Guarding Gaby Read online

  He nodded. “I’ll settle for that for the moment.” He winked. “And work on bringing you around over migas.”

  “Migas.” She sighed at the mere notion of the spicy mélange of eggs and peppers, tortillas, onions, cheese and tomatoes. She’d worked off that scant excuse for an omelette already. “You drive a hard bargain.”

  He chuckled. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Race you to the gate—” He was off like a shot.

  “Come on, Paco.” She glanced around her for the dog, but he had vanished. She shrugged and used her heels on the horse’s side. “Let’s show the man what we’re made of.”

  She bent low in the saddle, and Paco gave her all he had.

  Chapter Five

  Eli roused at the dog’s whimper, then fell back onto his sleeping bag with a groan. The sun was high in the sky, he could tell, even this far back in the cave. Near noon, most likely, so he’d only slept a couple of hours after Gaby disappeared with Chad.

  Fatigue seemed to have taken up permanent residence in his bones, and that was dangerous. The last several years as he’d traveled with his laptop and digital cameras to document events all over the globe, he’d mastered the art of sleeping wherever fate granted him the chance, dropping off instantly and waking quickly when emergency threatened.

  But here, where at last he might be able to clear himself and set old ghosts to rest, he seemed to have lost the knack.

  Since Gaby’s arrival, that was.

  For a moment, he let his mind wander to a place he’d avoided for years: the secret world he and Gaby had inhabited when they were young and believed in magic. Even he, who’d known too much of life’s dark corners, had behaved in a manner that was innocent, redeemed and cleansed by the love of a girl who, despite losing her mother, had remained untouched in her faith in mankind’s innate goodness.

  If others had been aware of the time he and Gaby spent together, his reputation would have led to the inevitable conclusion that their activities were the sort of thing one expects of the bastard son of a kept woman.

  Sheriff Anderson’s kept woman, to be exact, though Eli hadn’t understood the relationship between his mother and Chad’s father when he’d been very young.

  He had no idea if Chad was aware of it. Whether Chad had a clue about what kind of man his father really was.

  When Eli had made a kid’s mistake and tried to use what he’d uncovered about the former sheriff’s less savory enterprises as leverage to get the sheriff to leave Eli’s mother alone, Bill Anderson had merely laughed, then told Eli that his mother was involved in them, too. He’d warned Eli that no one would suspect an officer of the law but that he would make certain Eli’s mother went to jail if Eli breathed a word. He’d had one of his cohorts beat Eli so severely that Eli, abandoned on a deserted road, would have died had Gaby and Chad not happened upon him. Gaby barely knew him, yet she’d refused to leave his side until he’d received medical care.

  While he’d been in the hospital, Gaby had come to check on the boy most regarded as little more than a wild animal. Something had stirred to life between them.

  And the rest, as is said, was history.

  Eli never revealed who had injured him, but his mother had surmised the truth and begged him to leave. She was trapped, but she desperately wanted her son away and safe. Eli had refused to abandon her, but he spent more and more time alone in the desert, watching over his mother and spying on the sheriff, looking for the man’s Achilles heel.

  And meeting Gaby in secret.

  Eli had known what people thought of him, so however much he’d burned for Gaby, had longed to love her with his body as he had with his heart, he hadn’t acted on it. He’d suffered, yes—the tortures of the damned—after he’d left her each time.

  But with her, he’d been a kid again, he who’d left childhood behind early. They’d talked, they’d played…they’d fantasized about what could be. He’d let himself believe they had plenty of time to find the solution that would give them a future.

  Eli could almost laugh at the boy who’d briefly become a romantic. The world was not an innocent place, nor was it a venue for dreamers. He’d known that when too young, and his travels had reinforced the lesson.

  He flopped over and beat down the poor excuse for a pillow, ordering himself to sleep, for the night ahead of him was full.

  Then he heard the dog whine and roused.

