by Gail Barrett
He had to be careful. Paloma was dangerous. There was something different about this woman, something about her that threatened to creep beneath his defenses....
No mercy, he reminded himself firmly.
But he’d better keep his wits about him if he hoped to survive.
Chapter 4
Paloma tugged back her hand, the startling warmth of Dante’s skin, the rough, callused feel of his palm igniting a sudden flurry of excitement inside her and scattering her pulse.
Heat scalded her cheeks. She crossed her arms, trying to cover up her response. What in heaven’s name was wrong with her? All he’d done was shake her hand, and her senses had run amok.
She had no business responding to him like that. So what if he was hot—gorgeous in a rough-hewn, masculine way? He was a thief, possibly even the infamous Fantasma, the worst possible person for her.
And he didn’t even like her. She snuck a glance at his craggy profile as he lifted the laptop off the floor. She hadn’t missed the disdain in his icy eyes, or how his mouth curled down when he looked her way. He clearly wasn’t her fan.
Which was fine. Dante’s bad opinion of her didn’t matter, even if he did make her senses hum. She had far more important things on her mind—that blackmail evidence. Gomez’s death. That dreadful rash.
Her mind swerving back to Dante’s bombshell, she hugged her arms even tighter as she struggled to process the news. “If Gomez did have a disease, we need to let the authorities know. Someone else could be at risk.”
Dante straightened and met her gaze, his eyes more guarded now. “Let’s look at his computer first and find out if we have the evidence you need. Then we can worry about how he died.”
That made sense. The blackmail evidence took priority as the more immediate threat to the stability of País Vell. Besides, until they knew exactly what had killed Gomez, they couldn’t risk starting rumors. They needed more information first.
Dante led the way into the kitchen. He flicked on an overhead light switch, then headed to a farmhouse table at the edge of the spacious room. Paloma paused in the doorway, her gaze traveling over the polished tile floor, the high, vaulted ceiling with chestnut beams, a fireplace big enough to stand in along one wall. Once again, Dante had preserved the original structure while accommodating modern tastes. He’d knocked down some walls, creating a modern, airy kitchen in what had once been a servants’ galley with little charm or light.
And that was the problem, she decided as she joined him at the table and sat. This man fascinated her on so many levels—from his unconventional, criminal lifestyle to his incredible attention to detail in his restoration work, to the pain in his eyes when he’d spoken of his sister’s death.
He hooked a chair with his foot, dragged it closer to hers, and sat. Then he turned on the laptop, angling it so they both could see.
She skimmed the sexy quirk of his lips, the impressive definition in his arms. He had heavy, corded forearms, biceps that looked sculpted from steel. But of course, he’d have muscles. He spent his days chiseling and hauling stones.
“You still have that key?” he asked.
Realizing she was ogling him again, she emptied the bag of disks on the table, picked up the tiny envelope and handed it to him. He shook out the key and held it up to the light, his dark eyes intent.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“There’s nothing on it, but that’s not unusual. Banks normally don’t mark their keys. It’s too easy for them to get lost.” He nodded toward the laptop. “Mind if I look at his files?”
“What do you think you’ll find?”
“Bank records, hopefully. They should show a monthly charge for a safe-deposit box.”
That made sense. “Go ahead.”
He set down the key and pulled the laptop closer, the light from the screen carving hollows beneath his cheeks. She dragged her gaze to the computer, determined not to let her attention stray as he flipped through the various files.
“No luck?” she asked a minute later.
“Nothing obvious. I’ll check his directory for hidden files.” His fingers flew over the keyboard, and then he paused. “Here’s something. Finances. This could be it.”
Paloma leaned closer, anticipation rippling through her as he double clicked on the file. “What if he uses more than one bank?” she asked.
“He might. But I doubt he has more than one safe-deposit box.”
The screen flickered and changed. A message box appeared, containing a log-in space.
Her heart sank. “We need his password.” The way her luck was running, she shouldn’t have been surprised. “I suppose there’s no way around it.”
“Not really.” Dante minimized the page, then continued clicking on files. After a minute he sat back. “It’s not here. I thought he might have a vault for his passwords, but he’s not that high-tech. He probably keeps them on a piece of paper in his desk.”
She glanced at him in alarm. “You’re not thinking of going back there?” They couldn’t risk getting caught.
“You have a better idea?”
She leaned back in her chair and tried to think. There was no point in phoning the banks and asking if Gomez had an account. No reputable financial institution would give that information out. Besides, Gomez might not have banked in País Vell. There were hundreds of banks in the surrounding European countries—far too many to search.
“We need to find someone who can get around that password,” she decided. But who? She didn’t dare involve her father’s security team in this. If he caught wind of the blackmail scheme, he’d be furious.
“I have a friend who can probably help,” Dante said. “A computer hacker I know. He’s the one who cut the power to the casino so we could get in.”
“I thought you did that.”
“I only disabled the backup generators. Miguel did the rest.”
She rolled that over in her mind. “You’re sure we can trust him?”
“He came through for us at the casino. Rafe can vouch for him, too.”
