Jacintha Point Page 5

  'He told you that?' she asked faintly.

  'In no uncertain terms.' Quietly, Dan added: 'Why didn't you tell me things had progressed that far with him? Last night at the El Mirador, you let me think he was married.'

  'Did I?' Laurel cast round frantically in her mind for a solution to this new problem. If she said that she had indeed believed that Diego was married to Consuelo just the night before, how could her father believe that today she had agreed to marry him? And with burning clarity, she knew that that was exactly what she must convince Dan of. Diego was the only one who could bring pressure to bear for her father's release.

  'Well, I—I guess I didn't want you to know I'd been seeing somebody else while I'm still engaged to Brent,' she said with a coyness that sounded insincere to herself, but Dan appeared to accept her statement at face value. Indeed, he seemed relieved to hear it.

  'You don't know how happy I am to know that you feel that way, honey,' he leaned forward to squeeze her hand meaningfully. 'The minute I saw Ramirez last night I knew he was more the man for you than Brent could ever be. There's a certain way a man looks at the woman he loves, and that's the way Ramirez Diego—looked at you. I always got the feeling that Brent might look at himself in the mirror that way, but—' Dan stopped abruptly and ran a broad hand over his head. 'Honey, I don't want you to think I'm saying that because I'm in this place. I'd stay here and crumble to dust before I'd let you—'

  'I know, Dad,' Laurel inserted quickly. 'But—Diego —can get the wheels moving much faster if he's doing it on behalf of his f-father-in-law. He knows lots of

  people in the right places, so it's just a matter of time before you're out of here.' She glanced again round the depressing cell room.

  'You're sure this is what you want, Laurel?' Dan insisted, his hand tightening over hers. 'Marriage is forever to a man like Ramirez, so if you have any doubts, now's the time to speak out. There's no guarantee I'll be released even with his help, so don't let that influence you into rushing into a marriage that isn't right for you.'

  Laurel looked down at the broad hand covering hers, feeling its warmth combating the chill that had struck deep within her. 'Marriage is forever to a man like Ramirez ...' Only after her father had spoken those words did she realise that deep down she had been planning that if the marriage took place, it would be a short lived arrangement, terminating upon her father's release.

  Still, she told herself with an inward sigh, nothing had changed. She could still leave Diego and go back to Brent. Feeling more hopeful suddenly, she looked up and gave Dan a tremulous smile.

  'I've never been more sure that this is the right thing to do, Dad. All my future happiness is tied up in Diego.' And that was no lie.

  For the first time, Dan Trent smiled in his relaxed way, years seeming to fall from his salty tanned features. He, too, looked buoyantly hopeful when she took her leave a few minutes later, telling Laurel silently of how much he was relying on Diego's help to gain his freedom.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  'Ho la!'

  After schooling herself to hear Diego's somewhat cool mid-tones, Laurel stared blankly down at the telephone. The voice at the other end was a woman's, deep and thick, so not Consuelo's.

  'I—may I speak with Senor Ramirez?'

  'Senor Ramirez swims in the pool. Is importante?' 'Yes. I'll wait.'

  Making the original call with fingers trembling so hard they could scarcely dial had been bad enough. Laurel knew she could never summon up the courage to call again.

  'Momento, por favor.'

  Laurel drummed nervously on the side table and drew deep breaths as she waited for Diego to come to the phone. Who was swimming in the pool with him? Consuelo with her dark-eyed beauty? It wasn't hard to imagine that Diego, with his air of barely suppressed sensuality, appreciated the female form scantily dad in the privacy of his own pool.

  The receiver was picked up at the other end, and her fingers tensed on hers as Diego announced himself. 'It's—Laurel Trent,' she said hesitantly.

  'Ah.' There was silence for a moment, and Laurel wondered if it was due to the surge of satisfaction he must be feeling. His tone was level, however, when he went on: 'You have been to see your father?'

  'I—yes, last night.' Laurel swallowed deeply. 'I'm

  prepared to consider your offer.'

