Aztec Sun

by Judith Arnold

  It was more than just intuition, of course. More than just signals he was sending. She’d gotten looks from him. Assessing looks, searing looks, challenging looks.

  Seductive looks.

  Diego Salazar was classically handsome—but while Sandra liked classic cars like Rafael’s magnificent Thunderbird, she didn’t necessarily like classic looks in a man. Rafael Perez was much more than handsome. He appeared hungry, wary, charismatic, guarded yet aggressive. When he stared at her, she felt as if he were searching for her weaknesses, determined to exploit them—although she couldn’t imagine how he would, or why.

  His blunt compliment about her alleged beauty was exactly the sort of attack she had to defend against. Evidently he thought he could flatter her into submission. He couldn’t—although she had to admit that never before had a man with such raw sex appeal told her she was beautiful.

  Around them the air vibrated with the din of voices as more workers arrived at the cantina for some after-work refreshment. A few people approached Rafael to say hello, but although he smiled at them, his expression wasn’t inviting, and they hastily retreated, leaving him and Sandra alone in the island of golden light that illuminated their table.

  “Anything else you want to know about me?” she inquired, not because she particularly enjoyed talking about herself, but because she wanted Rafael to trust her.

  He drank his beer quietly, his dark eyes never leaving her. “What do you hope to get from writing about me?” he asked, his tone as dark as his gaze.

  “A paycheck,” she joked, knowing as she spoke that that wasn’t the entire truth. She wanted to something more from Rafael—she wasn’t sure what, but something more. No great journalism prize rode on a human-interest profile of a Hispanic entrepreneur. No muckraking revelations from this story would make the world a better place. Yet when a man refused to answer a reporter’s questions, when he denied the use of a recorder, he had secrets. And Sandra, like any reporter, came to life in the face of secrets.

  Or maybe it was Rafael’s mysterious eyes that brought her to life. Maybe it was the pressure of his hand against hers when he’d pushed away her recorder, the hard surface of his palm against her knuckles, the heat of his grip. Maybe what she was after had less to do with eking a story out of this assignment than finding out why Rafael Perez’s touch triggered such an odd sensation in her belly, in her thighs, along her spine, in the shuddering beat of her heart.

  Why in God’s name was she responding to him? He wasn’t the first good-looking man she’d ever met. He wasn’t the most pleasant. In all honesty, she liked his mint-condition sports car better than she liked him.

  “Did you grow up in East L.A.?” she asked, trying to keep her voice casual—as if that might prevent him from realizing she was interviewing him.

  He wasn’t fooled. “Where I grew up is none of your business.”

  “It is my business,” she argued, growing impatient. “I’m here to do a story about you and your studio. How am I supposed to—”

  “Let me tell you something,” he murmured. His hands flexed around his glass, his fingers strong and brown. “You want to write about White Angel, fine. You want to write about Melanie Greer, the studio, Diego Salazar, any of that—fine. But a man is entitled to his privacy.”

  “What about my readers? They want to know how you managed to start a studio from scratch and turn it into a thriving enterprise.”

  “Hard work,” he told her. “Perseverence. Ambition.”

  “Clichés,” she chided him.

  “If I’d stumbled in another direction, I would have become a doctor. Or a janitor. Or a guy on the line at the factory across the street. This is how things worked out. Put that in your article. It’s enough to satisfy your readers.”

  He was trying to close her out, and in a perverse way she appreciated his bluntness. But more than before, more than what her instincts had told her, she was certain that who Rafael Perez was and how he’d succeeded was an outgrowth of something much more complicated and compelling than this is how things worked out.

  “What do you mean when you say you stumbled?” she asked.

  His face shut down, as if an iron security gate had dropped across it. His eyes grew cold; his mouth lost its hint of a smile. He tossed a twenty-dollar bill onto the table and rose. “We’re done,” he said, even though Sandra still had more than half her beer left.

