Fifty-One

Cofre del Tesoro, Colombia
March 2011

Michael took a quick look around, glancing down the hall, both left and right, before rapping light knuckles against Lydia’s bedroom door. In his fist he held a key, but he decided to respect her privacy instead of using it—unlike her husband. Reyes hadn’t been on the island for weeks, his visits becoming even less frequent, more sporadic—but that didn’t mean he didn’t know everything that went on here.

Between the household staff and the recent unwelcomed addition of his son, Estefan, Michael had no doubt that Reyes knew everything that happened on Cofre del Tesoro. Standing here, in front of Reyes’s wife’s bedroom, waiting for her to open the door was dangerous and stupid—for both of them.

But this was worth the risk.

He lifted his hand again, but the door opened before it made contact. Lydia stood on the other side, hand on the knob, managing to look both excited and apprehensive at the same time. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” she said, her hand falling off the knob to lace fingers with its partner. “Maybe you should just go without me. I can watch from one of the upstairs—”

“No. You get to have this, and so does she.” He reached for her hand, pulling her across the threshold and into the deserted hallway. He pressed a key into her hand and closed her fingers around it. Her eyes went wide when she realized what he was giving her. “It’s Sunday—everyone is off island for the day. It’s just us,” he said. She nodded and slipped the key into her pocket to be hidden later.

He’d been trying to coax her out of her room for months now, to see Christina, but whatever threats Reyes had levied against her had kept her firmly in place. Until today.

“What about … him?” Lydia said, pulling her hand from him. “Is he gone?”

She was talking about Estefan, and he shrugged. “I haven’t seen him in days.” It was the truth, but saying it did little to calm the niggle of doubt that worried at him. He hadn’t seen Estefan, but that meant nothing. He could be anywhere, watching and waiting for his opportunity to glean a bit of juicy information to feed to his father. It wasn’t a question of if Estefan found them out; it was a question of what Michael was willing to do to keep him quiet when he did.

“Do you trust me?” he said. A memory, fast and bright, of asking Christina the exact same thing three years ago. The same day he’d met her mother and went tumbling, headlong, down the slippery slope he’d been treading since he first laid eyes on her daughter.

Lydia nodded and pulled her bedroom door shut. “Yes,” she said, giving him a smile.

The worry nested in the back of his brain no longer niggled. Now it poked and pushed, but he ignored it. Christina deserved this, and he was going to make sure she got it.

“Then let’s get this show on the road.” He cocked his head toward the stairs. “Meet you outside in ten minutes.”

He took the stairs to the second floor, winding this way and that until he stood in front of a door as familiar to him as his own. Knocking again, this time he opened the door without waiting for an invitation. Christina sat in the pink chair by the window, only it wasn’t pink anymore. She’d found a sheet somewhere, probably in one of the half dozen laundry rooms, and spread its sunny yellow expanse across the chair, covering the color she’d come to hate over the last year. She could do little about the drapes and walls, but the chair she made her own.

“Hey, you want to go for a walk or something?” he said, fighting to keep his tone flat. It was her eighth birthday and she was sure he’d forgotten.

Christina looked up from the book in her lap. “On the beach?”

He pulled a face. “I was thinking maybe the garden.”

She sighed, moving her bookmark so it could keep her place before standing. “Okay,” she said, stopping to slip her shoes on before stepping into the hall. “I’m tired of the beach anyway.”

They walked in silence toward the back of the house. He had to curb the urge to hurry her plodding pace. When they reached the bank of French doors, covered with heavy drapes, that lined the rear wall of the huge formal living room, he rushed ahead and stood in front of one of them. “Knock, knock,” he said, and she rolled her eyes at him.

“Who’s there?” she mumbled.

“Happy birthday.”

