“I was just thinking about shooting this lovely lady on the terrace. What do you think?”
Santiago shook his head. “If you keep bothering the lady, I’ll be shooting you.”
Leo straightened, holding his hands level with his shoulders. “No harm meant. Didn’t realize she was spoken for.”
“Does he really pick up girls with those lines?” Esme asked once Leo had cleared the lobby.
“More than you can imagine.” Okay, so her flirting wasn’t serious. Good to know.
She twisted her lips as if considering the other man. “I don’t get it. Maybe I’ve been mesmerized by a Latin surf god, but his lines have nothing on you.”
Santiago grinned. “Could I mesmerize you onto the beach in about an hour?”
Esme straightened her silk shell, considering. “Is there another surfing lesson in it for me?”
“Perhaps.”
“Then I’ll see you in an hour.”
A few minutes later, Santiago shifted onto his back so he could watch the clouds from his board. Just like he and Esme had done. . . could it be less than a week ago? He scrubbed his hand over his face. Forty-five minutes in the water and he finally had the answer to the problem. He even knew what the problem was. It wasn’t Esme or his family or the little flirtation that nearly led him to punch his best friend.
He was his father’s son. No better than Eduardo and in some ways worse because he saw what was happening and couldn’t change the outcome.
Obsessed with a woman. Obsession and Cruz men did not go hand in hand. He wouldn’t allow this to touch Esmerelda the way it had scarred his mother. Santiago would not continue the cycle. He couldn’t leave the villa until Constance returned in a few months, but he could put the walls that would protect Esme back in place. He could keep distance between them. Treat this relationship as what it could only ever be: a lighthearted affair.
The feeling left him feeling sick as rolling water carried him toward shore. He didn’t want to leave Esme to find love with another man. Yet he couldn’t love Esme the way she deserved without hurting her. It was a no win situation. For the next few months, at least, he could be with her. Now that he knew how close he’d come to the abyss he could protect her.
The board finally reached shore and Santiago stood, looking up. Casa Constance. It had become his refuge and now it was also his prison.
Esme made her way down the hill, grey silk shell and pencil skirt in place. She smiled and waved. She looked better in her sinful sundresses, but the suits were growing on him. The way the tight skirts outlined her legs. How her buttoned up jackets pushed her breasts up. Her penchant for sexy spiked heels—the kind that were now dangling her from fingers as she tiptoed over the sand—that were in no way businesslike.
Dios, he was going to miss her. The fact hit him like a twenty foot wave and pulled him under. Once he left Vallarta, and he had to leave to protect her, he would miss waking up with her, talking with her. Making love with her.
Santiago shoved the board, fin down, in the sand and started toward the path to the villa. Esme looked up and her steps faltered when she saw him intently walking toward her. She looked at him, away, and then concentrated her attention on the horizon until he reached her side. Even then she concentrated on the distant horizon. She crossed her arms around her middle and sighed before looking at him.
“Did you do it before or after you decided to seduce the villa away from me?”
Santiago didn’t have to ask what she meant, it could only be one thing. She knew about the loan payments. Well, at least it was in the open now. The only stumbling block to her happy ever after dreams and he’d created it without a second thought. Santiago wanted to take it back. Rewind the clock to the day he instructed the bank to transfer his childhood account into the villa accounts, but it was the ultimate out. The one way to keep her from getting too close to him. To protect her from his growing obsession. Gently, he took her arm to lead her inside. She shook him off.
“Let’s go back to the villa.”
“Was it before or after you decided on seduction that you made the first transfer?” Her hands gripped her upper arms until the skin turned white.
“I’ve wanted you in my bed, on my couch, in the shower for the last four years, Esmerelda.” He watched her for a moment and then nodded his head. “It’s all the same for me. As soon as I saw you in Velazquez’s office I wanted you back, and when I realized how deep Casa was indebted I knew what I needed to do to save it. Seducing you was just an added benefit.”
