by Claire King
Rafael, on the other hand, never changed his expression. His dark eyes bored through hers. “Now you have felt the kiss of two criminals, princesa,” he said quietly enough so Bobby would not hear. “You must be appalled.”
Olivia swallowed bile. “You’re just saying this so I won’t try to escape.”
Rafe swept his arm toward the ocean. “Escape,” he shouted, though he was prepared to tie her up to keep her with him. “You can probably walk back. Go! Be my guest. It was your idea to come with me in the first place.”
“To save your life!”
“I’m saved. You can go.”
Olivia looked wildly toward Bobby again. He was still smiling, and she couldn’t bear to meet his eyes. “This can’t be true. Ernesto has been the sheriff of this town for years,” she argued. “His father was sheriff here before him, a landholder who knew my uncle. A farmer!”
“And the most notorious smuggler in Mexico, until he died in a shoot-out with the federales twenty years ago,” Rafe added.
Words caught in her throat. No, it was too preposterous. Ernesto, a smuggler?
“What about all his friends, the people of the town? Do you expect me to believe they don’t know this about him?”
“Some of them do, I would guess,” Bobby said blithely. “His father was a farmer, before he started transporting shipments of marijuana in the 1950s, then raw cocaine from the mainland in the 1970s. You don’t build a hacienda like that on a farmer’s take-home pay.”
“He made up the story of his family?”
Rafe nodded. “He has the same pedigree as the rest of the men in Aldea Viejo,” he said harshly. “His father was simply more brutally ambitious. As is your Ernesto.”
“You’re a liar.”
Rafe studied her for a moment, making Olivia’s breath catch in her throat. She braced herself. If he slit her throat, she wouldn’t be surprised. He had the look of it in his eyes.
“I am a liar, princesa,” he said, ominously, and Olivia backed up one involuntary step. “Sometimes I think I lie about everything. I will admit that to you.” He took a deep breath, let it out carefully. His ribs were howling again. “But I am not lying to you about this,” he continued finally. “Ernesto Cervantes is a smuggler. A shark. The biggest shark in Baja. And he wants to kill us because we have been eating away at his stash of drugs.”
“No,” Olivia said again. “I don’t believe you.”
Rafe shrugged.
“And I’ll tell you why I don’t believe you,” Olivia persisted, furious with them, furious with herself for the kernel of doubt that had lodged like a slug in her breastbone. “Because you’re a criminal. You lie for a living. That’s what criminals do.”
“And you know what criminals do, Doctor?” Rafe asked mildly.
“I know they don’t tell the truth.”
“So why do you believe anything Cervantes has told you?”
Because I was thinking of marrying him, Olivia wanted to cry. And what kind of woman does that make me? Certainly not the intelligent, thoughtful one I’ve always imagined myself to be.
Rafe watched Olivia struggle with an answer. Just to be courteous, he supplied her with the one he thought might fit. “You believed what he told you because he looks just like what he says he is. He looks and acts like a wealthy, old-family Mexican landowner with a badge. You’re so in love with his fine manners and his perfect speech and his hacienda, you don’t want to know where all the money to pay for those things has come from—”
“Uh, Rafe?”
Rafe tore his eyes from Olivia’s. “What?”
Bobby nodded down the hill. Rafe followed his gaze. A Land Cruiser was slowly crawling the hillside, straight toward them.
“Hell,” he said. “Doctor?”
She was dazed, he could see. She looked up at him, but her beautiful black eyes were bewildered.
“What?”
“We’re going.”
She shook her head, and tears began to slide from the corners of her eyes. “I can’t go with you.”
He palmed her biceps, shook her slightly. “You can’t stay here.”
She stared up at him while the truth of that sank in.
Of course, she didn’t believe this Rafael person, despite the utter credibility in his black eyes. Beautiful, sincere black eyes were just as capable of deception as any other kind, she reminded herself sternly.
