Dateline: Kydd and Rios

by Janzen, Tara

  Dateline: Kydd and Rios

  Tara Janzen

  To Sue, Steve, Mike, and Kristen with love.

  First published by Bantam/Loveswept, 1990

  Copyright Glenna McReynolds, 1990

  EBook Copyright Tara Janzen, 2012

  EBook Published by Tara Janzen, 2012

  Cover Design by Hot Damn Designs, 2012

  EBook Format by A Thirsty Mind, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For more information about Tara Janzen, her writing and her books please visit her on her website www.tarajanzen.com; on Facebook http://on.fb.me/tcBKCq; and Twitter @tara_janzen http://twitter.com/#!/tara_janzen.

  Dear Reader

  Welcome to the Tara Janzen line of classic romances! New York Times Bestselling author, Tara Janzen, is the creator of the lightning-fast paced and super sexy CRAZY HOT and CRAZY COOL Steele Street series of romantic suspense novels. But before she fell in love with the hot cars, bad boys, big guns, and wild women of Steele Street, she wrote steamy romances for the Loveswept line under the name Glenna McReynolds. All thirteen of these much-loved classic romances are now available as eBooks.

  Writing as both Glenna McReynolds and Tara Janzen, this national bestselling author has won numerous awards for her work, including a RITA from Romance Writers of America, and nine 4 ½ TOP PICKS from Romantic Times magazine. Two of her books are on the Romantic Times ALL-TIME FAVORITES list – RIVER OF EDEN, and SHAMELESS. LOOSE AND EASY, a Steele Street novel, is one of Amazon’s TOP TEN ROMANCES for 2008.

  She is also the author of an epic medieval fantasy trilogy, THE CHALICE AND THE BLADE, DREAM STONE, and PRINCE OF TIME.

  Classic Romances

  Scout’s Honor

  Thieves In The Night

  Stevie Lee

  Dateline: Kydd and Rios

  Blue Dalton

  Outlaw Carson

  Moonlight and Shadows

  A Piece of Heaven

  Shameless

  The Courting Cowboy

  Avenging Angel

  The Dragon and the Dove

  Dragon’s Eden

  Medieval Fantasy Trilogy

  “A stunning epic of romantic fantasy.” Affaire de Coeur, five-star review

  The Chalice and the Blade

  Dream Stone

  Prince of Time

  River of Eden – “One of THE most breathtaking and phenomenal adventure tales to come along in years!” Jill Smith Romantic Times 4 ½ Gold Review

  Steele Street Series “Edgy, sexy, and fast. Leaves you breathless!” Jayne Ann Krentz, New York Times bestselling author //// “Bad boys are hot, and they don’t come any hotter than the Steele Street gang.” Romantic Times

  Crazy Hot

  Crazy Cool

  Crazy Wild

  Crazy Kisses

  Crazy Love

  Crazy Sweet

  On the Loose

  Cutting Loose

  Loose and Easy

  Breaking Loose

  Loose Ends

  SEAL of My Dreams Anthology

  All proceeds from the sale of SEAL Of My Dreams are pledged to Veterans Research Corporation, a non-profit foundation supporting veterans medical research.

  Panama Jack, by Tara Janzen

  One

  Nikki Kydd crawled up the hill, snaking through the rotting vegetation on the forest floor, her knees and elbows working in tandem, keeping low to the ground. At the top of the rise she stopped next to a man dressed in similar olive drab camouflage and pushed her sweat-dampened hair back off her face.

  “How does it look? Damn.” She slapped at a mosquito biting her neck.

  “Bad,” he grunted,” scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars.

  Nikki grinned, the flash of a mischievous expression showing through the grime streaking her face. “What in the hell did you do to them, Josh?”

  “Nothing you wouldn’t have done if you’d thought of it first.” Josh Rios pushed himself up higher by straightening one arm. The binoculars never budged from his face. “They’ve got a grenade launcher.”

