Running Wild (9 page)

Crap. Who could blame him if he’d gotten fed up?

Then, suddenly, there he was, weaving toward her through the ever-moving throng. When he reached her a moment later, he held out a tall to-go cup filled to the brim with ice and what looked like lemonade. “Here,” he said. “I thought you might be thirsty.”

She walked right past his outstretched arm to wrap her own tightly around his lean middle and give him a hard, relieved hug. Because the truth was, she hadn’t fully realized until this moment how much strength she gained just knowing that he was with her, shouldering a huge share of the burden.

And she really, really didn’t want to find out what it would be like if she had to do this on her own.

Finn looked down at her. “He-e-y—hey, there. You okay?”

She nodded against his chest. Then, firming up her chin, which had developed an unacceptable tendency to tremble, she stepped back...and thrust up that chin. “Of course,” she said coolly, reaching for the cup he’d offered and taking a huge gulp.

And God have mercy. She moaned against the cup’s rim. The lemonade tasted like manna from heaven as it slid like iced silk down her throat.

“Of course,” he repeated, a slight smile tugging at his lips as he checked her over. The moment she lowered the cup he reached out to rub his thumb across her bottom lip. He drew it back to study the drop of lemonade that decorated his thumb’s pad, then brought it up to suck the droplet into his mouth.

The way heat streaked through Mags’s veins, a person might be forgiven for thinking he’d done something a helluva lot more suggestive than licking up a drop of juice. She turned away to stare blindly at a group of young women currently parading down the street in Vegas showgirl–style outfits that were long on sequins, feathers and towering headpieces, and short on coverage. She glanced down at her own cargo shorts and double tank top and thought she could probably stand a little style herself. She had forgotten, during her years away from El Tigre, the sheer panache Latin women often brought to their fashion and makeup.

Even if it was the memories of this country that had steered her interest in makeup artistry.

“Shit,” Finn suddenly muttered next to her and she looked up to see him gazing past the performers in the street.

“What is it?”

“There’s a couple of thug-looking guys on the other side of the street,” he murmured. Then his voice went hard and authoritative when she started to turn her head. “Don’t look.”

“Is it Joaquin or what’s his name?”

“No, but they’re definitely on the lookout for someone and they don’t seem quite sure yet that we’re it, so don’t give them a better look at your face by facing them fully.”

“Gotcha.” Drinking the last of her lemonade, she turned casually away. “Give me ten minutes and I can change both of our looks so much our own mothers wouldn’t recognize us.”

He looked down at her. “How do you plan to do that?”

“I’m a makeup artist and I have stuff in my bag that can transform us.” And wasn’t it odd that she hadn’t already told him how she made a living? Even though they’d only been together one day, they’d shared so many adrenaline-fueled experiences it somehow caught her by surprise that he didn’t know. She knew about
him
being in business with his brothers.

“And you can do this in ten minutes?”

She nodded. “Or less.” She turned to consider the shops behind them and the tables set up along the edge of the sidewalk. “Let’s go in there,” she said, nodding at a shop two doors away from where they stood.

It was dim and cooler inside and she headed straight to the wall of carnival masks. “We’ll make yours easy,” she said and within two minutes had selected a tiger’s-head mask, two arm ruffs and a beads-and-bones necklace. She carried everything to the counter to pay.

“Is there a back door?” she asked the clerk, who was more interested in checking out the action on the street than in her and Finn. Except to check the price, he’d barely even glanced at her purchase.

Without taking his gaze off another group of scantily dressed young women outside, he jerked his head at the narrow curtain that separated the front from the back of the store.

They stepped through it and she put a finger to her lips. “Take off your shirt,” she whispered. “And if you have different pants to put on that wouldn’t hurt, either.”

He did as she said—and for once she was too busy digging her all-gold pirate outfit from the bottom of her tote to take the time to admire the show. Throwing in the costume had been a last-minute impulse in case she needed to supplement her meager funds while she was here. She hadn’t actually anticipated it would be necessary, but as she dropped her pants and wiggled into a pair of tights she thanked God for the little voice that had insisted she include it.

