After all this time, he still made her blood sing. She felt it rushing through her veins, quickening her pulse and infusing her with an energy she didn’t want to embrace.
She’d felt lethargic and detached for so long, ever since the miscarriage. And especially since she’d left poor, sweet, uncomprehending Ari. The divorce had come through three months ago. Though her outward appearance was the same, she’d been robed in guilt and depression.
Helena had brightened her lipstick two shades and hung ever more exotic earrings through her lobes. That worked to fool everyone except for those who knew her best, her sister, Katherine, and her father, whom she’d tried to avoid lately.
Elias had a tough, unyielding nature that had served him well in business, but didn’t always translate well into family life. His own marriage had been so happy that he couldn’t see how hers could have been otherwise. Lovely for you, Baba, that the state of your union brought you so much joy. Mine didn’t.
Helena saw his craggy features in her mind, saw him as he said words to her that she’d railed against.
You don’t just walk out of a marriage, my daughter. It’s a commitment before God and you must honor it….
Not if it’s a commitment I should never have made!
Nevertheless, you did make it. A Stamos does not break her word. A Stamos does not drag her family name through the newspapers.
I see. So a Stamos lives in misery for the rest of her life because she allowed her father to push her into a marriage that was a mistake?
Oh, it’s my fault that you dishonored yourself and became pregnant!
Why is that any different from your not marrying Theo’s mother?
Her father’s face had mottled with temper. I’m a man. These things are different for men.
Helena had just looked at him and laughed, long and bitterly. Yes, they are. She’d tried to please her father by agreeing to date Ari, tried to go against her own wild, impetuous nature and settle down when she’d become pregnant—marry and become a proper Greek wife. But then when she’d lost the baby…
She dragged her hands over her face. A shower will make me feel better. A shower and a glass of wine, maybe two.
She slid off the bed and turned on the water in the bathroom, running her fingers over the gold Venetian tiles inside the glass door of the shower stall. She allowed herself a little pride in the loveliness of the suite’s decor.
A fluffy, French terry robe on a mahogany hanger awaited her. Her suitcases had been unpacked for her, the clothes neatly hung and placed in the drawers of a solid birch dresser.
Elias had spared no expense in the design and construction of Alexandra’s Dream. Her mother would have loved the olive-toned walls, the light woods, the white curtains and coverlet in this suite. Helena and the design team had even covered the accent pillows in Alexandra’s favorite soft green.
The ship was an ode to Elias’s wife; a declaration of love; a visual reminder of her. Helena wondered just what it felt like to inspire that kind of devotion. Very few women did—certainly not her. Nick had left her without a word. Other boyfriends over the years had amused her but not inspired passion. Ari, poor man, was sweet but tepid. Bland. A man forever in beige…
Had Alexandra ever met him, she would have liked him but not adored him. Just as there was nothing to dislike—Ari had nice manners, could carry a conversation and dressed appropriately—nothing about him inspired strong feelings, either.
Helena fought a rising tide of childhood memories: Alexandra snipping rosemary sprigs for a lamb dish, wearing a large straw beach hat with silly plastic cherries on it, laughing merrily over a glass of Pinot Grigio and a dish of olives.
Her death hurt still. And Helena missed her gentle, loving support. Though her mother would very probably have sided with Elias in public, Alexandra would have soothed Helena, taken her hands in her warm ones and talked with her. She would have comprehended, perhaps even taken Helena’s issues to Elias in private and forced him to understand.
With a sigh, Helena uncorked a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc—there was no Pinot Grigio, her favorite—and poured herself a hefty glass. She turned off the shower and filled the big whirlpool tub instead, adding Parisian bath salts.
She padded over to the stereo system and put on the Tosca CD she’d brought with her. Then she peeled off her clothes and sat nude on the edge of the tub with her wine, her feet soaking in the water until the level rose higher. She drank the first glass too quickly and poured another before settling into the luxurious tub. She hoped her conflicting emotions would come to the surface and simply pop harmlessly like the bubbles in the water.
