by Janet Dailey
She felt so vulnerable now, so open to more hurt, yet she didn’t see how she could leave. If she changed her plans, it could be construed as an admission that he had been right all along. It would be an admission. She gritted her teeth to hold back the frustrated sobs rising in her throat.
The steering wheel was nearly jerked out of her hands as the front tires hit another of the many holes in the rutted track. Luz managed to hold on to it and keep the car heading straight down the muddy road. She had no sense of how far she’d come nor how long she’d been bouncing and sloshing over the track. Gray rain surrounded her, the estancia buildings long out of sight. She felt the pull of the mud dragging at the car and realized she didn’t dare slow down.
The road had run straight across the level ground for so long that Luz had become lulled by it. When it made a bend to the right, she wasn’t prepared for it. With the combination of speed and obscuring rain, she was on the curve almost before she saw it coming. She couldn’t hold the car on the mud-slick track. It skidded off the road into sodden grass. Instinctively, she let up on the accelerator and turned the car in a swinging arc to get back on the muddy trail. But when the wheels hit the thick muck at the car’s reduced speed, they lost traction. Without the car’s momentum to compensate for the sucking drag, they started spinning. Luz tried to control the wild fish-tailing and keep the car plowing forward, but the speedometer needle kept dipping lower and lower.
Finally, the tires spun uselessly. No matter how much she gunned the motor, the car wasn’t going anywhere. It was hopelessly stuck. Luz slumped back in the driver’s seat and automatically shifted it into park. The subdued rumble of the idling engine was drowned by the sound of the beating rain and the rhythmic slap-slap of the windshield wipers.
“Damn.” She clenched the steering wheel, shaking the immovable object in frustration while more tears scorched her eyes. “Stupid. Stupid.” She cursed the imprudent decision that had taken her down this road.
Blinking to clear the hot tears from her eyes, she looked through the rain veil at the sweep of land in front and to the sides of the car. It was a desolate stretch, completely empty except for a strange-looking tree not far from the road. There was a small adobe dwelling of some sort beneath its branches, and a faint trail leading to it. It was nearly as crude as that shanty section of Buenos Aires they’d driven through. Maybe one of the estancia workers lived there, although Luz couldn’t think why anyone would live so far from the headquarters.
The building represented an outside chance for help to get the car unstuck. The alternatives were either to wait for someone to come looking for her or to walk back in this downpour—however far it was—to the estancia. Neither of those appealed to her. She’d gotten herself into this, and she’d rather get out of it on her own.
Luz switched off the motor and took hold of the door handle. After an instant’s hesitation, she opened it and plunged into the sheeting rain. Her feet sank into the mire almost to the tops of her shoes. With her head down to protect her eyes from the pelting raindrops, she slogged through the mud to the side of the road and looked up once to get her bearings on the crude dwelling half hidden by the broad tree trunk. When she reached the narrow, overgrown footpath, she ran as fast as the slippery footing allowed.
The large oval leaves of the tree broke some of the rain’s force once she ducked under its branches to hurry to the door. The humid air reeked with some strong, offensive odor. Luz unconsciously held her breath as she passed the swollen base of the towering tree.
“Hello!” When she pounded on the makeshift wooden door, it bounced freely in its rotting frame. It wasn’t latched. Luz hesitated only a second, then stepped quickly inside and out of the rain that had soaked her to the skin. “Hello.” Her voice faded.
The leaking metal roof, the broken window panes and tumbledown benches informed her the place had been long abandoned. The door swung shut with a bang behind her and Luz jumped at the sound. Shaking the rain off her hand and arms, she moved cautiously into the middle of the one-room shack. As her eyes became accustomed to the gloom, she noticed a primitive-looking cot in a dark corner, covered with a lumpy straw mattress that seemed a bed more suitable for rodents than for people. A scurrying sound came from a pile of debris on the opposite side of the room, confirming her suspicions. She crossed to the window that faced the road, avoiding the pieces of glass on the tamped-earth floor. The mired car was a forlorn mudcoated lump against the iron-gray clouds.
