She straightened her seat as she was served a chicken sandwich, a bag of chips and a soda. Luke got the same meal, but he ordered a Scotch and soda to drink.
“I’ve got a proposition for you, Chantal,” he said once they had been served.
“I’m not interested in any of your propositions and don’t call me Chantal. Once I get to Tamillo I won’t be using my real name.”
“What name are you going to use?”
“I haven’t decided yet what my cover is going to be.” And she certainly didn’t intend to tell him when she did make up her mind.
“Aren’t you afraid Willowby will recognize you? I mean, you and he ran in the same crowd for a lot of years.” Luke ignored his sandwich and took a deep swallow of his drink.
“I’ve thought about that. We never really hung out together. He’s a couple of years older than me and I never had a conversation with him.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I’m not that memorable.”
He looked at her, his gaze sweeping over her face, then taking a fast trip down the length of her. “Don’t underestimate yourself.”
“I’m not. I’m being realistic. I used to mourn the fact that I’m average, but in this business that’s a plus.” She took a bite of her sandwich and thought about what he’d said.
It was true. She and Marcus had never been friendly or even casual acquaintances. They’d both attended various functions when they’d been teenagers, but she couldn’t remember ever speaking to him or his gaze ever meeting hers for any length of time.
Surely he wouldn’t recognize her. It was important that he not. If she wanted to get close to him, close enough to clap handcuffs on him, she needed him to believe she was somebody who would have no idea of the trouble he was in.
She hadn’t decided the best way to play it yet, but she knew for a fact he probably wouldn’t trust Chantal Worthington. He had to know that her mother was friends with his mother.
“Sure you don’t want to hear my proposition?” Luke asked, pulling her from her inner thoughts. “I think it would benefit both of us.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Okay, what?”
He finished his drink in one swallow. “Like I said before, Willowby is smart. He’ll know that bounty hunters are after him. He’ll be suspicious of anyone getting close to him, anyone asking questions. I think we should work as a team on this one.”
She nearly spat out her bite of sandwich. “You’ve got to be kidding.” It was as ludicrous an idea as Brandy Hamilton becoming a brain surgeon.
“I’m not kidding. I think we need to work together to bring him in. Think about it, Chantal. We’re going into a country where we have no jurisdiction. We aren’t going to get any help from the authorities and Willowby isn’t going to just waltz up and allow himself to be taken. It’s a two-man job.”
“I work alone.”
His eyes flashed with a hint of impatience. “And you can continue to work alone on other cases, but this one is too big, too complex to work alone. We can split the fee.”
“It isn’t about the money,” she replied. “And I’m not interested. Now, if you’ll excuse me. I’m going to take that nap.” Once again she lowered her seat, turned her head toward the window and closed her eyes.
The very idea of them working together was ludicrous, she thought. You couldn’t partner with somebody you didn’t trust, and she definitely didn’t trust Luke Coleman. She hadn’t forgotten that he’d walked away with the prisoner that by all rights should have been hers.
He probably just wanted to use her to find Willowby, then he’d waltz off with him and be the big hero. No way, no how would she be stupid enough to trust him.
Not in this lifetime.
Luke leaned his seat back and tried to relax, but tension rippled through him, making any real relaxation impossible. It wasn’t just the fact that he hated to fly that had him on edge.
It was Chantal.
She’d had him on edge since the moment she’d waltzed into Big Joey’s wearing a scandalously short skirt and a pair of red high heels that had made her legs look sexy as hell.
Hell on heels, that’s what he’d thought when he’d first seen her. There had been a challenge in her eyes, a determined thrust to her chin and a stubborn set to her full lips that had only intensified her attractiveness.
Sexy or not, she was in way over her head on this particular case and didn’t seem aware of that fact. He had to admit she obviously had sources he didn’t. If he hadn’t seen her airplane ticket he wouldn’t have thought about Tamillo as a potential place where Willowby might hide.
Mexico had been in his sights as a potential place to hunt, but he hadn’t pinpointed a specific town and in fact had been leaning toward one of the more popular resort areas. He’d figured Willowby would want to get lost in the crowd of a bigger resort.
Luke was willing to concede that Chantal was bright and resourceful, and she seemed to possess a single-minded determination that was admirable.
He slanted his gaze in her direction. Although her eyes were closed, he knew she wasn’t sleeping by the way she breathed. He took the opportunity to study her.
The coral blouse she wore complemented her blond coloring and flawless complexion and accented the thrust of her breasts and slender waist.
She might consider herself average-looking with her medium-blond hair and even features, but there was a spark in her eyes, a touch of the devil in her smile and a sexy sway to her hips that elevated her beyond average.
And that’s what had him worried. He’d studied the profile of Willowby’s victims and Chantal fit that profile. And if she proved herself as bright as he thought she was, she’d play on that aspect to get close to the rapist.
He tore his gaze from her and instead focused unseeingly on the seat in front of him. The day she’d started working for Big Joey, Luke had made it his business to learn everything he could about her.
