Deception Island (8 page)

He cocked his head, frowning.

“You speak French when you're surprised. Or turned on.” She swiveled to focus on the food as heat rose up her face. What was that about? She never blushed, especially when she was on the job. Had to be the air temperature. “Are you French?”

“Uh.” He uncrossed and crossed his legs.

Stifling a triumphant smile, she began to assemble a sandwich—ham, lettuce, tomato, olives. Anything basic and relatively fresh made her drool like a mastiff after prison food.

“
Are
you French, Jack? I can't pick your accent. And I swear your English is better than mine.”

He swallowed, his Adam's apple rising and dipping. “I'm a lot of things, and nothing. If I was a dog, I'd be a stray mongrel.”

Just like her. “Guess that makes me a prize Chihuahua.”

The bench shook with his laughter, deep and throaty, and only half-bitter. It did gooey things to her stomach. Man, that was so wrong.

“Pampered but scrappy as hell,” he said.

“That's me.” Half the truth, at least.

“Your foot—it's bleeding.”

“Really?” Blood trailed from the arch of her foot, mixing with water and grains of sand. “It's nothing. You should have seen what I did to the shark.”

He raised one eyebrow.

“I cut myself on the coral. No big deal.”

His forehead crinkled. “We need to wash it. Coral carries dangerous bacteria and toxins. And in the tropics the last thing you want is an infection. I'll find a first-aid kit.” He disappeared into the cabin.

She bit into her sandwich, closed her eyes and tilted her head back. The sea washed in and out, the breeze teased her face. No matter what became of her in the next week, at least she'd had the simple pleasure of this moment. In prison right now she'd be lying sleepless on her bed, trying to zone out the unvarying soundtrack of cries, groans and jeers of the other inmates. If the senator's people hadn't approached her, she'd be fighting a bunch of other homeless people for a spot under a freeway bridge. Here there were goddamn frangipanis. There were worse places to die—not that she planned to.

We may as well make the most of a bad situation
.

Yep. They might as well.

Chapter 8

After a couple of minutes Jack's footsteps trailed back from the cabin. “You're not supposed to be enjoying this.”

Holly opened her eyes. He stood over her, a wry half smile imprinting a dimple in his cheek. A pirate with a dimple—who'd have thought? “You're in my sun.”

“Sorry, your highness.”

He settled on the grass in front of her feet, his long legs sprawled, with a bowl of water and first-aid kit beside him. Crap—he intended to play doctor?

She pulled her foot under the bench. “I can do it.”

“You eat. I like having something to do with my hands. Doing nothing drives me crazy.”

She blew out a breath. When was the last time she'd willingly let a man touch her? An hour or two ago, he'd pinned her to a tree. She could let him clean a stupid cut. Laura would have no problem with someone worshiping at her feet—and it was a chance to get close to him, maybe draw him out.

“Come on, I won't bite,” he said.

The run and swim sure had relaxed him. She inched her foot forward. He grabbed the heel and pulled it onto his knee. Awareness reverberated up her leg and pooled in a part of her that hadn't seen action in a long time.

“Doesn't look too bad,” he said, all business. “But I'll give it a thorough clean.”

He poured a cloudy liquid into the bowl and directed her foot into it. It was as warm as the air surrounding them.

“This might hurt.” With a piece of gauze, he gently brushed over the wound.

She flinched.

“Painful?”

“Ticklish,” she said, through a mouthful of baguette. Thank God boredom had prompted her to raid Laura's bathroom supplies on her last layover and wax her legs and paint her toenails, for the first time in six years.

“Suck it up, princess. The guy who taught me to do this ordered us to spend a good ten minutes cleaning coral wounds.”

“Is first aid something you were taught in the military?”

He froze. Dark eyes flicked up to meet hers. Bingo.

“Don't look so scared,” she said. “It's obvious you're some kind of military man—you don't smell bad enough to be a real pirate. I won't tell, I promise. But I can't help wondering how you got caught up in all of this.”

“If I told you I'd have to kill you. In fact, I'd have to kill
me
.”

“I'm not asking for name, rank and serial number. Just a, ‘Once upon a time there was a nice young pirate called Jack...'”

“Consider ignorance your ticket to freedom.”

“Consider disclosure your insurance.”

“What does that mean?”

“Ever thought about what might happen if they catch you? If you're nice to me, maybe I'll lie and say you weren't involved in the kidnap. That you rescued me and saved me from a shark and a horde of pirates—and from death by coral.”

“It's not going to happen like that.”

