He meant to tease, but she didn’t take it that way. “Kellan, don’t.”
What? “I was giving you a compliment.”
“But it’s a sign of what could happen. Comments, innocent or not. Innuendo. Speculation. And heaven only knows what will happen once it gets out that we slept together.”
“Who’s going to tell? Not me.”
“Do you think Rick O’Reilly isn’t going to refer to this when he calls the hot number?”
“What’s he going to say? He saw us in bed together. The whole team knows we have to play the part to be convincing. And I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles that I never touched you beyond what was necessary to gain his confidence.”
“You would?”
“If you want me to. I told you before, this isn’t the SRPD. Things are different.”
“Is sleeping with your operators different?”
He saw the trap yawning in front of his feet moments too late. “Who have you been talking to?” he asked slowly.
“It seems to be common knowledge.” She wouldn’t look at him. Instead she concentrated on wiggling into a short skirt.
“Why is it coming up now? You didn’t ask me about other people last night.”
She began to apply her makeup. “Last night was fabulous. It was like falling into a dream and not waking up. But Rick O’Reilly and this whole operation…” She gestured with a mascara wand. “This is reality. I have to stay grounded. Alert. Otherwise I’ll be my own worst enemy, and we have enough of those around here already.”
She was slipping away. After all that they’d done and said and felt together, she was slipping away, and doing it on purpose. “Linn, what we have now is different from my relationships with other people.”
“I’m glad you feel that way.”
“It isn’t a dream.” He was starting to feel a little desperate. She still wouldn’t look at him. “This is as real as it gets. You and me, alone.”
“But we aren’t alone. Dean and Caroline are alone. Let’s talk about reality when we can be Linn and Kellan.”
“Last night we were Linn and Kellan.” He didn’t understand where she was coming from. To him, it was crystal clear. They’d created an island of reality in an environment that was based on deceit and drugs and death. A place that had been like an escape from ugliness. They’d created it together, a place that would have been impossible to create if either one was alone. And he wanted to be back in that place worse than anything he could remember wanting in a long time.
When she spoke again, the accent was back. “Come on, darling.” She pulled on an embroidered camisole that brought out the color in her eyes and the creamy tints in her skin. “Let’s get back on the job, shall we?”
LINN WALKED down the staircase beside Kellan, wondering how long she could keep up the front. The truth was, she didn’t want to act anymore. In any other investigation, she would meet the target, set him up, take him down. But there was nothing in the training manual that told you what to do when you started to fall for your partner.
Making love with Kellan had forever changed what she was willing to settle for. Had raised the bar in what she wanted from a man. But why did it have to happen here, when there was no time to savor it, no safe place to talk about it, no opportunity to work it into their lives?
That’s just an excuse, said something in the back of her mind. You’re using bad timing as an excuse to push him away. Again. The way you always do.
What was the matter with her? She was a competent, respected investigator, and yet deep inside she was still a little girl, calling in the night for parents who didn’t come. Natalie had been only partly right. It wasn’t that her parents had been undependable. They’d reached out and grabbed life, which meant they traveled, and though she and Tessa had been cared for during their parents’ absences, it wasn’t the same. The end result was that she didn’t expect people to stay, so they lived down to her expectations.
Kellan, it appeared, wanted to stay. Could she do something about it before he changed his mind and decided that he’d been wrong and she really was another of his short-term girls?
They reached the bottom of the staircase and crossed the flagstone hall to the dining room door. Kellan paused for a second and squeezed her hand.
That was so like him. He was supposed to be preparing himself for a mental duel with El Peligroso, and instead he gave her moral support.
You’d better not let this one get away.
She squeezed back, and he pushed open the door. Slanting columns of brilliant light poured in the long windows. Arroyo sat at the head of the table, buttering toast. He looked up and waved them in.
“Do you eat breakfast? I always do.”
With a murmur of thanks, Linn slid into the chair he indicated on his left, and Kellan took the one on his right. Two bodyguards, she noticed, were stationed at either end of the sideboard. Rick O’Reilly took the fourth chair at the end of the table.
Arroyo handed her a bowl of fruit salad, and she spooned glistening melon balls, apricot halves and green grapes into a glass dish.
“Coffee? Hot milk?”
“Gracias, señor.” He pushed a carafe over to her and she poured a cup.
This was so civilized. Like being on the set of some period movie, with all kinds of double-dealing and wickedness happening all around but never mentioned in polite conversation at the table.
“Caroline. Sleep well?” O’Reilly said with a smirk.
“Never better.” She smiled back at him, a smile full of sin and promise.
“Good dreams?”
“It was the strangest thing.” Tasting a bit of apricot, she found it had been sweetened with some kind of lime glaze, and she sighed with pleasure. “I dreamed of having sex with you, but there was a large kitchen knife involved somehow. One of those big ones that you use to cut up beef.” She paused to spear a grape. “Heaven knows what that means.” She bit the grape in half with a neat snick of her teeth.
O’Reilly stared at her, and she could swear his skin lost color. Arroyo gave a shout of laughter. “Let’s hope it doesn’t mean he’s cutting your product.”