He knew that she was worth a fortune, that she was close to her mother and liked shopping at the Plaza. He knew she worked out at least three times a week at a gym and had a personal assistant named Harrah and a best friend named Belinda Carlyle.
He’d learned the charities she preferred, the fact that she was well liked within her circle of friends and that she could handle herself well in a stressful situation.
What he didn’t know was what drove her? What made her tick? Why would a woman with her background, her money, want to be a bounty hunter?
He’d initially thought she was nothing but a bored socialite looking for a little fun, but over the months of watching her work, seeing her results, he’d slowly begun to change his mind about her.
What they did was hard, often tedious work and if she’d been just looking for fun she would have gotten bored and moved on months ago. But she hadn’t. Rather she’d continued to learn, to focus more and more on the bounty hunting and less on her social obligations and fun.
He glanced at her once again and caught the sight of blue sky out the window. A wave of disquiet filled him. There had been a time when flying had been a big part of his life.
His father had been a commercial airline pilot and had also enjoyed flying his small private plane on occasion. Luke’s childhood had revolved around weekend trips with his parents and younger brother to locations around the country.
He’d been twenty-two when his parents had decided to fly from their home in Chicago to Denver for a weekend of skiing. They’d asked Luke to go with them, but he’d declined. He’d preferred to hang out with his friends and party. They’d also asked Luke’s brother, Seth, but he’d also turned them down, preferring to spend the weekend with his fraternity buddies.
In a freak ice storm his parents’ plane had gone down and they’d been killed, leaving Luke with enough grief, enough guilt to last a lifetime. After that, he’d also developed a fear of flying.
Five months after his parents’ death, his brother had been killed in a convenience-store robbery. Seth had been in the store to buy a
soda when a gunman had burst in to rob the place.
Nobody knew exactly what had taken place that night in the convenience store. The first thing the gunman had done was shoot out the camera. When all was said and done, Seth and the store clerk had been shot and the gunman had escaped with all of $32.50.
Seth had lingered for two days in the hospital although he’d never regained consciousness. They had been two of the most difficult days of Luke’s life.
It had been a year of tragedy for Luke and the result had been he’d closed off, shut down and been in a dark place for a very long time. He’d crawled out of the darkness when the man who’d killed his brother had been arrested. The shooter had been wanted in another state and had skipped out on his bail. It was at that time that Luke knew what he wanted to do with his life.
Once again he directed his gaze to the back of the seat in front of him as his thoughts returned to the problem at hand.
Luke had been bounty hunting, or bail-bond enforcing, as it was now called, since he was twenty-seven years old. He’d had five years of experience and in those five years he’d faced a hell of a lot of criminals, some more dangerous than others.
Something about Willowby’s crime and his character made Luke think that Willowby might just be one of the more dangerous skips he’d gone after.
He thought the man was a sociopath, without conscience, without empathy for any other human being. Those were the worst kind of criminals and the most unpredictable.
Damn it, there was no way Chantal was ready for a job like this one. Granted she had handled herself admirably the night before in Danny’s Diner, but she couldn’t even use her handcuffs properly. He had a bad feeling about this one, a very bad feeling.
Somehow, someway, he had to convince Chantal that she couldn’t do this alone. He had to make her agree to partner up with him.
He checked his watch. He had two hours of the flight left to make her see things his way.
Chapter 8
Luke Coleman was nothing if not persistent. By the time they boarded the smaller plane in Mexico City bound for Tamillo, Chantal had a raging headache that had his name written all over it.
The worst part was that the more he talked, the more he made a crazy kind of sense. “I’m telling you, Chantal, this isn’t a one-man job. Even if you do manage to get him handcuffed and into your custody, you still have the job of keeping him contained and getting him back to the States,” Luke said. “How do you intend to do that all by yourself?”
She rubbed her forehead and frowned thoughtfully. Her ultimate goal in being here was to get Willowby back into custody to serve his sentence for his crimes.
She had to decide what was more important, her pride and independence or getting the job done right. “All right, let’s just say I’m considering your proposition of working as partners on this one,” she finally said. “Do you have a plan as to how this would all work?”
He grinned at her, that smile that made her think she probably didn’t want to have anything to do with whatever plan he might have.
“I’ve given it a lot of thought,” he replied. “You need a cover and I need a cover. Willowby has got to know that he’s on the A-list of most wanted for bounty hunters so he’s going to be suspicious of anyone who tries to get near him. So, I think a reasonable cover is for us to pose as newlyweds.”
Surely she’d misheard him. He couldn’t have said newlyweds. A flush of heat swept through her at the thought, a heat she didn’t understand. She stared at him in disbelief. “Excuse me?” she finally said.
“You heard me. Think about it, it makes perfect sense. Tamillo is a haven for honeymooners. We could hang out at all the local nightclubs, spend time eating together at the restaurants, jump from hotel to hotel and keep an eye out for our man.”
“Did you used to do drugs?”
“No, why?”
“Because only an addled brain could come up with such an idea,” she exclaimed.
