Dirty Angels 02 Dirty Deeds (12 page)

It just didn’t make any sense to keep going at someone’s family. Unless, of course, there was more to it. I was sure there was. Either Alana or one of her siblings was still involved in something and hanging with the wrong crowd.

Her brother was the obvious choice, being he was involved with drugs in some way. But so was everyone. Was her brother part of the same network that her father had been? If so, why would they still bother going after the children?

Unless Alana did something, even if she didn’t realize it, or knew something she wasn’t supposed to. Though she’d been open last night, she was still playing her cards pretty close to her chest. I had more questions for her but now that it was out in the open that people could be after her, now that she had admitted that her accident might have not been an accident at all, I was confident we would get to the bottom of things, especially now that she would be staying with me.

As soon as I gave the car to the valet, I went up to the room and started rearranging things for her arrival. It was a weird feeling knowing I’d be sharing my space with a woman. Not only on the intimacy level, but because I wasn’t sure how much of “Derek” I could show her. She only knew Derrin and parts of me were hard to hide.

For one, I knew she was a bit suspicious at the way I woke up the other day. I couldn’t help it. My sleep was usually so shallow, except when I was dreaming about Carmen, that instincts always took over. I could be up and ready to shoot or run within seconds.

Obviously I was going to pass it off as military training if it ever came up. But she would want to know how else I was going to protect her and that’s where the guns came in. Time to confess to her that I had a bit of a gun fetish. I didn’t need to hide that anymore.

I opened the door to the closet and lifted the bottom slab of it. I had pried it off when I first checked in and hid all my guns and weaponry in the hollow base. With the bottom back in place, it looked like an empty closet.

I decided to still hide them there – you never knew what the maids were going to think if they stumbled across them – but would give Alana a little show of them both. It sounded like she could handle it. If I were her, I would have invested in a gun a long time ago.

As for the silencers, the Ace bandages that kept the guns tucked to my waist, the knives, the rope, the CF explosives, the tracking devices, the GHB capsules, the duct tape, blindfolds, and handcuffs – well I wasn’t sure if she would buy it if I told her I was into some pretty kinky stuff.

I took out everything but the guns, a four-inch silencer for my .22, and the Ace bandage, and carefully placed them in a small zip bag, and brought them into the washroom. With a small motorized saw I always had with me, I cut away the bottom of the cabinet underneath the sink and stuck them in there. I placed the bottom over top of it and then rearranged towels and extra rolls of toilet paper onto so it wouldn’t attract any attention. I cut clean and any leftover sawdust was cleaned up and flushed away but even so I had to be meticulous. Guns I could explain. Everything else took me to a psychopathic level.

CHAPTER NINE

Alana

“You’ve lost your fucking mind, woman,” Luz swore at me over the phone.

I was sitting on the balcony of the hotel room, watching the waves roll in. “You’ve been saying that for ten days now.”

“And I’m going to keep saying it until you come back home.”

“Do you miss me?”

She sighed. “I just saw you last night.”

“Yeah, exactly,” I told her. In the distance, over the wavering blue line of the Pacific I saw a parasailer gliding down toward the boat. Everything was so bright and glittery and carefree in this part of town. I couldn’t get enough of it. Staying with Derrin seriously made me consider selling my apartment and buying a place on the shore. Unfortunately, my apartment was owned and paid for by Javier and I was pretty sure I couldn’t do anything without asking him for permission. Sometimes I hated that he treated me more like a delinquent kid than his sister but I guess it was better than nothing.

“You saw me last night,” I repeated to Luz, smearing coconut and lime scented sunscreen on my arms. Though the cast was now off my wrist, I had a bandage in place and I was determined not to get any crazy tan lines. “You saw that I was fine. Better than fine. Great.”

“That’s only because of all the sex.”

“You’d be great too if you were getting laid by a solider.”

“Shut up,” she told me. “I’m still allowed to worry about you. And I still don’t trust him.”

