Beautiful Stranger. Ruth Wind

smiled, but her large brown eyes were serious. “I know he’s gorgeous and wounded and mysterious, Marissa, but those wounds are deep. I don’t think that man has ever had anyone in his corner. I’m not sure he’s capable of making a connection with a woman.”

      Marissa felt suddenly humiliated that anyone should think she would go after a man like that, or had any hope of him coming after her. Aware that her cheeks were red, she waved a hand and made a joke. “I wasn’t exactly thinking of marriage.” She sighed. “I’m not the kind of woman he’d go for anyway.”

      “Uh, sweetie, have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?”

      She grinned. “Oh, yes. I admire myself in the mirror at least seven times a day, for very long periods.”

      Ramona laughed. “So, why not you, then?”

      “Do we have to do this? I’m embarrassed enough, okay?”

      “Mmm,” Ramona said, anchoring herself more firmly to Marissa’s arm. “I think we do. Maybe old Red Dog’s just what the doctor ordered to build up that flabby self-esteem.”

      Marissa laughed at a vision of lifting him overhead. “Push-ups for the ego?”

      “Sit-ups for the psyche!”

      “Sex for the soul.” It didn’t have the same ring and she knew it, but she didn’t take it back.

      “Yeah, that’s what he’s about, all right. Sex.” Ramona sobered. “Is that something you could do? Take what he offers and walk away when it was done?”

      “I could try.” She laughed throatily. “I mean, gosh, what’s the worst that could happen? Not like I haven’t had a broken heart once or twice in my life.”

      “Haven’t we all.” They walked along the sidewalk, silent for a long moment. “On second thought, Marissa, stay away from him. He’s just…” She lifted a shoulder.

      “He’s just what?”

      “Wrong for you, that’s all.”

      Marissa’s antenna rippled. She narrowed her eyes and said, “Would you mind being a little more specific?”

      Ramona didn’t answer for a moment. She was a diplomat at heart, a doctor whose patients worshipped the ground she walked on. “Look, don’t take this wrong—”

      “Oh, I know where that always leads.”

      Ramona stopped. “You probably do. And I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Marissa, but you’re clueless on this level. You think it doesn’t matter that you’re worth however many zillions it is now, but it does. You don’t know anything about life the way he and Crystal had to live it. You don’t even know about ordinary people’s lives.”

      Stung, Marissa crossed her arms and looked at the last gilding on the edge of the world, a brilliant gold zigzag edging the tops of the mountains. “And how much do you know about it, Ramona? More than I do?”

      A puzzled expression crossed her face. “Well, no, probably not, but—”

      “But,” Marissa added gently, “you might be less inclined to judge?”

      Ramona winced. “Ouch.” She raised her big, compassionate eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m the one being judgmental.”

      “It’s all right. I’m used to it.” She relented a little, rolling her eyes. “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

      “Labels,” Ramona said with a sigh. “What a pain. We all get stuck with them. Red Dog is the sexiest, baddest, saddest. I was the brainy busty one.”

      “Richest, fattest, smartest.”

      Ramona laughed. “Ha! We could have duked it out for smartest.”

      Marissa laughed. “Thank heavens. I couldn’t stand being the richest, the fattest and the smartest.”

      Chapter 3

      Crystal didn’t like white people all that much. Back in Albuquerque, there never had been that many in her life, really, only the ones on TV and at school, but here, it seemed like nearly everybody was white. It made her feel lost, kind of, like she was in a foreign country and didn’t know the language.

      She had to admit the old lady was pretty nice, and she was married to a Mexican who still talked as if he hadn’t been gone too long, and that made it easier to believe the lady was really that nice. She gave Crystal some Kool-Aid, and her house smelled like houses in Albuquerque, of onions and chili, which was for the Mexican husband, of course, but it still made it easier.

      After a while, the house filled up so much that Crystal got kind of panicky, afraid all of them would want to make polite conversation with her. But Mrs. Chacon seemed to know the exact minute Crystal wanted to burst into tears, and took her into a room at the back of the house where there was a bed and a VCR. She had a ton of movies, too. “Your uncle said you like movies. Feel free to watch whatever you want, all right? And maybe you can have a nap. I’ll save you some supper—don’t worry about that.”

      It almost made Crystal cry. That was what she hated about being pregnant. She cried over everything, as if she had an underground well in her belly and it over-flowed every day.

      She looked through all the movies, and there were some pretty good ones, she had to admit. All the Nightmare movies, which she liked because they made her real life—no matter how bad it was on a given day—look pretty good since nobody was stalking her; and some goofy old movies such as Gone with the Wind, which Crystal had watched and didn’t get at all. She thought Scarlett was a total bitch and deserved to lose a good guy like Rhett. There were also a couple of her absolute, tip-top favorites, such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which she’d seen at least a hundred times, and Last of the Mohicans, which made her cry and cry and cry, every single time. She didn’t know if she wanted to do that right now. To get the full effect, it was best if she was all alone and could make all kinds of noise without anybody hearing what an idiot she was about movies.

      There was no Titanic, which might actually have been too creepy for words. But there was one of the Romeo and Juliet with guns, the new one, with Claire Danes. Crystal put her hand on it, daring herself to look at it. But in the end, she just couldn’t. Not without Mario.

      For one minute, that hot feeling came into her throat—not tears, but something that burned a lot more—and she wanted to touch him, talk to him, so bad that she almost couldn’t breathe. But that didn’t do her or the baby or even Mario any good.

      The only safe movie after that was Ferris Bueller, and she stuck it in the VCR and kicked back on the bed. In minutes she was sound asleep.

      It wasn’t as bad as Marissa expected, back at Louise’s house. The rooms were bursting with Louise’s three sons, their spouses and the grandchildren, who now totaled five with the birth of Anna and Tyler’s second baby. Anna beamed tonight, looking like the ultimate Madonna as she nursed her black-haired boy, and she only smiled deliriously when people teased her about her three children, wondering if she planned on more. Tyler came to her defense. “We love babies. We’re going to have twenty.”

      Anna laughed at that. “Or maybe five.”

      Robert was there, of course, quiet as he always was, laconically cracking dry jokes at odd moments, always eating whatever Louise piled on his plate. Often, Marissa noticed, Robert, and Louise’s husband, Alonzo, could be found together, comfortably sitting side by side, exchanging a word now and then. And of course, he and Jake went way back, to Desert Storm. They talked in a kind of grunting guy shorthand, laughing at asides no one else ever got.

      But Marissa didn’t have to deal much with him directly, and Louise showed no overt signs of matchmaking, so Marissa relaxed and accepted the gathering for what it appeared to be: another of Louise’s rollicking, impromptu suppers.

      Marissa had never experienced such joyful family dynamics, and she loved being here.