“There shouldn’t be sex of any kind. I’m not the woman who has meaningless sex.”
“Have you ever tried? Seems Val kept you sheltered most of your life.”
“True,” Gabi managed. “But I’ve had more opportunities than Val is aware of. I simply didn’t act on them.”
Meg pinched her lips together, her expression amused. “How did that work out for you?”
“What are you suggesting, Margaret . . . that I sleep with my husband to scratch an itch?”
Meg shrugged with a nod. “You said he was attractive. My guess is all the parts work.”
Gabi gave a playful shove and had Meg dancing at the water’s edge.
“I can’t trust him.”
Meg’s smile fell. “You think he’ll hurt you?”
“No. Not physically. I don’t get that from him at all.”
“So emotionally?”
Gabi couldn’t put a finger on what her thoughts were. “How does someone have sex with someone they don’t like?”
“Men do it all the time.”
“I don’t have the plumbing to qualify as a man.”
It was Meg’s turn to push her. “You know what I mean. Listen, I’m not suggesting you ignore your head. But don’t be afraid to follow a smoking hot distraction. You know he’s not telling you he cares to get you in bed. You’re already married. There’s a deadline to your relationship that might give you exactly what you need to find your sexual self. It doesn’t sound like Alonzo helped with that at all.”
“And I trusted him,” she mused.
“If it helps at all . . . I like Hunter. Yeah, he’s hard around the edges, and I wouldn’t have passed him as a client for Alliance, but he’s enduring all of us rather well. And considering how much that man is worth, I don’t think he’d have to pretend at all if he didn’t want to.”
“He cooked dinner.”
Meg once again linked arms with Gabi as they turned back toward the villa.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get the image of him with all that flour covering him out of my head,” Gabi said.
“It’s not the flour that’s bringing that blush to your face. It was his attempt to be your personal spandex that’s heating you up.”
Chapter Sixteen
Remington hoped the leads in Columbia would dry up quickly. Unfortunately, they didn’t. Now he was on day three in the hot, humid urban jungle, leaning against the crumbling side of a building that called itself a bank. It wasn’t the bank where Picano’s account was set up, but inside was a slightly shady teller whose tongue wagged with every fifty-dollar bill Remington flashed. It helped to have Blackwell’s never-ending wallet.
Juan emerged from the broken-down building and searched the busy street. Before his eyes found Remington, another man, this one skinny and skittish, intersected. Remington let the smoke from his cigarette drift to the sky and lifted the newspaper in his hands to observe for a little longer. Juan had said he had a friend at the Picano branch who would meet with the two of them. He had a few hundred-dollar bills on him, and a few more in the hotel room tucked behind the toilet. From the lack of cleanliness, they wouldn’t be discovered there until the next millennium.
The two men shook hands and held what appeared to be an amicable conversation. Within a couple of minutes, Juan was once again scanning the street. The answer to who might be behind the activity out of the Picano account was only a few questions away. Problem was, in Columbia, it was impossible to determine who to trust.
Remington trusted no one.
He tucked the paper under his arm, tossed the butt of his smoke to the ground, and wove through traffic, pedestrians, and a few stray dogs roaming the street. A child, no older than three, pushed against his leg, his grubby little fingers out for anything Remington might spare. He pushed past the kid without a sideways glance. If he so much as offered a quarter, the kid would multiply like a fucking gremlin in water. Attracting attention was not on Remington’s list.
“There you are,” Juan said, his lips pulled back in a grin. “Se?or Remington . . . my friend, Raul, the one I told you about.”
Remington lifted a chin, offered a hand. “You speak English?”
Raul placed a sweaty hand in his, nodded as if a bobble doll had taken over his scrawny frame. “It’s the international language, isn’t it?”
Remington removed his hand as soon as possible. From the way Raul shifted on his feet, he was either seconds away from a heart attack driven from fear or was in need of a hit.
“Columbian bankers need to speak English.” Juan nudged his friend. “Right, amigo?”
“Sí, sí.”
Remington nodded toward an outside diner down the street. He’d already scoped out the area, knew of two escape routes if he needed to vacate his newfound friends’ company in a hurry.