“Do you still have family here?” Emmie asked.
“No. My father gradually brought the whole clan to the States. One of his brothers died here as a child, and his parents were really resistant about moving to the U.S. when they had a baby buried here, but eventually my father convinced them to come. Their other children were all in California. There was no one down here to take care of them.”
“One of the things I love about San Pablo,” Emmie said, “is how the generations take care of one another. We’ve really lost that in America. Everyone moves on and families spread out, and we can’t look after our elders.”
“And the elders can’t look after the bebés,” Michael agreed. “Are you going to return to Virginia when you leave here?”
“It’s my home,” she said with a shrug, then took a sip of her beer. “It’s where my parents are. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.” And just as he’d told her about his family, she told him about hers. She was an only child, her parents pillars of the community, her mother active in the Daughters of the Confederacy—a fact about which Emmie seemed somewhat embarrassed, and even more embarrassed after Michael asked her what the “Daughters of the Confederacy” was. “It’s a social organization for women who can trace their ancestry to Confederate soldiers. Both my parents can do that. Sometimes I swear they still believe the South didn’t really lose the War Between the States. It’s just been a very long truce, and we’re rebuilding our armies until we can march back into battle and defeat those damned Yankees.” Her laugh was surprisingly throaty.
“Do you feel that way?” he asked. Perhaps because he was a first-generation American, he had always found American history fascinating, like an epic novel he would read for entertainment, safe in the knowledge that it didn’t have much to do with him personally.
“I never felt that way,” she clarified. “My parents do, and their friends. I love Virginia, but I don’t want to turn back the clock. I prefer to look forward.”
“So you’re a rebel,” he teased.
“I suppose I am. A loyal Virginia rebel, though.” She didn’t laugh this time, but her smile was as sultry as her laughter.
Their food was gone. As he left money on the table to cover the bill, he scrambled to think of a way to prolong their evening. San Pablo had a movie theater, but he didn’t feel like sitting in a darkened auditorium with Emmie, all conversation shut down because talking would disturb the other viewers. He could take her to a cantina for a drink, but he didn’t feel like getting her—or himself—drunk. What he wanted was to talk more with her, to listen as she told him more about Virginia and her Civil War ancestors, to hear her describe her students. He wanted to look at her, bask in her smile, touch her. He wanted to feel if her skin was as smooth as it appeared, her hair as soft. He wanted to taste her smile with his lips.
“Why don’t we take a walk around the plaza,” he suggested.
“All right.”
The plaza was small, nothing that couldn’t be circumnavigated in under five minutes. But a band was performing in an open-air cantina abutting the square, a combo comprising a horn, two guitars and percussion. Along the walkways people lingered to listen. Evening strollers on the plaza gravitated toward the cantina, and a few of them danced, moved by the music.
Michael realized that he wanted to dance with Emmie. He’d never been much of a dancer, but he wanted to gather her into his arms and let the music infuse them. He wanted to have her face close to his, her eyes gazing into his, her hand enveloped in his. He wanted Emmie Kenyon.
He still hardly knew her—although they’d covered an awful lot of ground in just one evening. Their conversation had come so easily, and everything she’d told him about herself had fascinated him. Nothing was ever going to come of it—he would be back in California long before she’d be back in Virginia—but he wanted her. Life was for living, experiences ripe for picking. A lot could happen in a few days.
She stood on the edge of the plaza, listening to the lively music, moving to the rhythm of it. Above them the sky was a sheet of black sprayed with stars. The air was as warm and soft as velvet, scented with roses. One of her sandaled feet began to tap.
It occurred to Michael that he hadn’t asked a woman to dance for years. Maybe not since high school...he couldn’t remember. He hadn’t gone to many dances in his adolescence; they’d seemed hokey and uncool. His best friend’s sister had taught him a few basic steps, and fortunately he’d been popular enough that the girls he danced with apparently hadn’t minded that he wasn’t the most graceful guy in the room.
But he wanted to dance with Emmie. He wanted to hold her in his arms.
The band finished their number and all the onlookers, both inside and outside the cantina, applauded. They began another song, this one slower, more romantic.
Michael opened his mouth and then shut it. He wasn’t used to insecurity or self-doubt. When he wanted something, he went after it.
So he didn’t ask Emmie. He simply took her hand, turned her toward him, slid his arm around her waist and began to dance.
CHAPTER FIVE
HIS TOUCH SURPRISED HER—but not much. The intimacy that had blossomed between them over dinner felt so natural it seemed just as natural that he would close his hand around hers and tuck it between their chests, and he would bring his other hand to rest at the small of her back, and he would sway to the melancholy folk song the band was playing.
She couldn’t back away, and she didn’t want to. In truth, she wanted to move deeper into his embrace, to rest her head against his shoulder and clasp his hand beneath her chin, close to her lips. It was unusual for her to respond like this to a man-but Michael Molina was an unusual man.
Her parents would hate him. They would say he wasn’t white, a distinction that seemed meaningless to her. He’d told her his father was Hispanic, his mother as American as her own. His skin was a bronze shade, warm and tawny, and his hair was blacker than the night sky. She couldn’t really think of him in terms of a specific race or color, and she didn’t want to.
