A Man Without a Wife Read online

  But he wasn’t sixteen any more, and he more or less expected the same scenario with Ms. Ellen Lonetree, LPN. Women with voices like that didn’t have bodies to go with them. God wasn’t that generous, at least not the God he knew.

  He drove the better part of two states anticipating that she would be fat, unkempt, maybe with two black teeth. He did it quickly. He drove most of New Mexico at a steady eighty-five.

  * * *

  There was a diner directly across the street from the orphanage. Ellen had stood in front of it countless times, but she had never had any reason to go inside before. She hovered in the doorway and ran a hand nervously through her hair as she looked over the crowded tables for a place to sit.

  There was an empty booth next to the window. Perfect, she thought. It would be a hundred times better if she could just see Dallas first without him being aware of her. That way she wouldn’t have to worry about controlling her emotions, something she was admittedly poor at. Later, when she got a grip on herself, then she could simply cross the street and walk into the meeting, she thought. She would be cool, calm, apologetic.

  Sorry to bother you this way. My mistake. But since we’re talking, how did your son turn out? Is he beautiful? Smart? Does he walk in beauty, or didn’t your wife ever teach him the Navajo way?

  Ellen realized she was starting to tremble. She slid carefully into the booth, dropped her purse beside her and asked the waitress for a cup of coffee.

  “No!” she gasped, changing her mind. The woman looked at her oddly. But all that caffeine would probably just jangle her nerves, she thought, and they definitely didn’t need any more jangling.

  “Decaf,” she decided. “Just decaf.”

  The waitress brought it. Ellen wrapped both her hands around the mug, trying to warm them. It had to be ninety degrees outside, but she felt as cold as ice.

  She glued her eyes to Our Lady of Guadalupe’s door.

  After a while they began to feel dry and grainy from staring. What did she expect? That Dallas Lazo was simply going to come sprouting up from the concrete sidewalk, that he would just appear there like some kind of chindi, a Navajo ghost? “He has to park first,” she muttered aloud. Finally she dragged her eyes away from the door.

  Her gaze fell to the fire hydrant just outside the window. A hundred times during the past years, when her old Toyota had refused to run, Ellen had asked Shadow or her brother, Jericho, to drive her down here to Albuquerque. She had told them she was visiting a boyfriend. They always dropped her off at that fire hydrant, and when they were gone she slipped across the street into the orphanage.

  Even now, she didn’t know why she had never told them the truth. They were the closest thing to family she had left. They had never judged her before, and they’d had ample cause and opportunity to. But somehow she had always felt that her penance ought to remain private. It had to be her own personal atonement. Besides, telling the truth would have brought even them just a little bit too...close.

  She sighed, sipping the coffee. After a while, the hours she donated to the home had ceased to be painful anyway. She had never stopped wondering about Ricky, but somewhere along the line she had begun to enjoy the other kids as well. The very sight of them had stopped driving a knife into her heart. They needed so much. But of course, if they had been white, whole, unbroken, they would have been adopted as infants. They would no longer be at the home at all.

  She watched as a pickup truck, then an old, beleaguered Volkswagen came around the corner onto Juan Cabo Boulevard. The next vehicle was a Jaguar with Arizona tags. Ellen sat up so straight, so quickly, a little shock of discomfort went down her spine.

  Dallas Lazo was rich.

  Well, maybe not rich, she amended. Comfortable. Or at least he had been eight years ago. And he was certainly wealthy by reservation standards. Navajo doctrine forbade accumulating too much of anything, most especially money and worldly goods. But despite anything she had told Barbara, Ellen knew that Mary Lazo had pretty much been Navajo in blood only. She would have had no problem accumulating anything or marrying a man who did.

  Ellen’s heart started slamming as her eyes followed the Jaguar. It moved slowly up the street, looking for a place to park.

  She closed her eyes, afraid to watch, then she snapped them open again, afraid not to. How could she waste this single, precious chance of a lifetime? Emotion tore the air from her lungs. Her fingers tightened on the edge of the table and her knuckles went white. She strained forward to see.