  She muttered a curse, and without a second thought she grabbed the binoculars and held them to her eyes. Hanging by the strap around Josh’s neck, the binoculars caused his skull to thud against hers.

  “Dammit, Nikki. If you were going to konk me, I wish you’d done it before we left Costa Rica.”

  “Then you would have missed all the fun.”

  “Some fun.” He slipped the strap over his head and rolled over onto his back. Sweat and muck had mingled to form a mask of mud on his forehead and cheeks. He started to wipe at it with his arm, then decided otherwise. Anything was better than being eaten alive by the swarm of black flies buzzing around them.

  Relaxing for a moment, he stared up at the canopy of trees poking at the sky. Their thick foliage blocked out all but a few faint gleams of sunlight. He prayed none of the trees would topple over, for experience had taught him they were alarmingly unstable. More than once when bivouacked for the night, he’d heard one of the lofty giants let go of the earth and come crashing down, crushing everything in its path. That he was concerned about such an occurrence bothered him more than the possibility.

  He was definitely getting too old to bushwhack these godforsaken Central American rain forests. Well, actually, he wasn’t getting too old, but Nikki was. In the year since he’d found her on the streets of San Simeon, they’d been in and out of more scrapes than in all his previous twenty-four years. The girl had a way of finding trouble. She also had a way of finding a story.

  “Josh,” she hissed. ‘“Get your camera, the telephoto lens. We’ve got one.”

  He reacted immediately to her command, forgetting about his weariness in the rush of excitement. All they needed was one good shot; then they could get the hell out of there.

  The thought brought him up short again, his hand pausing on his Nikon, his brow furrowing. Damn, he was getting old.

  “Hurry,” Nikki whispered. “They’re moving out of the clearing. He’s the one in back. Typically.” She snorted the last word in disgust.

  Josh screwed in the heavy lens—Big Bertha, he called it—and automatically checked the other settings on the Nikon. Thirty seconds later, he had the camera poised and the lens racked out.

  “He’s American,” Josh murmured, “but . . . Ah, I see it.” He smiled, focusing on the tiny flash of captain’s bars on the man’s lapel. “For a military adviser, he’s awfully far from base.”

  “Yeah. I wonder what he’s advising them on. How to track nosy reporters through the rain forest?”

  “I’m not going to argue politics with you,” Josh said, letting his motor drive eat up a roll of film as he scanned the group of men, trying to fit the captain and a recognizable chunk of landscape into the same frame. He and Nikki disagreed on almost everything except how far they’d go to get a story. It made for a stormy relationship sometimes. “Okay, I’ve got it. Let’s go.”

  He turned toward her, but she was already ten steps ahead of him, slinging her pack over her shoulder and disappearing into the thick undergrowth at the bottom of the hill.

  Josh watched her, and found himself thinking all the strange thoughts that had been plaguing him for the last two months, maybe longer if he dared to admit it. Nikki had great breasts, and the way her hips curved into her waist was getting damn hard to i
gnore. The skinny girl he’d picked up as a stringer and interpreter was becoming a woman before his very eyes. He couldn’t shut off his awareness of her, and he didn’t know what to do about it. But one thing was clear—they couldn’t go on this way, running from one crisis to another, raising hell in every two-bit town in Central America, scooping the other reporters at every opportunity, and griping and complaining when they didn’t.

  Tonight, Josh, he told himself. Tonight he’d tell her she was going back to the States. He hoped he was up to the fight.

