Читать книгу The Housekeeper's Daughter - Laurie Paige - Страница 9

Maya Ramirez breathed deeply of the crystalline air and let it out in a long exhalation. The accompanying sigh was not exactly one of contentment—too many disturbing things had happened on the Colton ranch the past eight months for contentment to prevail—but at least she had found a certain peace of mind concerning her own future.

Her horse, a sweet mare named Penny for the coppery highlights of her coat, twitched one ear in her direction. Maya patted the mare’s neck and admired the scenery.

It was one of those February days along the coast of northern California in which the sky gleamed a breath-catching blue and the temperature had soared into the sixties after a week of cold, drizzly rain. Today, the cloud bank had receded offshore and all was bright and beautiful. For the first time in months, anything seemed possible.

Almost anything, Maya corrected, batting away a lazy bee that hummed over the lupine that was already beginning to flower in stalks of white, yellow and lavender blue.

“A hawk,” ten-year-old Joe Colton, Jr., yelled, pointing at the long, sweeping line of fifty-foot cliffs that scalloped the ocean along the western border of the ranch.

“Where?” Teddy Colton, younger by two years, called.

“Right there, silly— Uh, right there,” Joe amended with a quick glance at Maya.

She gave him an approving nod, then smiled with affection. She didn’t allow name-calling or insults. Although newly employed as their full-time nanny, she’d been baby-sitting the boys for years, being only sixteen when she’d first been asked to accompany Mrs. Colton to a spa and take care of Joe Junior, who had been a baby at the time.

Ten years ago. Maya sighed and shifted in the saddle, the sudden sting of tears surprising her as she contemplated the passage of time—so fast and yet so slow.

When Mrs. Colton had had Teddy, Maya had helped out with him, too. After graduating from the local high school, she’d started college via computer courses and worked on the Colton estate when needed by her mother, who was the housekeeper there.

Last month she’d been asked to move into the main house and take over as a full-time baby-sitter for the two youngest Colton boys. The nanny, Ms. Meredith called her. Frowning, Maya admitted she’d needed the job rather desperately.

She swatted another bee out of her face, then noticed several others crawling in Penny’s mane. The mare shook her head as one landed on her ear. Maya realized the warm weather had caused a swarm.

“Can we race?” Teddy shouted, giving her an appealing glance from his blue eyes.

She nodded. “I think we’re running into a swarm of bees. Turn back toward the ranch and ease into a canter. Don’t swat the bees. They’ll fly off if you leave them alone and don’t scare them.”

Both boys glanced around anxiously, but they kept their heads and did as told. After making sure they were on their way, she turned the mare, who switched her tail to each side and shook her head again. Gently Maya urged the mare into a fast walk, then past a trot into a loping run.

In front of her, the brothers let out a whoop of excitement and raced toward the stable in the distance. She leaned forward with a grimace and tightened her knees, but she couldn’t keep up the pace. After reining the mare back to a fast walk, she relaxed once more.

The mare repeatedly shook her head as they neared the paddock. Her ears twitched nervously.

Maya patted her on the neck. “Hey, pretty Penny, what’s the matter, girl? The bees are gone—”

She got no further when the horse gave a startled whinny, tossed her head and, without warning, took off at a dead run toward the stable. Maya grabbed the saddle horn and held on for dear life, fear rushing over her as she thought of falling.

The adrenaline boost gave her the strength to rise in the stirrups so that her weight shifted to her legs and her thighs acted as shock absorbers during the wild ride across the pasture. She pulled on the reins, but the mare raced on, heedless of the rider’s commands.

Ahead of her, she saw the boys dismount and stare at her in confusion. Then a man leaped on the horse Joe had been riding and raced toward her.

Maya saw the fence looming fifty yards in front of her and knew she would never make the jump. Neither would the mare with the extra weight of a rider and saddle on her back. “Whoa,” she called desperately and pulled on the reins to turn the frightened horse to the side.

