From Barcelona, with Love (11 page)

For a regretful second Mac thought about the pepperoni pizza, still hot and spicy and perfect. Fortunately for him, he did not voice that thought and anyhow it only lasted a second. He had the Montrachet open in a flash and was pouring the wine into the glasses Sunny had taken from the cupboard when she remembered.

“Mac? Exactly
what
are we celebrating?”

“The show's going on hiatus. I've gotten two weeks off.”

Her eyes rounded with surprise. Then she smiled. She kissed him again. Lightly this time, but on the lips. She lifted her glass to him.

“Perfect timing for our vacation,” she said, thrilled.

And then the phone rang. Didn't it always?

 

Chapter 14

Stuck with a wineglass
in each hand, Mac hesitated at the bedroom door. His cell phone was in his shorts pocket. He gave Sunny a “should I answer it” kind of look. She looked stonily back at him.

She did not offer to take the wineglasses so he could free his hand and answer. Instead, she walked past him into the bedroom, unbuttoning her white shirt as she went. She turned and gave him a look. He was still standing there. The phone was still ringing. He was still holding his very nice crystal glasses full of wine.

Eyes linked with his, Sunny slid the shirt off her shoulders. She unhooked the floaty white skirt and let it slide onto the wood plank floor that sloped toward the window because it was warped by the damp sea air.

The phone kept on ringing.

“You need voicemail,” she told him, naked but for her Hanky Panky turquoise lace boy-short underpants and the gold wedge heels.

“No contest,” Mac said, looking at her. For once, he ignored the ringing phone, and walked over and handed her a glass.

“
This
is our
real
celebration,” she murmured. The glasses tinkled pleasingly in a toast, which set Tesoro off barking. And for once Sunny scooped her up and dumped her in the hallway and shut the bedroom door.

It would be just the two of them tonight.

*   *   *

“You know what?”
she said, a few hours later. “I have a great idea for your two-week hiatus.”

Mac had his own idea for that hiatus. He lay back, watching lazily as she brushed her long dark hair, smoothing it with her hand after each stroke.

“It shines like a blackbird's wing,” he said admiringly.

“That's an improvement on a black Lab still wet from the ocean.”

“I should write a song about it.” He sat up and took a sip of white wine. Even warm, it tasted good.

“Somebody already did. Paul McCartney, I believe. Anyway he wrote something about a blackbird, maybe not its wings. But I'm getting away from the point.” She gave him that long slow under-the-lashes look that made Mac's toes curl all over again.

He reached out and pulled her to him. She fit so neatly into that space just beneath his shoulder, with her cheek pressed against his chest and her leg flung over him. He said, “Better tell me what's on your mind, Sonora Sky Alvarez”—he called her by her real name—“and what else we're celebrating tonight, besides my hiatus.”

“That's just it.
I
don't have a hiatus yet. I have to be in Napa this weekend for the wine festival. I've worked my butt off getting publicity for Ewan Mallow and Mallow wines, and this weekend will be the culmination. He's getting an award, plus a great rating from Robert Parker for the latest vintage.”

“Ah, that's right. I kinda forget you work too.”

She punched him and Mac groaned.

“My PR company may be small, but it's very good. All my clients are doing well, thank you very much.”

“All ten of them. Two of whom are failed actors.”

“They are so
not
failed.” Indignant, she pushed him away. “Marcus is in Paris making a movie with Charlotte Gainsbourg…”

“Marcus has a
small part
in a Charlotte Gainsbourg movie,” Mac corrected her. He loved to bait her, she was so passionate about what she did, and in fact she was very good at it. Her company was doing well and she was making quite a name for herself.

He said, “What about the other actor?”

“Well…” Sunny shrugged. “Okay, so maybe he has failed, but now he's writing songs. You'll see, he'll become the next John Mayer.”

“He might want to rethink that,” Mac said, “publicity wise.”

“That's because men need a woman like me, to keep them on the straight and narrow, publicity wise. Whatever any of my clients think, they know to button their lip and not say a word to the press without my approval.”

“Quite the little tyrant, aren't you.” He nuzzled the smooth hollow under her collarbone. “So, you're telling me I'll be all alone this weekend, is that it?”

