Just Beyond Reach Read online

  Eddie didn't even glance at the folder. He was too busy checking out her breasts and equally abundant ass. The man actually angled his head to get a better view of the latter. His gaze strayed to the rings on her left hand as he straightened. He wasn't subtle about that look either. Something new and distinct glinted within that dark, greedy interest as it took yet another scenic tour up to her face—and it wasn't regret.

  More like determination.

  Her research was so spot on about this jerk, she almost laughed.

  "Mrs…?"

  "Santos, but my friends call me Tess."

  "Tessa." The tech's teeth fairly gleamed as he intentionally pushed right past that social boundary. "I'm Eddie. Eddie Hernández." An oversized hand came up, only to stop inches from hers as the man's phone pinged. "Excuse me."

  To her surprise, the tech waved her inside the deserted pharmacy, closing the door behind them before he turned slightly to retrieve his phone from his back pocket.

  She took advantage of the distraction, studying the man as closely as he'd studied her while he scowled down at a text bubble on his screen, before typing out what appeared to be a rather lengthy response.

  Eddie had six inches on her paltry five foot five. Worse, the technician's oversized shoulders, thick arms and thicker neck were significantly bulkier than his California driver's license photo had let on. Of course, the photo had been snapped three years earlier, on the man's twenty-eighth birthday. Evidently, Eddie had decided to graduate from the Incredible Hulk School of Weight Lifting in the interim.

  Wonderful.

  Joe was going to be even more pissed than he already was.

  Tess sucked in her breath as she banished the thought. She didn't need Joe or his incessant warnings in her head, especially now. If he felt free to ignore their friendship of late, she could damn well ignore his growing paranoia.

  The fabric of the tech's white smock might be straining to contain the upper halves of those daunting biceps, but Joe was wrong.

  She could take this guy.

  Sure, she lacked brawn. But she more than made up for it in experience and other critical, non-beef-related skills.

  Not to mention, she was forewarned.

  Eddie finally glanced up as yet another text notification pinged. "Sorry. This is blowing up. I need to make a call. Can you wait?"

  Tess smiled into the eager hope kicking up the tech's prominent brows. "Sure." She held up her ready excuse for her presence in the first place: the manila folder and the spot check results within. "I haven't relinquished this."

  Right on cue, the tech grinned back. "I'll be a minute, maybe two."

  Her own smile grew as Eddie headed for the empty pharmacist's office across the lab. As easy as selling a porn magazine to a prisoner.

  The case was going to be a slam dunk.

  Why else would the tech leave a nurse he'd barely met alone in a lab full of narcotics?

  She blessed the man's need for privacy as the office door closed behind him. While she regretted the inability to eavesdrop, the need to see what Eddie had been up to cut deeper. Quickly cruising the perimeter of the room, Tess scanned the work surfaces as she went. The door to the clean room was open. But if Eddie caught her snooping in there, she could kiss any chance of gaining his trust goodbye.

  She stuck to the outer counters, and was rewarded as she rounded a partition—and then some.

  Tess suppressed a whistle as she moved up to the desk she'd spotted.

  Evidently Eddie was hawking more than just the oxy. The haphazard collection of Valium, Demerol and Ritalin mixed in with those Percocet tablets lying out on the desk proved it. And less than an inch from the pills? A vial of morphine.

  Damn him.

  In the right hands and in the right patient, that morphine and those pills could bring about a desperately needed surcease from pain. But in the wrong ones, the drugs became an addictive poison. How many lives had Eddie already tainted?

  How many kids?

  One was too many.

  Tess pushed the ever-expanding sea of innocent faces from her mind—especially the face that had been so very precious to her—and refocused her attention on the job at hand, swiftly counting the culled stock before she glanced around the partition to the office door.

  Still closed.

