“Which isn’t true,” Sofia insisted. “She and I were behind Blush and headed to my car. The second she heard that whistle she went around the side of the boutique.”
Shyly, the boy glanced from his mother to Sofia. “Sorry.”
“You’re not supposed to leave this studio by yourself,” Caro reprimanded. “Then, on top of it, you lied. Never, ever lie to me.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy.” He slinked over to Tish and looped his gangly arms around the dog’s neck.
Be careful, she’ll growl, Sofia wanted to say, but Tish’s tail began to thump.
She was…happy?
“Tish belongs to Luz,” the boy said. “I can take care of her until Luz comes back. Please?”
Sofia moved closer to Caro, dropping her voice. “You’ve got to tell him the truth. Kids have a tendency to lie when they’re being lied to.”
“Evan’s fragile.” Caro picked up the model watercraft, then, seeming at a loss for what to do with it, she hugged it close. “The hardest thing to do sometimes is lie to your child. You only do it then because it’s also the easiest thing to do, or the only option. When you’re a parent, the easy ways out and last resorts can be blessings.”
Sofia wanted to say she understood, but she could only empathize.
“Mommy, are you mad at me?” The boy’s small voice had them both turning their heads. Evan still held Tish protectively. “Am I in trouble?”
Caro unwrapped her son’s arms from the dog. “Sofia is Luz’s family. She’s in charge of Tish now.”
“But Mommy—”
“I’d like her to stay,” Sofia blurted, and everyone looked confused. Even Tish cocked her head curiously. “For a couple of hours. I have a meeting and I don’t want to make her sit through it when she could be hanging out with Evan. So would that be fine?”
Caro’s smile created a sparkle in her brown eyes. “We’d love it. Evan, why don’t you put your boat away and then get the foam ball for Tish?”
The kid bounced up and started to zip out of the lobby.
“Not so fast,” his mother interrupted, summoning him back. “Say thank you to Sofia for being so kind.”
Evan charged, throwing his thin arms around her waist. “Thank you!” He looked up at her through his too-long curls. “Tish loves me. I’m her best friend. Does she love you, too?”
“Oh, of course,” she said, because Caro was right. Sometimes it was easier to lie.
The response seemed to satisfy Evan and he released her to speed off again.
“Thanks,” Caro said. “It’s been Evan and me for his entire life. He’s the sensitive sort and he’s not quick to make friends. When he met Tish, it was as if he’d found his kindred spirit, if you put stock in that sort of thing. They’ve gotten on from day one. He’ll miss her when you take her away to New York.”
“When you’re as close as Evan and Tish are, distance doesn’t matter so much. I can bring her back sometimes.”
“You’d do that for Evan?”
Sofia nodded. Weekend visits weren’t out of the question, particularly when there were so many details left to settle in Eaves. “For Tish, too. Besides, I have that to figure out.” She pointed in the direction of Blush. “I’m sort of your neighbor.”
“Bautista told me. Do you think we’ll be neighbors for a while? Are you going to hold on to Blush?”
“I might. It’s an option,” Sofia said optimistically, but Caro wasn’t as easy to convince as her son. “Another option is accepting it for what it is—great commercial real estate.”
“Oh.” She seemed deflated. “You’re inclined to sell. Society Street’s its own community, kind of independent of the rest of Eaves. I love that about this street. But things are changing and I’m desperate to keep them the same. Is that selfish?”
“No, I get it. And I’m sorry I can’t ease your concerns, Caro, but the truth is I’m confused.” That nugget of honesty brought her relief. So she shared another. “I was born and raised here. I feel like a stranger now.”
Caro nodded as if in agreement. “This isn’t a remedy, but I’m here for you. I know what it’s like to no longer feel you belong in your own home.”
“Thanks.” Sofia went to the desk and scribbled on the guestbook. “Here’s my cell. Call me if anything comes up.”
