The Last Chance Ranch Read online

  The boy nodded. “Thanks, Dad. Can I go now?”

  “Sure.” He rubbed Tonio’s arm. “Hang in there, kid.”

  After he left, Ramón swiveled to look out the window, thinking about wounded hearts and emotions running amok. He thought about kissing Tanya this afternoon. He couldn’t remember the last time anything had made him feel so much. While their lips moved together, and he felt her hair on his hands, he’d felt dizzy, adrift. Alive like he hadn’t been in a long time.

  If the truth were told, he’d spent most of the day in a state of semi arousal. Everything set him off—her neat little hands, the movement of her small breasts beneath her shirt, the way she turned her head to look at the spines of books. Every move she made pleased him, aroused him, made him want to make love to her. Now.

  But that state of arousal had less to do with a need to see or touch or kiss any particular body part—though he’d certainly enjoy nibbling a breast—than it did with Tanya herself. The woman she was, the woman she’d fought to save. The lean and wary survivor she’d become.

  He’d told himself not thirty-six hours ago that he had to leave her alone. She needed time and space to sort out her life and options before she jumped into another relationship. She needed to live on her own and experience life without a man or the state making her decisions for her.

  It killed him to think of it, though—think of her leaving the ranch after he’d waited so long to have her here. He liked the way she fit here. She was a good cook and a talented baker, but he was more impressed with her ability to mother all the lost boys in his care. They gathered around her like hummingbirds around four-o’clocks, taking nourishment from her calm voice and encouraging laughter.

  For the sake of those boys, for the sake of Tonio, who would eventually learn Tanya was his mother, and for Tanya’s sake, Ramón had to leave her alone. No more kisses. No more sexy teasing. None of it.

  But a lonely, hungry voice in his head protested, She’s the one! The One.

  * * *

  Tanya was right about the arm. It was painful the first night but felt much better the next day. By the time a week had passed, she not only didn’t hurt anymore, but had grown so used to the stitches that she did everything she’d done without them. Soon she’d have to go to town to get them removed.

  It was a peculiar week in many ways. The weather was brilliant—sunny and dry and warm. Indian summer. Her morning runs were exhilarating.

  Tonio spent a lot of time in the kitchen, as did Zach. They talked, both of them, about everything and anything, as they peeled potatoes, or chopped carrots and tomatoes, or plucked freshly killed chickens of their feathers—a task Tanya particularly loathed. She’d grown used to eating animals she’d formerly seen running around the chicken coop, but didn’t like being able to identify which particular chickens she was chopping into pieces.

  There was one bad moment on a bright sunny afternoon. Although they sometimes played the radio, Desmary had complained of a headache and turned it off that afternoon. Outside were the sounds of other boys at their chores—feeding chickens and pigs, sweeping the barn. Tanya creamed brown sugar and eggs in a huge metal bowl while Tonio cracked walnuts from a huge bag someone had given them. It was tedious work, but he picked out nutmeats happily enough as long as he could nibble on some of them. It amazed her how much these boys ate—all of them nibbled, grazed, gulped, ate, all the time.

  Tanya paused in her stirring to reach for vanilla and a measuring spoon, humming tunelessly to herself as was her habit. It had driven Victor around the bend, that humming, and yet she couldn’t seem to drop it. It was a part of her, like having blue eyes or mousy brown hair.

  One and a half teaspoons per batch, which meant four and a half teaspoons for this tripled recipe. She measured two and was pouring a third when Tonio demanded in a harsh voice, “What is that song?”

  Tanya had to think. Which song was she humming today? An old folk song she’d learned at her one foray into camp when she was in sixth grade. “I don’t know what it’s called,” she said with a grin. “We always called it ‘There are suitors at my door.” She sang the first line.

  And remembered.

  This song, along with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “The Ants Come Marching Home” and “The Cruel War,” was part of her humming repertoire. It was the song Tonio had said he remembered his mother singing, the one about rivers running up hill and fish flying and a woman getting married the day before she died.

