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.
A mosquito whined in his ear. He slapped his face, and the squeal muted. He hadn’t been there for Theo then, and he hadn’t been there when Gabriel’s men had come in the night. He’d been en route back to Corsica after wrapping up a mission in Mali as they were sneaking his boy out of the country.
Rafe had walked into Theo’s grand-maman’s house, expecting his son to run and greet him, and found instead the terrified woman bound and gagged and three soldiers waiting to escort him away. How long had Gabriel been watching them? Rafe clutched the phone. Gabriel’s instructions were clear—if Rafe involved anyone else, he’d never see his son again.
He’d have to construct his contingency plan carefully. If Gabriel had contacts in the Legion—which seemed likely, given his intelligence on Rafe—they’d notice if several legionnaires suddenly took leave. But one? It was a gamble, but not as big a risk as doing this without backup.
Water poured off the roof, drops ricocheting up into the hammock. It was hot enough for him not to care about being wet, though that in itself was a danger. He peered out at the rain. He couldn’t risk calling from here—the less she knew the better. He dashed to the shed they’d passed earlier and shoved the door open. Something scuttled into a corner. It was a storage bunker and guardhouse, with gardening equipment, basic aquatic gear, a set of bunks. He inspected a roll of thick plastic—it’d do for a waterproof laptop case, later. Rain drilled on the tin roof. He laid out the comms gear and reinstated the batteries. Laura had been updating a blog regularly, with photos, so she had to have a strong satellite connection. After a few minutes, he figured out how to hook up the laptop to the internet connection via the sat phone, after first checking it wasn’t sending a GPS signal. It’d be suicide to make the call directly from the sat phone—whoever was paying the bills would see the number he dialed. He drummed his fingers on the laptop casing. A Skype call to a landline, using his personal account? Yes. All they’d be able to discern was that the sat phone was used in the Indonesian region.
He laid the sat phone outside the hut, where it could catch the signal, and dragged the USB cable just inside the shed door. After firing up Skype and disabling the video, he dialed his base. He asked for Flynn in English, in his best attempt at an Australian accent, shouting over the rain while muffling his voice. Not that his lieutenant ever got calls from home. After a few reconnects and holds, a gruff voice came on the line.
“Allard.”
Merde. Of all the guys to answer the phone. “Can I speak to Lieutenant Flynn?”
“Non.”
“Caporal Armstrong?”
“Non.”
“Capitaine Angelito?” For good measure.
“Non.”
Rafe pressed his lips together. He couldn’t go right through his commando team. Maybe they were all out training—or drinking, more likely. One more. “Sergent Levanne?”
“Non.”
“Where are they?”
“Who is this?”
“Flynn’s brother. It’s an emergency.” Rafe knew his lieutenant didn’t have family, but Allard probably wouldn’t. He wasn’t a guy anyone took into his confidence.
The line went quiet. Finally, Allard spoke. “Guiana—South America. Deployment. Can’t be contacted.”
Putain. “Camopi?”
“Oui...yes.”
Rafe winced. Of all the Legion outposts the team could be in, they picked Camopi, a hundred clicks upriver from nowhere? Even if Rafe got a message through, and Flynn could extract himself, it’d take forty-eight hours at least for him to get to Asia. “When will he return?”
A pause. Rafe pictured Allard’s I-don’t-give-a-shit eye roll. “Weeks. Months.”
“Thanks, mate.”
Rafe ended the call and leaned against the tin wall of the hut, clutching his temples. He could send a coded message to Flynn, over the internet, but it might not be picked up for weeks.
He was on his own.
* * *
Rafe woke to sun on his face. The insect calls had given way to birdsong. Had to be late. He sat up in the hammock, planting his feet on the floor to stop the world swinging, and pushed away the mosquito net. His mouth was as dry as the white sand on the beach a few meters away.
He pushed himself up, cricked his back and knocked on the villa door. “You awake, princess?”
No answer. A tingle of suspicion crept up his neck.
Another knock. “Princess?”
He pulled the key from his shorts pocket and unlocked the door. The bed was empty, the shutters open. A gauzy curtain sailed up before an open window, an insect screen tapping on the frame. The door to the bathroom was ajar. No one there.
Damn, he usually didn’t sleep that solidly. Years of commando training had him bolting out of bed at any suspicious noise, his instinct honed to recognize risk even as he slept. How could he have missed her leaving the villa? He hadn’t had a chance to do a proper scout of the island—what if a boat had managed to get through the infamous network of reefs and currents, and she was right now waving it down?
He jogged out onto the veranda and spotted movement in the lagoon, beyond the jetty that jutted into the azure water. She was swimming for it? No, her long, languid strokes were parallel to shore. She was...doing laps. His muscles unwound. He stepped inside, yanked a bottle of water out of the fridge and chugged it until his throat relaxed. Probably trying to keep in shape for her next photo shoot. He ripped off a handful of baguette and wandered back outside. She’d turned, heading to shore, the low sun lighting up lean, lightly tanned arms as they circled through the water.
When she reached the shallows she stood, her body glistening as she rose, barely covered by a bikini. Breasts, legs, curves.
“Mon Dieu.”
She looked up, straight into his eyes. Damn, he’d said that aloud. As she walked—sashayed—to the villa she combed her hands through her short hair.
“Not scared of sharks, then?” He deserved the Légion d’honneur for sounding that nonchalant.
She shrugged smooth, freckled shoulders. “What are the chances of getting attacked twice in twenty-four hours?”
“High, around here. I’d rather not have my treasure stolen from me when I’ve only just secured it.”
“Who says you’ve secured me? I could have slit your throat while you slept.”
