Lessons From A Latin Lover

“It’s a real page turner,” she’d assured him. But he’d been on the same one now for what seemed like a week. The words made no sense.

Weary, he lifted his gaze and stared across the water at the empty horizon.

“You read?” The sudden sound of an astonished female voice made him jump.

He turned his head and saw Lachlan’s grubby sister, Molly, standing on the balcony of the room next door.

He lifted a brow. “Are they keeping engines in the guest rooms now?”

Molly was the mechanic at Fly Guy, Hugh McGillivray’s island charter service. She was also a pilot, occasionally taking charters when Hugh was otherwise committed, but most of the time she was eyebrows deep in some greasy engine on a plane, boat, helicopter or motor vehicle.

Not, Joaquin thought, your average girly girl.

Probably the only one in the world who didn’t even own a dress! A fact he had learned when he hadn’t recognized her at Lachlan’s wedding because she’d actually been wearing one. A borrowed one. But he hadn’t known it at the time. He’d thought she was simply a fresh female face. She certainly hadn’t looked like herself. On the contrary, she’d looked…pretty. Sexy.

Approachable. For once.

His mistake.

He’d felt foolish for not realizing who she was, but he’d got past it and had attempted to redeem himself by asking her to dance.

“Dance?” She’d stared at him, sounding incredulous. “With you?”

“I don’t normally ask women to dance with someone else,” he’d said stiffly.

She’d laughed, but it had been a forced laugh. And then she’d shaken her head. “Well, thanks, but no thanks. Don’t put yourself out.” And she’d turned away to talk to someone else!

Cheeky brat.

And the only woman who had ever turned him down.

Not that he gave a damn. There were far more fish in the sea. He hadn’t spared her another thought. And he’d barely seen her since he’d been back. Oh, maybe they’d been in the same social gathering a handful of times because he was Lachlan’s friend and she was Lachlan’s sister.

But she was usually far too preoccupied with her engines even to deign to speak to him. And he had no desire to talk to her. He considered ignoring her now. And he might have, but at the moment even grubby tomboy Molly McGillivray was more welcome than his own dark thoughts.

“What are you doing over there?” he asked her.

“Suzette asked me to put some flowers in the room.”

Lachlan’s office manager and second in command, was all spit-and-polish efficiency. Joaquin couldn’t imagine she’d let Molly—wearing her grimy work shorts, faded orange T-shirt, and oil-streaked bandanna wrapped around her forehead to tame a riot of coppery curls—anywhere near one of the Moonstone’s pristine guest rooms. “Good thing she didn’t ask you to bring clean towels.” He grinned at the flash of green fire in Molly’s eyes, then when something else seemed to flicker in them, he added, “Lo siento. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t see Suzette sending you like—” he waved a hand in the direction of her grease-stained clothes “—that.”

“I was coming up, anyway,” Molly said stiffly.

“Oh.” He expected she’d do whatever it was she’d come up for and leave, but she didn’t. She stood there, so deep in thought she was making faces as she stared at him.

He frowned. “What?”

“Nothing.” She hesitated, then glanced toward the door that led from his balcony into his room. “Is she gone?”

“Is who gone?”

“The flavor of the night. Whoever you brought back with you last night.”

Joaquin stared at her. “What do you know about who I brought back with me last night?” he asked.

In point of fact he hadn’t brought anyone back. He’d considered it. He’d even gone so far as to leave the Grouper with a pretty blonde tourist from Germany. But she’d giggled too much. He’d walked on the beach with her, then remembered a “pressing phone call” he needed to wait for. She’d offered to wait with him, “to keep him busy while he was waiting,” she’d said with several more giggles. But he’d declined.

“I don’t know anything about her,” Molly said. “I just didn’t want her to come waltzing out in the middle of—” she broke off.

Joaquin lifted a brow. “In the middle of…?” He gave her an expectant look.

She made more faces. Then she shifted from one foot to the other and seemed to almost balance on her toes. She reminded him of Lachlan poised in goal, anticipating, ready.

For what?

No clue. She seemed to be poised on the brink of some great statement which she somehow couldn’t manage to get out. Well, if it had anything to do with disapproval of how he lived his life, she could take her opinions and stuff them!

