And Then He Kissed Me

by Curtis, Melinda

  She’d been more certain of it every passing hour, every passing mile. She loved his intensity. She loved his drive to succeed. She loved his assertiveness.

  Yes, he took it too far sometimes, as he had trying to find out her corporate secrets. But his passion came from an authentic place. From Nino, a boy abandoned by his father, a man who’d tried to right that wrong without forgetting about those less fortunate than he was.

  I love him.

  Nino stopped in front of Aubrey. “Mateo sent someone to take me and the motorcycle back to Quito. The driver has no replacement bike.” Nino attempted a smile. It didn’t reach his eyes. “We should go back to the hotel and attempt this trip tomorrow.”

  He was giving up on the journey? Aubrey very nearly grabbed his shoulders and shouted, “No!”

  “You can return.” Aubrey tried to keep disappointment from her tone but was afraid she failed. “I’ve got people expecting me at the plantation and a schedule to keep.” Aubrey fitted the helmet back on her head.

  “Wait. I…” Nino smiled at her the way he had the day they’d met and he’d suggested canelazo. “May I ride in your sidecar?”

  The fact that he wasn’t too proud to ask made her love him all the more.

  “If you like.” She hid her smile by pulling her visor into place.

  *

  The sidecar made Nino feel as old as Dotty.

  Or perhaps it was his crash-stiffening muscles.

  His legs were scrunched between sacks of groceries, a small cooler, and Aubrey’s bags. Sitting in the sidecar, he felt every pothole, every uneven bit of road. He reviewed emails on his phone. It kept his mind off his discomfort and the stupidity of swerving to miss a chicken, because–oof–there was another pothole. His back spasmed.

  “Look at that view.” Aubrey slowed on a narrow bridge that crossed a wide ravine.

  Mist rose up on either side of them. A volcanic ridge towered to the east, covered in harsh black rock. The view wasn’t unusual or even particularly pretty.

  Nino grunted, still stuck in his post-crash bad mood. He was wearing Dotty’s red helmet, which was a tight fit, but had an intercom system linked to Aubrey’s helmet, allowing them to talk to each other without shouting.

  “The least you can do is look.” Aubrey stopped in the middle of the bridge. Through the headset, her voice had a canned, tinny quality to it, making her sound cold and detached.

  If they’d been standing in a bar, he’d have cajoled her back into good humor with a whisper and a caress. But he wasn’t balanced on his own two feet. He was scrunched into the sidecar at her mercy. “It’s dangerous to stop like this. What if a truck comes the other way?”

  Aubrey didn’t budge. “The first time I saw this view, I was with my Uncle Peyton, my four sisters and my four cousins.” Had she seemed cold before? Her voice warmed to the memory. “We stopped on this same bridge. I was scared. You’ll notice this structure doesn’t look all that sturdy.”

  Nino rubbed the small of his back. “How long ago was this?”

  “Years,” she said vaguely. “My uncle told us to reach for each other–for family–when we were uncertain. We were all afraid the bridge would fall.”

  He envied her the large family. Siblings and cousins to talk to and lean on.

  “I felt so small.” Had he been able to see her face, she would have a dreamy look in her eyes. “Uncle Peyton told us this valley represented everything about Ecuador. Harsh mountains. Fertile valleys. And to the west, the ocean and the Galapagos Islands. Beautiful and dangerous country, but conquerable with those you love at your side.”

  There was something his father would never say. Nino toggled through his messages.

  “Do you ever take your eyes off that device of yours?” Aubrey plucked Nino’s phone from his hands and tucked it in her breast pocket, sealing the Velcro shut.

  “Hey!”

  She shook her helmeted head, expression hidden behind the tinted visor. “This isn’t New York. It isn’t Quito. You’re out of the office. If you keep your nose to that screen, one of two things will happen. You’ll either miss a one-of-a-kind breathtaking view or you won’t see danger coming right at us.”

  “Danger meaning another stray chicken?” Nino scowled.

  “Nino.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re here with me. Be here with me.” She revved the engine in neutral. “Layla’s always bragging about how Ecuadorians know how to live, and yet you don’t know how to appreciate the beauty around you.”

