Ghostrider - M. L. Buchman Page 0,44

asked Holly if she should watch the movie for cultural reasons.

Holly snorted, “Are you kidding? I’d rather watch a water buffalo sleep in the sun.”

Miranda thought about that as they lined up for takeoff.

Why would anyone want to watch a water buffalo sleep in the sun?

28

Pierre Jones checked the hospital hallway in both directions. He felt like a geriatric patient. His entire body was mostly a big bruise. The docs couldn’t believe he’d survived his low-altitude jump, never mind without serious injury.

No guards. Good sign.

He peeked into Rosa Cruz’s room—the number he’d gotten by total subterfuge from the nurses’ station…he’d asked.

She was awake.

Her smile lit brightly when she saw him in the doorway. It was a very powerful weapon on a lovely woman clothed in almost nothing and already lying in a bed. A sling held one arm, completely immobilized with a crossbody strap just below her breasts. That was something of a deterrent. And she wasn’t his lover, but rather Tango’s…and Gutz’s.

“What are you in for, Rosa?” He hadn’t heard she was injured.

She flinched briefly and that lovely smile wavered for the length of a single heartbeat before she covered it.

Please don’t let that flinch be because of what he expected it was. What he knew it was. He wished he’d phrased his question differently so that he could deny noticing anything. But he hadn’t…and she’d flinched.

Rosa knew that he knew something. But instead of addressing that, she shied off and answered the hospital question.

“I was the last one they picked up. They said they hadn’t even been looking for me until after they found the ‘last person out’—which must have been you. I was in the water long enough to become marginally hypothermic. And the shoulder.” She raised her arm ever so slightly, winced more understandably this time, then lowered it again. “Dislocated. Fixed, but I’m strapped in for a week. I didn’t know it was possible to be so cold. I’m warmer now, but still under observation. They said I should be free in a few hours. You that sent them back for me?”

“Of course.” He himself had been picked up by a group of jet skiers, making the seventeen-mile crossing from the mainland to Catalina. They’d spotted his chute and pulled him out of the water. The instant he’d come to, he’d called in his best guess at Rosa’s position.

“Are you okay?”

He shrugged yes, then wished he hadn’t. Wouldn’t surprise him if his whole body turned black-and-blue from how hard he’d hit the water.

As to Rosa, there’d been a long gap between the cluster of gunners and her own departure from the plane. Long enough for them to end up in a brief clench and—

Pierre cast the thought aside and took another step closer, both physically and to the elephant question in the room of her being a conspirator in a hundred-million-dollar hijacking.

“What did you tell them?” He knew that she would have been through the same level of debriefing he’d faced. Two officers and a video camera, cross-questioned on every moment from the first alert until they were hauled from the water.

She looked aside quickly and spoke low and fast. “That I don’t know what happened to the plane. That you helped me with my chute and pushed me out the door before going to help the pilots. Which was incredibly brave.”

“You heard?” He tipped his head toward the sea. They were in LA’s main VA hospital. The Pacific lay just a few miles away across Santa Monica.

She nodded and that’s when he saw how red her eyes were.

“Did you love him? Them?” Not that it was any of his goddamn business. But maybe it was. “Is that why you were helping them?”

Rosa nodded. Then shook her head. Then shrugged helplessly. “No. That’s not why I was helping them. Love them? I… They were both very good to me…in different ways.”

“But they didn’t know about each other.”

She shook her head. “Neither one would have liked it. I don’t know what I was doing. Mama always said that my older twin brothers and I were like three puppies in a pile.”

“So you tried to recreate it with Gutz and Tango?”

“Maybe. Mostly I was just not thinking. Life by default. Neither of them would ever have accepted another man. I was juggling them but it was close to coming apart. I knew that if they found out it was going to be ugly.”

He was on the verge of telling her just how ugly, brains spattered in the