“I would prefer to see that doesn’t happen,” she answered instead.
“Don’t you worry,” Kat piped in. “We’ve already done some legwork. Got the name of this bar where Garcia used to hang out a lot and—”
“Kat!” The captain stood her down with a stare. “Let’s wait for Del, why don’t we?”
Elisa estimated that meant they would take the cue from their friend on whether or not to share their information with her.
“Don’t worry, Kat,” Elisa heard her ranger call from behind her. “Won’t be a long wait.”
There was an empty seat between the female ranger and Clint, but Del dragged a decorative chair from against the wall and wedged himself in next to Elisa. His hair was wet and his shirt clung to his damp skin, testifying to his superior body. One eye was bruised and puffy, but his smile had returned.
“Holy moly, Cooper,” Kat said. “Your face looks like one of my nephew Austin’s crayon drawings. His favorite color is purple.”
“You get it all out of your system?” the captain asked. Nobody had to clarify what Del had needed to purge. Anger was one of those universal truths everyone understood.
“For now,” Del said.
“Good enough.” The captain scanned the faces around the table. “Let’s get to work.”
“Before we start,” Del offered, “there’s something I want to say.”
He paused to clear his throat, his friends waiting expectantly.
“I just…I mean…I’m sorry about the way I acted yesterday. I was mad, but I shouldn’t have taken it out on all of you.”
Silence surrounded the table a moment, then Clint drolled, “Ouch. That must’a hurt,” and the tension snapped like a dry twig.
“Clint,” Kat warned, elbowing him, then smiled across the table. “That’s really sweet, Del. We knew you didn’t mean anything by it. Heck, if you can’t lean on your friends when times get tough—”
The captain scooted his chair back, scraping the legs on the tile floor. “Apology accepted. Now can we get on with this? Mrs., ah, Cooper, you said you had something to tell us?”
“Call me Elisa, please.”
Del looked at her curiously while she prepared herself with a deep breath. Her nerves buzzed, both afraid of his reaction to the truth she was about to tell and relieved to finally have it out.
“Del told me,” she said, looking at the ranger captain, “that he could not be held accountable for Eduardo’s death if Eduardo was part of the transaction taking place in the warehouse.”
Captain Matheson nodded. “If he went there to conduct criminal activity, then he knowingly put himself at risk. The liability is his, not Del’s. But we have no proof that Garcia was involved in the arms deal. Are you telling us you do?”
“Not proof, perhaps, as your courts demand. But suspicions.”
Del’s eyes turned cold as chips of ice. “You said the resistance doesn’t buy guns.”
Though her stomach twisted at the implied accusation, she didn’t blame him for his suspicion. She had never been totally honest with him—until today.
“The resistance does not,” she said. Looking around the table, she wondered if any of the rangers, with their Uncle Sam and their red-white-and-blue upbringing, could believe the depravity of the leadership that controlled her country. “But the military might.”
Even stone-faced Clint showed his surprise. “You’re saying someone in the U.S. is selling guns to a foreign government? That’s a majorly serious offense.”
Del studied her curiously. “And knowing who the guns were for doesn’t help me any.”
“Unless it was Eduardo doing the buying,” she said quietly.
The captain frowned. “What makes you think Garcia was connected to the San Ynez army?”
“When I met him, he was injured in an army attack. His wound infected. In his fever, he talked of El Presidente finally taking his rightful place as leader of San Ynez.” Bile boiled in Elisa’s throat as she thought of Sanchez, the butcher, and his illegally gained power in her country. There was nothing rightful about assassination. “I thought his rambling no more than the delusions of illness, but later, after he recovered, he began to ask questions. About the resistance. Especially about our leader. I began to wonder if his presence in that village, on that day—even his injuries—had really been an accident. Colonel Sanchez has sent spies before to infiltrate the resistance before. To learn the identity of La Puma, our leader. What better way to earn our trust than to be wounded supporting the cause?”
“So you sent him away.” Kat looked as entranced as a teenage girl at a romantic movie. Only this wasn’t any movie. This was Elisa’s life. “Even though you…cared for him.”
Elisa nodded. “Yes.” It had been a hurtful time for her. A time when the mantle of responsibility threatened to crush her beneath its weight.
“Because you couldn’t risk exposing your people’s leader?”
Her mouth turned dry as powder as she gathered herself to tell the rest. She could not bear to look at Del for fear of the recrimination she might see.
She swallowed painfully. Del had accepted some of who—and what—she was. Feelings had developed between them despite their different backgrounds. If those feelings were to grow, he had to know the whole truth about her. If he couldn’t accept it, then their relationship was as flimsy as their marriage.
She raised her chin. Carefully met his measured gaze.
“Because I am my people’s leader.”
Del leaned against the jamb at the bedroom door, watching as Elisa brushed her hair. Despite the questions he needed to ask, now that the other rangers were gone and he could voice them in private, he paused to watch. The image of her in the mirror, stroking a brush repeatedly through the silky black waterfall of her hair, seemed so feminine, so serene. Totally at odds with his idea of a woman who was not only involved with a third-world insurgent party, but had founded it.
