by Claire King
She cursed at him in English all the way up the mountainside. If his chest hadn’t been so sore and his mood worse, Rafe would have laughed at her. The esteemed doctor knew some good, dirty American swear words. His mother would be shocked. He imagined her mother would faint dead away.
They reached the predetermined meeting place just as the sky lightened. They’d left any pursuers far behind, but Rafe knew it was only a matter of time before Cervantes and his goons picked up their trail in the bright light of a Baja California day. He turned just as the sun seemed to break the surface of the gulf. In spite of everything, the sight took his breath away.
Olivia sat on a rock and watched him. She hated to admit it, but he was sort of…beautiful, actually. His eyes were tired, and seemed to her to be tinged with some vague…regret. His gorgeous mouth was relaxed as he breathed in the morning air, his edgy face showed shadows, softening the angles into something almost artistic. Her mother would kill to paint that face, Olivia knew.
“Why do you do it, Rafael?” she asked.
He turned to her. “What?”
“What you do.” She saw his eyes narrow, but kept hers steady on him. “Run drugs.”
His face went expressionless. “Is this what your lover told you?”
“He told me there were two men in the area, bringing drugs from the mainland through Aldea Viejo. From his reaction to you in that bedroom back there, I’m just assuming you’re one of them.”
“I’m one of them,” Rafe said.
“Why?”
Rafe ran a hand down his face. Working undercover meant lying. Lying to everyone. Telling the good doctor he was a common bandit. He could not take a chance that this extraordinary lovely woman would reveal his secret. She could easily return to the arms of Cervantes, tell him the DEA, not common thieves, were trying to catch him red-handed in his own crimes. Cervantes would surely pull back then, lay low, become impossible to prosecute.
Rafe watched the sun rise another minute, trying to come up with a convincing reply. With thoughts of her lifetime of privileged status, he asked, “Have you ever been poor, Doctor?”
Olivia shook her head.
“Then don’t question why my people do what they do to put food in their mouths.” He turned back toward the gulf, scanning the hillside for any sign of Bobby.
“What your people do hurt my people,” she said.
“Americans?” he scoffed. “Americans can’t get enough of what Mexico has to sell them.”
“It doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it legal.”
He ground his teeth together. He wanted to end the lie, to tell her of his obsession to stop the real drug runner. To agree with her in every way. To make her see him as a man of honor.
Choking back the truth, he shrugged, knowing his cover had to remain top priority. “A man like me,” he said slowly, carefully, “is nothing but the smallest fish. A small fish does little harm.” He gazed across the morning haze to the spot where he knew Cervantes’s house sat. He couldn’t see it, but every sumptuous carpet and ornate piece of furniture and thin crystal glass stood out in sharp relief in his mind’s eye. “You should worry about the sharks, Olivia. Sharks prey on the poor and the addicted, and they grow wealthier and wealthier with each passing year. They are not struggling to feed their families. They are killing your high school kids to make themselves rich. You, of all people, should know how much damage a shark can do.”
“You try to excuse your actions by telling me you’re only a small dealer, insignificant in the wave of drugs that comes across the border.” It made her angry that he would dig for any excuse at all. “But you are a part of it—you and whoever your partner is. You are still in the wrong.”
Her tone infuriated him. She was right, of course. He’d spent his entire adult life dedicating himself to stopping the flow of drugs between the two countries—but to hear her condemn him made him crazy.
“What do you know about right and wrong, princesa?” he said, putting every ounce of disdain he could manage into his words. “I don’t imagine you have had to make any real decisions about right and wrong since the day you were born.”
“Are you kidding me?” Olivia jumped up, her aching, oozing feet forgotten. “Do you think because you were born poor and I wasn’t that you have had all the moral decisions to make?”
