Barefoot with a Stranger (Barefoot Bay Undercover #2)(71)

As expected, she gasped. “So where is it?”

“Beats me. But they think I know, so I’m on a watch list just to be sure I don’t suddenly buy an Aston Martin.”

“Nice car choice,” she said. “But if we found the money, couldn’t you be cleared then?”

He couldn’t help giving her a squeeze. “Your optimism is charming. Downright adorable.”

“Don’t be condescending.”

“I’m not. It really is charming. It’s…infectious.”

“Okay, then tell me the whole story, Mal, if you’re so damn infected by me. Don’t make me guess anymore.”

He was infected by her. Affected by her. Ready to open up in a way he’d never done before, and he hadn’t known her a week.

He slowed the car, almost stopping at a pitch-black section of forest and farm, not far from that Poinciana tree now. But he had enough time to tell her the truth, and deep inside, he knew he owed that much to her.

“I didn’t steal the money. A woman named Alana Cevallos did, or someone close to her.”

“How did she do it?”

“I’m not entirely sure. She worked as a high-level admin at Gitmo, a secretary to my boss and a liaison with the local community, since she’s Cuban. She and I became friends while I was there, and she came to me in a panic because she claimed she had found an enormous sum of money in an offshore account her husband had opened before he was taken away.”

“Taken away?” she asked.

“By the government. And now he’s dead.”

“What? Why?”

“There doesn’t have to be a reason, Chessie. Suspected of being a dissident, most likely. And with Alana having the quite unusual job of working as an administrative assistant for a US operation? Government made a move on him.” About a month after baby Solana was born, the bastards.


“And she just found the money?”

Mal shrugged. “My guess is she didn’t want to implicate her husband any further, since he was already a prisoner of the government. Anyway, she said she didn’t take it, but…”

“But you think she did.”

Did he? There was no other explanation, no matter how much he wanted to believe her innocent. “Probably at the urging of her husband, but he didn’t have access to those funds at Guantanamo, and she did. So it’s moot. They did it.”

She looked out into the darkness of the night, thinking. “Why did she go to you?”

“Like I said, we were friends.”

Chessie inched back and dropped her glasses so she could look over them, the question in her eyes obvious. “A married woman, Mal?” she asked.

He laughed softly at the implication, which couldn’t be further from the truth. “Alana is in her forties with three kids, Chess. When shit at Gitmo got ugly—and, man, it could get ugly there—you need an escape. Gabe had Isa, and they used to go off, but I didn’t have that many people who knew I wasn’t really a guard. Alana did, because she worked for our boss. So sometimes I went to her house for dinner, and I liked it there.”

“What did you like about it?”

He suspected she was still sniffing around to see if he’d had a romantic relationship with Alana, which he had not. “I liked her kids a lot. And there was a lot of good feels in that house, even with the father being gone. She kept it solid for those kids.” He shook his head, just thinking about what would have happened if she’d been arrested for embezzling US funds. A Cuban citizen who had all kinds of special clearance to work at Gitmo? “I hated to see that end for those kids.”

“So, what did you do?”

“She did it, actually. She created an account in my name that only I could access and put the money in there so the trail would lead to me.”

“But she didn’t put the money in there?” Chessie asked, confused. “I mean, you said they never found it.”

“It disappeared.”

She dropped back on the seat. “The answer is in the computer,” she said.

“There is no answer, Chessie. Who knows what her husband had arranged before he died? Someone got that money, maybe used it for other dissidents to fight the Cuban government, or who knows? Doesn’t matter. I took the blame for her.”

“It matters to clear your name,” she insisted.

“It might clear mine, but it would damage hers forever. So what good would my four years in prison have been? She’d be dragged off, and no one would ever see her again, and I couldn’t…” He struggled for the words, his throat thick, an old fear resurfacing, as it did any time he thought about going through this and trying to clear his name without implicating Alana. “I couldn’t do that to those kids.”

After a moment, he realized Chessie was staring at him, hard. He turned, ready to defend his decision. He’d certainly had this fight with her brother often enough.

But she’d pushed her glasses back, and he saw a tear slide down her face.

“Chessie, don’t cry,” he said, lifting his hand to wipe it away. But she grasped his hand and pressed it to her lips. “I can’t change this to save myself, and I won’t let those kids’ lives get lost just so I can find mine.”

She dropped her head back and closed her eyes. “So, do you think we can scare up Internet access out here?”