скачать книгу бесплатно
“We?” her mother asked. “Who is this we?”
Jennifer drew a deep breath, all too familiar with her mother’s nosy nature. “I’m bringing a friend home.”
“Ah, you’re bringing that sweet Elena? That girl from your building? I like her. She’s a good girl. She listens to her mother.”
“No, Mamá, not Elena. I’m bringing a…a friend. A friend who’s a…boy. A man, actually. A man—I mean, a boyfriend. I’m bringing home my boyfriend, all right?” A long silence echoed over the phone lines between El Paso and Odessa. “Mamá?”
“Who is this boy you’re bringing? What’s his name? Who are his parents?”
“He’s not a boy, Mamá. He’s a man. His name is Ryan. Ryan Madison. He’s very nice and very successful. Papi will love him.”
“Madison?”
“Yes, Mamá, Madison. Not Ruiz, not Hernandez, not Castillo. Madison, like the fourth president of our country.”
“Does he go to church?”
The doorbell rang and Jennifer glanced down at the dish towel tied around her waist. “Mamá, that’s him at the door. I’m cooking dinner for us tonight. You can interrogate him on his religious beliefs when we get there.”
“Well, I’ll tell your Papi that he isn’t in danger of losing his daughter,” Carmen said.
“And why is that?”
“Because once this man tastes your cooking, he won’t be back.”
“Goodbye, Mamá. I’ll see you on Friday evening. We’ll see you.” She dropped the phone in the cradle, then hurried over to the table and adjusted the colorful hand-painted Mexican stoneware on the bright tablecloth. She reached for the matches to light the candles, then decided candles might not send the right message.
After all, this agreement they had was strictly between friends. But they really weren’t friends yet. Perhaps acquaintances was a better description. But then, they were more than—
The doorbell rang again and Jennifer threw the dish towel onto the kitchen counter next to the stove and hurried to the door. At the last second, she raked her fingers through her hair and smoothed her palms over the skirt of her new dress. Though it wasn’t a maternity dress, it did have an empire waist. Her clothes had suddenly stopped fitting yesterday, as if she’d swallowed a basketball for breakfast, and she’d been forced to buy something new. Pasting a smile on her face, she pulled the door open.
Jennifer’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of him. She knew he was handsome—in a suit, in faded jeans, it didn’t really matter. Tonight, he wore immaculately pressed khakis and a pale-blue cotton polo shirt that set off his dark tan. His hair was still damp from a shower and it looked like he’d combed it with his fingers. “Hi,” she murmured, her knees going soft.
He pulled a bouquet of sunflowers from behind his back and held them out. “Hello, mi prometido. I’m sorry I’m a little late. I got tied up at the site.”
Jennifer laughed and took the flowers from his hand. “Come in. And it’s promitida. That’s the feminine form of fiancée. You’re my prometido.”
Ryan shrugged. “My Spanish is pretty lousy, isn’t it? I’ve been trying to learn. That way, when the guys on the drilling site are talking about me, I’ll know what they’re saying.”
“Come. Sit down. Dinner is almost ready.”
“How are you feeling?” he asked as he closed the apartment door behind him.
“Fine,” she said, grabbing a vase from an end table near the window. “No more dizzy spells.”
“Did you see your doctor?”
Jennifer shook her head, secretly pleased by his concern. “No, it’s nothing. I just have to be more careful about how I eat. Now, sit down and I’ll get you a drink. Would you like a beer?”
He nodded, slowly sat down, then frowned. “Do you smell that?”
“That’s my pozole,” Jennifer said proudly.
Ryan stood and stepped around her. “No, I really think something is—” He cursed and hurried over to the kitchen, where flames rose from the stove.
Jennifer screamed and hurried after him. “¡Ay, Dios mío! I’ll call the fire department. No, there’s a fire extinguisher… .” She paused, trying to remember where she’d put it. “Throw some water on it!”
Ryan calmly grabbed a stockpot from the rack over the breakfast bar and dropped it on top of the burning dish towel. Then he grabbed a saucepan and filled it with water, holding out his arm to keep her back. “It’ll go out in a few seconds.”
When he was satisfied that the fire was out, Jennifer hurried to the stove and pulled the cover off the pozole. But in her haste, she forgot to use a pot holder and the lid burned her fingers. She cried out and let it clatter to the floor, where it hit her big toe, which was sticking out of her sandal. The kitchen filled with the smell of scorched hominy and burned terry cloth as Jennifer’s eyes filled with tears.
