“Tomboy,” she supplied, matching his friendly smile. “Yes. Though I'm surprised you would remember.”
“Nick never let me forget. It was beyond his realm of comprehension that a girl like you existed.”
“He talked about me to you?”
“He still does. And I must confess, Amanda, that I was prepared not to like you.”
Her eyes opened wide. “Nick’s description was not flattering, I take it?”
“On the contrary, he's quite infatuated with you.” Paul leaned forward on the saddle horn. His eyes swept over her with the practice of a man who has met and entertained many women. And yet there was a sadness in them, and she instantly guessed he still mourned his dead wife. “Shall I be blunt?” he asked.
"By all means.”
“I envisioned you as a homewrecker. Oh, I know Nick’s had other women in his life since he and Danielle have gone their separate ways. But you’re the first woman he ever brought to the Stronghold. When he called Washington and asked me to fly down to meet you over the Thanksgiving weekend—well, I was quite prepared to dislike you. In fact, I had almost decided not to come and only at the last minute changed my mind.”
She bristled. ‘‘'What's between Nick and myself is not quite what it seems.”
Paul chuckled. “So I’ve learned. Nick informed me—in his most irritating manner, this morning—that you have no interest in becoming his mistress. At first I marked this as a feminine ploy calculated to snare my stepbrother. Then Nick told me that you believe your grandmother was the rightful heir to the Stronghold.”
‘‘Not believe—I know." She shrugged. ‘‘But there is no way I can prove it.”
“So you will settle for tormenting Nick?”
“To match your bluntness, yes.”
“Marvelous. My stepbrother deserves to have some of his male arrogance deflated. And you seem to make the perfect adversary. I'm going to like you very much, Amanda Shima.”
CHAPTER 51
Amanda and Paul rode back to the Stronghold together, friends now, talking of trivial things. Nick was in the stables checking out the shoe of the third horse. At their approach he set the hoof down and rose, brushing off the dust and hay from his jeans. The way they hugged his hips, the way the plaid cotton shirt stretched tautly across the enormous bull-like shoulders, was too much. His raw masculine virility was blatant, overwhelming.
He raised a brow when Paul helped her down from her mount. “So she's beguiled you also?" he asked his stepbrother with a half-grin, half-sneer.
“So much that I'm setting myself up as her protector."
Nick glanced at her but only said, “Watch out, Paul. She stings.” He took the saddle from the stable railing and slung it over his mount. “Either of you want to join me?” His mocking look challenged her, and she was relieved when Paul answered first. “Not me. I’ve got some briefs I’ve got to cover before Monday.”
“I need to check on Father,” she hedged.
Paul retreated to the library that was in the Stronghold’s new addition, and she played a game of chess with her father before he retired to his room for a nap. The rest of the afternoon she spent exploring the Stronghold. Her hands ran lovingly over the pockmarked walls, and her eyes committed to memory the tree-shaded courtyard and the old one-eyed adobe ovens. One did not see those reminders of an Old World’s Shangri-la any more.
Nick found her in the kitchen looking over the copper and wooden utensils that had to be almost a hundred years old. “Didn't the Bible warn against idol worship?” he asked gruffly.
She whirled, and he trapped her against the butcher-block counter, hands at either side of her hips. “Isn’t that what you’re doing—making an idol of this place?”
“And what did the Bible have to say about adultery?” she snapped.
The door opened, and Paul stuck his head inside. “Oh, pardon me. What I was going to say can wait until later, Nick.”
“No, that’s all right,” she said. “Go ahead, Paul.” She glared at Nick. “We’re finished.”
Paul saved dinner from being an uncomfortable challenge between Nick and herself by keeping the conversation on light topics. Only once did he become serious, when he addressed her father on the war.