He nodded slowly, enraging her further. She poked him in the chest, ignored his wince of pain. “Well, I have news for you, amigo,” she said. “I make moral decisions at every turn. Do I marry to please my parents and give them the grandchildren my culture and my hormones demand, or do I make my own way in a man’s world? Do I work myself to death, or let my father’s money help me slide through? Do I hold onto my cultural heritage with both hands, or bleed into the Anglo life to make things easier on myself? At every turn I have chosen the right path. How dare you accuse me of not knowing the difference between right and wrong simply because you have chosen poorly.”
Her chest was heaving, her wild, messy hair was tossed back by the freshening wind. She looked every inch the princess he accused her of being.
Rafe leaned into the finger that had been poking him in the chest. “Do you really think, Dr. Galpas,” he asked blandly, “that these decisions you have made are the same as the decision whether or not to starve to death? You are very brave to make them, of course,” he said expansively, ironically, “but have you had to decide whether stealing or smuggling or eluding the border guards is better or worse than watching your children cry themselves to sleep at night because they are hungry or cold or merely hopeless?”
“I am not ignorant of the world’s problems,” she said.
He shook his head. “I think you are,” he said slowly. “I think, Doctor, you are ignorant of many things.”
Chapter 4
“I thought I might find you here.”
The voice came from the rocks at Olivia’s back, and they both pivoted to face it. Rafe’s gun was in his hand before Olivia could think to be afraid—or relieved—that one of Cervantes’s men had found them.
But the voice just laughed. “A little late for caution now, Rafael.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Olivia saw Rafael relax and lower the gun to his side.
A man stepped out from behind the rocks. “You two were arguing so loud, I could have taken you out any time in the past ten minutes.”
“How long have you been there?” Rafe asked, tucking his weapon back into the waistband of his black jeans. He was a little chagrined that his partner had been listening to the scolding he’d been getting from Olivia. And more than chagrined that Bobby had come upon them without Rafe knowing it.
“A couple hours. I watched you come up the mountain.”
He stretched and yawned, just as though there weren’t a town full of lawmen hunting for the three of them this very minute, Olivia thought, incredulous.
“I was taking a little nap before the yelling started. Hello, Dr. Galpas. Would you like some water?”
Olivia tentatively reached for the offered canteen. So he knew her name, too. “Yes, please,” she said. She drank, while Rafael’s partner grinned at her. He seemed to take her presence in this godforsaken spot as nothing at all to be curious about. Olivia carefully handed back the canteen. “Thank you.”
“I’m Roberto,” he said to Olivia. “But everyone calls me Bobby.”
“Very nice to—” Olivia stopped herself. What did one say when introduced to a criminal? She should know that by now. “—meet you,” she finished lamely.
Rafe shook his head. She’d just been on a forced march and was being introduced to what she must assume was her second drug runner of the past twenty-four hours, and she still sounded as if she were having drinks with the First Lady. He hated rich people. He really did. They were completely out of touch with reality.
Rafe wrenched his focus back to the matter at hand. “A couple hours?”
“Our camp has been raided.”
That got hi
s attention. Rafael cursed violently. “Did they dig up our communications equipment?”
Bobby glanced blandly at Olivia, then raised his eyebrows at his partner. “Not yet, but they’re poking around,” he said. “Even if they don’t find it, I don’t think we’re going to get to it anytime soon. They have four men posted. And two of them are carrying some very nice semi-automatic machine guns.”
“What about the bikes?”
“I think we’re walking from now on.”
“Hell.” Rafe dragged a hand down his face, rough now with a day-old beard. He wanted to get back to the ocean, wash the sweat and the smell of Cervantes’s blood from his body. “I stashed mine outside the compound. It’s in the brush. Or was.”
“It’s gone by now,” Bobby agreed. “You must have had twenty men crawling after you last night.”
Rafe swore again, more softly this time. They needed the motorcycles now more than ever. The quick little dirt bikes had been perfect for outrunning Cervantes’s goons and their expensive, unwieldy sports utility vehicles. He and Bobby had been able to slide in and out of nasty confrontations without much more than shouting to show for it, and the rough desert had provided the perfect escape routes. No one had been able to follow them across the rock-strewn animal trails and down the washed-out arroyos.
