Extreme Bachelor (39 page)

“Oh, Ado—I mean, Juan Carlo. That’s really
profound.”

“Si
, it is very wise. But hear this,” he added. “You are too
stubborn.”

“Excuse me? Why does everyone think I should
just blindly accept what Michael says?”

“You should not,” Juan Carlo said. “But when
he tells you things, it is not attractive to be stubborn. You look.
. .” He glanced at Michael over his shoulder and said in Spanish,
“like a bull.”

“Bullheaded,” Michael helpfully
supplied.

“Oh!” Leah cried indignantly.

“Remember this.” Juan Carlo smiled, patted
her cheek, and stood up, tapping the nozzle of the gun against his
arm as he turned toward Michael. “But it does not matter now, does
it? Come now, Michael Raney. Give me the key.”

Michael laughed. “The key won’t do you any
good, Juan Carlo. The safe is empty. It’s all sitting in Swiss bank
accounts with my name on it.”

The tapping of the gun stilled. “Do not play
games with me,” he warned. “I will kill your love first and let you
watch her die.”

Leah’s brows dipped into a V at that. She
clenched her jaw and very quietly let go of the rope, judging by
the way it slackened around her body. Michael kept his eye on Juan
Carlo, his eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. “You want the key?”
he asked.

“Si
,” Juan Carlo said with a bit of a bow as Leah managed to
push the ropes down around her waist.

“Then I’ll tell you where it is.”

“Go on.”

“Maribel has it.”

Juan Carlo’s laugh was cold. “Even if you do
not produce the key, I will still kill you, Michael Raney. I have
my honor to protect.”

“Yeah, well, Maribel
stomped all over your honor,
amigo
. She used that key like a red
light,” he said as Leah quickly pushed the rope down to her knees.
“It was her ticket to good sex. That was her problem with you, you
know. No finesse in the bedroom.”

He would never know who moved first—Leah, or
him, or even Juan Carlo. But as Juan Carlo lifted the gun to shoot
him. Michael lunged at the same moment Leah rose up and clipped
Juan Carlo in the back, just like Cooper had taught them in boot
camp. When Juan Carlo doubled over on his side, Michael leaped to
his feet and kicked him in the face, knocking him back.

The gun went flying out of Juan Carlo’s
hand, and he was forced around by the blow to his head. He fell
against the bureau, and as Leah kicked him, Michael launched
himself at Juan Carlo, landing on his body and crashing with him to
the floor.

He didn’t know how Leah fell, but when she
scrambled to her feet, she was holding the gun by the finger loop,
as far away from her body as she could.

“Leah!” Michael shouted. “Get the rope!”

She whirled around, saw that Michael had
Juan Carlo’s hands behind his back, but that Juan Carlo was
struggling and cursing them in Spanish. She instantly put the gun
on the bed, grabbed the rope—grappling with the chair for a
moment—and then fell on Juan Carlo’s legs, wrapping the rope around
his feet.

In the meantime, Michael grabbed the other
end of it and strove to get the rope around Juan Carlo’s hands, who
was frantically struggling now, his face red with his cursing. Leah
scrambled up the side of Juan Carlo and grabbed his head, which
caused a burst of blue Spanish and venom directed at her. Leah
cringed, but Michael encouraged her. “Hold on, you’re doing
great.”

She held on while Michael trussed him up,
not only to himself, but to the bed. He jumped up with Juan Carlo
screaming at him, grabbed the gun, and then grabbed Leah, pushing
her out the door. “Go!” he said to her. “Get out of here!”

Leah ran.

Michael turned back to Juan Carlo, pointed
the gun at his head. “You fucking bastard,” he breathed.

Juan Carlo just laughed. “Kill me,” he said
easily. “Without the key, I am a dead man already.”

As Leah reached the door, it flew open, and
several men stormed in. She screamed; one of them grabbed her,
clamped a hand over her mouth, and dragged her outside. “Jesus,
lady, take a breath! We’re here to help.”

She grabbed his hand and pulled it free of
her mouth and then dragged a breath into her lungs. Several deep
breaths, actually, until her heart stopped racing and her hands
stopped shaking. And then she looked at the guy in the suit with
the shades. “Who in the hell are you?” she demanded.

