The Accidental Bridegroom Read online

  “I told you so I would believe it myself!”

  “All the newspapers say—”

  “They say what my mother and Armi tell them to say! And it isn’t that Maurice isn’t good and right for me, because he is!”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “I want to love him in the same wild way I loved Rafe.”

  “Maybe you are more mature now.”

  Pita’s dark eyes shifted to a strange-looking jumble of teetering boxes partially swathed in raggedly cut remnants of white satin.

  “Did you see the altar our little Gordita built?”

  When Cathy turned, she saw a smaller altar leaning drunkenly against Pita’s.

  “She made it in honor of Rafe,” Pita said. “She’s been struggling so hard on it. I didn’t tell you because—”

  As if in a daze, Cathy moved toward it. Three badly balanced boxes were only partially covered with scraps of satin. On the bottom box Sadie had laid out her dearest possessions. In the center, displayed as proudly as if it were an emperor’s crown jewel, was her latest ill-gotten treasure.

  The purple fluorescent skull gleamed up at Cathy with dark triumph. Beside it in the small golden frame Sadie had demanded last week was a picture of Rafe on his motorcycle.

  So this was why Sadie had been such a little monster in the market.

  The photograph—Cathy’s only photograph of Rafe, for Armi had found the others and destroyed them—was supposed to be locked away in her jewelry box. And Sadie wasn’t supposed to know it even existed.

  Cathy’s hand went to her locket, where she kept the key.

  Somehow the little minx, who constantly sifted through all of Cathy’s possessions and denied that she ever did so, had taken the key and stolen the picture, too.

  But Cathy didn’t dwell on Sadie’s innumerable crimes, rather on the poignant reason behind them.

  Her poor darling was desperately lonely for a father.

  “Oh, Pita,” Cathy said, collapsing before the tiny altar. With a shudder, she touched the garish purple glitter of the skull’s arching eyebrows. “I have to marry Maurice. And the sooner the better. Sadie needs a father so much. I know that, in time, she’ll come to accept Maurice.”

  “But if you don’t love him yourself—”

  “Oh, Pita, if only there really was such a thing as witchcraft. If only you had Lupe’s talent and really could concoct a spell and make me fall in love with Maurice.”

  Pita stiffened, drawing back with wounded pride and profound sorrow.

  Cathy realized instantly what she had done. “Oh, Pita. I’m so sorry. I should never have compared you to—I didn’t mean—”

  “Everybody always thinks Lupe is better—even you,” Pita said in a small, pain-filled voice.

  There was an awful, frozen silence. They both felt terrible, cut off from each other.

  Too late, Cathy realized that her own pain had blinded her and made her thoughtlessly cruel.

  No simple apology would suffice.

  It was one thing for Pita to put herself and her talents down, but Cathy knew that it was quite another matter for someone else to do it. One wrong remark, one joke that she was a disappointment compared to her mother—and the normally jolly Pita would turn gloomy for days.

  “Oh, Pita, I didn’t mean it. You know that I didn’t. I don’t even believe in—”

  “You did,” Pita said glumly. “And you’re right. I have no talent. I’m just a pitiful fraud. My spells never work. Remember the Pachecos. Who am I trying to fool?”

  Slowly Cathy went to Pita, but when she tried to put her arms around the woman to comfort her, Pita shrugged free.

  “Pita, please…please forgive me. I can’t bear the thought of leaving tomorrow, knowing I’ve hurt you.”

  Pita’s wounded gaze flickered past Cathy to her mother’s stern photograph, which had gone iridescent again. “Nobody’s ever believed in me. Especially not my mother… and I tried so hard. I—I still try.”

  “I believe in you, Pita. I’ve always believed in you. If it hadn’t been for you, I would have had a truly miserable childhood.”

  Still, Pita hesitated. Finally, she gulped in a breath and spoke. “Then will you let me try to show, both you and Mother, you’re all wrong?”

  “I already know how wrong I was.”

  “No. I wasn’t born the daughter of the great Lupe Sanchez for nothing,” she said with a touch of Lupe’s old arrogance. “If I dabble with my mother’s potion for true love, will you give it to Maurice and take it yourself when you bring him back to see Sadie?”

