Risky Business

a whisper that vibrated in the little room. “They might follow me.” She looked down at the long, shiny box. “They would follow me. I won’t risk my daughter’s safety.”
    She was right, and because he knew it, Jonas wanted to rage. He was boxed in, trapped between love and loyalty and right and wrong. Justice and the law. “We’ll talk to Moralas when we get back.” He picked up the box again, hating it.
    “Where are we going now?”
    Jonas unlocked the door. “To get a drink.”
     
    Rather than going with Jonas to the lounge, Liz took some time for herself. Because she felt he owed her, she went into the hotel’s boutique, found a simple one-piece bathing suit and charged it to the room. She hadn’t packed anything but a change of clothes and toiletries. If she was stuck in Acapulco for the rest of the evening, she was going to enjoy the private pool each villa boasted.
    The first time she walked into the suite, she was dumb-founded. Her parents had been reasonably successful, and she’d been raised in a quietly middle-class atmosphere. Nothing had prepared her for the sumptuousness of the two-bedroom suite overlooking the Pacific. Her feet sank cozily into the carpet. Softly colored paintings were spaced along ivory-papered walls. The sofa, done in grays and greens and blues, was big enough for two to sprawl on for a lazy afternoon nap.
    She found a phone in the bathroom next to a tub so wide and deep that she was almost tempted to take her dip there. The sink was a seashell done in the palest of pinks.
    So this is how the rich play, she mused as she wandered to the bedroom where her overnight bag was set at the end of a bed big enough for three. The drapes of her balcony were open so that she could see the tempestuous surf of the Pacific hurl up and spray. She pulled the glass doors open, wanting the noise.
    This was the sort of world Marcus had told her of so many years before. He’d made it seem like a fairy tale with gossamer edges. Liz had never seen his home, had never been permitted to, but he’d described it to her. The white pillars, the white balconies, the staircase that curved up and up. There were servants to bring you tea in the afternoons, a stable where grooms waited to saddle glossy horses. Champagne was drunkfrom French crystal. It had been a fairy tale, and she hadn’t wanted it for herself. She had only wanted him.
    A young girl’s foolishness, Liz thought now. In her naive way, she’d made a prince out of a man who was weak and selfish and spoiled. But over the years she had thought of the house he’d talked of and pictured her daughter on those wide, curving stairs. That had been her sense of justice.
    The image wasn’t as clear now, not now that she’d seen wealth in a long metal box and understood where it had come from. Not when she’d seen Jonas’s eyes when he’d spoken of his kind of justice. That hadn’t been a fairy tale with gossamer edges, but grimly real. She had some thinking to do. But before she could plan for the rest of her life, and for her daughter’s, she had to get through the moment.
    Jonas. She was bound to him through no choice of her own. And perhaps he was bound to her in the same way. Was that the reason she was drawn to him? Because they were trapped in the same puzzle? If she could only explain it away, maybe she could stop the needs that kept swimming through her. If she could only explain it away, maybe she would be in control again.
    But how could she explain the feelings she’d experienced on the silent cab ride back to the hotel? She had had to fight the desire to put her arms around him, to offer comfort when nothing in his manner had indicated he needed or wanted it. There were no easy answers—no answers at all to the fact that she was slowly, inevitably falling in love with him.
    It was time to admit that, she decided, because you could never face anything until it was admitted. You could never solve anything until it was faced. She’d lived by that rule years before during the biggest crisis of her life. It still held true.
    So she loved him, or very nearly loved him. She was nolonger naive enough to believe that love was the beginning of any answer. He would hurt her. There were no ifs about that. He’d steal from her the one thing she’d managed to hold fast to for ten years. And once he’d taken her heart, what would it mean to him? She shook her head. No more than such things ever mean to those who take them.
    Jonas