“I think you should know. Mr. Shima, though it is still highly confidential, that the United States is imminently prepared to enter the war against Japan. Even at this minute our forces are on standby alert at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. Japan has been building up her arsenal in the Pacific. I think you can appreciate how this could affect you and Amanda. Nick and I’ve talked about the results here in the United States—about what a declaration of war against Japan could mean to you—but Nick tells me you refuse to accept his aid.”
“That is so,” her father said.
Nick sat opposite her, saying nothing. The smoke from his after-dinner cigarette veiled his gambler’s eyes, but she knew that he watched her. What had prompted him to speak to Paul? Or was Paul speaking purely out of his own concern now?
Paul leaned forward, his handsomely aristocratic face set in solemn lines. “I hope you'll reconsider, Mr. Shima. Nick is here close by, where he could do something immediately if the need arose.”
‘‘We appreciate your concern,” was all her father would say. She knew he was too proud ever to accept help. And then again, she did not think he really believed—nor did she—that anything could occur in America so catastrophic as to reduce them to begging for help.
Nick and Paul lingered over after-dinner liqueur to talk, and she and her father excused themselves to retire for the evening. She thought for certain she would have no trouble sleeping. Lying in bed, she wondered how her grandmother had kept warm during the winter months when the weather happened to be harsh, for there was no fireplace in the room. She snuggled deeper beneath the comforter, though it was not really cold.
She could just imagine a warming pan at the bottom of the bed, or maybe even a hot brick or hot-water bottle . . . just as she could imagine the footsteps of Law Davalos passing outside her grandmother’s door . . . as she suspected Nick's would.
But the footsteps never came, and the hours ticked by. She was wretched. It was Nick's fault for pounding this feeling, this miserable, debilitating desire, into her.
At last she bounded from the bed and stormed out of the bedroom without even bothering to throw on the rose-pink robe that matched her pajamas. The nippy night air cleared the cobwebs from her mind but not the heat from her body. Overhead the sky was studded with diamonds. Yet she cared not, nor did she notice the fragrant scent of the oleander that mixed with the fecund odor of the warm earth drifting from the courtyard.
She stalked down the open portico to Nick’s room and rapped on the door. It opened immediately. The room was dark, but she could still make out that he wore only his jeans. His bare skin glowed where the black hair did not whorl about his chest. He stood back, saying nothing, and let her pass by him. Closing the door, he flipped on a dim lamp.
She whirled on him. "I came to tell you that it’s not worth it! Staying here at the Stronghold is not worth putting up with you! I want to leave—first thing tomorrow morning!”
He looked at her face framed by the sleek midnight hair that brushed the curve of her hips. “How can any woman fire me up the way you do, standing there in those damned virginal pajamas?” He turned away and sat down on the edge of the tumbled bed. ‘‘All right,” he said, as he removed first one boot, then the other. ‘‘Paul’ll take you back tomorrow.”
He stood up and began to unzip the jeans. She froze. That terrible gnawing was still between her legs. Dammit, why did she have to want him every time she was around him? He made her behave just like the animal he was. Well, she had more self-control. She'd show him she was stronger, more civilized! She refused to move while he stripped out of the jeans. Then she audibly gasped in the tense silence of the room. He wore no undershorts! He was exposed, engorged!
He never took his
eyes off her the entire time. ‘‘I know why you came,” he grated.
She pivoted and streaked for the door, but he reached it with her, trapping her. Too proud to scream, she stood rigid as his hands divested her of the pajama top. It dropped to her bare feet. He scooped her up and crossed to the bed, dumping her on it. She glared up at him with eyes that would have slashed him to ribbons had they been stilettoes. He jerked the bottoms off and stood looking down at her naked body.
She knew she should spring up now, run, naked, from the room while she still had a chance. “You beast! You damn rutting bull!”
He ignored her and mounted her, tearing into her. A soft moan escaped her lips as the pain winged through her. She tried to shove away the torso that plunged and hammered at her. But there was no halting it. And then she didn’t care. The pain was gone, and he was giving only pleasure. It was all wrong, but it didn’t matter. Not at that moment. Only the intense, breathtaking sensation. The terrible, engulfing need. He drove into her and pulled back, and she followed, not wanting to lose him. And then he would slam against her again.
