“Right,” she agreed slowly.
“And they wouldn’t expect you to come back to work while I’m away.”
“But the Chilean press, they’ll be all over us and no matter what we—”
“I’ve thought about that,” he interjected. “We can try to limit being seen together, but frankly I think it’s easier if we’re open and honest about the fact that we’re dating. I asked my agent and he says there’s no reason why we can’t be involved, that it’s not a conflict of interest.”
“You asked your agent?” she screeched, bolting upright.
“Relax.” He urged her back down to the mattress with his hands on her shoulders. “He’s so discreet I could tell him I had a fetish for animals and he’d start figuring out how to sneak me into the zoo at night.”
“That’s disgusting,” she decreed, but settled onto the pillows.
“To be honest, I think he was disappointed. I’ve never been the subject of any major scandal and I think he was hoping for something juicier than announcing my intention to start a relationship with my interpreter.”
“He’s sure it’s fine?”
“One-hundred percent.”
“And he doesn’t think Roland will mind?”
He shook his head. “No one cares.”
Her brow furrowed in thought and a crushing notion careened into his brain. He debated briefly, then decided to put it out there. “Unless you don’t want people knowing you’re with me?”
“You know that’s not it,” she assured him. “An interpreter dating her client isn’t the most professional scenario in the world, but it’s not unheard of. And you say my job is safe?”
“Definitely.”
“And the same conditions I mentioned before still apply. I’m not looking for a fling, so don’t commit unless you’re serious.”
“I’m serious,” he promised.
She exhaled. “Okay. Let’s go public.”
“Really?” he asked, unable to keep the disbelief from his tone. After all her protests about professional boundaries, he was astonished she’d relented so quickly.
“Really. I was using my job as an excuse to push aside my feelings for you. The truth is”—she paused to take a deep breath—“I was scared.”
He clucked his tongue, trailing a finger down her cheek. “Scared of what, querida?”
“What’s every woman who’s attracted to a man like you afraid of? Rejection. That you wouldn’t feel the same way.”
“I think I made my intentions pretty clear.” He moved one leg over hers beneath the covers, remembering that kiss in the salsa club, their escapades in the theatre room. He stiffened against her smooth thigh, rapidly losing interest in this discussion.
“And I came around in the end, didn’t I?” She smiled coyly, slowly pushing the duvet down to her waist.
He didn’t bother to reply, lowering his face to her breasts and taking her nipple in his mouth. He rolled his tongue around the hard peak, teasing her, while he slipped a hand between her legs. The slippery heat he found there sent a shudder through him, and he eased his body over hers, grateful he’d had the optimism to bring more than one condom.
“Hold on.” She planted her palms on his chest and pushed him off. “You called the shots last time. This round, I’m in control.”
He lay flat on his back and crossed his arms behind his head. She stroked him needlessly—he was as ready for her as if she was the first woman he’d taken to bed after five years of abstinence. She rolled on the condom and settled herself above him, positioning the tip of him between her legs.
He closed his eyes as she slid down and took him deeply. For the first time since he arrived in the United States, he finally felt at home.
Chapter 14
“If you wouldn’t mind, please bring your seat into position for landing, Señor Vidal. We’re starting our final descent. Welcome home.”
Eva didn’t miss the flight attendant’s lingering smile at Rio, or her wink as she moved down the aisle. It had been the same throughout the nine-hour journey, as Rio was offered extra drinks and pillows while Eva dodged the magazine practically thrown at her head.
She couldn’t fault Rio’s polite but impersonal responses, nor could she blame the woman for giving the only celebrity in the relatively empty first-class section a little extra attention, she supposed. But as the plane circled low over Santiago, the unease that had followed her all the way from Atlanta grew stronger and stronger.
The last forty-eight hours with Rio should’ve been blissful. Finally honest about her feelings for him, she should’ve lounged by his side in bed, indulged in his body, looked forward to her unexpected trip to a foreign country, and basked in the commitment that his invitation represented.
That first night had been everything she imagined. Monday morning he left early to train in his home gym, and after showering and packing a bag she drove over to join him and prepare for their flight that evening.
He was finishing what looked like a grueling sequence of deadlifts when her phone rang.
“Are you with Rio?” Roland asked without preamble. “Chelsea says he’s not with her and he’s not answering his phone.”
“I am,” she confirmed cautiously, wondering if that was the wrong answer and briefly indulging a paranoid fantasy that Rio’s agent had it all wrong and this would be the moment she lost her job.
“Put me on speaker.”
She gestured Rio over as she propped the phone on the bench press and pressed the speaker button. “He can hear you.”
“Tell him I’ve talked to the medical team and we’ve reconsidered. I’m happy for him to travel for the match in Chile, but I don’t want him to start. He can be subbed in if they’re losing, but his exhaustion showed in Miami. He needs to rest this week.”
Rio watched her expectantly. She bit her lower lip, considering how best to relay Roland’s message.
“He thinks maybe you should start on the bench on Friday. He’s worried about you.”
