In the Enemy's Arms (7 page)

“Okay,” she agreed. “Let’s say Trent has transformed into Saint Trent of La Casa para Nuestras Hijas.”

Justin’s jaw tightened at her supposition, but she didn’t let it stop her. His jaw had tightened, his brow had furrowed or his eyes had gone hard every time she’d ever seen him. It was part of the animosity that he usually managed to cover with sarcasm, faked good humor or mocking.

“What about you? What do you
do?
”

“I—” He stopped abruptly, and his expression turned totally blank. It wasn’t as if he suddenly realized he had nothing to say, but as if he’d put up a wall instead. As if he had nothing he wanted to say to
her.

The expression remained a moment before shifting into something sly, almost good-natured but not, almost relaxed but not. He moved into a more comfortable position, looking amazingly lazy and loose and, yes, damn it, handsome. “Let’s see, in the past few years I’ve dived the ten best spots in the world. I trekked through the rain forest in southeast Asia and traveled the Amazon by canoe from the headwaters to the Atlantic. I spent last Christmas in Moscow and my birthday in the Gobi Desert. I hiked across Central America and had only a few run-ins with angry men with guns.” His smile was the smuggest she could imagine. “Who knew money speaks every language?”

She stared at him, her back teeth hurting, but it wasn’t the usual urge to smack the grin off his face. She’d already shoved him a couple times today and pinched him in the car. She, who never lost her temper, never lost control, who was so many years past pinching as a weapon, had pinched him. And she hadn’t regretted it, either.

No, the pain in her back teeth wasn’t as bad as normal because something seemed…off. Phony. The lazy, loose-limbed look. The recitation of his adventures. The smile. Maybe what he was saying was the truth, but not the whole truth. Maybe it was the only truth he wanted to share with her. Maybe…

He was a jerk and always had been to her.
Start the game the way you intend to play,
her grandfather the high-school football coach used to say, and Justin had started their association being a jerk. But if his dive-shop friend’s behavior was anything to judge by, he didn’t share her opinion. Neither did Benita or her little boy. She’d invited him to dinner—
again,
she’d said—and he’d agreed without hesitation.

Which proved what? That Cate was on his list of people who didn’t deserve common courtesy?

She didn’t like having people dislike her, especially based on superficialities. He’d taken one look at her the night they’d met and recognized that she wasn’t like them. She didn’t have money; she’d been wearing the uniform for the waitressing job that helped pay her tuition. She hadn’t been sophisticated or witty, hadn’t known a damn thing about diving or clothing designers or sports or booze. He’d dismissed her as unworthy two minutes after meeting her and had emphasized it at every subsequent meeting.

And she’d borne a hell of a lot of resentment toward him. Not just for trying to dissuade Trent from marrying her. Not for telling her the night before the wedding that she wasn’t good enough for Trent. Not for dragging Trent off on a new adventure every time they were starting to settle in together.

She’d resented him because he’d made her feel
less.

And judging by the knot in her stomach, she still did.

She hesitated to raise her hand to brush off Justin’s list of vacations for fear it would tremble, but it didn’t. “Okay, Trent truly does help Susanna run the shelter, and you do things that cost a lot of money and benefit you and the travel industry. Let’s get back to the Wallace brothers. What do they have to do with Trent and Susanna?”

For a moment Justin looked as if he were wishing for the decent beer or fine tequila, too. He might even be throwing in a wish that he’d left her at La Casa for the men to do with what they would.

Then he sighed. “When Susanna started the shelter, she needed funding. The Wallaces give a ton of money to charity. Since they have offices here in Cozumel, I suggested they donate to La Casa. Give back to the community, you know. And they did.”

“Why didn’t you? Or Trent?”

His blue eyes darkened. “I don’t know what Trent does with his money, and it’s none of your business what I do with mine, unless you want to share your financials, too.”

She snorted. Rich people had financials; she had a checking account and a savings account. He had investments; she had a retirement account. He had revenue; she got a paycheck.

