She stilled, and a shadow crossed her face. She didn’t like being reminded of his past, of who he was.
She didn’t like thinking of him in Edgar’s office and the pool of blood flowing across the floor.
“Will you tell me why you did it?”
“Did what?” he asked.
“Why you had Edgar killed,” she said softly.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
She thought of saying no for a moment. It was easier to pretend he hadn’t planned a man’s death, easier to imagine this was just some wonderful dream free of context and consequences.
But it wasn’t. If she wanted to be with this man and to truly love him, she needed to understand what he had done.
“I want to know,” she said softly. “If you don’t tell me, I won’t ever understand and maybe there’s a part of me that won’t trust you.”
“What if my explanation makes you trust me less?”
“I don’t know,” she said softly, trying to be as honest as possible. “I guess we’ll take that as it comes.
What I do know is that if we aren’t honest with each other, we don’t have a chance.”
He nodded his head slowly, and then rolled off her to lie in the sand next to her. She snuggled into his side as he cradled her with his arm.
“Well, I started out in the Special Forces,” he said slowly. “I did that for several years, and then some friends of mine and I decided to go freelance.”
“Freelance?” she asked, unsure what he meant.
“We started hiring ourselves out to the highest bidder,” he said. “At first we thought we’d be fighting.
You know, fearless mercenaries and all that. And we did do some fighting. But what we mostly ended up doing was training other people how to fight.”
“I see,” she said.
“No, I doubt that you do,” he said with a bitter laugh. “But I’ll keep telling you anyway. I met Valzar around this time, by the way. He and his family go way back, descended from Conquistadores. They’ve owned and sold people for generations, controlling entire countries. They’re always working on some new deal, some new angle. Half the things that happen down here they have a finger in, legitimate and illegitimate.”
“He’s not a very nice man,” she said softly.
“No, he isn’t,” Sean replied with a harsh laugh. “Although he’s a damn good man to have at your back. I hooked up with Valzar because I wanted to get into a new field, hostage rescue, and he had the money. I was tired of teaching peasants how to fight. I knew that whatever I taught them probably wouldn’t save their lives, not as long as the guerrillas and the government refused to even consider peace. It’s always the peasants who get caught in the middle of these wars. With Valzar’s backing, I started contracting with several large insurance companies who offer kidnapping insurance to foreign businessmen.”
“I’ve never heard of insurance like that,” she said. “It sounds like a different world.”
“That world is all around us,” he said softly. “It’s just that most people don’t have the background to notice it. That’s the difference between people like me and people like you. I notice things.”
She didn’t say anything, knowing he was probably right. She hadn’t had a clue something was wrong at
Edgar’s until she’d walked out of the bathroom. She’d be willing to bet Sean wouldn’t have been fooled like that.
“So, Valzar and I started our little business, contracting with these companies and bringing in a nice revenue stream. Most of the time we’d just pocket the profits, and even the occasional hostage situation wasn’t too bad. Ninety percent of the time we’d manage to negotiate a ransom for our hostages and get them out safe.”
“What about the rest of the time?” she asked.
“We’d go in after them,” he said, his voice going lower. “Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. It’s a messy business.”
She nodded her head, as if she knew what he was talking about.
“So, how did you end up in prison?”
“I ended up in prison because I murdered a man in the United States where I could get caught.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.
“Why did you kill him?” she asked finally.
“Does it really matter?”
“Yes, it matters,” she said.
“I murdered him because he got six of my men killed, not to mention two hostages,” he said, his face emotionless. “Their lives were worth 25,000 to him. I learned later that he blew all of it in Vegas the next weekend. That’s why I killed him.”
She stayed silent for a moment, and then shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said softly.
“Will you tell me the whole story?”
“Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “I think if I don’t, I’ll always question what happened.”
“You can’t just trust me?” he asked. She looked at him sadly, and then shook her head.
“No, I don’t think that I can,” she replied. “I wish I could, but you’ve never given me the chance to make any decisions for myself. If you won’t trust me, how can I ever trust you?”
He rolled to his back, and put both hands behind his head. She did the same, looking up at the stars and marveling at how bright they seemed. She’d never seen anything quite like it. If only life wasn’t so complicated, she could spend her time with him simply enjoying the life they were leading. But she couldn’t just do that, she needed to learn what was really going on, and he was the only one who could tell her. As much as she wanted to turn her brain off, it wasn’t happening. She had to know.
“Well, I told you I did contracting with insurance firms,” he said. “I was negotiating a hostage release in
Sinaloa, up in the mountains. There were two businessmen who’d been snatched off the street in Mazatlan by drug dealers, and I suspect there was more going on between them than a simple ransom demand. Anyway, it was complicated by the fact that one of them had ties to the CIA.”
He paused took a breath, and she drank that in. What a strange world he lived in. Who had ties to the
CIA in real life? It sounded like a movie…
“When they heard about the situation, they sent an advisor down to work with me. Someone in his office had a big mouth, because they told a co-worker, who just happened to be a drinking buddy of Edgar’s, about the situation.