The Saint's Devilish Deal (12 page)

Santiago sat up, pulling her back against the chaise, and pulled the umbrella hood over the chair to shade them from the hot Mexican sun. Esme started to reach for her dress but Santiago stopped her. “It will only get in the way in a few minutes,” he said.

“Says you. I’d like to get dressed before someone sees us naked on the terrace and gets the wrong idea.”

“First, no guests. Second, you sent the workers away so there is no one to get the wrong idea. Besides, seeing you in that sinful dress and me naked wouldn’t exactly leave a lot to the imagination.” Esme tapped her foot against the cushion. “Third, if I’m going to make it through your twenty minute diatribe about how what just happened between us was a one-time thing, it was two old lovers quenching their thirst, I’m going to need a reward at the end. I can’t think of a better reward than doing the old-lovers thing again.” She smiled. He knew her so well. Scary thought.

He curved her body against his chest and Esme couldn’t stop her fingers from playing in the light sprinkling of chest hair. “So, go ahead, tell me how what just happened meant nothing. I’m already working up an appetite for my reward.”

She smacked him lightly, laughed, and cuddled into him. “The problem with sleeping with an old. . . friend is they know you too well. Okay, I was going to give you a million reasons why this happened and why it shouldn’t, but now I think I’ll surprise you. I think we should do this again. As soon and as often as possible and before you run screaming into the Mexican afternoon, I don’t mean I want a relationship with you. We’re business partners so we can approach this as just another partnership. The next six months are going to be intense. We’ll have to blow off steam from time to time. I don’t know about you but I haven’t blown off that much steam in a long time. So, partners with benefits?” There, that sounded like a grown up solution to their mutual attraction issued, didn’t it?

He watched her intently, his brows drawing together in. . . what? Confusion? He ran a finger along her jaw. “You have the most intriguing way of putting things. What happens when our six month business partnership is dissolved?”

Esme’s heart clenched at the thought but she refused to examine the reaction. “We can reevaluate then. I’m guessing you don’t want to live in Vallarta. I do. I’m tired of running businesses for other people. I want to build Casa Constance into a brand not just a single hotel. So I’m staying, Cruz Resorts be damned.”

“Cruz Resorts be damned,” he repeated and kissed her.

“What is it you want, Saint?” She desperately wanted to ask where he planned to go when he left, but just as badly, she didn’t want to know the answer. Esme knew it was ridiculous, but a small piece of her heart wanted to daydream that Santiago wanted to stay with her.

His hands, tugging gently on her hair, stilled for a moment. His index finger drew a circle on her back. Her stomach tightened and her nipples hardened. God, was this what teenage boys felt like ninety percent of the time? Like they had to have sex or die? Thank God she’d been born a woman.

“For now, I’m can’t imagine being anywhere else in the world,” he said, clicked a button on the chair to recline it back, and pulled her body over his once more.

Chapter Eight

“You’re killing me.”

  Esmerelda snorted. She stopped outside yet another trendy gallery in Viejo Vallarta and Santiago sighed. In the last two hours she’d dragged him from the mercados of Rio Cuale, buying at least a truckload of colorful Mexican blankets and fluffy pillows, enough fresh linens to make up every bed in the villa three times, and two Huichol yarn paintings. Santiago usually left the decorating and designing part of his developments in the hands of professionals. Decorators, architects. People who knew what would look good in a sitting room or bedroom. As much as he didn’t want to be there, a small piece of him liked imagining them working together on each room. Setting it up to create the wow factor that was needed for their future guests.

And that was reason enough to get Esme out of these shops and them back onto his plans. She didn’t need to redecorate the villa when a few cans of paint would do a serviceable job over the next six months. But, seeing the happy look on her face, he couldn’t shut her down. There was more than enough money in the villa accounts now to pay for everything, he reasoned, and most of it could be re-sold when the time came for them to move on.

Them? No, him. Simple translation error. He would move on and so would Esme, but they wouldn’t move on together. No, this friends-with-benefits arrangement had a definite expiration date: six months from now. The band around his heart tightened, threatening to chip away some of the icy layers to the red-blooded heat below. Santiago swallowed hard and clamped down on his emotions. It was better this way, for both of them.

