Orange Blossoms & Mayhem (Fantascapes) (16 page)

Suddenly, the American suit pushed his way forward. “There’s nothing strange about a woman carrying a gun for protection on the Inca Trail,” he stated firmly. “And if she hadn’t been, the assassin would have gotten clean away. She shot a cop-killer. You should be giving her a medal. Let the poor girl get food and some sleep. If you have more questions, do it in the morning. Him, too,” he added, nodding to Rhys. “From what I’ve been hearing, he’s got a target painted on his back. Yet here he sits in a lighted train surrounded by walls of windows.”

One of the detectives rapidly translated. Rhys bit back a smile. Arrogant Americans could be bloody annoying, but sometimes their supreme confidence that they were always right came in handy.

And then it was over. With no more than an anguished glance in his direction, Laine was led off by the big American. Interpol Lima flashed ID, as did the Brit with him. And then Rhys was in the back seat of a limo, watching the tail lights of the big American car disappearing down the street.

Laine?

It was all right. He’d see her at police headquarters in the morning.

But at first light he was on a plane to Lima, and by noon he was over the Caribbean on the first leg of his flight back to Interpol headquarters in France.

I watched dawn break over the balcony of my room at the Monasterio. Watched while the fountain silvered and the flowers went from gray to dew-kissed color. I thought about my foolish dreams of an intimate night, just Rhys and me. Dining on our private balcony, walking the courtyard garden in the moonlight, seriously testing the buoyancy of the high-quality mattress.

A foolish fantasy, but somehow the blasted Brit had got under my skin. No matter how many times I reminded myself ours was nothing more than a professional relationship, my heart clung to the mantra that had haunted me since we met. I’d saved him, he was mine.

So it hurt. The one time I allowed my imagination to soar just for me . . .

Idiot!
I was an integral part of Fantascapes, helping people indulge their dreams of fantasy weddings and vacations. Interpol had no place in my world. Dead bodies had no place in my world.

Particularly bodies that were dead because of me.

And to compound the stark truth, my personal fantasy of a night with Darcy/Rhys might have happened to the Laine Halliday who went up the mountain, but it wasn’t going to happen for the Laine Halliday who came back down.

Where was he? I wondered. If Rhys was what he said he was—and the credentials of the two men who had come for him confirmed that—then I hoped they’d gotten him out of the country. Time enough to figure it all out when he was safe. As for me, I suspected I’d gotten a top dog for a guardian as well. Hooray for diplomacy that sometimes actually worked. Dead bodies had a way of getting people’s attention.

I whispered into the darkness. “Rhys?”

Nothing but silence. My sense of loss astounded me. I hadn’t known the man seventy-two hours, and it was like I’d lost my best friend.

I didn’t even know what he looked like under all those bruises.

I’d accused him of faking it. My only excuse—killing someone tends to scramble the brain. At least it does for frou-frou wedding planners like me.

Dad and Mom, the brothers—what would they say?

And if I didn’t get some sleep, I was just asking to be railroaded into Public Enemy Number One.

Stoo-pid!
On the train I’d had some bad moments. Shock. Guilt. Doubts about everything. But reality dictated there was no way the Peruvian
policia
were going to jail the person—a female
norte americana
—who shot a cop-killer, a cop who was one of their own.

I was right. By eight that night I was on a plane to Miami. I called home to say I’d catch some sleep at the airport and fly into Golden Beach in the morning.

“
Laine, honey, what’s wrong?” Mom asked, with that built-in mom radar, which in Karen Halliday is honed to laser intensity.

“
Nothing . . . I’ll tell you when I see you.”

“
Laine?”

“
In the morning, mom.” I breathed wearily into the phone. “In the morning.”

“
The Arendsens? Is everything all right?”

“
They’re fine, Mom. They should be back in Cuzco by now.” Even I could hear my false enthusiasm, the slight quaver on the word Cuzco.

“
Lainie?” A long, drawn-out question in a single word.