I sighed. “I know you don’t.” I didn’t blame Luz. Ever since I told her that I was temporarily moving in with Derrin, she was the one who was acting like they’d lost their mind. She told me all the things I already knew myself – I didn’t know him, we’d only just met, I was still vulnerable, etc. But the thing was, I trusted Derrin. I don’t know why I did but I did. He promised to protect me and I believed him. And then later, when I saw his guns, I believed him even more. He had all the skills he picked up in the war, and affinity and passion for firearms, and the courage and determination unlike anyone I’d met. If anyone was going to get me through this, it would be him.

But the funny thing was, there was nothing to get through. As the days passed and the two of us settled into a routine of drinking, food and sex (rinse and repeat), as our bond grew stronger and my bones healed, there was nobody out there coming to get me.

We were cautious too. Derrin was always watching, like he was born to have this role. But no one approached us. No one was following us. No one was waiting.

Some days I went down to the pool and had daiquiris, other days I went to the beach, all while Derrin stayed on the balcony and watched me. I was right out there in the open, just ripe for the taking. And though the experience had been a bit nerve-wracking, time and time again the only people who bugged me were the hustlers selling their cheap trinkets on the beach. Damn, they were annoying. I would have thought they’d leave their fellow Mexicans alone but they still seemed to think I needed god-awful cornrows weaved into my head.

A few nights a week I met up with Luz. Sometimes Dominga. Because Dominga worked for a sister chain, she had a few friends working at our hotel and she told me they were keeping an eye on me too. It was sweet of her and I knew they were both so nervous. But as time ticked on, I was becoming more and more convinced that no one was after me. It was an accident. It was vigilante justice. No one was coming for me.

Sometimes I almost wished they’d try.

Meanwhile, when I wasn’t pondering my potential death, I was falling deeper and deeper for this steely-eyed man with a heart of gold.

It was wrong. I knew it was. I didn’t fall for men. I never fell in love. It’s not that I didn’t want it but it was never anything I pursued.

But I was falling for Derrin. I wasn’t quite there yet but I was well on my way. That feeling that borders on obsession, where your thoughts and body and heart crave him like water. You’re in a blissful, warm haze when he’s there and suffering in a dark hollow when he’s not. It was made even worse because I knew he was leaving. He wasn’t Mexican. He didn’t have a job here or a life. He was a visitor on these shores. There’s something so incredibly romantic and dramatic about that, the whole affair with a timeline, the impending goodbyes and heartache.

Thankfully I didn’t dwell on it too much. I wanted to enjoy the present. The past was brutal and the future was unclear but the present was brilliant. The present was in the shape of a strong, sexy man.

“I still think you should move back,” Luz told me, bringing my focus off the ocean. “You’re well on your way to recovery now. I say, move back to your place and get a cat for company.”

I scrunched up my nose. “Listen, you’re the cat lady in our friendship here, not me.’

She sighed loudly. “Fine. But I’m still going to call you every day and see if I can change your mind.”

“And I’m going to keep having hot wild sex with my soldier,” I told her. “Looks like I got the better deal out of this.”

She grumbled something and hung up.

“Did you just call me your soldier?”

I jumped in my seat, the sunscreen knocked to the floor and looked to the door where Derrin was standing there with a cocky grin on his face.

“Jesus,” I told him, hand to my chest. “How long have you been standing there?”

“The whole time.”

“How did I not hear you?”

“I can be quiet when it suits me.” He stepped onto the balcony and bent down to kiss me, soft and savory. He sat down on the other chair. I knew he wouldn’t be there for long. I guess I could blame my injuries, but I’ve always been the kind of person who can just sit for hours and hours and not move a muscle. Maybe it’s to make up for the fact that when I’m flying I’m on my feet all day.

Derrin, on the other hand, had a real problem sitting still. He was always moving. Sometimes I told him to chill out and forced him down with a beer but twenty minutes seemed to be his absolute max before he was up and doing stuff. The man just had too much energy though I was happy he was absolutely tireless in bed. The other day we’d fucked six times, included a blow-job in the bathroom of the restaurant we were at. I couldn’t get enough of him and he never seemed to tire. We made quite the team.

“So, Luz still hates me, huh?” he asked.

I gave him a sympathetic look. “She doesn’t hate you. She just doesn’t know you.”

