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- Herausgeber: Bastei Lübbe
- Kategorie: Erotik
- Serie: International Passion Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Her heart beating fast, Mara struggles to get through the crowd at Seville airport. Will she recognize her best friend’s shy brother from her schooldays? Even though she and Andy haven’t seen each other for ages, Mara accepted his unexpected invitation without a second thought. A change of scene is going to do her good and hopefully take her mind off the end of her engagement and the many sleepless nights the break-up has caused. The brawny, tanned stranger who waits for her at the airport, however, bears little resemblance to the boy from her past. Due to the beauty and magic of Seville, Mara admits to feelings that she never thought she would ever have ...
Sizzling love stories packed with erotic suspense - this e-book series features self-contained erotic love stories in picturesque settings.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 128
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
About the Series
About the Book
About the Author
Private Desire — A Kiss in Seville
Copyright
Dedication
Quote
June
July
August
September
Epilogue
Next episode
About the Series
Sizzling love stories packed with erotic suspense — this e-book series features self-contained erotic love stories in picturesque settings.
About the Book
Her heart beating fast, Mara struggles to get through the crowd at Seville airport. Will she recognize her best friend’s shy brother from her schooldays? Even though she and Andy haven’t seen each other for ages, Mara accepted his unexpected invitation without a second thought. A change of scene is going to do her good and hopefully take her mind off the end of her engagement and the many sleepless nights the break-up has caused. The brawny, tanned stranger who waits for her at the airport, however, bears little resemblance to the boy from her past. Due to the beauty and magic of Seville, Mara admits to feelings that she never thought she would ever have …
About the Author
Julia Moreno is a writer of noir novels. She lives in Italy but feels European. Every two years she writes a book, but reads three books per week.
Julia Moreno
A Kiss in Seville
Translated by Monica Bay
BASTEI ENTERTAINMENT
Bastei Entertainment is an imprint of Bastei Lübbe AG
Copyright © 2014 by Sperling & Kupfer Editori S.p.A.
Published by arrangement with Thèsis Contents S.r.l.
Title of the original Italian edition: “Un bacio a Siviglia”
Copyright © 2016 by Bastei Lübbe AG, Schanzenstraße 6-20, 51063 Cologne, Germany
Written by Julia Moreno
Translated by Monica Bay
Edited by Sasha Lovejoy
Project management: Sarah Pelekies
Cover design: Christin Wilhelm, www.grafic4u.de
Cover illustration: © shutterstock/Svetlana Prikhnenko | shutterstock/elisekurenbina | shutterstock/conrado
eBook production: Urban SatzKonzept, Düsseldorf
ISBN 978-3-7325-1566-0
www.bastei-entertainment.com
The events presented in this novel are imaginary, and any resemblance to real people or actual facts must be considered coincidental. Everything here is fictional, except for the setting. No one could ever make up a city like Seville.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
June
1
The car stops at the terminal.
Mara looks at the sky through the dashboard, and what she sees is a series of miserable lighter and darker shades of gray. The worst May in recent years in Rome (?) has become an equally unbearable June. Not a day passes without this fine drizzle that makes it seem like November.
She opens the door and gets her umbrella. She took the smallest she could find in the house, as she won’t need it in Seville. There, the climate’s dry, and it never rains; that’s what she read in the tour guides. It is one of many things that convinced her to go.
Her father is about to get out with her.
Mara freezes, tense. She doesn’t want to be walked into the airport like a frightened little girl who can’t make it on her own.
“Dad, we had a deal. You leave me here and go back home.”
“Okay. But call me as soon as you land.”
She stretches towards him, giving him a light kiss on the cheek.
“I promise. And don’t worry, everything will be fine.”
It’s not true, and they both know it. Nothing is fine, and maybe never will be. To be left after twelve years of love, a month from the wedding, kills you inside. It means seeing your world disappear, being swallowed by a tornado. You find yourself alone, and everything reminds you of the past.
Like the blue bag she is dragging under the rain: she bought it for the honeymoon, a couple of days before Luca changed his mind.
You coward, you bastard, you liar, you fucker. Insulting him makes her feel better. Last month she invented poems, rhymes, swear words, all dedicated to him. She conceives them, says them, recites them and for a moment she feels well again, carefree, as if all the anguish had turned into vapor. It only lasts for a second, then she falls back down in the hole into which she suddenly plunged.