She slipped a full-sleeved shirt over her tank tops and buttoned it up to her throat. She added a vest atop that, tied a sash around her waist and arranged the two oversize plastic skeleton keys to dangle just right. Her sword was in her suitcase back at Senora Guerrero’s boardinghouse, but she slid her plastic dagger into the sash at her side. She pulled on soft, flimsy-soled boots, then reached for her makeup kit and stepped into the small restroom that luckily provided a mirror and began sponging gold makeup on her face and neck and hands.

She turned to see Finn staring at her. “You are fast,” he said in a low voice.

She nodded and unfolded her soft tricorne, reshaped it and fit it over her hair, tying the attached kerchief in an elaborate knot at the back of her head to hold it in place. She gave herself a quick once-over to make sure she hadn’t missed a spot where her fair skin might show through, then jerked her chin at Finn. “C’mere.”

He squeezed into the tiny room and she indicated that he should take a seat on the toilet. “You’re tan enough to pass as a native so we’re going to keep this simple,” she breathed and dabbed yellow patches on his shoulders and upper arms, chest and abs, then squatted to paint black slashes atop them. She dropped the necklace over his head and tied the ruffs above his elbows. Strands of gold and black faux fur hung almost to his wrists. He’d changed into khaki shorts and she tied her leopard-print scarf around his waist, then handed him the mask. “Place this to give yourself the best vision possible, then turn around so I can get your back.”

He did so, and moments later Mags stepped back to check out the overall effect. “Not bad,” she murmured. “I’d do better with more time, but this ain’t too shabby.” She nodded at the mirror. “Check it out.”

He rose and did as she directed. For a second it was dead quiet in the crowded little room. Then, “Dammmmn,” he breathed. “You’re right. I don’t think my mom would recognize me. And you look amazing.” He handed her the camera. “Take a shot, wouldja?”

She did, then posed with him for a selfie, before getting down to business. “Let’s go see if I can make us some money.” She eased out of the bathroom and headed for the door in the back.

“Wait...what?” Finn was right on her heels, moving with amazing stealth for a man of his size.

Not that he was massively large or overly bulky. She shot a glance at him as they headed for the door that opened onto the street behind the festival, admiring his wide shoulders, nicely developed arms and leanly muscled chest and abs.

He was just right.

The front door crashed open and they both froze as they heard rough-toned voices demand from the clerk if he’d seen the two of them.

“Shit,” she whispered and wagged her fingers to indicate he should go back into the bathroom. She crowded in behind him and had barely managed to get the door closed past their blocking bodies when footsteps pounded past. The door to the back street opened.

And seconds later, slammed shut again.

Pressing back against Finn’s front, she eased the door open and peeked out. “Coast is clear,” she breathed. “We’d better go out through the front.”

The clerk was still more interested in the festival than them when they appeared back in his shop and they let themselves out the door. “Let’s go this way,” she said as they hit the sidewalk. “I’m hoping to find a plaza.”

They wove through the crowd for two more blocks and at the end of the second, Mags was rewarded, for it emptied into a plaza. “Grab me out one of your pans, would you?” she asked and walked over to a spot that was a bit clearer of people than the rest. “Just put it down at my feet, then go stand away from me,” she instructed when Finn pulled the smallest pot from the nest of three.

He did as she directed with the pan, but demanded, “What the hell are you going to do?”

“My cash is low. I’m going to make some more while the opportunity is hot.” And having said so, she struck a pose and froze.

Her stillness, in the midst of all the activity, immediately drew a crowd. People marveled at her unblinking resemblance to a statue and boys tried everything they could to make her flinch.

But she had been doing this for years and had built up an immunity to loud noises and hands clapped or fingers flicked in her face. It wasn’t until a little girl maybe three years old stared up at her in awe and whispered, “Is she real, Papa?” that she gave a slow wink.

