Miami Midnight (18 page)

“What about the family that lives here?” he asked from behind her. “Have you been up to check out the apartment since they left?”

“No.” If she walked out to the driveway and the Lamborghini, she thought frantically, maybe he would take the hint and leave. “The police looked at it, but I’ve been busy. And there have been so many other things.”

He started toward the garage. “Do you even know if they’ve been back? Have they removed any of their stuff?”

“No.” She had to run to keep up with him. Get rid of him, she told herself. He threw her off balance, raised this strange sexual panic that she couldn’t cope with. He had to go, if only for the sake of her sanity. Besides, she had to get back to the paper that afternoon. That was no lie. “I don’t know if I’ve got the key to the garage apartment with me,” she said. Ordering James Santo Marin off the property would do no good. She had to outmaneuver him. “The key may be in the house. We probably can’t get in.”

He had reached the downstairs door. When he turned the knob the door swung open into darkness.

“You won’t need it,” he said. “Somebody’s already been here.”

If the sea was an ink pot

And the sky made of paper,

The evil in women

Could not all be written.

If the sea was an ink pot

And paper the sky,

There would be no room for telling

How deeply men lie.

SPANISH FOLK SONG

Chapter 12

Gaby wandered through the apartment in a daze. The bedroom was even more of a shambles than the living room. The larger pieces of furniture were still there, but the Escuderos had taken the curtains, the braided rugs, wiped the kitchen clean of cooking utensils. Even the mattress cover was gone from the stripped bed. Someone had been in such a hurry to pull down the bedroom curtains that the metal rod was bent almost in a bow.

Gaby unhooked the damaged rod and laid it on the windowsill. The box fan was still in place. She turned the switch to see if it had been left because it didn’t work, but it hummed into life, pulling a strong, much-needed breeze into the room.

James Santo Marin stood in the doorway, thumbs hooked into his jeans, watching her. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

She shrugged. “Don’t be. You didn’t do it.”

She ran a finger over the top of the battered dresser, through a layer of spilled talcum powder. There’d always been a collection of photographs proudly displayed there: Angel in his First Communion clothes, Elena’s dead husband, Rafael, a number of snapshots of all the relatives still living in Cuba. Now there were only tracks in the talcum where pictures had been hastily scooped off the dresser.

“Elena was always so neat, so terribly clean and tidy. I can’t believe she’d come back and take everything and leave the place like this.” Gaby blamed herself for not checking the apartment sooner. Now, she remembered, there was no one left to help with the cleaning and the yard work. She was going to have to spend the weekend cleaning up the apartment alone. The thought dismayed her. She sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the mess.

“They didn’t do this,” he told her. “Somebody came back and cleaned the place out for them.”

She lifted her head. “Why do you say that?”

“Whoever it was didn’t know what to take. So they took everything that wasn’t nailed down.”

She threaded her fingers through her sweat-damp hair in a gesture of weariness. “It could have been burglars,” she said without conviction. “They rob places for money for drugs.”

His black gaze followed the movement of her arm as she pulled her hair up from the back of her neck and held it there, briefly, for a little coolness. “They’d have hit the big house for that,” he said. “There’s nothing in servants’ quarters to steal.”

He ought to know, she thought with sudden bitterness. Restlessly, she shrugged out of her jacket and laid it on the mattress. Her blouse was damp with perspiration. “Miami certainly wasn’t like this when I was growing up.”

He leaned against the doorjamb, his expression enigmatic. “There wouldn’t be any drug trade, Miss Collier, if the citizens of the United States didn’t fall all over themselves to shove the stuff up their noses. You can’t supply a market unless the demand exists.”

“Drug dealers are just giving people what they want?” Her voice was tinged with sarcasm. It seemed a century since she had had lunch with Dodd in the Brickell Tower restaurant and she was tired. The trip to
Calle Ocho
in search of answers had come to nothing. Except that she’d made a fool of herself, and been badgered first by the yuppie voodoo high priest and now by this arrogant Latin hunk who thought himself above the law.

His face tightened. “Are we back to that? Because I’m a
latino
, I’m automatically guilty of undermining upright American society?”

“You said it,” she snapped. “I didn’t.”

He pushed away from the doorway. “All right, Miss Collier. Should I tell you how many times I’ve been approached in boardrooms, in the men’s rooms in expensive restaurants, on the damned country club
tennis courts
by total strangers, by your hotshot Anglo social register types, Miami’s leading citizens, because their subtle prejudice says that as a
latino
I
look
like I ought to be able to fix them up with a couple of keys of their favorite recreational drug?”

Gaby’s lip curled. “I haven’t accused you of anything.”

“Or that I ought to do your friends a chummy favor,” he went on in the same ominously soft voice, “and pop them a few lines of cocaine if, uncouth grease-ball that I am, I want to be really accepted in sacred WASP inner circles? Do you know what that does to my tender
latino
ego? How goddamned flattered I am by it all?”

“I don’t want to discuss it.” He was standing over her, and she wished she hadn’t taken her jacket off. Her silk blouse was sticking to her, outlining her breasts.

“But
I
want to discuss it. I want to tell you how I feel when I’m trying to close a business deal with some arrogant Anglo asshole who’s sniffed so much snow into his brain that he can’t see the paper he’s signing, can’t understand the terms his lawyers and mine have carefully delineated—but who is going to accuse me, two or three days later, of being a dirty conniving spick who screwed him out of his money. And”—his voice hardened—”who tells me on the telephone after he’s thought it over that I could make things right if I just let him in on a little dealing occasionally?”

She looked away from him. “I don’t have anything to do with your problems!”

