By contrast, Smitty was an open book, a straightforward guy with every emotion and thought visible right there on his sleeve.
“Where’s Smitty?” McLellan demanded from the doorway.
“Talking to the boatyard manager, I think.”
“Do you need any help with anything?”
She shrugged and clenched her hands together to still the trembling. “No. I’m just trying to figure out the best way to finish the last of the work.”
He stared hard at her. Chris felt her chest tighten. Did he somehow know what she’d been doing? That she knew about the transponder?
“You’re not supposed to be down here alone,” he said.
She nearly let out the breath she’d been holding, then stood and gestured to the makeshift door stop. “I’m okay.”
McLellan’s scowl deepened. “We had a deal.”
“No we didn’t. You just thought because you wanted me to promise that I had promised.”
“Dammit, Christina.” He took a step toward her, then stopped himself. “Cooperate with me on this,” he said in a low voice.
“We’re tied up at the dock,” she retorted. “I think the engine room is safe.” At least on its own. When no one but me is in it.
He said nothing to that, only glared for a few seconds, then turned on his heel and left.
What’s up with him? she wondered as she closed the cabinet drawer. Then voices raised in anger above her head got her attention. McLellan was seriously pissed off. Smitty’s tenor came back at him, equally angry.
She shuddered involuntarily. The few times she’d heard her father fight with Granddad, she’d hidden under her bedcovers. When you were eight, adult anger, all that horrible energy, was terrifying. Still was, in a way.
She tiptoed to the stair bottom. No need to strain to hear.
“You weren’t supposed to leave her alone,” McLellan snapped.
“Hey, I went to arrange repairs, okay?” Smitty responded hotly. “She’s not going to get into any trouble in ten minutes.”
Quick, hard steps, as if McLellan was pacing. “Anything can happen in ten minutes and you know it.”
Smitty made a disgusted noise. “We’re supposed to be partners in this thing. Do you trust me or not?”
Chris backed away from the stairs. Who was playing the good guy in that little drama? And how would she ever be able to tell?
What if McLellan was the mole?
Ignoring the bolt of regret that shot through her, she slipped back into the engine room. She could do her part and make sure the device actually was a transponder. Kneeling next to the tool chest, she made two quick slashes with a craft knife through the block of white sealant securing the box to the floor. Her fingernails just fit inside the slash. She pulled up gently. The box rose slightly as the remaining sealant flexed and gave. Perfect. She’d be able to cut the transponder loose later, maybe park it someplace where it’d confuse whoever was following them.
A satisfied smile welled up in her soul. Oh, if it came right down to it, she could cause a helluva lot of confusion.
Chapter 9
Late that afternoon, Chris tossed her bath towel on a chair and stretched in the cool AC. After a day of screwing in wall panels and putting up mahogany trim, it felt good to be in her cabin. Alone. Away from the two men she should never have taken aboard.
She’d have been better off coming on her own. Taking on a pair of DEA agents might have seemed like a good idea two weeks ago, but it was sucking now. With every turn of the screwdriver, she’d wondered who to trust, who not to trust. One of the two men living on her boat was a liar. Possibly a mole. Possibly a killer. She’d call Gus tonight from the hotel.
In the meantime, she at least had this cabin to hide away in. A room of one’s own, she thought and mentally saluted Virginia. Virginia Woolf, who’d loaded her dress pockets with stones and walked into a river.
Maybe not a good role model for a seafaring woman.
Chris collapsed face down on her bed and sighed. Her shoulders ached. Her back ached. Her fingers cramped from clutching a screwdriver.
But God, Obsession looked good. And she’d talked to Natalie again, felt a little more confident every day that went by with her sister still calling her. As long as they were able to maintain contact, they might both stay alive.
Chris rolled onto her back, reveling in the box fan’s relatively cool air blowing over her clean, damp body. Sinfully wonderful, that’s how it felt. Her tired mind wandered over other things that felt wonderful: hot showers in winter, the fur of that Russian Blue cat her grandfather had had for so long, the black silk robe Natalie sent her last year.
