Page 2 of Tender Triumph

  Pale and heartbroken, Katie had told him never to call her again or try to see her. He did—repeatedly. And just as tenaciously, Katie refused his calls at her office and hung up the phone at home whenever she heard his voice.

  That was five months ago, and only rarely since then had Katie allowed herself the bittersweet luxury of thinking of him, even for a moment. Until three days ago, she had believed she was entirely over him, but when she answered her phone on Wednes­day, the sound of Rob's deep voice had made her whole body tremble: "Katie, don't hang up on me. Everything's changing. I've got to see you, to talk to you."

  He had argued vehemently against Katie's choice of this for a meeting place, but Katie held firm. The Canyon Inn was noisy and public enough to discour­age him from trying to use tender persuasion, if that was his intention, and Karen came here every Fri­day, which meant Katie would have feminine moral support if she needed it.

  The ladies' room was crowded and Katie had to wait in line. She emerged several minutes later, absently digging in her shoulder purse for her car keys as she walked down the hall, then stopped at the crowd blocking her reentry into the bar. Beside her at one of the pay telephones on the wall, a man spoke with a trace of a Spanish accent: "Pardon—could you tell me the address of this place?"

  On the verge of pushing her way into the tightly packed mass of humanity, Katie turned to look at the tall, lithe male who was regarding her with faint impatience while holding the telephone to his ear. "Were you speaking to me?" Katie asked. His face was deeply tanned, his hair vitally thick and as black as his onyx eyes. In a place filled with men who al­ways reminded Katie of IBM salesmen, this man, who was wearing faded Levi's and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his forearms, definitely did not belong. He was too... earthy.

  "I asked," the Spanish-accented voice repeated, "if you could tell me the address of this place. I have had car trouble and am trying to order a towing ve­hicle."

  Katie automatically named the two intersections at the corner of which the Canyon Inn was located, while mentally recoiling from the narrowed black eyes and patrician nose in a foreign, arrogant face. Tall dark foreign-looking men reeking of coarse mas­culinity might appeal to some women, but not to Katherine Connelly.

  "Thank you," he replied, removing his hand from the mouthpiece of the telephone and repeating the names of the streets Katie had given him.

  Turning away, Katie confronted a dark green Izod sweater stretched across the masculine chest that was blocking her way back into the bar area. Eyeball to alligator, she said, "Excuse me, may I get by?" The sweater obligingly moved out of the doorway.

  "Where are you going?" its wearer inquired in a friendly voice. "It's still early."

  Katie raised her deep blue eyes up to his face and saw his smile broaden with frank admiration. "I know, but I have to leave. I turn into a pumpkin at midnight."

  "Your chariot turns into a pumpkin," he correct­ed, grinning. “And your dress turns into rags.''

  "Planned obsolescence and poor workmanship, even in Cinderella's time," Katie sighed in mock dis­gust.

  "Clever girl," he applauded. "Sagittarius, right?"

  "Wrong," Katie said, extracting her keys from the bottom of her purse.

  "Then what is your sign?"

  "Slow Down and Proceed with Caution," she flipped back. "What's yours?"

  He thought for a moment. "Merge," he replied with a meaningful glance that faithfully followed every curve of her graceful figure. Reaching out, he lightly ran his knuckles over the silky sleeve of Katie's dress. "I happen to like intelligent women; I don't feel threatened by them."

  Firmly repressing the impulse to suggest that he try making a pass at Dr. Joyce Brothers, Katie said politely, "I really do have to leave. I'm meeting someone."

  "Lucky guy," he said.

  Katie emerged into the dark, sultry summer night feeling lost and depressed. She paused beneath the canopied entrance, watching with a suddenly pound­ing heart as a familiar white Corvette ran the red light at the corner and turned into the parking lot, screeching to a stop beside her. "I'm sorry I'm late. Get in, Katie. We'll go somewhere and talk.''

  Katie looked at Rob through the open car window and felt a surge of longing so intense that she ached with it. He was still unbearably handsome, but his smile, normally so confident and assured, was now tinged with an endearing uncertainty that wrung her heart and weakened her resolve. "It's late. And I don't have anything to say to you if you're still mar­ried."

