Chapter 18
Luke
Their trip to the W Hotel hadn’t been productive. Several staff members remembered seeing Leonardo Pascual the day he was interviewed there by Sol, they also remembered the journalist. Luke wasn’t surprised: she was simply memorable.
But no hotel employee recalled having witnessed Pascual talking to the person Sol had seen with the actor when he was about to leave.
Reviewing the footage from that day had also rendered no result.
Had it been any other witness—and not Sol—Luke would start to wonder if they’d perhaps imagined they saw Leonardo with someone mysterious the day they disappeared.
But Sol wasn’t the inventive type—at least not outside of her fiction.
Despite the lack of new usable information, Divya and Luke decided to at least take advantage of their trek to the beach to have lunch there.
They called Sol to ask for restaurant recommendations.
She gave them a couple of options and accepted the proposal to join them for lunch.
Sol told Luke to order something for her.
She’d grab a taxi and meet them in the restaurant.
The detectives followed her suggestion and went to Can Ros.
“Sol really has taught you how to handle yourself in a Barcelona restaurant.” Divya smirked after Luke had ordered black rice with cuttlefish and fried fish.
But even if Divya was teasing him, Luke couldn’t help the smile. “She has.” He knew that Sol would approve of his choices.
“So…should we talk now about that title you’re so set on getting?”
“It feels weird,” Luke admitted. “Hearing you say it like that, out loud.” He ran a hand over the back of his neck nervously and checked the restaurant’s door, even if it was too early for Sol to be there. “I mean, first I need to make sure she really wants to marry me as well.”
Divya rolled her eyes. “She does,” she deadpanned.
Luke was aware of his heart rate rapidly increasing. He leaned forward on the dark wooden table. “How do you know?”
“I do.” Her face was serious. She wasn’t joking. “You know I’m good at reading people.” She was the best at reading people. That was one more reason why she was such an invaluable asset for their detective agency.
“I still should make sure that she really wants to marry me though, no?” Luke tried reasoning.
Divya groaned. Threw her arms in the air. “Just propose, mate. Isn’t that what proposals are for?”
“I cannot be the one proposing,” he admitted, practically gritting his teeth. If there was something he’d learned from Sol after almost a year together, it was that, for a third marriage to even be mildly possible, it would have to be her asking him. That was the Sol way. “It has to be her.”
Divya whistled. “So you need to make her believe like the whole marriage was her idea in the first place and ask you to do it…”
He smiled. If Divya had been able to figure it out, it wouldn't be such a crazy idea. “Exactly.”
“You do realize if your plan succeeds and you secure the title, you’d probably have to spend more time away from your beloved London, right, mate?” Divya asked the most unexpected of questions.
“What do you mean?” He genuinely didn’t understand but wanted to. They should stop with the chat soon though, Sol would be there any minute now.
His detective partner blinked at him. “Sol likes this. She may want to relocate to Barcelona in the future to be closer to her family and friends in the city. Maybe spend part of the year here at least…”
As usual, Divya’s deductions made absolute sense but why hadn’t he reached them as well?
How was it possible that he had to be told about something that was more than evident if you knew Sol?
Did that information change anything? Was he all right with the possibility of having to be away from London for extended periods of time?
He was still thinking about the implications of what Divya had just made him realize when a waiter brought the appetizers. Sol made her entrance to the restaurant at the same time, wearing wide-legged jeans and a black leather jacket. Luke’s face lit up. She was stunning.
Sol
“The woman I was hoping to see,” Divya told her with a smile when Sol got to the table for three where Divya and Luke were already seated.
Sol kissed the Mancunian on both cheeks, kissed an absent-minded-looking Luke on the lips, and sat in front of the two of them in one of the booth-like tables on the restaurant’s ground floor.
“This looks great,” Sol said, trying a bite of the smoked sardines and eyeing the shrimp and potato salad that had already been served. “Thanks for getting me out of the house. I know you guys are working.”
“We were counting on you helping us with something,” Divya said, enigmatically.
“We were?” Luke snapped out of his thoughts.
Divya smiled, smugly. “We did,” she said, and then proceeded to tell Sol about their chat with Sandro Palau. “Do you want to know my plan to figure out if Sandro was the one Leo was seeing?”
“Been curious about it. Thought you were never going to tell me how you were planning on figuring it out.” Luke said.
He was in full working mode. Whatever it was that had been worrying him when Sol got to the restaurant seemed to no longer be on his mind.
Divya rolled her eyes at Luke, turned to Sol, and smiled at her. “You wouldn’t mind calling the instant celebrity Sandro Palau and asking him a couple of questions, right?”
“Sure, want me to figure out who his publicist is?”
Divya shook her head, took her cell phone from her pocket, and started scrolling. “No need for that. We have his personal mobile number.”
The detective told Sol what she needed from her. Sol took some notes, thought about it, nodded in agreement, and dialed Sandro’s number.
“?Hola?” Sandro answered the phone after a couple of tones. His voice was eager.
“Hi, Sandro? This is Sol Novo,” the journalist said, also in Spanish, clutching the phone in her hand against her ear.
Luke and Divya would only be able to hear her part of the conversation, but they wouldn’t have understood Sandro even if Sol had put him on speakerphone.
Fortunately it was still early enough, barely one in the afternoon, that so far they were the only ones in that area of the restaurant, so there was no risk of anyone eavesdropping on the phone conversation.
“I’m a journalist,” Sol continued, not wanting to mention the name of the outlet she currently wrote for and preferring to keep things vague. “I just did a profile on Leonardo Pascual and I’m trying to double-check something about him to add it to my story.”
