Chase ushered Maggie along the beach to the next big resort, rather than walking along the street where they could be targeted in a drive-by shooting. Once at the resort, they asked the concierge to call a cab.

Within minutes, the cab arrived. Chase bundled Maggie inside, and they were whisked away, headed back to their resort compound several blocks away.

“What’s your plan, Mr. Flannigan?” Maggie asked as soon as the cab pulled away from the curb.

“I’m not sure yet. I want to convene with Trevor and Carson to see if they have some ideas as to how to handle a confrontation with a cartel.”

“Should we go to the American Consulate or something?” she asked. “Do they even have a consulate here in Cabo?”

He rested his back against the seat and scraped a hand over his face. “I don’t know. But I can’t see that being much help, unless we want to hole up in their building.” His eyes narrowed. “Actually, that might be a good idea. While I’m dealing with Delgado, you could be safe in the consulate, if they have one here.”

“Nope.” Maggie crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not hiding in some government building, while you’re taking one for the team, namely for me.”

Chase frowned. “He’s not after you so much as me. And I can’t have you tagging along to this event. It’s not a conga line with a bunch of drunks. These cartels mean business. They shoot first and ask questions later, if at all.”

“If you’re going,” she poked a thumb at her chest, “I’m going.”

No way was Chase taking her to the confrontation with Delgado. “If you’re there, you put me at greater risk. I can’t defend myself if I’m worried about you. They might take you hostage and use you to manipulate me.”

“Then I’ll come in disguise. I’ll be a regular tourist in the right place at the wrong time.”

Before she finished talking, he was already shaking his head. “You know they’re armed with machine guns. They’ve been known to shoot innocent tourists on the beach with those kinds of weapons.”

“I don’t care.” She lifted her chin. “I’m just as much responsible for this situation as you are.” She threw back her shoulders. “I’m going, even if I have to disguise myself as a dog and bark for treats.”

Chase pressed his lips into a thin line. He admired the fact that she felt just as compelled to confront Delgado as he did, and she was fearless in her desire to help, but he couldn’t have her anywhere near when the shit went down. If he wanted to even the odds a little, he had to come up with a plan to surprise the cartel thug. With only three SEALs, they didn’t stand a chance against even a third of the cartel members in the Cabo area. Yeah, they were highly trained combatants, but ten or twenty-to-one odds were impossible. “We’ll discuss it later,” he said, though he had no intention of backing down and allowing her to accompany them to La Casa Loca that night.

Back at the hotel, Chase hustled Maggie into the lobby and to the elevator, keeping her close to his body should Delgado or one of his men be lurking nearby, waiting for Chase and Maggie to show up. They made it into the elevator with no problems along the way.

On their floor, Maggie stepped out of the elevator beside Chase and looked both ways. “Which room? Mine or yours?”

Chase stepped past her. “Yours. I’ve texted Trevor. He said he’ll be here shortly.”

“Hopefully Gina will know where Carson is,” Maggie said.

Chase nodded. “I could use all the firepower I can get. Ask him if he has any weapons. I really don’t want to go in empty-handed, if that’s the path we choose.”

“You might be out of luck on the weapons. I’m sure neither you nor your buddy got through customs carrying pistols, automatic rifles and machine guns. And I have no idea what Carson brought across the border.”

“True. But I have the Ka-Bar knife I packed in my checked bag. And I’ll bet Trevor didn’t leave home without his.”

Maggie shook her head. “Knives against automatic weapons. I’m not feeling really good about this. You don’t have any high-powered friends in this part of Mexico, do you? Maybe a connection with an opposing cartel or something?”

Chase blew out a long breath. “Afraid not.” He wondered if they still had time to call in a favor from his new boss, Hank Patterson. “Let me get on the phone and see if I can get any assistance in this matter.”

“We don’t have a lot of time.” Maggie shot a glance at her watch. “It’s just past noon. We have less than eleven hours to midnight. We could use a miracle right about now.”

As much as he liked the sound of Maggie referring to them as we, he still had no intention of bringing her with him to La Casa Loca that night.

Chase let Maggie slide her key card over the door lock, but then set her to the side and entered first.

“Hey, it’s my room,” Maggie groused.

Chase paused with his hand on the doorknob. “How often have you breached a room that could be filled with hostiles?”

“Every time I walked into my father’s office,” she muttered.

“Did he shoot at you?” Chase asked.

“Not with bullets.” She rolled her eyes. “Okay. You’ve proven your point. You can clear the room before I enter.”

Chase gave her a curt nod and entered the suite, moving quickly and quietly from room to room until he was certain it was enemy-free.

Maggie entered. “I’m going to freshen up, and then order something for us to eat through room service.”

While Maggie was in the bathroom, Chase placed a call to his new boss in Montana.