She instructed the gallery vendor to send three sets of hand-blown margarita globes, a score of shot glasses, and fifty wine goblets to Casa Constance by Monday. Her gaze caught on a large glass wall hanging behind the register. Veins of yellow and green ran through the underlying blue glass with tiny waves of cast iron making swells throughout the pattern. She tugged Santiago’s arm, sending a sharp thrill straight to his heart, effectively cracking the piece of him he wanted to be frozen forever.

“Oh, that’s perfect for the entryway, don’t you think?” She was asking him? He didn’t want to be her sounding board. Didn’t want to be part of this process at all. It looked like glass. Beautiful glass, but glass all the same. He looked around as if the few customers in the store would have an answer for him. No one paid them any attention. She looked at him. Expectantly.

“Over the mantle?” Dios, he was an idiot. Walking straight into the pit of partnership. Why couldn’t he just walk away?

She smiled. “Of course, can’t you just see the colors pop against the white walls?” Esme wrote another check—her seventh of the day—and they left the store. They couldn’t need much more from the local artisans. Could they?

“We don’t have white walls. They’re still grey.”

She waved a hand at him. “I caved. The crew you hired should be pushing brilliantly white paint across all that grey as we shop.”

“Wonderful. Let’s go.”

“Since you’re making me jump out of a plane in a little less than two hours to surf the sky I think you can handle two more shops,” she said and dragged him into the next gallery.

“We have masks for three bedrooms, glass for the entryway, two yarn paintings, and more wooden whatever-you-call-them—”

“Chachkies.” She pushed open the door to a talavera, a business selling tiles for everything from flooring to bathroom sinks.

“We don’t need tile, Esmerelda.”

“We do, Santiago,” she said, mimicking his tone.

“We agreed on sparse. High-end.” Esme was taking this too far. She was renovating like she planned to run the place for years.

  Of course she is, she thinks she’ll win because you’ve as much as told her so. Santiago squeezed his fingers over the bridge of his nose. He was setting her up and he couldn’t stop now. He had to win.

  She waved the gallery worker over, picked several bowls and another wall hanging. “Do you do sinks here?” At the worker’s nod, Esme asked to be taken to the workroom. As they followed the worker back, she hissed. “You keep throwing this we around like I’ve had any choice. You took all of Constance’s furniture, tried to ruin those beautiful floors, and painted over my red walls. Do you know how empty the villa will look, since you took everything away, without the bare minimum I’m buying right now? We have seven-thousand square feet to fill and I agreed to your all-white furniture idea when I was distracted by the thought of your lips against my neck. White furniture and white walls are too...”

“Hospital ward-ish?” He echoed their conversation from the day before and she shivered.

“Yes. We need color or all the fancy magazine layouts and hot surfers in the world won’t entice guests back through our doors.”

“You think all surfers are hot? Or just the one currently in your presence?” he asked, trying to distract her from buying out the entire district. Trying to distract himself for the part he was playing in Esme’s downfall.

Esme offered him an exaggerated eye roll. “So that inflated ego of yours doesn’t grow even larger, we’ll say all surfers.”

“Just how many of us have you known?”

She grinned. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Actually, now that he’d started this conversation he did want to know, but he had no business actually demanding those answers. He hadn’t exactly been celibate over the past few years. Better to get this conversation back on solid ground. Stick to business, Saint, and get her out of these shops.

“We have five moving trucks already set to arrive Monday morning.”

“And four of them are dedicated to the new sofas, chairs, and lounges. Besides, six is an even number.” He clenched his jaw at her flippant tone, but she kept talking. “Just because you don’t see how all of this will fit together—yet—doesn’t mean it won’t. Oohh, look at that sink.”

  He had to admit it was beautiful. The sink looked like it should hang in a museum, though, not be used by careless guests. Maldito, he could see the sinks—there were five in all—in the villa, being used for years by guests who would become friends.

No. He stopped that train of thought. He wasn’t staying in Vallarta, he wasn’t running Casa Constance for the rest of his life. If he got rid of the house on the hill, if there was nothing left for Eduardo to covet, maybe his mother would finally be free. For certain Esme would be free.

