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“I…I don’t know how to thank you.” It was no more than the truth; having always prided herself on being an uncommonly independent and resourceful person, she’d never been in such debt to a man before.
The artist—her benefactor—snorted and made a jerking motion with his head, aiming it over his shoulder in the general direction of his display. “You want to thank me, you can pay me for that picture I brought him down with.”
That was when Ellie first noticed that the boy’s bare feet and shins bore smears of the same blue paint that decorated the artist’s hands. Her mouth dropped open and she smothered a gasp of dismay with her hand. “Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry. Well, I—of course I’ll…” And she was rummaging through her purse, fumbling for her wallet. “How much do I—”
He waved her off, like someone swatting at a fly. “Forget it. Water over the bridge.” Bestowing a look of annoyance upon his captive’s dusty bowed head, he growled, “What do you want to do with him?”
“Me! Do with him?” She clapped a hand to her forehead and looked around at the gathering of tourists, perhaps in hopes of some sort of advice. Though officially a member of law enforcement, she’d had no experience in dealing with juvenile delinquents, or juveniles of any kind, for that matter.
Plus, beneath her crusty exterior there lurked a guilty secret: a heart like a half-melted marshmallow. This was a little boy, for God’s sake! One who didn’t appear to have been eating regularly lately, if not for most of his life so far. And at that, panic of a new sort seized her. She knew herself very well. She had her wallet in her hand; in another moment she was afraid she was going to give the kid every dime she had with her.
“Do with him?” she repeated in a hissed undertone, sidling closer to the boy’s captor. “What am I supposed to do with him? He’s just a little boy.”
“A little thief,” someone in the crowd muttered. There were rumblings of agreement. Someone else added something that included the word police.
“Look, I’ve got my purse back,” Ellie said to placate the gathering at large, and then, to the keeper of the captive, trying to keep a pleading note out of her voice, “There’s no harm done, can’t you just let him go?”
The “artist” shrugged.
Just then the purse-snatcher, seizing the moment—and taking no chances on anyone changing his mind or being outvoted—squirmed out from under his captor’s hand and vanished into the crowd.
There were a few cries of mild protest and dismay. Someone—a man—said loudly, “What’d you let him go for? Kid’s nothin’ but a thief. Shoulda handed him over to the police before he hits on somebody else.”
“Not my problem,” the artist mumbled around the revolting stump of his cigarette. With that he turned and shambled back toward his stall, sandals slapping on the baked adobe bricks.
For a moment or two Ellie just stood and watched him go, frowning and chewing on her lip while around her the crowd slowly dispersed, talking in breathless, gossipy undertones to one another as people do when they’ve been privileged to witness some untoward, possibly violent event. Presently, she drew a quick, decisive breath. No way around it—at the very least she owed the man a thank-you.
She couldn’t have said why she should feel such inner resistance to doing something simple good upbringing demanded. Such a peculiar tightening in her belly. A quickening of her pulse. It made no sense to her. Certainly it wasn’t his surly manner that put her off. Rose Ellen Lanagan didn’t know the meaning of the word intimidation.
Besides, she’d seen the twinkle in those cool blue eyes of his. Heard the warm, contagious peal of his laughter. That crustiness was ninety percent show, she was sure of it, though what purpose he thought it served she couldn’t imagine.
The artist had retrieved the painting he’d sacrificed in the interests of justice and was regarding it stoically, held at arm’s length in front of him. He must have sailed it, Ellie now surmised, into the path of the fleeing purse-snatcher, rather like an oversized Frisbee.
“That was quick thinking,” she said, coming up behind him.
The artist grunted without looking away from his masterpiece, which, smeared and smudged almost beyond recognition, in Ellie’s opinion now had actually attained a certain surrealistic charm. Personally, she considered it a vast improvement over the original.
With “thank you” hovering on the tip of her tongue, she hesitated; once again, the words seemed meager, hopelessly inadequate, not to mention alien to her nature. They came out sounding more prissy than anything.
“I really would like to pay you—for the painting,” she briskly added as the artist shot her a sharp, almost hostile look. His eyes weren’t cool at all, she realized, but a clear, almost transparent blue, like midsummer skies, with whites as soft and clean as cotton clouds. All at once her voice seemed to stick in her throat, and when she forced it through anyway it emerged sounding even more raggedy than usual. “It’s the least I can do.”