The rain splattered loudly on the metal roof, a combination of raindrops and runoff from the crowning tree branches overhead. A steady plop-plop punctuated the heavy patter, the drips of a leaky roof. Luz lifted aside the wet hair plastered to the sides of her face and neck and pushed it back, conscious of her sopped clothes and the wet patch she was making on the dirt floor. She shivered with the damp chill invading her skin and turned, nearly stumbling over a broken chair. Its back was broken and one leg was canted at an odd angle, but its seat and three legs were intact.
It was relatively dry inside the abandoned building, and she had a place to sit. Instead of slogging back to the car in that downpour, she decided to wait in the adobe hut, at least until the rain let up. Cautiously, Luz sat down on the chair, testing its solidness. Satisfied that it would hold her weight, she huddled in the chair and rubbed her arms to stir her circulation.
She thought she heard a noise, and paused to listen, but it was difficult to hear anything but the incessant rattle of the rain on the corrugated metal roof. She huddled into a tight ball again. A second later, Luz was certain she heard someone shouting her name. Frowning, she stood up and moved to the window facing the road. A truck was parked behind her car.
As she turned, the door burst open. “Luz!” Raul stopped abruptly inside the door, his head coming up like an animal unexpectedly finding its quarry.
“How did you know I’d be here?” Of all the people who could have found her why did it have to be him?
“These dirt roads often become impassable in a hard rain.” He stepped farther into the shack and ran a hand over his face, scraping off the rainwater. “When Carlos told me you took this road instead of driving to the highway, I knew you would have trouble. Would you prefer that I had left you stranded here alone?”
“No.” Luz swung back to stare out the window and protectively hugged her arms around her middle. “It was stupid of me to drive off like that,” she admitted tightly before he could say it.
“It was.”
“You didn’t have to agree!” She glared at him.
“If I agree, I am wrong. If I disagree, I am wrong, too. No matter which I said, I would be wrong,” Raul muttered in exasperation.
“That’s true, so you should have said nothing,” Luz snapped, then turned aside again, aware of how bedraggled she looked with her wet hair and wet clothes. She wiped at the undersides of her eyes, afraid her mascara had run. “Since you’ve come to take me back to the estancia, let’s go.”
“We will wait until the rain lets up. It won’t be long.”
She was not as confident as he was that the rain would soon diminish. “All I want to do is get out of here. I’m wet, cold, and uncomfortable.”
“And you have the disposition of a wet cat,” he retorted and turned away from her.
Luz silently acknowledged that she was guilty of hissing at him like some foul-tempered feline. She struggled to control those self-protective instincts that prompted her to lash out and keep him at a distance. She watched him rummage through the pile of trash on the floor. His shirt and jacket clung to his shoulders and back like a second skin, outlining the curve of his long spine and moving with the ripple of his muscles.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Looking for things to burn so we can build a fire.” Crouching, he pivoted on one foot to stack an assortment of rags, broken pieces of furniture, and rotting planks to one side.
“Where? There isn’t a fireplace.” Luz glanced around the four w
alls again to see if she had missed something he had seen.
“I will make the fire here.” Using the rags and jagged splinters of wood for kindling, he arranged them in the center of the earth floor. “The smoke has many ways out through the holes in the roof and the windows.”
The chilling dampness of her clothes raised the flesh beneath. Luz welcomed the prospect of a fire and dragged the broken-legged chair closer to the middle. As she sat down, Raul tore a long strip from a rag and used the lighter from his shirt pocket to set it on fire, then laid it atop the kindling and added large splinters and chips of rotten wood crosswise on top of that. Water dripped from the wet tendrils of his dark hair when he bent to blow on the spreading red embers. Luz resisted the impulse to reach out and smooth those wet-black strands off his forehead. She concentrated her attention instead on the tiny flame darting around the wood.
