by Claire King
He’d risked his life for this woman; she’d risked hers for him. No matter that she would never in a million years belong to him, belong in his world. No matter that she thought the worst of him. The adrenaline of the past day was zipping through his bloodstream like a drug.
He pushed her onto her back, cradling her head in his palm so she wouldn’t be in the dirt, and lay on top of her. He didn’t feel the sand sifting down his back, didn’t feel the ache of his bruised ribs or the sting of his blistered feet. He only felt the softness of her thighs under his pulsing body, and thrust forward, grinding himself against her. For the first time in his entire sexual memory, he was ready to climax before so much as unzipping his pants.
“Rafael.” He heard her gasp. He thought she wanted more, and he so wanted to give her more. He wanted to give her everything. He slid down her body and bit her nipple through her blouse and bra.
Olivia arched beneath him, unable to resist the drag of lust that pulled at her like an undertow.
Rafe heard the truck stop just outside the cave. It only made him more aroused. If these were to be his last moments, then he’d die planting his seed in this soft, beautiful—
“Rafe!”
Rafe froze.
“Rafe! For crying out loud, are you in there?”
It was Bobby. Rafe panted heavily into Olivia’s face. He was afraid to move suddenly, afraid he’d embarrass himself beyond redemption.
“Yes,” he said hoarsely. “We’re in here.”
“Thought so,” Bobby said. “Get out. I’ve got something to show you.”
There was a long silence from outside, while Rafe tried to gather his wits.
“Hold on a minute,” Rafe said, not in any hurry to see Bobby or the vehicle he must have stolen. “We’ll be right out.”
Olivia looked down. Somehow, of their own volition, her knees had dropped open, her legs wrapping tightly around Rafe’s hips. The front of her blouse was wet; it had come untucked from her skirt, and the back was probably filthy.
She pulled her lips through her teeth and bit down, closed her eyes tightly.
“Olivia?”
Tears leaked out the corners of her eyes. She couldn’t hold them back. She’d so wanted to be able to stop him, but her body had betrayed her. She’d been writhing beneath him, a smuggler, a criminal, as aroused as she’d ever been in her life.
While her mind screamed imprecations, her body seemed not to care in the least what kind of man it coupled with.
Rafe’s breathing was nowhere near normal, and every ounce of blood in his body was still pounding south, but he thought it best to try and make some effort toward getting off this woman and getting out of the cave. He shifted slightly, cutting off the moan that pushed past his clenched teeth.
“Olivia, we have to get out of here,” he said carefully.
He felt something wet and warm drop onto his wrist where he held Olivia’s head in his hand. “Olivia? Mi’ja?” he whispered, and brought his free hand to her face.
She was crying.
He rolled off her with something akin to panic, and came to his knees, hunched over in the narrow space. He was struck dumb for a moment, alarm and confusion swamping him.
“Are you hurt?”
Olivia shook her head.
“Are you…scared?” He was at a loss.
Olivia shook her head again. Rafe could barely see the small movement in the deepening dusk.
“Then why are you crying?”
Even as he asked, the truth hit him like a swift jab to his gut.
The princess. The damn princess. The daughter of San Diego’s finest Mexican society family was upset because some nobody from the barrio had had his way with her in a squalid little sand cave.
Poor little princess. She’d probably never been on her back before with anyone who didn’t have a doctorate or a Lexus or a condo on the beach.
Damn her. She certainly hadn’t been crying when that bastard Cervantes had his hands on her.
Every lifelong insecurity about his place in Olivia’s sort of world swamped him in that instant, made him forget that he’d forced her to believe the worst about him, that he’d terrorized and bullied her for his own purposes. In his mind, he was back in the barrio, running barefoot from immigration officers, keeping the secret of his parents’ illegal status a dark and mortifying secret. Waiting for the day George would come back and redeem them all. And Olivia Galpas was in the castle by the sea he imagined waited for her.
Damn her.