“
Tomorrow, Mom. Bye-bye.” I tucked my cell phone into my purse, sat on the edge of my bed with the usually sweet sound of airplanes zooming over my head, and shook. I was back in the United States. I was alive.

Rhys was . . . somewhere. Hopefully, alive and well.

He’d offered me a job. Was it for real? The men who’d taken him away had been very real. I’d heard the word “Interpol” whispered through the ranks of the
policia
. So Rhys really was an Interpol officer, using a devious plan to recruit me as an informant. A plan that, for some mysterious reason, had gone horribly wrong.

Due to some obscure nastiness in my world or his?

My best was on Rhys. How could it be me? I lived in a fantasy bubble of exotic weddings and vacation, with criminals as scarce as hen’s teeth.

And I wanted to keep it that way.

Didn’t I?

I was tired, tired, tired. My heart hurt, my body ached, my nerves were stretched about as far as they would go. But I knew what I had to do.

I had to get my head together and remember who and what I was. I was a troubleshooter for Fantascapes. That was my job. Anything more was highly questionable. My meeting with Rhys Tarrant had been so disastrous, Interpol would likely never let him near me again. Not even on the same continent.

Interpol. The people who kept their finger on the pulse of global crime. Protect and Serve.

Don’t think about it!
Rhys had indicated they wanted an undercover informant, someone no one would suspect. And I’d blown away an assassin in full view of a trainload of passengers. I’d been center stage, sharing the spotlight with an Interpol agent, before the Peruvian police, the British Embassy, the American Consulate, and Interpol itself.

Too bad. My new secret life had been a tempting thought while it lasted.

Rhys Tarrant, despite his arrogant Brit moments, would be a tempting thought forever.

Exhaustion finally won out over my yo-yoing thoughts. I crawled under the covers and slept.

The next morning, when I retrieved Bella, the South Florida air was so humid and heavy, I was glad to shut myself inside the cockpit’s artificial atmosphere. I filed my flight plan, and headed home.

So familiar, so blessedly familiar. The green of the everglades . . . acres and acres of crops. Tract houses, the rich blue of the Gulf of Mexico, towering condos and monster mansions. This was my world. I might leave it for a while, but I always came back. What did I have to do with some shadowy police international organization? Who were they? What did they do? How could they possibly have any use for me?

Just know I’ll find you, whether it’s here or in the States
. It had a nice ring, but good intentions weren’t much use if Interpol said, “It’s the girl or your job. We’ll send a check in the mail.”

I landed, taxied Bella into her hanger, climbed out of the cockpit. Jeff was standing there, looking as dark and brooding as a Florida summer thundercloud. “What’s up, kid? Mom and Dad said do not stop at the apartment. I’m to bring you straight to the house.”

“
Not much,” I mumbled, curling my lip. “Just Arlan Trevellyan, up to his tricks again.”

“
Trevellyan only makes you mad, Laine,” Jeff said, grabbing my suitcase. “He never put that look on your face.”

“
You staying?” I asked.

“
Damn right.”

“
Then you’ll find out when we get there.” I hauled myself up into Jeff’s black 4Runner, and we headed for the woods.

Golden Beach is one of those towns that keeps a low profile because enough northerners discover its idyllic setting without the Chamber of Commerce tooting its own horn. Although centered around the small core city directly on the gulf, county-controlled portions of greater Golden Beach stretch twenty-five miles from north to south and ten miles east to west. When we moved here, cattle ranching was second only to tourism as a source of income. A drive from Halliday House to town meant passing through piney woods, ornamented by live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, past rustling cabbage palms and spiky palmetto. Past grazing land dotted with cows, cow patties, and the inevitable flock of white cow birds. There even used to be a bull who was an escape artist, regularly holding up traffic as he ate his way through the grass that was greener on the road side of the fence.