  Oh, he knew how to appreciate the beauty around him, all right. It was there in the fire in her eyes, the spark that matched the heat in her voice.

  The gray mist danced beneath them in ephemeral tendrils, weaving through the canopy of tall trees on either side of the ravine. It was peaceful, even with the motorcycle’s beefy engine on idle. If he was the kind of person to take pictures, he would have taken a photo of this.

  “You see the mountain up there?” She gestured east. “It’s volcanic rock right now, but with a little soil mixed in, it will produce cocoa, the same way they established vineyards on the Greek islands.”

  He tried to see her vision in the midst of the bleakness. “You own that land?”

  Her face remained turned toward the ridge. “No, I’m recommending Bon Bon Chocolate buy land like it. Cocoa farmers are a disappearing breed. It’s a hard life without adequate pay. But with more partnerships with manufacturing to produce interesting and refined flavors and higher pay for crops, the farming life can be attractive to a new generation.”

  “That is forward thinking.” The kind of thinking that turned businesses around. He touched his pocket, reaching for his phone to send a text to Mateo on the topic of growing region expansion, and frowned. “Can I have my phone back?”

  “No. Enjoy the view.” She put the engine in gear and drove on, charging up the mountain in the middle of a thin strip of pavement. When she reached the top, they descended into a lush valley, but slowly, along a series of long switchbacks.

  The view was breathtaking.

  “I could make a fortune selling this view.” Nino glanced back to see if there was any place to build housing or a resort. “I should call my assistant Matteo to see who owns this land.”

  “Stop right there. If you sell this view, you’d only ruin it.” Before Nino could take offense, she added, “I don’t mean you’d ruin it. I mean it shouldn’t be sold. Some things are meant to be left alone.”

  Like her.

  Nino should have taken Mateo’s advice and stayed in Quito.

  He took advantage of a straight stretch of road and stuffed her backpack behind him, which made some of the bumps easier on his back, if not his folded knees. He gazed out at the landscape, which made the time pass quicker. And occasionally, he stared at Aubrey, wanting to remember these last few days together before she left Ecuador–and him–behind.

  They stopped for lunch at a small café. Based on its appearance, it wasn’t a prosperous dining establishment.

  “A woman like you shouldn’t eat at a place like this.” Nino climbed out of the sidecar and worked the kinks out of his body.

  “This café is clean, and the owner can use our business.” A few steps later and Aubrey embraced the man standing in the doorway, speaking in rapid Spanish. “How are the little ones? I bet they’ve grown since I was last here.” She handed him a cloth bag filled with canned goods, much the way Nino had handed food and water to the man living in the roadside cardboard shack–with compassion, not pity.

  When they’d met, he’d thought they were different. He was finding the differences between them were insignificant.

  A small boy hopped about the porch like an angry rabbit on two feet, and then he stopped, raising both hands in the air. “I killed it.”

  A large black centipede writhed on the ground, before collapsing completely.

  Nino stood near the motorbike, staring at the café.

  But he saw a different building, one that had housed his moth
er’s seamstress business. The centipedes and spiders had been huge to a small boy. The heat had been oppressive. The small pile of work his mother had demoralizing. It’d just been them back then. Later, after his grandfather died, his grandmother had moved in.

  Aubrey’s voice brought him back to the present. She called him over and introduced him to Carlito, the proprietor, who hurried inside to make them lunch.

  Nino and Aubrey sat down at a small rectangular table outside. It wobbled when Nino put his elbows on it, the same way the table in his childhood shack had wobbled. He felt unsteady in his chair.

  “What’s wrong?” Aubrey placed a hand on his arm. “Motion sickness?”

  “No.” Nino didn’t want to think about the past. His back spasmed, grounding him in the present. “It is only that this place seems familiar.”

  She removed her hand from his arm and glanced about. “Have you stopped here before?”

  Nino shook his head, catching sight of the cardboard covering the dirt floor in the café.

  Sh-sh-sh-sh. The sound of bare feet on cardboard as young Nino ran around the small brick house.

