When in Rio Read online

  From the pavement to the horizon, the scene was like something from an exotic postcard, although I was paying less attention to the spectacle of Rio than to the way Jack sort of guided me everywhere with his hand at the small of my back or at my elbow. It was all completely appropriate, taken moment by moment. But in addition to making me swoon at finding out that Jack had such courtly manners, the combined effect of all those appropriate little touches was inappropriately devastating on my susceptible libido.

  Still, the atmosphere was undeniable. Even here, a block off the Avenida Atlantica which fronted the world-famous Copacabana beach, we still caught brief glimpses of the mountains in the distance beyond the buildings. Amid layers of slate gray and green, Sugarloaf reared up starkly from its surroundings, the Christ the Redeemer statue blessing the whole scene from on high. Later in the week we were scheduled to take the cable car tour to the top of Sugarloaf and see the aerial view of it all. I found that prospect much more appealing than all the beach and water activities the Copacabana offered.

  Although I’d suggested we just go our separate ways to shop, Jack wouldn’t hear of it. He stressed the high rate of crime even in the nicer parts of town in broad daylight. A petite, lone female tourist would present far too tempting a target for muggers. I wanted to take offense, but even the small amount of research I’d done about Rio said he was absolutely right. And although feminism was all very good and well, I knew I was hardly in a position to argue. I was lightly built—five foot two—had no formal self-defense training and I didn’t even speak the language. I finally conceded it would be foolish of me to insist and let Jack lead the way. He seemed perfectly comfortable doing so, even without the map.

  In fairly short order I was able to find a cocktail dress that would go with some of my existing shoes. Jack steered me away from the little basic-black number I’d picked first. He pointed out, quite sensibly, that this would most likely be my one-time-only company-paid shopping spree in Rio, and it seemed a shame to waste it on a boring garment I could have easily bought back in Houston.

  The dress I wound up with instead was a deep claret-colored, sleeveless-wrap style, not too heavy for the climate but with enough drape to swirl sleekly over my hips and thighs, ending in a flirt of a ruffle just above the knee. A good dress for dancing, if some madness ever possessed me one day and I decided that dancing was something I wanted to try.

  “You don’t think it’s too…” I frowned at my reflection, fussing with the deep vee of the neckline. For a moment I’d actually forgotten who I was shopping with—not Callie or one of my other girlfriends or my sister, as usual, but my very male boss. Whom I had essentially just asked if I was showing too much cleavage.

  When Jack responded, his voice calm as ever though amused and a little husky, I could feel the blush creeping over my face. Curse my pale skin! Curse the Irish ancestors whose inherited genes made it so easy for anyone to tell when I was embarrassed.

  “I don’t think it’s too…whatever. It looks good. Very nice.”

  I avoided his eyes, looking back into the mirror. Slowly the blush subsided but I knew he’d seen it. I tried acting cool, playing in the mirror some more, gathering up my hair and twisting the long, unruly mahogany locks into a loose ponytail with one hand. I liked the look, the way it left my neck exposed…and I suddenly realized Jack was staring. At my neck or my neckline and possibly even the region I didn’t like the mailroom guy to look at.

  Dropping my hair like it was on fire, I dashed back into the dressing room and changed into my tame cargo shorts and little t-shirt, slipping my flip-flops back on. I half wished I’d kept on the businesslike slacks and blouse I’d flown in, rather than opting for my single change of just-in-case clothing.

  I bought the dress and, as an impulse buy, added a hair clip with a frill of floral black-and-garnet-colored silk. I would wear my hair up tonight if I wanted to, I thought sulkily. Jack was waiting by the door after I finished paying for things and I thought I saw a hint of a smirk on his lips, but he didn’t say anything as he led me down the street. Hand once again pressed firmly to the small of my back, which I tried to think of as a sensible precaution against getting separated in the crowd.