  Another silence, which went on for so long that she wondered if they had been cut off. But at last Diego spoke in a controlled tone.

  'Perhaps you will call me again when you make up your mind to accept my proposal.'

  Laurel gasped as if he had thrown her into the pool he had just come from. After all the hours she had spent tossing and turning in her sleepless bed bringing herself to this point, the least he could have done was to meet her halfway. But that kind of understanding, compassion, was evidently outside the orbit of Diego Ramirez's nature.

  'All right, damn you,' she choked, 'I'll marry you.'

  If she had expected a flowery speech of loverlike protestations she was disappointed in his abrupt: 'I will be with you in thirty minutes. You are at the hotel?'

  'Yes.'

  'Adios, Laurel. Until we meet.'

  The time seemed endless as she paced between one room and the other, even the scene from her balcony windows of activity on beach and water failing for once · to hold her attention. Her thoughts were chaotic.

  Why would a man like Diego Ramirez, wealthy, powerful, with a world of beautiful women ready to fall at his attractive feet, want to marry someone like herself? Her training as a model had given her poise, a grace of carriage, and she wasn't falsely modest about her looks—which, she supposed now, might appeal in their fairness to a man surrounded for the most part by darkly exotic women. But none of that added up to a reason for wanting to marry her. An affair, yes, such as she had suspected when she had believed him to be

  married. A lifelong commitment? No.

  The same chill enveloped her as had pierced her insides in her father's prison cell. 'Marriage is forever,' he had said. Laurel herself had held the same belief ever since she could remember. But here she was now contemplating that sacred state with a view to opting out when her father was released from prison.

  But Diego only had himself to thank for that, she told herself fiercely as she rushed into the bedroom and feverishly applied make-up to put a false glow on her pallid cheeks. The white tailored short-sleeved dress she was wearing reflected paleness to her skin, robbing it of the little colour it had had after a sleepless night.

  When the confident knock came at the outer door, she froze in her tracks. The nightmare that had begun the afternoon before with her father's arrest was far from being over. As she forced her feet across the tiled floor, Laurel knew it was only just beginning.

  She was taken by surprise when Diego, dressed casually in close-fitting jeans and white roll neck sweater yet still looking expensively turned out, took her hand and pressed his lips to her palm. The gesture was foreign to her, and a little distasteful, so she pulled her hand away abruptly.

  'Don't do that,' she said sharply. 'It's not necessary.'

  His brows lifted in a black arc. 'You consider it unnecessary to receive such a small symbol of my devotion?'

  Laughing voices echoed in the corridor and Laurel said jerkily: 'You'd better come in,' turning back into the small living room with its Spanish decor.

  'Let's get it straight from the beginning,' she said tautly, turning again to face the eyes that were like

  banked fires in his olive-toned face. 'I've agreed to marry you for one reason, and one reason only. You know what that reason is. So don't let's have any false displays of affection.

  'I never display affection falsely, querida,' he told her with dangerous softness. Then, his eyes cooling, he gestured to the small bar next to the kitchenette. 'May I pour us some drinks? A little celebration is perhaps in order.'

  'I'm not in the mood to celebrate, senor,' Laurel said drily, 'but I do feel the need for a strong whi
sky and soda.'

  He brought the drinks to where she stood at the balcony doors envying the carefree couples cavorting on the beach. She and Brent might have come here for their honeymoon ...

  'Thank you,' she said coolly, accepting the half-filled glass Diego handed to her.

  'A toast to—a fruitful marriage,' he raised his glass, then, when Laurel showed no signs of following suit, tipping it up to swallow deeply of its contents.

  'If you mean what I think you mean,' Laurel told him frostily, 'you can forget it. This marriage is to be one in name only, so don't build up your hopes for a yearly influx of tiny Ramirezes! '

  For a moment he was still, then with a toss of his wrist he emptied his glass and set it down on the table beside them.

  'No, querida,' he shook his head with maddening certitude, 'this marriage cannot be in name only. I will take only one wife in my lifetime, and she will be the mother of my children. You, Laurel.'

