The Rain in Spain

On a rainy night in Sevilla, travel writer Magda and scientist Javi are cranky with the heat—and each other. Being unable to keep their hands off each other isn’t the same as building a life together and cracks are starting to appear in their still fresh marriage.

As they stroll the cobblestone streets of one of Spain’s most romantic cities, Magda tries to show her husband just what it is she loves about the job that keeps her on the road so much. She has until the sun rises to convince him—and even more importantly, herself—that what they have is worth fighting for.

By
Amy Jo Cousins

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note upon Rerelease

Dear Reader

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Thank you!

About the Author

Excerpt from Callie, Unwrapped

Discover more titles by Amy Jo Cousins

Acknowledgments

Copyright

For Jon, and one magical, adventurous night in Sevilla.

I wrote this story for the Summer Rain charity anthology published by Pink Kayak Press in 2014. One hundred percent of our royalties were donated to RAINN and, along with the Winter Rain anthology, we raised a lot of money for that terrific organization. I’m releasing “The Rain in Spain” as a free story in 2016, with the hope that we will continue to generate donations for RAINN. If you enjoy this story, please consider making a $1 donation to RAINN in lieu of payment for it! You can donate here:
donate.rainn.org

All of my stories are about imperfect people finding love (even the erotic ones that are mostly about the sex), and if you like this one, I hope you’ll check out my other series on
my website
. Or subscribe to
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to hear about new releases, sales, early looks at new cover art and bonus reads for subscribers only.

~AJ

Sevilla, Spain, is a magical place. When I visited fifteen years ago, I wandered the city with, and occasionally without, an ex-boyfriend. Ours had been a civil breakup in the weeks leading up to the trip, and it seemed a shame for either one of us to miss out on Spain, so we traveled together anyway. The sun and heat were merciless that spring, and it did
not
rain while we were there. Tensions between the two of us ran high from time to time—a natural consequence, I guess, of a vacation with someone who is leaving your life. Our most enjoyable evening was a night where we let ourselves wander with no agenda, meeting up with Sevillans or other visitors and criss-crossing the city until dawn. I have stolen several of the locales we visited for Magda and Javi’s story, although you can safely hope that their evening ends much differently than mine did!

As a friend and relative of many men and women who could have used the support of an amazing group like RAINN in their lives, I am honored to have written this story for the
Summer Rain
charity anthology in support of the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. May everyone whose lives have been affected by violence and abuse find their own happy ending.

Amy Jo Cousins

T
he pigeons circled
La Giralda again, flickering with every orbit like animations on the corner of a page in a flip book, bright when catching the setting sun, dark when backlit. Sipping a
tinto de verrano
at a tiny table in the rooftop bar on top of her hotel, Magda faced the tower at a matching height. The cathedral’s bells tolled the hour, vibrating in her bones from across the square.

Only forty-eight hours in Sevilla and already today she’d needed space. Time alone without Javi breathing down the back of her neck about train schedules or hours of operation at the next tourist trap. Traveling together was meant to shore up their relationship, and she could tell that he was trying, but she feared this one-year anniversary trip—what Javi called their belated honeymoon—wouldn’t be able to fix what was wrong. Certainly a day alone touring gardens of the Alcázar hadn’t made her feel any better.

The heat was immense, pressing down on her, a weight on her perpetually damp skin. Storm clouds had threatened all day but no rain fell. The fluttery sundress and wide-brimmed sunhat had done their best, making her feel like a movie star from the thirties, but nothing could save this day from being a miserable, sweaty mess.

She deposited the hat on the seat of the matching chair across from her, and the sweat trapped in a line across her forehead cooled her skin in an evaporating stripe.

Not that she was complaining about the Alcázar. The photos and notes she’d taken would form the basis of a glossy spread in a travel magazine, a post to drive traffic on her blog, and would add further depth to her stock photo portfolio. Plus, the royal palace wasn’t on Javier’s carefully planned itinerary until tomorrow, so visiting it today had felt like ditching class to make out with her boyfriend in the empty auto shop classroom. Daring, semi-public adventure. Kinda sweaty too.

Pretty much exactly like a high school make-out session, minus the teen boy hands creeping up my shirt.

She dragged a fingertip through the puddle of condensation pooling around the base of her skinny, ice-filled glass. Not that she’d have pushed Javi’s hands away last night. Or if she’d known him back in high school either, for that matter. She was an
enjoy the moment to its fullest
kind of girl and the intimacy of fucking made for some of the most intense moments. His physicality was one of the first things that had drawn her to Javier after all. She’d never been into worshipping at the altar of big, manly muscle boys, always more interested in what was going on in a man’s brain than whether or not he could bench press a small car.

But she could spend all day licking each sharply defined ridge and curve of Javi’s body.

Seriously. All day, her mouth, his body.