She wondered briefly whether her attraction to him was nothing more than a rebellious urge. She couldn’t dismiss the possibility that she was drawn to him because she knew her parents would disapprove of any man whose name ended with a vowel, and because she’d found him here in San Pablo, a place they hadn’t even wanted her to go.
But there was more to it than rebellion, more to it than his being a singularly. handsome man. More than the power in his dark gaze, more than the warm strength of his hands, more than his lean, graceful physique.
Actually, graceful wasn’t the first word that sprang to her mind as he began to dance with her. Not that he was clumsy, but there was something endearingly awkward in the way he moved his feet, as if they had found the rhythm of the music but weren’t quite sure what to do with it. Michael didn’t dance like the well-tutored young men she was used to dancing with at cotillons and country club affairs, gentlemen in expensive suits who moved with the practiced precision of an army drill team. Michael wasn’t practiced, but his soul was in his dancing.
She liked the feel of his fingers curled around hers. She liked the heat of his chest close to hers, so different from the heat of the spring air. She liked the dense texture of his hair, the way the lanterns from the cantina glazed it with a layer of gold light and the way that same light edged the angles of his face.
She liked the way his nearness affected her. He made her feel interesting, as if what she had to say was important to him. He made her feel pretty, as if gazing at her brought him genuine pleasure. He made her feel sexy, as if dancing with her was the most erotic experience of his life.
Around them other people were dancing, too. One of the things she appreciated about San Pablo was the lack of inhibition in its people. Folks didn’t seem to care whether they looked silly dancing in the plaza while a band played in an open-air tavern. No one bothered to notice the two gringos in the crowd. One young man in obscenely tight black
jeans danced all by himself, as if to advertise his virility to the immediate world. Not far away, two innocent-looking teenage girls danced together, pretending to ignore him.
San Pablo was a magical place, Emmie acknowledged, a place where people danced freely in the public square, where Saturday night meant being outdoors in the starlight with music and beer and absolutely no worries. It was a place where a stranger could approach a woman shopping for peaches and make her feel more appealing than she’d felt in years..
“You’re beautiful,” Michael said, as if he had read her mind.
Her cheeks grew warm, and she bit her lip to keep from blurting out that she disagreed. His compliment hadn’t come across as manipulative sweet talk. Maybe it was the beer and the starlight and the magic of the night, but she believed he was expressing his honest opinion. “Thank you,” she murmured bashfully.
He moved his hand over the lightweight linen of her dress, tracing her spine upward until his fingers reached the blunt-cut ends of her hair. “I didn’t come to San Pablo looking for romance, you know,” he said.
She peered up into his face, a good six inches above hers as they faced each other. She had stopped looking for romance long ago, after the man her parents had deemed the perfect match for her—a strapping young fellow from what her parents called a “good” family—had broken off their engagement because she’d decided to spend a year teaching children in San Pablo instead of planning the most lavish wedding Richmond had ever seen. She hadn’t meant to cause a ruckus or dash anyone’s hopes, but she’d been secretly relieved when Martin had demanded that she choose between him and her silly fantasy of exposing children in the developing world to the glories of prealgebra and the Internet. The choice had been an easy one for her to make.
She would have been miserable married to Martin. Her parents had made sure she was miserable when he ended the engagement They’d called her self-destructive, self-centered, unrealistic, narcissistic, impractical—and a rebel. That they were inordinately proud of their rebel ancestors during the Civil War was an irony that escaped them. Emmie simply considered herself the newest breed of Kenyon rebel.
So here she was in San Pablo, having been labeled a troublemaker and made to feel like a loser who would never attract the attentions of an appropriate man again. Yet the way Michael held her in his arms, the way he looked directly at her when he talked to her, the way he absorbed her words when he listened to her... He made her feel like the world’s biggest winner.
Maybe he wasn’t appropriate. She didn’t care.
The song ended. She felt bereft, afraid that without the music he wouldn’t want to keep her hand entwined with his, his arm arched around her. But another song began, this one fast, and he started dancing with her again, bouncing with enough verve to compensate for his lack of smooth moves.
Emmie decided right then that she didn’t like men with smooth moves.
“I’m not too good at this,” he said apologetically, taking both her hands in his and swinging their arms.
“You’re fine,” she assured him. “I gather you didn’t attend dancing school in your youth.”
“Dancing school?” He snorted. “A hermano wouldn’t have been able to show his face in the neighborhood if he’d gone to dancing school.”
“Boys went to dancing school in my neighborhood,” she told him, then smiled and added, “their parents made them.”
“I think,” Michael said, pulling her slightly closer, “that you and I grew up in very different neighborhoods.”
“But we’re in the same neighborhood now,” she pointed out. She didn’t just mean they were standing on the same patch of pavement near the same street corner. She meant that where they came from didn’t really matter. All that mattered was where they were, who they were, what they wanted.
