by Alice Orr
PHOENIX FELT A LOT like one of the seagulls over Acapulco Bay, being blown this way then that by each new gust of wind. The lesson of the seagulls, as far as she could figure it out, was to relax and enjoy the ride. Phoenix wished she could take advantage of that lesson. She was in this exotic paradise with a handsome man at her side. If she had any sense, enjoying the ride was exactly what she’d be doing. Maybe she simply wasn’t very sensible.
Phoenix had spent the last five years teaching other people how to get closer to wherever it was they needed to be. She could equip them with skills and techniques for giving the impression they wanted to give, but she couldn’t transform them into the genuine article. In the meantime, she’d come to wonder what was truly genuine in herself. She’d ended up tutoring a sleazy character on how to make the world think he was squeaky clean. She hadn’t realized that was the case when she first took the job, but she couldn’t keep herself from recognizing the truth eventually. She left that job finally without so much as giving notice.
She’d drifted into the role she’d been playing in New York, from public relations specialist to consultant to manager of her own business in a field and company she had basically made up as she went along. She’d had no plan. She’d only done whatever came next with no real vision of where she might end up. She’d come to Mexico to put a stop to all of that by coming to a halt in general. Now, she felt herself drifting again, or being carried along by forces beyond her control, which amounted to the same thing. She didn’t want that.
“Do you think Porfiro will leave me alone from now on?” she asked Slater, hoping to pin down at least this latest out-of-control situation.
They were driving the Carretera Escenica back toward the city center. The deep blue Bahia de Acapulco sparkled in the sun to their left. Sumptuous homes crowded the descent from the highway to the water. The wild green of Punta Diamante tapered to jutting rocks and a border of sand beach in the distance. Phoenix didn’t want to believe that one overzealous creep could ruin whatever chance she might have of actually enjoying this lovely place.
“I’ve called him off for now,” Slater said, loudly enough to keep his words from being carried away by the wind along with the soaring gulls. “Still, you never know for sure with a guy like this.”
“But he did admit to breaking into my room this morning.”
Slater didn’t answer. Maybe he hadn’t heard her in the wind. Phoenix held her flying hair back from her face and shouted this time.
“That was a question. Did Porfiro say he came into my room and went through my things?”
Slater hesitated another moment while he negotiated a tight turn on the winding descent toward Acapulco proper.
“Yeah, sure,” he answered at last. “That’s what he said.”
Slater didn’t volunteer more. They picked up speed. Phoenix guessed he must be trying to get past this fairly treacherous stretch of highway as fast as could manage that. The wind made it hard to talk anyway. She contented herself with admiring the scenery and then the lively street scene once they were into the town. Back at La Escarpadura, Slater helped her down from the cumbersome height of the Jeep.
“I’m really grateful for your help with Porfiro,” she said. “This little mission was definitely beyond the call of duty.”
“At your service, ma’am,” he said with a mock bow.
Despite the lightness of his tone, Phoenix sensed a distance in his manner. She hoped she was imagining that.
“Please, let me repay you by buying you lunch,” she said.
“Thanks, but I think I’m going to catch some shut-eye. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
Phoenix felt herself coloring at the implication. Slater shifted from one foot to the other, as if he might be uneasy himself. She guessed he hadn’t meant to imply anything about the two of them on his terrace last night. That was simply what came out.
“It’s not lunchtime yet,” she said, hoping to get them past this awkward moment. “You could nap a while first.”
“I really can’t have lunch with you,” he said.
His tone was too tight to be misinterpreted. Phoenix felt herself coloring higher still.
“Yes, of course. It’s your vacation, and you have plans,” she said. “I’ll let you get to them.”
She knew she should thank him again or tell him she’d see him around. Some such pleasantry was certainly in order, but she couldn’t get the words to come out of her mouth at the moment. She turned her flaming face abruptly out of his sight and all but ran across the polished terra-cotta patio toward her room. She did her best to fake a casual sort of jogging pace but knew she was failing miserably at that. She was taking flight. Only a fool wouldn’t be able to see that.
She was a fool, of course, and she’d just been given the brush-off of the decade to prove it She and Slater had had a drink and a couple of laughs last night. She’d become the aggressor after that, practically accosting him in his room. Being a man, he’d responded to her advances. Why not? She wasn’t that hard to take, at least not for one night and a little hanky-panky. Unfortunately, she’d let herself think of last night as more than that. She was a fool all right.
Phoenix felt tears rising hot behind her eyes. She was almost to the safety of her room where she suspected she might indulge herself in a long cry. She was fumbling with her keys and already beginning to sniffle when a question occurred to her. If he didn’t want to see her any more after last night, why had he come to her room this morning? Could the complication of Porfiro have turned Slater off? He didn’t seem the type to let something like that influence him one way or the other.
She scoffed aloud at herself for thinking that. “How do you know what type he is?”
