Her Latin Lover (Contemporary Romance) (11 page)

It was the first time that Mary had ever heard anyone call him Paulo and not use his full title.

“You liked it, didn’t you Clara, the way he pushed himself between your legs?” The man started rubbing his crotch.

“I told you already, my name’s not Clara. It’s Mary.” She looked around. Where on earth was Paulo?

“Come here and see what a real man feels like.”

He grabbed her and forced his tongue into her mouth. Mary was overcome by the smell of rotten meat. She thought she was going to be sick. He shoved one of his hands on her backside and started to grope her breasts with the other. Mary tried to push him away, but he was very strong.

“Get off her you pig!” It was Paulo calling out from behind. His voice boomed across the square and he was pointing a pistol directly at El Leon.

El Leon let go of her to see who was shouting. He gave Paulo a big smile. “She has a great ass, Paulo. Nice firm breasts as well,” he said, flashing his metal teeth. He reached out again for Mary. However, there was now a bit of space between them and she used it to give him a good hard kick between the legs.

The man groaned in agony and fell to his knees clutching his genitals.

Paulo ran over to Mary and put his arm around her shoulder. “Are you ok? I am so sorry. I should never have left you.”

“Look out Paulo!” she yelled, but it was too late. El Leon had pulled out a gun and was aiming it at Paulo. He fired. Paulo fell backwards from the force of the shot, dragging Mary down with him into the dust.

Mary’s head hit the ground, stunning her for a moment. However, she soon came round and called out to Paulo. He didn’t respond; he just lay motionless on top of her. Mary managed to shift the weight of his body just enough to move her head and look at him. She could see a scarlet stain of blood spreading across the white cotton of his shirt.

“You’ve killed him you bastard! He’s dead!” she shouted.

El Leon came and stood over their bodies. “I should have killed him a long time ago. As for you, you little demon, you like to play dirty? I like to play dirty games too. I can see that we’re going to have a lot of fun together.” He rubbed his crotch again, this time with his gun.

Mary tried to look around for help. From what she could see, the rest of the villagers were standing nearby including some of Paulo’s men, but they weren’t doing anything. She guessed they were too scared. Behind El Leon stood three giant men. They looked like imbeciles, but they were all carrying guns ready to shoot anyone who tried to come to her defence. If only she had a gun herself. Where was Paulo’s gun? She seemed to remember that he had been holding it in his hand when El Leon shot him. She hoped it was the hard object that was currently pressing into the side of her hips. She had to try and get it without El Leon noticing. Maybe she could distract him.

“What type of dirty games would you like to play?” she forced herself to ask while she tried to search for the gun. It was difficult. Not only did she have the weight of Paulo on her, but she began to be aware of a burning sensation in the back of her head and in one of her legs which seemed to have twisted when she fell.

El Leon rubbed his pistol against his crotch more and more vigorously as he started describing some of the things that he wanted to do to Mary, or rather, Clara as he insisted on calling her. Mary kept on asking him questions about how she could satisfy him and he became so engrossed in talking about his sick, perverted fantasies that he didn’t notice Mary was fumbling around for something behind her back, nor did he notice her pull out Paulo’s pistol. Only when the gun was aimed directly at him did he see what was going on. Before he had time to react, Mary shot him square in the chest.

Chapter 10

Mary slowly opened her eyes, but was forced to close them by the terrible pain in her head. When she opened them up again, several hours later, it appeared to be late afternoon. The sun lay low in the sky. The last of its rays were fading from her room and slowly creeping out of the balcony windows. She could hear nothing and gradually began to doze off. When she awoke for the third time, she guessed that it was early morning the following day. How many days had she been lying in bed like this? She turned her head on the pillow. A severe pain shot through her temples, but through the pain she could make out early morning sunlight coming through the curtains. She tried to work out what was going on and what had happened to her.

At first she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t lying in her single bed inside her flat in London and then it started to come back to her: the poker game, Nick running off, Paulo meeting her in the hotel bar, meeting the priest in the church, coming to Paulo’s house, the fiesta.

