Crazy Sweet (3 page)

She felt his palms and his fingers moving over her, working on her, easing the tension from the muscles in her back and shoulders. She felt his strength and the skill of his hands as the water grew warmer and fogged the glass, blocking out the rest of the world.

And she felt the heat of his touch, the softness of the creamy soap he was smoothing over her.

He would find love again. He’d been made for love—and tonight he’d been made for loving her. Turning in his arms, she slid her hands around his neck, through his hair, and stretched up to meet his kiss.

CHAPTER

3

C
. SMITH RYDELL sat outside a cantina across from the Hotel Palacio in San Luis, El Salvador, drinking a beer, watching the street, and wondering if it was possible for the town to get through the night without something exploding or going up in flames.

Probably not, he decided. According to the local newspaper,
La Prensa,
there had been two explosions and five car burnings in the last week—and now the weekend had arrived. Things were bound to heat up when the sun went down, and it was sliding fast, sinking into the ocean like it had more sense than to stick around San Luis in the dark.

Hot tropical nights, hot tropical country, hot tropical politics, gangs, drug lords, the disenfranchised remnants of the civil war rallying into a rebel force in the mountains, and him smack dab in the middle of all of it—business as usual, except this round of adventure could be laid squarely at Red Dog’s feet. C. Smith Rydell had arrived this morning, almost immediately realized he’d missed her, and spent the rest of the day gathering intel and figuring out just exactly how much trouble she’d gotten herself into since they’d wrapped their Panama mission.

Plenty, and then some, and as soon as he figured out why his secure cell wasn’t working with the local system, he needed to let the boys at
Steele Street
know. The other option, going through the hassle of opening a Salvadoran cell account, was way at the bottom of his list, especially since he was heading back to the States first thing in the morning. So for now, C. Smith Rydell was drinking his beer and watching the street. He was especially watching the people on the street, and as of two minutes ago, most especially watching the tawny-haired blonde in the tight white halter dress with the red polka dots, little matching jacket, and white bow-tied spike heels with the two-inch platforms, which brought her all the way up to about five feet four—maybe. She was carrying a straw tote bag that was almost as big as she was, had hoop earrings the size of saucers and white designer sunglasses so big they barely perched on her nose. She also had, unbelievably, three tiny red polka-dot bows scooping up all that tawny blond hair into an elegant, if slightly mussed, French twist, which was more appropriate than a person might imagine, because she looked like something straight out of a brochure for the French Riviera. She looked like candy, sure, but expensive candy. The polish on her toes matched the polka dots, the flowers on her tote matched her toes, and her lipstick matched both.

C. Smith Rydell took another slow sip of beer, waiting, his gaze following her through his Ray-Bans. Certain laws of physics all but guaranteed that something was going to fall out of a dress that tight, and so help him God, he didn’t want to miss anything when it happened. The halter top, in particular, was giving him whiplash, even though he’d barely moved a muscle since he’d seen her.

Candy. Eye candy, sex candy, melt-in-your-mouth-and-come-back-for-more candy—all of it wrapped in polka dots and a bolero-style jacket that didn’t quite make the dress modest. She looked like she was more trouble than she was worth, but sometimes that sort of reasoning didn’t really register in a guy’s brain.

Smith wondered, idly, if it was registering in his.

She was definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time. He knew that much. As long as she’d kept moving, she’d been almost okay, but she’d stopped to sort through some street vendor’s cart of junk in front of the Palacio, and it was setting him on edge. She was one full block off the beaten path, the path the tourists took from one almost-brand-name hotel to the next, with stops in between for a couple of cute boutiques, cute cafés, and a light sprinkling of franchised restaurants. “Fledgling” was the word most analysts used to describe
El Salvador
’s tourist industry, and she was one full block and a bit away from it.

