“Hey, honey!” Zander called out, waving as she approached. He had stopped short of fake glasses, but the Ralph Lauren polo he was sporting was pink, with a popped-up collar to hide his muscled neck, and it contrasted nicely with his pleated—pleated—khakis and tasseled loafers. There was no way he could camouflage his muscled arms and weathered hands, but at first glance, he looked like any other frat boy turned corporate doob, down for a quick hop over the border.
“You got everything?” he asked as she slid into the car, and she nodded. “Good,” he said, his smile wide as he shifted his gaze from the street to her. “Try not to look so nervous. You’re calling them next, right?”
Erin blew out a long breath. “Right. I’ll let them know I have the money, then they’ll tell me where to meet.” She closed her eyes, drew in a long breath. “This could all be over this afternoon.”
“That’s assuming a lot of things go our way, and we’ve been over that. You can’t count on that happening.”
“I know, I know. Head toward the bridge anyway.” They had been over it. They’d been over everything, from the moment Zander had picked her up in the morning at the bleeding edge of dawn through the entire boarding process, then on the plane, besides. She’d booked their flights exactly as he’d instructed her, and they’d arrived at the Laredo International Airport just before two P.M. Plenty of time to confirm that the bank had the funds and that the first step in their plan would go smoothly. Now it was time for phase two. “I’m going to call them now.”
It only took a couple of tries for her to get the phone out of her bag and smooth her carefully folded information sheet out on her lap, and then to punch the digits in. The phone was keyed to the most robust cell tower system in the area—Zander had made certain of that—and she relaxed marginally when she heard the ringing on the other end. She darted another look at Zander, and he gave her an easy, encouraging smile.
Only the phone kept ringing. And ringing.
Erin’s hand tightened on the cell, pulling it away to make sure she’d dialed the number correctly. Then she crammed the phone up against her ear once again and…nothing. It just disconnected.
“They didn’t pick up!” she said, her eyes going from the phone to Zander. “Zander, they didn’t pick up. But the number is right—I double-checked. The number is right, but they didn’t pick—”
“Chill, Erin,” Zander said, and she forced herself to take a deep breath.
“Should I try again?”
“Not right away.” He was maneuvering easily through the city, as if he knew the place—which he should, given that they’d both spent the morning poring over maps on various planes, after he’d forced her to change their original flight at their layover point and book a new one that got them into Laredo a half an hour earlier than her initial itinerary. That had seemed like an unnecessary precaution, but, hey, she was paying for the man’s protection. She was willing to go with it, and she couldn’t deny the sense of relief she’d felt when she’d gotten off the plane with him. He’d forced her to hold his hand through the airport, which had been both vastly reassuring and borderline excruciating. But the distraction had kept her occupied until they’d reached their rental car, so she supposed even that was a carefully thought-out part of the “op,” as he insisted on calling it.
“Should we go over into Mexico now? Just to be there?” It sounded insane to say it like that. Mexico was a foreign country, a far and distant land. Only it wasn’t, here. Here it was just one short bridge away.
“Not yet.” Zander pulled over and squinted ahead, and Erin followed his gaze. He was looking at the bridge checkpoint that allowed customs officials to search you and your vehicle if you triggered any concerns. To Erin’s untrained eye, it all looked appropriately official, but Zander kept shaking his head, his jaw tight. “Too many of them,” he muttered.
“Too many of them for what? I thought you checked on everything.” He’d made a dozen or so calls while they’d been on the ground between flights. He hadn’t written anything down, hadn’t even stopped walking, just paced and talked, and mostly listened, every call seeming to piss him off more than the last. Erin hadn’t wanted to distract him, but she also hadn’t missed the fact that he was learning a heck of a lot more about where they were going and what they were doing than she had thought to. And she was the one with everything to lose.
She grimaced. She really wasn’t built for this. She was built for canvases and frames and installations, and evenings with wine and cheese and air-conditioning. Her own oil paintings, lovely though they were, were muted landscapes and studies of soft women in quiet settings. She didn’t even take risks with her paintings anymore, not like when she was a kid with a hand-me-down easel and tubes of cheap, bright paints. What was she doing here?