She hated him! Hated him! Still, she could not help herself. Helplessly she followed his lead. Had to. The whole room was afire with their savage battle of desire. She was afire. Only he could quench it.
She exploded, tightening about him, drawing him into her. And he exploded. “Dear God,” he whispered, his breath hot against her face, “it seems like I’ve waited forever—for eternity—for you. ’ ’
She looked up at him—at the strength in the contour of his bones, the roughness in the shadowy stubble of his jaw. Nick Godwin was very real, a very powerful force out of the present, not the past. Yet it was the past that had bound her to him.
She rolled away from him and sat up. Her hair curtained her perfect breasts, but her nipples, still aflame with passion, thrust through the silky strands. “You’ve raped me,” she said tonelessly.
The tender look that had eased the harsh lines of his face faded. His muscles bunched, but he only said, "Did I?”
She rose to her feet, standing as proudly as a high priestess. “I warned you I would have my revenge. Now I shall.”
The eyes shuttered over. Once more they were the politician’s unrevealing eyes. “Oh? How so?”
“Do you seriously think you can take a mistress and not have it affect your political career?” she raged. “The public would never elect to the legislature a married man who’s keeping a mistress. And I plan to let your constituents know that I’ve been your mistress! I’ll tell every nauseating detail!”
The smile that slowly creased his face frightened her. “That is where you’re quite in error, Mandy. The public couldn’t care less if I keep a mistress. What they would never countenance is my making the mistress my wife. That is a social faux pas. And you would never be anything but a mistress, my dear, because you can be bought. Your price is high, but you can be bought.”
CHAPTER 52
Amanda was miserable. Unlike the spider, she had entrapped herself in her own web. She wanted Nick, needed him, as much as her mother must have needed the opium when Taro rescued her from Ling Chuey’s. But this was a physical need, Amanda told herself, that could be satiated with the consummation.
The hunger of her soul for the Stronghold was something else. And throughout the long, lonely night in her great-grandmother’s room she damned the Ghost Lady and her own mother for bequeathing her the hunger for something that would never be satiated.
The next morning Nick was already gone—riding, Paul told her. He himself was leaving later that morning to catch the next flight out of Tucson for Washington. Apparently Nick had said nothing to him of what had happened the night before, because at breakfast he said, “You have shadows under your eyes, Amanda. Didn’t you sleep well last night? This old house gets drafty at times.’’
“I sometimes expect to meet a ghost whenever a draft does sweep through,” she joked as she spread marmalade on her biscuit. She looked up to find her father watching her, and she could tell, despite his usually inscrutable expression, that he suspected her nocturnal visit to Nick’s bedroom. She blushed, wondering if Paul also suspected.
She set her knife across her butter plate. “The fact of the matter is,” she said, looking first at her father and then Paul, “Nick and I are making each other miserable. We each want what the other cannot give. Paul, can my father and I ride back into Tucson with you?”
Surprisingly, she thought she detected a look of admiration pass over Paul's face as he replied that it would be no problem.
She was anxious to be gone before Nick returned from riding. She did not want to face him. He was as formidable an opponent as Elizabeth must have been. Amanda feared his strength of will over her more than his physical or political power. If she was not careful, he would easily dominate her, her very thoughts, her soul even.
The admiration she had seen in Paul’s eyes could not compensate for the deep ache that writhed inside her on the trip back into Tucson. As if sensing her agitation, Paul said, “You mustn’t think too harshly of Nick. His life hasn’t been that easy.”
“I don’t think of him one way or another,” she lied, looking out the car window. Dammit, there was another one of those Joshua trees. Ugly, eerie things, no matter how romantic the tales told about them.
“Amanda,” her father reprimanded from the back seat of Paul’s rented Packard. “Your rudeness is—”
“No, please, Mr. Shima,” Paul said. “My stepbrother’s directness can be abrasive sometimes, which somehow seems to appeal to his constituents.
