Tender Savage by Iris Johansen Page A

think about already. Her body was responding as mindlessly to him as it had when she had first met him, and she couldn’t afford to yield him any more victories. “If you come here again, I won’t speak to you.” Desperation threaded her voice. “You might as well give up now.”
    “I’ll still come.” He met her gaze and she saw both implacable will and an odd hint of sadness in his expression. “And I won’t give up, Lara.”
    He stayed for the simple dinner Manuel brought them and then departed.
    He came again the next evening and the following night also.
    Lara tried to maintain a frigid silence, but he ignored her coldness. He didn’t speak of the war or his life of the last nine years, but of that time before the revolution. He painted vivid picturesof his days on the rancho where he had grown up and then spoke of his time at the university. The tales intrigued her in spite of herself and she found herself drawn to question him.
    “You never speak of your parents,” she said. “Did you have a close relationship?”
    “Not with my mother.” He shrugged. “She liked being the lady of the rancho, but motherhood was a bit of a strain. I can’t really blame her. I was as wild a hellion as you could imagine when I was growing up. But my father and I were close. He was a good, simple man with strong convictions. He saw no reason to hide them when the junta came into power. He should have known—” He broke off and lifted his cup of coffee to his lips. “I admired him.”
    “He died in the revolution?”
    “Before the revolution. When I was at the university. The junta ordered my mother and him taken to the Abbey and the rancho confiscated.” He looked down into the coffee in his cup. “They were shot before my eyes.”
    Shock jolted through Lara. “Dear God,” she whispered.
    “I’d been agitating against the junta at the university and they wanted to show me what could happen if I continued. So they took me to the Abbey and—”
    “Don’t talk about it,” she said quickly. “You don’t have to tell me.”
    He shook his head. “I want you to know. It’s part of what I am.” His grip tightened on the cup in his hand. “The junta handled the matter very stupidly. I was only nineteen and all they would have had to tell me was that they wouldn’t kill them if I’d stop agitating. I loved my father.”
    Lara swallowed to ease the tightness in her throat. “They didn’t give you that choice?”
    He shook his head. “They wanted to set an example. They wouldn’t listen to me. They shot them and let me go back to the university with orders to disband our group or the same thing would happen to me and all my friends.” He smiled sadly. “As I said, they handled the matter very stupidly. They should have killed me too.”
    “No!” Lara’s rejection came with instinctive force. How many times during his lifetime had Ricardo been on the verge of death? While shehad been plodding steadily forward in her comfortable, mundane world, he had been going through hellish mental and physical anguish.
    “I was like a madman. Full of rage … and guilt.”
    “Guilt?”
    “They told me that I had killed them. That my rabble-rousing speeches had sent them to their deaths. For a while I believed them.” He put his cup down on the rocky ground. “But then I realized that they would have been killed anyway. My father was a powerful man and he hated the junta as much as I did.”
    “So you started the revolution.”
    “No one starts a revolution; it’s a chain reaction that explodes and keeps on exploding until the end is reached.”
    “With you providing the nitroglycerine.”
    “Do you think I like it?” he asked with sudden fierceness. “Do you think I wouldn’t rather have spent my youth doing something besides fighting this damn war? I’m almost thirty and I’ve known nothing but killing and maiming.” He drew adeep breath. “Some things are worth fighting for, but, Lord, I’m tired