So they shared the watch duties. William played endless rounds of solitaire, read seven daily newspapers including The Freedom Gazette, and became best friends with every patient and staff member on the floor. Roxanne worked on her laptop when she could concentrate, but more often than not, she was pacing or overthinking or doing some light, tap-only sparring with Mateo, the room’s furniture pushed to the side walls.
Too often, Mateo stayed with her when he should have taken the opportunity to sleep. But it was on one of those long nights in Father Juan’s room, stretched out on opposite ends of an uncomfortable loveseat, her feet in Mateo’s lap as the muted TV flickered over them, that he discovered that she was an amateur kickboxer. He’d looked both amused and amazed as he’d rubbed his thumbs into her arch.
“How do you think I put you down in the back of that restaurant?” she asked, reminding them of a time when the last thing he would have done was blissfully rub her feet.
“With the power of your mind?” He’d shrugged before he bit her little toe and then stood, his hand out to her. “You’ve got to show me some moves.”
When he did sleep and shower back at the hotel, he always returned with her favorite: a nickel-thin burger from Johnny’s, extra pickles. She always brought him a large black coffee and a ginormous maple bar from Freedom’s only doughnut shop; Mateo, she was beginning to learn, had a weakness for sweets. When William showed up to spell them both, they played hooky and took a guilty but much needed break.
Time away from the antiseptic cling of the hospital sometimes felt too good to waste on sleep. Which was why, five days after arriving in her hometown, Roxanne found herself at midnight sitting on a swing in the municipal park, enjoying the chirp of the crickets and the song of the cicadas as she sipped on a bottle of beer. Mateo’s swing creaked as he leaned over, placed his empty bottle in the carton and grabbed another, twisting it open.
She watched him tilt back as he drank, the bright glow of the prairie moon licking at the tips of his hair. He looked up and up. “These are really tall swings,” he commented, the moon highlighting his perfect profile.
“Yeah,” Roxanne commented, not having to look up to see the eighteen-foot tall swing poles. “Jumping out of them made me feel like I could fly. I used to bet other kids that I could jump out higher than they could.”
She drank her beer as he shook his head, still looking up. “You could have killed yourself.”
“Hey, it was a great way to make lunch money.”
He dropped his chin to lean his forehead on the chain and stare at her. His dimple poked into his cheek, but there was no smile in his eyes. “I act like I had it so hard as a kid,” he murmured. “But I was a pampered and overprotected child.”
Roxanne dropped her eyes and drank her beer. There’d been no additional discussion about her past, no time for it in the rush and crawl of caring for Father Juan. Part of her liked it that way; part of her was preparing to eventually tell him more. It was the bipolar state of her love for Mateo, something she found herself shrieking away from and scrambling toward, depending on what minute of the day it was. There’d been no one, ever, that she’d trusted enough to even consider disarming herself that way. Did she trust Mateo?
“You had your own nightmares,” Roxanne mumbled against her beer bottle.
“I never had to commit death-defying acts for my next meal.” When Roxanne said nothing else, Mateo let her off the hook and leaned back in his seat, looking out to the large, moonlit playground. “This playground would have scared the shit out of me.”
Planting her beer between her thighs, Roxanne held on to the chains and also leaned back, although she didn’t have to look around to know the exact locations of the two-story tall slides, the uber-tall fireman’s pole, the slick four-person-wide slide that sent children shooting off of it, exhilarated and squealing.
“We’d discussed removing the old-fashioned equipment when we renovated a few years ago and making the park less of a liability.” She relaxed into the soft non-temperature of the seventy-two-degree night. “We decided to add more ADA-compliant equipment and restore the old stuff. The ancient equipment is still the park’s most popular draw.”
“‘We?’” Mateo asked.
Roxanne pushed with her heels, set the swing to moving and let the ground slide away beneath her. “We, they, them,” she said, gripping the chain with one hand while she sipped from her beer with the other. “‘They’ make a lot of decisions with ‘my’ money. The more of my money they use, the more they want me to weigh in.”
One of the park commissioners still sent Roxanne invites to her family’s annual pig roast on the lake. Brandon always took care of the replies.
“Huh,” Mateo said, stretching out his long legs, his Wellies anchored on the ground as she glided past him. “Why do you give this town so much money if you hate it so much?”
“Why do you think we’re not being stalked by paparazzi right now?” she answered, pushing off again to add a little more steam to her swing. The chains squealed against the pole overhead. “I fund this dying town, and the locals don’t share information about me.” It was a little awkward to drink her beer now, but she managed it.
“Is that an agreement you came to with someone?”
She swooped past Mateo. “Essentially.”
“Essentially? So you didn’t sign a contract or shake hands and say...”
She planted her flip-flops in the soft dust and stopped herself on a dime. “Say what, Mateo? Say, ‘I will give you millions of dollars to prevent you from exposing me to the world? I agree to be blackmailed so you will protect my secrets?’” She shoved her hair behind her ear and stared at him. “No, nothing as mercenary as that was ever said. But I know. And they certainly know.”
She felt foolish and exposed.
The man she loved now knew that tycoon Roxanne Medina never got anything for free.