  The instant the thought crossed his mind, he knew he wasn’t. He was tired of fighting with her, and lately they seemed to do little else. Every conversation they had turned into an argument, and he knew why. Fighting was the only safe avenue for releasing his frustration. When he looked at her, or when she stood too close, he wanted to touch her . . . and touch her again. He wanted to run his thumb along her usually too smart mouth until her lips softened with desire. He wanted to gaze into her sea green eyes until she saw him as a man, until her golden lashes drifted down and she raised her mouth to his. Then he’d kiss her long and sweet. He would wrap his arms around her waist and pull her close, feeling her breasts press soft and full against his chest; and he’d kiss her some more, sliding his tongue into her mouth and—

  “Damn,” he muttered, forcing himself to back away from the waking fantasy. He’d never make it through the night if he allowed his emotions free rein. Hell, they wouldn’t even make it back to the hotel. A part of him insisted on believing that if he made the first move, she would respond. If he kissed her, she’d kiss him back. Of course, the rest of him said he was nuts, the parts of him concerned with survival, with common sense, with continuing to be a free agent.

  As he sat there in the dirt arguing with himself and breaking down the camera, a low bank of gray clouds rolled in over the trees, stealing the dim light from the sky. He cursed again and began jamming his gear into his pack, berating himself for being a fool. He’d lost all sense of perspective in his life. Nikki was filling his mind, making him do dumb things like getting caught in the rain. She was probably halfway to the jeep, and he was still screwing around on the hill.

  * * *

  Nikki dashed the last few yards to the jeep, clutching her pack in her arms to keep it dry. Once inside, she slicked her hair away from her face and grabbed a towel out of the back. The thick white terry cloth felt heavenly on her face. It should, she thought. They’d absconded with it out of the best hotel in San Simeon, the Paloma Grand Hotel. Of course, at her insistence, they’d left a neat stack of coins on the bathroom counter. But as she rubbed the luxurious cloth over her face, she wondered if they’d left enough.

  The other door was wrenched open, and she heard Josh swearing under his breath as he sloshed into the driver’s seat.

  “What took you so long?” she mumbled from beneath the towel.

  When he didn’t reply, she peeked over one heavily embroidered edge of terry cloth. He was sprawled over the steering wheel, his clothes steaming, his head hidden between his arms. Water streamed down the ebony strands of his hair and plastered his shirt to his body, revealing every muscle-hardened curve of his shoulders and biceps. Unbidden, her gaze traced the length of his arms to his large, rough hands, then dropped to his waist, and farther to where his leg rested against the stick shift, only a few inches from hers. A soft explosion of heat burst deep inside her body and trapped her breath in her throat. Jumbled, chaotic images flashed through her mind—of Josh sweeping her into his arms, of his mouth close to her ear, whispering in the dark, of her hand so small and white resting on his tightly corded thigh, her fingers slowly and gently stroking his satiny brown skin.

  “Let’s get going,” she blurted out. “Before the road turns into a swamp. I’d rather spend the night at the hotel than stuck out here.”

  “Good idea,” he mumbled, wiping his face on his sleeve and glancing over his arm. “I could use a cold shower.”

  His eyes were a dusky blue in the shadows, like a midsummer twilight. They met hers across the vapor-filled interior, and for a moment she forgot not to stare. He was so beautiful, his face, dark and arrogant, chiseled out of a young girl’s dreams. A streak of mud slashed down his cheek, concealing the lower half of the scar that traced his hairline. The result of an ill-spent youth on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, he’d told her once with a wry grin. During the past year, she’d imagined and then confronted him with a dozen different scenarios of that ill-spent youth. She’d come up with hair-raising exploits in back-alley street fights and illegal border crossings in the dead of night. He’d never confirmed any of them, but he hadn’t denied them either.

  Now she wondered anew about the person who had cut him, and she wondered what it would be like to touch that thin white line with her fingertip, to caress his face and take the old hurt away. The heat in her body slowly rose to her face, and she knew she’d looked too long.

  “Right. I could use a shower, too,” she said quickly. But deep down inside she doubted if the Casa del Flores had enough cold water to cool her down.

  * * *

  True to the hotel’s name, spidery boughs of bougainvillea interspersed with cascades of clematis swept around three sides of the Casa del Flores’s courtyard. Graceful palm trees swayed and dipped in the evening breeze, the rustling of their fronds lost in the sounds of the dining area. Tomorrow the whole place might go up in flames, but tonight the Casa del Flores was a haven of peace.