  The harsh New Mexico sun glinted off the Jaguar’s windshield, but she could make out two heads in the front seat. A man was driving and a smaller form sat in the passenger seat beside him. The boy was just a silhouette. She couldn’t see him.

  The car rounded the corner and moved out of sight. Ellen dragged in a rough breath of air and shot to her feet. It was okay. She didn’t actually have to see Ricky. In fact, it was probably better that she didn’t. She just needed to know, to hear how the boy was doing. And as soon as her hands stopped shaking and her knees stopped knocking together, she could do that. She could cross the street and meet Dallas Lazo—

  Except what if he brought the boy into the meeting with him? Was she prepared for that? How could she ever prepare herself for that?

  He wouldn’t do it, she decided. He wouldn’t put him through it. She dropped hard onto the booth seat again anyway, her legs going lifeless, feeling hollow.

  Then she saw him—somehow she knew it was him even though she hadn’t gotten a good look at him through the windshield. He came walking back around the corner where the Jaguar had disappeared, and he was alone. He was tall and there was an air of arrogant strength about the way he moved, the kind of confidence that had been earned the hard way, the kind that couldn’t be easily lost again because it hadn’t been gained freely in the first place. Ellen got up, snatched her purse and half jogged for the door.

  “Hey, lady, you owe me sixty cents!” the waitress called after her.

  She dug in her purse and found a dollar, shoving it into the woman’s hand. She had to get a closer look at him before he went inside the orphanage.

  She burst through the diner door onto the sidewalk when he was six or seven strides from entering and she dodged traffic to get to the other side of the street. Horns blared at her, but Dallas Lazo was too preoccupied to look up. She reached the opposite sidewalk, then she hung back, watching him as he came directly toward her.

  Finally she would know what he looked like, this man who had adopted her son.

  She thought she had been prepared for anything, to feel resentment or hatred or even a rush of knee-buckling gratitude. But what came to her when she saw his face was something like the bolt of lightning she had anticipated earlier when she had lied to Barbara. He looked the way he walked, like a man who had stared hell in the eye and had somehow made a friend of it. She had a fast, dazzling impression of short, dark curls and eyes the color of sky. There were crinkly lines at the corners that could have come from laughter but probably had come from tears. Either way, suddenly she was numb with regret. She watched blindly as he went inside.

  It had just been a letter, just a simple query, but she knew suddenly that he hadn’t taken it that way. Somehow she had dragged him right back to hell’s door.

  She took a shaky step backward and leaned her spine against the rough old brick of the orphanage. There was no help for it now, she thought. All she could do was end it as quickly as possible, go in there and face him, apologize. If he and his wife had given Ricky any kind of Navajo tutelage at all, then surely Barbara could be convinced to drop this whole thing, even if Ellen had screwed up and told her Mary was dead.

  Ellen moved away from the wall and made her way unsteadily to the door. She took a deep breath, pulled it open and stepped inside.

  Barbara was talking to him. The director turned around at the sound of the little bell on the door and smiled her saintly smile.

  “Ellen! You’ve made it. This is Mr. Laz
o. May I suggest we go into my office and—”

  But Dallas Lazo didn’t let her finish. He crossed the room toward Ellen and she fought the urge to back up, to recoil from the fury in his eyes. She lost the battle. Her spine collided hard with the wall, then her heart leaped into her throat and she had to gasp around it. He planted a hand against the paneling on either side of her head, trapping her where she stood.

  “I hope you’re a fighter, lady,” he said quietly, “because you’ve got one very ticked-off tiger by the tail.”

  Chapter 3

  Dallas heard his own words as though someone else had spoken them. They surprised him more than a little. It was just that the sight of this woman, this nurse, inflamed something wild inside him all over again...and she wasn’t at all what he had told himself to expect.