Kellan joined in the laughter, but O’Reilly remained distinctly subdued throughout breakfast.
Finally Arroyo turned to Kellan, and Linn sat back with her coffee. Here it came. Either they were going to be able to deal with the importer, or they would have to return to the office empty-handed and have to settle for taking down O’Reilly while Arroyo flew back to Colombia in his private plane, forever out of reach. In any case, Kellan would be doing the negotiating. Drug lords appreciated women, but they didn’t do deals with them. Linn had long ago learned to accept it. She was here to create a convincing background for Kellan with the reputation that had been manufactured for her. For her to attempt anything else would irritate them at best, and at worst, make them suspicious.
“So,” Arroyo began. “I understand you are interested in a business relationship.”
“I am,” Kellan replied.
“There is a small difficulty. I already have a very capable manager looking after distribution. I would hate to create competition for him.”
Kellan, with his organization charts and relationship matrix, was ready for him. “I know. I owe Rick a lot for the introduction, and I have no intention of cutting him out of the Bay Area market. But you have a hole, and I think I can fill it.”
Arroyo eyed him. “A hole?”
“You have California covered, but there’s a good market in Oregon and possibly even Idaho. I have connections in those states that would make it worth your while, considering the size of my orders.”
“Oregon. Idaho.” Arroyo sipped his coffee. “And how big would those orders be?”
“Five hundred kilos, to start.”
Arroyo didn’t even blink, although Linn had to take a sip of the mimosa that sat next to her place setting. Five hundred kilos was more than Dougie Vetten pushed through his distribution channels in five years.
“Five hundred.” Arroyo appeared to think this over. “Logistically this is difficult.”
“Not for you. I understand you have considerable resources at your disposal.”
Arroyo inclined his head. “The wine business has its advantages.”
“Oh?”
But Arroyo declined to elaborate. He was using the vineyard somehow to get the cocaine into the country. They had to find out how without sounding as though they were too interested.
“How long will it take you to collect the money?” Arroyo asked.
“Depends,” Kellan said. “With that kind of volume, what kind of money are we talking?”
“Fifteen thousand a kilo, fresh off the boat,” O’Reilly put in. “So two and a half million.”
“That’ll take me a week or so.” If he was staggered at the amount of cash, he gave no sign of it. Instead, he helped himself to more coffee. “Where will we do the transaction?”
“Here,” O’Reilly replied.
Now things were going to get tricky. Linn concentrated on her fruit salad and resisted the urge to catch Kellan’s eye.
“I’m not going to bring that kind of cash to a place where I can’t bring some people. For insurance. You know.”
Arroyo gave him a long look. “Is it that you do not trust me…or Mr. O’Reilly?”
“Oh, I’ve built up plenty of trust with Rick. That’s not a problem. But we’ve never done a deal at this level, either. I’ve never done a deal with you.”
“You would not be doing it with me.”
Linn shifted. They had to do it with him. So far El Peligroso hadn’t been caught because he never got his hands dirty. He supplied his distributors with top-quality Colombian cocaine, but didn’t participate in the transactions himself. But if CLEU wanted to take him down, they had to get the product from his own hands, with witnesses.
“Mr. O’Reilly will take care of the transaction,” Arroyo said, as though Mr. O’Reilly were going to do nothing more serious than give them a ride back to San Francisco.
“Then the deal’s off.” Kellan pushed his coffee away.
Linn sucked in a breath.
“What are you talking about?” O’Reilly demanded. “Mr. Arroyo didn’t fly all the way up here from South America so you could flake at the last minute.”
“He didn’t fly up here to hand the deal over to you, either.” He turned to Arroyo. “Either you treat me with the same level of respect as you treat Rick, or we don’t do business.”
Silence lengthened in the bright dining room while Arroyo weighed two and a half million dollars against the risks.
“Very well,” he said at last. “I will conduct this business myself. Here.”
Kellan shook his head. “No can do. We’ll do it in San Francisco. Someplace neutral, like a hotel. For all I know, the cops could be onto this place already, and there’ll be a nice posse waiting for me when I show up with the money.”
“This location is secure.” Arroyo’s lips had thinned and his voice had become tight. But his fingers on the china handle of his coffee cup were still loose, his movements controlled. Linn wondered just how far they could push him before his patience and caution snapped and they lost everything they’d worked for.
“You can’t know that,” Kellan replied. “I didn’t see any signs of the usual security.”
“I have people watching instead of equipment. Everyone on this estate is handpicked by me personally. They have been very effective in keeping it secure.”
So the employees were in on it. Some of them were talented at wine making, Linn was sure, but for all she knew, they were processing cocaine in the cellars instead of grapes.
Arroyo went on, “I have a talented vintner, and he has won many legitimate awards. But his talents are not restricted merely to grapes.”
Bingo.
Which made it all the more urgent that they set up the deal on neutral ground. They were badly outnumbered here, and had no hope of setting up a team to protect them or to gather evidence.
“I don’t like it,” Kellan said. “I prefer a hotel. That way we’re not likely to attract attention, everyone is on neutral ground, and most important, we don’t draw police attention to your operation here.”