  Balancing the manila folder atop the black gym bag on the counter, she snagged one of the sterile 3 cc tuberculin syringes—hypodermic needle attached. She flipped the plastic wrapping over and noted the nomenclature on the reverse. It was the same brand that'd been turning up in and around several of San Diego's middle schools.

  What were the odds those exact syringes were accidentally lying out next to an indiscriminate jumble of Schedule IV narcotics that were clearly not intended to be divvied up and dispersed as outpatient meds, much less sent to a hospital floor?

  Not good.

  On the other hand, the profit margin was excellent.

  If this tidy pile was any indication of Eddie's daily haul, the bastard was netting close to thirty thousand dollars a month.

  All on the backs of unsuspecting kids.

  Tess returned the syringe to the position she'd found it in, then retrieved her phone. She snapped closeups of the syringe and its nomenclature before moving on to photograph the vial of morphine and mishmash of loose pills.

  Returning her phone to her back pocket, she picked up the manila folder and rounded the partition in time to catch the muffled adios, amigo from behind the office door.

  She sprinted across the lab and grabbed a copy of Hospital Pharmacy from the burgeoning rack of magazines located far enough away from the office door to prevent suspicion, opening it on top of the manila file.

  By the time the door to the pharmacist's office opened, she appeared to be halfway through an article on an experimental ovarian cancer drug.

  She needn't have bothered.

  Eddie wasn't so much staring at her as through her when she glanced up.

  Tess closed the magazine and tucked it beneath the folder. "Is everything okay?"

  The tech finally focused. "What?"

  Yeah, he was definitely distracted—and she was definitely going to have to take a peek into the man's phone records to find out who'd caused that distraction, if not why.

  She nodded to the empty office behind him. "I take it your call involved bad news?"

  He shook his head quickly—too quickly. His smarmy smile returned as well as he closed in on her. "Nothing like that. But something has come up. A shame, since I was hoping I could show you around a bit after work, then fill you in on the critical hospital gossip over breakfast. It looks like we'll have to have a late lunch instead."

  The hell they would.

  For one thing, it was much too soon.

  It would be at least two days before the syringes she'd marked at the distributor level made it through the hospital's stock system and into Eddie's thieving hands.

  Then again, it wasn't too soon to lay the groundwork for the rest of the sting.

  Just in case.

  Especially when the opportunity was screaming to be abused even as this asshole was plotting to lure yet more naive eleven-year-olds into swallowing the loose narcotics lying out on that counter behind the partition—and worse.

  She shook her head, infusing regret into her gaze as she let it drop to the diamond sparkling up from her left hand. "I appreciate the invitation, but I'm married."

  "Meaning your husband doesn't let you socialize with friends?"

  The tech's ego nearly surpassed his swollen muscles—as did his cocky grin.

  Tess followed up her own smile with a soft chuckle. "Sure he does. But my friends are usually a bit more…" She let her gaze trail wistfully across the tech's burly shoulders. "…feminine."

  Eddie damned near preened. "So he's the jealous type?"

  An image automatically sprang to mind as she lowered her gaze to the rings on her hand. The wrong image. Then again, maybe it wasn't.


  Eddie reached out, tipping her chin with one of those thick paws of his. "Well? Is he?"

  Tess shoved Joe's heated, disapproving frown from her mind's eye, even as she decided to borrow the rest of the man. "He used to be."

  "Used to be?"

  She allowed a soft, lonely sigh to escape into the air between them. "I'm afraid Joaquín and I haven't seen much of each other lately. At least, not as much as I'd like. Not since he and his buddy bought into their nightclub. Let's just say the strain on our cash flow has…carried over into our marriage."

  Not only did Eddie refuse to remove his fingers from her chin, he damned near salivated as they tightened.

  Yup—her instincts were right on target. She couldn't be sure which had excited the tech more. The implication that she was a lonely wife or—

  "Your husband's Hispanic?"

  —that.

  After all, her faux surname could've been Italian or Portuguese. Though on this mission, Santos definitely wasn't.