The crowd roared and tossed a rain of El-TIPs into her pan. She changed her pose and remained unmoving for an additional twenty minutes, suffused by a sense of pleasure as rich as the cash growing steadily higher at her feet. Finally, seeing Finn circle back as he’d done periodically, she barely moved her lips to ask in English, “We clear to move on?”

He gave the area a casual glance. “As far as I can tell. I haven’t see the thugs again.”

“Good.” Giving up her pose, she stooped to pick up the container of pesos. People applauded and with a cheerful grin she rose and bowed with a flourish. Then she met Finn’s gaze head-on for the first time since beginning this gig. “Then maybe we should get while the getting’s good.”

CHAPTER NINE

“S
HIT
.” F
INN
PUT
his hand on Magdalene’s arm to stay her as they started around the corner that would bring them to the car-rental agency. He pulled her with him as he stepped back until the building blocked them from view again.

“What?” she whispered.
“What?”

“They’re here.” He risked another quick glance around the building, but his eyes hadn’t deceived him. The same steroid-fed gorillas they’d seen at the festival were standing next to the car they’d just turned in. “The cartel goons are over in the lot.”

Clearly stunned, Magdalene stared up at him without so much as a blink of those big blue eyes. “How did they know this is where we’d be?”

Good question. But he thought about it as he led her back the way they’d come and, thinking out loud, he said slowly, “They probably didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“When we hit town and you asked that guy if there was a place that rented cars, he immediately named this one. It might be the only game in town, and if that’s the case, it would make it the logical place to check. It’s also possible Munoz got a line on the car we turned in and that’s how they’ve been finding us. They probably came here first and found the joint closed for the festival, then tried again after we gave them the slip.”

“Crap, crap,
crap
!” The sclera of her eyes were very white against the gold paint still on her face. “Now what are we going to do?”

“I actually have a plan.”

“You do? What is it?”

“I’ll tell you when we get where we’re going.” From the front pocket of his shorts he pulled out the paperwork he’d gotten earlier at the car agency. After returning two pieces to his pocket, he shook open the map.

“Tell me now.” Mags reached around him for the map, but he half turned to wedge his shoulder between them and held her off as he pored over the route the clerk had highlighted.

“Dammit, Finn! Lemme see.” She reached again.

Again he deflected her. “You’ll see when we get there.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t make me hurt you.”

He made a rude noise. “Yeah, I’m real worried.” He folded the map and shoved it back in his pocket. “There’s nothing quite so scary as a gold pirate chick with a plastic dagger.” He grinned at her indignant expression. “Good thing I’m in possession of all the real weapons.”

“That’s true,” she agreed, then gave him a level look. “But you have to sleep sometime.”

He laughed and picked up his pace. He didn’t slow down again until they reached a small market along their route. “We’d better get some new provisions.” He blew out a breath. “I’m gonna miss that little cooler.”

“And the
ajiaco
,” she said wistfully. “I was really looking forward to having that tonight. It was one of my favorite dishes when I was a kid.”

They went inside and Mags asked to use the restroom, disappearing with that big-ass and evidently bottomless purse of hers behind the colorful bead curtain separating the store from the storage room. By the time she reappeared, pink-skinned from a scrubbing and wearing regular clothes, he’d selected an assortment of nonperishable groceries and a few pieces of fruit.

She looked at his selection, then grabbed a couple of chocolate bars and two big bottles of water. They took their purchases to the counter and she hauled out the scarf she’d knotted around the afternoon’s take. “Here. Use this. You’ve been paying way more than your fair share.”

He took it because he could see she’d make a fuss if he didn’t. And because he’d seen what she’d hauled in during that relatively short time.

Watching her in the square this afternoon had blown him away. He never would have guessed that someone who pumped out energy in the kind of massive waves she did could stand so still. She had
been
a golden pirate statue and none of the noise or movement on that square, none of the young boys who had done their best to make her flinch or the grown-ups who had waved disbelieving hands in front of her face, had affected her immobility one bit. Hell, he’d thought only cats could go that long without blinking.

