Barefoot With A Stranger

by Roxanne St Claire

  He leaned closer. “Sex with you was amazing,” he said, his voice a little husky. “And if you want an apology, I’ll give you this: I’m not sorry it happened, but I’m sorry if you feel I duped you.”

  She searched his face for a long time. “Huh, look at that. You do know how to define an apology.”

  He managed a smile. “Do you know how to accept one?”

  “Maybe.” Her eyes narrowed with the next question. “Would you have hit on me if you weren’t being hounded by God knows who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her shoulders sank a little. “Gee, thanks.”

  “I mean, I don’t know how else to live, so I’m going to assume everyone is out for me. Once I trust someone, Francesca…” He tipped her chin to lift her face toward his.

  “You can liaise?”

  “Frequently.” He took a chance and inched closer.

  “No.” She shook off his touch. “Can’t do that. Stop flirting with me.” She backed away some more, pointing at him. “And quit calling me Francesca.”

  “I can’t call you by your name? Why not?”

  “The way you say it is entirely and unfairly sexy.”

  Really. He’d have to hide that away in his arsenal of things he might need later. “Well, I never want to be sexy, that’s for sure.”

  “And no more inside jokes and almost kisses, and please, please, put a shirt on for the rest of your life.”

  Her humor gave him a little hope, and relief. “Are we good, then?”

  “Define good,” she fired back, just enough of a smile in her eyes that he knew she was yanking his chain.

  “I’d define it as—what was the phrase again?—‘the best sex—’”

  She slammed her hand over his mouth. “Do not push your luck, Malcolm Harris.”

  He kissed her palm and watched her eyes flutter the tiniest bit. So, he pressed his hand over hers and kissed again. And once more, because even kissing the inside of her hand was pretty much the best thing his mouth had done for hours.

  She didn’t move her hand. “And yet you continue to push your luck.”

  He turned her hand and threaded their fingers, keeping her knuckles close to his lips. “I don’t know how to stop doing any of those things you want me to stop doing,” he admitted. “I know you probably are thinking ‘never again,’ and I don’t blame you for one second, and I have no idea what kind of promises you made to Gabe, but—”

  “No promises,” she whispered, holding his gaze, the connection as fiery and real as it had been in the hotel room. “I haven’t made any promises.”

  “Good.” He kissed her knuckle. “’Cause contingency planning means anything can happen, Francesca.”

  “Contingency plans and liaisons. Can’t you call it what it is? Sex.”

  “It could be,” he agreed, leaning in to capture her mouth. She let go of his hand and placed it on his cheek, letting him pull her rain-dampened body into his chest.

  And she felt every single bit as real and soft and sweet and warm as last night. Their mouths just fit so perfectly, her tongue against his teeth, his lips over hers. Everything just fit and felt so damn good.

  “What the hell are we doing?” she murmured into his mouth.

  “Kissing.” He nibbled her lower lip. “I think it’s a standard part of any apology.”

  She smiled into the next kiss, less tentative, but still not fully happy about the direction her little walk in the rain had taken, he could tell. “Don’t forget the ‘I owe you one’ part.”

  He kissed her again. “I owe you one.”

  “One what?”

  “One more kiss. One more…” He lifted his head. “One more night.”

  She closed her eyes and sighed, her resignation practically palpable. “What the hell is it about you?”

  “Francesca.” He pulled her even closer. “I know you’ve never had a one-night stand or hookup or fling or whatever the hell you want to call it, but have you ever just had sex for fun? No strings. No promises. No commitments. No expectations or hopes?”

  “Yeah, last night.”

  “We could do that again,” he whispered. And again and again and again. “For fun.”

  “It was fun,” she agreed begrudgingly. “All that rolling around and laughing. That was pretty much textbook fun.”

  “Went way past fun,” he said.

  “Well into ridiculous. And I…” Her eyes narrowed in mock anger. “I wanted to do it again.”

