Spanish Surrender, page 18
She stole a glance at Simone’s body, so open and tempting beside her. It had been no hardship to fill its demands. She’d been able to meet those needs while doing something she enjoyed. Not a bad way to settle a balance. Except this morning, that’s exactly how she felt.
Balanced.
While they shared an amicable breakfast, she didn’t feel like she’d won some victory over Simone, nor did she carry any sense of indebtedness. So much of the tension that had plagued them from their first moments together had faded. She supposed a night of great sex went a long way to smoothing over rough edges, and the sex had been undeniably satisfying, but with their newfound peace, she didn’t quite know where that left her in the desire department. She and Simone were no longer adversaries, neither were they friends.
Loreto watched her openly now. Simone had fallen into her own world, or at least into her task. Her eyes were intently focused, first on her iPad, then on her phone as she seemed to move back and forth between the two, occasionally tapping on one screen or the other. It didn’t quite look like the leisure reading Loreto had pictured when they had joked about Simone taking an afternoon off. She frowned, pursed her lips, flipped back and forth between devices, then frowned some more. Though clearly frustrated, she didn’t sigh or flop around on the chair. She remained steadily and intently engaged, as if in some battle of wills, and while Loreto didn’t know what Simone had put herself up against, she wouldn’t have bet against her.
The thought disturbed her and came with the sudden urge to put some distance between them. Simone never even looked up as Loreto rose, left the cabana, and padded across the hot concrete to the pool. Easing off the side wall, she sank up to her waist. The water, while cool against her skin, did little to soothe the embers threatening to reignite within her. She kicked her feet off the bottom and reveled in the sensation of weightlessness, but as she leveled out to float effortlessly on her back, she had an unimpeded view of Simone once more. She didn’t even know this woman, not really. Why did she care if she grew frustrated or agitated with her work? She’d never spent any serious amount of time trying to alter someone else’s mood. And yet, when Simone scowled outright, Loreto felt torn between the foreign desire to go to her and the familiar desire to swim away.
Something drew her to Simone’s intensity, to the way she immersed herself in experiences, the way her stubborn brow creased and her blue eyes burned. At the same time, she missed seeing her relaxed, open, amused. There had been such pleasure in seeing the other side of that business façade last night, and again this morning. How could Loreto feel drawn to both sides? She couldn’t simultaneously want a woman to be relaxed and intense. Or perhaps she could want such a mix, but she couldn’t have them both at once.
Therein lay the problem. She and Simone had always existed on opposite ends of that spectrum. Loreto embodied relaxation, and Simone personified intensity, or at least they had until the last day or so. Yesterday, Simone had brought out something frighteningly intense in her. Today, she’d fostered something relaxed in Simone. The thought would have been nice if they had been able to coexist in the middle, but she feared they had merely passed by each other on the way to opposite poles.
Simone scowled. It actually took her a moment to realize Simone hadn’t intuited her musing and had instead grown displeased with something in front of her.
Loreto instinctively moved to intercept her displeasure and cut it off. Without allowing herself even a second to overthink, she flipped over and swam to the edge of the pool, hauled her body out of the water, and returned to the cabana. Grabbing a towel, she barely managed to swipe it across her legs before noticing the images on Simone’s dual screens. One appeared open to the early stages of a novel and the other an internet translator.
“Are you trying to read a book in Spanish?”
“Trying is the operative phrase,” Simone said without looking at her.
Loreto eased down onto the edge of the lounge chair without even asking. She ran her eyes across the text, the meaning of the words fluid and unencumbered in her mind. She couldn’t even imagine the contrast between her own, easy understanding and the frustration Simone clearly felt.
She gave into the need to state the obvious. “You don’t speak Spanish.”
“Why didn’t that occur to me?” Simone shot back, her voice tight but her skin soft as she eased over enough to welcome Loreto onto the lounge chair more fully.
“If only you had some easier way, like, I don’t know, if you could employ a personal translator with an affinity for reading.”
