Claire King - Renegade With A Badge

She was glad she’d bought the long skirt and matching blouse. It was made of inexpensive cotton, but it was of a traditional style that suited the house, and it was certainly better than her other “best” outfit—chinos and a camp shirt.

Olivia took a last, deep breath before she entered the wide-open doors of the front entrance to the hacienda. The double doors were made of solid oak, she noticed, and reinforced with beautiful flat iron scrollwork.

If she was going to have to attend a stupid party, this was certainly a nice place to do it. She doubted she’d find a single mini-quiche in this gorgeous house.

“Olivia,” Ernesto said, as she entered the foyer. He disengaged himself from a small, attentive group of people to come to her. Candles glowed everywhere, giving off the scent of Mexican jasmine and the aura of old-world elegance. Ernesto was dressed impeccably and he, too, smelled slightly of jasmine. Olivia had to struggle not to fuss with her dress.

“Ernesto,” Olivia said, and let him kiss her on the mouth. He had to bend slightly to do so; his elegant, lean frame towered by several inches over her smaller one. “Your home is more beautiful than you described it.”

He smiled graciously. “It seems, Olivia, that my father built it just so that beautiful women would be impressed by it.” His deep brown eyes glowed with sincerity and the reflection of a hundred candles. Olivia flushed at the compliment.

“I’m sure they are, then,” she said.

“Your team?” He made a show of looking around. “They have not come with you?”

The invitation had been for all of Olivia’s team, but their work had been finished the day before, and as none of them were being courted by the local hefe they’d decided to pack up camp and leave this morning.

“No, and you should be grateful. They’d have eaten you out of house and home,” Olivia said.

Ernesto smiled indulgently. “That, as you can see, would be difficult to do.” He led her into the main salon, where people appeared to be waiting for her arrival. “I have some people here I would like to introduce you to.”

Every eye turned to her as Ernesto introduced her to the room at large. He made careful mention of her position at Scripps in the introduction, Olivia observed.

“I’m only an assistant department head, Ernesto,” she whispered to him after the introduction was complete and she had been greeted like a queen. “There are four of those in my department alone. You made it sound as though I was running the whole place.”

He handed her a flute of champagne. “I am proud of you,” he said gently. “That is not such a bad thing, is it?”

“No,” Olivia admitted, taking a sip of champagne. “Oh! Dom Pérignon.”

Ernesto laughed. “I knew you were a woman of breeding, Olivia. But a wine connoisseur, as well? You will be a blessing at my table.” He kissed the hand he’d been holding. “Most of my friends, though I love them like family, don’t know a Dom Pérignon from a cheap Chablis.”

“Oh,” she said into her glass. “Well, thank you for inviting me.”

“No, Olivia,” Ernesto said, gazing meaningfully into her eyes. “Thank you for being here. It means so much to me.”

Olivia smiled and took another quick sip of champagne.

She had no idea what the intent, mysterious gleam in his eye was all about, but she would have bet that it didn’t have anything to do with identifying wine.

“I’d like you to meet some of my friends,” Ernesto said, taking her arm.

“Some of your friends?” Olivia said, looking around the crowded room.

Ernesto laughed again, and Olivia couldn’t help but smile. Oh, the man was in his element.

Olivia allowed him to guide her through the crowd. They made it just one or two steps forward at a time, as everyone wanted some attention from the hefe. Ernesto skillfully worked the crowd, while Olivia smiled and spoke easily with his guests, slipping automatically into Spanish, the language of her childhood home. But she had the oddest itch at the back of her neck, and it wasn’t until nearly an hour after she arrived that she figured out why. Everywhere she looked, there were uniformed men standing guard. Armed with unsmiling, intimidating faces and big, scary guns.

“Uh, Ernesto?”

Ernesto turned at once at the small tug on his sleeve. He covered Olivia’s rough, sea-weathered hand with his own smooth, manicured one and smiled deferentially down at her. Oh, yes, Olivia thought, distracted for a moment. This man could run Mexico from this hacienda. He had all the charm and old-world refinement of a Don.

“Yes, Olivia?”

She blinked up at him. “Pardon?”

Ernesto brought her hand to his lips. Olivia wanted to snatch it back; it looked like a sea hag’s gnarled fist against his full, beautiful mouth.

“You are tired of all this inane conversation, my dear?”

“What? No, of course not,” she protested, though, in truth, she would have given her right arm for a cold Mexican beer, her laptop and her narrow cot in her beach camp tent right about now. “I was just wondering about all the men here.”

Ernesto lifted one graceful brow. “The men here?” he said.

Olivia felt a little chill slide right past the itch at the back of her neck, but decided she must have imagined the slight menace in Ernesto’s perfectly modulated tone.

“I mean the men you have in uniform. Your deputies. Why are they here, at a party?”

“Ah, that. To protect my guests, of course,” he said, relaxing visibly. He swept his arm in an unmistakably urbane gesture. He smiled again, that charming flash of teeth. “They are unobtrusive, though, are they not? I believe it’s your American sensibilities that made you notice them at all.”

“Why do your guests need protection?”

