Beloved Tyrant

  BELOVED TYRANT

  Violet Winspear

  Monterey was a beautiful place to recuperate. Lyn Gilmore’s job was interesting. Everything, in fact, would have been perfect, Lyn thought, if it hadn’t been for the hateful Rick Corderas. He made her feel alive again!

  Her mind rebelled, her heart loved. Rick, a bold, seemingly uncivilized man with corsair blood in his veins, was quick to pronounce Lyn unequal to the job of coping with his fiery, willful niece, Leoni. It was not a good beginning. Buy Lyn resolved to try, for the child's sake. It didn’t matter a jot what this proud and haughty Spanish American thought of her. She hated him. Then why couldn’t she dispel his pagan image from her mind?

  CHAPTER I

  The position would only be temporary, of course, until Lyn Gilmour was fit again to return to her air stewardess job. Also the temporary part of the arrangement suited Julio Corderas and his wife. They planned to send their daughter Leoni to a boarding school in six months’ time, when she was eight, but in the meantime they desired a companion for her.

  Lyn gazed out of the lounge-car window and saw those enchanting glimpses of hidden bays, old Spanish houses and thick-girthed palm trees giving way to rugged mountain country. Ah, at last they had reached the valley and the train seemed to roar as the walls of rock enclosed it in a natural tunnel. Lyn could now see her reflection in the window beside her seat... she was still rather pale, with eyes both shadowed and apprehensive.

  Had she been wise to let Sister Todd persuade her into taking this job in Monterey? Had she the will, let alone the humour any more, to cope with a spirited child of seven years?

  The train broke out of the valley entrance into Monterey and in a while its speed began to slacken. They were sliding into a wayside station, and Lyn prepared to alight. She ran a powder-puff over her nose and cheeks, skimmed a comb through her hair, then carried her suitcase to the end of the lounge. Mountains towered over the train and there was a tingling warmth in the air, a tang of rich earth mingling with sagebrush and wild thyme.

  She stepped from the train to the platform and saw a station of weathered wood, peeling paint and a cluster of bright poppies sprawling down a bank to the railway line. Above the station rose tiers of densely growing trees, crowned by brown hills that thrust towards a rain-mottled sky. She stood beside her suitcase while the train gave a rather mournful whistle and clanked on its way. As the last coach curved away out of sight an indolent stillness settled down over the station, and Lyn was assailed by the lonely feeling that she had been dropped off in the middle of nowhere and abandoned.

  Not a soul awaited her on the platform, so she hoisted her case, walked out of the exit and found herself on a deserted roadway where sun-dried gravel covered her shoes with dust, while her nostrils tensed again to a mixture of wild new scents and her nerves quivered at the way the towering hills frowned down upon her in untamed glory and strength.

  She gazed around her ... surely she was being met? Surely she wasn’t expected to find her own way to the Hacienda Rosa, the home of the Corderas family? She had cabled them from San Francisco that she would be arriving today on the five o’clock train ... then her nerves gave a jerk as gravel suddenly crunched on the roadway behind her. She swung round and saw a man coming towards her. A few moments more and his long strides had brought him closer; a man in his thirties of an intimidating height, with thick black hair diving in a peak above a pair of ice-blue eyes. He wore an open-throated shirt tucked into narrow black trousers, and for only a brief moment did Lyn wonder if he was a servant sent to meet her.

  His shadow fell over her and his blue eyes were quizzing her from head to foot ... he might have been a Spanish conquistador appraising a piece of loot!

  “Do I assume you are the new governess, Miss Lyn Gilmour?”

  The curtness of his greeting struck Lyn as appropriate to his looks, and she felt a fine thread of antagonism tautening the nerves that were already on edge. “You assume correctly,” she said, and her voice was low and cool and very British.

  “I am Rick Corderas.” He took the suitcase from her hand, and she gave a start at the name, and the brush of his fingers. So this was her employer’s stepbrother ... the arrogant type, according to Sister Todd.

