From Barcelona, with Love (16 page)

Mac ate another churro. So. Bibi was lonely, unfulfilled, and probably emotionally at the end of her rope. Things did not look good for Bibi.

He e-mailed thanks back to Lev, wanted to call Sunny but, taking into account the nine-hour time difference, decided against it and e-mailed her instead
. Lot of traffic here, you're not missing a thing, but me,
he wrote.
Love you.

He called the desk and asked to be given a wake-up call at five, then fell into the big wide white bed and immediately to sleep.

When the call came he got up, refreshed, showered again, put on his clean jeans and, in deference to the Matriarch, a white linen shirt. He slung on his black leather jacket, ran his hands through his hair, refused to look in the mirror at his eye, put on his sunglasses, and took the elevator down to the lobby.

“Mr. Reilly, the Marquesa's car is waiting for you,” the manager himself told him.

Mac half expected an ancient Rolls, bright yellow like something from a fifties movie, but it was a BMWX5 SUV, black and shiny. Not a speck of dust, despite the Barcelona traffic.

“Señor Reilly.” The driver, a thin young man, sprang to attention when he saw Mac. He opened the back door with a flourish.

“Thanks, but I'll sit up front with you.” Mac walked round to the passenger side and got in. The interior smelled faintly of some flowery perfume.

The driver said his name was Carlos, and that they were only minutes away from the house where, he told Mac, the de Ravel family had lived for two generations. “The winery, what we call the ‘bodega,' is even older, of course,” he added.

Mac wondered if he might get to see the winery that, thanks to the Matriarch, had improved the fortunes of this family over the past few years. Not that they'd needed it. He checked out the tall stone house as the car swept through the iron gates, motioned in and on by an old man with a face like a pickled walnut under a bright blue beret.

Family retainer, Mac thought. That's what this family was all about. Wealth, position, and history. The Marquesa de Ravel was going to have a lot to live up to.

The massive wooden door stood slightly open. The driver got out, waved Mac up the steps, pushed the door wide, and ushered Mac inside. Then, with a polite
“Buenas noches, Señor,”
he departed, leaving Mac alone in the hall.

Mac was surprised not to be greeted by a butler, or at least a uniformed maid. On his left was what he guessed would be called the
grand salón
with its cushioned brocade sofas and crystal lamps; and on his right a dining room with a long table set as though for an imminent dinner party for twenty, with golden chargers and yellow plates, long-stemmed wineglasses and amber water glasses. A simple butter-yellow linen napkin was at each place, and a low gilded metal trough filled with pots of fresh herbs ran down the center. Mac could smell the basil from where he stood. He'd bet before he died old Juan Pedro and his Matriarch had held some great parties here.

He stared up the sweeping staircase at the twin fantasies of the theater boxes with their faded rosy velvet curtains and the gilded cupids tooting their trumpets. Somehow, he'd expected the conventional Spanish home of an older couple with heavy dark furniture, lowering beams, and half-drawn drapes, and what he'd gotten instead was an operetta, a theater set. It was all so fantastical it made him smile.

Still no one came to get him. Mac wondered uneasily about Montrin saying the Matriarch was concerned he got there safely. “Safely” was not a normal word to use. Could there be danger here?

Suddenly impatient, he walked through the hall toward the back of the house. His footsteps rang loudly on the marble floor. The house felt empty, as though no one actually lived here.

At the very end of the hall an open door led into a kitchen. Copper pans gleamed on a rack over a center island. To his left was another door. Curious, he opened it and peeked in. This was obviously the heart of the house, where the real living took place. Sofas still bore imprints of where people had sat; a sweater was flung across the back of one, and a folded newspaper waited to be read. French windows led onto a courtyard where an unseen fountain tinkled lazily. Two walls were lined with books and, curious about the de Ravels, Mac walked over to take a look.

Head bent, he read the titles: English and French as well as Spanish. Obviously the de Ravels were an international bunch.

