Read Online Burn: A South Beach Bodyguards Book by Erin McCarthy - Free Book Online

didn’t understand, though I was pretty sure it was about me, given that the older woman behind the counter kept pointing to me and laughing. One day I was going to learn Spanish for real, instead of the few phrases that I had mastered. It had taken me forever during my teen years to figure out that the little old ladies in the grocery store weren’t asking me to move out of the way, but were asking me to get things down off of top shelves. I was mortified when at eighteen a friend told me when we were in the store what a woman was saying. I realized I had spent at least three years shifting away when women spoke to me, which was the exact opposite of what they had wanted.
    “Do you know her?” I asked Isabel after I paid and we moved down to the pickup area.
    “No.”
    “Then what were you talking about?”
    “She said that maybe coffee would take away the sour look on my boyfriend’s face. I told her you’re not my boyfriend, but my stepbrother, and she said then I don’t have to put up with you and I should find a nice Cuban boy who isn’t the size of a giant.”
    Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. “I’m not your stepbrother.”
    Isabel snorted. “No, I suppose you’re not. We’re actually nothing to each other.”
    That made me feel bad. “I didn’t say that. We’ve just never had a chance to get to know each other or anything.”
    She gave me a long, searching stare that made me uncomfortable. “It really doesn’t matter, I suppose.”
    That answer made me even more tense. I picked up my cup and took a sip. “It matters,” I said, shortly.
    But she just shrugged.
    Fortunately there was no traffic, because it was a quiet car ride. Isabel stared out the window as we drove over the causeway and rather than looking over at her every three seconds like I really wanted to do, I forced myself to concentrate on the highway stretch in front of me.
    When we got to the Gables and to my former house, I felt a wave of nostalgia, which was ridiculous. So it was the house I’d grown up in. It wasn’t like it was jam packed with great memories and wonderful dinners and holiday family gatherings. After my mother left, my father let it go to shit on the inside, though he did pay to maintain the exterior. But the inside was still the same dated sixties remodel that had slapped midcentury modern on top of 1920s Spanish architecture. It was a bad combo, but Mickey had stopped caring. Mostly I had been alone in the house growing up and it had been a hell of a party pad in high school, because there was nothing to ruin. It was a dusty relic with lots of square footage.
    Out of respect for Isabel, I had her let us in the house with her key, even though I had a key too still. Mickey had never changed the locks. But she did look up at me apologetically.
    “This must be strange for you,” she said. “My mom said this is the house you grew up in.”
    It was my time to shrug. “It’s just a house.” Not a fucking symbol of my whole shitty childhood. Because that would be dramatic and stupid. “Your mom has done a nice job with it,” I said as we went inside, because she had. It was clean, for one thing. “I stayed here when Kim and Mickey were in Europe and you were visiting your dad.”
    “My mom loves to decorate.” Isabel went into the living room and stopped at the bottom of the tile stairs that went to the bedrooms. “Why do I suddenly feel nervous to be in my own house?”
    Maybe because it was my house. Or because she’d been assaulted in it. One or the other. “You were at the bottom of these steps knocked out cold, so that might have something to do with it.”
    “Did it occur to anyone I just fell down the stairs? I’m not exactly grace personified. I take after my father, not my mother.”
    She went up the stairs and I followed her, because that was my job. “I seriously doubt you tripped all on your own and fell down six stairs and landed in just the right position to knock yourself unconscious.