Freedom's Price
Authors: Suzanne Brockmann
CONTENTS
To all of my fellow members
of Amnesty International,
who believe, as I do,
that writing a letter can
save a life, and that one voice,
when joined by thousands of others,
can
make a difference
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to all of my new friends on the Internet—especially those from the RWL-List. Your support and help with research are hugely appreciated!
Dear Readers,
I’ve always loved recurring characters—both as a reader and a writer. To me, connected books are like a visit with friends, which is why it was so much fun to write
Freedom’s Price
and finish telling a story that began in last October’s reissue,
Forbidden
. In that book, Liam Bartlett, a journalist and political prisoner, was rescued by a group of San Salustiano freedom fighters led by Marisala Bolivar.
In
Freedom’s Price,
years have passed and Marisala’s uncle asks Liam to watch out for his niece as she travels to America to attend college. Sparks fly when the two meet again as they dance around their past identities—rescuer and rescued, warrior and journalist, student and teacher. But they finally kick aside expectations and limitations and embrace the roles that truly fit their feelings—lovers, best friends, and partners in every sense of the word.
I’m thrilled that Bantam has reissued this second and final installment in my Bartlett Brothers saga—I hope you enjoy reading
Freedom’s Price
as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Love,
Suz
ONE
“I’
M SORRY, WE
have no record of a Mary…Mara…”
“Marisala.”
“We have absolutely no record of a Marisala Bolivar requesting student housing.” The tired-looking woman behind the counter looked as if she were going to burst into tears. “Are you sure you sent in the required forms with your registration?”
“I’m sure of nothing,” Marisala admitted, hiking her bag higher up on her shoulder. “My uncle handled all of the paperwork.”
“Then it’s possible we never received the forms.” The administrator glanced toward the doors as they opened, then did a double take.
Marisala looked up to see Liam coming into the university housing office. Of course. She should have known. With his gleaming blond hair and his perpetual smile, Liam Bartlett was so handsome that whenever women—even tired women—saw him, they always looked twice.
She herself had done a double take when he’d surprised her by meeting her at Logan Airport.
“Believe it or not, I got a fabulous parking spot right out front,” he told Marisala, oblivious to the fact that all of the women in the busy office had stopped to gaze at him. “Did you get your room assignment and your keys?”
“Not exactly.”
He looked from Marisala to the housing administrator and back, his sunny smile fading. “Uh-oh,” he said. “What happened?”
“Santiago messed up.” Marisala knew she sounded a little too smug, but she couldn’t help it. Although she liked being here in Boston, attending this university was all her uncle Santiago’s idea. The courses of study he’d insisted she take seemed useless, and the fact that she was years older than the other students in the freshman class was embarrassing. Still, her uncle had made it clear she didn’t have a choice in this matter. She was here to get educated, to become—in his words—civilized. “I think he forgot to send in the housing request.”
Liam looked at the woman behind the counter. “I don’t suppose you have a dorm room empty and waiting?”
For the first time since Liam had tapped her on the shoulder in the airport’s baggage-claim area and she’d turned around to find herself gazing into his ocean-blue eyes, Marisala let herself really look at him.
He looked almost nothing like the frail, battered man she’d helped escape from the war-torn island of San Salustiano five years earlier. Then he could barely walk, courtesy of the injuries he’d received in the war and the beatings he’d survived behind the hellish prison walls.
Now he was a picture of good health. While he was still lean, he was no longer skinny. His body was well muscled, filling out the softly faded blue jeans and the white shirt and sport jacket he wore.
He was—as the American magazines she’d read on the plane had defined it—a total hottie.
On the other side of the counter, the housing administrator was shaking her head. “We have a wait list for campus housing that’s already over a hundred names long.” She looked at Marisala. “If you like, I can give you the forms you’ll need to apply for university housing for the January semester.”
Marisala leaned against the counter. “Sure. Why not?”
“Why not?” Liam didn’t look happy. In fact, he was practically sputtering. “Why
not?
Because January’s four months away—that’s why not!” He turned back to the housing administrator. “Isn’t there
some
thing you can do? She’s a foreign student and—”
“No, I’m not.” Marisala bristled in response. “I’m as much an American as you are.” Her mother had been American. Marisala had dual citizenship.
Liam backpedaled. “What I meant was, it’s not like your uncle lives fifteen minutes away in Newton.”
“This is not that big a deal,” she interrupted once again. “I’ll find an apartment—”
“Oh, Santiago’s going to
love
that.”