He locked his jaw against the self-doubt, bit down until it became a quiet, indignant rage. He was no longer a child, no longer a nobody.
“Pull yourself together, princesa,” he said coldly. “I would have expected a little more control from a woman with your…experience.”
Ah, a blow. Olivia felt it right between the eyes. His voice had gone flat and cool, and even in the dim light she could see his sharp features were honed by his customary scorn. Well, who could blame him for thinking the worst of her? She certainly thought the worst of herself.
It was her fault, all of it. Every mad thing that had happened since the day she’d arrived in Baja California. She’d been so enamored of Ernesto, so impressed by his manners and his attentions that she’d never looked beyond them to find out for herself the truth of the man beneath. And now she didn’t know what to believe.
She’d been fascinated by this Rafael from the instant she’d seen him in that hallway, had let him kiss her, had kissed him back. She’d tossed herself in front of him, practically forcing him to use her to escape the hacienda and Ernesto’s bloodthirsty goons, and now…this.
“My experience?” she whispered.
Rafe was deranged now. He felt like a caged animal. He wanted to claw his way out of the cave, away from her tears and his unmanly vulnerability, and run. Pace. Howl.
“Yes, Doctor.” His hands were clenched into fists, his arousal finally subsiding. “With making love to criminals.”
She stared up at him. “I’ve never made love to a criminal. Except you.” If that had been anybody but Bobby out there she would have done it, Olivia thought. It left her reeling to admit it.
Rafe spoke through his teeth. “You’re an idiot not to believe me about Cervantes.”
“I’ve never made love to Cervantes.”
Why that should ignite some small ember of relief in his heart, Rafe didn’t know. It didn’t matter whether she’d slept with Cervantes, he told himself harshly. It meant nothing to him that she hadn’t. Nothing.
All that mattered was getting her out of here. He knew his partner well enough to speculate on Bobby’s plans. They’d forget about trying to get the communications equipment on the beach, would instead drive the two hours to La Paz under cover of darkness. There, they could make direct contact with their informants, and get Olivia on a plane for the States at the same time.
It was a good plan, and one Rafe suddenly knew was critical to execute. He had to get her away from here, away from him. There was something about her that made him crazy, something that made the pure and simple fact that he’d known her just a matter of hours completely inconsequential.
“It doesn’t concern me one way or the other, Doctor. We have to get out of here,” he continued coolly. “We’re going to get you to La Paz tonight. You can catch a plane in the morning.”
A plane? She rolled onto her back, let her tears slide into her ears. Home.
She nodded. If she couldn’t fight, couldn’t defend herself against this man and his sudden change of mood, the least she could do was move. If she could manage to get out of this horrible little hole, she could be in La Paz in a matter of hours, and then the nightmare would be over. She slid to her knees.
“Okay,” she croaked. “I’m ready.”
But as they crawled from the cave into the faded evening light, Rafe and Olivia stopped in their tracks. Two armed guards stood with rifles pointed directly at them. Bobby, his hands bound behind him, sat in the bac
k seat of a Land Cruiser, smiling sheepishly with his teeth together, eyebrows lifted.
“I didn’t have much choice,” he said, as though offering an apology.
When the larger guard ordered Rafe to drop his gun, Bobby from behind him shook his head, then nodded quickly at the second guard and gave an exaggerated wink. Realizing the second guard was a federale, Rafe walked forward, gingerly placed his pistol on the ground and nodded almost imperceptibly back to his partner.
Bobby suddenly kicked at the car door with a blood-curdling scream. As the big guard spun around to handle the troublemaker, Rafe snatched back his pistol, sprang forward and swung his weapon like a baseball bat into the back of the guard’s head. The uniformed man dropped boneless, liked pile of dough, into the sand.
“That’s my man.” Bobby squealed with delight. “Give him a job to do, it gets done. It may take him nineteen hours to come out of a cave to do it, but it gets done.”
Olivia, puzzled as to why the second guard was so passive, turned to him. “Who are you?” she asked.