  “My sister-in-law was coming herself to meet you, then we had a slight domestic upheaval and I came instead.” His lip flickered as if the upheaval had been an amusing one; for him, anyway. A gleam of devilry leapt into his eyes, and Lyn could feel her fingers curling around the strap of her shoulder-bag. Suddenly she felt like making a dash from this bold-looking member of the Corderas clan; suddenly the thought of venturing into an unknown household was almost more than she could bear. Her pulses raced as the blue and arrogant gaze swept over her face, taking in the soft, incurving wings of her chestnut hair, the interesting tilt to her gold-brown eyes, the small dimple in her chin.

  “Have you been warned about my young niece?” His eye narrowed, holding a glint under the dense black brows.

  “I have been told that she’s inclined to have the devil in her,” Lyn admitted.

  He kicked at a stone and yet there was nothing in the least boyish about the action. “Leoni is fond of all creatures that crawl and creep and go bump in the night, Miss Gilmour.” His teeth glinted in a sardonic smile against his sun-darkened skin. “Around lunchtime she decided to amuse herself by shutting our cook in the larder with her latest pet, an acrobatic young frog. The larder door can only be opened from the outside, and poor old Bianca was in quite a state by the time her cries were heard and she was released.”

  “Oh, dear!” Lyn exclaimed.

  “Quite.” His left eyebrow took a quizzical dip. “Bianca is a much valued employee at the hacienda, and after such undignified treatment she was ready to quit her job. My sister-in-law had a hard time consoling her. These upsets, I fear, are inclined to take it out of Concetta, who is a highly strung person with a tendency to live on her nerves.” His gaze dwelt on Lyn’s right hand, which was plucking nervously at the strap of her bag. “Do yourself a favour, young woman. Catch the next train out of Monterey.”

  “Why do you say that, Senor Corderas?” Her pulses gave a disturbing flutter, and she addressed him as senor because he seemed so utterly Spanish despite the fact that he had blue eyes. She had the feeling that his outlook was also very Iberian.

  “Happy, contented children do not shut people in cupboards,” he drawled.

  Lyn privately agreed with him, but she was also ruffled by the doubtful way he was regarding her, as though he wouldn’t have thought her much of a governess even had his niece been a little angel.

  Annoyance darted through Lyn and she drew herself up very straight, stretching her five foot four as far as it would go, which was inadequately far in comparison to the superior height of this self-assured, cool-eyed Spaniard. “I admit the child sounds a bit of a monkey,” she said, “but most children are mischievous, and she might benefit from an old-fashioned spanking.”

  “The devil needs to be exorcized, not spanked out of Leoni.” His deep voice held intonations which matched his Spanish looks. “My niece has worked her way through five governesses already and I don’t doubt that she’s all prepared to tackle her sixth.” Again his eyes wandered over Lyn’s pale face and took in the shadows left by recent shock and illness. “Having warned you, do I now take you to the Hacienda Rosa, or shall I see you on to the next train back to the city?”

  Lyn met his eyes, so blue and startling in his dark face, and again she knew a desire to escape before she became involved with the Corderas family. She felt its urgency at war with her inborn instinct not to shirk a duty. Leoni sounded a most troublesome child ... yet surely it would be cowardly to run away from a small girl of seven. Lyn hesitated, a
nd then tilted her chin into a fighting angle. “Please take me to the hacienda.”

  “On your own head be it!” He swung on his heel, her suitcase in his hand. “Follow me, Miss Gilmour. I have a car waiting at the junction of this road.”

  Lyn followed him, aware that he had parked in the main road because he had planned all along to alarm her about this job; he had hoped she would quit before she even started it. She regarded his back with a flicker of dislike in her eyes. His wide shoulders tapered to slender hips, and there was in his bearing a lordly air ... she hoped he wasn’t typical of the people she had come to work among!

  They reached the car, a sleek grey Mercedes, and he opened a door and tossed her case to the corduroy-upholstered back seat. “Will you sit here, or up front with me?” he asked, speaking as if he didn’t care if she sat in the boot.