  “Put your shoes on, Nino,” his mother had cautioned. She sat near the open door, using the afternoon sunlight to embroider fine stitches in a traditional woman’s skirt. “Or you’ll get bit by something.”

  Centipedes. Spiders. Beetles.

  “I want to go home.” Nino had sprawled across his mother’s lap as if covering her like a blanket would make her take him back to the lavish air-conditioned house they’d shared with his father. “I want to swim.” In the pool that had been in their backyard. “I want to watch TV.” Their little hut had two electric plugs and no television.

  It had been a hovel.

  “I used to live in a place like this,” Nino said quietly to Aubrey. “My mother and I.”

  She returned her hand to his arm, a touch so warm and understanding Nino nearly pulled her into his lap. “After your father left you?”

  He nodded, seeing his mother’s care-lined face as if she sat inside the doorway. She had no cares now. “This café might be a step above our accommodations.”

  “What we need to make us happy is right here.” His mother had kissed a complaining Nino, but she hadn’t looked him in the eyes.

  And that’s when Nino realized a hard truth. They’d never be happy until he made enough money to return them to their former home.

  “My mother sewed traditional garb for the tourist shops and grew herbs in a window box that she sold to our neighbors.”

  “And what did you do? I can imagine you working, even at five.” Aubrey knew enough about life in Ecuador to know everyone in a family chipped in.

  “Everything.” He wiped his hands on his leathers as if wiping off the grime of the past–selling gum in the neighborhood square after school, working at a shoe factory, taking on any job that got them out of the worst neighborhood to a better neighborhood to his old neighborhood. He’d never go back to poverty. Never.

  “And what do you do now?” she asked softly. “Besides taking over companies?”

  The past slipped away. Nino stared at a red-feathered rooster scratching the dirt a few feet away, eking out what little he could find. “I’ve only bought companies my father had a stake in. He has no business interests left.”

  “Then you are free.” Aubrey squeezed his arm. “Free to be the Nino you were meant to be before your father left you.”

  Nino wasn’t sure who that was and besides, “I cannot erase my past.”

  “True, but you shouldn’t dwell in it either.”

  Carlito brought out two bowls of soup that contained a little rice and a few diced vegetables. His son put two warm cans of Coca Cola on the table.

  Nino thanked them. The soup had probably been what Carlito and his family planned to have for lunch. Aubrey’s thoughtfulness would compensate for their meal more than the money Nino planned to leave.

  “I don’t miss this life.” He turned his face into the sun. “Still, there is something to be said for working in the open air.”

  They ate the soup efficiently. It wasn’t something to savor, although it wasn’t bad, and reminded Nino once more of what he’d scrabbled from.

  Chapter 13

  “You brought a man,” Sister Mary Ofelia said to Aubrey in Spanish. The elderly nun stood on the second story porch of what used to be Bon Bon Chocolate’s plantation house. The late afternoon sunlight was unforgiving on her age blemishes as she frowned down on Aubrey and Nino.

  Frowning being what Sister Mary Ofelia did best.

  Aubrey smiled as she pushed the motorcycle through the front gate. Some things never changed.

  “You are very observant, sister.” Nino joked as if he’d known Sister Mary Ofelia for twenty years. “I am a man.”

  Sister Mary Lucia poked her darkly freckled face over Sister Mary Ofelia’s shoulder. “He looks better than the last man Aubrey brought here.”

  “You brought another man to this convent?” Nino quirked a brow.

  His good looks and charm made butterflies take wing in Aubrey’s chest, fluttering faster because he’d been revealing his heart to her throughout the day, perhaps without even realizing it.

  “I brought Eugene to help supervise a grafting project to strengthen the health of our cocoa plants and to see the results in the field of our yeast fermentation.” Aubrey parked the motorcycle underneath the staircase, providing cover in case it rained. “This building was the original plantation homestead.” The part-time home of Aubrey’s grandparents on her mother’s side. Built on stilts, it sat ten feet above ground, which had never deterred spiders or snakes getting to the second floor. “My maternal grandfather left it in his will to the nuns to use as a convent.”

