Barefoot with a Stranger (Barefoot Bay Undercover #2)(37)

He shrugged. “No.”

“No?” She laughed lightly. “No, you won’t tell me, or no, you didn’t have a big family growing up?”

“No big family, no noisy dinners, not much of anything, really.”

She felt a frown tug at her brow, trying to gauge if that was sadness or resignation or something a little darker in his eyes. Anger, maybe. Something not pleasant.

She couldn’t even think of a situation where there was not much of anything. But then she remembered all those addresses, all the way back to birth. “What about your childhood? How did you grow up?”

“On my own, mostly. My dad was”—he shook his head—“gone by the time I could speak. And my mom is a big dreamer but not much of a doer. Unless by doing you mean recreational drugs, which were her pastime of choice. We spent a lot of years moving around.”

She knew that, of course, but felt an ache for him. “It can’t be easy to be a single mom.”

“No, it’s not,” he agreed with a little more vehemence than she expected. “It’s probably the hardest thing in the world, but my mother made it about twenty times tougher than necessary.” He shifted in his seat again, and something told her it wasn’t physical discomfort bothering him now. “And I’m calling foul on the regs, Francesca. Wasn’t there something about intimate discussions?”

“Talking about your family and growing up isn’t intimate.”

He looked away, pretending to be more interested in the empty aisle of the plane.

“Unless it is,” she added.

He gave another shrug, and a face that tried to say he didn’t really care. Which made Chessie want to know more.

“So what’s your relationship with your mother like now?” she asked.

“Define relationship.”

She laughed. “That’s your answer whenever you hate a subject.”

He gave her a look that was both impressed and surprised. “And I thought your sister was the shrink.”

“Don’t need to be Freud to figure out when you want to turn the conversation away from something. ‘Define evasion, Francesca,’” she mocked.

She expected a playful response, but got a clouded, intense look instead. “I’m not evading anything, Chessie. There’s nothing to share about my family. I didn’t grow up like you and Gabe did.”


“Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset. It’s just…never mind.” He turned away again just as the sound system crackled with an announcement from the flight crew, telling them they’d be landing in Havana in a few minutes and reviewing the customs instructions for the third time since they got on the flight. It didn’t sound any different from any other country, Chessie had noticed.

When the announcement switched to Spanish, he pulled a file from the seat pocket that he’d been reading earlier. “Let’s go over Gabe’s dossier one more time.”

When he opened the folder, Chessie skimmed the “schedule” her brother had laid out for them. A rental car was reserved at the airport for their drive to Caibarién, where they were staying at a place called Mar Brisas.

“Let me guess,” she mused. “That translates to Sea Breezes?”

“Or shitty hostel with very little running water and dirty windows.”

“Mmmm,” she said. “Sounds dreamy.” But it could be when hopeless sex was happening. She tried to force herself to concentrate on the agenda.

“We’ll start with the Ramos farm, of course,” he said, pointing to words he was obviously having no problem reading. “Of course, there are no guarantees little Gabriel will be there.”

“It makes me crazy how hard it is to get information on people in Cuba,” she mused, finally focused on the document. “It’s like a big black hole in cyberspace.”

“It’s a big black hole on Earth, too.”

“I read somewhere that less than five percent of people in Cuba have access to the Internet,” she said, still astounded by the statistic. “And then I read there are Cubans on Facebook. So which is it?”

“Depends on where you are. In Havana, you’ll get Internet and Facebook. Out in the country? There could be nothing.”

“That ought to be illegal.”

He laughed. “It’s called Communism, and it is illegal to us.”

“I know, but now that relations are better, maybe more of them will get Internet. Why wouldn’t they want it?”

“Castro doesn’t want his people to see what they’re missing. You think he wants them downloading reality TV from America and thinking there’s an actual government like they see on reruns of The West Wing? His whole regime would topple.”

She got that, but still. “This whole job would be so much easier if we could get birth notifications online.”

“You can’t get DNA online,” he said. “You still need the child in person to do that.”

She turned to look out the window, thinking about the moment she’d see that child in person and how emotional and wonderful it would be. “I wonder if he looks like Gabe,” she mused.

Mal started to answer, then seemed to catch himself.

“What?” she asked. “What were you going to say?”