Captain's Paradise: A Novel

by Kay Hooper

  She held on to him desperately, her eyes closed as waves of heat swept over her, feeling her very consciousness dim, narrow in its focus until there was only him, only him and the incredible sensations he was rousing in her body.

  Michael held her tightly against him, his arms around her, hands roaming over her, caressing wherever they touched. Every time his teasing mouth closed over her sensitized nipples, she cried out softly and jerked, until finally she was writhing against him, the sensual tension he had built inside her reaching a sweet, unbearable agony.

  “Michael …” Her voice was a shaking, helpless plea, beyond thought.

  And he responded instantly. Half rising, turning, he tumbled her back onto the bed. His mouth trailed down over her quivering belly while his hands gentled her shaking thighs and slipped under her to cup her buttocks.

  His mouth was fire on her flesh, and Robin was burning, consumed, and she wanted more. She couldn’t hold her body still, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t beg him to stop or not to stop; she couldn’t do anything except feel, her nerves on fire, mindless and lost. The aching throb of need filled her whole being, and then his mouth found that core of pulsing heat, and Robin cried out wildly, her body arching. It was too much, it wasn’t enough, her senses shattered, flinging her. And then she was boneless, dissolving, like sugar melted for candy.

  She opened her eyes at last, focusing on him, realizing he was standing by the bed and she’d been too dazed to feel him move. He was stripping rapidly, his burning eyes fixed on her. Her thudding heart skipped a beat, and she felt the ebbing heat inside her renew itself under his passionate gaze. Before she could move, he was with her again, pulling her legs high around him and sinking his flesh deeply into hers.

  Robin caught at his back, her fingers digging in, gasping at the incredible sensation that was still a briefly unfamiliar one; it was like the memory of pain that was a thought, the real sensation always unexpected and stark. He was filling her, throbbing inside her, a part of her.

  Michael tangled his fingers in her hair and covered her mouth with his, kissing her deeply but with a new, searing tenderness. He was still, buried inside her, the tight heat of her sheath holding him in an unbelievable secret caress. He couldn’t stop kissing her, delving into the hot, sweet darkness of her mouth again and again. Her long legs were around him, her hands stroking his back almost frantically, and the hardness of her nipples prodded him.

  “Have I told you you’re beautiful?” he asked in a raw, husky tone, still unmoving, heavy on her.

  She struggled for breath enough to respond. “I don’t remember,” she managed finally, a bit wildly, the coiled tension of her body holding her in a taut, blissful grip.

  His mouth curved. “You are.” He kissed her again, then again, and his body moved subtly.

  Robin gasped, all her senses flaring, her arms and legs going briefly rigid around him. “Oh …” She lifted her head and bit his shoulder abruptly, maddened.

  His chuckle was a rough sensation against her throat. “Beautiful Robin,” he said, kissing her throat, moving again in that delicate way that sent a jolt through her entire body. “Beautiful, brave Robin. And mine. Mine?”

  “Yours.” She moaned. “Oh, damn you, Michael!”

  “Mine,” he said in a rasping tone, his eyes clinging in a primitive look of deep satisfaction. He moved again, then again, the gentle, subtle undulations of before becoming long, slow thrusts. She cried out, clinging to him frantically, her body moving with his.

  “Love me,” he said softly.

  “I do.” The tension was rushing now, storming, battering her in increasing waves of pleasure. “I love you.”

  Michael made a low, rough sound deep in his throat, the controls of tenderness and teasing splintering to release the inferno inside him. He wanted more of her, wanted to imprint her with the very essence of himself, suddenly terrified of losing what he had only just admitted he needed so critically. Robin. Beautiful, brave Robin, with her heartbreaking eyes and quick mind, her courage and her passion. He thought he’d die with needing her.

  With loving her.

  The explosion of emotion was like something rupturing inside him, marking him indelibly; in the same instant Robin cried out wildly, and the hot inner contractions of her ecstasy caught him in another tearing storm, until shock waves of pleasure tangled with the wild emotions.

