Читать книгу Deception Island - Brynn Kelly, Brynn Kelly - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThey skidded across a clearing, sea grass scraping the seat of Holly’s jumpsuit. A gentle landing, as promised. How did someone get that practiced at parachuting? You’d have to be in adventure tourism or the military, and the capitaine was no chirpy tour guide. So she was dealing with a paratrooper? Weren’t they the elite soldiers—dropped behind enemy lines on secret missions?
Her stomach knotted. He became more formidable by the minute. He unclipped them, pulled her to her feet and let go warily, hands splayed in the air either side of her, ready to catch. The earth remained steady. Gravity had begun to take her side, at least. He busied himself with unhooking clips and gathering the parachute, with the deft movements of a man drilled in the routine.
Beside the clearing, a long stretch of ocean beach thundered rhythmically. Otherwise they were surrounded by rain forest, screeching with insects. Was there a building, or would they sleep outdoors? A palm tree rustled overhead. She flinched.
“Bats,” he said, following her gaze upward, to where ragged black shapes glided. She shivered. Concrete jungles were more her thing.
“Don’t worry, they’re vegetarians. It’s the mosquitoes you must watch for.” He stripped off his jumpsuit, his dark, sleek clothing emphasizing his tall, taut body. More Batman than Superman, perhaps. Give her a brooding mystery man over a clean-cut farm boy any day.
Except today. And only ever hypothetically.
She fumbled with her gloves. “What do I call you?”
His dark eyes fixed on hers, unguarded for a second, as if it wasn’t something he’d considered. “John,” he said, his mouth curling at one corner.
“Short for Long John Silver? Or long for Captain Jack Sparrow?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I prefer Jack.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
She exhaled away the tension. If he was reluctant to tell her his real name, he must be planning to let her go. But what if the ransom wasn’t paid?
She jammed her fingernails into her palms. Even if the senator didn’t intend to pay, he’d have to at least go through the motions of searching for his daughter, after the publicity of the live webcast. He wouldn’t want the bad PR of admitting Laura had misled the public, with the primaries looming. Would the US military become involved? Did this count as a diplomatic incident? Terrorism? Jack might seem like the real deal, but one man couldn’t hold his own against a whole unit or platoon, or whatever pack American soldiers ran in.
Could he?
“Stop thinking so hard,” he said, crossing the gap between them in three strides. He laid a fingertip on her forehead. She froze. Some kind of threat? He stroked down to the bridge of her nose. Holy cow, he was smoothing out her worry lines. “You have nothing to be concerned about. You’ll be back in your rich woman’s world soon enough.”
He stilled, and stared at her, his forehead creasing. She gulped. Was he noticing the differences between her and Laura? He flinched, removed his finger and shook his head slightly, as if banishing an unwelcome thought. Had touching her been an instinctive reaction, a mistake?
His focus dropped to her shoulders as he began to unclip her harness, muttering some kind of chant in French. His gravelly scent washed over her. Her body heated up, as if it’d just realized it was back in the tropics after their high-altitude reprieve. She shivered, which made no sense at all. He reached down to slide the contraption over her hips, his fingers grazing her stomach. She lurched away. “I can handle that.” This was not a man to get worked up about, no matter how fine a specimen.
She wriggled out of the harness. Beyond the white tips of the breakers, the full moon lit a silver path to the horizon. Even if she could mobilize rescuers, how long until they arrived?
“You’ll have plenty of time to admire the scenery.” Jack’s deep voice made her jump. “Now, we find shelter.” He nodded to the sky above the jungle, where heavy clouds were rapidly snuffing out the stars.
At least the horizon was still out there. This might be a prison, but it wasn’t a cell, with no stars visible beyond the floodlights, no hope of hearing the sea, no hope of anything. At least here there was still a chance of rescue or escape, however small. She was alive, for starters. And not as helpless as he might believe.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” she said. “Like, right now.”
He started, as if suddenly awkward. Awkward was good. She could play on awkward. She hopped from one foot to the other—as much as she dared without risking falling on her face.