“Unless you want to come with me?”

His eyes told her that, despite how much he loved her, he did not want to spend a weekend in Napa meeting and greeting wine folk and testing their product.

He said, “I'd rather go fishing.”

A high-pitched snuffling wail came from behind the closed bedroom door.

“Oh my God. I forgot the dog.” Sunny ran to open it.

He watched her appreciatively. Then he saw the Chihuahua crouched outside, saw the little dog giving Sunny that “how could you leave me” look, saw it roll over, paws in the air, playing the “helpless little mite.”

Mac sighed and reached for the wine. He couldn't win with that dog. The little bastard beat him every time. He spotted Pirate lurking outside the bedroom door and called to him.

“Tell me,” he said to Sunny, “why
my
dog should wonder if he can come into
my
bedroom, when yours considers it her territory.” He reached out to stroke Pirate's shaggy ears.

“Oh stop it,” Sunny said, not wanting to get into the Tesoro/Pirate thing. It was an ongoing situation and besides it was not
exactly
what she wanted to talk about right now.

“So. Listen.” She settled next to him on the bed, clutching Tesoro to her chest.

Looking admiringly at her, Mac said, “
Portrait of a Naked Venus with Her Toy Dog
 … very Boucher. That's a French artist,” he added for her benefit.

“I
know
who Boucher is, but
this
Naked Venus would like to get a nice suntan, frolicking with her beloved in the aquamarine waters of the Indian Ocean … so clear, so translucent, so gently warm and inviting you won't believe it.”

He said, “You've been there, then?”

She looked, exasperated, at him, head on one side, long hair cascading over her shoulder. “Well, not exactly
been
there…”

“You mean you just read the holiday brochure.”

Sunny beamed. She squeezed Tesoro so tight the dog yelped. “You got it,” she said, excited.

“No, I don't.” Mac didn't want to hear about the Indian Ocean. He wanted to hear about the fast-running waters of Oregon's Rogue River and the steelhead he could catch there. He wondered if this time of year you had to use lures and not fresh bait. He'd have to check on that. Maybe he'd buy a new tent, a bigger one. That would make Sunny happy.

Sunny put her dog down and leaned enticingly over him. Her hair tickled his chest and her eyes—those long-lashed eyes—smiled right into his. “Think about it: Chinese food, Indian food, Creole food, fish fresh from the sea. Think low-rise hotels on white sugar-sand beaches, a turquoise sea, and those drinks with little umbrellas. They grow rum there you know.”

“Nobody ‘grows' rum.”

Sunny shoved him, impatiently. “So what about those rum drinks with little umbrellas then?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of an ice-cold Bud and a fishing rod, and the taste of
my own
freshly caught fish, with smoke curling from my barbie…”

“And the gnats biting my butt!”

“I'll tell them to bite mine instead.”

“Hah, even
you
can't control bugs.”

Mac laughed. “Babe, I can't even control you, and you're my very own bug, I'm bitten, caught, addicted.”

“Addicted to love,” Sunny sang the Robert Palmer line in his ear. “Just think, we can sleep under the stars with the sound of the Indian Ocean in our ears, and I'll bet they have mosquito nets. Just the two of us…”

“What about the dogs?”

Sunny beamed. This was the clever part. Women always knew which button to push. “No Tesoro this time,” she said. “Roddy can come here and take care of the dogs.” Roddy was Mac's assistant. “He understands Tesoro, and he adores Pirate. He adores you too, Mac. You know he'll do anything for his ‘boss,' even at short notice. Like, for instance, in a couple of days' time.”

“You'll love it, fishing,” Mac said.

Just as the phone rang. Again.

 

Chapter 15

“Oh my God,”
Sunny cried, suddenly remembering her soup, left on a low light hours ago. The smell of burned fish came from the kitchen and she leapt out of bed and ran for the door.

Mac gazed after her; unsure whether she meant oh my God it's the phone again, or oh my God it's the soup. The bedside clock told him it was 10:25
P.M
., but there were no time limits in his line of work. You did what you had to do at any hour, even though it might be rough on your private life. Sunny understood that. At least he hoped so.