She punched her room key into the lock. He was a man after all, and she’d never had much luck understanding male behavior in general. This one was not only a man but a gorgeous man as well. Phoenix spent the next few hours attempting to evict that gorgeous man from her consciousness. Afternoon had come, and she’d managed a furtive nap between blasts of her erratic air conditioner. She was feeling both uncomfortable and disgruntled as she scrambled up on her bed to reach the cord dangling from the ceiling fan. She pulled the cord then stood there atop the mattress for a moment to bask in the breeze from the circling fan blades. She was climbing back down from the bed when she noticed a note under her door. Someone must have put it there while she was trying to rest.
She guessed at once who it had to be from. No one else would write to her besides Slater. She didn’t know anybody else in Mexico. She forced herself to walk nonchalantly to the door. The note was on a single sheet of white paper folded over once. She opened it and read through the contents three times before the words came clear to her. Citrone Blue was back in town and had heard she was looking for him. He would meet her at five in the lanai lounge of the hotel.
Phoenix knew she should be overjoyed by this news. She’d come to Mexico to find out more about her grandfather. Talking with Citrone Blue was crucial to that quest. Now she’d found him and all she could think about was that she wished he hadn’t set up their meeting at La Escarpadura. She’d rather be far away from here. She’d rather be any place there was no chance she’d run into Slater McCain, not for as long as she lived.
Suddenly, it occurred to her that there was actually a high probability she’d get her wish after all and never see Slater again. She sighed and sat down on the bed. She couldn’t help wishing the note had been what she first imagined it to be.
Chapter Six
Slater told himself he was watching Phoenix because of the assignment. That was partly true, but only partly. He’d been hanging out around the hotel foyer ever since she ran away from him this morning. He’d wanted to go after her and kiss away the hurt he’d seen on her face when he said the cold words he had to say. He’d rooted his feet to the red tile floor instead. He’d finally forced himself to put some distance between them by turning her down flat when she asked him to
have lunch with her. He couldn’t let himself undo that distance no matter how much he wished he was with her instead of out here on his own lurking behind the one newspaper in English he could find in the hotel gift shop.
He wouldn’t blame Laurent for sending somebody down here to check up on what was happening. Slater was turning out to be a poor choice for tough guy. He should have been on the phone to Laurent as early as last night with at least something to report. As for Slater’s real assignment, ordinarily, he’d have been further along on that, too. He’d be hot on the trail of the money Phoenix took so maybe they could use that as leverage to get her to give up whatever dirt she might have on Laurent. Slater was dragging his feet on this gig all the way around. He’d made the worst mistake a cop can be guilty of. He’d let himself care.
Now, he had to figure out a way to keep this stall going until he got his head straight about what he should do with this woman he didn’t want to turn over, either to the bad guys or the good ones. He could probably keep the Feds at bay by claiming he was pumping her for info on the money and whatever else she might know. In the meantime, he should at least be checking out where the money was not. He should have been the one tossing her room this morning, not that the place looked tossed when he saw it. Maybe she’d imagined the whole thing, but why would she do that? She struck him as the levelheaded type. Besides, the slipperiness of the operation put Slater definitely in mind of SideMan Sax. He was the most likely choice for Laurent to send down here to do his hound dogging for him. Slater didn’t like the thought of a twisted character like Sax being after Phoenix.
Sax was a piece of work with a twist all right. That’s how Slater read him anyway. On the other hand, Sax looked like pretty high-priced talent, maybe too high-priced for playing watchman—unless he had other duties than just watching. What if Laurent had a suspicion Slater wouldn’t be up to knocking Phoenix off when the time came? What if Laurent figured he should send some backup for the wet work? Slater shuddered in the gut to think it, especially since his gut also told him what he was thinking could very possibly be true. That’s why he was out here in this not so comfortable lobby chair with last week’s news held up high enough to hide his face but low enough for him to see over the top of the pages. He was making sure Phoenix didn’t get out of here on her own and that nobody got to her, either.
The foyer was really a veranda supported by square, pale pink-colored stucco pillars from the red tile floor to the sloping roof. Breeze drifted through, and birds piped in every pitch from high screeches to low cooing sounds. The flower smell was sweet and heavy especially as midday came and passed. Slater took a few walks around the grounds, always with the entryway to Phoenix’s building in sight, to keep from attracting too much attention. Nobody was likely to bother him one way or the other. This was a live and let live kind of place. If a guy wanted to fly all the way down to Mexico and spend his vacation on the hotel veranda while everybody else hit the beach or took in the sights, so be it. Slater liked that attitude, except for the part of it that made this country a tailor-made hideout for criminals. The cop side of him didn’t care for that at all.
The cop side of him also didn’t care for the way the lazy heat of the afternoon made him want to doze off on the job. Luckily, Slater had clocked enough stakeout time back in his detective days to know all the stay-awake tricks. Still, he’d just about exhausted the lot by the time he spotted Phoenix coming down the path from the corridor to her wing of the hotel. He ducked out of sight through an archway off the veranda which led to a row of coconut palms interspersed with banks of bright flowers.