  She was the most stunningly beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. His throat closed in a crazy kind of panic as he took her in. The top of her head came to just about his nose. She was slender without being skinny, voluptuous without being overripe. All her curves were smooth, each sliding neatly into the next. He ran his eyes down her body, rearing back a little to do it, taking one hand off the wall. She wore tight denim jeans and a loose, flowing blouse that stopped just short of her waist. She was breathing hard and the fabric lifted infinitesimally each time she inhaled. He caught a flash of tawny skin and felt absurdly as if someone had punched him.

  He dragged his eyes back to her face. She had very thick, very black hair that fell in waves to a point just between her shoulders and her breasts. It swirled gently, hanging free. He put her age at about twenty-five. Her eyes were black—and blazing.

  Before he could expect it, she planted her palms against his chest and shoved at him with a strength that would have done that disk jockey proud.

  “Don’t you dare try to intimidate me!”

  Dallas recovered more quickly than he thought he had any right to, given the day he’d had. Just at the point of losing his balance he regained it again, and his temper came back with it.

  “Interesting choice of words,” he bit out.

  “Why?” she demanded.

  “Who’s trying to intimidate who, lady? You’re the one sending high-handed letters you have no business writing. Care to tell me why?”

  Ellen’s panic came back. For one sweet, blessed moment her temper had allowed her to forget who he was. He was just a man...a stranger with an almost palpable temper and heat about him, a man with eyes that had seen too much, who wouldn’t easily be intimidated or swayed. He wore some faint cologne that smelled clean and sharp. It filled her head. It made her nerve endings jangle and clamor. It—everything about him—threatened her. So she shoved him away. She didn’t do it because of anything he’d said—it had just been an ingrained, instinctive reaction because he was close enough to feel, to smell, to touch.

  But now he brought the situation crashing back to reality. Now, with his accusation, she remembered...and with memory came the certainty that she was on very shaky ground.

  She took a deep, steadying breath. “Of course I’ll tell you,” she managed. “I did it out of concern for the child.”

  “Concern?” he repeated. Dallas reminded himself that there was absolutely nothing in this world that could make him strike a woman. Almost nothing. He took a careful step away from her, putting even more distance between them.

  “Concern,” he echoed again disbelievingly. “No, I wouldn’t call it that. It’s more like walking up to a perfectly content hive where the bees are busy droning about their chores and smacking the hell out of it for no good reason. So the bees start buzzing around, ready to fight, and you know what happens after they sting? They die, lady. They die because some fool just felt like walloping their hive.”

  Ellen began to shake again. “The study—”

  “Screw the study. Tsosie’s not my kid. If you feel such great concern, go play with his head.”

  “Please,” Barbara interjected. For a moment she had been stunned into silence by the immediate animosity between the two of them. Now she struggled for control over the situation before it could deteriorate further.

  “Let’s all calm down,” she suggested. “I have some coffee waiting for us in my office. Let’s all sit down and discuss this rationally.”

  Ellen watched, oddly fascinated, as Dallas visibly got a grip on his temper. His jaw hardened, then clenched. He drove his hands into his pockets. But he never took his eyes off her face.

  “Fine,” he answered in the same too-quiet voice he had used the first time he’d spoken to her.

  “Fine,” she echoed warily.

  They moved toward Barbara’s office, side by side but giving each other a wide berth. Ellen watched him out of the corner of her eye, then rushed through the door when he held back to allow her to enter. She slid gratefully into the chair to the right of Barbara’s desk, her purse slipping from fingers she couldn’t feel any more. She clasped her hands tightly together in her lap.

  Dallas’s sky-blue eyes swept the room. Instinctively, Ellen looked around as well—and she saw precisely what he thought the problem was. She and Barbara were virtually shoulder to shoulder, facing him down. A man such as Dallas Lazo wouldn’t allow that, she thought. She certainly wouldn’t if she were in his shoes.

  She was right. He moved up to the desk, pouring himself a cup of coffee without waiting for a second invitation. Then he stood there, glaring down at them with what was definitely a subtle shift in the upper hand.

