The Rain in Spain by Amy Jo Cousins Page A

people who lived there saw it. What had happened to that man?
    The waiter hadn’t been by in forever, so when the door that led to the hotel staircase creaked open, she turned to place another order.
    Instead of the skinny kid in black pants and a white shirt she was expecting, she saw Javi, and was startled into looking at him as if he were a stranger to her. His thickly muscled male form, thighs straining at the loose cream trousers, biceps stretching the rolled up sleeves of a casually wrinkled white button-down. Dark hair pushed back from a widow’s peak fell in waves just to the tops of his ears. High cheekbones, straight dark brows, and lips that were almost pink like a girl’s. His entire face threatened to become pretty, if not for the heavy scruff of the five o’clock shadow lining his cheeks. Beauty on top of a bruiser’s body.
    Javi.
    Javi dressed to fit in, instinctively. Years of flying under the radar never quite went away. That had meant ditching the jeans and running shoes that screamed American tourist! two days into their trip, hitting up Zara and Massimo Dutti in Madrid for casually upscale clothes that let him blend into the crowd. Even with the gaps between his Mexican Spanish and the lisping glides of Castilian, he’d been mistaken for a Sevillan more than once since their arrival in this old city two days ago, something that hadn’t happened to her once. Her hair was as dark as his, but her pale Scottish skin burned in the sun and always made her feel like a ghost when she saw her limbs draped across his in bed, his coppery skin looking so much deeper, richer than her own.
    When they’d first met a year ago, she’d assumed her attraction to this bronzed, muscled man—the only stranger on the beach in Goa who’d known enough to stop the guy who wanted to pee on her leg after she’d been stung by a jelly fish—was nothing more than a casual connection. Who wouldn’t want him? Ripped, beautiful, saves you from getting peed on. A girl’s vacation fling dream-come-true right there.
    Javi had walked a path, invisible to anyone else as far as she could see, between the trust fund travelers and the aging hippies happier to be slightly grimy on a beach in India than smoking hookahs in whatever small town they hailed from. It was obvious to her that Javi’s not-at-all aimless travels were different than most, but she’d finally had to ask him if he knew why he seemed so unusual, so steady, compared to the other itinerants around the bonfires.
    “Everyone here belongs somewhere,” he’d answered. “They’ve always had a country to go home to.”
    She’d only known him for a few days at that point, but she’d already heard about his childhood as an illegal immigrant kid in Arizona before his family gained citizenship in the amnesty. Not rootless exactly, but never secure. At his wistful words, she’d slid a leg over his stomach and straddled him, pinning his hands to the sand above the edge of her blanket.
    “I can be your country. You can come home to me.” She’d meant it as a joke, but the words rang a bell deep in her belly. Rang true and solid even as she smiled at him. Because she knew what it was to lose your sense of home. She’d stopped visiting her family years ago and had locked up the loss in her heart.
    He’d bumped his hips up against hers, a slow stroke of his hardening dick against her crotch. “Yeah? You’re gonna let me cross your borders? Do I need a special visa?” His grin bunched his cheeks and she could barely make out his dimples in the flickering light of the bonfire against the night.
    “Oh, I’ll show you border crossing.” She’d dipped her head and pressed her mouth to his, releasing his hands and loving that she could make him laugh as he touched her.
    On the rooftop half a world away, the memory washed over her like an ebbing wave, pulling at the sand under her feet until she felt off-balance. Shaky.
    Where had that certainty gone? That knowing that