“Turn here,” she muttered as they approached the long, winding drive that led up to the resort. When he flipped on the directionals, the lingering remnants of Nina’s fear eased. He really was taking her back to the Mayan. She let out a low sigh of relief.
The resort was the latest in a string of San Cabo resorts that included Westin and Ritz Carlton and other high-priced escapes. Constructed to resemble a Mayan temple, the main building sat on a cliff overlooking the sea. Tall palms lined the drive leading up to it. Lit by floodlights, they provided an exotic approach to the stunningly dramatic pyramid gleaming against the night sky.
As Nina had anticipated, a valet came forward when the car rolled to a stop. He had to wait for Blackstone to hit the lock release to open her door. When he did, she scrambled out with considerably more haste than dignity. “Buenas tardes, Dr. Grant. Did you have a good drive this afternoon?”
“I’ve had better, Ramon.” Determined to establish a record of events, Nina pointed to the driver rounding the front end of the car. “This is Señor Blackstone. Rafe Blackstone. He’s visiting me. For a short time.”
Ramon took the hint. “Buenas tardes, Señor. Will you need this car when you leave? If so, I will park it here by the entrance instead of taking it down to the lot.”
“Here’s good.” Blackstone slipped him a folded bill with the car keys and took Nina’s elbow. “Lead the way.”
She did, making sure to repeat his name to the doorman and the clerks on duty in the breezeway that served as a reception area.
“There’s a waiter over there by the pool,” Blackstone drawled. “You want to introduce me to him, too?”
“You think this is funny?” she huffed. “Somehow, I don’t find kidnapping amusing. Neither, I suspect, would the local police.”
“Police down in these parts take a different view of things, but you can call them if you want. Ask for Chief Inspector Mannie Diaz. Tell him you’re with me.”
“Well, for…!”
Thoroughly indignant, Nina came to a dead stop. Hands on hips, she faced her tormentor.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’re a cop back there in town instead of scaring the crap out of me?”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Oh. Well.” That set her back a bit, but she recovered quickly. “So what are you?”
“We’ll talk about that in your suite. Where is it?”
“You don’t know?” she said snidely. “You seem to know everything else.”
Ignoring the comment, he urged her through the open-air lobby to the pool beyond. It was one of four at the resort. Two catered to families, the other two to adults only. The one on this level was an infinity pool, its floodlit waters seeming to flow over the edge and drop straight into the sea far below.
Instead of booking her into the main hotel, Nina’s superefficient assistant had reserved one of the casitas that clung to the cliffs behind the pyramid. They were quieter and more private—qualities Nina had very much appreciated until this moment.
Some of her nervousness returned as she led the way down several flights of steps and around bougainvillea-draped walls. The only sounds to disturb the evening quiet were the soft music emanating from hidden speakers along the walkways and the ever-present murmur of the sea.
By the time she'd reached her casita, however, her indignation had returned. Along with it came a healthy bout of anger. Fishing her key card out of her tote, she unlocked the door and marched inside. The spacious, beautifully decorated unit featured tile floors, a fully equipped kitchen, one bedroom with a master bath to die for and a small Jacuzzi tucked in a corner of the balcony that was suspended over the sea.
Nina didn’t give her uninvited guest time to admire the ambience. Flinging her tote on a sofa covered in muted jungle print, she folded her arms across her chest.
“All right, Blackstone. If that’s really your name. What’s this all about?”
“It’s really my name,” he confirmed, glancing around. When those laser blue eyes came back to Nina, they sliced into her like a scalpel. “And this is about your friend, Sebastian Cordell.”
“Huh?”
Of all the things she’d expected… Okay, she hadn’t known what to expect. But this certainly wasn’t it.
“Are you talking about the older gentleman I met this afternoon?”
“I’m talking about the man who invited you into his hacienda this afternoon.” His jaw hardened. “As for whether or not he’s a gentleman, you tell me.”
This was getting way too bizarre. Frowning, Nina tapped a foot. “Before I tell you anything, I want some answers. Who are you and who do you work for?”