She’d slipped into decrepit-hotel-and-locals’bar land, which was only a block from El Salvadoran barrio land, which was no place for a curvy blonde in a tight dress and platform heels—especially when his room on the third floor of the old Palacio had been chosen specifically for the view it gave him into the courtyard of Tony Royce’s backstreet villa.

Yessirree, the whole friggin’ town of
San Luis
was crawling with bad guys—real bad guys—and there wasn’t a one of them who wouldn’t want a piece of what he was looking at.

She needed a keeper, and women who looked like that usually had one who didn’t let them too far out of their sight. So where was hers? There had to be some rich old guy tagging along behind her somewhere, but Smith wasn’t taking the time to look for the lucky bastard. He didn’t dare.

He took another swallow of beer without taking his eyes off her. He didn’t care what the hell was in the vendor’s cart, it wasn’t worth the trouble she was going to find if she didn’t get her butt back to her oceanfront hotel.

The sooner the better. Smith wasn’t the only one who had noticed her. She was starting to draw looks from every direction, and it wouldn’t be too long before the guards patrolling Tony Royce’s gated mausoleum of a house checked the street and noticed her, too.

He had his bottle of beer halfway to his mouth, when the fat lady sang. Almost on cue, the blonde’s time was up. Royce’s men had spotted her. Two of them were coming through the big iron gate that fronted the street, one of them visibly packing a pistol, both of them heading straight for her, looking damned serious and like maybe they wanted to have some fun—bad fun.

Dammit.

Smith pushed himself out of his chair and abandoned his beer.

Saving damsels in distress wasn’t anywhere in his mission statement or his job description, but here he was, moseying across the street, getting ready to put himself between the bad guys and the cupcake.

It occurred to him that with his blue parrot shirt, baggy cargo pants, a day’s worth of beard, and scruffy haircut, he might not exactly look like a hero coming to her rescue, but he’d play that part by ear. All he needed to do was get her moving in the right direction, which was west. Due west. Back to the ocean and the one paved street in San Luis.

To that end, he speeded up his gait. She’d lifted a leather-wrapped bundle of something or another out of the cart and was giving it a once-over. With a hasty move, the vendor shoved the bundle toward her tote. She resisted for a second, but then he put a wooden crucifix on top of the bundle, and both items went into her bag. After another second’s hesitation, she pulled out some cash and handed it over.

Smith swore softly under his breath. She was going to get herself royally harassed at the least, or royally manhandled, or even worse, all for a bundle of junk and a wooden crucifix.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a third man coming out of the villa’s gate with a subgun slung over his shoulder—and wasn’t that just perfect?

“Arturo!” one of the first men called out.

Smith gave the guy a quick glance, saw him gesture down the street; when Smith looked, there was guy number four, carrying an AR15 carbine, crossing over in front of a battered old Ford pickup and heading for the woman and the Palacio.

If the situation had been perfect before, now it was absolutely perfect—him, the cupcake, and four of Tony Royce’s handpicked, well-armed assholes.

He looked back to the cart—and she was gone. The cupcake in polka dots. Completely disappeared.

How in the hell, he wondered, had she moved so fast in platform heels, and where in the hell had she gone?

There was only one answer to the second question. She’d been standing in front of the Hotel Palacio’s oversized wooden doors, and the only place she could have disappeared that quickly was through them.

Well, that had to be a bit of a shock to her. The Palacio was a fortress, with solid masonry walls and thick hardwood floors and doors, but the hotel was also as flea-bitten as they came, with fading paint and chipping plaster, a nicked and scarred reception counter, and a pair of bullet craters in the wall at the bottom of the staircase. There was no elevator in the Palacio. The place was eighty years old if it was a day, a three-story hollow rectangle with interior verandas running around each of the floors, overlooking a lush, overgrown courtyard. Smith had taken the third-floor suite on the southeast corner of the building and had spent most of the day shrouded in the dim light behind his balcony window, looking through a compact 20-power spotting scope pointed at Royce’s villa.