Once again, the baby inside her seemed to hold the controls over her emotions, turning her from a babbling idiot to a blubbering fool in the blink of an eye. She couldn’t stop the tears from coming even though she wasn’t sure why she was crying. It wasn’t the ruined meal or her stinging fingers or even the smoke stain on her kitchen ceiling. It was…everything.
Jennifer buried her face in her hands and slid down to sit on the kitchen floor. A few moments later, she felt Ryan beside her, his fingers stroking her temple. “It’s all right,” he said. “The fire’s out. No damage done.”
She looked up at him through her tears and a giggle slipped from her throat. “I don’t care about the fire or the food. That’s the least of my worries. I’m such a mess. I can’t seem to control my emotions. I start crying at the drop of a hat. My life is in chaos and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to set it right.”
“I know how you feel,” Ryan said, tipping her chin up and capturing her gaze with his.
“Yeah, I guess you do.”
He grabbed her hand and gave her fingers a squeeze. “Why don’t we sit down on the sofa and relax. I’ll call for a pizza and we’ll get to work. You can make pozole for me again some other night.”
He gently helped her to her feet and led her over to the sofa, then returned to the kitchen to order the pizza. Ryan found a beer in the refrigerator and brought her a glass of orange juice. Then he settled on the sofa beside her, his arm draped over the back. “So, where do we start?”
“Well, since I know pretty much everything about you, we should start with me.”
“How do you know about me?” he asked after taking a sip of his beer.
“I did a pretty extensive investigation before I came to see you at the drilling site. A bachelor’s and master’s degree from Texas A and M, dean’s list, graduated cum laude, bought your first well with money you made in the stock market, built your business into a multimillion—”
“All right, all right,” Ryan said. “Let’s start with your family.”
“My papi, Diego, came from Mexico when he was fifteen. He worked picking vegetables in California until he found a job in a factory. He got his high school diploma going to night classes. He lived the American dream, working his way up, saving his pennies, until he and my mother bought a small electronics factory in El Paso. Now it’s huge and he makes components for the auto industry. I think you’ll have a lot in common.”
“And your mother?”
Jennifer slid down to the end of the couch and stretched her feet out in front of her, leaning back onto a throw pillow. “Mamá. She’ll be a little tougher. Her name is Carmen and she’s the glue that holds our family together. She’s lived in this country nearly all her life and she has very high expectations for her children. We all must go to college, find a good job and marry a nice Catholic.”
“Well, that will be a problem then,” Ryan said. “I’m not a very good Catholic. I haven’t been to church in ages, although I used to be an altar boy. That should count for something shouldn’t it?”
“It doesn’t make a difference since we really aren’t getting married,” Jennifer said with a smile.
He slipped her sandals off her feet and tucked her bare toes beneath his thigh. “Brothers and sisters?”
“Four. Joe is nineteen, Maria will be fifteen on Saturday, Linda is ten and Teresa is eight.”
“And Jennifer?”
“I’m twenty five,” she said. “I went to U of T in El Paso and got a degree in accounting.”
“Accounting,” he said. “Kind of an odd background for a private investigator, isn’t it?”
She sat up. “Now, there’s another problem we need to discuss. You see, my parents don’t know I’m a P.I. They think I’m an accountant for the office. I don’t think they’d approve, they wouldn’t find it respectable enough. So if the subject of my career comes up, which I’m sure it will, don’t tell them the truth.”
“I can vouch that you’re a good P.I.,” Ryan said. “Look how you tried to help Lucy. You couldn’t do something so important as an accountant, could you?”
“I guess not. It’s just that I’ve spent my life trying not to disappoint my parents and yet trying to live my own life. You don’t know the pressure of being the oldest child, the perfect little girl. I turned into a rebel at an early age.”
“You couldn’t have been that bad,” Ryan said, “to turn out so well.”
Jennifer gave him a grudging smile. “As a child, I was a tomboy. Always with tangled hair and skinned knees. In high school, I wore short skirts and ran with a fast crowd. In college, I partied a little too much. And look at me now. I was supposed to remain a virgin until I got married. Breaking that little rule will become quite obvious in another month.”
“What about the baby? How do you plan to tell them about that?” Ryan asked.