  And though it emerged in a hoarse whisper and with his last ounce of strength, nothing on earth could have stopped him from saying, “I love you, Robin.”

  When she could move again, Robin managed to raise herself on an elbow and stare down at him. “When did you get so possessive?” she asked somewhat weakly.

  He opened one eye, then closed it again. “I always have been. You just didn’t notice,” he told her.

  Robin made herself comfortable beside him again, her head pillowed on his shoulder. “I would have noticed that,” she said musingly. “You weren’t. Not until today.”

  “It just got away from me today, that’s all. Does it bother you?” he asked politely.

  She giggled a little, so exhausted and blissfully sleepy she could hardly think straight. “No shabby tiger. Mine isn’t shabby either, in case you missed that.”

  He chuckled, drew her a bit closer. “I didn’t. In fact, you clawed my heart up good and proper. Go to sleep, love.”

  Smiling, she did.

  Michael woke slowly, his internal clock telling him he’d slept only a couple of hours. The sun was setting, throwing its dying orange light through the window. He was tempted to drift off again, but a niggling sense of wrongness prodded him until he finally eased away from Robin and sat up.

  She murmured something and turned her face into the pillow, and he looked down at her, tenderness rushing through him. One day he might find the words to tell her how much she meant to him, if any words could. One day he might be able to tell her that her vivid green eyes were the only light he’d ever known in the shadows all around him; they kept the darkness at bay.

  One day.

  He pulled his gaze from her reluctantly, looking around the room and wondering what was wrong. Then he realized. The gun Daniel had left for his daughter after the FBI had confiscated hers lay on the dresser, where she habitually left it, but his own was missing. It took him a moment to remember, and he closed his eyes, almost groaning.

  Dumb. He’d left it in the den when they had wandered out onto the deck, and what with one thing and another he’d not given it a single thought since. And the French doors standing wide open, a blatant invitation. Daniel’s two men, stationed outside and under cover, were watching the house, of course, but that hardly excused his own carelessness.

  Some agent he was.

  He slipped from the bed, careful not to wake Robin, and bent briefly to draw the sheet up over her. She stirred and smiled in her sleep, and he fought the urge to climb back in beside her and wake her with kisses, maybe even …

  Later. First he had to get his gun and lock up downstairs. He found his jeans and pulled them on, then went softly to the door and out onto the walkway above the den. The orange light spilling through all the glass downstairs gave the place a hellish glow, and he noted that idly as he went down the stairs.

  He closed and locked the French doors first, then turned toward the kitchen. His gun was on the counter beside the other door; he’d put it there when—

  Michael stopped suddenly halfway between the den and kitchen, all his thoughts tumbling, senses flaring, his muscles tensing in an instinctive reaction to danger.

  His gun. It was gone.

  And then a man rose abruptly from behind the breakfast bar, and there was the gun, in his hands, pointed with deadly accuracy at Michael.

  “Hello, Captain.”

  “Hello, Sutton,” Michael answered hollowly.

  NINE

  EDWARD SUTTON SMILED, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. He was normally a handsome man in his forties, with the blond good looks that generally adorned l
ifeguards; the past few days obviously hadn’t been kind to him. His clothes were rumpled, he was unshaven, and the gleam of revenge in his cold blue eyes had escalated to something near madness.

  “You couldn’t stay out of my life, could you?” he demanded, his voice harsh.

  Michael was trying to think clearly. “Come off it, Sutton. You took my sister as bait to draw me out, and we both know it. Surely you didn’t think I’d just sit on my hands.” Sutton’s back was to the walkway above; Michael deliberately let his voice rise.

  Sutton nodded jerkily. “Oh, I knew you’d come after her. I knew you’d suffer because I had her. That’s what I wanted. For you to suffer. The way I suffered after you meddled years ago and broke up my cartel.”

