Elizabeth Lowell - The Wrong Hostage

Her eyelids lowered halfway as she slid her palm down his hard length. She didn’t try to conceal the hunger shivering through her.

“The only difference between now and then,” he said against her mouth, “is that I’m smart enough not to let you slip through my fingers again. This time I’m going to see where it goes.”

Grace took his kiss and gave it back to him with interest, until both of them were breathing raggedly and struggling to get closer still. Then she tore her mouth away.

“Is this what you want?” she asked.

“You know it is.”

“Is it all you want?”

He smiled almost sadly, kissed her eyelids, tasted the faint salt of tears she hadn’t shed. “No. I want the rest of the truth. Sixteen years ago I believed you set me up. It was the only thing that made sense, until after the trial, when I was quietly told the setup came from my side of the street.”

She leaned her forehead against his chin. “I know. Now.”

“My fault,” he said, rocking her slowly in his arms. “I went crazy when they put the cuffs on me. I had a lot shorter fuse back then. Prison taught me to keep a lid on it.”

She almost laughed wildly. She really hoped he’d learned, because when she told him about Lane…

If she told him about Lane.

When she told him about Lane.

This gentle, tough, sexy son of a bitch was right-they couldn’t face Hector when there was a time bomb ticking between them.

“Amada, I don’t know what you want from me,” Faroe whispered into her hair.

She lifted her head and looked at him. He saw clarity and fear, sadness and determination.

“I want to make love with you,” she said. “I want to forget for just a little while what year it is, what hour. Then no more secrets. But you have to promise me one thing now.”

“Name it.”

“No matter what the secret is, you won’t walk away and leave Lane in Hector’s hands.”

“I can’t think of anything you could say that would make me do that.”

Her smile slipped and turned upside down. “I can. Your word?”

“Yes.”

Grace didn’t wait for Faroe to change his mind. She undid his jeans and slipped a hand inside, burrowing and rubbing until she freed him from his clothing.

And all the while she kissed him the way she wanted him, hard and deep and hot. Now.

“God,” he said hoarsely.

After that he saved his breath for what they both wanted. He pulled a condom out of his jeans, unwrapped it, and sheathed himself. Then he lifted one of her legs around his waist. She made a wild, hungry sound and climbed him until she could feel his erection sliding close to home. A wall slapped against her back. She welcomed it because it forced her closer to him.

She came when he entered her, came again as he drove into her to find his own fierce climax, came a third time while he leaned against her and tried to breathe past the wet fist squeezing him, pleasuring them. She gave a final shudder, tried to speak, couldn’t. Her legs slid bonelessly from him. She would have kept on going to the floor if he hadn’t been holding her between himself and the wall.

He laughed as he felt his own strength returning, but the bed was still too far away. He let them slide down the wall onto the thick rug, and began moving inside her again.

Her eyes opened. They were dark, dazed by spent passion and the new need building in her.

In him.

“Joe?”

“Like I said, amada. For some things, once just isn’t enough.”

TIJUANA

SUNDAY EVENING

GRACE LAY SPRAWLED ACROSS Faroe’s chest, listening to the faint ticking of the old-fashioned analog clock on the bedside table. Sultry wind billowed the heavy curtains. The sound of the restless ocean slid between the insistent honking of vehicles looking for space where there wasn’t any.

Like her, looking for time when there wasn’t any.

“Do you remember when we took one look at each other and just, well, dove in?” Grace asked softly.

“I remember the smell of the match you used to light a cigarette afterward.”

“It was a joint. I was tired of being a good girl.”

“Yeah, I remember that too.” Faroe smiled. “I should have busted your naked ass right there. Maybe we’d have had a better chance of making it stick if we both were convicted felons.”

She almost laughed, almost cried, and wished she could make time run backward.

“One first dance, one last dance,” she said in a low voice. “I guess that’s more than most people get.”

He wanted to ask what that meant, but didn’t. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

She pushed away from the shelter of his arm around her shoulders. Then she sat up and looked at him, memorizing the moment and the man, savoring the taste of him in her mouth and the scent of him sliding into her with every breath.

In the faint light from the city, Faroe saw the fullness of Grace’s naked body. He reached out to trace the line of her collarbone, then the curve of a breast. It wasn’t a demanding touch. He simply enjoyed feeling the heat and weight of her on his palm, the difference between male and female.

“What happened after they hauled you away?” she asked softly.

He rose to one elbow, caught a loose strand of her hair, and pushed it aside so that he could see her eyes, her expression.

Dark, withdrawing, waiting to speak the words she was so afraid of giving him.

“That was a long time ago,” he said. “Do you really want to live through it again?”

“Want to? No. But we need to. We can’t understand how we got here tonight unless we understand where we were sixteen years ago. I was a girl whose IQ and drive to get out of the barrio fast-tracked me through every school I ever went to. I passed the bar exam when most twenty-one-year-olds were planning how many ways there were to get drunk, high, and laid.”

“A lot of them still are doing the same thing.”

“Well, one day I looked around and decided I wanted to be like they were. So I told my boyfriend that I needed space. Not a whole lot. Just a week. I didn’t want to be fast-tracked into marriage the same way I’d gone through my childhood.”

“Another thing we have in common,” Faroe said. “An unusual childhood. My father was almost old enough to be my grandfather. Not that he was frail. Far from it. He was just a little…crazy. Too much weed, maybe.”