The fiesta! A series of ugly, disjointed images leapt before her eyes. She had shot someone; pointed a gun at a human being and shot them. The memory of it made her sit bolt upright in bed, but the pain at the back of her head made her lie down again. She remembered pulling the trigger and the sound of gun fire reverberating through the air. She had never touched a gun before in her life, much less shot someone, but who did she shoot? Was the person dead? Why wasn’t she in jail? She had to get up and find out what was going on. However, when she began to climb out of bed, a shooting pain came up from her ankle which was so bad that it prevented her from putting any pressure on it, much less walking anywhere. That, along with the ache in the back of her head, forced her to lie back down. Maybe Paulo would come in soon and tell her what had happened.

Where was Paulo? Why hadn’t he come in to see her? A picture came into her head of him lying still, collapsed, half on top of her. She remembered now: he had been shot, but how badly? Was he dead? Did she shoot him? No, it wasn’t her; it was someone else, someone fat and ugly, someone who was shouting obscenities at her. El Leon, that was it, he had killed Paulo and he was the man that she had shot. She had killed Paulo’s murderer, El Leon, but El Leon was the mafia. What would happen to her now?

These and a thousand other questions ran through her mind for what seemed like hours. Eventually she heard a sound in her room. She turned her head and saw the figure of a woman moving around, opening the curtains and arranging various items in the bedroom.

“Isabella?”

“Señora? Gracias Dio!” she cried out and crossed herself.

“What happened? What’s going on?”

“Señora, tranquila, tranquila.” Isabella came over and smoothed down the bed. Gently, she brushed a few stray wisps of hair off Mary’s forehead.

“Where’s Paulo? Is he dead?”

Isabella looked upset. Mary asked again, but all she would say in reply was, “Tranquila, Señora,” and soon after she left the room.

So Paulo really was dead. El Leon had killed Paulo and Mary had killed El Leon and it was all her fault. She felt sick. If she hadn’t come to South America, none of this would have happened. Actually, it was all Nick’s fault. If he hadn’t played that stupid poker game, they would both be back in La Puesta now, drinking frozen margaritas by the hotel swimming pool, while Nick typed up the story he’d been sent out to write about coffee. At least she was rid of that stupid idiot, but she had also lost Paulo.

She was thinking about the last and only kiss she shared with Paulo when she heard a knock on the door. It was so quiet that she wasn’t sure that she even heard it, but then the person knocked again, this time a bit louder.

“Come in Isabella” she called out, but it wasn’t Isabella who walked in, it was Paulo.

“You’re alive!” she said. She couldn’t believe her eyes. “I thought he shot you. I thought you were dead.”

“It was just a scratch, nothing serious. The bullet barely grazed the skin.” He put his hand over his shoulder where he had been wounded. He wasn’t wearing his customary black jacket and Mary could see a thick wad of bandages through the thin cotton of his shirt.

“El Leon must be a lousy shot. He missed.” Mary laughed. The big tough mafia guy that everyone was afraid of couldn’t even point a gun accurately.

“He is an excellent shot.” Paulo looked at her with deadly seriousness. “He aimed to miss. In fact I am surprised that he even hit me at all.”

“He certainly looked as if he wanted to kill you. He was pointing the gun directly at you. Maybe it was the kick I gave him that threw him off target.” Mary remembered how El Leon crumpled after she kicked him hard between his legs.

“Just because a man points a gun at someone, it doesn’t mean that he wants to kill them.”

“He said he should have killed you a long time ago.”

Paulo rubbed the scar on his face. “But he didn’t, did he? And he didn’t kill me this time either, did he?”

“No,” Mary reluctantly agreed. “But he could have and you should’ve heard the terrible things he was saying to me.”

“Is this what he said?” and Paulo repeated some of the vile obscenities that El Leon had said about what he wanted to do to Mary. His voice was flat and emotionless as he repeated them, as if he was reciting a shopping list and not the imaginations of a sick mind.

“Yes, that’s what he said, but how do you know? Did you hear him? Why didn’t you do anything?”

“I didn’t hear it, I read it. He sent me messages telling me what he was planning to do to you. I told you about it, remember? That’s why I arranged for guards to be placed around the house. I tried to protect you, but you obviously don’t need my protection. You seem to be more than capable of protecting yourself.”