Hearing hoofbeats coming up behind her, she glanced over her shoulder. The other rider was circling toward them. He closed in and raced alongside her.

“Kick free and come to me,” he yelled.

She slid her feet out of the stirrups and leaped into his arms just as he reached for her. He turned his mount and they ran alongside the fence. Penny fell in behind them and followed. Gradually he slowed his horse, then stopped.

In the stillness, there was only the sound of the two horses and the two humans, panting from the wild exertion of the run. His arms enclosed her in a blanket of safety.

It was like coming home.

“What the hell were you thinking, riding like that in your condition?” Drake Colton demanded, his golden-brown eyes flashing like molten rock in the afternoon sun, his gaze hot with fury.

So much for illusions. “I think my horse got a bee in her ear,” Maya said defensively, fighting a ridiculous urge to burst into tears now that the danger was over.

She was pressed to his chest in a vise grip. His heart pounded against hers, which was also beating hard with the aftermath of the fear when her horse bolted and with a new fear as his eyes raked down her figure.

She struggled to push away from his heat and his anger, the vibrant masculinity that called to something equally vibrant inside her. “I can walk,” she told him, forcing herself to ignore the unruly needs that clamored for attention inside her.

Memories of lying snug in his arms for hours and hours overcame common sense—the warmth of his embrace, the way his hands moved on her, his sudden smile. She closed her eyes and foolishly wished for things that were never going to happen. But a person could dream….

Drake returned to the stable. There, he let her gently slide to the ground, then dropped down beside her. “Here, boys, take care of the horses.”

Drake’s two youngest brothers, big-eyed with worry, took the reins, then stood there and looked from their older brother to their nanny as if afraid to leave them alone.

“I’m not going to hurt her,” Drake assured them in harsh tones, then added for her ears alone, “yet.”

“Ask River to check Penny’s ear. I think she was stung by one of the bees,” Maya called to the youngsters, ignoring the threat from the furious man beside her as the fears and dreams, the need to cry, faded into fatalistic calm.

She had thought this moment might come someday. But not so soon. She wasn’t ready, hadn’t prepared….

After the boys led the horses off to the stable, Drake turned back to Maya. It hurt to look at her, at the thick, dark splendor of her hair, the endless depths of her brown eyes and most of all, at the protruding mound of her tummy.

“Just how pregnant are you, anyway?” he demanded, which wasn’t at all what he’d planned to say to her upon his arrival at the ranch thirty minutes ago. At that time, he’d planned a calm, reasonable approach to their problems.

“What do you care?” she asked, so softly he almost didn’t hear. Then she walked away without a backward glance, leaving him standing in the dust, his heart pounding with emotions he couldn’t describe.

Maya stood under the shower and let the water flow over her from head to toes. She washed, rinsed and stepped out. From the hallway, she heard a knock on her door.

“Just a minute,” she called.

Fear coiled through her, not a pounding fear as earlier, but fear just the same. She wondered what ill fortune had brought Drake back to the ranch at this time.

Along with her bodily changes, her emotions had become all topsy-turvy during the past few months. That afternoon had been the worst. Yearning, joy, grief—she’d experienced all those and more during the minutes he’d held her close in that rock-solid embrace, their hearts beating as one.

As they had last summer.

But this wasn’t summer, she reminded herself. Summer and fall had come and gone with no word from him. Her confusion was to be expected; she’d thought she would also be gone before Drake came around again.

There’s no place in my life for a wife and family, his curt farewell note had stated.

Pain, as fresh, as unbelievable, as the morning she’d read those words, scorched through her, but there was no time for it now. She pulled on a terry-cloth robe and wrapped a towel around her hair. Her hands were trembling.

“Maya?”

Relief surged through her as she realized her mother was at the door. Inez Ramirez had been housekeeper at the Hacienda de Alegria ranch since before Maya was born. Maya’s father was the gardener and general groundskeeper.

“Come on in. The door’s open,” Maya invited.

Her mother looked her over when she entered. “Teddy said you nearly took a spill while you were riding.”

