He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You’re going to hate yourself when you sober up.” He grasped her arms and tried to lift her away, at least that part of her that was pressing so insistently against his crotch, but she only clung more tightly.
“Gabriela, will you stop?” Fine beads of perspiration stood out on his upper lip. “Dammit, this is not the time to do this. You’re bombed—and I’m tired of playing games. You hang up on me when I try to talk to you, you tell me you’re engaged to marry somebody else, now you show up in my bed. What the hell’s going on?”
When she laughed softly, he gave her a shake that set her beaded hair clicking. “You don’t take any of this seriously, do you? But then playing around is always a big damned game for Anglo girls, isn’t it? Do you know what it means to me to—”
He stopped abruptly. “That thing’s transparent,” he said hoarsely. He caught her exploring hand. “Who got you up like this? In this damned masquerade?”
Gaby wasn’t listening. His skin was hot to her touch, the muscles of his taut belly hard and tense. Her fingertip tenderly explored the tight vertical slit of his navel. He jumped. Violently.
“Jesus!” He caught his breath. “Did you expect me to just—lie here, while you do this?”
She saw his body was lightly defined from belly button to groin by a fine line of silky black hairs. She bent and touched them with her tongue, a gentle cat lick, then moved lower.
He clenched his hands, his body jolting as her eager fingers closed around him. She stroked him, tentatively, absorbed, hearing his shuddering sighs in response.
They could never love each other, Gaby was certain, the world held them apart. But they could have each other now. She moved to straddle him a little clumsily.
“Wait,” he murmured, “let me get you out of this.”
As she lifted her arms over her head he slid away the diaphanous gown and dropped it on the floor beside the bed. Then he held her away from him, drinking in the sight of her as she knelt over him wearing only the strings of shells and pearls, her tiny waist, gently rounded hips, breasts thrusting proudly.
“Ah God, you’re so enchanting.” His trembling fingers cupped her breasts with exquisite care, his thumbs stroking the tight nipples. When she moaned, he whispered, “What is it you do to me, Gabriela? Why did I find you now, when I can do nothing about it? Why is it that when I’m with you the world turns into a place I can almost live in?”
“I love you,” she whispered. She saw his skeptical glance. It didn’t matter. She wanted to please him, this beautiful man. She wanted to lavish him with her love.
She pressed the length of her smooth body against him, but he abruptly rolled over on top of her, making her cry out in surprise. Then his mouth took hers roughly, ravishing her with a long, devouring kiss that left her whimpering.
“I swore I’d never do this.” He kissed the warm wet hollows of her throat, her ear, her shoulder, hungrily. “I thought I’d never hold you like this again. Gabriela, I don’t know what this is about, waking up and finding you in my bed, but I don’t want to know.”
She pulled his head up by his black hair, the softest thick silk to her fingers, so that she could look into his eyes. She couldn’t know that he warred with himself at that moment, that he couldn’t resist her. She saw only his vulnerable scowl and thought she’d made him angry.
“I do want to love you,” she told him sincerely.
“Then show me.” He brought himself between her legs with tense, shaking care, his fingers gently opening her thighs, remembering she’d had difficulty taking him before. “Love me now, Gabriela. I need you to love me.” He buried his face in her fragrant hair. “Oh, darling, there’s never been anyone else for me.”
He possessed her in one driving stroke. Poised between the stunning pressure of his body and her own mindless ecstasy, she nearly fainted with pleasure. He was the lightning and the storm in passion’s dazzling fury, and she was the sky and the sea, surging, retreating only to return again, the center of her body in flames.
He filled her powerfully, whispering love words in a rough-soft murmur. “Gabriela, darling.” Shivering with desire, his control was tenuous.
She wrapped her legs around his hips, hearing his inarticulate cry as she slid her fingers between their bodies and touched him.