  There were drying tables set up across the yard. Cocoa nibs covered the table tops. Tarps were suspended over the tables to protect them from rain. It was primitive, but the amount of the grafted harvest was small.

  Sister Mary Rosa bumped the other two nuns with her wheeled walker, pushing them out on the porch. She ogled the newcomer. “Is this one married?”

  Aubrey waggled her finger at the nuns. “Don’t start.”

  “Do they matchmake?” Nino had wandered over to the drying tables and picked up a nib the size of a coffee bean. He sniffed it. “Why does it smell like syrup?”

  “The yeast draws out and emphasizes the natural flavors in the aroma at this stage.” Aubrey took the nib from him and rolled it between her fingers. It felt dry and firm, a good sign.

  “I’ve never seen unprocessed chocolate before.” Nino bit into it, spitting it into his palm almost immediately. “It’s bitter.”

  “The sweetness will be drawn out in the manufacturing process.” She popped the nib she held into her mouth, chewing it slowly, trying to identify the flavors and pick out anything unique relative to the samples she’d had in the past. “I must be crazy. But like you, I smell syrup.”

  He nodded. “Molasses. Is that normal?”

  It wasn’t, but Aubrey wasn’t telling him everything, at least not yet.

  “Is this one married?” Sister Mary Rosa asked again.

  “No.” Nino glanced around the simple yard. “Is this also a wedding chapel?”

  “Not hardly.” Aubrey walked over to the stairs, pausing near the bottom step. “These nuns don’t waste time on courtship. They marry couples. They’re hoping you’ll marry me tonight.”

  Behind her, it sounded as if Nino stumbled in bachelor-based fear.

  “He cannot enter unless he is married.” Sister Mary Ofelia’s words were tinged with annoyance and her gaze harder than a prison warden’s.

  “No men.” Sister Mary Lucia nodded her agreement.

  “No unmarried men.” Sister Mary Rosa sing-songed. “But there is always unido.”

  Unido. The common law marriage ceremony of the country’s poor.

  In the mountains to the south, thunder rolled. And rolled. And rolled.

  “No one
abides by unido,” Nino said in an odd voice.

  His comment had the nuns gasping.

  “He’ll be fine sleeping outside the way Eugene did,” Aubrey reassured them, turning to give Nino a what-the-heck look. “Beneath the convent.” Where she kept great-great grandfather’s yeast. She’d know by tomorrow if her love was misplaced.

  “Out here?” Nino peered at the shadows beneath the convent floor.

  “You’ll be fine,” Aubrey reassured him. “I’ll bring you a cot.”

  “I’ll drive your motorcycle to that village we passed an hour back.” Nino didn’t sound like he enjoyed the out of doors. “Someone will take me in.”

  For a price, she bet. “You’re not taking the motorcycle. My cousin Scarlet would kill me if she found out I loaned it to anyone.” It’d taken years for Scarlet to trust Aubrey with it.

  Nino’s dark gaze swung around to Aubrey. “Perhaps a donation to the convent would–”

  “No.” Sister Mary Ofelia disappeared inside, followed by her fellow nuns.

  “Unido…” Nino frowned at a series of cobwebs beneath the convent. “Like any marriage, it can be undone. Some even walk away from it.”

  She didn’t want to be his temporary anything. “If I married you, I’d own half of your assets. I could fund a lot of charities before you divorced me.”

  “You wouldn’t take advantage of me, mi cielo.” He passed his palm over her cheek.

  It was all she could do not to lean into him and agree to marry him in the local tradition. “You don’t know that for sure. Is the risk worth it?”

  “It might be.” His smile was as languid as that kiss they’d shared on the dance floor. “I’ve seen the size of spiders in the jungle.”

  A monkey howled in the forest canopy, its voice drowned out by the roll of thunder.

  “Aubrey, could you help with dinner?” Sister Mary Ofelia leaned out the doorway and glared at Nino. “You must eat outside.”

  Aubrey had food in the sidecar, but before she carried it upstairs, she needed to show Nino something. “You can store any food you brought here.” She opened a small refrigerator beneath the convent and picked up a clear, vacuum-sealed jar, as if interested in its contents.