Deception Island

She exhaled, switching off the flashlight and dropping it on the window seat. She wouldn’t put it past him to carry out his threat to relieve her of a finger or two—he was evidently a professional—but there was honor in him, too. He wouldn’t take advantage of the situation in that way.

So he’d booked a honeymoon suite—a honeymoon island. Good cover for a woman in her late twenties and a good-looking man not much older. Would someone come to service the suite, replenish their supplies? Could she get a message away—or steal their boat?

He crossed the glossy floorboards, leaving a trail of water, and unlocked another door. “Bathroom is out here.”

A covered deck held a vanity and mirror, but otherwise the “bathroom” was a tropical garden enclosed by a brushwood fence. In the center, a miniature thatched roof covered a shower. Garden lights lit spears of falling rain.

“Check for snakes and bugs before you use the toilet,” he said, indicating a door off the deck. “Hungry?” He brushed past her on his way back inside. She inhaled sharply, to make herself concave.

“Starving.” All that flipping and clenching in her belly must have burned her calories since dinner. Her meal of fish and rice seemed a lifetime ago.

She grabbed a white towel so thick it could have been a quilt, and blotted her hair.

Inside, the capitaine opened a cooler chest on a bench in a tiny kitchen. A rectangular scar nearly the size of a dollar bill dominated his right forearm, a patch of rough, paler skin gouged out of the brown. Hell of a burn.

“Pastrami, blue cheese, gruyere, olives, mussels, lobster...” He stacked several plastic boxes on the bench and carried them to the coffee table, balancing a baguette on top.

Her mouth watered. She didn’t even remember what half those things tasted like. She sat on the window seat, opened the nearest box and stuffed a strip of prosciutto in her mouth. They wouldn’t go to all this effort only to poison her, so what the hell. “This is not what I’d expected,” she mumbled, her mouth lighting up at the salty hit.

“I imagine it’s not. Look, I have nothing against you, this is not personal, so we might as well just...” He frowned.

“You were going to say, ‘Enjoy it.’”

“...eat up. And get drunk, if you like.” He waved a hand over the champagne. “All yours. The ice has melted, I’m afraid.”

“Where did all this stuff come from?”

“It’s part of the deal when you book this island. They supply everything, drop you off and leave you alone. No one will be coming to check on us, if that’s what you’re hoping. All we can do is sit tight.”

Dang. “You’d better pour me a glass, then.”

He swiftly uncorked the champagne, filled a flute and returned the bottle to the bucket.

“You’re not joining me? Are you Muslim?”

“No, just sensible.”

She sipped, and her mouth buzzed with apple and vanilla. She tabled the glass with a clatter. Last time she’d drunk champagne she’d been arrested. Jasper had bought it, to celebrate their biggest con yet. She’d been half-cut on the stuff when the door had fallen in. He’d arranged the whole thing, the alcohol ensuring she wasn’t at her sharpest in the interrogation. While she was in one room naively sticking to their agreed line that they were both innocent, he was in the next, turning federal witness against her in exchange for immunity. Which left her here, drinking expensive champagne with her pirate captor, while Jasper was no doubt screwing waitresses on some Caribbean island and wallowing in the millions of big-bank and fat-corporate money the Feds believed Holly had stashed. If only.

She scratched the spot on her lower back where Laura’s people had lasered off the tattoo of the jerk’s name. Well worth the pain. Hard to believe she’d once been so sucked in by the novelty of someone giving a damn about her—or pretending to. That wouldn’t happen again. Being alone trumped being betrayed.

“Santé,” the capitaine said, raising a bottle of water.

“You’re not what I expected in a pirate.”

He laughed, curtly. “You’re not what I expected in a princess.”

Fair point. “You can’t believe everything you read in the tabloids.”

“Obviously not. I thought you’d parachuted before, for starters.”

Her cheeks chilled. Laura probably had. She popped an olive into her mouth. “Like I say, you can’t believe everything you read.”

He tilted his head, frowning. “There was a video of you doing it, on YouTube.”

Crap. “I’ve never done it with a pirate before. Parachuted, that is.”

He sat opposite, his large frame barely contained by the wicker chair. “I find it strange that you didn’t have protection, going through these waters. Like you were just waiting for some bastard to turn up. You were a kidnapping waiting to happen—you’re lucky it was me.”

“Luckiest day of my life.”

“If you were my daughter, I wouldn’t have allowed it. Or I would have had a contingency plan, at least.”

I am the contingency plan. This was exactly why she’d been hired. Unlike the precious Laura, Holly was expendable. She pretended to chase the olive stone around her mouth, to buy time. No one in the world would notice if she disappeared—not even the parole officer she’d bought off with the senator’s money—and no one would ever believe Laura was connected to such a lowlife. Everything had been clandestine, from the way the senator’s private investigator had sniffed around to find a suitable candidate, to the way he’d tracked her down upon her release, and pounced. We need someone who can melt into the woodwork afterward, who can keep her mouth shut, he’d said. Oh, she’d heard the subtext, as clear as if he’d shouted it: they needed someone who wouldn’t be missed if she drowned, or worse.

