Chapter Thirteen—Check Yes or No
Rodriguez had reverted back to his thirteen-year-old self. That was the only explanation for this middle-school infatuation.
One little kiss. One innocent little kiss had sent him careening back to his pubescent level of romantic prowess, blushing like an idiot and gazing wordlessly at the object of his infatuation. He’d spent the entire damn day mooning over her.
She was already at the office when he arrived on Friday morning, keeping her hands busy with some crucial Karmic task. She looked up when he walked in the door and blushed.
Madre de Dios
, he loved that blush.
Rodriguez smiled. He meant it to be a cocky turn of his lips, designed to put some distance between them, but the message got garbled on the way from his brain to his face and he wound up with a sappy grin instead.
All day, the messages from his brain were short-circuiting before they got to his nerve endings. Why else would he spend so much of his time just gazing at her? And why, when she caught him looking, didn’t he pretend he’d been doing something else? Instead, he watched her color up and lower her eyes, a small smile tugging at her lips.
They’d been smooth, those lips, for the millisecond he’d felt them before she took them back. Soft, too.
He hadn’t gotten enough of a taste. Not by a long shot. She still confused the hell out of him, with her bizarre conversational leaps and unwavering good cheer, but one fact about Brittany Hylton-VanDeere was constant in his muddled thoughts—he wanted more of her.
Around mid-morning, he got sick of staring like a love-struck teen and asked her if she needed any help. Her face lit like the sun, as if he’d offered her a diamond tiara rather than asked for something to do with his hands so he’d stop imagining them running across her skin. She promptly put him to work, stuffing a batch of invoices into envelopes. After that, she set him to work filing—hadn’t she just filed yesterday? Where did all these papers come from?—while she spent nearly an hour on the phone with someone named Gianni, talking about bouquets, centerpieces, and boutonnières.
When she finally hung up the phone, it was with an air of triumph that was just as endearing as everything else she’d been doing today. God, he was turning into a sap.
“We have flowers!” she crowed. Brittany bounded out of her chair and danced around the desk, twirling and hugging her arms tight around herself. “
Flowers
,” she repeated pointedly, when he didn’t immediately respond with the proper level of awe.
She bounced right into his personal space. For a moment, he thought she was going to hug him, but she just stood there, bobbing on the balls of her feet and grinning at him.
“I did it.
Me
. The cake and the bridesmaids’ dresses were just troubleshooting. This was
planning
. I’m a real wedding planner now.”
Rodriguez couldn’t help but smile in the face of her enthusiasm. “Congratulations.”
“You didn’t doubt me, did you?” Her smile took a playful turn, a mock-ominous expression entering her eyes. “Question my ability to find the best darn flowers in town, in the face of wedding demons and natural disasters?”
“Never,” he swore, holding up his hands like an obedient hostage.
“I should hope not,” she said primly. “Never doubt the wedding planner.”
She was close enough to kiss—a
real
kiss this time—but Rodriguez hesitated. Somehow he knew a real kiss would change things. Her easy, bouncing flirtation would evaporate. It would be serious then, rather than a game they both were playing—and simultaneously pretending not to play.
When he stood close to her like this, close enough to feel the joy radiating off her in waves, he didn’t want the game to ever end. He felt buoyant, lighter than he had in years—if he had ever felt this light—and he didn’t want the weight of reality to sink them.
But, at the same time, he
wanted
to kiss her. He wanted the heavy reality to press into his skin, pushing them down toward recklessness and need. He wanted the earthy sensuality that was thicker and deeper than their current surface flirtation. He wanted more of her.
He leaned in.
“The list!” Brittany squeaked and bounded back to her desk, digging out a piece of paper and holding it up for his appreciation. In large letters on top were scrawled the words,
Murphy’s Wedding Checklist
.
Rodriguez came around from behind the filing cabinets and leaned against her desk as she put a neat little checkmark next to
Flowers
.
“Who’s Murphy?”
She met his eyes and a tinge of a rueful expression crossed her face. “You know Murphy’s Law? Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong? It seemed kind of apt for a wedding plagued by mischief demons.”
“Why, Brittany, I’m shocked. That’s a very pessimistic sentiment for someone of your perpetual optimism.”
