Page 35 of Take Me Tender

Something…familiar.

Oh, shit.

Oh. Shit.

Scattered snatches of conversation shifted in his journalist’s mind, coming together in a story that he couldn’t ignore or dismiss. Slowly, his gaze lifted from the screen to Cassandra’s anxious face.

He scanned her chin, the shape of her bottom lip, the arch of her eyebrows. “She’s your sister,” he said. “Nikki’s your sister.”

“Donor half-sibling,” Cassandra whispered. “And Jay…Jay, you have to promise me…”

He wasn’t going to like this, that was a given. Just as he didn’t like knowing he’d fallen head over his ass in love for the first time in over thirty years, just as he didn’t like that the woman he’d fallen for was a crazy-making female who couldn’t even have both eyes the same damn color like everyone else. He could never let Nikki know, he decided. He could never let her find out what she’d done to him.

“Promise me, Jay,” Cassandra said. “Promise me you won’t tell Nikki.”

Oh, hell. And now he really didn’t like the fact that he had a second secret to keep from her.

Fifteen

You must be a Lotus, unfolding its petals when the Sun rises in the sky, unaffected by the slush where it is born or even the water which sustains it!

—SAI BABA, INDIAN RELIGIOUS FIGURE

Shanna was drowning. Her heavy limbs took her down through the saltwater that filled the Olympic-sized pool, down toward the tiled coat of arms her father had ginned up from an ancestral legacy as deep as a sheet of Kleenex. The heated water stroked like silk against her skin and she reveled in the calming sensation. Closing her eyes, she spread her arms wide and embraced the fall, sinking into the serene moment.

A muted, liquid crash made it through her water-deafened ears. Her eyes flew open, but there was only a riot of champagne bubbles in her sight and then the hard grasp of a hand on her ankle. She gasped, inhaling water, as instinct made her fight the strange touch dragging her upward.

She breached the surface, coughing and sputtering, to face the one who’d manhandled her and still continued to hold her with a firm grip on her upper arm. Jorge.

“Wha—” She couldn’t get out a whole word before the coughing took over again.

His Spanish sounded more like Anglo-Saxon curses. In two long-armed strokes, he towed her to the side, then cradled her into his arms to mount the steps.

She was plopped onto a lounge chair and a beach towel was wrapped around her. When she looked up, the sun was behind him, turning him to a dark, threatening figure.

“How could you?” he demanded.

Water was still streaming into her eyes. How could she what? She coughed again. “What are you…” It took her a minute to catch her breath. “…talking about?”

“What were you trying to do to yourself?”

Relax? Revel in the warm water and sunny day? But then she thought how she must have appeared to him, spread-eagled and drifting downward. She coughed once more to rid herself of the last of the water. “It’s just something I used to do as a kid. Give myself…give myself over to the water, I guess you’d say.”

Jorge released an explosive sigh and moved so that the sun was no longer directly behind him. “You frightened me.”

“I guess.” Shanna took in the sight of him in his drenched work uniform of khakis and a Santos Landscaping shirt. “You need to dry off, too.”

He tried waving her away, but she rose from the lounge chair and, skirting the heavy work boots he’d managed to unlace before diving in for her, went inside to find fresh towels.

She scooped up a double-wide beach towel, then scurried to one of the downstairs guest baths for something smaller for his hair. As she started to hurry back, her wet feet lost purchase on the tile and she reached out to stop her slide. Her flailing hand caught the medicine cabinet over the sink and the door popped open, tumbling items from the shelf into the sink below.

Making a face, she stepped carefully back and began returning the sundries to the cabinet. Two kinds of sun-screen, a bottle of acid controller, and then another, almost full bottle of oxycodone prescribed to her mother. Shanna frowned at the painkiller for a moment, remembering that it had been mislaid on Robin Ryan’s last visit to the Malibu house. So here’s where it had landed. She tucked it beside the Pepcid, then reached for the small box now lying alone in the bottom of the porcelain sink.

A convenience pack of condoms.

The back of her neck burned and she hastily shoved it away, glancing over her shoulder to make sure Jorge hadn’t followed her into the house.