  Laurel gulped on her drink before seeking his eyes, 'Why?' she asked brokenly. 'Why do you want to marry

  me? We hardly know each other, let alone—love. We've hardly even kissed ..

  'That can be remedied at any time,' he said softly, reaching a hand up to touch the silver cascade of her hair, which she had left loose in an access of despair before his arrival. His touch disturbed her, heralding as it did the threat of further intimacies she would be powerless to prevent if they were indissolubly linked in a marriage relationship. Vaguely, as from a distance, she heard the muted sounds of his voice, and together with the whisky she had swallowed so rapidly they formed a hypnotic effect on her senses.

  `Have you never met someone for the first time, Laurel, and felt you had known them for all eternity? That somewhere in another time, another place, two souls had been intertwined and that it was their destiny to meet again, to love again? That is how I felt the first time I saw you, Laurel, at a fashion show in Acapulco, and I knew that you were the woman I had waited for all these years.'

  Mesmerized by the soft persuasion in his voice, Laurel's eyes clung to the liquid darkness of his before being drawn irresistibly to the masterfully drawn outline of his lips. She felt the glass being removed gently from her hand, a deceptively gentle arm at her back pressing her forward.

  Diego's first kiss held even less fire than Brent's undemanding lovemaking, and Laurel felt a distinct pang of disappointment. There was only the familiar sensation of warmth as the male mouth pressed against the softness of hers, teasing lightly at the corners. The punishing kiss he had extracted from her at El Mirador had held much more excitement, provocation, although it had been administered from anger.

  Then, with a suddenness that left her breathless, Diego was murmuring brokenly at her ear, his lips trailing hotly from there to her closed lids, her cheek, and finally closing possessively over her mouth.

  No man, not even Brent, had kissed her in that way and she instinctively stiffened, pushing with her hands against the male implacability of his chest, only to find her attention distracted by the expert touch of his hands. They seemed to be everywhere, stroking, caressing, cajoling with a sensitivity of their own in their knowledge of what would please her woman's body. She had never been so conscious of her female curves and contours until Diego's hands cupped, smoothed and pressed them to the throbbing male warmth of his. Her drugged senses were aware only of a primitive need to give without reserve to the man of her choice.

  But Diego wasn't the man of her choice. That remembrance came with the sear of her indrawn breath when his mouth lifted from hers. The soft murmur of his voice at her ear suddenly repelled her and she pushed herself from the confinement of his arms and backed against the kitchenette counter, her eyes a fathomless sea green as she stared at him, denying the recognition her pounding heart insisted on.

  'I—I don't feel that way about you,' she gasped, moving away from his compelling aura, elucidating for his incredulous stare: 'I mean—all that stuff about —being fated from other lives. That doesn't mean anything to me.'

  'No?' He moved with silent tread to stand near her again. Her darting eyes saw a faint film of perspiration on his brow, the flare of his nostrils, and sickness churned in her stomach. 'Yet you are not indifferent to me, carina,' he added huskily, raising a hand to

  twist a strand of her hair between his fingers. 'Our marriage has much to recommend it.'

  Laurel jerked woodenly away from him. 'A marriage between us, senor, has only one thing to recommend it in my eyes, and that is the release of my father.'

  'So The sooner we are married the sooner I will be in a position to help him reach that goal.' Taking his glass in one hand, he gestured to Laurel's and when she shook her head, strode over to the bar. 'You -realise that I cannot guarantee his freedom,' he went quietly from there, 'only a speeding up of his trial. If he is innocent—'

  'Of course he's innocent! ' Laurel swung round scathingly. 'My father has never done a dishonest thing in his life, let alone become involved in the drug trade!'

  'Yet he appears to have no business, no profession?'

  'He—gave that up after my mother died.' Laurel swivelled back to the window, hiding the tears brought on by sleeplessness and the unbelievable events of the past twenty-four hours. 'He—just seemed to want to get away from everything that reminded him of—'

  'And this included you, his daughter?' Diego interrupted from the sofa, where he had taken his drink.

