Risky Business

by Nora Roberts

  When the cab rolled up in front of the bank, Liz stepped out on the curb without a word. There were shops across the streets, boutiques where she could see bright, wonderful dresses on cleverly posed mannequins. Even with the distance, she caught the gleam and glimmer of jewelry. A limousine rolled by, with smoked glass windows and quiet engine. Liz looked beyond the tall, glossy buildings to the mountains, and space.

  “I suppose this is the sort of place that appeals to you.”

  He’d watched her survey. She didn’t have to speak for him to understand that she’d compared Acapulco with her corner of Mexico and found Acapulco lacking. “Under certain circumstances.” Taking her arm, Jonas led her inside.

  The bank was, as banks should be, quiet and sedate. Clerks wore neat suits and polite smiles. What conversation there was, was carried on in murmurs. Jerry, he thought, had always preferred the ultraconservative in storing his money, just as he’d preferred the wild in spending it. Without hesitation, Jonas strolled over to the most attractive teller. “Good afternoon.”

  She glanced up. It only took a second for her polite smile to brighten. “Mr. Sharpe, Buenos días. It’s nice to see you again.”

  Beside him, Liz stiffened. He’s been here before, she thought. Why hadn’t he told her? She sent a long, probing look his way. Just what game was he playing?

  “It’s nice to see you.” He leaned against the counter, urbane and, she noted, flirtatious. The little tug of jealousy was as unexpected as it was unwanted. “I wondered if you’d remember me.”

  The teller blushed before she glanced cautiously toward her supervisor. “Of course. How can I help you today?”

  Jonas took the key out of his pocket. “I’d like to get into my box.” He simply turned and stopped Liz with a look when she started to speak.

  “I’ll arrange that for you right away.” The teller took a form, dated it and passed it to Jonas. “If you’ll just sign here.”

  Jonas took her pen and casually dashed off a signature. Liz read: Jeremiah C. Sharpe. Though she looked up quickly, Jonas was smiling at the teller. Because her supervisor was hovering nearby, the teller stuck to procedure and checked the signature against the card in the files. They matched perfectly.

  “This way, Mr. Sharpe.”

  “Isn’t that illegal?” Liz murmured as the teller led them from the main lobby.

  “Yes.” Jonas gestured for her to precede him through the doorway.

  “And does it make me an accessory?”

  He smiled at her, waiting while the teller drew the long metal box from its slot. “Yes. If there’s any trouble, I’ll recommend a good lawyer.”

  “Great. All I need’s another lawyer.”

  “You can use this booth, Mr. Sharpe. Just ring when you’re finished.”

  “Thanks.” Jonas nudged Liz inside, shut, then locked, the door.

  “How did you know?”

  “Know what?” Jonas set the box on a table.

  “To go to that clerk? When she first spoke to you, I thought you’d been here before.”

  “There were three men and two women. The other woman was into her fifties. As far as Jerry would’ve been concerned, there would have been only one clerk there.”

  That line of thinking was clear enough, but his actions weren’t. “You signed his name perfectly.”

  Key in hand, Jonas looked at her. “He was part of me. If we were in the same room, I could have told you what he was thinking. Writing his name is as easy as writing my own.”

  “And was it the same for him?”

  It could still hurt, quickly and unexpectedly. “Yes, it was the same for him.”

  But Liz remembered Jerry’s good-natured description of his brother as a stuffed shirt. The man Liz was beginning to know didn’t fit. “I wonder if you understood each other as well as both of you thought.” She looked down at the box again. None of her business, she thought, and wished it were as true as she’d once believed. “I guess you’d better open it.”

  He slipped the key into the lock, then turned it soundlessly. When he drew back the lid, Liz could only stare. She’d never seen so much money in her life. It sat in neat stacks, tidily banded, crisply American. Unable to resist, Liz reached out to touch.

  “God, it looks like thousands.” She swallowed. “Hundreds of thousands.”

  His face expressionless, Jonas flipped through the stacks. The booth became as quiet as a tomb. “Roughly three hundred thousand, in twenties and fifties.”