  Just in time to see Gaby and Paco race past in the distance, as though the hounds of hell were after her.

  The dog glanced at him, then toward Gaby and back to him once again.

  “Go on, boy. It’s okay. Maybe she needs you.”

  The clap of his hands seemed to release the animal from his dilemma. With a spring of coiled muscle, after Gaby he went.

  While Eli watched.

  And despite everything, couldn’t help but regret all they had lost.

  Gaby dismounted from Paco and led him into his stall. She reached for the saddle her father had cherished, but when she’d uncinched it, she paused and traced one finger over the elaborate tooling.

  Frank Navarro had been a proud man and for good reason, however little she’d understood it before. He was once a vaquero of no small renown, to hear Celia tell the story. Gaby could dimly recall her mother’s shining eyes as she reminisced about the handsome young man who had swaggered into her life and won her heart.

  The saddle, won in a rodeo held across the border, was all that remained of his glory days. Gaby had never been able to connect her mother’s tales to the work worn man who struggled to keep his ranch, and his hopes for it, alive.

  Do as our fathers had planned, Chad had said. Gaby doubted that Bill Anderson had possessed the same vision as her father, but she only knew Chad’s sire as a distant, forbidding figure.

  Combining their ranches so that Gaby’s husband could tend the land her children would inherit was the only legacy Frank Navarro had hoped to wrest from the ashes of his son’s death.

  Chad was a nice man. He’d already gone out of his way to be kind to her, and he was willing to do more—much more, if she read his expression correctly.

  Would it be so bad to simply spend a little time with him and let her heartache and grief settle? She was tired, so tired, and it wasn’t only this place or losing her father. She hadn’t taken any vacation in two years, relentlessly focused on her climb. She often worked weekends, as well as late into the night.

  But her new position was waiting. However unreal it felt.

  She let Paco’s last hoof settle to the ground and took out the curry comb. Long strokes served to soothe not only the horse but herself, and the silence, broken only by the wind and the occasional bird trill or insect buzz, seemed to uncoil something too tightly wound inside her.

  New York seemed treacherously far away, in this instant, and the thought unnerved her. She couldn’t afford to lose her edge, or—

  Or what, Gabriela? You’d wind up alone and friendless? Except for Beth, she practically was.

  Just then, the dog trotted up, nudged at her leg, and she looked down. Scratched behind the dog’s ears and stared into the distance.

  Paco swung his head around and butted her hand, seeking his own share of attention.

  The dog tensed but didn’t leave her side, and soon she had both hands occupied. She smiled, thinking that perhaps she was a little short on friends of the human persuasion, but she had her own fan club, anyway.

  Chad was not interested in mere friendship, she was all but certain. Still, perhaps they could come to a compromise.

  Eli had once been dear to her, however painful his desertion. Perhaps she’d hallucinated him, but if not…this might be her chance to find out why he’d left her. Close that chapter of her life, for good.

  Her boss had offered her two weeks, while she’d insisted she’d be back in two days. Maybe she’d been wrong.

  “Okay, boys,” she said, giving them both one last pat. “After I get you both fed and watered, it’s time for a c
all to New York.”

  “Won’t you come in?” she asked the still-nameless dog a while later. “You did before.”

  He continued to sit on the front porch. Whined but wouldn’t enter.

  She opened the screen door and bent to pick up the water dish she’d filled for him. “Here. If I take your water in, will you follow?” She went ahead, but he didn’t budge.

  Neither did he leave, however. If she had any food with which to tempt him…

  The remaining bits of a box of stale crackers she’d unearthed and smeared with the margarine she’d scraped off its paper wrapping hadn’t done the trick. Not that she blamed him. Based on what she’d found, her father’s eating habits had been abysmal.

  If you were still cooking for him…

  “No.” Gaby uttered her refusal out loud. She’d barely made it through her conversation with Beth without weeping; her only hope to avoid it now, facing the prospect of weeding through her father’s belongings, was to treat this as merely another project to be accomplished. No treacherous detours down Memory Lane. No what ifs.

