Barefoot with a Stranger (Barefoot Bay Undercover #2)(23)

“And made a lot of enemies.” He raked his hand through his hair and looked away, misery in every pore on his face. “I need closure. I can’t f*cking breathe until I have closure.”

“I’ll find out what I can,” Mal assured him. “But what about Chessie?”

“What about her?”

“She’s smart, Gabe. She’ll hear me ask questions. She might have a few of her own.”

Gabe nodded, as if he’d already considered that. “Look, she knows there was a woman, obviously. And she knows I cared about her. She wouldn’t wonder why you’re trying to find out how she died.”

“But what if I get classified information in the process?”

“I trust Chessie, but for God’s sake, don’t put her in harm’s way. If anything happens to her, I’ll kill you, and the rest of my family will kill me.”


“Understood.”

“And I mean anything, Mal. Half your job is to protect her, and the other half is to guide her around Cuba.”

“What about getting the information you want?”

Gabe grinned and leaned back in his chair, putting his feet on the desk, a cocky son of a bitch again. “That’s the third half.”

But Mal leaned forward with one more question. “What are you going to do if you find out…if you don’t like what I learn about Isa?”

Gabe immediately put his feet back down and leaned all the way over the desk to make his point. “If she didn’t die peacefully and naturally, I will find out who is responsible for killing her and pluck out their eyes, break every bone in their body, and then stab them until they bleed out. What do you think I would do to anyone who even thinks about hurting someone I love?”

Mal swallowed against a dry throat. “Nothing less.”





Chapter Seven





Half a million dollars?

She’d stripped down, fallen into bed, and spread her legs for a prison guard who’d gone to jail for embezzling half a freaking million dollars? A loser with forty-two postal address changes in thirty-eight years who still had some holes in his whereabouts?

This had to be the icing on a cake of bad choices in men.

“Damn it,” she mumbled as she cruised through another database, unearthing one shocking piece of information after another. “You sure can look like one kind of person on paper and another in bed.”

Why would Gabe trust this guy? Why would he trust her safety to him and the project of finding his most precious possession—a child? To be fair, Gabe was a fantastic judge of character, and he must know something that wasn’t in these databases.

She brushed back some hair that fell over her face, vaguely realizing it had dried in the few hours since she’d showered and started researching her new “partner.” As soon as Nino brought her clothes, she’d be marching over to Gabe’s office for some answers.

Still wrapped in a fluffy Casa Blanca-supplied bathrobe, she pushed the computer away and walked through the French doors to the pool deck that overlooked a glorious water view. Turquoise waves lapped at white sand, a stretch of beach dotted by the bright yellow umbrellas that were a signature of this high-end resort. The sound of gulls and the occasional song of a kid’s laughter floated up from the sand, making her ache in a way she didn’t understand.

No, she understood. Sometimes it seemed like her love life was one long series of bad choices, all of them denying her the chance for that sound to be her child. And instead of being melancholy, she needed to get mad.

Mad that Mal wasn’t the one-night stand she’d hoped to have; now she had…feelings for him. She fisted her hand and banged the railing like she could punch the feelings away. She had to. He couldn’t be more wrong for her.

She closed her eyes and blocked out the postcard view, replacing it with the stark black-and-white data that she’d discovered about Malcolm James Harris, thirty-eight years old, born in Houston, Texas.

High school dropout, arrested for a drunk and disorderly at eighteen, enlisted in the Marines, did two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, then got out. More moves around the country in at least a dozen states—that’s where the holes were—with three stints as a prison guard. Then he joined the Maryland Reserves, got sent to Guantanamo, spent a few more months with no real address, then was at Allenwood as a prisoner…charged with stealing half a million dollars in federal funds.

He wasn’t a common thief; he was a big-time, showstopping thief.

And he’d never lay a hand on her again.

She closed the collar of the robe, as if she were physically blocking his access to her, and even that made her feel…sad. Mad. Frustrated.

Obviously, she’d never have sex with him again. Damn it.

That decision should suit her just fine—considering what she wanted in a man, and it sure as hell wasn’t a world-class embezzler with a list of forty-two different postal addresses. But it somehow didn’t suit her to think he was off-limits. Not primal her. Not Chessie who lost all control in a hotel with a stranger.

How could she forget how amazing that had been? How could she look at that face and not remember how his whiskers rubbed her thighs? How could she look at his mouth and not remember the taste of every kiss? How could she do this job for Gabe, pressed up next to Mal in an airplane, and not relive the way he owned every inch of her body and made her melt?