“I told you my name. Most of the time I run a marine construction company.”
“Other times?”
“I do independent consulting. Hazard elimination. Debris removal. That sort of thing.”
The sideline seemed legitimate. It was just the way he said it. As though there was more to removing debris than hauling it off in dump trucks or barges.
Nina’s foot tapped again. “I want to see some ID.”
With a sardonic shrug, he extracted a well-worn leather wallet from his back pocket and flipped it open to a California driver’s license.
There he was. Rafael Conall Blackstone. Height, 6’2”. Hair: black. Eyes: Blue. Weight: a really buff 180.
“‘Conall’?”
“My grandmother’s Irish.” A gleam flickered in his eyes, quickly come and just as quickly gone. “It translates to ‘strong wolf’.”
For some reason, the fact that he had a grandmother made him seem more human. Less dangerous. Which she knew was really absurd. Like murderers and rapists didn’t?
“My turn.” He slid the wallet back into his pocket. “What were…”
“Not so fast, Blackstone. I’m not finished yet.”
Impatience rippled across his face. Making an obvious effort to contain it, he hooked one of the high stools from the marble counter separating the kitchen from the dining area and swung it around.
Nina gave a huff of disgust. “Make yourself comfortable, why don’t you?”
He did, with one long leg braced against the floor tiles and the other propped on the stool’s rung. “What else do you want to ask me?”
“Oh, just a few little things. Like how you knew I hold a PhD. And where I’m staying. And that I met Sebastian Cordell this afternoon. Oh, yes—one more. There’s also the question of why in hell you didn’t ask me about this guy in town instead of kidnapping and scaring the crap out of me!”
He had the grace to look a little ashamed. Not much. Just enough to suggest he didn’t go around abducting women every day of the week.
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that. To tell the truth, I planned to pour a couple more margaritas down you, get you loose, and pump you for information there at the Purple Parrot. When that didn’t work, you forced me to resort to more direct measures.”
“What information?”
“For starters, how you know Cordell.”
“I don’t know him! Or I didn’t, before my car broke down this afternoon.”
“Pretty convenient, how you arranged for it to break down so close to his compound.”
“‘Convenient’?” Nina echoed, incredulously. “‘Arranged’?”
Thoroughly flummoxed, she groped for the other bar stool and yanked it closer so she could plop down. This whole thing was becoming more absurd by the moment.
“Why would I ‘arrange’ a breakdown?”
The rueful note disappeared from his voice. Hard and sharp-edged, it cut through the air between them.
“Maybe because Sebastian Cordell has something to sell. Something you might want,” he added, his eyes locked on hers. “You and a number of other entrepreneurs.”
The small sneer accompanying the last word brought Nina’s chin up with a snap. She’d worked damn hard to establish her company. She’d sunk every penny of her savings into start-up costs, then borrowed heavily to
purchase the building Grant Medical Data Systems now operated out of. The first months—the first years—had been scary as hell.
But she’d pulled it off. By sheer luck and perfect timing, she’d gotten in on the ground floor of a burgeoning and very necessary industry, and now turned an extremely healthy profit. One no one could sneer at!
Bristling, she poked a finger at Blackstone’s chest. “You listen to me, fella. I’m going to say this one time and one time only. I did not arrange to have my car break down. I did not use it as a ploy to meet Sebastian Cordell. And I am not interested in whatever the man has for sale.”
“Then why…”
The shrill ring of the phone sitting at the end of the counter cut him off.
“That,” Nina announced, with fierce satisfaction, “is most likely Ramon, checking to see if he should move the car to the parking lot. I’ll tell him to call you a taxi.”
“Not yet.”
“Yes, yet! This conversation is over.” Glaring at him, she snatched up the receiver. “Hola.”
The smooth, cultured voice that came through the earpiece made her swallow. Hard. With a helpless look in Blackstone’s direction, she responded to the gracious inquiry.
