The Viper (Untamed Hearts #1)(75)

“Oh, okay.” Katie leaned into her car and grabbed her phone off the front seat. She put it in her purse.

“Ay, Luis, I already told you!”

Katie turned around to see Sofia hit the back of Luis’s head.

“He needs to find his own woman. Desperately.” Sofia rolled her eyes at Katie and then gestured to Luis. “Give them to him. Make him useful.”

Katie handed Luis the keys. “Thank you.”

Luis nodded. “Sure.”

“Be careful with her stuff,” Sofia warned. “Don’t be tossing it around.”

“Where are we gonna put it all?”

“Figure it out.” Sofia linked her arm through Katie’s and forced her to walk back to the house. “It’ll be nice to have a woman around. So many muchachos around here. This place is drowning in them.”

“I see,” Katie agreed, as she turned around and watched Luis and Neto start unloading the car. She’d never seen a woman handle a whole pack of men like that. Well, she knew one woman who could. “You remind me of my friend Jules Wellings.”

Sofia grinned as she opened the front door. “Chu says the same thing. I need to meet her. She sounds interesting.”

“You’d probably hate each other,” Katie mumbled as she walked in.

“Chu says that too.” Sofia held up her hands, gesturing to the inside of her house. “Mi casa es tu casa.”

“It’s beautiful,” Katie whispered as she looked around at this house that was probably worth a million dollars in Miami, where the cost of living was so expensive. It had high vaulted ceilings and beautiful furniture. It was warm, light, and airy. There were pictures on all the walls. Colorful masks. Paintings of island scenery that were breathtaking. Nothing was plain or unnoticeable. Every corner was bursting with life. “It suits you perfectly.”

“Chu bought it for me,” Sofia said proudly.

“He must love you very much,” Katie whispered as she thought about the tiny apartment above Jules Wellings’s office where Chuito lived.

“He does.” Sofia didn’t sound totally confident. “But he has reasons to be unhappy.”

“I know.” Katie looked to the main wall in the living room, seeing all the pictures over the couch. The young faces of Chuito, Marcos, and a smaller boy, built so differently from them, slimmer, and more angular when the two teenagers in the pictures were already thick with muscles and hard with guarded gazes. “I’m sorry about your son and sister.”

“If I’m sad about it, they’ll keep blaming themselves,” Sofia whispered as she looked at the pictures over the couch. “So we’re not sad in this house. We’re happy. For Juan and Camila I make sure everyone is happy here. They don’t want Chu and Marc to blame themselves. I know they don’t.”

Katie felt the tears roll down her face as she looked at a picture of Marcos with a woman who looked so much like Sofia, perhaps a little less vibrant, but with warm brown eyes that glowed as they looked up at Marcos, whose arm was draped over her shoulders.

Katie turned to Sofia, finding that she was a watery blur, and said again, “I’m sorry.”

“No crying.” Sofia reached up and wiped at the tears on Katie’s cheeks. “In this house, the women don’t cry.”

“Why?” Katie choked as she tried to hold back the huge sense of loss.

“’Cause we’re stronger than them,” Sofia whispered. “We let them be sad. We’re happy instead.”

“That is stronger,” Katie agreed.

It was so much easier to be sad. Katie couldn’t even fathom the strength it took to be happy in the face of what Sofia had lost just to make sure her son and nephew didn’t blame themselves.

“When we need to cry, we cry alone, Katie. Women should always cry alone.” Sofia sounded like she believed it. “Then we get up and make sure the world knows it can’t hurt us.”

“I’m afraid I’ve cried in front of a man before.” Katie let out a choked laugh as she remembered how hard she’d cried when she knew Marcos was leaving. “Many times.”

“We’ll work on it.” Sofia reached up and squeezed her cheeks affectionately. “And don’t worry, chica. You’re not gonna have any reason to cry in this house. This is a happy house.”

“It is,” Katie agreed, because it really was. “Thank you so much for letting me stay here.”

“I didn’t do it for you. I didn’t do it for Chu either,” Sofia said cryptically as if she needed it stated that she made her own rules. She laced her arm through Katie’s again. “Are you hungry? You must be hungry. We’ll make dinner, and you can tell me about your interview. Did it go good?”

“It did.” Katie couldn’t help but be excited about it. “They officially gave me the job.”





Chapter Twenty-One


Marcos turned off his truck in the driveway and reached over to grab the groceries he had to pick up even though he was exhausted. His aunt had texted him fourteen times making sure he didn’t forget anything.

Which was pushy, even for her.

He was swamped at work. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was buy Aunt Sofia more groceries when she could barely fit the food she had in the cabinets. Chuito said her tendency to stockpile food came from being poor for so long. She was worried the money would run out, and they’d starve again.