Faroe traced a fingertip around Grace’s shadowy smile.

“Tell me more,” she said. “You never talked about yourself.”

“Neither did you.”

“I guess we didn’t talk much the first time, did we?”

He smiled and kissed the hand that was stroking his cheek. “We were too young and too hot to know any better.”

“We’re older now. Talk to me.”

“When other kids played baseball, my father took me out in the desert and taught me about tracking, shooting, hiking, camping, seasons of rain and sun and dust and hail, bandits and wetbacks, and never really trusting anybody but yourself.”

“Why was he such a loner?” she asked.

“When he was young, he ran drugs. Maybe he still did when he was older. I never asked, but I don’t think so. He hated what marijuana had become, the change from a playful girl to a ball-busting bitch running a billion-dollar business. He grew his own, smoked it, and watched the seasons change.”

“Your mother?”

“Left him shortly after I was born. Left me, too, I guess. I don’t remember. None of the women after her stayed long. It was just Dad and me.”

“No wonder you assumed I’d set you up for a fall,” Grace said. “Women have been disappointing you all your life.”

Faroe shrugged. “I’m not the only kid who was ever dropped on a doorstep. Things happen. You survive and learn and walk on.”

“And after they dragged you off to prison?” she asked. “What happened then?”

He swung his legs off the bed and sat up, turning so that he could face her. “I spent a night in the lockup. The Department of Justice wanted to make an example of me, show how tough they were on civil rights violators. The next day a judge released me on my own recognizance. You weren’t around when I went back to my apartment.”

“You didn’t want me anymore. You made it clear in the kind of gutter Spanish I hadn’t heard since I left Santa Ana.”

He would have smiled, but the memory was too painful. “You didn’t want to be around me. Before my arrest, I believed in the DEA the same way you did in the law. Complete, unquestioning faith. The DEA was the family I never had. After the arrest…”

“You felt betrayed and shaken and furious, like I did when I realized that the law I loved so much couldn’t save the son I loved more than anything else.”

“Yeah.” Faroe’s smile was a cold curve of light. “Guess I was really young for my age.”

“Belief isn’t a bad thing.”

He shrugged.

Wind sighed through the room, smelling of past and present, ocean and badly tuned engines.

“What did you do after the arrest?” she asked. “Did they offer a plea bargain?”

“Don’t they always?”

“Six months in prison isn’t much of a bargain,” she said. “I’ve seen drug dealers and rapists get off with less.”

“Oh, the U.S. Attorney offered better than six months.”

“What happened?”

“A month after the arrest, I told the U.S. Attorney to take his plea bargain and shove it. I pled guilty to a single count because it was the quickest way to get the mess in my rearview mirror.”

She waited, barely breathing.

“I did my six months in the federal day-care camp,” Faroe said neutrally, “came out the front gate, and didn’t look back. There was nothing back there I wanted.” He touched her cheek. “At least, that’s what I told myself. I signed up with St. Kilda Consulting and saw every part of the world that had shadows.”

“Maybe you should have looked back. Did you ever think of that?”

He stood up and went to the window. She could see him outlined against the night sky, echoes of past anger and pride in his posture.

“Did you look back?” he asked softly.

Silence. A long, ragged sigh.

“No,” she said in a low voice. “You made me out of control, wild, desperate for things a good girl couldn’t even imagine.”

“You could, and did. I wasn’t alone in that bed.”

“That’s what really scared me. When I saw you hauled off in handcuffs, reality came crashing in.”

“Which reality?”

“I was a young woman whose amazing career was the result of years of clawing and striving and sacrifice-my own, my dead parents’, my dead grandmother’s. All of those lives had been devoted to one thing and only one thing: giving me what was needed so that I could leave the violence of the gutter behind.” Her hands clenched and a tear left a gleaming trail down one cheek.

“Go on,” he said.

“There’s nowhere to go but where I did. Was I supposed to turn my back on three generations of sacrifice because I’d met an outlaw who gave me the best sex of my life?”

“That’s what really confused me,” he said.

“What?”

“You shouldn’t have been in my bed, but there you were. If you were working for the opposition, it made sense.”

“Only to you,” she shot back. “It made no sense at all to me. When they were dragging you off, you looked right into the lens of a television camera with such rage that the cameraman nearly fell down running away. Even with your hands cuffed behind your back, you scared him. And me. I ran and never looked back. Except…”

“Except?”

“You say I haunted you.”

“You did.”

“It went both ways. At night I’d dream and I’d wake up abandoned, crying. If Ted was there, I’d just say it was old nightmares left over from the day I walked in and found my family murdered. It was halfway true.”

“Only half?”

“Maybe less,” she whispered. “But you hated me. I could no more have you than I could bring my family back to life. Love was a bait-and-switch game, and I wasn’t going to play it anymore. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t survive.”

Faroe caught the second tear before it reached her cheekbone.

“I went back to Ted, told him I didn’t need any more space. A week later he hustled me to a JP. The week after that, I missed my period.”

Faroe tried to breathe, tried to speak, but there was a fist in his throat he couldn’t get around.

“Since birth control pills made me hurl,” Grace said evenly, “and Ted was careless with condoms, I figured there was a much better chance that he was the father than you. And once I held Lane, it didn’t matter. I took one look at his wrinkled face and tiny fists, and I fell hopelessly in love.”