by Lora Leigh
“Like Benny. Hold my nose and swallow?”
“There was no need for swallowing with Benny.”
“I don’t suppose.” Brenda turned her teacup, still looking doubtful. “If he was a toe, what’s Jesse Drummond? Or do I have to ask?”
Estrella passed the squeeze bottle of honey. She thought of the wave tattoo. “He was a tidal wave.”
Brenda squeezed, stirred, sipped, wrinkled her rabbit-pink nose and squeezed again. “You’re regretting letting him go, I can tell.”
“Yeah.” Estrella sighed. Her fantasies of the roadside he-man had been replaced with endlessly replayed moments from their time in the pool. She hadn’t dared delve into what the remainder of the night might have been. “But I think I’m better off this way. For one, lying to him was wrong. For two, his resemblance to my ex is more than a little weird. The physical part is explainable, if I accept that that’s the type of man I’m attracted to. But the other—the dangerous, violent thing . . .”
The green tea must have done wonders for Brenda’s sinuses because suddenly she got very quiet.
Estrella put her chin on her hand. “Do you think I’m a head case? Like subconsciously I want a man who’ll treat me badly?”
Brenda slammed her spoon down on the table. “What did the guy do to you? If he hurt you, I’ll get after him with my hedge clippers and turn his trunk into a twig.”
Estrella waved. “No, no! It wasn’t like that. Honestly. He was a perfect gent—well, maybe not a perfect gentleman, because that wasn’t what I asked for.” Ha! She’d asked for a righteous screw, but had backed out before she got it. “He treated me well. This is more about my attraction to his type.”
“You’re sure?”
“Mmm.” Estrella felt guilty for withholding Jesse’s confession about his stint in prison, but she wasn’t comfortable revealing it either, especially when she didn’t know the full story. She didn’t need to look any more inconsistent, either. That she’d run from his tattoos but not his prison record made no sense.
“Before you noticed the tattoos,” Brenda said, picking up one of the flat hard sugar cookies Estrella had put on a plate. She had bought a package of them for ninety-nine cents at the corner market. Her mother would be appalled, but between work and school, she had no time for niceties like baking.
Brenda finished crunching and returned to the question she’d started. “Before the tats, how did you feel about Drum? I mean Jesse.”
“I wasn’t thinking. I was only feeling.”
“Knowing you, that’s probably a good thing.”
“Wait, now. Mindless sex with a guy I barely knew—how can that be good?”
“Sometimes it just is. ‘Cause that’s what a woman needs. And sometimes—” Brenda looked at Estrella with her eyes crinkling into mascara-caked slits. “—it leads to the real thing. Hot chemistry is there for a reason, you know?”
“We’re not ‘meant to be,’ if that’s what you think. He turned me on from the window of a passing bus. That’s hardly a grand romantic beginning.”
“Twenty-one years ago, I met Lou in the men’s washroom of the Sunshine Superette. The ladies’ was clogged as usual. I came out of a stall with a piece of tissue on my shoe and he was at the urinal.”
“And it was love at first sight?”
“It was chemistry. But I was halfway gone when he had the decency to wash his hands before coming after me.”
Estrella chuckled. “Thanks for cheering me up.”
“Maybe you want to spend some time thinking about why you overlooked the tattoos in the first place, and if that’s really why you stopped.”
“That’s all I’ve done for the past two days. Maybe I actually need to stop thinking.”
“And start, oh, I dunno, living?”
Estrella wanted to protest, but she couldn’t. Until Jesse, she’d been existing, which had been about all that she’d thought she could handle. He’d made her want so much more.
Sunday night at Rosa’s Mexicali was Jesse’s favorite way to finish off the weekend. The partying crowd was absent, leaving the die-hard regulars and the occasional newcomer who looked amazed to have found chili-colored walls and tango dancers pulsing away inside a building with such a drab exterior.
On Sunday night, the band was generally coping with the remnants of their hangovers. They played only slow songs with a lot of desultory sax and more thumps and brush-sweeps than hard drumming. The multicolored lights were toned down to a warm glow and Jesse could hide out in a roomy corner booth with a plate of empanadas and salsa and not be bothered.
