The following stories are from my novel The House Of Robles 1 - Carnal Introductions. About this novel: This is the story of one family, one bad neighborhood and a lot of drama. The father is spurned, the mother betrayed and the siblings divided. With so much turmoil, you'd expect for the House of Robles to crumble. Instead, taboo walls have fallen. Intimate, suppressed desires are allowed to run free and rampant, and a family comes together in unexpected ways.
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Chapter One
Carmela Gets Her Oil Changed
"You'd better be home, old man, and you'd better be ready to work!" Carmela Diaz-Robles muttered to herself, as she swung her big red SUV around a slow moving mini-van. Contemptuously, the beautiful Latina glared over at the soccer mom in the lane next to her. Once Carmela hit the gas she quickly left the lagging vehicle in her dust. "And I really mean it this time, Pablo. You'd better be ready!"
As you can guess, patience was not among Carmela's most prevalent attributes. With a bachelor's degree in business management already in the bag, and a high stress job that annually rewarded her in the middle five digits, who could blame the gorgeous twenty-three year old for constantly being on edge?
And, as always, Carmela was running late.
"That arrogant circle-jerk!" She grumbled, remembering exactly why she was forty-five minutes past her scheduled appointment time. Her job as a leasing agent for Glenhill Properties made for odd hours. Initially, she'd been ecstatic when her secretary scheduled a late showing for a client. The client was interested in one of the top floor corner suites at the prestigious Jade Towers. Carmela stood to make a sweet commission on the deal, if only she could get the client to sign the dotted line on the leasing contract.
The client turned out to be a presumptuous and heavyset psychiatrist apparently used to having his way. Right from the start, the cocky older man had the nerve to do two things that infuriated the tall and very shapely Carmela. (She was tall for a typical Latina, anyway, as she stood at five foot eight without heels). First, the man had come in a full thirty minutes late, when Carmela herself had taken great and unusual pains to make sure she showed up on time. Second, the client had begun complaining about the expensive suite as soon as Carmela had unlocked the doors and allowed him to wander inside. This was all done in a pointless effort to get Carmela to either lower the monthly payment, or to toss some other concessions into the deal, like free parking vouchers for his patients. Oh, and there was one more thing that bugged the hell out of Carmela; the older, lecherous psychiatrist had been entirely unable to keep his probing eyes away from her body for more than ten seconds in a row.
Not that the arrogant young woman could entirely blame her client for that. Carmela was well aware that her seductive charms could have raised the pulse even on a dead man. She had a figure that most men drooled over, and that women jealously resented, and she well knew it.
As Carmela shifted over to the fast lane, she grimaced when she realized that on top of being late for her afternoon appointment, she was probably going to miss that evening's visit to the gym as well. For the last three years, she'd religiously hit the gym three to four times a week, with at least two grueling hours per session, give or take.
At first, Carmela had started going only to ogle the handsome and muscular personal trainers, but she'd progressed past that simple, puerile phase a long time ago and had since become obsessed with perfecting her own body. Intensive cardio and aerobics had sculpted her one hundred and fifteen pound frame into a little tower of lean muscle. Her legs were long and trim, her ass was curvy and tight enough to crack clams, and her thin waist gave her a sensuous hourglass figure. She didn't forget to consider her ripe breasts, a set of beautifully rounded C cups that dared any straight male not to stare at them.
Resisting the impulse to bring down the vanity mirror and take in the features of her fashion model caliber countenance, Carmela focused her concentration on the busy road ahead. Besides, she'd seen enough of herself by then to know her high points; her face was almond shaped, with full lips around an otherwise delicate mouth. Her large and penetrating brown eyes implied vast and intelligent depths, were an observer permitted to closely scrutinize them. Finally, her rich and pampered dark brown hair was currently tamed into thick and bouncy curls, and did nothing at all to detract from her pleasing olive skin tone. In fact, she felt that her hair beautifully accentuated the soft hue of her gorgeous body.
A glance at the digital clock reminded Carmela of her tardiness, and she blew out a mouthful of hot air as she fought to control her rising anger. Hadn't she been nagging her husband Frankie for the past week, to take her car into the stupid dealership for an oil change? And what had he done, but start bitching and moaning about how far out of his way the dealer was. So, Carmela had taken the car in herself a few days ago. She'd barely walked into the service department when the manager had taken one look at her face and figure and nearly jumped over the counter like a horny dog. The overbearing and pasty-faced man had come-on lines only slightly better than his breath, which smelled of stale onions and staler cigarettes. Not even the offer of free work on her car was enough to entice Carmela into going out with him.