“How can you be so sure? Maybe those men today recognized me.”

“If they did, they won't be putting in a call to your daddy—they'll be back here later to steal my captive and take the ransom for themselves.”

“You don't really think that's a possibility?”

“I'm trained to think in possibilities.”

“Then why don't you have a gun? Or a phone? I don't get why we're unprotected.”

“You fed the protection to the sharks, remember?”

“Only one of them.”

He tightened his grip on her foot.

“Ouch,” she said.

“Meaning?”

“As far as I can tell, it was in your best interests to lose those guys as much as mine.”

“Shoving a guy into a shark's mouth isn't my style. He tripped.” He scraped the wound, too hard. She bit her gums. “And we're not unprotected. I'd bet on you against a shipful of pirates. Where did a rich girl learn to fight like that?”

“I'll tell you something about me if you tell me something about you.”

“I don't play games, or make bargains.”

“I'll go first, then. So I like to be able to take care of myself—maybe because I've been so protected. It's empowering to know you've got your own back.”

She'd finished her sandwich and was wiping her hands by the time he responded.

“How did you learn?” He sounded pissed, like he was being forced to ask the question, like he itched to know but was reluctant to risk starting a real conversation. She'd have to take her time with it, draw him slowly into her confidence.

“Just picked stuff up, I guess. My father's bodyguards gave me pointers. I think they enjoyed it.”

“I bet they did. Did your father stop beating you after that?”

“What?” Her cheeks chilled.

“Your father. Did he stop hitting you once you learned how to fight back? Or was it Jasper who did the beating?”

She swallowed. “What are you talking about?”

“When we were up on the cliff you flinched when I approached to help you up, tried to hide yourself. Someone's hurt you, in your past. Repeatedly.”

“I was scared of you. What did you expect?”

“Scared of me? If only that were true. I don't think much scares you at all. No. It was more than that. It came from within.”

“What are you, a psychiatrist?”

“I've learned a few things about how the mind works. Who was it?”

He settled into a rhythm of slow strokes over the arch of her foot. She forced her leg to relax, in case he could feel her tension. If he could see through that much of her facade, what else had he picked up on? She hadn't given him enough credit. Rookie mistake. She took a swig of juice, stalling. This was meant to be about drawing him out, not her.

But you had to give something to get something back, right? Maybe if she opened up, gave him as close a version to the truth as she could without giving the game away, he'd start to give a damn about her.

He didn't press her, just continued brushing the wound, firing tingles up her legs with every stroke. She sure could use a topic of conversation that took her mind off his touch.

“My father. He'd get drunk, and start accusing me of all sorts of stuff. I think he genuinely thought he had to beat the evil out of me. His parents—” She gulped back the words. Jack had done his research on Laura. She couldn't claim the senator's parents were crazed religious zealots, like her grandparents. They were probably upstanding regular Baptists. She fought to remember details of Laura's life, gleaned from the same internet sources Jack might have seen. “My mother died when I was a baby, and I guess he took her death harder than he wanted to admit.”

“Is he still violent?”

“No, not to me. Not to anyone, as far as I know.”

“Not since you learned to fight back?”

“Something like that.”

“Tell me about that.”

How far should she take this? He was skating dangerously near the truth of her. But he was also looking at her differently—like an ally, not a princess. “I've never talked to anyone about this before, except my shrink.” That, at least, was true. He didn't need to know it was a prison shrink.

“Who better to tell than someone you won't see again after this week?”

She released a shuddering breath. “Okay... I was about fourteen, but small for my age. I used to hang out a lot in the gym at school, trying to stay away from home—before school, after school. I'd join in with the wrestling team, the boxing team, try some martial arts. Picked up something from all of them. I learned to use momentum and accuracy to make up for what I lacked in body mass, learned the strongest parts on a woman's body and the weakest parts on a man's, learned that the body only moves in certain directions—reverse those and you cause pain. Simple, really.” She left out the no-holds-barred fight club. Laura's private high school probably hadn't had one of those. “My fighting style was never very pretty—I wouldn't have won any competitions, but I wasn't in it for that. It was unpredictable, at least.”

“That's a good strength. Didn't your father wonder where you where?”

“He was too preoccupied with his...political ambitions to notice. He thought I was in dance class.” She grinned. Nice touch. Truth was, her parents had never cared where she was, as long as she wasn't asking anything of them, or cramping their drinking habits. They only wanted her around for the welfare checks.

