The Glory Game Part 32

She was not as confident as he was that the rain would soon diminish. "All I want to do is get out of here. I'm wet, cold, and uncomfortable."

"And you have the disposition of a wet cat," he retorted and turned away from her.

Luz silently acknowledged that she was guilty of hissing at him like some foul-tempered feline. She struggled to control those self-protective instincts that prompted her to lash out and keep him at a distance. She watched him rummage through the pile of trash on the floor. His shirt and jacket clung to his shoulders and back like a second skin, outlining the curve of his long spine and moving with the ripple of his muscles.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Looking for things to burn so we can build a fire." Crouching, he pivoted on one foot to stack an a.s.sortment of rags, broken pieces of furniture, and rotting planks to one side.

"Where? There isn't a fireplace." Luz glanced around the four walls again to see if she had missed something he had seen.

"I will make the fire here." Using the rags and jagged splinters of wood for kindling, he arranged them in the center of the earth floor. "The smoke has many ways out through the holes in the roof and the windows."

The chilling dampness of her clothes raised the flesh beneath. Luz welcomed the prospect of a fire and dragged the broken-legged chair closer to the middle. As she sat down, Raul tore a long strip from a rag and used the lighter from his shirt pocket to set it on fire, then laid it atop the kindling and added large splinters and chips of rotten wood crosswise on top of that. Water dripped from the wet tendrils of his dark hair when he bent to blow on the spreading red embers. Luz resisted the impulse to reach out and smooth those wet-black strands off his forehead. She concentrated her attention instead on the tiny flame darting around the wood.

"I thought somebody lived here," she said. "I thought he might help me get the car out of the mud."

"When you were not in the car, or walking on the road, I guessed you must have come here." Raul straightened, sitting back on one heel, and let the small fire get a good start before he added more fuel. "Although I could not be sure you were not walking in the opposite direction."

"I was angry." Luz offered no apology for it either. Her pride was still smarting from their argument in the polo pit.

"I noticed," he commented dryly.

She didn't want that subject introduced again, not even by inference. "What is this place?" she demanded instead. "An old gaucho's hut, I suppose."

"You would not have a chair to sit on if that were so." His mouth slanted in a line that held little warmth and even less humor. "The gauchos used ox skulls for their chairs. This place long ago belonged to a farmer. It has been empty for years. Carlos Rafferty tells me a family named Ortega lived here before I came, but they left more than ten years ago to go to Buenos Aires to find work."

Raul snapped two thin boards across his knee, then added them to the small blaze. When he looked up, it was to glance slowly around the room, his expression thoughtful and distant. His gaze encountered her curious stare, and he turned his attention once again to the fire.

"When I was a small boy, I lived in a place like this one ... maybe bigger. Or maybe I was small and it looked bigger."

She leaned closer to the growing fire and held her hands over the small flames, then rubbed them briskly together to spread the warmth. "When I was little, Hopeworth Manor always seemed so big and grand to me," Luz remembered with a vague smile. "It is big, but the staircase doesn't seem quite as tall anymore and the rooms don't seem quite as huge. A child's perspective of size is always larger than reality."

"Yes."

The rain continued its ceaseless hammering on the roof while its whispering fall outside the adobe walls drifted past the jagged panes of the broken windows. The faint crackle of the fire was a warm sound; Luz suppressed a shiver and inched closer to it. Its meager heat almost made her feel colder. Her glance strayed to Raul. His wet skin glistened in the firelight, the black of his brow and his thick, stubby lashes standing out darkly against the shiny tan. She tried to imagine him as a small boy playing in a room like this, but an image wouldn't come. Something in the relentless blue of his eyes told her he hadn't known much softness or laughter in his life.

"Did you ever dream when you moved to Buenos Aires with your mother that you'd become a well-known polo player someday?" she mused.

"No." He stacked more wood on the fire, propping them against each other like teepee poles. "We have not settled this situation with your son."

CHAPTER XXI.

Luz was on her feet in an instant, her abruptness knocking over the wobbly chair. "I don't want to talk about it." Every muscle in her body felt rigid as she walked away from the fire and Raul to stand at the window, fighting the tremors that were part anger and part chill.

"We must resolve this if he is to learn," Raul insisted firmly.

