The Saint's Devilish Deal (8 page)

“You would be surprised what I was thinking about out there.” Not one thought of waves had distracted him from Esmerelda since she arrived home. He’d tried to fool himself that he wanted to escape but in reality he could leave any time he wanted. Paying Constance’s bills assured him of that; she wouldn’t allow the place to be sold after he put so much cash into it. But Esme didn’t need to know that on the water just now he’d been thinking of her and a night beneath the vines in Napa rather than their supposed debt crisis.

“I’m not dumb, Santiago. That roll was bad, but I saw the news coverage. A couple of bruised ribs, bruised hip, torn ligaments in your knee. Bad, but not career ending.”

His shoulder twinged. “The papers didn’t get everything right.” He swiped more grey over the red walls. When he turned, Esme looked expectantly at him. “All the gory details?” She nodded.

“I saw the wave, knew it was too big. Too much power, but I couldn’t not take it. I was up for a second, maybe two, and then it was just water. Over me. Surrounding me. In my mouth, my lungs.” He swallowed, feeling the weight of the water press against him, keeping him down. Ripping at his arms and legs as if it wanted to tear him apart. He pushed the memories away. “I wasn’t thinking of another competition, Esme.”

“So you’re here because you can’t be there?” The words sounded hopeful and Santiago couldn’t let her have hope. He wouldn’t return to surfing but he also wouldn’t stay in Vallarta. He needed to be free. So did she.

“No. I’m here because Constance was kind when I needed a place to heal. I owe her, but I won’t stay, pequeña. I was a surfer and a property developer before this crisis; now I’m just a property developer. I float between deals and I like it that way. When we’re done here, I’ll leave. Anything that starts between us again, it won’t make me stay.” He pushed more paint across the wall.

“Well, thank god we got that settled. Here I was thinking you wanted to stay at Casa after and, frankly, I saw what you’ve been paying in rent and it’s not nearly enough. I would’ve hated to fight over rental increases in six months.” Her tone was teasing but he sensed another emotion underneath. Pain, maybe, anger. But he let the underlying tension slip away so that her words could lighten the mood.

They pushed more paint for a while, each lost in thought. Santiago wanted to know why Esme was back in Vallarta but didn’t ask. He didn’t want any half-truths from her, the way he’d given half-truths to her. Besides, this was their first semi-normal working moment since the meeting with Velazquez. Whatever brought her back from California didn’t matter.

“You got my answer. Why are you really here?” he heard himself say. The words shocked Santiago into silence for a few seconds. He hadn’t intended to ask that. Not now. Hell, not ever. He didn’t need to know her reasons—he only needed to show her she could thrive anywhere, not just at Casa. That way it wouldn’t hurt her so much when he took Casa away.

“Um, my aunt was sick—”

“You may not have your life splashed across the tabloids, but it was simple enough to call Bristol Bay and learn you’d quit your job a full week before Constance called.”

“I can’t believe you called my old boss. For what? A reference?”

“Just doing my homework.”

Shoulders stiff and back straight, Esme turned back to the wall, making a show of painting over the red walls.

“You landed in Vallarta less than five hours after she called,” Santiago pushed. “Not an impossibility if you had special dispensation from the U.S. Government to skip airport security. But I’m guessing that didn’t happen. Why were you coming back, Esmerelda?”

“Vacation?”

Even Santiago heard the question in the word so he said nothing, just waited.

“Fine. I broke up with a guy I was seeing and I wanted a change of scenery.”

“So you left comfortable, eighty-degree weather in Northern California for the refreshing one-hundred-ten-degree heat of a Mexican summer.”

“A Mexican summer on the beach,” she said triumphantly.

“You worked at a B&B on a beach.”

She painted a few more grey stripes over the red wall. “Are you going to tease me about this mercilessly over the next six months? Because, seriously, if I tell you I don’t want to hear one word about it.”

“Cross my heart,” he said, just as he’d said a million times when they were kids.

“He cheated with me.”

“Did I miss something in that translation?”

  Esme rolled her eyes. “Your English is as good as your Spanish. I said cheated with me. I was his ‘other woman’ and I didn’t know it. Not for a year. Not until his wife came screaming into the B&B. . . it was brutal. When I confronted him that night, he said I should consider myself lucky. That I got all the good parts of him and none of the hassle of keeping a clean house or cooking dinner or having children.” Her voice caught over the last words.

