Читать книгу Renegade With A Badge - Claire King - Страница 10

Olivia endured. That was the most she could say about the remainder of Ernesto’s lavish party, his expansive hospitality, his determined and public attentions.

It had been a terrible mistake coming back downstairs. She should have taken the advice of the smuggler and fled the house, Aldea Viejo, the country. Let Ernesto think his shrimp had actually killed her. Oh, God. She clamped a hand over her mouth to keep from bursting into hysterical laughter.

She’d still been shaking when she’d stumbled down the stairs, even after spending another five minutes back in the powder room, splashing water on her face and muttering recriminations to herself in the mirror. But she knew what she had to do if she wanted to keep Ernesto and his friends from being splattered across the beautiful old plaster walls of the hacienda, so she pasted a smile on her face like a prudent little scientist would when faced with empirical data.

The lanky man with the smirk on his mouth and the hunger in his eyes was very probably taking a bead on Ernesto right this minute, waiting for Olivia to come to her senses and fall into a crying, squalling heap on the floor. Something she very much felt like doing, as a matter of fact.

It was midnight now, and Ernesto was calling for a toast. Thank heavens. After that was finished, she’d go straight back to the motel, wait sleepless until morning, when she would take a taxi—or a bus or a vegetable wagon—to La Paz, and then the first plane home.

A flute of champagne was pressed into one hand, while Ernesto pulled her gently to his side by taking the other. Olivia went willingly. No point fighting the inevitable. She would smile at the sure-to-be elaborate toast—then get the hell out of Dodge. She’d had enough Mexican hospitality to last her a lifetime.

Ernesto launched into his toast with full vigor. She listened with half attention and smiled politely at the beaming crowd. Where was the criminal, while these people quaffed expensive champagne? Slitting throats? Stealing silver? Pressing up against some other unsuspecting female with that steely body and that shocking arousal? She took a gulp of champagne and choked on it.

“And if she will do me the very great—” Ernesto paused for effect here, and Olivia smiled gamely up at him, her face beet red from suppressed coughing, trying desperately hard not to spew Dom Pérignon onto his silk suit, “very great honor of becoming my wife, and the mistress of this house and the mother of this humble village, I will be the happiest man on God’s earth.”

The crowd erupted. Olivia let go with a spasm of coughing that had Ernesto patting her on the back. When she was finished gagging on her hundred-dollar champagne, she looked blankly around at the people crushing in on her, then, stupefied, up at Ernesto.

“What?” she whispered.

Ernesto bent his head to kiss her. “Say yes, my darling,” he said rather fervidly into her ear.

“To what?” she asked, spilling champagne on her clothes as someone jostled her from behind. She barely noticed. She had no idea what he was talking about. Had he just proposed? To whom? To her? In front of hundreds of people? With a sexually excited smuggler loose in his house?

Impossible.

Ernesto’s smile went a little stiff. “You are shocked.” He laughed heartily, though it sounded forced to Olivia’s ears. “I am shocked myself. I have been a bachelor for almost fifty years.”

“Ernesto, you can’t possibly—”

He cut her off sharply. “But I had never met a woman who could share my house and my life before now, Olivia Magdalena Rosanna deRuiz Galpas.”

Olivia almost groaned aloud. Not the whole name. He must be pretty damn serious if he was using her full name.

“You are a prize,” Ernesto continued in his beautiful voice. “A woman of education and family. The great-granddaughter of Don Ricardo Galpas of Chiapas,” he said loudly, though Olivia was sure he’d already mentioned that at least three times during the toast. “You will be the perfect wife for Ernesto Cervantes.”

At this show of bravado, the crowd erupted into cheers again. Olivia looked around, nearly bursting once more into hysterical laughter. The entire evening had been thoroughly surreal.

“Ernesto, we have to talk.”

He kissed her lavishly, his tongue breaching for the first time the seam of her lips. The man had just proposed marriage, Olivia thought, dazed, and he’d never even kissed her properly. She’d had a bandit pressed against her more intimately just an hour ago than this man had ever been. She’d never so much as tasted Ernesto Cervantes, who now fully intended to become her husband.