He leaned against a pole and took another swig from the bottle. “With a bread knife? Might have taken a while.”
“I’m persistent.”
“You would have got lonely here.”
“I’d have coped.”
Up close, her body looked strong, toned—not as delicate as she appeared in her perfume commercials. The body of a woman who’d never worked a day in her life, who had all day to spend in a gym. And what couldn’t be fixed by a life of leisure could be fixed by a surgeon. There’d been speculation of a nose job, lip implants. The surgeon must have been good. She looked wholly natural. Her nose was straight and her lips were full and pink and...and not something you should be looking at. She strolled past, close enough that he could smell the salty freshness of her.
He allowed himself a glance at her back. Strong shoulders curved down to a narrow waist. The bikini rode low on her hips, revealing the tiny V that only belonged to a woman with a good derrière. A ragged scar was carved into her lower back, in a looping formation. He narrowed his eyes. Not a scar.
“Who is Jasper?”
Her head snapped around, her eyes wide. “What?”
“Your tattoo. Former tattoo.”
She twisted, straining to look, as if it was the first she’d heard of it. “Someone I’d rather forget.”
“The scar’s still pink. Someone you decided to forget recently?”
“Uh, yeah. I’d been meaning to get rid of it for a while.”
“Your boyfriend’s name was Logan, not Jasper. I read about the breakup. You’d been with him nearly ten years.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“If my girlfriend had a tattoo of her former lover on her body, I wouldn’t want her leaving it there for a decade.”
“Maybe that was why he dumped me. Bit slow on the uptake, Logan was.”
“Story was that you dumped him.”
“Like I say, you can’t believe everything you read in the media. I’m going to try out this shower.”
She walked inside, the screen door snapping shut after her. He watched until she faded into the dark interior. Jasper. He’d read everything about her he could find on the internet while preparing for the mission—and there was a lot—and not once had a Jasper been mentioned. Rafe would have remembered the name—there was a Jasper in his company, a shifty guy he’d long ago learned to keep an eye on.
Laura and Logan had been America’s golden couple. They’d been together since she was a teenager, so Jasper had to have come before him. A first crush, a childhood sweetheart? But why wait so long to erase a youthful mistake, when she had all the time and money in the world, and a widely reported fixation on her body image? He crushed the empty water bottle. Parachuting, Jasper. It didn’t add up.
* * *
Holly shut the bathroom door and rushed to the mirror to inspect her back. Hell. The scar had sunburned and the skin around it had tanned, so the letters stood out in sharp relief, pink on brown. They hadn’t looked so obvious a month ago—the scar had been fading into her pale skin. No wonder the damn thing had started itching. She should never have nicked Laura’s bikini—she should have stuck with her own cheap one-piece. Jack wouldn’t have known it was from the Walmart bargain bin.
Had he bought her explanation? She walked to the shower and turned it on. A hiss spat out, by the cabin wall. She yelped and sprang back. A gas cylinder firing up, not a snake. Sheesh, she was jumpy.
“Everything okay in there?” Jack shouted, over the fence.
“Fine.”
Scanning for peepholes, she stripped off the bikini and stepped under the stream of water. Or would voyeurism be a good sign? Not that Jack seemed the pervert type. A guy like that would have women lining up to strip for him, though he’d sure taken a good look at her body just now.
She closed her eyes and dropped her head under the water. The sickly sweet scent of jasmine wafted around. Bliss. Her first shower in weeks. Expensive-looking toiletries were lined up on a stand. Might as well use them—someone was paying good money for this place, someone who wouldn’t be happy if the ransom wasn’t paid. And neither would Jack.
What was his deal? He seemed so confident, yet occasionally desperation crept into his voice, or his expressions. Reading people was her strength—borne of necessity—but she couldn’t get a fix on him. His tense conversations with the men at the plane, hiding the comms equipment, the things he’d said—no escape for either of us... He obviously wasn’t the ringleader here. His bearing, the way he’d protected her from the pilot and treated her with respect...that suggested a man with principles. She didn’t buy that he was doing this for the money, so what else would drive a seemingly decent man to kidnap?
One thing she’d confirmed she read right—he was physically attracted to her. His eyes had sparked when she’d walked back from the beach. He’d studied her head to toe. She might have been in prison for most of her twenties, but she hadn’t forgotten that look in a man’s eyes. She’d exploited it in many a bank employee and rich asshole, under Jasper’s instructions. If the FBI investigator who’d interrogated her had been a man rather than a sixty-year-old woman, she might have had a better chance. Jack might not be an easy target either, but if she could get him to fall for her, he’d be less likely to kill her when things went to hell.
And just how was she going to do that? The man was made of granite.
She smoothed conditioner on her hair—that alone was more of a luxury than she’d allowed herself in years. She’d been so disgusted with herself for the cons she’d pulled with Jasper, trading on her looks and her youth and her red lips, that until her Laura makeover she’d renounced every vanity except ChapStick. Some of the jobs she’d done for him had required more than flirting. And though she’d never crossed the line from the kind of physical intimacy Jasper called “innocent” and “harmless” to sleeping with the marks—thank God—each time she’d be left feeling nauseous and dirty. She’d take a long shower—just like this—and scrub raw every part of her body, wishing she could scour her soul. But then Jasper would act so grateful and pump up her confidence, and before she knew it she’d be doing his dirty work again. My brains, and your body, babe—unbeatable. She shuddered. Just the thought of that smooth voice... The femme fatale, they’d called her at trial, the scarlet woman who’d lured and corrupted poor, defenseless Jasper. If only.
This time she’d be using her body to save her butt, not to earn acceptance. She closed her eyes and let the conditioner run off. One last con and then she’d become an honest woman. She could be that girl again—she had to.