Robert whirled around. Carmen stood in the doorway. She wore a white sweater and a black skirt. It wasn’t short, but tight enough to be very interesting. Her hair was piled up on top of her head in a haphazard sort of fashion.
He was struck again by how small she was. She couldn’t have been more than five-three and a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. Not his type at all.
Why was his heart pounding as if he was at the end of a 5K?
“Mahoney High School,” she said, as she walked over to the stove and sniffed the sauce, “graduates more than eighty percent of the students who start there as freshman. That’s almost twice as good as some of the neighborhood schools.”
“Did you go there?” Robert asked, handing her the wine.
She shook her head. “No. I did the neighborhood thing.”
“Looks like you turned out okay.”
She shrugged. “Looks can be deceiving.”
He started to make some quip about liking bad girls, but in deference to Raoul, he kept it to himself. “Should I slice the bread?” he asked.
She nodded, handed him a knife and pointed toward a wooden cutting board on the counter. “The flowers are beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.”
Her tone was almost wary, and he wondered if he’d gone too far. “It’s January,” he said. “We should grasp on to every sign of spring we can.”
She smiled. “You’re right. At lunch today, Liz and I sneaked out and bought spring soap. We put some in every bathroom at OCM.”
“Spring soap?” he repeated. He put the bread that he’d sliced into the basket that she passed to him.
“Yeah, you know. There are winter soaps, like cranberry-apple or peppermint-spice. Spring soaps are totally different. When you wash your hands, you can almost image that you’re somewhere tropical.”
“I never gave that much thought before,” he said.
She laughed. “Perhaps you could buy some for the police station?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think I want to be known as the spring soap guy.”
“Perhaps not,” she admitted. She drained the pasta and motioned for Raoul to set the table.
“I didn’t know you had a cat,” he said.
“Lucy is low-energy but high-strung,” Carmen explained. “We got her from a shelter. She spends a lot of time hiding under the bed.” She set a big bowl of spaghetti on the table. “Let’s eat.”
“Food’s great,” he said ten minutes later, meaning every word of it.
“Spaghetti is easy,” Carmen said, pulling at the neckline of her sweater.
She was cute when she blushed. Robert smiled at her and then shifted his attention to Raoul. “So band keeps you pretty busy?”
“I guess.”
“Your friends play instruments, too?”
“My best friend, Jacob, plays the drums.”
Robert took another bite and took his time chewing. “Mahoney’s got a good football team. They went to state tournaments last year.”
“Yeah,” Raoul said. For the first time, Robert heard the bitterness. “If you’re an athlete, you’ve got it made.”
“No special treatment for the band?”
That just got him a look. Didn’t mean anything, but Robert filed the information away. “What’s the gang situation like there?”
Raoul shrugged. “I’m sort of busy with my classes. I wouldn’t know.”
“I was just curious. I know they mix it up every once in a while in that neighborhood. I suppose drugs are a problem?”
“Not for me.”
“Have you ever had anyone try to sell you something?” Carmen asked.
Raoul shook his head. “Trombone players don’t get a lot of attention from the drug dealers.” He stood up. “I’ve got a lot of homework.” He carried his plate over to the sink and rinsed it.
“How are your classes going?” Carmen said.
“Fine.” Raoul grabbed his backpack off the kitchen counter and walked out of the kitchen. Seconds later, a door at the back of the apartment slammed.
Carmen sat at the table and put her head in her hands. Robert scooted his chair closer. He reached a hand out and with one finger, gently stroked the back of her hand.
Carmen lifted her face. “He’s lying to me. He’s never done that before. Something is wrong. Very wrong.” There were tears in her eyes.
“Kids lie,” he said. “It doesn’t mean he’s in trouble. Maybe he’s embarrassed about his grades and intends to bring them up.”
She shook her head.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “We have cops in all the high schools. I’ll talk to the ones who are at Mahoney High School. I’ll see if they recognize his name. Okay?”
“Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”
Her face was close. Close enough that he could see the tears that still clung to her long lashes. Her skin was a lovely mocha and her lips were pink and inviting. He leaned forward. She stilled.
He bent his head and kissed her. She tasted like spaghetti sauce and red wine, sweet with just a hint of sharpness. And when she pulled back quickly, he had to force himself to let her go, to not demand more.
Her dark eyes were big.
“I hadn’t planned on that,” he said, proving that adult men lied, too. Maybe he hadn’t exactly planned it, but for months he’d been thinking about kissing Carmen.
She didn’t answer. She just looked as shaken as he felt. A few more strands of her silky hair had fallen down and her lips were trembling.
“Look,” he said, “I—”
“I know you were just comforting me,” she said.
He started to protest but realized that she was rationalizing the action. In her own way, she was as skittish as her cat. If she thought that he was romantically interested in her, her first instinct might be to run and hide, too. Carmen Jimenez might be twenty-nine, but he suspected she hadn’t had the experiences of other twenty-nine-year-old women. She’d been too busy raising her brother.
For the first time, he felt better about what had happened at Liz and Sawyer’s wedding. Maybe it hadn’t been him that Carmen had objected to? Maybe it had just been her lack of experience and her generally shy demeanor that