She didn’t believe Ernesto was a drug smuggler. That was impossible. That would mean she was a complete fool, a dupe, a naive and vain woman flattered into insensibility. She simply couldn’t accept that.
But that miserable kernel of doubt was growing at an alarming rate, though she assured herself that was just a reaction to the extreme stress of the moment.
Like the kiss had been.
Like the bizarre impulse to toss herself in front of a madman had been.
Yes, that was it. Oh, it was something of a relief to figure it out. She was simply reacting—badly, she had to admit—to stimulus, to the severe anxiety of the moment. Of all the moments since she’d run into this brooding, hawk-faced man in that hallway. Apparently, she had lost all analytical capability and had turned into some kind of lab rat.
And her reaction to this horrible lie? To the news that her would-be fiancé was coming up the mountain to rescue her? Well, she damn well wanted to run, that was all. Like a rat in a maze, surrounded on all sides by grad students with electric prods. Run like hell and worry later about which nut in a lab coat was actually going to zap her.
Rafe shook her again. Her face had gone white, her lips bloodless. “Olivia,” he said sharply. “We have to go.”
“Yes, I think that’s a good idea,” she answered numbly. “We should go.”
Rafe scowled at her. She was frozen in place, staring over his shoulder as if she were doing algebra equations in her head. “Princesa,” he muttered, and, sliding his hand down to her wrist, dragged her along the path.
Olivia’s swollen feet kept them from outrunning the slow-moving Land Cruiser—so they hid from it, instead. It was astonishingly easy to do, Olivia thought vaguely. The desert provided the best kind of cover, and her dirty clothes and dark hair and sun-browned arms and legs did the rest. Bobby, too, in his faded, worn brown trousers and khaki shirt, practically disappeared against the desert floor.
Rafe, in his black clothes, was much more conspicuous against the browns and dusty grays and cactus greens of the Baja backcountry, but his uncanny agility more than made up for his dark costume. He led the way through the brush and cactus as though he’d been living in it all his life. Which, Olivia supposed, could be the case. She swallowed thickly.
“Do you need water?” Rafe muttered without turning to her.
She would have been stunned at his extraordinary hearing, except that in the hours since they’d left the meeting place where Bobby had last offered her water, she’d seen him do a hundred extraordinary things.
“Yes, please,” she croaked. She was terribly hot and thirsty. She had never experienced the fiercest heat of Baja, because she’d always, as part of her job, stayed at the ocean’s edge. They were nowhere near the ocean now. She couldn’t even smell it any longer. All she could smell was heated sand and the sweat of three bodies and the imagined stench of her life going up in smoke.
Rafe stopped his inexorable forward march and motioned to Bobby, who thrust the canteen into her trembling hand.
“You should have asked for water an hour ago,” Rafe murmured, watching her swallow deeply. He was alarmed at the dusky color in her tanned cheeks, at the absence of sweat on her forehead. He’d been fretting like an old woman over the condition of her little feet for hours. He’d steered her carefully around the worst of the low-growing cacti and chaparral, unable to keep from wincing at every slow, painful step she took. Now he realized she was in much greater danger of dehydration than of anything else.
He scanned the horizon quickly. They’d been holed up here and there since dawn, but the
woman needed a proper rest. He’d have to find someplace where they could get out of the heat of the afternoon.
Olivia took a last drink of water. It was warm and tasted of the metal of the canteen, but it wet her throat. “You haven’t had anything to drink,” she said hoarsely, handing the canteen to Rafael.
He took it, capped it without drinking and tossed it back to Bobby, who replaced it on his shoulder, also without drinking.
“I spent five years picking avocados, Olivia,” he said, using her name absently. “You learn to drink a little in the morning, and then drink most of your water at night. You can work harder in the heat if your stomach isn’t weighed down by water.”
“You picked avocados?”
He grimaced inwardly at the incredulity in her voice. Yes, he’d picked avocados. He imagined her regular social circle didn’t include many former pickers. He took her hand in his and tugged her into a walk. “Just a little farther. We’ll get out of the heat for a while.”