Olivia touched Ernesto’s shoulder to break the kiss.

He smiled down into her face, glowing with triumph. “I must attend to my guests, now, love.”

“We need to talk, Ernesto,” Olivia insisted. She needed far more time than three weeks to decide on a husband for the rest of her life, no matter how perfect the man appeared to be. And there remained the small matter of how she was going to explain to him that she’d had a friendly little conversation in his upstairs hallway with a drug smuggler but had neglected to tell him.

“We will.” He kissed the hand he’d been clutching. “We will.”

But they didn’t. Olivia wandered around in a daze for half an hour more, caught up in a bizarre frenzy of congratulation and speculation, while Ernesto seemed to carefully avoid her.

Fine, she thought. Their discussion of this bizarre public proposal would be better conducted when they were alone, anyway. Two hundred complete strangers and one smuggler whom she practically knew in the biblical sense were not conducive to a quiet chat about the future.

She looked at her watch. Almost one. Surely the smuggler or thief or whatever he was would be gone by now. Surely. Unless he’d been caught and was even now being beaten to a pulp by an enthusiastic deputy. Olivia shuddered slightly. The man had terrified her, but she didn’t want anyone beaten. Jailed would be fine. Where he could face punishment for his crimes and still get three meals a day to fill out those hollows under his cheekbones.

She slipped back upstairs while the mariachis played and the wine and tequila flowed. No one, she knew, would miss her. Ernesto was very busy being the host, the bridegroom-to-be, and the rest of the guests were having far too good a time to notice that the bride-to-be had absconded. She’d wait upstairs until the melee died down, and then have that little talk with Ernesto. Might as well, she thought. There was no way she’d sleep a wink tonight. No boring party she’d been to in the past two years had offered both an intimate moment with a criminal and a marriage proposal.

Just as she reached the second floor, she heard a heavy tread on the stairs behind her. She froze for a moment, panicked, expectant. Then it occurred to her that the bandit she’d met had not moved with such plodding thumps of feet and weight. Olivia doubted he made any sound at all, unless he wanted to.

A guest, then. Eeh. She looked around for a hiding place. She did not want to be caught in this dim hallway with one of Ernesto’s rowdy revelers. There was far too much clear thinking to be done to waltz through the niceties with a stranger. She opened the closest door and slipped inside.

The room was dark. Even the moon was shut out by gloomy, thick draperies. Olivia leaned against the door for a moment to catch her breath, then peeked carefully out into the hallway again. Wonderful. There was not one man, but three, all waiting for the bathroom. She closed the door again quietly.

“That was a very touching proposal.”

Olivia spun around. She could see nothing, not even shadows, but she knew the voice. Would recognize it until the day she died, she realized.

“Ay, Dios,” she whispered.

Rafe did not turn on any lights. He knew he couldn’t be seen from outside—he’d closed the drapes himself—but he’d neglected to eye the distance between the bottom of the door and the threshold and didn’t want to take any chances. He was sure he couldn’t stand to look into her eyes, anyway.

“Have you come up to his bedroom, then, as a small treat before the wedding?”

“You said you were leaving!” she whispered furiously.

“I said, when I was finished.”

“My God, how long does it take?”

“How long does what take?” Rafe asked, almost as amused with her as he was infuriated. Engaged, was she? To that murdering scum?

“I don’t know! Whatever you were doing. Stealing. Smuggling.”

“Smuggling?” Now she’d surprised him. What the hell did this woman know?

Olivia could have kicked herself. “Or killing people, whatever you do. Where are you?” she whispered hoarsely. “I can’t see you.”

“It’s better, I think, if you meet him in the dark, princesa.”

He heard her small gasp, relished it. It made him mad, knowing she had come up here to meet Cervantes, after that nauseating public proposal. Unreasonable that Rafe should suffer over something that did not concern him in the least. But he did. And he wanted her to suffer a little, as well.