  “I’m sorry I left.” He slipped his hand around her neck, tunneling under the hat. “For a whole bunch of reasons, I’m sorry I left.”

  Her expression changed, the spark of anger disappearing from her eyes. “Now that, Mal Harris, was a genuine apology.”

  He punctuated it with another salty, slow kiss. “We are going to be alone for a few days,” he reminded her. “So…there’s always another chance.”

  She let out a slow, low exhale. “Mmm. Road-trip sex?”

  “Fun road-trip sex.”

  She eyed him, still on the brink of going either way. Any second she would nod or throw herself back and tell him to drop dead. “We’d need…rules.”

  A zing of something like hope fired through him, a sensation so utterly foreign he couldn’t even grab it before it was gone again. “Rules? Like a few mission regs?”

  “Yes.” She lifted her hand to start ticking them off, one finger at a time. “No unnecessary physical contact, just, you know, the deed. No flirting. No intimate conversations. No kissing at unexpected moments or holding hands in the car or whispering promises in the dark. And…” She was on her other hand now and getting closer. “For the love of God, Malcolm Harris, do not make me like you.”

  “What if I like you?”

  “Absolutely not, no.” She shook her head. “You cannot like me. And this only happens on foreign soil. The minute we land back here, it’s over.”

  “I can live with those regs.”

  She tipped her head a bit, as if he’d agreed too quickly. “Am I missing something?”

  “You sure about the foreign-soil part?” He dragged his thumb down to circle the sweet spot in the hollow of her throat. “Because tonight…”

  “Foreign soil only,” she finally said. “And that thing you’re doing with your finger on my…that?” She pointed to where he touched her, and moved her finger in an accusatory circle. “Against the unnecessary-physical-contact rule.”

  He wanted to tell her it was very necessary, but didn’t want to push his luck. “How about this?” He stepped back and held out his hand for a shake. “We have a deal?”

  She took his hand. “Sex with no strings, no commitments, no messy explanations, no feelings, no emotions, and no…hope.”

  He nodded and shook again. “Hopeless sex. Got it. Deal.”

  “Deal.”

  She stepped away. “On foreign soil.”

  “In foreign beds.”

  “No hope.”

  He nodded. “Utterly hopeless.”

  “Okay, then. Good night, Mal.”

  “Good night, Fran—”

  She held her finger up in his face. “It’s Chessie. Just Chessie.”

  For now. “G’night, Chessie.”

  Satisfied, she gave a little nod and glided across the sand with a little too much speed, her red scarf flouncing like a flag of victory in the wind.

  “Francesca,” he said softly.

  “I heard that,” she called back.

  Damn it. He’d already broken a rule. He liked her.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Cuba.” Chessie leaned over and looked out the fogged-up window of the plane, peering down to the island below. “Land of the world’s coolest cars.”

  Mal gave a dry laugh. “If you like vintage clunkers made before 1959.”

  “I love them.” She sat back from the window, aware, as she had been throughout the flights they’d taken to get here, the pressure of a sizable arm and thigh as he adjusted his body for comfort
in the tight coach seating. They’d fallen into an easy rhythm of conversation, reading, quiet, and more talk during the long day that started at dawn.

  And always, the undercurrent of…sex. A joke, a touch, a tease, a look. And at every turn, Mal reminded her of the deal, keeping the power turned up on the electricity between them. As much as she rolled her eyes and tried to spar with him, she was definitely up for some of that hopeless sex on her first mission in the field.

  “Computers and cars,” he mused. “Not to sound sexist, but those aren’t typical hobbies for a woman.”

  She shot him a look. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I said I didn’t mean it in a sexist way,” he insisted. “It’s actually kind of hot.”

  She looked skyward as if to ask, Why me, Lord? Then, “Computers aren’t a hobby for me, Mal, they’re my job.”

  “It’s unusual, is all I’m saying.”

