Her Enemy Protector (5 page)

Still, Colonel Folly had resisted the eloping scheme—that is, until the psychiatrist had dropped the other shoe. She predicted that Eduardo Ferrare would
kill his daughter
rather than let anyone
take
her away from him. The only possible exception might be if Eduardo
gave
his daughter away to someone of his own free will—as in approving a marriage. Reluctantly, the colonel had green-lighted the op. Now, Joe just had to get Carina to go for it.

“Okay,” she breathed.

“Okay what?” he asked cautiously. He needed to hear her say the words.

“I’ll marry you, Joe. But there’s one thing…”

Jeez, his pulse had just shot up like a rocket. “What’s that?” he asked, much more calmly than he felt.

“It has to be a real wedding. My father will demand proof, and he’ll verify it himself. We won’t be able to pull off faking it. We’ll have to actually exchange vows and get a marriage license—the whole nine yards.”

An instant panic speared into him, followed by an involuntary surge of exultation at possessing this beauty for himself. And then his brain kicked back into gear.
Get a grip, old man. This is just a mission.
They’d get an annulment as soon as she was clear of her father. And she
was
a Ferrare.

Although, now that he’d met her face-to-face, she wasn’t what he’d expected. She seemed more…human. More real. He’d expected a phony, shallow girl. But the young woman before him was intelligent. Self-possessed. Genuinely worried about her sister. And her eyes looked much older than he knew her years to be.

He gathered his thoughts and replied belatedly, “No problem. We’ll do a real wedding.” Now, why did his throat go tight when he said that? “Anything else?” he choked out.

She frowned, chewing softly on her full, pink lower lip. An urge to kiss that luscious mouth nearly sent Joe around to her side of the booth. God, she was beautiful. And young. Way too damned young for him. Thirteen years too young, to be precise. He was thirty-seven and she was twenty-four.

Her sultry purr interrupted his train of thought. “We need to be seen together around town, so we can claim to have met and fallen in love. You can bet my father’s going to want independent confirmation that you’re for real.”

For real. Now there was a thought. No way was he about to reveal his true identity. Not to Eduardo, who’d kill him for it, and certainly not to Cari. He had no way of knowing if she could keep quiet or not, and he dared not stake his life on it. Her guess that he was part of Charlie Squad was impressive, but he damn well wasn’t about to confirm it. To his knowledge, Julia hadn’t identified him as a squad member to Cari. Listening to her end of the call, it hadn’t come up in the brief conversation. But he would need to confirm that with Dutch. He made a mental note to do it tomorrow.

Joe frowned. “A whirlwind romance could be a little difficult to stage since your father never lets you off your leash.”

She shrugged. “Then we’ll have to figure out something else. I’m not going to do this unless I’m sure you won’t be in danger.”

Joe snorted mentally. Not in any danger? Infiltrating the inner sanctum of the most dangerous criminal Charlie Squad had ever run up against?
Dangerous
wasn’t quite the word for it.

Now that he was physically sitting in front of the target, the reality of what he’d proposed hit him full force. This could easily turn out to be the most horrendous assignment of his career. Not only could the father kill him, but the maverick daughter was a complete wild card in the equation.

He’d already made one huge tactical mistake with her: he’d told her his real name. At least she didn’t know his real last name, but it was bad enough that she knew him as Joe. When they’d been out in the ocean and she was so panicked, so
lost,
and had asked who he was, his real name had just popped out. He’d felt a driving compulsion to connect with her, one human being to another, with no subterfuge between them.

But now that he’d met her again, his misgivings deepened. She was too damned sexy for her own good. The pull of attraction he felt toward her was unmistakable and alarming. He’d already looked deep into her eyes and done something stupid once. Could he trust himself to keep a level head around her? Could he really masquerade as her husband—her
husband
—and not end up in serious trouble?

Did he have any choice? If Charlie Squad wanted to nail Eduardo Ferrare, they needed Julia’s testimony, and the only way to get it was for someone to rescue this girl.

