Читать книгу Hot Latin Docs Collection - Tina Beckett, Amalie Berlin - Страница 18

CHAPTER EIGHT

“I’M SURPRISED YOU don’t have shares in this place, Santi.”

“We probably do.”

“We?” Saoirse kept her tone light, but Santi could tell she knew the answer before she asked it. Even he noticed he was mentioning his brothers more frequently. His tone was less defensive each time, as though Saoirse was his safe harbor for all the complicated issues he was trying to unravel. He stole a piece of fried plantain and confirmed what she already knew. “Me and my brothers. We practically used to live here.”

“And why not? There’s everything a growing boy needs. Helibanas and endless refills of iced tea.” Saoirse snickered, all the while squeezing lime juice onto her ever-diminishing pile of fried plantains. “You won’t have worried about scurvy anyhow.”

“Yes.” Santi nodded gravely. “That’s why we came here. To ward off scurvy.”

“Stop it!” Saoirse giggled, slapping away Santi’s hand as he tried, for the umpteenth time, to tug the pickles out of her toasted sandwich.

“They’re the best part!” he protested, as if it was his earthly right to possess all her dill pickles.

“Precisely,” she retorted, extracting a sliver of pickle from amid the melty goo of cheese, pork and onion and popping it into her mouth. “Which is why I want to eat it.”

“You’d think you were pregnant the way you’re relishing that thing.”

The instant he’d said it he wished the moment away.

Up until he’d opened his big mouth, Saoirse had actually been glowing with something better than happiness—contentment. And the fact that he’d had even the tiniest bit to do with that had put a satisfied smile on his lips, too.

“Don’t. Just...” He tried to wave away his words. “Don’t listen to a thing that comes out of my mouth. Unless, of course, it’s wise and quotable.”

She gave him a dubious sidelong glance then took another big munch of pickle. “And what was it that made you think I ever bothered listening to a word you said, sensible or otherwise?”

And there it was—the smile that lit up his world—back on show in his favorite corner of his favorite cantina in the best city in the world. If only...

The hole in his life that had yet to be filled yawned wider.

It was time.

He needed to set things straight with his brothers. He’d spent weeks dithering, if he was being really honest, and waiting for the best moment if he wasn’t. With so much that was coming good in his life, he needed to stop stalling.

He waved a hand at the waitress, signaling their need for another round. Maybe just a bit more stalling...fortifying himself would be essential.

“Not for me,” Saoirse protested, plopping her hands on her belly as if to prove her point. “Two was more than enough. Anymore and everyone will think I look preg—”

She stopped in midflow, a film of tears clouding her tropical blue eyes before she could look away and scrub them clean. She pulled her fists away from her eyes and glared. “See what you’ve done? Now I’ve got pregnancy on my mind.” It was impossible not to notice the quiver in her normally steady voice.

“Hey,” he said softly, pressing a hand atop hers and stroking the back of his other hand along her cheek. “Believe me, Murph. Your belly is just perfect.” And it was. Everything about her was exactly right. Beautiful. “And just think!” He scrambled for a bright side. “No stretch marks. Ever!”

If you couldn’t dig deep enough to heal the wound, crack a joke. It was how he’d survived. Saoirse deserved more, but it was what he had on offer. A fake marriage. Bad jokes. Unzipping his heart and showing her what he really felt? Not there yet. Not by a long shot.

She pursed her lips at him and grabbed her iced tea, giving the oversize glass a sharp jiggle before she put her beautifully pouty lips around the straw.

Mio Dios, she could rule an army of thousands if she dared.

He wove his fingers together, inverted and stretched them, his bare ring finger standing out among the weave of digits. He’d promised to make an honest woman of Saoirse. As if she needed validating. Or more honesty.

She was more painfully honest than most. Painful only in that she confronted the truth head on. Boldly. Courageously. Life had treated her cruelly and she had come back fighting. She was an inspiration to him. And endlessly cheeky, he realized when he caught her loading her straw with ice water and flicking it at him.

“What’s that for?”

“The false optimism! Besides, if you had it your way and I kept eating these sandwiches by the bushel load?” She blew out her cheeks then deflated them with a pop. “You’d have a lot more on your hands than you ever bargained for.”

“Chamaquita, in my culture a few more pounds on that skinny little frame of yours would be nothing to worry about. If I took you home to my mother...”

Now it was his turn to look away. What a pair they were!

