The cab stopped in front of a large black door, and Justin paid the driver before sliding out. “Come on,” he said when she didn’t move. “Welcome to La Casa Seavers.”
Was he kidding? When he visited paradise, he lived in a squat, concrete bunker?
The moment the door closed behind her, the cabdriver accelerated away. She watched until he was out of sight, then turned back as Justin opened the front door.
Foolishness washed over her. Appearances were deceiving; hadn’t she learned that along with every other little kid in the world? Plain and ugly on the outside, maybe, but breathtaking inside. One glance was enough to show that.
The floors were a mix of terra-cotta and aged wood, and the walls were painted in warm earth tones. The furniture looked comfortable, the art exquisite, and what she could see of the kitchen would make her friends who cooked swoon.
“Not quite what you expected there for a minute, is it?”
“It’s lovely,” she admitted. Then the bitchiness that seemed ever ready to pounce around him added, “Your decorator did a very nice job.”
She wasn’t sure, but she thought he mouthed the appropriate insult before he turned toward the stairs. Abruptly, he turned back and stared into the living room.
“What—”
“Stay there.” He took the stairs two at a time, then disappeared down the hall.
Okay, she was a coward. She stayed, edging a bit closer to the door that still stood open. A few muffled sounds came from upstairs—not a scuffle or anything, just Justin doing whatever he was doing.
Her gaze went to the living room, trying to find what had caught his attention. A magazine lay on the floor next to the iron-and-stone coffee table, and one door on a heavily carved armoire stood ajar, less than an inch. Two of the half-dozen pillows on the sofa were crooked, and one was upside down. Other than those small details, it looked more in order than her own living room had ever been.
Justin’s steps thudded down the stairs, startling her. He reached past to close and lock the door, then started down the hall. “Come on. We’re not staying here.”
“Why?” She hurried to catch up, regretting that she had only a moment to register the formal dining room and that incredible kitchen before they were out the back door and on a patio that surrounded a sparkling blue pool. A block from the ocean and he had a pool?
The rich are different.
“Why are we leaving? Has someone been here? Why? Looking for us? And what does this have to do with Trent and Susanna?”
He stopped so suddenly that she ran into him. The backpack, at least half-empty before, now softened the collision. It still knocked the breath from her, though. It must have. It couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that they were so close. She was way too damn old for that. Besides, this wasn’t just any good-looking guy. It was Justin, for heaven’s sake. Enemies since the day they’d met, remember?
He dragged his hand through his hair. “Okay, look, you’re right. They didn’t just go off. They’re in trouble, and so are we. Yeah, those guys broke in here, looking for us and…”
“And?”
“And a flash drive with files that Susanna and I kind of, uh, stole.”
Cate stared. She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d declared he was wildly in love with her. Susanna stealing… Oh, hell, Justin stealing… It was so wrong, not just morally or ethically or legally, but for who they were.
She didn’t realize her mouth was gaping open until he pushed it shut with one fingertip under her chin. His grin was crooked. “I guess I should feel honored that you’re stunned speechless. You don’t think as badly of me as you like to pretend, do you?”
She tried to ignore the faint heat where his finger had been, tried to form a coherent thought. “So you guys st—” She couldn’t say the word. “You took some data that belongs to someone else and they want it back so now Susanna and Trent are…what? In hiding?”
Grimly he shook his head.
Horror replaced that stunned feeling. “Kidnapped? They’ve been kidnapped?” At his nod, she shoved him with both hands on his chest. “And these same people were shooting at us and they broke into your house looking for us and— Oh, my God, what have you gotten me into?”
She shoved him again, knocking him back a few inches, and he grabbed her wrists. “Hey, it’s not me. They got into trouble on their own. Well, more or less.”
“What does that mean—‘more or less’?”
“It means this isn’t the time or the place to talk about it.” He lifted her wrists a few inches. “If I let go, will you stop punching me?”