“It isn’t pessimistic. It’s practical.” She wrinkled her nose. “And apropos. I’ve talked to Lucy and the things that went wrong before I signed on to help are mind-boggling. Did you know they had to send the wedding invitations back
three times
? They kept getting the names of the bride and groom wrong.”
“Sounds awkward. It’s always wise to know who you’re marrying.”
Brittany’s head tipped to the side pensively. “What’s your first name, Rodriguez? Or is that your first name?”
“It isn’t,” he admitted. “And it’s Luis.”
“Luis,” she repeated, smiling softly. “Why don’t people call you that? It’s a lovely name.”
“You thought I went by my last name because I was named something like Philbert?”
Brittany giggled. “Something like that.”
“No, my parents weren’t so cruel.”
“So why do you go by Rodriguez? I bet there’s a story behind that.”
He shrugged. “Not much of one. My family all still call me Luis, but I started going by my last name in high school. One of my best friends was named Miguel Rodriguez. We weren’t related—his family was from the Dominican Republic—but we got into a lot of trouble together. Everyone assumed we were brothers and called us
those Rodriguez boys
. We both started answering to just Rodriguez and it stuck.”
“That’s a wonderful story,” she said, and he got the sense she actually meant it. Brittany could find fascination anywhere. “I never got in trouble in high school. My parents would have died of shock if I did anything reckless.”
“Yeah, you don’t really strike me as a wild child.”
“And you don’t strike me as a priest. I still can’t believe you were in the seminary.”
“Believe it,
cariña
. Some things you just have to take on faith.”
Before Brittany could press him for more details, the desk phone rang. She beamed as she snatched up the receiver, as if every phone call were an exciting new adventure. “Good afternoon, Karmic Consultants. How can I help you?”
At the caller’s response, her smile flickered out and a frown puckered her brow. “Lucy? Slow down, I can’t understand you. What’s that about a tonsillectomy? The wedding singer? No, I’m sure we can find a replacement band for the reception. No problem. Two weeks is plenty of advance notice for booking these things. Don’t worry a bit. I’m on it.”
Brittany hung up the phone and scribbled
Band/DJ?
onto Murphy’s Wedding Checklist.
“The wedding singer is having his tonsils removed tomorrow,” she said with a determined smile. “That wedding demon sure likes to challenge me. We have fifteen days to find and book a replacement band.” Her shoulders slumped a bit, some of her fierce good cheer fading. “I don’t suppose you know any wedding singers?”
“’Fraid not. My cousin Chewy is in a salsa band, but I doubt that’s the kind of thing Lucy’s looking for.”
Brittany instantly perked up, her brown eyes sparkling. “A salsa band? Really?”
“I don’t think they know ‘Love Shack’.”
“We’ll get a DJ for the standards in between sets. Lucy really wants a live band. She said she didn’t care if it was polka, as long as they were playing actual instruments. Is your cousin free two weeks from tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. He has a steady gig on Friday nights, but I don’t know if they play anywhere on Saturdays.”
Brittany’s enthusiasm visibly amped up a few notches. “You mean we could go see him tonight? Check out the band, talk to him about doing the wedding?”
“I guess we could,” he said, still trying to catch up to the conversation. She was always rushing forward at a hundred miles per hour. He still felt like he was thinking about tonsillectomies and she was planning a night of salsa dancing.
Doubt flashed across her face. “I didn’t mean you have to take me. You probably have plans. Friday night and all. The last thing you want to do is spend your weekend babysitting me.”
He couldn’t contradict her quickly enough. “No. I’d love to take you. If you’re sure you want to go. It isn’t some white bread version of a salsa club. Most people there won’t be speaking English.”
The doubt vanished and her enthusiasm returned in a visible rush. “Even better! An authentic salsa band at an authentic salsa club!”
He smiled. What must the view be like from Brittany’s world, where everything was a brilliant new experience? “I’ll pick you up around eight?”
She quickly shook her head, her smile never wavering. “I’ll meet you here instead. It’ll be simpler.”
He didn’t know why that was simpler, but he agreed to meet at Karmic and was rewarded with another beaming smile.