Zander grunted and started the car again, his gaze flicking to the clock. “It’s three o’clock. Let’s check into a hotel on this side of the river.”
Erin’s hands spasmed on her bag. “I really want to—”
“You’re going to call that number again in a half hour,” Zander continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “If they don’t pick up, and until they call you back, we are not going to cross the border and randomly hang out. That’s not going to be how this works, you got that?” He turned to her, the cheerful grin on his face belied by his tight words. “This could all be already shot to hell, Erin. Your parents could be dead. You could be next, waltzing in all wide-eyed and American, with a big ol’ backpack stuffed full of money. So we’re not doing that. We call and then we wait. And we keep waiting. If you don’t hear from them in twenty-four hours, I pretty much can guarantee you that there’s not much reason to—”
Zander broke off abruptly as she recoiled from him, and rubbed his face.
“Just make the call, Erin.” He glanced at the clock on the dash again. “In twenty-seven minutes.”
—
Erin was about to come out of her skin, and she wasn’t the only one. Zander checked his watch, the one concession he’d made to his original gear, because fuck him if he wasn’t going to know exactly what time it was at any given moment. He hoped it wouldn’t come to needing that level of precision, but the advantage of having the watch was also knowing exactly how many seconds it took for Erin to go from one edge of their Laredo, Texas, Best Western hotel room to the other. And then again.
He let her pace. The asshats over the border hadn’t called back, and Erin had left a message, terse, tearful, and exactly to his instructions, that she was in town and ready to go and would wait twenty-four hours before assuming the worst. Then she would leave. It was a convincing performance, and even he believed her, though she didn’t believe herself. But if the abductors didn’t call back in that time period, there was no way her parents were still alive. And that meant that if she wanted to stay that way, she needed to take a hike—in a rental car pointed out of Laredo and up to San Antonio, with a quick stop at the closest B of A she could find off of I-35. She’d dump the money back in the bank, then they’d keep driving, ditching the car in Austin, maybe, to catch a flight. The drive all the way back to Boston would be too long, with her melting down every other minute.
Then again, maybe she’d need that, and Zander rolled the idea around in his head. He’d planned for all contingencies. He watched her pace again, up and back, up and back. Even this one.
Part of him almost hoped the kidnappers wouldn’t call back. Erin had let drop that one comment about her parents’ troubles with the police, and then she’d clammed up. There clearly was a lot of bad blood between her and her mother, but she wasn’t in a place where she could talk about it. And he got that. There was a lot of bad blood between him and his dad, too, and he sure as hell wasn’t ready to talk about that. So he would give her the space she needed, and wait her out. In the meantime, he would play it cool and quiet. She’d never been great at the silent treatment.
But she sure could pace with the best of them.
He checked his w
atch again. It was eight o’clock. They’d gone first to an outlet mall, stocking up on the most basic provisions, and switching out Erin’s nice clothes for loose khakis, shorts, T-shirts, and running shoes, along with a bright ball cap. He wanted her visible, noticeable, and memorable. Not an easy feat for a woman barely five foot two, with minimal curves and a tendency to lose herself in a crowd, but at least her pale skin and dark hair would stand out here in the ass end of Texas. He dialed his Joe Prep look down a notch as well, but just to grab some shorts and trade in his loafers for thick-soled sandals. They were the kind of footwear college kids wore to look cool on Spring Break, but the sport version he got would stay wrapped around his ankles and provide more traction than his loafers could, and wouldn’t stand out as much as straight-up gym shoes.
“You hungry?”
“Why haven’t they called?” Erin suddenly turned on him, and he could see the strain in her now, when she was no longer wrapped up in her art-gallery clothes, her hair all jacked up from her running her fingers through it and putting on and taking off the ball cap about a hundred times. “I left a message. Could I somehow I have gotten the wrong number? Are they even still here? Is my mom still alive?” She looked at the phone in her hand. “It’s got plenty of bars. The connection was clear, I think. How could they not have gotten the message?”
