Chapter Thirteen

She should grab one of the guns right now. End this nightmare and move on. But Curt had said to cooperate.

Dammit!

Did that mean she shouldn’t try to escape if given a chance? Probably, considering he’d said as long as she didn’t feel endangered by Dimitri, he wanted her to work with him.

And, in spite of everything, she did feel weirdly safe with him. Like the fact that he’d let her know where the guns were hidden. She’d never have found them on her own, and there’d been no need to show her. He’d protected CAM and given her a deeper sense of security by showing her how to access the weapons.

But that didn’t change the fact that he was a spy. One she’d pissed off, no less.

She heard him stomping around in the stateroom. Even hardened spies stomped around like little boys when grumpy, apparently.

It wasn’t lost on her that her opinion seemed to matter to him. Exactly how much power did she wield here?

She washed her face and combed her hair, going through her normal bedtime ritual on an evening that was the definition of abnormal. Ready for sleep, she abandoned the bathroom and came face to face with Dimitri. Without a word, he brushed past her to use the head.

She changed into a T-shirt and shorts, then climbed into the bed, taking the far side against the wall. She was utterly exhausted, but wound up. Tonight would be fun.

Not.

A few minutes later, he joined her in the stateroom and stripped naked before pulling back the bedcovers.

“You’re not sleeping naked,” she said. Why does his body have to be so damn beautiful?

“Yes. I am.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t.”

“Does the sight of my body offend you? It’s just a penis. Half the world’s population has them. And you’ve already been intimate with mine.”

She rolled her eyes. Then, Lord help her, she flushed at the memory his words brought forth. Yes, she’d been intimate with that part of him. She’d done no less than beg for it.

In unison with her thoughts, his penis thickened.

He laughed. “I figured I was too exhausted for sex, but apparently, there is no such thing as too tired to want Ivy MacLeod.”

She glared at him, even as her thoughts ran along the same lines. How could she feel aroused…by him? She tucked herself closer to the wall.

He sighed. “I won’t touch you, Ivy. No matter how much I want to. But again, you can touch me all you want.”

“It’s just physical,” she said, her tone defensive. She forced her shoulders to relax. She was supposed to play along, and they needed to return to their earlier cease-fire and general accord. She raked his body with her eyes and allowed a slight smile. “It’s unfair that your body is so frigging gorgeous.”

“Unfair? I work hard for this body. It’s not about fairness, it’s about dedication.” He climbed into the bed and pulled up the covers, which tented over his ever-growing cock.

“Admit it, you’re only sleeping nude to rattle me.”

“I always sleep nude. But yeah. That too.”

The mattress had to be small to fit in the stateroom. It was a double bed, nothing more. Dimitri wasn’t a small man, and he took up more than half the space. She wasn’t a small woman. She pressed her back to the wall, giving him as much room as possible.

Exhaustion won, and sleep came surprisingly fast. Hours later, she woke to find she’d migrated to his side of the bed and curled up against him.

She’d dreamed of men chasing her and had sought his protection in her nightmare. She placed a hand on his chest and breathed in his scent. Ocean, sun, and testosterone all wrapped in a ripped body. His thick-muscled arm closed around her. She felt his strength across her back and found it a comfort, not a threat.

“Sleep, Ivy,” he murmured, more asleep than awake himself. “I’ve got you.”

If anyone wanted to hurt her, they’d have to get past Dimitri. She pressed closer to his side and dropped into a deeper, thankfully dreamless, sleep.

The night was dark and deep when Dimitri surfaced from sleep to find Ivy still curled at his side. Her T-shirt had ridden up, and his hand rested on her bare back. His arm was numb, but still, he didn’t move, not wanting to wake her and have her retreat to the far side of the bed again.

Had she managed to contact Dominick yesterday? He hoped she had. He’d gambled on the assumption the attorney general would seize the opportunity to exploit Dimitri’s inside information. For his part, Dimitri was more than willing to use Curt Dominick to gain Ivy’s reluctant cooperation.

It would play out in a vicious circle. Once they found it, Ivy would attempt to take the AUUV from Dimitri, but there was no way he could let her walk with it. No one was double-crossing anyone, because they weren’t really aligned, but it would feel that way to her once she realized the depth of his manipulation.

They were two people doing what they had to do. Plain and simple as that. In the end, Dimitri would win; Ivy would lose. And she’d spend the rest of her life hating him.

For him, the rest of his life would be short, and he’d probably spend it with a hard-on, aching for her.

He’d wonder why God hated him, but he’d stopped believing in any benign deity when the fifty-year-old sadist who controlled his life raped his little sister—again—as a means to control Dimitri. A dozen years later and he could still hear Sophia’s screams.

Ivy’s hair tickled his nose. She’d showered in the interval between finishing her work and their dinner on deck, and the scent of shampoo pulled him back to the present, away from the fetid apartment where he’d sold his soul a second time, too late to protect his sister.

He breathed Ivy in. Salt air, tea tree shampoo, and sweat mixed to create essence of her. Curled against him as she was, he could almost pretend that in a different world, she might belong by his side. Her aroma and warm body were a silent lullaby. Tactile poetry. He drifted toward sleep, numb arm and all.

Sometime later, a soft noise outside jolted him awake. The sound wasn’t right, not the usual water lapping against the hull. A footstep, or a small craft bumped against the stern. Someone was here. He could feel it. A glance at the clock indicated it was less than an hour before dawn.

He inched his arm from beneath Ivy’s shoulder and whispered in her ear, “We’ve got company.”

She snuggled tighter for a moment, then woke fully and stiffened at his side.

“There are men on the aft deck,” he whispered again. He nodded toward the window above the head of the bed. “They’re climbing onto the deck above us.”