“I thought somebody lived here,” she said. “I thought he might help me get the car out of the mud.”
“When you were not in the car, or walking on the road, I guessed you must have come here.” Raul straightened, sitting back on one heel, and let the small fire get a good start before he added more fuel. “Although I could not be sure you were not walking in the opposite direction.”
“I was angry.” Luz offered no apology for it either. Her pride was still smarting from their argument in the polo pit.
“I noticed,” he commented dryly.
She didn’t want that subject introduced again, not even by inference. “What is this place?” she demanded instead. “An old gaucho’s hut, I suppose.”
“You would not have a chair to sit on if that were so.” His mouth slanted in a line that held little warmth and even less humor. “The gauchos used ox skulls for their chairs. This place long ago belonged to a farmer. It has been empty for years. Carlos Rafferty tells me a family named Ortega lived here before I came, but they left more than ten years ago to go to Buenos Aires to find work.”
Raul snapped two thin boards across his knee, then added them to the small blaze. When he looked up, it was to glance slowly around the room, his expression thoughtful and distant. His gaze encountered her curious stare, and he turned his attention once again to the fire.
“When I was a small boy, I lived in a place like this one … maybe bigger. Or maybe I was small and it looked bigger.”
She leaned closer to the growing fire and held her hands over the small flames, then rubbed them briskly together to spread the warmth. “When I was little, Hopeworth Manor always seemed so big and grand to me,” Luz remembered with a vague smile. “It is big, but the staircase doesn’t seem quite as tall anymore and the rooms don’t seem quite as huge. A child’s perspective of size is always larger than reality.”
“Yes.”
The rain continued its ceaseless hammering on the roof while its whispering fall outside the adobe walls drifted past the jagged panes of the broken windows. The faint crackle of the fire was a warm sound; Luz suppressed a shiver and inched closer to it. Its meager heat almost made her feel colder. Her glance strayed to Raul. His wet skin glistened in the firelight, the black of his brow and his thick, stubby lashes standing out darkly against the shiny tan. She tried to imagine him as a small boy playing in a room like this, but an image wouldn’t come. Something in the relentless blue of his eyes told her he hadn’t known much softness or laughter in his life.
“Did you ever dream when you moved to Buenos Aires with your mother that you’d become a well-known polo player someday?” she mused.
“No.” He stacked more wood on the fire, propping them against each other like teepee poles. “We have not settled this situation with your son.”
CHAPTER XXI
Luz was on her feet in an instant, her abruptness knocking over the wobbly chair. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Every muscle in her body felt rigid as she walked away from the fire and Raul to stand at the window, fighting the tremors that were part anger and part chill.
“We must resolve this if he is to learn,” Raul insisted firmly.
“And your interpretation of ‘resolve’ is for me to stay away from the training,” she stated, then remembered her parting ultimatum. “Or do you want me to leave completely?” She challenged him with it again, angling her body toward him.
He didn’t move from his crouched position by the fire, balanced on one foot with one leg drawn under him, allowing him to rest on his heel. “I want to teach your son polo. I have told you that it is impossible with your presence distracting him. I think the choice now becomes yours.”
“What choice? Am I supposed to quietly accept being banned from watching my own son practice?”
“Why did you allow him to attend this school?” he questioned.
“So he could improve his polo game.” Her answer was quick and definite. “I thought you understood that in Paris.”
“Then why are you making it difficult for him now?”
“I’m not!”
“You are.” He breathed in deeply, turning his head away as if to control an answering surge of anger. “Come back to the fire, Señora Thomas, before those wet clothes chill you to the bone,” Raul instructed in a perfectly reasonable tone.
But the formal use of her name made her pause. When he’d burst into the cabin a few minutes ago, he had called her Luz. She walked slowly back while he reached over and righted her chair. She wished she hadn’t remembered that. She wished it didn’t matter to her.
