Thirteen
When the door of the cabana crashed open, Cutter bolted awake instantly. He knew at once that Cheyenne was gone and that he had a dangerous intruder.
Cutter was diving for his pistol in the bedside table, as Hernando burst into the bedroom with Cheyenne, an arm braced across her shoulder, his hand around her throat in a viselike grip, his automatic weapon drawn.
“Don’t even think about it, bastardo.”
The undertone in Hernando’s voice sent a chill through Cutter. He let his hand fall limply away from the drawer. No way could he risk a shot with Hernando using Cheyenne as a shield.
“Buenos días, mi amigo. This time I have your queen. So—it’s checkmate. I win. You lose.”
Cheyenne’s cry was low-throated, fearfully guilty. “Cutter, I’m sorry I went out without—”
“Shut up—” Hernando growled.
She swallowed convulsively as Hernando’s hand tightened on her throat.
Cutter’s head jerked toward her. Her skin was chalk white; her enormous eyes were wide with fright. Seeing her like that filled Cutter with revulsion. Her white dress was torn and muddy. There were bruises on her neck and face.
The bastard had put his hands on her, mauled her, hurt her. Hell. Who knew what else?
Hernando’s eyes burned like coals as he shoved the barrel of his gun hard into her check. “Now, smart guy, sweat! Crawl! Pray!” He waved his gun. “Get down on the floor! Now! On your knees! Then beg me for her life, or I’ll shoot her now!” He moved the gun back to her face. “Then you’ll die, too. And I’ll tell the world that the great el genio is a wimp without huevos.”
Cutter felt utter, blinding rage. The muscles in his face tightened into a savage mask of hate. “Let her go. You can have anything you want. Only let her go.”
“Where’s the boy?”
The two men glared at each other in the jarring stillness of the tiny cabana. The only sounds were the steamy dripping of rainwater from the eaves and the incessant chatter of the parrots from the nearby trees.
“Where is he?” Hernando yelled.
“Let go of my mom, pervert!” Jeremy screamed from a back window.
When Hernando whirled, Cutter dived for his enemy’s knees.
Jeremy’s dark head disappeared from the window.
“Call him back!” Hernando howled as Cutter crushed his right knee and a bone cracked.
“Let her go, or I’ll tear out your larynx!”
Just as Cutter slammed a fist into Hernando’s jaw, the gun exploded.
“Jeremy!” Cutter cried out. “Cheyenne! Run! Meet me at the field of orchids! If one of us doesn’t make it, don’t come back, no matter—”
Hernando fired again. Cutter’s voice died away as blood spurted from his shoulder. He could barely feel the bullet that had ripped through bone and sinew as he sagged weakly to the floor.
A third bullet shattered glass.
Orchids and water spilled everywhere and mingled with Cutter’s blood.
Miraculously the hard hands at Cheyenne’s throat fell away. Hernando was hugging his knee. The next thing she knew Jeremy was dragging her free and pulling her out of the cabana into the jungle to safety. Cutter staggered up and was right behind them as they raced from the cabana through snarled tangles of foliage and dripping rain forest.
They tried to stay together as they ran down the familiar path that led to the field of orchids, but Cutter was breathing hard and moved slower. The rain forest was so dense and dark, they were soon separated.
She and Jeremy broke out of the forest and into the sunny field of dazzling pink blossoms at almost the same moment.
But Cutter wasn’t there.
They didn’t dare scream his name.
When he didn’t come, she folded Jeremy, who was as pale as death to her frightened eyes, into her arms. They sank to their knees in the bright, soft-petaled blossoms. Motionless, they clung to each other, hugging each other. She smoothed the black hair from his hot face, waiting and praying silently to herself for another five or ten tense minutes.
Not so long ago all she had wanted was to be free of danger, to have her son. To have her own life.
She had not wanted to marry Cutter.
But everything was different now.
Hernando had kidnapped her son. Traumatized him.
But Cutter had come and gotten Jeremy back. Cutter had helped heal Jeremy and professed his love for her.
Hernando had almost killed her. Now he had Cutter.
She loved Cutter.
He had risked his life to save hers. He was willing to die for her now. He had known he’d been hit, when he’d ordered them not to go back.
But she would have no life without him.
Jeremy would have no father.
Cutter had told her not to come back for him and, in truth, the mere thought of facing Hernando again terrified her. But the thought of what Hernando would do to Cutter if she didn’t go was even more shattering.
“Jeremy, baby, I have to go back and try to help your father,” she whispered raggedly, starting to rise. “You have to stay here.”
“No!” Stubbornly he tugged on her skirt.
