Chapter 10
The café on the corner of 5th and Grant was little more than a snack bar. They’d already tried three other restaurants. Miami, it seemed, was serious about key lime pie, but they hadn’t spent more than five minutes at any one establishment.
Jet lag, or maybe just your garden-variety fatigue, was beginning to set in. Shep glanced at Carlotta. Her shoulders had begun to lose their starch, her face its stony determination. But he wouldn’t be sympathetic. Not a hardass like him.
“This looks like a popular spot,” he said. Twenty feet away, a girl in appropriately named shorts pressed her length against a half-naked boy, kissing him with enough enthusiasm to suck the lungs from his chest.
Carlotta scowled at the couple. “My sister did not come here for the pleasure.” The starch was back in her spine, with maybe a thin whip of whalebone added.
“If ya say so,” Shep said and didn’t allow the grin that threatened to appear at her snooty tone.
“I do. She would not disgrace her family so.”
The waitress had left moments before on her quest for yet another slice of pie.
“So you’re stickin’ with the idea that she was taken against her will.”
“Of course.”
“By who?”
“Whom?” she corrected.
For a second, he wondered how he had sunk so low as to be whommed by a haughty Colombian whose first language was not even English. But the sight of her sumptuous curves shrink-wrapped in slinky scarlet reminded him. Still, he raised a brow and tried to summon a bit more composure than the half a dozen men who had recently made fools of themselves on her behalf.
Carlotta glanced at the tablecloth, looking chagrinned and admitted, “I do not know who took her.”
He did. He knew in his gut-shot belly and was determined to tell her. Make her aware that Santiago still held a grudge, that the drug-running bastard had concocted this elaborate plan to get revenge. That she wasn’t fooling him. That he wasn’t a complete idiot. That... But in that moment, he realized she was crying.
“Hey,” he said, but even that bit of empathetic genius failed to stem the tears. She put a hand over her face, hiding her eyes. He tried to remain unmoved. Tried to remember the litany he had just been chanting in his mind. About how she wasn’t fooling him. How he wasn’t a complete moron. But God Almighty, it was entirely possible that he actually was. And even more probable that a glacier wouldn’t remain unmoved.
“Hey,” he said again, building on his social acumen.
She turned her face away.
He gritted his teeth, reminding himself that he was no pushover. No patsy. No bleeding heart dupe. But the ache in his left biceps strongly suggested otherwise. “It’s gonna be alright.”
She shook her head. Face scrunched, makeup smeared, she looked lost and miserable. Against all probability, she also looked even more beautiful than she had when she first stepped through Eddy’s office door.
In the end, there was nothing he could do but crouch beside her chair, whisper something nonsensical, and pull her gently into his arms where she sobbed quietly. It was either that or be attacked by the bevy of men who were watching with varying degrees of concern and testosterone-driven outrage.
“It’ll be alright,” Shep murmured again.
“How? What am I going to…?” Her voice cracked beneath the weight of her emotions. “I have broken my vow to care for her.”
He glanced over her head. The angry males were nudging closer as if moved by some indefinable element they could neither understand nor control.
And hell, what was he supposed to do now? Tell them it was all bullshit? That she was a consummate actress and he the hapless boob just along for the ride? Because even though he knew it to be the truth, it didn’t feel that way. It felt real and immediate and…intimate.
“We’ll find her,” he breathed and allowed himself to run one almost steady hand down the length of her feather-soft hair.
“How? I cannot sample all the pie in America.”
He found her chin, lifted her face toward his. It was piteously lovely. “If she’s here, we’ll find her,” he promised.
She opened her mouth, those scarlet lips, maybe to protest, but he brushed a thumb across the plump surface, shushing her.
“We’ll take another look at that postcard. If she’s half as smart as ya say, all we have to do is follow the clues. Right?”
Perhaps she planned to protest again. Instead, she nodded.
“But first, we gotta get some real food. And sleep,” he added.
“There is no time,” she protested. “We must—“
“We have to refuel, Lotta. Clear our heads. Take time to think things through.”
She acquiesced silently, shoulders slumping as she rose to her feet. He slipped his arm around her waist and could almost, but not quite, resist the sliver of possessive pride that sliced through him.