Читать книгу Counterfeit Bride - Сара Крейвен, Sara Craven - Страница 7

IT was a maid knocking on the door which woke her eventually. She sat up, pushing her hair back from her face, to find to her horror that it was broad daylight.

‘Señorita, your car is waiting,’ she was reminded, and heard the woman move away.

She glanced at her watch and groaned. She had overslept badly. She dressed rapidly, and almost crammed the loathsome wig on to her hair. She smothered a curse as she adjusted it. She had wanted to meet Ramón in the clear light of day, looking well-groomed and in control of the situation, and instead she was going to appear late, harassed and looking like something the cat had dragged in.

She grabbed her bag and left precipitately, aware that a porter was waiting in the corridor to fetch her cases.

As she emerged from the reception area into the sunshine, she made herself slow down and take deep, steadying breaths, as she saw the waiting car. Lopez was standing beside it, looking anxiously towards the entrance, but when he saw her he smiled in relief and opened the back door.

Nicola, steeling herself, climbed in. But the other seat was unoccupied. She twisted round, looking out of the rear window, but she could only see Lopez supervising the bestowal of her luggage in the boot. When he took his place in the driving seat, she leaned forward.

‘Where is Don Ramón?’

He turned. ‘I am to give you this, señorita.’ He handed her an envelope, then closed the glass partition between them.

Nicola opened the envelope and extracted the single sheet it contained.

‘I regret that urgent business commitments take me from your side,’ the writing, marching arrogantly across the page, informed her. ‘I wish you a safe journey, and a pleasant reunion with your novio.’ It was signed with an unintelligible squiggle.

Nicola read it several times, relief warring with an odd disappointment. So she would never see him again. On the other hand, it meant she only had Lopez to shake off when they reached Monterrey, and that had to be welcome news.

She read the terse words once again, then folded the note and stowed it in her bag, biting her lip.

Later, making sure that Lopez’ whole attention was concentrated on the road ahead, she reached into her bag and drew out the itinerary for her trip. There was an airport at Monterrey, and she would have to find out whether there were direct flights from there to Merida. There had been no time to finalise every detail before she left Mexico City. Teresita had seen to it that she had enough money for any eventuality, firmly cutting across her protests.

‘You are doing this for my sake, Nicky. It must cost you nothing,’ she had said.

In retrospect her words seemed ironic to Nicola now, but she dismissed that trend of thought from her mind, and began reading the brochures for her trip, trying to recapture her earlier excitement at the prospect. But it wasn’t easy. The names, the jungle temples no longer seemed to work the same potent magic with her as they had done. Nicola sighed and replaced them in her bag, arranging the crush-proof blue sundress she was going to change into on top of the papers.

She yawned, feeling earlier tensions beginning to seep away. Her little adventure was almost over, and she could begin to relax. Her sleep last night had been fitful, which probably explained her failure to wake this morning. She put her feet up on the seat, and relaxed. Next stop Monterrey, she thought.

It was the car slowing which woke her at last. She struggled to sit upright, putting an apprehensive hand up to touch the wig. She was stiff, and her mouth was dry, as if she had slept for several hours, but surely it couldn’t be true.

She expected to see suburbs at least, and signs of an industrial complex, but there wasn’t the least indication they were approaching a city. On the contrary, it seemed as if they were in the middle of nowhere. There were vestiges of habitation—a few shacks, and a tin-roofed cantina. And the road had altered too. They were no longer on a broad public highway but on a single track dirt road.

There were petrol pumps beside the cantina and this was clearly why Lopez was stopping. But where were they?

Lopez came to her door and opened it. ‘Do you wish for coffee, señorita? I did not wake you for a meal because I thought you would be glad to reach your destination at last.’

‘I would be glad of coffee.’ She got out of the car. ‘When do we reach Monterrey, Lopez? Is this a shortcut?’

The stolid face expressed the nearest thing to amazement it was probably capable of. ‘Monterrey, señorita? But surely you know—we no longer go to Monterrey. It is Don Luis’ order that we should go directly to La Mariposa instead.’

Nicola’s lips parted in a soundless gasp. For a moment, she thought she was going to faint, and caught at the edge of the car door to steady herself. She saw Lopez look alarmed, and pretended she had turned her ankle slightly on Teresita’s high heels.

She managed to say, ‘No—I didn’t know.’ This must have been the message Ramón had tried to give her, she thought frantically. ‘When—when shall we arrive at the hacienda?’