“My father is...easily persuaded. He leaves me to do my thing, I leave him to do his. I very rarely see him—I was raised by nannies while he spent most of his time in Washington. He outsourced me.” She grinned, hoping it sounded like the kind of joke a bitter rich girl might make. Of course Laura would have parachuted—and of course she’d have put it on YouTube. What else did Jack know about Laura that Holly didn’t? She’d have to be more careful.

He studied her, his head cocked.

“What?” she said, hovering a piece of pastrami in front of her mouth. Her stomach twisted. She hadn’t slipped up again, had she? She’d read enough about Laura in gossip blogs and social pages to know the heiress rarely saw her father.

He gripped his quads and dropped his gaze to the floor, like something had occurred to him. What had she said? Her gaze rested on his thighs. She could still feel how those muscles had bunched when she’d clutched them on the plane. At the time, she’d been too terrified to process the information. But that...that was a very human reaction. A very male reaction. And smoothing her worry lines—what was that about? Maybe he wasn’t as bulletproof as he appeared.

He shook his head and pushed to his feet, weariness weighing down his eyes. “I’ll check for wildlife and leave you to enjoy your castle, princess. Put this food in the fridge when you’re finished—I’ll switch it on now. And tuck in your mosquito net before you go to sleep. We don’t want them getting a taste for blue blood.”

Minutes later, he shut the door on her, taking the electronics with him. A key turned and scraped as it was removed. Despair clanged in her chest, the way it had every time she’d been locked in her cell for the night. She sipped the champagne and let her head fall back on a cushion, fatigue enveloping her. She closed her eyes. The room swayed like a boat.

How stupid was she to think that getting this job meant her fight was over? Her entire life had been a fight for survival. Ever since she was a kid, knocked around daily by her father, she’d set herself small goals—survive the beating, survive the day, don’t let him see her fear. As long as she kept waking up every morning, she was still winning. Tomorrow she’d figure out a way to survive another day, and then another, then another.

And the quads? The worry lines? There might be a way in under Jack’s armor, after all. She smoothed a finger down the curve of the glass. Maybe it wasn’t time to say goodbye to the old Holly just yet.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_f2ff0184-ba63-5dae-a206-746f59edaa72)

The hammock on the veranda creaked as Rafe settled into it, the sat phone and laptop on his chest. When he was confident the princess wouldn’t try to escape, he’d make his call.

His body ached after days of tension, but tonight sleep would evade him. Until now he hadn’t stopped moving—and hadn’t spent a minute alone. He’d flown to Indonesia under guard, prepared for the mission, tracked the yacht, grabbed the girl. Now he could do nothing but hope—and he wasn’t the hopeful type. While Theo was locked in hell, he was trapped in paradise with a beautiful woman. He’d better not have made a mistake in going quietly.

And then there was the woman. Two innocent lives at stake, because of him. He doubted he needed to worry about her emotional state, at least. She was as tough as any soldier in his company—and as beautiful as Simone. He exhaled, raggedly. So maybe it was possible for him to react to a woman like a normal man did.

Just as long as he didn’t act on it.

Focus. What time was it in Corsica—early evening? His commando team would have just finished eating. Perfect. Michael and Uriel, God rest their broken souls, had at least given him the space to quietly mobilize a backup plan.

He drummed his fingers on the laptop, hearing Laura move around inside the villa. So her father had outsourced her. Like Rafe had done to Theo, after Simone’s death. He could have given up the Legion, become a fisherman on Corsica like Simone’s brothers, or taken over her water sports school. But he carried a darkness inside him and battled it every minute. What if it spilled out one day, when he was alone with Theo?

Instead, he’d sold their home, closed her business, left Theo with his mother-in-law and embarked on ever more dangerous missions, on communication blackouts for months at a time—Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Guiana, Somalia, Cambodia... Hiding. Hiding from the guilt, hiding from a vulnerable little boy he cared about so much that it hurt, smack in the chest. Telling himself Theo was better off with a grandmother who knew how to show him love than a messed-up father who didn’t know what the hell to do with him.

It’d been the same with Simone—he might have loved her, whatever that meant to someone who’d been trained to hate. But if so, he’d been too damn scared to let down his guard. He didn’t understand normal human behavior. Why the hell she’d been attracted to him in the first place, he’d never know. They’d only married because she got pregnant. A few years later she’d had a brain aneurysm. By the time word reached him, in a desert in East Africa, the funeral had been and gone. He never got a chance to redeem himself. He rolled in his fingers the twin gray-green amulets that hung from his neck, each on a leather cord. His, and Simone’s. A warning not to break any more women’s and children’s hearts.