Free Renegade with a Badge by Claire King Page B

you have felt the kiss of two criminals, princesa, ” he said quietly enough so Bobby would not hear. “You must be appalled.”
    Olivia swallowed bile. “You’re just saying this so I won’t try to escape.”
    Rafe swept his arm toward the ocean. “Escape,” he shouted, though he was prepared to tie her up to keep her with him. “You can probably walk back. Go! Be my guest. It was your idea to come with me in the first place.”
    “To save your life!”
    “I’m saved. You can go.”
    Olivia looked wildly toward Bobby again. He was still smiling, and she couldn’t bear to meet his eyes. “This can’t be true. Ernesto has been the sheriff of this town for years,” she argued. “His father was sheriff here before him, a landholder who knew my uncle. A farmer!”
    “And the most notorious smuggler in Mexico, until he died in a shoot-out with the federales twenty years ago,” Rafe added.
    Words caught in her throat. No, it was too preposterous. Ernesto, a smuggler?
    “What about all his friends, the people of the town? Do you expect me to believe they don’t know this about him?”
    “Some of them do, I would guess,” Bobby said blithely. “His father was a farmer, before he started transporting shipments of marijuana in the 1950s, then raw cocaine from the mainland in the 1970s. You don’t build a hacienda like that on a farmer’s take-home pay.”
    “He made up the story of his family?”
    Rafe nodded. “He has the same pedigree as the rest of the men in Aldea Viejo,” he said harshly. “His father was simply more brutally ambitious. As is your Ernesto.”
    “You’re a liar.”
    Rafe studied her for a moment, making Olivia’s breath catch in her throat. She braced herself. If he slit her throat, she wouldn’t be surprised. He had the look of it in his eyes.
    “I am a liar, princesa, ” he said, ominously, and Olivia backed up one involuntary step. “Sometimes I think I lie about everything. I will admit that to you.” He took a deep breath, let it out carefully. His ribs were howling again. “But I am not lying to you about this,” he continued finally. “Ernesto Cervantes is a smuggler. A shark. The biggest shark in Baja. And he wants to kill us because we have been eating away at his stash of drugs.”
    “No,” Olivia said again. “I don’t believe you.”
    Rafe shrugged.
    “And I’ll tell you why I don’t believe you,” Olivia persisted, furious with them, furious with herself for the kernel of doubt that had lodged like a slug in her breastbone. “Because you’re a criminal. You lie for a living. That’s what criminals do.”
    “And you know what criminals do, Doctor?” Rafe asked mildly.
    “I know they don’t tell the truth.”
    “So why do you believe anything Cervantes has told you?”
    Because I was thinking of marrying him, Olivia wanted to cry. And what kind of woman does that make me? Certainly not the intelligent, thoughtful one I’ve always imagined myself to be.
    Rafe watched Olivia struggle with an answer. Just to be courteous, he supplied her with the one he thought might fit. “You believed what he told you because he looks just like what he says he is. He looks and acts like a wealthy, old-family Mexican landowner with a badge. You’re so in love with his fine manners and his perfect speech and his hacienda, you don’t want to know where all the money to pay for those things has come from—”
    “Uh, Rafe?”
    Rafe tore his eyes from Olivia’s. “What?”
    Bobby nodded down the hill. Rafe followed his gaze. A Land Cruiser was slowly crawling the hillside, straight toward them.
    “Hell,” he said. “Doctor?”
    She was dazed, he could see. She looked up at him, but her beautiful black eyes were bewildered.
    “What?”
    “We’re going.”
    She shook her head, and tears began to slide from the corners of her eyes. “I can’t go with you.”
    He palmed her biceps, shook her slightly. “You can’t stay here.”
    She stared up at him while the