Matador, Mi Amor

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY WILLIAM MALTESE

  Anal Cousins: Case Studies in Variant Sexual Practices

  Back of the Boat Gourmet Cooking (with Bonnie Clark)

  Blood-Red Resolution: An Adventure Novel

  Catalytic Quotes (Some Heard Through a Time Warp)

  Dinner with Cecile and William: A Cookbook (with Cecile Charles)

  Draqualian Silk: A Collector’s & Bibliographical Guide to the Books of William Maltese, 1969-2010

  Emerald-Silk Intrigue: A Romance

  Even Gourmands Have to Diet (with Bonnie Clark)

  The Fag Is Not for Burning: A Mystery Novel

  From This Beloved Hour: A Romance

  Fyrea’s Cauldron: A Romance Novel

  Gerun, the Heretic: A Science Fiction Novel

  The Gluten-Free Way: My Way (with Adrienne Z. Milligan)

  The Gomorrha Conjurations: An Adventure Novel

  The “Happy” Hustler

  Heart on Fire: A Romance

  In Search of the Perfect Pinot G! (with A. B. Gayle)

  Incident at Aberlene: An Espionage Novel (Spies & Lies #1)

  Incident at Brimzinsky: An Espionage Novel (Spies & Lies #2)

  Jungle Quest Intrigue: A Romance

  Love’s Emerald Flame: A Romance

  Love’s Golden Spell: A Romance

  Matador, Mi Amor: A Novel of Romance

  Moon-Stone Intrigue: A Romance

  Moonstone Murders: The Movie Script

  Schism on Antheer-D: Science Fiction (Gods & Frauds #1)

  Schism on Bnth: A Science Fiction Novel (Gods & Frauds #2)

  Slaves

  A Slip to Die for: A Stud Draqual Mystery

  Summer Sweat: An Erotic Anthology

  SS & M: Being Excerpts from the Nazi Death-Head Files

  Total Meltdown: An Adventure Novel (with Raymond Gaynor)

  When Summer Comes

  William Maltese’s Wine Taster Diary: Spokane & Pullman, WA

  Young Cruisers

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2012 by William Maltese

  Cover graphic by Cecile Charles

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For Christine Havens,

  Who has joined me on many a

  Sunday afternoon for wine and bullfights

  CHAPTER ONE

  This was Extremadura, east out of Trujillo, southwest from Madrid and hugging the border with Portugal. Rocky. Its very low hills were burned (often by temperatures over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit) by the Iberian sun to various shades of ochre and tan dotted, here and there, with olive groves.

  “It’s a man’s land,” Karen Dunlap had told her daughter. “What Lalo was thinking when he left it to you completely escapes me.”

  Alyssa’s mother hadn’t found her daughter’s sudden inheritance anything more than a tidy piece of real estate to be quickly dispensed with on the marketplace.

  “You go for days on end, out there, without seeing even a bird. Of course, there are the bulls; but, you never really get to see them, either. They’re sequestered off in the countryside, miles away from any man, woman, or child, who might approach them on two legs and spoil them for the bullring.”

  Karen had been at the Montego Hacienda for only one month, twenty years ago: the one and only month she’d been Señora Karen Montego, wife of Spain’s chief matador de toros Lalo Montego. It was a month and a marriage she didn’t care to recall, even now. One about which she still very seldom spoke.

  “He had to have been crazy,” Karen had decided, “up to the very end. Why else leave the ranch to you when he has a son by that Cartaga Woman.”

  The Cartaga Woman was Talia (nee Valéndez) Montego; although, Karen never gave her a Christian name. As far as Karen was concerned, Talia was, and always would be, simply the Cartaga Woman: Lalo Montego’s first and third wife. Talia had preceded, and, then, succeeded Karen in Lalo’s bedroom. The logical explanation was that Lalo had married Karen on the rebound and had had second thoughts when he was given the opportunity to get Talia back. After all, Talia had given Lalo a son, Adriano; and, in the end, she was the only one of Lalo’s six wives (seven marriages) who did. His mistake in marrying Karen became evident when, still on their honeymoon, he had engaged in a sexual relationship with a married lady on an adjoining ranchero. It was that affair which had sent Karen so quickly to divorce court.

