We could say…well, that your vocal cords were injured so you can’t speak, or something.”
“Unless my eyes were bandaged they’d still see the way I look at you.”
Marisa flushed.
“Besides,” he went on, as if regretting his admission, “there’s no reason why a strange priest and nun would gain access to la Fortuna. But they’re constantly taking in servants. It’s the only way.”
Silence hung between them for an endless moment. Then he spoke again. “Come on, Marisa.” Tyler’s voice was low, gentle. And she immediately distrusted it. “There’s nothing important enough for you to want to do this.”
Distrust, indeed. Her voice cooled. “My reasons are important, Mr. Murdoch, so please don’t make the mistake of dismissing them. Why is it so important to you to find this man?”
“Because I owe him. I was a hostage once and if not for Lieutenant Colonel Phillip Westin, who lived, ate and breathed for his men and didn’t give up on us, my friends and I would all be dead by now. I’m prepared to lay my life down for that man.”
Whatever Marisa had expected, it wasn’t that. However, Tyler wasn’t finished.
“But I’d just as soon get out with us still alive,” he added. “Which means that you don’t make one move without my say-so. I don’t care how well developed your Mezcayan heritage is, or what your reasons are for horning in on this op. There’re two people in Mezcaya that I trust, and one of them has been held captive for months now. So do what I say, when I say, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll come out of this with our skin intact.”
“And the other person you trust?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer.
Tyler was no longer looking at her, but out the window beside him. “Isn’t you.”
Two
Well. That was clear enough.
Tyler didn’t trust her. She didn’t particularly trust him, either, so she supposed that made them even.
“You’ve got different clothes?”
The absolute and utter change of topic surprised her. She looked down at her linen pantsuit. It had been excruciatingly expensive, but necessary, if she was going to make it back to the life she’d once had. She couldn’t show up as a representative of former Ambassador Torres in the polyester uniform she wore at the restaurant.
He’d made no sound whatsoever, but she could sense his impatience. “Yes, of course I have different clothes with me,” she answered.
“So you’ll look like a local? A likely candidate for a servant?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God for that,” he muttered.
Oh, she really didn’t like this man. “You don’t exactly look the part of a servant, either,” she retorted. What he did look like was a one-man military unit who’d never taken orders from anyone in his life.
If he took exception to her tone, she didn’t know it. “We’ll both change when we land,” was all he said.
She realized her teeth were worrying the inside of her lip and made herself stop. She didn’t want to pretend to be anything with this man, but if she had to, she’d do what was necessary.
“When will that be?”
“Soon enough.”
Her lips tightened. “Mr. Murdoch, things might run more smoothly if you’d just tell me what your plans are.”
“I’ll tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.”
She blew out a noisy breath, then unsnapped her harness.
“Where are you going?”
“To sit back there with the cargo. It’s friendlier than you are.” Her annoyance was a bristling, physical thing as she brushed past him through the cockpit door.
The bare skin of his arm tingled from the contact. He looked back at her. He was acting like an ass. He knew it. She knew it. She was beautiful, sexy as hell with her hair tied back in that tight knot, and he didn’t want to need her help. He didn’t trust her but he had to work with her.
Damn El Jefe!
He ran a practiced eye over the instrument panel, then looked back at her.
She was just fastening her seat belt, her head lowered as she fumbled with what should have been an easy task. A long strand of hair had worked free of her knot and clung to her cheek. She dashed it away with an angry motion, her gaze meeting his.
She looked away, but not quickly enough.
He thought he was immune to crocodile tears. Sonya had been able to summon them at the drop of a hat.
Hell. A conscience was mighty inconvenient, sometimes. “Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“Why?” She was suspicious.
“Only making conversation.” He turned back around, automatically checking his panel.
After a long moment, she answered. “I have a sixteen-year-old-sister and…”
He glanced back at her when she paused.
“Three brothers,” she finished flatly. But at least her tears were nowhere in sight. Then her eyebrows rose and with extreme politeness, she said, “And you?”
“I’m one of a kind.” Though, really, he had no way of knowing whether the man who’d fathered him had sired a dozen other offspring, since Tyler never even knew the guy.
“Indeed.” Her tone was dry. “What a pity the world doesn’t have more just like—” She gasped when the plane shuddered and suddenly lost altitude.
He snapped around just in time to see a piece of cowling fly from the nose. Fury followed hard on the heels of disbelief at the sight of his plane damaged. Wounded.
Under his hands, the stick jittered. His adrenaline shot through the roof as he struggled to maintain his heading. “Come on, baby,” he whispered. “Keep it together for me.” He raised his voice. “Get up here,” he ordered.
Marisa was already slipping into the right seat, fastening the harness. “Take those binoculars, there,” he ordered.
She immediately reached for the leather case. “What am I looking for?”
“Anything,” he said flatly. It took some doing, and the execution was hardly textbook, but he turned the plane, changed headings. Coaxed some precious altitude from the reluctant controls. Keeping one eye on the instruments, he looked out the window. “He’s probably got a truck. A Jeep, maybe.”
“He?”
“Whoever shot at us.”
“Shot!” She swallowed audibly. Holding the small, powerful lenses to her eyes, she peered out the side window. “Dios. All I see are trees!”
At least she wasn’t screaming in hysterics.
She wasn’t screaming in hysterics.
Tyler grabbed her arm and yanked her around. The binoculars tumbled out of her hand and bounced with a clank off the instrument panel to fall on the floor near her feet.
She stared at him like he was mad. “What is wrong with you?”
“Who’d you talk to?”
“What?”
“Come on, princess, spill.”
Realization dawned. Marisa’s fingers curled against her palms, wishing that they were clawing out his eyes, and the strength of that desire horrified her to her soul. “You think I had something to do with this?” She yanked against his grip,