There was a desperate sweetness in their lovemaking. She clung to him, one hand curled in his hair, dragging his mouth to hers, as wild as he. Streamers of silk came down around them and they tangled in them, pleasure building unbearably until the earthquake waves began. He held her, watching her face as she peaked. Then his body clenched, and he joined her violence with a loud, tearing groan as he poured himself into her.
They drifted back to earth, gasping, breathless, tangled in silk. After a moment he lifted himself on one elbow, still gasping, to look down at her. “Are you all right?”
She buried her face against him, tasting his smooth wet skin, the salty tang of his sweat. “I made love to you,” she murmured.
Breathless, he managed a husky laugh. “You’re smashed.”
He rolled over, holding her so that she lay in the curve of his arm. He took a long unsteady breath. “You’ve got to tell me,” he said softly, “how did you get in this mess? Do you have any idea what you’re doing here?”
She smiled, her eyes closed. “I’m Oshun and you’re Chango. You sent for me.”
“Sweetheart, don’t give me that garbage.” He absently stroked her wet hair back from her forehead. “Are you going to tell me?”
“Mmmm.” She snuggled closer.
“Gabriela? Will you listen to me?” He turned to her, frowning. “There’s something I have to tell you and there’s so little time. I tried to tell you before, that Harrison Tigertail and I flew A-sixes together in Vietnam. He was my electronic surveillance systems officer. Do you remember what he told you at the house? He didn’t come there just to fix the roof.”
He shifted his body to look down at her. “You’re not listening to me.”
She was curled against him, the palm of her hand under one cheek, as close to him as she could get. For several long minutes he didn’t move, studying her. His face, unguarded now, expressed more than he would ever tell. Then he carefully slid his arm out from under her and got out of the bed, naked body glistening in the candlelight.
Without bothering to pick up a robe he strode into the hall, then up the ladder onto the deck, footsteps pounding.
Gaby was sleeping. She never heard James Santo Marin shout furiously into the night, “All right, Castaneda, you son of a bitch. Where are you?”
Chapter 17
Dodd’s voice on the telephone was savage. “Dammit, I was sitting here waiting for you last night! You don’t think I’d accept a message at the last minute from some idiot who wouldn’t identify herself saying that you had to work and couldn’t keep our date, did you? I didn’t believe a word of it. I thought our date was still on.”
Gaby put her hand over the earpiece of the telephone. The newsroom was quiet and Dodd’s voice carried. Through the pounding black fog of her hangover she said tonelessly, “Dodd, something did come up.”
“Of course the damned police wouldn’t do anything,” he went on angrily. “All I got was that MPD regulations require a wait of twenty-four hours before filing a report on a missing person. Hell, I couldn’t let it rest there, I was worried sick. Mouse, are you listening? I got the damned mayor of Miami out of bed last night!”
Gaby didn’t answer. There was undoubtedly a moral lesson in all this, she thought. She’d been persuaded to go to a strange party at the iyalocha’s temple, she could hardly remember who’d brought her home, and now she had a splitting headache. Worse, the clothes she’d come home in were so strange, like something out of a carnival sideshow, that she had bundled them up and stuck them in the kitchen garbage. She had no idea where her good green dress was.
She would never again, she vowed, listening to Dodd’s furious flow of wor
ds, stand in judgment on her mother, or any other person with alcohol problems. She had some idea, now, of how awful it would be to face lost days—nights—that you couldn’t remember, dogged by the terrible guilt and fear of something you might have done without knowing it.
She looked down at the morning’s accumulation of messages on her blotter. She was due at a newsroom staff meeting on the coverage of the Vizcaya masked ball in ten minutes. She didn’t know how she was going to survive that, either.
Dodd’s voice stopped. Gaby realized she hadn’t been listening. “It was ... ah, sudden,” she said, hoping that was the right answer. “I knew you’d understand.”
“Is that all you’re going to say? You’re not even going to tell me where you were?”
She rested her head in one hand. She wished she knew so she could tell him. She might have been anywhere last night. “Dodd, I can’t talk right now. I’ve only been at my desk a few minutes, and they want me in a meeting.”