She levered herself, exhausted muscles and all, from the bed and opened the hanging locker. Natalie’s gifts hung neatly in their protective plastic bags. Little black dresses Chris had never worn, chic linen pant suits meant for attending posh birthday parties and visiting art exhibits. Chris reached to the shelf above and drew down the black merry widow Natalie had sent, shook it out to look at it.
“She must have high hopes for my love life,” Chris murmured.
More likely, Natalie was judging Chris by her own yardstick. Natalie had never lacked for anything, including men panting after her. Chris had never had that kind of attention lavished on her. And she certainly had never had a reason to wear anything like this.
On impulse, Chris slipped into the lingerie. It clung and gripped and hugged parts of her that hadn’t been treated that way in a long, long time. She turned to the full-length mirror on her cabin door and froze.
That wasn’t her. But it was, long and lean and curvy all at the same time. Her sun-streaked hair, now dry, flowed over her shoulders in soft waves, bright against the black lace. Chris turned from side to side, checking out the lay of this strange new land. She looked…
Powerful.
Hell, in a merry widow, any woman would. Pure sex. That’s what this little scrap of material was about. Put it on in half a minute and get it ripped off in even less time.
Chris shivered. It had been a very long time.
She dug through the half-dozen shoeboxes in the hanging locker until she found what she was looking for: the black high heels Natalie had given her years ago. Chris slipped them on and walked slowly back to the mirror. The height made her legs longer and slimmer. When she turned, she had to catch herself on the bed corner. Damn heels. But she could see why men liked them. Or liked what they did to the female form.
She’d just never seen why on her own body before. Her fingers traced the line of her jaw, down her neck, over the lace and silk barely covering her breasts. Down her sides, over her slender hips, which no longer looked so boyish, to the line of lace dipping toward the cleft of her legs. How easy it would be to command a man to get on his knees before her, to let his hands stroke her thighs, to watch him pull aside the silk and lace to lean forward and put his mouth—
The image of McLellan’s dark head poised between her thighs startled her. Not him.
Yes, him.
McLellan wanted her. She knew it in her bones. Men were so mechanical. So automated. See the cute girl, get a raging hard-on. Could she use that knowledge—his weakness—against him? Could she force herself to be seductive, if only to distract a man who might be her enemy? To tempt him into believing he controlled her?
If it meant her survival, yes, she could. If it meant Natalie would be safe, yes, she could.
The thought of Natalie made her smile despite herself. Natalie had understood from the age of seven her power over men. How many evenings had Chris waited patiently while Nat, already adept at style and color, applied Chris’s makeup before a date? Natalie’s pinky had stuck out at a precise angle while she penciled eyeliner with a master painter’s skill, her tongue tucked firmly in the corner of her mouth while she daubed blush onto Chris’s cheeks.
Chris awkwardly stepped out of the heels to put them back in their box, then paused. There, in the closet’s back corner, sat the metal box she
’d put there two days before Obsession had left Galveston.
Chris pulled it out and sat cross-legged on the floor to look at its smooth surface. After a moment, she opened the nightstand drawer without getting up and plucked a small key taped under the drawer’s bottom. She unlocked the box.
Inside, the Ruger 9mm lay, black and expressionless, in its foam cutout.
If I’d had this the night Eugene Falks broke in, I wouldn’t be worried about him now.
It was one reason she’d not bought a gun until now. Without touching it, she could remember the cool steel in her hands, the gunpowder’s musky scent with its curious, tangy afterbite, the controlled leap when she squeezed the trigger. The handgun course wasn’t required for her captain’s license, but she’d heard so many cruisers debate the pros and cons of firearms aboard that she’d taken a six-week course, just to see for herself. In all her range hours, she’d never missed a target. And standing there, firing round after round, she’d known suddenly just how easy it would be to solve the problem of fear with a single bullet, a crook of her finger. Come here, the gesture said. Come here and die. The sense of power. The seduction of control.