GEMMA SLATER went over all of her predeparture checklists of materials, supplies and snacks for the children’s center. As the summer-long intern on board, this kind of thing fell to her while the director took care of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on the registration paperwork.
Check: the three computers for the older children were in fine working order, and all the software and manuals in the appropriate boxes on a nearby shelf. The board games and cards and PG movies were neatly in place.
For the younger kids, Gemma had crayons, coloring books, felt, glue, blunt scissors, tape, construction paper. Check: she had diapers, pull-ups, wipes and baby powder for the few toddlers…. She grimaced. Technically, the children who came to the center were supposed to be two years of age, but she knew now from experience that some of them were not.
Sodas, juice boxes, milk, chips, crackers, apples, bananas…Her list went on and on. But she was distracted by two things. One, the way her aunt Helena’s face had gone all sad when Gemma had happened to mention the captain’s name—how weird was that?
And two, Gemma had finally met a boy taller than she was. Correction: a good-looking boy taller than she was. At five foot eleven in bare feet, Gemma was vertically challenged when it came to men. Which was better than being horizontally challenged, but not much. There was something so unromantic about towering over one’s date and having feet bigger than his, too.
But this boy she’d just met almost dwarfed her—and had even more skill with a soccer ball than she did. She’d first seen him kicking one around on deck a couple of evenings ago. Tonight, in half an hour, she had agreed to meet him at Just Gelato, the ice-cream place, so she hurried to finish up her tasks.
She inventoried and wiped down everything in the toy chests with disinfectant, which took forever, but finally she was done. She did a final visual check of the room and then, satisfied that she’d covered everything, she locked up and left.
When she got to Just Gelato, he was waiting for her. His name was Chris and he was American. He was part of the maintenance crew and he called other men “dude.” He called her “babe.”
“C’mere, babe,” he said after they’d eaten their ice cream—chocolate for him, raspberry for her—and shared an illicit, off-duty daiquiri that neither of them was supposed to have. She knew they could get fired for it, but it seemed daring and exciting to break the rules. Besides, nobody could see them in the deckside nook they occupied.
He flashed his lazy grin. And he pulled her right up against him, turned those unfairly blue eyes upon her and kissed her like nobody had ever kissed her before.
His lips were firm and a little demanding. He sucked on her tongue and curved his big hands around her rib cage, letting his thumbs move right up under her breasts.
Her heart pounding, Gemma kissed him right back and ran her hands through his blond hair. Gingerly, she tried sucking on his tongue but found the sensation very odd.
She was too busy analyzing the whole situation to truly enjoy it.
A lifetime of private girls’ schools and heavily chaperoned parties, not to mention bodyguards when her grandfather Elias was feeling paranoid, had seriously curtailed her dating activities. She was probably the only seventeen-year-old virgin for miles around.
Chris chuckled and broke the kiss, sliding his hands down her torso and letting them
rest casually at the top of her buttocks. Slowly, the warmth and the weight of them slid down, until he was cupping her whole bottom.
Wow. It felt good, but should she really be letting this boy touch her like that? She’d only just met him two nights ago.
You’re seventeen. You’re on your own for the first time ever. No parent is going to pop out of the bushes and tap his watch, calling, “Curfew!”
But still, Gemma hesitated. She was on the verge of pulling back when Chris tugged her toward him, right up against his obvious, er, interest.
She froze, temptation warring with caution.
He moved his hips ever so slightly.
“I, um…” she began.
“You, um?”
“I have to go.”
His lazy smile widened and his blue eyes twinkled down at her in the moonlight. “No, you don’t.”
She nodded. “Really. I do.”
“Chicken,” he said softly. He bent to kiss her again and she let him, because it felt so good. And he smelled so wonderful, like coconut and banana and rum.
“I have to work in the morning.”