“I didn’t ask you to protect me from the truth and I don’t need to be coddled. Not from the problems with my business or from your family issues, so why don’t we get right to the point. You bailed out the business and so I wouldn’t suspect anything, you came up with that ridiculous deal. What I don’t understand is what you get from it. You say you don't want Casa, that you don't want to be in Puerto Vallarta-”
“I don’t.”
“And yet you’re here, improving this place.” She swallowed and took a breath. “Who does, Santiago? Who wants Casa?”
He raised a hand to cup her cheek but she turned her head before he could touch her. “You know exactly who wants Casa Constance, Esmerelda. And I won’t let him have it. I won’t let anyone. This damned building—” he flung his hand toward it “—was my father’s second best weapon against my mother. I’ve taken myself out of his equation. I’m taking Casa so he can’t hurt her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Casa Constance was once Casa Magdalena. It belonged to my mother until my father tried to develop it. She gave it to her best friend, to keep him from it, and he’s never forgiven her.”
Esme jerked away from him and threw her words at him like icicles. “So you paid off the loans and left more money in the account than I’ll ever need to what? Make it obvious by the time our six month interlude is over that you’ve already bought and paid for my villa?”
“Something like that.” The world shifted around them and suddenly Santiago knew she wasn’t just accusing him of a mercenary seduction. “I did transfer the money to the villa’s accounts, but it wasn’t about protection. I did it for survival.”
“Survival? Whose? You can destroy the buildings, but that won’t keep Eduardo from buying the land and developing it anyway.” She jerked her arm from his grasp and strode down the path to the sandy beach. “Until now most of your investments have been commercial properties, warehouses, the random condo. My little villa isn’t much yet, but it will be, and owning it, keeping it from your father, would put you in the resort game, though, wouldn’t it? You’d be his competition. What’s your ex-surfer-real-estate-mogul plan, Saint? To punish your father by taking away Cruz Resorts? Do you think that will be enough to pull your mother out of her personal prison?”
“You don’t know anything about my mother’s problems, Esmerelda, so don’t pretend you do.”
“No, I don’t.” She pushed against his chest and skirted around him, heading for the white sand. “I don’t know anything about your life because you hide behind tabloid pictures, the odd sports magazine write-up, and stony silence any time I bring up the past. You could have told me all of this, you know. About Casa. About your father. You didn’t have to lie to me.”
Anger washed over him. For the past three days she had pushed and prodded him to tell her more about Eduardo and Magdalena. Now he did and she made like she was the victim. Couldn’t she see he was trying to protect her?
“You can’t change your mother’s illness by ignoring it or buying her a new home or keeping this land away from Eduardo. You don’t have enough money to save Eduardo from being a crappy parent. You do have enough to get your mother psychiatric treatment, but you’d rather fight with an old man who means nothing to you.”
They were back to this, were they? His family wickedly victimized hers for fun and profit. He didn’t care enough about his mother to help her. Constance had run out on both of them. She’d started this crazy
downhill slide. She ran out on Esme and Santiago when they both needed her, leaving them to clean up a mess neither wanted. That didn’t make her family the Brady Bunch.
“I want to own Casa Constance about as much as I want to go back to my father’s birthday party. The money I put in the accounts was never mine. It was bribery from Eduardo. Get good grades? Have some cash. Another birthday rolls around, here’s another pile of it. With every cent he was trying to buy me and he couldn’t so he made bigger cash deposits and assaulted my mother. I used his money to buy Casa out of the fix Constance left her in and even that won’t keep him from the property if we aren’t careful.”
“And that makes it so much better.”
“Wrong, pequeña, it makes it so much more fitting, don’t you think?” With that, he marched her off the beach and up the trail to the villa. Her mouth opened and closed before tears threatened to spill. He watched from the corner of his eye as Esme gathered herself and fought back the weepy mess. “Why don’t you admit you aren’t mad at me for saving the villa? You’re mad at Con because she couldn’t.”
