He stopped behind me and gazed out thoughtfully at the lotus. A breeze caught a few strands of his shaggy hair, the sun highlighting the gold in his eyes. Times like this I could pretend I lived here and that there wasn’t a horrible world outside the beauty and blooms.
He eyed the bread and ran his hand along his strong jaw in amusement. “You do realize that koi fish need special food.”
I shrugged. “I thought they were like your pigs and they’d eat anything.” The other day he took me down a path that passed through a clump of trees at the edge of the yard and we ended up at a farm of sorts. He showed me his pigs. I’d learned how Franco’s body had been disposed of.
He took a seat next to me. “Not quite.”
Somewhere beyond the flowers, the gardener Carlos, a nice little fellow, started up his lawnmower. The sound was so mystifying. It reminded me of the traces of suburbia and normalness I used to see when driving into Cabo San Lucas.
I glanced over at Javier, wondering if he ever found it odd how normal and peaceful his life seemed to be on the outside when it was anything but. I wondered if he orchestrated it that way, to keep all this beauty and elegance around him in order to balance all the bad. I wondered if he had ever come close to making this place even more domestic than it was, if he ever dreamed about having a wife, having children.
“So what happened between you and Ellie?”
He went rigid for a moment before his gaze settled sharply on mine. “Where did that come from?”
“I don’t know. I’m curious.”
His eyes narrowed suspiciously and he shifted in his seat. “Why are you so focused on my past?”
“Because the past makes you who you are. I want to know why you’re this way.”
“This way?” he repeated with a wry smile. “Luisa, I hate to break it to you, but I’ve always been this way.”
“Then what happened? Humor me.”
He clasped his hands together, his watch jangling.
“In a nutshell,” he said with an exasperated sigh, “I was trying to help her get revenge. I was also trying to show her who she really was, or who I still thought she was. In the end, my help did nothing. She’d changed. She played me. She threw me under a bus so she could be with another man, some dumb fuck, and laughed while I was taken away. I’m sure she knew I ended up in prison. I’m sure it only cemented her decision to be good. That was all the thanks I got for trying to help.” He shook his head, anger simmering in his eyes. “People are so fucking ungrateful.”
“So she broke your heart.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “Don’t mistake broken pride for a broken heart. No man wants to look like a fool. Because of her, I lost almost everything, and it took years for me to get it all back. That isn’t something you can forget overnight.”
Now I understood the shield.
A few moments passed us by. One white and orange fish did several laps around the pond, eyeing me hopefully every time he came near. I thought about what Javier said, how he saw something in Ellie that he wanted to bring out of her. Her truth.
Finally I looked to Javier and shyly asked, “Will you help me?”
His brow furrowed delicately. “Help you what?”
“Help me see who I really am.”
He smirked. “I think you’re already finding that out. One day at a time.”
“But there are no days after tomorrow,” I said, trying to keep my voice as flat as possible.
Tension broke the surface of his face but he reined it in. “I guess you’re right. So what are we to do?”
Something, I screamed in my head. Anything!
I gulped my thoughts down so they didn’t dare escape from my lips. “I don’t know.”
He eyed Carlos who was now mowing behind a flowering bush then looked back at me. “You do,” he said, his heady gaze trailing to my lips. “What we’ve always done.”
He reached for my shoulder and slipped off the strap of my dress with his index finger. His eyes fastened to mine as he gently eased me back so I was lying flat on the bench. In moments, his pants were unzipped, my underwear was pushed to the side, and my leg was straight up against his shoulder. He pushed into me in broad daylight, while the lawnmower whirred in the background and the flowers perfumed the air with their delicate fragrance.
Even though I felt completely exposed to the living, breathing world that whirled around us, I was absolutely captive to the private one between us. When I came, my nails raking down his back and into the loose linen threads of his shirt, I was holding on to more than just him; I was holding on to the day, the moment, the second.
The time where I was queen.
And where I was free.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Javier
It was the middle of the night when Luisa woke me, just a few hours before dawn, before the day came and I would get Salvador’s call.
As usual, she woke me up in the most exquisite way—her naked body pressed against mine, hands in my hair, lips on my chest.
“What time is it?” I groaned, both from lack of sleep and from the way she pushed herself against my dick.
“Does it matter?” she asked softly.
I opened my eyes and made out her features in the waning dark. “No, it doesn’t. Not when you’re like this.”
Her pearly teeth flashed in a gorgeous smile. “Good,” she said. She trailed her fingers down the side of my face and that smile slowly vanished. I didn’t even have to ask why. I knew why. I knew what was coming. I was doing everything I could to steel my mind against the impossible choices I’d have to make in a few hours.
“Javier,” she whispered, my name sounding like heaven. “What are you going to do to me?”
I grinded my jaw, trying to keep it together. “Don’t ask me this.”
“But you must know.”
“But I don’t know,” I whispered harshly. “I’ll know when the time comes.”
“Will you promise to be the one to shoot me? Like you said.”
“I never said I would do that.”
“Will you promise?” she repeated, running her hands into my hair again.
“No,” I told her. And I was telling the truth. “I will not shoot you. I will not harm you. I will not kill you. Do you feel any better?”
She shook her head, and I could see how wet her eyes were. A tear drop fell on my chest and the hollowness beneath it grew. “I don’t feel better, because I know the others will. Salvador will not want me.”
I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “We don’t know that!” I hissed.
“And then so what if he does! Can you let me go? Can you watch me go back to him, to be his wife again?” She pressed her fingers into her tearstain and swirled it around my heart in angry circles. “Is that what you’re still capable of?”
Yes. I had to be.
“Luisa,” I said carefully, looking into her shining, desperate eyes. “You can’t save me.”
She smiled, letting out a caustic laugh. “I don’t want to save you,” she said, bringing her face closer to mine. “I want to join you.”
I stared at her, completely dazzled by what she had said. Even with everything that I was, she didn’t want to change me, she didn’t want to save me. Perhaps it was because I was so beyond saving. Either way, she saw who I was and all my filth and she wanted to roll around in it with me.
She had become my equal.
And in the morning she would become nothing.
“Did he say when he was calling?” Este asked with a hint of annoyance.
I couldn’t even answer him. My eyes were trained on the new flip phone lying on my desk in front of me. It was the exact same scene as the week before, except there was one difference. Este was right. Luisa had compromised me.