Raul waited until she had sat down. “Your knowledge of polo is adequate,” he began. “It is considerably better than most, which I am sure is to the credit of Jake Kincaid. However, it is not on a professional level.”
“I never claimed it was,” Luz said stiffly.
“In the past, you have probably been very helpful to Rob. I also recall our conversation in Paris. You told me you only wanted the best for your son. Did you mean that?” he challenged.
“Yes.”
“Then you must turn his instruction over to me. You cannot coach him in the things I can teach him. If you try, you will slow his progress,” Raul stated firmly. “Is this what you want?”
“Of course it isn’t.” She tightly interlocked her fingers. Her elbows rested on her knees as she bent close to the fire, keeping her head down.
“Two people cannot tell him how to do the same thing. There must be one authority. When a child goes to a school, he is removed from his parents so that the instructor can have authority over him. If the child were taught in the home, there would be conflict. The parent could say this is right or this is wrong, and the child might believe that until the teacher could show him differently. Time is lost. It is the same here when you sit on the sidelines.”
“I’m not trying to make it harder for him. I only want to help,” Luz insisted, yet she saw the truth in what he said.
“Then help him by staying away. What I am asking is not unreasonable.” He stirred the fire with a stick, pushing the halfburned wood into the glowing center. “I am not saying you cannot talk to him about what he has learned or how a session went, only that you do not attend.”
“I understand what you’re saying, but I know Rob better than you do.”
“And you make allowances that a teacher would not, no?”
“Yes.” She knew how Rob would push himself, sometimes trying too hard, like today.
“Is that good or bad?”
“I don’t know.” The drumming rain on the metal roof seemed to echo the confused pounding in her head. “My children are very important to me. You’re not a mother, so I doubt if you can understand that.”
“When your husband left, you made them your life, no?” It was a challenging statement, and Luz caught the rough edge in his voice. There was a tightness to his mouth. “A mother’s love can also smother.”
“They’re all I have,” she answered defensively while wondering if he was speaking from personal experience.
“You have yourself.” A hard, steady quality was in
his gaze, which Luz found impossible to hold. Her eyes skittered away from him.
The fire crackled and popped. Its radiating heat touched more of her body now. She unzipped her jacket and peeled the wet sleeves down her arms, removing the barrier so more of the warmth could reach her skin. She hung the jacket on her knees so that the fire could dry it and stared into the dancing flames.
There was no use explaining to a man who was obviously so self-sufficient how incomplete she felt having only herself. There were so many needs that went unfulfilled. The absence of physical contact was an agony—not sex as much as a caring touch, or a pair of arms around her, a someone just to hold her. She needed to be loved. Rob and Trisha were all she had to fulfill that need.
Aware of the lengthening silence between them, she breathed in deeply, inhaling the smell of woodsmoke. Its wispy trail drifted to the broken window near the door. Her gaze followed its path until it disappeared in the falling rain. The fat, gnarled trunk of the tree outside the adobe hut was visible through the downpour.
“What’s that smell outside?” She remembered the vile odor she’d noticed when she’d first reached the cabin and asked about it, avoiding sensitive subjects.
“El ombu. I think you call it an umbra tree.” Raul shifted to add more wood to the fire. “When the Spanish first came to the Pampa, the ombu was the only tree that grew here. The ones you see around the estancias were all brought from Europe. They are not native to the Pampa, only the ombu. In Spanish, it is known as belasombra, which means ‘beautiful shade.’ In the heat of summer, crossing this flat grassland, it must have seemed like that.”
“And it gives off that odor?” She frowned.
“Sí. The sap, if you rub it on your skin, will keep away the insects.” He straightened and walked over to a work table along the wall, then dragged it close to the fire.
Luz thought he intended to break it into firewood. Instead he removed his jacket and hung it on a corner to dry. When he turned, he held out his hand, offering to take hers. She gave it to him. Something in the way he looked at her made Luz conscious again of her appearance. She bent her head to avoid his gaze and ran her fingers through the stringy wetness of her hair.