“Jeremy, if you go back, too, he’ll kill us all. Your father and I don’t want that.”
“I took karate, didn’t I?”
She smiled faintly, hopelessly. “No. Absolutely no. You have to stay here.”
“But, Mom, you just sat on the bench and watched me.”
“I paid attention,” she said bravely. “Stay here. End of argument.”
Tiny droplets of blood spattered the jungle floor.
Cutter could barely stand up, much less run.
Still, he staggered forward, panting; what little strength he had left was draining out of him.
His torn shirt was blood-soaked. The boiling-hot pain in his right shoulder was spreading down his arms and spine. He couldn’t feel his hands. His legs were paralyzed; his vision was blurred by mists of pain, and his sense of direction obliterated by the tunnel of thick draperies both ahead and behind.
When he fell, he couldn’t get up. A terrible cold was creeping through his body. Still, he smiled as he imagined Cheyenne and Jeremy safe, together, in the field of orchids.
He could die happy, if only they were safe.
Cheyenne was all that mattered. She and Jeremy.
All his life he had wanted love.
For a brief, shining time he had found it.
Cutter held that thought even when he heard Hernando stumbling on his bad knee as he tramped through the thick jungle undergrowth, his clumsy, crashing steps growing ever louder.
Cutter imagined her face, when she was all aglow after they’d made love.
Cheyenne. He wanted to die with her image branded on his brain.
He saw her on the beach with her glorious red hair blowing in the wind when he would have died if she hadn’t saved him. He thought of her eyes, which changed from emerald to hazy green, depending on her mood. He thought of the way they lit up with joy or darkened when he made love to her.
Almost, he could be happy as he lay there and thought of her. Almost.
He shut his eyes and waited for his executioner.
Hernando was at the helm of his Cigarette boat racing out of the cove at incredible speed. There was no anger in him now, only grim pleasure and satisfaction as he roared away from the other fishing boats whose brawny captains and crews waved to him.
Maybe el genio had smashed his knee. Maybe he’d even be crippled for life.
But he, Hernando, had won.
His men had made easy work of Lord’s man in Cannes and forced him to call his boss and lie. Then they’d beaten O’Connor and dumped him into the Mediterranean. Incredibly the tough bastard had swum to shore and lived.
El genio would die for sure. He would motor farther out.
Too bad he’d passed out cold again and, thereby, was out of his misery. The rich wimp had taken a bullet through his shoulder. He’d bled like a stuck bull, all over the cockpit. He was as white as a phantom and bound and gagged and unconscious now. His ankles were chained to a concrete block. As soon as he reached deep blue water, Hernando would throw him overboard.
Hernando was regretting that the woman and the boy had gotten away when he heard a noise from the cabin. As he turned, he gave a startled cry when they sprang at him from the hatch.
The boy and the woman.
His hands felt away from the throttle as they jumped him with stunning force.
The boat raced on at its dizzying speed as he dived for his gun.
He collapsed on his bad knee, and the gun slid away. Díos! Where had they come from?
She struck a glancing blow to the back of his head. The boy’s hand crashed into his neck in a karate chop.
A wave broke across the bow, drenching him. Blinded by salt spray, Hernando lost his grip on the wheel.
The boat spun out of control.
His last thought was, “Good, I will kill them all!”
But she hit him again. A puny blow, but the boat lurched. He fell forward, flailing his arms, unable to get away from her. His forehead crashed into the windshield.
The boat rolled. His good leg buckled, and he went reeling to starboard. Blinded, off balance, he grabbed at everything, anything, wanting to take the boy and the woman with him as he fell.
His hand locked in a vise around a slender ankle.
The woman gave a cry, startled and low-throated, delivered in terror when he captured her.
As Hernando fell overboard, dragging her with him, the world suddenly became silent and slow.
His skull hit the water at high speed.
She struggled, kicking at him, but he held onto her relentlessly.
Then the big boat sped away, leaving them in its roaring wake.
Motion. His lifeless body swirled helplessly, tugged under by a powerful undertow.
There’d been no chance for a poor boy like Hernando to learn to swim in the barrio. As he sank, drifting deeper, his fingers dug into her ankle ever tighter as he fought to breathe.
He gagged and strangled.
So did she.
Salt water burned his sinus passages and filled his lungs.
She lashed out at him, kicking ever more frantically, but he held her slim limb in a merciless death grip till the last of her strength was gone.
He fought the invading water till he could fight no more.
Soon he barely felt the burning pain everywhere in his head. He barely knew that his body was churning and twisting and sinking ever deeper into the blue.