“Penny bolted. I think she got stung in the ear. But I’m fine. Drake rescued me.” She smiled to alleviate her mother’s worries.

“I heard. The boys said River found the stinger and removed it.” Inez closed the door and crossed the room to lay a hand on her daughter’s forehead. “You don’t feel dizzy or faint? No pain anywhere?”

“No, really, I’m quite all right.”

Her mother ignored her. “Maybe you should see the doctor. I can drive you to town.”

“That won’t be necessary. I go in for my monthly checkup Tuesday. That’s only two more days. I don’t want to bother the doctor on a Sunday.”

Inez sighed and backed off. “If you start hurting, call me right away. Or if your water breaks.”

“I will.”

Maya watched her mother retrace her steps to the door, ready to return to the kitchen to prepare the evening meal for the Colton family, and whoever else might be in residence.

Her parents had been wonderful to her, after getting past the first shock of her news that she was expecting. They had immediately assumed she and Andy Martin, a local math teacher, would be marrying soon. They had been even more shocked when she’d had to tell them that Andy, the man she’d been seeing regularly until a few months ago, wasn’t the father.

Andy was her friend, but he wasn’t her lover.

Alone once more, Maya crossed her arms over her abdomen and silently prayed that Drake wouldn’t discover she was eight months pregnant with his child.

She thought of summer and starry nights and the blossoming of hot, wild passion that had known no bounds. They had made love in her bed, in his, in the sweet-smelling, prickly hay stored in the stable and barn.

After they’d danced several times at his father’s birthday party, Drake had made a quick trip to Prosperino, the tiny town that served the ranchers and dairy farmers and tourists who stayed at the many bed-and-breakfast inns along the coast around here. His dark, smoldering glances had told her why the trip was necessary—birth control.

But they hadn’t made love that night. During the toast to Joe Colton in celebration of his sixtieth birthday, someone had shot at the Colton patriarch. The ranch had been in an uproar for hours, the police milling about and questioning everyone over and over. No one had gone to bed until daybreak.

However, there had been other nights. “I’ll take care of you,” he’d said just before they’d made love. “Don’t worry about anything.”

And she had believed him.

She would have laughed at how foolish she’d been, except she felt too raw, too vulnerable at this moment and might end in tears. She wouldn’t go to the table with weepy eyes and increase her parents’ worry over her.

Knowing she had to, she rose, squared her shoulders and dressed. She would be expected to join the ranch staff who ate in the big dining area at one end of the kitchen. As someone had once remarked, life goes on.

The Colton family and friends usually ate in the formal dining room or in the sunroom that separated the living room from the patio cupped in the center of the U-shaped house. Drake would be with them, so she wouldn’t have to face him on top of everything else.

She dried her hair, pushed it back with butterfly clips and checked that her two charges were ready for dinner. They, too, were relegated to the kitchen now during meals, except for special occasions when their mother wanted to show them off.

Maya suppressed the cynical thought about her employer. The Coltons paid her salary as well as her tuition to college. Another few months and she would have a degree in early childhood education. Then she would take her child and leave the ranch.

Her heart gave a painful lurch at the thought of going away from all she knew and loved. Her parents would miss her. So would the boys. She would miss all of them dreadfully. However, she was twenty-six, old enough to make her own way in the world without depending on anyone.

When she, Joe Junior and Teddy entered the kitchen, an instant silence fell over the group gathered there. Glancing around, her eyes met the golden ones of her nemesis. “What are you doing here?” she blurted.

Heat rushed into her face at the quick stares she received from the house staff. He was a Colton. He could eat anywhere he pleased.

“Waiting for my brothers,” he explained easily. “I wanted to thank them for their help this afternoon.”

“Huh, it wasn’t anything,” Joe said. “You’re the one who saved Maya.”

“Yeah,” Teddy agreed. “You were really quick. Can you teach me to jump on a horse like that, without using the stirrup to get up?”

Drake laughed, his teeth flashing white against his deeply tanned skin. “You only need to grow another few inches and you’ll have no trouble.”

