Authors: Angela Claire
Brendan’s crew, though she had only seen them briefly and
only talked to the captain, had been American, she believed. Someone touched
her shoulder and she whipped around.
Brendan clapped a hand over her mouth to stop any
exclamation and whispered with a nod of his head toward the voices, “Friends of
yours?”
She shook her head no.
He searched her face and then removed his hand. “Really?”
“Really.”
Sophia had never in her life tried so hard to convey in her
expression that she was telling the truth to another person. And she had never
done it when she actually was.
“Okay. I believe you.”
“Not the crew, then, I take it,” she whispered back.
“No, which means we’re in a shitload of trouble.”
“Why?”
“I think those are pirates.”
Now, she may not have had the cleanest past, but just as she
had assured Brendan when they were dancing, she and Arthur just swindled. With
the one exception of holding Brendan at gunpoint—mostly just because she liked
him so much, as convoluted as that reasoning was—they were never violent. The
kind of people who ambushed yachts and called themselves modern-day pirates
scared her as much as they would scare anyone.
“Do you have a gun?” she whispered to Brendan and he gave
her a wry look.
“Do you?”
“Not with me, unfortunately.”
He took her hand. “There’s an armory on board, but I don’t
have access to it.”
“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?”
“We’ll have to hide.”
But he had no sooner said it than a plethora of boots hit
the stairwell. Her stomach dropped. Automatic weapons in hand, there were at
least half a dozen scruffy-faced hard-looking men in pseudo-military regalia in
front of them suddenly. She moved closer to Brendan as one of them stepped
forward, speaking in German.
Unfortunately, it was a language she understood enough of to
be scared shitless.
“Sorry to break up your little love nest,” the spokesman
then said in English, motioning with his gun toward the stairwell. “But we’d
like the pleasure of your company.”
“For what?” Brendan asked, so coolly that Sophia was
surprised by it. He didn’t look drunk anymore either.
“No time for chit chat,” the pirate, if that’s what he was
and it was certainly looking as if it was, answered.
“Look, if it’s the yacht you want, it’s yours,” Brendan
offered, taking Sophia’s hand as he did so.
“Most generous, Mr. Beckett.”
Sophia felt an almost imperceptible squeeze of her hand at
the pirate’s use of Brendan’s name. She knew what that meant too. This was
targeted, not a random “ships passing in the night” pirating as it were.
Perhaps this was a kidnapping.
“But your offer is most unnecessary. We have in mind other
more lucrative ‘booty’, if you’ll pardon the expression.” The pirate looked her
up and down in a way that caused her to feel nauseous.
“Just leave the girl here,” Brendan said, snatching his hand
back. “She means nothing to me and she can convey your ransom demand.”
“Oh, I’m afraid we require both you and the lovely Miss
Sophia.”
At the use of her name, she shot the pirate a startled look.
“Just what the hell is going on here?”
With an order to take them rattled out in German, the
spokesman turned away and several men came forward to prod them up and out onto
the deck.
Brendan didn’t offer his hand back to her, whether he was
trying to protect her with seeming indifference or whether the pirate’s use of
her name made him suspicious again, she couldn’t tell. Hard to believe that in
this dire situation that she would even care one way or the other, but she did.
More fool she.
The pirates pushed them into the motorboat they’d apparently
arrived on. Since they didn’t tie their hands—automatic weapons being so much
more of a statement, probably—Sophia wondered if she should make a move. Arthur
had taught her a thing or two on that score.
“Don’t,” Brendan muttered, in Spanish. She looked at him
sharply. “There are too many of them with those guns. Let’s just see where
they’re taking us. Agreed?” He didn’t glance at her as he spoke and the men
guarding them, if they had noticed he was speaking Spanish rather than English,
didn’t seem to care. It appeared that except for the leader, who spoke English,
these men spoke neither, but who could be sure?
She nodded, though Brendan wasn’t looking at her.
“Is there any chance these guys are mixed up with your
partner?” Again in Spanish and he didn’t use Arthur’s name, perhaps purposely
in case they were.
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly, in Spanish as well.
“And I don’t know which way that would cut anyway.”
He said nothing as they revved the boat out to sea at first,
and then cut in a different direction, though she couldn’t tell which. Not back
toward land, in the direction they’d come, but she couldn’t be sure which way
in the dark night. Brendan made no further effort to speak to her, in Spanish
or in English.
Probably thought he couldn’t trust her. Add to that her
worry that she couldn’t trust Arthur, if he was mixed up in all this, and that
she was probably in even more trouble if he wasn’t, and she was having a really
shitty night.
