playing up now? Little doubt it had something to do with the woman slipping her hand onto his thigh and giving his leg a gentle squeeze.
“Why don’t you go?” The compassion in Saoirse’s voice almost tipped the balance.
“Qué?”
“To your brothers. It’s written all over your face. And they’re the closest link you have to your mother, so...short of us hunting down someone who can do a séance...”
His eyes widened.
“One Helibana with extra sauce.” He barely heard the waitress as she slipped the sandwich onto the table, his hunger vanishing simultaneously.
“We’ll have that to go, please.” Saoirse smiled gently up at the waitress then stopped her with a quick “Ah!” before she left. “Would it be all right to make that about eight sandwiches to go?”
“Eight?” The waitress’s disbelief was nearly as deep-seated as Santi’s.
“No. You’re right. Make that a dozen.” Saoirse pointed generically toward the door then leaned in conspiratorially, “Valentino stocktaking night.”
The waitress nodded, smiling with a hit of recognition, then swished away.
“Well, look who’s all proud of herself for hitting the nail on the head,” Santi said to cover the surge of emotion filling up his chest like a lead balloon.
“Santi? Do you think I was born yesterday or something?”
“No, but I—”
“I saw your face when you were talking to that copper before.”
“The detective?”
“The badge-wearing guy, yeah. You looked like you’d seen a ghost and then you got all intense and broody for the next couple of hours. Not to mention the fact you’ve only mentioned stocktaking night about four hundred thousand times in the ambulance.”
“Have I?” his eyebrows shot up. “I don’t get brood—”
She cut him off with a cluck of her tongue. “Don’t even bother. You’re just lucky I took pity on you and made sweet love to you all afternoon to keep your mind off your troubles.” She sat back with a satisfied grin, all the while rat-a-tat-tatting her I-know-I’m-right fingers along the edge of the wooden tabletop.
“First of all, young lady, I think you’ll find it was me who made the first move.” Santiago drew himself up to what he hoped was his most impressive height.
“First of all nothing.” Saoirse shook her head with a quick no-you-don’t finger wag that would’ve sent any child running to the naughty corner of their own volition.
Damn. It was a crying shame this woman wouldn’t be a mother. Any offspring of hers would be about as well behaved as they came, too terrified to contest the finger wag.
“There’s a reason I haven’t been to see them yet.” Santi felt a muscle in his jaw twitch. Feeble, he knew. But it was his truth and he was going to own it. He wanted to be ready to see them.
“In my book? The best time to do something like this is when you’re least prepared. That way you’re expecting very little...” Saoirse collapsed her spine into a curve then sprang back upright “...and your bounce-back factor will be high.”
“My bounce-back factor?”
“Yes. You’ll be needing that if things don’t go well.”
“So you’re already banking on failure?” He bristled.
She snorted. “Santiago Valentino, I’ve never heard such balderdash in all my days. You are the strongest, most capable, failure-free zone of a human I’ve ever had the honor to work with.”
He shook his head. Now wasn’t the time for basking in undeserved compliments. “It’s not that simple.”
“You are, of course, completely free to share and explain why trotting down the road and telling your brothers you’re back in town is so difficult, but in my culture...” she paused for effect, the hint of a twinkle in her eyes “...we harbor our secrets close to our chests unless the whole village knows about it anyway, in which case there’s not much point in discussing what’s already a done deal. The point being, I fled for something everyone knew about. There was no need to spell it all out for folk. Public humiliation does that to a girl, but I’m getting the feeling you’re the only one who knows why you left.”
“I left a note.”
“Someone’s sounding a bit defensive.” She snorted.
“I could have just left! No note—nothing.”
“Really? Is that what you could have done?” Saoirse looked at him as if he’d just told the biggest honking lie of the lot. But she hadn’t known him then. Rebel without a cause didn’t even begin to cover it. The motorcycle was all that remained of his bad-boy image he’d fine-tuned to teenage perfection.
“You don’t know what kind of man—kid—I was back then.” He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I wasn’t a big fan of who I was becoming, this restless, confused mess.”
“Not so much of a mess you didn’t recognize what was happening. And not so much of a mess you didn’t man up and do something about it. Besides,” she added with a grin, “you did leave a note.”
“It wasn’t a back-in-five sort of job!” He snapped. “Sorry, I just—”
“Are we feeling a bit touchy because someone is actually going to go and do this thing?”
“Very.”
Jangling nerves were getting the better of him and that’s not how he wanted this to go. He’d joined the military to gain better control over himself—his emotions, his goals, his future. And here he was, messing it all up again.
Maybe that was the irony. When he’d been on duty in the world’s cruelest war zones, the main lesson he’d come away with? You couldn’t control life—you could only control how you responded to it. He should have had a reminder tattooed on his forearm: Be the man you know you can be.
“Tell me about the note,” Saoirse said softly.
“It was...it was sort of like a guide to life from fifteen to eighteen. My area of expertise.” He appreciated Saoirse’s laugh. To describe it now sounded so juvenile, but that’s what he had been. Countless miles from adulthood.
“And what was all this wise advice you were offering your brother?”
“It was reams—well, not exactly reams but it was vital information for a thirteen-year-old. The coolest place to hang out. Which locker bay to get assigned when he was a senior in high school, which streets to steer clear of because of the gangs, although he pretty much knew that already. Never to take Mr. Prunte’s science class because the man was a much better baseball coach than he was science teacher.” He watched as Saoirse’s eyes grew wider and wider. “I wasn’t going to leave Alejandro completely hanging.”
“What
