Barefoot With A Stranger

by Roxanne St Claire

  “You mean to tell me they never located the half mill?” Gabe blew out a whistle as he reached the door.

  “I guess someone found it, but not the US government.”

  “Think your old pal the motherly secretary has it?”

  Mal shook his head. “Don’t know, don’t care. And I won’t let Alana Cevallos take the blame now any more than I would then.”

  “My pal, the fucking hero.”

  Mal ignored the comment. “Did what I had to do.”

  “Taking the fall for Drummand’s secretary and spending four years in prison wouldn’t have been idiotic at all, Mal, if she’d been a hot piece of ass you were boning instead of a middle-aged single mother of three.”

  “Three kids eight and under,” Mal said. “All of whom would have been orphans and trapped in a wretched Communist country if Alana had gone to prison. They had everything to lose, and I had nothing.”

  “Just a hot-shit undercover career that some people would kill to have.”

  He still didn’t care. Those kids would have been lost, or worse, if he hadn’t taken the blame when Roger Drummand discovered that someone had stolen five hundred grand from the government coffers at Gitmo. And when Alana came to him and told him she was going to be blamed for it, he did the only thing he could do for the single mother.

  Gabe headed up the stairs to a sunny-yellow bungalow with a small brass sign that said McBain Security, pausing for a second. “Don’t you want to know where that money is?”

  He hoped it was in four healthy accounts, accruing a future for those kids and their mother. “Don’t know, don’t care.”

  “Think she has it?” Gabe asked, clearly still a master at reading people’s thoughts.

  “Then she wouldn’t still work at Gitmo,” Mal said, purposely not answering the question. “Or stay in that crappy Cuban town.” At Gabe’s look, Mal added, “I know people, too.”

  “The only person you need to know is me,” Gabe said.

  Mal laughed. “Still the most arrogant dickhead around.”

  “Usually. And I’m also the only arrogant dickhead around who can help you.”

  “I thought I was here to help you,” Mal said.

  “How do you think I’m going to pay you for this favor?”

  “I don’t want to be paid, Gabe.”

  Gabe put his hand on the door and nodded to the sign. “You do realize I don’t really work for a resort bodyguard company, right? You do know what I do here, right? Private witness protection. People who don’t want to be found, ever, by anyone, come to me. You could be a client. No charge. I can get you everything you need, every single piece of paper and ID, to set you up somewhere else. Not a federal agent in sight watching your every move.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d considered putting Gabe’s talent to work. But it never felt right. Why should he run when he was an innocent man? Still, the possibility intrigued. “Where would I live?”

  “I got people all over the world, my friend. Fiji, Hong Kong, Tokelau. You could be the fucking King of Micronesia. Name a country that appeals.”

  “The United States of America. You know, the country where I was born and the one I fought for as a Marine, then worked for as a spy on the side of the red, white, and blue. That country.”

  “Sorry.” The single word held so much punch, it made Mal swallow hard. “That country thinks you stole half a million dollars from the Guantanamo till. Pick another one.”

  “I’m not interested in another one.”

  Gabe looked genuinely disgusted. “Instead, you’ll spend your life looking over your shoulder knowing that no matter what you do someone is always watching, waiting for you to slip up.”

  “At least I’m not looking over my shoulder at Micronesia.”

  “Have you seen those islands? The place is a damn paradise.”

  “Would you live there?” Mal challenged.

  “Dude. I’m living here.” He swept his hand. “Bareass Bay. Where lost spies come to die. You’ll fit right in, my man.”

  Mal followed Gabe into a small office, the front area desks peppered with a few muscular guys who probably worked as freelance bodyguards or resort security, two women on computers, and, tucked in the back, Uncle Nino in his bright pink shirt, a phone to his ear.

  “My office is back there,” Gabe said. “Don’t pinch my sexy assistant, or he’ll sauté you in hot garlic oil.”

