The Rain in Spain Read Online Free Page A

woman.”
    “They have thick-cut fries and Heinz ketchup.”
    “A wicked, evil woman.”
    She ordered from the genuine Irish bartender with a lilt in his voice and a grin on his face. The bar was crowded with students and travelers from a dozen countries for whom an Irish bar anywhere was as familiar as home.
    Cheers and guffaws erupted from the booth nearest them as what she could have sworn were teenagers pounded the table in unison while a kid with a blond buzz cut trickled the last of a pint into his mouth and dropped the empty glass onto a table crowded with empties.
    She shook her head. At least the streets of Sevilla were safer for a group of tipsy revelers than most American cities. Wedged in between her and a man with grey hair under a flat cap, Javi bumped up against her shoulder. She smiled at him, inviting him to share the joke. “College students.”
    He nodded but kept his eyes on the bartender.
    “Did you study abroad junior year?” Maybe engineers didn’t do that. So many things she hadn’t had time to learn. She smiled to herself. Philosophy majors were off like a shot.
    “No.”
    “No interest?” Why even ask? Did she need any more confirmation that her peripatetic travel-writer shoes shouldn’t be parked under this man’s bed?
    His smile was a wry twist. The man next to him stood abruptly, knocking into Javi, who curved his body around hers, balancing himself without pushing against her. “Studying abroad is what the white kids do.” He put his hand on her shoulder for a moment, tugging her close as another couple edged up to the bar behind her. She tilted her head back. “We’d just gotten our papers after the amnesty when I went to college. We were still paying the fines.”
    She flushed. Of course. So many conversations they still needed to have. That first week that they’d spent together in constant contact, very rarely more than a few inches separating them on the beach in Goa, her hand on this thigh, his toes digging in the sand under her butt, had been full of late night conversations that only ended when they surrendered to sleep mid-sentence. These days, the closest they came to that kind of intimacy was when she fell asleep texting Javi while she was far from home. Recapturing that closeness was easier from a distance sometimes than it was in person.
    They’d almost ended before they’d begun, she remembered, the first time she’d insisted on paying for her half of their hotel room. Javi had been so insulted he’d practically sputtered with outrage. She had literally thrown money at him in the street when he wouldn’t accept it from her hands, this fascinating, fuckable man who would not listen to her. She’d told him he could meet her at the airport for the next leg of their trip, but only if he could find a way to accept her as an equal.
    “It’s not about the money, Javi. Blow it on a, on a . . . kite, for god’s sake! But I pay my own way.” They’d seen kites the day before, multi-colored fish and parrots and monkeys, dancing and swooping in the stiff ocean breeze.
    Her hours in the airport, wondering if she’d just made a terrible mistake, had been stomach-churning in anxiety. Off the beach, she was back in jeans and a long-sleeved peasant blouse. Her conservative dress and open, friendly face made it easy for people to talk to her, but they suddenly seemed less than ideal as a lure for a man whose desire had lain on her like a blanket.
    “Hey.” The tug on her hand jerked Magda back into the present as the bartender slid their plated burgers onto the polished wood counter in front of them. Javi drifted his hand from her bare shoulder down to her elbow, fingertips skimming and raising all the tiny hairs on her arm, and suddenly her throat was tight. Her vision swam as she blinked and her nose got hot, which meant it was turning pink too as she sniffed.
    Because he had showed. She didn’t know what permutations and twists of logic Javi had performed on