Not that Carmela wasn't immune to the occasional fling, what with Frankie always busy with his two extremely low end jobs, and never being around when she wanted him. He was a hard worker and a decent provider, she had to give him that much, but Frankie wasn't exactly the king of romance. Her husband of two-plus years was prone to drinking binges and farting flurries, not necessarily in that order. As for his vocations, well, to say it all, one of his jobs was detailing vehicle interiors at a stupid car wash.
Carmela remembered the mistake she'd made once, and only once, of taking Frankie to a business event. Her company's executive officer had asked her husband what he did for a living. Frankie replied, with a straight face mind you, "I'm a car detailer. I do all the inside vacuuming on the upholstery and spray Armor-All around the dash and console."
Like that was something to be proud of, Carmela's top lip curled in distaste. Frankie, please! Do you know how embarrassing that was?
On the positive side, there were plenty of attractive men trying to illicitly court the queenly Carmela, far better prospects than overweight psychiatrists and foul smelling counter clerks. For instance, there was Gerald, a handsome stockbroker from the well-known financial office on the first floor of the Jade Towers. He was in his mid-thirties, wore very stylish threads, drove a fancy Porsche, and had a fat bank account that he was frequently willing to ply Carmela with.
Oh, yeah, he was also very, very married, too.
The affair with Gerald had to be cut short, Carmela sighed, as the fine man was becoming more and more infatuated with her wily self. The last thing Carmela wanted was to be placed on permanent stand-by for whenever Gerald was looking for a quickie. Long ago, she had decided that no man would ever place her on a shelf and just leave her hanging there, not even her husband.
Why hadn't she met someone like Gerald earlier in her life? Why hadn't she waited just a little bit longer before she got married? For a moment or two Carmela seriously considered these questions, before the truth of the matter entered her thoughts. She'd been born and raised in the bad section of San Diego, where janitors and dishwashers abounded (not to mention car detailers). In that part of town, just holding down a minimum wage job was considered a worthy accomplishment, worthy of boasting of at liquor-infested family barbecues.
Taking the next off-ramp, Carmela had been left with but a single viable option for getting her oil change. Frankie's dad, Pablo Robles, could do it. The forty-four year old man was nicely built, with square shoulders and a broad back. Through their infrequent conversations, Carmela gathered that he'd spent over ten years in various construction jobs, followed by another ten as a building engineer-slash-custodian in a high-rise hotel by the bay. He was a man's man, able to do numerous manual chores in a pinch, ranging from landscaping to plumbing to roofing to you name it. General auto maintenance was not beyond his many skills.
The bad thing, on the other hand, was that Pablo was something of a heavy drinker in the late afternoons. It was best to catch him at around three or four, and very soon after he got off work. This meant Carmela would have to leave her job an hour early and drive into the rundown section of town that she'd much rather forget about, all in order to get her bothersome little errand accomplished. Thanks to the stupid psychiatrist, that plan had gone right into the shredder.
Luckily, Carmela managed to pressure her husband into picking up several quarts of high quality, synthetic motor oil just the day before. As she pulled into the Robles' wide dirt driveway, she was brimming with hope that the task wouldn't take the entire rest of the evening, and that drunken Pablo hadn't guzzled down a six-pack already. Her hopes were suddenly dashed when she observed her father-in-law sitting in the yard, underneath a faded parasol, with several cans of beer already resting at arm's length on the glass and white metal-framed tabletop beside him.
Carmela's SUV kicked up a large cloud of dust on the dirt driveway as she pulled to a stop. With some disgust, she waited until the brown mist cleared before she exited her vehicle. There was no way she was getting her expensive business suit dirty out here in the crappy ghetto! Finally the dirt leveled off and Carmela popped out of the vehicle like a champagne cork.
"Pablo! Pablo!" Carmela called out, succeeding only in drawing a tiny portion of the lethargic man's attention. "I'm sorry I'm late, but I'm here for the oil change! Can you still do it?" She glanced expectantly at him, before looking down at her Longines gold-plated watch as if wanting to convey her rush to him. "Can you please hurry?"
Since it was such a warm day, Pablo Robles was wearing a loose fitting muscle shirt that showcased his thick arms, a pair of baggy, black Bermuda shorts, and thong sandals. Not one to be pressured into action during his unpaid time off, the father-in-law casually got to his feet and started walking towards her.
"I was expecting you a little earlier." He commented dryly, while taking in her fancy business suit.
Or maybe it was her figure that the older man was scrutinizing, Carmela wondered. She couldn't tell one way or the other, and she didn't really care. She just wanted to get out of there!
"You wanna pop the hood for me?" Pablo asked.