It’d been the reason she hadn’t bought one before. But after Falks, after her conversation with Smitty…
She studied the Ruger’s gorgeous lines for a moment, then took it from its foam bed. So real. A little heavy for her, but the action was smooth as silk, the kick reassuringly solid. She pulled back the slide. Empty chamber. She ejected the magazine. A full ten rounds.
Chris slapped the magazine back into the gun. After a moment’s thought, she racked the slide to load the chamber. She stood to put the gun in the nightstand drawer, then caught sight of herself in the mirror.
The sex goddess was packing.
She smiled a small smile, enjoyed the moment, before she laid the Ruger in the drawer. The gun’s box and the merry widow—her secret weapons—went back in the closet.
The nightstand loomed heavy with threat beside her. Would she be able to use the Ruger if it came to it?
She saw again Eugene Falks’s single eye staring at her in the shaft of light.
Yes. She’d be able to use it.
In a heartbeat.
From Chris’s first glance around The Blue Note, the French Quarter restaurant had two kinds of patrons: serious blues lovers and serious lovers. The blues lovers clumped around small tables near a low stage where a band played a jazz tune so cool she had trouble following the music. The lovers paired up in high-backed booths and sat together on the same wide bench, a single dim lamp suspended over the table and the lovers’ hands busy beneath it.
“Classy joint,” she remarked dryly as the maître d’ showed her and McLellan to the last corner booth. She drew her jacket closer over one of Natalie’s ubiquitous little black dresses, conscious of McLellan’s warm hand on her waist.
He waited for her to sit down, then slid into the seat across from her. “I’m glad it survived Katrina. It’s my favorite.”
Given the restaurant’s clear division of clientele, for which? she wondered. The music or the making out? Or for making connections with Scintella?
Then again, she thought later, cutting into a delicately seared piece of sea bass, it might just be the food. The steaming sauce, a luscious combination of crab, cream and peppers, set off the fish’s tang perfectly. Heaven on a plate.
“You look like you’re enjoying that.”
“It’s almost as good as your cooking.”
Had she laid it on a little thick? She glanced up and found his gaze riveted to her open jacket top. Before she could call him on his gawking, he said, “I think you should take that jacket off.”
“Brazen lech,” she returned. God, it was hard not to shudder. But with revulsion or excitement? She didn’t speculate. She set her wine glass down carefully on the white linen tablecloth. “You’ve been hitting on me one way or another since we left Galveston—”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“I don’t think you are.” She studied him in the dim light. “You’re a handsome man. You’re charming and clearly used to getting your way with women. If you were sorry, you wouldn’t keep saying provocative things.”
His sudden grin proved all three of her points. “And here I thought you were complaining about my groping.”
“That’s next on the list.” She didn’t smile.
His teasing humor faded until his expression settled into stone. He paused while the waiter removed their plates, then he leaned forward to grasp her hand. “I’ll be honest with you.”
She let her fingers rest in his, trying to ignore her heart’s pounding. “About what?” she asked lightly.
He abruptly released her. “I’m attracted to you.”
Her heart’s pounding became almost painful, like a thumb throbbing under too tight a bandage. “And there’s a problem with that?”
“Hell, yes, there’s a problem.” He tossed his napkin onto the table as if the situation irritated him. “I’m on a mission. I can’t do my job if I’m hot and bothered over you.”
“I guess that would be a problem.” She deliberately imagined him on the phone with Scintella as she tried to get control over whatever emotion was making it hard to breathe.
His scowl deepened. He reached for her again, then stopped himself and grabbed his dessert spoon instead. While he turned it over in his hand, he said almost angrily, “Let’s have this conversation in Galveston, when we can do something about it.”
“Assuming we both make it back to Galveston.”
He glanced at her, then studied the spoon again. “I’ll get you home, Christina. The question is whether you’ll have the time. You’ll be busy with your sister, getting your charter business up and running. I’ll—” He trailed off as his gaze went to the front door, which was out of Chris’s field of vision. His eyes suddenly lit up, pleased.