“What’s addled about it? I’m telling you it makes perfect sense. Nobody will be suspicious of a couple of honeymooners.”
“I’m better off sticking to my own plan,” she replied.
He raised an eyebrow. “And what plan would that be?”
Damn. At the moment there were two things she would love to possess, a seat on another plane and a plan. “I’ll check into my hotel, pretend to be a sexy single woman on vacation and find Willowby,” she said.
“Okay, my first question is how are you going to check into a hotel under an assumed name? I would bet you used a credit card to reserve your room and that credit card will have your name on it.”
Double damn, she thought. “I never said my plan was completely flawless. What about you? Your name is far more recognizable than mine when it comes to the bounty-hunting business.”
“I’ve got a set of identification and a credit card under the name of Luke Kelly. I use it in situations like this when I don’t want to use my real name.”
She wasn’t surprised. She’d always believed he didn’t always walk on the right side of the law. The fact that he had fake ID just reinforced the point.
“I can check us in as Luke and Carol Kelly. That way if Willowby tries to check us out he won’t find anything to make him suspicious.”
“It’s still a ridiculous idea,” she said.
“What’s so ridiculous about it?”
She looked at him and deliberately slid her gaze from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. “No offense, but there’s no way anyone would ever believe that a woman like me would be married to a man like you.”
He opened his mouth to protest, but she hurried on. “Look, Luke, we both know that Willowby is not the type to forego the finer things in life just because he’s a fugitive from United States’ justice. He’s going to be staying in one of the best hotels, dining in one of the best restaurants and clubbing at one of the most exclusive clubs. He’s going to be in my world and frankly, you just don’t look like you belong in that world.”
His expression didn’t change and she wasn’t sure if she’d angered him or not. She knew her words made her sound like a first-class snob, but the truth was there was a class system and clothing and manners and haircuts defined not only her class but Willowby’s as well. As Luke was now, he would stick out like a Volkswagen parked in a row of Ferraris.
Rather than holding anger, his eyes now held a glittering challenge. “You think I can’t fit into your world? Chantal, you vastly underestimate my talent.”
“I don’t think so,” she replied warily. She didn’t trust that gleam in his eyes.
“I’ll tell you what, when we get to Tamillo I’ll check us into a hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Kelly. While you unpack and relax I’ll transform myself into the kind of man who will fit into your world, the kind of man you would marry.”
She grinned, certain that he couldn’t make a Gucci bag out of the proverbial sow’s ear. “All right, but if you don’t meet my standards, then the deal is off. You get me a separate room with your credit card and we forget the husband-and-wife cover and figure out something else.”
“Any other cover will be second-rate.”
“I’d rather settle for a second-rate cover than a second-rate husband.”
He laughed. “Is that why you aren’t married? Because you’re a snob and have impossible standards?”
“I’m not a snob,” she protested as he looked at her in disbelief. “Okay, maybe I’m a little bit of a snob, but I’m not married because I haven’t found a man I could tolerate longer than six months at a time. And what about you? Why aren’t you married?”
“I’ve never found a woman who could tolerate me for longer than six months,” he answered easily.
At that moment the plane began its descent, banking sharply to the left as it approached the runway. Once again Luke’s hands gripped the ends of the armrests and his face paled slightly.
Chantal almost felt sorry for him. She knew what it was like to be afraid
, how fear could twist your gut and send a chill through your heart. She felt that way sometimes at night in the dark when she was alone with just Sam’s presence for company.
At those times she thought about what it would be like if she didn’t have Belinda as a friend or her mother or Harrah in her life and she recognized that what she feared most was loneliness.
Other than Belinda, most of her acquaintances her age were either already married or in a committed relationship. Maybe she was too picky.
The problem she had now was that the men in her social group expected her to be nothing more than eye candy. They wanted a wife who would create wonderful dinner parties and do charitable work and not much more. They certainly wouldn’t understand or accept her desire to bounty hunt.
If she dated men who weren’t in her social group the concern was that they saw her money instead of her. Both of her parents had instilled in her a healthy respect for how money could bring out the best in people and the worst. They’d also warned her about men who would love to help her spend her inheritance.
She liked to believe she was a woman who could spend her life alone if it came to that, but deep in her heart she knew it wasn’t true. For one thing she liked sex too much. It wasn’t as though she was a slut or anything like that, but she did enjoy a lusty bout of sex occasionally.
And it had been a long time, too long since she’d indulged herself, she thought as the plane touched down on the runway.
She glanced over at Luke. At least she didn’t have to worry about anything sexual happening with him even if they did play house for a couple of days. He wasn’t her type at all.
“We’ll get checked into the hotel, then I’ll take care of the little business of making myself into the man of your dreams while you get settled in the room,” he said as the plane came to a halt.
“If you aren’t coming back to the room until you’ve transformed into my dream man, then I guess we’d better say goodbye now,” she replied.
“There you go again, underestimating me.” He reached out and ran his fingers across the back of her hand. “You’d be surprised by what I can pull off. I’m a man of many talents.”
Hell on Heels Page 10