Yes, it had been a long day. Even longer for Saoirse, who’d risen at dawn to do her rounds on the racetrack, but what was all this getting-misty-eyed business? He’d long ago committed his tear ducts to an unbreakable pact. They didn’t work. Ever. And in exchange? He would do little to nothing to fight it. So why were they playing up now? Little doubt it had something to do with the woman slipping her hand onto his thigh and giving his leg a gentle squeeze.

“Why don’t you go?” The compassion in Saoirse’s voice almost tipped the balance.

“Qué?”

“To your brothers. It’s written all over your face. And they’re the closest link you have to your mother, so...short of us hunting down someone who can do a séance...”

His eyes widened.

“One Helibana with extra sauce.” He barely heard the waitress as she slipped the sandwich onto the table, his hunger vanishing simultaneously.

“We’ll have that to go, please.” Saoirse smiled gently up at the waitress then stopped her with a quick “Ah!” before she left. “Would it be all right to make that about eight sandwiches to go?”

“Eight?” The waitress’s disbelief was nearly as deep-seated as Santi’s.

“No. You’re right. Make that a dozen.” Saoirse pointed generically toward the door then leaned in conspiratorially, “Valentino stocktaking night.”

The waitress nodded, smiling with a hit of recognition, then swished away.

“Well, look who’s all proud of herself for hitting the nail on the head,” Santi said to cover the surge of emotion filling up his chest like a lead balloon.

“Santi? Do you think I was born yesterday or something?”

“No, but I—”

“I saw your face when you were talking to that copper before.”

“The detective?”

“The badge-wearing guy, yeah. You looked like you’d seen a ghost and then you got all intense and broody for the next couple of hours. Not to mention the fact you’ve only mentioned stocktaking night about four hundred thousand times in the ambulance.”

“Have I?” his eyebrows shot up. “I don’t get brood—”

She cut him off with a cluck of her tongue. “Don’t even bother. You’re just lucky I took pity on you and made sweet love to you all afternoon to keep your mind off your troubles.” She sat back with a satisfied grin, all the while rat-a-tat-tatting her I-know-I’m-right fingers along the edge of the wooden tabletop.

“First of all, young lady, I think you’ll find it was me who made the first move.” Santiago drew himself up to what he hoped was his most impressive height.

“First of all nothing.” Saoirse shook her head with a quick no-you-don’t finger wag that would’ve sent any child running to the naughty corner of their own volition.

Damn. It was a crying shame this woman wouldn’t be a mother. Any offspring of hers would be about as well behaved as they came, too terrified to contest the finger wag.

“There’s a reason I haven’t been to see them yet.” Santi felt a muscle in his jaw twitch. Feeble, he knew. But it was his truth and he was going to own it. He wanted to be ready to see them.

“In my book? The best time to do something like this is when you’re least prepared. That way you’re expecting very little...” Saoirse collapsed her spine into a curve then sprang back upright “...and your bounce-back factor will be high.”

“My bounce-back factor?”

“Yes. You’ll be needing that if things don’t go well.”

“So you’re already banking on failure?” He bristled.

She snorted. “Santiago Valentino, I’ve never heard such balderdash in all my days. You are the strongest, most capable, failure-free zone of a human I’ve ever had the honor to work with.”

He shook his head. Now wasn’t the time for basking in undeserved compliments. “It’s not that simple.”

“You are, of course, completely free to share and explain why trotting down the road and telling your brothers you’re back in town is so difficult, but in my culture...” she paused for effect, the hint of a twinkle in her eyes “...we harbor our secrets close to our chests unless the whole village knows about it anyway, in which case there’s not much point in discussing what’s already a done deal. The point being, I fled for something everyone knew about. There was no need to spell it all out for folk. Public humiliation does that to a girl, but I’m getting the feeling you’re the only one who knows why you left.”

“I left a note.”

“Someone’s sounding a bit defensive.” She snorted.

“I could have just left! No note—nothing.”

“Really? Is that what you could have done?” Saoirse looked at him as if he’d just told the biggest honking lie of the lot. But she hadn’t known him then. Rebel without a cause didn’t even begin to cover it. The motorcycle was all that remained of his bad-boy image he’d fine-tuned to teenage perfection.

“You don’t know what kind of man—kid—I was back then.” He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I wasn’t a big fan of who I was becoming, this restless, confused mess.”

