A Summer for Scandal

by Lydia San Andres

  He didn’t do that either.

  What he did was look in his pocket for the slim volume he’d stuffed into it. The book was small but handsome— Lopez had done a good job with the binding.

  Emilia seemed to think so as well. She drew in a breath and looked up at him after flipping through the first few pages, her smile one of pure delight. Ruben’d had nothing to do with the production of the book, save for putting her in contact with Lopez and writing a short foreword, but the way she was looking at him made him feel absurdly pleased.

  “So you like it, then?” he asked.

  “It looks wonderful,” Emilia breathed. “It never gets old, does it? Seeing your name in print, I mean.”

  “Not for me,” Ruben said. He nodded at the booklet in her hands. “Lopez was very happy with how your book came out— he printed ten extra copies to display in his shop. He says he’ll send you a check if they sell. The rest he’ll send by cargo train. They’ll be here in time for the book fair.”

  “We do great work together, don’t we?”

  “I like to think so,” Ruben answered, his voice going husky.

  He wanted to take her into his arms, neighbors be damned, and do to her some of the things she’d written about in The True Accounts. As if divining his desire, she gave him a smile that was decidedly wicked.

  “I was wondering,” she asked, “what you thought of one of the scenes in the manuscript. It’s the one where the main characters find themselves stranded in the cave after their guide plummets to his death.”

  “The one in chapter eleven?” he asked. That one scene was all but scorched into his mind. “I think you’ll find, when you read my notes, that I enjoyed it very much indeed. Was it drawn from life?”

  “No, but it can easily be recreated if you think there are any deficiencies in the…choreography.”

  Ruben groaned out loud. “You’ll be the death of me yet, Emilia Cruz.”

  “So you keep saying,” she remarked. “But you never actually do keel over.”

  Maybe he was a fool for not having realized how much Emilia’s opinion meant to him. But as she laughed up at him, he began to feel some of the tension he had been carrying in his shoulders ebbing away.

  Luis and Miss Cruz joined them then, and their conversation came to a swift end. But for the rest of the day, his mind kept turning toward the cave scene and the image of the two of them reenacting it, rendering him so unable to follow the thread of conversation that even Miss Cruz felt justified in poking fun at him. It was very late before he admitted defeat and went back to the boarding house, wondering where his conversation with Emilia might have led to if they hadn’t been interrupted.

  Chapter 13

  It wasn’t until the next day that Emilia was able to look through the manuscript. She had finished her essay for the next issue of Minerva, as well as a story she meant to submit to some of the literary magazines. Putting the loose pages away in a drawer, she flipped aside the top page of the manuscript and began to look through it.

  It was full of marks.

  Torres had scribbled all sorts of annotations in the margins, and though most of them were suggestions for small changes, here and there he’d jotted down his impressions.

  “Too sentimental?” Emilia grumbled as she paged through the manuscript. “I’ll give him sentimental.”

  Very well, it was true the male protagonist had a tendency to declare his adoration of the virginal heroine in prose that was altogether too flowery. And there were passages of intense emotion that could benefit from some trimming, especially where Emilia had gotten carried away with the count’s reaction after a particularly emotional scene.

  Muttering under her breath, Emilia uncapped her pen and began making corrections.

  Some hours later, the manuscript was so full of notes it was almost illegible.

  The deep blue twilight had long since given away to darkness. Susana was already in bed under a light cotton blanket, absorbed in what had been one of their mother’s favorite books, the one that still smelled of her perfume when one pressed one’s nose to its deep blue covers.

  “Did Mr. Torres make any good suggestions?” asked Susana, marking her place with a finger and regarding Emilia over the rim of the spectacles she wore for reading.

  “He’s not completely wrong,” Emilia admitted grudgingly.

  She slid a fresh piece of paper into her typewriter and rolled it into place. Despite the fact that her father’s typewriter had lain unused in the study for almost five years now, she had never quite dared to use it. Instead, she had scrimped for three months until she was able to purchase one from Miguel Fung, whose uncle, the typewriter’s original owner, had died the year before. It was twenty years old, at least, and the s key tended to stick more often than not, but the clatter it made when she wrote was as glorious as a symphony.

  “Oh, you can’t mean to make such a ruckus now,” Susana said, yawning. She slid one of her embroidered bookmarks between the pages of the book she’d been reading and placed it on her night table, then turned to peer at the clock. “It’s nearly eleven.”

  “I won’t,” Emilia promised. “I’ll wait until tomorrow.”

  Susana didn’t answer, but turned off the lamp on her bedside and pulled her mosquito netting closed. A minute later, she had fallen asleep.

  Emilia pushed the typewriter away and took up her pen again, and the notebook she had brought inside. She wouldn’t be able to type up her manuscript until the following day, but at least she could finish a chapter or two of The True Accounts while she waited for sleep to claim her. She hadn’t even undressed yet, even though it was devilishly warm in their small bedroom.

  As she and the sultan curled up together in the crypt and waited for morning, Valeria recounted the first time she’d kissed a man. It had happened before she became a courtesan, Emilia wrote, during a boat ride through a lagoon strewn with fallen blooms.

