Fearless. Diana Palmer

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      He frowned. “Family is the most important thing in the world. Especially children.”

      “You don’t have any,” she said without thinking.

      His face set into hard lines and he didn’t look at her. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t want them,” he said harshly.

      “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I don’t know why I said that.”

      He smoked his cigar in a tense silence. “I was on the verge of marrying,” he said after a minute. “She had a little girl. They were my life. I lost them to another man. He was the child’s biological father.”

      She grimaced. His attitude began to make sense. “I’ll bet the little girl misses you,” she said.

      “I miss her, as well.”

      “Sometimes,” she began cautiously, “I think there’s a pattern to life. People come into your life when you need them to, my father used to say. He was sure that life was hard-wired, that everything happened as it was planned to happen. He said—” she hesitated, remembering her father’s soft voice, at his trial “—that we have to accept things that we can’t change, and that the harder we fight fate, the more painful it becomes.”

      He turned toward her, leaning back against the swing chain with his long legs crossed. “Is he still alive—your father?”

      “No.”

      “Any sisters, brothers?”

      “No,” she replied sadly. “Just me.”

      “What about your mother?”

      Her teeth clenched. “She’s gone, too.”

      “You didn’t mourn her, I think.”

      “You’re right. All I ever had from her was hatred. She blamed me for trapping her into a life of poverty on a little farm with a man who could hardly spell his own name.”

      “She considered that she married down, I gather.”

      “Yes. She never let my father forget how he’d ruined her life.”

      “Which of them died first?”

      “He did,” she said, not wanting to remember it. “She remarried very soon after the funeral. Her second husband had money. She finally had everything she wanted.”

      “You would have benefited, too, surely.”

      She drew in a slow breath and shifted her weight. “The judge considered that she was dangerous to me, so, with the best of intentions, she put me into foster care. I went to a family that had five other foster kids.”

      “I know a little about foster homes,” he said, recalling some horror stories he’d heard from comrades who’d been in state custody, however briefly. Cord Romero and his wife, Maggie, came immediately to mind.

      “I think life with my mother might have been easier, even if it had been more dangerous,” she murmured.

      “Were you there a long time?”

      “Not too long.” She didn’t dare say any more. He might have heard the Pendletons talk about their stepsister. “What was your childhood like?”

      “Euphoric,” he said honestly. “We traveled a lot. My father was, ah, in the military,” he invented quickly.

      “I had a friend whose father was, too. They traveled all over the world. She said it was an experience.”

      “Yes. One learns a great deal about other cultures, other ways of life. Many problems in politics arise because of cultural misunderstanding.”

      She laughed. “Yes, I know. We had a man in an office I worked for who was Middle Eastern. He liked to stand very close to people when he was talking to them. Another guy in the office was a personal space maniac. He backed right out a window one day trying to avoid letting his colleague get close to him. Fortunately it was on the first floor,” she added, laughing.

      He smiled. “I have seen similar things. What a mixture of people we are in this country,” he murmured. “So many traditions, so many languages, so many separate belief systems.”

      “Things were different when I was little,” she recalled.

      “Yes. For me, too. Immersed in our own personal cultures, it is hard to see or understand opposing points of view, is it not?”

      “It is,” she agreed.

      He rocked the swing back into motion. “You and Consuelo are wearing yourselves thin on this latest picking of fruit,” he pointed out. “If you need help, say so. I can hire more people to help you. I’ve already asked Jason for permission.”

      “Oh, we’re doing okay,” she said with a smile. “I like Consuelo. She’s a very interesting person.”

      “She is,” he said.

      His tone was personable, but there was something puzzling in the way he said it. She wondered for an instant if he, too, had suspicions about his cook.

      “What do you think of Marco?” he asked suddenly.

      She had to be very careful in answering that question. “He’s very nice-looking,” she said carelessly. “Consuelo dotes on him.”

      “Yes.” He rocked the swing again.

      “She said his father was in jail.”

      He made an odd sound. “Yes. Serving a life sentence.”

      “For drug smuggling?” she blurted out incredulously, because she knew how difficult it was to send a smuggler away for life without a lot of additional felony charges.

      His head turned toward her. He was very quiet. “Is that what she told you?”

      She cleared her throat, hoping she hadn’t given herself away. “Yes. She said he was mistaken for another man.”

      “Ah.” He puffed on the cigarette.

      “Ah?” she parroted, questioning.

      “He was piloting a go-fast boat with about two hundred kilos of cocaine,” he said easily. “He was so confident that he’d paid off the right people that he didn’t bother to conceal the product. The Coast Guard picked him up heading for Houston.”

      “In a boat?”

      He chuckled. “They have airplanes and helicopters, both with machine guns. They laid down a trail of tracers on both sides of his conveyance and told him to stop or learn to swim very fast. He gave up.”

      “Goodness! I never knew the Coast Guard worked smuggling cases,” she added with pretended ignorance.

      “Well, they do.”

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