Dateline: Kydd and Rios (3 page)

Her information hit him like a thunderbolt.

It also splashed his name across the front page of the
New York Times
. Dateline: San Simeon—Aragon Betrays Own Government—story and photos by Joshua Rios. It was also the first and last time he had a byline all to himself. All the succeeding ones read: Kydd and Rios. Ladies, she had insisted, always preceded gentlemen. . . .

Where was he? Nikki wondered, glancing up from her tattered notebook. A couple of men out of the motley crew hanging around the bar waved in greeting and she responded in kind. There had been a time when she’d avoided the other reporters covering the Latin beat. By nature they were an aggressive, wild bunch, professionally and sexually, with few scruples. But young as he was in comparison, Josh had made it clear they’d better not mess with Nikki, or with him for that matter. Her instincts hadn’t let her down in her choice of a protector. Of course, Josh didn’t mess around with her, either, a possibility that raced through her mind more and more often, though never as disturbingly as it had that afternoon in the jeep.

The memory brought an uneasy warmth to her face that had nothing to do with the sultry weather. She brushed her cheek with the back of her hand and shifted in her chair, returning her attention to the notebook. Josh was Josh, and she was Nikki. They were partners, business partners and friends, and both relationships were comfortable. The other possibility was a mystery she didn’t have any idea how to unravel.

“Hey, Rios,” one of the reporters called. “Find anything out there today?”

“Nothing you can’t read about in the
Times
.” Josh’s distinctly rough voice drew her attention like a magnet.

She glanced up and saw him coming out of the hotel’s back door, and she felt her disconcerting blush deepen. His clothes hid the curves and angles of all the hard muscle she had memorized in bits and pieces during their months together: Josh taking his shirt off to douse himself in a mountain stream; a flash of strong legs out of her peripheral vision as he changed clothes in camp; the strength of his arms in one of the rare moments when he felt it necessary either to hold her back or hold her down. She wished she could quit thinking such crazy thoughts. They would only lead to trouble or heartache, both of which she already had in abundance.

Watching him made her wish an impossibility. Thick black hair swept back from his face, though a lock in front fell across his forehead in damp strands. Layers of the ebony silk brushed the turned-up collar of his khaki shirt. Tight jeans, worn to a soft perfection, hugged his lean hips and covered the tops of his boots. A year in the tropics had toasted his skin to a deep mahogany brown, but his eyes were still the same strange, shifting blue, and she prided herself on being able to read them like a book.

He stopped at the bar and glanced over at her, cocking his head questioningly. At her nod, he ordered two beers. She saw him pause for a minute, counting the wad of bills in his hand, then say something else to the bartender.

Curiosity, overlaid with a big dose of apprehension, pushed all the crazy thoughts out of her head as he picked up a bottle of tequila to go with the beer. Something was wrong, and her misgivings grew with every measured step he took toward the table.

She waited for him to settle into a chair before blurting out the worst possibility she could think of. “You lost the film.” She would kill him if he’d lost the film.

“No,” he said wearily, passing a hand across his face and peering at her over the tips of his fingers. He’d worn a hole in the carpet, pacing his room, and he still hadn’t come up with the right words. Every time he’d gotten close, the image of her face had intruded. Those clear green eyes, the curve of her cheeks and brow, the soft perfection of her skin—they’d all conspired against his common sense and seduced him into giving free rein to his forbidden fantasies. All he’d accomplished in his hours alone was a frustrating state of arousal, something he’d guarded against for weeks. He felt like a fool.

“Is the typewriter acting up?” she asked, visibly relieved about the film.

“No.” He reached for the tequila and poured a good two inches of it into an empty water glass. It wasn’t enough, but it was a start.

“Did somebody die?” Her voice softened to a whisper as she leaned across the table, diminishing the distance between them.

Josh glanced up into her not-too-innocent eyes and felt his gut tighten. For a girl her age, she accepted death too easily. He should have gotten her out of Central America a long time ago. Pure selfishness, he thought, not liking the truth or himself.