On the first ring, Hank answered, “Patterson speaking,”

“Hank, Chase Flannigan here,” he said.

“Chase. Good to hear from you. But I thought you were on vacation. You shouldn’t be calling me until you get back.” He paused for a second. “You’re not in Montana, are you?”

“No, sir,” Chase said. “I’m in Mexico, and I’ve run into a bit of a challenge I was hoping you might be willing to give me some advice on or help with.”

“Shoot,” Hank said, his tone as authoritative as any SEAL commander Chase had served under.

He had just finished explaining the situation to Hank when he heard the water shut off in the bathroom. “Any help or advice you can give me is welcome,” he ended.

Hank whistled. “Cartels are a bad deal. Let me put a few heads together on this, and I’ll get back to you.”

“Thank you, sir. Again, any advice would be helpful.”

“You’ll hear from me in less than an hour,” Hank promised and hung up.

“Who was that?” Maggie walked out of the bedroom into the sitting area. “I hope it was room service. I’m starving.”

“Sorry, it wasn’t.” He lifted the house phone to call room service. “Pizza or sandwiches all right?”

She nodded. “Either sounds great. But if it’s pizza, make it pepperoni. I really like pepperoni, but I rarely get to choose what I like.”

He smiled. “A woman after my own heart.” Chase ordered a pepperoni pizza with double pepperoni. When he set down the phone, he studied Maggie. “Why don’t you get to choose what you like on your pizza?”

She drew in a breath and let it out. “My father gets heartburn with pepperoni, and my ex-fiancé wouldn’t eat pizza unless it was some fancy kind with baked tomatoes and spinach. All I ever wanted was a fast-food-chain pizza with pepperoni.”

“Why didn’t you ask for what you wanted?”

“I was always overruled by dominating men. When I was a teen, I’d sneak out of the house and use my father’s sports car to pick up my favorite pizza, take it to a park and eat half of it by myself. The other half, I’d hide in my backpack and carry up to my room to eat later.”

“As an adult you couldn’t get what you wanted?”

She shrugged. “Not when I was with either of them.”

He frowned. “You do like pepperoni, right? You’re not just settling on it because I like it, are you?”

She smiled. “Not at all. It’s my favorite. And if you recall, I chose pepperoni before you said what you liked.”

“That’s right.” He shook his head. “Must be some residual brain lapses.”

The handle on the door to the suite jiggled.

Chase’s attention shot to the door, and he hurried toward it.

The door burst open and Gina entered, followed by Carson, Trevor Anderson and Anderson’s pregnant wife Lana.

“Look who I found.” Gina dropped her purse on one of the sofas and flopped down beside it. “Seems SEALs are like magnets. They gravitate toward each other. Carson spotted Trevor from across the lobby.”

“Hey, Chase.” Trevor grinned, guiding his wife to the other end of the sofa. “Gina tells me you’ve made an enemy.”

“Glad to see Lana made the flight safely,” Chase said. “And yes, I’ve acquired an enemy. I could use some help, but I’m not sure how involved I want you to be. You have a baby on the way. Now is not a good time for you to waltz into a cartel rumble.”

Trevor’s eyebrows shot up. “True, but then, I can’t let you go in by yourself,” Trevor said. “Cartel trouble, huh? Why don’t you skip it altogether?”

“Because I can’t trust that Raul Delgado will leave Maggie alone.”

Trevor smiled and crossed the room to Maggie. “Pardon my friend’s rudeness.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Trevor Anderson.” He shook Maggie’s hand and turned toward his wife. “And this is my beautiful wife, Lana.”

Maggie smiled at Lana. “Nice to meet you.”

“Did you say Raul Delgado?” Carson stood behind the couch, his hands resting on Gina’s shoulders. “As in the Jalisco cartel’s leader, Raul Delgado?”

Chase nodded, his lips forming a tight line. “The one and only.”

Carson whistled. “I’ve been here long enough to know you don’t piss off anyone in the Jalisco cartel.”

“Yeah, well, he was hitting on my wife,” Chase said.

“Wife?” Trevor frowned. “What wife?”

“You just met her.” Chase’s lips twisted in a wry smile. “Apparently, I went on a bender last night, danced the salsa with this woman, closed down one bar and formed a conga line that stretched all the way down the beach to a twenty-four-hour wedding chapel where we tied the knot, and then ended up in La Casa Loca where I crossed Raul Delgado.”

Trevor’s eyes widened with Chase’s explanation. “Holy shit, man. All that in one night?” He shook his head. “I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I? What are you going to do when I’m not around to bail you out of jail or trouble?”

Chase frowned. “Really, I don’t want you to bail me out of this one. I’m afraid it’s more than you or I can handle.”

