Diamond Fire (Hidden Legacy #3.5)- Ilona Andrews Page 0,20

walks into the room, and everyone shuts up. Every time Grandma Ane sees her, her face turns green. Cousin Mikel just runs away. I love it.”

He hadn’t really answered my question.

The path brought us to the front of the house. Two girls my age stood by the fountain, talking. One was tall and blonde, the other was curvier with dark, almost black hair. A third girl, dressed in white, her brown hair braided over her left shoulder, sat on the rim of the fountain typing on her phone. The tall blonde was Gracia’s oldest daughter, Adriana; the one with very dark hair was either Samanta or Malina, one of Lucian and June’s daughters. They looked so similar, it was hard for me to tell them apart. The girl on the phone was Mikel and Maria’s daughter. Like her mother, Elba dressed in white and liked gold jewelry.

Adriana and Samanta—I was 75 percent sure she was Samanta—waved. Adriana noticed me and her eyes narrowed. Samanta looked uncomfortable.

“Don’t you know you’re not supposed to talk to the help?” Elba asked without looking up from her phone.

Well, hello to you too, Ms. Bitch. I smiled.

“Does your dad know that?” Xavier asked. “How many people has he paid off now—is it three or four? We’ve all lost count.”

“Que te folle un pez ,” Elba said.

I hope you get fucked by a fish? What did that even mean? Their Spanish was different from what I was used to in Texas, but I understood it well enough.

Xavier put his arm around me and I had to stop myself from driving my elbow into his ribs. I did not like to be touched. Especially by people I didn’t know. He did it in a protective way, but I still didn’t like it.

“Don’t mind her,” Xavier said.

We crossed the courtyard back to the west wing. My tablet chimed. I glanced at it. The cameras had come online.

“I have to go.”

“Really?” Xavier ducked a little to look at my face. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I had a nice time,” he said. He sounded like he meant it. Maybe he did.

The thing was, I kind of had a nice time too. Sure, he said some questionable stuff, but he tried to have an actual conversation with me, and that didn’t happen every day. And he tried to protect me from his cousin. I didn’t need any help, but it was kind of endearing. Also, he told me that his grandmother and Mikel had something to hide.

“I had a nice time too,” I said.

“Then we’ll do this again, right?” he asked. “Say yes, Catalina.”

He said my name. “Yes. We’ll do it again.”

I went inside, ducked into one of the conference rooms across from the suites, and checked the feed from the cameras one by one. All of the suite cameras were functioning. I switched to the hummingbird cameras outside. One, two, three, four . . . nine? There should only have been six. I tapped the feed from camera seven. It showed a sitting area on the west side, just outside the building. Camera eight covered the path on the east side from which Xavier and I just came. Camera nine was installed at the top of the fountain. Bern must have wanted additional coverage.

Xavier was walking toward his cousins.

My cell phone rang. I recognized the number. Valentina’s House Catering. Oh no. No, no, no. Arabella was in charge of the menu. If they were calling me, there was a problem.

I answered the phone. “Catalina Baylor.”

Valentina’s voice sounded in my ear. “We’ve had a tiny, little, itsy-bitsy problem. Someone broke into our restaurant.”

Crap. “I’ll be right there.”

Chapter 5

Valentina’s House Catering was in New Braunfels, a very German town in the middle of Texas. We had interviewed larger catering firms from Austin and San Antonio, but Mrs. Rogan decided she trusted Valentina’s and so that’s who we went with.

I parked in front of an old brick building. Leon got out of the passenger seat. Arabella was still in school, and today she was crash-writing a two-thousand-word essay, which was assigned to her a month ago and which she had started this morning. Leon was my battle buddy for this mission and he was thrilled.

“Cake shop,” he said.

“Yes.”

Leon let out a long-suffering sigh. “Are you sure that I’ll be enough? These places can get pretty rough. You walk into a cake shop and then some gunslinger tells you, ‘You ain’t from around here, partner,’ and the next thing you know, you’re in the middle of