  “Cartel?” Michael laughed, playing for time. “Is that what you called it? That’s a laugh. You and your associates were bleeding that country dry, violating every international law in existence. If I’d been your judge, I’d sure as hell have done more than exile your ass!”

  Michael had caught a flicker of motion from the corner of his eye, but didn’t dare look to see if it was Robin moving silently down the stairs. If she could get into position at the bottom, she’d have a clear shot at Sutton. He set a mental time limit, knowing she wouldn’t shoot as long as that gun remained pointed squarely at his chest. Just a few more seconds …

  “… I’m going to kill you,” Sutton was saying in a kind of monotone. “I wanted to watch you suffer first, but now I’ll just kill you. They’re after me again, thanks to you, and I don’t have time to waste.”

  “Less time than you know,” Michael said.

  Sutton laughed harshly. “Those two outside? I took care of them before I came in here. You ought to choose your watchdogs more carefully—”

  “Not them,” Michael interrupted flatly. “Do you really think I’d just sit here alone, waiting for you to take my bait?”

  “You always work alone,” Sutton declared, but his eyes were beginning to dart nervously.

  “Not this time. This time I have a partner. How else do you think I managed to board your yacht and disarm your men? I have a partner, Sutton. Holding a gun on you right now.”

  “You’re lying!” Sutton shouted.

  “No, he isn’t,” Robin said. And she took no chances; the instant the armed man twitched toward her and his gun no longer covered Michael, she shot it out of his hand.

  Michael retrieved the gun while Sutton clasped his hand to his chest, cursing. Putting a bit of distance between himself and the wounded man, Michael said calmly, “Thank God for your marksmanship; it’s twice you’ve done that.”

  Robin, dressed only in one of his shirts, her arm braced against the stair railing and the gun still steadily covering Sutton, flicked him a glance and said, “Actually, I meant to warn you about that. Marksmanship was always my weak point. So we’d better not count on a third fluke.”

  Michael could have laughed out loud, and nearly did. Instead, grinning, he said, “If you’ll keep him covered, I’ll go check on the backup we were supposed to have.”

  Robin moved to a point halfway into the kitchen, cutting the distance between herself and Sutton. “Sure. I’m bound to hit him from here.”

  “You could hit him from there with a baseball bat,” Michael observed, and went out to check on the backup.

  Sutton didn’t chance it.

  Two hours later Sutton was gone, towed away by the two FBI men who were nursing sore heads and subsequently disinclined to view their prisoner with kind eyes. In fact, they were rather obviously hopeful he’d try to escape so they could shoot him, a fact that a very subdued Sutton seemed to appreciate.

  “I think he’ll make it to Miami,” Michael said as he came back inside. “At least I believe they won’t kill him.”

  Robin was standing before the open refrigerator door, peering within. “We’ll have to get more groceries. If we’re staying until the end of the week, that is.”

  “Hey.” Michael turned her around to face him, looking down at her gravely.

  She slid her arms around his waist and held him tightly for a moment, then pulled back and smiled up at him. “I’m fine. I was scared to death, though.”

  Repeating something she had once said to him, Michael declared, “It didn’t show.”

  “I love you,” she told him fiercely. “All I could think was that I wasn’t about to let that rotten, no-good bastard take you away from me!”

  He turned her face up and kissed her as fiercely as she had spoken. Huskily he asked, “Remember when I paraphrased something about two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage?”

  Robin was having trouble with her breathing. “Umm. I remember. You said that’s what I had.”

  “The rarest kind. Instantaneous courage. That’s what you have, love. You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever met in my life, and I love you.”

  Sometime later Robin said, “Um … who were you paraphrasing anyway?”

  “Napoleon.”

  She giggled.

  “Well. I could have used Thoreau, except that he misquoted Napoleon and called it three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage.”