He heard a light footstep in back of him, smelled that same faint flowery scent from the car. He straightened up, and swung round to look.

She was standing there, in a red dress, by the open door, looking back at him. She smiled when she saw his black eye. He'd had a black eye the night she first met him.

“Well, Mac Reilly,” the Matriarch said. “Nothing much has changed, has it?”

“Not much, Lorenza,” Mac agreed.

 

Chapter 23

Miami

She was Lorenza Machado
when he first met her. Nineteen years old and delicious as a ripe peach, with the thickest Spanish accent that made the words “I love you and ohh how you do that thing … how I love it … oh make me feel that some more,” sound even more erotic to the young detective he had been then. Plus she had dark eyes that promised excitement and a smile that would haunt Mac's nights for years to come. He had fallen instantly and completely in love. And so, Lorenza told him, had she.

It happened in a club in Miami. The Havanita, it was called. A muggy Florida night, a low palm-thatched room leading onto a tiki-torched courtyard, crammed tables, waiters bearing trays of potent rum drinks over the heads of the dancers; a band—an even more potent mixture of Cuban and Puerto Rican—driving the Latin rhythms into the hot bodies on that dance floor. The very air seemed to throb around Mac, propping up the bar, drinking a Coke, a craggy twenty-three-year-old rookie detective, sporting a black eye from a fight a couple of nights before; dark hair a little too long for his own good, dark eyes too blue for women's own good, a body honed without the slightest effort on his part, and that was perhaps too good for both him and the women, who seemed to spot him a mile away, or even across a bar, and like iron filings to a magnet, were drawn to his tough young looks.

Mac had had his share of affairs, he'd even had a few weeks' fling with an “older woman,” all of forty-two and on the lam from an erring husband, but he had never before fallen in love.

Lorenza Machado was ravishing in short red chiffon that moved with her body as she danced barefoot with a handsome, flashy Cuban who had eyes only for her, and who wore his large gold Rolex over the cuff of his custom-made white guayabera shirt, and whose expensive Mercedes convertible was parked, by the well-tipped valet, right outside the club's red-carpeted entrance.

Lorenza's eyes linked momentarily with Mac's. She hesitated, missed her step, almost fell. The handsome Cuban caught her, laughed, offered her another drink.

“But I don't drink,” she said, looking back at Mac. He was still looking at her.

She excused herself, threaded her way through the dancers, came and stood next to him.

It was as though Mac had been struck by lightning. “I didn't know what it meant to be in love until I saw you,” was his opening line. It came from his heart.

She smiled her soft-lipped sensual smile, then reached up and touched his blackened eye.
“Pobricito,”
she said, her sweet voice full of sympathy.

His eyes drank her in.

“You have hot eyes,” she murmured, never having been devoured by a man's eyes before.

“Only for you,” he said. And then he took her by the hand and led her back onto the dance floor. He slid his arm around her, holding her in that place just above the waist so she was pulled toward him. His eyes never left hers. She leaned away, looking at him as they danced to a soft, light, romantic Cuban song, oblivious to the other dancers, to the waiters bearing trays aloft, to the handsome man she'd been dancing with, flirting with, just minutes before.

Mac moved his hand up her back, he touched the soft nape of her neck where her thick black hair swung as they moved, feeling the heat of her there, the hint of sweat. He leaned in to her, his face close to her ear. He could smell her flowery perfume, her skin.

“I'm in love with you,” he murmured, just loud enough for her to hear, through the soft blare of trumpets, the guitars, the hypnotic rhythm.

Her body relaxed in his arms, soft as only a sensual woman could be. Her head drooped.

“Yes,” she said, so quietly Mac could barely hear. But he understood. Love had struck them both.

“Where are you from?” he'd asked, still holding on to her hand.

“Gainesville,” she replied.

He stared at her astonished, then he laughed. “I thought you were going to say heaven.”

