AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I was born in a little village outside of Mexicali, which is just over the border in Mexico. Still have many relatives there. It’s where I started school, too, since we didn’t come north until I was nine.”
She’d lived in the United States her entire life and probably didn’t speak her first language as well as he spoke his second. “And yet you’ve gone on to build a successful business.”
He looked away again and his hand went to the buttons that kept his polo shirt closed. “I had my share of trouble. We moved to the barrio in East L.A. when we first arrived and it wasn’t always a good place for children. Especially teenagers.”
“And you think Malibu is?” Shanna shook her head. “Too much can be almost as dangerous as too little.”
“Then maybe we have more in common than first appears,” Jorge replied.
Yeah, right, Shanna thought. They were about the same age, but that was the beginning and the end of what they had in common. He was a successful, self-made man, and she was the spoiled, do-nothing daughter of another. Without knowing what to say, she picked at the peeling paint on the trim around the front window. It fell to the cobblestones, as thin and brittle as her heart felt in her chest.
“Ms. Ryan…”
Her head jerked around. “Shanna. Please call me Shanna.”
“It’s such a pretty name.”
Embarrassed, she laughed again, and lifted another shard of paint from the sill with her fake nail tip. “It came from one of my mother’s favorite romance novels.”
“Ah. Like all parents, she hoped her daughter would find love.”
But what had Shanna found instead? When she was younger, there’d been men who made appropriate playmates in the world of the L.A. clubs and red-carpet parties. But they’d drifted on to ever-younger Hollywood women and the ones who phoned her now had more in common with her father—their age, anyway—than they had with her.
For a few months she’d thought, hoped, Jay…Tears stung the corners of her eyes and she squeezed them tight, holding in the pain.
“Shanna. Shanna.” Jorge’s hand landed on her shoulder. It was warm and gentle. “Can I help?”
Scooting away from his steady touch, she rubbed the back of her hand against her cheek. “You are helping. I could really use that estimate.”
He was silent a moment and she wondered if she’d offended him somehow. “Sí. Sí,” he said, his voice stiff. “The estimate. I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”
“That would be great,” she said, though she sounded miserable. She felt miserable. Lifting her head, she looked next door at her house—no, the house she lived in…it belonged to her father, of course—and tried to imagine herself inside her deep marble bathtub, hot water penetrating its slick cold surfaces, hot water finding a way to warm her inside, too.
But the place next door was never warm, not really. And she rattled around it like an ice cube in an empty highball glass. More loose blue paint floated through the air as she ran her finger over the Pearsons’ sill.
A memory burst into her mind. That Fourth of July, the one pictured in the hallway. That had been her, she remembered now, wearing that banana-yellow bikini and grinning like a happy, sand-encrusted goblin. She’d been a happy, sand-encrusted goblin that day. The Pearsons had a tradition, she recalled. The kids invited to their party put on a Fourth of July parade on the beach, marching through the sand dragging wagons or riding thick-tired bicycles, accompanied by dolls, dogs, and whatever else they could decorate in red, white, and blue. Jay had dragged his youngest sister behind him on a boogie board, while Shanna spun in cartwheels beside them.
Unlike a lot of Malibu celebrations, the Pearsons’ party hadn’t been martinis and hors d’oeuvres, but beer and hot dogs burned by real dads and served by real moms and not by butlers and nannies. She couldn’t remember another quite like it—had they started going to Maui in July?—but that day, that day had been so perfect.
“It’s going to be a shame to tear this home down,” she said aloud. “It was a very happy spot.”
“Does your father really need it?”
“My father doesn’t need anything. But what he wants…” She shrugged.
“What do you want, Shanna?”
To feel warm. Needed. Important.
To be a person, and not a sponge.
To have a home. Her own home.
“I could buy this place,” she heard herself say.
His eyebrows rose. “Qué?”
“I have money. I used to model on occasion, believe it or not. I did a commercial or two.”
“For that candy bar. Decadence.”