Maybe the colonel’s idea that they lure Cari and Eduardo’s goons to an isolated location and just shoot it out with the bastards was a better idea. Except Cari could end up getting caught in the crossfire, and she was a one-hundred-percent nonexpendable asset. She had to be kept alive at all costs. He shuddered at the idea of bullets ripping through her satin skin, ruining her luscious flesh….

Jeez, he was already in trouble. He’d been with her for less than an hour and his imagination was running away with him. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. A fake marriage was the only thing he could think of to place himself close enough to ensure her safety and get her out alive.

He asked briskly, “Do you have access to e-mail? A cell phone?”

“Limited—and definitely spied upon. E-mail, yes. Cell phone, no. My father took my phone away after…”

He nodded in understanding, his jaw tight. The e-mail was a little help, at any rate. They could strike up an Internet acquaintance. “If I can come up with ways to bump into you and be seen with you in public, maybe go dancing with you a few times, then you’ll go through with it?”

She nodded, her gaze wary. She didn’t like the risk involved with his plan. Not that he could blame her. Neither did he, although probably for completely different reasons. In the final analysis, he was possibly more afraid of her than of her father.

He returned her nod and said lightly, “Then it’s a deal.”

He had no damned idea how he was going to pull off courting Cari Ferrare. She was a prisoner in her father’s home. But he’d make it happen. He had to. The bastard had slit her boyfriend’s throat in her own bed, for God’s sake. He shoved back the rage that bubbled up in his gut at the thought. He knew better than to let his natural empathy get the best of him. He might be medic and healer for Charlie Squad. But on this op, he was the prime operator. And he had a stinking suspicion he was in for some bloodshed before it was all said and done.

Joe pulled the paper napkin out from under his water glass, scribbled on it and shoved the paper across the table. “This is my cell phone number and e-mail address. You and I met tonight. You were accidentally seated at the table I’d reserved and we ended up sharing it. Make sure you mention me casually to your father over breakfast, or whenever it is you have cozy family conversations with him.”

Cari’s lovely mouth twitched at that one. “Cozy, huh?” A giggle escaped her and, for just a second, she looked like the dazzlingly beautiful, carefree young woman she ought to be. Of course, with the sights she’d probably seen in her father’s home and the hard living she’d already done, it was no wonder she acted older than her years.

An errant urge to protect her from any more hurt washed over him.
Well, buddy, that’s exactly what you get to do,
he told himself. There was just the small matter of keeping his own throat from being slit in the process.

“Call me tomorrow if you can get access to a phone,” he instructed her. “Thank me for tonight. There’s no need to be secretive about it.”

She laughed lightly. “I’m glad you said that because every phone in the house is monitored.”

“Perfect. I’ll ask if we can go dancing again some time and I’ll set up a date. Okay?”

“I don’t know if my father will let me keep the date, but I’ll try.”

“Just try to keep the tone of the call casual. Nothing that might arouse his suspicion. If your father objects, tell him you should go out with somebody now and then, for appearances’ sake. People will start talking if you never show your face in public anymore. It’ll draw too much attention to him.”

Cari looked startled at the tactic he suggested, so similar to her own. Her gaze lit with admiration, and she looked like she was wondering whether he was psychic or just really smart.

She took a deep breath and nodded gamely. “Okay.”

He had to admit it. She was a brave lady. They slid out of the booth and stood up simultaneously, abruptly coming chest to chest. She stared up at him like he was some sort of conquering god and, damn if he didn’t feel like one for a second.

He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Everything’s going to be fine. I promise.”

He could swear her eyes filled with tears as she turned away, but she spun around so quickly he couldn’t be sure. He watched her slender back retreat with quiet dignity down the sweeping staircase and out of sight.

He gave her enough of a head start to collect her goons and leave before he made his way out to the delivery van parked behind the club. With a careful look around to make sure nobody had followed him, he slipped into the passenger seat.

