Chapter 14

14

S ol knew she should have taken the subway, but she didn't want to navigate stairs, crowds, and standing-room-only cars in her favorite pair of Vialis platform leather sandals. They added seven centimeters to her height and an extra dose of empowerment, but they couldn't be described as comfy—or balancing.

She took a taxi instead and hoped the traffic wouldn't make her late. She knew she should have left her place earlier, but she'd been ridiculously and uncharacteristically indecisive when selecting what to wear that evening. It wasn't a vanity issue as much as a confidence-building one.

Choosing the right clothes for an interview with a celebrity, a trip to the theater with friends, or an escape to a new city was her way of fitting in and feeling at ease. And right now, she wasn't confident about her rushed sartorial pick: a pair of ultra–high waisted flared jeans and a short-sleeved black jumper. It was too simple yet not effortless enough.

She checked the time, instructed the taxi driver to drop her off a couple of blocks from the restaurant, and made her way down the steeped carrer del Torrent de l'Olla with barely five minutes to spare. Even walking in heels on that particularly narrow and hilly sidewalk of Gràcia would be faster than stand-still traffic.

When she got to the restaurant, Luke was waiting for her on the street. She hated that she'd almost been late. For some reason—could be the stress-inducing traffic or her dissatisfaction with her ensemble for the evening—she was feeling a bit stirred.

Was it nervousness? Surely not.

She made a point of never getting nervous. If she hadn't felt any trepidation when she interviewed Jake Gyllenhaal or Outlander author Diana Gabaldon, she couldn't feel anxious at that moment. She was simply meeting an attractive man with whom she'd had a nice time the previous day. Those weren't grounds for nervousness.

"Ciao, come stai?" he asked with a smile. Sol tripped at the sound of his voice in Italian.

She almost fell, but she was able to recuperate a vertical and mostly dignified position before Luke reached out to help her. She dismissed his gesture and thanked the hours of Pilates that had ensured her some sort of balance.

"?Malditas sandalias!" she muttered under her breath before finally addressing him with her best smile. She pretended nothing had happened. "Evening. I'm doing fine. I hope you love this place."

She made her way into the restaurant.

They were seated at a minuscule table and were given menus in Catalan. Luke could understand more in reading than he could just by listening to the language, but he'd decided to have whatever Sol chose.

She looked gorgeous and regal as always, even if he thought he had detected some tenseness on her part when they'd met on the street.

"The last time I was here, I ran into two different sets of friends. Well, some of them were just acquaintances…" Sol told him, her eyes focused on the menu.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but is the city that small?" he asked her with a daring smile.

Some humor was necessary at the moment.

"Of course not!" she protested, then realized he was teasing. "We're in Gràcia. The neighborhood was already hip when we didn't know what the concept meant. This is the kind of place where you'll find a good mixture of visitors and locals. So it's easy to run into people, I guess."

"You brought me to a popular place."

"I did. I had to call the restaurant to make the reservation," said Sol, finally looking at him. "And it's not like running into people doesn't happen in London. I swear I saw you one day at the corner around my place."

"And you didn't say anything?" he teased, trying to deflect from the fact that he was probably in surveillance mode when she saw him. "Where was it?"

"Waterloo," she said. Luke thought she was keeping it vague on purpose. She was probably still determining how much she could trust him and whether he was a nice bloke. It hadn't escaped him that they'd met in public places, and she'd always made her way there on her own.

"I like running by the river," he said to explain his presence in her London neighborhood. He didn't want to dwell too much on it. "I'm not paying much attention to the menu because I assume you'll decree the whole selection."

"You assume correctly," said Sol, smiling coyly. "And you still eat everything?"

"Yes," said Luke, trying to appear as assertive as possible.

"Red or white?"

"Red?"

"You sound unsure." Sol looked up from her menu, turning her eyes to him.

"I want to make sure I'm picking the right answer," he said with his best smile.

"We're talking about wine. All answers are right."

Sol ordered a couple of glasses of one of the Garnatxa options and a few items from the menu before asking him what had probably been on her mind the whole time. "So, you're Italian?"

"Why do you ask? It only took you weeks to appreciate it."

"I had you pegged as quintessentially Londoner," she said. "But I saw your last name on my cell phone, and I almost fell to my face on the street just now because you said hi in Italian."

"It happens." Except that had been the first time he'd used Italian as a wooing mechanism. "And I'm indeed quintessentially Londoner, but my parents are both from Southern Italy."

A waiter brought them wine and a few dishes. She explained what everything was with her usual competence, and Luke was happy with the switch of conversation. His identity as the son of immigrants wasn't something he wanted to elaborate on. But he liked her choice of words to describe him. He'd always felt that Londoner best described him.

"Do you watch The Privateers ?" he said then, knowing he was threading a very thin line. "I overheard a conversation in the lift at my hotel and now I'm intrigued."

"Of course I watch," she said, splitting up the anchovies and the croquettes between their two plates and grabbing a piece of pa amb tomàquet. "I'm an entertainment journalist and the show exploded. I need to watch it. Plus, I really liked it. Don't you watch it?"

"I don't," said Luke, and it was true. Since they'd started working on that case, he felt he should but hadn't found time for it. "Should I?"

"It depends on the kind of storytelling you gravitate to," she told him. "If you like period dramas, whodunnits, and shows featuring a couple of very sexy amateur detectives—and if you have a thing for the whole will-they-won't-they routine—then definitely yes."

"Will-they-won't-they routine?"

"Common TV trope, used often in mystery shows. You have a couple of investigators who tend to dislike each other but at the same time are attracted to one another, and the audience keeps wondering when or if they'll hook up. The Privateers did it with the two protagonists."

"Isn't it a show about eighteenth-century pirates?" asked Luke. He enjoyed how Sol explained things in an engaging way.

