“Maybe the guys who own this boat aren’t very good fishermen,” Bobby commented, using his pocketknife to pry open the cans.
“Did you find any tackle?” Rafe asked.
“There’s some in the hold,” Manny said.
“I think I’ll see if I can’t catch something a little fresher than that for dinner,” Rafe said. He went below.
“But there’s no stove,” Manny shouted down to him. “Where’re you going to cook it?”
Rafe came back up a moment later, a surf pole in his hand. He eased his gun from the waistband of his jeans and laid it next to Bobby. “Watch out,” he said. He looked toward the beach, then at Olivia. “How’s your arm?”
Olivia smiled. “Pretty good.”
He grinned back at her. “Then start swimming,
princesa.
You’ll have to schlep for wood while I fish.”
Olivia burst out laughing as Rafe dived, fishing rod and all, overboard into the warm gulf waters. “Schlep?” she called after him. “Schlep?” She jumped overboard after him. She was still laughing as she surfaced. “Rafael Camayo, you watch too much American television.”
Chapter 11
T
he swim did them both good. It allowed Rafe’s arousal to subside sufficiently that he could walk upright again, he thought wryly. And it got Olivia’s dress soaking wet, so that he could see the outline of her panties and the press of her nipples, rucked and stiff from the water, as she emerged from the surf.
It was a petty little pleasure, as grown men went, he supposed. But he took full advantage of it, sneaking glances at her as he fumbled with the fishing rod.
“Cold?” he asked, as she wrung out her hair.
“A little,” she said, trying to ignore the terrible sting of saltwater through the bandage. “I’ll get some wood.” She walked up the beach a little ways, then stopped. “Oh, how are we going to start a fire without matches?”
Rafe studiously chose a lure from the small box he’d tucked into his pocket. “Have a little faith. Smugglers are very resourceful.”
Olivia frowned briefly at him, then wandered into the brush that rimmed the beach. In a short time, she’d gathered an armful of dead sagebrush and ironwood pieces. She dropped them next to Rafael, who was already slitting open the belly of a small fish on the sand.
“I’m hungrier than that,” she commented.
“You know, sometimes you have no common sense,” Rafe mumbled absently, scooping out fish guts with his thumb. “It’s like you see the bear, and you know the bear can eat you, but you antagonize it, anyway.”
“Eat me?” Olivia asked innocently. “Is the bear going to eat me?”
Rafe looked up, then, chuckling, shook his head. “There’s just something about being on a beach for you, isn’t there?”
Olivia leaned over and hugged his neck. “There’s something about being on a beach with you,” she corrected rather rashly. She didn’t care. She was feeling rash. She was feeling relieved and rash and optimistic. She hadn’t kissed a criminal. Well, she had, but not the one that mattered. “So, what do you think about more kissing? Or are we going to cook that puny little fish, first?”
“Actually, I’m going to start a fire first, then catch another puny little fish for your highness, then look at your arm.”
“Then we can fool around?”
Rafe laughed again. “Maybe,” he said, heaving the fish guts into the surf. “It depends on your arm.”
“If your ribs can take it, my arm can take it.”
“My ribs can take it.” Though right now they were being pretty well battered by the pounding of his heart. How could she stand there in that damp dress, her hair slicked back from her face and her white bandage practically glowing in the night, and ask him if he wanted to fool around? He didn’t know that he’d ever wanted anything more in his life.
He pulled a waterproof lighter from the pocket of his jeans and carefully lit a frayed length of dry sagebrush, cupping his hand around the infant flame until it was crackling. The rest of the wood caught quickly, and once it was burning nicely, Rafe turned back to the sea for their dinner.
Olivia watched him. Fishing, he used the same economical motion of muscle and bone he used to do everything else. It was no wonder she felt so safe with the man, she thought. He could do everything. She lay back on the warm sand, watched the stars that cloaked the night sky. Drop him in the middle of the Baja desert, and in no time at all he was clearing caves of scorpions and buying dresses on Sunday mornings and catching fish in the dark.
“Don’t fall asleep,” Rafe said, dropping cross-legged onto the sand next to her. He’d caught two more fish; they were already gutted and rinsed. “We can’t sleep here tonight. We need to be on the boat in case Cervantes shows up and we have to make a quick getaway.”
“You know,” she mused, casually identifying star clusters in her head, “it’s amazing to me I didn’t peg you guys for Americans the first time I met you, the way you speak. ‘Quick getaway?’ You sound like an old movie.”