  She considered objecting, but decided that would be counter-productive. She wasn’t going to learn Rafael Perez’s secrets by confronting him directly. She would have to investigate quietly, discreetly—and hope that when she was done digging she would have unearthed something worth her efforts.

  For now, however, he was calling the shots. If he said they were done, they were done.

  They strolled in silence down the sidewalk to the studio’s main entry. In front of the factory that shared the block with Aztec Sun, they waited while a few cars breezed past. Then Rafael cupped his hand around her elbow and escorted her across the street to the gate.

  She recalled once more the feel of his hand covering hers in the cantina. She recalled it all too vividly—because his courtesy in taking her arm as they crossed the street provoked the same disturbing reaction inside her. With one touch, one piercing gaze, he could reduce her to a mass of quivering nerves and overheated yearnings. He could make her want to believe that when he’d said she was beautiful it hadn’t just been empty words, a ploy to distract her from her job.

  She willed her body to relax. As soon as they reached the gate, he released her arm and shoved his hands into his pockets. She wondered if he was as edgy as she was.

  He had no reason to be, of course. She was just Sandra Garcia, a general assignment reporter in Metro. He was Rafael Perez, rich, successful, able to alter his environment with his mere presence.

  They walked past the guard, through the gate and around the office building to the visitors’ lot. A timid gust of wind caused the broad fronds of a nearby palm to rustle. Next to one of the sound stages the motor of a truck rumbled to life.

  Rafael drew to a halt beside Sandra’s car. She fumbled trying to unlock the door, and her key ring dropped to the asphalt with a loud jingling. Before she could bend over, he scooped it off the ground.

  She braced herself to feel his hand against hers as he passed her the keys, but he confounded her expectations by opening the door for her. Was that his strategy—to use chivalry to charm her out of investigating him and his studio?

  Why was she so sure he had a strategy at all? What was it about him that convinced her he was hiding something from her?

  The inscrutable darkness of his eyes. The taut line of his mouth. The enigmatic quality of his smile.

  The fact that he’d called her beautiful when she knew she wasn’t.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, setting her tote on the passenger seat and then folding herself behind the wheel. He leaned against the door frame, gazing down at her. The low sun slanted a rosy light across his face, emphasizing its strong angles, making him look even more mysterious—and much too sexy.

  He dangled her keys above her, almost teasing, and then let them drop into her outstretched hand. “Why won’t you talk to me?” she asked, figuring she had nothing to lose.

  The glimmer of amusement in his eyes vanished. His gaze remained on her, impenetrable, as he mulled over his reply. “If you’re here to write about the movie, you’ll get all the talk you need.”

  “I’m here to write about you.”

  He opened his mouth as if to speak, then shook his head. “I don’t want fame. I don’t want celebrity. I make movies. That’s all.”

  “That’s not all.” She could persevere as well as he could.

  He reached through the open window of her car and traced a line along the edge of her chin with his index finger. Then he pulled back. “Don’t use your big brown eyes on me, Sandra. It won’t work.” He sighed and straighted up. “You’re here to write about White Angel. Not about me. A
nything you need to know, Diego will tell you.”

  Diego would tell her only what he and Rafael wanted her to know. What she needed to know—not just about White Angel but about Rafael, about this man with his riveting gaze and his ability to shatter her composure with a single, erotic stroke of his fingertip—she would have to find out herself.

  She turned forward and inserted the key in the ignition. Her hand felt clumsy twisting the switch. Her foot felt like lead against the clutch. For some reason, she didn’t want to leave, not while so much hung unresolved between them in the steamy evening air.

  But she had to go. For her job, for her sanity, she had to regain her bearings. She had to get away from Rafael Perez.

  As she backed out of the parking space, she saw him standing at the edge of the walk, watching her. Turning the wheel, she shifted into gear and started toward the gate.

  She glanced into her rear view mirror. He was still standing there. Still watching her.

  Chapter Three

  “SO, WHAT DO YOU SAY?” Flannagan asked Sandra, resting his chin on her head while he read what she’d typed into her computer.