“Those weren’t punches,” she muttered. “I can show you a real punch.” His grip loosened, and she jerked free. “I can’t believe… Oh, of course I can believe it. You and Trent never did think about the consequences of anything you did. Why should you? Your parents or their money or their lawyers always took care of it for you.”
Scowling, he took her arm and steered her toward the vine-covered fence at the back of the yard. “You’re such a snot, Cate. When you see a patient in the E.R., don’t you wait until you have his history before you start passing judgment?”
“I don’t pass judgment. I treat their illnesses, patch up their injuries and turf them upstairs or out. My responsibility and interest end when they leave my department.” Stolen information, kidnapping, getting shot at… Dear God, this was not what she expected of this trip.
He led the way straight to a gate that she wouldn’t even have noticed, covered as it was with the same flowering vines as the fence. Brushing aside leaves, he typed a code into the keypad, then pushed the gate open and sneaked a look outside before he stepped out.
“So we’re going to the police now, right? Or no, wait, we should probably call Trent’s parents and let them contact the FBI. With all the lawyers and politicians in the Calloway family, they probably know someone who can get them straight through to the director himself, and we are in a foreign country. The FBI or the State Department should be involved. I can get in touch with Emilia…or maybe I’d better call Trent’s dad instead. Emilia will be so devastated—”
Justin stopped short and faced her. “Stop babbling.”
She stiffened. “I don’t babble.”
“We’re not contacting the police or the Calloways or anyone else.”
“We have to. We’re not cops. We’re not qualified to deal with a double kidnapping!” That was the way things went in her world: she came across evidence of child or spousal abuse, a sexual assault, a shooting, a stabbing, a beating, and she reported it to the police. End of her involvement, except for an occasional court appearance to testify.
“This may come as a surprise, doc, but the kidnappers—the people who have Trent and Susanna in custody, the people giving orders to the bad guys hunting for us—don’t want the police involved. All they want is their files back, or they’re going to kill them, and they’re going to do their best to get you and me, too. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to piss them off anymore than they already are.”
She stared at him, his features as implacable as she’d ever seen them, then clamped her mouth shut and looked around for the first time since clearing the gate. They were on a narrow swath of grass, about as wide as the average car. On the left, fences and cinder-block walls marked the rear boundaries of homes and hotels that faced the ocean. On the right, heavy undergrowth that could conceal an army of thugs opened in a narrow gap to reveal the crumbled foundations of a structure long gone. Cozumel had found itself in the sights of numerous hurricanes over the years—probably the reason for the type of construction of Justin’s mini-mansion.
He exhaled, drawing her attention back to him. He mistakenly took her silence for acceptance, but she wasn’t convinced. “Did you listen to yourself just now?” she asked, the panicked tone gone from her voice, sounding much more like the seasoned E.R. doctor she really was. At least she had that much under control. “These criminals are threate
ning to kill Trent and Susanna. There’s not even a question what we should do next.”
“You’re right. There’s not. We’re going to find a place to stay for a while and come up with a plan for getting them back. Come on.” Shifting the backpack to his other shoulder, he started walking again.
Cate growled, surprising herself. Oh, she’d done it silently before when people annoyed her, but this was out loud, a good, threatening growl. She was that frustrated. But Justin’s only response was a snort as he continued moving at a steady pace.
Even as she dogged his footsteps, she considered her options: call her ex-father-in-law anyway. Call AJ and ask his smart detective advice. Call the local authorities—
She couldn’t call anyone unless she wheedled her phone back from Justin or managed to escape him long enough to find a pay phone. Wheedling was out—he would enjoy it too much and still refuse—and the idea of escaping him, of going out into town on her own when she didn’t speak the language and every man she saw might be the one who shot at them, turned her insides morgue-cold.
“Unless you like playing the subservient little female scuttling along ten paces behind, you might as well come on up here where we can talk.” Justin sounded entirely too easygoing. Why shouldn’t he? He was a risk taker, an adventurer, a thrill seeker and, as she’d said, he never worried about consequences. He’d probably gotten an adrenaline kick out of getting shot at. He was probably looking forward to the next moment of danger.
