Frustrated, feeling the constraint of bureaucratic red tape, Danny ground his teeth but kept his mouth shut.
Chapter Seven
COLOMBIA
Gabe stepped out of Armando Castillo’s shabby but well-kept house and slid his sunglasses on against the glare of morning sunshine. Chickens clucked and strutted around the house and a worn shed he assumed was a barn. A scruffy mule grazed behind a fence that had seen better days and wouldn’t hold back a more ambitious animal. Skinny stray dogs sniffed the pitted dirt streets of a barely there jungle village for scraps.
The air already sweltered, promising a day as thick as pudding with humidity, and Gabe’s shirt clung to his spine. Compared to the persistent coolness of Bogotá, it was as if they’d entered a different country.
He checked his cell phone to call Harvard and found no signal. Not a surprise, but being out of contact with his team in the middle of guerilla country with an untrained civilian woman in tow made him twitchy. Since leaving the city, the hair on the back of his neck prickled in a near preternatural sixth sense—if you believed in that sort of thing—that usually warned him someone was watching.
Laughter erupted from the house behind him and Gabe shook his head in complete awe. How Audrey went from giving Armando Castillo the third degree to becoming the limo driver’s new best friend was beyond him. He’d watched it happen and still couldn’t understand how it had happened. One minute, grief and guilt devastated Armando’s lived-in features as he explained someone had called in and changed Bryson’s pick-up time the morning of the abduction. The next, Audrey had him grinning and joking with her like they’d known each other forever. Maybe if Gabe knew Spanish, he’d understand how she managed that. Then again, maybe she just possessed a certain…magnetism or something.
God knew she drew him like the proverbial doomed moth to a flame.
Which ticked him off in a big way. Never before had a woman fascinated him to distraction like this. He liked to keep his love life—if he could even call it that; sex had been completely off his radar since the car accident last year—as orderly and precise as everything else he did. But she had the potential to destroy his meticulous life like a wrecking ball through concrete.
So he shouldn’t even consider Audrey Van Amee in that way. Idiot.
Warning prickled along the back of his neck again and he straightened, scanning the area. He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but that didn’t mean much. He excelled at spotting tails, but he wasn’t dumb enough to think that nobody in the world was better at tailing than he was at spotting them. He checked his watch then rubbed a hand over his jaw, which was in desperate need of a date with a razor.
What the hell was that woman doing in there, anyhow? They had just about overstayed their welcome and needed to get gone.
Ten minutes later, just as he was about to go drag her out of the house in a fireman’s carry if need be, Audrey emerged carrying a basket. Armando and his tiny wife, who had a voice that rivaled a foghorn, trailed behind. Gabe pushed away from the car, only to have to wait another five minutes as they chatted.
C’mon, woman.
He caught Audrey’s gaze and hitched his chin toward the Jeep. She crinkled her nose—and, dammit, he shouldn’t have found that expression as endearing as he did—then pointedly turned her back on him. He got the feeling she would have stuck out her tongue if they weren’t in mixed company.
Frustrated, he yanked open the Jeep’s door with enough force to rock the vehicle. He was tapping his fingers in succession on the steering wheel when she finally decided to bless him with her presence, and slammed the Jeep into gear almost before she had the door shut.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” She caught herself on the dashboard with one hand while protecting her basket with the other. “Impatient much?”
“In case you’ve forgotten, we’re working on a limited watch.” He shot her a narrow-eyed glare. “We don’t have time to sit around and chitchat with the friendly locals, especially when there are a lot of unfriendly locals in the vicinity.”
“I haven’t forgotten.” Audrey straightened and buckled herself into the seat. “And I wasn’t wasting time.” She reached into her basket and brought out a printed sheet of paper that she fluttered in front of his nose.
“Holy shit. You actually got something out of him?” He grabbed it from her. Spanish. Of course. He really needed to learn the language. “What’s it say?”
“Yes, I did.” She scowled and snatched the paper back. “But we’re lucky Armando even let us inside, not to mention told us anything. It’s extremely rude to come calling without bringing a gift, you know.”