Mara can’t wait to leave. The last few days have been a nightmare. She was torn between her wish to leave, and her parents’ attempts to make her stay. The thought of her alone, in a foreign city, surrounded by people she didn’t know, worried them a lot.
They imagined all sorts of risks and catastrophes, and seeing the anguish in their eyes had been a test she had been afraid she wouldn’t pass. If she did pass it, if she hasn’t changed her mind, it’s thanks to her sister. Tatiana has spurred and supported her, pushing her out of the warm shelter in which she had always hidden. “Go, explore, live. Nothing bad will happen to you.” That’s what she said to her. These words became Mara’s mantra.
She repeats those words to herself as she checks in her luggage, as she walks barefoot through the metal detector, and again as she steps into the aeroplane. When she finds her seat, a strange relief fills her. It’s done, the decision’s made, there’s no going back.
Finally the flight attendant closes the door. The airplane begins to move, to roll along faster and faster, to swallow the asphalt track, and finally peels off the ground and flies. Mara looks down and sees her universe become smaller and smaller, and finally disappear.
2
When the door of the plane reopens, it’s been little more than two hours, but it seems like a different planet. To welcome her on the ladder, Mara finds the sun and the bluest sky she has ever seen. The light is blinding, so that she has to shade her eyes to make out the contours of the airport. Seville is written in big letters on a long, low building: that’s where the passengers go, walking in a disciplined line. Mara follows them. The afternoon is really hot and the asphalt radiates dry heat: it’s as if a thousand hairdryers were blowing up from her feet.
Inside the airport, on the other hand, the air conditioning is extremely cold. Mara finds a chair in the baggage claim area, and waits for her blue bag. To be honest, she wishes she had to wait there forever — that’s how much she’s scared of walking through the sliding doors and facing a stranger.
Her pride is to blame for the fact that she is here now. In one of the many sleepless nights that followed Luca’s email, she had concluded that humiliation is only fought in one way: by taking the bull by the horns. So she got up, turned on her laptop and went to her Facebook profile. With two furious clicks she deleted the info: “Engaged with Luca Molteni.” Another click and Tamara Lucetti, known as Mara, was single again. But it wasn’t enough, hence the post she had scribbled down quickly: “I’ve been left almost at the altar for another woman: I’ve been humiliated and have no self-esteem. I’m looking for a way to get through this. Any ideas?”
In one night it had become her most popular post ever. And in between the deluge of likes (what is there to like, really?), clichés (he’s the one who’s missing out, you’ll be fine), explicit invitations (by men her father’s age), she got a message she did not expect. That name, Andy Rusconi, brought her back to a different era of her life.
She used to know someone called Andy Rusconi. It was her friend Ilaria’s shy and ugly brother. She and Ilaria had been classmates and best friends for that ephemeral period of adolescence. Now, she has no idea of what happened to her, as if she never existed. It didn’t take much for them to lose contact; Mara’s relationahip with Luca had already loosened the strings. After high school, when they enrolled in different faculties in two different cities, they had definitively parted ways.
It was unlikely that the sender was the same Andy Rusconi. It was a very common name in the outskirts of Milan. And yet …
Hi, I’m Ilaria’s brother, do you remember me? Let me come straight to the point. I read your request and I think I have an idea. You’re a teacher, right? So you have a couple of months of holiday. I have an ice cream shop in the center of Seville. Every summer I hire seasonal staff, and if you want, there is a spot waiting for you at the counter. Free housing, decent wages, exhausting schedules, but not tiring enough to keep you from enjoying a cheerful and sunny city. What do you say? You can come as soon as school’s over. Andy
Had she not heard the news of Luca and Carola’s forthcoming wedding, as early as July sixth, maybe she wouldn’t have been brave enough to say yes. But she was desperate to leave the city and the humiliation, so she made up her mind to take the offer in Seville.
But now that she is here, her mother’s words found their way through her insecurity.
“What do you know about Andy Rusconi? Maybe he’s a criminal, maybe the ice cream shop is just a cover, maybe he makes pornographic films …”
The porn film suggestion had made Mara and Tatiana laugh their heads off, for the first and last time in that very long month. But here and now, alone in a foreign city, she doesn’t find it very funny anymore. She really knows nothing about Andy Rusconi, not even if he’s coming to pick her up, or if she’ll have to catch a cab to the ice cream shop.