They’d be on foot, now, unless they could scrounge a couple of bikes somewhere. And Rafe knew that would be next to impossible. They’d brought the bikes in across the border; replacements would likely have to come from there, as well, and Cervantes was too well-primed for Rafe to risk the time it would take to make it back to San Diego, or even into La Paz or Cabo San Lucas, for new bikes.
Although it would mean getting rid of Olivia Galpas. He could deposit her neatly back into her tidy little doctor’s life, and forget all about her.
Someday.
No. No time for that, either. They’d just have to make adjustments. If they could get to their communications equipment, and radio in some assistance from the federales with whom they were working on this bust, then maybe the Mexicans could provide some transportation.
Unfortunately, that was a big “if.”
Olivia watched Rafael carefully. “Who raided your camp, Ernesto? Why?” she asked. “Do you keep drugs there?” That seemed incomprehensibly stupid. “And what did you mean, communications equipment?”
Rafe didn’t spare her a look. “Nothing,” he said.
Bobby smiled at her, though. “Satellite phones,” he explained casually. “Very expensive to replace.”
“She knows enough,” Rafe snapped.
Bobby shrugged. “I wasn’t the one who brought it up.”
“Why do you need them? To communicate with your buyers?”
Rafael grabbed her arm, led her to the edge of the clearing. His grip was unyielding, but he settled her gently onto the rock where she’d been sitting earlier. “Now is not the time for another moral lecture, princesa. Sit here and be quiet, while Bobby and I figure out how to not get all three of us killed in the next half hour.”
Olivia put her hand on his wrist to keep him from walking away. “Why don’t you just leave? Walk out right now? I’m sure you could hitchhike down to La Paz.” She wanted to plead with him, but she knew he would only scoff at her desperation. “It’s only a couple hours south, and it’s a big enough town that Ernesto would have a hard time finding you there. Go. Get away from here.”
He studied her hand for a moment, then looked up at her. “Why do you care whether he finds us or not?”
Olivia gave him a dead-on stare. “I don’t care,” she said, almost truthfully. “I just want to go home, and I figure the easiest way to accomplish that is for you two to disappear.”
“And what do we do with you?”
“Leave me. They’ll find me eventually.”
She let go of his wrist and eased off her sandals, as though that would settle the argument that she should be left behind. She began to weave her hair back into its customary braid, briskly and brutally detangling it with her nimble fingers.
“We had to have left quite a trail last night,” she added.
He looked down at her feet and flinched. He sat down next to her and, without a word, began pulling his own shoes off.
She blinked at him. “What are you doing?”
“My shoes are too big for you. They’ll rub a dozen more blisters into your skin if you wear them.” He yanked off his socks and shook them out. “Put these on under your sandals.”
She stared at his socks. “You want me to wear your socks?”
She looked horrified at the prospect. Rafe wanted desperately to hold that against her, but he wasn’t entirely sure he’d wear someone else’s damp, day-old socks willingly, either.
“They’ll protect your feet inside your sandals,” he said briskly. He reached down to grab one of her feet, then thought better of it. He knew himself very well. As angry with her as he was, as crazy as he was beginning to think she was, he knew if he touched one sore, sad little toe, he’d be lost. He’d be blowing on her blisters and massaging her instep like a lovesick little idiot, until Cervantes walked right up and shot him in the head.
And he’d probably die smiling.
He tried to push the socks into her lap, but she recoiled.
“I don’t want to wear your socks,” she insisted.
“Just take the socks, Olivia,” Rafe said.
She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t want to.”
Okay, now he was a little peeved. “Listen, princesa, I know you’ve probably never worn anything in your entire life not freshly laundered by half a dozen women wearing starched uniforms, but put on the damn socks or I’m going to put them on for you.”
