Jill Sorenson - Crash Into Me

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: Civilization and Its Discontents. “You believe in this crap?”

“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 guera .”

“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 fiancée.”

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.”

“You have a morbid sense of humor.”

“I’m not joking.”

“Maybe James is good for her. She looks happy.”

“He’s a fucking martyr,” he said sullenly. “If he were just some dumb jock, or a spoiled rich kid, like she is, I wouldn’t worry half as much.”

“You may be right. I think he cares about her, though.”

He didn’t dispute her. Instead, he brought her back to his original question. “So where’d you get the blue eyes, my little Guatemalan princess?”

“My dad, I guess.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t even know his name.”

“Isn’t it Moore?”

“No. That’s my stepdad.” She felt a twinge of guilt for deceiving him with the phony name, but she was telling the truth. Everett Moore had been her stepfather, and the thought of him made a darkness pass over her, like a cloud occluding the sun.

Ben must have seen it on her face. “Is he the guy?”

She didn’t have to ask what he meant, but she did. “The guy who what?”

“Who made you afraid.”

“He was one of them.”

Ben’s mouth made a thin, hard line. “Where is he now?”

“Why? So you can find him and beat him up?” She laughed, shaking her head.

“I feel protective of you, and you think it’s funny?”

“No. What’s funny is that you assume I need a protector. That tough-guy avenger crap is more about you than me, and it’s insulting. You want to make him pay for ruining your good-girl fantasy, for turning me into a real person with a lot of sexual hang-ups.”

He was silent for a moment. “So where is he?”

Her jaw dropped. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“So, I think it’s bullshit. I’ve known you had hang-ups from the beginning. Who doesn’t? I still have nightmares about the Japanese girl with the Kung Fu grip. I’ve always thought of you as a real person-you saved my daughter from drowning, for Christ’s sake. And believe it or not, in my fantasies, you’re a bad girl.” His eyes flicked over her. “A very, very bad girl,” he emphasized. “Nothing has changed, except that now I want to kill your stepfather.”