She looked up at him, a smile teasing the corners of her tiny mouth at last. “You remembered.” Tears sparkled, caught in her lashes, and she blinked them away. She was only eight—barely more than a baby. She had no idea what waited for her on the other side of the door, but he could see she didn’t care. Someone remembered her birthday. That was all that mattered. He’d never celebrated his own birthday. Not until he was twelve. The first birthday after he’d been placed with Sean and Sophia. He remembered the cake and candles. The two of them singing to him as if they were actually happy he’d been born.

He cleared his throat. “Seriously? Like I could forget. You’ve been jabbering about it for weeks now.”

Her smile widened into a grin. “I didn’t think you cared.”

For a moment he grappled with his emotions, dangerous and slippery, before he was able to force them back into the vise grip he usually kept them in. “Maybe I don’t care. Maybe I’m just tired of the moping,” he said with a shrug, pretending to himself that he’d managed to fool her. “Now, close your eyes.”

She obeyed instantly, bouncing on her tiptoes, her dark corkscrew curls buoyant around a face that was suddenly lit with joy.

He reached for her hand. “Keep ’em closed.”

Christina nodded, giggling as her fingers closed around his, gripping him tight. “Thank you.”

Those emotions slipped loose again, and he tried to pull his hand from hers. “You don’t even know what it is.”

Her hand flexed in his, holding him where he was, surprisingly strong for a young girl. “It doesn’t matter.”

He pushed the drapes aside to get at the doorknob. He unlocked the door and pulled her onto the veranda. “You can look now,” he said quietly.

She didn’t move, she simply stood there for a moment with her eyes closed, face turned up to the sun, enjoying the anticipation of what waited for her. He was about to prod her when she finally opened her eyes, a soft fluttering sigh escaping her.

Lydia stood on the flagstone path at the foot of the stairs that led to the garden, a bright-blue BMX racer leaning on its kickstand beside her. “I feel the need to point out that this house is a four-story building the size of a Holiday Inn,” he said looking down at her. “You may not, under any circumstance, ride it off the roof.”

She launched herself at him, arms and legs scrambling to hug him and for once, he didn’t fight her. “Thank you, thank you, thank you …” She said it over and over through the tears before pressing softly pursed lips to his cheek. “I love you too.” She whispered it a split second before she was down the stairs, streaking past the bike and into her mother’s arms. That was the real gift. They lived in the same house, yet they hadn’t seen each other in ten months.

“You live dangerously for a nanny.”

His shoulders instantly stiffened, but he turned to give Estefan an indifferent shrug. “She’d been crying for months, whining about seeing her mother,” he said fighting to keep his tone even. “I got tired of listening to it.”

The younger man pushed himself away from the doorway he slouched against. “Yes … I’m sure that was it,” Estefan said, his words dripping with sarcasm. “Where did you get the bike?”

Michael could hear amusement is his voice, as if the thought that he’d bother with such a thing for a child was a ridiculous notion.

And he supposed it was.

“Amazon.” Michael cut the young man next to him a caustic smile. “Feel free to leave anytime,” he said quietly, not wanting to alarm Lydia.

Estefan ignored him, watching the scene between mother and daughter play out in front of him, barely disguised lust plastered across his face. “She is beautiful, isn’t she?”

For a second Michael was unsure which girl he was referring to, and that uncertainty clenched at his gut. “She’s a child.” He turned to face Estefan head on. “They both are,” he said, his tone heavy with warning.

“Mmm …” Estefan shrugged. “Who are you reminding, Cartero? Me or yourself?”

He took a quick glance at the two girls behind him. They were lost in each other, paying no attention to what was going on between him and Reyes’s son, but he took a few steps forward to close the gap between them just in case. “So there’s absolutely no confusion—I’m not warning you. I’m telling you very plainly. If you touch either one of them, I will lay you open and watch you bleed.”

Estefan laughed, retreating into the shadows of the house. “So protective of things that don’t belong to you, Cartero. What would my father say?” he said before he walked away.

It was a threat, veiled and vague. But then again, the most deadly of threats usually were.