Sunset Bridge (17 page)

“Yeah, well, you got that right, but I’ll sell Happiness Key and fight you every step of the way in court if you get grabby, Marsh. I’m warning you.”

He looked shocked. “What are you talking about?”

“I want this baby. I didn’t plan it, but I want it. I’m going to be a good mother, unlike a certain other woman you were married to. You can be involved, but don’t think you’ll have any control about what I do and how I do it. “

“You still haven’t given me a good reason why you didn’t tell me. You’re keeping the baby. You weren’t wrestling with that. Wanda said you needed reassurance. Is that all this is about?”

All. To Marsh, making sure the father of her child loved and wanted her was simply “all this is about.” It was inconsequential, irrelevant. She was just a silly pregnant woman with insecurities and a need to have her dainty little hand held. He would do his duty, be a good father to their child, and heck, he had proved in a pinch that he could even consider her needs and pamper her a little.

Was that enough?

“I’m going home,” she said, looking for her purse, which she’d left in some corner. She spied the handle peeking over an ottoman and headed to reclaim it.

“Trace, don’t do this. Finish dinner. I’ll get Bay in bed, then we can talk things over. Hormones are flowing like mad right now. But we have to use good sense.”

Hormones?
For a moment she wanted to slap him. And maybe that part
was
hormones. But the rest of it?

“You should have told me you knew,” she said, “instead of pretending you were so interested in pleasing me.”

“And you should have told me, period.”

She shook her head, grabbed her purse and headed for the door, fishing inside for her keys as she walked. He followed her outside.

“We have to talk,” he said as she opened the car door. “Surely you see that?”

“I need time alone.”

“Trace.” He grabbed her arm. “This should be a happy time. I want this baby, too. If you doubt that, you shouldn’t. You know how much I love Bay. I’ll love this child every bit as much.”

She tried to breathe deeply, to consider his feelings, to move beyond her anger and insecurity. But all she could do was repeat what she’d said.

“I need time alone.”

He dropped her arm and moved away. “Call me when you’re ready. But please, call me?”

She slid into her seat and jammed her key in the ignition. Then, before she shut the door, she added, “If you call me first and start nagging, all bets are off, Marsh. I won’t be rushed, and I won’t be lectured again about my hormones and my lack of good sense. Got it?”

She didn’t wait to see if he did. She slammed the door, backed up and sped away.

O
n Sunday, Maggie rose early to clean the cottage, which was so tiny that cleaning was never much of a time sink. She did what chores there were to a Latin rhythm, a favorite Miami radio station that often, but not always, was clear enough to listen to here, if she didn’t mind occasional bouts of static.

Afterward she showered and washed her hair, leaving it loose to dry. The moment she caught herself wondering what she should wear for Felo’s visit, she decided to stick her hand in the closet and pull out whatever she touched. She didn’t want to primp, but she didn’t want to send him screaming back to Miami, either, not before he told her what he’d been able to dig up about the Duttas. Luckily she wasn’t forced to pair her fuchsia capris and tomato-red blouse. Khakis and a turquoise cotton pullover won the closet lottery.

She was zipping her pants when the local Miami news came on. The story at the top of the hour was the acquisition of several large cattle ranches by Peerless Sugar.

She snapped off the radio, sorry she’d indulged just before Felo arrived. This wasn’t the best start for their morning together.

Felo, Maggie and Peerless had a history. Peerless Sugar was one of the largest sugar companies in Florida, founded by a man named Fernando Echemendia after the Cuban revolution propelled him to the United States. Peerless had been handed down from father to son until the present CEO, Miguel Echemendia, had expanded it into the success it was. In addition to vast acres of sugarcane, the corporation owned miles of citrus groves and other properties, making Peerless a substantial employer and a carefully cultivated player in state politics.

Felo’s ex-partner and boyhood friend Alvaro Hernandez was the Peerless vice president.

Like Felo, Alvaro’s start in life hadn’t been easy, but while Felo had chosen to escape his dysfunctional childhood by earning good grades and college scholarships, Alvaro, who was two years older, had taken a different route, heading straight to the police academy after high school graduation and moonlighting after hours working security at local clubs. He was already established and able to pull the appropriate strings to partner with his boyhood friend once Felo graduated and joined the force.

But Alvaro’s lucky star had really shone on the night when Miguel Echemendia was attacked by a business rival inside the Miami Beach nightclub where Alvaro was working the floor. Alvaro had intercepted and disarmed the attacker before Echemendia’s bodyguards looked up from their dinner plates. A grateful Echemendia had hired him to head security at Peerless, and Alvaro had risen steadily through the company and now was close to the top.

Maggie didn’t have a problem with powerful people, but
this particular one
was
a problem. Alvaro had a hold on Felo she couldn’t understand or countenance.