And he was right that it was none of her business. She had better manners than that. She never pried into people’s private business, except on the job, where knowing what really happened to a patient could mean the difference between living and dying. She did her best to minimize the risks of anybody dying in her E.R.

Besides, she knew how Justin spent his fortune: fun, fun and more fun.

“The Wallaces invest. They get a tax write-off. The shelter gets badly needed money. The partnership benefits everyone, and they’re all happy…for a while. What happened to send you and Susanna into their office to take—” deliberately she rephrased “—to steal files from their computer?”

He ran his fingers through his hair, leaving a few blond strands standing on end. It gave him a look of boyishness that was seriously at odds with the definitely-not-a-boy body.

Not that she was noticing for any reason beyond a doctor’s appreciation of anatomical perfection.

“After the first year or so went so well, the Wallaces decided to expand their involvement. They started an adoption agency here in Coz, working with a few of La Casa’s sister shelters on the mainland, but primarily with La Casa
.
They did placements solely with American families, and they placed a lot of kids. Susanna was thrilled. She thought their success rate was so high because of all their contacts—family, friends, business.”

The knot returned to Cate’s stomach. Whatever was going on at the shelter, she’d kept it limited in her mind to Trent and Susanna. She hadn’t let the thought that the girls might be involved even peek into her consciousness. There were so many ways to take advantage of children, of young girls with no families, who could disappear into the system so easily.

Justin’s voice took on a darker tone, but his features stayed the same. Except for his eyes. The usual humor, charm—directed at others, never her—or irritation was gone, replaced by solid chunks of ice-blue anger. “A while back, six, maybe eight months ago, some women from Susanna’s church in Idaho volunteered at the shelter. One of them really fell for a girl there, an eight-year-old named Luisa. The woman went home, talked to her husband, her pastor, the rest of her family, and they decided to start the adoption process.

“A few months later, the agency told Susanna Luisa’s adoption had gone through. They gave her a big going-away party at La Casa, then kissed her goodbye the next morning and handed her over to the social worker who was going to escort her to her new family. Susanna waited a few weeks, then she called the woman to find out how Luisa was getting along, and the woman told her—”

Breaking off, Justin rose from the bed and paced the length of the room before returning and combing his hair again. Cate was seriously tempted to plug her fingers in her ears. She didn’t want to hear what came next. But she’d heard a lot of things on the job that she didn’t want to know. She kept her hands at her sides and waited.

“The woman said there must be some mistake. She and her husband had been rejected by the agency. They’d thought with the enthusiastic recommendation Susanna had given, it would be a sure thing. It broke her heart when they were turned down.”

How hard had that been? Falling in love with a child who needed you, in whose life you could make a real difference, and being told you weren’t good enough? Cate wasn’t particularly maternal—she got her mothering out at work—but it would have broken her heart. “So Susanna spoke to the agency and they said…”

“The couple didn’t qualify and Luisa had been placed in another home. Naturally, they couldn’t give out any other information. Privacy issues, you know.” He practically snarled the last words.

“Isn’t it possible the agency did place Luisa in a good home?”

He shot her a sharp look. “You think we haven’t hoped for that? Nearly two dozen kids had been placed through that agency. Two dozen girls we thought were happy and healthy and finally had a good home of their own forever.”

Us. We.
Those didn’t sound like the word choices of a man who only got involved after the fact. Just how connected was he? Not to Trent, not to Susanna, but to La Casa itself? More than she’d given him credit for?

She would hate to have been that wrong about him. It would make her feel petty and judgmental, even though he’d given her plenty of reasons to judge him.

Deliberately, she refocused. “I’m guessing this nagged at Susanna’s conscience until she had to know for sure where Luisa was.”

He nodded and dropped onto the other bed, but he didn’t sprawl back this time. Instead he sat directly in front of her, leaning forward, elbows resting on his thighs. Close enough that she could smell his cologne and see the faint variations of blue in his eyes. Close enough that she felt the need to sit back. She resisted. Just barely.

