Tara Janzen - Breaking Loose

“We don’t need a taxi.” Not where they were going.

“You have a car?” Regardless of how easily she’d taken the change in direction, the look she leveled at him from over the tops of the perfectly round, small gold and tortoiseshell sunglasses she’d taken from out of her purse should have stopped him in his tracks.

It didn’t.

“Yes,” he said. “But we don’t need it either, not yet.”

He glanced over his shoulder and was relieved to see the coast was clear. They weren’t being followed.

“Why not?” she asked. It was a legitimate question, for which he had a quasi-legitimate answer, which she could either buy or not. It didn’t matter to him one way or the other.

“Give me a chance here,” he said, “and I’ll get you back to your hotel in due time.”

“Due?”

“Due.”

He kept hustling her along, and to his surprise, she kept letting him. He’d been expecting insurrection since they’d gotten off the roof.

“So where are we going?” she asked, her tone the only cool thing in the tropical city, and he meant cool like ice, but she still had the “we” thing going, which worked for him.

“I have a room at the Posada Plaza.”

Her gaze went unerringly to the decrepit five-story building partway down the next block, and he was impressed. She’d either done a lot of homework before showing up in Ciudad del Este, or she was paying very close attention to her surroundings. The sign for the Posada Plaza was damn near indistinguishable from the dozens of others tacked onto the building. At one time, the hotel had been stylish. Hints of its former glory remained in the building’s pink stucco and the ornate shutters still hanging next to a few of the windows, but there was no disguising what it had become-a dive, pure and simple.

“The Posada,” she said, her heels click-clicking in an unbroken rhythm as they crossed the street. “I almost booked in there.”

“No kidding?” Right, and tomorrow the sun was rising in the west.

“No kidding, but I changed my mind at the last minute, something about the roach count.”

“It’s pretty high,” he admitted, and that was no lie.

“Then what are you doing there?” she asked, sounding more curious than smart-mouthed about it. “You could have afforded better.”

“Location, location, location,” he said dryly, keeping her moving. They weren’t nearly far enough away from the unfolding disaster at the Old Gallery to suit him, no more than a hundred meters. He knew, because his radio signal was guaranteed to a hundred and fifty, and he’d wanted to leave himself a cushion-thus the Posada. “Where are you staying? The Gran Chaco, or El Caribe?” It was one or the other. There were only two ultra-luxury hotels in the city.

And wasn’t it sweet, this little conversation they were having, with the deal of the day blown all to hell behind them-and that pushed him. That pushed him hard. No matter how many times it blew up, this deal wasn’t done until he walked away with the prize.

“Gran Chaco,” she confirmed.

Well, she was in for a bit of a letdown then. The lobby of the Gran Chaco was a tropical paradise, a garden courtyard of exotic flowers and bubbling fountains with mosaic columns spiraling up two floors to flank a first-class Asian fusion restaurant and a bar famous for their Singapore Slings.

The lobby at the Posada Plaza had a grill across the check-in window to protect the night clerk, one dead plant in a pot at the bottom of the stairs, and a restaurant specializing in ptomaine.

Lucky for her, he wasn’t planning on keeping her very long-just long enough to shake a little information out of her and get her out of town. There wouldn’t be time for a meal.

Or anything else, for that matter, and he was pretty disappointed in himself for even thinking about anything else. But there it was, jump-starting his imagination with every roll of her hips, with every glance he slanted in her direction.

She was drop-dead gorgeous, silky auburn hair swept up into a sleek French twist, except for the strands that had slipped out and were brushing across her shoulders, pale skin, almond-shaped eyes, exotic and richly, deeply brown shot through with streaks of green and amber. They knocked him out every time she lowered her sunglasses and gave him one of those looks. And man, oh, man, did she have a mouth on her-in every sense of the word. Smart, like he’d said, damnably imperious, and lush, her lips slicked with some cinnamon-colored sugar-and-spice lipstick he wanted to lick off.

Yeah, that’s what he was thinking about, kissing her crazy while he got his hands up her dress. He usually had more sense, but her whole “can’t touch that” attitude was enough to make any guy want to rise to the challenge.

And he meant rise.

A fleeting grin crossed his mouth. That’s what came from six months of fantasizing about a woman-a short fuse.

“The Posada isn’t so bad,” he said. “No worse than most of what’s down here, as long as you stay out of the elevators.”

She cast him another one of those whiskey-on-the-rocks looks from over the tops of her sunglasses, and his grin widened. Yeah, a knockout, just like he’d said.

“They’ve got a tag team running the lifts and working the clientele between floors, Marcella and Marceline,” he explained. “The night clerk gets fifteen percent on the action between the first stop and the lobby, and the day clerk is taking ten on floors two through five, and everybody is shelling out five to the cops.” She needed to know how bad it was here, bad everywhere, on every corner, in every shop, not just Beranger’s when he was carrying hot goods. Ciudad del Este was a cesspool of violence and misery, the police included. She needed to know she needed to get out.

“Just a regular little home away from home,” she said, her heels still hitting the street, one step after another. No matter how bad it looked-and even from a fair distance, the Posada looked like rough trade in a bad dress-Suzanna Royale Toussi kept walking like she wasn’t in over her head.

So maybe he hadn’t made his point-not yet.

“They’ve got a few amenities,” he said. “Damn few.”

“You could have sold that Plymouth of yours and checked into the Gran Chaco. The suite next to mine is available, and no, that’s not an invitation.”

He let out a short laugh. If she knew about his 1971 Hemi ‘Cuda, a blue fish he’d named Charo, it was only because she’d gone looking to find out. A classic, Suzi Toussi was right, Charo was worth more than a few nights’ worth of suite living at the Gran Chaco.

“Have you been checking me out, Ms. Toussi?” He gave her an even more assessing look.

“You failed calculus,” she said.

So did you, he could have told her, but refrained.

“You were looking good, too, like you had it in the bag,” she continued, “up until you bombed the final and completely tanked your grade. You were smart, just not smart enough at seventeen to think your way around-”

“Consolata-”

“Rodriguez,” she finished for him. “Consolata wrecked your grade point and your Galaxie.”

“The ‘65 Ford, yeah, that was a car.” Geezus. More of his automotive history.

“Women seem to be a recurring weak point in your life, Mr. Killian.”

Right. Like he needed reminding in that department, especially from her. Geezus.

“You’ve been talking to Esmee.” Talking to Esmee a lot.

“She adores you.”

Yeah, he knew it.

“Have you seen the scrapbook she made about you?” the divine Ms. Toussi asked, thankfully without giving him another of those looks, without giving him any kind of look.

Yeah, he’d seen his little cousin’s scrapbook. She’d started it young, when he’d been a big hero to her. He just wished she’d stopped young.