Olivia felt the whirling in her head subside to a manageable spin, felt her stomach settle from the shock of his voice. She’d been certain he’d be gone from the hacienda by now. It had been hours. “Why are you still here? If Ernesto catches you in his house—”

“Don’t worry, I’m leaving. You came up the stairs just as I was about to go down them.”

“Down them? Are you insane? Anyone could have seen you.”

“It’s past midnight, Doctor. By my estimation, most of the people downstairs were too drunk an hour ago to notice if an elephant walked through the room.”

“You promised me. You said no one would be hurt. Ernesto—”

His hand shot out from the darkness, startling her. She’d never even heard him move. His strong fingers clamped around her wrist.

“Stop calling him that,” he said. “Do not call him Ernesto, as though you know him. You know nothing about him.”

“No. You’re right. It doesn’t matter.” She was frantic. If anyone caught them together, all hell would break loose. She knew this man would do what he’d threatened, and innocent people would be hurt. Maybe even Ernesto. Most likely Ernesto.

Olivia squared her shoulders. “Okay, now you listen to me. You have to go before he finds you here.”

“And you will stay,” he said flatly, coldly.

“What? Yes.” Olivia shook her head to try to clear it. “What is the matter with you?”

“Why didn’t you leave today with your people?” She was so close. So close. He bowed his head a fraction of an inch, breathed in the smell of her hair. He loved the faint scent of the sea on her, as though she never really left the water, as though it ran through her veins. “Why did you come here tonight for this farce of a proposal?”

“My people? How do you know about my people? And what do you mean, this farce of a—? Are you nuts?” she whispered fiercely, coming up on her toes to hiss at him. “Mentally deficient in some manner? You’re a drug runner. He’s the sheriff of Aldea Viejo. And you have the nerve to call my perfectly good marriage proposal a farce?”

“I told you, princesa, that he’s not what he seems, and you’d be better off back in your little office at Scripps than down here, playing with men you know nothing about.”

Olivia’s eyes widened. “How do you know where I work?”

“I know everything about you. Including your obvious proclivity for madmen.”

Olivia blinked into the blackness. She could feel his breath hot on her face, and looked up. Her eyes had become just enough accustomed to the stygian darkness that she was able to see the sharp outline of his uncompromising jawline, the white around his shadowy pupils. “He is not the madman,” she said.

Rafe leaned forward again, ruthlessly ignoring the scent of her, the nearness. His physical reaction to both. “You think I am?”

No. She instinctively knew that whatever else dishonorable and desperate this man was, he was not mad. Not in any sense of the word. “Of course I do,” she whispered.

The catch in her voice undid him. How dare she fear him, when it was Cervantes, with his elegant manners and his elegant mansion, who lived so well off the suffering of drug-hungry Americans? Rafe was the good guy. It didn’t occur to him how ludicrous it was to be so indignant that his cover was working well enough to fool even this brilliant, beautiful scientist.

He advanced on her, deliberately brushing his lean body against hers. She retreated step for step, until she was backed against the door. He pressed mercilessly into her and reveled in the small trembling her body made against him. He was undeniably aroused. “Maybe I am a madman,” he muttered darkly.

He caught her mouth with his, was elated when it parted for him, even though he knew her lips had fallen open in shock and not arousal. He swept his tongue seductively inside. It didn’t matter. Didn’t matter.

Olivia thought her head had been spinning before. Good heavens. She was being kissed—and quite skillfully—by a criminal! She knew what a prudent woman would do in this kind of absurd situation. A prudent woman would ignore whatever excitement insane danger evidently stirred in her blood, knowing it for the temporary, stress-induced mania it was. A prudent woman would not give in to weak knees and shocking, reckless, sudden arousal. A prudent woman would fight.

Olivia opened her teeth as wide as she could and clamped down.

Rafe lifted his mouth the instant before her teeth snapped painfully together. He rubbed his thumb across her mouth once, twice, watching the movement with his eyes.

“Don’t bite me,” he admonished gently, and kissed her again.