  “You’ve made your bed, Gabriela. Deal with it.”

  Thus, resolutely, she left the dog to what he appeared to see as guard duty, though she found herself musing over possible names for him.

  Duke. There was something slightly noble about him, wasn’t there?

  She had to smile at herself. No, he wasn’t the least regal—but there was the John Wayne aspect of him.

  Okay, how about Butch? Well, he was definitely macho, not a soft and cuddly type, though he did seem to relish being petted.

  When he wanted it, anyway. Not necessarily on anyone else’s schedule.

  A loner, then. Strong and…sad.

  An Eli.

  She was lost for endless seconds, thinking of the teenager who was now fully a man. Who had never had the chance to be a boy. He’d let her be silly with him and had come as close to playfulness with her as she imagined he’d ever allowed himself.

  But there had always been a solemnity about Eli. A sorrow that hung over him, one he would not discuss. Their stolen hours had been filled with kisses she’d sighed over for days, with visions of a future as unlimited as the sky above her head. When the kisses had progressed into caresses, it had been Eli who kept them from becoming more. Left to her, they would have lost their virginity to each other early on, but Eli, sensitive about being illegitimate, had refused to risk creating a child who would share the same fate, despite all her offers to obtain birth control that would free them from the worry. Condoms could break, he said, and if she sought out pills, the news would whip through Chamizal like a whirlwind.

  They would wait, he insisted, as proper couples had managed to do for many generations before this era of easy sex that meant nothing.

  She meant everything to him, he said, and refused to budge on the topic, however painful the yearning of their bodies.

  Agonizing it had been, yet she would not give up one single second of the torture, because not being with Eli would have been much worse. As it was, they were lucky to see each other one night every couple of weeks. She had tried to walk by his side at school, and he had threatened to drop out if she did. Theirs was a love that would be allowed to exist only once they were away from here, he’d made very clear. She’d argued and pleaded and threatened, but he’d held firm. “You can’t understand, Gaby,” he’d told her over and over. “And I can’t explain. Either you trust me or you don’t.”

  She’d even broken things off between them once, thinking to force him to choose her over his dogged principles.

  It had been the most miserable month of her life.

  Finally, she’d slipped him a note in school, asking him to meet her that night, and when she’d seen him, so gaunt and troubled, she’d known that the separation had been hard on him, too. The vulnerable look in his eyes, at war with the resolute set of his jaw, kept her from demanding, yet again, an explanation.

  Whatever he needed her to be, she would. What secrets he must maintain, she’d no longer push him to reveal. She’d grown up a little during those endless days, forced to accept that love—and she did love him, desperately—was not black and white, nor was it as simple as she’d imagined it.

  And when, in the strained and ponderous silence of their reunion, she’d simply opened her arms to him, Eli had cried. Tears, from the most self-contained person she’d ever met to this day, had rattled her as she’d believed nothing else ever could. He’d been shaken, too, and it was then that they’d laid their plans to run away together after graduation.

  And only a month later, she’d lost him forever.

  Gaby came to herself in her room, one hand on the pull of the drawer in which she’d hidden the meager store of souvenirs she had of Eli. She paused, afraid to open it.

  Several deep, calming inhalations later, she thought she was ready. She was a grown woman now, not the girl who’d been so lovesick over a boy who had abandoned her. She would never believe that he had killed his mother, but the truth was that he’d never used their fallback meeting place or the letter drop they’d set up, just in case their original plans didn’t work out. Eli, thought to be reckless by residents of the town, was, when he really cared, cautious to the extreme. He would not trust their future to chance.

  Thus, when he didn’t show as planned and left no word for her, though she checked every day until she departed for college, Gaby had known she would never see Eli Wolverton again. He had reverted to the wild boy and had run, both from a town too quick to judge him—

  And from her, the girl who, in the end, couldn’t make him believe that she, alone of everyone he’d known, would not let him down. She was mature now and understood how unlikely their bond had been. How unsuited they were.