  Laurel shook her head impatiently. 'He had to put me in school. What else could a widowed man do with a twelve-year-old daughter? I could hardly share his life on the boat.'

  'It would not have been right for a young girl,' he agreed with such alacrity that Laurel sensed that he knew all about the women who had filled her father's loneliness temporarily. And that made her wonder about the women in Diego's life, the ones who had given him such sureness in his lovemaking. They must have been legion, she thought abstractly, her eyes flit—

  o

  ting over his smoothly knit frame on the sofa.

  'Come and sit down, querida,' he instructed, patting the sofa as if reading her thoughts. Contrarily, Laurel took the chair in juxtaposition to the couch.

  'How long do you think it will be before my father's trial comes up?' she asked, ignoring his wince of distaste at her businesslike tone.

  'I cannot say at this moment,' he shrugged. 'Perhaps one month, perhaps two.'

  'Months! '

  'Under other circumstances,' his mouth twisted into a wry smile, 'your father could be imprisoned for many months, perhaps years.'

  'I know. My father told me that last night. Well,' briskly, 'how soon can the marriage take place?'

  'Such eagerness on the part of my bride!' Diego got suddenly to his feet, looking like a smooth and slightly dangerous jungle animal as he paced around the small room. 'The wedding must be held in Mexico City. I have many friends and business acquaintances who would be less than happy if they were not invited to witness the ceremony. Apart from Consuelo, my close family consists only of my grandmother, who lives at the family estate in Cuernavaca. She is very old, and unlikely to travel to Mexico City for the occasion.'

  Laurel felt a faint tug of surprise at his mention of family ... apart from his dead brother, she had somehow imagined him a man alone without a past or discernible future.

  'You have no parents?'

  'No more.' A glance up into his face revealed a taut line to his lips, a perceptible hardening of his jaw. 'Both were killed in a plane travelling back from your

  State of Kansas many years ago. I was fourteen years old.'

  'I'm sorry.' Strangely, the words were more than perfunctory. Hadn't Laurel herself gone through the trauma of losing one parent? To lose both in one fell swoop must have been agony for a young boy.

  But Diego shrugged. 'The young recover quickly. And now,' he came back to seat himself on the sofa, pinning her eyes to his with his liquid black stare, 'we must settle a date for the nuptials. I will arrange for the civil cerem
ony a week from now—or perhaps next Friday, the religious rites to be conducted the following day, Saturday. It is perhaps not possible at such short notice to be married in the Cathedral, but perhaps a side chapel ...' He seemed to have forgotten Laurel's presence, lost as he was in the details of arranging a speedy marriage.

  'That—isn't very much time,' she inserted drily, moistening her lips with a nervous tongue.

  'The sooner you are my wife, the better it will be,' he brushed away her objection almost brusquely. 'It would not, of course, be correct for you to stay at my town house in Mexico City, so you will go directly to Consuelo's home there.'

  'No!' Laurel bit off sharply. `I—I want to stay close to my father. Why can't we be married here in Acapulco?' Hysterically, she wondered at her own sudden acceptance of the inevitability of a marriage between herself and a man she scarcely knew. Didn't want to know.

  A frown she was beginning to recognise as peculiarly his slashed two lines between his brows. 'That would not be possible, for your sake as much as for mine. Some of the people I will be contacting about your

  father's case will attend the ceremony in Mexico City, but not here.' One olive hand came out to clasp the hand in her lap. 'If you wish, we can come here immediately after the ceremony and spend our honeymoon there . In that way, you will be able to visit your father daily.'

  With that Laurel had to be content, although before Diego left she was able to persuade, him that two days spent with Consuelo would be sufficient to purchase bridal accoutrements. To his suggestion that she charge everything to the accounts he held in every major store in Mexico City she could only agree. Her slender bank balance would scarcely run to the finery befitting the bride of one of Mexico's most prominent men. The unwilling bride.

  CHAPTER FIVE