Read Online Hot Schemes by Sherryl Woods - Free Book Online

faraway expression. “The breezes were cooler, the plantains sweeter, the
lechón
more tender.”
    “Sí, sí,”
the others murmured. “That is so.”
    Only the nephews did not join in the chorus. They exchanged the jaded looks of children who have heard it all before time and time again.
    “But you can no longer find a plantain or a pig to roast,” Michael retorted.
    “Sí
,” Pedro said wearily, ignoring the bitterness in his nephew’s voice. “It is the memories which are sweet, not the reality.”
    “You’ve never been back to visit?” Molly asked.
    “Never. It is a choice I made. Not one dollar of my money will go into that man’s pocket.” He shrugged ruefully. “Not that I would be allowed back. I am regarded as an enemy of the people because I fought Fidel, because I spoke out as a dissident. Had I not escaped, I would have spent the last years jailed as so many others have.”
    “And Miguel?” Molly asked.
    “He attempted to organize a coup. He was jailed, but made a daring escape. He was shot and left for dead. Another of the guerrillas rescued him and smuggled him aboard a boat that crossed the straits that same night. He arrived in Key West one month after my own arrival. I brought Elena with me. It was nearly a year before Pilar was able to join him. And many years after that before Michael’s mother came. As the youngest of the sisters, Rosa was reluctant to leave her mother. She came only after Paolina Huerta died.”
    “But she sent Michael,” Molly said. Michael had once told Molly of the terror of his first days in a new country, sent to live with relatives he barely remembered without the mother he adored. He had been five years old, a baby, when he left Cuba aboard one of the famed Pedro Pan freedom flights. His aching sense of being abandoned had remained with him for years. Only after they were reunited did he begin to understand that his mother had sent him away out of love.
    As if all of this rhapsodic talk of a land he’d all but forgotten irritated him, Michael stood up abruptly and crossed the room to his aunt’s side. Tía Pilar clasped his hand in hers and regarded him with a tear-streaked face. “Find him,” she pleaded.
    “I will,” he promised.
    His mother again stood on tiptoe and kissed him on both cheeks. “Do not take chances.”
    “I cannot do my job without taking chances,” he told her, though a smile seemed to tug at his mouth at the start of an apparently familiar argument.
    “And I cannot be a mother without warning you not to,” she replied.
    She walked with him back to Molly. “Thank you for coming,” she said, her English precise and still reflecting her uneasiness with her second language.
    “I’ll be praying for Tío Miguel’s safe return,” Molly told her. “Please tell Tía Pilar that.”
    “She will be grateful. We all will.”
    Outside the tiny pink stucco house with its neat white trim, the street was quiet. Bright splashes of fuchsia and purple Bougainvillaea gave the simple homes a needed touch of jaunty color. Only blocks away on
Calle Ocho
, Southwest Eighth Street, the Little Havana restaurants would be opening their doors for midday meals of grilled Cuban sandwiches, chunks of pork, black beans and rice,
arroz con pollo
and sweet, fried plantains. The sidewalk stands selling
café Cubano
would already be doing a brisk business. Only Tío Pedro’s restaurant would remain closed because of the family emergency.
    “I’d like to make another stop before I take you home,” Michael said. “Do you mind?”
    “Absolutely not.”
    “Will Brian be okay?” he asked as an afterthought. Suddenly his expression turned worried. “Good Lord, Molly, I haven’t even thought about him. Where is he?”
    “He’s okay. He’s with his father. I called Hal from Sundays last night and asked him to keep Brian a few more days.”
    Michael regarded her with surprise. “You don’t usually give your ex-husband that kind of concession.”
    She