by Claire King
And worse, the jerk who’d pretended sympathy just so she’d relax and he could get the jump on her was now not crawling in after her, as he’d plainly promised he would.
Smugglers, she steamed. You just couldn’t trust them.
“Where are you?” she whispered furiously. She scooted to the opening of the cave. If, by any stretch of the imagination, it could be called that, she thought as sand spilled down her blouse. “Where the hell are you?”
“Be quiet,” he said as his face appeared against the harsh sunlight. “I’ll be right there.”
Olivia waited. Thank goodness she’d spent a week in New Guinea the summer before, going down every day in the institute’s small submersible. After that assignment, she’d be immune to claustrophobia for the rest of her life. Still, there had never once been a dangerous, pointy-tailed arachnid in that little sub.
Where was that damn smuggler? He couldn’t be trusted, but he’d save her from a scorpion—she felt sure about that.
He came back, finally. She could see his legs to his knees. He was dragging something—a shoot of sagebrush, she noted with surprise. Of course, he’d think to brush away their tracks. It hadn’t even occurred to her. Lucky thing she was an oceanographer and not spending her life on the lam. She wouldn’t survive the first day.
A little bubble of delirium lodged in her throat, and she gagged on it.
“Shh,” Rafe hissed at her as he crawled in beside her. His ribs were hurting, but that didn’t keep him from noticing when his arm brushed her breast, when his hip settled against the inside of her thigh as she shifted to make room for him. Oh, yes. It was definitely wise of Bobby to find someplace else to hole up.
Rafe reached out and leaned the length of sage against the outside wall of the cave, partially blocking the opening. Then he lay flat and scooted back into the cool darkness. With any luck at all, Cervantes, if he even came this way, would never look twice at the crevice in the wall of the hill.
Rafe slid the canteen over, thrust it in Olivia’s direction. “Drink as much as you can stand.”
She took the water, drank steadily for several seconds.
“Now you,” she said, tapping the canteen on his shoulder.
“I’m fine.”
“Right. You know, you die on me out here and I’ll murder you. How are your ribs?” she asked crossly.
“Better.” Rafe took the canteen over his shoulder and drank. He had to keep himself from licking his lips. He imagined he could taste her on the metal rim. “What makes you think you’re better off with me than Cervantes? We’re both in the same business, you know.”
“I don’t think I’m better off with you,” Olivia said flatly. “You’re just making it impossible for me to go back to Ernesto, aren’t you. And I’d obviously rather not die of exposure and dehydration if I don’t have to. Why are you breathing so hard if your ribs are better?”
“I ran up the arroyo a ways and brushed out our tracks.”
“Oh.” She was quiet a minute. “Do you think that will fool him?”
Rafe shrugged—a huge mistake because he felt the softness of her breast against his elbow. “Can you move back any more?” he asked testily.
“No, I can’t. I cannot believe you’d ask me that. I didn’t want to get in this hole in the first place.”
“Lower your voice, for God’s sake.”
Olivia felt the earth shiver slightly under her body. “Is that them?”
“Yes,” Rafe muttered. “He drives that fifty-thousand-dollar tank around this desert like he owns it.”
“He does own some of it.”
Rafe would have liked to give her a glare for that comment, but he didn’t want to move again. He was already having to fold his arms to keep from grabbing her, from rolling against her soft breasts in this godforsaken hole. The very thought made him smile.
“What’s with the big grin?” she asked.
“We’re a naturally happy people,” Rafe said blandly.
For a moment she simply stared at the back of his head. Then the delirium bubble she’d been choking down made its way up from her throat. “You’re a naturally happy people?” she repeated, strangling, clamping her hand over her mouth.
“Yes, now shut up. I think—oh, hell, they’ve turned down the arroyo.”
He felt her shaking behind him. Her whole body was trembling. He reached back a hand and clamped it around her knee. “Settle down,” he murmured. “They won’t see us.”
