Trust Me

“I just want to be sure I understand,” Lilah said, mercifully interrupting his thoughts.

Well, yeah. That makes two of us, sweetheart. I’d like to understand how I can be standing here thinking of all the different ways I’d like to have wild, swing-from-the-chandeliers sex with you when I haven’t seen you in ten years.

“Gran came to your office and hired you to rescue me?”

“That’s right.”

“And your brother has worked for her in the past. That’s why she went to him and how you came to be here?”

“More or less.”

“And after we…knew…each other you left Denver and joined the Navy?”

“Yeah. Now, if you don’t mind, we don’t have a lot of time before the sun goes down and the guards bring dinner, so let me ask the questions.” He’d think about his backstabbing libido later. Say back in Denver. Over a tall cool one at his favorite tavern. In the year 2025. For now, it was time to get down to business.

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“Know what?”

“About dinner.”

He reminded himself to be patient, that it was understandable she’d have questions. “Because I spent yesterday surveilling this place. There’s a big tree about five hundred feet from the compound entrance. It’s tall enough that I could see them ferrying food from the kitchen. Now I need you to tell me whether they come back after dinner to pick up your plate or wait until morning.”

“So far, they’ve always left it until morning.”

“Good. Do you see anybody in between time? Do they do a bed check or come in when the guard changes shifts?”

“No. Why?”

“Because.” He felt for the opening in the seam of his pants just below his hip. “If that’s the case, then once the food comes we essentially become invisible until dawn. And I plan on us being gone from here way before then.”

Disbelief—and a gleam of longing?—flashed in her eyes. Yet she was too well-schooled to expose her emotions longer than that single moment. “Well, yes, that would be nice. But short of dematerializing and squeezing through the bars—” her voice was suddenly cool and uninflected “—I don’t see how you’re going to accomplish that. And even if you could, you’d still have to get the corridor door unbolted and then get past the guards you’re so intent on avoiding. Somehow I don’t see any of that happening.”

He pulled the thigh-length, razor-thin cutting blade free from its hiding place. “Neither do I. That’s why we’re not going out that way.”

“We’re not?” Lilah’s lips parted in astonishment.

And just like that, that prickly wanna-touch sensation washed over him. Because she really did have the most luscious mouth….

“No, we’re not,” he said firmly, forcing himself to concentrate on their surroundings, to triple-check that he hadn’t overlooked anything, even though the layout was already firmly inscribed on his brain. Located on a windswept headland on San Timoteo’s southern tip, the cell block occupied the far end of the walled-off compound that was also home to a commandant’s residence and modest barracks.

The jail itself was the shape of a basic rectangle. At the top of the shorter, western wall was a solid iron door that opened from a guard house into a narrow corridor boasting a single small, skinny window. The corridor, roughly five feet by forty, fronted four small, barred cells that were identical in size and shared a common solid back wall. Their only other notable feature was their utter lack of creature comforts.

Deciding the surroundings were stark enough to depress even his overly active libido, Dom returned his gaze to Lilah.

Who’d taken yet another step back from the bars and was now standing in the sole shaft of sunlight, allowing him to see what he’d missed before due to the deep shadows that draped the room like a heavy blanket.

A smudge of bruises circled her right wrist, a larger contusion ran from shoulder to elbow on her opposite arm, and a fading but still telltale smear of yellow-tinged purple marred one side of her jaw.

The sight made him go cold. Suddenly wishing he could turn back time and have a real go at the sons-of-bitches guards instead of pulling his punches the way he had when he’d let them overpower him, he struggled to contain his anger and keep it out of his voice. “Lilah.”

His voice may have sounded normal, but clearly something—the rigidness of his stance, the muscle that had twitched to life in his jaw—must have tipped her off to his sudden tension because she went very still. “What?

“Did they hurt you?” he asked softly.

“Hurt me?” Despite her cautious response, the fingers of her right hand reflexively touched her battered wrist, revealing she knew what had prompted the question.

“Were you raped?”

Abruptly, her expression cleared. “No.” She shook her head. “No. I’m not positive, but I think El Presidente issued orders that I was off-limits…that way.”

“Oh, yeah? Why would he do that?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe because he only wants my money.”

“So the bruises are from what?” he persisted.

“This—” she indicated the area above her hand and gave a little shrug “—one of the guards got a little rough. The rest—” inexplicably, a faint flush colored the curve of her elegant cheekbones “—are from when I was being held in Santa Marita. There was a car accident. Well, I suppose accident might not be exactly the correct term—”

“But nobody forced themselves on you?” he interrupted, wanting—needing—to be sure.

“No.”

“Okay, then. That’s…good.” As if his vision had suddenly improved—maybe he’d taken a harder hit to the head than he’d thought—he now saw that in addition to having been roughed up, she was on the brink of being not slender but fragile, the kind of look people got when they’d gone too long without adequate food.

The discovery didn’t improve his temper. He wanted her out of here now. Even more than he wanted a piece of the guards, and he wanted that pretty damn bad.

The fierceness of his feelings caught him off guard, but he’d think about it later. Over that beer he planned to drink back home. Without a certain blue-eyed, satin-skinned blonde to distract him and make him crave things he didn’t need.

“If we’re not leaving through the door, how do you plan to get us out of here?” Lilah asked.

She was nothing if not persistent. “If I tell you, will you stop with the Twenty Questions?”

“Yes, of course. I—”

“Deal,” he said flatly, cutting her off. “To answer your question—we’re going out through the hole I’m going to cut through the wall.”

Lilah watched in shock as Dominic turned his back on her. Stepping close to the expanse of rough gray concrete that formed the back of the cell block, he began to run his hands over it like a blind man exploring a lover’s face.

A score of questions screamed for answers in her head, competing for space with a dozen exclamations. The two common themes seemed to be “how on earth?” and “you’re out of your mind.”

Yet his silence, combined with his averted back, made it perfectly clear he didn’t want to talk.

Well, neither did she, Lilah thought, retreating to her bed. She could use some time to think. And to sift through all the contradictory emotions that were bouncing around inside her like rubber balls in a cement mixer.

She was barely settled, however, and nowhere close to sorting through the jumble of doubt, hope, fear and frustration vying for her attention, when the sound of the bolt being drawn in the outer door splintered the silence.

Her gaze snapped to Dominic. In the fraction of time it took for the door to swing open, her jailmate whirled and slid down the wall to sit in a crumpled heap on the floor, his arms dangling limply, his eyes shut, his head flopped to one side.