She’d paid off a town. Her only support system were her employees—who she paid. And she’d bought herself a husband and a baby.
He stood, grabbed the chains of her swing, and pulled her back until she was off the ground and wrapped in his arms. “Hey, hey, belleza,” he said into her hair, against her struggles. He’d immobilized her so fast it infuriated her. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to upset you.”
“You did,” she said, wanting to bristle up and protect her soft parts. “Put me down.”
Instead, he nuzzled into her neck and the tenderness of it soothed her with a surprising surge of lust. There’d been no lovemaking, honestly no desire for sex over the last five days. Every touch had been about comfort and reassurance. The rare moments that they’d slept together in the motel bed, they’d been out the instant their heads had hit the pillows. But now he held her effortlessly, powerfully, in his strong arms and his lips feathered his words against sensitive skin.
“No one behaves like you’re paying them off,” he murmured, words for only her. “They seem to be grateful. When I go into Johnny’s, he starts frying a fresh patty, just for you. The grocery store won’t let me pay for anything. The other day, I had an elderly lady insist on holding the door open for me so she could tell me how lucky I was to have caught you.”
While Roxanne was physically still, she struggled internally against the soft seduction of his voice. She’d noticed it, too: the doughnut shop always started a new pot of coffee when she walked in, the nurses at the hospital checked on her and asked about her well-being as often as they checked on Father Juan.
“Let me go,” Roxanne said, her skin pebbling under his lips. “I can’t...think when you’re doing that.”
Gently, he slid his arms to the chains and lowered her swing until she could get her feet under her.
She stood and faced him. An equal even though, in her flip-flops, he towered over her. “Greed can look like gratefulness if you’re doing it right,” she said. “They’l
l stay in line as long as I give them what they need—but if that well dried up, they’d sell me for the cost of the bucket.”
“Okay,” Mateo said, nodding slowly, looking down at her from under his gorgeous tousle of hair. “I just thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if you also had a kingdom that needed you?”
“Don’t get any romantic ideas here, Mateo,” she said, shaking her head. “This town holds nothing but misery for me. I’m leaving it behind the instant my mo—the instant I can.”
There’d been one person Roxanne dreaded seeing; one person who had yet to make an appearance. Roxanne girded herself for the possibility every morning and said a prayer of thanks every night when it didn’t occur.
She took a deep gulp on the beer she was still holding and wrinkled her nose; it had gone flat and warm. Mateo took it from her, slid it into the carton, and grabbed two new beers, twisting the caps off of them both. He held a sweating bottle out to her.
“¿Paz, mi reina?” he asked. His eyes were soulful and intense. He’d pushed out that lickable bottom lip just the tiniest bit.
Okay, this guy was just as adept at using his looks to manipulate people as she was. Was it wrong that she felt that just made him more perfect for her?
She snatched the beer from his hand and pointed it at him. “Don’t think that calling me your queen and looking at me with your puppy dog eyes is always going to get you off the hook.”
Always? As if their relationship had a shelf life beyond her first positive pregnancy test. She’d peed on a stick this morning and when only one line had appeared in the window, she’d tried to feel disappointment. Tried real hard. But she’d wrapped the stick and box in toilet paper and shoved it into the bottom of the trash can with a stupid, exhilarated joy. She was guaranteed another month with Mateo. Another month without having to explain to him this thing happening in her, without having to wonder and worry and ultimately ask if it was happening in him, too. The contract bound him to her, and right now, with so many other emotional fault lines around her, she would relax into the false relationship it created. She could kiss him and care for him and lean on him and use the contract as camouflage.
She stuck a hand into the back pocket of her jeans. “Anyway, I think we have plenty of kingdoms to worry about right now. What’s the word from the Monte?”
Mateo gave her his placating smile before he took a deep drink of his beer. “We don’t need to discuss that right—”
“Mateo,” she said, cutting him off. “I am aware that Father Juan smashing himself into a tree does not stop the rest of the world from turning. What’s going on?”
Mateo leaned back on a heel and picked at his beer label with his thumb. “My lawyers got my father to agree not to discuss or try to change the succession while they were verifying all the documents. That should give us a few weeks—but again, the king wouldn’t be so conciliatory if he didn’t have me by the short hairs.”
Roxanne saw the sigh of his beautiful Atlas shoulders in his black t-shirt. “In the meantime, my father has had more contact with our people than he’s had in years. He’s zipping his long-lost son all over and introducing him to everyone. Sofia tried to assure me that everyone is skeptical, that they think our ‘brother’ is just another one of my father’s tricks. But Carmen Louisa is concerned. She said my father’s newfound enthusiasm for the Monte along with my absence has made more people willing to listen.”
“He’s definitely your brother and not a trick,” Roxanne said. “I don’t need my investigators to tell me that.”
Mateo looked at her. “Why do you say that?”
Roxanne took a thoughtful sip on her beer. “He just reminded me of you. Something in his shoulders. He can be still, take it all in without giving anything away. He reminded me of you when I met you in the bar, when you were so angry with me but were covering it up in the guise of the cool European.”
“He’s a Texan!”
“Yeah...” She waved her hand over her face. “Manly facade.”