  Mal smiled as he nodded to the old man and followed Gabe into an unremarkable space that consisted of little more than a desk and chair, a bookshelf, and a straight-backed and rather uninviting guest chair. The only thing of visual interest in the room was a glass jar stuffed with cash on top of the shelves.

  “Speaking of what’s wrong with this picture…” Mal said, a little stunned at the sparse surroundings. “Is that how you pay people?”

  Gabe threw a dirty look at the money jar. “I got a woman on staff who charges me every time I swear.”

  Mal let out a hoot. “Bet she’s rich.”

  Gabe fell into the chair behind his desk, no humor on his face. “I don’t want to be here in this particular hellhole, and yet, here I am. My own private Micronesia.”

  Mal frowned. “The private wit-sec program isn’t going well?”

  “It’s fine. It’s actually a brilliant idea, and I could stay busy and rich, but…” He huffed out a breath and looked out a small window that faced a building similar to this one, probably housing another service for the resort. “I came here to be close to where I hoped Isadora would be.”

  Mal’s gut tightened at the admission. “Cuba.”

  Gabe nodded slowly. “And now she’s…”

  Dead. Fuck. “I’m really sorry, Gabe,” he said, not for the first time. “I know…I know what she meant to you.”

  “You better than anyone,” Gabe said.

  “The glory days at Gitmo…” Mal could still smell the back room at Abbey Road where they’d worked together. Mal, armed to the nines, pretending to be a guard but really trying to get the detainees to trust him so he could get inside information. Meanwhile, Gabe used his extraordinary skills to persuade the “borderline terrorists,” as they used to call the ones who weren’t totally hard-core, to help the United States. And Isadora, the talented and beautiful CIA translator who managed to take Gabe’s mostly off-color words and make them work in Pakistani, Arabic, and Kurdish.

  “They weren’t exactly glory days,” Gabe said. “But I was really happy. Proving you can be happy in any shithole if you’re with the right person.”

  Mal couldn’t help smiling, just remembering how good Gabe and Isa were together. “She brought out a side in you I don’t think many people see. Tender Gabe.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Mal leaned forward. “Love-Note-Leaving Gabe.”

  His friend laughed, shaking his head. “Stuck them in our secret cubbyhole in the Country Club like a couple of teenagers.”

  “In the benches along the wall.” Mal remembered everything about where they’d done their best work. Dubbed the Country Club, it was more like a lounge, a spacious area where a few particularly talented CIA consultants worked under the relentless watch of Roger Drummand on his pet project of turning detainees into US spies in their own countries. “We used to stash porn in there for when you really needed to make one of those scum-suckers switch sides. Yeah, I remember.”

  “That’s not all I stashed,” Gabe said, laughing at a memory. “There’s a beauty of a Beretta Nano in there.”

  “What?” Mal choked a laugh. “How the hell did you do that and I didn’t know?”

  “I did a lot of things you didn’t know. I was scared something could happen. A riot or uprising. Something that would trap Isadora in that room with a detainee, so I used our note cubby to hide the pistol.”

  Mal shook his head. “Ballsy.”

  “Those morons couldn’t find a gun if it was stuck up their ass. That pistol is probably still there.” He shifted his gaze to th
e small window, his smile fading. “And so’s Isadora’s kid, Mal. Somewhere on that fucking rock. And I know he’s mine.”

  He’d never heard Gabe sound so…beaten.

  “I’ll help you,” Mal promised. “I won’t be able to bring him back myself, but we’ll find him. We’ll make sure he’s yours. And then we’ll come up with a way to get him to you.”

  Gabe gave a tight smile. “And find out what happened to Isadora.”

  “Do you know anything at all about how she died?”

  “Nothing,” Gabe admitted. “Not one of my few contacts down there knows a thing. Just that she was last living with this Ramos family on a farm. Surely they’ll know what happened to her. Was it natural causes? An accident? Or…retribution against me.”

  “No one knew about you two,” Mal said, wanting to take the look of abject pain off Gabe’s face. “Only me.”