  In spite of everything, she was impressed.

  “Let’s get one thing straight right off the top,” he began. “If you make any move whatsoever to try to take my son from me, we will disappear. It’s that simple. With all due respect to the Supreme Court, I really don’t give a damn what they decide. Ricky is mine.”

  Barbara rushed in, anxious to soothe. “No one would dream of taking your son away, Mr. Lazo—”

  He silenced her with a sardonic look. “Of course not, Ms. Bingham. Just as they didn’t take the Tsosie kid away, either.”

  She had the grace to flush at that. Ellen felt her gaze being pulled back and forth, from one of them to the other, but she didn’t dare open her mouth.

  “That was the child’s choice,” Barbara pointed out. “The Supreme Court is simply trying to ascertain if such Native American children should be given that choice in adoptive situations.”

  “Over my dead body,” Dallas answered with deceptive equability. “Ricky’s fine. He’s happy as he is. Leave him alone. Nobody’s going to give him any choices he hasn’t thought up yet on his own. If he does, then I’ll deal with them when the time comes.”

  “Mr. Lazo, we merely want to talk to him. I agree that Ms. Lonetree acted impulsively when she sent you that letter, but she was only trying to be helpful. Our staff was not aware of your wife’s death until she informed me, and under the circumstances I feel that Ricky really should be part of the study.”

  His gaze swept sharply back to Ellen. She fought the urge to cringe again, and wondered how he could do that to her. Cringing was definitely not her style.

  “If they didn’t know, how the hell did you?” he demanded.

  She felt heat stain her face. He’d know that no one on the Res would be aware of Mary Lazo’s passing. He’d know if his own wife had had any contact with anyone there—and she hadn’t.

  But Barbara was watching her closely now as well. She had no choice but to repeat the lie she’d already told her.

  “Grapevine,” she whispered.

  Dallas caught only a soft blur of sound. Damn her voice. It distracted him when he didn’t want to be distracted.

  “What?” he growled. “Speak up.”

  Her own temper surged back. “There are less than two hundred thousand people living on a reservation the size of New England,” she snapped. “They have very little to do but talk to each other and gossip. Word gets around.”

  He looked incredulous—as well he should, she thought,
her heart fluttering in panic.

  “Word of Mary? Her great-grandmother left that place fifty years ago.”

  Ellen made a desperate move to change the subject. She didn’t want him to sink his teeth into this one. She had a feeling he wouldn’t treat it gently.

  “Look, all you have to do is explain to Mrs. Bingham that your wife talked to Ricky of his birth culture. Then this whole meeting—and any future meetings—will be unnecessary. You won’t even qualify for the study.”

  She begged him with her eyes. Did he even understand what she was telling him or was he too angry to think? Just say it, she pleaded, whether it’s true or not. I’m sorry I started this. Just tell her and we’ll all go home. She had already heard what she needed to know, had already learned what she really had no business learning. Ricky was fine. He was happy as he was. It was enough—it had to be enough. Tell her, she begged again silently.

  Dallas couldn’t.

  One minute he was hating her and the next minute everything went out of him, the air, the rage, all his righteous indignation. He could see nothing in his mind’s eye but Ricky’s face. All he could hear was their conversation that morning, ringing again and again in his ears.

  I looked it up in the library.

  He moved back to the chair opposite them and sank down in it after all. Ricky was the thing here. He couldn’t lose sight of that fact. And for some reason known only to Ricky, after history class he had gone and looked up the Navajo in the library. Maybe it was just coincidence.

  Or God help him, maybe it was a warning.

  “No,” he said quietly. “She didn’t.”

  Ellen felt her heart punch against her ribs.

  “Mary was no more Navajo than I am,” he went on. He drank deeply from his coffee. It seemed to fortify him. “I don’t want him to be a part of this study. I won’t allow it, and I won’t cooperate. I’m not going to start putting things into his head that weren’t there before people started batting at hives.”