“Horsefeathers,” Rafe said in English, making Olivia laugh. “How’s your arm?”
“He just winged me, speaking of old movies. It burns a little when I move it, but I think the water did it some good. I hardly feel it anymore.”
Rafe spitted the fish on a long, smooth stick Olivia had intended to add to the fire. “Fire’s pretty hot, but I’m too hungry to wait.” Rafe held the fish over the flames. “I’m sorry I didn’t see him coming. I should have. I’m used to watching for him.”
“As I recall, we were pretty involved just then.” Olivia wrinkled her nose. “And he’s a sneak. I wonder that I never noticed that about him.”
Rafe looked over at her. She was flat on her back, relaxed as a cat, staring thoughtfully heavenward. “You know, I called my office the first day he went down to the beach.”
She turned her head to look at him. “Why?”
“I asked them to call Scripps and get you guys yanked off the beach.”
Olivia studied him for a minute, then looked back at the sky. “Huh. Lucky for you your foul plan didn’t work. I would have hunted you down and smacked you around if I’d gotten yanked from my first command assignment.”
Rafe chuckled. “I figured I’d be tougher to kill than you. And Cervantes would have killed all of you if you’d gotten between us.”
“I did get between you, and he hasn’t managed to finish me off, yet.”
“Luck,” Rafe grunted.
“Skill,” Olivia corrected. “Between your survival instincts and Bobby’s thievery and my experience on this stretch of water, we could elude that little weasel for another fifteen years.”
Rafe gloated a little over the “weasel” comment. He refrained from mentioning
he’d
known Cervantes was a weasel since he was ten years old, while it had taken her getting shot at to come to the same conclusion. “We just need to stay out of sight for another thirty-six hours.”
“Then what?” Olivia sat up, brushed the sand from her hands. “What happens on Tuesday, exactly?”
“Exactly? I never know what’s going to happen exactly. Maybe nothing.”
He slid one of the fish to the very end of the stick and blew on it until it was cool enough to touch. He then offered it to Olivia, who took it in her fingers and peeled the skin back. She took a bite.
“Needs salt,” she said.
“Stop poking the bear,” Rafe warned placidly.
Olivia mumbled something too low for him to hear, then giggled to herself. Rafe couldn’t help but smile at her. She was pretty damn charming.
Olivia ate steadily, picking out the bones of the fish and flicking them into the fire. “What do you
think
will happen, then?”
Rafe swallowed a bite of his own dinner. “If he shows up, we wait until he makes contact with his suppliers. Both Mexican and U.S. authorities have known about Aldea Viejo and Cervantes’s operation since before Ernesto even took over for his father. The
federales
could have shut down the town, but they never had enough proof to convict Cervantes. We want the Mexican government to extradite him to the States, and to do that, we have to have evidence he’s connected to the shipments directly.”
“Why extradite him? I mean, isn’t that a very complicated thing to do?”
“Very complicated. But he’s wanted for crimes other than trafficking inside the United States, and we want him to stand trial on our turf, where his money and position and influence won’t get him off.”
“What other crimes?”
“He murdered a DEA agent twenty years ago,” Rafe said, the words sticking in his throat even after all these years.
“My God, no wonder you want him so badly. He killed one of your own.”
More one of my own than you know,
he thought, the bitterness he’d held to him for so long rising in his chest.
“He must have been just a boy when it happened.”
“He was seventeen,” Rafe said tightly. “He’d already been a linchpin in his father’s organization for three years when he came across the border for the first time with a shipment of unprocessed heroin. One of our young officers was there to intercept, as part of a regular patrol near the Mexicali border crossing. The officer identified himself as an agent and asked Cervantes to step out of the car so he could search it. Eyewitnesses say Cervantes shot the officer before he had even finished his sentence.”
Olivia was watching Rafael closely now. His face, in the firelight, was flat, expressionless. His knuckles were white around the stick he still held, however, and his eyes were blazing. Fury, she thought. But something else, too.
Grief? For an unknown officer shot down so long ago?
“Who was he? The officer Cervantes killed.”
“My brother. George.”
“Oh, Rafe.” Grief swamped her—for him, for the child he’d been when his brother had died. “How terrible. How old were you?”
“I was ten, almost. Bobby was a year younger. George was his
padrino,
his godfather, as well as his cousin.”
“And you’ve dedicated your lives to making Cervantes pay.”
Rafe looked at her for the first time since he’d begun the story. “He was my brother,” he said fiercely, quietly.
