“Listen…you’d be a lot safer in my house than you would be in a hostel now that you’ve been arrested with me.”
“Safer? I don’t feel safer after I was just ARRESTED!” I couldn’t stop myself from shouting the last word.
“Shh,” he said, putting a finger to his lips. There was a woman and a little boy who had turned around to stare at us.
I thanked my lucky stars that they looked like Ecuadorians, and I hoped that they weren’t fluent in English. The woman said something in Spanish to the little boy, taking his hand and towing him away. Maybe it looked like a domestic dispute.
Emilio’s hand tightened on my arm.
“Come to my house, please,” he said again, but I got the feeling that it wasn’t really a request.
He had all of my stuff, including my passport. Even if I tried to break away now, what would happen?
So I decided to stick with him and figure out how it would play out.
“I’ll go home with you.”
Not a Spy
Emilio
I let out a breath that I didn’t know I was holding. I knew that she was headstrong, and she might be too stubborn to let me protect her.
If anything convinced me of her innocence, it was her bewilderment when we were arrested. If I’d set it up myself, I couldn’t have hoped for a better result.
If she had been part of the CIA, she would’ve told them who she was when we were arrested, unless she was ordered to go in deep.
I considered the idea that she’d been sent as a spy…or she had planted the cocaine herself.
I snorted and shook my head at such a preposterous thought. If she’d been sent to Ecuador as a spy, she’d done a shoddy job of it. In the time that we’d been together, I hadn’t seen her send so much as a text message. And a secret agent would have immediately gotten out of cuffs and run for it. An incarcerated CIA agent in Ecuador wouldn’t be in a very good position. There had been enough trouble when WikiLeaks had publicized the US ambassador’s candid critique of the president — I couldn’t imagine the media blowout if Ecuador was lucky enough to catch a CIA agent spying here.
I’d put her in the government’s hands myself. Nothing I’d do to her would equal what they’d do to her.
But now I was going to take her home, and I was going to get to the bottom of whomever had sent Aguilera to search my jet.
I was lucky that Ortiz was there, but I certainly paid him enough to look after my affairs. If he hadn’t prevented it before it happened, it meant that it had been enacted at the last minute. I’d only filed the flight plan a little bit before we took off.
Heads were going to roll.
I looked at Naelle’s beautiful profile.
There was something in her beautiful dark eyes — was it fear? anxiety — which awoke my protective instincts.
I was mostly sure that she wasn’t sent to take me down, and I would protect her while I could get to the bottom of this. It could be a ploy to gain my trust, but I highly doubted it.
I hailed the closest taxi. I didn’t normally use them, but we had unusual circumstances. I needed to g
et away from the police station before that asshole Aguilera even noticed that I was gone.
“North of La Carolina,” I told him.
He easily slid into traffic like a seasoned Quito driver. I told him where to turn, and soon we were at my house.
Very Sleepy
Naelle
The impact of his home diminished as I got used to it. He paid the cab driver and stepped out, putting a possessive arm around my shoulders. I didn’t know if I liked it. One, he was warm and solid. Two, he was awfully presumptuous for a guy I’d slept with just one night and who had proceeded to nearly kidnap me and force me to go back to the United States.