“I need to talk to you,” she blurted at last. Her face was red, and not entirely from the sun, Joaquin didn’t think. Curious.

“Talk to me? About what?”

More faces. She balled her fingers into fists. “It’s complicated,” she said at last. She didn’t look at him.

“Complicated how?”

“Look,” she said fiercely with another suspicious glance at the door. “Is she in there or not?”

“There’s no one in my room,” Joaquin told her. He rose lazily and stood looking at her. “So if you’d like to go in…” he added, his voice laced with a lazy teasing innuendo.

If she could make innuendoes about his love life, he could do the same about hers.

“No!” She gulped air. “I don’t. I need—” She stopped again and looked almost anguished.

He’d never seen Molly McGillivray anguished. She’d always been cheerful and blunt and basically a sort of no-nonsense girl. “Is something wrong?” he asked her.

“No.” She took a breath. “I just…have a proposition for you.”

His eyes widened. “A proposition?”

What the hell did that mean?

“A business proposition,” Molly said. Her voice sounded raspy and she licked her lips as if they were parched. She looked hot. The Caribbean sun was baking.

“Why don’t you come over and sit down and tell me what you have in mind,” Joaquin said. Before you faint and fall off the damn balcony.

“I—all right.” She scrambled over the railing to his balcony, leaving a couple of greasy fingerprints on the white paint.

“Sit down,” Joaquin said. If she had engine grease on the seat of her shorts that was Lachlan’s problem. She was his sister, after all. “Do you want something to drink? Beer? A glass of wine? A soda?” There was a small but well-stocked refrigerator in his room.

“A beer,” Molly decided abruptly.

And before he could make a move to get one for her, she darted past him into his room and got one herself! Actually she got two and handed one to him.

“Thank you,” he said, deadpan.

She gave a jerky little nod. “My pleasure. Well, Lachlan’s actually,” she corrected herself. She twisted the cap off the beer as she paced around the small balcony, still not looking his way.

Joaquin watched, not speaking as she stopped with her back to him and stared out across the beach. Then she tipped her head back and took a long gulp of the beer before squaring narrow shoulders and turning to face him.

“I want to hire you,” she said.

“Hire me?” His gaze narrowed. He didn’t know the first thing about engines. Wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in them. Never had been. And just because Lachlan had been saying he should stay busy, that didn’t mean he needed some misguided female in steel-toed boots offering him work out of pity.

“No, thanks,” he bit out.

Molly’s fingers tightened on the beer bottle. “You haven’t even heard me out.”

“I don’t need to. I don’t know an oil pan from a tail rotor and I don’t want to.”

“I imagine even you could tell the difference between those two,” she retorted with a roll of her eyes. But then she hunched her shoulders. “It’s not that kind of work. It’s something you’re good at.”

“Not soccer,” he said flatly. “I’m not helping Lachlan with the soccer team.”

In a misguided attempt to cheer him up when he’d first arrived, Lachlan had invited him to help coach the kids’ soccer team. That was the last thing Joaquin wanted to do.

If he couldn’t play the sport he loved, he wanted nothing at all to do with it. It hurt too much to watch anyone do what he could do no longer. Especially when he was going to be doing what he didn’t want to do at all.

But Molly shook her head. “Not soccer.”

Joaquin couldn’t think of anything else he was good at. “Then what?”

Her fingers strangled the beer bottle again. She took a breath. “I need you to teach me—” another swift deep breath. And another. Hell, in a minute she’d hyperventilate! “—how to seduce a man.”

His jaw dropped. The beer bottle slipped from his hand.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Molly bent down and snatched the bottle off the deck, slapped it on the table, then ducked past him into the room and, returning with one of the bathroom towels, used it to blot up the beer with a gravity far exceeding the amount that had spilled.

His brain was still buzzing, wondering if it was the heat of the afternoon sun or the beer that had caused his hearing to go. “You want me to what?”

As she mopped he could see that the back of her slender neck was almost as red as her hair. And when she stood up, her face was flaming. “Never mind! Forget I said anything. It was a stupid idea!” She tried to dart past him into the room, but he hauled her up short.

She jerked her arm, but he wouldn’t let her go. “Sit down.” He still couldn’t believe it, but her behavior was making it seem more and more like his hearing wasn’t as bad as he’d thought.

