It Takes Two: Deep in the Heart, Book 1 (6 page)

“Eat it while it’s hot,” she instructed, noting with purely female pleasure that Zach seemed appreciative of the fare. He’d removed his tie and suit jacket, laying them over the back of the chair. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, revealing muscled forearms. Longing rose inside Annie, but she told herself it had more to do with the fact that Zach was occupying the place where her husband had once sat than any further attraction she might feel for him. Her pride had been too badly injured by his rejection. She had put Zach in a bad spot with her advance, probably embarrassing him as he obviously wasn’t attracted to her, and the thought made her stomach burn.

Vowing never to make such a fool of herself with Zach again, Annie began laying out bowls of salsa. The spicy condiment was her specialty, made from ripe red tomatoes she grew in her garden behind the house. The tangy garlic in the sauce was fresh also, blended with chunks of jalapeño and just the right layering of grassy cilantro, all planted by her with a little help from Mary. The salsa recipe was greatly coveted in Desperado since she’d won the blue ribbon at the state fair, but Annie had declined to reveal her secrets. Instead, she sold jars of her homemade salsa down at the local market. Each month she said a prayer of gratitude for the extra dollars her salsa earned.

Zach didn’t fail to notice how mouthwatering Annie’s cooking smelled and looked. He loved fajitas and, although they were a common enough occurrence around the state, easily ordered anywhere, he had the feeling he was about to sample something a cut above common Tex-Mex offerings. Impatiently, he waited for Annie to be seated and begin eating before he dove into a tortilla packed with beef and garden-fresh vegetables. A sigh of delight rose in his throat, but Zach held it back, knowing Mr. Cade wasn’t in the mood for him to praise Annie’s skills.

Taking a bite of the warmly seasoned beans, Zach allowed his gaze to touch Annie’s face. Why had she kissed him, anyway? It hadn’t been a momentary emotion she’d been satisfying, he knew, from the intensity of her kiss.

No. She’d kissed him like she’d been hanging on for dear life, but he didn’t know why. Pulling his gaze away from Annie, he accidentally locked eyes with Mr. Cade. The old man appeared ready to erupt in a murdering rage any second. Zach pondered whether he should just forgo the rest of his dinner and head on down to the shack since he was obviously upsetting his host so much.

“Will you please cut my meat for me?” Mary asked sweetly.

Zach looked down into the little girl’s face and smiled himself. “Sure, sweetie,” he replied. “You like fajitas, do you?” he asked conversationally as he cut the grainy meat into small squares. For a moment, hazy imaginings that one day he’d be doing this for his own child drifted across his mind. What would it be like to be a father? Would he be any better at parenting, do things differently—better even—than his father had?

Remorse suddenly smote him. This small, disjointed family was functioning on its own. All they had was each other—and this dusty land, mainly fit for rattlesnake habitation.

The salsa he’d been enjoying developed an instant taste of flatness. Almost everything he was wolfing down at this table came from the hard work of Annie’s hands. Mary accidentally bumped his elbow, and he glanced down at the mocha-colored little face, accented with fine brows and delicate lips. He’d noticed Mary’s dress hung awkwardly this afternoon when she was playing ball with her grandfather, and assumed she was outgrowing it. A closer glance told him the flowered print dress was homemade, as were the fraying ribbons in her hair, straggly bows painstakingly tied there by loving hands—Annie’s hands, which struggled to take care of an old man, raise her daughter, run a farm.

They had so little, and Zach’s entire mission was to take away the only way of life they knew.

Slowly, he placed the fat tortilla back on to his plate. Without realizing he did it, Zach’s eyes found Mr. Cade’s. The old man was watching him strangely, the glare of hatred gone. Zach stared back, wondering what the crusty old codger was up to now. The expression in those worn gray eyes was changing to the frozen and dilated surprise of pain. Incredulously, Zach watched as Mr. Cade tried to stand up, clawed once at his chest, and slumped unconscious in the chair.

“Papa?” Annie asked, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

“Grandpa?” Mary’s tiny voice echoed her mother’s. Zach sprang into action. Leaping from his chair, he shouted, “Call for help—I think he’s having a heart attack!”