He’d used her to achieve fame and glory—and she’d helped him get both. That she’d been using him, too, didn’t ease his guilty conscience. It was time to let her go, before he used her for something else, something very personal, deeply sensual, and wrong enough to turn guilt into self-loathing.

Only in the darkest recesses of his mind did he acknowledge a fear he didn’t dare voice aloud even to himself: if they made love, he might never let her go. The green-eyed witch with the young blossoming body and white-gold hair was capable of consuming him. Even now, faced with reality instead of fantasy, his body and emotions continued to dominate his nobler instincts, filling his mind with the imagined taste of her mouth, intensifying the almost painful ache between his legs. To have her just once would be a disaster.
Please, Josh, try—for one more night—to keep your brains above your belt
.

“No, Nikki, nobody has died, at least not anybody we know,” he said, sliding back in his chair. A wry grin lifted a corner of his mouth as he shifted his gaze off into the night and fell silent.

Nikki never took her eyes off him. Through the long quiet moments she struggled to figure out what was going on behind the tense mask of his face. She thought she knew all of his moods, but she’d never seen him quite so strung out. Still, she felt it was best to let him take his time. Sooner or later he’d tell her what was bothering him. She reached for her beer.

“You drink too much,” he said without moving an inch.

She paused with the beer halfway to her mouth, looking at him in confusion. “Well, hell, Josh. Nobody exactly recommends drinking the water.”

“You swear too much, too.”

“Couldn’t be the company I keep,” she parried lightly, trying to ignore the uneasiness edging back into her mind. Something wasn’t wrong;
she
was wrong. What had she done? Was he still mad about the night before? No, she decided, he never held a grudge. Besides, she’d been right. His Spanish was atrocious. For a reporter in Central America, let alone one named Rios, not knowing the language inside out and backward was a severe handicap. How he’d grown up on the Tex-Mex border without picking up at least a smattering of the lingo was beyond her. He must have worked hard at remaining ignorant, which didn’t fit in with his natural curiosity about everything else under the sun.

She barely had time to throw out her first idea before he agreed with her.

“You do keep bad company, Nikki. As a matter of fact, I can’t imagine worse company than me for a seventeen-year-old girl.”

“I’m eighteen, and you need to give yourself more credit, Josh.” Only her smile added a teasing note to the words. The rest of her face remained coolly impassive, her eyes assessing.

He discounted the difference with a slight shrug. Then he swallowed half the glass of tequila, pulled an envelope out of his shirt pocket, and tossed it over to her side of the table.

The envelope landed softly on the rough wooden table, but the sound blocked all others from her mind. She kept her eyes glued on his, her smile fading into a grim line. She didn’t need to open the envelope to know what was inside. She’d seen a hundred plane tickets.

“Dammit, Josh,” she said through clenched teeth, flipping the envelope back at him. “We’ve been through this before, and the answer is always the same. No.”

“This time it’s yes.” The ticket came back at her.

The simplicity of his answer unnerved her more than the hardness of his voice. He was supposed to counter with one of the dozen or so reasons he’d formulated over the last twelve months, such as her safety or her worried relatives or the completely ludicrous one about her reputation.

She picked up the envelope, then let it drop back to the table. She couldn’t win playing his game.

“You wasted your money . . . as usual,” she said, throwing the argument back at him, deciding to clear out all the problems at once and hopefully distract him.

Josh recognized the ploy. She’d used it many times successfully, running circles around him with convoluted logic. But not tonight. Tonight he’d win and, through the winning, lose her.

“You’re going home.” And she was, no matter what he did or said. The situation was out of his hands.

“I am home,” she snapped impatiently. He’d picked a helluva night for a fight, she thought. They were both jumpy and tired from their run through the jungle. And he couldn’t have chosen a more volatile subject if he’d searched the seven seas. He knew it, too.