The boys, tall and rangy for their ages as all the Colton men were, claimed seats on either side of their older brother, their eyes filled with admiration as they gazed at him. Drake stood and pulled out a chair on the other side of Teddy for her. When he was seated again, the boys asked a thousand questions about his life in the SEALs.

“Where ya been this time?” Joe asked.

“Central America.”

“I wish I could go there,” Teddy said, envious.

“No, you don’t,” Drake told him. “It was hot, the mosquitoes were as big as magpies and I had the boniest donkey God ever created to ride over the mountains.”

He told funny stories during the meal, distracting them from the dangerous nature of his duties with the elite unit. Maya wondered what new scars he might have on his strong, lithe body.

Immediately, visions of his six-one, sinewy frame flooded her mind. She’d touched him all over, discovering every mole, every tiny imperfection…and every scar that spoke of a life lived dangerously close to the edge.

There’s no place in my life…

He’d made love to her, then written those words as she lay sleeping, innocently believing in a future that included them and their children and a lifetime of sharing. The table blurred. She held the anguish in by dint of will. No one would see her cry, she had vowed eight months ago, after that first awful storm of grief had passed.

She ate the delicious meal without tasting it. Every time her eyes met Drake’s over Teddy’s blond curls, a shiver rushed through her. His gaze boded no good for her.

Drake stood at the window of his dark room and stared at the windows across the central courtyard patio. Maya’s room. He knew it well. Once it had been his.

A flurry of emotion ran through him. Need. Anger. Despair. Loneliness. Name it and he’d felt it during the past eight months, even during hot nights in the humid jungles of Central America when he should have been concentrating on the business at hand.

His mission: rescue an American diplomat kidnapped by drug dealers and held in a mountain stronghold. He’d nearly lost two good men on that trek, but in the end, the mission had been a success.

A new scar from a bullet wound suddenly throbbed in the fleshy tissue of his hip. He’d been lucky. The bullet had missed his pelvic bone by half an inch. With a shattered hip, he wouldn’t have made it out.

He laughed silently, sardonically. Yeah, he led a charmed life. There was just one problem at present. Maya.

Past emotions hadn’t held a candle to the ones he’d felt upon seeing her on a runaway horse. Fear had clawed its way to his throat and stayed there until she was safe and secure in his arms.

Safe?

From her condition, she obviously hadn’t been very safe in his arms eight months ago.

The irony of the note he’d left on the table beside her bed struck him. He’d told her his job was too dangerous, his life too busy, to include a wife.

Right. What about including a child? He shook his head, unable to answer that question just yet.

Staring at the window across the way, he set his jaw and headed out. It was time they had a serious talk. He entered the long hall running along the other wing of the house and rapped on the door.

Every nerve in Maya’s body jumped when the knock sounded. “No rest for the weary,” she muttered, a gallows attempt at humor that did nothing to lift her spirits.

She’d supervised the boys’ studies, then read to them after their baths. Their mother demanded they be in bed and the lights out at nine. Maya was careful to comply. To fail was an invitation to wrath from Ms. Meredith.

Upon returning to her room, Maya had half expected Drake to be there, waiting for her. Finally, after almost an hour of fruitless study, she’d closed her textbook and prepared for bed. She should have known better. Coltons were a stubborn, unpredictable lot, and Drake was no exception.

She would live through this, she told her flagging spirits. She’d lived through his leaving and finding that awful note, then realizing she was pregnant and telling her parents. What more could life throw at her?

Warily, she approached the door after tightening the belt to her robe. She opened it and peeked out.

“I want to talk to you,” Drake announced in a low tone.

She considered locking the door. He probably knew how to unlock it without a key. The room had once been his before he struck out on his own.

Last summer, lying in bed with her, he’d told her of his childhood escapades, of sneaking in past curfew, of the hiding his father had once given him that had caused his mother to cry, making him feel so bad, he’d stopped skipping school and started studying. Now he slept in a room across the patio in the other wing of the house, a guest in his former home.

