Tempting Isabel (Paradise South #1) (3 page)

“The girls are fine, Isa. Yeah, they’re great. Will send you the clip of their dance recital…so adorable.”

“Oh, good, I’d love that,” she said, shoving the pangs of envy deep down, below the scars.

“But Isa, I was calling because I wanted to be the second to congratulate you! Antonio said it’s done—you’re a homeowner now!”

“I am. I am a homeowner.” She shook her head at hearing the words.
Crazy
. Then she knocked on the wood door frame.

“I’m so happy for you, Isa! How was your first night’s sleep?”

“Not bad. A bit choppy…from the excitement of it all. I’m still, well…a little floored. Literally.” She laughed, the puddles of splattered mop water she’d spilled mocking her from below. “I’m just knee deep in suds and pine scent right now.”

“I thought the maid service cleaned yesterday?”

“Yeah, the place was cleaned, but you know, not to my standards.” She laughed again.

“Your OCD standards, yes,” Celeste teased. “I know them well.”

“Yes, but that’s why Lucinda throws me as many events as she does. Because of my ‘perfectionist tendencies.’” And Isabel’s incessant need to compensate, fix, or undo the constant crap that happened around her. Lucinda was pretty damn awesome to overlook half of it.

“True. Just don’t go overboard like you do and hurt your back or something. Then how will that woman run you ragged?”

“I love my work, Celi, and now I’ll need it all the more. For gas money alone, with how far out of town I am. But anyway”—
shift to the positive, Isabel
—“I do love it out here.”

“God, Isa, I couldn’t be happier for you. A place of your own. Now we just need to find you a man to share it with.”

“Don’t you dare start,” she warned, trying to check her tone. She knew Celeste loved her and always meant well—hell, the woman had practically raised her—but challenging Isabel’s decision to steer clear of relationships was not needed. Nor welcome. “I know you want me to be happy, Celi, but I just can’t go there. Not after all that’s happened. I just need to keep to myself.”

Celeste owned the opinion that Isabel’s curse and the danger she posed shouldn’t prevent her from finding a man and “from really living.” But how could Celeste understand? Her sister carried no burden on
her
shoulders. And hey, she didn’t hear Celi fight Isabel’s decision to keep away from the girls. But putting others in danger was fine, right? It baffled Isabel, truly.

“Look, Isa, I don’t want to dampen your
new-house
high. You just enjoy your new place and when you get settled, I’ll come by for a quick visit. We’ll talk then.”

But Isabel wasn’t game for that talk, not again.

Just because Celeste’s ex, Juan, had left her and her three little girls cold, and Celi was now on the hunt, it didn’t mean Isabel wanted a man. She didn’t. She was done hoping. What was the point anyway? She’d already found, and then lost, Sebastian. And you only get one soulmate per lifetime, right?

Right
. And so, since the most recent tragedy, she’d formulated rules for herself. Isabel would continue to keep loved ones at a distance and not allow new ties. No relationships, period—especially not romantic ones. She’d take the occasional quick fling with one of Vallarta’s vacationing foreigners who knew nothing of her curse, and usually, in her experience, didn’t believe in such “superstitious crap” anyways. It was a perfect situation, unattached and safe release. A
win-win
.

After all, she was only
twenty-five
years old, and
she
wasn’t dead yet––for whatever reason. And for safety’s sake, she kept her sexcapades anonymous. No full names, no numbers. Guilt and danger free.

But her sister didn’t understand her—her curse or her vacuous
extra-curriculars
that led to nowhere on purpose—so, as always, Isabel just appeased Celi on the surface and ended their
talks
as quickly as possible. “Okay, Celi, sounds good.”

“Oh, hey! I’ll see you tonight? Antonio had said seven o’clock, I think. At our usual spot.”

“Yes, right! I almost forgot. See you at dinner.” Balanced with her two remaining brothers, dinner with Celeste wouldn’t be so bad. That is, as long as there was no repeat of last time, when Celeste brought a “friend” for Isabel.
God, that was awful.
But Ray and his boyfriend Eddie had monopolized the conversation as usual, so she’d managed.