He picked up the phone. “Reilly,” he said.

“Is this
Mac
Reilly?”

It was a woman's voice, light, pleasant, and with a trace of a lisp on the “this.” Cute! Mac had to resist the urge to copy her lisp when he agreed that yeth he wath Mac Reilly.

“Mr. Reilly, may I call you Mac? You see, I feel I already know you.”

Mac was surprised; he quite definitely did
not
know
her
. Still, everybody had a story and he got the feeling she was about to tell him hers.

“Go ahead, Mac it is,” he said. “And what shall I call you?”

“Jazmin.”

He nodded. “Pretty name. Is there another to go with it? Just, y'know, to give me a clue as to exactly
who
you are, and how you got my number, and why you might be calling me at—” He glanced at the bedside clock. “—at exactly half past ten on a Wednesday evening.”

“It's seven thirty
A.M.
here. And if I can call you Mac, you may call me Jassy.”

She was flirting with him and he didn't even know who she was, though he knew from the time difference she was calling from Europe.

“So, Jassy, you want to tell me what this is all about?”

Sunny had come back and was standing by the bedroom door. There was a stricken look on her face and a blackened fish pan in her hands. Mac got up and walked round the bed still naked, took the pan from her, kissed the stricken look from her face and whispered, “There's always the pizza.”

She threw a dagger look at him and then at the phone still held to his ear.

He sighed. The smell of burned fish did not bode well. Not only that, now Pirate had the baguette clamped between his jaws. He made a quick and wise decision not to get involved and returned to his phone caller.

“I apologize,” he said. “A slight distraction. Now, Jassy … you were about to tell me your real name?”

“Jassy
is
my real name. Jassy de Ravel.”

He remembered now. “Paloma's aunt.”

Sunny was still standing by the door with the burned fishy pan in her hand, next to the dog with the baguette still in its mouth. She was listening.

“I am,” Jassy said. “And I'm calling because Paloma told us yesterday—in fact she told
the whole family,
you saved her life. You
,
and
your dog,
she said.”

“I believe Pirate got there first.”

There was a tremor in Jassy's voice as she said, “I'm so ashamed, almost in
despair
when I think of what might have happened. I didn't know Paloma walked alone on the beach, I would never have allowed it…”

“Of course not,” Mac said, but he was thinking Aunt Jassy should have paid more attention to the child she was supposedly in charge of. “When you are the one looking after a child, that's what you're supposed to do,” he said coldly, because he had not forgotten it had been a close call and Paloma might very well have drowned. “You're supposed to look after them.
You
are the child's life-support system.”

“I'm sorry, and you are right to be angry. And I am calling, very humbly and gratefully, to say thank you.”

“Then I'm glad you called.” There was a silence. Jassy seemed to have nothing else on her mind, so Mac said, “No need to say thanks, I would have done the same for anybody. Say hi to Paloma for me.” Then he remembered the anguished look in the girl's eyes, the urgent feeling she'd wanted to tell him something, and added, “And tell the kid to call me if she wants to talk. Thanks again for the call,” he added, about to ring off.

“Don't go!” Jassy de Ravel's voice held a note of panic. “
Please,
don't cut me off. I have something else I need to talk about.”

Mac guessed what her call was really about. “You mean about Bibi.”

There was a pause, then Jassy said, “Of course I mean Bibi. We have to find her. I mean, Paloma needs to know if her mother is dead or alive.
There!
I've finally said it. Nobody else here dares even mention those terrible words.
Dead or alive.
And they're afraid to say well, if Bibi
is
alive, why has she abandoned her child. Do you realize Paloma was only seven when I went to L.A. and dragged her away from her mother and took her to Spain.
Seven years old,
Mac Reilly! I want to tell you, I've done my best but I am not this child's mother. And the fact is I'm not really suited to be
any
child's mother. Still, I've never left her—well, a couple of times, but only for short visits. And I'll tell you something else you need to know, Mac Reilly, I
love
that child. So, whatever you are going to find out about Bibi, and that terrible husband who also abandoned the kid he'd adopted, and about Bibi
murdering
her lover and his … his
bitch
 … whatever it is, I for one am prepared to face it.”