Exposed (2 page)

Now he laughed and just for fun, rolled down the windows before blasting it. They made for a comical picture in this neighborhood. “Look at us, two homies cruising through my old neighborhood, cranking out the country tunes.”

This area of Miami Gardens wasn’t as rough as some, but it was still a long way from the safer, middle-class neighborhoods to the south of the city. Rap and hip-hop were the soundtrack here, not country.

Hard-edged, tatted guys from their teens through their thirties stood around smoking on street corners even though it was early afternoon on a Thursday. Here it was mostly Cuban or Puerto Rican families like his own, blue-collar workers or dealers struggling to make ends meet, living from paycheck to paycheck. A lot of those were issued from the welfare department.

Everyone stopped and stared at them as they drove by, unfamiliar tunes pulsing through the open windows.

“Think they got a hate-on for my music or something?” Vance asked dryly.

“They’ve never seen anything like you before, Vance, I guaran-damn-tee it.”

His teammate grinned, showing even, white teeth against his dark skin as he tipped the brim of his black felt cowboy hat. “Can’t help it that I’m a redneck.”

Right down to the shitkickers he wore, Ethan thought with a fond grin. “You’re one of a kind, my friend. I’ll give you that.”

Vance settled back against his seat, that amused grin still in place. “Sticks and stones, man. Sticks and stones.”

They pulled through an intersection and crossed into a slightly nicer area, but there were still plenty of dealers and junkies around on the corners looking to either sell or score a fix. “Wonder how many of these guys are selling or using product from Fuentes?” Vance mused.

“All of them, probably,” Ethan muttered, ignoring the strange looks they got.

“Bet it sure makes you glad you made the right decision in getting outta here when you did, huh?”

“No shit,” he answered. He could easily have wound up being one of the guys standing around on a street corner here in the middle of the day, selling drugs. “But my mama didn’t raise no fools.”

Vance leveled a sideways look at him. “You mean she beat the fear of God into you whenever you stepped outta line.”

“Yeah, and that too.” He’d run with a rough crowd through high school, none of whom he kept in touch with. Low-level gang member wannabes, looking to gain street cred and make a fast buck. Last he’d heard, most of them either had been or were currently in jail, and more than a handful were dead.

Luckily his mom hadn’t been willing to allow her boy to go down that road. She and his father had ridden his ass through eleventh and twelfth grades, making sure he stayed out of trouble and graduated. And when he did, the next day they marched him down to the closest Marine recruiting office.

He’d been itching for the chance to leave home and see some of the world beyond Miami, and knew if he continued along the same path he was on he’d wind up in jail or dead. He’d been only too happy to sign the contract.

Goodbye Miami, hello Parris Island. Not an easy transition to make, but the best thing that had ever happened to him.

“Whatever, it’s not like you were such an angel either,” Ethan muttered.

“Sure as hell was, compared to you, anyway. My daddy woulda worn out his belt on me if I’d pulled half the shit you did.” Vance had been raised in Oklahoma by a hard-working, single dad farmer who subscribed to the
spare the rod, spoil the child
philosophy. And Vance sure as hell hadn’t been spoiled. Probably why he’d developed such a soft spot for Ethan’s mom right off the bat, since she loved to spoil the people close to her. They adored each other and she considered Vance her adopted son.

“Well, my dad tried that a few times too. Didn’t take.” And besides, seeing disappointment in his mother’s eyes after he’d done something stupid was way worse than any whupping his father could dish out with his belt.

He shook his head and continued. “When I think of what I put my mom through all those years, I thank my lucky stars she didn’t give up on me. No idea how she put up with me back then.”

“I don’t know how we put up with you
now
,” Vance remarked, jabbing him in the right shoulder with a meaty fist. Right where he’d taken two rubber bullets earlier that morning while working in the shoot house with the DEA’s FAST team.

Ethan winced and gritted his teeth. “You suck,” he grumbled.

Vance’s grin was unrepentant. “Yup. So tell me more about that girl you mentioned before.”

