One night in Sevilla could save—or sink—their marriage.
On a rainy night in Sevilla, travel writer Magda and scientist Javi are cranky with the heat—and each other. Being unable to keep their hands off each other isn’t the same as building a life together and cracks are starting to appear in their still fresh marriage.
As they stroll the cobblestone streets of one of Spain’s most romantic cities, Magda tries to show her husband just what it is she loves about the job that keeps her on the road so much. She has until the sun rises to convince him—and even more importantly, herself—that what they have is worth fighting for.
The Rain in Spain
By
Amy Jo Cousins
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note upon Rerelease
Dear Reader
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Thank you!
About the Author
Excerpt from Callie, Unwrapped
Discover more titles by Amy Jo Cousins
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Dedication
For Jon, and one magical, adventurous night in Sevilla.
Author’s Note upon Rerelease
I wrote this story for the Summer Rain charity anthology published by Pink Kayak Press in 2014. One hundred percent of our royalties were donated to RAINN and, along with the Winter Rain anthology, we raised a lot of money for that terrific organization. I’m releasing “The Rain in Spain” as a free story in 2016, with the hope that we will continue to generate donations for RAINN. If you enjoy this story, please consider making a $1 donation to RAINN in lieu of payment for it! You can donate here: donate.rainn.org
All of my stories are about imperfect people finding love (even the erotic ones that are mostly about the sex), and if you like this one, I hope you’ll check out my other series on my website. Or subscribe to my newsletter to hear about new releases, sales, early looks at new cover art and bonus reads for subscribers only.
~AJ
Dear Reader,
Sevilla, Spain, is a magical place. When I visited fifteen years ago, I wandered the city with, and occasionally without, an ex-boyfriend. Ours had been a civil breakup in the weeks leading up to the trip, and it seemed a shame for either one of us to miss out on Spain, so we traveled together anyway. The sun and heat were merciless that spring, and it did not rain while we were there. Tensions between the two of us ran high from time to time—a natural consequence, I guess, of a vacation with someone who is leaving your life. Our most enjoyable evening was a night where we let ourselves wander with no agenda, meeting up with Sevillans or other visitors and criss-crossing the city until dawn. I have stolen several of the locales we visited for Magda and Javi’s story, although you can safely hope that their evening ends much differently than mine did!
As a friend and relative of many men and women who could have used the support of an amazing group like RAINN in their lives, I am honored to have written this story for the Summer Rain charity anthology in support of the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. May everyone whose lives have been affected by violence and abuse find their own happy ending.
Amy Jo Cousins
Chapter One
The pigeons circled La Giralda again, flickering with every orbit like animations on the corner of a page in a flip book, bright when catching the setting sun, dark when backlit. Sipping a tinto de verrano at a tiny table in the rooftop bar on top of her hotel, Magda faced the tower at a matching height. The cathedral’s bells tolled the hour, vibrating in her bones from across the square.
Only forty-eight hours in Sevilla and already today she’d needed space. Time alone without Javi breathing down the back of her neck about train schedules or hours of operation at the next tourist trap. Traveling together was meant to shore up their relationship, and she could tell that he was trying, but she feared this one-year anniversary trip—what Javi called their belated honeymoon—wouldn’t be able to fix what was wrong. Certainly a day alone touring gardens of the Alcázar hadn’t made her feel any better.
The heat was immense, pressing down on her, a weight on her perpetually damp skin. Storm clouds had threatened all day but no rain fell. The fluttery sundress and wide-brimmed sunhat had done their best, making her feel like a movie star from the thirties, but nothing could save this day from being a miserable, sweaty mess.
She deposited the hat on the seat of the matching chair across from her, and the sweat trapped in a line across her forehead cooled her skin in an evaporating stripe.
Not that she was complaining about the Alcázar. The photos and notes she’d taken would form the basis of a glossy spread in a travel magazine, a post to drive traffic on her blog, and would add further depth to her stock photo portfolio. Plus, the royal palace wasn’t on Javier’s carefully planned itinerary until tomorrow, so visiting it today had felt like ditching class to make out with her boyfriend in the empty auto shop classroom. Daring, semi-public adventure. Kinda sweaty too.
Pretty much exactly like a high school make-out session, minus the teen boy hands creeping up my shirt.
She dragged a fingertip through the puddle of condensation pooling around the base of her skinny, ice-filled glass. Not that she’d have pushed Javi’s hands away last night. Or if she’d known him back in high school either, for that matter. She was an enjoy the moment to its fullest kind of girl and the intimacy of fucking made for some of the most intense moments. His physicality was one of the first things that had drawn her to Javier after all. She’d never been into worshipping at the altar of big, manly muscle boys, always more interested in what was going on in a man’s brain than whether or not he could bench press a small car.
But she could spend all day licking each sharply defined ridge and curve of Javi’s body.
Seriously. All day, her mouth, his body.