Except, tonight, by Sweet Tea. “What about that one?” he said, aiming his beer bottle at a hoochie whose breasts threatened to spill out of her top every time she leaned over to filch from a friend’s plate. Her hair was brushed forward around her face, as if being past forty were a crime she was trying not to be fingered for. “She’s pretty.”
Jesse thought of Estrella’s breasts, soft and real. He could still feel them in his hands, taste them against his tongue, like sweet plums. “You can have her.”
“She don’t want an old man like me.”
“You never know.”
“You’re the one she’s checking out.”
“Tell her I’m taken.”
Tea burped against the back of his hand. “What’s that? You’re taken?”
Yeah, taken with Estrella, who didn’t want him. “I didn’t mean anything,” Jesse said. He’d had two beers, the chipotle salsa was a green puddle and he was getting maudlin. Time to go.
He didn’t move. Weighed down by the block of lead that had been lodged in his stomach ever since Estrella had stared at him with fear in her eyes. There had been a watchfulness about her all along, but he’d sensed she was toying with the aura of risk, letting it excite her. What had happened in the elevator was different.
Jesse grazed his knuckles over the tattoo on his right forearm. Different, and senseless.
“I like the looks of that redhead at the table under the window,” Tea said, grinning. “She’s built for my speed. But that’s gotta be her husband with her.”
Jesse glanced over at the couple, catching the wife staring at him. When their eyes met, she turned to say something to her man, then got up and marched across the room toward Jesse. She looked like a mother hell-bent on telling him off. It had happened before. But for once Jesse had to be innocent. Until the irresistible allure of Estrella, he’d slipped out of every grasping entanglement like a trophy-winning running back.
Until Estrella?
Jesse froze his slumped position, but his mind was flipping through his options for escape. Goddamn, he’d known going after a woman like Estrella would lead to no good. “Don’t look now, Tea. The redhead’s coming for you.”
Tea got flustered. He tugged on his collar. “Me? What’d I do? She think I was flirtin’ with her? I don’t want be fightin’ with her old man.”
The blowsy redhead stopped in front of their booth and put her hands on her hips. She was full-bodied and bejeweled, dressed in black with fringe and spangles, her face as highly colored as her hair. The mouth was loose and generous, but a flinty expression said she was nobody’s fool.
“You’re Jesse Drummond,” she announced in a smoky voice.
“That’s him,” Tea said with relief.
Jesse leaned over the table to say, “Go get the other one,” and Tea was so rattled that he did.
The redhead slid into his spot. “I’m Brenda Ventano. You don’t know me, but I’m Estrella’s friend.”
Jesse nodded.
She looked him square in the eye. “What kind of guy are you?”
“ ’Scuse me?” Normally that question was said in a threatening manner, but the woman had been almost conversational, except for the frown lines cutting a deep groove between her hand-drawn brows.
“I want to know if you’ll be sweet to her.”
Jesse was bemused. “Do I look sweet?”
“Like that matter
s. My Lou, over there—” Brenda hooked a thumb at the fireplug with a flat-top and tattoos who was currently scowling at Jesse. “He’s sweet to me.”
“I get the point. But you’d better talk to Estrella about this. I don’t know what she told you, but I did nothing to—”
“Yeah, yeah, you were a perfect gentleman. She said. The girl gives credit where it’s due. But I’m not asking about the other night. This is for next time. What kind of guy are you? The kind who cares too much, or not at all?” Her eyes flicked up and down him. “I’m guessing not at all. You’re not looking for a sweetheart like Estrella.”
Jesse shifted, trying to figure out this woman’s relationship to Estrella. She was, like him, downmarket. But there was Estrella in that fancy building with the car he couldn’t buy without spending a full year’s pay. Nothing about her added up, except the way she made him feel.
Which was, beyond the lust, hopeful. Hopeful? Hell. He was past maudlin and into seriously demented sentiment.