  "Katie, we can't talk here like this. Don't give me a hard time about being late. I've had a lousy flight and it was delayed getting into St. Louis. Now, be a good girl and get in the car. I don't have time to waste arguing with you."

  "Why don't you have time?" Katie persisted, "Is your wife expecting you?"

  Rob swore under his breath, then accelerated sharply, swinging the sports car into a shadowy parking space beside the building. He got out of the car and leaned against the door, waiting for Katie to come to him. With the breeze teasing her hair and tugging at the folds of her blue dress, Katie reluctantly approached him in the darkened parking lot.

  "It's been a long time, Katie," he said when she stopped in front of him. "Aren't you going to kiss me hello?"

  "Are you still married?"

  His answer was to snatch her into his arms and kiss her with a combination of fierce hunger and pleading need. He knew her well enough, however, to realize that Katie was only passively accepting his kiss, and by avoiding her question he had told her that he was still married. "Don't be like this," he rasped thickly, his breath warm against her ear. "I've thought of nothing but you for months. Let's get out of here and go to your place.''

  Katie drew an unsteady breath. "No."

  "Katie, I love you, I'm crazy about you. Don't keep holding out on me."

  For the first time, Katie noticed the smell of li­quor on his breath and was unwillingly touched that he had apparently felt the need to bolster his cour­age before seeing her. But she managed to keep her voice firm. "I'm not going to have a sleazy affair with a married man."

  "Before you knew I was married, you didn't find anything 'sleazy' about being with me."

  Now he was going to try cajolery, and Katie couldn't bear it. "Please, please don't do this to me, Rob. I couldn't live with myself if I wrecked another woman's marriage.''

  "The marriage was 'wrecked' long before I met you, honey. I tried to tell you that."

  "Then get a divorce," Katie said desperately.

  Even in the darkness, Katie could see the bitter irony that twisted his smile. "Southfields do not divorce. They learn to live separate lives. Ask my father and my grandfather," he said with angry pain. Despite the doors opening and closing as peo­ple drifted in and out of the restaurant, Rob's voice remained at normal pitch, and his hands slid down her back caressing her, then cupping her hips, forc­ing her against his hardened thighs. "That's for you, Katie. Only for you. You won't be wrecking my marriage; it was over long ago."

  Katie couldn't stand any more. The sordidness of the situation made her feel dirty, and she tried to pull away from him. "Let go of me," she hissed. "Either you're a liar, or you're a coward, or both, and—"

  Rob's hands tightened around her arms as she struggled. "I hate you for acting like this!" Katie choked. "Let me go.'"

  "Do as she says," a faintly accented voice spoke from the darkness.

  Rob's head snapped up. "Who the hell are you?" he demanded of the white-shirted figure that materi­alized from the shadows beside the building. Retain­ing his grip on one of Katie's arms, Rob glowered menacingly at the intruder and snapped at Katie, "Do you know him?"

  Katie's voice was hoarse with mortification and anger. "No, but let go of me. I want to leave."

  "You're staying," Rob gritted. Jerking his head toward the other man, he said, "And you're going. Now move, unless you want me to help you on your way."

  The accented voice became extremely courteous, almost frigh
teningly so. "You may try if you wish. But let her go."

  Pushed past all endurance by Katie's continued implacable stubbornness, and now this unwanted in­trusion, Rob vented all his frustrated wrath on the intruder. He dropped Katie's arm and, in one smooth continuous motion, swung his huge fist di­rectly at his opponent's jaw. A second's silence was followed by the terrible crack of bone connecting with bone, and then a resounding thud. Katie open­ed her tear-brightened eyes to find Rob unconscious at her feet.

  "Open the car door," the foreign voice ordered with an insistence that brooked no argument.

  Automatically, Katie opened the door of the Cor­vette. The man unceremoniously shoved and folded Rob inside, leaving his head lolling over the steering wheel as if he were passed out in a drunken stupor. "Which is your car?"

