Love Inspired Suspense December 2013 Bundle: Christmas Cover-UpForce of NatureYuletide JeopardyWilderness Peril

by Lynette Eason

  “Talking to whom?”

  “Not sure, but I thought…”

  Reuben’s stomach tightened. “You thought what?”

  Paula blurted out the words. “He thought that Gavin was talking to his boss.”

  “What kind of boss?” Antonia asked.

  Silvio coughed. “He said sir and investigation.”

  The words fell heavily and left a silence in their wake. “He’s a cop?” Antonia ventured finally.

  Reuben flopped on the couch, his head falling against the back, eyes closed. He let out an enormous sigh. “Probably DEA. I should have known. Why else would a guy like that want to work here?”

  Antonia fisted her hands on her hips. “It makes perfect sense. He’s been working here for months trying to gather information about your brother or maybe to find out if you’re working with him. Hector is dragging you into ruin,” she snapped. “Your loyalty to him will destroy you, Reuben. What’s it going to take for you to see that?”

  He jerked upright, eyes flashing. “I love my brother just like you love your sister, and I’m not going to believe he’s back in the mob.”

  “He’s a criminal, and he has no right to involve you.”

  Reuben stood. “And so are you, Antonia, because you helped your sister kidnap my niece. Did you have the right to do that?”

  The tension crackled between them until he broke away and grabbed the backpack. “Let’s see what our spy packed for the trip,” he said bitterly. The pack was wet but the inside still relatively dry thanks to a nylon lining. Dumping the pack out onto the table, he found ammunition for a gun that wasn’t there.

  “He had more to bring to this shootout than the knife you gave him,” Silvio grumbled, holding on to Paula’s shoulder for support.

  Reuben extracted the knife he’d loaned Gavin and pocketed it.

  “If Gavin is undercover, then the cops know Hector is here, and Leland, too,” Antonia said.

  Reuben felt a stir of hope. If the cops knew the situation, they would get backup here for their agent as soon as they could. He reached deeper into the backpack. Gavin’s wallet did not prove to be of much help. The driver’s license indicated his name really was Gavin Campbell, but there was no identification to show he was working for law enforcement. Reuben threw the bag down in frustration when he heard an odd thunk. He looked again and discovered a small metal rectangle shoved in a pocket he hadn’t noticed before.

  The bottom had an output jack. It was a recording device. “He chucked the microphone somewhere.” Reuben stared at the tiny machine.

  “What was he recording?” Antonia said.

  Reuben’s nerves jumped as he pressed the play button.

  They leaned forward to listen. At first it sounded like nothing more than the rumbles of a storm, the audio crackling with noise. Reuben turned the volume up all the way.

  “…all off. We got cops involved now.” It was Hector speaking.

  “You don’t get to decide.”

  “Listen, Leland,” Hector said, voice louder, insistent.

  The voices were swallowed up in storm noise until a few seconds later.

  “Too late,” Leland said. There was a pause. “…saw something.”

  The sounds became hurried, branches snapping, and then the click indicating the end of the tape.

  Reuben swallowed. “He stowed the device and took off when Leland spotted him.”

  “Right before he got shot,” Silvio added.

  Reuben played the tape again, and they listened in silence.

  Paula chewed a nail nervously. “What does ‘all off’ mean?”

  Reuben did not want to answer the question, did not want to face the import of those two little words. “It means my brother had some sort of deal going with Leland.” He turned to look at Antonia. “And you were right all along.”

  ELEVEN

  She should have felt justified, satisfied, thrilled that Reuben had finally been forced to face the truth about his brother. Instead, as she looked into his stark face, drinking in the grief in his brown eyes, she felt only compassion. The mirror she’d held up to Hector had reflected back a criminal, but it also cast a dark shadow on his brother’s faith. “Reuben,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “And why would you be sorry?” he said in a tone that made something chill deep inside her. His eyes were flat and cold. “It’s what you’ve been saying the whole time. Your sister is right. You’re right. My brother is a criminal, and I’ve been blind, stupid and naive.”