Marisala couldn’t hide her grin. “I know. Isn’t that great?” She faced the housing administrator. “Can you give me a list of hotels in the area? Someplace I can stay temporarily?”
“Hotels?” Liam said. “Wait a minute—”
“I can give you a list,” the woman said apologetically, “but I can also tell you that everything in this area is booked solid. Two conventions are in town, not to mention all the parents dropping students off at all the colleges and staying overnight. You might be able to find a motel room out in Natick or Framingham.”
Marisala looked at Liam. “Do you know where Natick—”
“Yes, and it’s too far away. How would you get to your classes?”
“It would be only temporary, until I can find—”
“An apartment, I know. You keep saying that, and I keep imagining Santiago coming after me with a gun.”
Marisala laughed. “He wouldn’t.”
But Liam wasn’t kidding. He stepped closer, lowering his voice to speak to her privately. Beneath the aroma of coffee and the light hint of expensive cologne, she could smell sunshine and laughter. She could smell that sweet, musky, unmistakably delicious and entirely male scent that was pure Liam Bartlett. And just like that, she was fifteen years old again and hopelessly in love with her uncle’s Americano friend, the handsome young newspaper reporter with the sinfully sexy smile and exotic golden hair. “Mara, I promised him I’d look out for you.”
She stepped back, trying to distance herself from the memory of old, long-faded feelings. She’d been so certain Liam would return to the tiny nation of San Salustiano after the civil war was finally over. She’d waited impatiently for him as days turned into weeks, weeks into months. It seemed impossible that he hadn’t had an answering passion for her burning in his heart.
But she was wrong. Her grand passion had been tragically one-sided.
Now she kept her voice light. She was not the type to make the same mistake twice. She wouldn’t misinterpret Liam’s cheerful friendship as anything more than that again, no matter
how
good he smelled. “Good, you can fulfill your promise by helping me look for an apartment.”
Liam ran his hands through his hair. He wore it much shorter now than he had all those years ago, and the new style suited him. His face had filled out too. It was broader, fuller and less boyish looking, although his smile was still pure ten-year-old. And even though he was no longer gaunt from hunger and mistreatment, his cheekbones still dominated his handsome face, highlighting his perfect nose, his elegantly shaped lips, and showcasing those incredible eyes.
His eyes hadn’t changed at all. They were still the color of heaven on a sunny day.
“Mara, Santiago wanted you to live in a dormitory, not an apartment.”
“Then he should have made sure he sent in the housing application.” She couldn’t hide her smile.
He frowned at her. “This isn’t funny.”
“Yes, it is. Come on, Liam, think about it. Santiago is always so perfect. This is one very large mistake for such a perfect man to make.”
Liam looked at the girl standing in front of him. Woman, not girl. Despite the fact that she still looked and dressed like a fifteen-year-old, Marisala was twenty-two years old. She wasn’t a child anymore.
“It’s absurd, don’t you think?” she added. “I’ve come all this way to find I have no place to live.” Another smile played about the corners of her mouth. “It’s about as absurd as the idea that I need a guardian to take care of me.”
“
You
know you don’t need a guardian, and
I
know you don’t need a guardian.” Liam kept his voice deceptively even, hiding the turmoil that had been swirling inside of him from the first moment he’d set eyes on her again at the airport. “But that’s beside the point. Santiago asked me to do him this favor. How could I say no?”
“No.” Her brown eyes were so dark, they seemed almost black as she gazed at him. “Just like that. Want me to show you how to do it again?
No
. It’s really very easy.”
When Liam looked into this girl’s smiling eyes, he felt more alive than he had in years.
She was uncommonly beautiful, although someone walking past her on the street wouldn’t stop and stare because she disguised it well. Her baggy clothes hid her perfect, trim body, and her thick mass of wavy brown hair was tied back in a sloppy ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her deceptively sweet heart-shaped face made her look younger than she was, as did her delicate nose and her sensuously full lips and elfishly pointed chin. She wore no makeup, and her skin was smooth and flawlessly clear, with the exception of a large crescent-shaped scar on her cheek, at the corner of her left eye—a grim reminder of the war she’d survived.
She hadn’t just survived it, she’d fought and triumphed over it alongside men twice her size and weight. She’d taken charge in the chaos and smoke of battle and had become one of the guerrilla force’s fiercest warriors, a tiny slip of a girl with the emotional strength of a giant.
But, with the exception of that scar, she didn’t look much different than she had when they’d first met, back when she truly was only fifteen years old.
