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There was nothing the least enjoyable about that kiss! Every nerve in his body snapped with desire. His groin ached so fiercely, he could barely stand upright. Another moment or two with Margarita’s mouth under his and he would have dragged her down on the damned balcony, ripped off that handkerchief she called a gown and blown his chances with her forever.
He knew her so well. He’d watched her mature from a bright, eager girl into a stubborn, determined woman. Had wanted her for as long as he could remember. He’d been biding his time since she returned from the States, waiting for her to find a middle ground between the liberal concepts she’d absorbed during her years abroad and the more traditional ways of Madrileño. He’d declared himself a year ago and waited patiently for her to recognize how well matched they were. At this moment, he wasn’t sure he was going to survive the wait!
Intellectually, Carlos accepted that Margarita had to find her own way to him. That he couldn’t force her into his bed…as much as he’d like to. Nor could he force her to admit she wasn’t any more immune to the electricity that crackled between them than he was. All he could do was keep applying pressure. And keep in rigid check his growing urge to claim her in the most elemental way a man can claim his woman.
Holding back got more and more difficult every day. At the thought of her thick, silky black hair tumbling over naked shoulders and her slender body hot and urgent beneath his, the ache in his groin doubled.
Shaking his head at the follies of men, Carlos reached into his tuxedo pocket for a cigar. From past encounters with the stubborn woman he was determined to make his own, he knew it would take some time before the clamor in his body subsided and he could rejoin the others in the ballroom.
A wry smile twisting his lips, he bit off the end of the cigar. Margarita had no idea the knots she tied in his gut with a single flash of her magnificent violet eyes. If he was to retain any semblance of his masculinity, Carlos had better make sure she never did.
The way he felt right now, that might be far easier said than done.
Impatience beat at Margarita like the wings of the millions of monarch butterflies that made Madrileño their summer home. Dodging guests with a smile and the excuse that she was looking for her father, she slipped down one brilliantly lit corridor after another. It was almost impossible to find a private niche in the Presidential Palace that served double duty as the seat of government as well as her aunt and uncle’s home. Ball guests mingled in the anterooms and hallways, exchanging news about the latest diplomatic crises. Uniformed aides hurried to and fro. Servants jumped to open doors.
Finally she found a deserted chamber. The small room with its deep crimson walls and gilt-edged portraits of past presidents was used to receive lesser diplomats. Its single door and heavy velvet drapes that would absorb sound suited her needs perfectly.
Closing the door behind her, she fumbled in her beaded bag for a small, flat instrument closely resembling an ordinary cellular phone. Only she and the other SPEAR operatives knew the powerful capabilities packed into its innocuous plastic case. She punched in her code, spoke a few casual words and waited for the voice-activated sensors at the other end to verify her identity.
When she was patched into Central Control, she recognized the agent who responded immediately. Rangy, blue-eyed Marcus Waters had shared weeks of brutal survival training with Margarita—and let her know in his grinning, cocky way that he wouldn’t mind sharing a bed with her as well. She’d laughed off his offer at the time, but she wasn’t laughing as she listened to the astounding information Marcus relayed.
“We just got word your Madrileñan police bagged a very interesting fish in that big drug bust yesterday.”
“Who?” she demanded, too keyed up after her session with Carlos for word games.
“Brace yourself, babe. From the physical description flashed over the Net, we think he may be Simon.”
Margarita’s jaw dropped. “The man we’ve been hunting the past six months? The same man we suspect of executing a personal vendetta against SPEAR?”
“That’s the one,” Marcus said cheerfully. “Jonah’s in the air as we speak, on his way to San Rico.”
Jonah! The shadowy head of SPEAR. He was legend in the agency. A voice on the phone. A cryptic telegram. A cassette tape hand-delivered in a bouquet of flowers. The fact that he was now enroute to San Rico set her pulse jumping.
“He wants you to hightail it over to the Bastille where your guys are holding Simon,” Marcus instructed. “Just to make sure the bastard doesn’t bribe his way out of custody.”
In the midst of her clamoring excitement, Margarita could still feel a twinge of pique on behalf of her countrymen. “Not every Latin American official takes bribes.”
“Of course not. Only the ones who’ve gone bad. And unfortunately, they aren’t restricted to Latin American. Let me know as soon as you get Simon in your gun sights.”