  She opened her mouth to answer, but nothing would come out.

  Paula reached out a hand to Reuben. “We don’t know what he was up to.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Reuben spat. “If it involved Leland, it’s bad. Bad enough to bring the cops here.”

  Paula looked helplessly at Antonia and Silvio, as if she were searching for something comforting to offer. She found nothing and pressed a knuckle to her mouth.

  Reuben spun on his heel. “Going to the cupola.”

  “I’ll go, too,” Silvio said.

  “No,” Reuben said. “See to the shelter. Storm’s about to hit. If we lose the hotel, our best chance of survival will be in there. Silvio’s made it his mission over the years to reinforce the walls and upgrade the roofing to meet code. We should prepare a bed of some kind there for Gavin.” He trudged up the steps, and Antonia watched until he was out of sight.

  She found Paula staring at nothing. “This can’t be true. Hector has goodness inside him, deep down.” Tears glimmered in her eyes.

  Silvio squeezed her around the shoulders. “We don’t know what happened. Maybe when Boy Cop wakes up, he can fill in the gaps. Jumping to conclusions ain’t going to help anyone, is it?” He gathered her into his chest and kissed her wrinkled brow. “Okay now. Time to get going. I’ll haul the supplies to the shelter. Don’t want you ladies outside with—” he paused “—with bad guys and a storm. Pile up everything that needs to go and stack it in the kitchen.”

  Antonia held the door for Silvio as he hefted several gallon jugs of water and plunged out into the rain. Paula packed up a bag with bandages, shaking her head all the while.

  Antonia’s mind was not on the survival details. She couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. She’d gotten the thing she’d longed for and prayed about. Hector was crooked and Reuben could see it at long last. Yet it was not triumph, but grief or perhaps guilt that clawed at her chest. She realized suddenly that she had not been praying for Hector’s salvation, but for his conviction. She’d wanted him to fall and now he had. The thought shamed her.

  “Here,” Paula said, piling sofa cushions into her arms. “The shelter is small, no room for a cot. We’ll have to lay Mr. Campbell down on the cushions.”

  Silvio was already struggling through the rain with a box containing bread, peanut butter and other foodstuffs, so Antonia shoved out into the storm, her arms laden with pillows. The wind nearly took her off her feet, but she managed to both cling to the cushions and hunker over them to keep from going over backward. Struggling forward, she pressed on, nearly blinded by driving rain until Silvio grabbed her elbow and guided her into the shelter, where she stood panting.

  “Didn’t I tell ya to stay in the house?” he grumped.

  “Yes, but I don’t listen very well.”

  He stared for a moment, then let loose with a gravelly laugh. “At least yer honest about that. Well,” he said, sweeping an arm around the six-by-ten-foot space. “This here’s the island of safety on this island of danger.” He laughed again at his joke.

  She took in the thick walls, the low roof, the exposed plywood and beam interior. One small window, double paned and covered by a storm shutter, and the door were the only entrances and exits.

  “Reuben’s mama insisted we always keep the shelter up to snuff, even if there wasn’t money to treat the main house the same.”

  “Did you build it?”

  “Mostly,” he said. “Reuben helped right alo
ngside me, but he ain’t much of a carpenter. Started it way back when his mama brought the boys here. Hector helped, too, some. He’s not bad with a hammer and nails. Could have been a good line for him if he’d pursued it.” Something shimmered in Silvio’s eyes.

  “You love them, don’t you? Reuben and his brother.”

  “Ah, I’ve known them boys since they were born. Mr. Sandoval hired me to work on his boats ’cause we served together in the navy. Reuben was always easy, loved boats, loved the sun, loved people and the ocean, most of all loved working in his uncle’s fields. Didn’t ever see a boy so completely content working the earth. But Hector, he was different. I never really understood him. He needed something, power, maybe, or importance. Dunno. Maybe it was the same craving that got its hooks into his father. He was a good man once upon a time. I know because he saved my life.” Silvio turned his gaze on Antonia. “One thing I can tell you, Hector loves his daughter.”