Simone nudged Loreto’s shoulder with her own. “If only I’d thought ahead to do such a thing.”
Loreto dropped her voice. “Why didn’t you ask me?”
Simone shrugged, her arm rubbing slightly against Loreto’s. “I don’t know.”
Loreto tried not to take the nonanswer personally. She should have gotten up and walked away. She should have jumped back into the pool. She should have sunk beneath the surface until she couldn’t hear or see Simone anymore.
Instead, she picked up the tablet, eased back into a more comfortable position with her entire left side flush against Simone, and began to read aloud. “My first lover filled our shared air with the fragrance of oranges and olives hanging heavy, but unripe.”
She had no idea how long Loreto had been reading. Minutes? Years? Simone hadn’t intended to let her keep going. She’d only wanted a sample, but as the rich prose rolled over her, she sank ever deeper into the words, into the story, into Loreto’s voice.
“You speak of fate as a linear path or some fixed point upon some lifeline, but destiny is an ever-shifting storm of sand. It swirls and blows. Destiny is as effervescent as light and as pervasive as the fragrance of olive oil on the levanter that carves Andalusian hillsides.” Loreto stopped reading and stared down at Simone, who’d allowed her head to loll so far to the side it nearly grazed her shoulder.
“Is that the end of the chapter?” Simone asked, wishing fervently for the answer to be no.
Loreto blinked a few times, as if waking from a dream and not quite understanding which had been real, the dreaming or the waking. “Almost, I just, I wondered if you knew about the levanter.”
“It’s a wind from the sea, right?”
Loreto nodded. “The Mediterranean, yes. Where did you learn the word?”
“I’ve never heard it before until this moment,” Simone admitted, “but I just knew, something to do with the context clues in the passage, or maybe the way he writes. He’s made such beautiful sense of everything, it seems impossible not to know what he means.”
“This is Juanes Cánovas?” Loreto asked, speaking in the same hushed tone one might adopt while touring a church or mosque.
She nodded, her cheek brushing lightly against Loreto’s arm.
“He’s the one you’ve come for.” It wasn’t a question, and Simone felt no pressure to respond, though she hoped Loreto wouldn’t wait for more explanation. She didn’t want to think about it right now. She didn’t want to go back to that world yet. She didn’t want to examine that thought, either. She wanted to stay here in this cabana, with Loreto’s dripping body firm and warm against her own and her voice rich and smooth in her ear.
“And that’s where la levant found us.” Loreto continued with the passage. “Exposed to our own elemental natures and nestled in a nook she’d carved centuries ago in anticipation of our coupling. Drenched in liquid heat and held aloft by earth, oil, like ichor, pressed between the planes of our bodies until she absorbed fully into my skin.”
Loreto set the tablet down, signaling the end of the daydream, and a surge of regret welled up in Simone. Why hadn’t she listened sooner? Why hadn’t she looked at the olive groves Loreto had pointed out on their first drive? She’d had her chance to soak that scent into her own senses, to feel it against her skin. If she’d rolled down the windows, would she have felt the levanter stirring her the way the story had?
“Have you felt that wind? The one that carries destiny across the sea?” she finally asked.
Loreto nodded. Simone didn’t see her so much as she felt the movement. The subtle shift shook a drop of water from where it rested on Loreto’s chest. Simone saw it tumble down the hollow between her breasts and come to rest again on her stomach. She had the urge to lift her body over Loreto’s and settle more fully against her, skin to skin, until she’d absorbed everything between them. God, who was she becoming? Had that damn book seriously melted her into a puddle of lust and sentimentality, or had some uniquely Spanish combination of heat and Loreto done that?
“It blows from the east,” Loreto murmured.
“Do you believe it brings change?”
