Spanish Surrender, page 8
“For five years?”
Loreto laughed. “You’d be surprised how fast five years goes by when you’re enjoying yourself.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had five years of full-on fun.”
Loreto didn’t find that surprising, but she didn’t feel the need to say so this time. “It’s not too late.”
Now it was Simone’s turn to shift in her chair and change directions. “Somewhere along the line you became a tour guide though?”
“I did. Ren and Lina found me a few years ago in Bilbao.” Some more of the tension slipped from her shoulders at the memory. “They’d gotten lost one Friday evening down in El Arenal and asked me for directions to the Guggenheim. I told them I could show them the way but they’d be better off to save the museum for the next morning and take in the pintxo culture that night.”
“What happened?”
Loreto laughed. “Lina shook her head no at the same time Ren agreed.”
“Relationships.”
“No kidding, right? I sort of stood there awkwardly until Ren said, ‘Wait, your accent, are you an American?”
“I told them it was complicated, and apparently that was the magic word. They both burst out laughing. The next thing I knew, they were buying my drinks and food and telling me about their new tour company, and the next morning I was hired for a job I hadn’t applied for.”
Simone’s eyes widened. “So they have a habit of picking up strays? Glad to know it wasn’t just me.”
“No, totally them. They saw something in me that first night, and they pounced. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I kept testing their patience and boundaries, looking for the weak spot.”
“Did you find it?”
Loreto snagged the last piece of Iberian ham and dropped a dollop of red pesto right in the middle. “Probably, but they keep trying to take care of me, so maybe I should just be grateful. I guess I just have a hard time accepting or believing or . . . I don’t know. But being a tour guide makes more sense for me than anything else I’ve ever done. At least it fits my nomadic tendencies.”
“Are you just a wanderer at heart?”
Loreto frowned. “No. I’m not that sentimental. Moving around was always a learned, or maybe a necessary, behavior for me, but it’s ingrained there now. Might as well get paid.”
Simone’s eyes narrowed as if she’d just seen something small and shiny in Loreto’s gaze. “Necessary how?”
“Just, you know, life happens.” She stumbled over the non-answer, her skin prickling under Simone’s scrutiny, and finally looked down at the food on the table between them. “Hey, do you want the last bite of the pulpo, or should I?”
Simone blinked a few times, probably trying to process the abrupt change of topic. “No, I mean, you can have it, but—”
“Thanks,” Loreto said quickly, then added, “Why don’t you go ahead and have the cheese and jam. Which one do you like better?”
“Um.” She scanned the few remaining choices before pointing to a lighter piece of cheese.
“That’s a manchego, a sharper sheep cheese, and the topping is made from the type of oranges we saw growing all over Málaga. They’re too bitter for eating, but they make for a good marmalade. Why am I not surprised you went for the mix with the most bite?”
Simone scoffed. “I didn’t know my food choices could be used as a personality inventory.”
“Then consider that another cultural lesson. In Spain, food tells you much more about a person than their job or what kind of car they drive. Will there be eating at this business meeting of yours?”
“Not impossible,” Simone admitted. “Wining and dining clients is one of my fortes.”
“Then maybe we should break our no-business-over-food rule just long enough to teach you to order a few basics in Spanish.”
With that they were back on more even footing. Loreto made another mental note about the ability to distract Simone with the combination of food and work. She tucked the information away for later, but with it she stored the reminder not to let herself get into another situation where she might need to use it. Simone was not her friend. She was an employer. A sexy, hot, maddeningly stubborn, cutthroat, ladder-climbing executive who openly admitted to using personal contacts to manipulate people into business deals. In other words, she was exactly the type of person who could wreck everything Loreto worked so hard to tell herself she didn’t need.
She was still trying to remind herself of those facts as they wound their way through the corridors of the hotel and up the grand wooden staircase that danced with artificial starlight. Somehow it got harder to remember the words to her newly adopted mantra with Simone’s hips swaying as she climbed each step just ahead of her, that blue dress swishing across her thighs right at Loreto’s eye level as she went.
Her head told her she was being silly to even look at something she definitely shouldn’t touch. Nothing good could come of that sort of temptation, but all of the blood seemed to be leaving her brain for points farther south.
Mercifully she reached the door to her room before her libido subdued all her good sense. “Good night.”
Simone kept right on walking, but when she reached her own door, she stopped and called playfully, “Oh, Loreto.”
“Yes?”
“I’m not quite finished for tonight.”
She sagged against the door. “No?”
Simone laughed. “Honestly, I’m a little surprised you’re not more eager. I got the sense earlier you were biting your tongue and biding your time for this last stop on our little tour.”
Loreto’s heart hammered in her chest.
“Don’t make me do this in the hall like some sort of illicit transaction.”
Her face flamed at the choice of words. She should run. She should tell her where to take her damn transactions. She should tell her to put her money and her sexy ass back on a plane tomorrow morning because she didn’t belong here. Then again, as Loreto looked at the walls, the floors, the windows, anywhere but that dress, she remembered she didn’t belong here either.