  Katie stared at him blankly. "We can't leave him like this. He might need a doctor."

  "Which is your car?" he repeated impatiently. "I have no wish to be here in the event someone saw what happened and called the police."

  "Oh, but—" Katie protested, looking over her shoulder at Rob's Corvette as she hurried toward her car. She drew up stubbornly at the driver's door. "You leave. I can't."

  "I did not kill him, I only stunned him. He will wake up in a few minutes with a sore face and loose teeth, that is all. I will drive," he said, forcibly pro­pelling Katie around the front of her car and into the passenger seat. "You are in no condition."

  Flinging himself behind the steering wheel, he banged his knee on the steering column and uttered what Katie thought must have been a curse in Span­ish. "Give me your keys," he said, releasing the seat back into its farthest position to accommodate his very long legs. Katie handed them over. Several cars were coming in and leaving, and they had to wait be­fore finally backing out of the space. They swooped down the rows of parked cars, past a battered old produce truck with a flat tire, which was parked at the rear of the restaurant.

  "Is that yours?" Katie asked lamely, feeling that some conversation was required of her.

  He glanced at the disabled produce truck, then slid her an ironic sideways look. "How did you guess?"

  Katie flushed with mortification. She knew, and he knew, that simply because he was Hispanic she had assumed he drove the produce truck. To save his pride she said, "When you were on the telephone you mentioned that you needed a tow truck—that's how I knew."

  They swung out of the parking lot into the stream of traffic while Katie gave him the simple directions to her apartment, which was only a few blocks away. "I want to thank you, er—?"

  "Ramon," he provided.

  Nervously, Katie reached for her purse and searched for her wallet. She lived so close by, that by the time she had extracted a five-dollar bill they were already pulling into the parking lot of her apartment complex. "I live right there—the first door on the right, under the gaslight."

  He maneuvered the car into the parking space closest to her door, turned off the ignition, got out, and came around to her side. Katie hasti­ly opened her own door and scrambled out of the car. Uncertainly, she glanced up into his dark, proud, enigmatic face, guessing him to be somewhere around thirty-five. Something about him, his foreignness—or his darkness—made her uneasy.

  She held out her hand, offering him the five-dollar bill. "Thank you very much, Ramon. Please take this." He looked briefly at the money and then at her face. "Please," she persisted politely, thrust­ing the five-dollar bill toward him. "I'm sure you can use it."

  "Of course," he said dryly after a pause, taking the money from her and jamming it into the back

  pocket of his Levi's. "I will walk you to your door," he added.

  Katie turned and started up the steps, a little shocked when his hand lightly but firmly cupped her elbow. It was such a quaint, gallant gesture—par­ticularly when she knew she had inadvertently of­fended his pride.

  He inserted her key into the lock and swung the door open. Katie stepped inside, turned to thank him again, and he said, "I would like to use your phone to find out if the towing vehicle was sent as they promised."

  He had physically come to her rescue and had even risked being arrested for her—Katie knew that common courtesy required that she allow him to use her phone. Carefully concealing her reluctance to let him in, she stepped aside so that he could enter her luxurious apartment. "The phone's there on the coffee table," she explained.

  "Once I have called, I will wait here for a short while to be certain that your friend—" he empha­sized the word with contempt "—does not awaken and decide to come here. By then the mechanic should have finished his repairs and I will walk back—it is not far."

  Katie, who had not even considered the possibility that Rob might come here, froze in the act of taking off her slim-heeled sandals. Surely Rob would never come near her again, not after being verbally reject­ed by her and physically discouraged by Ramon. "I'm sure he won't," she said, and she meant it. But even so, she found herself trembling with delayed reaction. "I—I think I'll make some coffee," she said, already starting for the kitchen. And then be­cause she had no choice, she added courteously. "Would you like some?"

  Ramon accepted her offer with such ambivalence that most of Katie's doubts about his trustworthi­ness were allayed. Since meeting him, he had neither said nor done anything that was in any way forward. Once she was in the kitchen, Katie realized that in the anxiety about seeing Rob tonight she had forgot­ten to buy coffee, and she was out of it. Which was just as well, because she suddenly felt the need for something stronger. Opening the cabinet above the refrigerator, she took out the bottle of Rob's brandy. "I'm afraid all I have to offer you is brandy or water," she called to Ramon. "The Coke is flat."