It wasn’t until he had returned to his habitual place on the couch that he realized he had a date. With Brittany. To take her to a club where no one would speak her language, literally, and at least two of his cousins were guaranteed to be on hand and report back to his mother.
He wondered what it meant that even knowing it was going to cause family drama, he was still looking forward to taking Brittany out—if only to watch her face as she basked in each new experience.
Chapter Fourteen—The World’s Largest Vibrator
When Rodriguez roared into the Karmic Consultants parking lot that night on a real, bonafide hunk of Harley metal, Brittany felt like her insides were liquefying from the sudden rush of heat.
By all that was holy, the man drove a motorcycle.
Her knees turned to useless mush and she braced one hand against the building where she was leaning and the other against her heart.
He turned off the bike and kicked one leg over it. As he straightened, Brittany decided that worn denim and warm leather was the sexiest combination on the face of the planet, bar none. Why did men waste money on tuxedoes when they should all be running around in tight, faded blue jeans and leather jackets?
He yanked off the shiny black helmet and tucked it under his arm. As he prowled toward her, Brittany pressed her shoulder blades against the wall behind her to hold herself up. His gaze raked over her from the kitten heels to the sleeveless little black dress that managed to both cover her scar and be dead sexy, or so the clerk in the store had informed her.
Rodriguez’s eyes locked on her legs and he frowned. “Damn. I wasn’t thinking. Of course you’re wearing a skirt. We’ll have to take your car then.” He glared at the Audi as if it were still demonically possessed and had talked her into wearing a skirt just to piss him off.
“No!” Brittany protested, a little louder than she had strictly planned, but a girl’s vocal chords could not be expected to be demure when the prospect of riding a big black hunk of Harley hotness was being taken away from her. “I want to ride
that
.”
Rodriguez instantly grinned. He obviously loved the Harley monster as much as it deserved to be loved. He waved toward the bike with a mock bow. “Whatever the lady wants.”
Brittany would never have the proper degree of badass cool to be a biker chick, so she didn’t even try. She squealed and clapped her hands together, rushing over to the bike. Rodriguez laughed low and followed on her heels.
He pulled a second helmet out of the storage compartment as she petted the leather seat, cooing to the bike in a friendly, get-to-know-you-before-I-mount-you-and-ride-you-til-I-scream kind of way.
Rodriguez plopped the helmet onto her head and adjusted the straps. “You ever ridden one of these before?”
“Never.” Her parents would have had side-by-side heart attacks and then locked her in her room for the rest of her natural life if she’d ever even looked at a motorcycle. They were dangerous. They were forbidden. And Brittany had never wanted anything in her life as badly as she wanted to straddle the gleaming poetry of leather and chrome.
Rodriguez climbed onto the bike and held out a hand for her. “Hold on to me, lean with me when I lean, and just yell at me if I go too fast.”
Brittany took his hand and swung her leg over the bike. “What do I yell if I want you to go faster?”
He just laughed and shook his head. He turned to face forward and settled his helmet back into place as Brittany tucked her skirt as securely as she could around her legs to keep from flashing random passersby. She scooted up until she was pressed against his back, wrapped her arms snugly around his waist and rested her helmeted head on his shoulder. He smelled of leather and engine oil, the combination working on her senses like an aphrodisiac.
She felt the muscles in his back twist and knew he was looking back to check on her. “You ready for this?” his voice rumbled through the headset built into the helmet.
Brittany gave his middle an extra squeeze and pressed her thighs against his hips. “I was born ready.”
His laugh was drowned out by the sudden roar of the engine cranking to life. Brittany’s heart began to drum against her ribcage. The vibration of the bike hummed through her body, bone-deep and electrifying.
“Hold on,” he reminded her, though he had to feel how tightly she was pressed against him. No force on earth was going to separate her from the leather-coated, muscled expanse of his back.
With no further warning, the bike leapt forward like a filly from the starting gates. Brittany’s initial yelp of surprise turned into a shout of laughter as they sped out of the parking lot and into the evening traffic.
Wind rushed around her, the bike’s vibration rippled through her, and the world whipped past her eyes so fast it seemed like nothing more than a blur of lights against the darkness of the night. In all her life, she’d never felt so free as she did in this moment, clinging to Rodriguez and the beast, riding the wind.