“She asked Joseph Wallace why the woman from Idaho was turned down, and he said he would find out and let her know. She asked a couple more times, and he brushed her off, saying he’d get back to her soon on that. So a week ago, when she had her regular monthly meeting with him, I flew down from Alabama. She went to the meeting early, sneaked into an empty office and copied all the files relating to the adoption agency and the shelter onto a flash drive. She passed it to me in the stairwell, then I headed straight back to the airport while she kept the appointment. We figured if they suspected anything at the time, they could search her or La Casa and wouldn’t find anything. And any employees who might see me were a lot less likely to recognize me than Trent or someone from the shelter.”

The idea of Susanna stealing anything still boggled Cate’s mind. But if it was the only way she knew to prove that something was wrong, or to find out for sure what had happened to that little girl…

“Things seemed okay until yesterday. Trent went to pick up some donations from the Wallace Foundation, and he didn’t come back. Most of the staff was already on vacation. Susanna called me, then sent the local employees away and had them take the remaining girls with them. She went looking for Trent, and she didn’t come back, either.” He exhaled and his shoulders rounded, as if the telling had worn him out.

“What was on the files?”

“Don’t know yet. They were encrypted. One of my buddies back home is working on them.”

Encrypted files, missing friends, young girls disappearing into the confidential control of a questionable adoption agency. And, oh, yeah, gunshots, a phoned-in threat and a break-in at Justin’s house. Cold seeped into her bones, spreading until it made her shiver. She hugged her arms across her middle to fight the chill, but it didn’t help.

She must have looked about as freaked out as she felt because, abruptly, Justin laid his hand on her knee, and he gave the closest to a charming smile she’d ever gotten from him. “Hey, don’t worry. Remember you used to say Trent had the luck of the devil? He still does. He’ll get out of this, and Susanna, too.”

“When I said he had the luck of the devil, I was actually referring to you,” she grumbled.

He grinned. “I know.”

She tried very hard to not notice how long his fingers were, or that the tips were callused against her skin. He might live a life of luxury, but he didn’t pamper himself. He’d earned every one of those calluses, and the muscles, with hard work. Too bad he didn’t apply himself to something like a job or, just to be totally frivolous, making the world a better place, but at least he was dedicated to
something.

As the moment of silence dragged out, she kept staring at his hand, its warmth slowly thawing the cold underneath. He looked relatively calm and reasonably assured, but she couldn’t help but call to mind a take on a Kipling quote:
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…it’s obvious you don’t understand the situation.

For Trent’s and Susanna’s sakes—hell, for her own sake—she prayed Justin did understand.

Chapter 4

“T
ell me again why we aren’t calling anyone.”

Justin withdrew his hand—had she realized they’d touched more in a few hours than in thirteen years?—and hefted the backpack between his feet, unzipping it. “Because the bad guys with the guns and the hostages said not to or they would kill us all.”

“So far you’ve talked about kidnapping and—” Cate breathed, but sounded fairly normal when she went on “—black-market adoptions at best, child trafficking at worst. Do you believe the brothers are capable of murder?”

“I do,” he said flatly, as he dug through the clothes he’d stuffed into the bag to get to the cell phone charger near the bottom. He plugged it into the same outlet as the bedside lamp. The last thing he wanted—besides being involved in this mess—with Cate—was to let his cell go dead.

Just thinking the word
murder
made him wince.

“That’s a big step up.”

He gave her a cynical glance. “Child trafficking compared to murder? They seem equally disgusting to me.”

She nodded. Her little town might not be a bed of criminal activity, but it had some, and as an E.R. doctor, she must have seen her share of the violence humans could commit against other humans. “Isn’t it fairly common for kidnappers to make threats they don’t carry out?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask your cop friends about that.” Instantly he wished he could recall the words. No need for her to know that Trent had kept him updated on what was going on Cate’s life; even less need to let her know that he’d paid attention.

She didn’t seem to notice, but gazed at the drape-covered window and mused, “Making threats seems to me to be primarily a scare tactic to get people to do what you want. Actually carrying through on them—”