  “But after she got pregnant?” Gabe shook his head. “If I hadn’t had to leave Gitmo and take down those pricks in Miami, everything would have been different.”

  “You were doing your job,” Mal reminded him. “And you saved a lot of lives and stopped a lot of trouble by identifying Cuban spies.”

  “And made a lot of enemies.” He raked his hand through his hair and looked away, misery in every pore on his face. “I need closure. I can’t fucking breathe until I have closure.”

  “I’ll find out what I can,” Mal assured him. “But what about Chessie?”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s smart, Gabe. She’ll hear me ask questions. She might have a few of her own.”

  Gabe nodded, as if he’d already considered that. “Look, she knows there was a woman, obviously. And she knows I cared about her. She wouldn’t wonder why you’re trying to find out how she died.”

  “But what if I get classified information in the process?”

  “I trust Chessie, but for God’s sake, don’t put her in harm’s way. If anything happens to her, I’ll kill you, and the rest of my family will kill me.”

  “Understood.”

  “And I mean anything, Mal. Half your job is to protect her, and the other half is to guide her around Cuba.”

  “What about getting the information you want?”

  Gabe grinned and leaned back in his chair, putting his feet on the desk, a cocky son of a bitch again. “That’s the third half.”

  But Mal leaned forward with one more question. “What are you going to do if you find out…if you don’t like what I learn about Isa?”

  Gabe immediately put his feet back down and leaned all the way over the desk to make his point. “If she didn’t die peacefully and naturally, I will find out who is responsible for killing her and pluck out their eyes, break every bone in their body, and then stab them until they bleed out. What do you think I would do to anyone who even thinks about hurting someone I love?”

  Mal swallowed against a dry throat. “Nothing less.”

  Chapter Seven

  Half a million dollars?

  She’d stripped down, fallen into bed, and spread her legs for a prison guard who’d gone to jail for embezzling half a freaking million dollars? A loser with forty-two postal address changes in thirty-eight years who still had some holes in his whereabouts?

  This had to be the icing on a cake of bad choices in men.

  “Damn it,” she mumbled as she cruised through another database, unearthing one shocking piece of information after another. “You sure can look like one kind of person on paper and another in bed.”

  Why would Gabe trust this guy? Why would he trust her safety to him and the project of finding his most precious possession—a child? To be fair, Gabe was a fantastic judge of character, and he must know something that wasn’t in these databases.

  She brushed back some hair that fell over her face, vaguely realizing it had dried in the few hours since she’d showered and started researching her new “partner.” As soon as Nino brought her clothes, she’d be marching over to Gabe’s office for some answers.

  Still wrapped in a fluffy Casa Blanca-supplied bathrobe, she pushed the computer away and walked through the French doors to the pool deck that overlooked a glorious water view. Turquoise waves lapped at white sand, a stretch of beach dotted by the bright yellow umbrellas that were a signature of this high-end resort. The sound of gulls and the occasional song of a kid’s laughter floated up from the sand, making her ache in a way she didn’t understand.

  No, she understood. Sometimes it seemed like her love life was one long series of bad choices, all of them denying her the chance for that sound to be her child. And instead of being melancholy, she needed to get mad.

  Mad that Mal wasn’t the one-night stand she’d hoped to have; now she had…feelings for him. She fisted her hand and banged the railing like she could punch the feelings away. She had to. He couldn’t be more wrong for her.

  She closed her eyes and blocked out the postcard view, replacing it with the stark black-and-white data that she’d discovered about Malcolm James Harris, thirty-eight years old, born in Houston, Texas.

  High school dropout, arrested for a drunk and disorderly at eighteen, enlisted in the Marines, did two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, then got out. More moves around the country in at least a dozen states—that’s where the holes were—with three stints as a prison guard. Then he joined the Maryland Reserves, got sent to Guantanamo, spent a few more months with no real address, then was at Allenwood as a prisoner…charged with stealing half a million dollars in federal funds.