Olivia met his savage gaze. “You don’t have to defend yourself to me, Rafael. I am only surprised you haven’t killed him already.”
Rafe’s eyes reflected the flames of the fire. Olivia could not tell which blaze burned hotter. “I don’t want him to die,” he said. He glanced meaningfully at Olivia’s bandage. “I want him to suffer.”
“And so you became a drug agent. You and Bobby, both.”
“We made a blood pact after George’s funeral. I don’t even know if Bobby understood it all at the time, but he came to understand it, and he’s kept the pact all these years. It’s taken us twenty years to get this close—ten years waiting to grow up, ten years working our way through the agency.” He laughed shortly. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up in a cold sweat over the years, praying some son-of-a-bitch drug runner didn’t kill him before Bobby and I could bring him to justice.” He shook his head. “I know that must sound crazy to you.”
“Not crazy,” Olivia said. She steadied herself against the rush of admiration she felt for him. “Not crazy at all,” she finished quietly.
There were so many ways to exact retribution, Olivia knew. And Rafe deserved retribution, she thought, for himself and his family. Olivia understood perfectly what an eldest son meant to a Latino family. More than just a means to ensure the name, an eldest son represented all that was strong and noble about a family. Her own younger brother, the eldest male Galpas offspring, was the apple of even her enlightened, modern father’s eye.
But Rafael hadn’t turned into the kind of man circumstance and bitterness could have made him. He’d been patient, intelligent, resourceful. He’d followed the laws of both countries, and done his duty to his family at the same time.
Olivia cleared her throat, willing herself not to tear up. “I respect you for it, as a matter of fact.”
He blinked at her. “What?”
“I respect you, Rafael. You could have killed Cervantes a hundred times, I’m sure. I know you could have killed him the other night, in his house. But you’ve taken this path. I respect you for sticking to it, despite the anger you must feel.”
She damn near terrified him, this woman, Rafe thought. She sat innocently next to him, and just when he thought he could handle the way he felt about her, she said something that terrified him.
Respected
him? How the hell was he ever supposed to let her go, when she said things that made his heart swell in his chest and made every single hurdle he’d overcome in the past twenty years seem worthwhile, even honorable.
He gave her a scornful look. For his own protection, as much as anything. “My brother was a police officer, Olivia. How could I avenge his death by doing something illegal?”
Olivia smiled gently. This was the other Rafael, now. With his hard face and his sharp eyes. She scooted across the sand until she was plastered against his side, and took the stick from his hand. She tossed it into the fire, gripped his hand in hers.
“That’s true, Rafael,” she said softly, laying her head on his shoulder and watching the fire with him. “I’m sure, wherever your brother is right now, he respects you, too.”
Rafe felt the oddest sting at the back of his throat. He tried to swallow it down. He slammed his eyes tightly shut before anything unforgivable happened, and held onto Olivia’s hand for dear life.
“For a scientist,” he said roughly after a minute, “you have some very unscientific ideas.”
“I’m a woman, too,” Olivia murmured comfortably. “And a Latina.” She smiled wryly. “You cannot kill the passionate heart of a Latin woman with anything so simple as science.”
Rafe kissed the hair at the crown of her head. Lucky thing, he thought. He’d hate to see Olivia lose her passionate heart.
They sat together for a while, watching the fire die down. Rafe knew they needed to get back to the boat, but he was loath to make any move at all. He felt relaxed, contented almost, for the first time in months, without the perpetual simmer in his gut that reminded him constantly of his duty and his promise to his long-dead brother.
Olivia kept her head on his shoulder, equally unwilling to move. Her dress had dried in the heat of the fire and the breeze that had blown up after dusk. She was thirsty, but otherwise perfectly comfortable. Not cold, not hot. Just…happy.
She’d spent hundreds of nights like this in her life, even before she started working for the institute. Beach fires and clothes stiff with salt and sandy hair were nothing new to her. But she’d never been with Rafael on any of those beaches.
“Are you ready for another swim?” Rafe asked after a while.
She stretched her shoulders, sighed. “I don’t think so,” she said, and pushed him back into the sand.
The woman crawled on top of him as though she’d belonged there all her life, without a moment’s hesitation or abashment. He wrapped his arms around her instinctively.
“Olivia.”
“I want you, Rafael.”
“I know,” he said. He laughed thickly. “I can’t believe it.”
Olivia smiled. “Me, either. I’m normally a very cautious woman. If we were back in San Diego, you’d have to court me for months before I’d lie on top of you like this.”