Page 37 of For Better or for Ransom

“Fucking terrified,” she admitted.

“You can stay here, make sure no one gets in. Let me know if you see something…”

Sol wasn’t interested in doing that. “What makes you think I won’t be even more terrified then? Thinking of all the things that could happen to you?”

“Right.” He smiled, smugly. “Andiamo?” He extended his right hand to her.

She breathed deeply, took his hand. “Vamos.”

21

Sol

If we make it without getting caught…” Sol was whispering to Luke as they were trying to sneak inside Leonardo Pascual’s dressing room at the Casanova theater without being seen. “Do you promise to forget whatever it is that’s been bothering you, just for tonight?”

“Nothing is bothering me.” Luke was helping her through the unlocked window in Leonardo’s dressing room.

“Liar. Promise me!” She refused to keep moving until she got his reassurance.

“I promise.”

A couple of minutes before and as dusk was painting the city in dark colors, Sol and Luke had entered the community garden in the same block as the theater. They’d easily found the windows of the Casanova looking to the courtyard, identified the one that was in Leonardo’s dressing room, and gotten inside. All without raising any suspicion.

“I hope this place doesn’t have an alarm.” Luke took the cell phone from his pocket and used its flashlight feature in the dark room. The theater had remained unused since the last performance of El baño de Edipo, and there was no other play scheduled for at least a couple of weeks. They were counting on the place being empty.

“If we hear the alarm, we leave through the same window we’ve just used and act innocently. By the time the police would make it here we’d probably be home.”

“Look at you. Trespassing suits you. You look even sexier.” He grabbed her waist with both hands, pulled her toward him until their bodies were flush, and kissed her. She felt lightheaded—turned on too. And even if Sol was wearing one of Luke’s big dark sweatshirts and an equally loose pair of pants, she felt sexy.

She gasped for air after a kiss that had lasted for longer than was probably advisable.

“Why was that so fucking sexy?” she asked him, in between breaths.

He gave her one of his smoldering looks. “I think danger makes you horny, cara.”

Sol opened her mouth to protest. Realized he was right. Brought her index fingers to his pillowy lips, commanding him to shut up. “We’ll talk about this later—at home.”

The smirk on his lips was visible even through the darkness of the room, still illuminated only by Luke’s cell phone. “Looking forward to it.”

Sol closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and tried focusing. She opened her eyes again, ready. “We’ve established someone could have easily gotten here through the unlocked window and left the note. But could they also have taken Leonardo in here?”

“He is a big chap. I don’t see how.” Luke was talking as he tried reconstructing the events of the night Leonardo disappeared, and Sol was reminded of how much she liked to see her lover working. “For that to have happened, Leonardo would have had to arrive at the theater unseen, and then someone got into his dressing room and either they drugged him and had to drag him through that window and the courtyard—or they fought him? No.”

“So they get all the way here, risk being seen, just to leave a note?” Sol was furrowing her eyebrows, thinking.

“It was a very unsettling note. It’s the piece of evidence that made us think from the beginning something could have happened to him.”

“Yeah, but why leave it here? Especially considering no ransom has been demanded.” Sol still couldn’t understand. She’d perhaps been a bit turned on. But she was also terrified of getting caught. Why would someone have risked getting all the way to the theater just to leave such an unhelpful message? “What if the note was just a decoy?”

Luke, who was wearing a pair of nitrile gloves and had handed another pair to Sol before getting inside the theater, was checking Leonardo's things in the dressing room. He stopped, turned to look at her, grinned, then said: “Now you’re thinking like a true detective, cara.”

It wasn’t that he’d said those words in his sexier, throatier voice, the one that always made Sol’s leg tremble. Something about him calling her a true detective was warming her insides. She pulled out her cell phone, used the flashlight, and started looking alongside Luke.

After ten minutes of searching in perfect silence, Sol decided to tell him about something that was bothering her. “This is probably nothing, you’ll think it’s silly.”

Luke stopped looking at the garments inside the small wardrobe in the room and turned to Sol. “I never think something you say is silly.” She was melting. How could he always know to say the perfect thing? “What did you find?”

“Again, not sure if it’s something.”