“He’s an old friend of mine,” Bobby broke in, jumping out of the truck so the guard could untie him.
Rafe tied the unconscious henchman’s hands behind his back and dragged him into the cave. To maintain the federale’s cover, Rafe tied him, too, gave him a lighter blow to the head—just enough to make a convincing lump—and dragged him into the cave, leaving a clear drag mark.
“We’ll call and have them find you by morning,” Rafe promised the federale, who nodded to say he’d be fine.
The road to La Paz from Aldea Viejo was paved most of the way. Unfortunately, they didn’t take that road. They took every other one, however. Or so it seemed to Olivia.
They weaved their way down the coastline like drunken sailors, taking first one impassable dirt path, then turning onto another willy-nilly. Olivia closed her eyes after the first few hairpin turns and washed-out gullies. She stretched out on the back seat and pretended she was on a sort of dusty roller coaster. Good practice, she thought dizzily. And she’d need practice in not facing reality if she was ever going to get over the past few days here in paradise.
Olivia stared at the richly upholstered roof of the Land Cruiser. It swayed, or she did. She couldn’t tell which. But she had to hang on to keep from getting spilled onto the floor. Bobby drove just as she’d expected him to. Like a madman. And he whistled most of the time, as though all this were nothing more than the greatest of adventures.
After the first hour or so, though, Olivia began to appreciate the sentiment behind the whistling. No one was talking, and Bobby was just covering up that fact with a little incessant noise.
She sat up again when the road became particularly rough, and Rafael looked back at her in surprise.
“I thought you were asleep,” he said, his voice gruff.
“I didn’t want to end up pitched into the front seat,” she replied.
Rafe turned back to stare out the window. She’d caught him off guard, or he never would have looked back at her. She looked terrible in the dim illumination the dash lights gave off: circles under her eyes, her cheeks sunken from lack of food and water.
“Where are we?”
“Beats me,” Bobby said, grinning at her in the rearview mirror. “But we’re heading south. I think.”
“About half an hour out of Pinchilingue,” Rafe said, shooting his partner a glare.
Olivia gazed out the window to the complete darkness beyond. “I can smell the sea. If it were light out, we could see the island of Del Espiritu Santo. I did readings there one summer when I was in college.”
Her sad little voice caught at Rafe’s hardened heart. Damn her again. Rafe pitted his eyes against the night, willing La Paz closer.
“I don’t know about you guys,” Bobby said after a minute, “but I could use some food.”
“What time is it?” Olivia asked.
Rafe looked at his watch. “Nearly ten.”
“We’ve been driving almost three hours,” Olivia said, mildly surprised. Perhaps she had dozed off for a while and hadn’t known it. “Why so long? Aldea Viejo is only one hundred and fifteen miles from La Paz.”
“Not on these roads,” Bobby said. He swerved around a boulder the size of a Volkswagen in the middle of a washed-out path. Olivia felt the Land Cruiser shudder slightly as Bobby caught the back fender on the rock as he flew past. He laughed almost maniacally, and Olivia smiled in spite of herself.
“You’re certainly taking good care of Ernesto’s car,” she commented wryly.
“I’m planning to drive it into the ocean in the morning,” Bobby replied. “If I can find the ocean.”
“Are we lost, then?”
“Probably not.”
Rafe shot Bobby another frown. “Cervantes is likely watching the main road into La Paz,” Rafe explained without looking at her. “That’s why we’re taking all these back roads. It takes longer, but it’s safer.”
“Plus, it’s much harder on the vehicle,” Bobby said cheerfully, “which is just an added bonus.”
“We’ll get something to eat in Pinchilingue,” Rafe said. His own stomach was still knotted up, but he imagined the princess had to be starving.
She was. It had been more than twenty-four hours since the buffet at Ernesto’s party. Olivia continued to stare toward the sea. Twenty-fours hours? That didn’t seem like any time at all, really. And yet her life had been completely turned upside down in that short time. She’d barely had time to think. About much of anything, actually.
