"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—"