  She thought about it, but couldn’t remember a time when technology or engines didn’t interest her much more than dolls and dresses. “I guess it was the overload of testosterone around me. Someone was always working on a car in the driveway.”

  “You have a sister, though, don’t you?” he asked.

  “One, Nicki, the shrink. And my cousin Vivi, who, along with her twin brother, Zach, were raised with us after their mother died in Italy.”

  “Plus three brothers. Damn, that’s a lotta kids,” he mused.

  “Well, we had three parents, if you count Nino, who lived with us since I was a baby. But, yes, a great big Italian family with noisy dinners and heated arguments and hands…” She glanced at her own, making a gesture. “Hands flying. What about you?”

  He shrugged. “No.”

  “No?” She laughed lightly. “No, you won’t tell me, or no, you didn’t have a big family growing up?”

  “No big family, no noisy dinners, not much of anything, really.”

  She felt a frown tug at her brow, trying to gauge if that was sadness or resignation or something a little darker in his eyes. Anger, maybe. Something not pleasant.

  She couldn’t even think of a situation where there was not much of anything. But then she remembered all those addresses, all the way back to birth. “What about your childhood? How did you grow up?”

  “On my own, mostly. My dad was”—he shook his head—“gone by the time I could speak. And my mom is a big dreamer but not much of a doer. Unless by doing you mean recreational drugs, which were her pastime of choice. We spent a lot of years moving around.”

  She knew that, of course, but felt an ache for him. “It can’t be easy to be a single mom.”

  “No, it’s not,” he agreed with a little more vehemence than she expected. “It’s probably the hardest thing in the world, but my mother made it about twenty times tougher than necessary.” He shifted in his seat again, and something told her it wasn’t physical discomfort bothering him now. “And I’m calling foul on the regs, Francesca. Wasn’t there something about intimate discussions?”

  “Talking about your family and growing up isn’t intimate.”

  He looked away, pretending to be more interested in the empty aisle of the plane.

  “Unless it is,” she added.

  He gave another shrug, and a face that tried to say he didn’t really care. Which made Chessie want to know more.

  “So what’s your relationship with your mother like now?” she asked.

  “Define relationship.”

  She laughed. “That’s your answer whenever you hate a subject.”

  He gave her a look that was both impressed and surprised. “And I thought your sister was the shrink.”

  “Don’t need to be Freud to figure out when you want to turn the conversation away from something. ‘Define evasion, Francesca,’” she mocked.

  She expected a playful response, but got a clouded, intense look instead. “I’m not evading anything, Chessie. There’s nothing to share about my family. I didn’t grow up like you and Gabe did.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset. It’s just…never mind.” He turned away again just as the sound system crackled with an announcement from the flight crew, telling them they’d be landing in Havana in a few minutes and reviewing the customs instructions for the third time since they got on the flight. It didn’t sound any different from any other country, Chessie had noticed.

  When the announcement switched to Spanish, he pulled a file from the seat pocket that he’d been reading earlier. “Let’s go over Gabe’s dossier one more time.”

  When he opened the folder, Chessie skimmed the “schedule” her brother had laid out for them. A rental car was reserved at the airport for their drive to Caibarién, where they were staying at a place called Mar Brisas.

  “Let me guess,” she mused. “That translates to Sea Breezes?”

  “Or shitty hostel with very little running water and dirty windows.”

  “Mmmm,” she said. “Sounds dreamy.” But it could be when hopeless sex was happening. She tried to force herself to concentrate on the agenda.

  “We’ll start with the Ramos farm, of course,” he said, pointing to words he was obviously having no problem reading. “Of course, there are no guarantees little Gabriel will be there.”

  “It makes me crazy how hard it is to get information on people in Cuba,” she mused, finally focused on the document. “It’s like a big black hole in cyberspace.”

  “It’s a big black hole on Earth, too.”

  “I read somewhere that less than five percent of people in Cuba have access to the Internet,” she said, still astounded by the statistic. “And then I read there are Cubans on Facebook. So which is it?”