  “Do you think he stole it?” she murmured, too overwhelmed to notice Jonas’s hands tighten on the money. “This must be the money the man who broke into my house wanted.”

  “I’m sure it is.” Jonas set down a stack of bills and picked up a small bag. “But he didn’t steal it.” He forced his emotions to freeze. “I’m afraid he earned it.”

  “How?” she demanded. “No one earns this kind of money in a matter of days, and I’d swear Jerry was nearly broke when I hired him. I know Luis lent him ten thousand pesos before his first paycheck.”

  “I’m sure he was.” He didn’t bother to add that he’d wired his brother two hundred before Jerry had left New Orleans. Carefully, Jonas reached under the stack of money and pulled out a small plastic bag, dipped in a finger and tasted. But he’d already known.

  “What is that?”

  His face expressionless, Jonas sealed the bag. He couldn’t allow himself any more grief. “Cocaine.”

  Horrified, Liz stared at the bag. “I don’t understand. He lived in my house. I’d have known if he were using drugs.”

  Jonas wondered if she realized just how innocent she was of the darker side of humanity. Until that moment, he hadn’t fully realized just how intimate he was with it. “Maybe, maybe not. In any case, Jerry wasn’t into this sort of thing. At least not for himself.”

  Liz sat down slowly. “You mean he sold it?”

  “Dealt drugs?” Jonas nearly smiled. “No, that wouldn’t have been exciting enough.” In the corner of the box was a small black address book. Jonas took it out to leaf through it. “But smuggling,” he murmured. “Jerry could have justified smuggling. Action, intrigue and fast money.”

  Her mind was whirling as she tried to focus back on the man she’d known so briefly. Liz had thought she’d understood him, categorized him, but he was more of a stranger now than when he’d been alive. It didn’t seem to matter anymore who or what Jerry Sharpe had been. But the man in front of her mattered. “And you?” she asked. “Can you justify it?”

  He glanced down at her, over the book in his hands. His eyes were cold, so cold that she could read nothing in them at all. Without answering, Jonas went back to the book.

  “He’d listed initials, dates, times and some numbers. It looks as though he made five thousand a drop. Ten drops.”

  Liz glanced over at the money again. It no longer seemed crisp and neat but ugly and ill used. “That only makes fifty thousand. You said there was three hundred.”

  “That’s right.” Plus a bag of uncut cocaine with a hefty street value. Jonas took out his own book and copied down the pages from his brother’s.

  “What are we going to do with this?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Liz rose again, certain she’d stepped into a dream. “Do you mean just leave it here? Just leave it here in this box and walk away?”

  With the last of the numbers copied, Jonas replaced his brother’s book. “Exactly.”

  “Why did we come if we’re not going to do anything with it?”

  He slipped his own book into his jacket. “To find it.”

  “Jonas.” Before he could close the lid she had her hand on his wrist. “You have to take it to the police. To Captain Moralas.”

  In a deliberate gesture, he removed her hand, then picked up the bag of coke. She understood rejection and braced herself against it. But it wasn’t rejection she saw in his face; it was fury. “You want to take this on the plane, Liz? Any idea on what the penalty
is in Mexico for carrying controlled substances?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t want to.” He closed the lid, locked it. “For now, just forget you saw anything. I’ll handle this in my own way.”

  “No.”

  His emotions were raw and tangled, his patience thin. “Don’t push me, Liz.”

  “Push you?” Infuriated, she grabbed his shirtfront and planted her feet. “You’ve pushed me for days. Pushed me right into the middle of something that’s so opposed to the way I’ve lived I can’t even take it all in. Now that I’m over my head in drug smuggling and something like a quarter of a million dollars, you tell me to forget it. What do you expect me to do, go quietly back and rent tanks? Maybe you’ve finished using me now, Jonas, but I’m not ready to be brushed aside. There’s a murderer out there who thinks I know where the money is.” She stopped as her skin iced over. “And now I do.”