* * * * *
Captain Michaels had assured Sam and Mindy that he could
pilot The Ann on his own without the need to round up the rest of the crew, who
were undoubtedly dispersed all along the bars and hotels of the island, well on
their way toward full-blown intoxication anyway. Sam agreed just because at
this point he was so fucking worried.
Beckett hadn’t answered the radio call they put in.
“You just don’t know, Brendan, Sam,” Mindy had responded to
whatever look the lack of radio response had put on his face. “He’s probably
just got that Sophia in bed and believe me, he won’t hear anything until he’s
done. He’s a total pig like that. A one-track mind, I’m sorry to say, and don’t
get me wrong, I love him. He’s my brother. But really, sex is all he thinks
about with somebody like that girl.”
She’d rattled the speech off as the captain backed the motor
boat out of the dock. The fact that Mindy was even with them hadn’t been his
idea, but the former navy SEAL was a pussy about taking orders and since she
was a Beckett, blah, blah, blah. Even the fact that they didn’t know what they
were heading into didn’t change the captain’s mind. Why should it? He hadn’t
heard the story Arthur had given him. He just thought he was taking an obnoxious
paranoid asshole and his boss’ baby sister out to the yacht to interrupt his
boss in his play, which the guy didn’t look too happy about either, but orders
were orders.
At the last second, Arthur had shown up on the dock and
jumped on board the motorboat.
“Great, let’s just bring everybody along,” Sam muttered.
“If Sophia is okay, I’m not going to let her take this
alone.” The Chameleon looked exactly as he had earlier. Sam was a little
disappointed.
“And if she isn’t?” he asked.
“If she isn’t…” the guy faltered.
Great. He just hoped he wasn’t steering them all into some
trap the luscious little Sophia had engineered. Two Becketts for the price of
one or something.
Mindy smiled at him serenely.
Or something worse.
Chapter Eight
If this was the Grand Caymans, it was an isolated portion of
it. More likely, it was one of the sister islands, Little Cayman or Cayman Brac
or even one of the smaller unnamed islands. The pirates, or whatever the hell
they were, beached the motor boat on the deserted sand and led Brendan and
Sophia through some tangled scrubland to what looked like some kind of spooky
deserted plantation house. In disrepair and abandoned by the looks of it, the
house had vines growing through the window frames and any glass panes were long
gone. Shoving them up the rotting stairs to a room on the second floor, the
pirates locked the door, barring it as well by the sound of it. There was
probably at least one man left outside to guard too, though they heard the rest
of them go downstairs.
Inside the room, which Brendan could just start to see with
the beginnings of dawn, there was nothing but some crude wooden chairs and a
table, the floor no more than rotted wood. They’d be lucky if they didn’t fall
through it.
Brendan had been careful to look at Sophia as little as
possible during all this time since they had been taken off The Ann. It should
have been because he was suspicious of her, but it wasn’t. Maybe it was the
mark of a superb con-woman that she made him believe so completely in her fear.
He hoped it was. He hoped Sophia hadn’t been wearing the expression she was
wearing—the few times he’d been unable to resist making eye contact with
her—because she was really scared out of her wits and knew no more about all
this than he did.
Fuck, he hoped to God she was just taking him for all he was
worth, because he couldn’t stand the thought that she might really get hurt in
all this.
How lame was that?
“What is going on?” she asked, though it sounded as if she
might have just been asking it to herself.
“No clue,” he said, keeping to Spanish for the hell of it,
he supposed.
“I really don’t know, Brendan,” she said in the same
language. “I swear.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, I guess I believe you, but I
don’t know what that says about either of us.” He collapsed into one of the
chairs. On top of everything else, he had a hell of a hangover. “You speak
Spanish pretty well, by the way.”
“Well enough.”
“To play a Spanish maid?”
She looked at him sharply.
“Once I knew who you were, I figured it out. It was you I was
defending in that Four Seasons hallway. What a joke, eh?”
She fell to a crouch in front of him, switching to English.
“It wasn’t a joke, Brendan. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I know it’s
not good and I want to tell you something. Nobody ever stood up for me like you
did, ever. I was, I don’t know, hooked, I guess, ever since that moment.”
He reached out a hand to touch her face, her cheek so soft.
“How could a man ever trust you, Sophia?”
She jerked her head back as if he had slapped her. Then she
stood up, looking down on him. “How can anybody ever trust anybody? Even if I
wasn’t who I was, if I was just a girl you’d picked up at a wedding, could that
girl trust you? You, who’d slept with how many pretty girls and lost interest?
What’s one more to you? How could a girl ever trust somebody like you, rich and
handsome and experienced? Will you ever fall in love with anybody, Brendan, and
will she be able to trust you?”