Carson raised a hand. “You can count me in, if it helps. I’ve been bored since I got here. I could use a little action.”

“Thanks, but even three of us can’t go up against an entire cartel.” Chase paced the floor, head down, thinking.

“One of my specialties in the SEALs was explosives. I can make things go boom with practically nothing,” Carson offered. “You don’t meet him until midnight, do you?”

Chase nodded. “Midnight. But we’d have to sneak in, plant the explosives and hope we didn’t hurt anyone else. He’s asked to meet behind La Casa Loca. That’s a pretty popular tourist spot. We could create a lot of collateral damage if we go around blowing up shit.”

“Not to mention, if you kill civilians and tourists,” Gina piped in, “the Mexican government would lock you up and throw away the key.”

“Or turn you over to the cartel,” Carson said. “They don’t like dealing with them anymore than we do. Half the time, they pay them to leave folks alone.”

Chase met Maggie’s gaze. “Like the bartender said. He pays the cartel to leave him alone. Without weapons, we don’t stand a chance. From what I’ve heard, the cartel has everything from semi-automatic rifles to submachine guns. They aren’t afraid to employ them in crowded tourist areas, either.”

“Cabo is dependent on tourism, as are lots of other places in Mexico,” Carson said. “They’ve lost a lot of business and millions of tourism dollars due to cartel shootings, kidnappings and hangings.”

“You’d think the government would clean up their cartels before they go broke,” Lana said.

Carson laughed. “Unfortunately, the men in charge of the government can be as corrupt as the cartels. And if they don’t go along with the thugs, they’re killed.”

“Why did we come here for our delayed honeymoon?” Lana pushed to her feet, her brow furrowed. “Should we catch the next flight home to Montana?”

Trevor lifted her hand to his lips. “If you want to go home, I’ll get us on the next plane out.”

She frowned. “I didn’t fly all the way to Mexico to turn around and fly home the next day. I want to put my swollen feet in the sand and swim in the ocean.” She swept a hand across her small baby bump. “But I don’t want to put our baby at risk.”

“I’m calling now,” Trevor pulled his phone out of his pocket.

Lana covered his hand with hers. “No,” she said. “I refuse to believe it’s as bad as all that. Tonight’s the deadline. Let’s wait and see what happens.”

“If we stay, I’m going to help out my buddy,” Trevor said, “once we come up with a plan that doesn’t involve getting killed.” He shot a glance toward Chase. “You do have a plan, don’t you?”

Chase shook his head. “Unless you have a stash of weapons in your suitcase, I’m fresh out of ideas.”

Carson raised a hand. “I might know where someone, who will remain unnamed, might have a stash of illegally acquired weapons.”

“Yeah?” Chase looked up, hopefully. “Like what?”

“A couple of AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, one HK MP7 submachine gun, a P226 pistol, some C-4 explosives and remote detonators, to name a few.”

Chase and Trevor’s eyes rounded.

“Holy crap. Sounds like we might be in business,” Chase said.

Maggie shook her head. “Just remember, even if you have weapons and ammunition, there are only the three of you who know how to use them. When Delgado shows up, he’s not coming by himself.”

Carson cracked his knuckles. “We can handle a few more.”

“How about a thirty or forty more?” Maggie said.

“And remember, you’re in a tourist town,” Lana said. “When the bullets start flying, there will be civilian casualties.”

“Lots of bullets means lots more injured.” Gina raised her hands. “Just sayin’.”

Chase crossed his arms over his chest, a frown pulling his brow low. “The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that I need to go alone and unarmed.”

“Or, not at all.” Maggie crossed to stand in front of him. “You don’t stand a chance of coming out of it alive.”

He curved a hand around the back of her neck. “Would you miss me if I didn’t come back?”

She narrowed her eyes. “You haven’t even given me a chance to secure a life insurance policy on my new husband. I can’t let you die now.”

His mouth curved. “And here I thought you might be remembering why you married me last night.”

“Actually, I do remember,” she whispered.

“Yeah?” He tipped her face up to his, ready to kiss her when she finally admitted she loved making love to him.

Her lips twitched on the corners. “I did it to piss off my father.”

Gina laughed out loud. “That’s rich. Chase, you don’t know her father. I fully expected him to be here by now to drag her ass back to the States, where he’d stand behind her ex-fiancé with a shotgun or a lawyer to see that wedding through.”

Chase frowned. “Is that true? You married me to piss off your father?”

She stepped away, lifting her chin. “Why else would I marry a stranger I barely knew?”

Was that it? Had Maggie married him to get back at her father? A hard knot settled in Chase’s gut. Deep down, he’d hoped she’d married him because she might have fallen in love with him.

Who was he kidding? Only fools fell in love at first sight. Fools like him.