Surprised by an unexpected rush of sympathy, she moved back. He entered and closed the door.

His eyes, dark in the soft lamplight, as unyielding as a granite cliff, roamed over her. “Are you all right?” he asked quietly.

The question annoyed her. “Yes.” Her answer seemed to stir his temper.

He scowled. “Only a fool would be out on a horse in your condition.”

“The doctor said I could continue all my normal activities,” she said, tilting her chin defiantly as resentment swept over her. “I always ride with the boys—”

“That was stupid. If you’d been thrown—” Drake stopped, unable to block the image of her lying on the ground, hurt, dying.

“Damn you,” he muttered. “If you can’t think of yourself, think of the child. You’re going to be a mother. You have an obligation to take care of the baby.”

She moved away. “I know very well what my obligations are,” she said coolly.

Then she walked over and sat in the old rocker that had been used to soothe many a Colton baby, including himself.

Drake stalked over to the desk chair, pulled it around and straddled it, his arms resting on the back while he observed the woman he’d returned home to see, the woman his father had mentioned in his last letter, telling Drake of Maya’s pregnancy and suggesting that he come home.

An inner contraction, so strong it was painful, reminded Drake of last June and the week he’d spent at the ranch, home from his job with the Navy SEALs to celebrate his dad’s sixtieth birthday.

What a memorable visit that had been. Someone had taken a potshot at his father. Shortly after that Drake had made love to the dark-haired Madonna who now watched him warily. “Inez says you’re at least eight months along.”

Her eyes widened. “You talked to my mother?”

“Yes. Since you refused to discuss it, I went to the one person I knew would tell me the truth. Why didn’t you write?” he asked, changing tactics abruptly.

“Why didn’t you?”

The challenge hit him right between the eyes. “I was off the beaten path most of the time.”

The excuse sounded flimsy even to his ears. Her gaze flashed to him, then away, clearly expressing her disbelief.

He realized he’d grown up with this person, yet he didn’t know her. He was three years older and had traveled the world; she’d spent her life here on the ranch. So why did she suddenly appear to be the one who was older and wiser?

Impending motherhood had changed her. It was more than the fact that her breasts were fuller and her tummy rounded. He sensed a primordial knowledge within her that hadn’t been in the innocent young woman he’d loved, then left.

“My mission was dangerous,” he tried to explain. “I move around. There’s no future…I told you in the note I left.”

“I believed you.”

The simplicity of those three words threatened his self-control. They spoke of trust once given and now lost. Despair opened like a pit leading straight to the hell within him.

He exhaled heavily. He’d lived with the darkness for a long time. It was an old enemy, one he knew well. Standing, he thrust his hands into his pockets and paced to the window and back. “The child changes things.”

“It isn’t yours.”

He stopped in front of her, not quite certain he’d heard right. She stood and faced him with that calm, older-than-time composure she’d recently acquired.

“It isn’t your child,” she repeated the denial.

The silence buzzed around them like an angry swarm of killer bees. She returned his hard stare without blinking, then she smiled slightly, not in amusement but as if the whole situation was one of supreme irony.

This distant, world-weary attitude baffled him more than her not bothering to write and tell him the news. He considered the conversation with her mother and remembered a name. “Then it’s Andy Martin’s?”

“Is that what my mother said?”

“Yes.”

She tilted her chin in that stubborn way she had. “It’s my baby. Mine and no one else’s.”

He’d been in enough standoffs with desperate people to know an impasse when he hit one. “Right. A virgin birth,” he scoffed. “Look, this isn’t getting us anywhere. I came home to find out the truth. I mean to know it before I leave.”

“How did—” She clamped her lips together.

“How did I know about the baby? My father wrote. He said you were pregnant and that I should come home and get my affairs in order.”

“Affairs,” she repeated. “That’s the operative word with you Coltons, isn’t it?”