Jennifer groaned, then closed her eyes and flopped back on the pillow. “I don’t know. I was just going to wing it. Wait for the right moment and then tell them the whole thing all at once. I figured with Maria’s quinceañera and all the guests, there wouldn’t be a chance to interrogate me—or you.” She drew a shaky breath. “It’s probably going to get a little tense when we tell them about the baby and there will probably be a lot of accusations leveled at you.” Jennifer sat up and looked at him. “You can back out if you want. I’ll understand.”
He idly rubbed her leg, his palm sliding from her ankle along her calf and back again. Delicious sensations skittered over her skin at his touch. Though they barely knew each other, the action seemed perfectly natural. After all, he was her fiancé—at least for the next few months.
Still, it felt good to have a man pay attention to her. She’d been so lonely these past months, dealing with her pregnancy all by herself, wondering if she could handle so many changes on her own, frightened of what the future held. She felt safer when Ryan was near.
For the rest of the evening, they traded details of their lives and made up a few memories of their own—the night they met, their first kiss, the special spot where Ryan asked her to marry him, the first time they heard the baby’s heartbeat. And when they’d exhausted every subject and eaten the last piece of pizza, Jennifer walked Ryan to the door.
He bent closer and brushed a kiss on her cheek and then promised to be ready by noon on Friday. After she closed the door behind him, Jennifer reached up and touched her cheek, finding it still warm from the contact. She closed her eyes and sighed. Though it had been a nice kiss, she couldn’t help but wish that he’d kissed her like he had the previous day, his lips warm on hers, her face cupped between his palms.
For the first time since she’d thought of this preposterous plan, she actually believed it might work. With Ryan’s help, she felt as if she could accomplish anything. And it was clear he was a kind and charming man. How could her parents not fall in love with him? She already—
Jennifer sucked in a sharp breath and pushed the words from her brain. Yes, he was a wonderful man, the sort of man she might imagine spending her life with. But when she’d decided to have this baby, she’d also decided to raise it alone. She had her career and her own life and she’d worked hard at independence. She wasn’t about to give that all up now just because some guy had been nice to her.
“This will work,” she murmured. “I’ll tell my parents, I’ll come back to Odessa, we’ll break up and I’ll never see him again.”
But the thought of Ryan Madison disappearing from her life caused a sharp pang of regret. Was she really doing the right thing, using him like this? And would she be able to put him in the past and get on with her life as if she’d never known him?
CHAPTER TWO
“I DON’T KNOW what to say, darling. Do you want me to tell you we regret our actions? How can we? We found you. You became a part of our family.”
“You didn’t find me, you bought me,” Ryan said, his voice filled with bitterness. When the doorbell had rung, he’d expected to find Jennifer standing on the other side, ready to leave for El Paso. His heart had quickened as he pulled the door open; he’d been anxious to see her again. Instead, his mother had walked in, determined to straighten out everything that had gone wrong between them.
She was an attractive woman, trim and well-dressed, her ash-blond hair carefully styled into a simple pageboy. When he was growing up, he’d always been so proud of her. Rhonda Madison had been the prettiest mother on the block. Unlike some of the other mothers, her entire life revolved around Ryan—his school activities, sports. Anything that caught his interest caught hers as well. In hindsight, it all became clear. She’d been desperate to become a mother, and when she finally did, Rhonda Madison didn’t want to miss a single minute.
“Didn’t you ask questions?” Ryan demanded. “Like where I’d come from? What had happened to my parents?”
“He told us your mother was a teenage runaway,” Rhonda said. “We’d just turned over our entire life savings to this man. Your father might have been a little suspicious, but he wanted to make me happy and a baby was the only thing that could do that. We aren’t bad people, Ryan. And if we’d known you’d been stolen from your mother, we would have—”
“You would have bought me anyway?” Ryan asked. He waited for his mother to deny the accusation, but she didn’t.
“Have you talked to your…” The word stuck in her throat as if it pained her to say it. “The woman who gave birth to you?”
“You’ll be happy to hear she’s dead,” Ryan said, wanting to hurt her as much as she’d hurt him. “I’ll never know her, or my father. I do have a brother, though. And a niece.” Impatient to be done with the conversation, he glanced at his watch. “I have to get ready. I’m going away for the weekend.”
“Really?” his mother asked in a forced attempt at interest. “Where are you going?”
“El Paso,” he murmured. “I’m going to meet the parents of my fiancée.” Why he’d said it, Ryan didn’t know, for it was a bald-faced lie. Perhaps he’d meant to shock his mother, to draw her into another argument or maybe to drive home the fact that she wasn’t a part of his life anymore.
