Authors: Roxanne St. Claire
permit in less than two years, and I heard you say you have a Maserati.”
Dan laughed. “Is that blackmail?”
“Just sayin’. You like my mom. I like your car.”
“Cars. Plural.”
“Oh, wow.” Quinn made a choking noise. “Shoot me now.”
“Go to sleep.” Dan’s voice, still warm with laughter, was getting closer to the door.
Maggie hesitated for just one second, just as Max’s large frame ascended the stairs at the
end of the hall.
“The thing about Dan is,” he said quietly as he walked closer, “you don’t really have to
eavesdrop to find out what he’s thinking.”
“I’m not . . .” She smiled, admitting defeat. “All right. I am.”
“All you have to do is give him an opening,” Max continued, “and you’ll know more about
what’s going on in that deceptively complex head of his than you want to.”
“Deceptively complex?” Behind her, Dan’s voice was rich with disgust. “Because I’m
slightly more evolved than a caveman?”
“And much prettier,” Max shot back.
Dan closed the bedroom door and added a wink to Maggie. “He’s always been wildly
jealous of me. What’s up, Max?”
“I think you were right. I just ran every conceivable satellite coordinate, and guess what the
latitude of a good portion of Venezuela is?”
Maggie straightened. “Ten degrees, thirty-eight minutes north.” The very numbers on her
fortune.
“Exactly,” Max said, giving her an impressed look. “Did you know that?”
“Not offhand, but my husband was an avid fisherman and we lived by GPS. I can’t believe
I didn’t think of it.” She looked at Dan, excitement shooting through her. “That can’t be a
coincidence. If we put it together with the other numbers, I bet we get the longitude.”
“I did,” Max said. “Come and see where that puts you.”
“Let’s go,” Dan said, his hand on Maggie’s back as he lowered his head to whisper softly in
her ear. “And you can thank me later.”
Thank him—for lying?
Maybe she should. Maybe she would.
Several hours and what seemed like fifty-nine different permutations of possible GPS
coordinates later, Maggie hit the wall. Max had long ago been sidelined by his wife’s request
that he come to bed, leaving them to work into the night, a situation that didn’t seem to bother
endlessenergy Dan, but left Maggie yawning and tense.
They hadn’t discussed what transpired in Quinn’s room, too focused on all the GPS and
satellite possibilities, mathematical and otherwise, nit-picking through every word on two
fortunes, translating them into Spanish, searching for cryptic meanings, squeezing blood out
of her gray matter to figure out a puzzle that seemed impossible to solve.
She was a GPS pro from all those years on a fishing boat with Smitty, but that’s where her
cryptography skills ended.
“I can’t look at that anymore.” She waved a page of notes to the massive flat-panel screen
with the satellite image of Venezuela, dropping her head back on the sofa. “It’s there, I’m sure
of it, but we just don’t have enough to nail it.”
“We’re so close,” Dan said, stabbing his hair with two hands. “There are only so many
ways we can cut the numbers, so many different combinations of latitude and longitude,
minutes and seconds, and possible directions. One of them has to be in Venezuela. One of
them has to be the location of the money.”
She sighed, curling deeper into a light cotton blanket he’d brought out a few hours ago
from one of the bedrooms. “Let . . . me . . . just . . . think.”
Dan sat at the end of the sofa, tucking Maggie’s feet behind him. From beneath closed
lashes, she watched him, focused and strong and smart, and sexier than any man she’d ever
known.
She wanted so badly to move her feet to his lap. That’s all it would take. He’d be hard and
ready and . . .
He zoomed in on Maracaibo and squinted at the satellite image, and she watched his hands
work the laptop on the coffee table. So masculine and capable. Hands that could do amazing
things to her. That had done amazing things to himself that very afternoon.
Her gaze drifted up to his bicep, tightening, relaxing, then tightening again. Her stomach
did the same thing.