  "Brandy will be fine," he answered.

  Katie splashed brandy into two snifters and re­turned to the living room just as Ramon was hang­ing up the telephone. "Did the repair truck get there?" she asked.

  "It is there now, and the mechanic is making a temporary repair so that I can drive it." Ramon took the glass from her outstretched hand, and looked around her apartment with a quizzical ex­pression on his face.

  "Where are your friends?" he asked.

  "What friends?" Katie questioned blankly, sit­ting down in a pretty beige corduroy chair.

  "The lesbians."

  Katie choked back her horrified laughter. "Were you close enough to hear me say that?"

  Gazing down at her, Ramon nodded, but there was no amusement in the quirk of his finely molded lips. "I was behind you, obtaining change for the telephone from the bartender."

  "Oh." The misery of tonight's events threatened to drag her down, but Katie pushed it fiercely to the back of her mind. She would think about it tomor­row when she would be better able to cope. She shrugged lightly. "I only made the lesbians up. I wasn't in the mood for—"

  "Why do you not like attorneys?" he interrupted. Katie stifled another urge to laugh.

  "It's a very long story, which I'd rather not discuss. But I sup­pose the reason I told him that was because I thought it was vain of him to tell me he was one."

  "You are not vain?"

  Katie turned surprised eyes up to him. There was a childlike defenselessness to the way she had curled up in her chair with her bare feet tucked beneath her; an innocent vulnerability in the purity of her features and clarity of her wide blue eyes. "I—I don't know."

  "You would not have been rude to me, had I ap­proached you there and said that I drive a produce truck?"

  Katie smiled the first genuine smile of the night, soft lips curving with a winsome humor that made her eyes glow. "I would probably have been too stunned to speak. In the first place, no one who goes to the Canyon Inn drives a truck, and in the second place, if they did they'd never admit it."

  "Why? It is nothing to be ashamed of."

  "No, I realize that. But they would say they were in the transportation business, or the trucking busi­ness—something like that, so that it would sound as if they own
ed a railroad, or at least an entire fleet of trucks."

  Ramon stared down at her as if the words she spoke were a hindrance, not a help, to his under­standing her. His gaze drifted to the red gold hair tumbling over her shoulders, then abruptly he jerked his eyes away. Raising his glass, he tossed down half the brandy in it.

  "Brandy is supposed to be sipped," Katie said, then realized that what she had meant as a sugges­tion sounded more like a reprimand. "I mean," she amended clumsily, "you can gulp it down, but peo­ple who are accustomed to drinking brandy usually prefer to sip it slowly."

  Ramon lowered his glass and looked at her with an absolutely unfathomable expression on his face. "Thank you," he replied with impeccable courtesy. "I will try to remember that if I am ever fortunate enough to have it again."

  Squirming with the certainty that she had now thoroughly offended him, Katie watched him stroll over to the living-room window and part the nubby beige curtain.

  Her window afforded an uninspiring view of the parking lot and, beyond that, the busy four-lane suburban street in front of her apartment complex. Leaning a shoulder against the window frame, he apparently heeded her advice, for he sipped his brandy slowly while watching the parking lot.

  Idly, Katie noticed the way his white shirt stretched taut across his broad, muscled shoulders and tapered back whenever he lifted his arm, then she looked away. She had only meant to be helpful, instead she had sounded condescending and superi­or. She wished he would leave. She was mentally and physically exhausted, and there was absolutely no reason for him to be guarding her like this. Rob would not come here tonight.

  "How old are you?" he asked abruptly. Katie's gaze flew to his.

  "Twenty-three."

  "Then you are old enough to have a better sense of priorities."

  Katie was more perplexed than annoyed. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, you think it is important that brandy be drunk in the 'proper' way, yet you do not worry if it is 'proper' to invite any man you meet into your apartment. You risk soiling your reputation and—"