The notch in his throat bobbed. Was he remembering too?
Who cares, she told herself.You have only four hours to impress Ángel.
“Do we have a deal?” she managed. “I’ll help you after you help me.”
“Helping a thief isn’t a good idea.”
She half smiled. “You won’t know for certain until you try.”
His light brown eyes bore into hers. “Hand me what you stole, and we have a deal.”
“I was hoping you were going to say that,” she said.
Ignacio’s brows quirked in confusion as she placed the blue whistles into his awaiting palm. The metal gleamed in the afternoon sun. And Estefan the ostrich went wild for them.
“Better chuck those,” she said.
“Huh?”
Esmeralda reared back and unleashed the ostrich from hiscage.
Chapter 14
Ignacio
“What are you doing?!” His voice had risen to a prepubescent pitch.
The ostrich, a massive, beastly thing with tufts of frizzy hair on its head, lunged out of the open cage door, snapping its beak at the shiny whistles in Ignacio’s hand. He leapt back right before the bird, more like a dinosaur, ripped off his limb.
“Throw the whistles, you fool! Or Estefan will get you!” Esmeralda shouted.
“Estefan?”
“The ostrich!”
Something like a growl emanated from the bird’s outrageously long neck.
With a horrified gasp, Ignacio flung the whistles into the main alleyway to his right. Esmeralda grabbed him by the collar and yanked him to her as Estefan bolted forward. Ignacio crashed into her and tripped over her skirts. They tumbled onto the dirt. He caught himself as best he could so he wouldn’t squish her with his full weight.
He hovered over her. That mass of black curls he’d always thought were so pretty fanned out on the grass. Her blouse hung down one shoulder. Ignacio tried his very best not to look at her soft bronze skin. Or the constellation of beauty marks he once traced with his lips down to her stomach. He tried not to breathe in her familiar scent. Oranges. Mangoes. Vanilla. And jasmine. Always jasmine.
She winced. “I bumped my head on a rock. Way to clobber me, you goof.”
He frowned. “It’s what you deserve for trying to feed me to a monster bird.”
A group of trapeze artists sporting shimmering costumes that clung to their lithe bodies walked by, speaking about what sort of new stunts they might try during the parade to impress Ángel for their first challenge.
One of them gasped. “Estefan got out!”
The infamous ostrich opened his wings and did a strange sort of dance. They tried to calm him down, but instead, the beast barreled after them.
“Run!” the eldest girl in the bunch yelled.
The trapeze artists whirled around and bolted away, their shiny leotards refracting rainbows of light in their wake. Estefan chomped his beak as he took chase after them.
“Hurry!” Esmeralda ordered, shoving at Ignacio’s chest. “Help me.”
She scooted from underneath him and crawled on her knees toward the bottom of the enclosure. With steady fingers, she began releasing the fasteners holding the wheels in place.