“You picked avocados?” she asked again, her head fuzzy from heat and exhaustion. That seemed such a noble, difficult task—picking avocados. She wished he still did it. She would never feel ashamed about kissing an avocado picker.
“Yes, I picked avocados,” he said impatiently. “I know it’s hard for you to believe, but someone has to pick them, princesa. They don’t show up in your lunch at the Hotel Del Coronado by the hand of God.”
“I’ve never had lunch at the Hotel Del,” she said. Why was he so angry? It was not her fault he’d stopped picking avocados to become a criminal. Her high school prom had been at San Diego’s famous landmark hotel, but she hadn’t gone to her prom. She’d been too busy studying for her SATs. “How do you know about the Hotel Del?”
He didn’t answer, but behind her she could hear Bobby chuckle. Weirdo, she thought nastily, and trudged along after Rafael.
Rafe found what he was looking for just after the sun rose to its highest point in the vivid blue Baja sky. All morning they’d been listening to the relentless buzz of the Land Cruiser’s massive motor. They’d barely managed to stay out of its line of sight, and once or twice they’d had to stop, duck behind a rock outcropping or press themselves into the burning sand to keep from being seen.
Rafe desperately wanted to keep going. He needed eventually to circle back and get to his beach campsite. He had to have those satellite phones to reach his contacts in La Paz, who were tracking Cervantes’s shipments as they came across the gulf from the mainland. He was also required to check in every twenty-four hours, or, according to the agreement with the United States DEA, the federales were to begin intercepting the shipments on the assumption that he and Bobby had failed in their mission.
He needed to know when the next shipment was due, and where. Rafael was certain his taking Olivia had been the last straw for the wily Cervantes; the man’s pride would allow nothing less than the death of Rafe and his carnal. Cervantes would stop at nothing to destroy the men who had humiliated him and stolen from him—stolen something much more important to his vanity and his self-inflated reputation than any mere drug shipment.
Rafe needed to be there when Cervantes cracked, when he decided revenge was more important than his personal safety. If Rafe was any judge of a man’s character—and he’d made his living being an excellent judge of the character of men like Cervantes—he knew last night’s scene had pushed Cervantes right over that fine edge.
Rafe let go of Olivia’s hand, squatted in front of the small sand cave and peered in. He stood and whipped off his shirt. Then he knelt again and brushed the floor of the opening with the shirt. When he pulled it back out, three small scorpions clung to the fabric. He flicked the shirt until they dropped to the sand, then ground them under the heel of his running shoe until they were dead. He repeated the process with his shirt twice more, but found no more scorpions.
Olivia watched the whole exercise, fascinated.
Bobby squinted into the hole in the sand hill, while Olivia stared at the tiny squashed arachnids. “Looks tight,” he commented as he straightened.
Rafe crawled into the crevice. It was low, and his hair brushed sand from the ceiling into his eyes as he looked around. But it was marginally cooler, out of the glare of the sun, and provided good cover. Cervantes would have to come straight upon the water-formed sand crevice and actually look in, to see them in the shade the shallow cave provided.
“You get in first,” Rafe said, backing out. “Then she can crawl in after. I’ll take the first watch.”
Bobby laughed, making Olivia’s hair stand on end.
“I don’t think so, amigo. You get in there with her. I’m not about to risk my life crawling into a dark little hole in the ground with your pretty little hostage.”
“I’m not his hostage,” Olivia said dully.
“Whatever you say, Doctor.” He grinned wickedly at Rafe, who scowled back at him. “Still, I think I’ll find someplace around here to wait out the light. It’s probably better if we split up. Take the canteen for her. I’ll be back here at dusk.”
Rafe nodded. “Be careful.”
Bobby shot a glance at Olivia, who was still staring at the scorpion carcasses. “You, too.”
In moments, he blended into the desert landscape—just another wisp of brown in a world of muted color, indiscernible from anything else.
