In the Enemy's Arms (10 page)

Before he finished brooding, the bathroom door opened again and Cate came out. Her brown hair was damp, slicked back, and gleamed in the light. Her face was shiny with cream, and her feet were encased in pink flip-flops so fuzzy that her toes practically disappeared beneath the fluff. In between were pajamas.

Of course she wasn’t the type to sleep in a sexy little bit of silk and lace. He couldn’t be that lucky…or God couldn’t hate him that much. Depended on the viewpoint.

She wore cotton pants that ended just below her knees, bright pink with pairs of puckered streetwalker-red lips scattered all over. The matching pink shirt had one large pair of glossy lips in the center, surrounded by a slogan.
I’m a doctor. Let me kiss it and make it better.

He was torn between offering her something to kiss and laughing out loud. The laughter won.

She shook a warning finger. “My niece got me these for my birthday. She’s eight. All she knew was that I’m a doctor and she likes pink.”

“Hey, I like ’em. You look cute.” That was an understatement. Even in silly pajamas, the doc was sexy.

He yanked the stuff he needed out of his backpack and stood as she settled on the bed with a bottle of lotion. One shower coming up.

A very cold one.

Chapter 5

W
hen Mario picked them up the next morning, Cate was relieved to see he was driving a minivan instead of the ancient Bug. She was about to pull out the handle to wheel her suitcase, but he took it from her, stowing it in the rear while she followed. He opened the door to the backseat for her, closed it after she slid inside, then went around to the driver’s side while Justin got settled in front of her.

“Don’t expect that sort of chivalry from me,” Justin warned her, his amused gaze meeting hers in the rearview mirror.

“You call common courtesy chivalry?” Her tone was about as unperky as she felt. She hadn’t slept well. She would love to say that it was too much worry over her ex and her friend that had kept her awake, but she could at least be honest with herself. It had been Justin. More precisely, the knowledge that he was a few feet away in the other bed, wearing a pair of navy-and-green plaid boxers and nothing else.

They hadn’t even been in the same bed, for heaven’s sake. And it wasn’t as if she’d never slept with a man before. Hello? The ex-husband, the boyfriends since then, including AJ Decker, whom she’d thought she would marry until she found out he was in love with a woman from his past.

But there was something intimate about sleeping in someone else’s presence. Vulnerability. Forced trust. Potential.

Drums pounded a tempo in her head, stretching the muscles in her neck taut. She tilted her head first to one side, then the other, eyes closed until the blast of a horn far closer than a vehicle should be made her tense again.

“The goal when you drive in Coz,” Justin said over his shoulder, “is to see how close you can come to the other drivers without actually making contact. Most locals are remarkably good at it. It’s the tourists who have problems.”

He was looking amused again, his mouth quirked in a restrained smile. Normally the humor he found in everything annoyed her, but this morning, there was something reassuring about it. Had he stopped being a jerk?

Or had she stopped assuming that everything he did was based on being a jerk?

They passed through neighborhoods, slowing at stop signs only long enough to gauge the distance and speed of oncoming vehicles. Before the trip was half over, she’d learned to keep her gaze turned out the side window, skimming over brightly painted buildings, squatty houses and overgrown courtyards.

She heaved a sigh of relief when they reached the airport. All those heavily armed men who’d practically sent her scampering back to the plane on her first trip would be a welcome sight this time. What fool would mess with Justin and her with all those policemen and soldiers around?

Abruptly Mario slowed down, and it wasn’t for a speed zone sign; he ignored those the way everyone else did. “Over there. To the right of the terminal. Look familiar?”

Though there were cabs everywhere and travelers headed in and out, it was easy to spot the man he was talking about. He wore a Hawaiian shirt, untucked over denim shorts and at odds with the heavy scowl that flattened his features, and he was showing something—photographs, she would bet—to the policeman beside him.

“That’s Guzman,” Mario said. “Chief of security for the Wallaces, both at their offices and their house here.”

“He was at La Casa
,
” Justin added flatly.

“He’s got company. By the terminal doors. Also down at the other end. I’d advise you to duck.”