Her eyes rounded with alarm. Her reaction appeared genuine, so it wasn’t SEALs or her cousin’s mercenary army, unless she was a better actress than she’d let on so far. He was sure that if she’d managed to call in for reinforcements, triumph would have flashed in her eyes.

“Do you suffer from claustrophobia?” he whispered.

She pushed against his chest. “You can’t stuff me in the cupboard—”

“Shh. Okay.” He pressed his mouth to hers, then slid from the bed and pulled on skintight black pants and top, and tucked his gun into the built-in holster at the small of his back. He tossed matching clothes to her. “Hurry and put these on. It was supposed to cloud over in the night. It’ll be dark on deck.”

The ankle-to-wrist-to-neck clothing would be warm in the tropical climate, which was why he didn’t sleep in it, but the camouflage on the dark deck was a fair trade.

She changed quickly, and they left the stateroom. Lights on the security panel in the salon indicated the men had moved to the upper deck. Thank goodness the helm could be enclosed and locked. Dimitri turned on the monitor for the night-vision camera mounted outside the helm. Three men, all dressed in snug-fitting assault wear.

Dimitri gave thanks once again that paranoid mafiosi believed in sparing no expense on their security systems. Liberty had plenty of secrets that gave him and Ivy the advantage.

“Will they get in?” Ivy asked.

“Not without setting off the alarm. They’re trying to avoid that, to keep the element of surprise. My guess is they want to take the helm and control the boat, then come after us.”

“So we just wait for them?”

“No. First we listen, find out who we’re dealing with, then I attack.”

Liberty’s cameras all had microphones. He handed her a wireless headset, then slipped a second pair over his own ears.

“We don’t need the boat. We need the whore,” a man with a heavy Syrian accent said.

“That’s Spiderman,” Ivy whispered. “I have a good memory for voices and accents.”

A glance at the monitor showed a dark blotch over one man’s eye. He was half-blind thanks to her stilettos.

“Underestimate the Hammer, and you’re dead,” a man with a Russian accent said.

Shit. How had he been identified? “Thor?” Dimitri asked, before Ivy could ask what the man meant.

She nodded.

At least the common language among the men appeared to be English. Dimitri could translate Russian, but he only knew a few Arabic words, and nothing in Ivy’s bio indicated she knew any Middle Eastern languages. But then, he hadn’t known she spoke Japanese.

Was the third man a sign reinforcements had arrived? Dimitri wondered what his accent would tell them. Each man had at least one gun visible. No more messing around with machetes and adzes.

The attack on the party must’ve been an impulse. They’d figured on a quick grab. Ivy was there, and CAM was in her hotel room. Easy job, given that no one expected violence to break out in Palau. Security, even at large political events like that one had been, was always lax. And they’d dressed in traditional Palauan clothing, making it appear they were a local faction making a political statement. There was a vocal group of Palauans who took issue with the US being allowed to operate nuclear-powered vessels within Palau territory thanks to the Compact of Free Association, and the party was to celebrate another Compact-agreement success—solid cover for the Syrians to pose as political dissenters.

They hadn’t expected Dimitri at the party, but this time they were prepared.

“We don’t need Keaton. We don’t need this fucking boat. We need the bitch and her computers, and our homing signal indicates the equipment is down there.” On the screen, the one-eyed pirate pointed aft, toward the captain’s stateroom.

Ivy stiffened at his side. “How the hell—?” She paused and a moment later sucked in a sharp breath. “Fucking Patrick.” Her words were soft but angry. “The fail-safe in CAM was part of the design from the start. He must’ve told them about it and given them a receiver to follow the signal.”

“You didn’t change the design when you moved to the Navy?”

“It didn’t occur to me. Patrick had little to do with CAM beyond the initial concept. He must’ve been following my progress far more closely than I thought.”

“How accurate is the signal? Targeting accurate?”

He suspected her face had paled but couldn’t be certain in the dim cabin. “It’s accurate within three meters.”

Dimitri swore. “The secret compartment will never hold up.”

No time for cat-and-mouse, then. He needed to take these assholes down and then get Ivy to turn off the signal while Liberty hauled ass for open sea.

Through the headphones, they heard the third man side with the Syrian—not surprising given his accent was also Syrian. The two men returned to the aft deck, while the Russian stayed to search for ways to take over the helm.

“They’re separating.” He met her gaze. He’d wanted her to hide with CAM, but now that they knew these guys had a homing device, he was glad she’d refused. “Will you hide in the bow? There’s another secret compartment.

She shook her head. “No way.”

Now wasn’t the time to delve into her phobias. He pressed his Sig into her hands. “Fine. Take this. No safety. Long pull on the first shot, then a hair trigger. Wait for me in the guest stateroom. Hide as much as you are able.”

“Where will you be?”

He fixed his gaze on his stateroom. “I’m going hunting.”

She nodded.

After a moment’s hesitation, he cupped a hand behind her neck and pulled her face to his, giving her a deep, thorough kiss. If he failed, he’d damn well live his last moments without regrets, rules or no rules.

That she kissed him back didn’t surprise him. Adrenaline and fear were powerful factors.

“You’re amazing, Ivy,” he whispered against her lips as he cradled the back of her head. “You make me wish I really were Jack.” He released her and kept talking to prevent a reply. “If anyone approaches your hiding place without saying”—he smiled as the code came to him—“four-two-five, shoot first. Even if that person is me. Four-two-five is the all clear. If I say anything else, it means I’ve got a gun to my head and they’re using me to draw you out. Save yourself at all costs. Can you do that?”

Her nostrils flared, but she nodded, which didn’t surprise him either. Ivy was a steel orchid.

But then she did surprise him by pulling his head down for another kiss. Her tongue stroked his, quick and deep. She released him and said, “Please don’t make me shoot you.”