“Okay.” Caro hesitated before adding, “It could be that part of the reason I don’t want to tell Evan about your aunt is because I don’t really want to believe it myself. Instead of going to her service, I took a shift at Bottoms Up. I say I want to protect my son, but maybe I’m only shielding myself. I loved that damn woman. She was my friend.”
Sofia nodded. But she had to think—she’d loved Luz, too, yet had they been friends in the end? Or had time and distance let Sofia become as much of a stranger to Luz as she was to the rest of Eaves?
Escaping the question, she left the studio and tried to tell herself it didn’t matter now.
Even though it did.
CHAPTER 6
Bautista wasn’t a man who made snap judgments about folks—rarely was he interested in mustering the give-a-damn to try, and a low tolerance for boredom was partly why he turned away more clients than he accepted and was viciously selective when it came to the company he kept—but the moment he put Luz’s dog’s leash on Sofia Mercer’s wrist, he could see the ugliness of fear twisting beneath all that beauty.
She wasn’t his responsibility; she’d get no soothing words or reassuring smiles from him. As a matter of fact, the sooner she made up her mind to cash out the assets Luz left behind—and he suspected she would—the better his life would be.
His life, such as it was.
Every night since her death he’d slept here in his office, because his woman had despised the place. Too corporate, she’d criticized, rolling up the word in the thick blanket of her Argentine accent and whipping it out in such a way that he still didn’t know whether she’d meant to tease or attack him. When it came to confusing him, Luz Azcárraga hit her target with the masterful precision of an expert markswoman.
Holing up in this place was taking its toll on him. It’d backfired, whatever plan he’d had to sleep and work here and then climb on his bike when it all came to a head.
His chopper waited in the shared parking lot of Eaves’s East and West Millennium Towers, a pair of tinted glass-walled executive buildings that jutted out from the Cape like two rods in a cock-measuring contest. If he went to the window he’d be able to see his bike glinting up at him as if it were a lighthouse’s beam slicing through a foggy night, but the ache behind his eyes and the thready sensation of weariness skittering along his nerves warned him away from direct morning sunlight. He wasn’t a morning kind of man, yet he’d claimed an east-facing office—screwed-up planning on his part, and he was reminded of it each time he followed up a hard-liquor night with early client appointments and had to cope with the sun rising outside his windows.
The only client he’d booked today, the only person who could so much as tempt him to deal with anyone on the morning after Luz’s funeral, was Sofia. And she was a no-show.
It was already after eleven—practically midday, which made it perfectly acceptable to yank a beer from the minifridge without hearing his legal secretary complain about him washing down his breakfast with alcohol.
Avoiding the keepsake trunk containing folders of paperwork, electronic storage backup devices, and boxes of trinkets he’d rummaged through only once, when he and Luz had been preparing her will, Bautista stood up and stretched. He had forty-five years on him and could still move with agility that didn’t make his bones creak painfully or draw a labored grunt from his gut, but he’d been sitting too long preparing himself for Luz’s niece to waltz in and take over everything that had belonged to the woman he loved.
God, he loved her…as deeply as he hated the lies she’d told him.
His shirt and pants were creased, but a pressed corporate image wouldn’t matter one damn bit the second he threw his
leg over his bike and revved it to a roar that’d quiet the thoughts tumbling through him.
Bautista put his hand on the door lever, ready to heads-up Nessa that he was grabbing an ice-cold, but it jammed on the first attempt. Adding force and throwing open the door, he watched Sofia all but stumble into the office.
Christ, it was eerie how closely she resembled Luz. There were some differences, obviously, but the similarities grabbed him so tightly that for a merciless moment he couldn’t breathe.
“What if I said you kept me waiting too long and need to set up something with my secretary?” Bautista began to move around her.
“Please don’t.” Sofia’s fingers latched onto his rolled shirtsleeve.
If Luz were here…If she could reach out easily and touch him…If he could be this close to her one more time and tell her…
“Take your hand off me, Sofia.”
She let him go. “Sorry. But I’m asking you not to leave. I would’ve been here much sooner, but I lost Tish—”
Fuck, already? “That didn’t take long, did it?”
