Hidden Devotion

by Lila Dubois

  “Hello.”

  Franco froze in the doorway and dropped his shirt. “Uh…”

  She was backlit by the sun, hair glowing gold, her silhouetted figure trim and elegant in a skirt and blouse.

  “Hello?” She added a slight upswing to the end of the word as she stepped forward. Franco was too confused to reply. Marcia’s door was closed, therefore the museum was closed. This room should be empty.

  His brain seemed to be stuck on that fact until he got a better look at her.

  Once she was away from the windows, he was able to make out her features. She was beautiful, with large blue eyes and a golden complexion—tan, but not the leathered look fair-skinned people got from too much time in the sun. Her whole look was understated and elegant—she reminded him of the women in old photos. Because cameras had been so rare, those photos were usually meticulously planned, with the subjects wearing their Sunday best and standing straight and tall. Though her outfit didn’t seem fancy, he got that same sense of upright planned elegance from her.

  There was a hint of New England in her voice, and her clothing looked like heavy fabric—the skirt wool, the blouse some sort of slightly shimmery thick material.

  Her golden-brown brows drew together. “Do you work here?”

  “Oh, right!” How long had he been standing there staring? Long enough for it to be awkward? Undoubtedly. “I do work here, I’m—”

  He took a step, forgetting about the stanchions and velvet rope that blocked off the doorway on the guest’s side. Both stanchions fell over, the rope twisting around his ankle. Franco nearly fell, but managed to keep his balance, hopping on one foot.

  “Let me help you.”

  The woman crouched just as he bent down, and Franco knocked his head into hers. She yelped and leaned away. Franco reached to help her, stuttering an apology, and instead lost his balance. Arms flailing, he managed to smack her in the shoulder before finally surrendering to gravity.

  The blonde fell back onto her bottom and Franco landed on his hands and knees, his face an inch from her breasts.

  There was a pregnant pause during which he could only blink, wondering how the hell he’d managed this particular fuckup. Seriously, these things only happened to him.

  Then she started to laugh. The blonde dropped back until she was lying on the floor, propped up on her elbows, laughing so hard she was gasping for breath.

  Juliette peered at the half-horrified, half-bemused expression on the man’s face and a fresh wave of laughter shook her. Of all the scenarios for how this meeting would go, the current situation had never been even a remote possibility.

  Pushing his too-long hair away from his face, the man crawled backwards away from her, turning to sit on his butt and unwind the velvet rope from around his ankle.

  He looked like a hobo, or a frat boy after a week-long bender. Baggy jeans with holes in the knees and rips by the pockets hung limply on his hips. He wore a ratty t-shirt that may at one time have had university lettering on it and a neon-green zip-up hoodie with some obnoxious cartoon alligator on the front.

  Cut his hair, put him in a suit, and this could be Francisco, but nothing about this man said “Foundation President”. If this wasn’t Francisco, it had to be someone related to him, the resemblance was so strong. Plus, who else but a member of the family would be in the museum on a day it was closed?

  When he was finally free, the man rose to his feet and reached out a hand to Juliette. Rather dubiously, she accepted.

  As soon as their fingers touched, a shiver of awareness rippled through her. From the way he paused, eyes widening, she wondered if he’d felt it, too. It was chemistry, pure and simple, and she’d only felt something like this one time before, in Paris.

  His fingers tightened around hers and she was lifted to her feet with a surprising amount of strength. Juliette looked up into the startlingly light blue eyes of this odd man and said the only thing she could think of. “Hi.”

  He cleared his throat. “Hi.”

  “I’m Juliette…Juliette Adams.”

  “I’m a grade-A klutz.” He tucked his hands into his pockets with a self-deprecating smile. “Francisco Garcia Santiago.”

  “You’re Francisco?”

  Now he was back to looking bemused. “That’s me.” He grimaced. “We were supposed to be meeting? I was working and… I’ll go find an usher, or Marcia—she’s the director and you’d be better off talking to her anyway—and if you give me a few minutes, I’ll find someone.”