  But he had to have been aware of how much his leaving abruptly would hurt her, and that put everything she believed about how they’d felt for each other in question.

  Gaby dropped her fingers from the drawer pull and stepped back before she committed an act of sheer folly. She was not that girl anymore, soft-eyed and dreamy. He’d broken her heart once, and, with determined effort, she’d covered the raw edges and gone on with her life.

  Whoever Eli was now, the Gaby he’d known did not exist.

  With determined steps, she strode through the house, snagging her purse and the keys to her father’s truck. All she would allow on her mind for the next couple of hours would be groceries.

  “Come with me, boy.” She snapped her fingers and held the truck door open.

  He whined and nudged her hand while she waited to see what he would do. With a sheepish look, he bounded off into the distance.

  “I’ll still buy you some dog food,” she shouted after him. “And Eli couldn’t be a more appropriate name—but I’m calling you Buddy. Because I could really use one.”

  Chapter Six

  Where was a gourmet deli when you needed it? Or even a simple corner Korean market? If you wanted a fully-stocked grocery in this part of the world, you had to go to Alpine, and even then, you only had one option. Gaby shuddered at the mere thought of negotiating a superstore just now.

  Cabrera’s Grocery, right in Chamizal, was all she could manage. The basics were sold there; the only problem was the antagonism she would encounter. A good daughter took care of her papi. She’d abandoned her own. Whatever blame Frank Navarro bore for the tenor of their parting, she had been an adult for some time. She could have reached out to him instead of waiting for him to unbend and come to her.

  But he had, hadn’t he? Attended her college graduation, as evidenced by the program he’d kept.

  Why, Papa? Why didn’t you find me? Let me know I was forgiven?

  Surely that was the meaning of all the clippings, that he hadn’t disowned her, after all. But whatever his reason, he hadn’t made his presence known to her, and she’d spent years without him when things could have been different.

  She, just as much as he, bore responsibility for that. She em
erged from the pickup, squared her shoulders and walked inside. Whatever blame she must face, it was justified.

  The first instant was an assault of memory. Old Señora Cabrera ruling the cash register, her hair never allowed to stray from its original ebony, however great the contrast between aged skin and too-black hair. Sweeping her relentless gaze up and down the six aisles whenever a child ventured inside without parents, a common occurrence on hot summer afternoons after chores were completed. Gaby herself had raced inside on dusty bare feet many a time, sent by her mother or, later, as the motherless child now in charge of Celia’s kitchen herself.

  Many days back then, her father had barely paused in his working to eat and even then, he’d tasted nothing, simply shoveled it in to provide fuel for the back-breaking task of keeping the ranch running. His escape from grief had been in his work. Gaby’s had come in the form of books. For a while after her mother’s death, Gaby had attempted to keep the house in the manner her mother had, all the homey touches, the good meals, the spotless floors.

  She’d realized all too soon that her father noticed none of her effort, so gradually she’d reverted to simply handling the most pressing matters, keeping laundry done and meals on the table. Every other hour that endless summer had been spent retreating into fiction. The bookmobile came only twice a month; the librarian had taken pity on Gaby and allowed her to exceed the six-book limit, even turned a blind eye when Gaby delved into the adult fiction shelves, save only the most clearly unsuitable material.

  “Gabriela,” said a voice from the past.

  Gaby swiveled her head toward the sound. Blinked. “Linda? What are you doing here?”

  Her girlhood friend, Linda Cabrera, now round with child, strolled across ancient, scarred wood floors toward her. “I live here.”

  “But—” Linda had had her own dream of becoming a clothing designer. She had dressed Gaby’s dolls and her own, then graduated to making their prom gowns. After graduation, Linda had been set to attend Texas Tech on a scholarship.