“Ah.” There was a note of disappointment in his voice. A silence followed after the realization Sandro’s caller wasn’t bringing good news about Leonardo. Then he said: “I read the profile you wrote on Red Carpet.” Sol held her breath. “You captured Leo’s essence perfectly.”
Sol sighed. He liked her piece. Things would hopefully be somewhat easier.
“Thanks. So glad you liked it.” She smiled.
Luke and Divya’s curious eyes were on her.
They were clearly inpatient. Sol simply pointed to the food on the table so that they kept eating and let her do her thing.
“Listen, I’ve heard a rumor and I hardly know what to do with it.
Leonardo swore to me that he was single but I heard that he was seeing Pili Garcia?
I mean, they had crazy chemistry onstage…
” Divya’s initial part of the plan had been laid.
Hopefully Sol had been convincing enough in her delivery.
Sol lifted her eyes from the table, and Luke’s eyes were glued to her.
There were butterflies in her stomach but not because she was nervous about the bizarre request from Divya and the call with Sandro Palau.
Luke’s penetrating eyes were the ones making her almost blush.
She took her gaze from him and back to the table, and nervously slid her fingers between her hair, tucking a loose strand behind one of her ears.
“That’s absolute nonsense!” Sandro retorted against Sol's lie about Leonardo and Pili. “Who told you that?”
“You know I can’t divulge my sources. It wouldn’t be ethical.” Sol was also not supposed to make up stories either, but she justified the breach in journalistic integrity because they were trying to find an actor who could be in danger.
“People are such gossips!” Sandro retorted. “Leo wasn’t seeing Pili. Pili can’t even stand him. And she wasn’t his type!”
A knot tightened in Sol’s chest. She was taking advantage of a vulnerable Sandro to pry information from him. She reminded herself Leonardo Pascual was still missing and the detectives in front of her believed figuring out who his lover was could help them find him.
“But, do you know if he was really seeing someone?” She continued the attack.
“This is completely off the record, by the way. To be honest with you, I just called you because I want to get my editor off my back. But I won’t publish anything.
Who cares if Leonardo was in a relationship or not?
It’s his business. But I thought that perhaps, if I found out that it was true, I could tell the people who are investigating his disappearance…
” That last part had been harder to pull off than Sol had anticipated when she’d told Divya she’d help.
Sol had only been able to do it after she’d followed the notes from the instructions Divya had given her.
“Why do you want to do that?” Sandro’s voice had switched from calm to slightly alarmed.
“Perhaps if they find whoever Leonardo was seeing, they’ll find him…”
“Leonardo didn’t run away with his lover.” Sandro’s words were certain. “At least I don’t think so…” he added. It was almost as if he’d realized he needed to add some hesitation to his previous statement.
Both Divya and Luke had stopped eating again and were staring at her with questioning faces.
She tried reassuring them with a smile. There was something different about Luke though.
At first, Sol had thought that he’d been lost in his thoughts about the case.
But he kept staring at her in an intense way that made her heart beat faster every time she looked at him.
So she took her eyes from him, again. She needed to finish that phone call.
“But do you know if Leonardo was having a relationship?” Sol asked.
Sandro sighed. “If he chose not to tell you, I can’t do it myself.”
“I understand,” Sol thanked Sandro for his time and hung up the phone shortly after that, grateful the conversation was over, and that the two detectives had saved some of the appetizers for her.
“I’m starving!” She was still not looking at Luke.
Her cheeks warmed just thinking about his eyes on her.
“So…” Divya glared at Sol, impatient.
“Yes, Leonardo was totally shagging Sandro.” Sol opted to devour the food on her plate. If she looked at the dish, she didn't have to worry about facing her lover. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to know what was going on with Luke, but they needed to be alone first.
“See!” Divya slapped Luke on the arm, a knowing smirk on her face.
“How can you be so sure?” Luke inquired.
Sol allowed herself a glimpse of his features.
By the looks of his face, he wasn’t a fan of the Leonardo Pascual/Sandro Palau couple hypothesis.
Sol, on the other hand, found them adorable.
The two of them were smoking hot separately but even more so if one imagined them together.
A waiter brought the main rice dish. Sol waited for her to leave to begin to enumerate her deductions.
“Sandro got a bit jealous when I insinuated Leo was seeing Pili,” she said in between bites.
“Then he got all bothered when I told him I was thinking of talking to the investigators about my scoop regarding Leonardo seeing someone romantically. And at the end he pretty much confirmed he knew he had a relationship.”
“He did?” Divya was dying with curiosity.
“He didn’t say: ‘No, Leo wasn’t seeing someone’ or ‘I have no clue who Leo was or wasn’t seeing.’ He said that, if Leonardo chose not to tell me whether he was having a relationship, he couldn’t do it himself either.”
“That doesn’t mean Pascual was shagging Palau,” Luke protested. “It just means he knew the other one was shagging someone.”
Sol almost huffed. Fortunately, Divya intervened before she had to do it.
“Luke, mate. You’re smarter than this when you aren’t having a complicated day.
We’ve been told Leonardo isn’t big on sharing information about his personal life.
Not even with his parents. And all of a sudden he’s open to share with his cast mate that he’s shagging someone…
Doesn’t it make more sense if his cast mate is also the one he’s shagging? ”
Luke seemed to be about to protest, stopped to think, and then he made a gesture that meant concession.
What had Sol worried wasn’t how it was possible that her detective lover hadn’t seen something that was clear even for her, but why Divya had said that he was having a complicated day. Somehow Sol didn’t think that had to do anything with the case they were investigating.