She set her teeth. “You know, you have the strangest idea of what my life is like. And I’m warning you about the princesa crack.”
“You’re warning me.” Rafe bit the inside of his cheek for courage, then grabbed her left foot and began stuffing it into his sock. He tried not to linger over the small cuts, but found his thumb stroking them tenderly, anyway, as her foot disappeared into his too-big sock. “You are certainly brave for a—”
“Don’t say it,” she snarled, and grabbed the other sock from his hand. She yanked it on her bare foot, certain she couldn’t take one more second of his gentle ministrations. The socks were slightly damp with sweat, but they did soothe her aching feet. She slipped her sandals back on over them. She almost sighed.
“Thank you,” she said reluctantly. “That does feel better.”
Rafe nodded, then put his shoes back on over his bare feet and stood. He held out his hand. “Then let’s go. I want to try to get back and check out the situation at the beach camp before it gets too hot. We’ll have to circle—”
“Rafael, listen to me. Leave me here. It will be safer for all of us.” Particularly me, she thought. Because every time you touch me I forget what kind of man you really are. “They will find me before the morning is out, I’m sure. I’ll be fine here.”
He considered her thoughtfully. “You sound very reasonable about this.”
Olivia met his eyes. “I’m a reasonable woman.”
“And anxious to get back to your fiancé.”
She stared him down. True enough, though technically not the fiancé part. She would run as fast as possible back to Ernesto; he was the only person she knew who would be able to get her quickly out of the country.
“Yes.”
Rafe nodded slowly. “Brave,” he said, running his tongue across his teeth. “Or stupid. Get up. We’re walking.”
“What possible difference can it make to you now whether I go back to him?” she asked, a last-ditch effort.
He stared at her. What possible difference? Had he been the only one involved in those mind-altering, blood-pumping minutes back in that dark bedroom?
He considered that. Maybe so. Maybe she hadn’t felt anything but disgust, being kissed by a man she thought was a drug runner. But he’d been involved.
Up to his eyelids.
“I’ll tell you what difference it makes,” he ground out. “The man you’re so anxious to get back to? We’ve been stealing from him. The drugs we move? They’re his.”
Olivia stared at him for a full minute. “I beg your pardon?”
Her stupefied expression only made him angrier. She was so quick to believe the worst of him, but not of the real criminal.
“Did you miss that part of the conversation back at the hacienda?” he snarled at her. “We’re stealing from him. We take what shipments we can intercept and sell them ourselves. ‘Cutting into his action,’ I think you Americans call it.”
No man steals from me. Olivia remembered the words perfectly, remembered the look of fury on Ernesto’s face when he’d said them. But he hadn’t meant what this criminal was implying. He couldn’t have.
“You’re lying,” she said confidently.
“No, Olivia. I’m not.” Rafe felt Bobby’s eyes on him. Okay, a major breach of regulations, telling her about their mark. He would explain later to Bobby that the woman had driven him completely out of his mind. He simply couldn’t go another minute on this planet with her thinking Cervantes was anything but the murdering scumbag Rafe knew him to be.
And if she called him “Ernesto” in that little voice again, he’d do more than breach regulations. He’d haul her back to headquarters in San Diego and show her the file the DEA had been keeping for twenty years!
“Stealing from him?” Olivia said. “Stealing?”
“Stealing,” Rafe bit out. “Narcotics. From him.”
Olivia looked from one man to the other. “You’re stealing from him.”
“The lady has quite a gift for restating the obvious,” Bobby murmured, grinning.
She looked at Rafael. “He’s the shark.”
Rafe smiled cynically. “He’s the shark, Olivia.”
She came to her feet. “My God, you’re both insane. Ernesto is no more a drug smuggler than I am.”
Bobby only laughed at that, and it was all Olivia could do not to ask him furiously if he was on some sort of medication. Laughing? They’d just made the most absurd accusation about the sheriff of Aldea Viejo—a man even now searching for all three of them—and he was laughing?