She’d never intended to become the guiding force behind the resistance in her country, she’d said. But when, after spending three days imprisoned in the dark without food or water, she’d escaped, she’d lead her brothers and three other prisoners to freedom with her. From that point forward, they looked to her for direction. Together they’d vowed not to rest until all those whom Colonel Sanchez held unjustly were free.
She hadn’t wanted the responsibility of being their leader. Circumstance had called her to the role.
Which made Del wonder how she had found it so easy to walk away—especially to go to a man she considered a traitor to his people.
“You knew,” he said as she raked the brush down the length of her hair again, “that Garcia wasn’t just some bleeding-heart world-aid worker.”
“I suspected,” she corrected.
Their eyes met in the mirror.
“You were going to marry him, anyway.”
“I had a baby to think about.”
“All this about saving your people from tyranny, fighting for freedom, is just rhetoric, then. Easily abandoned when it’s inconvenient.”
“No.”
“He was your enemy.”
“He was the father of my child.”
Del felt a pang of regret when she set the hairbrush down and turned. He could happily pass a whole day watching her brush her hair.
Annoyed with himself for admitting it, even to himself, he shoved his shoulder off the door frame and stood straight. What he needed now was to focus on the conversation at hand, not personal hygiene.
But as she stepped toward him, sunlight streamed in the window beside them, gilding her almond complexion in a healthy glow. Her sleek body was ripening with pregnancy, he realized. Both her abdomen and her breasts were fuller, heavier.
A longing to touch those breasts, to measure their new weight in his palms, test their sensitivity with his thumbs, struck him like a blow. The impact sang along the nerves in his arms to make his fingers tingle and ran down his spine to settle as an ache between
his legs.
Damn, he’d been so close last night. He’d had her in his arms. If he hadn’t been so drunk…
She stopped in front of him. The familiar scent of vanilla and almond surrounded him. Del inhaled deeply.
Then jolted himself out of his lecherous fantasy before he did something stupid, like pulled her against him and let her feel the reaction she stirred in him.
“I am not proud of all I’ve done. But I had no proof that Eduardo was not what he claimed, no evidence other than the ramblings of delirium. And I was being hunted in San Ynez,” she said, her coffee eyes serious. “Sanchez’s captains promised him they would crush the resistance—starting with its leader. The soldiers were everywhere. It was difficult to escape them at times before I was pregnant. Carrying a baby, I could not have survived. My child could not have survived.”
Del tried to concentrate on her words, and not the tom-tom beat of blood in his groin. “So you just left. Left your people to fend for themselves in the middle of the hornet’s nest you stirred up.”
“No. I have twin brothers, Miguel and Raul. They were only sixteen when the resistance began. Too young for the responsibilities of leadership. But they have grown. They are twenty-four now, and seasoned. They have been—how do you say in Texas?—‘chomping at the bit’ to take control for a long time. Now El Puma can be in two places at once. They will not let my people down.”
She raised her hand toward him, as if she could make him feel the truth in her words, if only she could touch him. Her fingers hovered inches from his bruised cheek.
His breath caught. His heart stuttered. He pulled his head back. He didn’t want her fingers on his face. He wanted to draw them into his mouth and suckle each perfect pink fingertip.
He restrained himself from following through on that desire. Barely.
A sweat broke between his shoulder blades. This was crazy. She represented everything he loathed. People turning against their own flag. Civil unrest.
Vulnerable women, widowed by war, left to raise their babies alone, as his mother had been.
Del blinked back a wave of emotion. Vulnerable, hell. Elisa might have some uncertainties about her pregnancy and her future in the U.S., but she was the strongest woman he knew. He’d always seen the noble pride in her. The determination. Now when he looked at her, he saw the courage, too. He couldn’t imagine the kind of heart it took for a twenty-year-old girl to escape from prison, organize her people and stand up against an entire government.
He didn’t want to imagine it. Because imagining Elisa with that kind of courage meant admitting that everything he had done had been for nothing. Getting married, loosing his job—none of it mattered. A woman who could lead an entire freedom movement would have found a way to protect her baby, with or without his help.
Maybe she hadn’t come to the U.S. for the baby’s sake at all.
Del used the heat from his unwanted lust to fuel his anger. “Tell me. What would you have done if you’d married Garcia and then found out he was supplying Sanchez with guns?”
Her confidence wavered, along with her voice. “I do not know.”
“You must have thought about it.”
“I…I hoped I would find it was not true.”
“Would you have killed him?”
Elisa’s eyes opened wide. She stepped back. Knowing he was being irrational, that he’d gone too far, didn’t stop Del. This whole thing had gone too far. The investigation. The threats…
He stepped forward, closing the gap she’d opened between them, allowing her no room. No escape, this time.
“Was that your mission all along?”
“My mission?”
“Is that why you slept with him in the first place? To get him to talk? Find out if he was working for Sanchez?” He raked a hand across his forehead. “Hell of a strategy. Screw him. Have his baby. Kill him. Anything for the cause, right?”
