Or had she stopped assuming that everything he did was based on being a jerk?
They passed through neighborhoods, slowing at stop signs only long enough to gauge the distance and speed of oncoming vehicles. Before the trip was half over, she’d learned to keep her gaze turned out the side window, skimming over brightly painted buildings, squatty houses and overgrown courtyards.
She heaved a sigh of relief when they reached the airport. All those heavily armed men who’d practically sent her scampering back to the plane on her first trip would be a welcome sight this time. What fool would mess with Justin and her with all those policemen and soldiers around?
Abruptly Mario slowed down, and it wasn’t for a speed zone sign; he ignored those the way everyone else did. “Over there. To the right of the terminal. Look familiar?”
Though there were cabs everywhere and travelers headed in and out, it was easy to spot the man he was talking about. He wore a Hawaiian shirt, untucked over denim shorts and at odds with the heavy scowl that flattened his features, and he was showing something—photographs, she would bet—to the policeman beside him.
“That’s Guzman,” Mario said. “Chief of security for the Wallaces, both at their offices and their house here.”
“He was at La Casa,” Justin added flatly.
“He’s got company. By the terminal doors. Also down at the other end. I’d advise you to duck.”
Cate’s seat belt was half undone before Mario finished speaking. She slid to her knees on the floor, head tucked low. In the space between the front and back seats, she caught a glimpse of Justin. He was grinning.
“Bet no one ever shows you the town like this.”
But the grin wasn’t a very good one. It slipped and revealed a bit of worry behind it. It should have made her even less comfortable that he wasn’t as confident as he pretended. Instead, she felt a little better. She didn’t like being the only coward around.
“Now what do we do?” she whispered, as if the men fifty yards away could hear.
The answer came from Mario, his mouth barely moving. “Now Mario circles through the parking lot like he drives out here just for the pleasure, and then we forget about the friendly skies and see how the ferries are looking today.”
Pain in her left leg made Cate shift to find a small plastic car beneath it. It made her think of Rafael and Benita and the danger. “Will the Wallaces suspect you of helping us?”
Both men chuckled. “I’m just a dive master,” he replied. “I don’t even own my boat. The Wallaces are…”
“Snobs,” Justin said when he paused. “They give money to charity, but God forbid they actually deal with the people they’re helping. There are so few people in Cozumel worthy of their friendship that they bring in guests from elsewhere for their events.”
“And yet Susanna and I registered on their radar.” Justin and Trent had already been on it, of course, coming from the same background. “I’m impressed.”
“Yeah, well, I wish they’d never seen your faces or heard your names.”
His voice rang with true regret. Cate was surprised and just a little warmed by it. Not that it was his fault he’d invited sharks into a goldfish-filled pool. People in his world were wealthy, yes; self-centered and experts on the concept of entitlement, sure; but mostly they weren’t criminals. They didn’t exploit children. They didn’t fire employees by dumping them in the ocean to be the main course in a feeding frenzy.
And Justin had seen the results of that. Over the years she had inured herself to the blood-and-guts side of emergency medicine: missing limbs, disembowelments, the craters left behind by explosive bullets. He’d probably never seen a dead person who hadn’t already been embalmed and made up for a funeral. It would take a long time for that image to leave his head.
It seemed they must have driven miles before Mario gave the okay to get up again. Cate scrambled into the seat, brushed bits of crumbs and sand from her legs, then refastened her seat belt. They were in a part of town she’d seen only once in recent years, when Susanna had taken her the long way to the shelter from the airport. Signs identified the street as Avenida Rafael E. Melgar, flanked on one side by the main shopping district, on the other by incredible blue water.
Mario turned left, circled the block, then came out on another street that faced the ferry dock. The pier was broad, busy with people coming and going, and had security near its entrance. Each of the armed men was standing with another man, and the other men, like at the airport, were holding photographs.
Silently, Mario made a quick turn, back the way they’d come.
“Are the police and the army here corrupt?” Cate asked.