“Will do.”
Her momentary irritation forgotten, Margarita jammed the transmitter into her purse and willed herself to walk sedately through the crowded corridors. At last she reached the tall, arched doors that led to the plaza outside. Weaving her way through the limos lining the square, she quickly plotted her course of action.
Her condo was less than a block away, one of a cluster of new buildings that clung to a steep hillside. She’d purchased the airy little one-bedroom over her father’s strenuous objections and her mother’s very vocal fears for a young girl living alone. It hadn’t done the least good for Margarita to remind her mother she’d left girlhood behind her years ago.
She could change and arrive at the grim fortress that served as Madrileño’s central prison in less than ten minutes. Fifteen at most. From past visits to the dark, dank prison, she knew the rats that scurried along its narrow passages were the size of small dogs. She wasn’t going inside its walls until she donned a long-sleeved blouse, sturdy jeans and boots.
She wouldn’t need to invent an excuse to see the prisoner. As the niece of the President, she could pretty well go where she wished. Just in case anyone asked, though, she’d fabricate a cover story about needing to interview the prisoner to gather information for her job as an analyst at the Ministry of Economics.
In her simmering excitement, Margarita didn’t so much as glance over her shoulder at the ornate facade of the Presidential Palace…or spare a thought for the man she’d left cooling his heels on its balcony.
A relic of the days of Spanish rule, the Castillo San Giorgo sat like a stone monolith on a spit of land jutting into the sea. Almost five feet thick at the base, its walls had been constructed of a local stone the conquistadores had labeled coquina. The Spanish had used the same material to construct their fort at Saint Augustine, Florida, which Margarita had visited during her years in the States.
In English, coquina meant little shells, which was precisely what the stone consisted of—millions of tiny shellfish that had died eons ago. Their shells had bonded over time to form an almost indestructible stone embedded with tiny, razorlike bits of shell.
After checking her purse with its little radio and her snub-nosed .38 at the entry to avoid setting off the metal detectors, Margarita was careful not to brush against the walls as she followed the captain of the prison through dank, dark corridors. Not long ago, political prisoners had been crammed into the subterranean rooms the Spanish had once used for storing powder and supplies. Thanks to her uncle’s enlightened presidency, only a fraction of the cells were now inhabited. Even so, the stench of centuries of misery clung to the dim interior.
“This man you wish to speak to shares a cell with the other scum who use our people as mules to ferry their drugs,” the captain told her. “I sent a guard to bring him to an interrogation room.”
“Good.”
She’d come up with some reason to get rid of both the captain and the guard. She wanted time alone with the prisoner to verify if he was, indeed, the man SPEAR had been seeking.
Flinging open a narrow door, her escort warned her to watch her head and stood to one side. Margarita ducked under the low lintel, took one step into the stark room and froze.
A red-faced guard stared at her through eyes bugged almost out of their sockets with terror. An arm was wrapped iron-tight around his throat. His gun holster flapped empty, and the barrel of his semiautomatic dug into his temple. Behind him, a horribly scarred figure smiled a malevolent welcome.
“Come in, Señorita de las Fuentes. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Chapter 2
“Carlos?” Anna peered through the open doors of a small crimson and gold antechamber. “What are you doing in here all by yourself?”
“Looking for your cousin. Someone said they saw her come in here a while ago.”
What looked suspiciously like a pout settled over Anna’s delicate features for a moment. She chased it away with a toss of her dark hair. Slipping through the doors, she glided across the room.
“Won’t I do instead?”
Instant alarms sounded in Carlos’s head. Nubile and overripe for marriage, Anna had fixed her sights on him with almost the same determination he’d fixed his on Margarita. He suspected her determined pursuit sprang as much from jealousy of her cousin as from a young woman’s infatuation with an older and decidedly more experienced male.
Another man might have been flattered by her attentions. A few might even have taken advantage of her passions. Carlos didn’t feel the least temptation to accept the seductive invitations she insisted on sending his way. Anna was a pretty little thing, but she wasn’t Margarita.
Smiling, he strolled across the plush carpet. “Let me escort you back to the ball. I have no doubt Miguel is looking for you to claim a dance.”
“Miguel…pooh!” With a careless wave, she dismissed the lieutenant who served as Carlos’s aide. “He’s a boy. A mere boy.”