The moment stretched while he stared at her with that keen and piercing glare. While she noticed for the first time that his lips, without that awful cigarette clamped between them, seemed finely chiseled, almost sensitive—unusual for a man’s lips. For some reason her own suddenly felt swollen and hot, giving her a wholly alien urge to cool them with her tongue. And then…
“Keep it,” he said, thrusting the canvas at her so abruptly that she actually gasped. “Maybe it’ll remind you to be more careful next time.”
He turned away from her and was almost immediately swallowed up by a crowd of lady tourists, all cooing and chirping their appreciation for his heroism and his compassion, and eager to take home a souvenir of the Purse Snatching Incident.
Feeling somehow dismissed, Ellie left him posing for photographs with a group of middle-aged belles from Atlanta. And as she made her way back to the pier she was wondering, with a cynicism that was also foreign to her nature, if he might have paid that boy to snatch her purse, just to drum up business.
Ellie dropped the painting of three drunken-looking parrots onto one of the two single beds in the stateroom she shared—platonically—with her partner and fellow agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“Don’t ask,” she said, plucking a Hershey’s Kiss from the bag on her bedside table, even though the muffled groan that was her supposed husband’s only response made it clear he’d no interest in doing anything of the kind. Concern and guilt quickly banished the grumpy mood she’d come in with. “Still feeling lousy?”
The question was wholly unnecessary; Ken Burnside looked, to quote one of her mom’s favorite clichés, like something the cat dragged in—and given the sorts of things the cats were prone to dragging into her mom’s barn back in Iowa, that was saying something.
“I think I’ve got a fever,” Ken said in a hushed and pitiful voice.
He looked it, too, but Ellie squelched an instinctive urge to step closer and lay a ministering hand on his brow. She’d had to fight off the man’s attentions often enough in the early days of their working relationship so that, even though the ground rules between them had been firmly established long ago, she still didn’t quite trust him. Not even now, when he was laid out in his bed with his eyes closed, skin sweaty and roughly the color of old library paste.
“Maybe you should see a doctor,” she offered by way of compensation, peeling the last of the foil off the chocolate and popping it into her mouth.
“It’s just the stomach flu.” Rousing himself enough to open both eyes, he inquired blearily, “How’d it go in town?”
“Umm. Great.” Feeling calmer, she helped herself to a couple more Kisses and settled herself cross-legged on her own bed, carefully avoiding the still-gooey canvas. “I think I’ve pretty well established myself as your typical dopey tourist,” she said as she pulled off her sun visor. “Got my purse snatched.” Burnside made a strangled sound that may have been a snort. “Don’t worry,” she assured him, “I got it back—intact.” She didn’t think it was necessary to tell him how close she’d come to losing the vital meeting information. She was the rookie on this operation, and suspected her partner was already nervous about how she was going to handle herself when things got tricky.
“No further contact from the smugglers, though, and I gave them plenty of opportunity.” She gave the lump of misery in the next bed a dubious glance. “You going to be able to go with me tonight?”
“Don’t…think so,” Ken said in an airless whisper that alarmed her.
“We have to make that meeting.” Ellie’s heart rate was beginning to speed up. She hurriedly unwrapped another chocolate. “The instructions were clear on that. They won’t contact us to set up a meeting until they’re sure it’s not a trap. We have to be out there where they can look us over—make sure we’re not being followed.”
There was some deep, carefully controlled breathing. Then, in a voice tight with pain, “Maybe we should contact General Reyes—let him know what’s going on.”
“Let him know what? There’s nothing to report, and won’t be until after that meeting. If there’s a meeting; we don’t even know for sure they’ll go for it. It’s for sure they won’t if we don’t show up at—where is it?—José’s Cantina.” She paused, then said flatly, “If you can’t make it, I’ll just have to go by myself.”
This time there was no doubt about the snort. “Lanagan,” Burnside said in a faint but firm voice, “I know these people. They’re old May-hee-co—back-country Mexico. They won’t do business with a woman—especially one that looks like you. They’ll chew you up and spit you out…” He closed his eyes and licked his lips, clearly exhausted by that effort.
Ellie watched him for a long moment, a knot of cold fear taking shape in her stomach in spite of the insulating coating of chocolate. Finally she said in a low voice, “Ken, we can’t screw this up—not now.”
Her partner gave a deep, guttural sigh, then mumbled, “I’ll be okay. We still have a few hours. Don’t worry, I’ll make it to José’s with you…you’ll see.”
It was an important part of McCall’s credo that any day could be made better by a shot of tequila washed down with several bottles of pulque. Not that today had been all that bad; it had turned out to be a pretty good day, actually, in spite of the loss of “The Three Caballeros” to the feet of a street thief and a turista with golden eyes and hair and freckles the exact color of cinnamon.