“I waited about a year,” she continued, “taking the beatings, keeping myself sane and strong by imagining myself rising up to him, imagining what I'd do to him. Stupid, really—it got to the point I was taking on guys much bigger and stronger than him in the ring, and slaying them, but I just had this block when it came to my dad. I was serving up the beatings out of the house, and meekly taking them at home. I was scared that if I took him on before I was ready he'd bash the life out of me, literally. I had it in my head that I needed to be unbeatable by the time I took him on, so I'd train and train till my knuckles bled.” She clenched and unclenched her fists. “Pretty sure I broke a few bones in my feet, too. Kids at school started calling me Trinity. I kinda liked it.”

He frowned.

“You've never seen
The
Matrix
?” she said.

“What's that—a movie?”

“Are you even of my generation? You've got to see
The Matrix
. Trinity's this kick-ass girl fighter.”

“I'll put it on my must-see list,” he said, drily. “What tipped you over the edge?”

“One night he came after me, worse than before, because this time he had something else on his mind. Like he'd suddenly realized I wasn't a kid anymore, and there were whole other ways he could use me.” She rubbed her palms into her eyes. Crap. She'd gone too far—forgotten she was playing a role. Accusing a senator of
that
put her in dangerous territory, even if there was no one Jack could tell.

“You don't have to go into details. I just want to know what you did to the bastard.” Jack's jaw was set, his eyes glimmering dangerously, like he hated her father as much as she had, like he was right there with her in the cramped living room of her childhood home. If only.

“This goes no further, right?”

“Of course.”

She swallowed. “I just let him have it, like this thing that had been building up inside me for all those years just...exploded. I used everything on him—punched and pounded and kicked and scratched and—” Pain cut into her palms. She released her fists. She'd been clenching them, driving her fingernails nearly through the skin. “And he was so shocked he balled up in a corner and cried. And I just kept on going. Until suddenly I got it. I got it that...”

“That what?”

That the same thing had happened to him when he was a kid, and in that moment he'd gone back there. That I was beating up on someone who was just like me.
“That it was over. That he'd never do it to me again. That he was just a coward who'd been picking on an easy target, and I wasn't his punching bag anymore.”

“Why didn't you tell anyone? You grew up in America—don't they have laws?”

She scoffed. Laws didn't do a lot to protect poor kids from abusive parents. Everyone was too busy just surviving to get involved in other people's business, and those who were paid to care didn't have enough time or money to get around to everyone. Half the time kids were given straight back to their abusers—she'd seen it a dozen times.

But she'd survived. That day, she'd walked out for good, sick to the stomach about how exhilarating it'd felt to be the person dishing out the violence. Not long after she'd started living on the streets, her boxing coach had become concerned at the anger she was pouring into her training, and suspicious of her dirty appearance at school, and had taken her down to his sister's sailing club to learn a less-confrontational way to let off steam. For three years she'd lived in an attic above the club rooms, earning her keep by maintaining boats after school, waiting tables and, eventually, teaching kids to sail. She got a sailing scholarship to college.

And then she met Jasper, and was so shocked to get so much apparent affection from another human being that she dropped out. He'd figured out from the beginning she'd do anything to earn the crumbs he threw. He'd recognized her straight away for the damaged, cowering child she'd been, just like Jack had up there on the cliff, and had spent four years exploiting it. Jack wouldn't do that.

Right. Because she knew him so well.

“Laura?”

“Huh?” She blinked the moisture from her eyes. “Did you say something?”

“How is it you can go campaigning for him, now? Why would you wish a man like that on a whole country?”

Her mind whirred. Good point. She'd gone too far.
Shut up about yourself and channel Laura
.
This is all an act, remember?
“I think he regrets it. I think in the end the experience made him a better man, more aware of his weaknesses, more empathetic. That moment I turned on him, it changed him. He repented and apologized, and has spent the last decade or more making up for it. People can change.” Like hell. She'd seen her parents once since she'd left home, in the street, and they'd called her the kind of names she bet Laura's privileged ears had only heard in an R-rated movie. “And he's terrified of me turning against him, going public with the truth. He never says no to me anymore. What I want, I get—like this trip.”

In fact, as far as Holly could tell, the real Laura had practically blackmailed her father to indulge her whim to sail around the world, when her only experience of sailing was on a mechanized luxury yacht with a skipper—and probably a cocktail waiter. After he'd forbidden her, she'd announced her plans publicly, in a joint press conference with the grateful environmental charity she'd chosen to patronize. Hamstrung—and aware she was bringing good publicity to his planned presidential run—he'd folded, on the condition they find someone to secretly sail the dangerous parts.