San Antonio Rose (6 page)

Jeannie quailed beneath his fierce stare but kept her own expression defiant. She’d had too many years of practice in holding up her head, of leading with her chin in the face of censure. And she didn’t have to cower before any man, even if he was Tony’s father.

“He’s my son, isn’t he?” he accused.

“He’s
my
son!” she said adamantly.

“You know damned good and well what I mean,” he retorted with deadly calm. “I’m his father.”

“You’re nothing to him,” she returned cruelly. “You’re just some stranger who showed up for his grandfather’s funeral.”

His reaction made her die a little inside. His head snapped back, as if she’d slapped his face. His nostrils flared on a stunned breath.
His eyes darkened momentarily as something like pain clouded their depths.

Jeannie longed to reach out and caress that rigid jaw, to take away the hurt. She wished she could snatch back the hateful words she’d so callously thrown at him. She wondered what had happened to the love they had known, the promises they had made, the life they had planned.

“Rafe—” she began, but it was too late.

“Husband be damned,” he snarled harshly. “You’ve probably never even been married.”

“I never said I was,” she cried in self-defense. “You just assumed—”

“But you sure as hell let me believe it, didn’t you?” He flung her wrist away then, as if he couldn’t bear to touch her.

“Yes,” she admitted without apology.

“Why?” he demanded through clenched teeth.

“I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

She rubbed the slender wrist he’d just released, more as a stalling ploy than in accusation. He saw the bruises that were already beginning to form on her soft white skin—bruises that his own steely brown fingers had caused—and a surge of male protectiveness swept over him, leaving him shaken and disgusted with himself.

“Did I hurt you?” he demanded tersely.

She dropped her arm. “No.”

“You’re lying.”

“What difference does it make?”

“What do you mean by that?”

She tilted her head at its haughtiest angle. “It’s what you wanted to hear.”

His eyes hardened to cold blue marble. “I guess it was, at that.”

For a long moment they simply stared at each other.

Behind them lay a passion that, for better or worse, had never cooled. Between them stood a child conceived of their love. Ahead of them loomed a potential custody battle that could prove bitter, brutal.

“How could you do this to me?” he suddenly roared.

“Shout it to the world, why don’t you?” she yelled back.

“Answer me, damn you.” He lowered his voice to a sinister whisper. “How could you do this to me?”

“You’re a fine one to talk!”

“Don’t give me that garbage.”

“Who left who?”

The silence that followed Jeannie’s heated demand was filled with pain. It glittered in gray eyes and blue. And it was physically etched on both her face and his. But when he spoke again, Rafe’s words reflected neither the grief nor the regret that each of them felt.

“My name’s been in the newspaper at least once a week for the last five years.”

“Congratulations.”

He ignored her snide compliment and went
on coldly. “I’ve spoken at dozens of large rallies. Hundreds of small—”

“So?” She nearly choked on her challenge.

“So you’ve known where I was all this time.” His hands worked in vivid concert with his voice, cutting to the heart of the matter. “So you could’ve called me and told me I’d fathered a child.”

Jeannie sidestepped that for the moment. “I tried to find you right after you left.”

“I’ll just bet,” Rafe scoffed.

“I called everyone I could think of—your relatives, your friends. I even went into the barrio, thinking you’d gone back there. And then …” She swallowed hard, the memory of those dreadful days coming back to her with sickening clarity. “Then the nausea hit me, and I had to tell Big Tom.”

His jaw bunched with a fury too long contained. “Did he tell you in return that he’d offered to pay off my college loans and pick up the tab for my law school tuition if I promised to leave the ranch and never contact you again?”

She recoiled in shock and anger. “I don’t believe you!”

Unperturbed, he went on. “And did he tell you that when I refused his offer, he threatened to report my family to the immigration authorities if we didn’t pack up and clear out?”

“But you were born in San Antonio.” She
knew that that automatically made him an American citizen.

“Olivia and Enrique and I were, yes.”

She was almost afraid to ask. “And your parents …?”

He confirmed her worst fears. “Mexican nationals who’d illegally crossed the border looking for work and then stayed to raise a family.”

Jeannie shook her head in frantic denial, as if doing so would negate everything he’d just said.

Rafe took a step closer, his eyes narrowing to menacing slits. “Last but not least, did he tell you that when I called the ranch a month after we left, he dropped the bombshell that you’d eloped?”

“No,” she said softly, still shaking her head.

He nodded his. “Yes.”

“But …” Struggling against this new betrayal, she tried one last time to clear Big Tom’s name. “He said he’d help me look for you. He even said he’d call the sheriff and have him try to track you down.”

He laughed mirthlessly. “With all his money and all his connections, don’t you think he could have found me if he’d really wanted to?”

She had no answer for him, and in the ensuing silence even the clock on the wall seemed to mock her naiveté.

Tick
 … How could she have been so blind as to overlook a lifetime of prejudice on Big Tom’s part?
Tock
 … How could she have
been so stupid as to believe he would really pull out the stops to help her locate Rafe?
Tick
 …

Oh, if only she could turn back time!

“Five years!” Rafe finally addressed the issue she had managed to avoid earlier. “You could have told me five years ago that I’d fathered a son, and you didn’t!”

Near panic, Jeannie raised her palms in a conciliatory gesture. “If you would just listen to me—”

“So you can tell me some more of your lies?”

“I’ve never lied to you!”

“Except by omission.”

She lowered her hands and glanced down at the floor, knowing her actions were as good as admissions of guilt. But she refused to damn herself further by offering lame explanations.