“Did you say you want me to teach you to—” now he was having trouble getting his mouth around the words! “—seduce a man?”

Her shoulders lifted and her mouth twisted in one of those distasteful faces she’d been making earlier. But then she met his gaze squarely and seemed to defy him to make something of it. “Yes.” The word hissed through her teeth.

Good lord. He tried to bend his mind around it. His mind wasn’t that flexible. “Why?” he asked stupidly.

“For the usual reasons,” she snapped. “Why the hell do you think?”

He shrugged helplessly. He’d always thought he understood women very well. He sure as hell didn’t understand this one!

She sighed and squared her shoulders beneath the gargantuan T-shirt, then said evenly, “Look. It’s simple. I’m thirty-one years old.”

He was surprised. Of course she had to be, as she was only a couple of years younger than he was. But somehow he’d never thought of her as any older than when he’d first met her. She’d been about seventeen then. Still, “Thirty-one?” he echoed doubtfully. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! I’m not ancient.”

“I know that,” he said quickly. “I thought…younger. You look—”

“Like a thirteen-year-old boy?” Her mouth twisted.

Yes, actually. In those clothes. Though she sure as hell hadn’t at Lachlan’s wedding in that borrowed dress. But he wasn’t going there, either. “Fine,” he said at length. “You’re thirty-one. So what? Like you said, it’s not ancient.”

“Not yet. But it’s time I got married.”

“Married?”

He’d never even seen her with a boyfriend! It wasn’t that he’d thought she might prefer women, it was that she’d never given any indication of preferring anyone at all. Some people didn’t.

“Not everyone has to get married,” he said, in case she had suddenly begun to worry about it. “Lots of people lead perfectly happy single lives.”

“You, for example,” she said tartly. “I know that. But I presume that’s because you want to.”

“Damn right.”

“So, fine. Hooray for you. But I don’t want to.”

He blinked at her vehemence. “You don’t?”

“No!” She took a quick breath, then said more moderately, “No. I don’t. As surprising as it may seem, I want a husband. I want a family. I always have.” She said the words with almost as much bluntness as he was accustomed to hearing from her. And yet they weren’t disinterested. There was an emotional edge underlying them. She sounded vulnerable.

Molly McGillivray? Vulnerable?

“Your sister wears army boots?” he’d said incredulously to Lachlan the first time he’d met her.

And Lachlan had agreed with a wince as he’d rubbed his shin. “And she knows how to use them.”

That was the Molly McGillivray he knew. Not this one.

Now he rubbed the back of his neck and tried to think. The very notion of him helping some girl with marriage on her mind boggled his. Marriage wasn’t even a word in his active vocabulary, despite his mother’s recent not-so-subtle hints.

When it came to staying power, his romances—if indeed anyone beyond tabloid journalists dared call them that—rarely lasted longer than the half life of a loaf of bread. Which was the way he liked it.

In the past three weeks, he’d flirted with dozens of women and been delighted to have them flirt with him. Someday he would doubtless marry and do his duty by the family name.

But he was in no hurry. None at all.

Besides, what did seduction have to do with marriage? Unless Molly was planning to seduce some man, then kidnap him and haul him to the altar. He gave her a narrow assessing look.

“You want me to teach you how to nab some unsuspecting tourist?”

“Of course not!”

“Well, then—”

“He’s not an unsuspecting tourist!”

“You’ve got someone in mind?”

“Of course.”

“You do?” He couldn’t keep the astonishment out of his voice. His mind darted to all the eligible men on the island. “Um…anyone I know?”

“I don’t think you’ve met him. We grew up together. He lives in Savannah now—and elsewhere. His name is Carson Sawyer.”

No, Joaquin hadn’t met him. But he’d heard the name. Carson Sawyer was the “local boy who made good.”

“You think we’re driven to succeed?” Lachlan had once said to him when they were working their butts off. “You should meet Carson.”

Carson Sawyer, last Joaquin had heard, was worth about as much as a small Mediterranean country.

And this was the man Molly had set her sights on?

Talk about aiming for the moon!

“I don’t think—”

“We’re engaged.”

“You and Carson Sawyer?” Joaquin couldn’t have disguised his shock if his life had depended on it. Tomboy Molly with all her rough edges and a hotshot, fast-track business tycoon like Carson Sawyer?