“So do I.” He slid his hands up to her breasts and she gasped at the contact, even through her bra and cotton shirt.
Chris chuckled again as she ducked under his arms and backed away. “See you tomorrow, then,” he said. “I’ll come by the day-care center and say hello.”
She nodded. Then, before she could change her mind, she darted away.
ARIANA BENNETT OPENED her eyes, surprised that she could still perform the simple task.
I’m not dead….
I’m not dead?
She had been sure that the needle stabbing into her arm had contained a lethal drug.
She felt momentarily euphoric and then petrified again because she didn’t know where she was, and two men had just tried to murder her.
Ariana almost wished she were still a quiet librarian who followed all the rules. But she hadn’t been that girl in months. Instead she’d begun taking risks in order to clear her father’s name. Derek Bennett had been charged with dealing in illegal antiquities but had died before his trial began. Ariana had taken the job on the ship, which was listed in her father’s notebook, to check out his contacts in the Mediterranean. She had to discover the truth.
She had become the kind of woman driven to go to a mob-run archaeological site and ask questions. Questions that were evidently unwelcome.
A dark, scarred man named Nico had kidnapped her at a dig site near Paestum. He’d clapped an iron hand over her mouth, twisted her arms behind her back and tied her wrists. He’d threatened to break her neck if she made a sound. And when she couldn’t stop whimpering in fear, he’d stuffed a dirty rag into her mouth. Another man, larger and cleaner but somehow more frightening, had stood there and watched, not making any effort to help her.
“We need to find out what she knows.” Nico had spat the words in Italian. And he’d shoved her toward the other man. “Then dispose of her.”
That was the moment in which Ariana had discovered that maybe knowledge wasn’t all-important, even to a librarian. Breathing was.
She hadn’t had a lot of time to philosophize about it, however, because the two men had taken her to a dank underground room with a dirt floor and begun to interrogate her. When she hadn’t given them the answers they’d seemed to want, Nico slid a long, wicked-looking knife from his pants and would have slit her throat if the big, silent man hadn’t stopped him, worried about leaving too much messy evidence.
He’d offered to just put her to sleep, like a dog, instead. Fear paralyzed her; she didn’t want to die! And especially not without finding some answers to the riddle of her father’s criminal charges and death. But though the big man spoke to her in soothing tones, he was still bastard enough to stab a needle into her arm, and within seconds, everything had gone black.
Ariana swallowed, which was difficult since her mouth was so dry. Where was she now? She registered the pain in her head first, then looked around at the dirty white walls. This place wasn’t much better than the first, though someone had bothered to cover her with a thin blanket. She was lying on a bare mattress that smelled of mold and urine.
She pulled the blanket higher over her shoulders, which alerted her to the fact that her hands were free.
Ariana turned her head, which was a mistake. For one thing, pain assailed her; for another, her almost-murderer sat next to her. She instinctively recoiled, which sent fresh shock waves of pain through her head.
“Calm yourself, signorina,” the big, silent man ordered, an unreadable expression on his unshaven face. A tangle of dark hair added to his air of menace, and he wore a snug black T-shirt with dust-streaked black jeans and black boots. Last time she’d checked, black was not the color of the good guys.
She swallowed hard.
His obsidian gaze raked her body and she felt as if he could see straight through the thin blanket. Oh God. Was he going to rape her? She shivered again.
He stood, pushing back the chair he’d sat on. He went to a rucksack, opened it and yanked out another blanket. Then he unfolded it and draped it over her.
“Thank you,” she managed to say.
He turned his dark gaze back on her. “I’ll ask you once again. Who are you?”
“I t-told you before. My n-name is Ariana Bennett. I’m a librarian doing research….” Her voice trailed off at his fierce expression.
“Don’t lie to me,” he said.
“I-I’m not!”
The bearded hulk eyed her cryptically.
“Are you going to kill me?” she blurted.