He smiled. “Hey, it’s okay. Everything is
okay.”

JUAN Carlo was, as Michael very well knew, a
very passionate man—but he’d never thought him stupid. Maybe a few
years in Spanish prison had dulled his sharp senses, because he’d
let passion get in the way of common sense, and his desire to see
Michael dead lead him to some very bad decisions. Like coming to
the United States, for example. And then tracking Michael down. And
using Leah to draw him in.

But Juan Carlo was one lucky bastard, the
recipient of a little divine intervention, because when Rex
arrived, Michael had the gun barrel pressed against Juan Carlo’s
head and was debating whether or not he should kill him.

“Hey,” Rex said breezily
as he gingerly took the gun from Michael’s hand. “I told you to
let
me
kill
him.”

Juan Carlo snorted disdainfully, but Michael
stepped back, put his hand to the back of his head where Juan Carlo
had clocked him, and smiled maniacally at his foe, at the blood
splattered on his expensive blue silk shirt, at his hands, now
cuffed with steel. “Your ass is dead, Juan Carlo,” he said, and Rex
quickly put his hands to Michael’s chest and pushed him back. “I’ll
see you dead before you lay another hand on anyone close to
me.”

“Michael,” Rex said sternly, shoving him
backward. “It’s over. Shake it off.”

Michael laughed and added in Spanish, “Keep
an eye on your back, my friend, because I will never let this
die.”

Juan Carlo chuckled. “I would offer you the
same advice.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Rex said, and shoved
Michael hard into the kitchen, as another agent squatted down
before Juan Carlo and began to ask him questions in Spanish.
Predictably, Juan Carlo responded with colorful curses.

Michael shook Rex off and strode outside,
pushing on the kitchen door with such force that it almost came off
its hinges. He stalked off the porch and stood in the bright
sunlight, his hands on his hips, taking deep breaths to calm
himself down. On the other side of an overgrown yard, Leah was
leaning against the trunk of a nondescript rental car, her arms
folded tightly around her. There were dark circles under her eyes,
her hair was a tangle of blond, and her dress . . . well, that
dress just made his blood boil.

She was holding her arms tightly around her,
staring at the ground as she answered the questions of agents,
listened to them tell her not to speak of this to anyone until they
said she could, which, of course, they would never do.

Michael turned away, his guilt at seeing her
so exhausted and disheveled overwhelming. Rex had walked outside.
“Let her go, get her out of here,” Michael said.

“Sure,” Rex said, and left Michael alone to
collect his thoughts.

But a moment later, Michael heard an
exclamation of frustration from Leah and turned around in time to
see her striding toward him, her arms swinging, her eyes blazing.
“You aren’t going to pat my head and send me away after that,” she
said as she came to a halt in front of Michael, her chin tilted up
defiantly, her hands on her hips. “Isn’t there something you want
to say?”

“Say?” he echoed dumbly. There were a
million things he wanted to say. So many, he didn’t know where to
start.

Leah’s eyes narrowed, and
she rose up on her toes and leaned forward, so that they were
almost nose-to-nose and said, “
Say
. For example, sorry this
happened, Leah? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you there was a crazy
murderer lurking around and that you might possibly be in danger?”
she added heatedly as they brought Juan Carlo out of the cabin. “Or
how about, gee, it really sucks that you were poisoned and a gun
was put to your head and you could have died!”

“It was not poison,” Juan Carlo shouted as
two agents led him by.

“Oh, really?” Leah shouted after him. “Well,
thanks to you I’ll never drink orange juice again!”

Michael caught her arm, drawing her
attention back to him. “I’m sorry, Leah,” he said, assuming that
was what she wanted. “I am so sorry this happened.”

Dammit if tears didn’t fill her blue eyes.
It was one of those moments that every guy knows, a moment of total
cluelessness as to what he’d said or didn’t say to cause the tears.
Inside, he groped in the dark, searching vainly for a lesson
learned somewhere along the way that might fill him in.