  Antonia’s breath caught thinking about little Gracie. “My sister was trying to protect her.”

  His eyes fell. “I was, too, but I wonder if I destroyed Hector and his family while I was at it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  His face seemed to age before her eyes, grooves deepening around his mouth and the skin of his jaw slackening. “I was at the house that day. Couple of Hector’s men were having trouble working on one of his boats. I went to help. Was in the kitchen grabbing some water.”

  “What day?”

  “Day it happened.”

  She felt the tingle of approaching dread. “Silvio, what are you saying?”

  “I heard Mia talking on the phone, to you I suppose it was, saying she was going to take Gracie and leave.”

  Her mouth went dry. “And you told Hector.”

  His eyes blazed for a moment. “He’s the man. It’s his job to hold the family together.” His voice faltered. “I said he should go talk to her, apologize for whatever idiotic thing he did, make amends and do anything he could think of to straighten it out. I didn’t know… How could I know?”

  “That Hector would go after her and she’d stab him?”

  Silvio let out a slow breath that seemed to leave his shoulders hunched. “I thought it would help. Man’s got to keep his family together. I never imagined Hector would lay a finger on Mia.”

  Antonia felt sick. None of them had escaped the shadow of that terrible day. “You couldn’t have known.”

  “Don’t matter. Important thing is for you to know Hector loves Gracie and whatever dumb things he’s done or is doing don’t change that one little bit. He’s her daddy and he loves her.”

  Antonia thought about her sister, alone and scared. Hector, getting deeper into waters that could get them all killed. Reuben, brokenhearted that his belief in his brother had been an illusion. Anger, pride, judgment, vengefulness. All of those sins had spread their tentacles across two families who teetered on the verge of destruction. At least Mia and Gracie were safe for the moment. But what kind of life were they living? On the run with no family to support them.

  Pain knifed through her as Silvio arranged the cushions on the floor in the corner of the cramped space. “Will have to do.”

  Rain pelted against the roof. “Is this shelter going to stand through the hurricane, Silvio?”

  “She’ll stand against the wind.” He rapped a hand against the solid walls. “But…”

  Antonia waited. “What else are you worried about?”

  “We’ve weathered plenty of storms here in Florida, Antonia, and you know the wind is the part you can hunker down from. Get low, keep the windows closed, you’ll probably survive that part.”

  Her mind went to a fact her heart must have kept stuffed in her subconscious. “But not the water.”

  “When Charley hit, we got twelve-foot waves.”

  Antonia looked again at the roof only a couple of feet from her head, imagining the ocean swelling to monstrous proportions.

  Silvio seemed lost in thought as he, too, stared at the beams over their heads. “Tiny little island in a great big storm.”

  She thought about Reuben at the top of the cupola staring out at the view she now imagined, his heart heavy, his spirit low.

  Tiny island.

  Great big storm.

  *

  Reuben paused at the door that would lead up to the short flight of steps to the cupola. He put a hand on the solid wood and felt it tremble, as if there were a beast clawing at the other side. The walls around him rattled, and vibrations rippled through the soles of his boots. The beast had gotten in at last; Hurricane Tony had arrived.

  He turned and pressed his back there, sinking to a crouching position and letting the anger of the storm hammer against his shoulders. The worst thing he could do would be to open that door and let the eighty-mile-per-hour winds into Isla to wreck and destroy anything that remained of his family.

  And was there anything left of the Sandovals to save? The percussion on his back reminded him of his father’s conga drum, staved sides, taut head that could be coaxed to produce so many incredible sounds with just his father’s fingers and palms. In the simple days, the time before they’d moved to the big house on the beach and began to collect the speedboats, the Aston Martins, the luxury condos, his mother had danced barefoot to the beat of that conga drum, whirling her two little boys in her arms until they collapsed in a dizzy pile. Reuben’s hand clenched into a fist as he added his own beating to the force hammering on the door, anger roiling through him like savage music.

  He had not saved his brother.