Rio snorted. “The country’s best player, sitting on the bench in an international qualifier? Not a chance. Tell him to fuck off.”
She turned back to the phone. “He…disagrees.”
“I bet he does,” Roland muttered. “Eva, between you and me, try to get him to see reason. Venezuela haven’t qualified since the seventies. Chile should run away with this match. I know the decision comes down to him and the national-team manager, but he should take advantage of the opportunity to let some of the younger guys get playing time while he has a break.”
The Swede sighed audibly. “He’s killing himself with this overtraining. He practically staggered off the pitch on Saturday night. Can you talk to him? He might listen to you. He sure as hell isn’t listening to me.”
“I’ll try,” she promised, disconnecting the call. Rio rolled his eyes and resumed his deadlifts.
“That man worries so much, sometimes I think he’s my grandmother instead of my manager,” he scoffed.
“Maybe he has a point,” she ventured. “Why not give the younger players a chance, and come on if they need you? If a game can ever be as good as won before the first kick, this one’s a victory.”
“Nothing’s won until the last whistle.” He dropped the dumbbell with a clatter, circling his arms and flexing his shoulders. “Let’s get some lunch. I want to go for a run before we leave for the airport.”
Roland’s words echoed in her mind as the plane bumped onto the runway. She agreed with him—this was a good chance for Rio to rest and recuperate. But what chance did she have of convincing him?
Absolutely none, she concluded when they emerged from customs and were greeted by a surging mass of people barely contained by metal barriers and a line of security guards. Press cameras clicked and flashed, women screamed his name, teenage girls wept, and a huge homemade signed poked up from the crowd showing his name and jersey number beside the Chilean flag.
She knew Rio was famous, but she had no idea he was this famous.
He waved and smiled, barely acknowledging the black-suited security detail that ushered them past the horde, down what looked like a service corridor and into a luxury SUV with tinted windows. By the time the car pulled away from the airport Eva felt like she’d run a marathon.
“Oh my God,” she exhaled. “You did not prepare me for that.”
“I’m so used to it, I guess I forgot.”
“It’s always like this?”
He shrugged, sheepish. She looked out the window, shaking her head.
It turned out to be a short car ride as—instead of going to a domestic airport as she’d assumed—they pulled up to a private airfield not far from the international terminal.
She eyed the small, lone jet parked on the tarmac as Rio helped her out of the SUV. “We’re going in that?”
“I can’t fly commercial between Santiago and Antofagasta. There’d be a riot on the plane.”
“I have a thing about really small aircraft.”
“What sort of a thing?”
“A nagging awareness that they crash way more often than big planes fear-sort-of thing.”
“You’ll be fine. Wait ’til you see inside.”
He was right. As soon as she saw the luxurious leather seats, the fully stocked minibar, and the basket of freshly baked pastries, she forgot all about statistics. She buckled herself into a seat opposite Rio, smiled as the flight attendant poured her a mimosa, and enjoyed the view as the plane arced up into the sky.
Two hours later they touched down on a private strip outside Antofagasta. The seaside city looked like an urban oasis in the surrounding Atacama Desert, and viewing it from the air, she understood why it served as a crucial industrial port.
Excitement edged out anxiety as they took another luxury car to a grand hotel with an ocean view. It had been years since she’d traveled outside the States, and Chile had long been on her list of someday destinations.
To be visiting in five-star style with a famous footballer on her arm—well, that had never even entered her imagination.
“Just one room,” she observed after they finished checking in and rode the elevator to the top floor. “You’re feeling confident.”
He shot her a cheeky smile as the elevator doors slid open. “It’s a three-bedroom suite. I’ll even give you first pick.”
The suite was bigger than her condo. She drifted to the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the ocean. She blinked, trying to shake the surrealism of the moment and convince herself it was real, that she was, in fact, thousands of miles from normality, living the soccer wives-and-girlfriends dream she’d only ever read about. Yet here she was, dropped into a three-dimensional version of the gossip-page photos and Instagram posts.
Rio was a whirlwind—he played like one, lived like one. She never imagined she would get so caught up his dizzying orbit. Or that it would feel so much like home.
She was so absorbed in the view that she barely noticed Rio moving to stand behind her.
“Welcome to Chile,” he murmured against the crown of her head.
She whirled, unable to contain her delight. “This is amazing. Thank you for inviting me.”
“Thank you for accepting.”
She clapped her hands together. “What’s our plan? Can we sit on the beach, or will you be mobbed? Is your family meeting us here?”
“We’ll meet my mom and my brother for dinner later. They’re both at work.”
“Your mom still works?” She gaped.
“She likes her job. She’s a secretary at the university. I send her money and built her a house, but she says she’d get bored sitting at home all day.”
“Fair enough. So what are we doing next?”
He laughed, slinging his arms around her waist. “I’m going to bed. I only got a couple hours’ sleep on the plane.”
“Rio,” she whined. “We’ve flown thousands of miles to a different country and you want to sleep?”
“Yes. Although I could be persuaded to do something else first.”
She arched a misunderstanding brow, and he clarified by tightening his grip to pull her closer, lowering his face to hers and pressing a long, greedy kiss to her lips.