  Instead of the sultan’s soulful gaze, all Emilia could see when she closed her eyes was Torres.

  Ruben.

  Since the first time they’d kissed, she hadn’t been able to stop imagining what it would be like to touch him—to run her fingers over his arm, slide them inside the collar of his shirt, and feel the hard muscles of his thighs under her hands.

  Pushing her chair away from the table, Emilia decided a bath would be just the thing to quell the desire burning inside her stomach.

  She returned to the bedroom some time later, wrapped in a towel, droplets of water deliciously cool on her shoulders. As she reached into her drawer for a fresh nightgown, her fingertips grazed the lace edging on one of her chemises. Before she could think twice about it, Emilia was slipping it over her head, stepping into a pair of drawers, pulling on stockings and fastening them to her garters. A dress followed, and a dab of scent behind her ears, a pair of earrings and a lavaliere of Susana’s.

  Casting a glance at her sister, who was breathing evenly under the mosquito netting that covered her bed, Emilia eased quietly out of the bedroom and, after making sure her father was also asleep, the house.

  There were no fairgrounds in town, so the booths for the fair were being built in the park and in the streets surrounding it, which had been closed to all vehicles. The half-finished structures cast irregular shadows on the ground as Emilia hurried through the deserted streets.

  In the light of the electric street lamps, the houses of Paseo Principal looked like photographic reproductions of themselves. Someone in one of the houses was playing on a Victrola a song she recognized as the one the musicians on the bandstand had played that time she’d knocked Torres into the fountain. Her lips twitched up into a smile, and if she’d had any doubts of what she was about to do, they wafted away with the music.

  She opened the low iron gate and stood inside it for a moment, getting her bearings. The front door wouldn’t be open, but the kitchen door just might be.

  Silent as a thief, she stole inside the house and traversed the kitchen, findin
g the back staircase and ascending, one steep and narrow step at a time. Without a light to guide her way, she was forced to cautiously slide each foot over the wooden treads, wincing whenever there was a creak.

  Emilia had always been impulsive, but this was one of the rashest things she had ever done. Sneaking up to a man’s rooms in the dead of night, swimming half naked with him when anyone could have caught them… For all everyone said that Emilia was bold and daring, she’d never imagined she would do something like this.

  At long last, she was in the second floor, the dark hallway stretching in front of her.

  There were six doors, and they were all closed. Emilia looked at them in dismay, then noticed the beam of light escaping from the bottom of the farthest door to the left. Thanking whatever spirit had possessed Mrs. Herrera to install such a thick runner over the tiled floors, she crept towards the door.

  It wasn’t locked, she discovered as she turned the doorknob. Pulling it toward her with one swift motion, she slipped inside and closed the door behind her.

  Ruben was seated at a table, hunched over a small notebook. His hair was in disarray and the top button of his shirt was undone, exposing a triangle of dark flesh. She might have lost her courage and fled if he hadn’t looked up at the sound of the door, saying irritably, “I told you, Mrs. Herrera—” He cut himself off and gaped at her. “What the devil are you doing here?”

  Emilia drew in a deep, fortifying breath and wished she could’ve instead drawn a deep, fortifying sip of brandy or something equally as bracing, but rallied her courage and said the words she’d never thought she’d say to a man not her husband: “I’m here because I want you to take me to bed."

  Ruben would have been less surprised if she had told him she needed to find three dancing bears for a midnight performance at the town hall.

  He had been going over the text of his new column for El Diario Nuevo and wishing for a cool breeze and, yes, thinking about the damned scene and the way her damned lips had curled when she’d suggested reenacting it, and when she burst into his room and all but demanded he ravish her on the spot, he’d had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.

  “I want you to take me to bed,” she said again when didn’t immediately respond. Her hair was wet, curling every which way, her face was red, and her shoes, he discovered when he looked closer, were unlaced at the ankle.

  She wasn’t a dream. Even better—she was real.

  He sat back in his chair. “And if I won’t?”

  Evidently, this was not at all what she was expecting. Emilia frowned at him. “Is every man this difficult to proposition, or are you just that contrary?” She came forward then, and perched on the corner of his table. The hem of her skirt grazed his knee and even through the fabric of his trousers, the slight touch sent a jolt through him. “I suppose I’ll have to seduce you.”

  “What makes you think you can seduce me?”

  She reached out and as her fingertips brushed his open collar, he let out a sound that seemed suspiciously like a groan. “That,” she said with satisfaction.

  The bedroom lamp cast a soft glow over her skin. Ruben thought about unfastening her dress and uncovering more of it, and the very idea made him feel flushed, as if someone had a lit a fire inside his own skin.

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “There’s nothing I’d like better than to lay you down, part open your legs, and drive myself inside you,” he said roughly, then added, with a twist of his lips, “Especially after that remark about chapter eleven. Did you know I read it over and over again, just wishing you were beside me so I could do to you all the filthy things that the count does to Elisabetta?”

  Heaven knew Emilia was no prim miss, and he’d read some very explicit things in The True Accounts, but the things she’d written in this book had left him panting.

  Just the thought that every single one of those lines had come from her pen—from her mind— made his blood boil all the hotter.

