Page 26 of Wicked Beautiful (Wicked Games 1)
The phone starts to ring again. I glance at the caller ID and groan. “I need to take this.”
I can tell Tabby wants to say more by how reluctant she is to rise from her chair. To avoid any further con
versation, I pick up the phone.
“Hola, mama. ¿Como estas?”
The stream of shrieked curses that spews from the earpiece is so loud I yank it away, wincing. Wisely, Tabby leaps up and hustles from the room, closing my office door behind her.
She’s heard my mother’s tirades before. She knows how bad it can get.
“Mother, please,” I say in English. “Calm down.”
“Calm down?” she cries, outraged. “You tell me to calm down when I see a picture in the newspaper of my daughter kissing el diablo himself?”
I sigh, close my eyes, and rub my forehead. Here we go.
She continues in English, punctuating every few words with a Spanish curse. “You see that pendejo after all these years and you don’t chop off his pecker, you kiss him? Que chingados? Have you lost your mind? You should’ve shot that puto! Yours wasn’t the only life the hijo de puta ruined, Isabel!”
Pain. Rage. Shame. How wonderful it is to be reminded that your own stupidity was the cause of so much chaos. Of so many shattered lives.
I whisper, “I know, mama.”
“Your father, your brother, me, Eva…we all suffered because of him! Our whole family suffered! And you most of all! How many letters did you send him, mija, how many times did you try to tell him—“
I leap to my feet and slam my fist on the desk so hard the computer monitor jumps. “Mama! I know!”
My mother falls silent. In the stillness of the room, all I hear is the sound of my own ragged breath.
She says quietly, “Then tell me what that kiss was, Isabel. Tell me what you think you’re doing. Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’re doing exactly the same thing you did when you were fifteen: falling for a liar.”
Slowly I lower myself to my chair. My voice comes out hollow as a bell. “By accident, I found out he owns a restaurant in New York. I went for dinner, and he was there. And he didn’t recognize me.” My voice breaks. I take a few shallow gulps of air before going on. “But he seemed…he’s attracted to me. To Victoria. And I thought…”
I hear a sharp intake of breath. “You thought you could even the score.”
I don’t answer. It’s a special kind of hell, having someone know you so well.
After a moment’s pause, my mother speaks again. “Is he rich?”
“Disgustingly. He doesn’t just own the one restaurant. He owns over twenty of them.”
I can almost hear the wheels turning in her mind. “And he’s famous, obviously. Or at least infamous. The papers called him a playboy.”
My low laugh sounds ugly, even to my own ears. “Apparently he goes through women like water.”
She mutters, “Bastardo.” Then: “A rich playboy with no morals—because we both know he has no morals—must have all kinds of things he doesn’t want people to know. All kinds of things that would surely make him suffer if they came to light.”
I hear the smile in her voice when she says the word suffer. My mother would have been an excellent mafia doña.
“Exactly.”
She exhales. In my mind’s eye, I see her standing at the kitchen sink in her drab housecoat, staring out into the front yard, the long pigtail phone cord wrapped around her wrist. In the old days, when I was a kid, this time of year the grass would be dry and brown, as would the fields beyond the yard, but the sprinkler and irrigation systems I had installed after my first book hit it big ensure that everything is green now.
Beautiful, abundant green, the color of money.
“You must be careful, mija.”
“He’ll never know it’s me, mama. I’ll get close to him, find out what I need to know, and then ruin him. In and out. Quick and deadly.”