"And your interpretation of 'resolve' is for me to stay away from the training," she stated, then remembered her parting ultimatum. "Or do you want me to leave completely?" She challenged him with it again, angling her body toward him.

He didn't move from his crouched position by the fire, balanced on one foot with one leg drawn under him, allowing him to rest on his heel. "I want to teach your son polo. I have told you that it is impossible with your presence distracting him. I think the choice now becomes yours."

"What choice? Am I supposed to quietly accept being banned from watching my own son practice?"

"Why did you allow him to attend this school?" he questioned.

"So he could improve his polo game." Her answer was quick and definite. "I thought you understood that in Paris."

"Then why are you making it difficult for him now?"

"I'm not!"

"You are." He breathed in deeply, turning his head away as if to control an answering surge of anger. "Come back to the fire, Seora Thomas, before those wet clothes chill you to the bone," Raul instructed in a perfectly reasonable tone.

But the formal use of her name made her pause. When he'd burst into the cabin a few minutes ago, he had called her Luz. She walked slowly back while he reached over and righted her chair. She wished she hadn't remembered that. She wished it didn't matter to her.

Raul waited until she had sat down. "Your knowledge of polo is adequate," he began. "It is considerably better than most, which I am sure is to the credit of Jake Kincaid. However, it is not on a professional level."

"I never claimed it was," Luz said stiffly.

"In the past, you have probably been very helpful to Rob. I also recall our conversation in Paris. You told me you only wanted the best for your son. Did you mean that?" he challenged.

"Yes."

"Then you must turn his instruction over to me. You cannot coach him in the things I can teach him. If you try, you will slow his progress," Raul stated firmly. "Is this what you want?"

"Of course it isn't." She tightly interlocked her fingers. Her elbows rested on her knees as she bent close to the fire, keeping her head down.

"Two people cannot tell him how to do the same thing. There must be one authority. When a child goes to a school, he is removed from his parents so that the instructor can have authority over him. If the child were taught in the home, there would be conflict. The parent could say this is right or this is wrong, and the child might believe that until the teacher could show him differently. Time is lost. It is the same here when you sit on the sidelines."

"I'm not trying to make it harder for him. I only want to help," Luz insisted, yet she saw the truth in what he said.

"Then help him by staying away. What I am asking is not unreasonable." He stirred the fire with a stick, pushing the halfburned wood into the glowing center. "I am not saying you cannot talk to him about what he has learned or how a session went, only that you do not attend."

"I understand what you're saying, but I know Rob better than you do."

"And you make allowances that a teacher would not, no?"

"Yes." She knew how Rob would push himself, sometimes trying too hard, like today.

"Is that good or bad?"

"I don't know." The drumming rain on the metal roof seemed to echo the confused pounding in her head. "My children are very important to me. You're not a mother, so I doubt if you can understand that."

"When your husband left, you made them your life, no?" It was a challenging statement, and Luz caught the rough edge in his voice. There was a tightness to his mouth. "A mother's love can also smother."

"They're all I have," she answered defensively while wondering if he was speaking from personal experience.

"You have yourself." A hard, steady quality was in his gaze, which Luz found impossible to hold. Her eyes skittered away from him.

The fire crackled and popped. Its radiating heat touched more of her body now. She unzipped her jacket and peeled the wet sleeves down her arms, removing the barrier so more of the warmth could reach her skin. She hung the jacket on her knees so that the fire could dry it and stared into the dancing flames.

There was no use explaining to a man who was obviously so self-sufficient how incomplete she felt having only herself. There were so many needs that went unfulfilled. The absence of physical contact was an agony-not s.e.x as much as a caring touch, or a pair of arms around her, a someone just to hold her. She needed to be loved. Rob and Trisha were all she had to fulfill that need.

Aware of the lengthening silence between them, she breathed in deeply, inhaling the smell of woodsmoke. Its wispy trail drifted to the broken window near the door. Her gaze followed its path until it disappeared in the falling rain. The fat, gnarled trunk of the tree outside the adobe hut was visible through the downpour.

"What's that smell outside?" She remembered the vile odor she'd noticed when she'd first reached the cabin and asked about it, avoiding sensitive subjects.