‘In less than two hours, señorita’ He spoke as if expecting to be congratulated. ‘You will be pleased, I think, to reach your journey’s end.’

Journey’s end, Nicola thought as she negotiated with some difficulty the patch of dry and barren ground which separated the cantina from the road. Journeys end in lovers’ meetings—wasn’t that what they said? But there was no lover waiting for her—just a formidable and justly enraged man whose path she had dared to cross.

Inside the cantina, a girl was frantically wiping off a table and chairs, and Nicola sank down on to one of them, trying to control her whirling frantic thoughts.

What was she going to do? She knew from Teresita that the Montalba hacienda was miles from anywhere, with no nearby stores where she could unobtrusively perform her transformation, or crowded streets for her to fade into. And there was nowhere to hide, or means of escape here. This looked like the kind of place where there might be one bus a week to the nearest town.

The girl brought coffee, black, hot and freshly brewed. Nicola gulped hers. It didn’t quench her thirst, but at least helped to revive her a little.

She had been mad to let herself fall asleep again, she reproached herself. If she’d been awake, she would have seen they were turning off the highway, and asked why. She might even have put some kind of a spoke in Don Luis’ plans, although it was difficult to know what.

Lopez had come in, and was drinking his coffee at an adjacent table. Moistening her lips, Nicola asked him a little falteringly if he knew why Don Luis had changed his mind about their destination.

‘The Señor did not honour me with his reasons,’ Lopez said a little repressively, then his face relaxed a little. ‘But I think, señorita, it is because of the chapel. There is a beautiful chapel at La Mariposa and no doubt Don Luis wishes to be married there. It is a family tradition.’

‘A family tradition,’ Nicola echoed weakly. All Teresita’s forebodings had been right, it seemed. If she had taken this journey in person, there was no way Cliff could ever have traced her. She tried to feel glad for them both, but inwardly her stomach was churning with fright.

She stole a glance at Lopez, wondering what he would do if she threw herself on his mercy and confessed everything. She had money, perhaps she could bribe him to drive her to Monterrey. Then she remembered the note of respect in his voice when he had spoken of Don Luis—the way he had said, ‘It is a family tradition’, and knew there was no hope there. He would take her straight to his employer, and a search for Teresita would be mounted immediately. And if by some mischance she and Cliff were still unmarried, then it would all have been for nothing.

She got up abruptly from the table, and asked the girl who had brought the coffee to show her the lavatory which was housed in a rough-and-ready corrugated iron shack across the yard at the rear of the building, where a few scrawny chickens pecked in a desultory manner among the dirt and stones.

The flushing apparatus didn’t work, and the tiny handbasin yielded only a trickle of rusty water. Nicola took off her dark glasses and stared at herself in the piece of cracked mirror hanging above the basin. Her eyes looked enormous, and deeply shadowed, and she felt as taut as a bowstring.

It had all gone hopelessly, disastrously wrong, and she had not the faintest idea how to begin to put it right. All she could do, she supposed, was go with the tide, and see where it took her. And if that was to the feet of a furious Mexican grandee, then she had only herself to blame for having got involved in the first place.

As she crossed back to the cantina, she noticed a battered blue truck standing in the yard. The driver was standing talking to an older man, probably the cantina’s owner. Nicola looked longingly at the truck as she passed. She’d asked for a way out of here, and now one was being presented, dangled in front of her, in fact.

But could she take it? The driver had stopped presumably for petrol and a drink, which meant that the truck would be left unattended at some point. But would the driver be obliging enough to leave the keys in the ignition? And how far would she get anyway in a strange vehicle, when only yards away there was a powerful car with a driver who knew the terrain, and would overtake her quite effortlessly because it was his duty to do so?

As she looked away with an inward sigh, she encountered the driver’s smiling eyes.

‘Bonita rosita,’ he called, his glance devouring her shamelessly. She saw the cantina owner put a hand on his arm, and say something in a low voice. It was obviously some kind of warning, and she heard the word ‘Montalba.’ The truck driver sobered immediately, his expression becoming almost sheepish, and he turned away shrugging, and moving his hands defensively.

Nicola shivered a little. What kind of man was Don Luis that the mention of his name could have such an instant effect?

On her way back to the table, she saw a telephone booth in the corner. If it hadn’t been so totally public and within earshot of anyone who cared to listen, she would have been tempted to try and get through to Mexico City and say to Elaine a loud and unequivocal, ‘Help—get me out of here!’