  “Depends on where you are. In Havana, you’ll get Internet and Facebook. Out in the country? There could be nothing.”

  “That ought to be illegal.”

  He laughed. “It’s called Communism, and it is illegal to us.”

  “I know, but now that relations are better, maybe more of them will get Internet. Why wouldn’t they want it?”

  “Castro doesn’t want his people to see what they’re missing. You think he wants them downloading reality TV from America and thinking there’s an actual government like they see on reruns of The West Wing? His whole regime would topple.”

  She got that, but still. “This whole job would be so much easier if we could get birth notifications online.”

  “You can’t get DNA online,” he said. “You still need the child in person to do that.”

  She turned to look out the window, thinking about the moment she’d see that child in person and how emotional and wonderful it would be. “I wonder if he looks like Gabe,” she mused.

  Mal started to answer, then seemed to catch himself.

  “What?” she asked. “What were you going to say?”

  He just gave his head a quick shake.

  “Can’t you even tell me what she was like? I mean, she was the mother of my nephew. Maybe.”

  “No maybe about it,” he said softly. “The chances of Isadora being with someone other than Gabe after they met are somewhere between zero and zero.”

  “Really?” She leaned closer, so fascinated by this woman who elicited such an emotional response from Gabe. “And it went both ways?”

  He laughed. “Yes. If anything, he was more nuts about her.”

  Chessie tried to grasp that, and failed. “I’ve seen a lot of girls lose their minds and hearts, and other parts, over Gabe, but not ever the other way around. How long were they together?”

  “I don’t know, honestly. They were already a secret couple when I met Gabe and were still together when I left.”

  “Secret?”

  “No one knew, only me and only because Gabe and I were close.”

  That, too, was surprising. Gabe must really trust this man. “How did you meet him?” she asked.

  “I met him at Guantanamo,” he said simply.

  “I know that, but how did
you two get to be such good and trusting friends? Gabe doesn’t let a lot of people into his private circle.”

  “We had an unusual assignment,” he explained in a soft whisper meant only for her ears. “Gabe was there to butter up the detainees and make them fall in love with the US, and I was there as a guard to watch them. We developed very different relationships with detainees, then we had to share what we learned. Plus, I was undercover to them, and he wasn’t.”

  She considered that, and gave into a thought that had plagued her for a long time. “Please tell me he didn’t torture any prisoners.”

  Mal’s laugh surprised her. “Detainees, and no. Quite the contrary. He made friends with them.”

  “So they would tell him secrets,” she guessed.

  “Essentially. And so they’d consider switching sides.” He folded up the paper. “It doesn’t matter, Chessie. The program he worked on is long closed. And we’re not going to Guantanamo, we’re going to Caibarién.”

  “What about Isadora? Was she a spy, too?”

  He smiled at her relentlessness. “Yes. Isa was CIA. A translator and language expert. She must have spoken ten or twelve different languages. Farsi, Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, Chinese, Japanese, and every Romance language you can imagine. Perfect dialect, just an incredible talent. And they worked side by side, day and night, Gabe and Isa.”

  Isa…who could have been her sister.

  The importance of what they were doing hit again, and Chessie vowed to put her fantasies about hopeless sex out of her mind for a while. Right now, she was here on a mission of hope. Hope for her brother, and for this child of a woman she’d never know but somehow knew she would have loved.

  She couldn’t forget that.

  Chapter Twelve

  So far, so good.

  But then, Mal knew that Gabe would have covered every base with the documentation to get into the country. Posing as Mitchell Walker, executive producer and owner of Green River Productions, Mal sailed through customs, and from his vantage point, it looked like Chessie, aka Elizabeth Brandt, had done the same.

  He’d briefed her on how to act with the Cuban officials—humble, innocent, and warm—and prepared her for the questions she’d be asked. Leaning against a wall in the tight hallway, he checked his watch against the next flight’s departure time, looking up when a man approached him.