"El ombu. I think you call it an umbra tree." Raul shifted to add more wood to the fire. "When the Spanish first came to the Pampa, the ombu was the only tree that grew here. The ones you see around the estancias were all brought from Europe. They are not native to the Pampa, only the ombu. In Spanish, it is known as belasombra, which means 'beautiful shade.' In the heat of summer, crossing this flat gra.s.sland, it must have seemed like that."

"And it gives off that odor?" She frowned.

"S. The sap, if you rub it on your skin, will keep away the insects." He straightened and walked over to a work table along the wall, then dragged it close to the fire.

Luz thought he intended to break it into firewood. Instead he removed his jacket and hung it on a corner to dry. When he turned, he held out his hand, offering to take hers. She gave it to him. Something in the way he looked at her made Luz conscious again of her appearance. She bent her head to avoid his gaze and ran her fingers through the stringy wetness of her hair.

"I'm a mess." She picked at the clinging front of her blouse, pulling it away from her skin, then again pushed at her hair. "I wish I had a comb."

She saw his muddy boot an instant before a black comb was thrust almost under her nose. "Thank you." She took it from his hand without looking up.

Raul moved away, crossing to the pile of debris to search for more firewood. She listened to the rummaging sounds he made while she raked the comb's teeth through the wet tangle of her hair, slicking it back and away from her face. When she had finished, she self-consciously fiddled with the comb until Raul came back to the fire and added a few more pieces to the dwindling supply of fuel.

She pa.s.sed him the comb, doubting that her disheveled appearance had been greatly improved.

As she lowered her glance, she saw him slide the comb into his hip pocket. Luz couldn't help noticing the way his wet breeches clung to his lean flank and muscled thigh, showing the outline of his jockey shorts. She looked quickly away when he crouched down to a.s.sume his former position beside the small fire.

"You have not said whether you intend to comply with my request." Raul poked at the fire, sending up sparks, not leaving it alone any more than he let her alone.

The chair wobbled under her when she shifted positions to grip the sides of the seat. She smiled wanly at the thought that she was literally and figuratively on shaky ground, then sighed.

"I'll stay away." It occurred to her that they wouldn't be sitting by this fire if he had explained his request earlier instead of attempting to make it an onto. But he'd lost his temper, and so had she, and here they were. "Polo is important to Rob." Luz explained her change of mind. "It's the most important thing in his life right now. I don't know if you can understand how determined he is to prove himself. He wants to be at the top. I want to help him do that, in whatever way I can, even if that includes staying away from the workouts."

"I think you will not regret it," Raul said. "And I have noticed the way he drives himself. Polo is not simply a sport to him. For the moment at least, it is his life. We will see if that will last."

"I believe it will." She hesitated thinking of Drew's plans for Rob to attend college. "Although I'm not sure that's good."

"Does it bother you that he may wish to make a career of polo?"

"Not really. I know it's a dangerous sport, and players have been killed or crippled by falls, but that's part of it." Luz paused, the corners of her mouth pulled down in grim resignation. "It's his father who won't be pleased by the decision." Leaning forward, she let go of the chair seat and crossed her forearms, resting them atop her legs. Her gaze turned thoughtfully to Raul, studying his impa.s.sive features. "Did your mother object to your playing polo?" she asked.

"By the time I took up the game, she had died," he replied without emotion. Something in his sharp glance rejected any polite mouthings of sympathy from her.

"What do you think of Rob's ability? I know you haven't worked with him long, but does he have the potential?"

"Possibly. He wants it badly enough." Raul broke off a large splinter of wood from his fire-stirring stick and tossed it into the flames and watched it catch fire. "Sometimes I see some of myself in him."

"What do you mean?" Other than their mutual interest in polo, she saw no similarities.

"I suppose it is the determination you mentioned, the demand you make on yourself for perfection and never being satisfied with less."

"How did you learn to play polo? I mean, I know you worked for a man who played, but did anyone teach you about the game?"

"Here and there, this one would show me that. But I was a groom playing with my employers' guests. Not much notice was paid to me unless I did something wrong. Hector taught me many things about horses. But the game itself, I learned by trial and error-mostly error."

"You've known Hector a very long time then." Hector had implied as much. "How old were you when you played your first game?"