“I’ll just find a tree to go behind,” she said, eyeing the fringe of darkness beyond the clearing. “Seriously, dude, I’m about to burst my bladder all over this suit.”
He grimaced. Oh yeah, he was picturing it. Job done.
“Go down to the beach,” he said, quickly. “Less chance of snakes and spiders. But watch for scorpions—keep away from driftwood and rocks.”
Ugh. She was only used to dealing with human predators. The beach could work, though. She could scoot around the sand dunes and up into the jungle. “Flashlight?”
He pulled one out of a bag. “If you’re not back in three minutes, I’ll come after you.”
“What do you think I’ll do—swim home?”
A smile tugged at his lips. “Three minutes, princess.”
That’s all I need.
* * *
Rafe began repacking the chute and harnesses. A large piece of fabric and a bunch of clips and straps could have a dozen uses on a deserted island. He looked up, lining up the Orion Nebula with the star Alnilam to confirm where north lay. The villa was on the northeast of the island, beside a lagoon.
Phase two was complete. Gabriel’s men had come through this far, at least. They hadn’t dropped him in the ocean, they hadn’t harmed the heiress, they hadn’t shot them both dead. Maybe this fool mission might actually succeed. Maybe Gabriel would keep his word. While Rafe held the trump card—the woman—he was in a position of power. As long as he kept her alive and in sight, phase three had every chance of succeeding.
In sight. His gaze snapped toward the beach. Three minutes was up. Light spilled from behind a sand dune. The jumpsuit wasn’t the easiest thing to get out of, if you weren’t used to it, if your hands were still shaking from the buzz of the free fall. He’d give her another minute.
Merde—he should have taken the sat phone. Too busy trying not to think about her bladder, or any other body part. He couldn’t afford to lose the equipment before he figured out how the hell to get them out of this, without triggering Gabriel’s suspicions.
He stuffed the last of the chute into the bag and zipped it, then shrugged both packs onto his back. The light on the beach hadn’t moved. The air grew hotter and wetter by the minute. Better get the princess to shelter before the storm hit.
He jogged to the beach. “Laura?”
No answer. The swell had increased, the waves smashing onto the sand. He yelled louder. Nothing. His chest tightened. He closed in on the beam, sinking to his ankles in sand. The flashlight was propped on a rock. No Laura. Merde.
He switched it off and gave his eyes a few seconds to readjust. She’d run off down the sand. He followed, stepping in her footprints to save energy. The trail ran out at the edge of the rain forest. He scanned the foliage, found a recent disturbance in a stand of bamboo, and stepped noiselessly through the gap. Tracking someone in jungle this thick was easy, and he was trained to operate in darkness. She’d have to push through the foliage blind, leaving tracks, making noise, burning energy. She only had a four-minute head start. He smiled. Cat and mouse. His favorite game.
* * *
Why was the damn thing not working? In pitch darkness, Holly felt for the buttons on the sat phone and punched them for the tenth time. The screen stayed resolutely black. It’d been fully charged that afternoon, so it couldn’t be the batteries. Could it have been damaged when the capitaine—Jack—jumped from her boat? Or when they’d plummeted at God knew how many miles per hour? She was screwed. What now?
A fern rustled next to her. She pulled her feet onto the rock she was sitting on. Snake, scorpion or spider? After a minute the noise stopped. She eased to her feet and backed away—into something solid. She gasped, swiveling. A tree. Get a grip, princess. Could she creep back out to the beach and make a bonfire to attract a ship or plane before Jack found her? And how the hell would she light it—rubbing sticks? Put her in a city alleyway and she’d know just how to survive. In the wild she couldn’t tell a turtle from a stone.
“Thought I told you not to run.”
She yelped. Where the hell had he come from? A click, and light filled the forest. That, at least, was an improvement. She blinked rapidly. “I walked.”
“You ran.” He rested the flashlight’s beam on the sat phone. “Hard to get that working without the battery.”
“Ugh. You took the battery.” Of course.
He tapped a pocket on his thigh. “As you said, trust is going to be an issue between us.”