And then her feet moved of their own accord one step at a time, each one as fleeting and temporary as what she felt for the woman whose room she stepped into. She watched, entranced, as Simone walked purposefully over to the bed, reached up, and unclipped her long, blond hair, shaking the shimmery strands loose across her bare shoulders, then quickly swiped something into her hand. She turned to smile at Loreto once more.
Closing the distance between them, she pressed close enough for Loreto to catch the scent of what she could only assume was some very expensive perfume before she took Loreto’s hand in her own.
“Thank you for today,” she said softly. Then she abruptly withdrew.
Loreto gritted her teeth at the spinning sense of disorientation, but as she slowly shook the lust-tinged haze from her vision, she realized she was holding something she hadn’t been a moment earlier. She glanced down at her palm to see a piece of paper. That’s all she could process at first, until the numbers came into focus.
The realization hit her like a wrecking ball of emotions. Disappointment, relief, embarrassment, greed, and hunger, along with the realization that she hadn’t been propositioned. She’d been paid.
“Good night,” she managed, her voice only slightly lower than usual as she backed out the door.
Closing it behind her, she ran her hand along the rough stucco wall, both to keep herself upright, and to feel something physical grate across her skin. Only when she got to her own room and crashed with a heavy thud onto her too-big bed did she allow herself to exhale.
She’d come too close, misunderstood too much, left herself too open. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t had warnings. She’d spent much of the evening reminding herself not to go there with this woman. She had every logical reason to keep her distance, both physically and emotionally, and yet the minute Simone beckoned, Loreto had answered like a well-trained puppy.
Staring up at the exposed beams, she was forced to admit the problem wasn’t that she failed to see how dangerous a woman like Simone could be, it was that Loreto liked to live dangerously.
Chapter Four
“A reasonable breakfast at a reasonable time makes all the difference to a day,” Simone said as they exited the hotel and headed down another decoratively tiled path. “Don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Loreto grumbled. “I didn’t get either.”
Simone laughed. “The sun’s been up for almost an hour.”
“The sun and I don’t generally keep the same schedule.” Loreto flipped her shades into place.
“And it’s not ungodly hot,” Simone observed aloud.
Loreto grunted her agreement. She’d been surlier than the day before, though she’d clearly been awake when Simone had knocked on her door. She’d already dressed in the same style of cargo khaki shorts she’d worn every day since they met, but she’d traded her work polo for the gray one Simone had purchased on Calle Larios the day before. It fit more snugly than the others, showcasing the little swell of muscle in her biceps and the subtly feminine taper of her waist. Simone approved of the improvement more than an employer probably should, but at least she refrained from saying so as they shared a morning meal of coffee, yogurt, and healthy, whole-grain cereals that Loreto groused only meant the hotel catered too much to wealthy Europeans on summer holiday.
Simone argued upscale hotels didn’t usually stay open because of locals wanting a staycation, but she suffered a twinge of disappointment when Loreto gave her a grudging nod of agreement.
So Loreto wasn’t a morning person. She could understand that, at least hypothetically. It even made her wonder if her assessment about Loreto’s hangover the previous morning had been unfounded. Then again, maybe she was hungover now, too. She could have gone back to the terrace and had more of that Spanish red wine she’d insisted meant so much to the culture. She would have been within her rights to do so, but for some reason the thought of her sitting at their table, drinking alone under the stars, made Simone’s stomach tighten.
She’d rather make peace with the fact that her guide wasn’t a morning person. She’d even consider allowing them to start their day a little later tomorrow, but they were up now, and with the meal over, they were on company time. She preferred company time. “This Alhambra we’re seeing. Should I have a crash course before we arrive?”
Loreto nodded reluctantly. “Probably, but there’s no arriving. Technically we’re already here.”
“Right, because you mentioned the hotel used to be this place’s monastery when it was built.”
“Not when it was built,” Loreto corrected. “It was added after the fortress was conquered.”
“When the Catholics took it back?”
“There was no taking it back. The Catholics hadn’t owned it before then, despite what the church would like you to believe.” Loreto straightened her shoulders and adopted a more professional tone. “At that point there was no Spain as we know it, only a group of regional kingdoms. Some of them were Visigoth, some Roman, some barely more than tribal alliances. They considered themselves Aragon, or Castilian, or Andalusian.”
“Andalusian, like the people I’ll be pitching to.”
“Roughly the same concept, but much less cohesive. The Andalusian identity would be tested and redefined and tested again over the ensuing centuries, starting in roughly 711, when invaders from Northern Africa ventured across the straights of Gibraltar.” Loreto grew more animated as she talked.
“What did they do?” Simone asked, momentarily caught up in the story.
Loreto’s smile spread for the first time all morning as she pushed open an outer door in a stone wall and revealed a massive botanical garden. “This.”
Trees bloomed with vibrant, red flowers. Immaculately trimmed hedges crisscrossed to produce maze-like patterns. Trellises strung with leafy vines cast intricate laces of sun and shadow into sunken, shimmering pools. If the courtyard and terraces inside the hotel had been surprising, these were awe-inspiring.
All around the gardens, massive buildings rose brown, red, orange, and Loreto wove a purposeful path in and out between them all as she continued with her tale.