“Yes,” she said softly, then after a silent moment, she said, “they say it’s what carried the Moors to Spain. There might be more legend than fact there, but I know for certain it churns the Strait of Gibraltar. I sailed through it once. I’d been meant for Italy, but the wind ripped through the channel, caught swells that made the North Atlantic look like a farm pond. It pushed me back to Spain. When we docked at Málaga, I just knew this was as far east as I could go. I’m sure it sounds silly to you, but the levanter carved the Rock of Gibraltar. I felt no shame in letting it wear me down as well.”
Without conscious thought, Simone turned more fully onto her side and rested her head on Loreto’s chest. “It doesn’t sound silly.”
“No?”
“I want to go there.”
“Where?”
“To the Rock of Gibraltar.”
Loreto’s muscles tightened underneath her, but if she hadn’t just shifted into her current position, she wouldn’t have noticed the change, because her voice betrayed nothing out of the ordinary. “Why?”
The bluntness of the question and the reaction of her body gave Simone enough pause to stir candidness in her. “I’m beginning to suspect I’ve missed some opportunities.”
She’d meant on the trip, but as Simone allowed the statement to hang suspended around them, she had another creeping suspicion those missed opportunities might have stretched to other areas and times in her life as well. She didn’t care for the thought, and in order to keep it from lingering, she asserted herself again with a bit more force. “I’d like to see the Rock of Gibraltar. I feel strongly about this.”
She tilted her chin up so she could see Loreto’s dark eyes again before adding, “It’s not an order. I just want to, or, I don’t know, I feel like I should.”
Loreto looked away.
“You think I’ve lost my mind, don’t you?” Simone sat up, breaking the contact between them. “I probably have. I honestly don’t know why this matters. It probably doesn’t. Maybe the heat’s gotten to me.”
“No,” Loreto said softly. She forced a smile that barely grazed her cheeks. “It’s not the heat, or maybe it is, but the heat, it’s Spain, too, as much as the wind, or the water, or the dirt, or the people. Gibraltar, it’s, well, it’s complicated.”
“Complicated?”
Loreto’s smile grew. “Yes, so it makes perfect sense that you’d want to go there.”
Simone didn’t fully get the joke, but she knew it had been directed at her, and she grinned anyway. “Fine. I’m complicated. I’ve been called worse. I am looking forward to going to Gibraltar, though.”
Loreto nodded and pushed up off the chair. She didn’t share Simone’s enthusiasm for their side trip. That much was clear. But she said, “It’s beautiful down there. I don’t think you’ll regret it.”
Simone looked up at her, standing there in all her glory, muscles taut and her bronzed skin glistening with drops of water from the pool. As her eyes traveled up strong thighs, over the thin cover of her tight swim shorts, across her firm abs and high breasts, Simone had a sudden and overwhelming urge to pull her back down onto the chair. The impulse was raw and rough, and she might have been powerless to resist if she hadn’t continued her path upward to include Loreto’s beautiful face and those deep, unreadable eyes.
There was a warning there, one she’d blown past last night. If she did so again, she wasn’t at all certain she’d have the strength to stop. She wet her lips with her tongue as the heat within her crackled to the surface again. The prospect of losing control felt distant and almost academic in the face of such formidable physical temptation. Her resolve perched precariously on the knife’s edge of restraint and abandon when Loreto made the decision for her.
“We should go,” she said, breaking the spell, though she made no actual move to leave.
“We should,” Simone agreed and found the strength to stand, but the move put them dangerously close again. She’d only have to tilt her head an inch to cover Loreto’s mouth with her own. In this moment, in this heat, in this little linen paradise, the kiss would be so easy.
Then it wouldn’t, a fact she should have been the one to draw attention to.
Instead, Loreto again stepped back. “We have work to do.”
She nodded. “That’s what we’re here for.”
Loreto smiled. “No, that’s what we’re going out for.”
Chapter Ten
“The weather’s actually pretty mild in the—” Loreto stopped talking as she realized Simone was no longer walking beside her. She turned back to see her frozen in the middle of a long, wide pedestrian boulevard. “What?”