“Oh, but Miss Collier, you do.” He sat down on the bed beside her. Very close beside her. “Because I see it in your eyes, that same speculation about my Latin viability. Only it’s not,” he murmured huskily, “whether I can pass you a little cocaine, is it? It’s something even more interesting.”

“Don’t start that.” She tried to get up, but he held her by the arm. “Let me go.”

“What’s the matter?” His hot black eyes were inches from hers. “Worried about the stereotype of the indestructible screw-anything-anytime Latin sex drive?” he asked softly. “Or even about your own uninhibited Anglo willingness?”

She managed to free her arm. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He raised his eyebrows mockingly. He was so close she could feel his body heat through her clothes. “You don’t? Hey, every time I see those beautiful silvery eyes of yours run up and down my body, I know you want to sample the goodies. But you’re not sure if I will live up to your expectations, right?”

She tried to inch away from him. “I wasn’t ‘uninhibited,’” she croaked. “That’s a lie! I’m not like that at all!”

“Beautiful Miss Collier, you could have fooled me.” He lifted his hand and touched the tumbled strands of her damp hair, frowning when he saw her flinch. “The flowers I sent you were supposed to say that I, at least, remembered all of it—very clearly.”

Gaby’s heart was pounding. She eyed the doorway desperately. “I’ve never done anything like that in my life. Usually I’m not, I mean I never have been...” She saw his eyebrows raise again. “I don’t mean I’m a virgin or anything like that.”

The words had burst out in spite of herself, and she blushed. It was rank insanity to be in the same room with him. He always did this to her. “It was the storm,” she said breathlessly. “You took advantage of me.”

“I took advantage of
you
?” For a moment he was genuinely startled. “Lady, you’re the one who grabbed me and pulled me down on top of you, and then felt me up.”

Her mouth fell open. “Is that what you thought? That I—that I
grabbed
you?”

“Well, I couldn’t say no, could I?” He was so close his breath brushed her lips. “God, you tempt me,” he muttered to himself. “And I thought this would all go away.”

She knew he was going to kiss her. She was trembling from the closeness of that chiseled face with its incredible eyes. Yet she felt compelled to say something to stop him. “You have your own hang-ups,” she said breathlessly, “about p-promiscuous Anglos.”

“I specialized in Anglo girls in college.” He lowered his dark head. “I know what I’m talking about.”

She shuddered as he pulled back her damp hair, turning her face up to him. She still couldn’t move. “I’m not going to be one of your experiments,” she whispered.

“Believe me, you’re no experiment.”

He ran his warm, firm mouth lightly along her cheek, toward the shivery sensitiveness of her ear. Gaby quivered helplessly. His sensuous mouth hovered over hers, stirring an almost violent rush of need in her body. It was like electricity, the erotic spark that leaped between them. She’d almost forgotten its devastating magic. Totally captive to it, she lifted her arms and wound them around his neck, pressing her body into his.

A soft groaning sound broke from him. His arms tightened around her almost painfully. He smelled of male sweat with an underlay of soap, his body hard and warm, and her mouth opened to him. She felt him tremble, suddenly blazing with desire. Ah, how she remembered that passionate trembling, she thought dizzily, his sexy body and its steely strength!

She was aware that what she was doing was reckless, eminently dangerous. James Santo Marin was almost certainly a criminal, even if he was nearly too handsome to look the part. How could she be doing this, she wondered, wanting everything? When she was sure the attraction was only physical?

She deliberately put the questions out of her head. Everything had passed her by. Love, happiness, even sex, nothing had ever touched cowardly little Mouse. Right now she didn’t want to think about anything but this.

She pressed her body against his and slid her hands down his back, fingernails scraping the ridged muscles, the indent of his spine.

“My God.” His hands quickly slid up under her skirt, trembling to find only the thin scrap of nylon panties. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Yes.” She was on fire. A wild woman. That was not even her own voice.

His hand touched her bare skin, parted her tightly clasped thighs, and pressed against the shallow cleft. He stroked the little hooded button of flesh gently, insistently. “Easy, easy,” he told her as she jerked up against him, biting her lip against a wild, shivery scream. The sensation was more than she could bear.

He gazed down at her face, her half-closed eyes, lips swollen with naked desire.
“Gabriela ... “
The Spanish version of her name was incredibly seductive. “Don’t do this,” he murmured, “unless you want to.”

Smiling dreamily, Gaby showed him nothing but total, sensual surrender. He pressed her down onto the bed. She lay passively as he stood up and yanked off his shirt. The muscles of his naked chest and shoulders rippled as he kicked off his boots, then unzipped his jeans and peeled them down his legs. Then he pushed off his clinging black briefs.

For a moment he was outlined against the window in a blaze of hot summer light, his body spectacularly golden, yet vulnerable in its beauty. He looked young, unguarded, incomparably vital. As he turned, the florid shaft of his sex jutted out from him, almost brutishly heavy against his groin’s mat of dark hair.

The nearly sinister reality of the naked male body washed over Gaby in a chilling wave. And she was embarrassingly aware that she was still fully dressed, that she still wore her linen skirt, flowered silk shirt, even her shoes. The man who moved to the edge of the bed was completely naked.

She sat up, fighting panic. “I can’t do this!”

“What?”

“You heard me.” She scrambled to her knees on the bare mattress. Had she completely lost her mind? All he had to do was touch her and she went crazy. “I don’t fall into bed with a—with a man in the middle of the afternoon!”

He went very still. He stared at her for a long moment, then he said, his voice expressionless, “Do you want me to come back after dark?”

“No! No! I can’t. I don’t want you.”

He didn’t move, handsome features frozen, eyes slitted in dawning anger. Gaby sat back on her heels. She knew she couldn’t have said anything worse.

“What are you trying to do to me?” he asked harshly.