It was just a matter of time. After all, he’d been hurt before. Three years ago he’d lost his spleen as a result of a motorcycle accident. He’d nearly died from loss of blood before the injury was discovered. But he’d recovered from that. He’d come back. And this time would be no different.
He’d worked his tail off. He’d done everything the docs told him to—and more. He’d rehabbed until he was sure he was as fit as ever. It had taken him four months. Then, a month ago, he’d walked into the training room and said to the docs, the trainers, the team owners, “I’m back. I’m as good as new. I can do everything I ever did.”
And he went out onto the pitch and showed them.
They had watched politely. And then, to his amazement, they had shaken their heads. “You’ve recovered wonderfully,” they agreed. “But you can’t play soccer. It’s too risky.”
“What?” He’d stared at them, disbelieving.
“Spinal stenosis—” the congenital narrowing of the spine that had contributed to his paralysis and which they had discovered while treating him “—is nothing to mess around with. Next time you might not recover feeling at all.”
“How do you know there will be a next time?” he’d demanded.
They’d just looked at him. “How do you know there won’t?”
He’d argued. Damn it, he’d had to argue!
But in the end, it was the insurance companies who carried the day. They wouldn’t insure him. It all came down to liability. Joaquin Santiago was too big a risk for any team.
Ergo, he couldn’t play.
His world collapsed. He felt fine. He felt fit. He felt gutted. His father expected him to come back to Barcelona and get on with life.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Martin Santiago had said. “You just need something to do. A job,” he’d added pointedly, “which has been waiting for you for fourteen years.”
But Joaquin couldn’t face it. Not yet.
“Take your time,” his old teammate Lachlan McGillivray advised. “I know it feels like the end of the world. It felt like it to me when I retired. You get over it,” he promised. “You just need some space while you find something else to do with your life.”
Easy for Lachlan to say. Lachlan had long ago found something he wanted to do. He’d begun buying property and rebuilding and restoring old buildings, turning them into a series of one-of-a-kind small elegant inns across the Caribbean. Since retirement he’d made his home here on Pelican Cay where he’d married a local girl and had a baby son. His future, even out of soccer, was of his own making.
Joaquin’s was not.
His future had always been a given. Soccer had given him a reprieve, but his life had been foreordained since birth. Santiago men went into the family business. It was as simple as that. For the past five generations all of them had devoted their lives to the company Joaquin’s great-grandfather, for whom he’d been named, had begun.
Since there had been telephones, the Santiagos had been involved in communications. The company had evolved with the times, and now had its corporate fingers in a lot of pies. It was thriving, growing, facing daily challenges.
“Santiago men always faced the challenge,” Martin was fond of saying.
Joaquin would, too. He knew that. His father expected it. So did he. Martin had been tolerant of the years Joaquin had spent playing soccer only because he was a strong vigorous man in good health who didn’t need his only son and heir trying to take over before he was ready.
“So you play a while,” his father had said, waving a hand dismissively.
But it had always been understood between them that when Joaquin’s soccer-playing days were over, Santiagos was waiting and real life would start.
Joaquin was no fool. He’d always known he wouldn’t play forever. He’d accepted that.
But that had been when “real life” was somewhere in the future. Not now.
Not yet.
But with one blow yet had become now. His father and the business were waiting. His mother with her lineup of prospective brides—more “real life”—was waiting.
But he couldn’t face it.
He had been back in Barcelona two days when he knew he needed more time.
“I just need to get my head together,” he’d told his father. “I need a little space before I start.”
“Space? You’ve had four months!” Martin sputtered.
But his mother, Ana, the more patient of his parents, had taken his side. She’d patted his hand and said to his father, “Give him time, Martin. A month. Two. What’s the difference after we have waited all these years. He needs to grieve for what he has lost.”
His father had been skeptical, but in the end he’d agreed. “We will be waiting, though,” he’d said giving Joaquin a stern, expectant look.
And Joaquin had nodded. “I know. I’ll be here.”
“Of course he will,” his mother had said. “And then we will all be happy and Santiagos will be waiting and—” she’d kissed his cheek “—finally you will get around to giving me those grandchildren I’ve been waiting for!”
That was the other half of his future—getting a mother for the inevitable Santiago offspring.
His mother had shaken her head with bemused tolerance at all the groupies who’d trailed after him during his soccer career. She didn’t take them seriously. They were silly and transitory.
None of them would become “the Santiago Bride.” She knew that. So did Joaquin.
“Time enough for you to find the right woman when you are done playing games,” she’d always said.
Something else to look forward to, he thought grimly now as he lay on the chaise longue on the small balcony outside his room at Lachlan’s trendy Moonstone Inn and tried not to think about it.
He’d been here over three weeks now, every day trying to psyche himself up for his new life.
He wasn’t there yet.
Listlessly he picked up the book he’d been trying to read for the past hour. Lachlan’s wife, Fiona, had told him he’d love it.
“It’s a real page turner,” she’d assured him. But he’d been on the same one now for what seemed like a week. The words made no sense.
Weary, he lifted his gaze and stared across the water at the empty horizon.