  Eddie's gaze had dropped to her overly abundant chest, and he was not memorizing her name tag. Obviously, the creep assumed a Hispanic husband meant that she held a preference for Hispanic men.

  True enough.

  She just didn't prefer this Hispanic man.

  Fortunately for her case, her current mark proved oblivious to the mental qualifier as he tossed all subtlety aside and lowered that oversized hand, managing to stroke the inner curves of both her breasts as he twined an errant lock of her hair around his fingers.

  She managed not to flinch. Barely.

  Absentee husband or not, it was time to say something.

  Tess nudged a faint smile to her lips. "I should probably warn you, my husband once sliced off a man's fingers for doing precisely what you're doing."

  The tale was mostly true.

  Unfortunately, Eddie wasn't fazed. "Just his fingers?"

  She pushed harder on her smile—and the truth. "Well, I was forced to ask him to stop before he and his blade got any…lower."

  This time Eddie took the hint, letting the russet curl unravel as she stepped back. "So tell me, Tessa. Where's this club of your husband's?"

  She didn't bother hiding her suspicion. "Why?"

  "Maybe I've been there."

  She mirrored Eddie's shrug as she turned to the magazine rack to slip the copy of Hospital Pharmacy home. "Unless you party south of the border, I doubt it."

  "Tijuana?"

  She turned back, covering her surprise at his own. That was the strongest response she'd gotten from the tech yet.

  Why?

  "Yes…his club's in Tijuana. Is there something wrong with that?"

  Something flickered in the tech's gaze. Flickered, hell—it was flaring.

  Interest?

  She could only pray it was. Either way, the seed had been planted. It was time to back off and let it germinate.

  She held out the manila folder with the sheaf of papers inside. "It was nice meeting you, but I've got to get back to work. Janice told me to tell you that if you have any questions about the earlier miscount, to call her directly." The moment Eddie retrieved the folder, Tess headed for the pharmacy's outer door.

  "Tessa."

  Her reluctance wasn't feigned as she turned back.

  It really was too soon for this. Anything more on her part now—especially eagerness—would only jeopardize her cover. Not to mention her case.

  She waited for Eddie to speak, but he didn't.

  He closed in on her instead. He was mere inches away by the time he halted, staring directly down into her eyes.

  She'd swear the tech was gauging her. Not her body this time, but what lay inside. Namely, her mind…and her morals.

  Why?

  There was no way he'd let her in on his operation this soon. Not given the array of narcotics she'd found lying out on that desk.

  She finally prompted him. "Yes?"

  "Your husband…is he an American citizen?"

  Tess blinked. How the hell was she supposed to play this one? And where the devil was he going with it?

  She opted for swinging up onto the proverbial fence. "He's naturalized. Why?"

  She could have sworn Eddie was relieved to learn that her mythical husband was in the States legally. She'd also swear the tech's mind was now churning a million miles a minute. She wouldn't have known it from the lazy shrug that followed, though.

  "You were right about that call I had to make earlier. Everything is not okay. Something's come up that I need to take care of. A family matter."

  A family matter?

  She didn't bother hiding her confusion or her suspicion. She hadn't even begun to plant the idea that her husband was dirty yet.

  Though, really, it wasn't a stretch.

  She'd already admitted that "Joaquín" was in over his head with a Tijuana nightclub, so much so that their marriage was floundering. In any country, that level of financial desperation—plus club—tended to suggest that a club owner might be willing to look the other way on any number of illegal activities, including the distribution of narcotics. But what would her mythical husband's citizenship have to do with that?

  Unless—

  Oh, hell.

  Eddie was looking for someone to move drugs across the border. Why else was he thrilled over the confirmation that Joaquín could drift between Mexico and the United States without raising the suspicions of immigration officers in either country? Add on those lengthy texts and that tense call the tech had just made, and she was beginning to suspect that a scheduled shipment was seriously at risk because the regular driver had been forced to bail on a coming run.