  Just to be ornery, she switched off the monitor and spun in her chair, forcing him to stand straight and look at her face instead of her notes. As usual, he was dressed in clashing colors; as usual, he smelled like a stale cigar. Sandra had never met his ex-wife, but the woman had her sympathy.

  “I say good morning,” she answered coolly. “What do you say?”

  He gave her a hybrid look: half a smile and half a scowl at her impertinence. “I say, what do you say? Did you find a story for me at Aztec Sun?”

  She regarded Flannagan thoughtfully. Yes, she’d found a story, or at least the possibility of one. But she wasn’t ready to discuss it yet. “Maybe,” she said.

  “Meaning...?”

  “Meaning, I said good morning to you. You’re supposed to say good morning to me. Where are your manners, Frank?”

  “Admit it. You’re glad I sent you over there yesterday. Deep in your heart you don’t want to write about the police department and all that nasty crime. You want to write about a Chicano millionaire. Maybe if you file a nice enough story he’ll take you out for dinner.”

  “I don’t go begging for dinner dates, Flannagan. And I don’t trade nice write-ups for food.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you didn’t check him out. How long have you been in this racket, Sandy? Haven’t you learned how to work it yet? You’re single and over the hill—”

  “Over the hill!”

  “—And here you are, doing a story on a very rich bachelor with a Spanish surname. What you’re supposed to do is, during the interview, you ask him how he likes to spend his free time. He says something like, ‘I go skiing in Aspen,’ or ‘I bake bread,’ and the next day, you show up with two round-trip tickets to Aspen or a bag of yeast and ask him if he’s free for the weekend.”

  “Right,” Sandra muttered, unable to suppress a grin. “And then I get married, stay home and make babies, and you don’t have me in your hair anymore.”

  “You’re catching on,” Flannagan said, playfully chucking her chin. He started toward his desk, calling over his shoulder, “Let me know when you’ve got something.”

  Sandra swiveled back to her computer and turned the monitor back on. The notes she’d entered into her file on Aztec Sun were preliminary and not terribly significant, mostly data she’d culled from the public-relations material Diego Salazar had supplied yesterday. She would need the information as filler when she wrote her article. But for the moment, she wasn’t sure what her article was going to be.

  The puff piece Diego wanted? An expose on Melanie Greer’s inexplicably giddy state of mind?

  Or the true story behind Rafael Perez?

  She was pretty sure he had a story. She just didn’t know what it might be. And one small part of her couldn’t deny that she was pursuing it not for the article but for the man.

  She was thirty-three years old, hardly over the hill. And even if thirty-three was over the hill, getting married wasn’t Sandra’s primary goal in life. She had nothing against marriage—or making babies, for that matter. But she couldn’t link such concepts in her mind with Rafael Perez. She didn’t want to wrangle a dinner out of him, or go skiing with him, or bake bread with him.

  What she wanted—besides a big story with her byline on it—was to figure out how to immunize herself against the very real power emanating from him, a power that caused people to grow respectfully still in his presence, that caused the molecules in the air to hover in silent suspension around him. She wanted to discover what gave him such a daunting, haunting allure—and she wanted to be able, when she was done with this assignment, to walk away and never give him another thought.

  The notion of never again thinking about him seemed absurd. Just as he could take over a room merely by entering it, so he appeared able to take over Sandra’s mind, to occupy and preoccupy her to an annoying degree.

  Throughout her drive home yesterday, she’d been plagued by visions of him: the smoky darkness of his gaze and the ironic twist of his smile, his height, his lean, lanky physique, his long, thick hair. She’d arrived home, jotted her first impressions of the studio and the man into her notebook, slapped together a sandwich for dinner and thought about him. Relaxed in a bath, watched a little television, climbed into bed...and thought about him.