  “What’s an hour, more or less?”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  Three days later the Black Angel cruised away from the house at the beach, heading for Fort Myers. Lisa was virtually recovered; the other girls had been released and gone to their various homes. Sutton was in jail awaiting trial, whenever federal, state, and international authorities agreed on the order in which his offenses would be tried. It developed that Sutton had never transferred the Dragon Lady out of Dane’s name, so Daniel pulled a few strings and got the yacht released to him.

  Michael said he’d just lose it again in a poker game. But he was smiling when he said it, and Robin thought there was more friendship between the two men now. More trust. She was glad to see that.

  As for her relationship with Michael, Robin had never been closer to anyone in her life. She had never given or received so much love. And the very fact that without hesitation Michael had trusted her twice to “get the job done” in dangerous situations, first risking his sister’s life and then his own, had given her more self-confidence than she would have believed possible. The demon of fear was gone now, assigned its proper place as a natural reaction and an impetus to do what had to be done.

  But there was still a last, shadowy demon at her heels, and Robin knew it was one she had to face.

  As the boat neared Fort Myers, she became more and more quiet, standing in the doorway of the wheelhouse as she had in the beginning and watching him guide his boat. She felt content in his love, and secure, but she wasn’t certain how he’d react when she told him—

  “Stop nerving yourself up for it and just tell me,” he said suddenly, with a flickering smile.

  Robin was startled, but not much. “Well …”

  “I’ll tell you.” He reached for her hand and carried it briefly to his lips, then said quietly, “While I pick Lisa up and head back to Miami, you’re going to fly to San Francisco. And take that test at the academy.”

  She held his hand in both of hers. “I don’t want to leave you, Michael, even for a week. But I have to. I’ll be haunted by that if I don’t go back and try again.”

  “I know, love.” He drew her to him and slipped an arm around her, keeping one hand on the wheel. “I’ve known that all along. And I applaud.”

  A bit shakily she said, “If you sail off while my back’s turned, I’ll track you down.”

  He bent his head and kissed her thoroughly, then smiled, his eyes glowing. “Not a chance. I’ll be at the marina waiting for you to come back to me.”

  “Promise?”

  His arm tightened around her. “I promise. And if you’re not back within a week, I’ll come after you. That’s a promise too. I know a good thing when I fish her out of the ocean.”

  Robin snuggled closer, too happy for words. She hated good-byes, but the homecoming looked wonderful.
<
br />   The week Robin had anticipated to make arrangements and take that final exam at the police academy turned out to be an optimistic estimate. She hadn’t anticipated that the academy officials would balk, insisting that she repeat the weeks-long course in its entirety. They refused to accept her assurances that she didn’t want a badge or a certification, just a final grade on a written exam. She didn’t want to join San Francisco’s finest; she didn’t want to be a cop.

  They didn’t understand.

  Finally, in desperation, Robin called her father, shamelessly pulling the biggest string she had, and within hours she was taking the exam under the bewildered eye of an instructor.

  Still, the delay pushed her right to the limit, and it was eight days after leaving Michael when she landed in Miami, hastily stowed most of her bags in a locker at the airport, and set out for the marina. The last thing she expected to see upon reaching the slip where the Black Angel was tied up was Dane.

  He was dressed as she’d first seen him, all in white and formally, clean-shaven again, and bright-eyed. Half sitting on the side of the boat, he raised an eyebrow at her and said lazily, “Hello, stranger.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked blankly.

  “I’m about to escort Lisa to that fancy school of hers. She wanted to go on the yacht—which I haven’t lost yet. We’re about to leave.”

  “Where’s Michael?”

  Dane grinned, but before he could answer, Lisa’s bright, laughing voice did.

  “Out getting a ticket to San Francisco.” She climbed up from belowdeck, carrying a small bag. Her dark blond hair was caught up in a ponytail, and her blue eyes were smiling. “He started getting jumpy last night, Robin, and he was impossible by this morning. By about two hours ago I think he was convinced you’d been spirited off by the seventh fleet, and he’d never find you again.”