The Last Chance Ranch Read online

  “You don’t have to buy me ice cream.”

  “I want to. It’ll make me feel better.” He reached for and clasped her free hand, then let it go, as if remembering she didn’t like it.

  The funny thing was, she was getting used to being touched again. Between Tonio, Zach and Ramón, there wasn’t much chance someone wouldn’t be touching her at one time or another.

  “I’m hungrier than ice cream,” he said. “Let’s get a sandwich or something. If you’re feeling okay.”

  “I’m really hungry,” she said. “Any good hamburgers in town?”

  He winked. “I know just the thing. C’mon.” And he took her hand again. “Do you mind?” he added, lifting their joined hands to illustrate. His long brown fingers looked strong and graceful, and she liked the way his skin felt against her own. It felt like a big deal, holding hands. “I don’t mind,” she said quietly.

  He took her to Yolanda’s, a small, happy, old-fashioned diner. The floors were wooden, the booths of dark red vinyl, and the tables had ranch theme tablecloths thrown over them, little Bar S and Half Moon brands on a brown plaid background.

  They settled in a booth by the front window, and Tanya looked out at the gray day, feeling snug. A waitress offered coffee, and both of them accepted with enthusiasm. “And we want a couple of hamburgers, with fries,” Ramón said. “Cheese on one. Tanya?”

  “Please.”

  “You got it,” the waitress replied, scribbling their order on a small green order pad. She picked up the laminated menus they hadn’t examined and hurried away.

  Gingerly, Tanya put her arm on the table and touched the bandages. “It’s probably going to be a few days before I can lift anything,” she said ruefully. “Good thing it wasn’t my left arm—I’d hate to leave Desmary with all those apples to chop.”

  “Are you left-handed?”

  “So is Tonio.” He smiled. “I didn’t even realize it until he started school. He eats with both hands.”

  Tanya inclined her head. “Is he creative, then?”

  “Some. His real gifts are in the analytical realm, though. He loves numbers and formulas and engine parts.”

  “Victor did, too.”

  Ramón’s dark eyes went opaque. “Tonio has a picture of his dad in front of that old Fury, which Victor restored. Remember the picture?”

  “Yes. I took it.”

  The waitress brought thick ceramic mugs of coffee. Tanya stirred in sugar. “Does Tonio ever talk about Victor or me? Does he ever see the rest of family? Any of Victor’s sisters?”

  “No.” Ramón sighed. “They used to come to visit when he was younger, but we haven’t seen any of them in a long time.”

  A small crackle of anger rustled on her nerves. To smooth it, she breathed in slowly. “At one time, I really believed I had acted in Tonio’s best interests by agreeing to the custody arrangements.” She hadn’t actually seen Ramón—he had conducted his business by letter. “Even then, I was wise enough to realize you had qualifications none of the rest of them did.” She frowned. “What made you come forward, Ramón? I’ve never asked.”

  “No one else wanted to adopt him.”

  Stunned, Tanya stared at him. “What?”

  “They didn’t want him because he had your blood.”

  The anger crackling on her nerves grew more intense. “But rather than give me any joy at all, they pushed for me to give him up to you totally.” As if the anger had clotted in the swollen pathways of her arm, a sudden pulse of pain struck her wrist. “Sometimes, Ramón, I look back and can’t believe how foolish I was—how weak and malleable.”

  “No.” His jaw was hard as he reached over and put a hand on hers. “You weren’t weak. Not ever. You were young and without help and you did the best you could.” His nostrils flared with strong emotion. “You stayed alive.”

  Tanya lifted her chin. “Yes, I did.”

  His eyes glittered with something she couldn’t read but somehow it stirred her. The rustling on her nerves turned softer and warmer. Fluid awareness pooled in her breasts and washed over her thighs, and she found herself imagining how his body would feel against her own. As she stared, it seemed he knew her thoughts, for the hand that he had allowed to rest on hers shifted, and his long, graceful fingers moved in a light, erotic pattern over her inner wrist. “I’m glad,” he said.

  As if aware that the conversation had taken a deeply intimate turn, he leaned back suddenly and lifted his coffee cup in a toast, offering a smile in place of the heady sensuality on his face only moments before. “To life!”