She wanted to slap him. He could see it in her eyes. To her credit she squeezed her hand into a fist at her side instead. “How lucky for me, then, that you came along,” she said as quietly as a serpent’s sibilant warning. “I did not have to murder him. You did it for me.”
If she’d swung a baseball bat between his legs, she couldn’t have taken the breath from him faster. Or more completely.
She tried to slide past him, out of the bedroom. Recovering just in time, he reached back, slapped his palm flat against the door panel and slammed it shut. His arm blocked her passage.
“I did what I had to and you damn well know it,” he gritted out.
She surprised him by nodding. “You were protecting your friend. I have accepted that. It is you who cannot accept that I also have done what I had to do, to protect my people and my child.”
Just like that, her quiet righteousness robbed him of his fury. She was right. Who was he to judge her?
A fool, that’s who. He’d tried to contain his anger at himself over the mistake he’d made at the warehouse, but it kept spilling out. Mostly onto her. She’d borne the brunt of his frustration since the day he’d found her at the cemetery chapel, and put up with it virtually without complaint. Even pretended their relationship might be growing beyond a mere marriage of necessity.
She’d let him kiss her. Hold her.
Because she needed him to keep her baby safe.
She’d done what she had to do.
Was that really all there was between them? Damn it, why did it matter so much to him? He wasn’t supposed to care about her. She was a duty to him, nothing more. A way to right a wrong, clear his conscience.
At least, he’d thought that’s all she was.
His stomach turned sickly. With his right hand still flat against the door, he swung his body around hers, planting his left palm on the door, too, and trapping her between his arms. “If I said I accepted all of it—you being La Puma, the resistance, Garcia—what then?”
He leaned so close to her that he could feel his breath reflected from her face, but she didn’t budge. She didn’t push him away, didn’t tell him to go to hell. No, she kept too much inside to show that kind of emotion, just like he did.
Instead she dabbed her lips with the tip of her tongue, and sent his body temperature soaring.
“It would be a start, I guess,” she said.
A start to what? Two years of anorexic marriage leading up to a divorce on the day she met her permanent residency requirements? Friendship? Pop-your-eyeballs-out, total-body-workout sex?
He had no doubt sex would be great between them. When two people who kept so much bottled up inside themselves finally let go, the results were bound to be explosive.
Maybe that’s exactly what both of them needed. A little release.
A lot of releases.
Now that he knew she not only hadn’t been in love with Garcia, but had suspected him, however faintly of being a traitor to her people, there was no reason to hold back. She wouldn’t be betraying Garcia, and Del didn’t have to feel guilty about taking another man’s woman.
There was a great big bed behind him, and he had time to kill.
He lowered his head until their noses bumped, nudged to find the right fit. He angled his head and shared her next breath, taking it deep inside himself. He gazed into her rich, dark eyes.
And then he stopped.
He couldn’t do this now. Not when this storm of desire he was caught in had been whipped into existence by anger. And not with her looking at him like a yearling heifer cornered by a full-grown Brahma bull.
He hadn’t exactly given her a chance to catch up to him, going from accusing her of plotting murder to wanting to commit acts with her that might still be illegal in several states in about six and a half seconds.
Besides, he didn’t want to mate with her in a frenzy of pent-up frustration channeled into lust. He wanted to take his time with her. Savor her. He wanted her to be as desperate for him as he was for her.
He leaned his forehead against hers. On the door his hands cur
led into fists, but he didn’t pull them away. If he did, he might touch her. And if he touched her, he wouldn’t stop until he’d touched every inch of her.
“I guess a start is better than an end,” he said, his mouth against her temple. He couldn’t resist lowering his head to nibble at her cheek with his lips. “Especially since we haven’t even gotten to the good part yet.”
“The good part?” For someone who had been standing still the past five minutes, she sounded remarkably out of breath.
He smiled into her hair, liking the effect he had on her. “The part where I tell you what an amazing, courageous, indomitable-spirited woman I think you are.”
“Mmm.” She tipped her head back to give him access to her throat. Against his better judgment, he coursed his mouth over the creamy column.
“And you tell me what a strong, hot hunk of man I am, and how much you want me.”
“Ah,” she said.
He raised his head in time to see her eyes open, focus. He hadn’t felt her move, but her hands were fisted in his shirt.
“That would be the part where you’re dreaming,” she said, and gave him a little shove back as she ducked under his arm to freedom.
He probably should have taken offense, or at least felt mildly rejected, but before he could round up enough brain cells to think about anything other than the clean taste of her and the intoxicating scent of her skin, he caught her grinning. She tried to press her lips back into a straight line, failed and let a laugh burst through her smile.
He shifted position, propping one shoulder against the door and trying to look casual despite evidence to the contrary pushing at the fly of his jeans. “Dreaming, huh?”
She shrugged, half apologetic, half wickedly encouraging. The little flirt. She was teasing him.
Torturing him, actually.
He narrowed his eyes at her seriously. Turnabout was fair play. “That’s all right. Go ahead and laugh. Guess your mother never told you.”
“Told me what?”
“If you work hard enough for what you want, dreams do come true.” Her smile sobered while his grew. “And I’ve always been a very hard worker.”
The Last Honorable Man Page 15