“No, I’m not.”
“She left this place, abandoned you, and you’re angry.”
“She was sick—”
“She didn’t say goodbye.” The wooden decking changed to tile and they entered the villa through the terrace doors.
Marquez, behind the desk, checked in new guests. No reservations were on the books, so these walk-in customers were probably old friends of Constance’s. Past guests. Esme had been right; Con’s guests were coming back.
“Welcome to Casa Constance,” Santiago growled. The elderly couple clutched their bags and stepped closer to one another as if he were there to steal the battered luggage at their feet. Marquez looked from Santiago to Esme, alarm on his face.
Santiago didn’t care. He dragged Esme behind the desk, picked up a folder, and started toward the grand staircase. “Enjoy your stay.” He threw the words over his shoulder as he marched Esmerelda up the main stairs, down the hall, and up the rear staircase to her third floor suite. Slamming the door behind them, he tossed the file on a low coffee table.
“Nothing to say? Or are you working yourself back up to a weepy meltdown? I should warn you, I’ve been on the receiving end of hundreds of female weepies so I’ll expect an Oscar performance.”
“I am not working myself up to anything and you damn well know it. Stop protecting me from life one minute and comparing me to your ill mother in the next.” She paced to the terrace and back to the door. “I don’t know what you want from me. You want me to be mad at Constance? Fine, I don’t think she was being fair to either of us. But you came up with that stupid partnership agreement and then bought the villa. You lecture me on being personable and creating excursion packages and yet you couldn’t even be civil to the guests checking in? Good lord, Santiago, you own this villa now. Do you want to keep it from Eduardo or not?” A strange expression flitted across her face. She closed her eyes and sighed. “You don’t. Tobias was right. The day he came here he said Casa wouldn’t exist for long. You’re tearing it down and then you’ll leave and Eduardo will do what he wants anyway.”
“Dios, Esmerelda, that’s a little dramatic don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, Saint, is dragging me off the beach, up a hill and frog-marching me past guests dramatic?”
Santiago sat on the fainting couch, propping his sandy feet on Constance’s low table. “Not dramatic. Sensible. Having this conversation in private is better for your profile, don’t you think?”
“My profile, as you call it, has nothing to do with the way you manhandled me on the beach. It has nothing to do with you selling Con and me out.”
It took all the strength Santiago had not to reach across the space and pull her into his arms. He knew this had to happen; it was the best way to push Esme out of the danger zone he presented to her. The problem was that to protect her he had to first hurt her, and he didn’t like the feeling.
“But it is fitting, isn’t it? He’s always wanted this place so he bought it.”
Esmerelda’s face crumpled and she sagged to the sofa. “I’m such an idiot. How could you do it, Saint? How could you give Constance’s heart to your heartless father?”
*
Esme couldn’t understand Santiago. He wanted her in his bed so he charmed her. He wanted Casa so he threw a pile of money at it. For as long as she could remember Santiago Cruz got what he wanted. She’d forgotten that in a cloud of lust but the message was loud and clear now. The question was what did he want now? To keep Casa? To punish his father? And did she fit at all into his plans?
Her stomach turned as she wondered where she could start over next. It certainly wasn’t Vallarta. Living here, with the shadow of Casa Constance on the hill, being unable to spend her days on the terraces or the beach would be torture. Staying meant watching Santiago turn her beloved home into a weapon, and she couldn’t do it. He would stay as long as he could lord his possession of Casa over Eduardo. The game he played was sick, just as Eduardo’s games were sick. She was a fly in the trap as much as Magdalena.
“I won’t be a pawn in whatever game you’re playing with your father, Santiago. Just spell it out for me. What do you want?”
He pushed the file across the table, stood, and crossed to the terrace.
Defeated, Esme opened it and began reading. Mostly legalese, but two paragraphs stood out from the notarized document. She read it twice before the words sank in.