Now . . . as Jeff drove east on Main Street, I realized I hadn’t really looked in quite a while. I’d winced when the cows disappeared, when the castor bean fields—once a cash crop for castor oil—were destroyed. I’d winced when the cabbage palms and palmetto were torn out of the ground, when every last bit of green was flattened for new housing developments. And then I stopped looking because I couldn’t bear the change.
Don’t look, and it hasn’t happened.
The truth was, the old Florida was nearly gone now. Houses, condos, villas, shopping centers—mile after mile after mile—where cows once grazed.

I’d turned ostrich. Truth was . . . Golden Beach was no longer a sleepy Florida backwater. But Halliday House? That was still a long ways out, set on so much land we’d still feel private, even if they built a whole new city up around us.

As Rhys and I passed the entrance to I-75, we finally left the spanking brand new behind. We were passing tree nurseries now, an orchid farm. Narrow paved roads led off outer Main Street to houses with room for horses, a riding school that specialized in dressage, an ostrich farm. Here, rugged individualism still reigned. At age twenty-seven it was easier for me to understand why Mom and Dad built out in the woods. There was nothing cookie-cutter about the Hallidays—except perhaps that pesky Serve and Protect gene—so a model house out of a developer’s brochure was out of the question. And, naturally, the only water anywhere near the Hallidays would be a river officially designated “wild and scenic” by the Florida legislature.

We turned off Main Street, made a series of abrupt right-angle turns over the course of the next three miles and cruised under the solid canopy of trees that marked the Calusa River basin. If the horse country people were independent, the stubborn residents who lived along a river that flooded every rainy season made them look like pikers. Halliday House was solid coral pink stucco, surrounded by a ten-foot wall the same color. The living space reared up out of the surrounding jungle like some fairytale medieval fortress, the house on sturdy twelve-foot cement supports topping the wall like the second layer of a wedding cake. Jeff pressed a button on a gadget on his SUV’s visor and huge black wrought-iron gates slowly swung open. The house sprawled before us, with parking underneath and an L-shaped ramp for Dad’s electric wheelchair in case power to the elevator failed. Though, naturally, we had a generator and a back-up generator. (Dad was once a Boy Scout, of course.)

We drove through and pulled up beside Mom’s white BMW. “Ready?” Jeff asked. Throat dry, I could only shake my head. “Courage, kid. Whatever it is, you know the family always has your back.”

Oh, shit!
I didn’t want to go in there blubbering like a baby. Of all the brothers, because we were closest in age, I knew Jeff best. In spite of our squabbles, we were buds. If I haven’t mentioned it, Jeff’s what you’d expect when someone says SWAT team—tall and brawny, as capable of wrestling an alligator as a bad guy. He has a sort-of-a square face, with wavy brown hair and blue eyes. And hands that can heft an MP-5 as easily as I could handle the .22. Fortunately, he’s supremely good-natured when not fighting bad guys. Maybe he just hasn’t been at it long enough to become cynical.

“
It’s bad,” I admitted. “Dad’s going to have a fit.”

Jeff shrugged and reached for the 4Runner’s door. “Hey, as long as you didn’t shoot anybody . . .” At my failure to proclaim my innocence, his hand froze on the door handle. He swung around and looked at me. “You didn’t, did you?” he whispered, awed.

“’
Fraid so.”

“
Gawd!” Jeff breathed.

“
Let’s go,” I said. “You can hear about it inside.” We exited the SUV and got into the elevator. Jeff punched the single button for House Level.

I was riding to my doom.

I don’t mean to make Dad and Mom sound like ogres. They’re about as great as parents come and a lot more understanding about strange events than most, but . . .

I’d sometimes wondered how many Dad had killed . . . and did my brothers keep a body count? I was nearly certain Doug and Logan had followed Dad into the same line of work, though Doug had downsized two years ago to something a bit more tame, starting a still struggling private security and investigations agency in Orlando. Proving that troubleshooting definitely ran in the family, although now Doug’s primary mission was solving problems for Orlando residents and the vast number of international visitors who found their way to the resort capital of the world. But as for shooting anybody, he might have when in government service, but I was quite sure the Orange County Sheriff’s Department frowned on that sort of thing.