After all, she didn’t know him back then either, when she studied with Ilaria and spent entire afternoons in Villa Rusconi. It was the prettiest house Mara had ever seen: a palace outside Milan, overlooking Lake Como. A driver would pick them up at school, with a smokey gray Mercedes, and at home they’d find a freshly made meal prepared by the cook. It was an alien world to Mara.
Andy was kind but very reserved, and she exchanged a few words with him only a few times. He never showed up at his sister’s many swimming pool parties. Maybe because, depite his family’s social prestige, he wasn’t popular: he had acne and was too skinny, which made of him the ugly duckling in a family of beautiful people (his Mum even used to work as a model, though just for mail-order catalogues).
Based on his Facebook profile, it seemed that Andy probably hadn’t changed: his Facebook profile picture shows an icecream cone, and the only photos with people were taken at parties where she couldn’t pick out which person he was. So now, clutching the handle of her blue bag, she walks to the sliding doors with a sense of venturing into the unknown.
It’s just like in Andy’s group photos: she doesn’t see anyone she can recognize as Andy amidst the people waiting. She keeps walking, cutting through the small crowd, rummaging in her purse for her phone with her free hand. Don’t be anxious, she tells herself, waiting patiently, he will come.
“You look just like you did in highschool.”
The voice is so close that it makes her gasp. Mara turns around.
The man in front of her has nothing to do with the boy she remembers. At least twenty pounds of muscles have filled out his shoulders, arms and chest. Not even a hint of pimples. Insetad, he sports a south-lands tan that stands out against the white T-shirt he’s wearing.
“You’re Andy?” she can’t help saying, and she feels stupid. Of course it’s Andy. You can see how he looks like his mother; he has the same green eyes, the same high cheekbones. Even the same sly smile, which suddenly makes her feel uncomfortable. She does not give him time to answer and shakes her head, furious with herself. “Sorry, I asked a stupid question. But you have changed an awful lot.”
“Thank God for that,” he laughs, taking her bag. “Is this all you’ve got?”
“The bare minimum, just until I get used to the new environment. Then I’ll do some wild shopping.”
In the car, the conversation turns to the classic banalities that fill silences at all latitudes. How was the flight, how’s the weather in Italy, is it always so hot here … In the meantime, the streets slide by amidst chaotic traffic — and suddenly there is Seville, the city Mara has, until now, only seen online.
A maze of alleys to lose yourself in, old and colorful houses with an exotic touch. Andy stops in front of a yellow-ochre building with windows edged in red, and many plants on the balconies.
“Where are we?”
“This is the first house I want to show you. There are two possibilities for where you can stay. Come in.”
Mara follows him into a door that leads to a patio. Enchanted, she stops to gaze upon the marble pillars, the arches, the fountain in the middle, geraniums and roses growing together with climbing plants she doesn’t know the name of, and the walls covered with azulejos. She notices that Andy is waiting for her at the base of a staircase.
“Sorry,” she says, hurrying to catch up. They climb two flights, reaching a balcony running the circumference of the patio. He opens one of the doors leading off the balcony.
“This is the flat. It’s my friend’s, Inés. She’ll be in Argentina for the whole summer, her mother has health problems. She would be very pleased to know you’re looking after her house and her cat. But if you don’t want to live alone, there’s a room available at the aunt of my business partner. You can choose.”
The cat’s name is Geronimo. He is sitting still, with pride fitting that of an Apache leader. He’s black, with a long fur and penetrating green eyes. Andy strokes him, and Geronimo lets him — it’s a sign he knows him well. Mara can’t stop looking around, overcome with what she sees: a myriad of colors, objects, photographs, pillows, perfumes, in a wise chaos that wraps you like a caress.
“I’ll stay here. It’s beautiful. And the cat will keep me company.”
3
The ice cream shop is just across from the cathedral, on the main road in Seville. Actually it’s an ice cream bar, the coolest in town, boasts Andy. Bright and spacious rooms, tables inside and outside, and a showcase of ice cream that looks like a carousel, with a myriad of flavors she’d never heard of. Her new colleagues seem like good people, most of all making her feel welcome at once.
“This is a multiethnic place. The bartender is named Ian, he’s Irish. Chad comes from Senegal, Ramo is from Ghana. You’ll be at the counter with Anita, she’s a local.”