Dodd had told her that a Miami police car patrolling Palm and Bougainvillea islands had reported to police headquarters that she’d returned home in the early hours of the morning. When he received the report, Dodd had called her at once, both angry and concerned. He’d sat up all night in his Brickell Tower condominium, he’d told her, not daring to move from the telephone. He was even more furious when Gaby told him not to come over. That she would talk to him later in the morning.
There was no way she could have faced Dodd at four A.M., straight from an experience with a Santería priestess in a marina somewhere. And after what had seemed like a dream of meeting James Santo Marin that turned out, when she found the undeniable evidence of their lovemaking, to have been not a dream, but real. All she had wanted to do was crawl into bed for a week.
Unfortunately, at seven o’clock Harrison Tigertail had arrived with his roofing crew. She’d only had a bare two hours sleep, and was certain her life was turning into the proverbial nightmare. Her head was killing her and nothing made much sense. “Am I in the middle of a drug war or something?” she’d screamed at the Seminole contractor. “You’re here to keep an eye on me, aren’t you?”
He had stalked off without speaking to her, to work with his roofing crew.
“Well, Mouse, what were you doing,” Dodd demanded, “staying out all night? Where the hell, in Miami, would someone like you go?”
Gaby stared down at her pile of unopened mail. Dodd would never connect Gabrielle Collier, the woman he’d known for most of his life, with a drunken wanton in a wild transparent dress in the company of a voodoo priestess and other strange characters. And who had ended up again, in spite of being engaged, in another man’s arms!
“Dodd,” she said, “is Mar-Belle Development Company a part of Brickell Corporation?” When there was only startled silence on the other end of the line, she went on, “Mar-Belle is listed in the building license file as currently renovating four houses on Palm Island, and that you and your father are the Mar-Belle corporation officers.”
She could have stopped there, but some guilty hangover demon drove her on. “I think I know what you were trying to do, especially the way my parents have always mismanaged their property and finances. That is, if you were involved with a company like Mar-Belle that’s buying up old houses on the island to make showplace estates, it would probably be sensible to try to get my mother’s power of attorney. So you could handle the sale of our place yourself and see that it was done right.”
Gaby had an almost cruel sense of detachment as she listened to absolute silence on Dodd’s end. “I know you weren’t going to cheat us or anything like that,” she said. She didn’t know that, but she owed him the benefit of the doubt. “I still don’t see why you didn’t tell me.”
It had occurred to her that Dodd might just hang up. With something like relief she heard him clear his throat. “Mouse, darling, for God’s sake,” he said hoarsely, “let me explain.”
“Was it because you knew Jeannette couldn’t handle it, and you thought I couldn’t, either?”
“Dammit, I haven’t done anything yet!” he roared. “Will you please listen? If I’d had the power of attorney, yes, I would have worked a sale of your property to our company. But a fair and equitable sale. I wasn’t going to—”
“You don’t have to yell,” she said, putting one hand over her eyes. “But if we’re going to get married there has to be a certain amount of trust between us. This sort of thing doesn’t help.”
“I wouldn’t cheat you or your mother,” he said feelingly, “please don’t accuse me of that. Look, Mouse, you’re not going to live in that old place after our wedding, and once Jeannette is through with her very expensive rehabilitation program at Mount Sinai, she’s going to be looking for a condominium in Bal Harbour or maybe even Lauderdale. Think of your mother, honey. She’s got to sell!”
“Are old houses on Palm Island bringing a lot of money?” Gaby’s tone was innocent. “I’ve been away in Europe for five years, so I’m not up on these things.”
He groaned. “Mouse, waterfront property in downtown Miami is highly speculative. What do you want me to say?”
She knew what she wanted him to say. “I hear it’s a good investment if you buy up houses in blocks. Very, very profitable. The building licenses at the courthouse show Mar-Belle has bought up most of our street.”
