by Cindy Dees
And then it was gone. As quickly as it had flashed out of him, the emotion was erased. But it left her shaken. Even more frightened because of the tremendous control he had over it.
“What?” Joe murmured. “What’s that look on your face?”
She answered, stiff-lipped, aware that Gunter was still watching and could read her words if she wasn’t careful. “Who are you?”
Joe’s mouth turned up in a smile, but his words, uttered past clenched teeth, were all but snarled. “I’m the guy who’s going to set you free.”
With her body still singing its need for him, it was hard to ignore the siren call of her desire, hard to reconcile the cold knot in her stomach with the heat zinging across her skin. What was wrong with her? She desperately wanted to get away from her father. She wanted to live her own life, to be free of the web of crime and violence all around her. Joe had promised to take her away from all of this. But at what cost?
Was she willing to pay his price?
She’d certainly known in her head that Joe would do whatever it took to get her out, but she’d been naive to ignore what that really meant. If even a fraction of the stories her father told about Charlie Squad were true, every member of Joe’s team was only one step shy of insane when it came to accomplishing the mission.
And she’d just brought one of the chief nutcases into her father’s home.
She started when Joe announced abruptly, “I’m no good at just sitting around. I’m going for a swim. Wanna come?”
The mere thought of cool water and Joe flowing over her heated skin evoked almost unbearable sexual pleasure. “Uh, I think I’ll pass,” she mumbled.
Joe shrugged and stood up. He took two quick, powerful steps and made a running dive into the swimming pool, knifing cleanly into the water in a shallow dive. He emerged nearly at the other end of the pool, executed a neat flip turn, and took off stroking toward her. Fifty easy laps later of her father’s twenty-five-meter-long pool, and showing no sign of tiring, she quit counting. Well, that explained where the gorgeous physique came from.
Even Gunter was openly watching Joe’s smooth, powerful strokes. He glided through the water like a porpoise, with water streaming off his sleek body in a V-shaped wake as every pull of his arm rocketed him forward. A constant forward momentum not attributable to his upper body and turbulence just under the surface of the water behind him gave testament to the strength of his legs as he kicked pistonlike from the hips. His was the beauty of a true athlete.
She was almost sad when, well over a hundred laps later, he popped out of the pool. Mesmerized, she drank in the sight of him strolling toward her, his body flushed from exertion, his hair standing up every which way like he’d just gotten out of bed and his eyes so alive she could hardly stand to look at them without exploding.
She handed him a towel as she asked, “How far did you go?”
“’Bout two miles,” he answered casually from underneath the snowy terry cloth as he dried his hair.
“Where did you learn to swim?” she asked.
“Duh. In a swimming pool,” he answered drolly in his best beach bum voice.
Suddenly suspicious, she glanced over her shoulder and, sure enough, Gunter was standing there. The German threw an assessing look at Joe and said shortly, “Mr. Ferrare wants to see you. Now.”
Chapter 8
Joe padded into Eduardo’s office behind Gunter. The air-conditioning was cold against his bare skin, especially after the tropical sun outside. Although he’d have preferred not to show Eduardo any reaction to it, there was no help for the goose bumps on his chest and arms, nor the occasional shiver that rattled through him. A transparent tactic by Eduardo to drag him in here like this, wearing nothing but a pair of swim trunks and a towel around his neck. It was, no doubt, meant to make him feel naked and vulnerable before the grandeur of the great man. Whatever.
He dug his toes into the thick carpet and did his damndest to strike a casual pose. “Yo, Mr. F,” he drawled at Eduardo, “you really gotta get outta this mausoleum and hit the waves. It’s gorgeous out there.”
Ferrare scowled. “Your arrival has caused me substantial unexpected work that keeps me at my desk.”
He’d bet. He could just imagine the mad scramble by Ferrare’s people to figure out who in the heck had just blown into their midst like a minor hurricane. He just prayed they ran into the fake life history Charlie Squad had hastily planted for Ferrare’s people to find.
