by Cindy Dees
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.
“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. Hell, he could even fool a lie detector if he worked at it. And standing like this in front of Eduardo Ferrare, who could order him killed in an instant, meant he was working damned hard at lying well.
“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 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.” It 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 did know her.
Eduardo leaned forward, glaring. “I think you’re a fucking punk. A cheap wannabe. And I think you seduced my daughter in a feeble attempt to get inside my organization.”
“Hey!” Joe protested. “I was straight with you, man. 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 the Blackjacks. They’d kicked Eduardo’s butt enough times for him not only to respect them, but also 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 had perched a hip on the wide stone balustrade and was 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 should 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 route out of here. I can arrange to have a fast boat sit offshore and we could swim out to it.”
“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 our hands on a couple of wet suits.”
“Gunter keeps all the diving gear locked up.”
Joe frowned. “I could have some 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?”
“Several 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.”
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 knew 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 her fingers across his cheek gently. “Ah, Joe. I would trade 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. It took a while, but eventually the tension left his shoulders and he moved, shifting 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 beneath 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.”
“What about Eduardo? Was he around a lot?”
“No. He traveled all the time. The thing was, nobody ever knew when he might come or go. By the time I was ten or so, though, he had his organization pretty well established and started to spend more time at home.”
“What kind of father was he?” Joe prompted.
“He never failed to provide for us. We always had new clothes and went to good schools. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he openly loved us. But in his own way, he showed us he cared. Or maybe he just felt guilty for killing our mother.” She shrugged. “I think he regretted that we weren’t boys, though.”
Joe’s arms tightened briefly and he mumbled, “I, for one, am thrilled that you’re a girl.”
She smiled.
“Tell me more.”
She couldn’t tell if this was some sort of subtle interrogation for the purposes of doing his job or whether Joe was simply interested in her life. Either way, she continued speaking. “He always brought us gifts when he’d been out of the country. Sometimes a stuffed toy or a box of expensive chocolates. Once, he brought us both silk dresses from Paris. He had us wear them to a big party he threw for the leaders of a drug cartel he was trying to hook up with.”
“And did he?”
She frowned. “Did he what?”
“Did he hook up with the drug cartel?”
“Oh. Sort of. A couple of the members didn’t want to do business with him. They said he was too violent. So he killed them and then asked to join the cartel again. The survivors let him in.”
“Did he talk about business around you and your sister?”
“Actually, he was pretty careful about not talking around us. I think he liked to pretend we didn’t know what he did. He always told us he owned a bunch of coffee plantations. When we were young, most of what Julia and I knew we learned from eavesdropping on the servants.”
Joe snorted. “How old were you girls when you figured out what he really did?”
She had to think about that one. She searched her memory for a time when she didn’t know what and who her father was. “I can’t remember ever not knowing that Daddy killed people and sold drugs that make people sick.”
“What did you think about that?”
“I used to lie in bed at night and pray that no one would come to our house and kill us to get even with Daddy for killing someone they loved. Which is to say, I had a lot of nightmares and insomnia, even as a little kid.”
“Wow. That’s some burden to carry around,” he commented.
“You know, the worst of it wasn’t the fear. It was the guilt.” She hadn’t thought about this stuff in a long time. The old pain seared across her stomach like an ulcer.
“Guilt? Why?” Joe asked when she didn’t continue.
She considered her words before answering slowly, “I used to think that if Julia and I hadn’t been bo
rn, Daddy wouldn’t have needed to turn to crime to support us. I figured all of it was our fault. To get the money to take care of us, he had to do the things he did.”
“And how old were you when you grew out of that illusion?”
She gazed out at the ocean, a vague, growling mass out there in the dark. “My head grew out of the idea before I hit my teens. But I don’t know if the heart ever grows out of something like that.”
Joe lurched behind her. “You don’t honestly think your father’s life of crime is your fault, do you?”
She shrugged. “I know it sounds stupid. Like I said, the head gets over it. But you have to admit, if Julia and I had ever gone to the authorities, maybe he could’ve been stopped. Maybe a lot of lives could’ve been saved. Maybe she and I are as guilty, in our own way, as he is.”
“Julia’s disappearance has caused a major blow to your father’s activities. She very much wants to do whatever she can to stop him further.”
She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Right. While I partied the night away and let her take all the heat. And the guilt train just keeps on rolling.”
“Your sister was in a unique position by being your father’s bookkeeper. You didn’t have the luxury of having her insider knowledge.”
She snapped, “I may not be his bookkeeper, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know any inside stuff.”
“Like what?” he challenged. “What do you know that could be of use to the authorities?”
“Well, I know when he’s going to have important meetings. He always wants me to put in an appearance at them. To serve drinks to his guests and let them cop a feel.”
Joe’s arms tightened around her at that.
She shrugged. “At least he never made me sleep with any of them. I hear that some of the men in the cartel make their wives and daughters service important clients.”
“Sick bastards,” Joe said.
“Lucky for you, Eduardo told me I didn’t have to show up for tonight’s meeting. I guess he figured you might go nuts if someone touched me, and he doesn’t want a scene with this bunch.”