“The Muslim Moors were doing advanced algebra and geometry when most of Europe had fallen head-first into the Dark Ages. They built magnificent structures many stories taller than most people of the time thought possible from such simple designs.” She led her between two buildings that very much fit those descriptions. “And they brought advanced concepts of irrigation, which, I get, doesn’t sound exciting, but remember those jams you ate last night? None of the fruit needed to make them could’ve been grown in this part of the world until the Moors arrived.”
“And these gardens,” Simone mused, understanding for the first time that such lush landscaping shouldn’t naturally exist in a mountainous region.
“These gardens are nothing compared to the ones above us at the Generalife.” She said the word with a thick Spanish accent she didn’t generally carry while speaking English, like “Hen-ah-rah-leaf-ay.”
Simone shook her head, unwilling to even try to replicate the word.
“It’s another smaller place in La Alhambra, where the Caliph and his immediate family would go to get away from the fortress.”
“They had to build another palace to get away from their palace?”
“Just up the hill from the first palace, like it seriously looks down into the main palace.” Loreto snorted. “Rich people aren’t so different across time and cultures.”
Simone didn’t know if she’d go that far, but she didn’t want to get off track. “So the Moors revolutionized the region?”
“You cannot overstate their influence in this part of the world. They reigned for nearly eight hundred years.”
Simone’s steps faltered. “Eight hundred?”
“From roughly 700 to almost 1500 AD.”
Simone did the math quickly in her head. “The time from the beginning of their reign to the end is longer than the time between 1500 and now.”
Loreto’s smile grew to full force for the first time all morning. “Well done, Rubia. If we’re judging culture by time in office, the Moors still beat them all, the Romans, the Catholics, the Fascists, the modern monarchs, and the socialists.”
“That’s quite a laundry list of ruling ideologies,” Simone said, a little overwhelmed by them all. She’d always had a mild interest in empires, a fact she doubted Loreto would find surprising.
“And no matter what some people would like you to believe, the Moors might’ve stormed the country by force, but it didn’t take many generations for the people to embrace them fully,” Loreto said as they stepped into another, more open courtyard, with a much more expansive view of the mountains above and valleys below. “But I’m getting ahead of myself, because I didn’t bring you here at ass o’clock in the morning to lecture you.”
She hadn’t minded the lecture, but she didn’t say so. She had a feeling Loreto was working up to something, and the anticipation built in her chest in ways it hadn’t since she’d arrived in this country. She felt like she stood on the precipice of something big, something exciting, something important, and when Loreto handed over two paper tickets to a man standing by a huge, ornate wood and brass door, he swung one side open and in clear English said, “Welcome to the Nasrid Palaces.”
Simone stepped into another world.
As her eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, her breath caught. She stared up in awe at a long chamber, a gilded relic of another time, another civilization.
“The Moors were scientists and philosophers and architects, but they were also artists,” Loreto said, her voice lower and carrying a bit of wonder. “See the plaster work?”
How could she not? The ceilings were covered in it, so were arches and doorways, sometimes even cascading low enough to touch. Delicate scrolls and swirls spun outward with the looping scrawl of Arabic script running around the room. She could barely focus on the details because there were simply so many of them, but as she walked slowly along the masterpiece, she took note of vines, flowers, stars and moons, and crests, some as big as her head, some no bigger than her smallest fingernail.
“How could anyone possibly carve all of these details? They cover everything. The sheer volume of this room . . .”
Loreto chuckled. “Not just this room, the whole palace, but they didn’t carve it. It’s not engraved. It’s all molded. While the rest of Europe was chiseling things out of rocks, the Nasrid perfected a technique of molding plaster in ways that could be connected, strung together, built upon, and even painted.”
Simone wandered through one of the ornate arches to another room and noticed several of the minuscule details still held hints of blue in their grooves and ridges. “I see the paint.”
“And that’s original, with no air conditioner, no moisture control. Hell, there weren’t even window shades or doors on some of these rooms. Think about how often you have to paint your apartment or office, and yet that plaster and paint has lasted nearly eight hundred years.”
Simone felt oddly humbled by the idea. Or maybe she merely picked up some of the awe in Loreto’s voice. Something about this place inspired reverence, but Loreto amplified it in surprising ways. Simone found it hard to reconcile the sloppy, grumbling, laissez-faire woman who’d grunted through breakfast and who’d lost years wandering aimlessly around Spain with the poised and knowledgeable guide currently exuding appreciation for history, innovation, and elaborate craftsmanship.
“They made similar advancements in tilework,” Loreto said, oblivious to the fact that Simone’s appreciation had shifted from the walls to the woman describing them. “Here, look at this space.”
Simone followed her into another room, or rather, another set of high walls, though they didn’t have a roof. Overhead, the morning sun didn’t have enough height to shine down on them, but the light still radiated in, reflected in the polished colors of tile mosaic encasing doorways in the opposite walls. The vibrant yellows, blues, and greens would have been pretty even if they’d been installed yesterday, but they were made even more impressive by the hundreds of years of exposure they’d weathered. Above them, more plasterwork of flowing Arabic letters extended several stories high.