  Tonio stared fiercely at her, his eyes ablaze with anger and hurt and a thousand questions. Standing there with the scent of vanilla in her nose, the notes of a song dying between them, Tanya willed him to remember, so the lie could be over. So she could stop tiptoeing around him. Softly she sang the last verse, the one he remembered.

  “Stop it,” he said fiercely. “Don’t sing that song anymore.”

  “Why?” she asked quietly.

  “I just hate it, that’s all.” He stood up violently, nearly knocking over the chair, and bolted out of the room.

  With a shaky sigh, Tanya measured another teaspoon of vanilla and couldn’t remember if she had added three or four. Better too little in this instance, she decided, and stirred it in.

  She wondered how long it would be before he would guess. If he guessed—she supposed there was no reason for him to do so. Her hair was not long and blond anymore. Her body was lean and hard, rather than round and soft. Her name was Tanya, not the diminutive Annie he more than likely would remember.

  And yet, the song was powerful. It was one she’d sung to him before bed every night. Every night. She’d even considered putting a tape of it inside the diaper bag she took to the day-care woman’s house that last night, but hadn’t had time.

  The incident disturbed her all afternoon. That evening, wearing a jacket over her sweatshirt, she sat on the back porch gutting pumpkins to be used as jack-o’-lanterns. The seeds she put in a huge bowl for roasting later.

  The night was fresh and cool, smelling of distant leaf burnings and rustling grass. Indian summer in New Mexico was truly glorious. She loved being able to sit outside after dark in October.

  The screen door creaked and Tanya glanced over her shoulder to see Ramón coming to join her. He carried two mugs of coffee, and put one down beside her on an overturned orange crate. “Thought you might like this,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  He, too, had been a little odd this week. After the kisses last Saturday, she’d known a pleasurable sense of arousal and anticipation. But he steered clear of her, and at meals or other functions when he could not avoid her, he treated her like a sister, with friendly respect.

  Now, dropping on to the old wooden chair near her own, he wrinkled his nose. “Aay, that stinks. I never liked the way pumpkin smelled.”

  “Me, either.” Tanya shook her rubber-gloved fingers to loosen a long orange string. “Has to be done. Bet you like pumpkin pie.”

  “Not really.”

  “Not even with whipped cream?”

  “Nope. Custard pies are disgusting. I used to have an aunt who made about thirty of them for every family gathering, and everyone else quit bringing pies because she baked so many, but they were all pumpkin or custard types.”

  Tanya smiled. “I don’t remember anybody making pies when I was a child. There were no family gatherings, really. We moved so often we usually didn’t even have any friends to invite over on holidays.”

  “Now that you say that, I realize I don’t know much about your childhood. All I know about your parents is that they wouldn’t help you when you…er…”

  “Killed my ex-husband?” Tanya supplied dryly.

  Ruefully, Ramón laughed. “Yes.”

  “They disowned me when I married him. I actually married him so early—” she had been one day past seventeen “—because they were moving and I was tired of going all the time. I never really had another conversation with them.”

  “I would say it’s hard to imagine,
but I’ve seen all kinds of parents in my line of work.”

  “Mine weren’t all that terrible,” she said. She so rarely thought of her parents it was as if they’d borne her in another lifetime. “I felt like I didn’t belong with them.”

  “Was your father abusive?”

  “No,” Tanya said. It was not an uncommon question, coming as it did from a professional in the field. Often the children of abusive marriages grew up to repeat the pattern. “My dad was a philanderer. Slept with any woman he could get into bed. My mother responded by moving every time he formed an attachment. I went to sixteen schools by the time we made it to Albuquerque.”

  “And yet, with all of that, you turned out okay.” He grinned, nudging her foot with his toe. “More or less.”

  Tanya smiled, halfheartedly, thinking of Tonio. She told Ramón what happened, then asked him, “What do you think he remembers? I mean about the way Victor acted.”

  Ramón took a breath. “He remembers some of it,” he said quietly. “He used to wake up from his dreams screaming.”

