“Why do you do it?” I ask.
He gets up again, rummages through another gym bag he must have brought down from the house while I slept. Then he checks his watch. “We need to head out.”
“Head out for the rendezvous?”
“They won’t wait around. Get changed, Athena. I’ll be outside, prepping the boat. Come as soon as you’re ready.”
The apparel he’s selected for me is much more my style—T-shirt, jogging top and slacks, flip-flops—but they’re all too big, and I’m mortified when I catch my reflection in the glass of his windshield. To distract him from my tragic appearance, I point to the house on the hillside. “Who lives there?”
“He's an acquaintance.”
“Is this his boat, too?”
“No. Jump on.”
When I remind him of my sore ankle, he plays the gentleman again, lifts me aboard. It’s something I can’t quite get my head round—the paradox that is Barrett Carlisle. He’s already a billionaire, but he kills for money. He’s a predator who also protects. He ends lives with relish but is tender and even chivalrous to an injured woman. He goes out of his way to be charming and extravert in public, when in private he’s so taciturn with his emotions he’s barely the same person. I don’t expect he’ll ever tell me everything, but seeing as I’m along for the ride, I’m going to do my best to get to the bottom of the mystery that is my dark defender.
What made him this way? Who started it all? Will he ever stop?
Below deck is a ridiculously overdone boudoir berth, complete with satin sheets on a squashed-heart-shaped bed, Persian rug, mini bar, empty champagne bucket, and air freshener with a perfumed scent straight out of Arabian Nights. I’m not sure whether I should do a dance with veils or just throw up.
“How long still before we get to the rendezvous?” I ask him when he pokes his head in to check on me.
“It's just a couple of hours. You should stay down here till we’re away from the bay, then come up if you like. I bet you’re dying to see what this baby can do.”
“Uhhh, yeah, if you say so...” It strikes me as a reckless thing to suggest under the circumstances, but then he does live life on the edge. And he’s done his homework on me. “Even better than a jet ski...”
“You’ve no idea.”
“It's very trusting of you, last night—to let me pilot like that.”
“I knew you had it in you. And I couldn’t pilot and shoot at the same time, could I.”
“So there’s something you can’t do?”
He nods to a small galley area at the back. “There might be a sandwich or something in the fridge. Help yourself.”
“And you?”
“I’ve already eaten.”
He revs up the cruiser’s beast of an engine, gets us underway as I take a grateful first bite of my cheese, ham and pepperoni sandwich. It’s a good combo, and I wash it down with a sparkling Appletini. Carlisle maintains a respectable speed while I’m below deck, doesn’t push it. And to be honest I’d rather stay down here for a while, until we’re so far out of sight of Valdez’s hacienda it might as well not exist anymore, except in my nightmares.
But if I have to go on deck, I so don’t want to wear what I’m wearing. Next to a sexy British billionaire—no, the sexy Brit billionaire—I look like a slum dog junkie on a bad hair day. So I go to see what the boat’s single closet has in store, not exactly holding my breath. Going off the decor so far, I’ll probably be sifting through exotic negligee. Sigh.
A sleeveless arm lashes out when I open the door. It grabs me before I can react. I scream into a firm hand pressed hard against my mouth, so hard I can feel teeth puncturing lip. The man pulls me in, coughs a few times, and then snarls in my ear, “You make another sound, and I break your neck. Nod if you understand.”
I do as he says. But how did he get in here? When? That hateful voice sounds...recent, familiar. He sweats profusely, and he’s trembling.
Again I hear the click of a gun behind me, just like on the Jet Ski last night. And again the dread washes over me: is this bullet for me? Is this how my kill-trip ends?
“You’re going to tell me who you are, both of you,” he says between coughs. “You’re going to tell me who you’re working for. Then I decide whether to kill you or not.”
I don’t believe that last part for a second. He has no reason to let us live. He's got none. We’re dead, Carlisle and me, unless...
No, we’re just dead. This is Valdez’s personal bodyguard—a man with a vendetta of his own. He’s already failed in his duty once. He must have tracked us last night. Carlisle did think we were being followed across the bay, but he was sure that once we’d cut into the cove, we were invisible. We're untraceable. So how could this man have seen us, without lights, on the dark ocean? And why didn’t we hear him climb onto the boat? Where did he leave his own boat?
There are just too many questions that have no answers. And no way out of this.