“Yes, Mr. Cordell, I made it home safely.”
Every muscle in Blackstone’s body went taut. His narrowed gaze drilled into Nina as she clutched the receiver.
“What? Lunch tomorrow at your hacienda? I…Uh…”
Chapter 3
Wolf’s gut twisted. Cordell! The prey he’d been sent to take down. The same bastard suspected of extracting top secret information from a United States senator. Now oozing his poisonous charm into Nina Grant’s ear.
And here Wolf had come so close to believing the woman. Almost swallowed her tale of a breakdown. Damn near let her air of righteous indignation and melting, brown-sugar eyes convince him she’d flown down to Cabo on vacation as she claimed. Yet…
The terse message Ace had texted a little while ago indicated they’d come up empty at their end. OMEGA could access a host of databases, public, private and otherwise. Wolf knew damn well they’d run Nina Grant through every one. Yet none of the agency’s wizards had been able to turn up a connection between Grant and Sebastian Cordell. As far as they could tell, she was clean.
Until this moment, everything in Wolf concurred with that assessment. He’d lived on the razor’s edge so long he’d learned to trust his instincts where people were concerned. The short time he’d spent with her had him ninety-nine-percent convinced Nina Grant was the busy exec on vacation she claimed to be. The finger she’d poked in his chest moments ago had just about clinched the matter in his mind.
He had only a second to decide whether to go with his gut-level assessment. A mere heartbeat, while she looked at him, wide-eyed and stuttering, to come up with an answer to Cordell’s invitation.
“Yes,” Wolf hissed. “Tell him yes!”
He could see the doubt in her face, the distrust. Her knuckles were white on the receiver, her body taut with indecision. He was sure she would refuse his urgent request when she cleared her throat.
“Lunch sounds delightful, Mr. Cordell.” Her eyes remained locked on Wolf’s. “Twelve-thirty it is. No, no need to send someone to pick me up. I’ll drive myself. What? Oh. Right. I guess I do need your phone number in case I get lost or stranded again. Let me get a pen.”
Wolf had Cordell’s numbers. All of them. But he kept silent while she hunted down a pencil and jotted a string of digits on a paper napkin.
“I’ve got it. Thanks. I’ll…I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He was in! Or she was. Wolf contained his fierce elation as she hung up the receiver and stared at it blankly for a few seconds.
“I can’t believe I just did that.” Her eyes lifted to his. “Why did I just do that?”
“I can’t speak to the why,” he said slowly, “but I’ll tell you this. A whole bunch of folks will be real happy that you did.”
“At the risk of repeating myself…why?”
He sifted the details in his mind, sorting out what he could and couldn’t tell her, and decided on the varying shades of the truth.
“I told you I freelance on occasion.”
“Right.” Her forehead crinkling, she repeated the line he’d given her. “At which time you specialize in eliminating hazards and removing debris.”
“One of those hazards is Sebastian Cordell.”
“Aha!”
Despite the seriousness of the situation, a grin tugged at the corners of Wolf’s mouth. “Aha”? Who said “aha” these days, outside of a slapstick comedy? Dr. Nina Grant, apparently.
She looked indignant again, like a tabby cat who’d been about to pounce and got its whiskers pulled instead.
“So that story about being into marine construction was just that?” she huffed. “A story?”
“No, that part’s true. I do this as a sideline.”
“Some sideline!” Frowning, she chewed on her lower lip for a few moments. “So why do you consider Sebastian Cordell a hazard?”
“We suspect he courted and seduced the senior senator from Maine.”
“Janice DeWitt?” she gasped. “The senator who died in a car accident a few weeks ago?”
“There’s some question,” Wolf said carefully, “whether it was an accident or a suicide.” Or something else.
So far the FBI and Secret Service had managed to suppress the evidence indicating that a member of the U.S. Congress had deliberately driven her vehicle through a guardrail and over a rocky cliff. Likewise the gut-wrenching e-mail she’d sent the President Pro Tem of the Senate, confessing that a disk encrypted with highly classified information might have been compromised by the man she’d taken as a lover.
