“Yes,” she said, following him upstairs. Sonny had knotted ties for her brother every time he’d gone to court, so she’d had a lot of practice.
While he sat to put on his shoes, she studied the room. On the wall to her left, a framed portrait of a nude Hawaiian girl stood against a backdrop of brilliant green palm fronds. A strategically placed hibiscus-giant, luscious, and gorgeously red-made the full-length picture more artistic than erotic.
The rest of the room was austere in comparison. White walls, sand-colored carpet, and white crown molding. The bed was huge, but low to the ground, its white down comforter and fluffy white pillows blending in with the surroundings rather than dominating the room. A black mahogany dresser had a pair of cuff links on top, nothing else. Across from the bed, there was a fireplace, its hearth cold and unlit.
Beyond a half-wall partition, a pale green love seat and matching chair faced a smart-looking plasma screen TV. The weather channel was on mute. Mahogany bookshelves, filled with scholarly-looking volumes, completed the room.
The space was visually striking, modern, and sterile. The shock of red hibiscus in the framed photo and the green leaves in the background, a motif that was repeated on the designer couch as well as the floor-to-ceiling curtains, were the only splashes of color.
The focal point, however, was not the floating bed, flat screen TV, or naked island nymph. It was the view. The west-facing wall was all glass, with windows so tall and wide Sonny felt as though she could step right out into the Pacific.
She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself tightly.
Ben ducked into the master bath, probably to make himself even more devastatingly handsome, so she browsed his book collection while she waited. Jean-Paul Sartre. Karl Marx. Dostoyevsky. Immanuel Kant.
He liked philosophy. Ew.
“You read this stuff?” she asked, raising her voice.
He reentered the bedroom, crossing it to stand in front of his dresser drawers.
“Uh, yeah. Some of it.”
She pulled a book off the shelf. Sigmund Freud:
“What crap?”
“Penis envy.”
He glanced at the book she held and fastened his cuff links. “That one’s not about penis envy. But no, I’m not a fan of that particular theory.”
“Oh? Explain why.”
“Well, oversimplified-”
“By all means, oversimplify. Otherwise, my penis-deprived brain will explode.”
He laughed. “I’ve never met a woman who wasn’t delighted with what she had. Are we in agreement?”
“Yes,” she said, replacing the book, disappointed that she hadn’t been able to start an argument.
“Are you going to knot this tie for me?”
She walked up to him, looking into his deep brown eyes. He was so controlled today, so reserved. It made her want to mess up his hair and unbutton his shirt. Instead, she formed a nice Windsor knot, taking longer than was necessary, standing closer than she had to, smoothing the tie down over his sternum and her hands across the impressive breadth of his shoulders when she was finished. “Done,” she whispered, pressing her stocking-covered knee to his thigh.
“Thanks,” he said tersely, stepping away from her.
“I didn’t know this was such a formal affair. I would have worn my ball gown.”
His eyes raked over her, lingering on the swells of her breasts. “You look fine,” he said in a low voice, then lifted his gaze to the doorway.
Sonny didn’t have to look over her shoulder to know Carly was standing there, eavesdropping. In over five years as an agent, and a lifetime of hyper-awareness, she’d never been snuck up on.
Nor had she ever lost herself so completely in a role.
Sonny bit her lower lip, on the cusp of madness. Here she was, old enough to know better, dumb enough to do it anyway, in danger of falling for a man who wasn’t even bothering to pretend he was interested in a real relationship. On the job, no less.
She turned toward Carly, vowing to stay focused on her assignment, not Ben Fortune’s bedroom eyes, for the remainder of the evening.
Before crossing the border from San Diego to Tijuana, Ben explained that Carly’s grandparents had been married on Christmas Eve fifty years before. They’d hired a professional photographer to mark the occasion, and invited Ben and Carly to be part of the family photo, hence the more formal attire.
Over a hundred friends and family members were in attendance, also decked out in their finest, most of whom didn’t speak a word of English. While Ben and Carly posed for the photo, Sonny sat out the festivities at a long table in the banquet hall.
When Ben found her again, she was chatting with several other revelers and enjoying some delicious holiday fare.
“I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” he said.
“You don’t know much about me.”
He couldn’t argue that. “What are you?”
She finished off her tamale with a smile. “A woman. What are you? A space alien?”
“You know what I mean.”
“My mother is Guatemalan.”
He raised an eyebrow in surprise, and Sonny reacted defensively, having encountered this reaction many times. Her mother was of Spanish descent, but the majority of Guatemalans were native Mayans, marginalized to coffee plantations in their homeland, often used as farmhands in the United States. In San Diego, Guatemalan heritage was synonymous with cheap labor and dark skin.
“There are light-skinned Hispanics in Guatemala, just like any other Latin-American country,” she explained.
He held his hands up, claiming innocence. “I didn’t say there weren’t. I’ve just never met a blue-eyed Guatemalan.”
“And how many Guatemalans do you know?”
He smiled. “One. My gardener.”
“You have a gardener? You don’t even have a yard.”
“What I do have, he’s done an excellent job with.”
She smiled back at him, shaking her head at the extravagancies of the disgustingly wealthy.
“You take after your mom?”
“No. People tell me I look like her, but I don’t see it. She’s very pretty.”
“So are you.”
She just shrugged, not bothering to disagree. In her experience, when she tried to deflect a compliment, it was assumed that she was fishing for more. “She and my brother have dark hair. When I was a kid, everyone called me
“What does that mean?”
She couldn’t believe he didn’t know. Several of Carly’s relatives had been calling him the masculine equivalent of the word all evening. “It means light hair or skin. Or, in your case,” she added, for his hair was dark and his skin sun-browned, “white boy.”
“Oh. I wondered about that.”
“Why didn’t you ask Carly?”
“I don’t trust her translations.”
“That’s probably wise. She told her grandmother I was your fiancee.”
He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “I knew it.”
“She’s made quite the turnaround. Was it less than a week ago she was warning me away from you?”
He glanced at his daughter, smiling and beautiful, posing for photographs with her grandparents. “Just wait. When she has her first fight with James, she’ll be cursing you to hell and lighting herself on fire.”