But she didn’t take the bait and the pained expression on her face caused a wave of guilt to rush over him. Sooner or later, he’d have to stop punishing her and accept what she and his father had done. But he wasn’t ready. Not yet. The wound was still too raw, and even after it healed a bit, he doubted that he’d ever be able to fully forgive them.
“Maybe, after you get back, you can bring your young lady to the house for dinner,” she suggested. “Your birthday is coming up. We could plan a barbecue.”
Ryan turned away from her and stuffed another shirt into his overnight bag. “Sure,” he muttered. He’d missed twenty-six birthdays with his real family, why not spend another one with the people who had been faking it? Suddenly, birthdays didn’t seem so important.
He heard her sigh in defeat and approach him from behind. When she placed her hand on his shoulder, he stiffened. He fought the urge to turn to her and gather her into his arms, to forget everything that had happened in the past month. But nothing could erase the lies they’d told.
In the end, she silently walked out the front door of his condo, leaving him to deal with his demons. Ryan furrowed his fingers through his hair and cursed softly. He’d never been a man to act on his emotions, choosing to think every word, every action out first. But since he’d learned of his true parentage, he couldn’t rely on his usual dispassionate nature anymore. Nothing made sense, and until it did, he’d just have to operate on instinct alone.
A soft knock sounded at the door and he spun around, ready to rebuff his mother again. But Jennifer stood in the open doorway, dressed in a pretty peasant blouse and a colorful skirt. She wore a straw hat on her head, her long hair tucked up beneath the crown. Like the sun appearing from behind a dark cloud, she instantly lightened his mood.
“What is it?” she asked, frowning. “You look upset.”
“Nothing,” Ryan murmured, gathering up his overnight bag and tucking his garment bag under his arm. “I just had a visit from my mother. Needless to say, it didn’t go well.”
“You shouldn’t punish your parents for this,” Jennifer said softly. “They didn’t know.”
“They should have asked,” Ryan countered.
“You can’t know what’s in a mother’s heart. Sometimes the need to have a child is so strong it hurts.”
Ryan’s jaw went tight and he fought the impulse to tell Jennifer to mind her own business. But if there was anyone he could talk to about his personal problems, it was her. And he didn’t want to break the tenuous connection they’d built between them. “I thought I’d drive,” Ryan murmured. “We can take my Lexus. I’ve got a CD changer and—”
“But I have a convertible,” she said, accepting the change in subject without further comment. “And it’s a beautiful day. Besides, I know a short cut through the desert. I bought some lunch for us and we can stop at Red Bluff Lake on our way there.”
Though Ryan would have preferred to determine the route and take his own car, Jennifer seemed so excited about the trip, he decided to throw caution to the wind and go along. After all, this was the new Ryan Madison, operating on instinct and emotion. He grabbed his bags and walked out behind her. Her little convertible was parked at the curb. It had to be at least ten years old and didn’t look as though it could make it through town, much less across all of West Texas. “Maybe we should take my car,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” Jennifer chided. “We’ll have fun.”
As they headed out of town, bypassing the interstate that went from Midland-Odessa to El Paso, Ryan realized why she’d chosen the route. It was obvious Jennifer didn’t believe in speed limits. Or stop signs or double yellow lines. She was in all probability the most aggressive driver he’d ever seen short of Al Unser or Richard Petty.
He relaxed a bit when they got out of town and sped toward Kermit. “Maybe we should use this time to brush up,” he shouted over the sound of the wind racing around them.
She turned and grinned at him, her eyes hidden beneath the brim of her hat and her dark sunglasses. “All right,” she said. “Ask me anything.”
He considered his first question carefully. He really wanted to ask her about the baby’s father, but Ryan knew he ought to leave that question for another time. “Jennifer. That’s an odd name for someone of your background.”
She laughed. “That’s my father’s doing. When he first came to this country, he loved to go to the movies. The only movie he’d ever seen in Mexico was Duel in the Sun, with Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones. He saw it at an old cine when he was eight. And then he came to America and the first movie star he saw was Jennifer Jones, walking right down the street in Los Angeles. He took it as a sign from God that he was meant to live in this country. And that’s how I got my name.”
Ryan laughed. “All right, now it’s your turn. Ask me anything.”
“You were involved,” she said. “Nearly married a woman named Elise. Then you broke it off last year. Why?”