Not that Javi’s timetable would allow her to waste a whole day on something that couldn’t be checked off a list in Rick Steves’s guidebook. She lifted her glass and pressed the cold surface to her cheek. Their belated honeymoon was a disaster. Javi had spent so much time planning this trip with her, and he’d been so sweet with his eagerness to make the trip special, that she hadn’t had the heart to remind him that she preferred to wander. Making jokes about his list of sights to be seen during the first seven days of their trip had grown less and less funny as she’d watched him draw lines through each item in order, watched him check his notes on transit times to the next scheduled activity or vista, while she tried to show him the one right in front of them. Make him see.
For seven days, she’d been as invisible as the items on that list.
She didn’t understand it. When she’d first met Javi on a beach in India, he’d been following a Southeast Asia itinerary so tightly scheduled she wanted to cry. But he’d chucked it in a heartbeat upon learning that she wouldn’t be leaving Goa until she felt like she knew it. Until she’d seen it as the people who lived there saw it. What had happened to that man?
The waiter hadn’t been by in forever, so when the door that led to the hotel staircase creaked open, she turned to place another order.
Instead of the skinny kid in black pants and a white shirt she was expecting, she saw Javi, and was startled into looking at him as if he were a stranger to her. His thickly muscled male form, thighs straining at the loose cream trousers, biceps stretching the rolled up sleeves of a casually wrinkled white button-down. Dark hair pushed back from a widow’s peak fell in waves just to the tops of his ears. High cheekbones, straight dark brows, and lips that were almost pink like a girl’s.
His entire face threatened to become pretty, if not for the heavy scruff of the five o’clock shadow lining his cheeks. Beauty on top of a bruiser’s body.
Javi.
Javi dressed to fit in, instinctively. Years of flying under the radar never quite went away. That had meant ditching the jeans and running shoes that screamed American tourist! two days into their trip, hitting up Zara and Massimo Dutti in Madrid for casually upscale clothes that let him blend into the crowd. Even with the gaps between his Mexican Spanish and the lisping glides of Castilian, he’d been mistaken for a Sevillan more than once since their arrival in this old city two days ago, something that hadn’t happened to her once. Her hair was as dark as his, but her pale Scottish skin burned in the sun and always made her feel like a ghost when she saw her limbs draped across his in bed, his coppery skin looking so much deeper, richer than her own.
When they’d first met a year ago, she’d assumed her attraction to this bronzed, muscled man—the only stranger on the beach in Goa who’d known enough to stop the guy who wanted to pee on her leg after she’d been stung by a jelly fish—was nothing more than a casual connection. Who wouldn’t want him? Ripped, beautiful, saves you from getting peed on. A girl’s vacation fling dream-come-true right there.
Javi had walked a path, invisible to anyone else as far as she could see, between the trust fund travelers and the aging hippies happier to be slightly grimy on a beach in India than smoking hookahs in whatever small town they hailed from. It was obvious to her that Javi’s not-at-all aimless travels were different than most, but she’d finally had to ask him if he knew why he seemed so unusual, so steady, compared to the other itinerants around the bonfires.
“Everyone here belongs somewhere,” he’d answered. “They’ve always had a country to go home to.”
She’d only known him for a few days at that point, but she’d already heard about his childhood as an illegal immigrant kid in Arizona before his family gained citizenship in the amnesty. Not rootless exactly, but never secure. At his wistful words, she’d slid a leg over his stomach and straddled him, pinning his hands to the sand above the edge of her blanket.
“I can be your country. You can come home to me.” She’d meant it as a joke, but the words rang a bell deep in her belly. Rang true and solid even as she smiled at him. Because she knew what it was to lose your sense of home. She’d stopped visiting her family years ago and had locked up the loss in her heart.
He’d bumped his hips up against hers, a slow stroke of his hardening dick against her crotch. “Yeah? You’re gonna let me cross your borders? Do I need a special visa?” His grin bunched his cheeks and she could barely make out his dimples in the flickering light of the bonfire against the night.
“Oh, I’ll show you border crossing.” She’d dipped her head and pressed her mouth to his, releasing his hands and loving that she could make him laugh as he touched her.
On the rooftop half a world away, the memory washed over her like an ebbing wave, pulling at the sand under her feet until she felt off-balance. Shaky.
Where had that certainty gone? That knowing that Javi was the one? She glanced at him, standing by the door, and wondered how she was supposed to find her way back.
She thought about ignoring him. A full day of thinking and wandering and more thinking until her thinker was sore hadn’t brought her any closer to a conclusion. She could feel the edge of one in her brain, the jagged lip of an idea that frightened her, but the edge felt like a cliff and she held back from getting too close.
The only reason she was here, on the rooftop, as opposed to at the Santa Justa train station buying one ticket to somewhere—anywhere—else, was because she’d said she loved him. But the instinct to bolt before he finally came to his senses and rejected her was strong. The wounded look in his eyes—the one she’d put there that morning when she’d stopped him at the door with a hand on his chest and told him to find his own way that day, without her—had followed her through the narrow streets and behind the thick walls of the Alcázar. Now, that hesitancy, the way he stayed close to the door instead of striding over to her little round table and grabbing the other chair, complaining all the while about how tiny the decoratively perforated metal seat felt under his ass, tugged at her.
