Romancing the Alpha: An Action-Adventure Romance Boxed Set (84 page)

“But a boat is a boat,” Seth tried. “We can always take off for Mexico or Honduras.”

“Yeah,” Tobin said skeptically. “All those not-at-all corrupt places. We can add Panama to the list. Maybe go to Colombia.”

Point made. And anyway, they’d never outrace the motorboat if it decided to take up the chase.

They couldn’t accept Julie’s original suggestion, either: that since it was all her fault and she was such an idiot — her words — they ought to dump her at the nearest port and let her deal with it on her own.

Right. Like he’d ever let that happen. Hell, he’d had the woman up against a tree at the beginning of this crazy night. And the secret promise he’d made then — that he’d do anything to convince her to give him one more chance — was one he’d never break.

But to get to the point where they could even think about that, they had to get rid of the cash in a way that got the cops off their tail. But how?

Serendipity
nosed out of the lee of the island and into open water. It was a relatively calm night with a steady trade-wind breeze. That much, at least, was on their side for what they had in mind.

They’d need any luck they could get, because the trickiest option was the last one — the one they were heading for like three blind mice.

Julie kept her eyes on the GPS and her hands gripped tightly along the sides of the chart table. All those reefs and a very thin, meandering line to follow between them — at night. And it wasn’t like
Serendipity
had headlights; all they had was the light of the moon. Seth had even turned off the mast-top light and taken down the radar reflector to make it harder for Hernandez and his men to find
Serendipity
when they realized they’d been duped. Which probably wouldn’t take long.

The electronics console in front of her had a busted radio. Tobin, steering at the boat’s wheel, had a busted cheek, because of her. Seth, keeping lookout at the bow, had a fire in his eyes that scared her with its intensity. And Julie, she had a busted ego. She’d messed up — no, fucked up — big-time. She’d caused all this.

“A little more to the right,” she called out the cabin door.

“Starboard,” Tobin called back quietly, his voice light and patient. Which only made her hang her head lower. She’d never taken the younger brother seriously, but the man had the heart of a soldier, the courage of a lion. He had no reason to help her on this at all — but he was all in. Unquestioningly on her team.

God, she’d lucked out with these two. Especially with Seth. How had she ever doubted him?

Well, she’d bury her head in a bucket later — if Hernandez and his men didn’t do that for her. Right now, she had to focus on guiding the boat out of the reefs, then getting to the convent.

Which was probably going to be about as safe as sailing a boat through a maze of reefs at night. But she was sure that was the only way. Professor Leeds wanted the package delivered to the convent at Matigúas? He’d get it delivered.

“But are the nuns really nuns?” Seth had made a good point when they hashed it out.

“There was a name on the package,” she said. “A man’s name. Roberto somebody. So I’m guessing the nuns are legit.”

The more she thought about it, the more she decided the convent and orphanage really were legitimate. Professor Leeds had pictures of it all over the excavation office — lots of shots of happy kids giving the camera a thumbs-up. News article clippings, even. If Leeds was using the convent, it was as a front.

“I don’t get it. Why is an archaeologist sending money to a convent?” Seth had asked.

She shrugged. “I bet he’s selling artifacts illegally in Guatemala then laundering the money through Belize. I bet part of it really does get to the nuns and the kids. But the rest probably goes to a private account. And this guy Roberto, I figure, is Leeds’ inside man.”

“A guy in a convent?”

“A gardener, maybe,” she guessed. “The rector? Who knows? Just someone to handle Leeds’ payments without drawing attention to himself.”

“Let’s hope Roberto isn’t the guy who buries bodies in the yard,” Tobin had muttered then.

In the end, they decided it didn’t matter — much. If they could get the money to the nuns, it would be off their hands. There’d be no evidence of wrongdoing on their part, and Professor Leeds, if he had his own band of goons, couldn’t reprimand her for delivering the package as requested. Right?

“Unless the convent turns out to be a drug den,” Seth pointed out. “Then we’re completely screwed.”