But she was none of those things, and she just wanted the world she’d awakened in that morning to come back—the safe, settled, routine world.
She refused to jog to catch up, but after a dozen of the longest strides she could manage, she was beside him again. He looked so damn complacent that another growl nearly escaped before she forced it deeper down.
Despite his invitation to talk, he didn’t say anything while they walked another few hundred yards. When she glanced over her shoulder, she couldn’t pick out which grown-over fence was his, and she couldn’t help but shudder as her gaze skimmed the opposite side. Anything could be hiding in there. Wild animals. Wilder people. The kind of people who were holding her ex-husband and her friend captive.
A shudder rippled through her, strong enough to make her stumble. Justin’s fingers curled around her biceps, holding her upright until she caught her balance. She tried to put gratitude into her look, but it came off more a grimace than anything else. All the years they’d known each other, they’d never touched, not once, and suddenly he was grabbing her, pulling her, catching her, every time she moved, it seemed.
And she was grateful—for some of it, at least. Just grateful, nothing more, nothing less.
She was repeating that to herself when a car turned off the street ahead and onto the grass and stopped, facing them. The sun glinted off the windshield, hiding the occupants, and fear rushed through her veins. “Oh, God,” she said breathlessly, her gaze darting around in search of the nearest cover. Another vine-draped fence was a few feet away on her left, the overgrowth more than eight feet to the right. The nearest cover was Justin, and she didn’t hesitate to spin around behind him, her eyes closed, her hands clenched, waiting for shouted orders or a hail of bullets.
Instead, all she heard besides the thudding of her heart was…
Chapter 3
Laughter. Justin knew he shouldn’t laugh. He understood that Cate was frightened. Hell, so was he, though not at this very moment. After all, he had called Mario for a ride while he was upstairs and told him what he knew about Trent and Susanna’s trouble. It just wouldn’t have been fair to ask him to involve his family otherwise. “Gee, thanks, doc. Let the bad guys shoot me first.”
Her body went stiff and she opened one eye, then the other. Peering past him, she saw what he’d already seen—Mario’s wife, Benita, standing beside a Beetle twice her age, her pregnant belly almost too big to fit behind the wheel, and four-year-old Rafael poking his head out the open driver’s door. The tension drained from every part of Cate’s body except her face and her right hand, still knotted in a fist. He quickly moved out of striking range.
She sniffed haughtily. “At least I know emergency medicine. If she’d shot you, I could put pressure on the wound until the ambulance arrived.”
“You’d be surprised how much first aid I’ve learned over the years. I do care about the consequences sometimes.” That comment had stung. Sure, he’d been a little reckless years ago, but who in their late teens/early twenties—besides Cate—hadn’t been? He still took risks. Just living was a risk. A person couldn’t exist in a vacuum—or, in her case, an emergency room.
But his risks were calculated. When he dove or climbed mountains or trekked into the wilderness, he was prepared. The experience was as safe as a man could make it.
Turning from Cate, he approached Benita and bent to accept a hug first from her, then Rafael. “Thanks for coming.”
“I’m happy to help out.” Her words had a faint, lyrical accent that hinted at time spent elsewhere. Before marrying Mario, she’d worked for a cruise line and traveled the world. She didn’t seem to have any regrets that she stayed in the same place all the time now, spoiling a family instead of passengers.
Cate cleared her throat, and he stepped back to introduce them. The two women exchanged looks and nods before they all got into the car, Cate squeezing into the backseat with Rafael, Justin struggling to fit in the front passenger seat while Benita did the same on the other side. When she caught him frowning, she shook a warning finger his way. “Be grateful I didn’t pick you up on the scooter. That would be a tight fit.”
He’d seen entire families tootling around on bikes made for two. “Hey, I’m not complaining. I like Bugs. Love ’em.”
Once the vehicle was moving, Benita shifted her gaze to Cate’s in the rearview mirror. “I understand you’re a doctor, you used to be married to Trent and you help out at La Casa.”
“I am, I was, I do.”