  Too bad. While she wasn't opposed to expanding her investigation, she'd need time to alert the necessary players. To get them, and their covers, slotted into place.

  Until then, it was best to play stupid—and out of the tech's greedy reach.

  At least for now.

  "I don't understand, Eddie. What does your family matter have to do with my husband?"

  "Nothing. Unless you think Joaquín would agree to help me out. I need a favor."

  She actually laughed. "Don't take this the wrong way, but why would my husband want do to anything to help you? He doesn't even know you."

  He smiled. "The favor is actually for my uncle. Those texts and my call were with him. A friend of his needs a lift north from Tijuana later tonight. My uncle asked me to drive down to bring him across the border, but I have to work. So, you see? I'm in a bit of a bind. Your husband's club is in TJ, right? My uncle would pay well for the extra stops on his way home. Money that might ease the current strain on your finances…and marriage."

  Damn. She'd set herself up for that last part.

  But a border run tonight?

  The tech was risking a hell of a lot on a desperate club owner's values. Not to mention that whatever this was about had nothing to do with ferrying a friend for his "uncle". Eddie had addressed his caller as amigo just before he'd hung up. The tech had to be running drugs across the border, as well as stealing them from the pharmacy.

  Still, to be willing to pull in a stranger on the fly? Just how much money was tied up in that shipment tonight?

  Given the tension that had taken hold of Eddie's hulking shoulders as he waited for her answer, quite a bit.

  Unfortunately, she still couldn't afford to look too eager. Not with those pills, those syringes and that morphine definitely headed for more middle schoolers' hands.

  Eddie's border runs would just have to wait their turn.

  She finally shook her head—firmly. "I don't think he'd be interested."

  "But you can't be sure, can you? Because you haven't asked." Eddie smiled. "Why don't I ask him myself?"

  The man was pressing.

  Hard.

  Tess held that murky stare for several moments longer, not bothering to temper her frown, much less hide it altogether. She caught the faint line between those dark brows, as well as the ones pinching in about his mouth. The tech wa
s desperate.

  Well, she wasn't.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Erring on the side of caution, she allowed her frown to deepen. She'd set this up too carefully to blow it now. "I'm afraid your phoning wouldn't be a good idea either. Joaquín's not fond of strangers calling him. Especially—"

  "He can call." Eddie's hand came up to forestall further argument as he fished a black leather wallet from the pocket of his trousers. He withdrew a business card and held it out.

  His name, a local phone number.

  That was it.

  He nudged the card closer. "Just give it to him, okay? Ask Joaquín to call me. If he's not interested—" The tech's shrug wasn't nonchalant as he'd clearly intended it to be. "—maybe he knows someone who is."

  Tess considered the card for several moments before accepting it. "Fine. But don't blame me if he doesn't call." She didn't wait for an answer, just tucked the card into the pocket of her nursing smock as she headed for the pharmacy door.

  She didn't pull the card out until she was alone in the elevator. And then all the card served to do was cause her budding migraine to flare within her right temple.

  What the hell had just happened?

  Things weren't supposed to have moved this quickly. Let alone in this direction. Eddie had latched onto her fake husband harder than he'd latched onto her.

  Damn it. This was supposed to be a straightforward pharmacy case, albeit one that involved middle schoolers. Not a single fact she'd uncovered during her research on the tech had pointed to border traffic.

  Until now.

  In an instant, she'd gone from juicy bait to empty hook.

  Well, she'd just have to spear on another appetizing chunk for the tech. This one in the form of a ready-made Hispanic husband.

  But first, she'd have to get one.

  2

  Something was wrong.

  Tess snapped her eyes open as she jerked her head up from the edge of the tub until she was seated upright. A moment later, the unease fled as quickly as it had come, leaving a tide of receding lather in its wake. The thin froth of bubbles slid off her breasts altogether and plopped into the tepid water just beneath.