“They got the message.” Zander stood, kicking off his sandals. “I’m grabbing a shower and then we’re going to go eat some tacos across the street. And then we’re going to wait another sixteen, eighteen hours. They’ll call.”
“But how do you know?” Erin’s eyes were fixed on him, mournful, and Zander shucked off his shirt. By the time his head cleared the neck of it she was looking away again, but the color had risen in her cheeks. Excellent.
“I know because there’s three hundred grand resting on them doing one simple thing—return a couple of idiots to the States. That’s it, that’s all they have to do. Keep two people alive and well, locked in a room, until they can cart them across a city and dump them off. This isn’t a big deal to them, Erin. It’s business.”
She was still looking resolutely away, and Zander went for his pants. She turned her back on him completely, and he grinned as she stalked over to her bed, tossing her phone down to check the backpack full of money for the fifty-billionth time. They’d transferred the funds out of her shoulder bag as soon as they’d checked in, then stuffed that bag in one of their new packs, the money in the other. Now she unzipped the money backpack, looked inside, and zipped it up again. “It move much since the last time you looked at it?”
“What else am I going to—,” she said, turning to snap at him, having forgotten that he was damn near naked. The flush of reaction that swept through her was instantaneous, and Zander fought and lost the battle with his own body just as quickly. He could see her try to force herself to look away, to turn, but she didn’t. Hell, maybe she couldn’t.
And wasn’t that just a crying shame.
“What is it, Erin?” he asked, moving toward her, the soul of concern. His speed seemed to throw her, and he was right in front of her before she expected him to be. Her eyes widened as he caught her hands and held them high against his chest, searching her face. “What’s wrong? Besides the obvious?”
She blinked at him. “The obvious? You mean that my mom is being held captive in some pit, hurt, scared, maybe injured?”
He shook his head, not letting go of her hands. In fact, he started stroking her fingers rhythmically with his calloused thumbs. Her eyes darted down to where their hands joined, then back up to meet his gaze, but he wasn’t reading fear in them so much as confusion. Confusion and reluctant heat. Worked for him. He couldn’t have Erin falling apart on him. He was not above a little distraction to make that happen. “Remember what we talked about,” he said, and she shivered at the sound of his voice, as if it was more of a sensory overload than she could manage. But he kept talking, low and steady. “Both your mom and her boyfriend may be scared, sure. But they have to be mobile, and they have to be coherent. It’s a hell of a lot harder to move a hostage who can’t walk around on his or her own. Your parents are as safe as they can be, for two people stupid enough to get themselves in this situation in the first place.”
He said the words deliberately, and once again, Erin didn’t take the bait. Every opening he gave her to defend her mom’s lack of judgment slid off of her like water off a duck. Just how long had her mom been getting into trouble and expecting her to bail her out?
Now she was staring at their joined hands again, too hard. She drew in a shaky breath. “You really think she’s—they’re safe?” she asked. “You’re not just saying that to distract me?”
“Hey,” he murmured, and she lifted those bright eyes to him, now swimming with hurt and need and fear and hope and a couple of other things he couldn’t identify and was pretty sure he didn’t want to. Not if that meant they would go away. He felt something give way inside him, just a bit, a chunk of ice breaking loose and freeing up a need of his own, hot and sure and real for all that he wouldn’t give in to it, not completely anyway. But maybe just a little. “I won’t lie to you, Erin,” he said. “I really do think they’re safe. I’m not telling you that to distract you.” He leaned in closer, and she didn’t move, couldn’t seem to even breathe. “I’m doing this to distract you.”
Chapter 12
Zander kissed Erin’s mouth so softly, so gently, that her entire world seemed to balance on its edge, precariously wobbling, just begging to fall.
“Zander, I—”
“Shhh,” he murmured. “I’m a trained professional.”