And as he floundered, Leah choked on a sob
as she hauled off and hit him in the arm as hard as she could.
“Sorry isn’t good enough!” she cried through her sobs. “You have
used me and hurt me and humiliated me, and now you almost got me
killed. Sorry. Is. Not. Good. Enough!” she said, hitting him with
each word.

Michael stood there, stoic and unmoving,
uncertain if she intended to hit him again, uncertain if he should
just take it or make her stop. Leah raised her arm again, but then
dropped it. Her shoulders sagged; she dropped her chin to her
chest. “I want to go home.”

“Okay, baby,” he said low, and put his hand
on her arm, but Leah instantly shrugged it off and would not look
up.

He looked at Rex, who put a hand on Leah’s
shoulder. “Let us take you back to camp,” he said soothingly, and
led a strangely dejected Leah away.

If Michael could have any moment of the day
back, it would have been that one. He wished he’d never seen her
expression—the weariness, the bewilderment. Part of him wished he’d
never even run into her again so that he would have spared her all
this turmoil. He’d been so intent on his own wants he had obviously
failed to consider Leah’s fully. He’d just been so certain they’d
both want back what they’d lost years ago. It never occurred to him
that the intervening years would rise up to stop him.

Leah didn’t look back, just let Rex lead her
away.

Michael felt about as low as he’d ever felt
in his life.

After one of the agents took Leah back to
camp, Michael spent the rest of the day with Rex ensuring that what
had happened on Sunlight Canyon Road would not be discovered by
local authorities or by the media—or whoever owned the rundown old
cabin, for that matter. As far as the world outside the U.S.
government was concerned, Juan Carlo Sanchez had never come to the
United States, and government agents would make sure that his
tracks were completely erased.

A nondescript white car pulled away from the
cabin, whisking Juan Carlo away to some clandestine holding cell.
As they watched it barrel down the gravel road, Rex asked, “So
what’s the deal with the key? Your boy won’t stop talking about
it.”

“It fits a safe deposit box that was full of
money and gold and a lot of blow at one time,” Michael said with a
snort.

“That explains some of it,” Rex said. “We
know he owes a lot of money to some really scary people.”

“He won’t find it in that box,” Michael
said. “And all this time, he thought I was the one to have cleaned
it out, the stupid fool.”

“Who did?” Rex asked.

Michael smiled wryly. “His wife. Who
else?”

IT was late when Michael got back to camp,
and the women were in rare form. As usual, they were divided into
two main groups. The Starlets, as Leah called them, were sitting
around a roaring campfire, obviously a little drunk, laughing and
singing and calling out some surprisingly lewd suggestions to the
camera guys milling around.

The cameramen, however, were not as
interested in those suggestions—at least not professionally—because
there was another group of women who were arguing over something
that had happened on the rafting trip, and it looked as if it might
come to blows.

“The girls are tired,” Cooper said with a
slight shake of his head. “They need a nap.”

“What’s going on?” Michael asked.

“A paddle accident,” Eli said as he squinted
in the direction of the squabbling women.

“A lost paddle?”

“Nope. One of them managed to hit another
one in the back of the head through a chute, and wouldn’t you know
it, that opened up a whole other can of worms.”

“About?” Jack asked.

Eli sighed, swiped the baseball hat off his
head, scratched his scalp, and put the baseball cap back on before
responding. “I’m not certain, but I think about shoes.”

“Shoes?”

“Shoes
,” Eli said emphatically. “Those two women and their friends
almost killed each other over a pair of shoes.”

“Now be fair, Eli,” Cooper said. “It was a
pair of Stuart Wiseass, or something like that.”

“What does that mean?” Jack asked.

“Hell if I know,” Cooper admitted.

The four men peered at the women, who were
quite animated in their heated discussion about who had done what
to whom, baffled by such strong feelings about shoes.

But when a petite brunette carelessly tossed
a plastic tumbler at a buxom blonde and hit her in the knee, a
screech went up that had Eli and Cooper moving quickly to break up
what all of them feared could turn into a brawl.

“So how was
your
day?” Jack asked as
he and Michael watched Cooper try to reason with women who were
alternately pouting and arguing, while the rest of the women
snickered about it.

“Not so great,” Michael said truthfully.