He expertly navigated them through the thick traffic of midtown and then through a maze of narrow streets where she stopped being able to identify any landmarks. Or read any of the neon signs on the business around them when they stopped at a red light. The ads were all in a foreign language—Spanish, she could only assume.
We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.
Rodriguez twisted to check on her again and she flashed him her widest smile. Motorcycles, foreign lands, and salsa dancing—tonight’s adventure just kept getting bigger and bigger.
The light turned green, he tapped once on her arms wrapped around his abdomen, as if to remind her to hang on, and then the motorcycle roared forward, jolting another laugh out of her.
She felt incredible, like the motorcycle was a tuning fork, vibrating her to the most delicious frequency so she was primed to draw every drop of passion and life out of the night.
She almost whimpered in complaint when Rodriguez pulled them into a parking space and cut the engine. He climbed off, pulled off his helmet, and ran a hand through his hair—looking just as Bad Boy GQ as ever. Brittany could only imagine what her hair would look like as she fumbled with the straps to the helmet.
“Here.” Rodriguez reached over and deftly unclipped the helmet, tugging it off gently to avoid catching her hair.
She reached up to assess the damage to her neat little bun. It was crushed and listing drastically to one side. So much for her chic hairstyle. “I look like a lopsided old maid, don’t I?”
Rodriguez shrugged as he stowed the helmets. “So take it down. Looks better down, anyway.”
He said it so casually, but the idea that he actually thought about her hair, had preferences about her
hair
, sent delicious ripples of joy from her heart straight to her fingertips. Brittany quickly pulled the pins from her savaged bun and finger-combed her curls into some semblance of a loose style.
Rodriguez offered his hand to help her off the bike and Brittany was struck again by what a gentleman he was.
She’d always been around gentlemen—the men in her social circle opened doors and held chairs religiously—but Brittany had always felt their courtesy was forced or by rote. When Rodriguez offered her his hand, she felt cherished and cared for.
She climbed off the bike. Her legs were still wobbly from the ride and she was grateful for Rodriguez’s hand firmly wrapped around hers as they made their way across a dark parking lot to a building that looked more like a warehouse than a club, with bass pouring heavily through the walls.
There was a line wrapped around one side of the building, but Rodriguez guided her past it, right up to the velvet ropes at the door. He traded laughing comments in Spanish with a bouncer the size of Mount Everest then tucked Brittany under his arm and they walked through a black door with
Fuego
stenciled in red letters at chest height.
The outside of the club was dark and austere, but as soon as they stepped through that door, everything changed. The contrast was a shock to the senses. The interior was an explosion of color. Reds, oranges, the occasional purple or blue—it was like walking inside a living fire.
The main room was roughly circular in shape. A round stage rose in the center of the room, surrounded by the dance floor like an iris. The outermost circle was an elevated seating area, looking down on the dance floor and stage. Two long, curved bars faced one another across the expanse of the circular room.
Rodriguez nodded toward the trombone player on the stage. “That’s Chewy.”
He didn’t look a thing like Rodriguez. Chewy was a wiry whipcord of a man, with long black hair curling around his shoulders, wearing a flame-red shirt and dripping with sweat as he poured his life into the song.
“Come on. We can talk to him between sets.” He started to lead her toward the seating area, where they would have a good view of the stage, but Brittany tugged back on the hand holding hers, stopping him.
“I want to dance.” She had never danced salsa before in her life and she would probably be terrible at it and make a complete fool of herself, but she hadn’t come here to sit on the sidelines.
Rodriguez met her eyes and laughed, shaking his head. “Of course you do. I should have known.”
He changed direction and led her to the floor. The music was louder here, the sound a physical presence with them on the floor.
Rodriguez led her to a small, open space on the crowded floor and turned her to face him. He put her free hand on his shoulder and pressed his own against the small of her back. He bent his head close to her ear so she could hear him above the music. “Like this. Step back,” he guided her with his body and she took a faltering step back, “and forward.”