But now that she had a moment or two, questions popped into her frontal lobe like rifle fire.
Like why a small village police force owned a fleet of expensive Land Cruisers. Olivia smoothed her hand over the buttery leather upholstery. And why that hadn’t occurred to her before now.
And why Ernesto needed fifteen men in uniform when Aldea Viejo was about the size of a San Diego housing tract—but with fewer people. He’d told her during those walks on the beach that his men were trained to catch the drug runners that used the coastline as a drop-off point between mainland Mexico and Tijuana. But she’d spent three weeks cruising up and down that coastline, and she’d never seen any of Ernesto’s men on the water.
Why hadn’t that occurred to her, either?
And another thing. Why in the world was she driving along the coast with two known outlaws, trusting them to get her to La Paz and on a plane home? She slumped back into her seat. Why didn’t she bail out of the moving car at the nearest gully and take her chances with the sea and the desert?
And why the hell did the surly one with the perpetually grim expression appeal to all those little fantasies she obviously had been storing up without knowing it about tall, dark and dangerous men?
What was that syndrome—? Stockholm Syndrome, in which captives imagined themselves attracted to their captors, no matter how absurd that attraction would seem in the course of their normal lives.
She had Stockholm Syndrome.
Only, she wasn’t technically Rafael’s captive. She knew he was rescuing her as much as he was holding her hostage. He was taking her to La Paz so she could go home, and in keeping her was ensuring Ernesto’s ire would never cool; endangering himself and Bobby and making certain they could never go back to Aldea Viejo.
She frowned at her reflection in the side window. There was another explanation, then. She wasn’t a stupid woman. She’d never before allowed her instincts or her emotions to rule her head. So why were they screaming at her now?
She shifted her eyes and stared at the back of Rafael’s head. His short hair stood up in spikes. He had the shiniest hair, she thought. Even after all they’d been through, it practically shimmered. She absently fingered the loose braid over her shoulder.
All her life, she’d taken the wisest course. Not always the easiest, by any means, but always the wisest. Every brain cell she’d ever owned was counseling her now, cautioning her, admonishing her. It was an audible roar inside her he
ad.
But her instincts and her emotions told her something entirely different. They pleaded with her to look at the man sitting so rigidly before her. To really look at him. There was something more there than her mind could comprehend, and her instincts and her emotions seemed to have no trouble deciphering it.
She was exhausted with the struggle. Soon enough, she thought, it would be over. She’d be on a plane home, and Ernesto Cervantes, whatever part he played in this drama, and this Rafael person would go back to their wretched lives and their bitter vendetta—and she’d never know what happened to them.
With a little sigh, she toppled back onto the seat. “Wake me when we get to Pinchilingue,” she murmured, and fell asleep to the pitch and jerk of Bobby’s mad driving.
The familiar scent of the sea woke her. Olivia sat up in her seat and looked around. They’d stopped at a small cantina on the edge of a typical-looking Baja town. Olivia could hear the water.
Bobby leaned nonchalantly against the hood of the Cruiser. Olivia suspected that nonchalance was as much a cover as the determined cheer. Rafe was nowhere to be seen. She pushed open the door and stepped outside. Another smell assaulted her nose, weakened her knees. Meat. And tortillas. And spicy salsa. She was ravenous.
“He’d better buy a lot,” she said.
Bobby, as she knew he would, smiled broadly.
“We’ll drive off to a quiet spot and cook him if he doesn’t. Rafe tacos.”
Olivia shook her head, but couldn’t stop the smile that slid over her face. “You are so weird.”
“Do you have to use the facilities?”
Olivia glanced at him. For a smuggler and an outlaw, he was certainly well spoken. Facilities? It was almost absurd to call any bathroom between Rosarito and La Paz anything so genteel as the “facilities.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Come on.”
“I know how to go by myself.”
“I should hope so,” he said, shuddering. He looked horrified, and Olivia had to smother another smile.
“You just want to keep an eye on me.”
He slid her a sideways leer. “Sort of.”