What she wanted was vague to her, a swirling coil of undefined thoughts and yearnings. She didn’t want a fling with a stranger passing through town. Maybe all she wanted was to be held for a while, her body rocking to the music. She wanted to feel wanted by a man as special as Michael Molina.
They danced until the band took a break, and then Michael took Emmie’s hand and strolled with her across the patterned, tilelike slabs of cement that paved the plaza. The dry air had lost much of its heat, but as long as he held her hand she wouldn’t be cold.
“One thing I remember about San Pablo is the smell,” he commented. “Not just the plant smells and the cooking smells, but there’s this dusty smell. I used to think it came from the adobe.”
“Adobe doesn’t have a smell,” she argued.
“Sure it does. It’s sun-baked mud. Why wouldn’t it have a smell?”
She laughed and shook her head. San Pablo, smelled very different from Richmond; the air had an alien lushness to it, even though it was arid. But the fragrance had nothing to do with the construction material of the buildings.
He sped up, tugging her hand as he strode briskly across the street to the building that housed the municipal offices. It was a squat structure of beige stucco, with a red-tile roof and wrought-iron grilles covering the lower-floor windows. He pulled her into the arched alcove that led to the main door, then guided her against the wall. “Smell it,” he dared her.
She inhaled. “I don’t smell anything.”
“Are you kidding? It’s as strong as smoke.” He leaned toward the wall and filled his lungs. “Different from smoke, but just as strong.”
She sniffed again but smelled nothing. “You’re pulling my leg,” she muttered, although she was having trouble containing her laughter. “There’s no smell.”
“Come closer.” He drew her deeper into the alcove, into the cool shadow of the doorway. All she could smell was him, the spicy tang of his shampoo, the clean scent of his skin. For a moment she couldn’t see him. She could only smell him and feel the heat of him. Then her eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, just in time for her to watch him dip his face forward and brush her mouth with his.
If she’d wanted to inhale the building’s smell, she wouldn’t have been able to. Just that one light kiss seemed to paralyze her lungs. And her arms, her legs, her back—everything but her heart, which suddenly beat fast and wild, as if desperate to keep her alive, to keep her senses drinking him in.
It was barely a kiss, yet it swamped her with sensation. She tasted beer on his lips, and salt and masculinity. The flavor of Michael filled her.
“Are you okay?” he murmured.
Bewildered, she bit her lip again. Okay? He’d scarcely kissed her; why wouldn’t she be okay?
Gradually she realized what he was really asking: was his kissing her okay? She nodded, then leaned toward him as he bowed to take another kiss. This one wasn’t as restrained. It wrapped around her the way his arms wrapped around her and the music and the tropical air, as dark as the shadows, as mysterious as the night.
She lifted her hands to his shoulders and he placed his at her waist, urging her closer. He angled his head and moved his lips on hers, slowly, seductively, until she was moving hers, as well, until they were moving together. This dance was much more elegant than their public dance by the cantina. This dance in the shadows found them perfectly synchronized.
When his tongue ventured out to caress her lower lip, she opened to him. When his hand glided up her back to her nape she nestled against his palm, welcoming his touch. When he slid his tongue into her mouth she met his thrust willingly, bravely, fiercely. When he groaned, she groaned, too.
What she felt for Michael was more than a mere rebellion, more than a giddy adventure in an exotic land. It was hot and pulsing and hungry. It was deep inside her, in her heart and her womb, a desire so keen it made her shiver with pleasure. His fingers swirled through her hair and his other hand stroked the width of her waist, and she wanted nothing more than to melt into him, to give him everything and take everything from him, to be generous and greedy all at once.
“Where can we go?” he whispered, easing his mouth from
hers. He kissed the tip of her nose, the bridge of it, her brow, the crown of her head. “I can’t take you back to my room. I’m sharing it with a colleague. Where can we go?”
If she’d been a little less mesmerized by his kiss, she would have announced they couldn’t go anywhere. She had only just met him that morning, after all. It didn’t matter how much she felt she knew him; she hadn’t known him long enough to consider going anywhere with him.
But she wanted him, insanely.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’m boarding with a family. We can’t go there.”
A reluctant laugh escaped him. ‘I love San Pablo, but it’s really lacking in accommodations.”
“Maybe...” Her voice emerged broken, and she paused to collect herself. “Maybe it’s too soon, anyway.” She hated being reasonable at such a time, but she couldn’t help herself. It was too soon.
He leaned back, scooping handfuls of her hair and sifting it through his fingers as he studied her face. He looked concerned, and she thought about explaining to him that even if it was too soon, she hadn’t minded his kisses. She’d cherished them, in fact She’d adored them. She’d wanted more. She’d wanted to find somewhere private, somewhere even more magical than this alcove near the plaza, and make love with him. She could tell him that even though they’d only just met and she wasn’t foolish enough to sleep with someone she hardly knew, making love with Michael would have been okay with her.
More than okay. It would have been sublime.
But to say so would take too many words. So instead she rose on tiptoe, holding herself steady by gripping his shoulders, and lightly kissed his mouth.
Found: One Son Page 8
