Playing With Fuego Read online

  Table of Contents

  Other Bella Books by KG MacGregor

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Copyright © 2012 by KG MacGregor

  Bella Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 10543

  Tallahassee, FL 32302

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  First published 2012

  Editor: Katherine V. Forrest

  Cover Designer: Kiaro Creative

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59493-313-4

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Other Bella Books by KG MacGregor

  Malicious Pursuit

  House on Sandstone

  Mulligan

  Just This Once

  Sumter Point

  Out of Love

  Secrets So Deep

  Worth Every Step

  Sea Legs

  Photographs of Claudia

  Rhapsody

  Shaken Series:

  Without Warning

  Aftershock

  Small Packages

  Mother Load

  Acknowledgment

  People often ask where I get my story ideas, and I can honestly say this one was inspired by the struggles I experienced as a white Southerner trying to find my way in Miami, Florida, one of the most culturally diverse communities in the world. It was only natural that I tell this story in first person. When I first moved there nearly twenty years ago, I was instantly caught up in the cosmopolitan excitement, and fascinated at being surrounded by so many beautiful people. Then I went through my phase when I wanted a machine gun mounted to the top of my car. Fortunately, that passed without bloodshed as I slowly came to recognize and appreciate all Miami had to offer. I left Florida last year for fresh digs in California, but with plenty of fondness for my years in the Magic City—proof positive that attitudes can be changed with greater understanding.

  As always, I thank my editor and friend, Katherine V. Forrest, this time for helping me tackle a new point of view. Thanks and love also to my partner Jenny for her technical assistance, and for supporting my work in every way imaginable. To Karen Appleby, my glitch-finder, much appreciation. And once again, I salute all the staff at Bella Books for their hard work and professionalism, and kudos to Kiaro Creative for this dazzling cover.

  About the Author

  A former teacher and market research consultant, KG MacGregor holds a PhD in journalism from UNC-Chapel Hill. Infatuation with Xena: Warrior Princess fan fiction prompted her to try her own hand at storytelling in 2002. In 2005, she signed with Bella Books, which published the Golden Crown finalist Just This Once. Her sixth Bella novel, Out of Love, won the Lambda Literary Award for Women’s Romance and the Golden Crown Award in Lesbian Romance. She picked up Goldies also for Without Warning, Worth Every Step and Photographs of Claudia (Contemporary Romance), and Secrets So Deep (Romantic Suspense).

  Other honors include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Royal Academy of Bards, the Alice B. Readers Appreciation Medal, and several Readers Choice Awards.

  An avid supporter of queer literature, KG currently serves on the Board of Trustees for the Lambda Literary Foundation. She divides her time between Palm Springs and her native North Carolina mountains.

  Contact KG through her website at www.kgmacgregor.com.

  Chapter One

  “Holy Jenko!”

  Few things fire me up like a pair of cockroaches running in circles around my feet. There I was stomping and flailing about with the broom like a marionette, but it was all adrenaline. I just wanted to pulverize their gnarly innards and grind them into the concrete floor.

  “You need to get over that woman!” That was our construction foreman Bo shouting at me from outside, where he was taking down the house’s hurricane shutters.

  To the untrained eye, yelling out my ex’s name as an expletive probably seems a bit vindictive. That’s because they don’t know Emily Jenko like I do. Screaming her name helps squelch my lifelong impulse to swear, much like chewing gum keeps people from smoking and smoking keeps people from eating. Seriously, nothing says shit or fuck like a throaty “Jenko!”

  “Palmetto bug or banana spider?” He took amusement from my aversion to Miami’s crawly things.

  “Bugs—plural—and I’m leaving their guts in here for you to clean up.”

  The kitchen flooded with light as he removed the last of the shutters with his power drill. The house didn’t yet have new window frames, so the corrugated aluminum sheets we screw onto the outside every night are meant to discourage squatters. That works fine until some enterprising thief unscrews them and carries them off for what they’ll fetch at the recycling center.

  Other than his habit of laughing at my squeamishness over insects, Bo McConnell is one of the nicest guys I know. A towering African-American with more freckles than Howdy Doody, he respects women as only a father of three teenage daughters can. Underneath his ever-present Marlins baseball cap is a stripe of gray hair growing straight back from his forehead, which he blames on his girls. His soft hands belie three decades of construction work, but I think they suit his gentle soul.

  Another reason I like Bo—and I’m fully aware this will make me sound like a xenophobe—is because he speaks flawless English, and without an accent. That’s rare in Miami, where two-thirds of the population is Hispanic. It’s not that I don’t appreciate diversity. I just don’t like being the one who’s different.