  “I’ll sit here beside my case.” She spoke with equal crispness and stepped past him into the car. He clapped the door shut, then sauntered to the long gleaming bonnet where he stood and selected a cheroot from a case he took from a pocket of his trousers. As he applied his lighter to the cheroot, his glance lifted to the sky, where a chain of clouds were racing over the mountains, threatening to tear wide their sides on those peaks. A few spots of rain must have struck down on that upraised face, for suddenly he grimaced and swung in behind the wheel of the high-powered car. With an impatient jerk of a brown hand he brought the engine to life; the car faced an empty stretch of road, and the breath caught in Lyn’s throat as the Mercedes shot forward as though possessed of the velocity of an aimed missile.

  Rick Corderas drove in silence, the throat-tingling smoke of his cheroot drifting over a broad shoulder to Lyn. After about a mile the road grew narrower, steeper, and they kept sweeping around hairpin bends.

  It was only now that Lyn realized how jumpy she had grown. At one time the speed of gigantic aircraft had not held the power to unnerve her, yet now she grabbed at the interior handle of the door beside her while she gazed out upon the wild country through which they were travelling. High and tree-clad, alive with scents and bird calls, and far below the dark blue surging of the Pacific ocean. The beauty and strangeness of it all touched her deeply. Everything she looked at was so vivid with life, and in silent bitterness she thought of David ... he should have been with her to share all this. My dear - oh, my dear, I don't want to go on living without you!

  Her lashes sank down over the pain in her eyes. She wanted to weep, to cry out against the inexorable knowledge that she must go on living without the man she loved; the young pilot she was to have married ... Lyn shuddered at the memory of the crash he had fought so gallantly to avert. A routine flight from London to California, then they had flown into a sudden storm only a few miles from their destination ... disaster had struck them ... blinding pain for Lyn had followed.

  When she began to recover from the rib fracture which tore her left lung, they had told her about David. He and his copilot and nine of the passengers had died in the crash. The hospital staff had been kindness itself to Lyn, especially Sister Todd. Determined that the English girl shouldn’t brood on her memories, her lost hopes of what might have been, she had suggested that until Lyn was fit to return to duty she take this job of companion in beautiful Monterey.

  Now Lyn was actually here and driving with Julio Corderos’ stepbrother to the Hacienda Rosa, the ancestral home of an old-established Spanish family, whose ancestors had come by wagon train to these wild hills and valleys to build white-stoned farmhouses and to plant their vines.

  Lyn became aware that Rick Corderas had shot her a look over his shoulder, taking in swiftly the way she gripped the door handle beside her. “It won’t do,” he said grimly, “if I’m taking a timid kitten to the hacienda. Leoni and my aunt, the Dona Estella, will make mincemeat of you between them.”

  She bit her lip, infuriated that he should refer to her as a kitten in that scornful tone of voice. “You’d better keep your eyes on the road,” she retorted, “or you will make mincemeat of both of us long before we reach the hacienda.”

  “You should have sat beside me,” he taunted. “Then I’d have had no need to disengage my attention from the road. You women are victims of your own illogical impulses.”

  Taut as a ramrod, Lyn gazed at his wide, arrogant back and the curl of cheroot smoke drifting over his shoulder. His black hair ran to another smaller peak at the nape of his neck, and there was a sort of savagery about his darkness and his way of driving, as if since meeting her he was determined to show her that she was out of place in Monterey. Sister Todd had said she might meet him, though he no longer resided all the time at his brother’s farm. He and his sister Rosa were the children of the father’s second marriage.

  Lyn glanced out of the car window and saw that the hills had given way to a small village, a straggling cluster of adobe houses, a few shops and a tavern from out of which wailed a snatch of Spanish music. It sounded strange and foreign, and added to Lyn’s feelings that she had entered another world.

  As the village slipped away behind them the road grew rougher. The rain began to slant across the windscreen and Lyn could feel the wheels lurching on ridges of soft mud. “We had a heavy rainfall last night,” Rick threw over his shoulder. “It seems to have washed down quite a bit of mountain dirt There he broke off and cursed in Spanish as the big car went into a skid and for one wild moment hovered on the very edge of a sheer ravine ... only a hard turn of the wheel swung them clear of the ravine, with only inches to spare between them and a plunge into the ocean and eternity.