  I spotted one, two, three stores with bathing suits in the window, but wanted to avoid thinking of modeling suits the way I had just inadvertently modeled dresses in the boutique. So I stuck to the safe course of suggesting we get Jack something next, for the evening’s festivities. He nodded in the direction of a shop a bit farther down the street, one that showed menswear in the window.

  Jack took more time than I thought he’d need to decide on a pair of very crisp, flax-colored linen pants, a subtly striped cream-colored shirt and a navy sports coat, also in a linen blend. No tie, but the salesman tucked a pocket square of bright red into the breast pocket as the tailor was fussing about at Jack’s ankles, pinning up cuffs.

  I was floored when, after seeming to consider it for a moment, Jack frowned at the salesman, shook his head and said something that sounded like, “A senhora desgasta o vermelho escuro hoje à noite.”

  No. No way. No fair. He spoke Portuguese? No wonder he was the senior exec selected to come to the very cool, very costly conference in Rio. But still—no fair! And what had he said, anyway? Because the salesman was looking at me now, appraisingly I thought. And appreciatively, I sincerely hoped, as he nodded and smiled and then spoke to Jack again. He spoke, then Jack spoke, then he spoke again and then both of them laughed, ha ha! Even the laugh sounded Portuguese. And then the salesman supplied a handkerchief in a lemony-creamy silk that picked up the sheen in the shirt, and Jack nodded and seemed to be making some sort of arrangement with the tailor. Presumably to have the whole thing altered and delivered to the hotel tonight, from the gestures. I wondered what sort of premium he’d have to pay for that. Probably considerably less than any premium he could have negotiated in English.

  “Bathing suit for you next,” Jack said breezily as we stepped out into the street. He had changed into more casual clothing in the dressing room at the store. He’d purchased and now wore the male equivalent of my own outfit, except that his multipocketed shorts and t-shirt hung loosely, whereas mine were just formfitting enough for fashion. He’d replaced loafers and socks with a pair of worn leather deck shoes he’d brought along, and I couldn’t fail to notice that his legs were nicely shaped and he had a hint of tan.

  I’d seen him wear casual clothes before of course, at company picnics and the like. But here, the change seemed to go deeper than just clothes. He seemed more relaxed all over all of a sudden, almost like a tourist.

  “They’ll be bringing all that to the hotel later,” he explained.

  “I gathered that,” I said dryly. “So. Portuguese, huh? I’m assuming there’s a story behind that?” We had already shared quite a few personal stories, actually, over the week and a half of working closely to prepare for this trip, and during those portions of the twelve-hour flight when we were both awake. None of those stories, however, suggested fluent Portuguese would figure into his background. Granted, I had never specifically asked whether he spoke it, because it had never occurred to me that he might. But I was still a little surprised that he hadn’t told me.

  Jack just chuckled and had the grace to look a little sheepish. “My college roommate for about three years was Brazilian. We’re still friends actually. He’s from São Paulo.”

  “Does he still live there? Could he bring us our luggage?”

  “What, aren’t you having fun shopping? On the company dime?” He ducked under the awning of a little sidewalk café and snagged a table for us out of the sun, raising a hand to get the attention of the waiter inside. “I ended up spending quite a bit of time here in the summers, and after we both finished undergrad I stayed with Mario’s family for a while and we just sort of hung out, really. Bumming around the country. Gave me a chance to network with some people Mario’s dad knew, then there was an internship and eventually I started doing s
ome field research down here. Actually, I did all the work for my thesis in the Amazon. I picked up a few things.”

  “A few things? Just a mineral water, please,” I said to the waiter, who seemed to have no trouble with my English. Jack ordered a beer, to my surprise, and then looked back at me with a cocky, smug smile. He even raised one eyebrow, which he often did. It always drove me slightly nuts.

  “So aren’t you having fun shopping?”

  “What? Oh, of course I am. I mean it’s Rio, on the Copacabana, a company credit card. What’s not to write home about?”

  “Hmm. You’re planning to write home?”