And maybe, because of their new friends-with-benefits policy, she would come with him for a while before moving on with her life.

*

The second her feet touched solid ground, Esme collapsed to her knees and sucked in breath after breath of humid air. Fingers digging into the earth, she swore she would never again defy nature just because Santiago Cruz dared her to.

“Fun, wasn’t it?” Santiago asked, kneeling behind her because their jumpsuits were still buckled together. She could imagine the look of excitement on his face. Hadn’t she seen something similar twice this morning? Excitement. Confidence. An internal knowledge that nothing you did could go wrong.

It wasn’t a feeling Esme was familiar with, especially after plummeting more than one thousand feet to the ground. Now, as the afternoon sun beat down on her back and the stiff breeze caught in the corners of the parachute, she wished she had never agreed to this deal.

“That,” she panted, pointing her hand toward the sky, “is not my idea of a good time.” She sucked in a long breath and tried to stand. Her wobbly legs protested so she sank back down.

Santiago unclipped their harnesses as one of the jump school’s workers began gathering the parachute fluttering in the wind. “Pure adrenaline, Esmerelda, it’s what you’ve been missing from your life.”

If pure adrenaline, as he put it, kept that awful frown off his face, she might risk her life again. He’d been annoyed from the moment they left the taco stand on the beach until they ordered the last tile sink from the talavera. Frowning, sending out Keep Away signals that confused the sales people. Esme couldn’t figure him out. He obviously wanted the villa to succeed, he wanted to win, so why wasn’t he more interested in the small details that would ensure the villa remained out of Eduardo’s hands?

Her legs finally jelled and she knew she could stand without toppling over. “I don’t consider jumping out of a perfectly good airplane at fifteen-hundred feet, holding my breath for five minutes, and clamping my mouth shut so the two million insects we passed as we plummeted to the ground wouldn’t get into my throat a good time.”

“We weren’t flying more than two minutes.”

“We weren’t flying at all. Plummeting, Santiago, we were plummeting to the earth,” she said, pointing at his chest. Although, now that the terror was gone, she felt something more. . . energetic. Esme glanced at the sky where the plane circled as it readied for landing. If he asked would she go again?

Sighing, Esme admitted that she probably would. Not just because he asked her to but because for a couple of seconds as they floated down she felt the pure exultation Santiago was still talking about. And now she was poking his very fine chest trying to convince herself she didn’t like something she liked just because Santiago kept her off balance. She didn’t like being off balance and that alone should keep her annoyance level up. Only it didn’t.

Darn it, why couldn’t she just stay annoyed with him? They could have been shopping this entire time, buying things the villa needed. Instead she’d risked her life—okay, they had risked their lives together—because he kept insisting she needed to experience the attractions they’d soon be selling. As far as Esme was concerned, she’d gotten in touch with enough adrenaline just sleeping with Santiago.

Not that they’d done much sleeping. And that thought pushed her adrenaline level up another notch. Her breath caught as she gazed at his beyond-excited expression. Who needed to jump out of a plane? She was becoming an adrenaline junkie just standing next to her Saint.

Only he wasn’t her Saint, she needed to remember that.

“You aren’t mad. You loved every second of that jump. Well, after the high-pitched screaming ended you loved it.”

Did she? Now that she could breathe again the weird, heart-pounding feeling seemed to intensify. No, she wasn’t afraid, but what? The adrenaline wouldn’t let her mind rest for more than a second before it was off and running in another direction. All Esme knew was that at this moment she wasn’t afraid and she wasn’t angry. She was. . . happy?

He waved a hand at her, shucked the jumpsuit, and began unbuttoning hers. “Wait until you see what I have planned for this afternoon.”

“As long as a bubble bath is included, I’m in.” Esme squinted up at the sun and then glanced at her wrist, which was watch-less for the first time in she didn’t know how long. As part of Santiago’s deal—which he’d informed her at noon would still be enforced, lovemaking or no—she hadn’t been allowed to wear a wristwatch. And he’d confiscated the timepiece necklace she tried to stash under her tee before they left the villa. Didn’t matter. Two hour deal or not, one death-defying feat per day was her limit and she told him so.