“Right now?” I asked.
He gave a slow nod. “Yes. Now.”
“Sure,” I said, forcing another motherfucking smile on my face. “I’m sure you’re not a psycho axe murderer.”
He let out a guffaw. “No, I’m not an axe murderer. I’m just an expat, a businessman, a capitalist. And I can show you a good time in Veracruz, Miss …?”
“Willis.”
“Lovely. Miss Nora Willis. Come have a drink with me, Miss Nora Willis.”
He held out his arm for me, like any self-respecting woman in her right mind would take it. I eyed it. “You never told me your name,” I said.
“I didn’t? It’s Travis.”
“Nice to meet you, Travis.”
He led me around, back the way I came, where I picked up my bags, and I fought every single urge in my body to turn around and look for Camden. He’d come all this way for me and yet somehow I knew he was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CAMDEN
“I am going to fucking kill Javier Bernal.”
The sentence hung in the car like a layer of fine dust. Gus put the bag of dried pork rinds that he was eating out of down and gave me a steady look.
“I believe it,” he said, crumbs in his mustache. “But do you really expect to go into that shop with guns blazing and get out of it alive? No one just kills Javier Bernal.” He resumed munching. “Besides, I don’t think you really need to kill him. He’s obviously not keeping Ellie there against her will.”
My eyes seared into him, enough that his mouth jerked in surprise. “Sorry. I know this is tough for you.”
Tough didn’t even begin to describe it. Tough was easy. This was insurmountable. After we followed Ellie and Javier back to the fish shop, after I saw them … together … his hands and lips all over her, her head back, succumbing to him, I passed right out from the pain. Anyone else would say it was my shoulder, my gunshot wound sneaking up on me. It wasn’t that. It was my heart being ripped in tiny, inconsequential pieces, bloody and cold. It was my pride falling down to its knees. It was everything I thought we’d shared turning out to be a lie and the woman I was chasing was nothing more than a ghost.
Gus let me pass out on the fishing boat until just before dawn, when the fishermen were coming to start their day. We went up the street, back to the stolen car and hunkered down there for most of the morning, watching the fish shop, trying to decide what to do next.
I wanted to barge in there and shoot Javier right between the eyes. Part of me didn’t even care if it was a suicide mission. But he was right. It wouldn’t matter – it would feel good for a second, but the damage was already done.
Gus cleared his throat. “To be fair, Camden, we don’t know what’s been going on here. Ellie might be playing a part.”
“She’s still in love with him.”
“I don’t think so. Ellie doesn’t love easily. There’s something else at work here, more than memories. We don’t know what Javier has held over her head or what he’s promised her.”
“You sound like you’re taking her side,” I grunted, glaring through the dirty windscreen at the fish shop in the distance.
“I’m always going to take her side,” Gus stated. I looked over at him and he gave me an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, I like you, Camden, but my allegiance is to her.”
“Why? Why are you doing all of this for her? What has she ever done for you?”
He blinked fast a few times, as if keeping back tears, and then turned his attention to his bag of pork rinds. “Love isn’t just about keeping score, or what one does for another person and what another person has to do in return.”
His words struck me. “You love her?”
He nodded. “I do. I’m not in love with her. It’s not like that. I’m not like you. I care for her a great deal, more than she’ll ever really know. It’s … complicated.”
I frowned, watching him for a few moments, trying to figure him out. “Everything that has to do with Ellie is complicated,” I finally said, checking Gus’s watch on my wrist. I was able to take another pill in about an hour. At this point it wasn’t for the pain anymore – the pain in my heart had overtaken the wound on my shoulder and no pill would make that go away. But it gave me a sense of happiness, of oblivion, that I so desperately wanted to hold on to.
I know what Gus had been saying. I’d been a damn, damn fool. Always the fool, Camden McQueen.
“You’ll work this out,” Gus said. “You can get the chance I never had. Ellie has a good heart in her, hidden but it’s there, and you bring that out. You’re good for her and you’re good for each other. Don’t you forget that.”
I wanted to. I wanted nothing more than to forget.
“Someone’s leaving,” Gus announced and I sat up in the car, ducking down a bit. We were a block up the street, no one could really see us in the car. Still, it didn’t hurt to be careful.