“Of course,” he murmured, half talking to her, half to himself, “the latitude on your fortune
also includes everything else six hundred miles north or south of the equator anywhere in the
world, including the middle of Africa, the lower tip of Indonesia, and part of the Malaysian
peninsula.”
She knew he was right. Latitude and longitude coordinates of minutes only gave you a
fairly large geographic area. But further divided into seconds, those coordinates were far more
specific, right down to an actual street block.
The numbers they had could be either minutes or seconds.
“We have two sets of numbers,” she said. “And even though one of those sets matches a
latitude across Venezuela, the other can’t be the longitude in minutes, because it isn’t
anywhere near Venezuela. And if the numbers you got from the FBI files are the longitude in
seconds,
then it doesn’t really help us.”
“There have to be more fortunes,” he said softly.
Obviously.
“Because this one,” he continued quietly, “could take us across the fattest part of
Venezeula. But you know what’s in there?”
He leaned forward, studying the screen on the wall, his jaw set and accented by beard
growth. How would that feel against her thighs?
It would feel scratchy and . . . good.
“The Jimenez coffee plantation. Somewhere west of Maracaibo is a place called Monte
Verde. What better place to hide your money than on your plantation?”
She looked at his thighs, spread wide as he leaned over the laptop keyboard. She’d seen
those thighs in the dark that afternoon. Watched him steal a secret release. It had taken
everything in her to keep from helping.
“And miles of impenetrable rain forest, fathoms of muddy rivers, and endless, rolling,
impassible mountains.” He rubbed his beard, then turned to her. She closed her eyes tight. If
she faked sleep, he wouldn’t talk… or touch . . . or test her control again.
“A hundred million dollars could be anywhere in that country, Maggie. What we need is a
short list of who could possibly have . . .” She felt him lean closer, could smell his scent as he
got nearer, the weight and warmth of him over her body. “What
you
need is sleep, Maggie
May.”
His fingers touched her hair, brushing it off her face.
Should she open her eyes? She knew what she’d see. Attraction in his jade green eyes.
Desire. Arousal. The same stuff that was electrifying her own body. Everything she’d been
fighting with common sense and bad memories.
He grazed her lower lip with his fingertip, or maybe the pad of his thumb. It was just a little
calloused and smelled clean and masculine.
Then he was gone. She heard the table lamp click, saw darkness behind her lids, heard his
footsteps around the counter that separated the living area from the kitchen.
She stole a peek, catching his profile as he opened the refrigerator door and stood
silhouetted in the light. One hand threaded his hair, the other reached in to get something.
She heard the hiss of a bottle cap, and the scuff of his footstep behind the sofa where she
lay. He put a hand on her shoulder, warm enough that it couldn’t be the one that held the beer
or soda he’d just opened. Gentle enough that the touch was more tender than sexual. Long
enough to make her ache to roll over and invite him to join her on the couch.
He pulled the blanket higher and tucked it under her chin. She almost let out the little mew
in her throat, the gesture was so sweet.
Just as she nearly lost the battle and opened her eyes, he murmured, “You’re so different.”
Different?
Different from what she used to be? Different from someone else? Or just
different . . . from what he usually liked?
His footsteps headed to the front door. She peeked through her lashes again to see him
stand for a moment in the darkness of the patio and unlit pool; then he closed the door and left
her alone.
She put her hands on the blanket where his had been, the need to have him near so powerful
that it took her back to when that same man—with a different name, different face, different
hair—did precisely the same thing to
her body. Funny thing, that physical chemistry. It really must be pheromones or scent.
Throwing off the blanket, she sat up. He couldn’t have gone far.
Outside, she stood in the doorway, scanning the dark, empty patio that easily sat thirty or
more in various arrangements of tables, chairs, and chaises. She peered at the house, seeing
one light—her room. Was he in there, waiting for her?
“I’m over here.”
She turned toward the shadows of a tiny cabana, where a double-width chaise was tucked
under an arched overhang. A brown bottle was balanced on his stomach, his laser gaze sharp
even from twenty feet away.