She had quit fighting now, but he held on to her limp foot and dragged her down.
lf she were dead, a part of el genio would die, too.
For himself, he prayed for one thing—to see Isabella’s face one last time.
Instead he saw his mother’s face as she had lain in the dirt after the barrio jackals had beaten her and called them both terrible names. Instead he remembered the vow of vengeance he had taken that day.
Still, he wanted to think of Isabella, not his mother.
His daughter’s face would not come.
His eyelids flickered. His eyes rolled.
Everything grew dark and silent.
Holding on to the lifeless woman, he drifted deeper until he was lost forever in the cold, blue darkness.
Cutter was pale, shivering, unconscious.
They were calling for a doctor.
“Please, dear God, please don’t let him die,” came the faraway, slurred sounds of a woman’s husky prayer.
Her voice, weak and fragile.
Or was it?
Hot, searing pain spread through Cutter’s right shoulder.
Freezing. Hungry. Cold.
Freezing. Hungry. Cold
The sun was burning through the clouds. He could feel its warmth upon his skin even as he shuddered.
Dimly Cutter felt the peaceful lapping of the waves beneath his dangling feet as two men carried him from the boat and lowered him onto the sand. There were voices around him, in the distance, nearer, too.
He opened his eyes.
Shapes came slowly into focus. Uniforms. Both white and blue.
Then she was there, kneeling closer because he stirred, uncaring that her sodden white dress dragged in the sand.
When she saw that he was conscious again, her face grew radiant. Weak as he was, her beautiful smile and sparkling eyes filled him with the savage urge to live.
“I waited and waited,” she breathed, shivering. “I was so afraid, so worried, you wouldn’t ever wake up.”
“Cheyenne, my love,” he whispered soundlessly, wondering why she looked so wet and bedraggled.
She wore white. Only today her dress was plastered to her body. Her wet red hair blew in the wind as it had that day so long ago on the island when he’d fallen in love with her. Still, to him she looked like an angel.
He moved his lips, but when he tried to speak his throat burned.
“You came back,” he whispered at last, though his voice was dry.
“For you,” she said gently. “I would have had no life—without you. You told me once that you played by your own rules. Not some gangster’s. Not mine. I guess I decided maybe I’d better show you I could do the same.”
“I’m supposed to save you.”
“Maybe it was my turn.”
“My turn, too, Dad!” Jeremy said. “I chopped him in the neck like that Lupe guy taught me to. I was brave this time, huh?”
“Very brave.”
“I thought maybe Hernando would use the Cigarette boat,” she said. “We got to it first, broke the lock on the hatch and hid inside.”
“He could have killed you both.”
“He nearly did. He dragged Mom down. These fishermen helped me—”
“Jeremy, hush! Cutter, darling, we were too afraid for you to care much about our own safety.”
Wet strands of her long red hair blew around her face and neck. A silver light came from behind her and lit her hair like spun flame. As always there was something fragile and otherworldly and enchantingly angelic about her. He noticed that the jungle was ablaze with huge, exotic flowers—bold pinks, reds and blues.
She was slender and fragile. More so than usual, after her ordeal.
What kind of woman would take on a killer like Hernando?
He had dragged her down—Cutter saw the marks on her face. She was one helluva woman. She truly loved him.
Cutter groaned as a sudden burning pain in his shoulder made him convulse.
“The ambulance is on its way, darling. There’s a hospital in Quepos. Doctors. The works. You’re going to be okay. As soon as you’re stable they’ll fly you to San José.”
“So—you saved my life a second time? On a second beach.”
She smiled. “And it had better be the last.”
“I promise.”
“Say it.”
“What?”
“You know...the three words I longed to hear...for seven years.”
“I love you,” he whispered, touching the darkening bruise on her cheek.
“I love you, too.”
“What about me?” Jeremy piped up.
“That goes without saying,” Cheyenne said, pulling him down beside them, so that Cutter could touch his son’s face.
“You were both great,” Cutter whispered. “Great.”
“You don’t know the half of it, Dad! Mom—”
“Shhh—”
Men with stethoscopes were racing toward them with a litter.
Cutter’s last pleading words to her before they carried him away to the ambulance were, “Don’t leave me.”
“As if I ever could,” she said.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the breeze fanned them with the sweet smell of rain.
Cutter woke with a start when the balcony doors right above him were slammed open, not by the wind, but by his son.
“How come they never found Hernando’s body? Do you think maybe some sharks ate him or something?” Jeremy shouted down from the balcony to the garden.