There were reminders everywhere, it seemed, of the problems between her and Felo. And still she had invited him back into her life when she had asked for his help.

When he called at nine-thirty to tell her he was crossing the bridge to the key, she started the coffeemaker. He preferred Cuban coffee, a thick, sweet espresso he made with a traditional stovetop pot. By now, though, he would have already enjoyed two, his morning ration, before setting out. Since she’d never quite developed a taste for it, he wouldn’t feel obliged to include cafe cubano on his breakfast menu.

As she had done incessantly since their conversation, she wondered about the point of this visit. Surely nothing he’d learned was such a secret he couldn’t tell her over the telephone. He’d mentioned interviewing Janya and Rishi, and she’d agreed that was a good idea, but since a phone call would have sufficed, she knew there was more. Whatever the reason, sadly, she was looking forward to seeing Felo every bit as much as she was dreading it.

By the time he knocked, she was setting out plates and mugs. She called for him to come in but didn’t rush to greet him. He found her in the kitchen, not a treasure hunt of any magnitude, since the cottage was less than six hundred square feet.

“Hey, Mags,” he said casually from the doorway, as if they had never been apart. “Didn’t I give you that sweater?”

Too late now, she realized he had. A traitor to her gender, she found little pleasure in shopping. Felo, on the other hand, loved buying clothes for her, and while Victoria’s Secret was his favorite stomping ground, no matter where he was, he could spot something that would look good on her.

“You did,” she said, still not turning around, as if his arrival was of no consequence. “You always paid attention to whatever women were wearing at the moment.” Left unsaid? That maybe his fashion sense was a by-product of his interest in women, period.

“My mother and I went shopping a lot when I was a boy. We walked to the mall to get out of the house whenever my dad started drinking. We never bought anything—we never had money. But I used to tell myself as soon as I could, I would buy her those things she’d loved so much. By the time I could, she was gone.”

The rest of his sentence lay in the air between them: and so he had bought things for Maggie instead.

She finally turned. He was holding a loudly purring Rumba blissfully draped against him. “You never told me that.”

“It’s not a happy memory.”

He looked just the way he always did. Vibrant. Seductive. Very, very male. But this morning there was a hint of sadness in his eyes, as well.

“Did you have a good drive?” she asked, not sure what to say about his revelation and trying to forestall more of the same.

“It was better than driving through rush hour.”

“Coffee’s ready. I made it strong. That was the best I could do.”

“Are you hungry?”

She was starving, but she hadn’t wanted to ruin her appetite. Felo’s breakfasts were amazing.

“I can wait,” she said. “I know it’ll be worth it.”

“I brought pastries. JoJo’s. Pour the coffee while I set things out.”

They had been together so long, this was the way their relationship had developed over time. He told her what to do; she told him the same. No please or thank-you needed. It was a form of intimacy, accomplishing the little things together with no fuss or bother. An unusual request, of course, was different, an excuse for old-fashioned good manners, but now old habits were showing.

She did as requested, spooning sugar into his cup. With Rumba rubbing against his ankles, he rifled through cupboards and found a plate, which he filled with pastries from their favorite bakery. JoJo, the old man who’d owned the place for almost forty years, never turned out a failure. Her mouth watered.

“Want me to get started?” he asked. “I’ll snack while I cook. I brought fruit to cut up, if you’re interested.”

The kitchen was small, really only large enough for one cook. But they had worked together in smaller. The first apartment they’d shared, nothing more than an efficiency, had come with a creaky old Murphy bed that took up most of the floor when it was lowered. By the time they lowered it at night—or any time of day—neither of them had cared about floor space. Their world had shrunk to a double-size mattress, their hands and lips, and skin gliding over skin.

She couldn’t refuse to help, not even when it meant brushing against him, finding he was just inches away when she turned, feeling the warmth of his breath against her cheek when he spoke.

“Sounds good,” she said. “I’ll get started. What are you making?”

“Pisto Manchego, if that sounds good.”

“You know it does.”

“I wanted to make the pisto last night, and I got everything chopped. But I got a call just as I was turning on the burner.”

“Work?”

“What else?”

Such a simple answer, but these days so fraught with meaning. Was Felo seeing another woman now? Or still? Was his lover calling at night, wishing he was there with her instead of in the house he and Maggie still owned together, chopping vegetables for the woman who used to live there?

Had Maggie simply taken Felo’s natural warmth and charm and turned it into infidelity in her head, his sympathetic ear into an affair with a colleague? His anger at her failure to marry him and have his children as a growing disinterest in her?

“I’m surprised you were able to come this morning,” she said, struggling to accept his answer at face value. When Felo was assigned to a homicide, he worked it steadily for the first forty-eight hours, and a trip out of town would have been unthinkable.