“Not so much of a mess you didn’t recognize what was happening. And not so much of a mess you didn’t man up and do something about it. Besides,” she added with a grin, “you did leave a note.”

“It wasn’t a back-in-five sort of job!” He snapped. “Sorry, I just—”

“Are we feeling a bit touchy because someone is actually going to go and do this thing?”

“Very.”

Jangling nerves were getting the better of him and that’s not how he wanted this to go. He’d joined the military to gain better control over himself—his emotions, his goals, his future. And here he was, messing it all up again.

Maybe that was the irony. When he’d been on duty in the world’s cruelest war zones, the main lesson he’d come away with? You couldn’t control life—you could only control how you responded to it. He should have had a reminder tattooed on his forearm: Be the man you know you can be.

“Tell me about the note,” Saoirse said softly.

“It was...it was sort of like a guide to life from fifteen to eighteen. My area of expertise.” He appreciated Saoirse’s laugh. To describe it now sounded so juvenile, but that’s what he had been. Countless miles from adulthood.

“And what was all this wise advice you were offering your brother?”

“It was reams—well, not exactly reams but it was vital information for a thirteen-year-old. The coolest place to hang out. Which locker bay to get assigned when he was a senior in high school, which streets to steer clear of because of the gangs, although he pretty much knew that already. Never to take Mr. Prunte’s science class because the man was a much better baseball coach than he was science teacher.” He watched as Saoirse’s eyes grew wider and wider. “I wasn’t going to leave Alejandro completely hanging.”

“What did you do? Tuck it under his pillow?”

Her words, meant to be jokey, struck him like daggers. Reminders that he had been a coward. Leaving home only to try and prove his mettle on an anonymous battlefield where failure wouldn’t feel so personal. But it had. Every life lost had sucked his soul a little bit drier, leaving it little more than an arid wasteland. And now he was supposed to just wander over to the bodega with a sack of sandwiches and make everything all right again?

A surge of frustration washed through him.

“What was I supposed to do, Murph? There’s no guide for kids whose parents are shot right in front of them. My kid brother almost died. And all he had was me—the poor second to my older brothers who did the best they could in the circumstances. Looking after us, making good on their full-ride scholarships to medical school while keeping the family business running as well. They don’t write those kind of guides, mija. I did the best I could.”

Saoirse stared at him slack-jawed.

“That may have come out a bit more aggressively than I’d intended.” It didn’t sound like an apology. But it was one. The best he could do, all things considered.

She shook her head, her fingers steepling in front of her lips. Whether it was to keep words in or out he couldn’t tell.

Her fingers parted.

“So, what you’re really saying is that your brothers are the only ones in the world who would understand?”

He nodded. Maybe it was a simpleton’s view, but that’s what his heart was telling him. Saoirse could offer compassion and that, of course, was invaluable...but his brothers had understanding. They’d lived through what he’d lived through and for the first few years after their parents had died the shared experience had been an insoluble glue.

“Well, then...” she nodded at the huge paper bag the waitress was carrying in their direction “...I guess you’d better get going.”

* * *

He heard them before he saw them. The unmistakable laughter. The playful mocking. A sharp chiding for a near miss with a catering-sized can of jalapenos, chased up by a call to throw an extra case of pinto beans to “the ugly one.”

Egalitarian brother love.

In the Valentino household? They were all “the ugly one.”

“Hé!” he called out a few yards away from the back storeroom where they kept their stock.

The banter continued unabated. They obviously hadn’t heard him.

Santi repeated the call, too loudly this time, and all the hustle and bustle of stocktaking clattered to an abrupt halt.

His brothers stood as if in an artist’s tableau—all caught in the midst of an everyday action—the expressions on their faces unreadable. He held up the unmistakable delivery bag from Mad Ron’s.

What exactly do you say to the people you loved most when you’d walked out on them fifteen years earlier?

“Helibanas? They’re still hot.”

Alejandro stepped out from the shadows of the doorway, a flat of canned tomatillos in his hands, his expression unreadable.

Flaca loco, they’d called him.

Alejandro wasn’t skinny now. He looked tall, athletic...muscular. The opposite of everything those idiot gangbangers had reduced him to with their bullets.

“Hé, gordos!” Alejandro flicked his head toward Santi. “The ugly one finally decided to show.”

And with that, he threw the flat of tomatillos toward his brother as if it were weightless. “What are you waiting for, bro? Get counting.”