The Accidental Bridegroom

by Ann Major

  Five

  Either he’d gotten a bad attitude after the grinning mechanic had confirmed his truck was totaled, or this barren mountain village really was uglier than most Rafe had seen this far south of the border. There were no trees, nothing green. His entire impression would have been of dust, skinny dogs, barefoot kids, junked cars, ramshackle sidewalks and rutted roads had the streets not been strewn with marigolds and the village noisily alive with infectious gaiety.

  Rafe tried to ignore the bizarre sensation that magic was in the air as he strode swiftly up the crowded, cobblestoned street, counting the huts because there were no street signs.

  Men jammed into doorways, drinking tequila and talking, eyed him curiously.

  He passed a baker’s shop with grinning skeletons painted onto the windows. He was tired of traveling, furious about his truck, and hungrier than hell. He was ready to get where he was going and find out if the kid was his—so he could hightail it back to Texas.

  Finally, when he climbed higher, the holiday madness and the crowds and even the houses thinned out.

  A dark boy rushed toward him out of the purple blackness. “Eh, gringo. Chicles?”

  The little tough was appealing, but he had the look of a lot of kids down here. He had old eyes in a young face.

  Rafe peeled a dollar out of his wallet, but when he held it out to the kid, the kid took one look at him and gasped. Black eyes popped from beneath thick inky bangs; his dark face turned sickly gray. When Rafe leaned down to give him the dollar, the kid scooted backward and screamed as if in mortal terror. Dropping his wares, the kid bolted.

  Well, that was a first. Never before had Rafe seen a kid selling Chicles run from an American dollar.

  Rafe figured he looked even worse than he’d thought. Several half broken snaps on his shirt were undone, and a thin coating of chalklike dust covered every inch of his tall frame—from the whitened brim of his battered black hat to the pointed toes of his boots. There was a rip in his black leather jacket, and he smelled of grease and dirt, not to mention sweat. But street-smart little toughs like him didn’t scare easily, and there was no way the kid could have spotted the 9mm Browning automatic jammed in the back of Rafe’s waistband.

  Rafe forgot the kid and kept climbing until he counted the twentieth house. There he turned onto a much narrower street that looked like a dead end. Fifty meters farther and his chest tightened when he saw the white walls and the red-roofed house—exactly as Manuel had described them.

  A single guard was washing a red sports car in front of the massive Spanish doors cut into the white wall.

  Getting inside would be a piece of cake. But the dead-end street made him nervous. He didn’t like places with only one way in and one way out. Swiftly, Rafe cut around the back, scrambling up a steep cliff behind the house. When he saw the darkened holes in the mountain face, he realized they must be the ruined mine shafts Manuel had told him about.

  Knowing he could be shot for climbing a wall in Mexico, Rafe jumped onto Cathy’s, anyway.

  A cute white playhouse that was a replica of the larger white mansion behind the wall dominated the courtyard.

  Somebody had a kid, all right.

  Rafe paused, drawing a jerky breath.

  Relax. A dumb playhouse doesn’t have to mean you’re a father.

  Just as Rafe was about to swing himself over, he saw the same little dark-skinned tough who’d dropped his chewing gum crawling over the opposite wall. The boy sprang onto the patio as lithely as a cat. Rafe let himself down, too, racing after him, keeping to the shadows.

  When the kid reached the house, he tossed a rock up to a second-story window and called out a name. “Sadie!”

  Sadie. It was just a name, but it singed Rafe like electricity.

  The upstairs window flew open.

  And a tiny figure with long golden hair and a tall pointy hat stuck her head out excitedly. The tall hat bobbed up and down. Furtively, she put her fingers to her lips and pointed to the room next to hers. Then she vanished, only to reappear in the next microsecond at the door of the balcony.

  The brat moved like lightning.

  Rafe saw that the tall, pointy hat matched her trailing black gown. He felt vaguely uneasy as he remembered how he’d loved costumes as a kid. He felt uneasy still as he thought of the charge he still got when he worked undercover.