Heat climbed up her throat. It had run for three or four years. Shanna between satin sheets with chocolate melting on her chin and running toward her barely covered cleavage. Her head tilting back, her mouth open for the phallic-shaped candy bar.
Jorge shrugged. “They played it on the Spanish language stations, too. ‘Take a taste of sin.’”
Her face burned hotter. “I made money from that.” She knew she sounded defensive.
He shrugged again. “Bueno. Especially if it’s enough to buy this house from your father.”
Would he sell? Maybe, if she showed him how nice it could be again, even though not up to the standards of the marble monstrosity next door, of course. “But it’s not enough to pay for all the work it needs, too.”
“It’s a small house. What it needs doesn’t look major to me. Do it yourself.”
She stared at him. “What?”
He cocked his head toward the house. “There are paint cans inside. Start with them. Go to the hardware store and buy some paint scrapers and brushes.”
“But I…” Have Pilates classes and nail appointments and…and…nothing. I have nothing. I know how to do nothing. Tears stung her eyes again.
But she was supposed to be calm and in charge. A woman of business.
A woman of value.
Yet she’d felt as empty as this old house for so very long that even Jorge Santos’s beautiful eyes and steady gaze couldn’t change that.
Eight
Cooking is actually quite aggressive and controlling and sometimes, yes, there is an element of force-feeding going on.
—NIGELLA LAWSON, CULINARY WRITER
Monday morning, Nikki was back in Jay’s kitchen, cutting a pineapple for the massive fruit salad she planned to set out for the scheduled meeting of NYFM’s editorial staff. She’d already served Fern one of the granola and yogurt parfaits she’d prepared, and then overheard the teenager on her cell phone telling her boyfriend, Jenner, that she was shopping with the girls that day.
Nikki blew out a sigh. She could put away at least one worry for the moment.
Then Jay appeared on the back deck, shirtless and wet, a half-naked reminder of all the other worries that were front and center in her mind—as they had been all weekend she’d been home alone with Fish.
Jay knew she wasn’t attracted to girls.
Worse, he knew she was attracted to him.
Worse than that, he was attracted right back.
Casting him another sidelong look, she fell right into admiring everything so maddeningly unforgettable about him: his lean muscles, his golden skin, the charming smile he beamed her way when he caught her watching. She remembered the touch of his hot tongue on her naked nipple, and as if he did, too, his smile widened.
He was too damn good at this.
Scowling, she jerked her focus back to the cutting board and almost wished she hadn’t hurried home on Friday night after they’d returned to his house from the restaurant. While it had allowed her to break free of him at a crucial moment, maybe if she’d stuck around some new plan would have occurred to her. As it was, she was now stymied as to how to handle the situation.
Stuck.
Without a single idea of what to do about the man she wanted as a reference, not a lover.
As he opened the sliding glass door to step inside, she kept her gaze on the golden yellow triangles of pineapple she was piling into a bowl. The one thing she had going for her was how well she kept her distance from other people. Until she came up with a better plan, she’d pretend there was a wall between herself and Jay.
The problem with that, of course, was that he didn’t see the same imaginary bricks she was so busy cementing together. He came into the kitchen and so far into her personal space that when he reached around her for a coffee mug, the damp underside of his bare arm slid against her shoulder.
She jumped just like when he’d put his hand over her mouth Friday night—at times her instincts would balk at a man’s sudden moves—and then shuffled left so that she had more air.
“Nice weekend, cookie?”
Small talk. She could do that, though she wasn’t good at it. “Sure. Spent a few hours at the martial arts studio working on my black belt, taught a self-defense class at the local Y, then polished all sixteen pairs of my steel-toed boots that you won’t let me wear to work.”
He leaned back against the countertop, regarding her with a lazy gaze. “Oooh, scary. But you’re a better chef than you are a storyteller. I’m betting you actually caught up on your backlog of cooking magazines, pampered yourself with a pedicure, then watched some sappy chick flick on Lifetime while you practiced your new hobby.”