“He used you?”

“The funny part is that I was using him just as badly.” Esme tried to laugh but the sound was hollow. Her mouth twisted and Santiago wanted to cross the room to hold her. He knew that would only result in her pushing him away, so he stayed beside his wall. “I didn’t love him. He was easy to be around because he didn’t make demands on my time. It isn’t like he broke my heart or anything.” She twirled a loose lock of hair around her finger. “I wanted to come back to help Constance. To make some plans. I guess I wanted to float for a little bit before I started my life up again.”

“And here you’ve been whacking me with the No Floating Allowed stick since you moved back in.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?”

Santiago shrugged. “Not really. It’s simple enough to tell someone else how they should live. Harder to see the answers in your own life.”

“A philosophical surfer? Be still my heart.” She batted her eyelashes at him, a move she’d perfected as a teenager, and for a second it seemed they were back where they’d started all those years ago. She sighed. “We’ve started over at least twice now. But this time, could we just agree to leave the past in the past and try to save the villa? As friends?”

Friends. She was fooling herself to think they could ever be anything as innocuous as friends. But she had a point. If they kept fighting over the same things, Eduardo would win. Casa would be lost. He nodded.

“Speaking of philosophy, what message are we sending our well-to-do guests with ugly grey walls?”

This time her laugh was real and Santiago felt the tension drain from the room. Time to get back to work, a voice inside him said.

“The room isn’t going to be grey. Have you never painted before? This is a base coat. It will cover the red so that no streaks bleed through the top coat.”

“And the top coat will be?”

“White. A nice, clean, white canvas.” She looked around the room, excitement growing in her eyes. “Brilliant white. Just what your New York designers would order.”

“The hospital ward of your dreams?”

The frown only lasted a minute, and then was replaced by a smile as she remembered him down the hall when she informed Constance that white walls and white furniture were too much like hospital wards to be relaxing. “Broken up by pops of color,” she said, echoing Constance’s retort from all those years ago. Lost in her imagination, Esme said, “Blues and greens and maybe a little yellow. Happy colors.”

Santiago could almost see the brilliantly white room with white furnishings. Could imagine sitting on one of the terraces in newly cushioned chaises and drinking a beer. He stopped that train of thought, fought the urge to cross to her side of the room and kiss her senseless. “Well, as you said, I’m not much of a painter. Before I do something unfixable to your walls, I’ll go.”

Santiago stood, and placed his paintbrush back into the bucket. He needed to get a bit of distance from her before dinner tonight, to keep all the walls in place.

*

Esme watched the clock take another tick toward the six and barely repressed a shiver. Not only had a cold shower not worked, but with every twist of her hair or swipe of Cori’s blush brush she felt her skin tighten. She had to get a grip. If she was this worked up at four minutes until six, how would she survive an entire dinner in Santiago’s presence? Everything would have been fine if they hadn’t had that stupid heart-to-heart downstairs. If he hadn’t helped her paint. Why couldn’t he have stayed in his precious ocean for a few more hours?

This is not a date. It’s dinner with a business colleague. Just dinner, calm down.

“Ow!” Esme flinched as Cori’s hot iron tapped against her forehead. Best friends since childhood, when Esme realized she needed more than emotional armor to take on Santiago’s dinner demand, she called Cori who closed her confectioner’s shop early to help.

“Well, if you’d stop fidgeting like a toddler,” Cori said, blowing out a breath. “I know this is Santiago and I know you’re nervous about the villa, but Esme, you’re blowing everything out of proportion.”

Only she wasn’t. Esme hadn’t told Cori about the deal. Hadn’t told her that the flames Santiago ignited all those years ago had been reignited to a blazing fury by a single kiss. She didn’t want to hear another lecture from Cori about the Cruz men. Her brain knew all about Santiago, Tobias, and Eduardo. It was her heart that was the problem. The Santiago who watered Constance’s flowers and who was upset about firing a friend was the boy and almost business partner she remembered from Napa.