Not that Javi’s timetable would allow her to waste a whole day on something that couldn’t be checked off a list in Rick Steves’s guidebook. She lifted her glass and pressed the cold surface to her cheek. Their belated honeymoon was a disaster. Javi had spent so much time planning this trip with her, and he’d been so sweet with his eagerness to make the trip special, that she hadn’t had the heart to remind him that she preferred to wander. Making jokes about his list of sights to be seen during the first seven days of their trip had grown less and less funny as she’d watched him draw lines through each item in order, watched him check his notes on transit times to the next scheduled activity or vista, while she tried to show him the one right in front of them. Make him
see
.

For seven days, she’d been as invisible as the items on that list.

She didn’t understand it. When she’d first met Javi on a beach in India, he’d been following a Southeast Asia itinerary so tightly scheduled she wanted to cry. But he’d chucked it in a heartbeat upon learning that she wouldn’t be leaving Goa until she felt like she knew it. Until she’d
seen
it as the people who lived there saw it. What had happened to that man?

The waiter hadn’t been by in forever, so when the door that led to the hotel staircase creaked open, she turned to place another order.

Instead of the skinny kid in black pants and a white shirt she was expecting, she saw Javi, and was startled into looking at him as if he were a stranger to her. His thickly muscled male form, thighs straining at the loose cream trousers, biceps stretching the rolled up sleeves of a casually wrinkled white button-down. Dark hair pushed back from a widow’s peak fell in waves just to the tops of his ears. High cheekbones, straight dark brows, and lips that were almost pink like a girl’s. His entire face threatened to become pretty, if not for the heavy scruff of the five o’clock shadow lining his cheeks. Beauty on top of a bruiser’s body.

Javi.

Javi dressed to fit in, instinctively. Years of flying under the radar never quite went away. That had meant ditching the jeans and running shoes that screamed
American tourist!
two days into their trip, hitting up Zara and Massimo Dutti in Madrid for casually upscale clothes that let him blend into the crowd. Even with the gaps between his Mexican Spanish and the lisping glides of Castilian, he’d been mistaken for a Sevillan more than once since their arrival in this old city two days ago, something that hadn’t happened to her once. Her hair was as dark as his, but her pale Scottish skin burned in the sun and always made her feel like a ghost when she saw her limbs draped across his in bed, his coppery skin looking so much deeper, richer than her own.

When they’d first met a year ago, she’d assumed her attraction to this bronzed, muscled man—the only stranger on the beach in Goa who’d known enough to stop the guy who wanted to pee on her leg after she’d been stung by a jelly fish—was nothing more than a casual connection. Who
wouldn’t
want him? Ripped, beautiful, saves you from getting peed on. A girl’s vacation fling dream-come-true right there.

Javi had walked a path, invisible to anyone else as far as she could see, between the trust fund travelers and the aging hippies happier to be slightly grimy on a beach in India than smoking hookahs in whatever small town they hailed from. It was obvious to her that Javi’s not-at-all aimless travels were different than most, but she’d finally had to ask him if
he
knew why he seemed so unusual, so steady, compared to the other itinerants around the bonfires.

“Everyone here belongs somewhere,” he’d answered. “They’ve always had a country to go home to.”

She’d only known him for a few days at that point, but she’d already heard about his childhood as an illegal immigrant kid in Arizona before his family gained citizenship in the amnesty. Not rootless exactly, but never secure. At his wistful words, she’d slid a leg over his stomach and straddled him, pinning his hands to the sand above the edge of her blanket.

“I can be your country. You can come home to me.” She’d meant it as a joke, but the words rang a bell deep in her belly. Rang true and solid even as she smiled at him. Because she knew what it was to lose your sense of home. She’d stopped visiting her family years ago and had locked up the loss in her heart.

He’d bumped his hips up against hers, a slow stroke of his hardening dick against her crotch. “Yeah? You’re gonna let me cross your borders? Do I need a special visa?” His grin bunched his cheeks and she could barely make out his dimples in the flickering light of the bonfire against the night.

“Oh, I’ll show you border crossing.” She’d dipped her head and pressed her mouth to his, releasing his hands and loving that she could make him laugh as he touched her.

On the rooftop half a world away, the memory washed over her like an ebbing wave, pulling at the sand under her feet until she felt off-balance. Shaky.

Where had that certainty gone? That
knowing
that Javi was the one? She glanced at him, standing by the door, and wondered how she was supposed to find her way back.

She thought about ignoring him. A full day of thinking and wandering and more thinking until her thinker was sore hadn’t brought her any closer to a conclusion. She could feel the edge of one in her brain, the jagged lip of an idea that frightened her, but the edge felt like a cliff and she held back from getting too close.

The only reason she was here, on the rooftop, as opposed to at the Santa Justa train station buying one ticket to somewhere—anywhere—else, was because she’d said she loved him. But the instinct to bolt before he finally came to his senses and rejected her was strong. The wounded look in his eyes—the one she’d put there that morning when she’d stopped him at the door with a hand on his chest and told him to find his own way that day, without her—had followed her through the narrow streets and behind the thick walls of the Alcázar. Now, that hesitancy, the way he stayed close to the door instead of striding over to her little round table and grabbing the other chair, complaining all the while about how tiny the decoratively perforated metal seat felt under his ass, tugged at her.