He cleared his throat. “You’re right. I wasn’t looking for Estrella. She found me. And then she let me go.”
“But you’re still interested.”
“Doesn’t matter. She’s not.”
Brenda blew a raspberry out the side of her mouth. “Are you that stupid? When a woman says, I want you, I want you, but I can’t have you, it’s up to you to go after her and show her that yes, she can.”
Jesse had considered that. “I’m not in a position to be aggressive.”
“All you have to do is knock on the door. Give her a chance.”
Jesse looked for Tea, and found him leading the hotcake onto the dance floor, wearing a boyish grin. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew what kind of guy I am.” Bad joke, considering.
Brenda rested her hands on the table with a clunk of rings and bracelets. “Then tell me.”
Jesse didn’t know what happened then. Maybe it was the mood, the alcohol, or Brenda’s been-there-cleaned-up-after-it air of experience, and of course her mysterious connection to Estrella didn’t hurt. Or maybe it was just that he was ready to talk.
For whatever reason, he told her, Estrella’s friend, in quick words and a soft voice, about the loneliness that had filled him with futility and anger as a boy, his fall into crime, the harshness and beauty of going to sea, even the stupid drunken night in a bar that had put him in prison. Brenda looked alarmed at the latter, but then she asked him about Estrella and he closed his eyes to answer—not being eloquent, although he sure as hell wished he could—and when he opened them she was nodding. Yes. He was approved, and that meant more to him than he’d expected.
Chapter Five
There was a chest at her peephole. Estrella knew instantly that the chest belonged to Jesse. But when he stepped back in the hallway, giving her a view of the rest of him, the air went out of her lungs. Her fingers and toes and tongue—even, seemingly, every hair on her body—curled.
His face tilted toward the peephole. “Estrella?”
“Yes. Give me a moment.” All ten fingers were wound around the handle of a mop. She pried off five to unlock and open the door, looking over her shoulder at the apartment. She’d lapsed in her weekly chores and had spent the day catching up. Eve would expect the place to be perfect when she arrived home tomorrow.
Estrella absolutely could not invite Jesse inside.
She peered around the edge of the steel door. Clearly, he’d come straight from work. The orange vest was gone, but his blue T-shirt and jeans were ripe with the day’s sweat and dirt. A damp stain around the collar testified that he’d washed up as best he could.
“Jesse.” She widened the door. “Come in.”
He hesitated, looking through to the shining apartment, an ice palace with white marble floors, spans of glass and mirror, and walls so pale, it was nearly impossible to discern they were blue. “No, thanks. I’m a mess. I only dropped by to—” He pulled an arm out from behind his back. “—give you these.”
Flowers? Estrella’s eyes widened. A half-dozen sunflowers, big and gaudy as Mexican dinner plates, wrapped in green tissue.
“I chose wrong,” he said, frowning at the apartment.
“They’re beautiful. They’re perfect.” She put every emotion into her voice as she took the paper cone and it seemed to her that the vastly unoriginal and inadequate words rose out of her to bob in the air like helium balloons. “I love them. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He smiled with one side of his mouth. The wry side. “I’m not really the kind of guy who brings flowers, but they seemed like ones you’d like.” His eyes went again to the apartment.
She shoved the mop aside. “You caught me playing Cinderella. Are you sure you won’t come in? I don’t mind that you’re di-dirty.” Her tongue stumbled. She colored, certain that he remembered how she’d told him she wanted to get dirty with him. “I, um, owe you an apology for . . . you know. And I’d rather do it inside.” Was that also suggestive? “I’d rather we sat down, I mean.”
She walked away from the door, juggling the flowers as she wiped her hands on the back of her jeans. “Take a seat. I want to pop these in a vase.”
The apartment was open concept, so she had no reprieve from his tracking gaze even in the kitchen area, which had been designed to disappear within the sleek modern decor. Estrella had never seen a less kitcheny kitchen. She’d taken days to learn the whereabouts of the few usable cabinets with their touch latches cleverly hidden in the seamless expanse of high-gloss surfaces.
