When We Left Cuba(7)
As with everything in our lives, where Alejandro went, I followed, until his anger became my anger, his dreams my dreams, his hope my hope, his death my death.
We left my brother behind in Cuba, buried in a mausoleum with countless other family members, his body interred beneath the same soil his killers now control.
I take a deep breath. “Are you interested in my help or not?”
Dwyer snubs the cigarette out on the ground with the toe of his evening shoe. “Possibly. We’ll be in contact.”
He’s gone with a clipped nod, leaving me alone on the balcony, torn between hope and despair.
It’s just me, Isabel, and Maria at the house with our parents now that Elisa has married. Maria spends her days in school while Isabel and I struggle to occupy our time. We volunteer with charities, the church, and then, of course, I have my political extracurricular activities. Still, it feels so aimless. I’ve resurrected the argument to allow us to attend university, asked to help out with the sugar company our father is resuscitating from its near demise thanks to Fidel’s revolution.
Eight months ago, the regime passed the agrarian reform law, limiting the amount of privately owned land, redistributing the remainder or seizing it for government use. With a stroke of a pen, everything my family and others like us had built for centuries simply vanished. The rumors coming out of our country are harbingers of far worse. Thousands of my countrymen have been tortured, imprisoned, murdered.
“You should be careful.”
The voice jolts me, and I pivot slowly, prolonging the moment a bit for female vanity, but mostly to clear my head.
He’s no less golden now that I know who he is, or now that he’s officially engaged. In fact, the only thing marring his handsome face is the scowl directed at me.
“Dwyer is not someone you want to get on the wrong side of,” Nicholas Preston warns.
Given his influential position in the government, I’m not surprised he’s familiar with a CIA official; from the interest I saw in his gaze, I’m not surprised he tracked my departure from the ballroom in the midst of his engagement announcement, either.
I bristle at the words, though, at the warning contained in his tone, at the implication that I need a keeper.
“I can take care of myself.”
“Maybe you can, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be more careful about the company you keep. Dwyer won’t feel guilty about using you in order to achieve his ends, and he won’t concern himself overmuch with what happens to you in the process. He doesn’t play around.”
“Good, because I don’t play around, either.”
His words feel a lot like all the ones my parents put before me, the barriers and obstacles—my gender, our family’s status, the need to marry a man who reflects well on my family, the importance of always advancing our position in the world.
He steps forward, and I tilt my head to the side, studying him.
“Should you be out here, Senator Preston? I can’t imagine your fiancée would be pleased to see you so concerned with another woman’s affairs. Especially someone like me.”
In this sedate little town, this insular island, I am a scandal.
A tic in his jaw erupts as the word “fiancée” falls from my lips. A full-body flinch at “affairs.”
I smile, all teeth this time. “Like I said, I can take care of myself.”
He doesn’t speak, the silence yawning between us, and then he nods, the motion stiff, the familiarity that existed between us earlier on the balcony erased.
“Of course you can. I apologize for intruding.” There’s a hint of mockery in his tone and in the curve of his lips that suggests he bites, too. “As you said, my fiancée is waiting for me.”
It turns out his is a remarkably effective closing line as I am met once again with the sight of his back and the rarity of watching a man walk away from me.
I never accepted any of those five proposals, never really considered them, because while most were nice enough men, some odious but in possession of perfectly nice fortunes, they never made me feel anything.
They never slid under my skin and rattled me.
In one evening, Nicholas Preston has.
chapter three
“How did it go last night?” Eduardo Diaz asks me in Spanish, his voice low, his gaze darting around the crowded restaurant as we debrief the introduction he arranged between Mr. Dwyer and me.
“I’m not sure,” I admit. There hardly seems to be a point to lying to a man I used to blackmail into playing tea party when we were children. Eduardo is the sort of friend who is practically family.
“Well, how did you leave things?”
“Mr. Dwyer said he’d be in contact.” I lower my voice. “I got the impression the CIA doesn’t have a plan for getting close to Fidel, but he was intrigued by the idea of using me to accomplish such a feat.”
Eduardo takes a sip of his coffee, a frown on his handsome face. “It’s not enough.”
“Maybe not, but what was I supposed to do? The man is suspicious. If I’d pushed too hard, he likely would have thought I was a Cuban agent or something.”
The spying going on between Washington and Havana has been particularly fervent these days, and Fidel is rumored to have inserted spies into the growing exile circles.