Avenging Angel (24 page)

Now she wondered anew about the person who had cut him, and she wondered what it would be like to touch that thin white line with her fingertip, to caress his face and take the old hurt away. The heat in her body slowly rose to her face, and she knew she’d looked too long.

“Right. I could use a shower, too,” she said quickly. But deep down inside she doubted if the Casa del Flores had enough cold water to cool her down.

* * *

True to the hotel’s name, spidery boughs of bougainvillea interspersed with cascades of clematis swept around three sides of the Casa del Flores’s courtyard. Graceful palm trees swayed and dipped in the evening breeze, the rustling of their fronds lost in the sounds of the dining area. Tomorrow the whole place might go up in flames, but tonight the Casa del Flores was a haven of peace.

Nikki sat hunched over her table, jotting notes by candlelight. Three empty beer bottles flanked a plate of half-eaten beans, rice, and tortillas. She’d picked all the chicken out. If Josh didn’t sell a story pretty soon, there wouldn’t be any chicken next time. She really had to get on him about it. The figures she quickly added up proved her point. They were running on empty.

Boom or bust, she thought with a disgruntled sigh. Even looking at her notebook, she didn’t know where all their money went. There were too many miscellaneous entries—all of them in Josh’s handwriting. “Misc.” seemed to be his only expenditure.

She flipped to the back pages where they kept their private accounts. Typically, Josh’s debits were all labeled “Misc.,” the last one nearly three hundred dollars. What in the miscellaneous hell had he done with three hundred dollars? she wondered, wrinkling her brow.

She had very few debits on her private page, just a sure and growing line of credits tucked away in a Boulder, Colorado, bank. But there weren’t enough of them. She needed more money, lots more money. A year of risking her tail in the hottest spots in Latin America hadn’t given her the price of one person’s freedom.

Unwanted, that knowledge forced its way to the front of her mind, constricting her heart with sadness. Her mouth softened in pain, and suddenly she wished Josh would hurry up and come down to dinner. She didn’t like to be left alone with her thoughts, not when they turned to her mother.

A story, Nikki, she told herself. Think of a story, a blockbusting, fortune-making story. They needed a story like the one they’d broken the day she’d gone looking for protection. The day she’d found Joshua Rios. . . .

Read on for a excerpt from
Outlaw Carson

One

“I can’t work with the man,” Kristine Richards announced. She tossed the memo from the dean of the university onto the piles of clutter on her desk, starting a small avalanche of papers.

Jenny, her elderly graduate assistant, crouched down and retrieved a few of the letters, stuffing them into her arms, already filled with many other important papers.

“Won’t, not can’t,” Jenny said, looking around for someplace to stash the unattended-to business. No empty space magically appeared. Sighing in resignation, Jenny opted for the last resort, collating the correspondence by using the thousand or so books lining the walls of the office. She made sure an edge of each envelope stuck out from the volumes. Within a minute, the shelves looked like they might take off and fly.

“Okay, have it your way,” Kristine agreed easily. “I won’t work with the man.”

“The university is already into Carson’s Tibetan project up to their ears,” Jenny said, “and they want to make sure the findings get published. You’re the logical choice for his assistant.”

“Then they should have made darn sure I was the one chosen to go to Tibet in the first place. But no, they sent Harry Fratz, and Harry caught some god-awful bug. Lucky for Harry.”

Less than a year ago, Kristine had been stunned and thrilled to learn that her employer, Colorado State University, had been selected to help fund—and then share in the glory—of an ambitious archaeological study. A renegade archaeologist named Carson planned to compile an inventory of ancient Tibetan monasteries, temples, and shrines. Kristine had been certain she’d be picked to go along as Carson’s assistant. No one on the university’s staff was more qualified, least of all Harry—except by virtue of his gender. But they’d picked Harry, who had barely lasted two months, and now the whole expedition was in shambles, an international disaster.

They had a lot of nerve, she fumed, trying to drag her in on the tail end of Carson’s Catastrophe, as the history department now labeled the project. The whole damn thing should have been Richard’s Reward from the start. She knew more about Tibet, fact and fiction, than Harry had ever even bothered to imagine.

She sorted through the junk on her desk, finally coming up with a chocolate chip cookie. She blew a little dust off one edge and took a tentative bite.

“You’re going to die someday,” Jenny admonished her.

“I’ll be in good company. What else does the university have to offer their finest Asian historian for summer employment, besides sorting out somebody else’s mess and babysitting the glory boy who made it?”

“Probably a pink slip.”

Kristine choked on her cookie. Jenny patted her on the back.

“There, there, honey. I hear the community college is looking for a history teacher.”

Kristine raised her watery eyes to meet Jenny’s. She didn’t doubt her assistant’s summation of the situation. The older woman’s uncanny intuition had never failed her when it came to the inner workings of the university.

“That’s . . . blackmail,” she gasped, reaching for her cold cup of coffee.

“You’ll be dead before you’re thirty,” Jenny said as she watched Kristine use a pencil to stir the sugar up from the bottom.

Kristine swallowed a sip or two anyway. “Still in good company.”

“But you’ll probably live through the summer,” Jenny went on. “It’s up to you whether you do it working on Kit Carson’s Tibetan findings or job hunting.”

“Blackmail,” Kristine muttered. Carson, she thought. Kit Carson. Even his name rankled her. What kind of fool name was Kit Carson?