“It didn’t take long to figure out the death was an accident. Plenty of witnesses and no questions by the time we finished up around midnight. Gary says hello.”

Gary was Felo’s present partner, a man on the cusp of retirement, and Maggie had always been fond of him. Some months before she left, Gary had taken her aside, at a sports bar where so many cops went after work, and warned her that guys like Felo didn’t come around very often. “Stop hanging around the edges of his heart and plunge right in,” he’d said, the grisly image a product of one beer too many and a harrowing day of investigations.

Onion was sautéeing in olive oil now, pleasantly redolent, and in a moment Felo added garlic, making it more so. She
found mangoes and papayas in a bag and began to peel and slice. Felo had always been in charge of shopping for fruit, instinctively knowing when it was at its peak. Her luck in this endeavor had never been half as good.

He put down his spatula, reached over and broke off a piece of a pastelito, a flaky, buttery pastry. He stretched out his hand and poised it in front of her. “Open up.”

There was no point in trying to protest the intimacy. She knew Felo would feed it to her, anyway, the minute she did. She chewed, appreciated and swallowed. “Pineapple.”

“I think there’s guava, too. JoJo said only the best for you.”

“Did you tell everybody in Miami you were coming to see me?”

“Not Alvaro.”

The moment he said the name, he realized what he’d done. His annoyance at himself was obvious.

“Why not?” she asked as his eyes shuttered and his lips thinned into a grimace. “Did you think he’d disapprove?”

“No, I didn’t. He likes you, even if the feeling’s not mutual. I didn’t tell him because I don’t want Alvaro involved in us.”

“Us?” She refrained from saying there was no longer an “us.”

“That’s right, Mags.
Us.
You and me. Didn’t we spend enough years together for the word to have some meaning?”

She knew better than to touch that. “Alvaro was
always
involved in ‘us,’ Felo. He was always right there, hanging out on the sidelines.”

“Alvaro is my friend. I made it through the streets of my childhood because he was there to protect and guide me. He’s not an easy person to know, and these days he’s got a reputation he deserves. But he only deserves it because he’s
cultivated it carefully, so no one messes with him. If he was half as ruthless and dangerous as you think, he’d have every law enforcement agency in the country investigating every move he makes. But he’s walking the streets and nobody’s following him.”

She couldn’t believe they were talking about this. His relationship with his ex-partner was a good part of the reason she had left Felo. She knew better than to continue, but she couldn’t seem to leave it alone.

“Since when does walking the streets mean a man isn’t guilty? These days Alvaro has friends everywhere, and most of them owe him favors. Don’t tell me the bad guys are all in jail. We both know most of the ones with connections are fat, flourishing and free.”

“He’s vice president of Peerless Sugar, not a two-bit gang leader.”

Maggie took up Felo’s challenge. “Your buddy started out doing all the dirty work for Miguel Echemendia, Felo. You think Echemendia’s bodyguard could keep his nose clean? You think he stayed on the right side of the law all those years he was working his way up to second in command? And now that he’s the de facto CEO, because Echemendia’s too befuddled to butter his own bread, he’s got even more reason not to play fair.”

“You think there’s a businessman in this country of ours at Alvaro’s level who got there by playing fair every second of every day?”

She wasn’t a fool. She knew Felo was right about that, if not about the extent of Alvaro’s criminal activity. But one fact was indisputable, the important one, the one that had severed their relationship.

“Alvaro was behind your decision not to support me when I challenged Paul Smythe, Felo. You’ve never denied that.”

“No, you just never listened to what I was saying.”

“Alvaro wanted me to keep my mouth shut, to let the crookedest state’s attorney in Miami’s history continue his dirty tricks unchallenged. And he had lots of reasons. Famosa was his childhood friend. Yours, too, for that matter. And Smythe is a good friend to Peerless. Your old boyhood pal used you to make sure things happened the way he wanted them to, never mind that he used to be a cop. And you let him! You took his side against
me
.”

Felo’s anger was clear from the way he softly punched his next words. “Nobody uses me. Not my friends. Not you. The situation was never as simple as you wanted it to be, Mags. It was complicated. It
is
complicated. And you’re not good with complicated, or with listening. Or trusting.”

She was stung by the criticism, even if it wasn’t new. “I’ll agree, trust was an issue for us.” And there was that “us” word again.

Felo put down his chopping knife and, in one fluid motion, put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him.

“Let’s not talk about Alvaro, because he’s not important. Let’s talk about
us.
I loved you then, I love you now. But at the end, I wasn’t getting anything back. You were obsessed with the Famosa case, then later with getting even with Smythe. The whole thing became personal to you. You were trying to prove something. When I talked about our future, your mind was always somewhere else. So I found other people to talk to, and I stayed out late because what was the point of going home? Yeah, it was childish and stupid, but how long did it take you to notice things were changing between us?”