  All his prayers and effort, the conflict and confrontation, wasted in a naive belief.

  And the most horrific cost of his error? He’d lost Antonia.

  Bile rose in his throat.

  The life they could have had, the love they could have nourished and tended over the years like his precious orange grove. Gone. Hector’s crimes had overwhelmed it all. Still, maybe there was a piece he didn’t see, some explanation that would excuse Hector’s partnership with Leland, a way it could all be explained.

  “Stop it, Reuben,” he growled to no one. “Stop deluding yourself about your brother. Antonia is right. He’s crooked like our father.” Saying the words aloud drove them deeper into his gut.

  Like our father.

  His mother would have said, “God the Father is perfect, Reuben.”

  He knew it was true, but the knowledge did not ease the razor-sharp pain that knifed inside him.

  He thought about the people huddled under his roof one story down. Gavin, Paula, Silvio, Antonia. “Father God, I cannot understand why You did not help me save my brother.” He wanted to shout it, to hammer against the wooden walls loud enough for God to hear. Instead the words came out in a broken whisper. “I don’t understand, but I will not turn away like my brother and my father. I will not turn away from You.” He pressed his forehead to the damp door. “Help me keep them alive.”

  He could not force himself to say one more prayer for his brother, not one more plea to add to the discourse he’d composed over the years, not a single additional request for intercession. Instead he pressed his hand to the door and offered up only one broken word to the Father who he knew had caught every tear and anguished hope. “Hector.”

  He opened his eyes to find Antonia there, hair dripping diamonds onto the floor, her eyes soft.

  “Reuben,” she said. “I wish I had been wrong.”

  He stood and cleared his throat, wondering how long she had been in the stairwell. “Wishing doesn’t change anything, does it?”

  “No, but I was wrong to want him to fall.”

  Her lips trembled slightly and so did his resolve. He wanted nothing more than to bury his face in her hair, to hold close the comfort of her lips and insert himself into the circle of her embrace.

  Instead he managed to edge by her, careful not to breathe in the scent of her, which he knew might break through his weakened self-control. “Is the storm shelter rea
dy?”

  “As best as we could. It’s pretty jammed in there.”

  The lobby was dark and quiet, except for the annoyed comments from Silvio, who stood next to an open closet, receiving a pile of neatly folded blankets from Paula.

  “We have enough already,” Silvio grumbled. “The storm shelter is only so big, you know.”

  Paula answered him by plopping several more blankets into his outstretched arms. “We don’t know how long we’ll be in there.”

  They all stopped as an onslaught of wind rattled the walls.

  “Did you…?” Reuben said to Silvio.

  “All windows are boarded up. Back door is bolted, but we can get out if necessary. Front door is locked.”

  “That’s never been a very solid lock,” Reuben said. “I’m going to board it up.”

  Silvio shoved the pile of blankets into Antonia’s arms. “I’m helping Reuben. You hold on to these.”

  Reuben grabbed the hammer from the kitchen and went to a stack of plywood he’d piled in the entry for easy access.

  With Silvio on one end of the board and Reuben on the other, they levered the wood into place. He’d just placed the nail, ready to hammer, when something snapped. Reuben watched in horror as the upper hinge of the door distended and twisted, fingers of metal springing loose as it failed.

  “Hold it,” Reuben shouted, throwing his weight against the door and trying to get a nail steadied against the shuddering wood.

  Silvio pressed his back there, his legs straining. “Hammer it down, quick,” he groaned.

  Reuben saw Antonia drop the blankets and start toward them.

  “No,” he shouted.

  She made it two more steps before both the hinges gave way completely and the bolt snapped. The door blew inward, bringing the wrath of the hurricane with it.

  TWELVE

  Antonia was knocked backward from the impact of the wind that rushed into the hotel with the force of a runaway locomotive. Through the tangle of hair that plastered her face, she saw Reuben and Silvio fall under the heavy plywood before her view was obscured by a maelstrom of flying papers, books, cushions and whatever else the storm could liberate from shelves and bookcases.