The last thing she wanted was for him to find her fondling prophylactics. They’d shared that one kiss while painting at the Pearson house, and then he’d stopped by this place earlier in the week “to check on how his workers were doing,” but he’d spent more time with her than with the men trimming the hedges.

He’d kissed her then, too.

But she was trying hard not to think of where that was leading. Like a few moments before when she was floating in the pool, she was trying to enjoy the moment instead of worrying about what lay ahead.

For the last few weeks—months? years?—the future had seemed so empty to her. She’d latched on to Jay, hoping he would fill her void, but that relationship had drifted away like dry sand in a stiff breeze.

Returning to the pool with her stack of towels, Shanna promised herself she wasn’t so desperate that she would think of Jorge in any but the most here-and-now sort of terms.

And here-and-now he was, looking soggy and more than a little self-conscious as he dripped, still fully dressed, onto the pool deck. Shanna tossed him a couple of the towels and used a third to wring out her wet hair.

“Do you want me to see if I can find something of Dad’s for you to wear?” she asked. “I’m sure there are sweatpants upstairs.”

He shook his head. “I’ll be all right.” He started to blot his clothes.

“That’s not going to work very well,” she advised him. “At least take off your shirt so we can spread it out to dry.”

Though he halted his ineffectual blotting, his hand merely hovered over the buttons at his throat. His hesitation puzzled her.

“I won’t look,” she said, smiling a little to show she was joking.

“Promise?” he muttered.

Unsure if he was kidding now, she half-turned as she fashioned her long towel into a below-the-armpits sarong. He’d already seen her modest black bikini, of course, but his discomfort was making her uneasy. And too aware of her near-nudity.

From the corner of her eye, she saw him fling the wet fabric toward a woven-backed chair where it landed in a heap. She crossed to it herself, tsking a little, and spread it out across the seat. Then she turned to him. “You’ll never get it—”

The word “dry” didn’t make it off her tongue. Instead it stuck there like a postage stamp, as she took in the sight of Jorge, half-naked. Oh, wow.

His chest rippled. Beneath fine-grained, dark golden skin, there was a wealth of working-man muscle. And to keep it all from being too extraordinarily beautiful, the dark tattoos scattered across his flesh gave him an edge no amount of Method acting would lend to even the most leading of Hollywood’s men.

“They’re gang tattoos,” he said, his voice abrupt. “Most of them, anyway.”

They certainly weren’t the colorful illustrations you saw at the mall or the gym. The tribal armbands the big-wave surfers had inked around their biceps and the Disney characters adorning their girlfriends’ ankles looked nothing like the raw black images sprinkled on Jorge’s chest and upper arms.

A primitive thrill shot up Shanna’s spine as she drew closer to him, intent on getting a better look. It was the same thrill, she realized, that she’d felt years ago when she’d gone with some friends to a Native American powwow at a desert reservation east of L.A. That day, the primitive beat of the drums had created inside her this exact combination of excitement and dread.

Jorge’s gaze was on her face, she could feel it, though her own couldn’t break away from the canvas of golden skin in front of her.

A tombstone adorned one heavy bicep. RIP, it read, and then two dates. Whoever it memorialized had died at 17 years old. On the opposite arm was a sombrero leaning on a machete that was dripping blood.

Other symbols, stylized letters that were an acronym she didn’t recognize, an Aztec Indian head, and an intricately drawn sun decorated the right side of his chest and belly. But over his heart at slight center-left—she blinked, trying to believe her eyes—over his heart was the profile of a woman’s face.

Her face.

Could it be? Was that her head and torso in profile, a replica of that old advertising for Decadence candy bars? It certainly looked like it was, with her chin tilted back, her hair flowing down her neck, her eyes closed as if she was savoring…or anticipating…

Shanna watched her hand reach out. Slowly, slowly, as if it might disappear if she moved with any speed, she placed the pad of her forefinger against the image.

Jorge’s muscles flinched beneath her touch, but the tattoo remained. Her gaze lifted to his.

“A decade ago you were like…a…a pinup girl for me and my friends,” he said.

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