Twelve hours later in the community hospital, Zach wearily remembered he hadn’t called LouAnn. Somehow, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. Another emerald ring to match the green in her round eyes would buy him entrée back into her bed. And, after all, with their wedding in just under four weeks, it wasn’t like she was going to end their relationship just because the demands of his job had interfered with his promise to call.

Bull
. His job wasn’t interfering with a damn thing, Zach forced himself to admit. He’d allowed himself to get drawn into a personal situation when the whole job should have been as cut and dried as frigging beef jerky. Now he sat, wasting time in a Lysol-stinking hospital in God-knows-where, Texas, because he was a jerk.

A greedy jerk, if anyone was adding adjectives.

Mr. Cade had suffered a major heart attack, but the emergency-room physician had felt certain he would survive it. Fortunately, a cardiac specialist had been reached and was on his way to the hospital, so Mr. Cade would receive the best possible care. The whole long evening still felt bizarre and unreal to Zach. One moment he’d been wondering how he was going to get through the night without the old man cutting out his gizzard, and the next thing Zach knew, he was sleeping in a cracked vinyl chair in a crappy little hospital.

A small voice inside Zach kept pointing out that the whole mess was his fault. He guessed it was so. Hatred and anger must have exploded a frothing cauldron of stress in the old man’s chest. Even now the situation didn’t seem real to him as Zach played it over and over in his mind.

Behind the paramedics’ truck had come a car, a black-painted, station-wagon-looking thing, so old that Zach had been intrigued by its ancient appearance. A wiry man about Zach’s height had popped out of the rusted antiquity, sporting a feather earring hanging from one ear and raven hair to the middle of his back. Annie had run to throw her arms around the newcomer, shocking Zach further.

To his greatest amazement, she’d quickly bundled Mary into the car. It was only when the car pulled away that Zach had realized the damn thing was a hearse. He had started to protest at little Mary going off with the eclectic character, but Annie had jumped into the ambulance, seating herself in a cramped space next to where her father was laid out on a stretcher. Somebody had shoved Zach to the right-side door of the vehicle, and an impatient hand had pointed to the seat. For a moment Zach had balked. He had no business going to the hospital. The Aguillar family’s pain wasn’t his. This wasn’t his concern.

A moan from inside the ambulance had caught his attention. He glanced to the back of the vehicle, and the sight of Annie’s strained, frightened face illuminated by the fluorescent lighting decided him. She was a strong woman, but this wasn’t simply a cut finger. Annie didn’t have a soul in the world right now to lean on—and one further second didn’t pass before Zach had decided he wanted to be there for her if she needed someone.

Now he waited impatiently for Annie to come out of ICU.
Hot, blazing hell
, Zach thought, glancing at his watch. It was seven o’clock on Sunday morning. LouAnn wouldn’t believe the outlandish tale of what had happened to him in the last twenty hours. He was going to have to dream up something more believable to tell her. He imagined LouAnn tucked into her pristine, white-lace bed at her folks’ house, tuckered out after last night’s festivities. It was too early to call her because she was a beast if awakened before noon. In fact, the housekeeper wouldn’t dare to disturb her if he called right now.

For the moment, that suited Zach fine. He needed a little bit of time to make up a plausible excuse for why he’d neither shown up nor called her last night. However, he should call Carter. The man was a type A personality who slept little and was probably awaiting Zach’s call anxiously about how things had gone, anyway.

Taking out his calling card, Zach went to the lobby pay phone and punched in Carter’s telephone number. Drawing a deep breath, he waited, his gaze darting down the hall to watch for Annie. As he expected, Carter answered on the first ring, sounding wide awake.

“It’s me, Carter,” Zach informed him.

“How’s it going in Desperado?”

Zach winced. “I ran into a small snag,” he said, suddenly not wanting to explain his whole ridiculous-sounding predicament. He was bone-weary, and his business suit felt like it had become part of his skin. An injection of coffee would become a necessity soon. “It’s not anything I can’t handle.”