Those flowers had nothing on her. He could see that plain as day as he peered from the corner of the archway. He could also feel what the look of her did to the inside of him, how she made his pulse race as if he were doing that uphill run he’d thought about this morning. She had on a pale blue dress, soft and cool against the flashy Mexico colors all around her. Her skin glowed golden warm along her shoulders, which were bare except for the thin straps holding up the top of her dress. That top fitted her close but not tight. Tight would have been too obviously sexy. Her style was more subtle than that. She didn’t need to come on strong to have every man in gaping distance wishing she was his.
Slater felt himself caught between hating those other guys for having the nerve to gape at her in the first place, and wishing he was the one who had her for himself when it occurred to him to notice she was looking pretty fancied up tonight. The blue dress was simple but not exactly what he’d call casual, and the shoes she had on were the strappy kind that women wear when they’re going out somewhere special for the evening. She also had on a long, narrow shawl thing, draped loose across her back and hooked over her elbows so it hung down on both sides. The shawl was lacy and the same creamy color as her shoes. She had on dangly, silver earrings, too. She’d made herself even more beautiful than usual, the way she might look for going out on a date.
That fact clamped on to Slater’s stomach and gave it a twist that reminded him he hadn’t taken time off from his bird-dogging to have lunch. He’d kept watch over her all day nonstop. Now he had the feeling all that watching had set him up to see exactly what he wanted least to see in the whole world right now, Phoenix with another man. She was headed straight down the path that led to the thatch-roofed, open-air lounge above the bay where there’d be a crowd later on waiting for the sun to set. She wasn’t moving at a strolling pace the way this place had a tendency to make you want to do. She was hurrying along, as if she had a purpose in mind, as if she had somebody to meet. Slater sighed hard. At the moment, he didn’t have much love for his job. This undercover scene was starting to get him down big time.
“It’s a living,” he told himself, trying to be smart and offhand. Too bad that particular act wasn’t playing anywhere near believable right now. Too bad he had no real choice other than to slip out from his hiding place under the palms and follow Phoenix Farraday wherever she went, even if she happened to be headed for another man’s arms.
PHOENIX TOLD HERSELF this was a highlight of her trip to Mexico and wished she could believe that. Slater McCain had robbed the glimmer from any moment without him in it. She’d have to get over those feelings. She’d picked herself up and left her business and her way of life behind in New York City. She could certainly do the same with a man she’d barely known for a heartbeat They’d had a brief holiday fling, a one-night affair, nothing more. The pain of acknowledging that, even only to herself, seared straight to her soul. The view from the lanai out over the sparkling bay, usually so enchanting, had lost its brilliance for her. Slater had robbed her of that, too. She turned away from the view she’d been so eager for just yesterday.
Phoenix recognized at once that the man walking toward her was Citrone Blue. She’d seen a photograph of him from her grandfather’s collection. She didn’t recall the features exactly. They’d been faded into graying tones of black and white, a snapshot from a 1950’s camera, taken in the glare of too much tropical sunlight for the lens. His bearing was what she remembered, the way he held himself tall and proud, like a military officer or a king. Her grandfather had claimed his friend carried the blood of Spanish grandees, but Phoenix had never believed that completely. As Citrone Blue walked toward her now, straight and elegant with his head held high, she wondered if her skepticism might have been unwarranted. He stopped next to her chair and smiled down at her. He even bowed from the waist before he took her hand.
“You are the beloved grandchild of my dear old friend,” he said. “I can see him in your eyes.”
He lifted her hand and bent to kiss it in the most genteel manner. She wouldn’t have been surprised to hear his heels click together, as well. She couldn’t help but be charmed by such old-fashioned grace. His gray hair thinned to baldness at the top of his head. She could see that as he bent over her hand. He’d been the younger of the two in her grandfather’s stories. They were both little more than boys then, seeking wild adventures in a
n exotic paradise. Citrone Blue had been the cohort in those escapades, a young man with enough history already to require the camouflage of an obviously assumed name. He was an old man now. Beyond his refined way of speaking and the ascot tucked so perfectly into the starched, white collar of his dress shirt, she could tell that his youthful recklessness had become the stuff of memory and legend long ago.
“Hello, Mr. Blue,” she said returning his smile. She was very happy to see him, much more so than she would have thought just moments ago when her regrets about Slater McCain had crowded all other feelings from her heart. “I’m so pleased to meet you at last.”
“The pleasure is entirely mine, my dear.” His English was flawless.
Phoenix moved to rise and pull the chair across from hers out from beneath the table so he could sit. He touched her arm before she could do so.
“Stay where you are, my dear.” He pulled the chair out for himself and sat down, straight-backed, into it. “Let me look at you. Your grandfather would have been proud to see how lovely you have grown to be. I will simply have to be proud for him. He would have relished this moment. He spoke so fondly of you so many times.”