“Hey, man. I’m not a high-maintenance guy, I swear. I’m totally willing to pull my weight around here if I’m gonna be a burden to you. I used to clean pools, and I’m pretty good with plumbing. You got any johns backed up? Flushing sluggish, maybe?”
Eduardo looked taken aback at the turn this conversation had taken. “My plumbing is fine.”
Joe grinned and opened his mouth to speak, but Eduardo cut him off, correcting hastily, “Rather, my house’s plumbing is fine.”
That was more like it. The guy was off balance now. Joe pressed his advantage and perched a hip on the edge of Ferrare’s desk. Gunter gaped, appalled at the nerve of such a thing. Good. Wouldn’t hurt to have him off-kilter, either. Joe drawled, “This is a pretty nice spread you got here, Dad. Mind if I call you Dad?”
“Yes, I mind!” Eduardo bellowed.
Joe shrugged. “Yeah, you’re right. That does feel kinda weird. How ’bout Ed?”
“How about Mr. Ferrare?” Eduardo ground out between his teeth.
“It’s your name. Your call. So what’s up? Big G said you wanted to see me.”
It took Eduardo a second to figure out that Big G was Gunter. And it didn’t take the German too long after that to level a dire scowl in Joe’s direction. Finally, Eduardo seemed to recall that there was actually a purpose behind this farce. He cleared his throat. Placed his palms flat on his desk. Seemed to be having trouble regaining his mental focus, let alone control of the conversation. Yup, upgrade his dimwitted son-in-law act from category 1 to category 2 hurricane. Joe held back a grin. Hell, torturing Eduardo was turning out to be a whole lot more entertaining than he’d ever imagined it could be.
“I have your dossier here,” Eduardo announced. “My people assembled it last night.”
That snapped his mind back to business fast. “I have a dossier?” he echoed. “Cool! What does it say?”
“It says you’ve had a little trouble with the law.”
“Shucks, don’t believe everything you read, Mr. F. The cops said some ugly things about me, but they never proved anything.”
Eduardo leaned back in his chair, his gaze keen. Assessing.
Assess away, buddy. I’ve been trained by the top shrinks in the business to lie like an angel. Heck, he could even fool a lie detector if he worked hard at it. And standing in front of Eduardo Ferrare, who could order him killed in an instant, he was working damned hard.
“It says here you are a firefighter.”
“Well, I’ve been through fire school and I passed the advanced course for chemical fires and hazardous-material burns last year. And, yeah, I’ve worked my share of fires. But mostly, I’m an EMT. I’m the guy who peels folks out of car wrecks and wraps blankets around people when they stumble out of burning buildings.”
“It also says here that you’ve been implicated in causing several suspicious fires.”
Joe shrugged. “Like I said. Nobody ever proved a thing. It’s all smoke and mirrors. Good one, huh? Smoke and mirrors?” He guffawed at his own joke.
Eduardo lashed out, “What does my daughter see in you?”
Good try. Abrupt and shocking shift of topic to startle a straight answer out of a suspect. Too bad Joe had been trained by the top police and FBI interrogators in the United States. He looked Eduardo dead in the eye. “That’s easy. I love her.” And damned if that didn’t almost feel like the truth rolling off his tongue. Hell, he hardly knew Cari. And the more he did get to know her, the more he realized how little he really knew her.
Eduardo leaned forward, glaring. “I think you’re a smalltime punk. A cheap wanna-be. And I think you seduced my daughter in a feeble attempt to get inside my organization.”
“Hey!” Joe protested. “I told you. There was no seducing going on until after the wedding!”
“Nonetheless,” Eduardo forged on, “if you thought you just caught the fast train to the top of the wise-guy pyramid, you thought wrong. Nobody gets a job—or respect—from me unless they earn it. You got that?”
Yeah, he got it. Like Charlie Squad. They’d kicked Eduardo’s butt enough times for him not only to respect them, but to fear them. And the biggest dropkick of all was standing right under his nose. Asshole. Joe answered casually, “Sure thing. And that’s the way it ought to be, too, if you ask me.”