“But in his defense I must say something about his life—well, really about my great-grandmother. Elizabeth was awfully disappointed when my mother kept bearing children who died in infancy. Elizabeth wanted an heir. By the time Mother gave birth to me, I think she was—worn out. And, quite frankly, I think she knew my father never loved her. I used to hear their arguments, though I never understood what they were about. And then every once in a while I heard my father arguing with Elizabeth. Good Lord, she had to have been at least eighty or more, but even then she was a domineering powerhouse.
“Then, when I was a freshman in college, my mother died. The day after her burial my father moved out of the Stronghold and within six months married a widow carrying a posthumous child—Nick, or Dominic, as he named him. I think in honor of the original owner, your great-grandmother.”
“A small bit of retribution," Amanda said thinly.
“Anyway,” Paul continued, “my father and his second wife, Nick’s mother, Laura, were killed in a senseless auto accident when Nick was three or four, I don’t remember exactly. I was in France fighting.” Paul flashed her a small smile. "World War I, so that should tell you how much older I am than you.”
He returned his attention to the road. “The courts sent Nick to live with Elizabeth at the Stronghold. When I returned from the war to finish college, I drove out to Cristo Rey whenever I could to visit Nick. It was obvious the old woman barely tolerated him. Oh, she saw that he was fed and clothed, as stipulated by the courts, but love—I don’t think she knew how to give it. Occasionally I took Nick into Tucson for a movie or a ballgame. But I don’t think Nick ever forgot the horror of his dependency on her. I think that’s why he’s determined to climb his way to the top. You know, when Elizabeth finally died, Nick refused to come with me to the funeral. For that fact, not many people did. Not even her granddaughter—my Aunt Abigail. My father’s sister hated everything about the Stronghold.”
Paul glanced at her. "Perhaps I’m stepping out of bounds, saying all this. But I feel it needed to be said. I don’t want anything standing in the way of our friendship.”
Amanda expected her life to return to normal after that. Resolutely she put Nick from her mind and concentrated on her studies, which had suffered some in the time she had been seeing him. She had a letter from Paul the week after he returned to Washington, telling her how much he enjoyed meeting her and her father and
that he hoped all was well now. She tried to read between the lines, but, of course, Paul was probably too much the diplomat to reveal anything other than the polite exchange demanded of a social letter.
She did not see or hear from Nick, with the exception of his name on the radio or occasionally his photo in the newspaper. And then anger at him and her own weakness would flood her, and she would switch off the radio or flip the page of the newspaper. At least the arrival of her period brought the good news she was not carrying the brute’s child. But that damnable hunger for Nick persisted, a burning thing that was difficult to ignore.
Then early in December something happened that wiped all thought of Nick from her mind. She was fixing Sunday dinner— mashing the potatoes—when the radio announcer interrupted "Kaye Kaiser’s Music Hour” with the report that Japan had destroyed the naval and air bases at Pearl Harbor and Hickham Field in Hawaii.
When the news commentator, H. V. Kaltenborn, reported minutes later that the battleship Arizona had been sunk in the bombardment, she dropped down on her knees next to her father.
The news of the sneak attack by Japan continued to cut in on regularly scheduled radio programs the rest of the day. She and her father remained rooted to the radio cabinet. Each time an announcement was made, they looked at each other ominously, saying nothing, feeling only a great sense of shame.
Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, newspapers blared out that the FBI had arrested selected enemy aliens, including 2,192 Japanese. She secretly hoped that would be the extent of the government’s operations against the Japanese in America.
But the peace that was supposed to come with Christmas died out by the year’s end. After that things had the quality of a nightmare that began in fear and continued in hysteria.
At work Larry showed her a copy of the Los Angeles Examiner in which a syndicated Hearst columnist, a Henry McLemore, had written, “I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. . . . Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry. Personally I hate Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”
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