A famous fool’s name, she silently admitted. He’d come out of the vastness of Asia nearly ten years ago, dazzling museum directors from Beijing to Calcutta with the extent of his knowledge and the rarity of his archaeological finds. He was a virtual unknown who’d made a name for himself by being part of the spectacular excavation of the burial tomb at Lishan in China, with its amazing collection of thousands of lifesize terra-cotta warriors; a renegade Buddhist monk with unparalleled access to the secrets of the Far East.

She’d never met him. No one she knew had, except for poor, dumb Harry, and the hospital wasn’t allowing visitors. Still, you couldn’t get three historians in the same room without his name coming up, usually on the end of “That damn barbarian.” It took only two archaeologists to reach the same consensus, both of them praying Carson wouldn’t be the first to be allowed to excavate any of Tibet’s hallowed ground. Tibet was an archaeologist’s dream, but no one could do more than list any artifacts that were visible. It was illegal to dig at any of Tibet’s religious sites.

Carson was too unorthodox to fit in the realm of academia, and he’d lost his reputation shortly after he’d gotten it. He didn’t have a degree in anything, not even the equivalent of high school, if the rumors were correct. And if what they were hearing from China was true, while supposedly cataloguing Tibet’s shrines and temples, Kit Carson had crossed the final line into out-and-out grave robbing.

Kristine groaned and dropped her head on the desk. The university must be desperate to threaten her with dismissal. Any tenured professor would refuse to work with Carson on the grounds of protecting his or her reputation, now that Carson had slipped into infamy. Unfortunately Kristine didn’t have tenure or a reputation. “Publish or perish” went the old adage, and she’d be damned if she perished this close to a full professorship.

“Kristine, dear?”

“Yes?” she replied without lifting her head.

“That green rag you’re wearing today is really too awful for words. I’ve told you a hundred times you’re a winter.”

“Thank you, Jenny,” she muttered into the papers cushioning her face. Carson. Kit Carson. She groaned again.

* * *

The first two trunks arrived at her house the first Monday after finals. The second pair came on Tuesday. By Wednesday, Kristine and the deliveryman were on a first-name basis. The university, through Dr. Timnath, the head of her department, had insisted she accept Kit Carson’s luggage, assuring her she’d need the trunks for her research and requesting that she be discreet. She’d countered with a mention of tenure, priding herself on being able to
discreetly
work it into the conversation three times. She was beginning to wonder, though, if the owner of the luggage was ever going to make a personal appearance, and whether or not she dared break off the heavy iron padlocks to see what was inside the fascinating old cases. One look at them had convinced her, albeit belatedly, of the wisdom of taking on the Carson project. Who knew what treasures lurked in the trunks’ cavernous depths?

“Now, Bob,” she said, Wednesday morning, yawning and scrawling her name across three of the tiny lines on his delivery sheet. Her second signature missed the lines completely. With her free hand she tightened her grip on the one hundred and twenty pounds of pure ugly she called a dog and most people called a beast. “I want you to notice I’m giving you an extra signature here. If you show up tomorrow morning, please put the trunks on the deck without knocking or ringing the bell. Okay?”

“It’s against the rules, Kristine,” the deliveryman said nervously, keeping one eye on her mastiff.

“Come on, Bob. Live dangerously. Bend the rules.” And let her have at least one morning of sloth, she prayed. Last night there had been a welcome home party for Harry to celebrate his hospital release. She’d stayed much too late in a vain attempt to corner the guest of honor. He’d looked far healthier than she would have guessed for a man newly risen from his deathbed, and he’d avoided her like the plague.

“Okay,” Bob finally said. “I’ll try it . . . once.”

“You’re a great guy.” She flashed him a smile, using the last of her strength.

Half an hour, two aspirin, and one mug of coffee later, Kristine draped herself over the open refrigerator door and searched for something edible. Mancos nudged her legs, whining.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Old Mother Hubbard better get something for the cupboard.”

The whining stopped abruptly, and Mancos whirled around, almost knocking her over in the process. He barreled out of the kitchen hell-bent for leather, sliding on the wood floor and letting out a woof that made coffee redundant.

Eyes painfully wide, Kristine shuddered and shook her head, trying to get rid of the ringing in her ears. She heard Mancos hit the dog-door at full speed, followed in the next second by a loud, deep, “Aaiieey-yah!”

“Dammit, Bob,” she muttered, slamming the refrigerator door shut and stumbling after the mastiff. She ran through the living room, threw back the curtains, and jerked the atrium door open—to the most amazing sight.

He was fast, she had to give him that, and light of foot, like a highwire artist. And he definitely wasn’t Bob. He was racing along the deck railing, keeping either one step in front of or one step behind Mancos’s snapping jaws. The morning light spilling over the foothills cast him in a golden halo, a color shades paler than the thick, silky hair pulled away from his face and hanging in a roan braid down his back. Shorter strands of dark auburn hair feathered across his cheeks and melded into the winged curves of his brows.

The sleeves of his black tunic were rolled up, revealing dark skin, tightly corded muscle, and more gold bracelets than she could count. A wide leather belt hung low on his hips, banded on one side with the hilt and sheath of a large, wickedly curved
khukri
, the blade of a Gurkha mercenary. His jeans were tucked into roughly made short boots, nothing more than flaps of leather sewn together with strips of rawhide that were secured with silver hoops at the top. He was a running wind chime, and the music of his quick steps left her stunned.

She really needed to do something to save him, she thought, or her dog, if he went for his knife. Then he saw her, and his flashing grin and sly wink made her instantly aware of a need to save herself.