Saving Tess Read online

  Clay

  Her curls fanned out across my sheets, brown against plain gray. She’d never really liked the color of her hair, but I’d always thought it looked like chocolate. Not milk chocolate but the deep, rich color of bittersweet dark chocolate. The sort that made a person’s mouth dry and left them unable to decide if they wanted more.

  She was like that too, I thought. Looking all sweet and innocent, but that first taste said there was so much more to indulge in. Headstrong, stubborn, determined, all characteristics that were both endearing and maddening at the same time.

  She said my name, and I pulled my thoughts away from the puzzle that was her. This was one place where things were simple. From that first kiss, I’d known the two of us would fit together, not in spite of our differences, but because of them. Back then, I’d been worried that if I’d tried to initiate anything, our friendship would suffer, but all our coming together had done was strengthen what was already there.

  “Are you going to stand there all night, or are you going to come to bed?” she asked saucily. “You know, in some places, we wouldn’t be considered man and wife until we consummated the marriage.”

  I let my gaze caress her naked body, slowly moving from ankles to knees to hips. I lingered on the patch of dark curls between her legs, then resumed my perusal, taking in her tiny waist before taking in her small, firm breasts, tipped by nipples the color of butterscotch. Her chest and neck were flushed, her lips parted ever so slightly. By the time I reached her eyes, the air between us was thick with our arousal.

  “I suppose all of the consummating we did before doesn’t count,” I said, wetting my lips.

  She shook her head and grinned. “Nope.”

  “Then I suppose it’s our duty to consummate as much as we can before the honeymoon’s over.” I gave a dramatic sigh. “I suppose I can suffer through it if you can.”

  She laughed, those gorgeous indigo eyes of hers dancing, her perfect tits jiggling enticingly. Damn, she was gorgeous. I still couldn’t believe that, after all those years apart, she was finally mine. Forever.

  My cock filled, thickened, rising toward my stomach, and I wrapped my hand around my shaft. The simple touch made me shudder, and I tightened my grip at the base of my cock, hoping I wouldn’t embarrass myself.

  The feel of her skin against mine, hot silk that could only be rivaled by the molten heat of her mouth. The need I had for her pulsed low in my belly, an ache that never went away and only rarely faded. What I felt for her was stronger than anything I’d ever known, too intense to be called want or need. Being with her was more important than eating, than breathing.

  I didn’t know what I would do if I lost her…

  A loud bang startled me out of my dream. I didn’t have a chance to be pissed that I’d woken up just as I’d been getting to the good stuff because Brianne was now sitting in the passenger’s seat, and her expression was all business.

  “How the hell have you made it so far in the FBI sucking this badly at stake-outs?” She glared at me. “Or do they just have low standards?”

  I rubbed my hand over my face and tried to clear the sleep from my head. “I’m a profiler, Brianne. Stake-outs aren’t really my thing.”

  “I’m in the army,” she countered, “and I’ve managed to do just fine.”

  I started to ask her if anything happened, but then my brain caught up with my surroundings. “Wait a minute. You just got back into the car. I’m pretty sure leaving during a stake-out is as bad as falling asleep. Where did you go?”

  “I got bored,” she said matter-of-factly. “I couldn’t sit here on my ass when that guy in there could have information about Tess.”

  I really hoped she hadn’t done something stupid. “Brianne, please tell me–”

  “I wanted a look inside,” she continued as if I hadn’t said anything at all. “See if I could figure out what he knew.”

  “That was dangerous.” I thumped the heel of my palm against the steering wheel. “Not to mention the fact that you could’ve tipped him off to us being here.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t have a chance. The place was already empty.”

  Alarm bells went off in my head. “Empty?”

  “Not empty,” she clarified. “Furniture and all that shit is there, but there’s no one inside.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, unsure I wanted to know the answer.

  “Lights all turned off all several hours ago and haven’t been back on since. No noises outside the usual appliance sounds. No running water. No toilet flushing.”

  All excellent observations. “How’d you get close enough to see all of that?”

  “I have my ways,” she said, her fingers tapping out a nervous rhythm on her knee. “Besides, it doesn’t matter how, only that it’s true. Your guy isn’t in his apartment anymore.”

  Shit.

  “We saw him go inside,” I said. “And we didn’t see him come out.”

  “True,” she said. “But what can I tell you? He’s not there now.”

  “Dammit!” I smacked the steering wheel. “What a fucking waste of time!”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “If the place is empty, it means we can do some reconnaissance. He might not be very forthcoming, but maybe we can find something in his apartment that is.”

  “You want to break into his apartment on the off chance we could find something that says where Tess is?” I’d known we were both getting antsy, wanting something to happen, but what she was talking about doing was crazy.

  She shrugged. “You got any better ideas?”

  Dammit.

  I didn’t. And she knew it.

  “If we go to jail, I’m not being anyone’s bitch,” I said as I opened the door. “Come on.”

  She followed me into the apartment building and up the stairs to the second floor. When we reached the door, I knocked, ignoring the dirty look I got from Brianne. It wasn’t her I didn’t trust, but rather that I wanted to be sure before I did something irreversible.