He’d been wildly attracted to her then too.
At the time he’d been smart enough and sane enough to recognize that his feelings were inappropriate. He was eight years her senior. He had been a grown man while she was just a kid. He’d locked everything he’d felt deep inside of him, forcing himself to ignore his attraction to Santiago’s beautiful young niece, using his iron will to make himself forget he felt anything for her besides friendship.
And he
had
forgotten.
Until a few hours ago, when he’d picked her up at the airport.
When he’d seen her again, it had taken every ounce of strength in his body not to pull her into his arms and cover her mouth with his.
He
still
ached to kiss her.
But he couldn’t. Not now. Not after his promise to Santiago. Like it or not, he had agreed to be Marisala Bolivar’s temporary guardian.
“You have to tell Santiago you can’t do this,” Marisala told him.
God, he wished he could. He wished it were that easy. “I’ve already told him I would.”
“Tell him you’ve changed your mind.”
“Marisala, I promised him. Look, it’s not really that big a deal.” Liam tried to convince himself as well. He didn’t dare tell her that Santiago had asked him to teach his willful niece how to behave less like the leader of a commando squad and more like a polite young lady during her stay here in Boston. He was going to give her time to adjust to being in a strange country before he told her that her uncle had asked him to school her in everything from how to dress, how to wear her hair, and most of all, how
not
to speak her mind with her usual frank bluntness at all times. “We’ll have dinner once a week, touch base over the phone on the other days—”
“And I’ll be required to report to you where I’m going, what I’m doing, and exactly who I’m doing it with.” She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “He wouldn’t treat me this way if I were a man.”
“You’re right,” Liam agreed. “But old habits are hard to—”
“I spent nearly four years fighting to bring freedom to San Salustiano,” Marisala interrupted gently. “I fought for freedom for all, not freedom for my uncle to tell me what I can and cannot do.”
Liam glanced back at the woman waiting patiently behind the counter. “We can argue politics some other time. Right now we have to figure out what I’m going to do with you.”
It was a poor word choice. Her hackles rose visibly. “What
you’re
going to do with me?” she repeated. “You don’t have to
do
anything with me. In fact, you, my friend, can just go out to your car, take it from its
fabulous
parking space, and drive away. You can let
me
deal with
my
problem.” She turned back to the counter, lifting her chin. “I’d like the names of those hotels in…wherever it was, please.”
“Look, I’ve got a spare bedroom. I guess you can stay with me for a few days.” Even before the words came out of his mouth, Liam knew saying them was a terrible mistake. It was going to be difficult enough seeing Marisala once or twice a week without wanting to touch her. Having her live with him in his house was sheer insanity.
But it was going to be only temporary.
“Gee,” she said dryly, turning to gaze at him. “Don’t sound so enthusiastic about it.”
“It’s just…” He started again. “It’s not going to look good—you moving into my place, even for just a few days.”
She lifted one eyebrow, gazing at him steadily. “We shared a one-room shelter in the jungle for nearly six months.”
They had. And he’d spent half the time unconscious and weak from his injuries, and the other half of the time pretending that he felt nothing more than a brotherly affection for this girl. At the same time he’d been well aware of the speculation that had gone on. He’d overheard the gossip that he and Marisala were lovers. When he’d found out about the untrue assumptions, he’d been ready to sleep outside of the tent—until Marisala had bluntly informed him that the rumors that she was “the Americano’s” woman kept away unwanted male attention.
“I don’t want Santiago to think—”
“Santiago’s biggest wish is for me to be distracted by a lover who will keep me smiling and get me pregnant, whereupon I’ll have to marry and then will be forever out of my uncle’s hair.” Her gaze turned speculative. “I wouldn’t put it past Santiago to have sent me to Boston in hopes that you would give me a whole hell of a lot more than your protection as my ‘guardian,’ if you know what I mean.”
Liam knew exactly what she meant. And although Santiago had definitely wanted Liam to be much more than Marisala’s guardian, becoming her lover
wasn’t
what the older man had in mind.
“In fact,” Marisala continued, a sparkle of amusement in her eyes as she leaned closer and lowered her voice, “I can just picture Santiago sending his assistant, Raphael, up here to Boston with an order to sneak into your home and stick pinholes into the tips of all of your condoms.”
“Marisala!” Liam felt his face heat with a blush, and he turned away, hoping she wouldn’t see how her frankness had unnerved him. He turned to implore the housing administrator, “Please. Are you absolutely positive there’s nothing you can do to help?”