But Molly was nodding seriously. “Since I was fourteen and he was fifteen. Since he went to sea.”

“That’s—” Joaquin did the math in his head “—seventeen years ago!”

Molly shrugged. “We weren’t in any hurry. It was right. We knew it. And we both had other things to do.”

“But—”

“We were both happy,” she insisted. “It worked. For both of us. We both did what we wanted to do. But now—” she lifted her shoulders “—now it’s time.”

“To seduce him?” His mind still wasn’t that flexible.

“Haven’t you been listening to anything I said?” she demanded.

“Yes, of course. It just seems a little, um…bloodless? Cut-and-dried?” Joaquin was bilingual, but he would have had trouble with this in any language at all.

“Exactly,” Molly agreed, surprising him. Then she went on. “That’s the point. It shouldn’t be ‘bloodless.’ It should be wonderful, moving, passionate.” Molly’s voice became animated, the color rose in her cheeks again. She looked eager and alive and hopeful. And then, as quickly as it had come, her eagerness vanished and her shoulders slumped. “Only it isn’t happening.”

“It?”

“The passion. The…sex stuff.”

She didn’t want him to teach her about sex, did she? God almighty!

“He treats me like his pal. Which I am, of course,” Molly said hastily. “But he needs to see me in a new light. So I—thought maybe you could help me.”

He opened his mouth. Stood there. Stunned. Then closed it again.

“You are good at it,” Molly said firmly. “I’ve seen you. Lots of times.”

“Seen me what?” he demanded, visions of her spying on his bedroom activities making him decidedly uncomfortable.

“Pick up women. Get picked up by them. Flirt with them. You know,” she said a little desperately. “I’m not good at that stuff. But I can learn,” she added.

He looked at her doubtfully. “You want me to teach you how to seduce your boyfriend?”

“Fiancé. Why not? It’s how I learned to repair engines. It’s how I learned to fly. I went to an expert.”

“I thought Hugh taught you to fly.”

“I’m not asking Hugh to teach me how to seduce Carson! And I’m not asking Lachlan, either, so don’t even suggest it!” Abruptly Molly headed for the wall to climb over it and leave. “Never mind. Forget it. I shouldn’t have bothered. I should have known you’d think it was stupid.” She turned on him. “If you say one word—”

“I’m not saying anything.” He caught her arm again and swung her around so that she landed on the chaise and stared up at him. He stood over her, breathing hard, aware of a sudden new energy pumping through him. “Don’t be so damn quick to jump to conclusions. What do you need to know?”

“If I knew I wouldn’t be asking, would I?” Molly folded her arms across her chest. “I just want to make him look at me differently when he comes for the island homecoming. I want him to see me as a woman. He never has.”

“Never?”

“Well, not never. But not for a while. We had things to do. We didn’t want to just get married and have babies. So we got engaged. It took the pressure off.”

“It did?” Joaquin shook his head, dazed at the logic. “How?”

“I didn’t have to worry about finding a boyfriend, and he didn’t have to worry about finding a girlfriend. We had each other, but we could go ahead and do our own things. Then someday, when the time was right, we’d get married. But he’s so busy, he doesn’t remember.”

“So why haven’t you reminded him?”

“I’m not begging Carson to marry me! He’s got to want to. And he will,” she said stoutly. “I just need to make him sit up and take notice. But I don’t quite know where to start. That’s where you come in. I can pay you.”

“I don’t want your damn money!”

“Well, too bad. I’m not a charity case!”

“No. You’re a nutcase! How much time do you have to turn into a femme fatale?”

“Ten days.”

“Ten days? That’s all?”

Molly’s chin lifted. “If you’re any good, that should be long enough!”

“Or if you are,” he countered.

She didn’t flinch. Much.

They glared at each other. All he could see were her deep-green eyes, her face full of freckles, the smudge of oil on her nose and that grubby bandanna covering her forehead. For the first time in a month, he couldn’t even see the emptiness of the horizon.

“It’s a deal,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

CHAPTER TWO

IT WAS QUITE POSSIBLY the stupidest thing she’d ever done.

Once she was back home, staring in the bathroom mirror as she stripped off her grimy shorts and T-shirt to take a shower, Molly even said so out loud.

