Free Renegade with a Badge by Claire King Page A

socks were slightly damp with sweat, but they did soothe her aching feet. She slipped her sandals back on over them. She almost sighed.
    “Thank you,” she said reluctantly. “That does feel better.”
    Rafe nodded, then put his shoes back on over his bare feet and stood. He held out his hand. “Then let’s go. I want to try to get back and check out the situation at the beach camp before it gets too hot. We’ll have to circle—”
    “Rafael, listen to me. Leave me here. It will be safer for all of us.” Particularly me, she thought. Because every time you touch me I forget what kind of man you really are. “They will find me before the morning is out, I’m sure. I’ll be fine here.”
    He considered her thoughtfully. “You sound very reasonable about this.”
    Olivia met his eyes. “I’m a reasonable woman.”
    “And anxious to get back to your fiancé.”
    She stared him down. True enough, though technically not the fiancé part. She would run as fast as possible back to Ernesto; he was the only person she knew who would be able to get her quickly out of the country.
    “Yes.”
    Rafe nodded slowly. “Brave,” he said, running his tongue across his teeth. “Or stupid. Get up. We’re walking.”
    “What possible difference can it make to you now whether I go back to him?” she asked, a last-ditch effort.
    He stared at her. What possible difference? Had he been the only one involved in those mind-altering, blood-pumping minutes back in that dark bedroom?
    He considered that. Maybe so. Maybe she hadn’t felt anything but disgust, being kissed by a man she thought was a drug runner. But he’d been involved. Up to his eyelids.
    “I’ll tell you what difference it makes,” he ground out. “The man you’re so anxious to get back to? We’ve been stealing from him. The drugs we move? They’re his.”
    Olivia stared at him for a full minute. “I beg your pardon?”
    Her stupefied expression only made him angrier. She was so quick to believe the worst of him, but not of the real criminal.
    “Did you miss that part of the conversation back at the hacienda? ” he snarled at her. “We’re stealing from him. We take what shipments we can intercept and sell them ourselves. ‘Cutting into his action,’ I think you Americans call it.”
    No man steals from me. Olivia remembered the words perfectly, remembered the look of fury on Ernesto’s face when he’d said them. But he hadn’t meant what this criminal was implying. He couldn’t have.
    “You’re lying,” she said confidently.
    “No, Olivia. I’m not.” Rafe felt Bobby’s eyes on him. Okay, a major breach of regulations, telling her about their mark. He would explain later to Bobby that the woman had driven him completely out of his mind. He simply couldn’t go another minute on this planet with her thinking Cervantes was anything but the murdering scumbag Rafe knew him to be.
    And if she called him “Ernesto” in that little voice again, he’d do more than breach regulations. He’d haul her back to headquarters in San Diego and show her the file the DEA had been keeping for twenty years!
    “Stealing from him?” Olivia said. “Stealing?”
    “Stealing,” Rafe bit out. “Narcotics. From him.”
    Olivia looked from one man to the other. “You’re stealing from him.”
    “The lady has quite a gift for restating the obvious,” Bobby murmured, grinning.
    She looked at Rafael. “He’s the shark.”
    Rafe smiled cynically. “He’s the shark, Olivia.”
    She came to her feet. “My God, you’re both insane. Ernesto is no more a drug smuggler than I am.”
    Bobby only laughed at that, and it was all Olivia could do not to ask him furiously if he was on some sort of medication. Laughing? They’d just made the most absurd accusation about the sheriff of Aldea Viejo—a man even now searching for all three of them—and he was laughing?
    Rafael, on the other hand, never changed his expression. His dark eyes bored through hers. “Now