  “That’s just it,” Jonas said quietly. For the second time, he removed her hands, but this time he held on to her wrists. Frightened, he thought. He was sure her pulse beat with fear as well as anger. “Now you do. The best thing for you to do now is stay out of it, let them focus on me.”

  “Just how am I supposed to do that?”

  The anger was bubbling closer, the anger he’d wanted to lock in the box with what had caused it. “Go to Houston, visit your daughter.”

  “How can I?” she demanded in a whisper that vibrated in the little room. “They might follow me.” She looked down at the long, shiny box. “They would follow me. I won’t risk my daughter’s safety.”

  She was right, and because he knew it, Jonas wanted to rage. He was boxed in, trapped between love and loyalty and right and wrong. Justice and the law. “We’ll talk to Moralas when we get back.” He picked up the box again, hating it.

  “Where are we going now?”

  Jonas unlocked the door. “To get a drink.”

  Rather than going with Jonas to the lounge, Liz took some time for herself. Because she felt he owed her, she went into the hotel’s boutique, found a simple one-piece bathing suit and charged it to the room. She hadn’t packed anything but a change of clothes and toiletries. If she was stuck in Acapulco for the rest of the evening, she was going to enjoy the private pool each villa boasted.

  The first time she walked into the suite, she was dumb-founded. Her parents had been reasonably successful, and she’d been raised in a quietly middle-class atmosphere. Nothing had prepared her for the sumptuousness of the two-bedroom suite overlooking the Pacific. Her feet sank cozily into the carpet. Softly colored paintings were spaced along ivory-papered walls. The sofa, done in grays and greens and blues, was big enough for two to sprawl on for a lazy afternoon nap.

  She found a phone in the bathroom next to a tub so wide and deep that she was almost tempted to take her dip there. The sink was a seashell done in the palest of pinks.

  So this is how the rich play, she mused as she wandered to the bedroom where her overnight bag was set at the end of a bed big enough for three. The drapes of her balcony were open so that she could see the tempestuous surf of the Pacific hurl up and spray. She pulled the glass doors open, wanting the noise.

  This was the sort of world Marcus had told her of so many years before. He’d made it seem like a fairy tale with gossamer edges. Liz had never seen his home, had never been permitted to, but he’d described it to her. The white pillars, the white balconies, the staircase that curved up and up. There were servants to bring you tea in the afternoons, a stable where grooms waited to saddle glossy horses. Champagne was drunk from French crystal. It had been a fairy tale, and she hadn’t wanted it for herself. She had only wanted him.

  A young girl’s foolishness, Liz thought now. In her naive way, she’d made a prince out of a man who was weak and selfish and spoiled. But over the years she had thought of the house he’d talked of and pictured her daughter on those wide, curving stairs. That had been her sense of justice.

  The image wasn’t as clear now, not now that she’d seen wealth in a long metal box and understood where it had come from. Not when she’d seen Jonas’s eyes when he’d spoken of his kind of justice. That hadn’t been a fairy tale with gossamer edges, but grimly real. She had some thinking to do. But before she could plan for the rest of her life, and for her daughter’s, she had to get through the moment.

  Jonas. She was bound to him through no choice of her own. And perhaps he was bound to her in the same way. Was that the reason she was drawn to him? Because they were trapped in the same puzzle? If she could only explain it away, maybe she could stop the needs that kept swimming through her. If she could only explain it away, maybe she would be in control again.

  But how could she explain the feelings she’d experienced on the silent cab ride back to the hotel? She had had to fight the desire to put her arms around him, to offer comfort when nothing in his manner had indicated he needed or wanted it. There were no easy answers—no answers at all to the fact that she was slowly, inevitably falling in love with him.

  It was time to admit that, she decided, because you could never face anything until it was admitted. You could never solve anything until it was faced. She’d lived by that rule years before during the biggest crisis of her life. It still held true.

  So she loved him, or very nearly loved him. She was no longer naive enough to believe that love was the beginning of any answer. He would hurt her. There were no ifs about that. He’d steal from her the one thing she’d managed to hold fast to for ten years. And once he’d taken her heart, what would it mean to him? She shook her head. No more than such things ever mean to those who take them.

