Enamored

The gentle face on the starched white pillow was pale and very still. The man looking down at it scowled with unfamiliar concern. For so many years, his emotions had been caged. Tender feelings were a luxury no mercenary could afford, least of all a man with the reputation of Diego Laremos.

But this woman was no stranger, and the emotions he felt when he looked at her were still confused. It had been five years since he’d seen her, yet she seemed not to have aged a day. She would be twenty-five now, he thought absently. He was forty.

He hadn’t expected her to be unconscious. When the hospital had contacted him, he almost hadn’t come. Melissa Sterling had betrayed him years before. He wasn’t anxious to renew their painful acquaintance, but out of curiosity and a sense of duty, he’d made the trip to southern Arizona. Now he was here, and it was not a subterfuge, a trap, as it had been before. She was injured and helpless; she was alive, though he’d given her up for dead all those long years ago. The cold emptiness inside him was giving way to memories, and that he couldn’t allow.

He turned, tall and dark and immaculate in his charcoal-gray suit, to stare out the window at the well-kept grounds beyond the second-floor room Melissa Sterling occupied. He had a mustache now that he hadn’t sported during the turbulent days she’d shared with him. He was a little more muscular, older. But age had only emphasized his elegant good looks, made him more mature. His dark eyes slid to the bed, to the slender body of this woman, this stranger, who had trapped him into marriage and then deserted him.

Melissa was tall for a woman, although he towered above her. She had long, wavy blond hair that had once curled below her waist. That had been cut, so that now it curved around her wan oval face. Her eyes were blue-shadowed, closed, her perfect mouth almost as white as her face, her straight nose barely wrinkling now and again as it protested the air tubes taped to it. She seemed surrounded by electronic equipment, by wires that led to various monitors.

An accident, the attending physician had said over a worse-than-poor telephone conversation the day before. An airplane crash that, by some miracle, she and the pilot and several other passengers on the commuter flight from Phoenix had survived. The plane had gone down in the desert outside Tucson, and she’d been brought here to the general hospital, unconscious. The emergency room staff had found a worn, carefully folded paper in her wallet that contained the only evidence of her marital status. A marriage license, written in Spanish; the fading ink stated that she was the esposa of one Diego Alejandro Rodriguez Ruiz Laremos of Dos Rios, Guatemala. Was Diego her husband, the physician had persisted, and if so, would he authorize emergency surgery to save her life?

He vaguely recalled asking if she had no other relatives, but the doctor had told him that her pitifully few belongings gave no evidence of any. So Diego had left his Guatemalan farm in the hands of his hired militia and flown himself all the way from Guatemala City to Tucson.

He’d had no sleep in the past twenty-four hours. He’d been smoking himself to death and reliving a tormenting past.

The woman in the bed stirred suddenly, moaning. He turned just as her eyes opened and then closed quickly again. They were gray. Big and soft, a delicate contrast to her blond fairness; her gray eyes were the only visible evidence of Melissa’s Guatemalan mother, whose betrayal had brought anguish and dishonor to the Laremos family.

His black eyes ran slowly over her pale, still features and he wondered as he watched how he and Melissa had ever come to this….

Chapter One

It was a misty rain, but Melissa Sterling didn’t mind. Getting soaked was a small price to pay for a few precious minutes with Diego Laremos.

Diego’s family had owned the finca, the giant Guatemalan farm that bordered her father’s land, for four generations. And despite the fact that Melissa’s late mother had been the cause of a bitter feud between the Laremos family and the Sterlings, that hadn’t stopped Melissa from worshiping the son and heir to the Laremos name. Diego seemed not to mind her youthful adoration, or if he did, he was kind enough not to mock her for it.

There had been a storm the night before, and Melissa had ridden down to Mama Chavez’s small house to make sure the old woman was all right, only to find that Diego, too, had been worried about his old nurse and had come to check on her. Melissa liked to visit her and listen to tales of Diego’s youth and hear secret legends about the Maya.

Diego had brought some melons and fish for the old woman, whose family tree dated back to the very beginning of the Mayan empire, and now he was escorting Melissa back to her father’s house.