“I found her, Bautista, but searching for her ate up some time. Then I had to change my clothes, and these aren’t even my clothes”—she pinched the front of her green top to illustrate that it was baggy across the breasts—“but mine were so dirty after I’d fallen and I didn’t want to show up here looking sloppy and I had to go all the way to Shore Seasons to borrow an outfit from my roommate. After all that it made sense to check out, since we’re heading back to New York today, anyway.” Finally she stopped talking. “What are you thinking?”
“That you’re boring me and wasting more of my time. People generally don’t get a second opportunity to waste my time.”
Sofia slid directly into his path. “You don’t scare me.”
“Yes, I do.” As desperately as he wanted nothing more to do with the woman, he just as desperately wanted her close for the exact same reason: She was familiar. Hurting Sofia would be like hurting Luz.
Nothing had eased him into the idea of losing his woman. One morning she’d woken him up by playing with his hair and they’d had slow, easy sex, then they’d fought in his kitchen about coffee beans and she’d slammed his door because she knew he couldn’t stand slamming doors. The next time he saw her, she was on a white-sheeted gurney at the hospital—an empty body.
The funeral had been his burden. Nessa tried to help, but he wouldn’t allow her or anyone else’s intrusion. Now there was Sofia, a woman who looked so much like Luz but could never be her.
“You want this to be wrapped up and over with, don’t you?” Sofia tried, her voice closer. “Me, too. If you give me some time, we can settle this and you can go on with your life.”
“She didn’t tell you, did she?” he asked, turning around and knowing damn well that Nessa now stood at her office door, riveted. “Luz didn’t tell you that she was my life?”
“She—uh—no, she didn’t say she was seeing anyone seriously. At the funeral you didn’t make it all that clear, either.”
“I’d figured out by then what I really meant to her.”
“What does that mean?”
“You want to do this?” He pointed to his office and her gaze flew to the tattoos stretching down to his wrist—a flock of crows. “Go in, take a seat. Do it fast, before I change my mind.”
Her glare was frosty, and that flare of instant anger made her startlingly different from her great-aunt. Luz wasn’t the type to let anyone know the precise moment she became pissed. She’d held him at arm’s length, always keeping some part of herself out of his reach when all he’d wanted to do was love her the only way a man like him knew how—protectively, greedily, selfishly.
“I keep comparing you to her,” he said flatly, once Sofia sat in front of his desk and he came around to stand beside her. “I hate that I’m doing it, but that’s what’s happening.”
“And I’m falling short of a woman you just described as being your life?”
“I didn’t say you fell short. You’re different. You’re scared, querida. She wasn’t.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know Ellen skipped out. I know Finnegan waited until you got a new heart before he did the same thing. I know that Luz had pride in her voice when she talked about her Sofia.”
“Pride?”
“She loved you.”
Her expression hovered somewhere between grateful and skeptical. Whatever number her parents had done on her wasn’t his problem to fix. He had to remember that.
“Luz told me nothing about you, Javier Bautista.” She looked at her hands, her fingers curling and uncurling on his desk. “She was your life and you were her…what?”
“Lawyer.” He went to the other side of the desk but didn’t sit. He was damn tired of sitting, of being still. “A breakdown of her estate is here.”
She opened the folder he put down in front of her and started to scan the spreadsheets. He was almost impressed that she continued to review instead of immediately shutting the folder and complaining of a headache. “Debts are itemized in section four. Her funeral expenses, in the second subsection, have already been resolved, paid from a dedicated bank account.”
“All those dresses left on her bed. When those are returned, will the credit go back into this account?” She set down the open folder. “They were all—”
“Wrong for her,” he muttered as the exact words drifted from her.
“If you knew they were wrong, why did you buy them?” she asked.
“I didn’t. My secretary, Nessa, bought them at one of those high-end joints in Boston. The credit’s going back to her.”