She couldn’t help it. The tiniest giggle escaped from her, and she leaned in to him just a fraction of an inch. She’d override all her own better instincts for one hot second, she decided. She could allow herself that, surely. She sighed and tilted her head back, letting Zander deepen the kiss if he wanted, content for the moment to just be in the circle of his arms.
Zander didn’t need any further invitation.
Without moving his hands from hers, he pressed himself against her, branding her mouth, and it was as if all the questions between them evaporated, leaving nothing but heat and adrenaline and an endless, aching need. A need that suddenly seemed all encompassing. Zander had been gone for so long, saving everyone but her, and now, for just this moment, in the cocoon of the hotel room where everything was still possible and nothing had yet gone wrong, she just wanted to—
“You know, you’re thinking an awful lot for someone about to get laid,” Zander murmured.
And just like that, it was like they were teenagers again. Erin’s laughter slipped out, loud and unrestrained, and Zander picked her up so easily that it startled her. And then they were in the bed, both of them fighting for the top position, but Zander winning easily—even more easily than he had before. His body loomed large as he stretched out on top of her, staring for one second into her eyes. That’s all she got, that one second, because then he shifted his gaze away and his mouth was at her temple, his body curving into hers as her legs parted naturally and she hooked her heels behind his legs. Erin still was fully dressed, but she was fast losing her grip on reality as Zander trailed a row of kisses across her cheek and along the delicate ridge of her ear.
“You’re still so goddamned beautiful, you know that, Erin?”
She felt the heat flare across her cheek as she groaned, angling her head away as he sunk lower, his lips drifting down her neck to explore the curve as it dipped to her collarbone. It was like he’d memorized a map of her body, remembering every sensitive point, every bundle of nerves, and he drew his lips along her skin like he was planning on tasting every inch of her with excruciating precision.
Erin reached up, fumbling for her clothes, and Zander batted her hands away. He rose up until he was kneeling over her, and she blinked up at him, confused.
What she saw almost made her stop breathing.
Zander was staring at her as
if she was something more than just a person, more than just an old girlfriend he was reconnecting with. No. This was like he was seeing a ghost, his face awash with such naked longing, such intensity, that Erin couldn’t even make a sound, let alone form words. He moved with an almost stealthy grace, his fingers at her T-shirt, pulling it way from her khakis to bare her stomach. Erin should have felt the cold wash of air-conditioning across her skin, but she didn’t, her skin seemed inflamed as he lightly skimmed his fingers over the soft swells of her breasts. He pressed her shirt all the way up, staring at her, and there was no way he could miss the way her nipples were pebbled up in urgency beneath the thin bra, silently begging for his touch.
Despite the fact that she was trying to lay absolutely still, Erin instinctively arched a little, and Zander’s expression changed, his smile deepening, going almost wolfish.
“Something you want, Erin?” he asked, and he leaned down close, his body shifting again to lay against hers, the heaviness of his erection hard and insistent in the vee of her thighs. “Because there’s something I want. Something I’ve been wanting for a really long time.”
Erin’s sigh drifted into a soft moan as Zander’s hand snaked around her to unclasp her bra. He half lifted her, yanking off her shirt and bra with almost one movement, before pressing her back to the bed, both hands on her breasts now, palming her as he bent down to take her mouth with his. He tasted of salt and heat and he flexed his fingers against her breasts, trapping her nipples between his long fingers in a move that caused such an exquisitely sharp ache that she gasped against him, and Zander’s kiss grew even harder, more demanding. Heat pooled in her abdomen even as Zander broke off the kiss and dragged his mouth down her neck, pausing to taste the throbbing hollow of her pulse, then sliding farther down, his lips replacing his left hand as he took her breast into his mouth and slid his tongue against the painfully tight nipple, teasing it even as his right hand toyed with her other breast, mimicking the movements beat for beat. When his tongue flicked over one nipple, his fingers would brush the other one. When his fingers squeezed, his lips would compress on her until she was writhing beneath him, exhaling in a series of moans and whimpers that grew more agitated the more he played.
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