As a matter of fact it was the integrity of that personal creed of his, as affected by the street thief and the cinnamon girl, that had him worried, and making for his favorite watering hole for reinforcement at the first soft promise of twilight. Live and let live. He’d come way too close to forgetting his favorite motto to suit him. Today a lady’s purse, tomorrow…who knew where such a careless act could lead? If he didn’t look out, before he knew it he’d be sliding down that long slippery slope toward a social conscience. Uh-uh, no thank you, not for him. No sirree.
That was why he sailed into José’s Cantina with a wave and his usual, “José—¿Qué pasa?” for the guy behind the bar—who also happened to be the owner—and swam his way through the noisy murk to his favorite table without taking much notice of who else was in the place. If he had, he’d have turned around and walked right out again and never looked back. He swore he would have.
As it was, by the time he saw her—Lord help him, the cinnamon girl!—sitting there all alone at the table in the front corner by the glassless window, he was already settled comfortably in his own favorite creaky rattan chair with the tequila, a quarter of lime and a saltshaker and the first of the local brews making wet rings on the table in front of him, and it just seemed like it would be too much of a waste to go off and leave them sitting there. Hell, he thought, might as well drink ’em and see what happened in the meantime.
Maybe nothing would. Maybe none of the regular patrons of the place would notice her. Maybe she’d come to her senses and leave. Maybe the person she was obviously waiting for would show up and McCall wouldn’t have to think about how she was going to get herself back to her cruise ship without getting her bones jumped in one of the dark alleys between here and the tourists’ part of town.
Maybe it would turn out to be true that the Lord looked out for children, drunks and fools.
Hell, it was none of his business, anyway. Live and let live.
But the image of that smile of hers kept crowding into his mind, the way it had burst so suddenly, so wonderously over her grave little face, like…oh, a dozen comparisons he could think of, all of them clichés, none of them quite worthy. So naturally he couldn’t help but watch her as he licked lime and salt, slugged the tequila and sat back to enjoy his pulque, though he tried to look as if he wasn’t—watching her, of course he meant, not enjoying the beer. Noticing the way she kept looking at her watch, frowning.
Noticing the growing ripples of interest from the regulars lounging around the bar, and the helpless looks José—who knew his customers well—kept throwing McCall. The ones that said plainly, Hey—she’s a gringa, you’re a gringo, that makes her your responsibility. So do something!
To which McCall’s response was a shrug uniquely Latino in character, but which in any language easily translated to, She’s not my problem, man.
He’d just about decided to take a chance on ordering a second beer when, Lord help him, he saw the woman get up from her table and head straight for the bar. How could any woman be so stupid, he wondered, even for a turista? He’d thought her pretty cute, he remembered, when he’d seen her this morning, but she was seeming less and less cute by the minute. Even her smile was fading from his memory. In fact, he was experiencing a powerful urge to yank her up by the scruff of her neck and haul her home to her mama—or her husband, he amended with a frown, belatedly recalling the gold band he’d seen on the third finger of her left hand.
That memory inspired a new spurt of anger. What was her husband thinking of, to let his wife go off alone to such a dive? Or—a new thought—if he was the one she’d been waiting for, to stand her up like this?
He blamed the anger for making him once again forget his motto as he watched the woman push her way through the massed male bodies at the bar, cinnamon head barely topping burly shoulders—and Mexican men weren’t that tall. His muscles tensed and anger sizzled in his belly as he watched those bodies turn to let her through, but just a little, being sneaky about giving way just enough to let her pass but with plenty of contact. Watched her ask José a question, apparently oblivious both to the bodies and to the leers on the faces around her. Watched José shrug and shake his head in reply.
With a sinking feeling in his gut, McCall then watched the woman squeeze back through the pack, and with one final frowning look at her wrist and a sweeping glance around the cantina, go out the door.
A moment later he knew a sense of inevitability—of fate, if you will—as two of the more disreputable-looking bar patrons separated themselves from the wolf pack and slunk out after her, smirking to one another and their comrades in an anticipatory way that made McCall go cold.
Live and let live…live and let live…she’s not my problem, he chanted hopelessly to himself, staring into the gloom at the bottom of his pulque bottle.
And then, “Ah, the hell with it,” he muttered to nobody in particular, tossed a handful of pesos onto the tabletop and followed.
Chapter 2
Outside the cantina, McCall paused to light a cigarette while he checked things out, caution being, in that part of town, always the better part of valor.