Cate’s seat belt was half undone before Mario finished speaking. She slid to her knees on the floor, head tucked low. In the space between the front and back seats, she caught a glimpse of Justin. He was grinning.

“Bet no one ever shows you the town like this.”

But the grin wasn’t a very good one. It slipped and revealed a bit of worry behind it. It should have made her even less comfortable that he wasn’t as confident as he pretended. Instead, she felt a little better. She didn’t like being the only coward around.

“Now what do we do?” she whispered, as if the men fifty yards away could hear.

The answer came from Mario, his mouth barely moving. “Now Mario circles through the parking lot like he drives out here just for the pleasure, and then we forget about the friendly skies and see how the ferries are looking today.”

Pain in her left leg made Cate shift to find a small plastic car beneath it. It made her think of Rafael and Benita and the danger. “Will the Wallaces suspect you of helping us?”

Both men chuckled. “I’m just a dive master,” he replied. “I don’t even own my boat. The Wallaces are…”

“Snobs,” Justin said when he paused. “They give money to charity, but God forbid they actually deal with the people they’re helping. There are so few people in Cozumel worthy of their friendship that they bring in guests from elsewhere for their events.”

“And yet Susanna and I registered on their radar.” Justin and Trent had already been on it, of course, coming from the same background. “I’m impressed.”

“Yeah, well, I wish they’d never seen your faces or heard your names.”

His voice rang with true regret. Cate was surprised and just a little warmed by it. Not that it was his fault he’d invited sharks into a goldfish-filled pool. People in his world were wealthy, yes; self-centered and experts on the concept of entitlement, sure; but mostly they weren’t criminals. They didn’t exploit children. They didn’t fire employees by dumping them in the ocean to be the main course in a feeding frenzy.

And Justin had seen the results of that. Over the years she had inured herself to the blood-and-guts side of emergency medicine: missing limbs, disembowelments, the craters left behind by explosive bullets. He’d probably never seen a dead person who hadn’t already been embalmed and made up for a funeral. It would take a long time for that image to leave his head.

It seemed they must have driven miles before Mario gave the okay to get up again. Cate scrambled into the seat, brushed bits of crumbs and sand from her legs, then refastened her seat belt. They were in a part of town she’d seen only once in recent years, when Susanna had taken her the long way to the shelter from the airport. Signs identified the street as Avenida Rafael E. Melgar, flanked on one side by the main shopping district, on the other by incredible blue water.

Mario turned left, circled the block, then came out on another street that faced the ferry dock. The pier was broad, busy with people coming and going, and had security near its entrance. Each of the armed men was standing with another man, and the other men, like at the airport, were holding photographs.

Silently, Mario made a quick turn, back the way they’d come.

“Are the police and the army here corrupt?” Cate asked.

“No more than anywhere else,” Mario answered.

“The brothers are filthy rich.” Justin twisted to face her. “Don’t the police back home in Copper Lake pay special attention to any complaints from the much-
respected Calloway family?”

“Maybe. Probably.” She hated to admit it was true. The exploits of some of Trent’s Calloway cousins were legendary, never resulting in jail time or any punishment their parents didn’t dole out.

“Wasn’t that why you kept the Calloway name when you guys broke up?”

Cate snorted. “Do you remember my maiden name? I had no desire to go through life as Dr. Proctor.”

“Aw, then you could have specialized and been Dr. Proctor the proctologist.”

She swatted Justin’s shoulder, and he gave an exaggerated yelp.

“What is it with you? Were your fingers crossed behind your back when you took the oath to ‘first, do no harm’?” He rubbed his shoulder, then his glare faded. “Okay… So, Mario, can you get us on a boat?”

Mario snorted. “I’m the dive master. Of course I can get you on a boat. I can’t take you all the way to the coast, but if my cousin Pedro can meet us, he’ll get you to Cancun and on a flight out from there. It’ll have to be after lunch, though. The morning boats are long gone.”

He turned off the main road again, heading north, or maybe east. Cate had no idea. The notion of getting out on the ocean appealed to her, though the fact that they were doing it to try to sneak out of the country didn’t. Did the Wallaces’ influence extend to the mainland? Could they use that influence to pick up a phone and stop her and Justin from getting on a plane?