Arroyo’s spoon clinked sharply against the side of his cup as he stirred sugar into it. “What makes you think we will not attract attention in the city?”
“I’ll book a room at one of the conference centers. There are so many suits in briefcases walking around that one or two more won’t be noticed.”
“They will notice five hundred kilos of cocaine, my friend.”
“Ah, but that’s where your experience comes in. Wine is delivered to hotels all the time. You can plan a delivery, and no one will remark on a winery truck at the loading dock. Only, the cases will be filled with the product. Once you have the cash in hand, and the shipment has been inspected, one of my people can simply direct your driver to my warehouse, unload, and send the truck on its legitimate way.”
Arroyo gazed at Kellan thoughtfully.
“It worked for Hidalgo Martinez,” Linn put in, sipping her mimosa as if she didn’t care much either way. “Only in his case it was carved figurines, of course.”
Arroyo turned his impenetrable gaze from her to O’Reilly, and she held her breath while he spoke to his lieutenant. “Do you have someone on the dock at one of the hotels?”
O’Reilly nodded. “The Santo Domingo. And it so happens it’s attached to the conference center.”
The black eyes flicked back to Kellan. “I will give this some thought. I will let you know.”
“I propose a toast, then.” Linn smiled and picked up the pitcher of mimosa. “To a successful business relationship.”
13
THE TAXI DROPPED Linn and Kellan in the center of town, and within five minutes the surveillance van cruised up beside them and the side door slid open.
Kellan handed in their bags, waited for Linn to buckle in, and then swung onto the seat beside her.
“How’s the jet-setters, then?” Danny navigated out of town and accelerated onto the freeway.
Linn leaned back on the headrest. “Darling, you’ll never get into Eton with an accent like that. It’s positively East End.”
“Yeah, well, the closest I ever got to Britain was watching Monty Python.”
“Will the real Linn Nichols please stand up?” Kellan put in. “You can ditch the accent. You’re among friendlies.”
“The friendlies could use a plan about now, after frying our brains in the heat for two days,” Cooper said from the back of the van.
“Be glad it wasn’t the whole weekend.” Linn’s eyes were still closed.
“Yeah, what was up with that?” Danny glanced over his shoulder and back at the highway. “I thought the house party lasted until Sunday. I’m glad it didn’t, mind you. We didn’t see a thing except the limo coming in and you guys coming out.”
“We had what we needed, so I didn’t see much point in sticking around waiting for something to go wrong.”
“And nobody questioned you?”
Kellan shook his head. “Once we pinned them down to an agreement, they expected I’d have to take off and start making arrangements.”
That was part of it. And part of it was that Arroyo had started to get way too interested in Linn over breakfast. Asking her to dazzle Rick O’Reilly was one thing. He was nothing she couldn’t handle. But asking her to set herself up with El Peligroso would take her to a whole different level of danger, one to which he couldn’t in good conscience send anyone on his team, even someone as resourceful and creative as Linn had proven herself to be.
No, the real reason he’d wanted out of there right after breakfast was the thought of spending any more time together without this thing between them being resolved.
The lady was seriously talented. Seriously smart.
And he was seriously in trouble.
Right from the beginning of this opera
tion, when he’d seen her working O’Reilly on the hot number, he’d been intrigued. But being with her was like trying to focus a camera—like bringing two disparate halves together to make a whole. And last night had been his first glimpse of that whole.
He’d known she was capable, and she’d worked beside him seamlessly. But the times they’d been together were always in the context of work. At the State’s temporary apartment. At the winery. Never on their terms or their turf.
It was no wonder she had backed away. He should have thought it through himself and realized that, in essence, they’d begun under false pretenses. What he needed to do now was find some one-on-one time, because the fact was he wanted to be alone with Linn Nichols, away from drugs and the law enforcement world. Just the two of them, all alone, with some serious exploration of each other on the menu.
Linn straightened and swiveled a little on the van’s bench seat. As she did so, her knee nudged his thigh and a jolt of sensation raced up his leg, the way a cat’s-paw of wind might riffle the calm surface of a lake.
Definitely some serious exploration, he promised himself.
THEY’D LEFT THE WINERY at eleven in the morning, but between the drive from Napa to the city, the endless debriefing with Lieutenant Bryan, her report, and kicking off the machinery of a major joint-forces operation, it was close to seven by the time Linn got back to her condo.
She stood on the front porch and drank in the dreamy peace of the lawns and trees. The creek rustled in the background, and a pair of ruby-throated hummingbirds duked it out over the purple fronds of her Mexican sage.
Salvia, she reminded herself.
This couldn’t be the real world, and yet people spent their entire lives in it completely unaware that there were people like Enrique Arroyo out there.
He had taken her aside just before they’d left Napa, when Kellan had been distracted by someone else. It was nothing personal, he’d said, the words coming out of his well-shaped mouth and bearing no relation whatsoever to his grandfatherly mien. If he found out that she had spoken of him to anyone, or capitalized on her knowledge of the winery in any way except for the upcoming buy, he would start with her parents and continue to eliminate the people she loved until he was convinced of her discretion.
His Hot Number Page 14