“You read?” The sudden sound of an astonished female voice made him jump.
He turned his head and saw Lachlan’s grubby sister, Molly, standing on the balcony of the room next door.
He lifted a brow. “Are they keeping engines in the guest rooms now?”
Molly was the mechanic at Fly Guy, Hugh McGillivray’s island charter service. She was also a pilot, occasionally taking charters when Hugh was otherwise committed, but most of the time she was eyebrows deep in some greasy engine on a plane, boat, helicopter or motor vehicle.
Not, Joaquin thought, your average girly girl.
Probably the only one in the world who didn’t even own a dress! A fact he had learned when he hadn’t recognized her at Lachlan’s wedding because she’d actually been wearing one. A borrowed one. But he hadn’t known it at the time. He’d thought she was simply a fresh female face. She certainly hadn’t looked like herself. On the contrary, she’d looked…pretty. Sexy.
Approachable. For once.
His mistake.
He’d felt foolish for not realizing who she was, but he’d got past it and had attempted to redeem himself by asking her to dance.
“Dance?” She’d stared at him, sounding incredulous. “With you?”
“I don’t normally ask women to dance with someone else,” he’d said stiffly.
She’d laughed, but it had been a forced laugh. And then she’d shaken her head. “Well, thanks, but no thanks. Don’t put yourself out.” And she’d turned away to talk to someone else!
Cheeky brat.
And the only woman who had ever turned him down.
Not that he gave a damn. There were far more fish in the sea. He hadn’t spared her a
nother thought. And he’d barely seen her since he’d been back. Oh, maybe they’d been in the same social gathering a handful of times because he was Lachlan’s friend and she was Lachlan’s sister.
But she was usually far too preoccupied with her engines even to deign to speak to him. And he had no desire to talk to her. He considered ignoring her now. And he might have, but at the moment even grubby tomboy Molly McGillivray was more welcome than his own dark thoughts.
“What are you doing over there?” he asked her.
“Suzette asked me to put some flowers in the room.”
Lachlan’s office manager and second in command, was all spit-and-polish efficiency. Joaquin couldn’t imagine she’d let Molly—wearing her grimy work shorts, faded orange T-shirt, and oil-streaked bandanna wrapped around her forehead to tame a riot of coppery curls—anywhere near one of the Moonstone’s pristine guest rooms. “Good thing she didn’t ask you to bring clean towels.” He grinned at the flash of green fire in Molly’s eyes, then when something else seemed to flicker in them, he added, “Lo siento. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t see Suzette sending you like—” he waved a hand in the direction of her grease-stained clothes “—that.”
“I was coming up, anyway,” Molly said stiffly.
“Oh.” He expected she’d do whatever it was she’d come up for and leave, but she didn’t. She stood there, so deep in thought she was making faces as she stared at him.
He frowned. “What?”
“Nothing.” She hesitated, then glanced toward the door that led from his balcony into his room. “Is she gone?”
“Is who gone?”
“The flavor of the night. Whoever you brought back with you last night.”
Joaquin stared at her. “What do you know about who I brought back with me last night?” he asked.
In point of fact he hadn’t brought anyone back. He’d considered it. He’d even gone so far as to leave the Grouper with a pretty blonde tourist from Germany. But she’d giggled too much. He’d walked on the beach with her, then remembered a “pressing phone call” he needed to wait for. She’d offered to wait with him, “to keep him busy while he was waiting,” she’d said with several more giggles. But he’d declined.
“I don’t know anything about her,” Molly said. “I just didn’t want her to come waltzing out in the middle of—” she broke off.
Joaquin lifted a brow. “In the middle of…?” He gave her an expectant look.
She made more faces. Then she shifted from one foot to the other and seemed to almost balance on her toes. She reminded him of Lachlan poised in goal, anticipating, ready.
For what?
No clue. She seemed to be poised on the brink of some great statement which she somehow couldn’t manage to get out. Well, if it had anything to do with disapproval of how he lived his life, she could take her opinions and stuff them!
“I need to talk to you,” she blurted at last. Her face was red, and not entirely from the sun, Joaquin didn’t think. Curious.
“Talk to me? About what?”
More faces. She balled her fingers into fists. “It’s complicated,” she said at last. She didn’t look at him.
“Complicated how?”
“Look,” she said fiercely with another suspicious glance at the door. “Is she in there or not?”
“There’s no one in my room,” Joaquin told her. He rose lazily and stood looking at her. “So if you’d like to go in…” he added, his voice laced with a lazy teasing innuendo.
If she could make innuendoes about his love life, he could do the same about hers.
“No!” She gulped air. “I don’t. I need—” She stopped again and looked almost anguished.
He’d never seen Molly McGillivray anguished. She’d always been cheerful and blunt and basically a sort of no-nonsense girl. “Is something wrong?” he asked her.
“No.” She took a breath. “I just…have a proposition for you.”
His eyes widened. “A proposition?”
What the hell did that mean?
“A business proposition,” Molly said. Her voice sounded raspy and she licked her lips as if they were parched. She looked hot. The Caribbean sun was baking.