“We also suspect,” Wolf continued soberly, “Cordell may have used the senator to gain access to extremely sensitive top secret information.”
Nina took a step back, and her shock that a popular, charismatic senator had indulged in an extramarital affair and possibly committed suicide took an instant and very personal turn. The information Kevin had downloaded from her personal computer certainly wasn’t top secret, but it had been crucial to her business. She would have shared it with him if he’d asked. Not all of it, of course, just the nonproprietary data that might have been useful to his financial planning and investment operation. That he’d dug into her private files without her knowledge or consent had stunned her. That he’d leveraged the data he’d extracted to benefit one of her competitors had royally pissed her off.
“Bastard,” she muttered.
“Yeah, he is.”
Pulled back to the present, she blinked. “I was referring to the jerk who pulled almost the same thing on me.”
Blackstone cocked his head. “How so?”
It embarrassed her to admit how blind she’d been. She had to force herself to recap the sorry details.
“My fiancé stole proprietary information and sold it to a competitor. Correction, make that ex-fiancé.”
She wasn’t looking for sympathy. Good thing, because the man seated on the bar stool a few feet from her didn’t display so much as a trace of it. Instead, a gleam of satisfaction leapt into his blue eyes.
“Then you understand why we’re so anxious to nail Sebastian Cordell.”
“I understand it,” Nina replied cautiously, “but I don’t see how my having lunch with him will help.”
“We’ve been trying to get someone inside the compound. Unfortunately, Cordell’s goon squad take their duties very seriously.”
“I noticed.”
“But Cordell just issued you an engraved invitation. We can fit you with a hidden camera, have you—”
“Whoa! Hold on there, Blackstone.”
With the shoulder holsters strapped onto the goons he’d just mentioned all too vivid in her mind, Nina scrambled off her stool and backed away.
“I’m not into playing spy games.”
“This isn’t a game,” he fir
ed back.
“Yes, well, whatever it is, I’ll leave it to the pros like you.”
Blackstone vacated his stool and followed her into the living area. Like the rest of the casita, the room was elegantly furnished. A three-section sofa in muted colors formed a conversation pit, with a monster slab of white-veined black marble in the middle to serve as a coffee table. Facing the sofas was an entertainment center containing a sixty-inch flat screen TV, a DVD player, an assortment of recent movies and an iPod dock.
Nina’s iPod and earbuds were still in her straw tote, so the only sound in the room, as she faced Blackstone was the restless murmur of the sea below the balcony, just off the living area.
“We need your cooperation, Dr. Grant. Cordell plans to auction the information he stole to the highest bidder. If it falls into the wrong hands—an unfriendly government or a terrorist organization, for instance—it could seriously jeopardize U.S. national security.”
“Oh, sure. Lay the safety and security of the United States on my shoulders, why don’t you?”
Nervously, Nina swiped her palms down the side seams of her linen sundress. She’d always considered herself a good citizen. She paid her taxes on time, donated to a number of charities, gave blood regularly and volunteered at a homeless shelter one weekend a month.
She did not, however, in any way, shape or form, see herself as a modern day Mata Hari. The prospect of entering Sebastian Cordell’s heavily guarded compound with a camera hidden somewhere on her person made her break out in a cold sweat.
“Look, Blackstone, I’d like to help. I really would. This just isn’t my area of expertise.”
“We have from now until tomorrow noon. I’ll make sure you know what you’re doing before you go in.”
Her palms froze in midswipe. “From now until tomorrow noon?” she echoed. “What are you planning to do? Camp out here tonight?”
“If that’s what it will take to make you comfortable with the operation.”
If anything, the prospect of spending the next twelve-plus hours in close quarters with Rafe Blackstone made her twice as nervous.
“It won’t work,” she told him firmly. “I’m the world’s worst liar. Even a little social fib makes my face turn red, and I can’t look people in the eye.”
Risky Engagement Page 3