“Eduardo’s money bought the villa, Esmerelda,” he said from the French doors. “I don’t want it, but I don’t want him to have it. So it’s bought and mostly paid for by him. Your job is to keep it going.”
Esme knew she should feel ecstatic but she only felt sad. Santiago stared out to the ocean, as separate from her as he had ever been. What had it cost him to use family money, money he swore he would never touch, to save her business?
“You didn’t have to use his money. We had a plan, a good one.”
“Running a business on a shoestring is never a good idea. A good month means extra money and daydreaming about ‘when.’ A bad month means stress and worry. You have a good business head, Esmerelda, you should be able to focus on bringing Casa to life, not how you will pay the staff or how much interest a loan is accruing.”
“You think I can’t handle the pressure.”
“I don’t think you should have to handle the pressure. There is a difference.”
Anger replaced the ambivalent feeling in Esme’s stomach. She wasn’t weak a woman who would rather ignore the hard facts of life than deal with the pain. She would not hide like Magdalena or run away as Constance had.
She intentionally kept emotion from her voice. “You have a payment plan listed here, no interest, payable whenever I feel like it.” He nodded. “Sleeping with you wasn’t enough of a payback?”
His shoulders hunched. “Don’t go there, Esme. Our affair had nothing to do with the money. It was unfinished business.”
The words pierced the balloon of hope that she hadn’t realized she held onto like a child at a carnival. So he was using her, just not in the way she thought. Paying off the villa’s loans was payback to his father. Sleeping with her was payback for the way she dumped him after Napa.
“Our business is now concluded, Saint. Feel free to hide away from your family problems on any beach in the world—as long as it isn’t mine.”
Nodding, he turned back to the room. “I had a feeling you’d see things my way.”
“I don’t see anything the way you see it, you big jerk. I see a man who coddles everyone in his life because he is afraid of someone breaking. What he doesn’t see is that he is the broken one.” He blanched, but Esme was too angry to stop. “Your mother chooses to be verbally and emotionally abused by your father. Constance chose to keep her illness from you and me and everyone one else, and then she left. Your father is the villain of your childhood, but you just blew your entire life up because y
ou’re still the little boy afraid to stand up and take what he wants.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No? My mother was manic-depressive and refused to medicate. My father, in his grand wisdom, decided all she needed was a change of scenery so he brought us here for a vacation and my mother drove them both off a cliff. He abandoned me to play the hero in my mother’s demented dreams.”
He set his jaw. “Our families are nothing alike.”
“No, they aren’t. When she was in control, my mother loved me and my dad with everything she had. Your father loves money and power and hurting people. Your mother loves you but she needs help, Santiago, not avoidance from you and not coddling from your brother.” Frustrated, she picked up the papers and threw them at his feet. “I’m not another person you need to protect. I own the responsibility of caring for myself. I’ll repay your loan with ten percent interest. The payments will be small at first, but you can expect the first installment when I take over Casa.”
They watched one another closely for a few moments without saying a word. Esme made the first move, taking a step toward the door. She held up a hand when he stepped forward.
“I don’t need you taking care of me or my aunt, Santiago. I never wanted that. But I did want you. Don’t follow me, and please move your things back to the second floor.”
She turned and ran before the emotion clogging her throat erupted in tears.
Chapter Thirteen
Esme sat on the sand, waves lapping at her feet, with everything and nothing on her mind. She’d wandered the beach until she couldn’t see Casa any longer and then, satisfied that anyone who came looking for her would stop before finding her, sat down to brood. Her mind whirled but found no solid place to stop.
Santiago bought the villa, not through an agent or contract, but his actions were clear.
Constance was still absent.
She needn’t find a new place to live because Santiago made it imminently clear that he was the one leaving. In six months. Oh, how would she make it through six months of living under the same roof with a man she loved and hated in the same instance?
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