White light flashed through the forest. A second later the sky rumbled. “We go this way. You take this.” He passed her the flashlight. “Give me the equipment. Stay close behind me and step where I step. Stomping should scare away snakes and scorpions—and watch for spiderwebs. You’re no use to me dead.”
Dude, I’m no use to you alive, either.
She followed him, stamping until her feet throbbed. The roar of the ocean receded. Something touched her bare neck. She gasped and froze.
He turned. “What is it?” Concern flecked his tone.
She slapped at her skin. It was wet. She exhaled. “Nothing.” Spooked by a drop of rain. More drops rattled on the broad leaves around them.
He grabbed her shoulder and coaxed her around. “Give me the light.”
He eased his fingers under the collar of her jumpsuit, brushing her nape, then scooped his palm around her upper back. She shivered. Light spilled over her shoulder as he searched. He circled his hand to her upper chest, brushing the tops of her breasts, and released her. She stumbled to reclaim her balance.
“All clear.”
“What should I be scared of? What’s the most dangerous thing out here?”
“Humans.” He returned the flashlight and turned back to the jungle. “Me, in particular.”
“That’s a given.” Humans she could deal with. “I mean, what animals, what insects?”
“Snakes, mostly,” he shouted, walking again. “Only half a dozen species will kill you, most of them in the water—cobras, kraits, sea snakes, coral snakes, vipers... If a krait gets you, you have about a fifty-fifty chance—but by the time you get the first symptoms you’re dead. And there’s scorpion fish and stone fish. The sharks you’ve already met. In these jungles a bunch of spiders will give you a painful bite but probably won’t kill you. Same with the scorpions—the sting hurts, but you’ll live.” He looked up into the canopy. “And the slow loris can give you a poisonous nip.”
“The what?” She followed his gaze. “You’re making that one up.”
“Looks like a sloth, but smaller. It probably won’t kill you, unless the bite gets infected.”
“Good to know.”
“The biggest killer’s the mosquito. They kill more people than the others combined.” He held out a hand to help her navigate a boggy patch. She ignored it. “Malaria, dengue fever, Japanese Encephalitis... Don’t worry, princess, we have spray.”
Lightning strobed. Thunder snapped through the sky and shook the ground. Rain pelted her through the thinning canopy. Jack moved faster, crashing through the undergrowth like an elephant, ducking under branches, stopping occasionally to hold them back for her. A large hulk loomed ahead—a rusty tin shed, rain shelling its roof. Their accommodation? Jack charged into a thicket of scrub, and she tumbled through behind him, into air. A path. That was an improvement.
“Nearly there, princess.”
After another hundred feet the path widened into a grassy clearing. Lightning illuminated a wooden cabin with a thatched roof. Jack crossed the lawn and took the steps to the veranda in a single stride. A lizard the size of her arm scampered out of his path and disappeared into the darkness. She shuddered.
“Stay here,” he said as she reached the veranda. He dropped the bags on the doorstep and jogged out into the rain.
She wiped her face with her sleeve, though it was just as wet. They were beside the sea again, but the waves on this side of the island lapped rather than crashed. Two arms of dark land circled a patch of still blackness. A lagoon. She inhaled the fresh, fertile scent of jungle and sea. Rain splattered all around. She’d been in worse prisons, and this one had a guard who was a step up from the correctional officers she was used to—in so many ways.
A motor shuddered to life, a hundred feet away or more. An outboard engine? But he said there’d be no escape until the ransom was paid. A light flickered on above her head, and a yellow glow spilled from a window. A generator. Not a boat. Her shoulders slumped.
Jack returned, walking as calmly as if it were a sunny day. Rain slicked his buzz cut and flowed down his face. He opened an insect screen, unlocked the door and held it open. “Your suite, your highness.”
Low lamps lit a bed scattered with pink frangipani petals and draped in a mosquito net. A window seat was stacked with red and turquoise cushions. On a glass coffee table, a bottle of champagne nested in a bucket. “Good grief.”
“Did I mention we’re on honeymoon?”
She froze. One bed. Her gaze darted to meet his, her stomach flip-flopping.
“Bed’s yours,” he said, quickly, lowering the bags to the floor. “I’ll take the hammock outside.”
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.