  Nikki sat hunched over her table, jotting notes by candlelight. Three empty beer bottles flanked a plate of half-eaten beans, rice, and tortillas. She’d picked all the chicken out. If Josh didn’t sell a story pretty soon, there wouldn’t be any chicken next time. She really had to get on him about it. The figures she quickly added up proved her point. They were running on empty.

  Boom or bust, she thought with a disgruntled sigh. Even looking at her notebook, she didn’t know where all their money went. There were too many miscellaneous entries—all of them in Josh’s handwriting. “Misc.” seemed to be his only expenditure.

  She flipped to the back pages where they kept their private accounts. Typically, Josh’s debits were all labeled “Misc.,” the last one nearly three hundred dollars. What in the miscellaneous hell had he done with three hundred dollars? she wondered, wrinkling her brow.

  She had very few debits on her private page, just a sure and growing line of credits tucked away in a Boulder, Colorado, bank. But there weren’t enough of them. She needed more money, lots more money. A year of risking her tail in the hottest spots in Latin America hadn’t given her the price of one person’s freedom.

  Unwanted, that knowledge forced its way to the front of her mind, constricting her heart with sadness. Her mouth softened in pain, and suddenly she wished Josh would hurry up and come down to dinner. She didn’t like to be left alone with her thoughts, not when they turned to her mother.

  A story, Nikki, she told herself. Think of a story, a blockbusting, fortune-making story. They needed a story like the one they’d broken the day she’d gone looking for protection. The day she’d found Joshua Rios. . .

  Two

  “General Travinas, the former secretary of defense, and his armed forces stormed the Palacio de Simeon this morning at dawn, taking control of the government. All of the remaining cabinet members—Mendez, Cavazos, and Estrada—were taken hostage. President Aragon is believed to have left the country.”

  As the radio signal buzzed and cracked its message of anarchy, Nikki shoved a pair of pants, a shirt, a comb, and her toothbrush into a ragged satchel. She’d waited too long. She’d trusted all the wrong people. Her heart beat fast beneath the dirty blouse she’d thrown on. She had to move quickly and find help for herself. It was too late to help her mother now. Until the fires of revolt burned themselves out, no one would risk releasing any political prisoners, and certainly not Helen Kydd Cavazos.

  She needed to find an American, and every American left in San Simeo
n would be on the steps of the palacio, trying to get a story for a newspaper, magazine, or television station. Only the reporters remained in the small country racked by rebellion. Everyone with any sense had left weeks ago, except Nikki.

  Looking around the shabby one-room apartment, she now realized her mistake. Aragon had set them all up, all of his loyal followers, especially Victor Cavazos. He’d sold them down the river. Nikki knew the how, the when, and the why, but she was the only one outside of a prison who did. Aragon had underestimated her if he thought she wouldn’t use her knowledge. Or maybe he had dismissed her as a flighty teenager, the mere daughter of the woman he’d never trusted, the wife of his minister of economic development. Or maybe he thought she didn’t know the language and politics of his country well enough to understand what she’d seen and heard during palace functions. He was wrong on all counts.

  Nikki had liked Victor, her mother’s new husband, but the dashing, debonair Latin had proved to be incredibly ineffective in dealing with Aragon. Helen had been under house arrest for a week before the president had thrown her in prison. Victor should have whisked her out of the country long before then.

  “Damn Victor,” Nikki said under her breath. “Damn his cowardly hide.” Now it was up to her to get her mother out of prison, a tricky business, and all she had to exchange for protection was information. Most of the war correspondents she’d met would sell their own grandmothers for a story. She needed somebody more idealistic than that. She needed someone who looked as if he knew what he was doing, without knowing exactly what he was doing. Someone who knew exactly what he was doing wouldn’t need her for long. He’d take her information and run, either leaving her behind or trying to ship her back home.

  And she wasn’t leaving without her mother.