Brittany caught the rhythm quickly, but the steps eluded her. She was far from a natural, but she was having too much fun to care. Rodriguez was a beautiful dancer, elegant and sexy, smooth and strong. He guided her easily, catching her when she was in danger of spinning into another couple and drawing her back in close to him. He laughed with her when she accidentally stomped on his foot.
She found herself listening eagerly for his quietly murmured words of praise when she managed not to mess up. Just one low, “Good,
cariña
,” was enough to have her heart rolling like a conga drum.
The song seemed to last forever, but was still over far too quickly. When another song started up, with a faster, wilder beat, Rodriguez tipped his head toward the seating area questioningly.
“Just one more?” she asked, knowing one more would never be enough.
Rodriguez didn’t ask her if she was sure. He didn’t ask how she was feeling or look like he didn’t think her heart could take it. He just pulled her into his arms and dove with her back into the tide of music. Brittany laughed as she tried to keep up.
Did life get any better?
Four hours later, Brittany sat curled in Rodriguez’s lap on a chair on the VIP veranda. When the band had taken a break, this area had been jammed. When Brittany had refused to take the last chair, none of the gallant Latinos on the rooftop veranda would sit either. Rodriguez had solved the Mexican standoff (with actual Mexicans!) in the best possible way. He sat down and pulled her onto his lap.
The band had since departed to start their last set and the veranda had cleared out considerably, as the dancers who had come out here for some air went back to the floor to dance their feet off. Brittany didn’t move. She was exactly where she wanted to be. Instead, she closed her eyes and listened to the steady thumping of Rodriguez’s heart and the flow of the Spanish conversation floating around her like music in the air.
She had a band for the wedding—an
excellent
band, who could play both “Love Shack” and “Shout”. She’d had the best night of her life, dancing until her feet ached. And Rodriguez’s warm arms kept the chill of the night—or rather, early morning—breeze at bay.
No doubt about it. Life didn’t get better. This was it. Perfection.
“You want to go back downstairs?” Rodriguez asked, his voice pitched intimately low. “Dance some more?”
Brittany groaned. “As much as I would love to, I think my feet would fall off if I tried to dance one more step. Not to mention your poor feet if I stepped on them any more.”
She more felt than heard his laugh. “You hardly stepped on them at all during that last set.”
“You’re lying, but since it’s for my benefit, I’ll allow it.” She dropped her head back against his shoulder and sighed with utter contentment. “This was fun. There should be a better word than that. A word that means fun only
more
than fun. Fun is small and this was huge. This was so fun it should be called…funderful.”
He snorted. “Funderful. Absolutely. This was extremely funderful.”
“Is there a word that means more than fun in Spanish?”
“
Divertisimo
. Which I don’t think is actually a word. Not any more than funderful is.”
Brittany tried out his word, knowing she was butchering it horribly. He laughed at her attempt and she wrinkled her nose. “What did I just say?”
“Nothing. I believe I can state with authority that whatever you just said wasn’t a word.”
Brittany sighed, too happy to consider being offended. She let the lovely silence wrap around them again. It was punctuated by the soft conversation of a nearby couple.
“I should have learned Spanish,” she murmured, more to herself than Rodriguez. “It’s such a lovely language.” She took his hand and twisted her fingers through his. “I should learn it now. Teach me Spanish, Rodriguez.”
“What do you want to know how to say?”
“What do I want to say?” Brittany bit her lip, her mind racing with possibilities. “I want to say, ‘I love to dance’.”
“
Me encanta bailar.
”
Brittany tried that out, and after six or seven tries, managed what Rodriguez called a serviceable approximation. She untangled their fingers and ran hers lightly across the lines on his palm. “How do I say ‘I love the music’?”
“
Me encanta la música.
”
“
La música…
that’s just lovely. In Dutch it’s
muziek
. Moo-zeek. Which I always thought sounded more like something you should shriek as you’re running away from rabid cows rather than something you would actually want to listen to.”
He snorted out a laugh and Brittany smiled against his shoulder, delighted she had made him laugh.
She
had done that.
“You speak Dutch?”
“Terribly. I’m just awful at languages, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. I love speaking new languages. Even though the native speakers beg me not to. Still, I persevere. Kind of like dancing. Your poor toes know what I’m talking about.”