“I knew you’d make short work of the thing. When will you be back?”

Zach rubbed the back of his neck. As badly as he’d wanted to leave, now he felt like he owed it to Annie to hang around, at least long enough to make certain her father was going to live. What else could he do—take a taxi from the hospital back to Austin and say, “Too bad, Annie, hope your father makes it?” Especially since he had to face the fact he’d probably been the catalyst, if not the sole reason, Mr. Cade was close to finding pennies on his eyes.

Shit. If he even had the pennies to spare.

He popped his knuckles, the sound like gunfire in the empty corridor. “I don’t know, exactly,” Zach hedged. “For one thing, my rental car is out of commission. I’m going to have to wait until they can send another one down, which won’t be any later than this afternoon, I hope. But I haven’t exactly nailed this deal yet, so I may stay and throw a little more wood on the fire, so to speak.”

Carter laughed heartily, and Zach frowned. “You do that. If anyone can convince those people, it’s you. Say, you missed a real humdinger of a party last night.”

“Yeah?” Zach didn’t really care about the party at the moment, but felt obliged to listen to the details.

“Yeah,” Carter confirmed. “It was a real nice affair. And LouAnn looked gorgeous, but I could tell she was missing you.”

“I couldn’t break away to call her,” Zach said. “I hope she had a good time.”

“Well, I’m sure it would have been better if you could have been at the party, Zach. However, LouAnn was flaunting a pair of emerald earrings she’d just received from her fiancé—that’s what she was telling everyone, she was so proud. So I don’t think she’ll be too angry with you for not showing up. You just give her a call later and smooth things over.”

“Yeah.” Zach closed his eyes, hoping the pain lancing his head wasn’t a major migraine coming on. “I’ll call you later and let you know what’s happening.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

Zach hung up and leaned his head against the black pay phone, dimly aware that it smelled dirty, like a thousand hands had clutched it over the years, transmitting panic and worry into the very plastic. Suddenly Zach felt nauseous, and he wondered if he’d ever be able to wash the stench of dishonesty off his own skin.

“That was loverboy checking in,” Carter said with a chuckle.

“How’s the job going?”

The light, female voice pleased Carter, especially so near his ear. Only seconds before the phone had rung, his ear had been receiving the most sensual tongue-tickling it had ever experienced. “Everything’s going right as planned,” he said with satisfaction, before tugging her delicious curves closer to him.

With the possessive enjoyment of a man in total control, Carter closed his palms over the woman’s ripe breasts, squeezing the nipples lightly. He smiled at her expected moan of delight. “We’ve got nothing to worry about now,” he continued, more to himself than his companion. “That nacho-eating Mexican is going to seal this deal for us faster than you can shed your clothes, honey.” Carter felt pure satisfaction well up inside him. Life was interesting when one knew how to play the game.

The woman was trailing teasing fingers along the rigid line of his erection, and Carter nuzzled his lips in her hair with contentment.

“How did you know Zach would be able to get the Aguillars to sell out, Carter?”

He laughed and rubbed his lips against her forehead. “Because it takes a spic to know another dirty spic, honey. They know how to talk to each other.”

“They’re from Mexico, too?”

Carter shrugged, dismissing Zach’s heritage along with the Aguillars’. “I reckon. Aguillar’s a Mexican name.” He drew a deep breath of anticipation, as much from the knowledge that the contract would be signed as what the woman’s manicured hand was doing to his penis. “Anyway, don’t you know God quit passing out brains south of Texas, honey?”

She giggled a little. “Ritter International would flip if the newspapers ever caught one of your priceless quotes, Carter.”

Carter grinned and ran his hand over her stomach. Racial issues weren’t his problem. He knew how to avoid touchy matters like that. Since Zach’s and his law school days, he’d immediately seen possibilities in the brash young law student. Later, when Zach had started the corporation that was to become Ritter International, Carter had read Zach’s name in the
Wall Street Journal
and decided to put the touch on an old school chum for a job. It had all worked out very well—but now, Carter planned on riding Zach all the way to the presidency of Ritter.