Rafe watched him fade, reluctant to see him go. He and Bobby had been nearly inseparable since childhood, and he always felt safer on assignment with his primo by his side.
With a shake of his head, Rafe turned back to Olivia. “I want you to go in first,” he said. “If Cervantes spots us and decides to get nasty, you’ll be out of the line of fire.” When she didn’t answer, he looked down at her. She seemed to be in shock. Her color was better after the water, and she was sweating again, but she didn’t look at him. “Olivia?”
“Yes?”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“What did I say?”
“I am to go in first, and then you’ll come in after.”
“Okay,” he said slowly. “So is that what’s going to happen?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“Because you just took three scorpions out of there.”
“Out of there. Which means they are no longer in there.”
Olivia nodded. “But they may have had babies in there, or friends. Wives. Scorpions are polygamous. There may be dozens of wives.” She finally looked up at him. “Hundreds.”
He saw instantly that she was on some sort of raw edge herself.
It was, suddenly, more than he could do to continue to hold himself apart from her. He gathered her gently into his arms. She was shaking, and she burrowed her face into his chest.
“I hate scorpions.”
He smiled. “You picked the wrong country, then, mi’ja.”
“I don’t think I can get in that little hole. I’m sorry. I know perfectly well I brought this whole situation on myself, but I really don’t think I can get in that little hole when I know there are scorpions in there.”
“It’s not such a little hole, Olivia. I was just in there. And there were no scorpions.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they would have stung me,” he said reasonably.
Olivia sniffed. She was in no mood to be reasonable. Lab rats could take only so much, she thought miserably. “They wouldn’t sting you,” she said.
He felt a dampness on the front of his shirt. She was crying steadily now. He felt none of the normal, male alarm. He’d grown up in a houseful of women who cried at the drop of a hat. “Because I’m too ugly?” he murmured, trying to cheer her.
“No, because you’re too mean.”
He smiled, watching for the Land Cruiser over her shoulder. He could hear it coming closer. “Have I been so mean to you, mi’ja?”
“Yes. And don’t call me that name. Don’t call me your dear. It’s worse than princess.”
She fought a losing battle against the tears, and Rafe felt her shoulders shudder. He pressed a kiss on her dusty hair. “All right. I won’t call you anything but ‘Olivia’ from now on. Okay? Just stop crying now, will you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You have to. And you have to crawl into the cave. Be brave, Olivia.”
“I am brave,” she said into his chest. “I’m famous for being brave. Really. People comment on it all the time. But not with scorpions.”
He pushed her gently away from him, swiped his thumbs across her cheeks. The tears had made tracks down her dirty face. She was sunburned and dehydrated and filthy, and her dark eyes were sunken into her face and bruised looking. He kissed her ever so gently because he still thought she was more beautiful than any woman he’d ever known.
“You can be brave with scorpions, Olivia. Just think of them as little spider versions of me.”
She stared into his eyes. Gentle eyes, now. No fire-breathing dragon behind them, full of fury and danger. Her eyes fluttered closed when he brushed his lips over her forehead a second time, then popped back open. She had the strongest, strangest sensation that if she kept her eyes on his, she would be okay. Somehow, she would get out of this alive.
“I can—do that,” she said, her voice hitching.
Rafe nodded and stopped himself just before he kissed her again. There was a time to be an idiot and a time to take oneself in hand, he told himself sternly. He could contemplate later why one kiss in a dark bedroom from this woman had affected him more than any sexual experience he’d ever had.
Right now, he needed to get her in that cave before Cervantes came around the next corner.
“You can.” And just in case she doubted it, he put his wide palm over her dusty hair and shoved her inside.
Chapter 5
Before she knew it, Olivia was stretched out in the back of the crevice. Her tears of exhaustion quickly dried up as she realized she was inside the very same crack in the earth where just moments before scorpions had been happily storing up painful venom. The chill that slid down her spine shook her all the way to her tightly curled toes.