They would be screwed. Her logic was shaky at best, the whole plan a long shot. Julie chewed her lips and plucked at a strand of her shirt as her eyes strained at the GPS screen. No need to get ahead of herself. Right now, getting back to the mainland was all that mattered.

“A little more lef— port,” she called.

“A born sailor,” Tobin chuckled. Humor in the line of fire — the man had guts.

She eyed the distance to the mainland on the chart. Twenty miles. Didn’t seem like much, but Seth said it would take about four hours.

“Except the damn tide’s against us,” Tobin muttered.

Right, the tide. She eyed the navigation instruments uncertainly. Some pirate she’d make.

Seth, on the other hand, made a damn good buccaneer. Scruffy hair, shadowed chin, dark eyes. The couple of times he ducked into the cabin to check the instruments, he could have had a knife between his teeth and said
Arrr, arrr!
When he checked with Tobin at the wheel, his commands were curt and confident, as if he’d been piloting these waters all his life.

That second chance he’d been talking about — she wanted it, too. If they ever got out of this mess.

It took five hours in the end, and her eyes were dry and scratchy by the time they dropped anchor in a secluded cove not far south of Santa Marta. The place didn’t even appear on the chart, just as a sketch on the back of a beer coaster another sailor had given Seth some time ago. He had a whole collection of them — navigation coasters, he called them with a little grin.

When Julie finally left the chart table to come on deck, the sky was split into a dozen layers of pink, orange, and red.

“Wow,” she breathed. Sunrise over the ocean was even more beautiful when seen from a boat, the water all around
Serendipity
turning gold.

It would have been a Kodak moment if she hadn’t had so much on her mind. Then an arm slipped around her waist, and Seth was there, leaning his head against hers, giving her silent reassurance. The fringing jungle was alive with avian squawks and whistles, and the moon hung just above it, as if it had been waiting for them to wave it good day. A moment she didn’t need a camera for to remember forever.

She sighed, and he did too. If only they could hide beneath a blanket and push the world away. But the sun was rising; it was time to get moving.

“Okay, Indiana Jones, you lead the way,” Tobin said once they’d beached the dinghy and faced a thick wall of jungle.

She looked left, then right. The coastal road wasn’t far inland, but getting there… She reached over a shoulder and withdrew her machete from its straps on the outside of her backpack, then glanced at Seth one more time.

He was gazing back at
Serendipity
, anchored so serenely in the cove, its reflection rippling slightly in the calm water. Then he caught her gaze and she saw it: a vision of the two of them on that boat, in another cove, another day. With all the serenity and none of the anxiety.

She took a deep breath and stilled her wobbly knees. Mission first. Future later.

Zing!
She slashed the machete through the knotted undergrowth.
Swish!
A clutch of vines fell.
Whoosh!
Leaves the size of umbrellas fluttered to her feet. Given a couple of days, Mother Nature would work her magic, closing the gap like it had never been there.

Thwack!
Step by step, she led her little band forward. There was a certain thrill to it, a high. And even though sweat was pouring down her face and her arm aching by the time they broke out onto the road, it felt good to be doing something other than running away.

“Now what?” Seth asked, looking up the empty road.

She wiped the sleeve of her T-shirt over her face. “We catch the first bus that comes along, get the bike, and hightail it to the convent.” She patted the bulge in her backpack, feeling the package they couldn’t wait to get rid of.

“Easy,” she finished, hoping she was right.

An hour later, Julie was humming down the road on her motorcycle, street dust sticking to her sweaty skin. The bus driver had given her directions to the convent, twenty miles up into the hills, when he’d left them a few blocks from the place she and Seth had stashed her bike before fleeing for the boat.

Everything was a rush except getting on the bike, because the place she’d hidden it — in the bushes beside the beach bungalow where she’d been staying when she first met Seth — was full of memories. She could have stood there and relived them all day: the laughs, the late-night talks, the early-morning sex, and well…pretty much everything in between. Amazing how two people could tumble right into love, given the right time and place. She’d been scared to use the word then, but it was getting closer and closer to the tip of her tongue with every minute she spent with Seth.

Every minute, and every mile. Because they’d covered a hell of a lot already — on foot, by road, and on the boat. Hell, what an adventure.