“Mmph,” she answered. She could hear the rumble of the vehicle getting closer, but experienced no reaction at all to the sound. No fear, no thought of escape, nothing. She knew why, of course. She’d gone round the bend.
A naturally happy people? This guy was the least naturally happy person she’d ever met. She imagined he had ten distinct gradations of forbidding, at least that many of gloomy, and maybe more than ten of downright irate. She could do a doctoral thesis on the querulous subsurface currents in the man. Naturally happy?
She turned onto her side, holding her mouth, vibrating with suppressed laughter. Oh, she was hysterical, all right, she thought. The bizarre party last night, the exhaustion of a twelve-hour chase, the ludicrous whopper about Ernesto—all had combined to make her insane. A naturally happy people? She’d never heard anything so funny.
Rafe watched the truck move slowly into the small canyon where he and Olivia were hidden. He could see Cervantes clearly. The man was talking on a cell phone, his eyes scanning the hillside. Rafe took a sharp breath as Cervantes squinted in the direction of their hiding place. He felt Olivia roll to her side behind him. He slid his hand around her knee to the back of her calf and squeezed reassuringly. She was making a distressed sound at the back of her throat, and he was afraid she’d start screaming at any moment. He stroked the muscle of her calf to soothe her, while watching Cervantes through the cover of the sagebrush.
The driver got out and kicked through the sand, glancing every few seconds back at Cervantes.
Rafe smiled grimly. At times during the past three months—and certainly at times during the past twenty-four hours—he’d have sworn he had the luck of the damned. But as he recognized the face of the man with Cervantes, he decided a little good fortune had finally come his way.
The driver was making an excellent show of looking for tracks in the sand, but was actually managing to erase most of them. Rafe watched him keep a close eye on his boss in the car. When he knew he was being watched, he’d squat and look thoughtfully at the ground, or peer into the brush or at the near horizon.
Rafe almost laughed in relief. No wonder the three of them hadn’t been caught last night. It had seemed like a miracle at the time, one he hadn’t been anxious to question—but this explained it. At least one of the federales who had infiltrated Cervantes’s operation was on the job. And making a good hash of it.
The driver looked around for a minute more, then got back in the vehicle and eased it into drive. Rafe could hear Cervantes shouting at him, and shouting at some poor sap on the other end of the phone at the same time.
The man was not mincing words. Rafe half hoped Olivia would hear the tirade, though she was obviously terrified enough as it was. Cervantes undoubtedly had never shown the lovely doctor this rough side to his disposition. The stream of obscenities alone was enough to sully his reputation on both sides of the border as an elegant ladies’ man.
And his face. Rafe took some satisfaction in looking at his face. Cervantes’s features were swollen grotesquely, his nose a purple mass stuck between two black eyes. Rafe grunted quietly. The bastard would think twice before he ever again put his filthy hand on Dr. Galpas’s breast.
Rafe was close enough to see the sweat trickling down the fold of Cervantes’s jowls. The elaborate SUV undoubtedly had air-conditioning, but Cervantes wouldn’t use it because of the risk of overheating the vehicle while the windows were down.
Sweat, old man, Rafe thought. Sweat about every single thing that’s happened. Get yoursel
f all worked up.
The SUV finally inched off down the wash, Cervantes screaming profanities into his phone. The driver, bless him, was tensely, almost exaggeratedly scrutinizing the landscape.
It took them fully ten minutes to reach the end of the arroyo, where they stopped for another few minutes. Deciding which way to go, Rafe knew. He waited patiently while they made their decision. He didn’t mind the wait, wouldn’t even have noticed it except that he knew Olivia was probably holding her breath in fright until they were gone. Half his job was waiting; interminable stakeouts and year-long sting operations and court cases that dragged on for weeks. He was very, very good at waiting.
Rafe didn’t much care which way the SUV went. He knew Bobby was out of sight and was now satisfied that the three of them could avoid the noisy, poorly organized searchers by heading out after dark. For one thing, Cervantes himself was making enough of a clamor to give even the most inexperienced quarry ample warning. And since they were also receiving a little help from the boys in khaki, Rafe was confident Cervantes wouldn’t catch them. Until they wanted to be caught.