Gunter cleared his throat loudly as Joe caught a flurry of movement out of the corner of his eye, a flash of long, tanned legs and white bathing suit at the patio door. Then the diamond ring on Eduardo’s finger caught the sunlight streaming in the windows. The ring was a gaudy piece, sporting a large kite-shaped diamond set in a massive gold band. It threw sparkling prisms all over the white room as its owner hastily stuffed the papers strewn across his desk into a file folder.
Carina strolled over to Joe and looped her arm through his. “You boys having a nice talk?” she asked lightly.
Eduardo opened his desk drawer to put the papers away.
“You don’t have to bother hiding that, Daddy. I know you checked out Joe. Oh, and I hope you thanked Judge Cabot and his wife for their hospitality to us.”
Eduardo’s eyes narrowed. Easy, Cari, Joe thought loudly, in hopes that she’d catch his brain waves.
She continued. “I mean, I up and drag some stranger home with me. Of course, you’ll check him out. I hope you didn’t get too upset over that whole business about starting those fires. Joe would never do anything like that. And even if he had, nobody was hurt. All the buildings they accused him of torching were abandoned. A bunch of bored kids probably did it.”
Eduardo snapped, “What else did he tell you about his past?”
Joe whispered loudly, “I didn’t tell her the part about fixing toilets. I mean, how unsexy is poo?”
Cari went rigid beside him, as though she was waging a mighty battle not to burst out laughing.
Eduardo growled, “Get out of here. Go surf or whatever it is you young people do.”
Joe wiggled his eyebrows suggestively at Cari. “Let’s go do a little whatever, eh?”
She slapped him lightly on the arm. “Behave yourself!”
He wrapped an arm around her waist and dropped a kiss on the tip of her nose. “Never,” he said, laughing back.
In one smooth move, he turned her around and started for the door. Trading smooches with her, Joe wandered out of Eduardo’s office, for all appearances having completely forgotten about his father-in-law’s existence in the midst of the various love nibbles he was busy trading with Cari.
Gunter closed the door more firmly than necessary behind them, staying inside with his boss. Still sore over the Big G remark, apparently.
Joe dropped his head onto Cari’s shoulder in a moment’s relief. “Thanks for charging in to the rescue like that. I owe you one.”
Her arms tightened around his waist briefly and she murmured, “You’re welcome. I’ll be sure to collect later.”
Hmm. That sounded interesting. Time-out. The op, Romeo. Focus on the op. Yeah, except this gorgeous, smart—and brave—woman was the op. How cool was that?
Cari rubbed her arms against the chilly night air as she stepped out onto the balcony. Joe’s silhouette was a darker shade of black against the inky night. Thick, angry-looking clouds scudded across the sky, threatening to burst into a major squall at any moment.
Finally, after a long evening of supper with her father and then movies in the media room, they were alone. Truly alone, without microphones picking up their every whisper.
Joe sat on the wide stone balustrade, staring pensively out to sea. His stillness drew her to him, pulling at her heartstrings as surely as she knew she shouldn’t let it. All that silence he’d wrapped himself in made her want to charge out and rescue him from it.
“What are you thinking about?” she murmured as she perched on the balcony beside him.
“I’m watching the cameras out here. There’s a weakness in the system.”
“Do tell.”
“They sweep back and forth to achieve full coverage of the grounds. Wherever there are moving cameras, there are blind spots. It would be possible to slip in behind the arc of movement of any one of them and make our way anywhere we needed to go on the grounds.”
She loved hearing his voice. Listening to him talk soothed her. Made her feel safe. More to keep him talking than because she really cared about the answer, she asked, “And where do we need to go?”
“I’m thinking the ocean is our best bet to get out of here. I can arrange to have a fast boat sit offshore and we could swim out to it.”
She frowned. “Gunter has radar watching the water. No vessels are allowed within a mile of this place.”
“What happens if some tourist strays into this mile-wide zone?”
