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I’m so proud of you and wish I’d been a better father. May your life always be blessed with love.
She felt too numb to appreciate the touching thoughts and refolded the letter and returned it to its envelope. She’d save it with the photos. The small collection would be a time capsule, like her mother’s cherished box. Appalled by the odd pairing of sentiment and guilt, she looked up just as Rafael stepped onto the porch. Santos and Fox remained talking together by the SUV.
“I imagine you struck a tough bargain,” she said.
He took the chair beside hers. “Of course. I don’t trust agents to look out for anyone but themselves.”
“Is there anyone you do trust?”
He reached over to catch her hand. “Other than you, no.”
“That’s probably wise.” Her hand nearly disappeared into his. “Mr. Calderon wants me to study the family portfolio tonight and meet again tomorrow with Santos. Will you be able to stay here another day?”
“Yes. Let’s ask Refugio to make some sandwiches and go out to the tree to eat.”
“I’d much rather do that than study columns of figures. I do balance my checkbook each month when I receive my bank statement, but I don’t know anything about investments.”
“I doubt Mr. Calderon expects you to do any of the actual work yourself.”
“No, he doesn’t, but I should be able to recognize what’s a wise investment and what isn’t.”
Rafael stood and pulled her to her feet. “If profits on stocks were easily predictable, then everyone would be wealthy.”
“I suppose, but I’m way out of my depth here.”
He swept her with an appreciative glance. “You look fine to me.”
She smiled and took a step toward the door. “Thank you. I need to change my clothes while Refugio makes our lunch.”
He shook his head. “No, the path isn’t difficult. Stay in your skirt.”
The sly look in his eye made it plain what he was thinking, and it would be easier to hike up her skirt and climb onto his lap than to have to shimmy out of her jeans first.
“I’d no idea you’d be so interested in exploring the countryside.”
He looked off toward Santos and Fox. “I’m into the environment. There’s a lot about me you don’t know.”
That was an understatement, and there was an enormous amount he didn’t know about her. “I’m sure that’s true. What’s your blood type?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
He frowned at the unexpected question. “A positive, like most people in Spain, so there were plenty of us to donate blood if the prison hospital needed it.”
A chill of horror shot clear to her toes. She’d grasped for the hope he’d had some rare Gypsy blood type that would have protected him from being a heart donor for her father. She walked on into the house thinking she really needed to talk to Dr. Moreno. Santos had his telephone number, but even if Moreno had discussed a transplant with her father, she doubted the physician would know, or admit, what her father had really wanted. Right now, she needed to stop thinking and let a simple picnic brighten her dangerously dark mood while she could still hide it.
Rafael carried the basket and a folded blanket as they walked along the trail. “I’ve never been on a picnic, unless you count foraging out of trash cans.”
“No, that’s a survival technique. Picnics are pleasure outings.” She bit her lip rather than ask how his mother could have left her children in such dire straits while she’d occupied herself as a serial mistress to the rich.
“I’d not thought of it as survival training, maybe part of military special ops. I was just born desperately poor.”
He didn’t speak of other women, thank God, but she wondered how old he’d been when he’d lost his virginity and who the woman had been. An older woman, she thought, someone who’d tucked a hundred dollar bill in his jeans. “I’m sorry you had such a difficult childhood.”
“It was all we knew, so it didn’t seem difficult to us then. Now I’m surprised I lived through it without being run over by a truck in some narrow alley.”
With his height and build, it was difficult to imagine anything getting the better of him. Maybe with what he’d already survived, a bull didn’t strike him as a deadly threat.
