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“Kinda what it feels like at the moment,” Adam agreed, scratching at his hair. A chunk of mud came loose and dropped onto the floor.
“No!” Ximena protested, raising her hands. “Don’t touch it. Don’t touchanything.”
“We could take him out into the garden and throw buckets at him until he’s manageable,” Diego suggested.
The fact that the hotelier did so in English rather than Spanish made it clear that he intended the remark to be overheard.
“He will scare the other guests,” Ximena countered firmly, glaring at Adam. “He should go to his room, strip off all of those clothes, and give them to me to be burned.”
“This is a perfectly good shirt,” Adam protested.
He tugged the soaked garment away from his chest and frowned at it, trying to remember what color it had been when he had put it on last week.
Ximena drew in a breath, clearly striving for patience.
“Then I will wash it—but I am only touching it with a stick,” she declared. “Put it out on the veranda.Allof it,” she emphasized sternly, her green-tinted brown eyes flashing with menace.
“Yes, ma’am,” Adam agreed. “Though I was kind of hoping to make use of that bath of yours.”
“You want to go into my washroom looking likethat?” Ximena squeaked.
Adam shrugged. A few more flakes of mud shifted to the ground.
“It’s a bath, not an embassy dinner,” he noted.
Ximena stepped over the laundry basket and stalked up to him. Her head came roughly to his chin. She jabbed a finger at his chest, stopping just short of actual contact.
“My washroom isclean,” she seethed. “It is going to stay clean. You are not going to go anywhere near it until you have removed the swamp you are carrying around.¿Entiendes?”
“Claro, Señora,” Adam replied, forcing a straight face.
“Bien.” She pulled back her finger, treating him to a haughty look. “Now take off your shoes.”
Adam glanced down. His rugged leather boots were completely caked with filth. The mess looked even wetter and less appealing than the stuff on his shirt.
“Yeah, fair enough,” he acknowledged with a sigh.
Satisfied, Ximena pivoted back to collect her laundry basket. She set it on her hip and stalked down the hall.
“Just be glad she didn’t see that knife,” Diego said with a nod toward the sheath at Adam’s belt.
Adam’s hand moved automatically to his machete. The blade was eighteen inches long and sharp enough to split a palm frond down the middle.
“You know what she said she would do if she caught you wearing it in the hotel again,” Diego continued.
“It’s useful,” Adam countered, giving the top of the hilt a possessive little pat.
“Anyway, someone is already using the bath. You would be out of luck even if Ximena hadn’t forbidden you. I’ll have Óscar bring you water.” Diego eyed Adam tiredly. “Lots of it.”
Adam crouched down to tug at the laces of his boots. He gingerly removed them. After a critical look at his socks, he took those off as well.
His toes looked all right.
Diego plucked a key from the rack behind the desk and handed it over. After the fifth time Adam had lost his key while out on a job, the hotelier had declared that it must be turned in for safekeeping anytime he left town.
Adam tossed the comfortable weight of it in his palm as he swung his boots over his shoulder, holding them by the laces. “Has anyone…?”
“Dios, no,” Diego asserted, looking mildly aghast. “Nobody goes in your room. Not after the crocodile fell out of the closet.”