Cervantes and his studiously hapless driver finally chose to move north again, and the SUV swung widely to the right.
Rafe shifted slightly so he could look at Olivia. At least she’d stopped that terrible shaking.
“Olivia. They’re gone.”
She was wound into a fetal position, her eyes tightly closed. She didn’t answer. Shock, Rafe guessed. He ran his hand down her calf to cradle her foot. Through the sock he’d given her he could feel the swell of flesh around the tight straps of the sandal. Poor princess, he thought as he loosened the strap of the sandal. She’d had a hell of a couple days.
“Olivia,” he whispered again. “It’s all right. They’ve gone.” Still no answer. Rafe grasped her ankle and shook it lightly. “Dr. Galpas?”
Good God, she’d fainted from fright.
Well, that was just typical. The princess had fainted dead away at the first little sign of trouble. Shook herself with fear until she collapsed. He squinted down at her in the dim light of the cave. A woman like Olivia Galpas was not built to withstand much more than your average spoiled house cat, he thought, forgetting that a moment earlier he’d been more sympathetic to her plight.
“Doctor,” he said sharply. He angled his wide shoulders in the narrow confines of the crevice, going painfully down on one elbow. He waited a second until the pain in his ribs subsided slightly, then raised his hand. “Come on, princesa. I know it’s probably not your favorite thing to do, but it’s time to face reality.” He patted her cheeks a couple of times.
Olivia murmured, low in her throat. Rafe let his hand rest against the soft skin of her gently rounded cheek for a moment, watching her long lashes flutter. No harm in that, he told himself. She was in a faint. She’d never remember he’d stroked the line of her jaw with his thumb, curled his knuckles into the indentation below her cheekbone.
As he watched her, she made another small sound. Coming around, was she? He snatched his hand back, and plastered his perpetually perturbed expression on his face, the one he knew made her furious.
But she didn’t come out of her faint. She gave a delicate little snort, instead, and began to snore.
He stared at her, astonished. “Are you asleep?”
She didn’t answer, of course. But her nose twitched slightly, and she began to snore in earnest.
Rafe laughed in surprise.
Not fainted, not scared out of her wits, not paralyzed with fright. Asleep—as though she hadn’t a care in the world.
As though she trusted him to take care of her while she slept. Abruptly, he stopped laughing. Watched her sleep for a minute.
“Dr. Galpas,” he whispered, “what am I going to do with you?”
She murmured faintly again and tried to find a more comfortable position on the hard ground.
Rafe carefully levered himself to a semi-sitting position—cursing quietly as he dislodged another shirt full of dirt down his back—and gently eased the strap open on Olivia’s other sandal.
She sighed in her sleep.
“Stupid woman,” he muttered, massaging the arch of her foot through the thick sock. “Stupid sandals.”
He stretched out beside her as she sighed again. Fingering his ribs through his shirt and bandage, he decided nothing was broken. But he wasn’t anxious to see the bruise that probably covered him stem to stern.
He let his breath out slowly. No sense trying to wake Olivia and get her moving. She obviously needed the sleep, and he was tired, too. He rolled against her and closed his eyes to take a nap.
But as his body pressed against the sleeping woman, his heart began to pick up speed in his chest. He shifted slowly to face her, aware of her soft, full mouth, half open, only inches away. His hand, as if in a dream, stroked slowly down her back to rest gently on the small curve of her hip. He thought of the past few years—how he had shunned women, no matter how good looking or how friendly. His single purpose in life was revenge. It had consumed him. Maybe there was something more important, he thought, his hand idly caressing the lovely hip.
Just as Olivia’s eyes eased open halfway, he closed his own and breathed her scent of seashells, the ocean.