"It's set aboard a pirate ship, yes. The surgeon turns up dead when they're at sea. It looks like he got sick, but the captain, played by Murray Groff, doesn't buy it and starts sort of investigating. He suspects his new second in command, the quartermaster, did it. But the viewer knows the quartermaster didn't do it, plus the quartermaster is also suspicious of the circumstances surrounding the surgeon's death. In the end, the two of them investigate together, and you know the killer needs to be someone from the crew."

"Who plays the quartermaster?"

"Leonardo Pascual. He'd done a bunch of theater before this."

"And the will-they-won't-they is between the captain and his second in command?"

"Yes," said Sol.

"And do they?" asked Luke, trying on his best smoldering smile.

"I'm not going to spoil it for you."

"Please do. If you tell me they hook up, I'll probably watch. If not… the whole will-they-won't-they routine really frustrates me."

"It can get annoying when the writers stretch the whole thing for seasons on end. Blame it on Moonlighting . They made Cybill Shepherd's and Bruce Willis's characters hook up in season three, and the ratings plummeted after that. So now a lot of shows take their sweet time. It doesn't happen in The Privateers though." She was clearly enjoying the TV analysis. "At the end of the season, you know who the killer is and the two protagonists end up in bed."

"So, and tell me if I'm tiring you out with all these questions, why have I read something about the show being controversial?"

Luke lamented once again the specific circumstances surrounding his acquaintance with Sol. If things were different, he'd be asking about Moonlighting . He'd grown up on reruns of it and Detective Montalbano in Italian.

"That's because of the leaked screenplay. The one you think was stolen from our Pilates studio," Sol explained.

"I read about it being stolen, remember? The whole Voyeur article suggests the script disappeared from the studio during one of Josie's classes."

"And what, you think another class participant took it?" asked Sol.

Luke almost choked on the wine he was drinking. Was he telling her too much?

"Don't tell me you actually believed it?" she insisted.

"Why do you think it's so out of the question? What if one of the studio members who was in class that day stole it?"

"You're basing your whole theory on one article."

"Isn't Voyeur a credible source?"

"Not really," Sol said. "And I should know. I freelanced briefly for them back in the early 2000s."

With that admission, Luke saw a corroboration of his wanting to believe in Sol's lack of involvement.

"What about some kind of professional resentment? I think the TV agent who's always there used to represent the show's creators and doesn't anymore."

"You're taking the whole amateur sleuthing thing very seriously!" she said, smirking.

He felt a bit offended that she thought he was an amateur. And his discomfort increased at his lack of honesty with her when it came to his profession and interest in the case.

"People change representation all the time," Sol continued. "Especially when they get bigger opportunities. I mean, it's true that Agatha supported Sara and Bryana from the beginning and lost them as clients right when they started making more money. Agents usually get around a ten percent commission. But hers is a smaller agency, and the change made total sense for Sara and Bryana. And again, it happens all the time in the industry. Stop seeing weird things where there's nothing."

He registered everything Sol told him about the case, and even though he was very much enjoying the evening and the company, he also felt the need to confide in Divya soon. Money was a motive, and Agatha would have lost the potential to make lots of it when the Daniels sisters changed representation.

"I still don't think anything could have been taken from Josie's though," Sol insisted yet again. "She vets every single new member."

"Josie's is basically the perfect studio," he joked.

"Seriously, it is flawless. I can tell you nightmare stories about some of the Pilates places in London I've tried," Sol said vehemently, and Luke almost chuckled. The woman had a posh side he wasn't sure she was totally aware of.

"No nightmare stories, please. I promise never to leave Josie's," he said. "But tell me about the whole controversy with The Privateers . I can't decide whether to watch it or not until I know the whole story."

"And you are still okay with spoilers?" she asked, and he nodded. "I need to ask because complaints about spoilers make up about a third of the negative feedback I get from readers."

"Making a mental note to ask you about the other two-thirds in the future," he said, giving her the option to still talk about it if she wanted.

" The Privateers is a much more engaging subject, believe me. The whole controversy arose when people started reading the leaked screenplay. Everyone assumed the new season would have a new murder to investigate. More people can mysteriously die aboard a ship in the eighteenth century, no? But in the first episode of the second season, the quartermaster is the one killed off and the captain is presented with a new second in command, who happens to be a woman this time."

"So they killed Leonardo Pascual's character?" asked Luke.

"He's also a fan favorite, and they switched from a gay relationship to a more conventional one. Already in that first episode, there are signs pointing to a new will-they-won't-they dance between the captain and the new quartermaster."

"Now I don't know if I want to watch."

"Right? Production on the second season of The Privateers has been postponed after the whole leak, and there are rumors of rewrites," added Sol in a gossipy tone. "So you have time to decide."

He still had a thousand other questions for her that would help him with the case, but he was running out of a plausible pretext to keep asking her about that particular show. A waiter had just brought one last dish of rice and fish, and with it came the perfect excuse for a change of subject.

"I'm starting to understand why you got so upset with me yesterday when I told you about my sad lunch," he told her. "This is delicious."

"I'm glad you're enjoying the food." She smiled.

"Not just the food." He returned her smile with his best, most insolent one.

"Quit flirting or I'll ask you where you had lunch today. And you better not disappoint me." Her smile lit her whole face.

"Oh, I won't disappoint you this time. I went to one of the places you recommended on your list. It was good, but I'm not sure I chose wisely. I could have used your help…"

Luke knew he shouldn't be chatting her up so forwardly—not because he was worried she'd reject him, which she most certainly would, but because he was supposed to be working her in a different way. But he couldn't help himself. Being far from home and from the office and his managers had almost made him forget everything that was at stake. He just knew he wanted to keep getting to know Sol.