She creased her brow, hating to rely on someone she didn’t know. But Rafael Navarro was the fiancé of her old school friend, Gabrielle Ferrer. And Paloma knew their judgment was sound. Besides, Dante had as much at stake as she did, maybe more. He’d hardly recommend a man they couldn’t trust.
“All right. Go ahead and ask him to help.”
“I’ll call him right now.” Dante tugged his cell phone from his back pocket. He punched in a number, then rose and headed toward the sink. “Coffee?” he called back.
“Sure.” Her gaze went to the laptop again. “I’ll check the rest of these disks, then start looking for information about that rash.”
Dante turned on the faucet to fill the coffee machine, and the running water muffled his voice. Shifting her mind to Gomez, Paloma made short work of the disks and flash drives, which contained only his correspondence from the past few years.
Hoping she’d have better luck identifying what killed him, she opened a search engine on the computer and typed in the keyword rash. Several pages later she’d seen images of everything from shingles and smallpox to rosacea, but nothing that even remotely resembled Gomez’s horrific face.
She added the word diseases. Still nothing. She sat back and frowned at the screen.
“Miguel’s going to meet us at the Roman bridge in an hour,” Dante said from the kitchen island. “He wants to take the laptop back to his place. You have a problem with that?”
Paloma rose and walked to the island. She hated to give up control of the laptop. It was the only possible link to that blackmail evidence she had. But she couldn’t do this alone. And the longer it took to find that surveillance footage, the greater the chance that something else w
ould go wrong.
“As long as you’re sure we can trust this guy.”
Dante set two cups of coffee on the counter, and his gaze connected with hers. “I told you we can.”
“It’s just…I’ve been burned before.” She added sugar to her coffee and stirred it in. “When you’re a public figure like I am, you never know when someone’s going to leak something to the tabloids to make a buck. It doesn’t even matter if it’s true.”
He cocked his head. “You’re saying the stories they’ve published about you aren’t true?”
Wishing she could claim just that, she sighed. “No. Most of them are true. Exaggerated, maybe, but I’ve made my share of mistakes. I haven’t exactly been a saint.”
His dark eyes warmed. The corners of his mouth kicked up in a wickedly carnal smile that brought a rush of heat to her loins. Then he lowered his gaze, forging a slow, hot path to her breasts and back, and her heart did somersaults in her chest.
“I never did care for saints,” he said, his voice even huskier now.
Her pulse skittered and lurched. She lifted her cup and gulped down some coffee, counting on the quick jolt of caffeine to bring her back to earth. But her knees felt weak, every nerve ending sizzling with sensual awareness. Dante was hard enough to resist when he acted surly. But when he turned on the charm, leveling that bad-boy smile her way…
“Any luck finding that rash?” he asked, suddenly all business again.
She took another sip of the espresso coffee, needing time to compose herself. “Not so far. None of the images even come close.”
Forcing her mind back to Gomez, she carried her cup to the table and sat. After fortifying herself with another sip of the strong coffee, she continued her search, entering more keywords.
So Dante had flirted a bit. So he’d exhibited some typical male interest and checked her out. It didn’t mean anything. He was hardly going to hit on her after the hostility he’d shown all night.
“Try searching for bleeding,” he suggested, lowering himself into his chair.
“All right.” Conscious of his rock-hard thigh just inches from hers, she typed in bleeding disease. “Hemophilia, von Willebrand disease. That’s not right.”
Next she tried bleeding red eyes. “Trauma, broken blood vessels,” she read, skimming down the links. “Nosebleeds. That’s ridiculous.” Gomez hadn’t died of anything as simple as a nosebleed. He’d bled everywhere, profusely, spreading copious pools of blood over the tiled floor.
Shuddering at the memory, she entered profuse bleeding, but still nothing pertinent came up. Growing frustrated, she added death.
The page flickered again. A dozen links came up, and she skimmed the words. “Dengue fever. An epidemic in Yemen, possibly caused by sarin gas. Pregnant women in India dying from contaminated IVs. Hemorrhagic fever…”
Her heart skipped a beat. She slid her gaze down the list. Marburg. Lassa.
Ebola Zaire.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, appalled. She gave Dante a horrified look. “That can’t be it.”
“What?”
“Ebola. Hemorrhagic fever.” Stunned, she clicked on a link. A map of Africa appeared on the screen. “It occurs mostly in Africa. Zaire, Sudan. Not Europe.” Certainly not País Vell. Unless Gomez had traveled recently…
But no, it had to be something else. At least she prayed it was. Even the thought of Ebola terrified her. Hardly anyone who contracted it survived.
“Are there any pictures?” Dante asked.
“I’ll see.” She clicked on another link and slowly scrolled down the page. “It incubates for two to twenty-one days,” she read. “The symptoms are fever, sore throat, weakness, diarrhea, cough. Did your sister have any of those?”
“No. Not at all. And she sure as hell didn’t travel to the Sudan.”