  Even as he reassured himself that their mutual liking for disguises and costumes didn’t have to mean anything, he felt a pulse begin to throb where he’d bumped his forehead.

  Was this miniature, hyperactive whirlwind his daughter?

  No daughter of his would sneak out at the age of six to meet a street kid.

  Then why did he feel this strange mixture of complex, unwanted, paternal emotions as he watched her lean down, struggle impatiently with her long skirt and unbuckle her shoes? Slipping her shoes into her pockets, she stealthily tiptoed across the balcony.

  “What do you want, Juanito?” she whispered, sounding excited and yet annoyed, too, in flawless Spanish.

  If she was his daughter, she’d better speak English, too.

  If she was his daughter… Get real!

  As Rafe inched closer, a twig broke under his heel.

  Both kids jumped as if they’d heard a bullet.

  “What was that, Juanito?”

  “A ghost, maybe. They’re out, you know.”

  In big-eyed silence they searched the shadows and trees for ghosts.

  “I don’t see anything,” Sadie said in a scared whisper.

  The little thug’s chest swelled with self-importance. “Well, I saw one already.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Sadie said.

  “I saw your father!”

  Rafe wanted to spring out and scream that it wasn’t true. Instead, he froze.

  “When?” Sadie bobbed up and down on the tips of her toes. “Where?”

  “A few minutes ago. In the street. I tried to sell him some chicles.”

  “Ghosts don’t buy chicles, stupid!”

  Ghosts? What was that supposed to mean?

  “Well, he took ’em.”

  “Now I know you’re lying, Juanito.”

  “No! He had a cowboy hat just like the one in your mother’s picture, but he’s cut his ponytail. And he was all dirty and scratched and spooky-looking just like he’d crawled out of his grave! And he smelled like he was about half-rotten, too!”

  “Wow!”

  “Come down! And I’ll show you where I saw him!”

  The miniature witch looked over the railing. With an imperious flick of her wrist, she sent her pointy hat sailing down to him. When he caught it and put it on his own black head, she giggled. Carefully gathering her long skirts in one arm, she jumped up onto the balcony railing and grabbed a branch of the tree beside the house.

  “Why don’t you take the stairs?” Juanito asked.

  “’Cause Mommy’s in her room and she might see!”

  Sadie glanced down again and lost her balance. As her arms waved wildly and she teetered, Rafe felt paralyzed by a gutless terror. Then she steadied herself. Letting out his breath, he marveled as the imp swung herself down the branch, hand over hand, till she reached the trunk with the easy grace of a gibbon monkey. There was another scary moment when her dress ripped on a twig and she almost fell again.

  When she jumped down, Juanito took her hand. The look of intense excitement and great affection that passed between them reminded Rafe of his own childhood friendship with Mike. Then they raced to the wall where Juanito had come from, and scaling it, they slipped over it, vanishing into the darkness together.

  Obviously this was no new trick.

  Obviously Cathy had absolutely no control over Sadie.

  Not surprising. Cathy had never been into control. If she hadn’t been the free-spirited product of too much control, she would never have fallen for him. The question was—was the miniature blond witch his daughter?

  He hoped fervently that she was n
ot.

  But there was only one way to find out.

  *

  The tall brilliantly lit windows with the flowing gauzy curtains, and the unlocked doors of Cathy’s house made surveillance as easy as taking candy from a baby, so easy he wouldn’t need the glasses he used for night vision. Rafe crept along the balcony in the dark, peering into every window and trying every door to see which was locked and which wasn’t.

  He even sneaked inside, into the empty living room, where he knelt, tension tightening his gut, as he studied framed photographs of Cathy and the school she had started in the village, of Cathy and the shelter and soup kitchen she had built for the village poor. Tenderly he ran a fingertip alongside the cheek of the little girl before he set a particularly endearing close-up of the child smiling impishly at an iguana back down.

  There were stacks of photograph albums filled with pictures of Sadie as a baby, as a toddler. Flipping through them, he saw pictures of a laughing Cathy doing things with her daughter; of Cathy doing good works and surrounded by appreciative poor villagers. In one picture, Sadie and Juanito were hanging upside down like possums from trapezes. In another, Sadie was squirting Juanito in the face with a yard sprinkler.