  Tanya lifted her cup. “To survival.”

  “Not survival,” he said. “There’s so much more to life than that, cricket.”

  For a moment, she only looked at him. She didn’t want the rest—no passion, no wild highs and lows, no despair or great joy—just simple, calm, day-to-day survival. “I didn’t mean it in the grim sense.”

  The waitress appeared. “Here we go,” she said, but hardly paused before bustling away again. She sailed by once more, dropping a bottle of ketchup and one of mustard on the table.

  “Smell that,” Ramón said and smiled at Tanya. “There’s a lot to be said for simple pleasures.”

  Tanya piled everything—pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, ketchup and mustard—onto the burger. Awkwardly with the bandages, she lifted it in both hands and took one second to savor the salty, rich scent before she bit into it. Juices exploded on her tongue—a perfect melding of salt and fat and crisp cold vegetables and pungent sauces. She closed her eyes, savoring the flavor.

  “Little things are everything,” she said when she could speak. “Everything.”

  Ramón only nodded, a strangely stricken expression on his face. “Eat your cheeseburger, Tanya. And then I’ll show you a bookstore I think you’ll like.”

  “Shouldn’t we get back soon?”

  “They’ll manage without us.”

  She shrugged. “Okay.”

  * * *

  By the time they emerged from the diner, the rain had stopped, but a cold wind had blown in behind it, sharp and piercing. The sky was still gray and heavy-looking. Tanya said, “It almost feels like snow.”

  He lifted his chin, smelling the air. “Maybe. I think it’s a little ways off yet, but you never know. Last year, there was snow on the Sangre de Cristos by the end of August.”

  “That’s early.” Tanya huddled deeper into her coat. The mild tranquilizer she had finally accepted at the hospital, combined with the terrific hamburger, made her feel warm and calm.

  As they walked down the largely deserted streets, Ramón told her about the owners of the bookstore. The man had fled his native Mexico as a young man. “I think,” Ramón said with a smile, “that he was wanted by the law, but it has never been said in so many words.”

  “Ooh,” Tanya said, “a desperado.”

  He nodded. “Someone wanted his skin. He ran into the mountains and fell ill. A very beautiful young woman found him and took him to her grandmother, who was a famous and powerful curandera, one of the local healers.”

  Tanya smiled. “And he fell in love with the young girl as the grandmother healed him.”

  “You’ve heard this story before.” A glitter shone in his dark eyes.

  “Variations, anyway.”

  “Ah, well, you know then, that the girl was as gifted as her grandmother, and became a curandera, too. He runs the bookstore, and she dispenses herbs and potions to everyone in town.”

  “Very romantic.”

  “You’ll love the bookstore. You still like to read, don’t you?”

  She chuckled. “Trust me—prison makes readers of non-readers. The ones who were readers to begin with turn into fanatics.”

  “I can imagine.”

  He stopped in front of an old building. A plate glass window had been painted with the words Walking Stick Bookstore in an arch. Below it read Ceéaro Valdez, Proprietor. Across the bottom of the window were more gold letters: Knowledge is po
wer.

  “Nice,” Tanya said.

  “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” Ramón asked, pausing outside.

  “I’m fine.” She looked at him. “Later, I will be miserable. Tomorrow, I may be grouchy. By the day after tomorrow, life will be back to normal. Right now, I feel just fine.”

  He laughed. “Okay. I’ll save my worrying for tonight.”

  She gestured toward the door. “Getting some good books to keep me company later might be just right.”

  As she stepped into the store, Tanya instantly fell in love. A scent of books and dust and cinnamon tea struck her nostrils, and from hidden speakers played soft Andean flute music. A rabbit warren of bookshelves, illuminated with small lamps set alongside single chairs and small tables, stretched beyond her vision. She paused. Sighed.

  A woman behind the counter smiled at them. “Ramoncito!” she cried. “Where you been keeping yourself, hijo?” She came around the counter, a short, round woman with ebony hair swept with wings of white. She took Ramón’s hands and looked him up and down. “You been working too hard again. I want to see some meat on those bones.”

