“I’ll remember that.”
“Good girl.”
He cranked left one more time, stepped on the gas, took the Cruiser over the median, into the southbound lane, and headed back to the Gran Chaco.
“I think there’s another road out of here,” he said, remembering the maps of the city he’d downloaded and studied.
“One of the service roads on the golf course goes all the way down to the river. If you follow it long enough, it’ll empty out on Calle Palma.” Palm Street.
Okay, he was impressed.
“Ponce is going to head back to Beranger’s, same as us,” she said, turning in her seat and looking out the back windshield.
He heard it, too, the sound of sirens approaching from the north. Hell.
“We’ll never get ahead of him taking the river road,” she said. “Do you hear those sirens?”
“Yeah, and we don’t need to get ahead of him. We just need to get in place. He can have first shot at Beranger’s. If he walks out of there with anything, I’ll go after it.” He speeded up-quite a bit. “How far is this service road into the golf course?”
She looked out each side window. “About a quarter mile.”
He speeded up a helluva lot more. The best way for this to work would be to get off the road before the cops even knew they were on it.
He was hoping a hundred miles an hour for a quarter mile would do the trick.
“Do you have a visual?” he asked, somewhat surprised by the quick pickup and good handling of the Cruiser. He wasn’t an SUV kind of guy, but this thing was doing its job.
“No. We’re still clear.”
There was no median this far from the guardhouse, so when he saw the smudge of a dirt road peeking out of the heavy vegetation on the east side of the pavement, he slowed down just enough to take the turn without rolling the vehicle-which was quite a bit of slowing down.
Thirty yards in, he slowed down even more, and at the edge of the golf course, where the trees ended, he came to a stop. They would cross after the cops went by.
It didn’t take long, about half a minute, before the sirens crested and started to wane, the police passing them on their way to the Gran Chaco.
So, this was perfect. They’d escaped the cops. Ponce was very unlikely to turn around and virtually follow the police to the scene of where he and his men had committed murder. Even in Ciudad del Este, that was bound to go over very poorly. Of course, the cops would be looking for Suzi. Everyone was going to be looking for Suzi, and all of them for no good reason.
He needed to get her out of this country, and he needed to keep her with him until he could do it.
Yeah, that’s the way it was going to be from here on out, him and Suzi Q joined at the hip, until he put her on a plane, whether she liked it or not.
And yeah, he knew exactly where he was headed with the whole joined-at-the-hip plan-trouble.
Which didn’t stop him from making his play.
“We need to cut a deal, you and I, together.”
She buried her head in her arms on the dash and swore under her breath, way under, but he heard her, and he waited until he got what he wanted.
“Fifty-fifty,” the word finally came out.
“Sure. Great. I can work with that.” Not really. She was lying, but he didn’t care. He was lying, too. He didn’t need a deal with her to get what he wanted. He just somehow, in a very real macho caveman way, needed to be in charge of her for a while, until she really did leave the country.
It wasn’t about sex.
Not all of it. Really. Not even most of it.
It was more about… more about…
He let his gaze drift up the length of her to where she was draped over the dash like she didn’t have an ounce of energy or gumption left. No, it really wasn’t about sex. The sun was coming in through the windshield, dappled with the shadows of the palm fronds above them, dappling her. She had a line of sweat running down her side from under her arm, and one down the middle of her back, turning her black shirt even darker. The telltale print of her holster showed across her shoulders in another damp trail, and he could see the grip of a semiautomatic pistol where her shirt had been pushed back, a Beretta M9 to be exact, a 9mm, and yes, he recognized it just by the frame and magazine.
She actually looked kind of tough, wearing a pair of lace-up boots and tactical pants with cargo pockets, like maybe she could kick a little butt. Of course, she’d be kicking it in a silk camp shirt and butter-soft Italian leather boots, so soft the tops folded down. Her tactical pants weren’t heavy cotton twill like his, either. They looked like a linen and cotton blend, expensive, tailored to within an inch of their lives for some long-legged, curvy-hipped, small-waisted, all-girl female like Suzi Q… Sugar… Shu-gah.
Sweet.
Her hair was coming out of her Spa Monterey ball cap in kind of a tangle, but he could still see the nape of her neck-and when he did, he knew that was it. The whole caveman thing was about the nape of her neck, the sheer tenderness of that soft expanse of satiny skin, the silken strands of auburn hair curled damply across it, the delicacy of her nape, the vulnerability of it.
The way he wanted to get his mouth on it.
Yeah, that was the situation-the kiss-the-back-of-Suzi-Toussi’s-neck situation. Talk about tough.
Tough luck, because he sure as hell wasn’t going to be fulfilling that little fantasy anytime soon.
As if to prove his point, off in the distance, coming from the north, he heard the rise and fall of police sirens again.
Suzi lifted her head at the sound, her eyes meeting his across the console and the bucket seats.
“More cops?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Gang-style slaying at the Gran Chaco is going to trump a lot of street crime. It doesn’t even matter that the dead guy is Jimmy Ruiz. What matters is that he was killed in the gringa‘s room.”
Even behind her amber tinted glasses, he could see the sudden edge of panic in her gaze, and man, did he understand. In about ten minutes or less, she was going to own the top slot on the cops’ suspect list, and ending up in a Paraguayan prison was simply not on the menu-ever.
Then she went for the slam dunk. For the barest instant, as their gazes met, she did something so unexpected, so ingenuous, so purely female, that all he could think was Fuck it. She bit her lower lip, her teeth gently pressing into that plump curve of super soft, cinnamon-lipstick-slicked skin-and it was a done deal.
The whole thing was over.
Without another thought, he leaned across the Land Cruiser and took her mouth with his, his hand sliding around the back of her neck, over her soft, satiny nape, his fingers tunneling up into her hair, holding her, his tongue sliding into the warm, honeyed depths of her mouth.
And sliding again, exploring, taking her with a kiss, again and again, holding her tighter, kissing her harder, his heart starting to pound-because she let him. She more than let him. Geezus, for such a piece of work, she was so sweet, turning into him, her lips so soft, her tongue sliding over his teeth. She made a small sound deep in her throat, and he knew he was in trouble, hands down, no holds barred-and he loved it, the heated thrill of it, the chase, anticipating the hot, hot sex of discovering a woman for the first time, the excitement of taking her clothes off-the way he wanted to take Suzi’s clothes off and just get into her.
Yeah.
He slanted his mouth over hers more fully, taking more of her, taking everything he could get, all the sweet surrender and every soft sigh.
Oh, yeah.
She was so wonderfully dangerous, turning him on. Six months of nonstop fantasizing had brought him to this, their first kiss and wanting to just “do it” and keep on “doing it” in the front seat of a stolen Land Cruiser, with a dead body behind them, a dead body ahead of them, the cops getting closer, second after second, and him getting hard.