“Well I tried to get to know her last night.”

“It doesn’t really help that you don’t talk much.”

“I do with you.”

“Only because I talk your ear off and you’re forced to keep up.”

He clasped his hands together, leaning forward on his elbow, his hands trailing over the gleaming skin of my legs. “So what do you want to do?”

“About Luz?”

“Today. What do you want to do today?”

There were a bunch of things I wanted to do. Most of them involved his dick. I think he knew this.

“Aside from the usual?”

He nodded and tried to wipe the grin from his face. “Yeah. Want to go check out the market in the old town?”

“The one that goes over the bridge? You planning on buying overpriced crap?”

He shrugged. “I’m a tourist aren’t I?”

Don’t remind me
, I thought.

An hour later we were getting out of a cab onto the congested cobblestone streets of the old town. We would have taken the rental car – he had gotten a super sexy Mustang – but parking in that area of the city was a total bitch.

Today was no exception. It seemed every tourist, expat, gay lovers on vacation, and locals were out and about. It gave me a sense of purpose, vitality. I had slipped on a light batik-print sundress for the outing and even though I now had a walking cast on my leg, at least the doctor was able to put a black one on so it looked a bit sleeker. Okay, it probably didn’t, but it made me feel better. Plus it made it much easier to get around. I didn’t have to use crutches or lean on Derrin as I had been doing.

Despite that though, he still grabbed my hand. The intimacy of it all surprised me. It sounded absurd after ten days of fucking and sleeping tangled together and cuddling and kissing and all that wonderful stuff. But this simplest gesture was so pure and so proud. As he led me through the crowd to the market stalls, I felt like he was showing me off to the world.

How pathetic was I that this was the first time I’d felt that? That I felt someone was proud to be with me?

I blinked back the hot, sentimental tears that wanted to fall down my face. I didn’t want him to know how he was affecting me. He was starting fires in my soul from kindling I thought would never burn.

We walked along for a bit and I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt this happy – if I had ever felt this happy. It was like everything before this moment was a blank slate. Even all the bad, the horrible, the sorrowful things, I felt like they couldn’t hurt me anymore. There was just me and Derrin, walking on a hot day through the old town of Puerto Vallarta, taking in the smells of fried tortillas and salty ocean breezes. Mariachi music drifting in from restaurants where tourists were smiling awkwardly, trying to get them to go away.

Eventually we found ourselves in one of them, ordering half-priced margaritas. In my purse I had some pickled chili peppers I picked up at the market. We dipped warm from the oven chips into fresh green salsa and ate them with juice running down our chins.

With a bit of a day buzz going on, we decided to try and walk back to the hotel. We’d go through the town on the Malecon and then walk north along the beach. If we got tired, we’d walk two steps to the nearest hotel and get a drink. It had all the markings of a perfect day. It was the perfect day.

We were walking through the town square, past the iconic church tower, when he squeezed my hand and said, “You know what, Alana?”

“What?” I loved the sound of my name with his raspy accented voice.

“Back in Minnesota, we have a saying that’s pretty applicable right now.”

I frowned, puzzled. “Minnesota? Isn’t that in the states?”

He blinked then said, “Yes. I played hockey there for a bit. Big hockey state. Lot of Canadians go down there to play.”

Made sense. “What is it?”

“I’m sweet on you.”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing. “I think that’s what Americans in the movies say. Not ex-solider, hockey-playing Canadians.”

He shrugged. “It’s true.”

“Well I guess I’m sweet on you too,” I told him. “You know in Mexico, we have our own saying.”

“Go on then,” he said with a grin and wrapped his arm around my waist, pulling me toward him. I stepped forward, careful not to put my cast on his toes, and pressed against his chest.

A deafening crack ran through the air.

I felt wind at my back and something solid hit my cast.

Someone somewhere was screaming. Maybe it was me.

“Run,” Derrin said through gritted teeth, staring up and over my shoulder, his grip on me like a vice.

I turned and followed his line of sight. There was a quick movement at the top of the bell tower. I looked down at the space behind me. The ground was split open from a bullet. Pieces of concrete had hit the back of my cast.