“So that’s why you’re angry with me! That’s why you haven’t come to see me and why you’ve left me alone in this room to rot. It’s because I was the one who pulled the trigger, not you.” She understood now. She’d damaged his masculine ego by being the one to kill the big, scary mafia boss. She, a petite woman who had never fired a gun before, had done what all of those macho men had feared to do all this time. Men like Señor Marcos and Paulo should have stood up to El Leon years ago and stopped him.

“You pulled the trigger and killed him.” He practically spat the words at her.

“Only because I was brave enough to do it and if I hadn’t, he would’ve killed us both.”

“How do you know he was going to kill you?”

“You, yourself just told me about some of the horrific things he threatened to do.”

“He threatened them. He didn’t actually do them. I had protection set up for you. You would have been OK.”

“He was pointing a gun at me for goodness sake.”

“Actually no, he was not. From what people have told me, he wasn’t pointing the gun at you at all. He was pointing it at himself.”

“But in a sexual way,” Mary persisted.

“Yes I believe it was and that is a stupid thing to do with a gun. But you can’t shoot someone just because they do stupid things with guns and say a few crude words. Half the men in South America would be dead by now if you did.” He stared at her. His eyes were cold and menacing, nothing like the deep, smouldering looks that had enveloped her at the fiesta only a short while ago.

“I only did what everyone else hasn’t had the guts to do for years. Admit it! Why else would you be defending the sick pig?”

“Because no matter how sick he was, El Leon was my brother and you murdered him. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go to his funeral.”

Before Mary had a chance to reply, he walked out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

Chapter 11

Isabella accompanied Paulo to the funeral service at the main church in Corazon. Paulo didn’t need to ask her; she went willingly. After all, she had known El Leon almost all her life, ever since he had been a chubby little toddler, known merely as Leonito, ‘Little Leon’. Paulo was glad of the company on the drive and he listened as Isabella reminisced about Leon as a small boy and how terribly affected he had been by his mother’s death. It had affected everyone, but Leon, being only two years old at the time, could not understand why his mother wasn’t coming back. Paulo could still remember his baby brother’s howls that echoed round the house, hour after hour, as he cried himself to sleep every night, refusing to be comforted by anyone.

Leon had grown up to be a lonely child. While Paulo ran around outside, playing with other children and riding horses, Leon stayed indoors on his own. Isabella said that sometimes she would walk into a room and see Leon sitting in a corner, perfectly still, doing nothing. She said that he looked like a cat about to pounce, though what he was waiting to pounce on, she never worked out. When he was forced to play with other children, he would taunt them and play tricks on them. Paulo wondered if he did it on purpose so that he wouldn’t have to play with them again.

It wasn’t just children that he wanted to hurt. One day Paulo caught him torturing a lizard out by the stables. He was cutting its tail off, one section at a time. Paulo asked him why he was slicing up the reptile and Leon replied he had heard that lizards could live without their tails and he wanted to see how much of their tail he could remove before the creature finally died.

The only child that Leon was nice to was Clara. Clara would come over to the house regularly with her family and Leon would spend hours listening to her, telling him local fables and reading him fairy stories. However, as they grew older, Clara spent more and more time with Paulo, riding horses, visiting friends and going to fiestas while Leon stayed at home, alone. At this point in the conversation, Isabella started crying and neither of them spoke again until they reached Corazon.

When they entered the church, Paulo immediately saw the large coffin lying directly beneath the huge gold cross that hung from the ceiling. Paulo had paid for a decent casket made of good wood, but he had declined the added expense of fancy trimmings. If Paulo hadn’t bought the casket, he doubted that anyone else would have. Leon didn’t have any children and his wife, Lola, had disappeared mysteriously many years ago. It was rumoured that she was a prostitute whom he had met in La Puesta. Three years after they were married, Leon announced that she had gone home to her family because her father had died. However, she never came back to Corazon and more than one person believed that Leon’s thugs had permanently removed her. Paulo guessed that they would never find out the truth now.