“Push you?” Infuriated, she grabbed his shirtfront and planted her feet. “You’ve pushed me for days. Pushed me right into the middle of something that’s so opposed to the way I’ve lived I can’t even take it all in. Now that I’m over my head in drug smuggling and something like a quarter of a million dollars, you tell me to forget it. What do you expect me to do, go quietly back and rent tanks? Maybe you’ve finished using me now, Jonas, but I’m not ready to be brushed aside. There’s a murderer out there who thinks I know where the money is.” She stopped as her skin iced over. “And now I do.”

“That’s just it,” Jonas said quietly. For the second time, he removed her hands, but this time he held on to her wrists. Frightened, he thought. He was sure her pulse beat with fear as well as anger. “Now you do. The best thing for you to do now is stay out of it, let them focus on me.”

“Just how am I supposed to do that?”

The anger was bubbling closer, the anger he’d wanted to lock in the box with what had caused it. “Go to Houston, visit your daughter.”

“How can I?” she demanded in a whisper that vibrated in the little room. “They might follow me.” She looked down at the long, shiny box. “They would follow me. I won’t risk my daughter’s safety.”

She was right, and because he knew it, Jonas wanted to rage. He was boxed in, trapped between love and loyalty and right and wrong. Justice and the law. “We’ll talk to Moralas when we get back.” He picked up the box again, hating it.

“Where are we going now?”

Jonas unlocked the door. “To get a drink.”

* * *

Rather than going with Jonas to the lounge, Liz took some time for herself. Because she felt he owed her, she went into the hotel’s boutique, found a simple one-piece bathing suit and charged it to the room. She hadn’t packed anything but a change of clothes and toiletries. If she was stuck in Acapulco for the rest of the evening, she was going to enjoy the private pool each villa boasted.

The first time she walked into the suite, she was dumb-founded. Her parents had been reasonably successful, and she’d been raised in a quietly middle-class atmosphere. Nothing had prepared her for the sumptuousness of the two-bedroom suite overlooking the Pacific. Her feet sank cozily into the carpet. Softly colored paintings were spaced along ivory-papered walls. The sofa, done in grays and greens and blues, was big enough for two to sprawl on for a lazy afternoon nap.