  Cathy thought potions were ridiculous. But she would have agreed to anything to make Pita feel better.

  “Of course I will, Pita.”

  Pita’s black eyes gleamed with sudden inspiration as she marched across the room and picked up her mother’s diary. “For once in my life, I’ll show her. And I’ll show you, too, Cathy. I’m going to make a spell that will turn your world upside down.”

  Cathy remembered the henpecked Abelardo and felt a faint qualm.

  Then the dirt floor beneath her feet trembled.

  “Just another baby earthquake,” Pita said on her way to the kitchen with the diary of spells tucked against her plump bosom.

  “Pita—maybe you shouldn’t get too carried away. Now remember, all I want is to fall in love.”

  “I promise you, on the conceited soul of my esteemed mother—who, as you know, was the greatest witch and curandera in all of Jalisco—that you will fall in love. Madly, impossibly in love. And it will be even better than the first time.”

  Lupe Sanchez’s photograph began to shake. Indeed, her whole altar rattled dangerously.

  Cathy screamed, but Pita, her good humor entirely restored, smiled and said again, “Don’t worry. It’s just another baby earthquake.”

  Three

  When his pickup topped the ridge, the desert with its tumbleweeds, and cacti stretched like a beige ocean toward the blue wall of mountains.

  He was crazy to be here—suicidal to have driven so far into Mexico when he was a wanted man.

  Rafe reached involuntarily into his shirt pocket for his cigarettes before he remembered he’d finally quit six months ago.

  Damn!

  He replaced his tanned hand on the steering wheel and drove with one eye on the road and the other looking over his shoulder. He was worried about a hell of a lot more than his new truck.

  This whole thing could be just another setup to lure him across the border.

  No way could the blue-eyed brat in the fuzzy snapshot Manuel had sent him really be his!

  No way did Rafe want to have anything to do with the rich, half-baked screwball, who’d nearly destroyed him.

  After several bad years, Mike’s and his business was really starting to fly. The last thing he needed was trouble like Cathy, who had had a peculiar knack for turning his life upside down. And she’d damn sure thrown him to the wolves when the heat was on.

  The wolves being one very big, bad wolf—Armi Calderon.

  When a billion dollars had leaned on him, Rafe had felt it. And Armi had done a hell of a lot more than lean. He’d smashed. He’d pulverized.

  Rafe, who prided himself on his tough-guy image, was secretly ashamed that he still had nightmares about the night he’d gotten drunk after Cathy had walked out on him. So blind drunk and professionally careless, he’d been easy pickings for Armi’s four goons when he’d staggered out of his favorite bar. They tackled him from behind and dragged him into a dark alley. When he’d refused Armi’s business proposition, Armi had ordered them to kick in his ribs.

  Rafe had been sobbing like a baby, saying he’d take the money, when Armi had finally called them off. Then the rich bastard had just stood there in his three-piece suit and smiled down at Rafe, groveling and writhing in the dirt. Finally, Armi had knelt and, in a deadly soft voice, said how his favorite dish was the American hamburger. Then Armi had taken out a monogrammed handkerchief and cleaned the bloo
d off Rafe’s mouth as gently as he might have tended a baby. But as he’d risen slowly, he’d said, “You drunken, two-bit, cheap piece of trash—if you ever cross me again or come near my stepdaughter, I’ll let them turn you into hamburger.”

  Armi had flung an enormous wad of cash down into the blood and grime, along with the photographs he’d shredded that Cathy had taken of Rafe. Armi had pivoted on his heel and walked off, stopping at the end of the alley. “That’s all you’ll ever get out of me.” Then very softly, very gently, he whispered, “Your life is my thank-you for saving my life.”

  Armi Calderon wanted people to think he came from class. And most people thought anybody with that kind of money was class. But the truth was he came from the gutter. He’d gotten rich fast because he was smart and mean. Because he was a bully who was very good at buying powerful people. Six and a half years ago, he’d enjoyed crushing Rafe like a bug. Rafe knew Armi would take personal pleasure in making good on that threat.

  So what was Rafe doing down here?