  Juliette hid her smile. He was nothing like she’d expected from the information in the file or what she’d found online on the flight down here. “No, we don’t have a meeting.”

  “Oh, well, uh…” He ran a hand through his hair, struggling to figure out what else to say. “Want me to find someone to give you a tour?”

  “That might be hard, since the museum is closed today.” She said it gently.

  “It is? Then it’s Monday.”

  “Yes,” she confirmed, “it’s Monday.” Juliette fought the urge to grab him and kiss him. He was just so hapless it was cute.

  “Wait…if it’s Monday, how did you get in here?” For the first time he regarded her with suspicion. In Juliette’s opinion, that reaction was very late coming.

  “The door was unlocked.” That wasn’t entirely true. The deadbolt on the front door hadn’t been engaged, so it had been child’s play to open it. She’d had wire cutters in her hand, ready to deal with the alarm if her quickly gathered intel on the museum’s lack of security was wrong, but nothing had gone off.

  “Oh, uh, sometimes I forget.” He was still looking at her suspiciously. “So you’re just here visiting the museum?”

  “No, I actually came to meet you.”

  “You…did?” He sounded both alarmed and resigned.

  “Yes. I have something I think might interest you.” Reaching up, Juliette first took the clips out of her hair, which was half down after he’d accidentally whacked her on the head. She didn’t miss the way his eyes lingered on her as the locks fell around her shoulders.

  Opening her purse, she slid the hair clips in and then extracted the cardboard sleeve she’d placed the pictures in.

  Wordlessly, she handed it to him. Francisco frowned but shook the photos out into his hand. He peered at the first one for a moment, before his whole body went still. Flipping to the next one, he brought the photos closer to his face then fumbled in the pocket of his hoodie, extracting a pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses.

  They magnified his eyes cartoonishly and Juliette had to bite back a giggle.

  “Where did you get these?”

  Juliette opened her mouth, ready to start her carefully prepared statement, the first phase in a plan to suss out what he knew about the Trinity Masters, but before she could say anything, he’d turned and walked away, disappearing through the door he’d appeared from.

  Juliette waited, but he didn’t come back. Half-amused, half-irritated, she too stepped through the door, taking time to put the stanchions and rope back in place before following after the lost member of the Trinity Masters.

  Franco jerked on his gloves, moved the letter he’d been examining off the light box, carefully laid out the photos the blonde had brought then flipped the light on.

  Planting his hands on the worktable, he peered at the first photo. Three men. The one on the left in white, or possibly tan pants and a jacket. The older man in the center in loose clothing and tall boots, a rifle across his chest. Francisco knew both of them. Well, he didn’t know them, since they’d been dead a long time. He recognized them.

  William Ludlow was on the left, and in the center was Calixto Garcia, general in the Cuban revolution. Next to Garcia was the third person—a younger man wearing a hat, sporting a wispy mustache that meant he was probably only in his teens.

  “Unbelievable,” he muttered to himself. He needed to check the background against a picture they had in the collection of Ludlow and Garcia together. I
t looked as if both photos were taken the same day—the men were in the same outfits, with the same scenery in the background. In the photo they had on display, there were a variety of men standing behind and slightly downhill from Ludlow and Garcia. The third man in this picture had to be someone important to merit a photo with two such powerful men. A hat shadowed half the younger man’s face, but there was something familiar about him, as if Franco should recognize him. He almost looked like—

  “Pedro Garcia Fernandez.”

  Franco’s head jerked up so fast his glasses slid down his nose. He shoved them back into place. The blonde—she’d said her name, but of course he couldn’t remember it—gestured to the photo. “You were muttering to yourself. The third man is Pedro Garcia Fernandez.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She took a larger envelope from her purse and extracted a single piece of paper. “The photo was mounted to this.”