“A couple of my father’s men go out in a boat and tell them this is a private beach. They’re invited to leave in however strong terms it takes to get rid of them.”
“So how do you feel about swimming a mile in the ocean?”
She grimaced, remembering that terrible night she’d swum out into the ocean and run into Joe. “It would be awfully cold.”
“Yeah, it would,” he agreed, obviously thinking hard. “I wonder if we could get ahold of a couple of wet suits.”
“Gunter keeps all the diving gear locked up.”
Joe frowned. “Maybe I could get a couple of wet suits dumped on the beach and hidden where we could get at them.”
“Motion detectors all the way to the water,” Cari replied.
Joe nodded. “Yeah, I saw those when I was watching the place.”
“You watched this place?” she asked, surprised. “For how long?”
“A couple weeks. Technically, I was watching you. But I also scoped out possible ways to pull you out of here.”
“And found none,” she added bitterly.
He smiled gently. “Don’t knock it. How else would I have managed to convince you to marry me?”
Startled by the sincerity in his voice, she replied, “Don’t sell yourself short. If I’d have met you under perfectly normal circumstances, I’d have been interested in you.”
He shrugged. “Under normal circumstances, our paths would never have crossed.”
Her gaze narrowed. “You see me as some spoiled little rich girl, don’t you? You think I run around with the jet set, partying the nights away and being generally useless.”
“I didn’t say that,” he replied evenly.
No, but he thought it. They all did. Everyone who lived outside her world and looked at it from afar thought she had some great life. But outsiders didn’t live with bodyguards dictating their every movement, with the constant threat of kidnapping or murder hanging over their heads. Outsiders didn’t flinch at every loud noise or get awakened in the middle of the night and hustled down to a panic room in the basement to hide, locked in with a terrified maid for hours on end while God knows what transpired upstairs.
She said defensively, “You think it’s been a bed of roses growing up in this house because my father has so much money, don’t you? You think wealth makes it all better?”
His back went stiff. “It sure as hell beats growing up without any money at all.”
She paused, arrested. He’d just given her a rare glimpse at the real man behind the facade he kept so carefully in place. Grew up poor, did he? “Did you have two parents when you were a kid?” she asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Did they love you?”
“Of course they did.”
She reached out and trailed h
er fingers across his cheek gently. “Ah, Joe. I’d have traded all this luxury in a heartbeat to remember what my mother looked like. To know what a hug from her felt like. To know that something other than my father’s jealousy and rage cost me my mother.”
He muttered dangerously, “What do you mean? What exactly happened to your mother?”
“Eduardo killed her when I was a toddler. He decided she was having an affair and broke her neck with his bare hands. Julia overheard him bragging about it once.”
Joe stared. Then his brow grew thunderous. Then, finally, the tension left his shoulders and he moved, shifting to sit behind her, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her back against his solid warmth. “I’m sorry, princess. I keep forgetting to look past the surface with you.”
“Past the surface?” she repeated.
“There’s so much more to you than meets the eye. You’re so dazzlingly beautiful it’s easy to get caught up in just looking at you. I keep having to remind myself not to underestimate the woman behind the looks.”
Warmth that went beyond shared body heat flowed through her. “That’s possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” she murmured.
“Then you’re going to be one easy lady to romance,” he laughed. “I haven’t even begun to ply you with real flattery yet.”
She snuggled deeper into his arms. “Sounds yummy.”
He chuckled and, if she wasn’t mistaken, buried his nose in her hair for an instant. But then the light touch of his breath on her ear withdrew and he said quietly, “Tell me about your childhood. What was it like growing up here?”
“We didn’t really grow up here. We spent most of the time at the main compound. It’s on the other side of St. George at the edge of the jungle—”
“I know the place.”
He did? How was that? Her mind spun with possible answers to that one. Belatedly, she continued. “I was two when my mother died. Julia—she’s five years older than me— mostly raised me. The servants were too afraid of my father to do much more than feed and clothe us.”
