“Oh, yeah?” Evan replied, curious.
He just stared, his gaze piercing as though he could see all her secrets. She looked away, shuttering the damn metaphorical windows to her soul. When she looked up again, Evan was met with an unexpected sight. The mystery man was smiling.
“There's another,” he declared. “In the storage area.” He thumbed over his shoulder toward the cave from which he had come.
“Another marker?” she clarified.
“Sí.”
Evan weighed her options. It wasn’t as though looking in the next room would make them any more alone. “Can you show me?”
He nodded once.
“I’m Evan, by the way. Evan Cole.” She had read somewhere that telling your captor your name was important; it humanized you. Not that this guy was a serial killer or anything, but better safe than sorry and all that.
When he didn’t reply, she prompted, “And you are?”
“Nadie.”
“Nadie?” she repeated.
“It means nobody. I’m nobody.” He turned to the small opening,
“Well, that's not true. If anything, you’re two people,” she grumbled.
He spun around and faced her then, his eyes two yellow flames.
Cam quickly schooled his expression, but his rage still burned. Rage directed at himself. His undercover abilities were exceptional; his facility for crawling into the skin of another persona was nothing less than extraordinary. This woman, with her throwaway comment, had shaken his confidence.
Why had he even volunteered to show her the stack of stones in the first place? He pushed everything he was feeling out of his mind and slammed the door.
He gestured to the opening.
Seeing her wary expression, Cam took a step toward her, his Miguel Ramirez persona fully engaged. “Chica, if I wanted to force you, I could do it right here just as easily.”
She paled at the remark and retreated. Unaffected by her distress, he tapped the face of his watch. “Come on. Let's go. El perro que no camina, no encuentra el hueso. The dog who doesn’t walk doesn’t find the bone.”
Evan seemed to gather herself. She moved toward the opening. “That's very folksy.”
“My abuela.” He paused for a moment, remembering his grandmother swatting him off the couch when she would visit. “It's an old Chilean proverb.”
She met his gaze with determination in her eyes. Then she dropped to her knees next to the hole he had bulldozed.
“You first,” she commanded.
Cam stepped in front of her kneeling form, then he turned and ducked his head through the opening, the image of her sinking down before him stilting his movements.
Cam scolded himself for injecting part of Cam's reality—his grandmother's adage—into Miguel's legend, but he shook it off. He scanned the storage cave and found the little stack of rocks he had noted and dismissed earlier just as a cinnamon-colored ponytail popped through the ingress. When he rescued her from the stingray, he hadn’t been able to discern her hair or eye color. The fogged mask hid her face, and when she finally ripped off the cap, her hair was wet and matted. On the beach, he was more concerned with impressing Atlas March than inspecting this woman. Today he noted her hair was a warm russet, her eyes, a soft, light brown that nearly matched her hair. It suited her. Despite her clumsiness and their inauspicious encounters to date, something about this woman was centered. She was comfortable in her own skin, something Cam hadn’t felt in years.
She stood dusting off her cargo pants and T-shirt, and Cam was momentarily caught up in the way her hands moved across her body. It was a practical, practiced motion, yet Cam found the action of her palms traveling over the hills of her breasts and around the cinch of her waist oddly erotic. The sexiest thing about this woman was her complete lack of awareness of her innate sensuality. He fisted his palms. Miguel would invade her personal space, hit on her, give an unwelcome squeeze to her ass. He took half a step toward her, and, for the first time in the three years he had assumed the identity of Miguel Ramirez, he couldn’t do it. Cam couldn’t do it.
He was jarred from further introspection by the clap of her hands.
“Well?” She tapped the face of her watch, mimicking his action from a moment ago. Cam's gaze moved to Evan's hands. They were small, the nails unpolished. She wore no jewelry. Like the rest of her body, her hands were beautiful unadorned.
“Well?” he repeated.
“The marker?” She blew a lock of hair upwards off of her face, exasperated.