Renegade With A Badge. Claire King
Had this desperado brushed his teeth before breaking into the local sheriff’s house and crashing her going-away party? What the hell kind of bandit was this?
“When you’re finished?” she blurted with uncharacteristic indiscretion. “Finished with what? Are you robbing Ernesto? Are you the smuggler?”
Nosy, reckless woman. Rafe shook her slightly. “Do you understand?” he repeated, sounding dangerously provoked.
“Well, can you tell me how long you’ll be?”
Rafe nearly burst out laughing. “Doctor.”
Olivia nodded briskly. “Yes, yes, I understand.”
“And Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“I will kill him first. I want you to remember that.”
Olivia nodded again, swallowed hard. “Yes, I will,” she said in a strangled voice.
Rafael let her go, almost reluctantly. His head was buzzing from the contact of her body against his, his blood was running hot through his lower body, his fingers itched to touch the smooth skin of her neck a second time.
“One thing more,” he said through gritted teeth, suddenly as furious with himself as he was with her. For lingering, for getting caught, for finding Cervantes’s lover more arousing, more attractive, than any woman he’d met in years. For caring what happened to her.
Olivia’s chest was heaving, her body beginning to shake in reaction. She’d been in grave danger there for the briefest moment, but she was unsure exactly what the threat had been.
“What?” she breathed, her eyes locked on his.
“Get out of here as soon as you can. Get back to the States on the next plane or bus or vegetable wagon.” He reached out, gave a gentle tug on the long braid that had come to rest on her shoulder, running his thumb along the broad length of it. “I don’t know how much you know,” he said, almost to himself, “and I don’t care. Just get out.”
And while Olivia stood, trembling, wondering, the man disappeared without a sound down the dark hallway.
Chapter 2
Olivia endured. That was the most she could say about the remainder of Ernesto’s lavish party, his expansive hospitality, his determined and public attentions.
It had been a terrible mistake coming back downstairs. She should have taken the advice of the smuggler and fled the house, Aldea Viejo, the country. Let Ernesto think his shrimp had actually killed her. Oh, God. She clamped a hand over her mouth to keep from bursting into hysterical laughter.
She’d still been shaking when she’d stumbled down the stairs, even after spending another five minutes back in the powder room, splashing water on her face and muttering recriminations to herself in the mirror. But she knew what she had to do if she wanted to keep Ernesto and his friends from being splattered across the beautiful old plaster walls of the hacienda, so she pasted a smile on her face like a prudent little scientist would when faced with empirical data.
The lanky man with the smirk on his mouth and the hunger in his eyes was very probably taking a bead on Ernesto right this minute, waiting for Olivia to come to her senses and fall into a crying, squalling heap on the floor. Something she very much felt like doing, as a matter of fact.
It was midnight now, and Ernesto was calling for a toast. Thank heavens. After that was finished, she’d go straight back to the motel, wait sleepless until morning, when she would take a taxi—or a bus or a vegetable wagon—to La Paz, and then the first plane home.
A flute of champagne was pressed into one hand, while Ernesto pulled her gently to his side by taking the other. Olivia went willingly. No point fighting the inevitable. She would smile at the sure-to-be elaborate toast—then get the hell out of Dodge. She’d had enough Mexican hospitality to last her a lifetime.
Ernesto launched into his toast with full vigor. She listened with half attention and smiled politely at the beaming crowd. Where was the criminal, while these people quaffed expensive champagne? Slitting throats? Stealing silver? Pressing up against some other unsuspecting female with that steely body and that shocking arousal? She took a gulp of champagne and choked on it.
“And if she will do me the very great—” Ernesto paused for effect here, and Olivia smiled gamely up at him, her face beet red from suppressed coughing, trying desperately hard not to spew Dom Pérignon onto his silk suit, “very great honor of becoming my wife, and the mistress of this house and the mother of this humble village, I will be the happiest man on God’s earth.”
The crowd erupted. Olivia let go with a spasm of coughing that had Ernesto patting her on the back. When she was finished gagging on her hundred-dollar champagne, she looked blankly around at the people crushing in on her, then, stupefied, up at Ernesto.
“What?” she whispered.
Ernesto bent his head to kiss her. “Say yes, my darling,” he said rather fervidly into her ear.
“To what?” she asked, spilling champagne on her clothes as someone jostled her from behind. She barely noticed. She had no idea what he was talking about. Had he just proposed? To whom? To her? In front of hundreds of people? With a sexually excited smuggler loose in his house?
Impossible.
Ernesto’s smile went a little stiff. “You are shocked.” He laughed heartily, though it sounded forced to Olivia’s ears. “I am shocked myself. I have been a bachelor for almost fifty years.”
“Ernesto, you can’t possibly—”
He cut her off sharply. “But I had never met a woman who could share my house and my life before now, Olivia Magdalena Rosanna deRuiz Galpas.”
Olivia almost groaned aloud. Not the whole name. He must be pretty damn serious if he was using her full name.
“You are a prize,” Ernesto continued in his beautiful voice. “A woman of education and family. The great-granddaughter of Don Ricardo Galpas of Chiapas,” he said loudly, though Olivia was sure he’d already mentioned that at least three times during the toast. “You will be the perfect wife for Ernesto Cervantes.”
At this show of bravado, the crowd erupted into cheers again. Olivia looked around, nearly bursting once more into hysterical laughter. The entire evening had been thoroughly surreal.
“Ernesto, we have to talk.”
He kissed her lavishly, his tongue breaching for the first time the seam of her lips. The man had just proposed marriage, Olivia thought, dazed, and he’d never even kissed her properly. She’d had a bandit pressed against her more intimately just an hour ago than this man had ever been. She’d never so much as tasted Ernesto Cervantes, who now fully intended to become her husband.
Olivia touched Ernesto’s shoulder to break the kiss.
He smiled down into her face, glowing with triumph. “I must attend to my guests, now, love.”
“We need to talk, Ernesto,” Olivia insisted. She needed far more time than three weeks to decide on a husband for the rest of her life, no matter how perfect the man appeared to be. And there remained the small matter of how she was going to explain to him that she’d had a friendly little conversation in his upstairs hallway with a drug smuggler but had neglected to tell him.
“We will.” He kissed the hand he’d been clutching. “We will.”
But they didn’t. Olivia wandered around in a daze for half an hour more, caught up in a bizarre frenzy of congratulation and speculation, while Ernesto seemed to carefully avoid her.
Fine, she thought. Their discussion of this bizarre public proposal would be better conducted when they were alone, anyway. Two hundred complete strangers and one smuggler whom she practically knew in the biblical sense were not conducive to a quiet chat about the future.
She