But the man who made that deal with her, who smirked as he shook her hand and ordered her to dinner. . . That was another man entirely. Esme needed to figure out which was the real Santiago. She was out of her depth and sinking fast. Worse yet, she had the feeling her keep-him-at-arm’s-length resolve would crumble before she sat in the soft-as-butter seats of his midnight blue Porsche.

“Why are you so nervous?” Cori asked as she pulled the iron from Esme’s hair and began arranging sections on her head. “It’s just dinner.”

“Just like it was only dinner in Napa. Only it wasn’t. That dinner led to a lunch and a vineyard tour and in just a couple of days Santiago was the center of my life.” The words rushed from Esme’s mouth even as she struggled to stop the flow. She could still smell the scented candles he’d arranged in one of the wine cellars where they met. Could hear his breathing in the middle of the night. Smell the musky, male scent of him as they walked row after row of grapes. She barely held back a sigh.

What she needed to remember was how he’d turned on her, not how he’d turned her on. Santiago had disappeared when she’d needed him most, leaving no one to fight his family. She couldn’t let the same thing happen to Constance.

“Let me guess, picnic dinners before a fire and last minute changes from fancy dinners to rides along the coast?” Esme could only nod as Cori continued. “Sounds like a Cruz man to me. Making plans, keeping you on your toes, never letting you relax. That’s how they wear you down, make you fall—”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Esme sat up, pulling away from Cori’s hot curling iron. “Are you saying you and Tobias…? You dated Tobias and didn’t tell me? When? How?” All thoughts of Santiago, all her nervousness about dinner disappeared in a flash.

“My over-in-sixty-seconds relationship with Tobias has nothing to do with you and Santiago. Just remember, it’s only business,” she said. The grim line of her mouth told Esme this conversation was over.

“Why does that not help? This isn’t just business. The villa is personal to me.” And so is Santiago, said an unruly sliver of her heart. Try as she might, she couldn’t relegate Santiago into any boxes she created in her mind. The man was infuriatingly unboxable.

Cori finished Esme’s updo and turned her to face the mirror. Esme’s right hand went to her throat and her eyes widened.

The jewel tone of the amethyst sheath rippled in the light and enhanced her natural color, making her lightly tanned skin glow. A few brushes of loose powder covered the freckles on her nose and a few swoops of smoky shadow made Esme’s eyes the most brilliant shade of green she had ever seen. Loose, spiraled tendrils of hair caressed her neck and cheeks, with most pinned up on her head. So different from her usual professional ponytail or French twist, Esme was almost afraid to move her head.

This was exactly the kind of armor she could use to keep Santiago at bay. The woman smiling at her in the mirror was cool and confident, every trace of the nervous Esme carefully hidden behind lip, eye, and cheek colors.

Her heart rate finally calmed and her palms dried. Esme grinned. “You’re brilliant.”

Cori smiled back and began putting brushes and irons away. “Had those pastry classes at cooking school not paid off, I might have been an okay hairdresser.”

Esme squeezed Cori’s hand. “Thank you for helping me prepare.” Cori cocked an eyebrow at her choice of words. Esme shrugged. “I keep telling myself this is a six month interview.”

Grinning, Cori nodded. “Not only are you going to knock him off balance, you’re going to keep him there. Trust me. Cruz men are all about the exterior so keep him focused here—” she rotated her hands in circles before Esme’s torso “—and keep your focus on bringing the villa back to life. Now, two rules. No champagne, you can’t handle it any better than I can. And don’t kiss him goodnight. A Cruz plus a kiss equals a catastrophe for mere mortals like us, right?”

Esme grabbed her lipstick, keys, and a comb, placing them in her small silk clutch as she stepped newly painted toes into the strappy, silver-studded Manolos she’d saved for months to buy. It was about time she let them out to see the light of the moon, Esme decided, feeling more feminine than she had allowed herself in years.

Chapter Six

Santiago caught his breath as he glanced up the stairwell. Esmerelda was breathtaking. She had taken him seriously and gone was the short, tight length of her usual skirts. Gone the boring grey color. Instead purple silk hugged her curves, stopping just above her knees with a single strap holding the dress over her left shoulder. The dress dipped provocatively over her right breast and under her arm. Her fresh, eucalyptus scent tickled his nose.