He waited for a long moment. “Dammit, Mouse, we can’t discuss this over the telephone, there are too many variables, and it sounds like hell! Look, have dinner with me tonight. I’ll do what I should have done in the beginning. I’ll bring the Mar-Belle plans for the Palm Island development and show you what’s being done.”
Gaby lowered her head, the receiver still clasped to her cheek. What had she just done? she asked herself dully. There couldn’t have been a worse time or place to bring all this up, but she had. She’d wanted, for some not very charitable reason, to back Dodd into a corner. Did it all boil down to the fact that Dodd had been high-handed, even as he’d thought he was looking after her and her mother?
“I can’t meet you, I’m working late,” she told him. “Half the newspaper is assigned to Vizcaya tomorrow night, and we’ve got a meeting right now to go over who’s going to cover what.” She remembered to ask, “How’s your mother?”
“Fine, fine.” His voice was tight. “When am I going to see you? We can’t leave this dangling. We have to talk about it. Our plans are still on, aren’t they? You haven’t had any ... ah...” He hesitated, but had to make sure. “...second thoughts, have you?”
“Nothing’s changed, Dodd.” Gaby couldn’t help a rush of regret for the mean-spirited way she’d brought up the business of the Palm Island property. “Look, I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow night there will be thousands of people milling around at Vizcaya,” he reminded her. “And the Bankers’ Club is hosting the Festival Committee reception at seven-thirty. Darling, I can’t do it. I’ll be tied up for most of the evening.”
“Afterward.” Tomorrow night was in the distant future. First she had to get through this terrible day. “I have to file my story by nine-thirty, but we’ll talk then.”
“Mouse, I love you.”
“I’ll see you at Vizcaya,” she said, and hung up.
Crissette stopped by her desk a few minutes later.
“Everybody’s been looking for you, Gabrielle. Why didn’t you call in late?” She peered at her. “You feel all right?”
“I did call in late.” Gaby avoided the other woman’s eyes. “I just got here.”
“Hey, something’s happened.” Crissette hadn’t missed the flush, the hectic look of exhaustion. “Want to talk about it?”
Gaby shook her head. “David moved into the garage apartment last night.” She pressed her fingertips to her temples, wondering if the uproar inside her head would go away in time for the newsroom staff meeting. “I just found out before I left this morning. That’s part of the reason I’m late. I had to go see if he needed anyt
hing.”
“Yeah, I brought his things over in my car.”
Gaby lifted her head painfully. “You helped David move?”
“Well, he doesn’t own much.” Crissette looked defensive. “Only a couple of boxes of clothes, his stereo, and some books. He needed a car, and I said yes.”
“Oh, Crissette, I hope—” Gaby had been about to blurt out something about taking love when you could get it, but she’d caught herself just in time. “I hope things work out,” she said neutrally.
During the Times-Journal staff meeting the giant masked ball at Vizcaya generated the usual banter about summer festival week assignments. In all the stories on festival week there had, fortunately, been only a few sour notes. The Dolphins lost the preseason exhibition game at the Orange Bowl and the sports editor, who had predicted a fourteen-point win against the Dallas Cowboys, took considerable ribbing. Wednesday night’s Goombay street festival had been devastated halfway through by a violent thunderstorm. The reporter assigned to it had struggled with a write-up that, unfortunately, was criticized by the Miami black community as too downbeat. Staff enthusiasm was running low for the final gala on the grounds of the Deering museum.
“This idea of the press in costumes is unworkable,” Jack Carty said bluntly. “Reporters and photographers in fancy dress have to come back here before deadline and file their stuff. The city room is going to look like the last act of Don Giovanni.”
“It keeps out gate-crashers,” the managing editor said. He didn’t even look up. “At last year’s costume ball, people were coming in the gates passing themselves off as reporters, security guards, waiters, even telephone linemen. The rule this year is that the press and television not only have to show ID’s, they have to dress appropriately. This is a museum. With a crowd this size there has to be some way to ensure stuff doesn’t walk off the place wholesale.”
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