When he finished paying up, she reknotted her scarf around the hardly dented mound of El-TIPs and thanked the clerk for letting her use the bathroom. Then they packed their bags with their supplies and hit the streets again.

Not much farther on, they began to catch an occasional breeze. He steered her to the right at the end of the next street.

“We must be getting near the river,” Mags said. “It feels a little cooler and I’m catching a whiff of it now and then.” Turning her head, she gave him a smile that was almost girlishly sweet. “I love that smell.”

“Good,” he said as they reached the street running along the river and turned left. “Because we’re taking a boat from here.” He braced himself, waiting for all the reasons why it was a stupid idea.

“Will it get us closer to our objective?”

“Yeah. Pretty damn close, in fact.”

“It’s probably a good idea, then. Hopefully it won’t occur to Joaquin and company that we’d take this route.”

Huh. Every time he thought he had her all figured out, she caught him by surprise.

But he didn’t have time to mull it over because he was beginning to note that the farther they walked toward the dock where the agency clerk had told him he’d find the boat, the rougher this section of town became. He didn’t care for the way some of the men lounging and smoking outside a bar they were approaching eyed Mags.

Without missing a step, he shifted her to the street side of the wooden plank sidewalk.

“What the—”

“Keep moving and don’t make eye contact with the guys up ahead. I don’t like the way they’re looking at you and I doubt you would, either. But trust me when I say I’m pretty sure they’re the kind who’d take any eye contact from you as encouragement.”

“What if they thought I was already taken? That I was all hot for you?”

He shrugged, both at the question and the way his body predictably got with the program with an immediate mental,
Oh, yeah. Come to Daddy.

Since his body was a dumb animal that had gone without for a while and tended to show its willingness to change its luck when so much as a whiff of opportunity arose, he forgave it that. At the same time, he did what grown-ups do and ignored it. “Toss-up,” he said. “It might be just the ticket—or it might set off a feeding frenzy.”

“I like the first idea. Not too crazy about the second when I’m the chum.” She slid her arm around his waist. “Maybe if we start off easy.”

Holy crap, she felt good snugged up against his side. “Yeah,” he said, sliding his arm across her nearest shoulder and hooking his elbow around her neck, his hand dangling dangerously close to the thrust of her breast. “Maybe then.”

Finn knew it was playacting, but glued against Mags from shoulder to thigh as they walked in slow, sensual unison down the sidewalk, all he really cared about was her heat, her scent sinking into him. It was already sweltering, so shouldn’t it have made him feel caged in? Yet it didn’t. It just felt kind of...right.

They were almost to the knot of men when Mags looked up at him and laughed. “You do know, don’t you, that you still have your makeup on?”

Well, hell
. As soon as they’d cleared the festival he’d removed his mask and those hula-skirt-type arm things and put his T-shirt back on. But after that he’d been so focused on getting to the rental agency, then on getting
away
from it without being seen, that he’d entirely forgotten the makeup she’d put on him. Even when Mags had used the store’s restroom to wash off her own and strip off her hat, swashbuckler shirt and boots, it hadn’t dawned on him.

Now here he was, approaching a bunch of guys that he’d call bikers if they were in the States and, okay, had any actual Harleys outside the cantina, and he was decked out in fucking cat makeup. Great way to intimidate the South American Bad Boys. The only saving grace here was the hurkin’ big knife he’d taken off Joaquin, which was tucked in his leopard-print belt.

An-n-nd...shit. Could have done without the reminder of the scarf threaded through his belt loops.

Apparently, though, Team Bikers Without Bikes thought it was cuter than the
olinguito
mammal recently discovered in the Andes, because they started whistling and making kissy sounds and generally saying things that even with his inadequate piss-poor Spanish he could tell was a version of “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

The tone was universal even if the words were not.

Still, he was known far and wide—at least throughout Clan Kavanagh—as Mister Mellow. These jokers would have to do a helluva lot better than make pussy jokes to truly embarrass or anger him.