“The initial report we received from your investigators says he’s ex-military, an Army Ranger,” he said. She hadn’t had the time or concentration to read the cursory report.
“He works now as a professional bodyguard. Do you remember Trujillo’s daughter, the girl who was kidnapped a few years ago?”
Roxanne nodded, remembering the teenaged heiress’s world-famous abduction and recovery.
“He was the one who found her.”
Roxanne’s elite investigators were uncovering details about Mateo’s brother while staying under Easton Fuller’s radar. She didn’t want to trigger his itchy “send” finger. She still hadn’t told Mateo about the CEO’s threat to reveal the contract. She’d had no bandwidth to work on Fuller’s trap, and the last thing Mateo needed was more pressure. She would wait until Father Juan was better, and then she would tell him.
The beer burbled uncomfortably in her stomach at her continued silence.
Mateo tipped back his beer again and looked to the black velvet sky. “If my father is going around telling that story, of the heroic, child-saving bodyguard, then I am well and truly fucked.”
Roxanne put a hand on his wrist. “Which is why you should go home.”
He didn’t look down. “I am not having this conversation again.”
While Roxanne hadn’t asked for many details of the Monte—there was only so much the human psyche could handle—she had repeatedly and daily insisted that she was fine, that she had plenty of help, and that Mateo should go back to Spain. Each time she said it, she meant it. And repeatedly and daily, when he insisted he was staying, she snuggled into the comfort of having him by her side.
But she did not want to be the reason he lost his kingdom.
“Mateo, we don’t know how long Father Juan is going to be this way.”
He looked down at her. “We’ll give it another week. If nothing’s changed, we’ll figure something out.”
The way he kept saying “we” had her toes curling in her flip-flops. “Is that smart?” she asked, fighting herself to put his needs ahead of her own. “Waiting a week?”
He snatched her hand off his wrist and pulled it up to his neck, pulled her close with his beer-bottle-holding hand at the small of her back. “Since when has anything we’ve done been ‘smart,’ mi hermosa,” he said, his eyes flashing golden devilment down at her. “Why should we start now?”
The sudden press of his long, hard body against her, the wicked grin so close to her mouth, had Roxanne breathless in a way she hadn’t been since the night of the phone call, in a way she’d had no capacity for when she was overwhelmed with fear and worry. When Mateo looked down at her like this, when he needed her like this, the fear of death and endings seemed very far away.
Her desire to jump up onto her toes and press that mouth down on hers was interrupted by her cell phone ring.
With her hand still on Mateo’s neck, his hand still pressed to her back, she took the call. “William?”
“Father Juan’s swelling has gone down. They’re prepping him for surgery now.”
“Now?” she asked a little wildly, her hand digging into Mateo’s neck. “But I didn’t get to say goodbye.”
It was such a stupid, fatalistic, exposing thing to say. Mateo put down his beer and wrapped her in his arms as William continued talking in her ear. “Roxanne, there’s a good chance you won’t have to. Come back to the hospital, and we’ll all wait together.”
“Right, sorry,” she gasped against Mateo’s shoulder into the phone. “Okay, we’re coming right now.”
She ended the call. Mateo surrounded her in his arms and hugged her close.
“Lie to me and tell me he’s going to be okay,” she murmured.
“It wouldn’t be a lie.” He was heat and strength, surrounding her. “I believe he’s going to be okay. But if he’s not, we’ll get through
this. You’re not alone. You have so many people who love you.”
Roxanne closed her eyes and put his words in her pocket, saved them for a time when she needed them as fortification or when she could take them out and look at them, press them to her lips. He was wrong; he obviously hadn’t been paying attention. Very few people loved her.
But she prayed, along with the other prayers she was sending up right now, that if she only had one person’s love, that it would be his.
May: Night Five
Part Two
They’d already started the surgery by the time Roxanne and Mateo rushed into the private waiting room. She was sure she smelled like cheap beer in the antiseptic space; over the next several hours, as the walls begin to close in on her, she wished she’d picked up another six pack.
She imagined William wished he had something stronger to pour down her throat as he had to intercede—again—to keep her from biting off the head of another nervous nurse who stepped in to give an update.
The doctors had tried to warn her: The surgery to repair tissue and eliminate a large clot was going to be slow and intricate. They’d hesitated to give her a time frame. But as the clock ticked on, the increasing sense of doom made her want to flee the hospital and leave it burning behind her.
William joined her as she made her twelve-thousandth circuit of the room. “You know,” he said, falling into step beside her as her flip-flops slapped the floor. “You’re going to have to get it together. I hear that kids are in and out of the hospital all the time. How are you going to react when young Timmy breaks his arm falling out of a tree?”
“Tammy,” Roxanne growled, still pacing. “She will be a young Tammy. And she will never break her arm.”
William laughed, big and hearty and irritating. “Indeed. What kind of velvet-lined bubble will this child live in?”
“She just...” Roxanne stopped and tossed her hands up at William in exasperation. Her attorney had been a tireless companion on this nightmare ride. But right now, he was a pain in her ass. “She’ll be protected. She’ll be safe.”
Lush Money (Filthy Rich) Page 22