Olivia was stunned, not just by the soft admonition, but by the tenderness of the kiss. Did criminals kiss like this, with such soft intent? With such sweet breath, and small sounds of pleasure? Surely not. Criminals had foul breath that tasted of tequila, and they groped at innocent women, violently. They didn’t seduce with soft, sucking little kisses and careful, stroking hands and eyes closed so tightly.

Olivia’s eyes closed, too. So she could think, she told herself. So she could use her excellent, well-educated and analytical brain to get herself out of this preposterous situation. Out of this preposterous town, where men proposed marriage in front of hundreds of other people and bandits kissed like angels.

Oh, pull yourself together, she told herself, keeping her lips vised together despite the fact that the smuggler was now licking at them. Licking!

She felt her body flood in arousal, and was mortified. Such a physical reaction from such a cerebral woman. It was a bizarre case of chemical response, she knew. People in peril often reacted against character. She’d read studies in which women in very dangerous situations had formed relationships they wouldn’t normally consider…wow, was he nibbling her lower lip? Oh. Oh, dear.

Okay, okay, she didn’t have to be governed by a simple chemical reaction. So he knew how to kiss. He knew how to kiss…her. And so no one had ever kissed…her quite like this before. She was a scientist, for God’s sake. She could overcome plain old ordinary knee-jerk response, couldn’t she?

The smallest moan escaped her when the smuggler gave up on her mouth and moved to her neck.

Couldn’t she?

The doorknob turned at her back, and only then did she realize she was jammed against it. Her hands went flat against the bandit’s chest, and she shoved as hard as she could.

Rafe staggered back, staring at her. Her mouth glistened from his kiss, and her eyes, in the darkness, glittered wildly. She was as turned on as he was, he realized, stunned. He’d meant to teach her a little lesson—and this was how she reacted? Crazy woman. He was reaching for her again, desperately, when he heard the small sound.

She swiped at her mouth, as Rafe stood, paralyzed, in front of her. For the first time in his life, he had no idea where to turn. His first instinct was to grab the woman and make a run for it. He knew the instant the thought came into his head, it was insane. He had to get out, and fast. But he could not leave her. Not with Cervantes.

“Olivia?”

It was Ernesto. Olivia put her hand over the doorknob at her back, and realized she had inadvertently pressed the button on the knob with her hip, locking him out of his own room.

“Yes?” she said, her voice ringing hollow and terrified in her own ears. Why was the bandit just standing there, watching her? She wanted to scream at him to go, but she knew Ernesto would hear.

“Olivia, open the door,” Ernesto said sharply.

“Yes, all right, Ernesto,” she said, but did not move. Her eyes were locked on those of the man who had just kissed her, whom she’d very nearly kissed right back. A drug smuggler, the worst kind of man. Mortification tightened her chest, and she struggled to breathe.

“It’s dark in here,” she called through the door, stalling for time. “I’m sorry, I can’t find the light.”

“It’s next to the door,” Ernesto said impatiently. He banged on the heavy door with his fist, making Olivia jump. “Why have you locked the door?”

“Go,” she breathed. And in an instant, the dim outline of the man faded from her sight.

Olivia squeezed her eyes shut, popped them open again. She’d not even heard him move, had no idea where he was.

She fumbled with the door as long as she plausibly could, and finally got it open, allowing the light from the hallway to spill into the room. She resisted looking over her shoulder to make sure the smuggler was not standing behind her.

Ernesto frowned at her. “Why are you in my room?” he asked. “And in the dark, with the door locked?” He surveyed the large room carefully from the doorway, then moved past Olivia and stalked across the tile to the thick Aubusson carpet that lay beneath the huge, dark canopy bed. “Olivia?”

Olivia snapped her attention back to him. She, too, had been scanning the room. The bandit couldn’t have simply disappeared; he had to be in the room somewhere.

“I’m sorry, Ernesto,” Olivia said. “I came up to use the powder room and I stepped in here by mistake. I didn’t even know where I was until I turned on the light. What a beautiful room.”