“Actually, he’s older than most lieutenants,” Carlos countered mildly. “He worked his way up through the ranks and received his commission based solely on merit, not through family connections like so many.”
“I don’t wish to speak of Miguel.” A sulky note crept into her voice. Slanting him a doe-eyed look through thick lashes, she slid her palms up his lapels. “I wish to speak of us.”
Gently, he captured her wrists. “There is no us. You know I’ve asked your uncle for Margarita’s hand in marriage.”
“Yes, well, my cousin has a mind of her own when it comes to choosing her man. As do I.”
“So I’ve discovered,” he said dryly. “Come, Miguel will be looking for you.”
“I don’t want to dance with Miguel.” Stubbornly, she dug in her heels. Her pout was real now. “If you must know, I saw Margarita leave the Palace almost an hour ago.”
“Did you?”
Well, well. That bit of information provided Carlos intense satisfaction. Evidently he wasn’t the only one who’d needed some privacy to regroup from that shattering kiss they’d shared on the balcony.
“Did she say where she was going?”
“No.” A sly expression slid across Anna’s delicate features. “Perhaps she went to meet a lover.”
“I think not,” he replied calmly.
In one of their more acerbic exchanges, Margarita had let Carlos know she wouldn’t come to his bed a virgin…if the sky should fall and the mountains crumble and she one day decided to marry him. His jaw had locked at the idea of another man touching her, but he was honest enough to admit that he hadn’t exactly spent the past thirty-eight years in a monastery.
He knew for a fact, however, that Rita’s natural fastidiousness had kept her from forming any casual liaisons since her brief fling with another student during her years in the States. That gave him some consolation. As did the knowledge that her continued abstinence chafed her as much as it did him. She was a passionate woman, with the fire of her people in her veins…a fire Carlos was determined to stoke.
His body hardened once more at the mere thought of Margarita’s mouth hot and eager under his. She wasn’t as indifferent to him as she liked to pretend. She couldn’t tremble at his touch, couldn’t flush with heat the way she had, if she cared nothing for him.
Impatient to find her, Carlos tugged at Anna’s clinging hands. He’d locate Margarita, escort her home, pick up where they’d left off on the balcony. And this time…
“Commandante!”
The urgent call whipped his head around. Although Carlos had given up both his uniform and the title he’d earned as commander of Madrileño’s elite counterterrorism strike force when he accepted the post of deputy defense minister, old habits died hard. His military aide still called him commander, and Carlos still responded instinctively.
“Yes?”
Miguel Carreras hurried into the room. Short, sturdy and well muscled, the lieutenant admirably filled out his uniform adorned with a gold-roped aguillette and fancy dress sword.
“You must come at once, sir. There’s been a…”
When he saw Anna clinging to Carlos’s lapels, the lieutenant skidded to a stop. Surprise and hurt flickered in his brown eyes. Then his training kicked in and he turned a face of rocklike impassivity to his superior.
“There’s been an incident at the castillo.”
“What kind of an incident?” Carlos asked, calmly disengaging Anna’s hands. He hadn’t missed that look of startled dismay on his aide’s face. He’d talk to Miguel later and explain the situation, perhaps offer him some advice on handling Anna. Although he had to admit his own track record with the de las Fuentes women made him something less than an expert on the subject.
Stiffly ignoring the woman at his superior’s side, Miguel poured out a hurried report. “I don’t have all the details. Only that one of the prisoners was taken in for interrogation. He overwhelmed his guard and threatened to kill him. Margarita…Señorita de las Fuentes…offered herself as a hostage instead of the guard.”
“What!”
Shock and disbelief slammed into Carlos. Every muscle in his body snapped wire taut.
“He took her with him,” Miguel related with a worried frown. “Into the jungle. He commandeered a Jeep and took her with him.”
The vicious curse that erupted from Carlos widened Anna’s eyes.
“The captain of the guard just brought the word,” the lieutenant finished. “He’s waiting for you in the Gold Room.”
Leaving an openmouthed Anna behind, Carlos strode through the doors. Questions hammered at him with each sharp crack of his heels on the parquet floors. What the devil was Margarita doing at the prison? Why had she offered herself as a hostage in the guard’s place? Who was this prisoner who’d taken her?