  “Rosalía, this is my friend Tanya Bishop. She’s cooking at the ranch with Desmary.” He grinned devilishly. “Blame her for my skinniness.”

  Tanya grinned and rolled her eyes. Rosalía tsked. “Like I’d ever blame a woman for anything a man did!” A flicker moved in the almond-shaped eyes and she took her hands from Ramón and put them close to Tanya’s bandaged arm. “May I?” she said.

  Caught in the extraordinary depth of the beautiful eyes, Tanya nodded. The woman put both her palms on her arm, one just above the elbow, one just below. Tanya felt nothing, except the extraordinary warmth of Rosalía’s fingers, but it was as if Rosalía were reading something, or listening. After a minute, she pursed her lips, then opened her palm and placed it palm down against Tanya’s. She looked at Ramón and jerked her head toward the books.

  He made a noise of mock outrage, but smiled. “Okay?” he said to Tanya.

  She nodded.

  Rosalía stared into Tanya’s face. “Tell me about the sorrow of this hand,” she said, leading Tanya to a comfortable deep couch set behind the counter.

  “I cut it on a stick. I felt out of a tree, just a little while ago.”

  Rosalía smiled. “No, not this new hurt, not that hand. Longer ago. Old wound.” She covered Tanya’s hand with her other one, making a warm sandwich, just as Ramón had done a little earlier. “There is damage here—if you don’t heal it, there will be arthritis later.”

  Tanya tried to think of something she’d done to the hand, but could think of nothing. Perhaps she meant repetitive motion injuries, but Tanya cut with her left hand. “I don’t know. Cooking?”

  Slowly, the woman shook her head. Tanya became aware of the sound of pan flutes piped in quietly through speakers in the ceiling. Soothing and haunting. They increased the feeling of stepping into another time, another world. “No, cooking is a creative thing,” Rosalía said. She frowned. “It’s deep.” She shook her head, rubbing her open palm in a circle over the bones of Tanya’s hands.

  Unbidden came an image of this very hand holding a gun up before her, and she knew that was the answer Rosalía sought. “I shot a man dead with this hand. A long time ago.”

  “Ah.” Rosalía nodded, and slowly let Tanya go. “You go look at books.”

  Tanya backed away, sensing the woman was not dismissing her, but giving her room to come to terms with this new piece of self-knowledge. Iris, her friend in prison, had often done the same thing.

  As she headed into the rabbit warren of bookshelves, Tanya kept her hands close to her belly, feeling bemused. The strange encounter might have been right out of “Twilight Zone,” except Tanya had seen such women at work in the past. It was a gift, like any other. Like all nontraditional healers, curanderas relied on the harmony of body and mind and spirit.

  And, too, there had been an odd thing about her right hand. For months after the shooting, she’d been unable to use it at all. It gave her terrible pain to even lift a glass of water. Repeatedly, prison doctors had examined it, but could find nothing wrong. A psychologist finally told her it was akin to hysterical blindness—when a person witnessed something too terrible to contemplate, they sometimes could not see. The hand that shot Victor carried the sorrow of the act for Tanya, who couldn’t.

  Moving her fingers, she remembered the terrible months just after the shooting. No one had understood how conflicted she’d been. They didn’t understand that she had loved him once, that he’d fathered her child, that he could be a funny, loving man. He was evil, too, and that evil had caused his death as directly as Tanya’s lifting the gun, but no evil came in the world without some hope. It was thinking about the good in him that upset her.

  She twisted her mouth. Water under the bridge now, and she would not open the wounds again. Instead, she let the wonders of the bookstore seduce her, and wandered through the stacks. She saw Ramón in an aisle of music history. Tanya ambled toward the cookbooks and fell adrift in glossy pictures of French cottages, their tables overflowing with Provencal food.

  She had no idea how long they were there, how long she spent drifting through one warren and into another. Outside, a second leg of the storm moved in, and mild thunder jumped in the heavens, lending the rooms an even cozier aspect. She carried two cookbooks, three paperback novels, and a Spanish-English colloquial dictionary. Although she’d spent several years reading and writing Spanish in prison—yet another of her endless self-improvement projects—she still got lost when the conversation moved very fast. It seemed everyone at the ranch could move between the two languages at will and she didn’t like being at a disadvantage.