  For a moment, Tanya considered asking what Antonio said after those nightmares, but she didn’t think she could bear to know just now. “My poor baby.”

  “He’s okay. He’s a good kid.”

  “Yes, he is.” And maybe, Tanya thought, he would forgive her the small duplicity she had practiced here. “Do you think we made a mistake by not telling him the truth about me?”

  He stood up suddenly. “Come on, let’s take a walk.”

  “Why?” She held up her gloved, pumpkin-stringed hands. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

  “I see.” He reached over, grabbed the plastic table cloth from the table, and flung it over the pumpkins. “But it’s important.”

  For a moment, Tanya measured him. Then she stood and stripped off the gloves. “All right,” she said, and followed him down the steps into the moonswept night.

  Chapter Nine

  Dear Antonio,

  It came to me this morning that the man I killed was your father. I wonder if you hate me for that.

  I also wonder if you’re like him, and how. I wonder if you’re starting to look like him as you get long-legged and lose your baby fat. I wonder how I’ll feel if I see you and you’re his spitting image.

  Sometimes I go over that last time he found us, and I wonder what I could have done differently. I go over it and over it and over it. But we moved fourteen times in twenty months. We moved out of town. We moved into a house under an assumed name. I waited tables and dyed my hair. I signed restraining orders… I did everything I could think of. And still he found us.

  The time before the last one, he found us in Santa Fe, and he was furious. I hid you in our bedroom when I saw him coming up the walk, and closed the door. You screamed the whole time. I’ll never forget it. After that, I kept wondering how long you would have been stuck in that room screaming if he’d actually killed me.

  That’s when I bought the gun. That fear made me decide it was time to take care of it myself, since no one else would. So I bought the gun and hid it and waited for him to find us again. When he did, I killed him. It wasn’t the right answer, but it was the only answer I had left. I hope, if you hate me for what I’ve done, you’ll remember that.

  They tell me that if that had happened now, I wouldn’t go to jail. I guess that’s some comfort—that some other woman and some other boy won’t have to pay the price we’ve paid here. I love you, son. I just want you to know that.

  Love, Mom

  The night was brisk, tasting of leaves and dry grass, and the peculiar notes of the desert itself, a pungent odor of juniper and sun-heated earth. Tanya tugged her jacket close around herself. “Okay, so you do think we made a mistake in not telling Tonio the truth?”

  “No, that’s just it—I know we didn’t make a mistake. He might be upset when he learns the truth, but what I see is the two of you developing a real relationship, without all the entrapments of past history, at least on Tonio’s part.”

  Tanya nodded slowly. A high moon lit the prairie with pale fingers, and lent a halo to Ramón’s dark hair. His profile was hawkish against the night, that conquistador’s nose and high brow. A little shiver touched her, starting in her spine and radiating outward. She wanted him to kiss her again.

  Actually, judging by her rather heated dreams, she wanted quite a bit more than kissing. They were almost embarrassing.

  “I’ve been worried about it. About the fact that we’re not telling the truth.”

  “Sometimes telling the whole truth only hurts people, Tanya. You know that.”

  She nodded.

  He nudged her with his elbow. “You worry about everything. Maybe you should try to let some of it go. Those bags of guilt you’re dragging behind you have to be pretty heavy some days.”

  Ruefully, Tanya smiled up at him, and made a motion as if she were taking a duffel bag off her shoulder to give him. “You want one?”

  “No, thanks. I have plenty of my own.”

  “You? What do you have to be guilty and worried about?”

  “Not guilty—though I do have a bag of that. Mostly I worry. About Tonio. About you.” He gestured widely. “About all the boys.”

  Tanya pursed her lips, stepping carefully around a prickly pear spread around the foot of a yucca. Ramón made them all sound like part of some noble quest, as if he went around rescuing boys here and there, fishing them from the river of sin and sorrow. She frowned. “Am I one of your projects?” she asked. “Is Tonio?”

