Dateline: Kydd and Rios (18 page)

“You’ve given me no choice,” Cardena said. “I will take Nikki home.”

“How long will it take?”

“I have connections. We can be in Miami by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Miami?” Josh asked in a wary tone.

“Don’t worry,
Señor
Rios. Not everyone in Miami deals in contraband. My connections are old and trusted family friends. She will come to no harm under my care.”

“If I didn’t believe you, you’d be showing up in Sulaco empty-handed instead of taking off for Florida.” He dismissed Cardena and turned to Nikki. He thought about kissing her good-bye, then decided against anything as dangerous as a kiss. He thought about touching her face, her hair, then thought he’d better not. So he stood there, looking down at her, struggling with the words that wouldn’t come. “Are you going to your aunt’s in Colorado?” he finally asked.

“I think she’s the only one in the family who’ll have me.” Nikki attempted a smile.

“You’re a celebrity. You’ll have them all eating out of your hand,” he assured her with a weak smile of his own.

“I don’t know, Josh. I left a long time ago. I was only fifteen the last time I saw my aunt.” Her glance strayed to the toes of her tennis shoes. She hated saying good-bye, hated leaving him. “Maybe I’ll go to Washington. David can put me up until I get reassigned. That is, if he doesn’t fire me. I promised him I’d stay out of trouble . . . and now I’m going to miss out on the biggest story in San Simeon.” Her gaze slowly rose to his, and she swore softly. “Dammit, Josh. This is practically blackmail, making me leave now.”

“Priorities, Nikki, not blackmail.”

“You’re going to get a week’s worth of front-page exclusives out of this.”

“And you’re going to get your mother.”

“David will kill me.”

“Only if Travinas doesn’t get to you first.”

The sobering fact hit home with the force of truth. She’d rattled the mad dog’s chain, and the master wouldn’t be too far behind. He’d used her, never intending to fulfill his end of their bargain. The only chance her mother had was in Delgado’s victory, and Delgado needed Josh.

“I believe these belong to you.” Cardena returned to them, carrying her duffel and Josh’s satchel. She hadn’t realized he’d left. “My men are ready. You will go with Miguel,
Señor
Rios. He’ll take you to Delgado. And you, senorita, you will come with me back to the ranch. We’ll take my plane into Costa Rica. From there I’ll arrange our entry into the United States.” He looked at Josh. “I’ll contact you from Costa Rica, if my plans meet with your approval.”

“Bring her passport back with you from Miami.”

“Josh!” she gasped. He was clipping her wings but good.

“Sorry, Nikki.” He lifted the satchel strap over his head and angled it across his chest. His hand automatically slipped inside the front pocket for a cheroot.

“We must go,
señorita
.” Cardena gestured toward the jeep pulling to a stop in the middle of the compound. “
Adiós
, señor
.”

“
Adiós
.” Josh jammed the cheroot in his mouth and struck a match off his pants.

Cardena touched her arm, silently telling her it was time to go. She shook him off, keeping her gaze fixed on Josh. “Promise me . . . promise me you’ll bring my mother to Colorado. Boulder, Colorado.”

“I remember.” He inhaled deeply, drawing the smoke into his mouth.

“Promise me, Josh,” she insisted.

He dropped the match and removed the cheroot from between his teeth. Troubled blue eyes met hers through a cloud of slowly exhaled smoke. She read many things in his shadowed gaze, none of which she wanted to believe. The sadness she’d only guessed at before was undeniable now, the weariness even more evident.

“Promise me you’ll come.” This wasn’t going to be their last good-bye. She wouldn’t allow it.

“I’ll come.” He sucked again on the cheroot and blew another cloud into the air. “I promise.”

He’d lied.

Nikki tipped her sunglasses down on her nose and checked the hand-drawn street map provided to her, under duress, by a reporter at the
Times
. He’d sworn her to secrecy on his Pulitzer, promising to disavow ever having seen her should she confess where she’d gotten the map to Josh’s Texas hideaway. The fishing was too good, he’d said, to risk not getting invited back.

Fishing. Nikki couldn’t believe it. She’d been worrying herself sick over him for the past month, and he’d been off fishing the coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

And this neighborhood. She didn’t believe it either. Stately oaks, old clapboard houses set back from the street, wide lawns, flowering bushes lining the gravel driveways. The place had an aura of genteel but homey shabbiness. She’d expected something else, something more along the lines of a modern neighborhood of glassy houses and artful landscapes, not this last bastion of middle America, not for Joshua Rios.

As if on cue, a young woman rounded the corner of one of the houses, garden basket and clippers in hand, a wide-brimmed hat shielding her face from the sun, and a toddler in tow. Nikki checked the house numbers. Josh’s next-door neighbors.

Taking her foot off the brake, she eased her car down the street and pulled into his driveway. Blue hydrangeas followed the dirt and gravel lane around to the back of the white house. A garage with wide barn doors stood on the edge of the lot. The driveway continued to a gate leading to the alley. Nikki stopped the car next to the screened back porch and wished she’d called first. He’d obviously come to this backwater town to disappear for a while. Company, especially hers, might be the last thing he wanted showing up on his doorstep.

But she’d given him a month. A month she’d spent nursing and nurturing her mother back to health. He’d fulfilled that end of the bargain. He’d gotten her mother out of San Simeon. He’d helped Delgado destroy Travinas. He’d gotten his week of front-page exclusives for the
Times
.

David still wasn’t speaking to her, although he had taken time to dictate her “resignation” letter. She’d signed without a fight. She was tired of fighting.

She got out of the car and shook out her white cotton skirt. Then she reached back into the car for her twenty-nine-cent flip-flops. After a moment’s consideration, she left her duffel bag in the front seat, to save time and embarrassment if he immediately kicked her out.