“Why don’t you come over and sit down and tell me what you have in mind,” Joaquin said. Before you faint and fall off the damn balcony.
“I—all right.” She scrambled over the railing to his balcony, leaving a couple of greasy fingerprints on the white paint.
“Sit down,” Joaquin said. If she had engine grease on the seat of her shorts that was Lachlan’s problem. She was his sister, after all. “Do you want something to drink? Beer? A glass of wine? A soda?” There was a small but well-stocked refrigerator in his room.
“A beer,” Molly decided abruptly.
And before he could make a move to get one for her, she darted past him into his room and got one herself! Actually she got two and handed one to him.
“Thank you,” he said, deadpan.
She gave a jerky little nod. “My pleasure. Well, Lachlan’s actually,” she corrected herself. She twisted the cap off the beer as she paced around the small balcony, still not looking his way.
Joaquin watched, not speaking as she stopped with her back to him and stared out across the beach. Then she tipped her head back and took a long gulp of the beer before squaring narrow shoulders and turning to face him.
“I want to hire you,” she said.
“Hire me?” His gaze narrowed. He didn’t know the first thing about engines. Wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in them. Never had been. And just because Lachlan had been saying he should stay busy, that didn’t mean he needed some misguided female in steel-toed boots offering him work out of pity.
“No, thanks,” he bit out.
Molly’s fingers tightened on the beer bottle. “You haven’t even heard me out.”
“I don’t need to. I don’t know an oil pan from a tail rotor and I don’t want to.”
“I imagine even you could tell the difference between those two,” she retorted with a roll of her eyes. But then she hunched her shoulders. “It’s not that kind of work. It’s something you’re good at.”
“Not soccer,” he said flatly. “I’m not helping Lachlan with the soccer team.”
In a misguided attempt to cheer him up when he’d first arrived, Lachlan had invited him to help coach the kids’ soccer team. That was the last thing Joaquin wanted to do.
If he couldn’t play the sport he loved, he wanted nothing at all to do with it. It hurt too much to watch anyone do what he could do no longer. Especially when he was going to be doing what he didn’t want to do at all.
But Molly shook her head. “Not soccer.”
Joaquin couldn’t think of anything else he was good at. “Then what?”
Her fingers strangled the beer bottle again. She took a breath. “I need you to teach me—” another swift deep breath. And another. Hell, in a minute she’d hyperventilate! “—how to seduce a man.”
His jaw dropped. The beer bottle slipped from his hand.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Molly bent down and snatched the bottle off the deck, slapped it on the table, then ducked past him into the room and, returning with one of the bathroom towels, used it to blot up the beer with a gravity far exceeding the amount that had spilled.
His brain was still buzzing, wondering if it was the heat of the afternoon sun or the beer that had caused his hearing to go. “You want me to what?”
As she mopped he could see that the back of her slender neck was almost as red as her hair. And when she stood up, her face was flaming. “Never mind! Forget I said anything. It was a stupid idea!” She tried to dart past him into the room, but he hauled her up short.
She jerked her arm, but he wouldn’t let her go. “Sit down.” He still couldn’t believe it, but her behavior was making it seem more and more like his hearing wasn’t as bad as he’d thought.
“Did you say you want me to teach you to—” now he wa
s having trouble getting his mouth around the words! “—seduce a man?”
Her shoulders lifted and her mouth twisted in one of those distasteful faces she’d been making earlier. But then she met his gaze squarely and seemed to defy him to make something of it. “Yes.” The word hissed through her teeth.
Good lord. He tried to bend his mind around it. His mind wasn’t that flexible. “Why?” he asked stupidly.
“For the usual reasons,” she snapped. “Why the hell do you think?”
He shrugged helplessly. He’d always thought he understood women very well. He sure as hell didn’t understand this one!
She sighed and squared her shoulders beneath the gargantuan T-shirt, then said evenly, “Look. It’s simple. I’m thirty-one years old.”
He was surprised. Of course she had to be, as she was only a couple of years younger than he was. But somehow he’d never thought of her as any older than when he’d first met her. She’d been about seventeen then. Still, “Thirty-one?” he echoed doubtfully. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! I’m not ancient.”
“I know that,” he said quickly. “I thought…younger. You look—”
“Like a thirteen-year-old boy?” Her mouth twisted.
Yes, actually. In those clothes. Though she sure as hell hadn’t at Lachlan’s wedding in that borrowed dress. But he wasn’t going there, either. “Fine,” he said at length. “You’re thirty-one. So what? Like you said, it’s not ancient.”
“Not yet. But it’s time I got married.”
“Married?”
He’d never even seen her with a boyfriend! It wasn’t that he’d thought she might prefer women, it was that she’d never given any indication of preferring anyone at all. Some people didn’t.
“Not everyone has to get married,” he said, in case she had suddenly begun to worry about it. “Lots of people lead perfectly happy single lives.”
“You, for example,” she said tartly. “I know that. But I presume that’s because you want to.”
“Damn right.”
“So, fine. Hooray for you. But I don’t want to.”
He blinked at her vehemence. “You don’t?”
Lessons from a Latin Lover Page 2