  “No person is a project.” His voice held a note of annoyance. “There are only people and I do the best I can with them. You were one of the people I wanted to see come through the system—somehow-—okay. Most of these boys will die early deaths if I don’t intervene, and some of them will no matter what I do.” He looked at her. “But I have to try.”

  They stopped on a bluff overlooking the first finger of the Rio Grande—not nearly the formidable river it would become, but nonetheless a river with a certain authority. It clucked into the hollow made by a cottonwood’s roots, and rushed over rocks. Tanya let go of a sigh she was unaware she was holding. “What about Tonio?” she asked, looking at the water. “Was he a project?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. His voice was thick when he spoke. “Tonio was born to you and Victor, but he’s my son, Tanya. I’ve raised him for eleven years.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  His mouth went hard. “Don’t say it, Tanya. Just leave it out there. I am Tonio’s father. He is my only child.”

  “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”

  He looked at her but said nothing. They stood face to face on the open prairie, moonlight spilling down upon them like some narcotic perfume from a broken bottle. The light washed over Ramón’s high cheekbones and touched his lips and the long brown strength of his throat. She ached to touch him.

  He stared back at her, and Tanya felt his gaze lick her face and hair, her shoulders and breasts. Remembering his words in the bookstore, she said, “I really need to kiss you.”

  “We shouldn’t, Tanya.” But he moved a step closer, raising a hand to brush her hair off her shoulder. “I should leave you alone and let you find your own life, but I keep circling back to you, over and over again, like some lost sheep.”

  Tanya, made bold by his body language, if not his words, moved closer and put her hands on his waist under his coat. His sides were lean and warm below the cotton shirt, and she felt a shifting in the muscles when he took another step toward her. His arms circled her shoulders loosely and she let hers slide around to his back. Their bodies met lightly.

  Their mouths joined. It was that simple and that clean. He bent and fit his mouth to hers. It wasn’t so sweet this time. Tanya’s body flushed as his mouth opened, as his sensual nature—so obvious in the way he touched everything and everyone, in his deep appreciation for beauty—overtook his cautious side. He made a low, w
arm noise and moved closer, and she felt his hard, flat belly against her own, felt his chest against her breasts. His lips moved in an expert dance of slow savoring, as if her mouth were more delicious than anything he’d ever tasted. Pleasure made her soft all over, in her knees, her hips, her hands that stretched open on his back.

  His tongue ribboned the inner edges of her lips, and that part of her, too, was soft in response to him. She inclined her head slightly and let herself relax, giving him access to her mouth. A sharp bolt of almost overwhelming desire ripped through her when his tongue met hers, when they tangled so slowly, so deliciously. His hands moved on her back, and he pressed his hips to hers, and there was another jump in her nether regions.

  Heaven, she thought vaguely. Heaven to kiss and kiss and kiss under a wide, open sky filled with moonlight and the smell of crushed sage, and the tiny scratchings of hidden jackrabbits the only sound. Heaven to let her body mold closer and closer to his as the kiss deepened, intensified. Heaven to feel Ramón’s strong hands reaching down to cup her bottom and urge her closer, to feel the ancient rocking movements between them.

  She put her hands under his shirt and heard a hushed sound—delight and excitement—escape her throat. His skin was elegant satin, hot and smooth and delectably sensitive. He caught her lip and sucked on it, as if urging her to do more.

  It had been such a long, long time. A powerful urgency built in Tanya’s body, an ache too long left, and hunger so wild it seemed almost wanton. She moved her hands up his back, skimming his spine and the supple expanse of his muscles. Then, dangerously, she let her hands fall to the high, round rear end she had so often admired. He groaned and she pulled him closer, thinking nothing except that she would die if she had to stop.

  A sudden noise in the darkness shattered the moment. An owl screeched and a small animal made a pained noise, and as if they’d been doused with water, Ramón and Tanya startled, clutching to each other in the primal, ancient fear of humans at the mercy of nature after dark.

  They looked at each other, and Ramón lifted a hand to smooth Tanya’s hair from her face. “It’s La Llorona, the weeping woman, come to warn you.”