she splashed into the waves and swam back and forth in the warm salty sea.

  Swimming in those clear waters was pure bliss. It was as if she became the sea. She swam for at least thirty minutes before she saw him running across the beach toward the water, wearing his swimsuit. He was dark, muscular and shapely—perfect. He plunged into the surf and swam toward her, his strong, brown arms slicing the water with remarkable skill. She couldn’t help being impressed by the fact he was a powerful swimmer.

  “Hi,” she said when he reached her and stood up, shaking himself like an overgrown puppy. “You’re supposed to be working.”

  “I saw you out here and couldn’t resist temptation.”

  When his eyes lingered on her bikini top, she felt like stripping it off and swimming naked. On that thought, she swam away from him again, but he chased after her, catching her easily, grabbing her by the ankle and then slowing his strokes to match hers.

  They swam for a long time, both above the water and beneath it, like two dolphins cavorting. When she’d had enough, she stood up. Without a word she began strolling languidly toward shore.

  He paddled up behind her and splashed her to get her attention. She whirled and pretended to be annoyed, but he merely grinned and splashed her again. When he wouldn’t stop, she screamed, but he just splashed her harder. The raucous water fight that ensued left them breathless with laughter.

  Only when she called for a truce did he quit. For a moment they stood breathing heavily in the sunlight, their wet bodies glistening, each too aware of the forbidden excitement being together caused.

  “The less you wear, the better you look,” he said.

  “Don’t ruin everything—”

  “If you took off
your top, you’d look like Aphrodite coming out of the sea.”

  To tempt him, she fingered the strap of her bikini top.

  Then, as if he had rights he didn’t have, he moved toward her and touched her cheek with his fingertips. Next he ran his thumb over her lips. She drew his thumb into her mouth and sucked on it. He was warm, as warm as the salty sea.

  His hand went lower, along the line of her cheek, down her throat, feeling its way along the supple curve of her shoulder, down to the strap of her bikini, which he lowered over her arm.

  “I want to kiss you again so much,” he said in a husky tone. His eyes grew tender. “And I don’t want to ever stop.”

  Even before he spoke, she could feel her body taking charge. It remembered every thrill she’d experienced with him—from his striptease in the pool house to his kiss in the oven-like market.

  “If you were Isabela, I’d kiss you,” he said.

  “But I’m not. So a kiss isn’t allowed.”

  “Says who?”

  She couldn’t quit staring at his wide shoulders or at his mouth.

  Any more than he could stop staring at hers. “If you were Isabela, you’d let me,” he whispered, moving closer, lifting the chain from her throat. “Very pretty.”

  “A gift from Isabela. Speaking of Isabela, she’s probably been calling me on my cell phone.”

  “I want you,” he said baldly.

  “But you’ll marry her. And Eusebio might be—”

  “To hell with them. What about us?”

  “This morning we made a plan—”

  “Before I realized how deeply I felt about you.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe this, then.”

  She started to protest, but Cash pulled her down into the surf and kissed her before she could argue. Then her body took over, and the warm water rushed over them. She kissed him back, this time with less resistance.

  In the market he’d broken down the walls and defenses that had taken her years to erect. As the surf broke over them, rocking their bodies together, she felt overrun, and she no longer had the presence of mind to care. Her feelings for Cash were so sweet and wickedly wild and all-consuming, it was impossible to think of Isabela.