Noticing the taut set of her shoulders, he approached her and instinctively raised his hand to help relieve that tension. He hesitated right before he touched her. He’d never used his powers unless someone consented, notwithstanding the other day’s unintentional loss of control with this very woman. “May I?”
Her dark brows flickered in concern before she shrugged in acceptance.
Taking a calming breath, he placed his hand on her shoulder, entering not just her physical space but that of her life force. With barely a push of his power, he dispelled the negative energies causing her stress, but he carefully disguised the fact by massaging the spot on her shoulder.
She blinked in surprise. “I’m better already. What was that?”
But of course he couldn’t tell her.
With one last stroke of the exposed skin on her neck, he reminded himself that his silence was for her own good. “It’s a healing massage,” he lied. “I learned it from a Buddhist priest.”
She bent her neck and raised her shoulders up and down as if to test the cure. “It’s awesome.”
Pointing to a stairway in the rear of the store, he said, “Would you like that coffee now? It’s upstairs.”
Sara hesitated, knowing that if she took the first step up those stairs, things would definitely get more complicated. Every other time she had been here, either alone or with her mami, they had stayed in the store. The public part of his life.
That step upward…
Maybe she was reading too much into his invitation. And why did it suddenly matter to her so much, anyway? It was just coffee.
Up in his personal space.
With a nod, Sara walked to the back of the store and climbed the narrow stairway that led to Ricardo’s living area. She knew that about him from the tattle in the neighborhood. He was the handsomest bachelor for blocks, and all the women in the barrio gossiped about him while at the bodega or stuffing their faces with sweets at the bakery.
Rumor had it that he had once had a thing going with the lady from the shelter up the block. Other than that his life was a closed book. No one knew where he came from or why he had settled in their upper New York City neighborhood a few years ago.
As she walked into his apartment, she learned more about him.
He had a large family, all of whom smiled out from the framed photographs gracing one shelf of a bookcase. And he’d been a marine, she realized, thanks to a photo of Ricardo in a dress uniform with whom she assumed were his parents.
The bookcase was also loaded with an eclectic mix of books, everything from Zamiatin to Orwell to a collection of Shakespeare plays in both English and Spanish. She noticed a leather-bound tome, The Conquest of Mexico and Peru, juxtaposed with a romance novel. She couldn’t stop a smile. Who couldn’t appreciate a man secure enough to read a romance? she thought.
Her information gathering was cut short as Ricardo stepped up behind her, laid a hand on the small of her back and guided her in the direction of a narrow eat-in kitchen to one side of the space.
On the bistro-size oak table, a napkin-covered plate rested beside settings for two. “Expecting someone?”
Ricardo shrugged his deliciously broad shoulders. “I was hoping I could catch you this morning. Hoped we could talk.”
“So let’s talk.” She removed her jacket, stuffed her gloves and scarf into the pockets and draped the garment on her chair. She propped her knapsack against the wall and then sat at the table.
He walked to the stove and removed the coffeemaker—the old-fashioned aluminum kind of espresso machine you heated on the range. When he poured the coffee, a heavenly aroma infused her senses. He returned to the stove and came back with a ceramic pitcher filled with hot milk from which curls of steam arose.
“Care for some?” At her nod, he topped off her cup and his own, and sat opposite her.
Beside the covered plate, just one small bowl rested on the table. As she removed the top she noticed it was raw sugar. “Do you have—”
“I don’t usually keep anything artificial, but I could go ask a neighbor.”
“No, that’s okay.” A spoon or two, or possibly three, weren’t going to make much difference to her already ample hips, she thought, and spooned sugar into her coffee.
“Try a beignet,” he said, removing the cover from the plate. “Samantha made them fresh this morning.”
Samantha Turner, she assumed. The lady from the shelter. Maybe some of the neighborhood gossip wasn’t so far off the mark. “Are you and she—”
“Just good friends and nothing more,” Ricardo immediately said, apparently well aware of the rumors floating around about their relationship.
The fact that he was quick to explain was unsettling. It meant that this cup of coffee might be about more than she’d thought at first. That was worrisome, and Sara didn’t have time for guessing games. She decided to take the direct approach.
“I’m assuming this talk is about my mom.”
Another shrug of those impossibly broad shoulders followed her question. “I was thinking this could be just a talk.”
“As in a personal talk?”
The look of a scared little rabbit flashed across her gamin face before the bravado that Ricardo was more familiar with settled in. “Do you realize that we’ve known each other a year and have never spoken about anything other than your mami?”
“And why would we want to change that?” she retorted, her perfect little chin inching up a determined notch.