“Okay
m’ija. Hasta luego. A las siete en las
tarde.”

“Right. Seven.
Ciao.
” Isabel sighed as she hit “end” on her screen, and her playlist automatically resumed.

She set her phone on the coffee table with a long sigh, then got right back into her hard rock distraction.

She shut her eyes tight, and whipping her hair around wildly, she unwound again. With every
head-banging
nod, back to freedom. No pressure, no curse, no loneliness.

And when the song ended and switched to the next, she opened her eyes…

…and screamed bloody murder.

*

A face. At the
still-slightly
-hazy rear slider.

“Cover yourself, Isabel…you’re killing me!” Roberto said as he moved to the open doorway.

“
Por Dios!
You scared the hell out of me, Roberto! Jesus!” In a veiled huff, she ducked into her bedroom as he made his entrance. In Mexico, the unannounced and uninvited were never turned away, an unspoken code that basically applied to any time of day at all. But it didn’t mean she couldn’t be
pissed-as
-hell by it. She’d loved the sweeping freedom of being
half-naked
in her far off piece of solitude. And, damn it, now she’d have to hunt for something to put on.

But also, this was the fourth time this week Roberto had stopped by. First at her cramped
room-share
in town and now at her new home, a
thirty-minute
drive south of Vallarta. She could safely assume this visit would be like the others, rehashing an already extremely tired conversation. She was feeling too elated and, at the same time, too exhausted to hear his rant about how they were meant to be together. And he wouldn’t let it go.

“Give me a second!” she called from her bedroom. “Hey, can you pause my playlist?” she asked him, unable to hear herself think as she searched around her room for a
not-so
-small box of her more comfortable clothes.

But except for her professional outfits she’d already hung in her closet, the box of her
hang-around
clothes was out in the main room. “Hey, just sit and make yourself at home. Or better yet, grab a drink from the sink. It’s so hot out already!” she called, hoping to redirect him to the kitchen while she made a run for the box.

“It is hot, outside and in!” he called back to her, a wink in his voice.

She poked her head out. His back was to her, at the sink filling two glasses. She made a tiptoeing run for the box, only ten feet away from her door toward the slider.

“Shit!” she screamed, only a foot from her goal.

“What, Isa? What is it?” he said, spinning around.

Her foot. The right one. It throbbed and dripped red.
Damn it!
She hopped the short distance to the box to grab whatever was on top—her yellow satin robe—then threw it on. She scoffed at the dark red droplets all over her newly cleaned tile floor. From the corner of her eye she saw Roberto moving in her direction to help. “I’m fine. Just sit on the couch. Please…”

Her foot pulsated in pain while hot embarrassment flared in her cheeks. But more than that, the loss of the serenity she’d had just minutes before Roberto’s appearance, and hell, Celeste’s phone call, was filling her with pure anxiety.

“Isa, please let me—”

“I got it, Roberto. Thanks, though.” She closed the robe at her front as she hopped to her room, sank to the floor, and pulled out a tiny tortilla
chip-shaped
piece of glass. It matched the lower right corner of the slider.
Of
course.

She pulled herself up and limped her way to the bathroom, leaving more red spots in her wake.

*

Bandages. She hadn’t unpacked those either, but her grandfather had always kept first aid stuff in the powder room. Albeit two or three decades old now, she was sure something was there to do the job. Annoyed by the entire turn of events, even though she should be quite used to happenings like these, she adjusted the long sleeves of her robe down toward her hands and hopped back out to the main room, this time with a towel at the bottom of her foot as not to extend the bloody trail. She moved past Roberto, who stood to help again. Her palm went up. “Really, just sit there…and relax.”

She threw on the light to the powder room and just narrowly avoided seeing herself in the mirror with the large
spider-web
crack resonating from its center. “For God’s sake!”

“What now?”

She shook her head and blew a sigh of relief. “Just a broken mirror’s all!” she said with intended sarcasm.