  Rafe remembered Cathy saying that she had started taking pictures as a child because her parents photographed their family. The only photographs had been on their grand piano and had featured glittering couple with celebrities and royalty.

  “It’s as if I don’t exist,” Cathy had said wistfully.

  Cathy had told him she dreamed of having a normal life. She had wanted to fill photograph albums with pictures of her children and husband and pets and genuine friends. She had taken dozens of rolls of him. Rafe, who was drawn to the endearing photographs of Cathy and Sadie, wished he had more time to linger over them, but when he heard a sound in the next room, he stepped quickly back out onto the balcony.

  Thirty minutes later he had the layout and a plan. From the shadows, he had watched Maurice try to make love to Cathy when they had come out onto the terrace. The awkward little scene had been short and sweet, Cathy begging that they save the hot stuff for the honeymoon because she was utterly terrified Sadie might be spying and pop out of the woodwork at just the wrong moment.

  Terrified. That had been her exact word.

  From the snatches he could catch of their rather heated conversation that had to do with another kiss and a suitcase full of iguanas, Rafe had concluded that the miniature witch was not exactly pleased with the snooty French aristocrat Cathy planned to marry.

  From the shadows, Rafe had watched Pita cooking in the kitchen. He had seen her uncork a bottle of champagne and set it in an ice bucket. When she had leaned over it and shaken a vial of pink powder down its long neck just as if she were salting the cavity of a chicken, he would have given anything to break cover and go inside and ask her what the hell she was up to. But the scene got stranger. Like a kid reciting a difficult poem she’d memorized for class, Pita had picked up an old book and read from it aloud to a large framed photograph of a stern-looking Indian woman.

  As Pita read, Rafe got cold all over, the way one did when a Texas norther blew in. Only this was weird and spooky even before the blue flames under the teakettle had turned green, and the golden frame of the Indian woman had reflected the same eerie color.

  Pita closed her book, and, with a satisfied smile, patted the bottle of champagne and laid the glowing photograph down beside it. Then Rafe realized he’d better make a move because Cathy and Maurice were already upstairs.

  So, he’d crept up to the second-story balcony and observed Maurice in his bedroom undressing. And Cathy in hers as well. Only he had watched Cathy longer.

  When she came out of her bathroom wearing only a towel, her yellow hair spilling everywhere, he couldn’t move. Then she let the towel drop, and his blood ran like fire in his veins. For a long moment, she stood at the mirror, eyeing herself critically.

  Then she began to do things. First she slathered lotion all over her body. Hungrily, he watched her fingers sliding everywhere, lingering on her breasts, her stomach and thighs. When she was done, he thought that would be the end of it.

  But no, she brought her hands under her delectable breasts and lifted them higher, inspecting the luscious lobes, the perky nipples. Then she paraded in front of her mirror, striking seductive poses. She stood on her tiptoes and stuck one of her long gorgeous legs up on the counter. She arched her spine, played with her hair, holding it up and then letting it fall all over her shoulders in thick glorious tangles.

  Rafe groaned hoarsely as jealous rage and desire shuddered through him. Was she practicing those teasing love games because she intended to use them on Maurice?

  When Rafe remembered how she’d played fast and easy with him that first night when she’d been trying so hard to impress a bad-boy thief, he had to clench his hands to keep from going in and grabbing her and giving her what she so obviously wanted.

  The fury that burned inside him like acid was illogical. He was over her. Therefore, he had zero right to be jealous.

  Maybe if he hadn’t had her before, he wouldn’t feel this sudden hot possessive fury that she was his and no other man should ever touch her. Or maybe if he didn’t know just how great she was in bed, he wouldn’t have found her lush body and wanton strutting so damned appealing.