“What was she wearing yesterday?” The casket had been closed, as per Luz’s rigid instructions.
When I go out, I don’t want anybody to see me with my eyes closed.
She’d wanted to be remembered by her smile and the way her stare could be so serious that it made folks uncomfortable. In death, she appeared vulnerable, but nothing would ever hurt her again—not even his love.
“She was wearing a black dress with flowers all over it. Lotuses. She’d wear it to the beach sometimes. That dress and a pair of sunglasses with white frames. I couldn’t find the sunglasses but wouldn’t have let her wear them, anyway. I wouldn’t let anyone hide her face that way. I had them put her cross around her neck and her rosary in her hand.”
“And her hair?”
“Loose. She’d want to be comfortable, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Back to the paperwork. The debts are minimal—she didn’t live all that extravagantly and kept her finances in good shape. Her computer hasn’t been cleaned, but that’ll happen soon. Her CPA surrendered tax records, and those are all here.” He indicated a box inside the open trunk. “If you have trouble sleeping at night, dig in.”
“This doesn’t bore me. I have a business degree and I studied fashion merchandising. I don’t come from glamour and fluff.”
“And a motivation to get the most out of liquidation might keep you really interested,” he said, though he’d meant the cruelty to stay in his head and not get out in the air where she could hear it.
Snapping the folder shut, she said, “I didn’t come to Eaves because of an inheritance. I came to say good-bye to Luz.”
He’d refrained from telling her about the inheritance over the phone specifically to find out if her moral compass was bent. So he was inclined to believe her. “Assets,” he went on, ignoring his instinct to apologize when he’d offended unjustly. “She drove a Bug. It’s at my place, along with her bicycle. The building on Society—the apartment and the store—are free and clear. Luz had two employees. One took off for Sandwich and the other works at Shore Seasons. You might’ve met her already.”
“Paget. She checked me in. She seems nice.”
“Blush’s activity has been suspended and will remain that way until you decide if you want to sell or dissolve the store,” he continued. “I canceled a shipment of c
ondoms that tried to come through a couple of days ago, but you’ll need to get involved and close out the open accounts. Again, it’s detailed in the files.”
“Slow down,” she said. “God, this is too fast. Yesterday you tell me that everything of hers belongs to me now, and today you’re telling me how to get rid of it all.”
“Isn’t that what you want? You’ve got a setup in Manhattan.”
“Yes. A job and an apartment and a great car.”
“Greeting cards are a long way from vibrators and rope. Whatever apartment you’ve got, I’m almost sure its landlord won’t be all right with a Siberian husky. And something tells me you’re going to get tired of putting New York to Cape Cod miles on that great car of yours. I was Luz’s advisor, but I’m going to give you some advice and hope you’ll accept it for your own good. You can’t continue your life and try to hold on to the one she gave you. We both know it’d be most convenient for you to cash out, so don’t pretend you aren’t in a hurry to do just that.”
She lashed out with an obscenity and then a whimper. “You’re wrong. I’m not in a hurry to let Aunt Luz go.”
“Time’s going to move without you. My role in this is to transfer what was hers to you, not to give you sympathy or hold your hand. If that’s what you’re after, go to Burke Wolf. He went to the apartment with you, and I heard he took his time leaving.”
She smiled recklessly and he noticed a dash of dusky pink on her bottom lip. A tiny nick, a fresh one. “There’s stuff between Burke and me that you’ll never understand. For the record, he didn’t hold my hand and wasn’t all that sympathetic after we left the bar.”
Luz had told him Burke and Sofia had once been friends but had fallen out when the Mercers left Cape Cod. Ask him, a couple of kids had no business getting all tangled up in each other the way folks said they’d been. Burke kept himself mobile and could be a mean son of a bitch—how he’d ever gotten along with a delicate type like Sofia, Bautista couldn’t guess.
“It’s too bad you’ve got nobody who’ll let you cry. Ellen and Finnegan made sure to stay away.”
“You know where my mother is?”
Meant to Be Mine Page 8