But she wasn’t ready to talk to him. Not yet. Hadn’t figured out any of the answers to the questions that had haunted her all day, through the mosaic-tiled archways and the extravagant, blooming gardens, next to the damp, still reflecting ponds of the underground water reserves, even the most functional of areas designed for beauty and symmetry to the eye.
There had been a carefully-balanced opposition in her own thoughts.
Magda with Javi means unhappiness.
Magda without Javi means . . .
She tucked her knees tighter under the table’s edge and rested her elbows on the white painted round, pressing her forearms together in front of her chest. Her thumbs lined up in front of her mouth like she was about to play at the children’s hand game. Here is the church, and here is the steeple. Open the doors . . . and see all the people! Not that they’d taken anything so traditional as the church route. Her side of the church would have echoed with empty pews, although surely her parents would have shown up? Two taciturn farmers to balance the scales against what she imagined as Javi’s large, happy family, even though she hadn’t met them yet. Her travel schedule made planning a trip to visit them a challenge, but she sometimes wondered if her husband didn’t know how to explain his strange wife to his more traditional family.
Her own informal wedding announcement to her parents—an envelope of photographs of her and Javi at the government office where they’d married in India, and a note in which she’d briefly described the ceremony—had elicited a Hallmark card of congratulations and a thousand-dollar check she’d never cashed.
“How’s the service up here?” Javi’s voice was low, rough. He put his hands in his pockets and shifted his weight from one side to the other.
She’d wanted to come up to this rooftop bar and look at the city the first night they’d arrived in Sevilla, but Javi had made reservations at a Chinese restaurant that was the latest culinary obsession of the Sevillanos and he was so excited at the coup that she didn’t have the heart to insist. They’d passed smoky, open-front cafes with legs of cured ham hanging from the ceiling over the bar and she’d wished for tapas, hunks of queso manchego, and bowls of briny Mazanillas aceitunas, but had eaten lotus root and crispy duck.
It had been, of course, delicious, though she chafed at his insistence on planning every meal. Every moment.
“Slow.” It was a question you could ask your new wife—twelve months had passed in a handful of breaths, it seemed. Or a total stranger. She wasn’t ready to be a wife again today. Would he understand what she wanted if she hinted? “But there are plenty of open tables.” She let her eyes wander over the dozen tables scattered across the rooftop between the waist-high walls. And waited.
His forearms flexed, fisting bulging in his pockets. She’d asked him about it once, noticing him tucking his thumb inside his fists and squeezing over and over again. It wasn’t tied to anger, she thought. Nerves perhaps.
He hadn’t understood winter in Chicago when he’d gone there to college from Arizona, he’d said. The largest blood vessel in a hand was in the thumb and if you hugged it with your four fingers it worked as a hand warmer. He’d made it through four months of winter that way, before learning the trick of asking about a pair of black leather gloves at any Lost and Found. There was always a pair.
So, thumbs tucked inside fists, even here in Sevilla where the brutal heat and the heavy salt in every dish had made her fingers a little puffy, the silver band on her ring finger digging in to her flesh until she couldn’t tug it off anymore.
That she’d even tried felt like a curse.
Javier walked to the table two over from hers, hips rolling in that way that made awareness pulse in her belly. That shouted this man knows how to da
nce, how to move, how to fuck.
She wished she didn’t know it was true. It was hard to think clearly around him.
The clatter of the chair’s metal feet dragging across the painted rooftop rang loudly in her silence. He turned the chair to face La Giralda, too. She had to look to her right to see him looking at her, eyes like a laser on her face. She waited for him to start in with the questions, the demands to know what she’d done, why she’d thrown his carefully planned itinerary out of whack.
She smiled the polite smile of a stranger, a tourist traveling alone who might welcome conversation with someone from home, as long as it didn’t get too personal. “Hot day today.”
The weather. He raised an eyebrow.
That’s what you give me to work with?
She bit her lip just off center and tried not to smile. If he’d sat at her table, she would have tangled her feet with his right then to feel the scruff of his bare hairy ankles against her own. She remembered she was contemplating untangling more than their limbs and the heavy blanket of lethargy settled over her again.
“Your first time in Sevilla?” he asked, still playing along.
“Yes. You?”
He nodded, eyes on the church tower. “Are you . . . enjoying your visit?” Javi, so good at fitting in he could talk to anyone, pretend to be at his ease anywhere, was terrible at this.
“Some of it.” She took pity on him. Or drove the knife in. “I went to the Alcázar today. It’s lovely.”
She sipped her drink, saw Javi wince out of the corner of her eye. They were quiet for a couple of minutes. He was no doubt rearranging the itinerary for the next few days. What had been today’s scheduled activity? Visiting the Archivo General de Indias maybe, with the scholarly letter of introduction he had procured that would allow them to see the original journals of Christopher Columbus, not currently on display in an exhibit. She was actually sad to have missed that.
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