Owning a broken mirror was even worse than having plain cracked glass. But seeing your own splintered reflection! It was almost laughable—seven years’ bad luck on top of her infinite curse?
Mother in
heaven…

Yes, in her country,
deep-seated
superstition and ancient beliefs in the unseen dictated many people’s lives. All of her family’s endless and usually inconvenient
Mexican-Mayan
rituals were both nostalgically heartwarming and depressing, being that most of their fears were centered around her very existence.
Isabel the walking
jinx
.

Sighing out her frustration, she rinsed and then bandaged her foot, hung a towel over the mirror from the cockeyed light fixture above, and went back out to Roberto, who kept himself seated on the sofa this time.

“You really okay? Need stitches?”

“No, no, I am fine, thanks. And hey, sorry I snapped at you,” she said, limping over to the mop while pretending not to have seen him shudder as he eyed her robe draping down over her breasts. She blushed, then felt her nipples tighten from a new hard breeze coming in off the bay. And the slippery satin fabric wasn’t helping. She quickly moved away from his obvious gaze as if she’d resumed cleaning, and took the opportunity to readjust her robe’s neckline. God, she hated how awkward things were with Roberto now.

It’d been this way since that blackout drunken night more than a week ago, and his damn infatuation was just too much to take. Waking up naked in his arms had been mortifying enough, but he still wouldn’t let it go. More importantly, despite Roberto’s skeptical take on her situation, she believed the incident to be a potentially fatal mistake. But all the proof and dissuasion in the world had no effect on his stubborn insistence that they were each other’s soulmates.

“Salt water will do a deep cut good. Come to the beach with me, Isa.”

“I can’t. I have three
back-to
-back meetings—shoot, starting in an hour! And it’s at the Five Breezes on the north side of town,” she said, noticing the time on her microwave.

“Just come to the bedroom with me real quick then, for a foot rub, a body rub, whatever…” He winked. “Or I can take you right here and now. Let me relax you, soothe you.” Then he held out his hand to her, a little wilted wildflower in his fingertips. “I’m still under your spell, Isabel. A flower…for my flower.”

She rolled her eyes at him and at the dying little weed, although she knew he was just trying to be sweet. Still, it was too much already! Just too damn much. “Enough of that, Roberto!” Then,
half-playing
to hide her true aversion, she threw a rag at him, which knocked over the spray bottle on the end table. In an attempt to catch the bottle, she bumped into the mop bucket. Again.

Another round of dirty water spilled all over her newly cleaned floor, except that it didn’t help dilute any of the nearly dried blood droplets. She could only stare while Roberto jumped up to grab paper towels from the kitchen.

“Damn it,” she grumbled, frustrated with his sexual innuendo, her lack of time, and her unending clumsiness. “Roberto, I love you. You are my oldest and dearest friend. But you’re driving me nuts! For the last time and for your own good, best friends are all we can be. Ever. You
know
my rule—”

“And you know what I think of your rule and of your supposed curse.” He made emphatic air quotes and rolled his eyes. His family, French Canadian, didn’t share the
deep-rooted
beliefs hers did.

“Here we go again. Okay, so you don’t remember any of the four funerals over the last four years?” A rhetorical question posed in her angriest tone. “Or growing up together and the crazy things that happened to me and to everyone around me? Daily?” She pointed to a scar on his chin from when she’d collided with him
head-on
in the third grade. “And the things that still happen?” She nodded toward the bucket and then held up her bandaged foot.

“All chance happenings, Isabel,” he said, moving to inspect her foot as she was now within arms’ reach, but she pulled away.

“Chance? Right.
Chance
. Coincidence. Look, we can agree to disagree once and for all, but the annual
loss of life,
Roberto…there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t…see their faces. And no one has to shoulder that pain and guilt but me,” she said with a hint of quivering emotion in her voice. To buy time for composure, she adjusted the satin sleeves of her robe to be sure they covered her arms fully and crossed them over her now heaving chest.

“Isa, you don’t have to shoulder it alone. I’m here for you, and I always will be.”

“If you don’t even believe me, Roberto, how can you really be here for me?” She shook her head. “That’s not even the point, though. Believe it or not, I have a fatal track record, and your life is not something I’m willing to screw with. You shouldn’t even be hanging around as often as you do! Roberto, you’re my only friend, and I don’t want to lose you, too.”