“No. Oh, no. That's why I'm here. In Miami. I've run away from college.”

Mac had driven through Gainesville once or twice. In those years the university seemed to be all the town consisted of, set deep into the flat swamplands of northern Florida. He understood. She didn't belong there.

She was looking down at their clasped hands. A current seemed to run between them. It was so strong it almost had a color. Blue.

She said, “I'm a sophomore. I miss my home. I feel better here, in Miami. The food, the people, the music. Closer to my family, in Spain.”

Mac, who'd practically raised himself alone on the streets of Boston's rough North End, wished he had a family to miss. But suddenly it didn't matter. He asked her name, told her his.

Then, just like when he was in junior high, he said to her, “Will you be my girl?”

“Of course,” Lorenza said.

And she was. For three passionate months, heady with love and sex, she traveled up and down Florida to be with him. But a young detective was expected always to be there, and Mac was dedicated. His schedule was tough, his time not his own.

Finally, that was what caused the end of the affair, though not of their love. “That will be forever,” they'd told each other.

“All good things must come to an end,” she'd said, sadly collecting her few possessions from his cheap studio apartment that certainly did not come with a Miami ocean view, only of a rough parking lot dotted with Corollas and old Ford trucks, one of which was Mac's.

Lorenza had been summoned back by her family to Spain, actually to the island of Majorca where she had been raised like a young lady. “Or at least they tried,” she'd once told him with a giggle as she lay wantonly naked in his arms after making love for the third time that night. The nights were so long then, so filled with each other's needs and emotions, so sensual, so hot they could never get enough of each other.

But it was over. For good. They could not survive the pressures of her family, their youth, their parents, and his ambition. “Love,” as they knew it then, was at an end, though it would live on in Mac's heart, a wonderful memory. As it did in Lorenza's.

They both realized young love like that could never be repeated. Never forgotten. In fact not only had Lorenza been Mac's first true love, she had been his only true love. Until he'd met Sunny.

 

Chapter 24

Barcelona

“So?” the new
Lorenza said, standing in front of him, barefoot and wearing a red chiffon dress, exactly the way she had when they first met at the Havanita. “Do I get a kiss?”

“You mean for old time's sake?”

Arms folded across her chest, head tilted to one side, Lorenza looked deep into his eyes. “More than twenty years, Mac, and you still remember ‘old times'?”

Oh, he remembered. Now, in that red dress, in the soft evening light, she might have been the young girl he had known then. Her body was still slender, the face she'd always complained was too round, was still smooth; the big dark eyes that always reminded him of Goya's court portraits still held a hint of unrestrained fire. She looked so very Spanish, her cloud of dark hair swept up at the sides with tortoiseshell mantilla combs.

“I don't have to try to remember,” he said simply. “You never left me.”

She came toward him, held out her hand. He took it in both of his. She said, “They say first love is the one you always remember.”

“Then they're right. But you had the advantage, you were expecting me.”

She laughed. “Surely it must have crossed your mind, since you remember me so well, that the woman in Spain with the name Lorenza, the woman who contacted you, might just be the same?
You,
the famous private detective.”

“I simply thought you were Paloma's grandmother. The family boss.”

“Stepgrandmother. I was married to Paloma's grandfather.”

“Juan Pedro de Ravel.”

Their hands were still clasped.

“People thought I'd married him for his money and position. It wasn't true. I loved him very much.”

“I'm sure you did.”

“Not the way I loved you, Mac. This was different, but still wonderful.”

“I'm glad,” he said.

Then Lorenza stepped into his arms and kissed him. And time stood still.

Her perfume, ginger lily and dark amber, was in his head, the faint citrusy scent of his skin in hers; a paradise revisited, youth reclaimed in a single long embrace. He felt her bones beneath his hands, the way he had when he'd held her on that dance floor, the pliable swing of her body as she finally took her mouth from his and leaned back studying his face.