  There are only a handful of non-Hispanics like Bo and me at the Miami Home Foundation, a nonprofit builder funded by grants and donations from the community. Unlike Habitat for Humanity, which builds new dwellings on donated land, our mission is to renovate blighted homes to make them safe and attractive for families needing a hand up. Sometimes there’s little difference between us and Habitat. We gutted this house all the way down to its frame and concrete foundation because vermin infestations and water damage from a leaky roof rendered the structure unrecoverable. Like Habitat, we employ a small construction staff during the week but rely also on unpaid weekend help. Recruiting all those volunteers—and then herding them on Saturdays—is my job. MBA in human resources, Dartmouth. On the days my job drives me crazy, I comfort myself with the fact that at least I have one, which is more than a lot of people in South Florida can say.

  “It’s a good day to paint…not so humid, nice little breeze. This feels more like March than May,” Bo said, passing his drill through the window so I could lock it in the toolbox. Things of value have a way of walking off the jobsite here in Li
ttle Haiti, which is why even the toolbox is chained to an eyebolt in the floor. “What’s our gang like today?”

  “We’ve got the choir from the Morningside Church of Faith. Four men, eight women. Not too bad for a paint crew.”

  “Any linebackers?” That was our code for volunteers who look strong and fit. “I need that pile of extra blocks out back moved up to the curb for pickup tomorrow.”

  “Sorry. Maybe if we all pitch in for a half hour or so, it won’t take too much out of anybody.” The last thing we want is for one of our volunteers to keel over with a heart attack, so we’re always careful not to give people more than they can handle.

  While he went off to lug the five-gallon paint buckets out of the storage shed, I counted out a dozen T-shirts in various sizes and took them out to the end of the driveway, where the volunteers were talking excitedly and sharing coffee from a giant thermos. I always like how happy everyone is first thing in the morning. Church groups seem to stay that way throughout the day. It’s usually the corporate types and teenagers who start groaning by the first break.

  “Look, everyone. It’s Daphne, from the training session.” The woman attached to that exceedingly cheerful voice was Morningside’s music minister, a curly-haired cherub with lines around her mouth and eyes, probably because she smiles all the time. If I were a churchgoing songbird, I wouldn’t mind this jolly bunch, but I’m agnostic and can’t carry a tune in a pickup truck.

  Unlike the music minister, I suck at remembering names, but then I have a new crew of names and faces every week. A quick rundown of the sign-in sheet identified her as Diana.

  “Good morning! I’m so excited to see you all here. We’re going to have a fabulous day.” Meryl Streep has nothing on me. “Daphne Maddox, volunteer coordinator for the Miami Home Foundation. I’m sure you all remember me from the orientation last month. All right, let’s see a show of hands. How many of you slept through that?”

  That always brought a few chuckles, and helped me segue into a repeat of my safety spiel, a harrowing litany of things like tetanus, blindness and paralysis that could result from carelessness on the jobsite. Diana offered to pray for our deliverance, which seemed like a good idea.

  As folks bowed their heads, I noticed a white Porsche Carrera creeping slowly past the house, its tinted windows shielding the driver from view. One thing about blighted homes is they tend to be in blighted neighborhoods, and it’s all too common to see rich dudes in their sports cars and luxury SUVs trolling the streets of Little Haiti in search of a drug buy. Their brazen attitude always gets under my skin, but never more than when we have a church or youth group onsite. It pissed me off royally when the Porsche parked at the end of the row alongside vehicles belonging to our volunteers.

  The driver made no move to exit, and when the choir members followed Bo around the side of the house for painting instructions, I considered calling the cops. It wouldn’t be the first time they busted up some action on this street at our behest. Instead I decided to make a show of jotting down the license number, figuring whoever it was would get spooked and drive off.

  Then the driver’s door opened and a woman’s leg emerged clad in skinny jeans and red high-topped sneakers, the designer variety, not the kind you actually wear when you want to sneak somewhere. Like any good lesbian brain, mine went to work on conjuring what the rest of her would look like but something was off about the context. If she was a drug buyer, she wasn’t a very smart one. With everyone in the universe now holding a camera phone in their pocket, those guys never did more than crack the tinted window when they came by. Probably not a choir member either…just a gut feeling about rich camels not getting through a haystack in heaven, or whatever that saying was. And she definitely wasn’t from the foundation because none of us could afford a hundred-thousand-dollar car.

  As I got closer, I could hear her talking on the phone—Spanish, of course, because that’s what nearly everyone in Miami speaks—and that’s when I saw the familiar blue slip of paper in her hand. All the privileged, arrogant, entitled, pompous pieces fell into place. She wasn’t a drug buyer, and she wasn’t with the church or the foundation. She was here under court order to perform community service for a crime against society.

  “If you want—”

  She swung her other leg out and without even making eye contact held up a finger to shush me. Not a good idea.