"Fifteen. When I played in my first club match, I was seventeen. Before that, the others had been friendly games on the estancia's polo field, but this one-it was an official game with umpires, scoreboards, timekeepers, spectators." A sardonic humor seemed to twist his mouth. "Seor Boone, my employer, provided me with my polo equipment and colored shirt. Hector loaned me his spurs. My white breeches were an old pair Seor Boone's son had outgrown. I remember they smelted of mothb.a.l.l.s. And I spent every bit of money I had on a pair of shiny new boots." As he paused, he looked at her. "No one told me that you shouldn't wear black boots because the blacking comes off when you rub against another player's white breeches. I was very unpopular that day."

Luz could well imagine the derisive comments he'd drawn, and the ridicule, either to his face or behind his back, but Raul would have known. She knew how humiliated her son would have felt if it had happened to him at seventeen. "I imagine that was the last time you wore them."

"They were all I had. I tried to polish them brown, but it was not very successful. It took me six months to save up enough money to buy another pair."

"Why did you go back on the field?" She marveled at his ability to swallow his pride and continue to play-in his brown-polished black boots, knowing he'd be subjected to more ridicule. Considering how many times his pride must have been crushed, it was no wonder he had acquired such a thick skin. Perhaps he was ent.i.tled to some arrogance now.

"I knew I was good at polo. I was determined to prove I could be the best, not because they scorned my black boots, but because I knew I could do it. There were other things I could not do, but at this I could be the best."

His expression became strained with the intensity of his feelings. The glitter in his eyes and the aggressive angle of his jaw were hardened by the pa.s.sionate determination that drove him. Nothing was going to stand in his way of achieving this end, Luz realized. Nothing else mattered to him. She frowned as her bewilderment deepened.

"For more than twenty years, I have practiced and played, practiced and played. I have studied every facet of the game, gone over every play, every mistake, and worked to do a little bit better. It is impossible to be at one hundred percent for every game, not when you play nearly every month of the year. But I try for seventy-five percent, eighty, ninety, to raise my game standard. Still they rate me at nine goals. I wonder what it is I have to do-what I have missed that keeps me from the ten." Frustration brought his teeth close together, forcing the words through them. "In my gut, I know it can be."

"You sound like Rob." Tears welled in her eyes.

"Then you know how it is," he said tightly.

"No. I don't." She shook her head numbly from side to side. "I don't understand at all. I've never wanted anything so much that I hurt inside. I don't know what you're talking about."

As she listened to Raul, remembering similar thoughts expressed by Rob and recalling Trisha's need for a purpose, all of it came crashing in on her. There was nothing like that in her life. There wasn't any goal she was striving to attain. She had nothing in particular she wanted to accomplish. If she'd had any dreams of anything beyond a husband and family, she didn't remember them. She'd gone on from day to day, certain there was nothing she lacked. She was Luz Kincaid; she had everything.

"What is it?" Raul frowned.

"Nothing." But her wavering voice betrayed her.

In one continuous motion, Luz stood up and turned her back to him. She shut her eyes for a moment to stem the flow of tears and breathed in deeply through her nose to steady her shaken senses. Then she felt his presence very close to her. When she opened her eyes to look, she found him beside her, frowning intently at her.

"What is wrong?" he questioned again. When she tried to turn away, his hand checked her movement and gently drew her back to face him. "Why are you crying?"

"Because ..." Luz stared at the row of b.u.t.tons down his damp shirtfront. "Because I've never felt that way about anything in my life. I don't know what you're saying. Isn't that crazy? Everybody I know has his heart set on something except me. With Rob, it's polo. Trisha wants to be a lawyer. Audra wants to keep the family together. For G.o.d's sake, even Drew is waiting for the day he can try a case before the Supreme Court. I'm forty-two years old. And I don't know why I'm on this earth!"

His frown deepened. Almost tentatively his hand touched the combed-slick side of her hair, then lightly stroked it. "Luz ..." But he didn't seem to know the words that would rea.s.sure her.

She turned her face against his arm, resting her cheek against the damp sleeve. "I don't want to write a book. I don't want to sing songs. I don't want to make a million dollars. I don't want to be the best at anything. My G.o.d." She choked on a sob. "What's wrong with me?"