He pursed his lips as if to stifle a laugh.
“Ha ha.”
“Thanks to me your lips and tongue are still intact,” he said, before he stilled. His eyes flashed with what she recognized from their first night as desire.
And yep, she felt it, too. She shifted her feet. Scrambled to fill the quiet between them. “Well, thank you, for stripping me of the knife. My lips and tongue appreciate it.”
Stripping? Oh my God. Was she still drunk?
“My pleasure.” He stepped in closer, pointed with his free hand. “Aaand, speaking of lips, you have something on your cheek.”
That didn’t make any sense at all to her, but she rubbed at her cheek.
“Nope, it’s still there … to the left … a little lower.” And yet, despite his directions, she was failing. “May I?” he asked.
“Yes, please. Just take it off.”
Oh my God.
The man was kind enough not to point out her Freudian slips, and simply brushed his thumb against her cheek. “There you go.”
“Thank you,” she said, as another wave of awkwardness washed over them. She needed to straighten this conversation out, take her mind and language out of the gutter and redirect it toward the task at hand. “So, why were we sent out here?”
“I’m supposed to show you something.”
Her mood plummeted. “I’m not sure what you could show me that could properly justify what was done to my mom and granny. I don’t understand this dynamic. How everyone’s acting so calm, so casual in there … when she did what she did to our families.”
He took a drag of his cigarette, and blew out smoke exaggeratingly away from her. He matched her stern expression. “What did she do to our families, Diana? Why don’t you tell me?”
She growled at this loyalty, but in his expression she noted a true curiosity. “You really don’t know?”
“No. Not that whatever you say will make me think that Lolo and Lola were fully responsible for whatever you claim.”
How did that happen—how could he make her swoon one moment and then leave her frustrated the next?
Diana didn’t mess with complicated personalities for this very reason—it took too much headspace, took too much work. Much of why she and Carlo had vibed was because they hadn’t needed to fight over their relationship. Their decision to be together was logical. They were easy. They were predictable.
Of course, they also ended in disaster, so maybe she wasn’t the best at judging character after all.
Bottom line: Joshua was like a mother in labor, angst and sharp emotions on the outside, but vulnerable on the inside, and maybe, Diana just had to wait it out. She had helped women in labor for hours. She could stand there for a minute longer.
To find out the total truth about her family history, she would have to.
“Well?” he asked.
She met his eyes. “Antonio Cruz was a father who didn’t take responsibility for his child. And Flora Reyes aided and abetted his crime. Because of this my granny was left to care for her child, alone. And my mother suffered because of it.”
He shook his head. “And that’s the final story.”
“Obviously not. Hence the reason why I followed you out here. Otherwise, I would have convinced my mother to blow this joint, after seeing all”—she turned toward the house and raised a hand at it—“all this.”
“Nothing is as easy as it looks. All that?” He pointed at the house. “That, and the parties; that is what everyone sees. But I believe every family has secrets, Diana.” He dropped the cigarette and, with a shake of his head, ground the butt with his shoe.
“Oh, what a relief.” She waved away the smoke that wafted in her direction.
“I would be more worried about the air pollution in Manila than that cigarette.”
“Right, but wrapping your mouth around a chimney of tar doesn’t help, either.”
“All right, all right, Dr. Cary. Let’s go.”
She tried not to grin. “Where?”
“Can’t you just come without having to ask every question under the sun?” He turned, obviously expecting Diana to follow.
She scrambled after him. A path emerged adjacent to the cement fence line of the property, hidden behind lantana bushes. Diana ducked and weaved, following Joshua’s back and the contrasting tiles dug into the ground amid the grass.
“Are we doing something illegal here? Because I don’t do illegal,” Diana said, and then corrected herself, remembering that, in fact, she was on vacation because she did break the rules. “I mean, not totally illegal anyway.”
“Nope—they still own this part of the property.” He stopped, turning. His face sported a pained look. “Are you ready?”
All of this angst and anticipation was not her style. “Yes, I was ready back there. What is it?”
With a hand, he raised the bottom branch of a lantana bush that had climbed the side of the cement wall so that it encroached onto the path like an overhang. Diana ducked underneath, her hair catching in the leaves.
What she saw took her breath away. It was a house—a farmhouse bungalow. White wooden exterior with a slightly pitched black roof. Black shutters and a wraparound porch with two rockers next to the front door. It seemed familiar; Diana dug within the recesses of her brain to remember.
“It’s a California bungalow–style home,” Joshua said, and shuffled past her. The grass was sparse here, the ground muddy in parts; he sidestepped it. “It’s built with cement walls to withstand tropical storms, but it’s made to look like it as much as possible.”
“Oh God, it is.” A picture flashed in Diana’s memory, a photograph of her granny next to her great-granddad in front of the Gallagher home in Marysville. Behind it was an expanse of fields, and a never-ending sky. It was one of a handful of photographs her granny had, after traveling across the country.
“What …” she began to ask, but didn’t know where to start.
“Lolo and Lola made their wealth out of real estate. They were great at it. He saved while she invested. Hotels, restaurants, resorts. They bought and sold over decades, looking for a place to settle down, and they decided it would be here in Forbes. Lolo Tony had this built when they moved in. I remember him being really stubborn about the details. I used to watch from the back porch of the house.” He pointed back toward where they came. “Before Lola insisted on putting a cement wall up. C’mon.” He gestured and climbed the porch, opening the door. It squeaked a melancholy sound, and out came the scent of wood.
She’d expected a living-museum quality home, rickety insides with cobwebs, maybe old-fashioned equipment, a farm table and antique furnishings, a porcelain wash basin. But the inside was simply a home with real walls and wooden floors. The living room had a couch and a TV on a stand. A small glass-top breakfast table sat in the middle of an eat-in kitchen. “Oh. This is surprising. Was this like his man cave?”
“You could say that. This was where he worked, where he read, and where he went when he needed to get away, which was most times. If someone asked for him, Lola would say, ‘He’s behind the wall,’ in her feisty way, and we’d know he was here and not to be bothered. Except by me, of course, because I was the favorite.” A grin graced his face, then it faltered a little, “Probably because we were both kind of the same. We didn’t belong anywhere or to anyone, truly.”