“No more than anywhere else,” Mario answered.
“The brothers are filthy rich.” Justin twisted to face her. “Don’t the police back home in Copper Lake pay special attention to any complaints from the much-
respected Calloway family?”
“Maybe. Probably.” She hated to admit it was true. The exploits of some of Trent’s Calloway cousins were legendary, never resulting in jail time or any punishment their parents didn’t dole out.
“Wasn’t that why you kept the Calloway name when you guys broke up?”
Cate snorted. “Do you remember my maiden name? I had no desire to go through life as Dr. Proctor.”
“Aw, then you could have specialized and been Dr. Proctor the proctologist.”
She swatted Justin’s shoulder, and he gave an exaggerated yelp.
“What is it with you? Were your fingers crossed behind your back when you took the oath to ‘first, do no harm’?” He rubbed his shoulder, then his glare faded. “Okay… So, Mario, can you get us on a boat?”
Mario snorted. “I’m the dive master. Of course I can get you on a boat. I can’t take you all the way to the coast, but if my cousin Pedro can meet us, he’ll get you to Cancun and on a flight out from there. It’ll have to be after lunch, though. The morning boats are long gone.”
He turned off the main road again, heading north, or maybe east. Cate had no idea. The notion of getting out on the ocean appealed to her, though the fact that they were doing it to try to sneak out of the country didn’t. Did the Wallaces’ influence extend to the mainland? Could they use that influence to pick up a phone and stop her and Justin from getting on a plane?
If she got back to the United States in one piece and breathing, she wasn’t leaving again.
They wound up at a tiny part-market part-diner for breakfast. She was apparently the only non-Spanish speaker in the place. Even Justin spoke fluently to the waitresses, more relatives of Mario. Frenchmen might claim theirs as the language of love, but Spanish, she decided, was the language of passion. Even ordering breakfast in it sounded exotic and fervent.
After the food arrived, Justin and Mario returned to English for her benefit. They planned and plotted, and she simply ate and nodded to everything. Mario would get them on one of the afternoon dive boats, and his cousin would meet them halfway between the coasts. Mario would provide a gear bag so they wouldn’t arouse suspicion by dragging her suitcase and Justin’s backpack on board the boat. He was also loaning them dive gear, his own and Benita’s, so they would fit in with the rest of the passengers.
As if she could fit in with a bunch of divers. Trent had tried from the beginning to get her to learn, but when did she have time? She’d worked her way through college, busted her butt through medical school and a residency. The only vacation she’d taken in twelve years had been their honeymoon—not her best trip ever, considering her new husband had cheated on her twice.
But it wasn’t her worst trip, either. This one held that honor. At least she hadn’t known about the cheating until years later, while she’d seen and heard and felt the gunshot.
The rest of the morning passed too quickly. After breakfast, they went to Mario’s house, a neat little cottage set inside cinder-block walls with decorative iron across the top. Little grass grew outside; most of the space had be
en converted to a lush garden, the colors so bright and intense that Cate was ashamed to compare them to her straggly little flower bed at home. Benita and Rafael were out visiting her mother, but she’d laid out the gear for Cate before she’d left.
Like the flowers outside, the dive skin was brightly, intensely colored and looked at least two sizes too small when Cate held it up. Noticing her skeptical gaze, Justin said, “They’re supposed to fit snugly. Don’t worry. They stretch.”
“I know.” She’d seen pictures of him and Trent in theirs. The garments stretched a lot and hid very little.
There were also a pair of booties, a mask, a buoyancy compensator, a snorkel, gloves and neon-yellow fins. Mario really wanted her to look the part. She’d be lucky if she could walk after she got it all on.
Far too quickly for her peace of mind, she was put to the test. After transferring all their stuff to the gear bag, a large rolling duffel, they drove to the dive shop. Justin’s motorcycle sat where they’d left it the day before. As if prodded by the sight of it, he dug the keys from his pocket and tossed them to Mario. “Take care of it for me. And hey, I like the paint job the way it is.”