It was plain to see, however, that they’d succeeded in pissing off Mags. “What the
hell
?” she growled and opened her mouth, clearly prepared to deliver a set down in her liquid rapid-fire Spanish.

He tightened the bend of his elbow around her neck and gave her a big feral grin when she looked up at him. “You know I grew up with six siblings, right?”

“Yeah, yeah—you don’t appreciate them, needed some space from the whole family, but especially the women, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Not really the time to have this discussion again, Kavanagh.”

“Yeah, it actually is,
Deluca
. Because compared to my brothers and sisters, these guys are novices.
Nothing
is more ruthless than a Kavanagh kid with a grudge and the slice-and-dice vocabulary and fertile imagination to come up with unique retribution. By the time I hit first grade I was an old hand at sucking it up and never letting anyone see that anything said to me could actually
get
to me.”

“And...? Oh-h-h.” She drew the word out as the answer to her own question dawned. “There’s nothing a bully hates quite as much as that, is there?” She threw back her head and laughed. “Brilliant. You’re rather diabolical.”

“I try,” he admitted modestly.

They’d drawn abreast of the clowns outside the cantina. Her laughter seemed to have shut them up, however, and the two of them sauntered past unmolested.

Or at least Finn thought they had until, reaching around him, one of the men grabbed Mags’s ass in the wake of their passing.

Rage exploded in his brain and, spinning to face the assailant, he caught the groper with an uppercut to the jaw just as the guy was pulling back his hand and winking and mugging for his buds. The ass grabber went down like a felled sapling and Finn, still seeing red, pulled back his foot to kick the shit out of him, but Mags grabbed him by the arm with one hand as she fumbled in her big purse with the other. “We’re kinda outnumbered here, dude,” she muttered urgently under her breath. “We gotta move.”

Seeing she was right, that the asshat’s friends were beginning to recover from their surprise and weren’t happy with him—or, by extension, Mags—he had to agree that putting some distance between them was probably an excellent idea. Clamping his fingers around her free wrist, he took off at a dead run. She’d demonstrated yesterday that she could keep up.

He swallowed a snort. Hell, who was he kidding? She could likely outstrip him if it came right down to it. The woman could
run
. So damned if he’d insult her by expecting anything less now.

They pounded down the wooden sidewalk for a full two blocks, angry nonbikers a posse of raggedly spread-out avengers in their wake. Finally, he spotted a ramshackle marina up ahead that had to be the one the clerk told him about. “This way,” he said when they reached it and swerved onto the long dock.

Checking out the boats, he muttered, “No,” to every one they approached, then passed by. “No, no,
fuck
no, no,
yes
! That one!” He pulled them to a halt in front of an open, narrow craft that looked like a slightly oversize dory, with its narrower flat bottom and high sides. He could see shipped oars inside but it also had a nine-horse motor attached to the back. It wasn’t exactly what he’d anticipated, but it was the only one painted royal blue with an orange keel and orange trim.

Pulling the key from his pocket, he tried to hand it to Mags. “Climb in and I’ll untie it.”

“
I’ll
untie it,” she said. “You get it started. I don’t know bupkes about engines of any kind.” Squatting down, she lobbed her bag onto the floor of the boat between the two middle plank seats and went to work unfastening the front line looped around the dock cleat. “And make it snappy,” she added. “Those idiots will be here any minute now.”

He didn’t bother arguing. She was right; he should have assigned the duties that way in the first place. The motor looked fairly ancient and it was going to take some finessing from someone who actually knew something about engines. Not to mention that he was the one who’d been given instructions for locating everything they needed before he could even start the damn thing.

Climbing into the boat, he located a small lockbox beneath the bow and used the key to open it. From inside, he pulled out the starter cord and wound it around the pulley. Then he hauled out a good-sized gas can, quickly connected its fuel line to the motor and squeezed the rubber bulb in the line a couple of times to get gas into the carburetor. After pulling out the choke, he gave the wooden handle on the cord a yank. It gave a halfhearted cough, then died.