Island Affair (Keys to Love #1) - Priscilla Oliveras Page 0,64

entire family together with her not feeling like an outsider, either too young or too different or too emotionally weak to be an equal.

Time had eroded the age gap once she’d reached adulthood. Regular therapy had helped with the other two.

But somehow, having Luis here with her, partnered with someone she respected and cared for like her parents and siblings were, gave her a sense of belonging she had always craved.

She recognized that this wasn’t real, but for now, she allowed herself to believe it.

Stepping between the artfully scarred wooden table and Luis, Sara squatted tentatively on his left knee.

“You can’t possibly be comfortable like that. Come here.” His large hands grasped her hips, easily sliding her toward him until her bottom rested snug in the crook of his lap. The motion pulled the hem of his shorts up a few inches, leaving the warmth of his thigh cushioning her legs.

He rested his chin on her bare shoulder, the day’s growth of scruff rough against her skin. Earlier, while they’d waited for dinner to arrive and she responded to emails and social media comments in the first-floor office, he had showered and changed. Now his earthy scent mixed with a clean soapy smell luring her closer.

Instinctively she melted against him, barely curbing the urge to burrow into the sanctuary of his muscular arms and chest.

Luis’s hands tightened on her hips for the briefest moment, before releasing her to fiddle with his domino pieces. He picked up one, set it back in the same place. Moved another to the end of his tiny row, only to put it back in its original spot. A pointer finger tap-tap-tapped the top of another piece but didn’t change its position. As if he were . . . nervous. Or distracted. By her, maybe?

Did he feel the same drugging pull? A similar impulse to bag the game and head up to their room to explore where their pent-up attraction might lead?

“Okay, so I’m next,” Edward announced, thwarting Sara’s ill-advised musings as he plunked down a domino.

The play continued around the table, with Luis sometimes stopping one of the others from making a move that might potentially block their partner. Occasionally the game slowed as someone counted the pieces, trying to ensure they didn’t “lock” the game, as Luis called it, by placing the last domino with a certain number on one end of the train while the same number remained at the other end. In essence, leaving no one with the ability to make another move.

“How do you say that in Spanish again?” Robin asked.

“Tran-car,” Luis repeated, enunciating the syllables. “To lock, or to get stuck, basically.”

Robin repeated the word in her heavily English-accented Spanish. “I have taken medical terminology Spanish to help communicate with patients, but my tongue simply cannot master the rolled r,” she told him. “Of course, I didn’t have the added benefit of a nanny who spoke the language to teach me from a young age like some of us did.”

Sara flinched at the blunt accusation in her sister’s tone.

“No, you had your nonfluent mother setting aside her career until Jonathan and you started school,” Ruth countered.

She shot a sharp look at Robin and reached for her vitamin smoothie. Lips pursed around her metal reusable straw, Sara’s mom swallowed the rest of her usual reprimand, though her disappointment etched her thin face.

The age-old mother-daughter disagreement and the way Robin dragged Sara into it scraped down Sara’s spine like sharp fingernails. It used to draw blood, send her tiptoeing away to avoid the fray. The years her mother had stayed home with her first two children, putting her blossoming career on hold, later choosing not to do the same after Sara was born, were a thorn in all three Vance women’s sides. For completely different reasons.

While Sara had been working hard to figure out how to let go of the abandonment she felt, every once in a while, Robin poked at the sore spot.

“And thus began the merry-go-round of college student nannies, many of whom required babysitters of their own.” Robin’s lips twisted with sarcasm. “Remember the one who needed my help with her algebra when I was in seventh grade?”

“Oh god, how about the girl who mixed up the sugar and salt when she tried to bake us chocolate chip cookies? Twice!” Jonathan threw in, his scrunched face mimicking his mouthed “gross.”

A chorus of moans greeted his addition to the bumpy trip down memory lane. Sara heard Luis’s muttered “yuck” and