  He wasn’t a common thief; he was a big-time, showstopping thief.

  And he’d never lay a hand on her again.

  She closed the collar of the robe, as if she were physically blocking his access to her, and even that made her feel…sad. Mad. Frustrated.

  Obviously, she’d never have sex with him again. Damn it.

  That decision should suit her just fine—considering what she wanted in a man, and it sure as hell wasn’t a world-class embezzler with a list of forty-two different postal addresses. But it somehow didn’t suit her to think he was off-limits. Not primal her. Not Chessie who lost all control in a hotel with a stranger.

  How could she forget how amazing that had been? How could she look at that face and not remember how his whiskers rubbed her thighs? How could she look at his mouth and not remember the taste of every kiss? How could she do this job for Gabe, pressed up next to Mal in an airplane, and not relive the way he owned every inch of her body and made her melt?

  She jumped at a knock on the villa door. “Get a grip, Chess,” she mumbled, pushing off the railing, mentally preparing to deal with her grandfather. Gabe might have told Nino about the child, but the “my partner is an embezzler” vault should stay closed for now.

  He knocked again, harder.

  “I’m coming, Nino. No need to beat down the door.”

  She waited for his typical response, a muttering in Italian or butchering of an English idiom, but there was nothing but silence from the other side of the door. Before she opened, she peeked through the peephole and sucked in a quiet breath. That was so not Nino.

  Aw, man. This wasn’t fair. Even distorted by the lens, Malcolm James Harris, transient thief, was all dark and smoldery. How was a woman expected not to fall into bed with him…hours after they met?

  Because he stole half a million dollars, that’s how. Imagine what he could do to a woman’s heart.

  “I have your bag from the airport,” Mal said.

  Well, she had wanted to talk to him alone, so this was as good a time as any. She tightened the robe again. She would have preferred to have real clothes on, though. And maybe a little makeup.

  Not that she felt she needed to impress him, but she could use a dose of confidence in the face of his flawlessness.

  Flawlessness? He was a thief with forty-two former addresses, one of them a prison cell.

  “Let me in, Francesca.”

  The demand, spoken low and slow and without any doubt th
at she would let him in, did stupid things to her stomach. She opened the door, and he rolled the suitcase in, following close behind. Stepping back, she looked up at him, self-consciously pulling the robe tie.

  “Are you going to blush every time you see me? ’Cause it’s a dead giveaway.”

  She was blushing? She touched her face as if she could wipe away the heat. “I’ve been out by the pool.”

  Wordlessly, he nudged her into the hall toward the living area, carrying her suitcase for her. “We need to talk.”

  “I know,” she said, a little ticked that he acted like it was his idea.

  She dropped into one of the chairs, but he stayed standing, his torso blocking all the light from the patio. “You can sit down,” she said.

  He wore baggy shorts that showed strong, muscular calves with a dusting of dark hair. Sneakers that were at the very least a size twelve and a plain white T-shirt that showed off the result of hours spent at the gym. Or maybe he’d pulled hard labor in prison.

  He loomed over her. Too close. Too big. Too good in bed and how could she stand to not have that again, even just once?

  “You want to know if I told him, don’t you?” he asked, obviously misreading her expression of horror at that last thought.

  “What I want is for you to sit down. I know you didn’t tell him since your teeth are intact, you bear no bullet holes, and your arms and legs are still attached.”

  He gave just enough of a smile to make her stomach do a somersault, and he did perch on the armrest of the plush sofa, taking away a little of his overpoweringness. A little. “Proof that our liaison is still a secret.”

  “Liaison?” She almost choked on the word. “That’s a pretty fancy word for stupid.”

  His jaw opened just a little in reaction. “You think it was?”

  This time she did choke. “Well, it wasn’t smart.”

  “Yeah? And what makes you think that?”

  “First clue? Your midnight escape.”

  “Okay, yes. Once you said your name and I put two and two together, I knew—”

  “Gabe would beat your ass if he found out you seduced his sister.”