Why? Because demand surged inside him, refusing to be denied. He needed to touch her again. To experience the same spark he had the other day. Her goodness and purity. Her passion. It had been too long since he had allowed himself that kind of intimacy.
But he didn’t tell her all that. Instead he said, “Because if we don’t, we might regret it for a long time.” Then slowly he leaned across the width of the small table and did the only thing he could.
He kissed her.
Chapter 4
H er lips felt chilly beneath his, probably from her walk in the cold. They were hesitant at first, but as the chill slowly left them, so did that uncertainty.
He moved his mouth to savor her welcome, to relish the touch. It had been so long since he had allowed himself something even as simple as a kiss.
Sara parted her lips, allowing him entrance, and he took the kiss deeper. But danger lurked on the smooth, sweet recess of her mouth. As she matched his intensity, the energy built between them, grew and melded their two similar forces in a stunning palpable surge. As if burned, Sara suddenly withdrew.
“What was that?” Confusion and fear were clear on her face.
He chastised himself for once again failing to control his power. He should have realized from their touch the other day that Sara could discern his energy, and that any kind of intimacy with her could be difficult, if not downright impossible. Around her, he lost his self-control.
He remembered the first time such a thing had happened with a woman. His lover at the time—a doctor with an international relief organization—had been so disturbed by the unusual sensations, she’d left his bed and never returned. He had been more careful in later encounters, always restraining his emotions in order to contain the life energy within him.
With Sara, he’d forgotten caution and restraint, so lost was he in the wonder of her kiss. Because of that, some of his energy had unintentionally touched her once again. Retreating across th
e table, he sat back down and grabbed his mug of coffee. “It was just a kiss,” he replied calmly. Much more calmly than he felt.
Sara searched his features, but he had shut down. His green eyes, the color of thick Christmas pines, had grown flat and his pupils were tight little pinpoints of black. She didn’t doubt that the handsome man sitting across from her was lying.
He dropped his head to look down at his coffee mug, and his hair slid forward like a curtain to hide him from her scrutiny, further confirming her observation.
Being here with him was definitely not a good idea, she decided, recalling how she had fallen for another handsome man’s lies. She knew nothing about Ricardo Fernandez, although he had arguably earned some part of her trust with the way he had helped her mother. At first she had been skeptical of the claims from those he had supposedly “cured.” She had even thought that he might be a con man, only he hadn’t asked for money.
So far, he had kept her mother alive far longer than the doctors at her own prestigious hospital had predicted.
So, she asked herself, if she could entrust her mother’s life to him, shouldn’t she be able to share a simple cup of coffee and some…
“What did you say those were called?” she said, and motioned to the plate in the middle of the table.
His head jerked up; an incredulous look had taken possession of his face. “Excuse me?”
“May I have one of those?” She pointed to the square, sugar-covered doughy things.
“You want one?” he asked. The sharp planes of his face were still taut with concern.
“You did ask me in for some coffee and…those things.”
“Beignets. They’re called beignets. And you’d like to stay and have one?” A smile slowly curved his lips and seeped into his eyes, warming them to a deep emerald color.
“Yes, but don’t think that means anything else is going on, because I am so not interested,” she said with a nod of her head to emphasize the point.
“And that kiss before…”
“A mistake on your part, but I’m willing to forget it if you are,” Sara said, although she wasn’t sure how easy it was going to be to forget not only the kiss, but the feeling of rightness that had come with it.
When their lips had met, she had sensed so many things once again, including a deep well of goodness about Ricardo. Because of that, she was willing to put aside the weirdness of their kiss, as well as the anger that should have come with his rather abrupt approach.
“You want to forget it?” he said, each word slow, as if he needed to make clear to himself just what she had asked.
“Yes, I do. And you?” Even as she spoke, a part of her hoped he wouldn’t agree, because the kiss, as unusual as it had been, had been quite good. Maybe better than good.
Ricardo cupped the mug in his big hands and hesitated for a second before nodding. “You’re right. Your mami is my client, and mixing business with pleasure—”
“Is never a good idea,” she finished for him.
But as he handed her a beignet and steered the conversation toward more neutral topics, she felt a dash of disappointment.
She tamped it down and told herself she had done the right thing. When would she learn that handsome men with no visible means of support could only bring her trouble?
In the suburbs of New York, people settled into their homes and hibernated like bears for the better part of the winter, coming out only when necessary. Not so in the city. Occasional ice and snow sometimes made the everyday routines of life difficult, but the staunch residents went about their business, burdened with the layers of heavy clothes, their patterns not much different than at the other times of the year, only slower.