  “No. I prefer to keep that air of mystery.” For a split second I carried it off with a straight face, but then a giggle broke through. “I take digital pictures of everything, everywhere I go in the field—or whatever this counts as—and then I do a big photo essay, a scrapbook sort of thing, and e-mail it to all my family and friends. Just the first time I visit a place or if something unusual happens. Usually it’s plants and animals, but this time I don’t have much wildlife to show yet.”

  I pulled out my digital camera and showed an amused Jack the shots I’d already managed to get in the limited time we’d had. There was the view of the beach as we drove up to the hotel, Sugar Loaf in the distance. The one really good, unobstructed view we’d had so far of the Christ the Redeemer statue in the distance. A lone pigeon pecking at some sort of wrapper on the sidewalk near the base of a streetlight pole and a few shots of Jack’s amazing hotel suite. Oops. I tried to flick past the shot of Jack, whom I’d snapped from the back as he leaned out over the balcony admiring the ocean view while I had been inside, also admiring the view.

  “Hey, go back, go back. What’s this?”

  “Do you want me to send you a copy?” I tried to dissemble, as he took the camera from me and clicked around to find the shot again.

  And then I realized he was looking at me with those eyes, with that smile creeping around the corners of his mouth. “You can make a special edition of your photo essay just for me,” he finally said and advanced to the next shot, which was a broad view of the avenida we were sitting next to, featuring the sidewalks with their geometric-patterned tiles. The last photo in the series, I thought, taking the camera back…until I clicked the arrow one more time, thinking it would return me to the main menu, and saw a photo of myself trying on the red dress. In the picture, I had just come out of the dressing room and was turning and looking over my shoulder to find the mirror.

  “We need to get moving. We still have some things to get done if we’re going to finish in time for a nap before the thing tonight,” he said.

  He wasn’t looking, didn’t realize I’d seen the photo. It wasn’t a bad picture of my profile, actually, although I didn’t usually like photographs of myself. Resisting the urge to delete it, I turned the camera off and returned it to my tote bag.

  “My friend Mario doesn’t still live in São Paulo, by the way,” Jack was saying. “He has a house about an hour and a half from here, up in the hills. I’m actually planning to spend next weekend there once the conference is over, see some sights, that sort of thing. You’re welcome to come too, he has plenty of room. Or you can just spend Saturday and Sunday at the hotel of course, either way. But you might even change your mind about Rio if you get away from the beach. Brazil is one of those places ecologists tend to like.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “Rainforests. They’re pretty neat.” And my subsequent story about a two-week bird-tagging project in Costa Rica took us from the café back out onto the street, ignoring the charming sidewalk tiles and the colorful local flavor to chat about interesting creatures we had camped out to see and take notes on in our college days.

  It wasn’t until Jack stopped at the swimsuit shop we’d been heading toward and looked across the street with a funny expression that I abandoned the conversation to follow his gaze. I nearly choked on suppressed laughter when I saw what he was looking at.

  There, next to a formalwear rental place with tuxes in the window, was what by every indication appeared to be a kinky lingerie shop.

  The window display featured torso mannequins sporting a range of apparel, from simple leather g-strings to fairly fetish-worthy bustier-and-garter sets. The crotchless black leather hipsters with little red hearts along the edges were my immediate favorite, possibly because I had a pair much like them only in satin, back at home.

  If Jack hadn’t been there I would have been in that store like a speeding bullet, probably ignoring the panties and checking out what they had under the glass display counters I just knew were in there somewhere behind all the leather, lace and high-gloss latex. Would they carry lubes in interesting local flavors? Were Brazilian vibrators any different from American ones? Perhaps I owed it to myself to find out. Later. When I wasn’t shopping with my boss.

  After a moment of awkward silence, Jack gave a little shrug and said a bit too innocently, “But you said you had undies in your carry-on bag, so you’re already all set.”