  Jonas Sharpe was a man on a mission, and she was no more to him than a map. He was ruthless in his own patient way. When he had finished what he’d come to do, he would turn away from her, go back to his life in Philadelphia and never think of her again.

  Some women, Liz thought, were doomed to pick the men who could hurt them the most. Making her mind a blank, Liz stripped and changed to her bathing suit. But Jonas, thoughts of Jonas, kept slipping through the barriers.

  Maybe if she talked to Faith—if she could touch her greatest link with normality, things would snap back into focus. On impulse, Liz picked up the phone beside her bed and began the process of placing the call. Faith would just be home from school, Liz calculated, growing more excited as she heard the clinks and buzzes on the receiver. When the phone began to ring, she sat on the bed. She was already smiling.

  “Hello?”

  “Mom?” Liz felt the twin surges of pleasure and guilt as she heard her mother’s voice. “It’s Liz.”

  “Liz!” Rose Palmer felt identical surges. “We didn’t expect to hear from you. Your last letter just came this morning. Nothing’s wrong, is it?”

  “No, no, nothing’s wrong.” Everything’s wrong. “I just wanted to talk to Faith.”

  “Oh, Liz, I’m so sorry. Faith’s not here. She has her piano lesson today.”

  The letdown came, but she braced herself against it. “I forgot.” Tears threatened, but she forced them back. “She likes the lessons, doesn’t she?”

  “She loves them. You should hear her play. Remember when you were taking them?”

  “I had ten thumbs.” She managed to smile. “I wanted to thank you for sending the pictures. She looks so grown up. Momma, is she…looking forward to coming back?”

  Rose heard the need, felt the ache. She wished, not for the first time, that her daughter was close enough to hold. “She’s marking off the days on her calendar. She bought you a present.”

  Liz had to swallow. “She did?”

  “It’s supposed to be a surprise, so don’t tell her I told you.”

  “I won’t.” She dashed tears away, grateful she could keep her voice even. It hurt, but was also a comfort to be able to speak to someone who knew and understood Faith as she did. “I miss her. The last few weeks always seem the hardest.”

  Her voice wasn’t as steady as she thou
ght—and a mother hears what others don’t. “Liz, why don’t you come home? Spend the rest of the month here while she’s in school?”

  “No, I can’t. How’s Dad?”

  Rose fretted impatiently at the change of subject, then subsided. She’d never known anyone as thoroughly stubborn as her daughter. Unless it was her granddaughter. “He’s fine. Looking forward to coming down and doing some diving.”

  “We’ll take one of the boats out—just the four of us. Tell Faith I…tell her I called,” she finished lamely.

  “Of course I will. Why don’t I have her call you back when she gets home? The car pool drops her off at five.”

  “No. No, I’m not home. I’m in Acapulco—on business.” Liz let out a long breath to steady herself. “Just tell her I miss her and I’ll be waiting at the airport. You know I appreciate everything you’re doing. I just—”

  “Liz.” Rose interrupted gently. “We love Faith. And we love you.”

  “I know.” Liz pressed her fingers to her eyes. She did know, but was never quite sure what to do about it. “I love you, too. It’s just that sometimes things get so mixed up.”

  “Are you all right?”

  She dropped her hand again, and her eyes were dry. “I will be when you get there. Tell Faith I’m marking off the days too.”

  “I will.”

  “Bye, Momma.”

  She hung up and sat until the churning emptiness had run its course. If she’d had more confidence in her parents’ support, more trust in their love, would she have fled the States and started a new life on her own? Liz dragged a hand through her hair. She’d never be sure of that, nor could she dwell on it. She’d burned her own bridges. The only thing that was important was Faith, and her happiness.

  An hour later, Jonas found her at the pool. She swam laps in long, smooth strokes, her body limber. She seemed tireless, and oddly suited to the private luxury. Her suit was a flashy red, but the cut so simple that it relied strictly on the form it covered for style.