You’ve got to stop thinking that way, she told herself. Noah didn’t raise you to let other people solve your problems.
“So I’m just supposed to take on these killers myself?” she muttered.
If it comes to that. Flight or fight. You either run away, or you take the fight to them. You stood up to Zack, and he had a gun. You are not powerless. Trust your gut, but make up your own damn mind.
Her gut told her to fight, but who was she supposed to be fighting?
“Who wants me dead?”
She had thought that perhaps the bomb attack was the work of the Villegas brothers, wanting revenge for what had happened a week before.
Noah was very careful about which clients he would let her interact with, especially now that his little girl was becoming a very attractive young woman, but he would always introduce her to clients as a way of testing her people-reading skills. When he introduced Carlos and Raul Villegas, a pair of young Cuban-American entrepreneurs who, if their claims were to be believed, operated a successful night club in Key West, her keen senses went on high alert.
She could tell, at a glance, that Raul was the younger brother. He looked younger, with an athletic physique, a clear unlined face and a full head of jet black hair, but it was the less obvious clues that spoke to Jenna. Raul was cocky, with a strutting attention-seeking demeanor that was textbook younger sibling behavior. She noted his clandestine glances to see if older brother Carlos was watching him, but she couldn’t tell whether Raul was looking for his older brother’s approval, or trying to assert his independence. She also caught him looking at her, not leering openly, but letting his eyes flick up and down her body.
His attention had made her uncomfortable enough to loosen the knot in her T-shirt hem and tug it down to her thighs.
Carlos was very different. Handsome but not in a youthful way. He had a fake but practiced smile and eyes that never seemed to move. He made her wary. Noah had warned her about people like this, men who were well-versed in the art of manipulating others to get what they wanted — hucksters and pick-up artists who used their charisma to exploit people. Carlos hadn’t even looked at her.
She had retreated to the Kilimanjaro’s bridge and later, when Noah had joined her and asked for her impressions of them, she had expressed her opinion in the most succinct terms. “They’re both creeps.”
“It’s actually much worse than that,” Noah told her. “Carlos Villegas has been making the rounds of charter operators, looking for someone to run errands for him.”
Jenna was intelligent enough to know what that meant. The Villegas brothers were small-time drug traffickers who were looking to find new ways to bring product across the Gulf. “You knew that, and you still let them come on board?”
“Today, they are just clients, out for a dive. Their money is as good as anyone else’s. Don’t worry. I’m not going to become a smuggler.”
Only now did she recall that his answer, and his evident willingness to even associate with men like the Villegas brothers, had bothered her. Subsequent events had caused her to forget all about that.
It had happened just as they were preparing to weigh anchor and head back to port. Carlos had approached Noah and tried to strike up what he must have thought would be a casual conversation as a way to make his pitch. Jenna had been eavesdropping from the relative isolation of the bridge, curious to hear how Noah would shoot him down, when to her astonishment, Raul had appeared on the ladder.
“Is this where you’ve been hiding, chica?” Without waiting for an invitation, he climbed up onto the elevated deck and then leaned back against the control console as if he had every right to be there.
Jenna had felt herself go cold. It was, she realized now, the first time she had ever truly felt the fight or flight response. She wanted to scream for help, to run down to the lower deck and take shelter behind Noah, but she had resisted the urge. This was one of those opportunities Noah had talked about, a chance to put what she had learned to use in real life. And besides, other than sneaking up on her, what bad thing had Raul done? Nothing. Yet.
His smile had been genuine, but his eyes had betrayed him. Jenna noticed how he had kept glancing to his left, mentally constructing the fiction he would use to win her over. “You should come down and party with us.”
“I don’t think my father would like that.”
She had stressed the word ‘father’ hoping that would be enough to discourage him, and almost immediately saw that it would not. He had smiled like they were old friends who skirted parental rules on a regular basis. Co-conspirators. “You always do what daddy says?”
“It’s a small boat.”
He had licked his lips and eased forward. “Aww, c’mon baby. Don’t play hard to get.”
He wants me to call for help, to be scared. What will shut him down?
She had forced herself to relax, leaned against the console beside him, mimicking his posture, and had looked him in the eye. “Raul, I’m not playing hard to get.”
There was a glimmer of triumph in his eyes, and she had wondered for a moment if she had misjudged him. Desperately, she had searched her repertoire of techniques. “Do you have a sister, Raul? Or is Carlos your only family?”
The triumphant look had faded. He had looked away, and she’d known that she had found the right pressure point, perhaps more than one.
“No. No sister. I have a younger brother in Cuba.”
“Oh? What’s his name? How old is he?”
She had sensed a shift in his demeanor. His narcissism was ebbing. He no longer felt compelled to conquer her, to possess her. His lust was gradually changing into something more like the protective love of a brother for a sister.
Suddenly, Noah had charged up the ladder. “What the hell is going on here?”
Before Jenna had been able to answer, Noah had slammed a fist into Raul’s abdomen. Raul had curled around the blow like a worm on a fishhook. Noah had grabbed him by the neck and propelled him away from Jenna, pitching him off the elevated platform. Raul had thudded, senseless, onto the deck below.
Noah had turned to Jenna, and in a voice that still chilled her, said simply. “Stay here.”
Jenna had complied, but her insatiable curiosity had driven her once more to spy on what was happening below. She saw Noah pull Carlos close and whisper something in his ear. A moment later, both of the Villegas brothers had gone into the water, willingly it seemed, and had begun swimming toward nearby Long Key.
When Noah had joined her on the bridge, he’d said, “We won’t speak of this.”
And they didn’t.
To the best of her knowledge, no complaints were registered with local law enforcement or maritime authorities. If they had wanted to, the Villegas brothers could have sued Noah or tried to get his charter privileges revoked, but doing so would have exposed them to further investigation that might have revealed their illegal activities. Yet, they had not seemed the sort to simply let it go.
Somehow though, the idea that the Villegas brothers were behind the bomb attack just didn’t fit. It was too complex, too sophisticated. They were small-time thugs, more likely to lie in wait with a baseball bat. If she had read them correctly, they were the sort of men who preferred to deal with their enemies personally.
There were other pieces that didn’t fit. Who were the men posing as FBI agents? Why had they been interested in her?
Suddenly, she saw what she had been missing, the one thread woven throughout all of the unconnected dots, the one thing that was constant in every instance. It still made no sense to her, but the connection was there.