  She came around a corner and found Ramón sitting on a sofa near a window. A tiny lamp burned on the antique table, and Ramón was washed gold with the incandescent bulb on the right, silver-gray from the window on his left. The fingers of light fanned over his high, clear brow, cascaded down his elegant cheekbones, danced on his generous, seductive mouth. Such a face, she thought, struck dumb once again.

  He didn’t seem to notice her, and Tanya clasped her books to her chest like a schoolgirl with a crush. Her lungs felt overfilled, her body too tender for the clothes she wore. Intelligence and compassion and a sense of humor—all showed in the exquisite features, along with the alluring seductiveness. How had he managed to avoid marriage all these years? How was it that some determined female had not corralled him by now?

  At the diner earlier, Tanya had said she did not want life—but she did. She wanted to dance and make love, she wanted to cry out with passion and chortle with joy. She wanted to bear another child and have another husband and—

  Be young and live.

  She was afraid, too. Afraid of the intensity of her nature and the combustibility of Ramón’s. He was genial, a generous man who would please almost any mother or matchmaker as a suitable husband candidate.

  But Tanya was not the foolish sort of woman who mistook a kind man for a bland one. In his eyes was a fierce and blazing passion, carefully banked. He was a man who controlled himself rigidly and carefully, a man who kept his passions skillfully concealed, but she knew they were there. Waiting.

  For her? She didn’t know and didn’t know if she wanted to find out.

  A fleeting image of him, naked and close, gave her a momentary weak-kneed breathlessness. Embarrassed, she ducked her head and was about to turn away when he called her name in a loud whisper.

  She turned.

  “Come sit with me,” he said quietly, gesturing. “I want to read you something.”

  On stiff legs, she moved toward him, creaking slowly down to perch on the very edge of the sofa next to him. “I only bite on Saturdays,” he said.

  Bite—oh, that brought up some images! She clasped the books closer to her chest. “It is Saturday.”

  “Ah, so it is.” He waggled his eyebrows wickedly. “Well, I don’t bite hard.�
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  A shiver goose-walked down her spine. “Umm, what do you want to read to me?” Her voice sounded odd in her ears, all breathy and soft.

  He put his book down next to him, on the cushion between them. Outside, thunder growled over the sky, and rain pattered musically at the windows. Inside, the haunting Andean flutes floated through the room. Within Tanya’s chest beat a quick, fluttery pulse. It seemed impossible such tiny beats could circulate enough blood through her body, and as if to prove it, she felt a little light-headed.

  Gently, he took her books from her arms and put them on top of his own, then shifted the pile to the floor at his feet. He moved closer. Tanya shrank away from him, overwhelmed with the narcotic scent of his skin, and the way the silver and gold light caught in the long strands of his dark wavy hair. Her heart beat faster, and to her dismay, she realized her hands were shaking. When he reached for her cheek with his fingers, she started violently, her gaze flying to his face.

  He halted, then stretched out his hand again and lightly put his fingertips on her jaw. “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do, grillacita, little cricket,” he said, his fingers moving lightly. “But I really need to kiss you.” His gaze touched her mouth, moved back to her eyes. “Will you let me kiss you, Tanya?”

  She stared at him, wanting him and yet, so afraid. “Yes,” she heard her voice whisper. And again, “Yes.”

  He opened his hand on her face, his fingers spreading to clasp her ear, his lean palm cupping her cheek. The touch was unbearably gentle, wildly arousing. To be touched at all was almost more than she could bear, and when he came closer, bending over to kiss her, Tanya panicked.

  She put her hand up and stopped him, ducking her head away from him. “Ramón, no, I—it’s just—this is—” Rising terror bolted through her and she started to stand up.

  Ramón let her go instantly, but caught her good hand. “Hey. You don’t have to run away.”

  Tanya swallowed, feeling faintly foolish as the panic attack eased. It was Ramón here, sitting next to her, his thigh resting against her own, looking so sensually handsome. Hesitantly, she lifted her hand to touch his face. He didn’t move, just waited while she touched his jaw, his cheek, his chin. Beneath her fingers, his skin was warm and male, coarse where his light beard was shaved off his chin.