  “Then do it.” She leaned down so her face was very close to him. Her eyes caught the lamp light and Ruben was surprised at their intensity. “We can do all of it, and more besides.”

  He closed his eyes, then opened them and gave her a rather baleful glare. “There are a thousand reasons for why I should button you up and send you right home, but I’ll be damned if I can think of a single one right now.”

  “Don’t think,” she advised him, and promptly made it impossible for him to do so by drawing up her skirts and revealing a pair of shapely legs encased in white cotton stockings. Ruben could never understand why the rules of propriety insisted on the wearing of clothing so patently unfit for tropical weather, but he had to admit the sight of them was not altogether unwelcome. He traced the line of her stockings with his hands until he reached her garters, then helped her unfasten them, his fingers tangling with hers.

  Her shoes and stockings were off in a moment, and then her bare legs were around him and her hands were trailing over his arms and shoulders, clasping together at the nape of his neck, and she was bending down to kiss him. Her mouth tasted of tooth powder and her skin…her skin smelled fresh and clean and faintly flowery, and it was all he could do to keep from dragging his mouth down her neck and tasting the rest of her. He slid his hands even higher and tightened his grip on her thighs.

  A moment later, he pulled away from the kiss and laid his head against her knee, his heart hammering inside his chest. Two days ago, he’d told her he meant to make her his. As Ruben looked up into her eyes, the heat in them evident even in the low light, he realized that he was, irrevocably and absolutely, hers.

  “If we do this—”

  “When,” she corrected him gently.

  “When.” He licked his lips. “I’m yours for good. I don’t have a lot to offer, but—“

  “All I want,” she murmured, “Is you.”

  “And you will have me. But not now, not completely. Not until I can give you more than my body.”

  She was very still. Ruben looked up at her face, worried he had insulted her, but her expression was soft and she was reaching over to caress his hair. Her fingertips grazed the curve of his ear. “Who says I want more than your body?” she asked.

  He pressed his lips to the inside of her thigh. “Your eyes do.”

  Standing from the chair eliminated most of the distance between them. Ruben took her face between his hands and kissed her again, nearly groaning out loud when her teeth closed gently on his lower lip.

  He pulled away and began to tug on the fabric of her knee-length knickers until they were on the floor and she was revealed to him.

  “But I thought you said—”

  “I said you couldn’t have me completely. But I don’t mean to button you up and send you home. There’s plenty I can do to give you pleasure. If you want me to.”

  He spread the two sides of her bodice apart, then forced his hands down to the table as he waited for her reply.

  “I want you to,” she said softly.

  So did Ruben. He wanted it so much that his hands almost trembled as they rose again to sweep over the shoulders he’d laid bare. “I’m glad,” he breathed, and pressed his lips to hers again.

  Of all the daring things Emilia had done in her life—and the list was long—this was by far the most enjoyable. Ruben had bared her chest and had one hand cupped around her right breast while he trailed a line of kisses down her neck. It was, she reflected, the most delicious sensation she had ever felt.

  Then his mouth closed around one nipple and she was forced to revise her opinion.

  Letting out a shuddery breath, Emilia twined her fingers through his dark brown curls once more, the crests of which looked gilded in the lamplight. At the sound of her sigh, he glanced up and his light brown eyes took on the same hue. “Everything all right?”

  “Everything’s wonderful,” Emilia told him.

  He gave her a brief smile. “Just wait. It gets better.”

  His hands felt h
ot on her bared thighs. Her legs tightened around him and at the motion, he swept his tongue one last time over her tight nipple and reached down to place a kiss on the inside of her knee.

  She leaned back, laying her palms flat against the desktop behind her, her fingertips touching paper and glass ink pots and reminding her that she ought to keep still to avoid dashing it all to the floor. It would not be an easy task—she could already feel the urge to squirm with sheer delight as Ruben kissed his way to the insides of her thighs.

  It was clear what he was about to do—Emilia had seen something like it in one of the naughty postcards she kept tucked in her notebook, but the cheeky expressions in the black and white figures did nothing to convey how unbearably good it actually felt.

  The buttons down the front of her dress were open to the waist, a warm breeze sweeping over nipples still wet from his mouth. Emilia made note of the sensation, in order to describe it in the next installment of The True Accounts. Then Ruben pushed her legs open wider and dipped his tongue into the crease of her thigh and the words she’d been collecting were swept away like leaves in a breeze. She let out a breathy gasp and dug her fingers into his scalp.

  “Aren’t you glad I thwarted your dastardly plans to drown me?” he said, pulling away to give her a wicked smile.

  “Ecstatic,” Emilia gasped. “And I promise to never attempt it again, only don’t stop.”

  His laugh reverberated against her sensitive skin. He didn’t speak further, but applied himself to the task at hand with an assiduousness that soon had Emilia trembling on the desktop, her teeth ground against her bottom lip to keep from crying out as his tongue explored her cleft, stroking up and down and circling that one spot—

  It took only a finger to bring her over the edge. Her own fingers scrabbled on the tabletop, curling as tightly as her toes, and he rose hastily to press his lips against hers and swallow her cry, his finger still inside her as she pulsed around him and ground against his palm.