“Stupid,” she told herself. “Daft. Insane. You are a complete whacko. All of the above.”

She still couldn’t believe she had actually asked Joaquin Santiago to teach her to seduce a man. Even less could she believe he’d said yes.

Though if she thought about it, maybe that wasn’t so hard to believe. It was no skin off his ego, after all, if she was too dim to even grasp the fundamentals. He wasn’t the one who was going to look like an idiot.

The very thought of it made her shudder. In fact it made her feel more naked than she was, stepping into the shower right now.

But the truth was, she was desperate. The realization that things were changing had crept up on her slowly, beginning nearly two years ago when Lachlan’s relationship with Fiona had almost ended in disaster.

Everyone could see how right they were for each other. And yet they almost hadn’t made it happen. Lachlan had very nearly blown it.

Still, she’d assured herself then, that was Lachlan. Her oldest brother had always been totally focused on the soccer pitch and totally clueless in real life. But then sane, sensible Hugh had nearly screwed things up, too, when he’d let Sydney get away!

It had taken him months to find her. And he was damned lucky, to Molly’s way of thinking, that Syd loved him as much as she did.

Both her brothers had been incredibly lucky. They’d come to their senses before it was too late. But some people didn’t.

Hugh’s first love, Carin, and her husband, Nathan, for example, had stayed apart for years after their first encounter. And Nathan’s brothers, according to the island telegraph, had had their own relationship problems.

The path to true love, she knew all too well, was fraught with peril. So it made good sense to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to her and Carson. The thought had been growing ever since Lachlan’s marriage. It had come into sharper focus after Hugh’s wedding. But it hadn’t taken on a real sense of urgency until Duncan appeared.

Duncan was an absolute dreamboat. He was, without a doubt, the most gorgeous male Molly had ever set eyes on. He had eyes as blue as the sea, a dimple in his left cheek that begged to be touched, and a smile so teasing and engaging that every woman he flashed it at nearly swooned at the sight.

And he was only four months old.

The boy would be a lady-killer when he grew up.

One look at Duncan Dunbar McGillivray, her drop-dead-gorgeous nephew, and Molly had fallen like a ton of bricks. Every maternal instinct she’d ever buried beneath engine grease and motor oil and a baseball cap was suddenly on alert.

She caught herself chucking him under the chin and tickling his toes and playing peek-a-boo. She hummed long-forgotten lullabies while she cleaned carburetors, and snatches of old nursery rhymes ran through her head while she welded metal frame.

“Who the hell is the Grand Old Duke of York?” Hugh had demanded last week. “Don’t tell me Grantham got promoted.”

Lord David Grantham hadn’t—and never would—ascend to a dukedom. “No. Dave’s still Dave, as far as I know,” Molly had mumbled, embarrassed, then clamped her lips together and tried not to think in rhyme the rest of the afternoon.

But she still volunteered to baby-sit without being asked. She bought stuffed dogs and school-of-fish mobiles and cardboard books by the dozen. She relished every smile Duncan bestowed on her and cherished every bubble he blew and every noise he made.

That she was such a sap when it came to babies astonished her. She’d always liked kids. She’d been a teacher for several years before she’d decided she’d rather be a mechanic. But this wasn’t just “liking kids” this was different.

This was Duncan. With eyes like his father’s and a nose like his grandma’s and a glimmer of his mother’s—or his auntie Molly’s—red in his hair, in Duncan Molly saw hints of the children that someday she might have. And she found herself rocking him and imagining the day when she would rock a child of hers and Carson’s.

In the region of her heart, she began to feel pangs she’d never ever felt before.

And that was when she knew she and Carson had waited long enough. Carson had made plenty of millions. She had a job she loved. Their engagement had served its purpose. She wanted more.

She couldn’t say Carson felt the same.

The last time he’d come home, eager to show off her nephew, Molly had taken the baby with her to meet him. She was sure he’d take one look at this wonderful new human being and would instantly understand.

He’d been…surprised…to say the least.

“Who’s this?” he’d asked. It had been seven months since he’d been home, so Molly supposed he might not have known Fiona was expecting. But surely just looking at Duncan, he would know.

But before she could reply, he’d gone on, “Are you trying to tell me something, Mol’?” And then he’d shrugged and said a little ruefully, “You could have just told me you’d found somebody else.”