Benita’s scoff was soft. “If Mario and I ever divorced, I would take him out on his boat, weight him down and send him to the bottom of the sea.”
Justin grinned. “Yeah, but Mario’s not like Trent. At least, not the Trent she divorced.”
A glance over his shoulder caught a flicker of surprise crossing Cate’s face. The instant her gaze connected with his, her eyes narrowed suspiciously. She didn’t like him, didn’t trust him, and he didn’t care. Well, he cared only in that it would make the next however-many hours they were stuck together more difficult, as if dealing with bastards like the Wallaces wasn’t difficult enough already.
But he didn’t give a damn that she thought he was the same irresponsible trust-fund brat he’d been in college. It didn’t bother him that she could overlook the same things in Trent that she considered fatal flaws in him. It didn’t matter at all that she couldn’t see past her prejudices or bother to notice that just like her, Trent and everyone else, he’d grown up.
He straightened and scowled out the front window. It really didn’t matter, damn it.
“Where are we going?” Cate asked.
Benita glanced from the mirror to him to the street again. When he didn’t volunteer an answer, she did. “A little place Mario picked out. No one will ever think to look for you there. I would never go there if my darling husband whom I dearly love hadn’t told me to.”
Justin grinned. No doubt, the hotel his dive buddy had chosen was more than adequately substandard. The televisions, if there were any, would pick up only static; the mattresses would rate one thin level above the ratty carpet for cleanliness and quality; and the guests next door would likely be renting on a half-hourly basis. Back when he was young and foolish, he’d spent some time in such rat holes.
He’d bet his brand-new buoyancy compensator and dive computer, neither of which had even made it into the water yet, that Cate didn’t know such rat holes existed. He didn’t know whether to anticipate her discomfort or dread her whining.
Benit
a made a few turns practically on two wheels, quite an accomplishment for a vehicle as squat as the Beetle, drawing a delighted squeal from Rafael. The kid had pressed his back against the side of the car, his bony knees drawn to his chest, and was watching Cate with his head tilted to one side. Her presence kept him from his usual endless chatter.
“You can talk to him,” Justin remarked.
Cate’s gaze flashed his way, then she looked at Rafael and pitched her tone to a warm, cheery softness that she never showed Justin. “Hi. My name is Cate. What’s yours?”
Rafael stared.
“You must be, what, about four years old? And you’re going to have a new brother or sister. Which one do you want?”
Rafael still stared.
Without changing her voice at all, she spoke the next words to Justin. “Sure, I can talk to him. You just neglected to mention that he doesn’t speak English, didn’t you?”
“Aw, gee, and you don’t speak Spanish, do you? Sorry, doc, I thought you knew everything about the life in the universe.” Suddenly pain shot through his upper arm. He jerked around the best he could in the confined space—which meant his head, neck and one arm were contorted around toward her while the rest of him continued to face forward—and scowled. “You pinched me.” She’d reached through the narrow space between front seat and frame and pinched him.
“Stop fussing,” Benita warned, “or I’ll do it next time, and I leave bruises. Understand?”
Justin settled back. “I’m sure she left a bruise. I think I can feel a knot forming as we speak.”
“Rafael speaks a little English, Cate,” Benita went on. “But he’s shy about using it with Americans. Rafi? What are we having?”
He smiled slowly at Cate before answering softly, “We are having a baby girl.” Then his smile turned sour. “No boy.”
Cate’s smile came slowly, too, and was sympathetic. “No boy? Aw, maybe next time.”
“Maybe,” he echoed.
While they continued to smile at each other, Justin turned his attention to the neighborhoods they were passing through. He’d been coming to the island for fifteen years but had only a general grasp of the city’s layout. He could locate the airport and the various hotels he’d stayed at before buying his house. He knew where every dive shop on the island was, along with his share of tourist-friendly clubs and restaurants. But Benita had made so many turns, and with each block the street seemed narrower, the buildings smaller and poorer, the people on the street tougher. This part of Coz definitely wasn’t on the island tours.
In the Enemy's Arms Page 4