Crash Landing. Lori Wilde

it looked like he pulled out an American Express black card and dropped it into her palm. The blonde closed her fingers around the card, leaned over and kissed his cheek.

      Buying her off.

      Sophia snorted. How could she be jealous of that?

      Since his arrival, Gibb Martin had either been on the phone or in meetings with the cadre of other businessmen that Sophia had flown in, while the blonde had spent her time at the Bosque de Los Dioses luxury spa.

      Sophia’s oldest sister, Josephina, worked at the spa as a massage therapist. In order to work for or contract with Bosque de Los Dioses you had to sign a confidentially agreement; they could only gossip about the clientele with each other and even then they had to make sure no one overheard their conversations.

      A few minutes later, Josie came out of the employee entrance, toting her own brown bag casado. “Hola.”

      “What’s up?”

      Although they had been raised in a bilingual household, Josie preferred to speak Spanish, while Sophia thought of English words before the Spanish equivalent popped in her mind. Probably because she’d lived with her aunt in California the year after their mother had died and being so young, she’d had no trouble adapting to that culture. Sophia set the hammock to rocking by pushing against the palm tree with her big toe.

      “Nothing new.” Josie plunked down on the cement bench beside the rows of empty hammocks strung from the trees for the guests to enjoy. At this time of the afternoon almost everyone was out on an excursion. “How about you?”

      “Waiting to take a fare to Libera at two.”

      “How is El Diablo holding up these days? That plane is as old as I am.” Josie was forty-one, fourteen years older than Sophia and she’d been married to her high school sweetheart, Jorge, for more than half her life. They had three children who were high school age.

      “I’ve got the plane running like a top.”

      El Diablo was the contrary 1971 Piper Cherokee 180F she’d inherited from their father after he’d retired two years ago. She was the only one of the seven Cruz offspring who’d had any interest in flying.

      No one had begrudged her the gift of the plane. Her siblings considered the plane a burden, not a blessing, and granted it was something of a heap, but it was how she made her living. Flying tourists into the Cloud Forest where only bush planes could go. She dearly loved flying and had just finished aircraft maintenance school so she could keep El Diablo in the best flying condition possible.

      Josie unwrapped homemade beef tamales from the plantain leaf they had been cooked in. “You’ve made Poppy very proud.”

      Sophia sneaked another glance at Gibb Martin’s tree house bungalow. Blondie had come out on the veranda and was leaning against the balcony railing. The woman waved at her sister Josie and smiled.

      Josie waved and smiled back.

      “You know her?”

      “Every day on my massage table for the last two weeks. She’s my two o’clock appointment and she tips big with her boyfriend’s credit card. I will smile and wave at her all day if that’s what she wants.”

      “She seems a bit superficial.” Okay, that was snide. Contrite, Sophia popped three fingers over her mouth.

      “Stacy is a cover model,” Josie said. “What else would you expect from her?”

      “Something a bit less cliché?”

      “Does your prickly tongue have anything to do with the fact that she’s the girlfriend of that handsome American venture capitalist you keep staring at?”

      “I do not stare at him.”

      “Uh-huh.”

      “Well, maybe a little, but how often do you see blond men around here? It’s not him personally. It’s just his hair.”

      “Uh-huh.”

      “It is.”

      Josie nodded at an overweight bald guy in his thirties who was horsing around with his buddies on one of the rope footbridges that linked the bungalows to the main lodge. “You are telling me that you would stare at that man if he had blond hair?”

      “Yes, sure,” she lied.

      Josie snorted. “By the way, the venture capitalist stares back at you too when you’re not looking.”

      “He does?” she asked, surprised to hear her voice come out an octave higher.

      Josie nodded. “He stares hard.”

      Sophia gulped, ducked her head, and felt heat flush her cheeks. Hey, what was this? She wasn’t a blushy-gushy kind of girl.

      Josie sent her a knowing glance. “Things are not going well with Emilio?”

      “What?” Sophia startled. “No. Emilio is great—”

      “But Emilio is in San Jose and Mr. Tall, Blond and Handsome is here?”

      “I didn’t say that.”

      “You didn’t have to.”

      Her sister was wrong. She wasn’t that fickle. Was she?

      “Sophia,” Josie wheedled. “You can tell me. What is it?”

      Sophia shrugged. The bark on the palm tree at the end of the hammock had sloughed off from where the ropes had rubbed it. “It’s nothing really.”

      Josie clucked her tongue, shook her head. Sophia had never been able to keep anything from her older sister.

      “Emilio and I are sliding more toward solid friendship than red-hot romance,” she admitted. “We have not even made love yet.”

      “But you’ve been dating what, two months?”

      “My point exactly. Only five dates in two months. If this relationship was headed somewhere important, should we not pine for each other every time we are apart? Am I wrong?”

      “You expect too much,” Josie said. “Emilio is a nice man. He would make a good husband and father.”

      “And that’s enough?”

      Josie gave a knowing smile, dusted crumbs from her fingers and got to her feet. “What else is there?”

      “Passion for one thing.”

      “Passion fades. That’s when friendship counts.”

      “You make marriage sound so boring.” Sophia yawned.

      “Not at all. As time goes on, you will learn to value other things above passion.”

      “That might work for you,” she said. “But me? I want sparks. All the time. Fireworks or nothing.”

      Josie made a quiet chiding noise. “You’re more like Mother than you think. You’ve got her starry-eyed idealism.”

      “There’s nothing wrong with setting my standards high.”

      “There is having high standards and then there are unrealistic expectations.”

      “If Mother hadn’t believed in passionate love that lasted she wouldn’t have stayed in Costa Rica and had seven children.”

      “True, but look at everything she gave up.”

      “For love.”

      “It wasn’t easy for her. Starting over in a new country. Learning another language. Navigating a strange culture.”

      “But she did it because she loved Poppy so much. That’s what I want. Someone who’d swim the deepest ocean for me.”

      “You’re not going to start singing are you?”

      “I might,” Sophia teased, splayed a