  He accepted it when she held it out, vaguely aware that she was looking curiously around his workroom/office/library. There were four photo corners stuck to the paper, where the photo had once been, and under that, faded handwriting said, “William Ludlow, Calixto Garcia, Pedro Garcia Fernandez”.

  Ignoring the other photos for now, Franco took off his glasses and looked at the woman. She’d removed a pile of folders from a chair he’d forgotten was there and taken a seat, seeming tidy and elegant amid the controlled chaos of his workspace.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Juliette Adams.”

  “How did you get this photo?”

  “It was in my family’s papers.”

  Her voice was smooth, but something about the way she said “family” had his Spidey senses tingling.

  “Why did you bring them to me?”

  Juliette Adams raised a brow. “Isn’t the young man in the photo, Pedro, your great-grandfather?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Is it a secret?”

  “Not a secret, but not something we talk about.” Franco looked at her, letting the silence stretch out. He never minded silence, since his mind had a tendency to wander anyway, but he’d been told it made other people uncomfortable and had used that to his advantage several times.

  Juliette kept a small smile in place. Apparently silence didn’t bother her.

  Franco broke first. “Come with me, there’s something I want to show you.”

  Juliette followed Francisco out of the mad-scientist laboratory. He opened a door, muttered, closed it. He nearly tripped over his feet as he sped towards the next door. Throwing it open, he stuck his head through then motioned for her to follow.

  The elegant front room was on the north side of the house, the afternoon light diffused. Francisco darted across the room, flipping on the display lights. Small spotlights shone on large glass panels that divided the room into sections. Each glass panel was printed with semi-opaque images depicting photos, letters and maps. Francisco tucked his glasses in his hoodie pocket as he stopped in front of one of the panels. Juliette waited until she was sure he was done moving before joining him.

  “My family has been fortunate. My great-grandfather, Pedro, immigrated to the US, and through friendships with several powerful families, including the Smiths, he was able to build his business and assist other Cuban immigrants.”

  Francisco pointed to a photo of a young Hispanic man. It was a posed photo, the man’s expression serious and unsmiling.

  “This is Luis Garcia Cruz. My grandfather.” Francisco’s voice fell into a rhythmic tone of someone telling a familiar story. “He was born in 1922 and was studying to be a priest until World War One, when he left the seminary after the death of his close friend Henry Smith.” Francisco motioned to a photo of Luis with a young man in an army uniform. Both were smiling.

  Juliette took a few steps to the side, pointed at another display with the header “The Spanish-American War”. “But your great-grandfather fought in the Cuban Revolution.”

  “You refer to it as the Cuban Revolution?” Francisco seemed surprised.

  “The United States was late to a war the Cuban people had been fighting for a long time.”

  “True.” Francisco gestured to the image of Luis. “Grandfather told stories about how his father had fought in the revolution. But my grandfather was full of stories, some of them believable, many of them not. The craziest ones are mostly about Pedro, which is why we don’t include him in the museum.”

  “They must be very crazy then.”

  “Well, one story is that Pedro was the illegitimate son of Calixto Garcia.”

  “Why is that an unbelievable story? Wasn’t General Garcia a rather famous womanizer?”

  Francisco shrugged one shoulder. “True. That is not the most unbelievable story.”

  “Oh?” Juliette kept her tone casual and inquisitive, but her heart was pounding.

  Francisco opened his mouth, but then shook his head, studying the museum display instead. The silence lengthened to the point of uncomfortable, and Juliette had to fight the urge to grab Francisco and shake him until information fell out.

  The thunderous knock on the museum’s front door was so unexpected that Juliette let out a yelp.

  Francisco was just as startled, jerking sideways into the display, which luckily didn’t break.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “There’s someone at the door.”

  “I should get that.” He stumbled away, nearly tripping over his own feet.