Her dark eyes kept running over his lean, fit body, admiring the way he sat on his horse, the thick darkness of his hair under his panama hat. He wasn’t an arrogant man, but he had a cold, quiet authority about him that bordered on it. He never had to raise his voice to his servants, and Melissa had only seen him in one fight. He was a dignified, self-contained man without an apparent weakness. But he was mysterious. He often disappeared for weeks at a time, and once he’d come home with scars on his cheek and a limp. Melissa had been curious, but she hadn’t questioned him. Even at twenty, she was still shy with men, and especially with Diego. He’d rescued her once when she’d gotten lost in the rain forest searching for some old Mayan ruins, and she’d loved him secretly ever since.

“I suppose your grandmother and sister would die if they knew I was within a mile of you,” she sighed, brushing back her long, wavy blond hair as she glanced at him with a hesitant smile that was echoed in the soft gray of her eyes.

“They bear your family no great love, that is true,” he agreed. The distant mountains were a blue haze in front of them as they rode. “It is difficult for my family to forget that Edward Sterling stole my father’s novia on the eve of their wedding and eloped with her. My father spoke of her often, with grief. My grandmother never stopped blaming your family for his grief.”

“My father loved her, and she loved him,” Melissa defended. “It was only an arranged marriage that your father would have had with her, anyway, not a love match. Your father was much older than my mother, and he’d been a widower for years.”

“Your father is British,” he said coldly. “He has never understood our way of life. Here, honor is life itself. When he stole away my father’s betrothed, he dishonored my family.” Diego glanced at Melissa, not adding that his father had also been counting on her late mother’s inheritance to restore the family fortunes. Diego had considered his father’s attitude rather mercenary, but the old man had cared about Sheila Sterling in his cool way.

Diego reined in his mount and stared at Melissa, taking in her slender body in jeans and a pink shirt unbuttoned to the swell of her breasts. She attracted him far more than he wanted to admit. He couldn’t allow himself to become involved with the daughter of the woman who’d disgraced his family.

“Your father should not let you wander around in this manner,” he said unexpectedly, although he softened the words with a faint smile. “You know there has been increased guerrilla activity here. It is not safe.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” she replied.

“You never do, chica,” he sighed, cocking his hat over one eye. “Your daydreaming will be your downfall one day. These are dangerous times.”

“All times are dangerous,” she said with a shy smile. “But I feel safe with you.”

He raised a dark eyebrow. “And that is the most dangerous daydream of all,” he mused. “But no doubt you have not yet realized it. Come; we must move on.”

“In just a minute.” She drew a camera from her pocket and pointed it toward him, smiling at his grimace. “I know, not again, you’re thinking. Can I help it if I can’t get the right perspective on the painting of you I’m working on? I need another shot. Just one, I promise.” She clicked the shutter before he could protest.

“This famous painting is taking one long time, niña,” he commented. “You have been hard at it for eight months, and not one glimpse have I had of it.”

“I work slow,” she prevaricated. In actual fact, she couldn’t draw a straight line without a ruler. The photo was to add to her collection of pictures of him, to sit and sigh over in the privacy of her room. To build dreams around. Because dreams were all she was ever likely to have of Diego, and she knew it. His family would oppose any mention of having Melissa under their roof, just as they opposed Diego’s friendship with her.

“When do you go off to college?” he asked unexpectedly.

She sighed as she pocketed the camera. “Pretty soon, I guess. I begged off for a year after school, just to be with Dad, but this unrest is making him more stubborn about sending me away. I don’t want to go to the States. I want to stay here.”