Just as Ricardo had seen Sara the other morning as she walked home from work, he regularly observed his barrio neighbors as they passed his shop. The brown of the UPS man as he made deliveries down the block to Mrs. Hernandez, who was addicted to one of the shopping networks. The familiar blue of the postman. Mrs. Lopez, wearing her mourning black as she walked her rather rotund table-scrap-fed beagle, who never failed to remind him of the recently deceased Mr. Lopez.
Even the animals in the neighborhood had their patterns. Mr. Rivera’s Siamese cat sat on the windowsill across the street, anxiously watching the activity below where a stray black cat—another neighborhood regular—lazed in the sun.
Which reminded him, it was time to feed Bob. In a stab at irony, Ricardo had chosen the innocuous name for the calico, one of the feral felines that roamed this part of the barrio. Bob had limped to his doorstep nearly three years ago, one ear nearly torn off, scratched and bleeding from a fight.
The cat had been skittish at first, cowering in a corner of the small back patio. Ricardo had advanced slowly, murmuring soft words and reaching out for the calico’s life force. Gently, he had breached its defenses, emitting calming energy to heal the cat’s injuries, just as he had occasionally healed other strays in the neighborhood.
Since that day the calico had shown up every morning and night for a feeding. Though it grew healthy and friendly enough to pet, it still possessed a tomcat attitude that said the food wasn’t reason enough to become domesticated.
Just like some people, Ricardo thought. Not surprisingly, Sara came to mind. She was all attitude herself. All I-can-take-care-of-myself. He wondered what her life had been like to create that kind of spirit, as well as her I-don’t-need-a-man-in-my-life vibe. He had definitely sensed that coming off her the other day when he’d kissed her. Even still, he recalled, she couldn’t hide her interest in him. That had been obvious.
Grabbing the box of dry cat food from a kitchen cabinet, he headed downstairs and out the back door, only to find that last night’s meal sat untouched.
Funny. He couldn’t recall whether he had seen the cat last evening as he closed up shop, but sometimes he didn’t see Bob at night. The calico would sneak in well after lights out, but the dish would be empty in the morning.
Ricardo didn’t give it much additional thought, having to prepare for the day ahead and the two clients who awaited his restorative routines, as well as another customer who had placed a special order for a religious statue.
As he did every day, Ricardo checked the offerings to the Santería deities on the altars, replenishing them as necessary. Afterward, he sat on the grass mat in the back of the store to begin his meditation routine. Since the incident the other day, a strange sense of darkness had lingered about him, but he had been unable to determine what was responsible.
Samantha had confirmed that she had similar sensations and concerns, but likewise, had encountered nothing out of the ordinary during her nightly patrols.
Although troubled by that persistent darkness, he forced himself to start. Legs crossed, he laid his hands on his knees and breathed deeply. In and out, in and out. Slower and deeper. Bit by bit he released the tension in his body. Finally he looked toward the spot of morning sunlight playing across the floor in front of him. He focused on it until it blurred into a rainbow of colors.
He let himself flow into that light, and allowed the brilliance to course into him, losing all sense of himself as he melded with the forces around him. Calm filled him, spreading outward to shed light on the darkness that had plagued him for days.
Like the sun radiates its warmth, his energy poured out from him, touching the energy around him and becoming one with it, and taking it within himself until its strength charged his core. As his power grew
, he let himself shift ever outward, aware of the need for more power to heal those who would come to him today.
Light suffused his essence. Balance came to him.
Ricardo reached out further.
The beast had been sleeping, recuperating from a night spent filling himself with the blood of animals both above and below the surface. For days he had contented himself with the sewer rats until he got a sense of what was available in the neighborhood above. Like any good hunter, he had scoped out the prey and their habits, decided which ones would be easiest to take first—the weak and the alone.
The ones no one would notice were gone.
Like the rats.
The rodents had served their purpose at first and would again, once game was not as easy to capture in the area. But for now, a world of delicacies awaited him.
Delicious strays like the two cats from last night. The first one had been thin and weak, nearly on its last legs, which had made it an easy kill. The second one, however, had been a treat. It had dodged him quite well in the confines of the narrow alleyway where he had cornered it, but eventually, he had unleashed his full speed and caught it. The animal had been deliciously healthy and with that special power about it. The power that was filled with goodness, pulling at the vestige of humanity that lingered within him. The humanity that seemed to grow with every encounter with the force.
He knew the source was close. He could soon find out who it was that had the power to cure him, to make him human once more.
The touch of that power awakened him as it called to him again.
Rising to his legs, the beast lifted his head and sniffed.
Nothing alive.
Despite that, the power pulled at him. As it had the other morning.
Devotion Calls Page 4