“Shut. Up,” Simone said as her arms fell to her side with a little flop, her eyes wide and her gaze focused past Loreto at the full expanse of the Plaza de España.
“That isn’t exactly the reaction I’m used to,” Loreto said, though she didn’t find this one unpleasant, especially out of someone as reserved as Simone.
“Seriously, though.” Simone gestured ahead to the impressive building in their path with its semicircle arc, ornate towers, and half-moon courtyard. “Does every place have to be more impressive than the last?”
Loreto laughed and walked over to stand beside her. She’d been here many times, usually with a large group of camera-wielding tourists. Normally, this was the point where she had to take seventy-five photos on fifty different cameras. She’d spent so much time telling people to squeeze in or scoot over, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d just stood and taken it all in.
“I mean, really. It’s a bit much for every city in Spain to just have some gloriously beautiful, ancient treasure hidden in the middle of their streets and parks,” Simone continued. “You people are like magnificence-hoarders.”
Loreto felt the stretch of pride against her rib cage. This was the most effusive praise Simone had heaped on her, or not her so much as the things she had to share about Spain, though sometimes those things did feel like a part of her.
“What’s the story behind this one?” Simone asked with a droll sort of humor as she started walking again. “Home of some Moorish concubines who overthrew the Prince of Tides? Columbus’s personal shoe-storage venue? The first resting place of the Holy Grail?”
“Municipal buildings,” Loreto answered.
Simone threw her some side-eye.
“No joke. The rooms behind the arched promenade are mostly filled with regional government offices.”
“But what was it originally? What kingdom did the sultan or caliph or queen who sat in the throne room rule over?”
Loreto laughed and stopped to let a horse-drawn carriage pass in front of them before they continued toward a large, circular fountain in the stone courtyard. “No rulers, no thrones, no great history lesson here. The park we just came through, and this plaza, were both built for the nineteen twenty-nine World’s Fair.”
“It’s less than a hundred years old?”
“Yes, practically Johnny-Come-Lately on the whole historical spectrum of Spain.”
“But it looks downright ancient with the detailed tile work and pointy spires shooting up into the air.”
“The spires represent the four ancient kingdoms of Spain, and the tile alcoves each showcase scenes depicting the various provinces. The style was part of regionalism and Moorish revival of the time.”
“She says with all the architectural background of someone who claims no formal education.”
Loreto shook her head. “It’s all on the Wikipedia page. I can read.”
Simone sighed. “Indeed, you can.”
She had a flashback to them ensconced on the shared lounge under the shade of the cabana, Simone’s body hot and soft against her own as she read about heat and vigor and making love in a grove of olive trees. Simone had melted into her then every bit as much as she had the night before. The thought sent the images in her mind tumbling, back to her bed as she slipped inside.
And she tripped.
She hadn’t been watching where she was walking and a raised stone caught the tip of her toe, sending her stumbling a few steps toward the fountain.
“You okay?” Simone asked, a hint of amusement in her voice.
“Yeah.” Loreto nodded to the large basin of water only a couple feet away now. “Could’ve been worse.”
Simone nodded. “I think we’ve had enough swimming for today. You were saying? Or rather reciting the Wikipedia entry?”
“No, I’m done, just trying to tell you this isn’t an old building so much as a relatively newer building meant to look like an old one.”
Simone still looked suspicious as they skirted around the fountain and onto a footbridge. “I want to believe you. And I do, but there’s a moat. We’re literally crossing a moat.”
“We are,” Loreto said, recovering from her mental lapse and reveling in the lightness, both in Simone’s voice and spreading through her own chest. She’d been so worried when she woke up this morning that things would be different between them today, but she hadn’t even considered the possibility that they’d be different in such wonderful ways. Simone had become almost a different person, but Loreto couldn’t deny a shift in herself as well. Simone’s little comments of disbelief or challenge felt more humorous now, her studiousness more attractive than annoying, her regal air more grounded in confidence than entitlement. Maybe Simone hadn’t been the only one who needed to relax a little.
