Chapter 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 bano 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.”
“Just tell me.”
In the dark, his eyes were an even deeper chestnut brown. You could almost get lost in them. She reminded herself she needed to focus.
“There are a lot of makeup products here: foundation, mascara, primer, at least three different types of contour, an array of eye shadows, blush, lip gloss, eyebrow gel… Whatever you may need to get dolled up, it’s here.
And theater actors use a lot of makeup so that their faces look even more expressive and dramatic from a distance” she explained, pointing to some of the products on Leonardo’s narrow vanity table, while Luke’s eyes remained fixed on her.
She almost blushed. Sol didn’t know what was happening with her that day, but it was almost as if she couldn’t take his intensity.
“Okay, tell me why that’s weird.” He wasn’t questioning her reasoning, just wanted to understand.
“There’s nothing to remove any of it. Or to hydrate and replenish the skin after. I interviewed Leonardo on Thursday,” she tried explaining.
“I remember.”
She thought Luke sounded mildly bothered. She almost couldn’t repress her smile. She didn’t like jealousy, but a mildly jealous Luke was a bit funny.
“Okay, so he was wearing makeup that day during the interview,” she continued.
“He was?” Luke was smug now. A smug 34-year-old who’d been granted the best genes and always looked scrumptiously gorgeous—no freaking concealer needed for him, even hungover and with only four hours of sleep.
“It was very tastefully done. A regular person wouldn’t even realize. But I’m trained to notice those things.”
“I don’t follow.”
Sol sighed. “Don’t get jealous when I say this, okay?”
“I don’t get jealous.”
Her eyes swept toward the ceiling.
“I won’t get jealous,” Luke finally groaned.
“Okay, so Leonardo is a very attractive man.” Luke’s face was twitching, but he didn’t say anything.
“He takes extremely good care of himself and knows how to always look good. But he’s forty-five years old.
No one gets to that age looking like he does without taking exceptional care of their skin.
We actually talked about our skin care routines during the interview.
His is way longer and more detailed than mine.
Which made me think whether I should be taking better care, frankly… ”
“You look great.” He put an immediate stop to any thoughts Sol had of perhaps needing to do something else to look younger. “But I still don’t follow. The chap is very attractive and I promised not to get jealous. What are you trying to tell me?”
“That I can’t believe he was planning on getting to the theater, wearing street makeup as he was, and he wasn’t going to remove all that first, hydrate well, and then put his theater makeup on.
Same way I can’t believe he went out to dinner every night with his cast mates, without removing all the stage makeup first, and moisturizing well after that.
But there’s no product of that sort here…
” She signaled again to the makeup on the dressing room table.
“Cara, you’re brilliant!” Luke grabbed her face and gave her one quick, yet still breathtaking kiss. “Now, let’s get out of here.”