  Juliette took a few deep breaths, centering herself and prepping a new approach. These “crazy stories” told by Francisco’s grandfather Luis may be tales of the Trinity Masters. To anyone outside the organization they probably would sound unbelievable. She needed to know more about Luis, since he’d been a member, but never called to the altar. There were too many unanswered questions for her liking.

  Juliette was staring into middle space, sorting out her thoughts and questions, when the sound of a familiar voice jerked her attention back to the present. It almost sounded like…

  Sucking in a breath, Juliette walked quickly towards the door Francisco had used, the voices getting louder as she approached the entrance to the museum. She rounded a corner and stopped in her tracks.

  “Dammit, Devon.”

  Chapter Six

  Francisco resisted the urge to slam the door in this guy’s face and boot the gorgeous blonde out on her ass. He was starting to feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole—nothing quite made sense.

  “Do you work here?” the tall brown-haired man asked. Like Juliette, the guy looked put together and preppy, his attire—pressed khakis and a logoed dark-blue polo shirt—practically screaming New England.

  Franco wanted to hole up in his office—alone—with the photos for a few days. To spend a proper amount of time studying them. Since the blonde had brought him the pictures, it would be rude for him to rush her out of here, but this guy was just an annoyance keeping him from working on this new puzzle.

  “The museum isn’t open.” Francisco inched the door closed. “Come back tomorrow.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed and he very deliberately put one foot over the threshold, toe of his shoe against the bottom of the door. “I’m looking for someone.”

  “They’re not here, because we’re closed.” Francisco vaguely wondered where his cell phone was in case he needed to call the cops. Since he lived upstairs, and the museum was more informative than value-heavy artifact-based, the security was minimal. There may be a panic button on the system keypad, but he couldn’t bank on it.

  “Who are you?” the man demanded.

  Francisco blinked at the question. “Shouldn’t I be asking who you are?”

  “Dammit, Devon.” Juliette’s words were quiet but spoken with fervor from somewhere behind him.

  The man shoved the door open, knocking Francisco back, and stepped inside. His gaze was focused on Juliette.

  The urge to protect rose hot and
sharp, filling the space behind Franco’s breastbone with heat and sending adrenaline racing through his limbs. He put a hand on the man’s chest, stopping his advance.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?” Franco’s voice changed with his anger, and for a moment he heard traces of his own father’s tone in the words. It was far from a bad thing—no one fucked with Henry Garcia Hernandez.

  The newcomer’s gaze shifted away from Juliette, and the muscles in his shoulders and upper arms tensed and bunched.

  Franco hadn’t been in a fight since he was a kid and didn’t actually know what to do next.

  “Devon, you shouldn’t be here.” Juliette appeared at Franco’s side, placing her hand on his shoulder.

  The man—Devon—dropped his gaze to Juliette’s hand. His shoulders slumped.

  “The two of you, uh, know each other?” Franco looked from Devon to Juliette.

  Juliette was smiling but her eyes were hard. She wasn’t happy this Devon guy had shown up. Franco placed his hand on top of hers. As their fingers touched, another shock of awareness went through him.

  “Yes, we do. Francisco, this is Devon Asher. Devon, this is Francisco Garcia Santiago. This is his family’s museum. Since you’re here, you might as well come in. Francisco was about to tell me a story.”

  “I was?” Francisco decided that this wasn’t an Alice-in-Wonderland situation, but rather like being in a Marquez novel.

  Devon closed the door, his gaze still lowered, the tension between him and Juliette palpable. On a hunch, Francisco looked at Devon and Juliette’s hands, checking for wedding bands. Devon wore a heavy gold ring on his right hand, but Juliette was ringless. So they weren’t married, but there was definitely something between these two—a kind of tension that usually existed between couples in a complicated or bad relationship.

  “Francisco, you were going to tell me about your grandfather’s crazy stories.” Juliette slipped her arm through his, turning him towards the gallery they’d been in.

  “That’s what you want to hear?”