  Alyssa wasn’t Lalo Montego’s daughter. Her father was Donald Dunlap, Boston socialite, married to Karen for less than two years when he was shot dead in the crossfire of police and three bank robbers. Immediately thereafter, Karen had pretty much abandoned her daughter to a series of nannies, tutors, and private schools, to become an instant member of the international jet set and “café society”, picking up three more husbands in the bargain, one of whom had been Lalo Montego.

  Then, after her last divorce (this time from a Swiss banker), Karen had decided to settle down; although, she had long since passed the point of ever really seeming like a “mother” to her daughter, neither having seen much of each other over the years.

  Alyssa had met only two of her mother’s four husbands, counting her father. And, Lalo Montego hadn’t been one of them. That Alyssa had been made primary beneficiary of Lalo Montego’s Spanish estate, quite a sizable holding, left her more than a little bewildered.

  “Turn it over to all over to lawyers,” Karen had counseled. “Let them sort it out with Adriano’s lawyers, because Adriano won’t stand by and see you get his birthright without a fight.”

  But when the lawyers suggested the property be liquidated, Alyssa decided, quite on impulse, that she wanted to see it first.

  “It’s no place for a woman,” Karen had persisted. “Take it from someone who has been there, done that, got the T-shirt, burned it, and tossed the ashes. You’ll feel completely cut off from civilization.”

  If she’d been more attuned to her daughter, Karen would have realized that it was just that kind of escape for which Alyssa was looking, needing somewhere to where she could escape and re-think her decision to break up with Ty Gordman.

  Everyone, her mother included, was sure Alyssa had slipped off the deep end the minute she not only refused Ty’s proposal for marriage but stopped seeing him altogether. Not only was he handsome, but his family connections made him one of the better catches among the always surprisingly few prime bachelors available.

  Certainly, Alyssa “liked” Ty. But, liking and loving, at least as far as she was concerned, were not one and the same. She enjoyed his company, because he was polite, well-mannered, danced well, made pleasant conversation, and could make her laugh, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed him so much as to contemplate spending the rest of her life with him.

  Alyssa was enough of a romantic to envision marriage as the beginning to an eventual “death do us part” ending. On the other side of the same coin, she was enough of a realist to see that, perhaps, such long-lasting marriages were not usually the rule. Where divorce had once been looked upon as an anathema by the rich, it was now a course of action even they embraced at the drop of a hat.

  The driver, Flavio, said something, calling Alyssa from her reverie and back to the present. He was pointing.

  Ramón Selene, seated in the seat beside Alyssa, immediately scooted forward for a better look at circling birds in a patch of cloudless blue sky off to one side.

  Ramón was the foreman of the ranch Alyssa now owned. He’d met her at the airport in Madrid. They had been driving since morning, except for a short break for lunch.

  Never very talkative with his new employer, perhaps logically made ill at ease by the presence of a young American woman who probabl
y didn’t know a bull from a heifer, he had lapsed into complete silence long before the car passed through Toledo en route to Trujillo. He wasn’t silent now, though, even if his animated conversation was with the driver and not with Alyssa.

  The birds, obviously the subject of conversation, continued their downward helix over something probably dead.

  “…go for days without seeing even a bird,” Karen had said. But, surely, a few buzzards shouldn’t be cause for such excitement.

  Alyssa strained to catch segments of the conversation. After all, she did speak the language, forced into it by obligatory foreign language lessons heaped upon her by a long line of tutors and teachers in private schools. But as she had discovered in France, on her first visit, there was usually a period of transition needed, wherein it was necessary to recognize the language spoken by the natives wasn’t the same sterile language taught in classrooms far removed from the countries in question. Flavio and Ramón were simply speaking too fast for her to translate.

  The car came to a sudden stop. Ramón opened his door and got out.