  Then again, I didn’t completely trust her.

  She’d lied to Tess for years, and anyone who would deceive their sister for that long made me think they couldn’t be trusted, no matter her reasons for doing it.

  No one answered the door. I went down on one knee and pulled a few small tools from my pocket. It didn’t take me long to pick the lock, and there wasn’t a deadbolt, which meant the two of us were in the apartment less than two minutes after we reached the door.

  I waited for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the darkness, and Brianne surprised me by doing the same. Most people who went into a strange, dark room automatically reached for a light. The switch on the wall, string from the ceiling, a flashlight – it didn’t matter. Brianne didn’t though.

  “Try not to touch anything.” I pitched my voice low but didn’t whisper. Sometimes a whisper made more detectable sounds than most people realized. “If you see anything that’s promising, call for me, and we’ll look at it together. I’ll do the same.”

  She nodded. “I’ll take right, you take left.”

  Before I could agree or make another suggestion, she was moving. I watched her for a moment, impressed with the efficiency with which she searched. Clean, precise, methodical. The fact that it was impressive bothered me though. Brianne wasn’t someone who simply had a knack for organization. She might’ve been a neat soldier, but this was beyond neat. Her movements were professional. So much so that I filed the information away to be discussed later.

  Right now, we had work to do and didn’t know how long we had to do it. Finding Tess was our priority.

  Eight

  Tess

  When Luis said he had a place for us to go for the night, I’d assumed he’d meant another apartment, maybe a house, somewhere he had friends and supplies. Or, at least, supplies. I wasn’t so sure he was a social enough person to have friends.

  I hadn’t been expecting anything expensive, or even anything nice. I wasn’t a snob.
Give me somewhere clean to sleep, and I’d be happy. Give me somewhere safe, and I’d be content.

  Instead of somewhere clean and safe, however, I was sitting on a mattress that I hoped wasn’t bug-infested, in a cheap motel that probably saw more aliases and prostitutes than…well, I couldn’t really think of anything that could possibly have seen more prostitutes and aliases than this hotel. The mustached man behind the barred glass had leered at me while making comments that had me wishing I didn’t know Spanish, but Luis had barely blinked as he handed over a roll of bills.

  Luis had claimed the bathroom first, and I’d thrown every possible lock on the door, then wedged a chair under the doorknob. Then I’d perched on top of the bedspread, determined that I wouldn’t fall asleep. Fortunately, the throbbing in my hand had made that unlikely.

  Or so I’d thought.

  I’d been out before Luis was done in the bathroom. I’d woken up a couple hours ago, stiff and really needing to pee. Now I was back on the bed, gagging at the thought that I’d actually slept on something very likely coated in more bodily fluids than I wanted to imagine.

  The first thing I would do when I got home would be to take a two-hour shower. Maybe I wouldn’t even wait that long. The embassy would have showers. At least that was what I kept telling myself. It was the little things that kept me going.

  “Ice,” Luis said as he shut the door behind him. “I also found some food.”

  The armful he dumped onto the bed was more vending machine fodder than it was real food, but it was something to eat, so I wasn’t going to complain.

  “Thank you,” I said as I reached for what looked like a granola bar. “I have to ask, are you sure this place really is safe? I would think it was the kind of hotel that cartels would use to sell…whatever.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “The cartel does not allow their members to use their product, and if they wish the services of a…prostitute, they have their own.”

  Yeah, that made me feel much better.

  “Do not worry,” he said as he sat next to me on the edge of the bed. “I will not let anything bad happen to you.”

  I wished I could say that made me feel better, but it didn’t. I appreciated everything Luis had done for me, but I didn’t see how he’d be able to protect me from the lowlifes at this motel, let alone a drug cartel. Then there was the way my intuition kept telling me that something wasn’t quite right. The more time I spent with him, the less I trusted him, and the less I trusted his plan. I understood that local authorities could be in the cartel’s pocket, and I wasn’t naïve enough to think that the American Embassy workers were above taking bribes, but I was beginning to doubt that hiding in this motel was less dangerous than going to the embassy.

  “Eat,” he said, holding out a package of a vending machine staple – cheese crackers and peanut butter.

  I took the crackers and offered him a weak smile. As a teenager, I’d doubted my ability to read people, deduce their intentions, but when I’d gotten hired at the Times, I’d had to regain that confidence. Over a decade working in the news business had taught me a lot, and my reporter’s instincts were buzzing like crazy, but I didn’t know what course of action to take.

  So I ate. My stomach wasn’t happy with this reintroduction to solid food, and each little bit I nibbled required me to pause until it decided not to rebel. Luis opened a bag of chips and ate just as slowly, but I didn’t think his stomach was the problem. He didn’t speak while he watched me, methodically going from one chip to the next as if he couldn’t even taste them.

  “I need to call my paper,” I said finally. “I don’t know anyone in Costa Rica, which means the only other logical reason for me to be here is an assignment. I don’t remember getting one, but that has to be it. Nothing else makes sense.”

  “You do not believe in…what is the American word? Destino?”

  “Destiny?” I asked. “You think this is destiny? Fate?”