“What are you doing?” she asked, walking toward him, the breeze in the palm fronds and
the brush of her long cotton skirt the only sound. She lifted her hand to push her hair off her
face, and Baba’s bracelets fell down her wrist, adding a ping of silver against silver, and a
sexcharged memory, into the silent night.
“Right now I’m counting stars.” As she approached, his perusal dropped to her chest, to the
rhinestones flickering across her breasts. “Is that a dragonfly or a butterfly winking at me?”
She ran a finger over the tiny pink and green stones sewn into her top. “You tell me. You’ve
looked at it enough tonight.”
He grinned, white teeth against tanned skin. “About a hundred times, I think.”
“What are you doing?” she whispered, reaching the side of the chaise.
“Having a beer. Want some?” he asked.
“Yeah.” She gave him a nudge with her knee. “Scoot over.”
She shouldn’t do this. She shouldn’t slip between the armrest and his rock-hard flank,
shouldn’t let her flouncy skirt flutter over his khaki shorts and bare calf, shouldn’t share his
beer and thoughts.
But she did. He handed her the bottle and she took a solid swig, then returned it to his
stomach, leaning back against the angled cushion. “Good, but not Heineken.”
“What can I say? Totally ghetto.”
She laughed softly.
“I thought you were dead to the world,” he said.
“I woke up when you left.”
“Sorry. I thought you were asleep—I had a massive epiphany and you didn’t answer me.”
That she was
so different?
“What was your revelation?”
He slid his gaze away with a sideways smile. “It’s a secret now.”
“You wouldn’t tell me the truth anyway.” She turned to get more comfortable, the move
pressing her breasts against that lovely bicep. “Besides, it doesn’t matter.”
“What doesn’t?”
That she was different. “How many fortunes we have,” she said. “Even if we get two more
of them, with eight more numbers, we have what? Maybe sixty-four different combinations of
latitude, longitude, minutes, and seconds, east, west, north, south?”
“So we track them all. I have the resources.”
“You still can’t convince me that all that money’s still hidden after all these years.” She
tapped the beer bottle with her nail. “Give.”
He handed it to her. “Listen, if a hundred million dollars got laundered in the six months
Alonso Jimenez has been out of prison, the FBI would know about it, and I would know about
it. And these people wouldn’t be going to all this trouble to get your fortune. Someone could
be dribbling it into banks and accounts, but not more than five percent of it. There are too
many safeguards in place to track that kind of cash.”
She sipped, then rolled back into the space he’d made for her, balancing the bottle on his
solar plexus, keeping one hand around it, her arm resting easily on his stomach muscles.
“So what do we do next, Irish?”
He gave her a half smile at the nickname. “In the next few minutes, or tomorrow?”
“I know what you want to do in the next few minutes.” His pants weren’t totally tented yet,
but she could see a bulge growing. No force of nature could stop her from looking at it.
Imagining it. Wanting it.
“Pretty obvious, huh?” He took the beer.
“Mmm hmm.” She curled her fingers around his bicep. “That’s why I came out here.”
He finished the drink and set the bottle on the ground next to him. “Really.”
“To talk.” Liar, liar. “About Quinn.” That ought to quench his passion.
“Don’t worry, Maggie, I had no intention of blowing your old cover. If he thinks you were
a waitress, that works for me.”
“It’s not ‘an old cover,’ ” she said, hearing the resentment in her voice.
“It’s not? You were a waitress in Miami? News to me.”
“I was, for about one lunch rush. Then I got fired. And met Ramon.” She shifted, trying to
move away but the chaise was a tight fit. “It’s the story Smitty used to tell people when I
worked for him at the bar, and I never contradicted it. Not even tonight, when I should have.”
“Maggie, listen to me.” He turned to face her. “Not all lies are bad. If your husband wanted
to spare your boy the grief of certain things, why not? He wanted Quinn to think he was his
father, right?”
“But that doesn’t have anything to do with what we told him I did before he was born.” The