“Excuse me,” he murmured as he left the booth without a backward glance.
Chris swallowed hard, then leaned partly out of the booth to see what had pulled him away from his declaration of lust for her. She watched him stride purposefully toward the door, then pull Halle Berry toward him and kiss her warmly on the lips.
Chris turned back to her excellent glass of wine, relieved by disgust. It figured. If he was as free with his “affections” as Smitty had implied, he’d mug down on any pretty woman, no matter which side of the law she walked.
But it took the pressure off, she suddenly realized. His gesture toward this other woman reminded her who he was and what he wanted to do—and she didn’t want to jump into the sack, much less a relationship, with a crony of Jerome Scintella’s no matter how good his hands had felt on her that night. She took a deep breath. Regaining perspective was always a good thing.
I’m after Natalie and nothing else.
Then McLellan leaned into the booth, a warm, open grin on his face. He smelled faintly of the woman’s perfume, something musky and sensual. “Christina, this is Jacquie Adair and Russ LeBlanc. This is Christina Hampton.”
The good guys had arrived. Chris let go of a faint sigh of relief and shook hands with the perfect Jacquie, faintly surprised by the friendly warmth radiating from the woman. Another agent who didn’t look like one.
“I’m so pleased to meet you,” Jacquie said. She flashed a brilliant smile as she slid gracefully—while wearing a long, slinky dress—into the booth across from Chris.
“Mon dieu, so am I,” Russ murmured.
Chris shook his broad, powerful hand. Definitely cop material. She smiled into his alert, hazel eyes and took in his severe haircut, the character lines around his eyes, and his almost military bearing. In his dark suit, he reminded her, of all people, of Antonio Garza.
“Have a seat.” McLellan sat next to Chris and draped his arm across the bench back behind her.
While Russ and Jacquie ordered drinks and McLellan rearranged his and Chris’s wineglasses, Chris studied them. Russ and Jacquie had the eas
y familiarity of a married couple. Chris would have gauged them to be opposites: her gorgeous and cultured and elegant, him plain and earthy and matter-of-fact. They sat near each other, but there wasn’t the same physical affection she’d briefly seen between Jacquie and McLellan.
Had McLellan and Jacquie been lovers? Were they still?
“How’s it going?” Russ asked McLellan once the waiter was gone.
Jacquie’s voice was all whiskey and smoke as she added, “I didn’t think we’d see you again.”
Chris tossed a sidelong glance at McLellan. “Did they kick you out of town last time you were here?”
“I left in a hurry, but it was for a good reason.” His fingers lightly touched her shoulder, then he leaned in to say in a low tone, “I’ll tell you later.”
“Are we havin’ dessert, chère?” Russ asked Jacquie.
“Death by chocolate, as soon as possible,” she said at the same time as Russ. They laughed and Russ raised his hand to flag down the waiter again.
“What’s your boat?” Jacquie asked.
Surprised by this abrupt entry into business, Chris said, “She’s a custom design. Nineteen sixty-six.”
“A classic,” McLellan remarked, pride emanating from his voice. “Gorgeous yacht.”
“Think it’ll fool the island security?” Russ asked.
“I’m counting on it.” Chris ran her finger over the rim of her wineglass. “I’m not leaving my sister with that madman.”
No one said anything for a long moment. The band had picked up a slow blues tune—one that made “woe-is-me” sound like seduction—that throbbed in the walls while the harmonica’s raspy notes cut through the cigarette smoke that hung over the tables. McLellan’s body radiated tension and Chris struggled not to be overwhelmed by the dark mood suddenly enveloping them.
“We’ll get her back,” McLellan said. “We’ll do what we can.”
“I know the risks.” Chris turned to take him on, will for will. “I know there’s a good chance this might go down wrong and people will end up hurt. Natalie could be one of them.”
Dead Reckoning Page 13