At that moment, he could have wrung her neck…or kissed her until she stopped this charade she’d decided to act out and responded to his kisses as she had last summer. His body went hard in an instant. Last June she’d been all sweet fire and sexy innocence, as eager to explore him as he had been her.

“You know me better than that,” he said, the words coming out husky, the hunger evident.

Her hand flew to the neckline of the robe, which she pulled tightly closed as if fearing he might rip it from her lush body in a fit of uncontrollable passion.

“Do I? Maybe we don’t know each other at all anymore,” she suggested.

The sudden bleakness in her eyes struck a tender place under his breastbone. He thought of the woman who had told him her plans to finish her degree and teach school in Prosperino, or maybe start her own business and work with the troubled kids over at the Hopechest Ranch where she tutored students in remedial reading. It was her optimistic vision of the future that had forced him to write that note. It was a future he couldn’t hope to share.

Abruptly he headed for the door. “You’re right. Maybe we don’t know each other now, but once we did. Your mother said I shouldn’t upset you, but don’t think this is the last of this conversation.” He left quietly and headed outside for the steps that led down to the shore.

Maya rubbed her back and paced restlessly about the small room. Was her back hurting worse? Had she injured herself during the ride? She bit her lip against the pain and loneliness of the midnight hour. And the hunger that ate at her since she’d felt Drake’s arms around her once more, strong and sure and capable.

How long before she forgot those moments last summer? Months? Years? A lifetime?

Unable to sleep lately or to sit for long periods, she walked the floor for hours. Most of the time she was confident of her ability to care for herself and a child, but sometimes, like now, her courage faltered.

Drake was a complication she hadn’t foreseen. After his leaving last summer, with only a note to explain that they had no future, she hadn’t thought he would even care if she was carrying his child.

The pain of that moment rushed over her anew, nearly causing her to cry out. She gritted her teeth and waited for it to pass. She’d learned, during the past eight months, that one could endure.

Sitting in the rocker and leaning forward as far as she could to relieve the pressure on her lower back, she knew she would have to admit the truth.

Unless there was a way to hide the truth…

She picked up the phone and dialed a number in L.A. When her sister answered, Maya spoke quickly and in a low voice.

“Lana, this is Maya. I have a question for you. Are you alone? Can you talk?”

“Well, hello, baby sister,” Lana said in surprise. “Yes, I’ve just given my patient her final medication and was heading for bed. What’s happening?”

Maya took a careful breath. “Drake Colton is home. His father told him about…about…”

“The baby?” Lana finished helpfully when Maya faltered.

“Yes. Listen, I know a DNA test would reveal the identity of the father, but no one could do anything to the baby without my consent, could they? Like take blood?”

“Is Drake threatening to take the baby from you?” Lana demanded indignantly.

“No, no, nothing like that. He doesn’t know he’s the father—I haven’t told anyone but you—but he thinks he could be.”

“Could be!” Lana’s tone was shocked and angry. “How many affairs does he think you carry on at one time?”

“Never mind that. What about the DNA test?”

“I’m a private duty nurse, not a lawyer, but I think he could. I mean, a court order would do it.”

“And the Coltons can afford the best lawyers in the world,” Maya said, then sighed. She felt physically and emotionally exhausted.

She waited patiently as Lana tried to reassure her on her maternal rights, then said good-night.

The future seemed dark and even more uncertain all at once. How could she have been so foolish? she’d asked herself a thousand times during the intervening months.

She knew the answer. Love. The stuff of dreams.

Well, she was awake now, she mused ruefully, forcing a smile at her once idealistic self. Reality was a backache and an inability to find a sleeping position that her body accepted. Reality was also Drake Colton.

Unlike her longtime friend Andy Martin, Drake hadn’t mentioned marriage. If she told him the baby was his, what would he do—insist on marriage or simply offer to support the child…or try to take it from her?

She had no idea what “putting his affairs in order” meant to him. She again fought the despair that darkened her spirits at unguarded moments. She had known Drake all her life, but she truly hadn’t a clue about his intentions.

Sighing, she got up and paced some more.