He captured her chin between his thumb and forefinger, forcing her head up so that he could see her face. The blue of his eyes burned into hers before blazing a fiery trail down her cheeks to her lips, moist and trembling.

A dizzying sense of déjà vu enveloped them, and she half-expected his mouth to smother hers in another kiss.

Her mind rebelled against the idea, given the animosity between them, but her body had a memory of its own. It recalled instead the gentle caress of his hands upon her breasts and their aching crests, the spreading warmth of his palms sliding down her belly to the juncture of her thighs, the ball of his
thumb bringing her to the brink of oblivion, the muscular length of him weighing her down and driving her over the edge.

Even now, with both of them up in arms over their son, desire for him flickered deep inside her.

He doused the flames with his icy demand. “Why didn’t you come to me? Write to me? Call me?”

Irritated with herself, she wrenched her chin from his fingers. “A million reasons.”

“Name one.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d believe me,” she confessed around a deep breath.

“All I’d have had to do was look at him to know you were telling the truth.”

Her eyes appealed to him for understanding. “I couldn’t take that chance.”

He regarded her dispassionately. “Name another.”

“I was afraid you’d try to get back at me through Tony.”

“How?”

“By taking out your anger toward me on him.”

“Hurting him, you mean.”

Jeannie nodded miserably. “Yes.”

Rafe exploded with rage. “For five years you deliberately hid my son’s existence from me, then you have the unmitigated gall to stand there and tell me you did it because you
thought I’d hurt him—my own flesh and blood!”

“I wasn’t sure how you’d react when you found out,” she snapped. While his outrage now made her fears seem foolish in retrospect, they’d haunted her all this time.

He took a deep breath, controlling his temper by an act of will. “And how else did you justify keeping me in the dark for all these years?”

“Your political career.”

That made him pause. Running for the state senate was something he’d been preparing for since he’d gotten out of law school. Toward that end, he’d built a potent political base within the barrio, winning local battles over housing and better drainage on the low-lying West Side.

Now he wanted to cross the fault line from Mesoamerican presence to mainstream politician. He wanted to tackle the statewide issues, such as public education and health care, that affected Anglo and Hispanic alike. And even though the primary was still a year away, he’d already hired someone to raise the money and generate the name-recognition he needed to run his campaign.

This wasn’t exactly the kind of publicity he’d had in mind, however. And just thinking about the newspaper headlines alone—thinking aloud, really—was enough to make him groan. “The media would have me for
breakfast, lunch, and dinner if this story got out.”

“It wouldn’t be any picnic for Tony either,” she said pointedly.

Rafe nodded in agitated agreement, then nailed her in place with a hard stare. “This could have been cleared up quietly if you’d only gotten in touch with me when you found out where I was.”

Sick to her bones of all the deceptions, Jeannie told it like it was. “By then it was too late, and I was too bitter.”

“I had a right to know.”

“You had no rights as far as I was concerned.”

His hand slammed down on the tabletop, making her jump. “Who the hell appointed you judge, jury, and executioner?”

The door swung open at the loud crash, and Martha looked in from the dining room. Jeannie warded her off with a shake of her head, and the door swung closed.

Rafe paced the kitchen floor like a caged panther, cursing her father under his breath, mourning the years he’d lost with his son, trying to think how to handle this so that no one else would be hurt. His hair gleamed blue-black in the sunlight shafting through the sparkling windows, and his shoulders threw broad shadows across the shining wood floor.

Jeannie followed closely on his heels, wanting
to reach out and cradle his head to her breast to ease his torment. She wished with every fiber of her being that they could go back to the beginning and make a fresh start, and wondered how she could undo the damage that Big Tom had done.

When he stopped abruptly, she collided with him from behind. And when he whirled on her, she fell back a step, feeling powerless to cope with the raw pain she saw in his eyes.

“You’re as manipulative as your old man.” His accusation pierced her like a well-aimed arrow.

She stiffened in shock and affront at the vicious comparison. She certainly didn’t blame him for feeling that way—his scorn was well founded in fact—but it still hurt her to the core that he thought she was capable of such machinations.

“That’s neither true nor fair,” she declared fiercely.

“He couldn’t have a son of his own, so he took mine.”

“He loved Tony.”

“You thought you could just kiss me off—”

“You kissed me!”

“Consider us even, then.” He closed the gap between them, and she could feel both the heat of his anger and the fabric of his trousers through her silk skirt. “You used me and I used you.”

Her gray eyes widened in dismay. Her throat went itchy and tight with emotion. Her heart
ached at the way he’d just ground the kiss they’d shared at the gravesite under the heel of retaliation.

Rafe gripped her shoulders and shook her, hard. “When are you going to tell Tony about me?”

Jeannie twisted, but couldn’t escape his digging fingers. “When I feel he can handle it.”

“If you think I’m going to let another day go by without claiming my son,
Señorita
Crane,” he stressed with a mocking accent, “you’ve got another think coming.”

She felt a cold chill at the realization that he could take legal action regarding Tony. “But you can’t just pop into his life after ten years and expect to take charge.”

“I’m his father!” He released her suddenly, and she stumbled backward. “I have rights!”

She caught her balance against the back of a chair and drew herself up rigidly. “You have no rights—not like this!”

His blue eyes bored through her like a diamond-point drill. “Don’t bet the ranch on it.”

Maternal instinct transformed Jeannie into a tigress, turning her into as dangerous an adversary as he. “I’ll see you in hell before I let you turn Tony’s world upside down.”

“Fine.” Rafe spun on his heel and strode across the room. At the door he pivoted and fired his parting shot. “I’ll see you in court.”

Five