I can trust him now with money, she mused. Ivan has been a very fair partner to me…But I can’t trust him with my heart, she concluded. Lucina was not used to mixing business with pleasure. Few men had ever gotten close enough to her for intimacy. However, she had rarely found much pleasure in men who were not about business. And Ivan David was surely a young man about the task of capital gains. So he was definitely attractive to her in an intimate way. The two of them were just intertwined in a complicated dance of emotional hesitancy.

Lucina rubbed her temples with both hands to relieve the stress. And as she sat there alone on Ivan’s comfortable sofa, she thought, Maybe too much business has ruined my own capacity to trust love.

IN HIS BEDROOM, Ivan looked down at his cell phone and read the missed phone calls of four separate women, including Carolyn Padilla. He could already imagine her calling him Papi. He shook his head and bit his bottom lip in frustration.

“Yeah, she just fucked my whole night up,” he grumbled of Lucina’s timing. Nevertheless, he figured she had a point. He had been reckless because he could be. His recent behavior was similar to his brother’s.

He thought about that for a minute as he stretched out across his bed, fully clothed, and kicked off his shoes.

What if I just…picked out the baddest woman I could find in San Diego and made her my new showpiece? he questioned. I wonder what Lucina would say about that.

That led him to think about business again.

“The Executives’ Club,” he told himself out loud. “Nothing but the best: women, cars, boats, airplanes, properties…like in the Robb Report.”

Ivan smiled up to the ceiling and calmed his nerves. Lucina had sparked another business idea for him. He thought about it more and couldn’t wait to get back into his office to have his guys post up his latest creation on their website.

However, in the morning Lucina woke him up with other pressing news.

She knocked hard on his bedroom door and screamed, “Ivan, hurry up and see this! A report about Perry Downing is on the news!”

Ivan jerked up from his bed and looked over at his alarm clock on the tall dresser. It was 7:43 AM. He had gone to sleep sometime after four, with another stream of ideas running through his mind.

He mumbled, “Perry’s on the news for what?”

“He was in an accident last night in Balboa Park,” she answered.

Ivan froze and remembered how toasted the football player had been before he left the club.

“Shit!” He leaped up out of bed and ran out into the living room, where Lucina was watching the morning news. But by the time Ivan had made it out, the newscasters were finishing their report.