While his mind whirled with unanswered questions, fear coiled in his gut. Margarita didn’t know the jungle. She’d been raised in the city, spent her summers at her father’s sugar plantation and years at school in the States. She’d never hacked her way through strangler vines as thick as a man’s arm or dodged tarantulas the size of dinner plates. If by some stroke of luck she managed to escape this prisoner, she wouldn’t last a day in the steaming green hell that covered most of Madrileño.
An icy sweat had pooled at the base of his spine by the time Carlos strode into the Gold Room. At his entrance, the captain of the guard snapped to rigid attention, took one look at his murderous expression and blanched. Although democracy had taken firm root in Madrileño, most security matters—including the national police and administration of the prison system—came under the military, which was headed by the Minister of Defense. As deputy defense minister, Carlos stood in the captain’s direct chain of command. He could have the man’s head, or at least his pension, for this incident.
“You talk.” He fired the words through clenched jaws. “I’ll listen.”
“We took this prisoner with the others in the big drug bust yesterday, the one we coordinated with the Americans.”
“I’m aware of the operation,” Carlos snapped.
He should be. After receiving a tip about a major heroine shipment being moved through the mountains to an isolated airstrip, he’d worked forty-eight hours straight to set up a multipronged, multinational attack. His men had taken down two planes, half-a-dozen aircrew members, a number of small-time drug lords and so many locals engaged in transporting the uncut heroin the police were still trying to sort them all out.
“This particular gringo would not tell us his name,” the captain reported. “He’s an ugly bastard, very scarred, with one glass eye. We assumed he was one of the fliers. When they asked us to hold him in special custody—”
“Who asked you to hold him?”
The captain blinked at the whiplike question. “The Americans, sir. We received a call…I assumed you knew.”
Carlos would find out who made that call later. Right now, his only concern was Margarita.
Unfortunately, the captain could shed no light on why she’d asked to see this particular prisoner. All he knew was that she’d showed up at the prison and requested an interview.
“The gringo seemed to be expecting her. He called her by name and smiled when she offered herself as hostage instead of that sweating, sniveling guard, as though he’d anticipated just such a move.”
Carlos stared at the captain, his face shuttered while confusion piled on top of the fury gripping at his chest. What the hell was going on here? What had Margarita gotten involved in?
“The gringo left us locked in the interrogation room,” the captain confessed, shame evident in every line of his stiff body. “The walls of the castillo are so thick, it was a good ten minutes before anyone found us. My men report that Señorita de las Fuentes walked out beside this man as though they were going for an evening stroll. Only after I was found did we discover that a Jeep was taken.”
“So no one saw which direction they headed?”
Miserable, the captain shook his head. “No, commandante.”
With some effort, Carlos held back another vicious curse. When he was satisfied that the captain could provide no further information, he dismissed him with a curt order to draw up a comprehensive plan to prevent such escapes in the future.
“Find Señor de las Fuentes,” he snapped at Miguel. “Ask him to join me here.”
The lieutenant hurried away, leaving Carlos to think furiously. The certainty that there was more involved in yesterday’s operation than a routine drug bust grew with each passing second. The tip had come at such an opportune moment. The support from the States had been too ready. And this call to the prison…
His face grim, he moved to an ornately carved console and snatched up the phone. He’d spent a few years in the States himself, first as a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff College, then as a military attaché to the Madrileñan ambassador. He still had some friends in high circles. Some good friends.
By the time Margarita’s anxious father hurried into the reception room, Carlos was coldly, savagely furious. Even after four calls and several blunt reminders of Madrileño’s unflagging support for America’s antidrug campaign, he still didn’t know who’d made the call. But he was determined to get to the bottom of it.
“What’s going on?” her father demanded, puffing a bit from his quick walk.
A career bureaucrat, Eduard de las Fuentes had worked tirelessly to help his brother win the presidency and institute badly needed reforms. He was a good man, traditional in his family values but forward thinking when it came to his country’s needs.
Succinctly, Carlos recounted the astounding events of the past half hour. Eduard gaped at him, his mouth popping open and closed like one of the orange-spotted frogs that populated the jungle.
“Margarita? This scum took my Margarita?”
“Apparently, she offered herself as hostage in exchange for the guard.”