Olivia could feel her own heart stirring as Rafe’s slow-motion hand continued its casual caress. His light touches sent out invisible currents that warmed her deep inside. For so long, her life had been void of such emotion—full of scientific study, writing papers, going to all those parties where rooms full of men stood around talking about ocean currents. They were desperate for women at institute faculty parties, Olivia knew. Sometimes she felt like calling the geek police and having all her co-workers arrested. Anyone with breasts and a pulse could be the belle of those balls.
But Dr. Olivia Galpas was, in addition to being young, smart, and possessed of (lovely) breasts and a (strong) heart, the only Hispanic woman in the whole institute. And she’d been the showpiece of every provost cocktail party and university barbecue since she’d hung her MIT doctorate on the wall of her tiny office. Dr. Eames, who was in charge of general funding for the institute, had even taken to tossing her in front of the local and international press to announce important discoveries in the fascinating world of oceanography—something Olivia might have resented had anyone ever bothered to show up at the press conferences. Not a lot of people were interested in minute changes in water temperature in the Indian Ocean. Even the infamous, glamorous El Niño had lost its shine after a year or so.
Olivia Galpas was a novelty in the white male world of oceanography, just as that wide swath of super-heated ocean water had been a novelty when it first showed itself. Olivia had been fervently hoping that everyone would get sick of her soon, as well.
Well, not everyone. She had spent time with Ernesto, enjoying his charm, being proud to be with such a distinguished man. But her heart had never beat even one eighth-note faster. He was dashing, but somehow cold. And now she was learning the truth about him, realizing what a nightmare a life with him might be.
Then there was this bandit—a man whose inner goodness she sensed, no matter what he said about himself. A man who wanted to save her, to nurse her feet, to touch her so protectively.
Engulfed by his tenderness, she leaned toward him. His eyes drifted open partway, and they began a long, slow delicious kiss. She felt his gliding tongue as his two hands folded around her breasts.
A feeling of exhilaration swept through her, and she wondered how she could abandon herself to such a stranger, how she could be swept into a kiss that now was making her feel wild. She wanted to tell him what a good man he could be if he would take on a better profession, but the words came out as small sounds of pleasure and her own hands began to slide over his lean body.
Trying to clear his head, Rafe turned his face away, taking quiet, short breaths. Be professional, he told himself. Keep her safe and nothing more. But her nearness warmed him, drew him to her, let him for the
moment escape the obsession with revenge that for too long had consumed all his heart.
Still in a slow dream of exhaustion, they began to reach under clothes and softly explore. In the cool dim light, their hands touched backs, glided around necks, unbuttoned clothes and folded them back. Each time their lips met, the kisses became harder, teeth bumping, tongues wrestling. They lay on their sides under the low cave ceiling, nearly naked against each other, their mouths melting together, unwilling to pull apart. His hand drifted down her tight stomach, over the smooth hip and down her leg. Working his hand gently between her thighs, he eased his fingers tenderly into her delicately flowing juices, silky and warm.
Olivia groaned as his fingers swam back and forth, then pushed in deeper, kneading what she thought must be the bottom of her heart. She felt his hard erection against her, and she reached to stroke it.
Sliding his mouth down her neck, Rafe sucked first one of her hard nipples, then the other.
“Do you want me, princesa?” he murmured, as she began to work her hips back and forth against his sliding hand. “Tell me, tell me what to do.”
Curling over him, she put her lips gently to his ear, then let her warm breath, coming faster now, fill it with an answer that came from animal instinct, not scientific textbooks.
“Yes,” she whispered with a shudder as desire for this outlaw possessed every nerve and muscle in her body. “Yes,” she breathed again, as he writhed his sensitive ear away in a frenzy and their mouths landed back together with new urgency.
He smelled of sagebrush, and she squeezed her eyes closed as his hand quietly worked in her, pushing, pulling, sliding. She clutched him and felt his arousal against her. Lifting her thigh over his, she guided him forward, running her hand between his legs to feel all of him.
“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, wanting to say something, anything, to let her know his awe, his unbearable pleasure. Fighting temptation to take her wholly, all at once, he pressed his tip through her soft hair and into her folds where his hand had been. He pushed gently, pulled back, then entered farther.