Mario’s only response was a wicked grin.
Inside the dive shop, he showed them to the cramped space that served as office and storeroom. Once he left again, Justin unzipped the bag, pulled out Cate’s suitcase and opened it.
“Hey—” She bit off the protest as he removed her swimsuit. The pieces of fabric that had been perfectly adequate back home suddenly seemed so small in his big hands, especially the bottoms that he hadn’t yet seen her in.
His leer was exaggerated as he examined the panty, the front and back connected by two thin strips of fabric decorated with bows. She knew she should have brought a maillot instead.
“Put that on, then I’ll help you into the dive skin,” he said, laying both pieces on the battered desk.
“I can do it myself, I’m sure.”
“Okay. Then you can help me into my skin.” Grinning, he turned his back.
“I can do this in the ladies’ room.”
“Or you can do it right here where I can keep an eye on you. Figuratively speaking, of course. I would never peek.”
She stared mutinously at him, but he didn’t sneak a look, didn’t take his gaze off the large map that hung on the wall in front of him. Reluctantly she moved behind a stack of boxes that offered a semblance of privacy—from the waist down, at least—and hastily undressed.
“Do you know how many women I’ve seen naked?” he asked, his tone as normal as if they were talking about the weather.
“I’m sure more than I have, and I did an ob-gyn rotation.” She dressed in record time but still felt inadequately covered. The temptation to pull her T-shirt back on was almost too much to bear, but damned if she’d let him know he made her that uncomfortable. “Besides,” she went on with a flippancy she didn’t feel, “you haven’t seen me naked.”
Whether it was her movement back toward the desk or some sixth sense that let him know when bare skin was covered—sort of—he turned, still grinning. “There’s time, doc. As long as we’re both breathing.”
Flirting came as naturally to him as breathing. It was a good thing she wasn’t susceptible to it. Or an incredibly handsome face. Or a grin that managed to be both wicked and innocent at the same time. Or a body that looked as if some sun god had come to life. Or…
Oh, hell.
He stripped off his shirt, then pulled out the two dive skins. “Time for the wet-suit wiggle.”
He stepped into first one leg, then the other, tugging the Lycra up over his calves, and sweat beaded on her forehead. It was the room—small, cramped, warm with the day’s humidity. After swiping her face, she picked up the second dive skin, balanced on the edge of the desk and did the same. The fabric did stretch miraculously, but she was damp, her skin sticky, and the suit didn’t want to go on smoothly. She wiggled, wriggled, stretched and pulled, finally getting the material to her hips.
“You’re not helping,” he muttered, and turned his back to her once more.
Recalling his tease—Then you can help me into my skin—she sniffed. With the time and money to devote to diving as he had for half his life, he’d probably done this a thousand times. It came as naturally to him as scrubbing and gloving up did to her. The difference was, she was used to gloving just her hands, not her entire body.
Then he turned, just enough to give her a side view, and she realized what he meant about not helping. He was aroused. Not full-blown, all-out, would-do-Viagra-proud aroused, but on the way.
Heat scorched her from inside out. She would like to think it was shock, maybe even horror at the very idea, but there was that damn self-honesty again. To say nothing of the swelling of her nipples and the tingling in places she didn’t want to think about, certainly not in conjunction with him.
Justin Seavers had gotten a hard-on watching her dress.
And she liked it.
* * *
Aw, hell.
By the time they were half-dressed in their dive skins and ready to join the other waiting divers outside, Justin had gone through every curse word he knew a dozen times in his head. What was he, sixteen again? He couldn’t begin to count the number of times he’d watched women put on or take off their wet suits. Hell, even when he was sixteen, it hadn’t turned him on, not once.
But those women weren’t Cate, who was apparently some sort of witch who had discovered a great delight in not only irritating, annoying and patronizing him, but now also in giving him erections at the worst possible times.