  He nodded, his face lighting up. “Yes! Fate.” He put his hand over mine. “An unknown reason brought you to San Jose. An accident with an unknown cause left you near where I was. All to bring the two of us together.”

  I wasn’t a big fiction reader, and on the rare occasions I did pick up a novel, it wasn’t romance. I didn’t have anything against the genre. It just wasn’t my cup of tea, so to speak. I could read fantasy or horror where the concept of destiny and fate were often used, but when it came to the notion of something that important moving us around like pieces on a chessboard all so two people could hook up…I found the whole thing preposterous. Love didn’t work like that, if it was even real at all.

  I wasn’t about to explain all of that to Luis, because if I did, I knew the question that would inevitably come next.

  Why didn’t I believe?

  That was a path I didn’t want to take, a discussion I didn’t want to have.

  And it was none of Luis’s fucking business.

  Still, I couldn’t let him think that I believed the two of us were soulmates or some bullshit like that.

  “I think me calling work is the best way for me to get my memory back,” I said. “Plus, it gives me some leverage. Print media may be having issues, but the New York Times is still a big name. If my people know what’s going on, I can use that to get out of the country safely.”

  Disappointment flooded his face. “I can keep you safe.”

  I softened my tone. “Look, it’s nothing against you. I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me. It’s just time for me to go home.”

  “What if you leave behind unfinished business?”

  I shrugged. “I guess I’ll figure that out after I learn the truth of why I came here.”

  He reached out and tucked a curl behind my ear, his fingers lingering for a moment before his hand dropped back to his side.

  “I do not want you to go,” he said quietly. The eyes that met mine were blazing with something I didn’t want to name.

  “I have to go,” I insisted. “This isn’t my home.”

  “It could be.”

  He leaned forward so quickly that I barely had time to register what he was doing before his mouth was on mine.

  A memory flashed into my mind. Other hands touching me. Hands I’d wanted to feel on my body for what seemed like forever. Salt on his lips from my tears. The way he took it slow, letting me know I could ask him to stop and he would. But I hadn’t wanted him to stop. I’d wanted more. More of him. All of him.

  Clay.

  The name jerked me back to reality.

  This wasn’t Clay, and I didn’t want this. I leaned back, but Luis followed, his lips trying to pry mine apart. The need I’d felt to treat him carefully disappeared under a flood of anger. Misreading a situation was one thing, but to keep pushing when someone tries to move away was something else.

  I put my uninjured hand on his chest and pushed him back. For a few seconds, I was afraid he wouldn’t respond to that either, but then he broke the kiss. He glared at me, then stood up, his hands curled into fists.

  A jolt of fear went through me as I realized how vulnerable I was right then. He could hit me, force me to do things, and I doubted anyone here would even blink. Women probably screamed here all the time. I didn’t even have two hands to fight back.

  Before my scrambling mind could wonder what I would do if he came after me, he spun on his heel and stormed out, slamming the door behind him. I breathed a sigh of relief that was short-lived when I remembered that my life was in Luis’s hands for the time being. If he wanted, he could go to the cartel and give me up. If that was too direct, all he had to do was leave me there. The odds of me being able to make it alone weren’t in my favor.

  I felt a sudden longing for someone else, someone who’d always made me feel safe.

  Clay.

  Except the last time I’d seen him, I learned that everything I thought I’d known about him had all been a lie. So why did I feel like if I found him, everything would be all right?
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  Nine

  Tess

  I wiped the steam from the mirror and studied my reflection, wondering how long it would take for me to start looking like myself again. It wasn’t the stitched up cut on my head as much as it was the dark smudges under my eyes and the weight I’d lost. My cheeks were sunken, the bones in my face and at my joints poking out under the skin.

  I sighed and awkwardly toweled my hair dry with one hand, grimacing at the snarls I knew were just waiting to snag my brush. Maybe I should see if Luis could take me somewhere to get my hair cut. Shorter would be easier to take care of. Then again, I wasn’t planning on staying there much longer, so it didn’t matter.

  I detangled as much as I could with my fingers, then brushed the rest out before pulling it back into a ponytail as best I could. I applied some foundation to the bruise-like half-moons under my eyes and debated putting on more makeup. It wasn’t that I wanted to look nice or anything like that. It was just that without makeup and my hair this way, I looked like I was barely out of high school.

  Fuck it.

  My still-healing fingers were screaming as I shoved my makeup in my purse and went back out into the room. Luis looked up from the rickety chair that had been shoved against the wall, his hungry gaze devouring every inch of exposed skin. Fortunately, there wasn’t much for him to look at since the women’s clothes he’d managed to scrounge up were still a few sizes too big for me.

  “I want you to take me back to where you found me.”

  My words hung in the air between us, their meaning clear. I was done letting him make all the decisions and determine how things would be done. I knew what I wanted, and I’d laid it out there for him to accept or reject. Where things went from there would depend on what he said next.

  “I do not believe that is a good idea.”

  I crossed over to the bed and perched on the edge, more leaning than sitting. I studied him without a word, trying to figure out if he was saying that because he was angry that I’d rejected his kiss or if he really thought it wasn’t a good idea.