Her breathing was steadier now, and she folded her hands in front of her demurely, hoping Ernesto would not notice that her breasts were full, her nipples peaked against the peasant blouse, her cheeks flushed. It shamed her, her irrational reaction to the smuggler, who represented everything in the world she condemned—but she would deal with that later. In the convent she fully intended to join the instant she got home.

“It is a beautiful room,” Ernesto conceded, his eyes narrowing. He walked over to her. “Your hair is mussed. And your cheeks are pink.”

“I…I was dancing earlier,” Olivia replied with a laugh. “And I have had too much of your excellent champagne, I’m afraid.”

He scrutinized her for a minute, then, seemingly satisfied with her excuse, smiled. “Have you been enjoying yourself?” he asked softly, taking a strand of her loosened hair between his smooth fingers.

“Very much,” Olivia said brightly.

“And you like my house?”

“It’s everything a house should be, Ernesto,” she said sincerely. “You have exquisite taste.”

His face relaxed even further at the compliment. “I’m flattered, though I must admit I have decorators. I have never had a wife to advise me in matters of the home,” he said easily.

Olivia felt that prickly sensation at the back of her neck again. For heaven’s sake, now what?

Oh, Lord. How could she have forgotten? Not an hour ago, this handsome, intelligent, well-mannered and propertied man had stood in front of two hundred of his closest friends and announced he wanted to marry her.

Funny how the kiss of a bandit could make you forget the important things in life.

“Ernesto, let’s go back downstairs,” Olivia said, tugging on the sleeve of his beautiful suit. This one might just be Armani, she thought as her fingers slid over the fine fabric.

Ernesto stood his ground. “No, Olivia, not just yet,” he said, his voice husky. “I like your hair after dancing. After we are married, we will dance every night before bed. It makes you look like a wanton,” he finished with a small smile.

Which is just what I am, Olivia thought grimly. Only not with Mr. Right, here. With Mr. Utterly Wrong.

“Ernesto, we must talk about your proposal,” Olivia began.

“We will, querida.” Ernesto took her hand from his arm and drew her gently toward him. He took her chin in his hand. “I know there are many questions in your head, about your work and your duties here. But these questions will have to wait. Now, we have time only for this.” He dipped his head, grazed her jawline with his lips.

He smelled of expensive cologne and expensive champagne. Olivia fought back a repulsed shudder, and wondered why the perfect man made her want to run in the opposite direction, while the last man on earth she should want could seduce her with nothing more than his voice in the darkness.

“You look so beautiful tonight, in your Mexican peasant clothes,” Ernesto murmured. “Have I told you that?”

“Ernesto, your guests—” she protested weakly.

“We will attend to them in a moment, Olivia.” He banded one strong arm across her back and drew her against him.

He was partially aroused, and Olivia again had to bite back the urge to flee.

“Do you realize, this is the first time we have ever been truly alone together?” he breathed, nipping at her earlobe.

Olivia squirmed slightly, but when Ernesto seemed to take the small movement as encouragement, she went stiff in his arms.

“We are not alone,” she said as reasonably as she could. “There are two hundred people here.”

He laughed softly. “Outside then, where our guests will not interrupt us.”

“Not our guests, Ernesto,” Olivia said firmly. “Your guests.”

His hand drifted to her breast, squeezed. “Our guests soon enough, my love,” he whispered, then took her mouth with some fervor, pushing his tongue past her lips.

Olivia was too shocked for a moment to respond one way or the other. But soon enough her instincts kicked in. She protested the kiss against Ernesto’s mouth, but the sound was muffled, and even to her it sounded like a whimper of passion. Ernesto gripped her breast, pinching at the nipple, and ground himself against her.

And then, so suddenly she couldn’t comprehend it, he was gone. She rocked on her feet, holding out a hand for balance.

The other man stood before her now, breathing fire. His chest was heaving and his dark eyes were slitted until she could see nothing but black pupils. For a moment, he simply glowered at her, wordlessly accusing her. She felt an absurd contrition, as though he’d caught her cheating on him.

He turned to look at the man sprawled on the floor.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Rafe sneered at his mortal enemy.

At the man who had killed his brother.