  Because when it came to Cathy Calderon, it seemed his brain could still get soft and a certain polar organ of his anatomy could still get hard and take over the brain-work. The same way it had the night when he’d seen her sparkly high heels fly over her wall, the same way it had when she’d hitched up her chiffon skirts and thrown her bare leg over the seat of his bike.

  That improbable night had started off hot and had just gotten hotter.

  He’d fallen hard and fast for Cathy Calderon. No other woman had ever gotten to him the way she had, and he’d thought she’d felt the same way about him.

  As if it were yesterday, he remembered climbing on his motorcycle behind her, holding on to her waist and yelling the directions to his and Mike’s house as they’d sped away through the warm dark night.

  She’d been a natural on the big powerful bike.

  A natural at other sports he’d liked even better.

  If only he hadn’t been dumb enough to think he could control the situation; dumb enough to forget that she was Armi Calderon’s stepdaughter. Dumb enough to forget that the rich always played mean and dirty.

  With her chiffon skirts flying over his thighs, they’d raced along the 610 Loop past the Astrodome and then onto the empty Gulf Freeway, leaving her world behind and entering his.

  “Where are we?” she whispered breathlessly when he’d told her to stop in front of a small clapboard house nestled under half a dozen tall pecan trees.

  “Park Place,” he muttered bitterly, seeing the peeling paint on all the bleak houses, the unmown yards, the burned-out house next door even in the darkness. “Pee Pee Town.”

  “Pee Pee Town?”

  “Hey, nobody calls it that except me,” he murmured with a guilty grin as he helped her off the bike and took her hand to lead her up the crumbling concrete driveway. “A lot of nice people still live out here, but it’s damned sure not River Oaks.”

  “Count your blessings,” she said almost wistfully. “At least you’re free to come and go as you please.”

  “Right. ’Cause nobody gives a damn about me.”

  “Maybe that’s not true anymore,” she whispered a bit too possessively.

  He caught her to him and for a moment stood there looking down at her. “You really think you’re gonna stick around long enough to change things?”

  “You’d better believe it.”

  He tried to make light of it. “I’ve been on my own since I was thirteen. Maybe I like things just like they are, Skinny.

  “Slim. I prefer Slim.”

  He smiled. “Maybe you’re just a rich girl who’s had every damn thing she’s ever wanted, who thinks it’d be fun to go slumming.”

  She turned white. “No. Don’t put yourself down like that. And the name’s Cathy. Cathy Calderon.”

  He nodded and tried to look impressed, as if he didn’t already know.

  She smiled her cute smile. “And you don’t like things the way they are. Any more than I do. My life’s not so great, you know. What I want more than anything is to escape.”

  “Rafe Steele,” he murmured, leaning down and fumbling in a flower bed till he dug up his front-door key. Then he unlocked the door and stood back, bowing slightly as if she were a princess, letting her enter first. “After you, Skinny.”

  “Slim!”

  “Right. Slim,” he drawled the nickname as he followed her inside.

  When he saw her dark eyes taking in the green shag carpet that needed vacuuming and the rest of the awful mess Mike had made, Rafe quickly began peeling his roommate’s clothes off the backs of the chairs and piano bench and dirty beige couch. There was a pair of lacy panties and nylons draped over the brass chandelier.

  The mess was a good sign. Maybe it meant Mike was home.

  Rafe grabbed the feminine lingerie and then knelt down and started picking up the newspapers and beer cans from the floor.

  Standing up again, his arms dripping with a tangle of clothes and newspapers, Rafe said sheepishly, “I wasn’t perfectly straight about…the hideout. I didn’t tell you about my roommate. He gets sloppy when I’m not here to nag.” Louder he yelled, “Yo—Mike! Company.”

  A chair was pushed back in the kitchen. Heavy footsteps resounded across a linoleum floor, then a swinging door that separated the bright yellow kitchen from the messily stacked dining room was pushed open.

  “Yo, brother!” A dark, muscular figure in a white T-shirt and torn jeans leaned negligently against the door-jamb. “Long time no see!” rumbled a deep friendly voice. “I didn’t expect you tonight. Manuel told me he sent you out on the Calderon job.”