“No, I am not going to kill you.”
Gratitude washed over her, then suspicion. “W-why not?”
“Because I don’t have all the information I need from you.”
Ariana drew her knees up to her chin. “I don’t have any more information.”
“No? That remains to be seen.”
“You can’t just keep me prisoner here!”
“I see. You would prefer to stay with my companion? The one who likes knives?”
Ariana shuddered. No, she’d take her chances with this man instead. In spite of her fear, intuition told her that he didn’t really intend to hurt her. He just wanted information—or something else. Maybe money?
Ariana’s stomach growled loudly.
Was it her imagination or did the corner of his mouth flex? “You are hungry, eh? Tonight’s menu is warm Pinot Noir, hard cheese, stale bread and olives. Dessert is more stale bread. Interested?”
He moved toward his rucksack again and dug around in it. He pulled out a bottle of wine and extended it to her.
She inspected the sealed neck. “Do you have a corkscrew?”
He came over to take the wine from her, pulling a pocketknife out of his jeans. He opened the seal and plunged the blade into the cork in a clean, utilitarian movement. Then he extracted the cork from the bottle expertly. He handed it back to her. “Drink.”
She was too excited at the prospect of wetting her dry mouth to worry about a glass, and the warm wine tasted like nectar of the gods. She took a hefty swallow of it. “Please, you have to let me go.”
“Impossibile.”
“The captain and the crew will be worried about me. They’ll report me missing. You don’t look like the kind of guy who wants to have a chat with the Naples police.”
He said nothing, just tilted back his head and drained a good quarter of the bottle. She watched as the muscles of his powerful throat contracted to swallow the liquid. There was something almost sensual in his thirst.
He set the bottle down, reached into his pack again and tossed her a hunk of bread. Then he pulled a knife from a cargo pocket and used it to slice a hard yellow cheese wrapped in butcher’s paper. “Signorina?” He extended a couple of pieces to her.
“Thank you.” She wolfed one of them down and took another swig of the wine, starting to feel marginally better. Her courage revived
a little, too. “I don’t suppose you have aspirin in there?” She pointed to the backpack.
“Perhaps you will make a trade. Information for painkillers.”
“I’ve given you all the information I have!”
He snorted, but reached into the depths of the pack and pulled out a small plastic bottle. He tossed it to her.
She popped the lid and shook a couple of tablets into her hand, inspecting them to make sure they were really aspirin and not some sort of hallucinogenic drug.
He noted that. “Very wise.”
When she’d swallowed them she threw the bottle back at him. He caught it easily, even though his attention was distracted by a noise above them. How had he done it? He must have great peripheral vision.
“What is your name?” she asked him. “And where are we?”
He turned his grim gaze upon her again, apparently deciding that the noise was nothing to worry about.
“You will not concern yourself with such things. Eat. It is better that you do not know where we are.”
CHAPTER FOUR
AFTER PALERMO, Alexandra’s Dream had stopped in Venice, one of Helena’s favorite cities. Now, a couple of days into the Roman Empire Cruise, she curled up with her sketchbook on a chaise on the Helios deck, gazing out at the beautiful port of Dubrovnik. She’d been there many times, so she felt no urgent need to go ashore, but she regretted the fact that Gemma couldn’t get away. She’d have loved to show her niece the city itself, as well as the island of Lokrum in the bay, where Richard the Lionheart had been cast ashore in 1192. The densely wooded island carried a legendary curse dating from the last Benedictine monks to reside there.
Helena’s mouth twisted as she thought of another curse, this one attached to the nearby bay of Sunj, and having to do with the tragic story of two star-crossed lovers. How fitting that Nick and I should be here together.
Dubrovnik was a popular tourist resort town of about 45,000 residents. The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw had written in 1929, “If you want to see heaven on earth, come to Dubrovnik,” and to Helena’s mind, he was right.
Karen Kendall - An Affair to Remember Page 3
