Then her rental car had to break down out there among the cactus and sun-baked hills. Where, she discovered, not a single bar popped up on her cell phone. Probably because she’d forgotten to charge the damn thing!
Thank God for the hacienda she’d spotted after a hot, dusty trek—and that the problem with her rental was so easily fixed. All she wanted now was a plunge in the pool at her resort, a frosty margarita, and some of that decompression time her staff insisted she needed.
Bracing herself for another blast of heat, Nina climbed out of the Hummer and thanked the two men who’d been sent to check the car. They sported shoulder holsters, too. Sebastian Cordell took his personal security seriously.
“Muchas gracias.”
She fished a wad of pesos out of her straw tote, but the two men waved away the tip. Stuffing the pesos back in her bag, Nina thanked them again and slid behind the wheel. A dusty half hour later she hit the roundabout on the outskirts of Cabo San Lucas.
By then, a plunge in the pool had dropped well down her list of priorities. Her resort was another twenty minutes away. Her parched throat cried for something cold and wet—now! With that icy margarita in mind, she whipped the wheel and exited the roundabout. A screech of tires had her wincing and offering an apology to the vehicle that had pulled into the circle behind her.
“Sorry.”
Luck was with her. She made only one wrong turn in Cabo’s narrow streets before she found the multistory parking garage that served the inner harbor. The lower floors were full, but she zipped into an empty space on the fourth floor. Locking the rental car, she took the elevator down to the paved walkway leading to the marina.
According to her trusty guidebook, Cabo’s protected inner harbor attracted sailboats and yachts from all over the world. A forest of tall silver masts validated that claim and acted as beacons to the restaurants, shops and bars lining the marina. Happy hour was in full swing Nina noted as she approached the crowded center. Lively salsa and mariachi music filled the air and souvenir hawkers had turned out en masse to capture the lucrative tourist trade.
She escaped most of the salesmen, but one particularly persistent youngster glued himself to her side. Flashing a grin, he flipped back a sleeve to display a skinny forearm banded with shiny bangles.
“Hola, senorita! You buy a bracelet from me, yes?”
“No, gracias.”
“These very good quality silver. From Taxco.”
Right. Uh-huh. If those bangles were products of Mexico’s fabled silver mines, she was Angelina Jolie.
“They’re very nice,” she replied diplomatically, “but I don’t wear silver.”
“Very good quality,” he chorused again, twisting off a braided band. “Here, you try.”
“No. Gracias. No.”
“You try! You try!”
He grabbed her arm and shoved the braided band at her clenched fist. Half suspecting a ploy to distract her while one of his cohorts lifted her wallet from the tote slung over her shoulder, she tried to pull her arm back.
“No! I don’t—”
“You heard the lady. Beat it, kid.”
The deep growl spun both Nina and the pint-size vendor around. She looked up—not a common occurrence for someone who measured five eight in her bare feet—and felt her stomach do a flip.
Whoa, momma! Not two minutes ago, she’d been thinking of Angelina Jolie. Now here was James McAvoy, Angelina’s sexy costar in Wanted. Same dark hair, same blue bedroom eyes, same chiseled chin.
Only this version was tougher. Leaner. Definitely not into Hollywood chic. His boots had collected almost as much dust as Nina’s sandals. His wrinkled khaki trousers and the gaudy tropical shirt he wore over a black T-shirt, looked as though he’d just pulled them out of a suitcase. And the man needed a shave. Badly.
Nina was no stickler for protocol. Well, maybe a little. Okay, a lot. She expected her employees to present a neat, businesslike appearance at all times. That applied equally to everyone, from her division heads to the medical data-entry clerks.
She was fair about it, though. She held herself to the same strict standards. She dressed well, if conservatively, and worked out regularly to maintain both her health and her trim figure. She was conservative in her makeup, too. A few swipes of mascara was all she needed to enhance her brown eyes. Peach lip gloss did the trick for her mouth—which she now forced into a polite smile.
“Thanks for the assistance,” she said as the kid who’d dogged her footsteps scampered away. “The boy was nothing, if not persistent.”
“You have to learn how to shake ‘em off. Must be your first time in Cabo.”
It was a statement, not a question, but she answered it anyway. “Yes, it is.”
Those blue eyes made a slow descent from her wide-brimmed straw hat to her designer sunglasses to the lips her ex-fiancé had described as all too kissable.
That was before she’d handed the conniving rat his walking papers, of course. During their last, somewhat less than cordial meeting, Kevin had flung other descriptive phrases at her. “Hard” and “stubborn” and “a real ball-buster” came immediately to mind.
“I was just going to have a beer.” The dark-haired stranger hooked a thumb at the open-air bar behind him. “Care to join me?”
Thirst battled with common sense. If Nina hadn’t been thinking of Kevin, odds were she would have turned down this casual invitation, just as she had that of the silver-maned hacienda owner. She never cruised bars, much less let strange men pick her up. But her parched throat and the remembered sting of Kevin’s insults overcame caution.
“Sure. Why not?”
The Purple Parrot looked much like the dozens of other bars in the harbor area. Square tables topped by chipped formica crowded its railed-in veranda. Red and green-plastic chairs added a colorful air, as did the plastic pennants strung from corner to corner. Inside the bar itself were shelves lined with a staggering array of bottles.
“Over there.”
Grasping Nina’s elbow, the stranger steered her toward a just-vacated table with an unobstructed view of the marina. The sudden and totally unexpected sizzle that radiated up her bare arm flustered her so much she barely took in the sea of gleaming white sailboats.
“I’m Rafe,” he said by way of introduction. “Rafe Blackstone.”
“Nina. Uh, Grant.”
Oh, for pity’s sake! The heat must have gotten to her more than she’d realized. Bad enough she’d given in to the impulse to have a drink with a man who looked like a cross between a movie stud and a hood. One touch, and said stud came close to finishing what the sun had started. She was practically melting under her linen sundress.
It had to be that dark stubble on his cheeks and chin. Or the way his black T-shirt stretched