When she shook herself out of her reverie and onto the bike and Seth swung up to sit behind her, that L word was closer than ever. The bumps in the road nearly rattled it out of her, as did the beauty of the morning sun, slanting gold-green over the fields and patchy forests along the way. It was quite the contrast to a night of sashaying gracefully over the ocean waves on
Serendipity
. And quite the contrast to her usual mode of travel — alone.

Seth’s arms wrapped so far around her that they overlapped at her waist. He wasn’t just hanging on. He was protecting, promising. If the Kawasaki’s engine weren’t so loud, she might even have said it.

I love you.

She pulled in a deep breath, letting her ribs expand under his touch. It was just the two of them, because they’d left Tobin in town. Assuming everything went smoothly, they would meet back at the beach bar later. A big assumption… But if things did pan out, she’d have a hell of a lot to say to Seth the minute she got the chance. Starting with those three words and
I want a chance with you, too.

The hill was getting steeper and the truck in front of them slower, so she glanced at the triple image in the cracked side mirror.

The road was clear. She sped past the truck then pulled back into the right lane. A red car behind them did the same, and again when they both overtook a straining little three-wheeler piled high with fuel jugs. When the red car revved up to pass the next car, too, she looked more closely. And when it swung into the sharp right turn to the convent at the same time as her, she muttered out loud.

“Shit.”

It was impossible to make out the driver’s face with the shadows flitting across the road, but the colors of the license plate were clear enough. Not Belize’s black-on-white, but the bright-blue-on-white of a Guatemala plate.

Shit, shit, shit.

She revved the bike so high, Seth nearly squeezed the air out of her to keep from tumbling off the back.

“What?” he shouted over the engine noise.

She dipped her chin toward the mirror. “Leeds, or one of his men.”

She felt the weight shift as Seth twisted to look behind

“The cops, too!” he shouted.

What? She looked in the mirror again and cursed. The red car filled most of the crooked panes, but in the distance were a couple of jeeps, showing in triplicate. Everyone was closing in.

“Faster!” Seth urged, and she opened the throttle up.

The convent was a smudge of white at the end of a long green tunnel of magnificent banyan trees. A view she would have stopped at admire, if only she had the time. Instead, she swerved around an overhanging vine and sped on, eyeing the road where it narrowed ahead.

A minute later, she understood why. There was a stream and a tiny one-lane bridge ahead, forming a bottleneck.

“What now?” Seth uttered as she slowed down.

She pointed with an elbow. “It gets worse.”

Seth, to his credit, didn’t say the obvious:
How can it get worse?

“They’re fixing the bridge,” she finished.

Even from a distance, she could see that the surface of the bridge was rutted and dotted with stacks of cobblestones waiting to be laid. A man walked toward the bridge from one side, leading a mule piled high with bamboo. Half a dozen men stood, kneeled, or hammered on the bridge, and a sign with a crooked arrow pointed left.

“What does
Desvio
mean?” Seth shouted into her ear.

“Detour.”

He cursed. “Like we have time for a detour.”

Definitely not. But maybe…

“Hang on,” she yelled to Seth.

Six faces looked up from the bridge.

“Watch out!” she yelled.

“Juli—” Seth started, and one of the men jumped to his feet, waving his arms wildly to shoo her away.

She beeped. No time for a detour.

“Whoa!” Seth yelled and held on tighter.

She slowed down just enough to swerve around the detour sign then rev onto the upswing of the bridge. It was a lovely, cobblestoned arch that must have dated to colonial times, like the convent.

The vehicles in pursuit honked their horns as shouts rang out, and the mule brayed.

“Watch out!” she shouted, unwilling to let go of the handlebars now. “Get out of the way!”

Bodies leaped out of the way as she slalomed left around a pile of stones, then right around an openmouthed worker. If Seth hadn’t thrown out his foot for balance, they might have wiped out when she twisted away from a gaping hole that appeared out of nowhere.
Bump, bump, bump
— the bike hammered over the stone path as a screeching sound of slamming brakes came from behind. The cars were stopping, unable to cross.