Ethan’s mind went blank for a second. “What girl?” He hadn’t dated anyone for a couple months. Things had been crazy at work lately, ever since the terrorist attacks at the Qureshi trial back in April. It was hard enough to date, let alone have a relationship with someone when he couldn’t tell the woman what he really did or explain why he had to suddenly cancel or even leave partway through a date.

That never went over too well with the ladies, and so far in his time with the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, none of them had stuck around long enough to find out the truth. Which was fine for now, since he was happy with keeping things casual.

Vance shot him an annoyed frown. “You know, the one who lived near you growing up. You told me her parents’ place is across from your mom’s, and that she’s an Assistant U.S. Attorney down here linked to the Fuentes case.”

Oh.
That
girl. “Marisol Lorenzo.”

“Her family Puerto Rican too?”

“No, Cuban.” He hadn’t seen her in four years, when she’d been partway through her law degree and he’d been getting ready to try out for the HRT. He’d been shocked to find the little-girl-next-door was all grown up, and not only that, but
hot
. The attraction he’d felt toward her had made him damned uncomfortable.

Since then he’d gotten periodic updates about her from his mother, who was still friends with Marisol’s mom, but that was all. “Yeah, when I checked a couple weeks back I found out she landed a job with their High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area office in West Miami.”

Vance nodded. “That’s cool. Good for her.”

“No,
not
good for her,” Ethan said in a flat tone. “She’s smart and always was driven, but she’s only been on the job for a few months and has never dealt with anyone like Fuentes before. With this turf war going on between all his lieutenants, they’ll be looking into who’s involved with the case at the U.S. Attorney’s office. She’ll be at risk. You know exactly what kind of risk I’m talking about.”

Together with the FAST team they’d been going over detailed intel compiled on the known lieutenants and their enforcers. One enforcer in particular had a reputation for making hardened criminals shit their pants when he showed up. Word on the street was, his victims begged for death before he ended their misery.

Ethan didn’t want Marisol or anyone else he cared about within a hundred miles of someone like
el Santo
, let alone to wind up on his radar. “I’m going to talk to her while I’m in town, just to make sure she understands what she’s dealing with and that she’s taking the right precautions.”

When Vance stared at him, eyebrows raised, Ethan scowled. “What?”

“That’s pretty overbearing, considering you haven’t seen her in four years, don’t ya think?”

Ethan shrugged, the motion slightly belligerent. “She’s been a friend of my family forever. I used to look out for her when we were growing up. It’s no different now.” If he felt she might be in danger, he was damn sure going to say something. He had elite training and she didn’t. It was his responsibility to ensure she knew the stakes, so she could take appropriate precautions.

“If she’s an Assistant U.S. Attorney, then she’s smart enough to know the threat she’s facing by working on this case,” Vance pointed out in that maddeningly calm, practical way that irritated the shit out of Ethan when it pertained to something in his personal life. This time was no different.

“She’s smart, but she’s not street smart, even though she grew up here.” She wasn’t clueless about danger, not by any means, but he still didn’t like it.

From the moment his mother had first mentioned it to him a few weeks ago, the thought of her being in the crosshairs of any one of Fuentes’s men made all his hackles go up. The U.S. Attorney’s office was trying to get the asshole to agree to a deal wherein he turned over some of his more ruthless lieutenants in exchange for a reduced sentence.

Because there was no way he wouldn’t be convicted on multiple federal offenses once his case went to trial. Until his arrest the man had controlled a vast empire that stretched along the entire Gulf Coast and up the eastern seaboard.

Drugs, weapons, money laundering. And women. All bought, sold and traded on a private black market that had made Fuentes into a billionaire by age thirty. And those charges didn’t even count the insane number of murders he was purported to have ordered. Thankfully he’d been caught while trying to flee to a non-extradition country.

Ethan turned the corner onto the street where he’d grown up. His parents’ place was the second from the end of the block, on the right. A tidy one-story ranch-style house done up on a cheery yellow stucco with a bright red front door.

On the sidewalk thirty yards up from the house, a small crowd had gathered around one of the old trees along the side of the street.