Josh saw the sparks of anger in her eyes, the tightening of her mouth, and knew with a sinking heart that the end was near. He’d made her good and mad, and maybe that was for the best. Maybe in her anger she would find relief from his betrayal—for he’d betrayed her absolutely and irrevocably. He accepted what he had done, but it didn’t make telling her any easier.

“Better check your passport again, Nikki.” He stalled a moment longer, wanting to hold their friendship for just a few more seconds, wanting to watch her and know she still cared enough to fight with him before she shut him completely out of her life.

Her eyes flashed with defiance. “Forget it, Josh. You can’t make me go.” She held her head a little higher, her shoulders a little straighter.

Her unconscious body language reminded him of all the reasons he’d kept her with him for so long. She had the courage of a person twice her age, and the purity of conviction reserved solely for the young. But it also reminded him of all the reasons he had to let her go. With the candlelight turning her hair into molten silver and her face into a sweet mystery of shadows, she broke his heart with wanting.

“Can and will,” he said softly, forcing himself to hold her gaze. “The game’s over, Nikki. I reported you to the authorities. They’re sending an aide over in the morning to pick you up.”

From one breath to the next, and the next, he watched her emotions race from shock to disbelief and finally to confusion and pain. In less than a minute, he had destroyed a year’s worth of trust, a lifetime’s worth of friendship.

“J-Josh?” She spoke his name in a broken whisper, offering it like a talisman against the impossible, as if the one word could hold their lives together.

He wanted to say he was sorry, but the pitiful statement didn’t come close to describing his feelings. He hated the grief clouding her eyes, hated himself for putting it there, and had to look away. The next morning he would hand her over to some stuffed shirt from the embassy and then he’d get drunk and stay drunk until another story came along, or until he forgot how painfully innocent his young partner really was, how innocent she’d always been.

Nikki slowly rose from the table. His silence mocked her, the downward cast of his eyes making a sham of all they’d shared. Her body trembled, her heart beat fast and furiously, hurting, breaking, and aching all at the same time.

“Damn you,” she whispered. “
Damn you
.” Then she turned and fled into the lobby.

Josh finished his beer and another double shot of tequila, all the while keeping watch on the front desk. He knew she’d make a run for it, but he also knew she wouldn’t stick him with her room bill. The lady had an honest streak a mile wide. Thanks to Nikki, he had the cleanest set of books south of the border. It wasn’t her fault money ran like water through his fingers.

None of his thoughts made him feel better. In fact, they made him feel a helluva lot worse. Holding his head in his hand, he poured more tequila into the glass.

Women! he thought. Who could figure them? He tried to console himself with that generality, but Nikki wasn’t a generality. She wasn’t even a full-grown woman. She was teasing warmth and shining brightness, and having her by his side made him special. None of the bums hanging around the bar had Nikki Kydd showing them the truth behind the obvious. None of them had Nikki complaining about their cooking with a subtle wrinkling of her nose or a grumpily voiced critical review. None of them had her sharing a campsite with them at the end of day as the tropical sun slid into the sea.

And she only looked like a full-grown woman.

“Damn.” The muttered curse held merely a fraction of the frustration and anger welling inside him. He’d screwed up everything, from the minute he’d thrown the ticket at her until his last ultimate stupidity. It had all seemed so clear, so right, when he’d called the embassy. And now it all felt horrible, heart-wrenchingly horrible. His shoulders sagged in defeat.

Big boys don’t cry
. He tried another hopeless cliché and hung his head down, sighing heavily. If he started to cry, he’d know he’d had too much to drink. But he didn’t feel drunk, not even close. The stricken look on her face would probably keep him stone-cold sober until he was ninety.

Raking a restless hand through his hair, he allowed himself to consider other options. He could go to her and explain. Go to her and apologize. Go to her and—and tell her that her leaving was for the best . . . how much he cared. . . . Tell her how many nights he’d lain awake thinking of her, of the two of them. . . . Tell her he loved her, and hold her and kiss her until she believed him—and he lost his mind.