  I felt the blood running to my face and was already savoring the power I had to make this woman’s life miserable. “If you want credit for today, you have ten seconds to hang up and get your butt over to the house. Otherwise just go on back to bed and we’ll start this little game over again next Saturday.”

  I was already halfway back to the house when I heard her slam the door and scamper up behind me, but like a clueless twit, she continued to chatter away on the phone. I spun back around and whipped my hand across my throat as a sign for her to cut it.

  She finally stuffed the phone into her back pocket, and by now was making eye contact, with a dark glare that must have rivaled my own—enormous brown eyes set between a deep V that bisected her perfectly sculpted eyebrows. Her angry look, no doubt, and I relished having put it there.

  I shuffled the papers on my clipboard and thrust it into her hands. “Fill out the form and then come find me for your assignment.”

  Not that I had anything urgent to do. I just didn’t want to dance from one foot to the other while she wrote, so I went into the house and pretended to sweep up squashed cockroaches while watching her through the window.

  She stood about five-eight and had one of those slim figures that meant she could just go and pluck anything off the rack and have it fit perfectly. Makes me sick. Her long dark hair had tiny golden streaks all through it—like we don’t know that’s fake—and it was pulled back in a tight ponytail with two-hundred-dollar Jimmy Choo sunglasses perched on top.

  “What do I put where it says Agency Number?” she called.

  “I’ll fill in that part,” I answered gruffly, irritated to discover she had the sort of deep, husky voice I normally find very sexy. Not on this woman.

  I stomped back down the front porch steps and snatched the clipboard from her hands.

  “Follow me.” I led her past the paint crews to the backyard and pushed the wheelbarrow over to the blocks Bo wanted moved. The whole pile was about the size of a pickup truck. “We need these brought around front and stacked at the end of the driveway. Two fifteen-minute breaks and a half hour for lunch. Cleanup starts at three and that gets you eight hours.”

  It was then I noticed her fingernails, finely manicured and painted a deep glossy burgundy, like she’d never done an honest day’s work in her life. I felt a small pang of sympathy, enough to offer my work gloves, which she took without so much as a grunt of thanks. In fact, she’d stripped all the emotion from her face, as if she didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of knowing how pissed off she was. Some people are too stubborn for their own good.

  Maribel Tirado León, according to her paperwork. Thirty-three years old with an address on Brickell Bay Drive, one of the most upscale areas of Miami. No wonder I didn’t like her. Most of our community service workers were drunk drivers but they usually got fifty hours and her court order said thirty-two. Probably winked at the judge.

  Or more likely, the judge was her uncle or an old friend of the family, someone they all knew back in Cuba. That’s how things work in Miami, and if you happen to be a fair-skinned, blue-eyed blonde from New England like me, whose command of Spanish goes only as far as no hablo español, forget it. Nearly every job in town requires you to be “bilingual,” which means you can butcher English all you want but not Spanish.

  So far, Maribel León was the walking, talking personification of everything I hate about Miami, but my list is long and she couldn’t possibly hit all my hot buttons.

  But then I watched her work, and over the course of the morning I developed a grudging respect as she whittled that pile of blocks d
own. No easy task because she had to balance them just right on the wheelbarrow, and it kept getting mired in the soft sand at the corner of the house. The second time it tipped over, I had to sweetly tell her of the No Cursing Rule we had on the jobsite. Good thing I hadn’t thrown her in with the church choir.

  At eleven thirty, another gang from the church showed up with a gigantic spread of sandwiches and salads, but Miss Attitude declined their kind offer to share. Instead, she spent the entire lunch break leaning against her car chattering on her cell phone. From the sour look on her face, she was complaining about me. I liked that.

  While the choir gathered across the street under a shade tree, Bo slid down the wall and stretched his legs out alongside mine on the porch. “I don’t know what you said to your community service worker, but I hope you’ve got a version that works on teenage girls.”

  “She needed a little attitude adjustment and I helped her get it.”

  “Looks like you made an impression. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of our reluctant volunteers work that hard. I had to tell her twice it was time to knock off for lunch.”

  I actually hadn’t intended to make her move the whole pile of blocks by herself. That was a lot of work even for a linebacker, which she wasn’t. But she seemed hell-bent to not complain or show any sign of weakness.

  “I bet she’ll be taking your name in vain tomorrow when she rolls out of bed.”

  As we got back to work, I had to admit I was feeling a lot less vindictive. She wasn’t nearly the princess I’d thought she was, though I still doubted she’d ever done physical work like this before. She had muscles, though…the sinewy kind women got from working out with a personal trainer two or three times a week.

  If anything dampened my impression about her, it was how she’d ended up here in the first place. Even the volunteers who goof off are still volunteers, the sort of people who give up a Saturday of their own accord out of kindness to others. Court-assigned workers never glow with pride and satisfaction the way our volunteers do after a day’s work.