  She’d thought about that moment at the cantina when he’d clamped his hand over hers. She’d thought about the heat and strength in his grip, the heat and strength in his eyes as he’d stared at her across the table in the dimly lit room.

  Why, hours later, had she continued to feel disturbing shivers of sensation when she remembered the hard surface of his palm against her skin? Why couldn’t she stop picturing the way he’d blocked her car door with his body, the way the rough tip of his finger had felt along her jaw, the presumptuousness of his having caressed her like that? Why, hours after she should have been fast asleep, had she found herself wondering what his mouth would feel like against hers?

  Why was she still thinking about him today?

  Blame it on Flannagan, she muttered. He’d been the one talking about how she should hook up with a Chicano millionaire.

  She shut off the computer and lifted her tote. The hell with Chicano millionaires. There was only one thing Sandra was after, and that was a story.

  The morning was clear and hot; as soon as she eased her car out of the Post’s building’s garage, she donned her sunglasses, cranked up the air conditioning and turned on the radio. The original version of Layla blared through her rear-mounted speakers. She tapped her fingers against the steering wheel in time with the guitar riffs while her mind ran through the observations she’d made yesterday, when Diego Salazar had left her in that windowed booth where she could watch Melanie Greer and her co-star, Antonio Torres, rehearse their scene under John Rhee’s direction. Melanie had seemed dazed, giggling and staggering and strangely detached from her surroundings. She’d behaved drunk, or...something.

  A woozy starlet on the set. A brooding B-movie producer. A too-eager PR guy who smiled all the time and supplied Sandra with a folder of publicity information that said absolutely nothing.

  There could be a story in all of it: TV star zoned out on the set of her first feature film. It might not be City Hall or the police department or crime among the homeless, but it was more substantial than ethnic-pride blather designed to increase the Post’s subscription rate in Hispanic neighborhoods.

  The guard at the studio entry recognized her and waved her through the gate. On her way to the visitor’s lot, she cruised slowly past Rafael Perez’s T-bird and sighed wistfully. The hell with dinner or skiing or baking bread with him. She wanted a spin in his car.

  Not that she’d seek Rafael out and ask for one. She hoped to avoid him until after she’d spent some time alone with Melanie Greer. She had the feeling Melanie might be able to provide some answers to her questio
ns—or at least, to give her a clue as to what questions she ought to be asking.

  She gave her name to the receptionist in the lobby of the office building. “Diego Salazar is expecting me,” she said, checking her watch. She’d told him she would be there at ten o’clock that morning; she was only a few minutes early.

  The receptionist buzzed his office and announced Sandra’s arrival. Within a minute he waltzed into the lobby, dressed in a double-breasted suit and a Jerry Garcia tie and brimming with robust energy. His eyes, his teeth, even his hair shined. Sandra was glad she’d left her sunglasses on.

  “Ah, senorita bella,” he greeted her, taking her hand and kissing the air near her cheek.

  Cripes. When had they reached this level of intimacy? Did he think treating her like his long-lost love was going to change her opinion of his studio?

  “Would you like to watch some filming today?” he asked. “Our star is in Building B again, doing interiors.”

  “Sure, I’d love to watch,” Sandra said, exerting herself to match his enthusiasm.

  “Let’s go.” He sent the receptionist a desultory wink, then held the door open for Sandra and followed her out into the steamy morning. Sandra allowed herself a furtive glance at Diego’s pricy suit and wondered if he was as rich as Rafael Perez.

  Not likely. Perez was the founder of Aztec Sun, its C.E.O., its guiding spirit. He might let an underling out-dress him, but he’d never let one outearn him.

  “Did they film much after I left yesterday?” she asked, just to make conversation.

  Diego shook his head. “There are night exteriors which will be filmed on location. Action scenes, mostly. They take time to arrange—permissions have to be obtained, the stunt drivers and extras lined up. We’re saving them for later. But if you want to watch when we do those, Sandra, I’m sure I can get you a front-row seat. It’s all right if I call you Sandra?” he half asked.