Ernesto sighed, then turned away for a moment to greet yet another supplicant. Olivia did a quick count of Ernesto’s not-so-unobtrusive pack of gun-toters. Fifteen!

“I’m sorry, Olivia,” Ernesto said when he returned his attention to her. “You were saying?”

“Why do you have so many men posted here at the hacienda? Have you had trouble? Are you expecting trouble?”

Ernesto’s lips compressed ever so briefly, then he took Olivia’s arm again and led her to a relatively quiet corner. “Olivia,” he began patiently. “I am the sheriff of Aldea Viejo, as well as a very wealthy man.”

“Yes, I know, Ernesto.”

“And as such, I face many dangers, every day. We have criminals here in this small village, just as you have in your large American cities.”

“But at a party?”

Ernesto shrugged, his broad shoulders enhanced by the fine cut of his suit.

“Have you been robbed here at the hacienda?”

Ernesto’s eyes darkened. “Certainly not.”

“Are your guests in the habit of walking off with the family silver?”

“Olivia,” Ernesto admonished, offended.

Olivia smiled, but rubbed at the back of her neck all the same. “I’m teasing, Ernesto.”

He watched her carefully for a moment, then leaned to kiss her lightly on her mouth. “I should hope so. Do not concern yourself with these questions, Olivia. I have my men here to protect my guests.” He smiled gently. “Most especially my guest of honor. It is my duty to protect you, Olivia. And it is my pleasure.”

“I don’t need protection, Ernesto,” Olivia said meaningfully. Best to begin as you mean to go on, she thought. “I have been taking excellent care of myself for several years now.”

Ernesto wrapped her hand around his forearm, scanning the crowd of guests absently. “Another thing I admire about you, Olivia.” He brought her hand to his mouth again and kissed it. “But in all your travels, I cannot imagine you have come across the kind of men I am dealing with now.”

“The smugglers?” He’d mentioned it before, on one of their walks. Drug shipments had been coming through Aldea Viejo, out of range of the Mexican Federal Police, the federales, in La Paz. Ernesto was determined to bring the smugglers to justice, but they’d been as slippery as reef eels so far.

“They are very dangerous, these men,” Ernesto said.

“But not stupid. I doubt very much they’d crash this party.”

Ernesto’s eyes narrowed fractionally. “One never knows what the criminal mind will think of doing.” Ernesto smiled, nabbed another glass of champagne from a passing tray and toasted Olivia cordially before taking a sip. “Does one?”

Rafael Camayo crept through the house, using the clamor of the party on the floor below to cover what little noise he made. Though his mother would be shocked to know it, this was hardly the first time he’d broken into someone’s home and searched through every room like a bandit.

It was, however, the first time it had ever been so important to him.

Rafe skirted a lighted doorway. A fussy little powder room, he noted with disdain, wondering how many of the ladies and gentlemen using the elaborate, gold-plated facilities knew how Cervantes had paid for them.

He smiled grimly. Probably more than a few. Rafe knew from years of tracking Cervantes that many of the man’s friends were actually more like associates; partners in crime, so to speak. Not that Rafe’s employers—the United States Drug Enforcement Agency—or their associates in the Mexican government had ever been able to get the goods on any of them. Lesser men fell, swept up in routine drug raids, while Cervantes and his swanky pals held lavish dinner parties and toasted each other’s cleverness.

He and his partner, Bobby, had been in Baja California for months now, trying to change all that. They’d been methodically stealing drug shipments from Cervantes’s men and slipping them surreptitiously into the hands of DEA agents across the border in Mexico. They made no arrests, busted neither the men at the drop site nor the runners who brought the stuff over from mainland Mexico. They simply swept in—or snuck in, depending upon the situation and the likelihood one of them would be shot through the head—and stole what Ernesto Cervantes firmly believed was his.

It was a last-ditch effort, a plan devised by Rafe and Bobby alone, and one that neither the federales nor Rafe’s superior officers at the DEA thought likely to succeed. But Rafe and Bobby were determined.

They knew Cervantes—knew him inside and out—though neither of them had ever been within fifty feet of the man. They knew he could outwait the authorities and their traditional methods forever, keeping his minions on the front line while he led his respectable, lawful life.

But he would never tolerate being ripped off by a couple of filthy, low-class bandidos.

It was driving the big man crazy, Rafe thought with an unprofessional smirk, just as they’d hoped it would. Cervantes was a canny kingpin, but a kingpin nonetheless, and with the ego to go along with the title. It wouldn’t be long—couldn’t be long, according to Rafe’s superiors back in San Diego—before he showed up at one of the shipment sites himself. Rafe could almost smell Cervantes’s frustration, could almost touch it.

It was certainly evident by all the thugs he had posted at this little soiree.

Rafe had easily slipped past them all, of course. Another thing that would have shocked his mother. Ten years as an undercover DEA agent was excellent training, but it was nothing to the years in the San Diego barrio of his youth. A boy who spoke no English learned how to fade into any background in the border towns of San Diego, or he risked being picked up by cruising immigration officers looking for his illegally “immigrated” parents.