“Looks like something exciting’s going on,” Vance remarked, ducking his head to get a better view. “Someone’s halfway up that big-ass tree.”

The huge live oak halfway up the block that Ethan and the other neighborhood kids had climbed thousands of times while growing up on this street. He slowed and turned down the music as everyone turned their heads to look at the SUV.

Pulling up to the curb, he closed the windows, put the SUV in park and ducked a little to peer through the windshield. Whoever was up the tree looked like they were having trouble getting down.

Moments later, a shapely rear end clad in what looked like black yoga pants appeared in a gap between the foliage.

“Well, look at that. A bona fide damsel in distress, and it turns out I haven’t done my good deed for the day yet,” Vance said with a grin and reached for his door handle.

Ethan popped his own door open and stepped out into the humid Miami heat. The figure in the tree shifted, scooted down a sturdy branch and seemed to cling there, frozen. She had long, dark hair secured into a ponytail that ran down between her shoulder blades.

The crowd had turned away from Ethan and Vance and stood watching the woman again. Nobody seemed to be offering assistance.

Then the woman in the tree turned her head and recognition slammed into Ethan.

“Speak of the devil,” he murmured with a smile, and hurried past Vance to get to her first.

Chapter Two

Okay, this wasn’t how she’d planned to spend her afternoon off.

Marisol blew a stray strand of hair out of her mouth and tightened her grip on the branch of the live oak. It was ninety-two freaking degrees out and humid enough to coat her skin in a fine sheen of sweat that wasn’t improving her grip any.

Tamping down her annoyance at the small crowd gathered around the base of the tree, she considered her next move. The onlookers were mostly elderly residents who lived on the street, a few mothers and their children. They’d been watching her so far futile efforts for the past ten minutes, occasionally offering up oh-so-helpful advice like, “try grabbing that branch to your left,” “be careful” or, her favorite, “you should have called the fire department instead.”

Really nice when she was already halfway up the freaking tree.

Mrs. Fernandez stood directly below her, wringing her hands in distress, her gray hair full of purple Velcro rollers. “He’s climbing higher, Soli, quick.”

Marisol glanced up and aimed a glare at the long-haired black-and-white cat peering down at her from another branch fifteen feet above her head, its green eyes curious.

“You little bugger,” she muttered under her breath. She knew he was doing this on purpose, probably enjoyed seeing her make a spectacle of herself. Cats were like that.

“Careful—don’t scare him! Hugo, come on, baby, come to mama.” She crooned it again in Spanish for good measure.

Marisol was searching for the next good foothold when someone drove up behind her with country music blasting from their sound system. The music was so out of place in this neighborhood that she glanced back to look at the black SUV with tinted windows parking at the curb. Then the music shut off and Hugo let out a pathetic-sounding mewl that made Mrs. Fernandez frantic.

“Oh, my baby, he’s so scared! Quick, Soli. Just a little farther. You can do it.”

If I break my neck because I volunteered to go after this stupid cat, I’m gonna be pissed.

Setting her jaw, she carefully shifted her weight so she could reach for the next branch up. The sole of her sneaker slipped on the rough bark. She let out a squeak and grabbed hold of the closest branch, swaying precariously, sending leaves scattering to the ground. The small crowd let out a collective gasp.

Heart pounding, she didn’t dare move. The closest branch above her was too far away to grab, and the one below was just as far. Going up from here was as impossible as getting back down again.

Crap. Now she was stuck halfway up the freaking tree, same as the cat.
I should have called the fire department instead
.

“Looks like you could use a hand up there.”

She whipped her head around at the sound of that masculine voice coming from beneath her. Her heart stuttered when she found herself staring down at none other than Ethan Cruz, former neighborhood bad boy-turned-Marine, and the object of all her teenage fantasies.

As well as plenty of her X-rated adult ones.

Those arresting golden brown eyes locked on hers, glinting with humor. He wore a gray T-shirt that hugged his muscular chest and left his sexy, ripped arms bare, exposing the tats on the back of each forearm. “Hey,” she blurted out, surprised to see him, embarrassed that he’d see her like this.