His Defender. Stella Bagwell

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СКАЧАТЬ Two

      An hour and a half later, Isabella parked her car in front of a small frame house shaded by a huge ponderosa pine and an ancient cottonwood. On fifty acres of red, rocky land, the Corrales homestead was situated at the edge of a wide arroyo and hidden from the nearest neighbors three miles away.

      Outside her car, Isabella breathed in the familiar scents of pine, juniper and sage as her gaze swept to the far north where the high, snow-capped peaks of the San Juan Mountains were visible, then to the south, where the landscape swept away to rocky red buttes and wide-open mesas.

      For the past thirty-five years her mother had lived in this same spot. And throughout Isabella’s childhood this tough land had been her magical playground. Unlike her half-brother John, who’d constantly hounded their mother to drive him in to Dulce for what little entertainment there was to be had there, Isabella had loved the outdoors and had spent her time with the neighbors’ grazing sheep and climbing the nearby rocky bluffs.

      Sighing with fond memories, she turned and walked toward the house. She was near the front steps when a black mongrel dog ran up behind her and barked.

      Whirling around, she looked down to see Duke scurrying toward her. His happy whines and furiously wagging tail elicited a fond laugh from Isabella. No matter how long she stayed away from her home on the reservation, Duke never forgot her.

      Squatting on her heels, she hugged the dog’s neck and stroked his graying muzzle.

      “Hello, my old buddy,” she spoke softly to the dog. “How is Duke? Hmm?”

      “He’s a happy dog now that you’re here.”

      The spoken words brought Isabella’s head up to see her mother standing in the open door of the house.

      Alona Corrales was a young forty-eight. Slim and tall, her black hair was threaded faintly with gray at the temples and worn in a long braid against her back. Her gentle brown features were still smooth and lovely. Each time Isabella looked at her mother or even thought of her, she felt immense pride and love.

      “Mother!”

      Rising from the dog, she ran the last remaining steps to the doorway and threw her arms around her mother.

      Laughing softly, Alona hugged her daughter close to her breast. “You didn’t tell me you were coming today! This is a wonderful surprise!”

      “I finished my business earlier than expected today. And I couldn’t wait to come home,” Isabella explained.

      Alona put her daughter aside and gave her a beaming smile. “I’m so glad. But I wasn’t expecting you for a few more days.”

      “Well, I can only stay for tonight,” she warned as she followed Alona into the modest house.

      “Then we won’t waste a minute. Come with me to the kitchen. I was just finishing up some strawberry preserves when I heard Duke bark. You can have a glass of iced tea while I work.”

      “Sounds great,” Isabella said as the two of them made their way to the kitchen.

      Inside the small, cozy room, Alona went directly to the stove and stirred the contents of a huge metal pot with a wooden spoon. Isabella opened the white metal cabinets where the glasses were stored.

      “Do you want a glass, too?” she asked her mother.

      “Please. It’s getting hot in here from all this cooking.”

      While Isabella filled the glasses with ice and located the pitcher of tea, she said, “You should get air-conditioning, Mother.”

      “To use only two months out of the year? The cost is too much.”

      After adding sugar to both glasses, Isabella carried the drinks over to a small chrome-and-red Formica table.

      “I would help you with the cost.”

      Alona shook her head as she lifted the pot from the gas burner and began to pour the cooked strawberries into small mason jars that were sitting in neat rows on a nearby countertop.

      “You have enough expenses of your own right now to worry about helping me. By the way,” she added as she concentrated on filling the jars, “I went by your office site this morning. The carpenters are getting up the framework. The one in charge told me they should have the outside completed by the end of the month. That is, if the weather holds fair.”

      Isabella eased down in one of the dinette chairs and kicked off her high heels. As she massaged her feet, she said, “I drove through Dulce before I came out here. I wanted to see for myself just what the carpenters had been doing. When I look at how much more there is to do, it feels like the whole thing is going at a snail’s pace. I’m beginning to wonder if I should have simply rented a building.”

      “You tried, remember? There wasn’t anything vacant that would have been appropriate for a law office. And besides, renting is like throwing money out the window.”

      Isabella smiled faintly as Alona placed the dirty pot in a sink filled with soapy water.

      “I am renting a house, Mother.”

      Frowning, Alona began to tighten the lids on the jars. “Only because you refused to live here with me.”

      Picking up her tea, Isabella took a grateful swallow before she replied to her mother’s comment. “Mother, we’ve been all through this before. I love you very much, but we shouldn’t live together. We both need our privacy, and I would drive you crazy with my messiness. And anyway, it will be nice to live only a few blocks from where I’ll be working. I won’t have to get up early and make a long drive.”

      “Maybe so,” Alona reluctantly agreed. She left the cabinet counter and joined Isabella at the table. “And I can’t gripe,” she went on. “Not when I’m so happy that you’re finally back on the reservation. These years you’ve been away getting your degree and working have been lonely for me.”

      Even though Isabella’s life had been very busy the past few years, she’d been lonely, too. Friends were not the same as family. And the bustling city of Las Cruces was not the same as this land that was her home.

      “You haven’t heard from John?” she asked.

      Alona’s expression was suddenly shuttered as she sank into a chair across from her daughter. “Not in a couple of months.”

      Isabella felt a spurt of disgust. As soon as her brother had graduated high school more than fifteen years ago, he’d left the reservation for better things. She couldn’t exactly fault him for that. She’d had to go away for a while, too, to get her education. But during that period she had continually visited her mother on a regular basis. John returned home only once or twice a year and even then it was only to stay for a few hours.

      “Sometimes I think he’s ashamed to be Apache,” Isabella said with disgust. “He acts like it dirties him to come home to the reservation.”

      A pained expression crossed Alona’s face. “Bella, that’s an awful thing to say of your brother!”

      Isabella made a palms-up gesture. “You don’t see him around СКАЧАТЬ