“Your father may be wise to insist,” Diego murmured, although he didn’t like to think about riding around his estate with no chance of being waylaid by Melissa. He’d grown used to her. To a man as worldly and experienced and cynical as Diego had become over the years, Melissa was a breath of spring air. He loved her innocence, her shy adoration. Given the chance, he was all too afraid he might be tempted to appreciate her exquisite young body, as well. She was slender, tall, with long, tanned legs, breasts that had just the right shape and a waist that was tiny, flaring to full, gently curving hips. She wasn’t beautiful, but her fair complexion was exquisite in its frame of long, tangled blond hair, and her gray eyes held a kind of serenity far beyond her years. Her nose was straight, her mouth soft and pretty. In the right clothes and with the right training, she would be a unique hostess, a wife of whom a man could be justifiably proud….

That thought startled Diego. He had had no intention of thinking of Melissa in those terms. If he ever married, it would be to a Guatemalan woman of good family, not to a woman whose father had already once disgraced the name of Laremos.

“You’re always at home these days,” Melissa said as they rode along the valley, with the huge Atitl´n volcano in the distance against the green jungle. She loved Guatemala, she loved the volcanos and the lakes and rivers, the tropical jungle, the banana and coffee plantations and the spreading valleys. She especially loved the mysterious Mayan ruins that one found so unexpectedly. She loved the markets in the small villages and the friendly warmth of the Guatemalan people whose Mayan ancestors had once ruled here.

“The finca demands much of my time since my father’s death,” he replied. “Besides, niña, I was getting too old for the work I used to do.”

She glanced at him. “You never talked about it. What did you do?”

He smiled faintly. “Ah, that would be telling. How did your father fare with the fruit company? Were they able to recompense him for his losses during the storm?”

A tropical storm had damaged the banana plantation in which her father had a substantial interest. This year’s crop had been a tremendous loss. Like Diego, though, her father had other investments—such as the cattle he and Diego raised on their adjoining properties. But as a rule, fruit was the biggest money-maker.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. He doesn’t share business with me. I guess he thinks I’m too dumb to understand.” She smiled, her mind far away on the small book she’d found recently in her mother’s trunk. “You know, Dad is so different from the way he was when my mother knew him. He’s so sedate and quiet these days. Mama wrote that he was always in the thick of things when they were first married, very daring and adventurous.”

“I imagine her death changed him, little one,” he said absently.

“Maybe it did,” she murmured. She looked at him curiously. “Apollo said that you were the best there was at your job,” she added quickly. “And that someday you might tell me about it.”

He said something under his breath, glaring at her. “My past is something I never expect to share with anyone. Apollo had no right to say such a thing to you.”

His voice chilled her when it had that icily formal note in it. She shifted restlessly. “He’s a nice man. He helped Dad round up some of the stray cattle one day when there was a storm. He must be good at his job, or you wouldn’t keep him on.”

“He is good at his job,” he said, making a mental note to have a long talk with the black American ex-military policeman who worked for him and had been part of the band of mercenaries Diego had once belonged to. “But it does not include discussing me with you.”

“Don’t be mad at him, please,” she asked gently. “It was my fault, not his. I’m sorry I asked. I know you’re very close about your private life, but it bothered me that you came home that time so badly hurt.” She lowered her eyes. “I was worried.”

He bit back a sharp reply. He couldn’t tell her about his past. He couldn’t tell her that he’d been a professional mercenary, that his job had been the destruction of places and sometimes people, that it had paid exceedingly well, or that the only thing he had put at risk was his life. He kept his clandestine operations very quiet at home; only the government officials for whom he sometimes did favors knew about him. As for friends and acquaintances, it wouldn’t do for them to know how he earned the money that kept the finca solvent.

He shrugged indifferently. “No importa.” He was silent for a moment, his black eyes narrow as he glanced at her. “You should marry,” he said unexpectedly. “It is time your father arranged for a novio for you, niña.”

She wanted to suggest Diego, but that would be courting disaster. She studied her slender hands on the reins. “I can arrange my own marriage. I don’t want to be promised to some wealthy old man just for the sake of my family fortunes.”

Diego smiled at her innocence. “Oh, niña, the idealism of youth. By the time you reach my age, you will have lost every trace of it. Infatuation does not last. It is the poorest foundation for a lasting relationship, because it can exist where there are no common interests whatsoever.”

“You sound so cold,” she murmured. “Don’t you believe in love?”