She was right. And fuck, maybe it was the residual of the
whiskey and the memories of last night—not to mention the adrenaline of the
fear—but he kind of felt as if he already had. But he’d be damned if she’d ever
find out about it.
“Let’s just leave our little drama at the door, Sophia. I’ll
take it as a given that you don’t know why we’re here any more than I do. I
guess then I’m going to assume this is a plain vanilla kidnapping of a rich
man. Maybe they only knew your name because you’re the babe the rich man had on
board. Maybe somebody in the crew was even complicit.”
She crossed her arms, looking doubtful.
“What?”
“Nothing, except it seems like an awfully big coincidence.”
“Well, it does to me too, but you said you weren’t
involved.”
“I said I wasn’t involved. I said I didn’t know about
Arthur.”
“No honor among thieves, is that it?” he responded, unable
to hide the disgust from his voice. “Nice crowd you hang around with, honey.”
“It’s not like that. It’s just that Arthur was getting his
marching orders from somebody else. I mean, we had targeted you, the way we
always—” She halted abruptly, as if remembering who she was talking to.
“By all means, go on, unless you’re afraid of giving away
trade secrets.”
She stiffened. “Fine. We targeted you the way we always
target rich guys. We usually allow a few months for surveillance. Not constant
of course. In fact, the least amount of surveillance over that period that we
can in order to avoid arousing suspicion and still get as much intelligence on
the mark as possible. We do the surveillance in disguise usually, which is why
I was dressed as a maid that time. I was searching your room.”
“Nice to know. Find anything of interest?”
“No, but by the by, I got trapped in the closet when you
came back unexpectedly with that woman, I forget her name.”
“Me too. Oh yeah, Kim. She’s a bitch.”
“Yes, I could tell right away how much thought went into
your carnal relationships.”
“And you just listened to the whole thing, did you?”
“Actually, I watched it. Remember how those closet doors
were, the slats?”
“Oh yes, how nice for you. You should have come out and
joined us. I do that too sometimes, jaded playboy that I am.”
“Thanks, but I wasn’t dressed for it.”
“So what was your point here, other than to creep me out?”
“I seem to be good at that. Virginity, voyeurism, they all
creep you out. You’re surprisingly conventional, Mr. Beckett.”
“Your point?”
“My point is we had put only a few weeks into the job when
suddenly Arthur said we didn’t have time for the usual methods. He insisted
that we had to search your apartment instead and plant the bugs and then go to
the wedding the very next day. That was bound to make anybody suspicious.”
“Anybody but me. I just trotted off to the Caymans with
you.”
The little witch had the nerve to smile at that. “It was
really very sweet.”
“Enough,” he said sullenly.
“My point is somebody else was calling the shots, not
Arthur.”
“That’s not how it usually is?”
“Almost never. Especially not in the last few years. And he
wouldn’t tell me why the box was so important.”
“Oh, yeah, the famous puzzle box.”
“Where is it anyway?”
“Is this the part where I tell you what you want to know,
thinking we’re in the same boat? And then once you’ve gotten the information
you need, you admit this was all a hoax and you’re behind the whole fake
kidnapping thing?”
“Sadly, no,” she assured him. “Though I would like to know
if you even have the damn thing.”
“Not anymore.” They had been speaking in English and if this
was the information their captors, or even Sophia herself, was waiting for,
they were welcome to it. He tilted back on one leg of the chair. “I bought the
box originally for Virginia as a wedding present. The guy who offered it to me
would only take cash and I thought it was neat. Not neat enough to merit all
this fuss of course.” He gestured around them. “Go figure.”
“Where’d you get it? Arthur wouldn’t tell me that either.
Maybe he didn’t even know.”
“There was this Italian guy at a house party I was at a few
months back. He was kind of an asshole, but he was talking about it one night
and I thought it sounded intriguing.”
“Talking about it how?”
“See, this is just perfect.” He couldn’t help but smile,
even though he wasn’t a hundred percent sure he was kidding. “I’m going to
unwittingly give you whatever morsel of missing information you need and your
partner’s going to pop in, making it clear you were just luring me on with this
‘damsel in distress, in the same boat as me’ thing.”
“Well, could you hurry it along then? I have a facial to get
to and we have to knock you off and everything afterward.”
He grinned, shaking his head. “I guess this kind of thing is
no big deal to criminal masterminds—”
“Petty thieves.”
“—like you, but I’m scared shitless.”
She shrugged. “You don’t look scared shitless, by the way.”
He put a hand to his pounding head. “I’m too hung over to
show the proper amount of cowardice.”
Laughing, she came behind him and set two fingers on each of
his temples, massaging lightly. His eyelids dropped closed. “God, that feels
wonderful.”