  At my incredulous snicker he just grinned disarmingly and steered me back toward the swimsuit shop, where I tried not to act too shocked at the prices. Even with limited experience in converting the currency in my head, I could see this was going to be an expensive purchase. I was already deep into justifying that expense to myself. It was a special situation, after all—a girl doesn’t get to buy a bathing suit in Rio every day, and the suits were absolutely gorgeous.

  “This isn’t on the company card or on you, by the way,” Jack murmured, startling me as I pored over a rack of suits that looked like they would be almost painfully complicated to put on. “In fact, can I get about a twenty-second suspension on the company’s very clear and excellent and appropriate sexual harassment policy to ask you something, Kate?”

  He followed up quickly at my raised eyebrow. “It has absolutely no bearing on your work, which I wouldn’t ever call into question because it’s impeccable. You’re here because you’re good at what you do, and for no other reason. I don’t want you to think I had any ulterior motive in asking you to come to this thing instead of, say…well, anybody else. And your reaction can be just as off-the-record as the question. No harm, no foul. Okay?”

  He looked so earnest, I ignored the huge neon sign in my mind that was flashing DANGER, Katie Snow, DANGER! Instead I just nodded. My mouth was too dry for me to say much of anything anyway.

  “The thing is, we could go to a tourist-trap swimsuit place anywhere on the strand,” Jack explained, “and I’d hand you the company card and tell you to knock yourself out. I brought you here instead because I feel a little bad about the lost luggage. I mean, you didn’t even want to come to Rio in the first place, and now your clothes may be lost forever. So I wanted to get you something, a souvenir. I thought I could buy you a really great bathing suit to wear in Rio, since you need one anyway. It’s sort of the bathing suit capital of the world, so it seemed like a good memento. But I didn’t know how that sort of gift would be received. By you. And my twenty seconds is probably up now.”

  He was offering to buy me a bikini worth a few hundred dollars, American, and he wondered how I would receive the gesture? I looked for my flashing neon sign but it was flickering out in a flood of hero-worship and rampaging hormones, egged on by travel fatigue. “I have absolutely no problem with that, Sir.” Oops. The “Sir” was possibly a bit much. “If anything, the comment about the lingerie store was more inappropriate than that, when you think about it. Although since you weren’t offering to buy them, I guess it didn’t really have the same impact.”

  Jack smiled at me then, really smiled, and at that moment I would’ve gone along with him buying me a full kinky wardrobe of lingerie from the store across the road if he’d suggested it. My mother—who, fortunately for me, was not there—would probably have assured me that there was absolutely no difference between accepting underwear as a gift and accepting a bathing suit as a gift. She would have insisted that I shoul
d in no way consider it socially permissible to accept a present of this nature from a man who wasn’t my husband, in any case.

  And I suspected Jack had a mother somewhere who would tell him the same thing about buying me such a thing, and would also have a thing or two to say about the type of woman who would receive that present and not fling it back in his face. But she wasn’t here either, and we were both exhausted from the flight, and my own swimsuit was somewhere between São Paulo and here, and it was Rio…

  Fifteen minutes later I was the proud owner of the slinkiest black bathing suit ever constructed. Surprisingly, though it looked complicated, it had proved easy enough to put on. After I brought it out to the register, the salesgirl—who spoke a surprising amount of English. Maybe Portuguese wasn’t going to be needed here after all—started to get simpering and catty about Americans’ grooming habits, and where I could go to get a bikini wax. I adored the expression on her face when I calmly explained that I found even the typical Brazilian-style wax simply left too much hair for my taste.

  It was a delicious moment because it was nothing but the truth. I had actually gotten into the habit of keeping the whole area completely clean-shaven about a dozen years earlier, when I was seventeen and terrified somebody might see a scrap of hair at a pool party or peeking out of my drill team uniform trunks. It did mean traveling with some fairly extensive shaving equipment at all times, but at least I never had to worry about embarrassing pubic hair sighting when I picked a swimsuit. The occasional ingrown hair, yes. Having to go to a strange bikini-waxing parlor in a country where I didn’t speak the language, no. It was a trade-off that seemed fair enough to me.