  But as usual, just being near her pushed him over some fatal edge and reduced him to an animal. By the time she pulled on her transparent black nightgown, his brain had shorted out from overload, and that rebel polar organ lodged in his too-tight, dirty jeans that never thought straight had begun to harden and ache with a lot of dumb ideas of its own.

  That’s when the plan had hit him.

  It would mean crossing the line.

  She’d had that effect on him before.

  His lips curved in a bitter smile, and he yanked his 9mm Browning out of his waistband. Emptying the bullets into the palm of his shaking hand, he counted them twice, one by one, just to make sure he had them all.

  Then he stuffed them into his back pocket along with the handcuffs. He needed the gun for scaring, not for killing.

  The unsuspecting Maurice was still singing in the shower when Rafe came up behind him and jammed the muzzle into the small of his spine.

  Never before had Rafe deliberately terrorized an innocent man.

  There wasn’t a scuffle. Just a brief, whispered, no-nonsense conversation. Not so brief that Rafe didn’t have time to note the cultured French accent. Not so brief that the hatefully smug, white-faced aristocrat couldn’t angrily select a few items from his wardrobe that would be perfect for Rafe’s masquerade in the little seduction scene he intended to play for Cathy. Not so brief that he didn’t apologize to the naked Maurice as he quickly handcuffed and gagged him. Binding his ankles together, Rafe locked him in his closet with a couple of blankets and a pillow.

  Rafe showered and shaved and dabbed on some of Maurice’s fancy French after-shave. Then he dressed in black slacks and a black silk turtleneck and a gray cashmere blazer. The black suede shoes were a little tight, but the fit was okay…considering.

  As he ran Maurice’s comb through his short dark hair, Rafe thought of Cathy’s dark nipples peeping through black lace.

  This was better than okay. Better than his usual undercover stuff.

  The silk was smooth and soft against his skin.

  Nice.

  But dealing with Cathy would be nicer.

  Six

  Cathy whirled at the feather-light knock at her bedroom door, spilling the glass of champagne she was holding all over her hand and black filmy peignoir. She was so nervous, she just gulped down what was left in the goblet, and, taking the bottle out of the ice bucket, poured herself another glass. Then she poured one for Maurice.

  Not that she believed for one minute that Pita’s love potion would work. It was just that she needed the champagne to get through the awkwardness of tonight.

  Odd, how the thoug
ht of making love had never, not even the first time, seemed awkward with Rafe.

  But Rafe had been so earthy and wild, he’d made her feel the same way. It had just felt natural and right with Rafe. Maurice was a much more refined breed—a much superior breed, she hastily reassured herself.

  Maurice’s second knock was softer than the first. But to Cathy it thudded deadlier. In spite of her bubble bath and all the lotions and perfume she’d doused herself with to make herself feel sexy, in spite of her clingy black lace gown and filmy peignoir, she felt about as much enthusiasm for the project ahead as if she were condemned to die and about to face her executioner.

  I will grow to love him! I will! Making love to him is a necessary step…

  Hastily, she choked down a second glass, nearly strangling on the frothy bubbles.

  “Come in…darling.” Her attempted purr that was supposed to sound alluringly sophisticated sounded shaky and unsure. “I left the door open…darling.” Oh, why did that endearment stick like a dry lump in her throat?

  The door cracked and she saw Maurice’s elegant, black-sleeved hand reach in and turn off the light.

  Oh, why hadn’t she thought of that? Maurice was so elegant and refined, so exquisitely considerate to understand that things would be so much easier for her in the dark.

  And it was very dark, because she’d grown self-conscious earlier and had locked the balcony doors and drawn the second heavier curtains behind the sheers.

  “Where are you, my darling?” he asked.

  Maybe it was the champagne, but Maurice’s low, French-accented voice sounded huskier than usual. A wanton, electric thrill coursed through her. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad, after all. Or was there really something in that love potion Pita had been so silly with excitement about?

  No—that was too ridiculous to even consider.

  “I’m over here,” Cathy answered less nervously.

  As swift and surefooted as a panther, he zeroed in on her like a nocturnal hunter in the velvet darkness. His broad-shouldered body loomed expectantly over her.