loosely—had lifted her spirits. She hadn’t any idea why—the paintings were almost wonderfully dreadful, and the artist himself the very image of the sort of man conscientious mamas once warned their innocent little girls about. Perhaps she’d just so badly needed her spirits lifted.
It took only that thought to make them plummet again. How could Ken… No. Firmly, and not for the first time, she squelched the desire to blame her partner for a circumstance that truly was not his fault. Probably it was so tempting—it felt so good to blame Burnside for every little thing that happened to annoy her—simply because he annoyed her so. Which she judiciously admitted wasn’t his fault, either. He couldn’t help being the kind of overly macho, arrogant know-it-all type of male for whom she’d always had zero tolerance. Most likely he’d been born that way, and being raised in the male-chauvinist bastions of the Old South hadn’t helped his personality development any. Certainly, he was never going to change.
And, in spite of that character flaw—perhaps, she secretly admitted, even because of it—he was a very good agent. He was cautious, a meticulous planner, which Ellie liked and wholeheartedly approved of. Like her, he left nothing to chance. But not even they could have foreseen food poisoning.
Food poisoning! Because of it—or a twenty-four-hour-flu bug or turista or whatever you wanted to call it—at this very moment her erstwhile partner in an undercover operation it had taken two years to lay the groundwork for and countless hours of tricky and dangerous negotiations to set up, was back on the ship, flat on his back in his stateroom, groaning in helpless agony. Now, at the most critical stage of the operation, when the trap had been baited and the quarry was circling, the culmination of all they’d worked for actually in sight!
No, it wasn’t his fault.
But dammit, how could he have let this happen?
The impotence of her anger penetrated even into her muscles, it seemed, and she drifted to a halt, frowning and lost in thought, amidst the sluggish river of tourists.
“Oof!” she gasped suddenly, as a small, wiry body collided with hers, hard enough to knock her breathless.
Off-balance, she struggled to stay upright, only to feel the strap of her handbag slipping off her shoulder. She felt a tug and snatched at her purse—and grabbed thin air.
“Hey!” she yelled in futile outrage, as a child wearing only a pair of ragged jeans darted and squirmed his way beyond her reach with her brand-new straw handbag clutched to his scrawny chest.
Around her, pudgy people with sun visors on their heads and cameras dangling from their necks turned to stare in the dazed and clueless way of those witnessing the unexpected and out-of-the-ordinary.
“Come back here!” Ellie bellowed, incensed. Knowing it was useless, she took off in pursuit anyway, gasping, “Somebody stop him! He took my purse!”
My purse. Just that quickly, panic replaced anger. Not that there was so much money in the handbag—this was, after all, a government operation, and she certainly wasn’t rich—but the instructions, the procedure for setting up a meeting with their contacts—that was something that could not be replaced.
Oh God, what would she do if she lost it? Compared to this disaster, Agent Burnside’s case of food poisoning was a mere blip. A hiccup.
Trying to make headway through the knot of tourists, most of whom had now stopped dead in confusion, was like trying to walk uphill in a mudslide. Still, she was sure she’d have had a chance if it hadn’t been for the sandals. Ellie wasn’t used to sandals, which, like the Hawaiian print shorts and tank top she wore, were part of her “tourist” disguise. Give her a nice solid pair of Nikes and she could outrun just about anybody; in spite of—maybe because of—her size, she had always been quick. In these cursed hard-soled sandals, though, all she could do was flail her way among the frozen spectators, slipping and stumbling on the uneven adobe brick pavers, while far ahead through a shimmer of frustrated tears she could see the purse-snatcher darting through the crowd, making for the entrance to the plaza. If he got beyond the plaza, Ellie knew, he’d vanish into the maze of narrow, dusty streets, the warren of scrap wood and tin shacks, the tangle of fishing boats…the part of this tourist town the tourists never saw. She’d never see him or her purse again, of that she was certain.
A moment later she wasn’t certain of anything, even the evidence of her own eyes.
One second the boy was there, shaggy dark head and narrow sun-bronzed back plainly visible, all but branded on her retinas. The next second he’d disappeared—vanished—and her purse…her precious purse! was flying…flying in seeming slow motion, tumbling lazy as a butterfly through the shimmering sunlight, shoulder strap like a looping lariat against the sky. And then an arm, lean and tanned as leather, reached up and fingers stained with electric blue snatched the purse right out of the air.
Breath gusted from Ellie’s lungs as she halted, open-mouthed, rendered speechless by overwhelming relief coupled with wonder. Not that miracles, and the silent, breathless awe that accompany them, were unknown to Ellie; in her lifetime so far she’d been privileged to witness quite a few: Orcas breeching in the Alaskan Straits; the birth of a dolphin; a loggerhead turtle struggling up a sandy Georgia beach on an inky-black night. Not to mention a thousand smaller miracles, the kind that happen every single day and so few people even notice. But this was different. This was the first miracle she could recall that involved another human being. And a male human being at that.
The crowd parted almost magically, and even that seemed only part of the miracle. Still stunned, Ellie watched the culprit shuffle toward her, now sniffling piteously, tears making shiny tracks on his dusty cheeks. His skinny ribs were heaving, and there were fresh, quarter-sized abrasions on his knees—a matched set. The paint-smudged hand clamped on the back of his neck looked large against its vulnerability, and strong enough to snap it.
“This belong to you?” The owner of the hand, only slightly less scruffy than his captive, was holding out her handbag, dangling by its strap from one hooked finger. Under the brim of his Panama hat his eyes were squinted and his teeth were showing, but it didn’t look to Ellie like a smile. More like Clint Eastwood in one of those old westerns where he always seemed to be wearing a serape.
It suddenly seemed necessary to lubricate her voicebox before she spoke, although when she tried to swallow it didn’t help much. The scratchy sound that came out was just pretty much Ellie’s normal speaking voice. And she couldn’t do much about that, since she’d inherited it approximately twenty-eight years ago from her mother.
“I…I don’t know how to thank you.” It was no more than the truth; having always prided herself on being an uncommonly independent and resourceful person, she’d never been in such debt to a man before.
The artist—her benefactor—snorted and made a jerking motion with his head, aiming it over his shoulder in the general direction of his display. “You want to thank me, you can pay me for that picture I brought him down with.”
That was when Ellie first noticed that the boy’s bare feet and shins bore smears of the same blue paint that decorated the artist’s hands. Her mouth dropped open and she smothered a gasp of dismay with her hand. “Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry. Well, I—of course I’ll…” And she was rummaging through her purse, fumbling for her wallet. “How much do I—”
He waved her off, like someone swatting at a fly. “Forget it. Water over the bridge.” Bestowing a look of annoyance upon his captive’s dusty bowed head, he growled, “What do you want to do with him?”
“Me! Do with him?” She clapped a hand to her forehead and looked around at the gathering of tourists, perhaps in hopes of some sort of advice. Though officially a member of law enforcement, she’d had no experience in dealing with juvenile delinquents, or juveniles of any kind, for that matter.
Plus, beneath her crusty exterior there lurked a guilty secret: a heart like a half-melted marshmallow. This was a little boy, for God’s sake! One who didn’t appear to have been eating regularly lately, if not for most of his life so far. And at that, panic of a new sort seized her. She knew herself