When he released her mouth she only had one activity on her mind.
“Pick a bedroom,” she instructed, and followed him into the first one they found.
“So my colleague rushes in and says there’s a big commotion at the school, she thinks it must be burning down as the whole fire brigade is parked outside. I panic and race over, worried something’s happened to the kids. As soon as I arrive a teacher hurries toward me, saying she’s so glad I’m there, they didn’t know what to do. I ask, what to do about what? Rio, she says. I say, what about Rio? She looks at me like I’ve just asked her what day it is. Rio, she shouts, has been up a tree all morning and he refuses to climb down!”
Rio rolled his eyes as Eva joined in the laughter at his mother’s oft-repeated story. He shook his head in mock embarrassment and disapproval.
In truth he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had so much fun.
He stretched his legs in front of him on the floor of his aunt’s house. Normally this dilapidated, aluminum-roofed shack in the village on the outskirts of the city where he’d lived as a child wouldn’t have been the first impression he’d chosen for a woman like Eva. He’d thought as much that morning when his mother called to tell him his aunt was hosting dinner. He loved his family, but he didn’t relish having to ask Eva to cope without indoor plumbing for a few hours.
He’d been nervous all afternoon, cautiously trying to prepare Eva for the trip out to the village, but now as he watched her listen attentively to yet another of his mom’s embarrassing tales he realized he shouldn’t have doubted her. She hadn’t so much as blinked at the dirt roads, the crammed-in rows of shacks or the way they all filled their plates in the kitchen and then sat on the floor to eat in the sitting room, which was the only one big enough to accommodate all ten people.
“Where is your family from, Eva?” his aunt asked from her perch on an overturned crate.
“Mexico, originally.”
“You’re really good at understanding our crazy Chilean accents,” his cousin Rosario commended.
Eva smiled. “Rio’s teaching me all the slang.”
“It’s her job,” his mother announced proudly. “Eva told me she spent a lot of time studying Chile and the way we speak so she could do a good job for our Rio when he arrived.”
Everyone murmured noises of approval, except for his brother, who remarked, “It must be a hard job trying to make this guy sound smart and funny.”
Rio half-stood, intent on giving Julio a punch on the arm, but Rosario beat him to it.
“Ignore him,” she advised Eva. “We all do.”
“Do your parents also live in Atlanta?” his aunt asked.
He saw the flash of sadness that clouded Eva’s eyes and got to his feet, extending his hand for her to join him.
“Sorry everyone, this interview is over. Eva is sick of hearing all your humiliating and seriously exaggerated stories from my childhood. Come on,” he urged, pulling her upright. “Let’s go for a walk before it gets too cold.”
She glanced uncertainly toward the kitchen. “Oh, no, let me help clean up first.”
“Don’t worry,” his cousin Alfredo chimed in with a wink. “We’ll save you some dishes.”
He breathed easier once they were outside, away from his family’s well-meaning but prying questions.
“I hope that wasn’t too painful,” he said, wincing.
She shook her head, her smile radiant under the solar-powered lamp mounted above his aunt’s front door. “I’m having a great time, actually. Your family is amazing. Everyone is so nice and welcoming, and I love hearing the stories about when you were a kid.”
“Don’t believe every
thing you hear,” he muttered, but he couldn’t suppress his answering smile.
He took her hand and together they walked down the main road that ran through the village. There were no tall buildings to break up the wind this far out toward the desert, and the breeze whipped up dust from the streets and swirled it around their ankles. Most of the dwellings they passed were shacks as shabby as his aunt’s. The flashing lights from TV screens illuminated windows covered with everything from handmade curtains to threadbare towels, as the handful of streetlights flickered over their heads, illustrating how unreliable the electricity supply was this far out of town.
“I’ve never brought anyone else out here,” he told her quietly.
She looked up at him in surprise. “Really? Not even Mercedes?”
He shook his head.
“But you were with her much longer than you’ve been with me.”
“I never saw the point. We dated for over a year, but I always knew I’d never…” Marry her. Spend my life with her. Fall in love with her like I think I’m falling in love with you.
“Never what?”
“I knew we were mostly having fun. It was never going to become too serious,” he amended. “Anyway, she wouldn’t like it out here. She used to complain if the tables were too close together in restaurants, so I don’t think she would’ve coped with cramming onto the floor.”
“Then she missed out,” Eva replied matter-of-factly.
“Maybe.”
“Definitely.”
They walked in silence for another few minutes, dirt crunching under their feet.
“You look like your mother,” Eva remarked.
“And my brother looks like his father,” he replied, referencing Julio’s three-inch height advantage and overweight build.
“I would never say anything, in case you were worried. Your secret’s completely safe. I promise.”
“I know.”
They continued down the road, the noise of his thoughts filling in the void left by their lack of conversation.
He thought about this village, his family, the real reason he’d never brought any other girlfriends to the place he’d been born, or even to the high-rise apartment building in the rough part of town where they’d moved after his father died.
Crossing Hearts Page 17