  “Are you all right?” Rick demanded.

  “Yes.” The word was a threat of sound, for she was sitting with closed eyes, living again a moment of peril and fear in the air, a cry, a name, driving up from her innermost being. Then David’s name shuddered to silence within her and when she opened her eyes they were speeding along beside a high white wall, over which hung green branches bearing golden oranges. A pair of graceful iron gates came into view and Rick pressed on the car horn until a brown-skinned boy came running to open them. He leapt on the step of the car as they swept through the open gateway and gazed at Lyn through the open window.

  “Buenos dias, señorita,” he smiled.

  “Hullo!” Lyn smiled back at him. He was about eight years old and had a pair of sparkling dark eyes that regarded her without shyness.

  “My name is Pico,” he informed her, “and my father he is foreman for Senor Corderas. I have two sisters and a brother, and a goat called Manuela.”

  “How nice for you, Pico,” she said, and heard Rick Corderas utter a heartless laugh up there in the front seat.

  “You are very pretty, senorita, like a gazelle.” For an eight-year-old Pico was amply supplied with Spanish gallantry, and Lyn felt her cheeks grow warm as Rick Corderas deliberately glanced round at her, mockery incarnate in the look he gave her.

  When he swung the car to a standstill in front of an arched doorway, Lyn found herself comparing the high white wall that enclosed the hacienda, shutting it away from the eyes of the world, with Moorish habitations ... as if in the blood of the Corderas clan there ran a strain of Saracen ... men who had kept harems within secluded courtyards. This was strong in her thoughts as Rick lounged out of the car and opened the door beside her. Lyn felt his brown hand close warm on her wrist, felt its effortless strength as he assisted her from the Mercedes.

  “Bring the senorita’s suitcase, Pico,” he said to the boy. He then pushed open the arched door and Lyn stepped into the central court of the Hacienda Rosa.

  The court was paved with softly coloured tiles and a fountain played with a cool sound in a big stone basin. Pink and golden roses shone through the water, climbing over every piece of stonework, smothering pergolas and tiled benches in fragrance and colour. A series of decorative archways led into the lower rooms of the hacienda, and a veranda connected the upper rooms, with a pair of stairways leading to it, their ironwork as delicately wrought as old lace.
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br />   “What a very beautiful place!” Lyn’s delight rang warm in her voice. “I almost feel that I’m in Spain.”

  “This part of Monterey retains its Spanish aura,” said Rick, and coolness shaded them as they stepped through one of the iron-fringed archways into the house.

  The place was very quiet, so that Lyn’s high heels sounded like castanets on the tiles of the hall, furnished with richly carved mahogany, a hoard of family silver, and chandeliers that would look superb when alight. The scent of wet roses stole in from the patio, and an unforgettable moment was created for Lyn.

  “I’m afraid you are in for a disappointment if you expect to be met by Julio, or Concetta.” Rick’s deep voice made the words sound ominous in the silence of the hall. “Julio is away moving cattle, and when Concetta develops one of her headaches she’s likely to be indisposed for hours.”

  Lyn lifted her eyes to his dark face, and a little more of her poise slipped from her. She had been hoping to meet Leoni’s parents today and her eyes expressed this. Rick looked totally unmoved. “I warned you,” he drawled. “Leoni and Dona Estella are going to have you all to themselves!”

  Lyn was not too worried about meeting the child, but from Sister Todd she had heard that Julio’s aunt was a real Spanish matriarch, proud, handsome, and of a chilly disposition. Lyn shivered.

  “Come,” said Rick, and he opened a door that led into a living-room. Lyn looked around her and tried to cast off apprehension ... it was an attractively furnished room with hand-woven Mexican rugs lighting the dark wood of the floor and a pair of Monterey landscapes boldly displayed against the cream walls.

  “Let me take your coat,” said Rick, and as she fumbled with the big buttons he stepped behind her and deftly slipped the coat off her shoulders. She felt him close to her, tall, dark-skinned, vibrantly male, and when his hard fingertips brushed her arms she drew away from him, resenting the vitality that somehow threw David’s death into sharp focus.