She’d come this far, she told herself, eyeing the screen door. With a steadying breath to bolster her courage, she mounted the steps and knocked on the door. When no one answered, she ventured onto the porch and tried the kitchen door. It creaked open, compliments of a faulty latch and no lock.

“Josh?” She peeked inside and called his name again. Still no answer.

She looked back out onto the porch, her gaze drifting over the hammock hanging in the corner and the Formica dinette table strewn with large fishing lures. A couple of orange life vests hung from hooks in the kitchen wall. A wilting philodendron was pushed into a corner, its vines trailing up a length of fishing line tied to the porch screen. There was nothing there to remind her of the Josh she knew, unless she counted the dusty stack of newspapers and magazines next to the dying plant. It made her wonder just how well she did know him. It made her wonder what she was doing there.

Sighing, she turned around, her flip-flops squeaking on the floorboards. Their time together had always been so intense, so fraught with tight deadlines, fast-breaking stories, and then the final disastrous two days. She still woke up in the middle of the night sometimes, covered with sweat, her breath caught in her throat, still feeling the remembered pressure of a gun at the base of her skull.

Cardena had made a worse deal than he’d thought when he’d agreed to take her home. Halfway over the Caribbean, she’d come out of shock, surprising both of them with a near-hysterical collapse. The man was a saint. He’d talked with her, reassured her, listened to her babbling and crying, and in the end, he’d traveled with her all the way to Boulder, personally taking her to her aunt’s house. Saying good-bye to him had been almost as hard as leaving Josh.

Almost, but not quite, which was why she found herself standing on this old back porch near the Texas-Louisiana state line. She lifted the hair off the back of her neck and looked around again. As long as he wasn’t there, he couldn’t kick her out. She might as well get comfortable.

The moon sat cool and serene in the darkening rainbow of the sky, adding its clear light to the warm, humid night. Josh stopped his car halfway up the driveway and walked around the front of the house to get the mail. He picked the evening paper up off the front porch and scanned the headlines while letting himself in the door.

Once inside, he tossed the paper on the couch and started stripping his shirt off over his head. That was when he noticed the kitchen light. More curious than wary, and realizing it should have been the other way around, he went to investigate.

He could have left the beer bottle on the table, he admitted, and the back door did have a tendency to swing open in the slightest breeze unless it was hooked from the inside, but the sunglasses on the counter definitely didn’t belong to him. They were big and pink, and they were nested around a half-eaten roll of antacid tablets. A thrill of excitement he couldn’t control curled around the pit of his stomach.
She’s here
.

He crossed the room, instinctively heading for the coolest spot in the house. Shaded from the moon and the sunset by large overhanging trees, the porch was dark except for the narrow beam of light coming from the kitchen. The yellow band streamed across the floor, split by his shadow as he opened the door wider.

He stood there for a long time, leaning against the jamb and resting his head on his arm, watching her sleep in the hammock. A feeling of deep, unexplainable peace washed over him. He seemed to have spent so much of his life thinking about her. In the last month he’d come close to convincing himself she was nothing more than a strange infatuation he should have outgrown. That the way they’d lived their time together had as much to do with the clarity of his memories as the woman herself. Watching her sleep, he knew better.

For whatever reason, the contours of her face touched him like no other. The shape of her, what he saw in her eyes when she smiled, pulled at some unknown place deep inside him.

She was there, and he was going to make love with her that night—and he was going to hold on to her and see what they had come morning.

He let out a soft breath, pushed away from the door, and walked back into the kitchen, content to let her go on sleeping and dreaming until—until dinner was ready. A broad grin spread across his face. She was here.

Nikki awoke to a black velvet night and the chirping song of crickets. She knew exactly where she was, on Josh’s back porch on the sultry side of Texas. The house next door was where the gardening lady and the little boy lived.

She stretched full out and relaxed back into the hammock, deciding she liked Texas. The dry Colorado air had wreaked havoc on her system after so many years in the tropical latitudes. She felt better here, more at home, more like she belonged.

Josh watched her wake slowly, enjoying the length of bare leg hanging out of the hammock. A flip-flop dangled from her toes. He eased forward in his chair, taking a shrimp out of the ice-filled bowl on the table, but never taking his eyes off her.

A soft crackling sound drew her attention away from the quiet night beyond the screen. She rolled her head sideways and found him sitting in the dark, peeling a shrimp and watching her.

“Hi.” An easy smile curved his mouth.

“Hi.”

“Dinner is ready.” He nodded at the table.

“What are we having?”

“Shrimp, beer, and bread. All the basics.”

So far so good, she thought. He didn’t seem inclined to kick her right out. Neither did he seem surprised to see her.

“Were you expecting me?” she asked.

“No.”

“Were you planning on coming to Colorado?”

“No.” He shook his head. He wasn’t going to lie to her. He’d hoped to forget her.

“Hmm.” She murmured a noncommittal sound, not knowing what to make of his answer, or of the queasiness it caused in her stomach.

“Come on over, before the beer gets warm.”

Outwardly calm, inwardly cautious, she slid out of the hammock and walked to the table. He’d cut his hair, shorter than she’d ever seen it. No unruly strands swept behind his ears or brushed the collar of his black polo shirt. The style gave him a harder, cleaner look, highlighting the lean angle of his cheekbones and the dark lines of his eyebrows. It made him seem more of a stranger.

Under his ever-watchful gaze, she sat down and spent an inordinate amount of time arranging her skirt. Things were different between them, subtly awkward and not-so-subtly tense. She felt the change in his quietness. When she dared to look up, she saw it in his eyes. Suddenly she understood. He’d already reached a decision about her, about them. The pain in her stomach increased.

“I don’t think I can eat,” she confessed, fearing the worst.

“When was your last meal?”