A soft breeze—a subtle reminder from Tropical Storm Paulette, like a blown kiss—was whisking away with it the heat of the day and the odors of poverty and inviting in the cool green smell of the sea, and he was savoring that along with his tobacco when the sound of voices drifted to him, carried on the wind. Male voices first, slurred and guttural, speaking Spanish…answered by a lighter one, low and scratchy but definitely female.
And becoming all too familiar.
Following the sound of the voices, McCall was finally able to make out three shapes a little farther down the narrow sandy street, in the shadows just beyond the yellow patch of light from the cantina’s open window. He exhaled, tossed his match into the dirt and started reluctantly toward them.
He was still several yards away when he heard a man’s laughter abruptly interrupted by a sound rather like, “Oof.” At the same time, one of the bulkier shapes suddenly and mysteriously doubled over on itself.
A moment later, the taller of the two remaining shapes began to perform a sort of hopping, stumbling dance, like a broken marionette.
Sharp, staccato Spanish rent the velvet night. Cuss words, if McCall was not mistaken. Very angry cuss words.
Seizing the moment, he lunged forward, pushed between the two would-be assailants and their intended victim, grasped her firmly by her upper arms and hustled her rapidly away from the scene of the intended crime.
Naturally, she resisted—silently except for some heavy breathing—until he growled, “Cut it out, you idiot—can’t you see I’m trying to help you?”
He felt her body go taut and her face jerk toward him, but she still didn’t say anything, not until they’d turned a corner and were out of sight of the cantina and well out of range of the two disgruntled thugs. There McCall halted and let go of her arms.
She stepped away from him then and said breathlessly as she set herself to rights with little brushing, tugging motions, “You’re the artist. The American. From the plaza this morning.”
McCall snorted. He could see her face, a pale blur in the darkness.
“I didn’t need help.” She sniffed—a disdainful sound. “Not to handle those two.”
McCall made a disgusted sound of his own. “Lady, you don’t need help, you need a nanny. All you did was tick them off. What were you going to do when they decided to come after you?”
“Outrun them,” she answered promptly, with an arrogant little toss of her head. “I came prepared this time—see?” And she lifted one foot to show him a tidy white running shoe.
“Lord help us,” he breathed, exhaling smoke. But in spite of his very best efforts to squelch it, he felt the beginnings of admiration—just a tiny burr of amazement in the center of his chest. Fearing that in another breath he might even laugh out loud, he said instead, “You’re way off the tourist path, lady. What the hell were you doing in a dive like that anyway? Much less alone.”
“That’s none of your business,” she said in a surprised and huffy tone.
“Sister, you got that right,” McCall shot back. He was thinking dark and sour thoughts about sticking to his motto from now on, no matter what. Live and let live. No doubt about it, that was the way to go.
So what were his feet doing, carrying him along with the foolish turista, walking him right beside her as she started off down the now-deserted street? She didn’t want his help, she’d told him so. And besides, she was none of his business—she’d told him that, too, and on that subject at least, they were in complete agreement.
“You sure you’re headed in the right direction?” he inquired sarcastically after a while, keeping his lips firmly clamped on the filter of his cigarette.
She ignored him and strode confidently on, finding her way as he did, by the light of a rising three-quarter moon and the occasional splashes of pale yellow from an open window or doorway. Voices—snatches of conversations, bits of laughter, a crying baby—made little sparks, tiny explosions of sound in the quiet. Far away McCall could hear the shushing of waves on the playa, keeping up a quirky rhythm to their own crunching footsteps.
He said in a pleasant tone, “What’d you do, leave a trail of bread crumbs?”
She threw him a look but didn’t reply, and a moment later jerked impatiently, like a balky child, when he took her arm. “The playa’s this way, ma’am,” he said with exaggerated politeness as he steered her oh, so gently in the right direction. “So’s the launch that will take you back to your ship. I assume that’s where you wanted to go?” He figured with this woman, you never knew.
“Yes. Of course. Thank you.” He could hear the prissiness of chagrin in her voice, and feel the stiffness of wounded pride in her arm just before he let go of it.
She didn’t say another word, though, not even when they were back on the main tourist drag, safe among oblivious honeymooners strolling beneath strings of lights looped between palm trees, where music swirled and wove through soft voices and bright laughter and white-coated waiters bearing trays of margaritas glided among rattan tables. Instead she kept throwing him questioning, half-puzzled looks.
They were within sight of the pier when she finally said dryly, “I think I can find my way from here, don’t you?”
He had no answer for her and his thoughts were too dark and bitter to share, so he just kept on walking beside her in glowering silence, all the way to the pier gate. There they both halted.