Well, not exactly the worst. That would have been if they’d already hooked up with the Louisiana group that surrounded them. He’d dived with most of them before, and the guys never would have let him live it down.
They were gathered around the massage table underneath the straw-thatched palapa, waiting while Mario’s crew loaded tanks and readied the boat. Justin stood with one hip braced on the table, while Cate sat beside him, looking as if she’d rather be anywhere else in the world. He didn’t even take it personally this time. He would feel just as out of place dressed in scrubs and stuck in her E.R. with a bunch of people whose language he didn’t speak.
Keeping half a mind on the conversation, he scanned the area every few moments. There was no one strange lurking around, no cars illegally parked on the street above, no one standing on the pedestrian bridge with binoculars for a better view. As Mario had said, the Wallaces’ punks couldn’t be watching all the dive boats. Still, that itch between his shoulder blades wasn’t going to go away until they were on the boat and well away from the pier.
The call to board the boat couldn’t have come soon enough. Cate trailed him to where they’d left their gear. Benita’s BC, a bulky vest that secured the tank and helped the diver achieve neutral buoyancy, looked as if it weighed more than she did. Mario helped her onto the boat, with one of the other divers steadying her, and she moved to a corner at the rear. Justin was glad he hadn’t had to help her.
And a little ticked that the others had beat him to it.
He nodded toward the opposite end of the bench. “Come forward, or the diesel fumes will get you. These guys prefer not to dive in water people have been puking into.”
She moved to sit beside him, tension radiating from her in waves. The seasick patch Mario had provided was stuck behind her ear, and she stroked it from time to time as if making sure it hadn’t come off. He had to give her credit. She was scared, but she still held herself together. A lot of women he knew would have had more than a few hysterics by now, but anyone looking at her would think she was nervous about her first ocean dive, nothing more.
Once the boat chugged away from the pier, Justin gave an inward sigh. Being out on the water always made everything better. He wished he had his own equipment, wished that instead of leaving the boat when they met Mario’s cousin, he could go into the water with the other divers. The Palancar Reef was a beautiful
place. Finning around down there for a half hour and photographing whatever sea life he came across was his favorite way to pass time. Cate would enjoy it, too. It was a whole different world from the E.R. where she spent most of her time.
Abruptly catching the drift of his own thoughts, he stiffened. Wanting to take Cate diving? Was he insane? Hadn’t he figured out that she was a huge pain in the ass right after meeting her? Hadn’t Trent and every other time he’d seen her confirmed it? She was the last thing he needed in his ocean, unless he was contemplating drowning her.
But she did look sexy in that dive skin, the devil inside him pointed out. And in that bikini. And even in those silly pajamas. Truth was, she was damn sexy. Period.
Staring at the tanks the crew had secured in the boat, he considered hooking up to one. Obviously, his brain was oxygen deprived at the moment.
Proving it, instead of getting as far away from her—from temptation—as he possibly could, he leaned closer. “You okay?”
Brushing a strand of hair from her face, she nodded, then asked, “You wish you were diving with them?”
He grinned. “Is it that obvious?”
Another nod. “What makes it so special?”
“Geez, ask a hard question, why don’t you.” He gazed over the water, at the cruise ships heading into Cozumel, the fishing and dive boats heading out, the ferries jetting across to Playa del Carmen. Finally he met her gaze. “It’s…incredible. The fish, the water, the reefs, the freedom, the sense of discovery, the people. It’s just you and your dive buddy in a whole new world. It’s something everyone should try at least once. A lot of people aren’t cut out for it, but you never know until you give it a shot.”
Her nose wrinkled delicately. “It’s dangerous.”
“It can be, but, hell, doc, so is walking down the street. So is being in church if it’s the wrong place, wrong time.” He elbowed her lightly where the BC covered her ribs. “So is volunteering at a shelter for orphaned girls.”
“You’re such a cheerleader for it, maybe you should teach.”
In the Enemy's Arms Page 8