Paloma eased out a shaky breath. “Then it has to be something else.” Thank God. She scrolled down the page even farther. “It leads to a rash, red eyes and hiccups, of all the odd things. Death occurs in the second week.”
She glanced at him. His face had paled, and his mouth had turned suddenly grim.
“What is it?” she asked. “Did your sister—”
“Just keep looking.”
“But—”
“She was fine when she went to work that night.”
Her nerves wound tight. “So it couldn’t be that. She would have had symptoms, right? The disease would have to incubate for a while. She wouldn’t just suddenly get sick and die.”
But what if it was Ebola? What if Gomez had caught it from Dante’s sister? And what about that patient at the hospital? Could his symptoms have been the same?
“There was a case at the hospital where I volunteer, a man who died recently with a strange rash. It was just about a week ago, in fact.”
Dante’s gaze sharpened on hers. “He looked like Gomez?”
“I don’t know. I never saw him. I just overheard one of the doctors discussing the case.” She pressed her hand to her belly, apprehension making her ill. “They called the coroner in. He was going to send the tissue samples to a lab in Spain. They probably have the results by now.”
“If it’s Ebola, what would they do?”
“Notify the health authorities. Issue an alert. Maybe quarantine people. It’s highly contagious. Ninety percent of the people who get it die.”
And she’d stood beside Gomez in the bathroom, breathing the air. She’d taken her gloves off, then touched the counter, the faucet, the door....
Her lungs closed up. A wild feeling of panic drained her of any warmth. She had to be wrong. How would Ebola have arrived in País Vell?
“We can’t tell anyone yet,” she told Dante. “Not until we’re sure. People would go crazy.” There’d be a mass stampede from the country, a rush on the pharmacies for drugs, total panic in the streets....
“So what do you want to do?” Dante asked.
“We need more information. But Dr. Sanz, the doctor who treated that patient works the late shift. He won’t be in until this afternoon.”
“Can you get his home phone number?”
“Not easily.” Not without raising questions. “But we could talk to the coroner while we wait. He conducted the autopsy.” Dante grimaced, and she raised her brows. “What? You don’t want to talk to him?”
“What’s the point? The guy’s a quack. He’s the one who claimed my sister overdosed.”
Not wanting to hurt his feelings, she chose her words carefully. “And you’re sure that’s not true?”
He tipped back in his chair and crossed his arms. “She swore she’d gone straight.”
“Addicts have been known to lie.”
“I know that, but she really had changed her life. She was holding down her waitressing job and staying away from her old friends.”
He believed he’d failed her. Her heart wobbled at the sudden insight, the guilt in his voice striking a chord. She understood that guilt. She’d failed to save her older brother Felipe’s life. And she’d lived with the pain of that failure every day for fifteen years.
“It still seems odd that the coroner could have made a mistake like that,” she said. “How could he have confused a disease with a drug overdose?”
“She had a needle mark on her arm,” Dante admitted. “He said she had other signs, too—like her blue lips and discolored tongue.”
Paloma chewed her lip. A needle mark sounded damning to her. “But if she slipped and took some oxycodone…maybe there was heroin mixed with it—or some other kind of drug. And maybe it caused her to look like that.”
Dante shook his head. “I told you, she’d gone straight.”
“Then you’re probably right,” she said, knowing it was futile to arg
ue that now. “The coroner made a mistake. Either way, he should have the lab results by now. We can ask for a copy and see for ourselves.”
“I guess.” Dante straightened his chair with a thud. “If you think it will help, give him a call.”
She glanced at the still-dark window above the sink. “It’s too early. He won’t be in his office yet. Why don’t we stop by there after we drop the laptop off?”
“All right.” Dante shrugged off his suit jacket and stood. The stark white fabric of his dress shirt drew her gaze to his tawny skin. Suddenly feeling breathless, she looked away.
“I’m going to change clothes,” he continued. “There’s a bathroom down the hall. Help yourself to anything you want in the fridge.”
Paloma blinked as he strode off. Was this his house? He’d just insinuated as much. But why hadn’t he admitted that from the start? Unless he routinely kept a change of clothes at his work sites…
Mulling that over, she gathered their dirty cups and washed them in the sink. Was she being naive to trust him? Could Dante have some hidden motive for offering to help her out? But that was nuts. She’d thought up this plan. She’d arranged for his release from jail. And naturally he’d want to work together when they’d both been caught on camera.
Deciding the long, stressful night had clouded her thinking, she turned off the tap and dried her hands. Her gaze landed on his cell phone, which he’d left beside the sink. No matter what secrets he had, she’d promised to clear his name. And since Tristan had precipitated this disaster, it was time her brother did his part to get them out.
He answered on the second ring.
“Tristan, it’s me, Paloma.”
“Where the hell have you been?” His voice exploded over the line. “I’ve been waiting for you all night. Carlos called with some lamebrained story that you’d been kidnapped. Did you get that computer disk?”
“I’m fine,” she said, annoyed that he hadn’t bothered to ask. But of course, he was frantic about the blackmail. She had to cut him some slack. “And no, I didn’t get it. It wasn’t there.”