McCall jerked his head toward the far end of the long narrow pier where the cruise ship’s pristine white launch bobbed on Tropical Storm Paulette’s gentle swells, and said, again rather sarcastically, “There you go.”
The pier was brightly lit. He could see the brief flash of a gold stud in her earlobe, then the sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose when she turned her face to him. From somewhere out in the harbor came the sudden thump-thump-thump of a helicopter’s rotors. He listened to it fade rapidly into the distance while he watched the reflections of the pier lamps in her golden eyes.
They searched his for a long moment, those eyes, and then he heard the soft intake of her breath, as if she was on the brink of saying something.
Still she hesitated, and he wondered if, in different light, he might have seen her blush. Then, as if she’d come to some sort of decision, she held out her hand. “I’m Ellie. Thank you.” She said it on the breath’s delayed exhalation, in that scratchy voice he was beginning to get used to…even find sort of sexy. And impatiently, as if she thought he might not believe her, “I mean that sincerely, Mr.—”
“Just McCall. And you’re welcome—sincerely.” But he made a lie of that as he sardonically tipped the brim of an imaginary hat.
She gave him one long level look that made him feel vaguely ashamed he’d mocked her before she nodded, then turned and walked away down the long pier.
“And I sincerely hope I never set eyes on you again… Mrs. Whatever,” McCall muttered grumpily to himself as he jammed his hands into the pockets of his paint-stained dungarees and headed for the friendlier bustle of the plaza. Damned shame the best-looking and most interesting woman he’d run into in a long time turned out to be married, but…what the hell. Just as well. Live and let live.
He was wading into the swirl of tourists’ laughter and party music before it came to him—the reason for that nagging little sense of disappointment: he’d been waiting…hoping, one last time, to see her smile.
By the time the launch had delivered Ellie back to the cruise ship, both the adrenaline rush that had sustained her through the incident outside José’s Cantina and its embarrassingly trembly aftermath had faded to a hazy memory. What was left was the Alice-in-Wonderland feeling, that sense of sheer disbelief that such events could be happening to her.
Had she, Rose Ellen Lanagan, really struck a man in the…um…in such an effective place? Had she really managed to disable two large—admittedly clumsy—male attackers? It didn’t seem possible. She’d always been such a nonviolent person, gentle and sunny-natured to a fault. Even in her animal-rights activist days her protests had been limited to peaceful demonstrations, sit-ins, parades and picket lines. Even though, true to Ken Burnside’s promise, the government had seen to it that she was well trained in the necessary law-enforcement skills, including the use of firearms and basic martial arts techniques, it had never really occurred to her that she might one day be called upon to use that training. At heart she was still a nice Iowa farm girl who happened to have a doctorate in biology—and a badge.
A badge! Lord above—as Great-aunt Gwen might have said—if anyone had even suggested, back in her teenaged years and college days, that she, Ellie Lanagan, would one day be a special agent working undercover for the United States government, she would have fallen down and rolled on the floor with laughter. How had such a thing happened?
The only answer Ellie could come up with was that it had seemed like a good idea at the time. She’d been so sickened by the carnage the traffickers in endangered species were inflicting on some of the earth’s rarest and most beautiful creatures…so enraged by their callous disregard for living things…. Okay, Ken had gotten to her in a weak moment, maybe, but she’d certainly had plenty of opportunities to change her mind since. The fact was, she’d truly believed in what she was doing. She still did.
But what was all this physical stuff? She was supposed to be the brains of this operation—the technical advisor, the wildlife expert. Ken Burnside, former cop and FBI agent, was supposed to provide the muscle—not that they’d expected to need much. Their purpose, after all, was simply to make contact with the smugglers, a band so elusive and cunning they’d managed for years to elude every attempt on the parts of both American and Mexican authorities to put an end to their operation. One reason for that, it was believed, was that the smugglers seemed to have no permanent camp, and always managed, like guerilla fighters, to slip away into the jungle one step ahead of a raid. It was hoped that Ellie and Ken, posing as eager American buyers with more money than sense, might manage to gain the confidence of the smugglers enough to work their way into their camp. If they were successful, their job was to record evidence and plant a tracking device that would enable government forces to locate them and put them out of commission once and for all. Their mission was nonviolent; the weapon of choice would be American dollars, not bullets. And so far, things had been moving slowly, but according to plan.
How was it, then, that in her first day on Mexican soil she’d already been involved in not one, but two incidents involving physical violence? And both times, if it hadn’t been for that American artist stepping in when he had….