She said nothing as she massaged him into jelly for a few
minutes. “You didn’t show cowardice back there,” she finally said softly. “You
tried to get them to leave me on the boat.”
“Mmm.” He didn’t want her to stop the head rub. “Think how
stupid I’m going to feel when I find out you’re behind all this.”
The fingers stopped. “You don’t really believe that, do you,
Brendan?”
He opened his eyes to find her leaning over him, waiting for
his answer. He kissed her lightly. “No.”
She smiled. “So tell me the rest of the story. About the
Italian guy.”
“The Italian guy. Right. So anyway, this guy at the house
party was going on about this puzzle box he had inherited from his South
American grandmother. She’d gotten it from some Nazi after the war. Or maybe
the grandmother was German. I don’t remember. Both maybe.”
He leaned forward and pulled her by her hands on to his lap,
kissing her nose. He cuddled her close, as if they weren’t in a probably
life-threatening situation. He just wanted to hold her, to feel her in his lap.
“And you know how in a puzzle box, there’s usually one part of the box that
moves to the side and opens another part that opens another part and so on in a
combination sort of until the real box in the middle is revealed?”
She nodded, looping her arms around his neck.
“Well, he was claiming that no one could figure out this
combination, but that according to his grandmother, there was some incredible
jewel inside. Apparently it had belonged to Goring’s wife. He was going to show
it to us, but then with one thing or another—”
“What happened?”
“His girlfriend, the hostess of the party, caught him in bed
with my butler.”
“Your butler?” She laughed.
“And anyway, we didn’t see him after that.”
“The Italian guy with the puzzle box or your butler?”
“Unfortunately, not my butler. But the guy with the puzzle
box showed up a few weeks later and offered to sell it to me for fifty thousand
dollars in cash.”
“Tell me you didn’t pay him that!” He apparently looked
guilty enough of such stupidity, and was, that she marveled, “I could’ve bilked
you for a fortune.”
He kissed her, hard. “Still could if we make it out of here.
But anyway, I kind of felt I was paying it more along the lines of blackmail to
get him out of my butler’s life, my life I guess, and I did think the box was
cool. It was just the kind of thing Virginia might find neat, although she’d probably
be able to open it in seconds flat, which would take all the fun out of it. But
then there was supposed to be this jewel or something inside.”
She kissed him, long and leisurely.
“What was that for?” he asked breathlessly when she lifted
her head.
“Well, you’re about to get to the part about where the box
is and since my evil cohorts and I have to knock you off right afterwards, I
thought I’d sneak a kiss in. You’re a really good kisser.”
He bent his head to her again, demonstrating the point.
“Thanks,” he said when he was done. “You too.” His hand wandered down to her
luscious ass, fondling. “But I don’t care how sexy and kooky you are, you’re
not going to lure me with your wicked ways into having sex with you while we’re
under armed guard,” he murmured.
She wiggled her bottom in his lap, demonstrating she was
aware of his erection, and exacerbating it in the process. “Oh yeah? No
condoms, Mr. Responsible?”
“More like ‘don’t want my dick out and in the middle of
something when automatic weapons are in the vicinity.’”
“Okay, so where’s the box then?”
“It was in a drawer in my desk at the office. I’d put it
there, intending to ask my secretary to wrap it for the wedding.”
“You chauvinistic pig.”
“Absent-minded chauvinistic pig. I forgot all about it.”
“So what did you give your sister for her wedding?”
He grinned.
“And you’re a bad brother too,” she whispered, laughing.
“So I told Sam Kendon where it was.”
“Who is he? Oh, wait, that’s the big tattletale who ratted
me out, isn’t it?”
“Otherwise known as the private investigator I hired to find
out who broke into my apartment and held me at gunpoint. Yes.” He kissed her,
long and leisurely, one hand at her ass, another dipping under the neckline of
her tee.
“So where is the box now?” she pulled away to ask.
“Kendon has it.”
“In Manhattan?”
“No, here,” he murmured against the smooth skin of her neck.
“I mean in the Caymans. He flew down this morning, or yesterday morning I guess
it was by now.”
“So what’s in the box?”
“I don’t know. He claimed he couldn’t get the fucking thing
open.” Picking her up, still kissing, he set her on the table, moving in
between her legs, grinding her pelvis in to his.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Brendan,” she whispered. “But
I don’t know who these guys are. So nobody’s going to burst in.”
Just then the door slammed opened and they broke apart,
startled, looking at each other.
“I hope I’m not interrupting something,” the woman who
entered said.
And for some goddamned reason, both he and Sophia burst out
laughing.