  Alyssa realized there were several horsemen approaching from one side. Once abreast of Ramón, who was standing beside the car, the horses stopped. Ramón talked several minutes with the riders before getting back into the car.

  “Is something wrong?” Alyssa asked as he again joined her. The riders were reigning for a turn-back the way they’d come.

  “Some difficulty,” Ramón admitted, obviously reluctant to continue with an explanation. He wished she weren’t around to ask questions. He would have undoubtedly been more at ease if—whatever the present problem—he were able to handle it himself, without having the new owner right there to look over his shoulder.

  “Whatever it is, I’m sure you can handle it,” she said, deciding she really wasn’t up to pretending she could even begin to be in charge of the situation. She had come here to escape and think, not become involved in playing enthusiastically at ranching. “I’ve been informed that you continue to do an excellent job in overseeing the property.”

  If she had assumed her ready delegation of authority would relieve her of the problem, she was sadly mistaken. As much as Ramón might have preferred relieving her of it, there was no way he would be able to keep any of this from her if she decided to stick around for any length of time.

  “Another bull has been killed,” he said finally.

  Flavio put the car into gear, and they again started moving.

  “Another bull? Killed?” Her curiosity was aroused in spite of herself. “Some disease killed them, you mean?”

  “No,” he admitted reluctantly. “Someone killed them. With a gun.”

  “A gun? Some one? For heaven’s sake, how many did this someone kill?”

  “We’ve found four.”

  Outside, there wasn’t a cloud (only buzzards) in the sky. Shimmering bands of heat lifted from the plain. Dust rose with the heat, stirred by God only knew what, since there was hardly a breath of breeze to be had anywhere. Trees, whenever making their occasional appearance, were either the gnarled limbs and trunks of olive, or some other low, squat trees which Alyssa wasn’t able to identify. The latter had dull silver trunks and twisted branches that extended to all sides. She couldn’t help being reminded of pain-distorted souls stretching arms upward for relief from Hell’s blast-furnace heat.

  Karen had been right when she described the landscape as “more suited to a man’s tastes”. It definitely lacked the slightest feminine touch—at least at this point in Alyssa’s observations of it.

  “Who?” she asked. “I mean, any suspects? After all, who goes around shooting helpless animals?”

  “Yes, who?” Ramón echoed, though he, unlike Alyssa, had his suspicions. “Whoever, we’ll find him. The ranch is large, but nowhere is it so big as to hide a person like that forever. That I promise you.”

  Why did Alyssa shiver? How could she chill in heat so long having penetrated the car, despite the air-conditioner on at full blast? Was it something to do with the revelation that, somewhere, out there, was someone with a gun, who might decide humans were worthier targets than stupid, four-legged beasts?

  Or, was she letting her imagination run rampant? Certainly, Ramón had never said anything to insinuate that whoever killed the bulls might soon be looking for two-legged victims. Possibly, it wasn’t all that big of a deal after all. Despite vast economic improvements, Spain still had a moneyed elite and an extensive population of poor; one of the latter possibly just found him or her brought to the point of killing for.…

  “Food?” she suggested. It was more than apparent, by the look Ramón gave her, that he hadn’t been anywhere near following her mental conjecture. She hurried to clarify. “The bulls, I mean. Did someone, perhaps, kill them for food?”

  “Oh,” he responded, finally getting the gist. “No.”

  So, Alyssa left it at that, hoping he would be able to take care of it after all. Frankly, she couldn’t imagine what difference a bull or two made in the long run. She had seen the figures that indicated the presence of over a thousand of them on the Montego Hacienda.

  Once again, the conversation jolted to a complete stop. Alyssa pushed herself back into the leather seat and dreamed of arriving at the ranch where she could, hopefully, surrender herself to the unadulterated luxury of a long bath.

  At least a dozen more miles were eaten up by the speeding car, and Alyssa began to wonder if she was ever going to see a bathtub before nightfall. She still had no real concept of the size of the ranch she’d inherited and found it hard to register how it had been well over an hour since Ramón had indicated they’d just passed over the eastern edge of her property.