  “Hey, this is Cathy Calderon. Cathy, meet Mike Washington,” Rafe cut in pointedly, his intense blue gaze glaring warningly at Mike. Rafe strutted around the corner and pitched all Mike’s junk into his bedroom and slammed the door, which jammed on the pair of lacy panties.

  “I like a man who knows that having fun is more important than keeping house,” Cathy said with a giggle, picking up the panties and helpfully tossing them inside, too.

  “Then I’m your man,” Mike boomed, giving her a big white smile.

  Mike was huge and black and as musclebound as a boxer. A thin scar ran the length of his right cheek.

  “You’re Cathy Calderon?” Mike was now frowning with deep disapproval.

  “Mike,” Cathy said ever so gently, going up to him, “lighten up. You don’t have to worry. I know all about Rafe…and you and your little operation. He told me everything.”

  “He did?” Mike said, shooting Rafe a dark, startled look. “Manuel told me mum was the word on this job, brother.”

  “Things haven’t changed, brother,” Rafe said quietly.

  “Then—”

  “I was sneaking out of the house with a friend,” Cathy continued.

  “Her friend was drunk and tried to rape her,” Rafe put in grimly.

  “I don’t think he would have gone that far, but when Rafe sweetly tried to rescue me, Jeff punched him out. I ended up saving Rafe.”

  Mike roared with laughter. “You’re losing your touch.”

  “Do you have to tell him every damned detail, Skinny?”

  “Slim! Am I missing something? I thought Mike was your partner…in crime. I was trying to reassure him.”

  “Crime? Say what?”

  Rafe let out a long, exasperated sigh. “Cathy—do you have—”

  “Let the lady talk, Rafe.”

  Rafe grabbed Cathy and pushed her toward the living room. “She’s said too damned much already.”

  “So, how’d you figure out what Rafe was doing there?” Mike demanded. “Usually he plays it smarter than that.”

  “He told me.”

  “He what?”

  Rafe strode past Cathy.

  “Cathy, can I talk with the man here?” Rafe asked politely. “We need to have a private man-to-man chat.”

  “Sure,” she said, smiling. “Don’t mind me.”

  She stepped back and Ra
fe pushed Mike into the kitchen and then closed the door carefully.

  Mike spun around. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Mike—hey, it’s not like I planned this. I’m playing it by ear. And listen, she doesn’t know I’m a bodyguard. I couldn’t tell her that—’cause she hates bodyguards. The brat thinks I’m a thief.”

  “Say what?”

  “She thinks you’re one, too. But it’s cool. She likes the idea.”

  “No, it’s not cool, man. And you were stupid to bring her here.”

  “Yeah? Well, what was I supposed to do? Her father hired me to protect her. I couldn’t leave her wandering around alone. No telling what she would have done next.”

  “So what are you planning to do? Spend the night with her—here?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Well, you’d better not handle Armi Calderon’s daughter, if you get my drift. Or he’ll handle you. I’ve heard things about that guy.”

  “Hey, I do have a three-digit IQ.”

  “But you’re a low achiever.”

  “Not to worry. You’re here to protect me.”

  Mike picked up his jacket. “Not for long.”

  “What?”

  “Manuel put me on a job, too.” Mike opened the back door and headed out. “One of Vadda Thomas’s bodyguards walked out on her tonight after her concert.”

  Rafe whistled. Vadda was a beautiful soul singer. Mike was an avid fan. “At least she’ll be more fun to look at than JoJo.”

  “My interest in her will be strictly professional, the way yours better be with Cathy Calderon. Don’t cross the line—it always causes problems. Remember Consuelo—”

  “Hey, I didn’t-”

  But Mike was gone.

  And Rafe was alone with Cathy.

  Which wouldn’t have been so bad, because he’d taken Mike’s advice to heart. Which wouldn’t have been so bad since one of Rafe’s credos was, NEVER, never sleep with a client.

  Except that Cathy had ideas of her own.

  Every time she smiled, it got harder and harder to remember that he had been hired to protect her, not ravish her; harder to remember that he was the pro, that he had the situation under control.