After the white van pulled out into traffic, he pushed aside a curtain and crawled into the high-tech surveillance setup in the back. As he pulled the microphone and battery pack out from under his shirt, he asked his boss, “Did you get all that?”

Colonel Tom Folly scowled. “Yeah. I got it. And I still think you’re nuts.”

Chapter 3

T
he dance floor was hot and crowded, but Cari barely noticed the sweaty bodies bumping into her or the choking haze of smoke filling the air.

He was here.

She hadn’t seen him yet, but she could feel Joe’s presence the moment he stepped into the club. Over the course of their previous meetings—a handful of dates to go dancing under the watchful eyes of Freddie and Neddie—she’d grown extraordinarily attuned to his nearness.

Her father would, no doubt, get a full report from Freddie and Neddie that the American had shown up again and the two of them had danced the night away together. At first, her father had been highly suspicious of Joe and grilled her mercilessly about the new man in her life. But as she limited her attentions exclusively to Joe and all the reports from the guards said he steadfastly treated her with gentlemanly restraint, Eduardo seemed to relax.

The night Joe had sent her home to put on a more modest dress had gone a long way toward softening Eduardo’s attitude about the American—just like Joe’d said it would.

If anything, she thought she’d caught a glimpse of relief in her father’s expression when she’d told him over dinner tonight that she was going out dancing with Joe again.

Who’d have thought that, in just a few weeks, her would-be rescuer would worm his way into her father’s good graces without ever meeting the man? She had to admit it. Joe was good. He’d pegged her father cold. But cold enough to buy the idea of a quickie marriage between them? That part still worried her. A lot.

She and Joe had struck up a lively Internet conversation, but it was hard to do more than trade heavily edited essentials of their life histories with Eduardo’s security men monitoring every post. Joe had fed her a rather sordid tale about being an ex-firefighter who’d been wrongly accused of arson. Having met the man, she didn’t have the slightest doubt that it was all a load of bull. And she still didn’t know any more about the real Joe than she had when she’d first met him.

She’d wanted to spend more time with him. Do more regular dating stuff. But Eduardo wouldn’t cut her loose for anything except dancing. Fortunately, she could work with dancing as a form of seduction.

She’d been glad when Joe suggested they meet at this particular nightclub. It played the hottest dance music this side of the equator and was the sort of place where she could ratchet up their relationship to the next level—to an attraction that would justify their elopement later.

Yeah, that was it. She wanted to go to a sexy dance club and drape herself all over Joe, purely in the interest of promoting his safety. Right.

Whether she wanted to admit it or not, she was wildly attracted to her future husband.
Future husband.
At first, that phrase had felt strange and foreign to her, but over the last few days, the sound of it had been getting more and more comfortable.

She was also getting more and more comfortable with the idea of being infatuated with Joe. Hey, why not go with the feeling? It would make their marriage act that much more believable to her father when the time came. So she mooned around the house all day, dreaming about him, and happily let her father rib her about it. She spent hours trying on dresses until she found the perfect one, and she let the housekeeper rib her about that, too.

The other reason Cari was glad they were going somewhere steamy tonight was that Joe’s impeccable restraint was starting to get on her nerves. She liked to think of herself as reasonably attractive, but he seemed completely impervious to that fact. It was all well and good to be hot and bothered over him, but it would be nice if he returned a smidgen of the same attraction for her.

The song blaring around her ended. She thanked her partner—the son of a business associate of Eduardo’s—for the dance and headed off the big dance floor. The club was packed tonight and it was slow dodging the gyrating bodies around her.

Where was Joe? She couldn’t see him over the press of people around her. But he was near. She could
feel
it. She got short of breath just thinking about touching that gorgeous body of his again. He was such a contrast to the beefy brutishness of her bodyguards. Joe’s was the toned fitness of an athlete. He was muscular but lean, powerful yet graceful.

She smoothed her palms down the red Marilyn Monroe-style halter dress she’d agonized over choosing all day. She hoped it would shake Joe up a bit tonight. Okay, shake him up a lot. If it didn’t, she gave up. The guy would officially be priest material.