  Finally, the car turned right into a lane that bisected a grove of olives. The trees betrayed their age by displaying gaping holes that often formed tunnels from one side of a tree trunk to the other. A novice would have insisted such trees had likely seen their last days. However, the trees’ full canopies of delicate leaves, silvery-gray on the bottom and dark green on top, parenthesizing clusters of small black fruit, proclaimed otherwise.

  After the barrenness of the land through which she’d just driven, Alyssa found this bit of visible green decidedly refreshing.

  The grove gave way to a coppice of old and impressive oaks, attractive as only those particular trees can somehow be. Suddenly, in amongst them appeared the first evidence of well-manicured lawn, and—yes—water spurting rhythmically from a sprinkler system. Alyssa’s dreams of a bath were suddenly resurrected.

  The hacienda sat amongst more oak, olive, and fruit trees. It was a large house, in the Spanish style, with white-washed adobe and red brick, the latter echoing the ferrous content of the soil in the area. The windows, large and overhung by balconies, were lined with lattices of iron grillwork seemingly so insubstantially delicate as to remind Alyssa of a lace mantilla she’d seen in the duty-free shop at the airport in Madrid.

  Also, suddenly, there were flowers, complete carpets and tapestry-like cascades of them, gold and red, blue and white, able to survive within the parameters of this small oasis where they would quickly have perished beyond the availability of life-giving water.

  When the car door opened, and Alyssa stepped out, the first thing she smelled was how the perfumes, exuded by the many blossoms, hung so heavily—almost palatably—within the air.

  “Flavio will see to your things,” Ramón informed, giving Alyssa immediate leave to precede him up the three steps to the entranceway leading to the main door of the hacienda. The whole access area was embraced by a cupping grape arbor that’s intricate weave of vines and wood supports dangled delectable clusters of green grapes and dappled the sunlight.

  One of two massive panels, each inset with its own polished bronze bull-head whose metal nose ring acted as a door knocker, came open. Before Ramón could introduce the emerging, heavy-set woman to the new mistress of the house, though, a commotion erupted somewhere around a corner of the building, out of sight
.

  Ramón glanced at Alyssa, his look one of my-God-what-can-possibly-be-happening-now-?

  “Mara!” he yelled, by way of instructing the plump woman just through the door that Alyssa Dunlap was now fully in her charge, with or without formal introductions. He was quickly off and running to find the cause of the to-do.

  “Viene…viene!” Mara insisted, coming to shoo Alyssa into the house, much like a mother hen moved to protect her brood from a fox in the hen house.

  Alyssa complied, but only because she couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Certainly, she wasn’t yet confident enough in her new position to insist on following Ramón to the source of the continued confusion that sounded very much like men fighting.

  What was going on, here?

  If she were expecting answers from Mara, she was disappointed.

  “What’s happening?” she asked finally, having yet to discover that Mara’s realm was the house, and anything beyond its walls was usually of no concern of hers.

  “Men!” Mara said, by way of all-encompassing summation and flashed a wide and welcoming smile.

  “Fighting?” Alyssa asked, uncertain whether she asked a question or made a statement. It made no difference, since Mara paid no mind, on either account.

  “I’ll show you to your room,” the portly woman said instead. Her English was good, albeit with a decidedly sing-song cadence that seemed almost Oriental. “We’ll get you a nice bath, and I’ll bet you’re ready for some fresh clothes, now, aren’t you?”

  “Indeed,” Alyssa admitted. Since she doubted any access to the continuing brawl outside, even if she wanted it, which she didn’t, she decided to let it run its course. If Mara wasn’t concerned, why should Alyssa be? Most likely, Mara’s insinuation that men were simply men was apropos for even this particular occasion.

  “This way,” Mara instructed and led the way through a large living room and up a wide flight of stairs.

  The second floor had rooms that opened up from a balcony that overlooked the living room. Alyssa’s suite offered access to a second balcony that overlooked the inner courtyard of the hacienda.