“Hold that thought,” Cutter muttered with a drowsy smile, glancing up at Jeremy and the blackening sky from his chaise lounge and then lazily closing his eyes in an attempt to continue his nap.
“I’ve been reading about sharks,” Jeremy persisted. He leaned over the balcony railing and began to sling the red yo-yo he’d bought in the flea market last week up and down. “There are lots of ’em down here. Tourists are always getting eaten or sucked away in undertows.”
“Jeremy! Hush!” Cheyenne murmured, looking up from her dog-eared paperback thriller. “Hernando is dead. We are safe. Your father needs to rest. The last thing he needs is to think about stuff like that.”
“I don’t mind thinking about Hernando being eaten—”
“Shhh!” To Jeremy she said, “I told you to read quietly, till three when your father gets up.”
“I forgot.”
“Like always,” she chided gently.
“Okay. Sorry. Can I go over and play with Juan then? He’s got a different kind of yo-yo.”
Juan lived next door.
“No,” she said. “It’s going to rain, and you’ll be stuck over—”
“Why don’t we let him,” Cutter assented with a sly grin.
“Please, Mom?”
“Just this once,” Cutter insisted. “He’ll be okay.”
Then father and son both nagged her silently with their eyes.
“All right then, but only since your father...”
Gingerly Cutter eased himself higher in his chaise lounge. A week had passed since Hernando had shot him. Cutter was out of the hospital and convalescing under Cheyenne’s attentive care. She had rented a villa in the cool mountains outside San José and cooked every meal herself. The doctors said she must be a magician with soups and herbs because they had never seen anyone with Cutter’s injuries improve so rapidly. When other patients had smelled her spicy casseroles and soups and begged her to bring them something to eat, and she had done so, they had quickly gotten well, too.
Today, even beneath the dark skies, the gardens and patios of the house were ablaze with oversize orchids and draperies of lush bougainvillea. Bromeliads hung from the brick walls, and a large cage by a huge philodendron vine was filled with dozens of chattering tropical squirrels.
“So many flowers,” Cutter murmured lazily to his wife, when he heard Jeremy dash out the garden and slam the gates.
“Flowers are a good sign for us,” Cheyenne said absently, turning a page. “Especially when so many bloom by day.”
“If you say so, my darling. They certainly seem to bloom whenever you are around.”
Lightning flashed in the mountains.
She didn’t look up from her book. “I’ve told you before, I’m a talented gardener.”
“You’re a lady of many talents.” Cutter’s smile grew tender as he leaned over and teasingly snatched her book from her fingers and tossed it aside.
“I was on the last page.”
“It’ll wait.” He sighed, growing serious. “I can’t. Besides it’s going to rain.”
“Cutter.”
“Come here. Your patient needs a little of your tender bedside care.”
She smiled. “What exactly do you have in mind?”
“I think you know. You probably put something in my food just to get me hot for you.”
“I did not! And you’re much too badly injured to even think about sex.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said in a hard, masculine voice that was filled with sudden strength and determination.
She laughed as he pulled her down into his arms.
He suppressed a groan of pain.
“See, you’re still too—”
“Pura vida,” he said, ignoring the burning ache in his shoulder.
“You hate that expression.”
“But I love you.” His smolderingly intense eyes conveyed the same message. So did his broad grin. “I love you.”
“So, what are we going to do about it, tough guy?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Plenty.”
In the next instant his arms were around her and his mouth hungrily possessed her lips. When she gasped with heady pleasure, she set him aflame. Soon he was holding her tight as if he intended to get inside her then and there.
A long while later he lifted his head from hers and stared at her. Gently, wondrously, he touched her face, her throat. Then he smoothed her hair. “We’re going to be together, my darling. Always. We’re going to live happily ever after. Just like they do in your books.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in happy endings,” she said, beaming at him in delight as the first raindrop struck her cheek.
He continued staring at her and smiling. “I do now—since I have you.”
Very gently he placed his hands on either side of her face before he kissed her again.
They were together; they were in love. After seven lonely years, they knew that nothing could ever part them again.
And because their eyes were closed and their mouths fused in a wild exultation that joined their souls, neither of them saw every flower in their garden burst into bloom.
A fierce wet wind stirred through the garden, causing them to break apart.
“Cutter! It’s going to rain!”
He didn’t care. He took her hand and pulled her up. As they hurried toward their house, huge, fat drops began pelting them. Thunder cracked, and then the rain began to rush down in torrents freshly watering the flowers and earth as he pulled her inside.
No way would Jeremy try to come home till the storm was over.
Gently, without speaking, husband and wife came together.
Cutter kissed her—a long, deep kiss that felt as eternal as his love for her.