He’d seen plenty, especially the hit-ups Red Dog had spray-painted on Royce’s stucco walls and the fallout of her handiwork. There were four tags visible from the courtyard, and two guys doing their best to wash them off or paint over them, neither of which was working.
Red Dog 303
in big red letters and numbers had been bleeding through every coat of paint the men had put on today. She’d made Royce’s villa look like a crack house in
East L.A.

She had to have loved that, tagging the bastard without getting caught by his security system or his guards, but Smith knew Gillian, and he knew the coup de grâce had been the half-million-dollar cocaine deal she’d screwed up between Royce and
Mara
Plata, a Central American gang whose business specialties included extortion and drug-trafficking. He’d gotten the news about the pooched deal from his old friends at the DEA Country Office in
Panama City
two days ago. They hadn’t been any too happy to have the case they were trying to build against Royce blown for them, and they were going to be even unhappier when he told them who had been involved.
La cazadora espectral,
the ghostly hunter, she was called in Central America, her reputation made with a hit a year ago on a Guatemalan crime boss who’d been exporting his assassination services to the United States. When Christian Hawkins had called Smith yesterday and asked him to follow up on Red Dog’s unauthorized side trip to
El Salvador
, way too many pieces had fallen into place. Seeing her tag splashed all over Royce’s walls had confirmed it all, Superman’s worst suspicions and Travis James’s biggest fear.

The
Mara
Plata deal wasn’t the only one the other two SDF operators thought Red Dog might have mangled for Royce over the last two years, but Smith could guarantee, no matter what she’d done before, this was the first time she’d actually signed her name and address to the deed. He needed to call Hawkins and tell him to batten down the hatches. It didn’t take a decoder ring to figure out what
Red Dog 303
meant, and wherever Royce was, Smith didn’t think it would take the bastard too damn long to sic somebody on her tail—somebody mean and out for blood.

The girl loved trouble, beyond a doubt, the kind of trouble she could dish out, which Smith had a tremendous amount of respect and appreciation for. But this kind of trouble made him wish Hawkins or Travis would lock her up until Tony Royce was either dropped into a bottomless pit in
Leavenworth
, or dead.

Preferably dead.

The guy was sick in a bad way, especially when it came to women, which made Smith walk a little faster. The cupcake wouldn’t last five minutes in Royce’s company. Not that Smith had seen Royce around, and given the lax attitude of the guards, leaving the grounds to harass a woman, he doubted if Royce was in residence. The ex-CIA agent had a reputation for brutality that extended beyond his twisted inclinations toward the fairer sex.

Arturo and his gang were mid-street when Smith pushed through the doors of the Palacio—just in time to see a flash of white with red polka dots disappear beyond the first landing of the staircase.

Geezus.
She couldn’t possibly be staying at the Palacio. The place was a dump, even by his standards, which he could guarantee were lower than hers.

He cruised by the hotel clerk with a short wave and started up the stairs. Casual, that was him, genetically disinclined to panic under any and all circumstances. Still, he was taking the stairs two at a time.

Behind him, he heard Royce’s men entering the lobby, which despite everything, surprised him. Harassing a woman on the street was one thing. Following her into a hotel, even one as run-down as the Palacio, was another.

He cleared the first landing and looked down the length of the second-floor veranda. Palm trees from the overgrown courtyard shielded part of the walkway from view, but he still saw her elegantly mussed French twist, the curve of her hip, and one of her platform heels disappear around the corner of the outside staircase, heading toward the top floor.

What in the hell was she up to, he wondered, and where in the hell was she going? There were only two suites on the southern, top-floor wing of the Palacio, his and the Salvadoran honeymooners’ next door to him.

Below him, he heard Royce’s men entering the courtyard, and behind him, he heard someone coming up the stairs, fast, which for some damn reason, some damn reason in the
Heroism for Dummies
handbook, meant he had to really put his ass on the line here.