While she filled a crystal vase at the tap, she smiled nervously at Jesse, perched uncomfortably on a low Barcelona chair made of bands of woven white leather and crisscrossed steel legs that looked like they might snap under his weight.
Why had he returned, and with flowers? The flowers were either a last shot at getting into her pants or a sign that he had actual feelings for her. Both options put her on guard.
She plunked the vase on the granite countertop. The sunflowers were glaringly out of place here, but they’d cheer her own drab place immensely once she got them home. Lavish arrangements of white lilies and roses were placed around Eve’s apartment. As she’d instructed, they’d been freshly delivered that morning to be at their peak for her arrival.
Jesse had noticed. He rubbed a finger behind his ear, staring at the bowl of white roses on the glass coffee table. “I really got it wrong.”
“No, you didn’t.” Estrella wondered if she should explain, but decided not to. Better to wait and see what he wanted.
She seated herself on the sofa, dread growing as she thought of the doorman downstairs. He was a friend, but she couldn’t expect him to cover for her. Bad enough that he’d stopped her that morning and wordlessly, amusedly, handed over a small envelope that turned out to contain her ripped panties. “How did you, ah, find me?”
“The doorman wasn’t too sure about letting me up,” Jesse admitted. “I look disreputable, huh? He even tried to deny you live here, but I pointed out the mailbox label for E. Romero on the sixteenth floor.”
Estrella blinked.
“That’s you, right? I guessed it had to be.”
“You found me.” She knitted her fingers in her lap. Okay, what now? Her eyes went to his arms. The wave tattoo was covered by a short sleeve, but on the other arm were two marks, not even remotely threatening in the light of day. “About the other night,” she started.
“Forget it. I understand. You changed your mind.”
“Not exactly. It wasn’t that I stopped wanting you.” Oh God. She flushed. His face drew her eyes and she had to force them back to the tattoos that hardly seemed to matter anymore. “To be honest, I still want you. Just looking at you makes me—” Sweat.
“Makes me remember. How it was.” She blew out a breath. “And then you bring flowers.” Her head bowed. “It was just . . . I had a moment of panic. Because of your tattoos.”
He nodded.
“Irrational, hm? But that was it.” She lifted her hands,
palms up, then dropped them back to her lap.
Jesse didn’t speak until she looked at him and saw the patience in his face. “Let me show you,” he said, getting up to sit beside her.
He reached for his sleeve. She held herself very still. “This one I got in Japan, on my first overseas job. Most of the guys had some nautical theme going. I went for the more artistic version.”
“It’s faded.” The inked outlining was all in blue with a faint shadow of gray. With his tan, the tattoo might have been only a tracing of veins just beneath his skin. Her hand rose, then stopped midair.
“Go ahead,” he said.
She put her palm over the wave drawing, like a child playing peekaboo, though there were no feelings of fear. That moment had passed. There was only a quickening desire. Her fingers played scales against the firm muscle, then drew down the inside of his arm, where the real veins rose to the surface. She wanted to take his hand, but he was pointing to his other tattoos.
“Here, a hula girl from a crazy weekend on Oahu.”
She almost laughed. Could there be a less ominous tattoo?
His thumb rubbed against his forearm. “And this one.”
A small blue star. And silence.
“No story?” she prompted.
“Prison,” he said. “The guy used pen ink.”
She pulled air through her teeth. “You’re lucky you didn’t wind up with hepatitis. Why did you get it?” Imagining gangs and threats.
“Boredom,” he said first, then corrected himself. “I missed the sky at night.”
She lifted his hand, pulled his arm into her lap. Outlined the star with one finger. “That’s my name, you know. Estrella means ‘star’ in Spanish.”
Jesse smiled.
Coincidence or not, the revelation seemed significant. She leaned toward his arm, her hair falling forward to veil her face as she closed her eyes and kissed the tattoo. Tony’s not here, he’ll never be here, I got away and I will be safe, she said in her head, a promise that had been repeated many times since her move and the painful break with her family, but that finally, finally seemed real.