Page 15 of South Beach Bodyguards

She made a face. “I don’t like coffee in any form.”

That made her an enigma to me. I rolled my window down, wanting some fresh air, even if it wasn’t fresh. “When was the last time you went to the beach?” I asked her, craving cool waves over my skin. Maybe a hard swim would knock some of the restlessness out of me.

“I don’t know. Maybe last September? Something like that.”

“I was there in October. Why don’t you grab your bathing suit at the house and we can go this afternoon.” Technically, that didn’t fall under the umbrella of proper security techniques, but it wasn’t like I wasn’t going to take my gun, no matter what. But then I thought about leaving it rolled up in my towel and decided that wasn’t such a great idea. I could hear Alejandro telling me to go for it, but I wasn’t as much of a rule breaker as he was. Actually, I wasn’t a rule breaker at all. “Scratch that. It’s a bad idea until we know what’s going on.” My number one priority had to be keeping her safe, not cooling down in the ocean.

“I don’t understand why anyone would want to intentionally hurt me,” Isabel said. “I am not the type of person who makes enemies.”

“This isn’t about you,” I said, as I fished my sunglasses out of the glove box. “This is about my dad. You have to know he does shit that is not legal.”

She frowned. “I didn’t know that. What do you mean?”

She couldn’t be serious. “Mickey firmly believes in the motto of the Beach. If you’re not indicted, you’re not invited. His whole social circle is criminal. You can’t call it mob, but they’re all trying to get away with what they can in the pursuit of big money. This town was built on that principle.”

“Does my mom know that?” She sounded aghast.

I suppose I couldn’t blame her but at the same time I was floored by her innocence and naiveté. Was there ever a time when I was that freaking unaware of how people were always out to get what they could? If there was, I didn’t remember it. Actually, that wasn’t true. I had a memory of being four and my parents were throwing a big party, right after we moved into the house in Coral Gables. My father thought it made him made him look respectable, that somehow he and his former stripper wife were shaking the glitter of South Beach off of them and living the American dream. I had a babysitter, but she had been just as eager as me to crash the party, and I had been young enough to assume that my parents were good people, who were well liked. But by the end of that party, I knew that my mother was letting a man who I had never seen before suck on her bare breasts. And that a lot of adults did drugs, got into physical fights, and gave a shit about no one but themselves.

My parents weren’t exempted from any of that, my father doing a line of coke off the fireplace mantle, and it was like discovering Santa isn’t real. It shattered my perception of my world, of the people entrusted with teaching me morality. I didn’t understand it then, couldn’t articulate it at four years old, but it was the day I found my own moral compass.

Apparently Isabel had her own moral compass as well. “I’m pretty sure your mother knows Mickey likes to dabble in shady business dealings.” Like my mother, Kim was a former stripper. Though obviously that didn’t make her a bad person, I just meant that she had seen a thing or two in her time, and wasn’t naive. I liked Kim a lot because she was strong but sweet. I knew that after she retired from dancing, she had worked high-end retail sales to support herself and Isabel. I also knew that she was more than happy to never have to work again, and who the fuck could blame her for that?

A year with Mickey had given her a healthy nest egg and a house.

The house I’d grown up in. Which pissed me off, I could admit it. That house should be mine. Not because I wanted it, but because it was my right. My due. At the very least Mickey should have asked me how I felt about him giving it to Kim, and offered it to me first. But no, he’d seen that house as a convenient way to hide some money, not as a sentimental place where he had raised his only child.

Yep. An asshole.

Who still got under my skin.

“What makes you think she knows?”

“She knows where the money is kept. My father had to trust her enough to marry her. He would have given her access to some of the secrets. Not all of them. But some of them, some of the money.”

“What money?”

I didn’t feel like explaining everything to her. I found a parking spot in front of Starbucks. I swung into it, ignoring the car honking behind me when I paused to parallel park. “The money.”

“That clears it right up.” She sounded petulant.

I started to get out of the car, but she sat there like she wasn’t planning to get out of the car. “You have to come with me,” I told her.

“I don’t feel like it.”

“And I don’t care how you feel.” I slammed my door shut and stomped around to hers. I was tired and hungry and I needed caffeine. I was pissed at my father and I was worried about Isabel’s safety and her health. She still didn’t seem right in the head after the incident and I was afraid that somehow someone would get the jump on me and kill her. It was really damn annoying that I had no clue what any of this was about. I yanked her door open. “Get out.”

Her eyes widened and her bottom lip trembled. Tears rose in her eyes. “Fine. God.”

Fuck, she was tearing up like she was going to legitimately cry. Fuck, fuck, and fuck. “Don’t cry.” But it didn’t sound kind or reassuring. It sounded bossy and dickheaded.

“I’m not!” She got out of the car, and shoved past me to the sidewalk. She stood there, waiting, her arms over her chest.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and it didn’t sound brimming with sincerity, even though I meant it. I was just never good at conveying emotions.

She was silent, just going into the coffeeshop when I held the door open for her. She didn’t acknowledge me at all while we waited in line, but after I ordered my coffee, and the cashier addressed her in Spanish, she answered in kind and they ended up having a five minute conversation I didn’t understand, though I was pretty sure it was about me, given that the older woman behind the counter kept pointing to me and laughing. One day I was going to learn Spanish for real, instead of the few phrases that I had mastered. It had taken me forever during my teen years to figure out that the little old ladies in the grocery store weren’t asking me to move out of the way, but were asking me to get things down off of top shelves. I was mortified when at eighteen a friend told me when we were in the store what a woman was saying. I realized I had spent at least three years shifting away when women spoke to me, which was the exact opposite of what they had wanted.

“Do you know her?” I asked Isabel after I paid and we moved down to the pickup area.

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