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Her face lit up when she spoke again. “Everything! To be honest, my idea of traveling is usually finding those few blocks of high-end stores and shopping all day. Then going to a fancy restaurant to show off what I bought. My mom trained me well. The only difference between us is, I don’t generally have eight whisky sours and plant my face in the spaghetti bolognese. I’m not sure what it is about this place. Maybe it’s being here at Maria Rosa’s, but I want to see everything.” She paused and started to flip through pages she had dog-eared. “The train up to Sugar Loaf Mountain, the Christ the Redeemer statue, Tijuca Forest—the giant waterfalls, the favelas…I want to see it all!”
“That’s an awfully tall order for one day.”
Her bright smile fell. “I wish we had more than one day.”
There was no way in the world I would ever be able to deny this woman anything that made her face light up like that. I scratched my chin. “You know what? I have an idea.”
“What’s that?”
“I think it should be a surprise.”
“I love surprises!”
Maybe I shouldn’t have left this morning then.
“Alright. You trust your life in my hands for today?”
“It was in your hands for an entire plane ride. So I don’t see why not.”
It wasn’t the time to mention that I was a fuck of a lot more reckless when I wasn’t in the sky. “Okay. Get dressed. And you’ll need to wear something tight. No loose clothing. If you have any of those bicycle shorts and a tight tank top, that would work best.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll head to the kitchen and whip us up some ovos picantes e salsicha.”
“Mmm…sounds delicious.”
“It is. You’re going to love my sausage.” I winked and left her to it.
MARIA ROSA HAD AN OLD, beat up, open-air Jeep that boarders could use for seventy-five Brazilian Real a day, roughly about twenty bucks. I loved the thing, and Kendall seemed to, as well. She hadn’t stopped smiling since she laid eyes on the hunk of junk. Once, I had rented a Mustang convertible while I was on layover in Barcelona and had planned to spend the day with one of the flight attendants who had been in my bed the night before. She made me put the top up so it wouldn’t mess her hair up. That was the last time I bothered attempting to do anything outside of fucking when I stayed at a hotel. But Kendall, the woman with a T-shirt that costs more than my entire wardrobe, just pulled an elastic band from her bag and tied her hair back without even thinking about the mess the wind may cause. It made her that much more sexy to me.
“How much longer? Are we seeing Christ the Redeemer first?”
We had been slowly driving up a winding mountain road for the last ten minutes, so her guess was a good one. Although she didn’t know it yet, it was more likely she would be praying to Christ to save her ass in a few minutes, rather than snapping pictures of him for Instagram. “We’re almost there. I haven’t decided what we’re going to see first. But we will see the statue at some point.”
She scrunched up her face. “How could you not have decided on our first stop if we’re almost there?”
“Ahh…a riddle. That’s for me to know and you to figure out, my perky friend.”
She rolled her eyes, but I was certain she was having a great time, even though we hadn’t gotten to the fun part yet. When we were a minute or two away from where we would be leaving from, she caught on that I wasn’t wearing tight clothes, yet I had told her she needed to.
“Where are your bicycle shorts?”
“Don’t have any.”
“Don’t you need tight clothes?”
“Nope.”
“How come? You told me I needed them for what we were doing today.”
“I actually didn’t. I told you I needed you to wear tight clothes. But I never mentioned that it was for what we were going to do today.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I just wanted to see you in tight clothes.”
Her eyes flared. But instead of getting mad, she threw her head back in a fit of laughter. “You are such a perv.”