If she got back to the United States in one piece and breathing, she wasn’t leaving again.

They wound up at a tiny part-market part-diner for breakfast. She was apparently the only non-Spanish speaker in the place. Even Justin spoke fluently to the waitresses, more relatives of Mario. Frenchmen might claim theirs as the language of love, but Spanish, she decided, was the language of passion. Even ordering breakfast in it sounded exotic and fervent.

After the food arrived, Justin and Mario returned to English for her benefit. They planned and plotted, and she simply ate and nodded to everything. Mario would get them on one of the afternoon dive boats, and his cousin would meet them halfway between the coasts. Mario would provide a gear bag so they wouldn’t arouse suspicion by dragging her suitcase and Justin’s backpack on board the boat. He was also loaning them dive gear, his own and Benita’s, so they would fit in with the rest of the passengers.

As if she could fit in with a bunch of divers. Trent had tried from the beginning to get her to learn, but when did she have time? She’d worked her way through college, busted her butt through medical school and a residency. The only vacation she’d taken in twelve years had been their honeymoon—not her best trip ever, considering her new husband had cheated on her twice.

But it wasn’t her worst trip, either. This one held that honor. At least she hadn’t
known
about the cheating until years later, while she’d seen and heard and
felt
the gunshot.

The rest of the morning passed too quickly. After breakfast, they went to Mario’s house, a neat little cottage set inside cinder-block walls with decorative iron across the top. Little grass grew outside; most of the space had been converted to a lush garden, the colors so bright and intense that Cate was ashamed to compare them to her straggly little flower bed at home. Benita and Rafael were out visiting her mother, but she’d laid out the gear for Cate before she’d left.

Like the flowers outside, the dive skin was brightly, intensely colored and looked at least two sizes too small when Cate held it up. Noticing her skeptical gaze, Justin said, “They’re supposed to fit snugly. Don’t worry. They stretch.”

“I know.” She’d seen pictures of him and Trent in theirs. The garments stretched a lot and hid very little.

There were also a pair of booties, a mask, a buoyancy compensator, a snorkel, gloves and neon-yellow fins. Mario really wanted her to look the part. She’d be lucky if she could walk after she got it all on.

Far too quickly for her peace of mind, she was put to the test. After transferring all their stuff to the gear bag, a large rolling duffel, they drove to the dive shop. Justin’s motorcycle sat where they’d left it the day before. As if prodded by the sight of it, he dug the keys from his pocket and tossed them to Mario. “Take care of it for me. And hey, I like the paint job the way it is.”

Mario’s only response was a wicked grin.

Inside the dive shop, he showed them to the cramped space that served as office and storeroom. Once he left again, Justin unzipped the bag, pulled out Cate’s suitcase and opened it.

“Hey—” She bit off the protest as he removed her swimsuit. The pieces of fabric that had been perfectly adequate back home suddenly seemed so small in his big hands, especially the bottoms that he hadn’t yet seen her in.

His leer was exaggerated as he examined the panty, the front and back connected by two thin strips of fabric decorated with bows. She
knew
she should have brought a maillot instead.

“Put that on, then I’ll help you into the dive skin,” he said, laying both pieces on the battered desk.

“I can do it myself, I’m sure.”

“Okay. Then you can help me into my skin.” Grinning, he turned his back.

“I can do this in the ladies’ room.”

“Or you can do it right here where I can keep an eye on you. Figuratively speaking, of course. I would never peek.”

She stared mutinously at him, but he didn’t sneak a look, didn’t take his gaze off the large map that hung on the wall in front of him. Reluctantly she moved behind a stack of boxes that offered a semblance of privacy—from the waist down, at least—and hastily undressed.

“Do you know how many women I’ve seen naked?” he asked, his tone as normal as if they were talking about the weather.

“I’m sure more than I have, and I did an ob-gyn rotation.” She dressed in record time but still felt inadequately covered. The temptation to pull her T-shirt back on was almost too much to bear, but damned if she’d let him know he made her that uncomfortable. “Besides,” she went on with a flippancy she didn’t feel, “you haven’t seen
me
naked.”