The Return of His Caribbean Heiress
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Lydia San Andres
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Prologue
Eighteen-year-old Leandro Díaz was a poet, and therefore, well versed in all the intricacies of love. He didn’t know he had been wrong about all of it until love walloped him between the shoulder blades one bright summer day.
To be fair, it was a ball that struck him first. It wasn’t until he twisted around to look reprovingly at the little boy he’d assumed was the culprit that Leo came face-to-face with the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. And it hit him again—love. The sudden, desperate, breathtaking kind he had only ever read about.
Everything around him seemed to go still. The shouts of the children playing behind them quieted, and the conversation coming from the group sitting in Paulina de Linares’s terrace was suddenly no more than a hushed murmur. Leo couldn’t even feel the breeze, which just a moment before had been moving briskly through the leaf-heavy branches of the mango tree.
It was as if the world had come to a complete stop—and when its movement resumed, it was at a slightly different pace than before.
In a white dress bedecked with lace-edged ruffles, the girl looked like one of the clouds scudding across the sky behind her, though of course that simile was all wrong. He ought to be comparing the sparkle in her eyes to the stars above, or her lips to budding roses. Or maybe that was too trite...
He was so busy composing a poem in his head that it took him a moment or two to realize that she was talking to him.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
Concern was evident in every line of her delicately angular features, and it only grew more pronounced when Leo found himself too tongue-tied to reply immediately.
His first impression of Lucía Troncoso was quickly followed by even more favorable second and third impressions. Although one wouldn’t have guessed it from looking at her pristine dress, she’d been playing ball with four rambunctious little boys. After making sure that Leo hadn’t been grievously injured by the throw, she coaxed him into joining the game. Truth be told, it wouldn’t have taken much persuading. Leo may have been more adept with a pen than he was with a bat, but he was as fond of the boys as if they were his own younger brothers, and he had always loved running around with them.
And it didn’t hurt that joining in the game gave him the excuse to look at Lucía as she dashed from one side of the lawn to the other, ruffles aflutter.
They didn’t have the opportunity to play for long—the sun was high in the sky and the air was redolent with the scent of the Moorish rice and pork chops that were being prepared for lunch. Whether by the grace of the fates or the artful intervention of his hostess, Leo was seated next to her at the table. Her nearness left him even more breathless than all the running had.
Then her fingers brushed his as she passed him the tostones and Leo was rendered almost delirious.
He tucked into the mound of rice on his plate with an enthusiasm that surprised him. Weren’t people supposed to lose their appetites when they were in love? Leo was ravenous, and not just for the crisp salad with its tangy vinaigrette or the figs in syrup they were served for dessert. He drank in every single word that fell from her lips. He shivered at every bright peal of laughter and every sparkling sidelong glance she gave him whenever she said something impish.
It wasn’t until the rest of the gathering had settled drowsily into rocking chairs with their demitasses of strong, sweet, aromatic coffee that she took the initiative and asked him to go for a stroll. Their path took them around the shadier part of the garden and the brick-bordered flower beds, bursting with periwinkle flowers in delicate blue clusters. On an impulse, Leo bent to snap off a spray, which he presented to Lucía with a flourish.
Her answering smile was made of the same stuff as cooling breezes and refreshing drinks, lighter and sweeter than the lemonade he had been sipping earlier. One of her front teeth was ever so slightly crooked, and the sight of it hit him like another blow, this one to the chest.
“You’re sweet,” she observed, tucking the blossoms into her hair, which had been braided into a coronet. “No one’s ever given me flowers before.”
“How can that be possible?” The question popped out before Leo had a chance to think them through. “I should think you’d had entire gardens dropped at your feet in celebration of your beauty.” He came to an abrupt stop, suddenly stricken that she’d find his compliment insincere as some people did when his words came out overly ornamented. “You really are, you know. Beautiful. In a way that transcends your features, as if what one sees is your soul shining through.”
Her soul, and what looked like an excess of feeling that intrigued him.
They had wound around the mango tree and were momentarily hidden from view behind its thick trunk. Leo took a hasty step backward, mindful that Lucía’s older sister and brother-in-law must be watching out for her from the terrace. Before he could get too far, Lucía’s hand shot out and her fingers curled around the front of Leo’s shirt, tugging gently until he was once again behind the mango tree.
For a long moment all she did was look at him, her bright brown eyes ablaze with curiosity. “No one’s ever spoken to me like you do, either.”
“Oh?” Leo blinked. “Is that a good—”
Lucía surged up on her tiptoes, her face so close to Leo’s that her breath ghosted over him when she said, “I like it. And I would like it even more if you kissed me. Would you?”
Leo jerked his head into a nod. With more enthusiasm than grace, or even skill, he kissed her.
It was too glorious for words. Her lips were like silk, or velvet, or one of the expensive fabrics at Don Enrique’s store that Leo always longed to touch when he went in to buy ink and pencils. She tasted sweet—a little like the dessert they’d just had, but mostly a heady, complex flavor that was all her own.
The hand that had been clutching his shirt drifted down to his forearm, and he had to restrain a shiver as her fingers came into contact with the bare skin below the sleeve he had rolled up to his elbow. He didn’t dare touch her. Didn’t dare do anything but stand there, drawing in long drafts of air as he grazed her lips with his, over and over again.
If everything around him had gone still when he’d first laid eyes on her, the entire world fell away when he kissed her. Leo had never felt like this, as if he was in a daze—or a dream.
The sound of her name being called from the terrace was like waking up.
“Lucía! We’re leaving!”
Lucía’s grip tightened on his arm, her teeth closing gently on his lower lip.
Then, like a girl out of one of Perrault’s stories would upon hearing the clocks strike midnight, she broke away from him and hurried to her waiting family. Only she was no penniless scullery maid—she was an heiress, and so far beyond Leo’s reach that he knew dreaming about her was as useless and foolish as trying to climb a ladder to the moon.
And yet dream he did.
It was all Leo could do to wait for midmorning the next day. He had bathed and dressed by the time the sun started peeking over the horizon, and he checked his watch so frequently that his mother made a remark about him wearing out the silver plating.
As soon as the hour hand had shifted over to ten, he seized his hat and jacket and strode out of the house, checking his pace only because he didn’t intend to arrive at Lucía’s house covered in perspiration.
His steps slowed further when he rounded the corner. The house where she lived with her sister and brother-in-law was so large it was daunting, its neatly manicured grounds sprawling from one end of the street to the other. A large, columned terrace wrapped around the front and side of the house, and the main door was easily more than twice his height.
Unlatching the wrought iron gate, Leo stepped through and resolutely marched up the front steps, where a woman in a dark dress was watering a spray of orchids that sprouted from a ceramic pot.
“Buenos días,” he said politely. “Is Lucía home, by any chance?”
“Lucía?” the woman echoed, straightening the watering can. “You just missed them. Their ship sailed half an hour ago.”
“Sailed?” Leo’s heart began to pound. “Sailed where?”
“Why, to Europe,” the woman said, eyebrows raised as if the answer should have been obvious. Her voice gentled, likely at the flicker in his expression.
“Europe,” Leo repeated the word as if he’d never heard it before. “I didn’t know they—When are they expected back?”
Sympathy. It was sympathy in the woman’s tone when she said, “Not for several years, at least.”
