by Lily Harlem
Lifting her head, bottom lip trembling, she gazed ahead. “Of course it has crossed my mind, but I can’t think who it would be. They’re all so…nice and if Tommy had suspicions then—”
“Who is this Tommy?” Jose interrupted.
“My manager.”
“The one you’re going to report me to, right?” Dillon cut in.
She glanced out at sea, narrowing her eyes at the bright reflections bouncing off the glassy surface. “Yes.”
“So you know their full names?” Jose asked. “Every single one of them?”
“Of course.” She turned to look at him.
“Your security people have done thorough checks to make sure their names are genuine? No one has changed their identity in the past?” He rested his palms on the table and leaned forward, staring into her eyes. “It’s important.”
“Well…” She frowned, eyes darting back and forth. “I trust—trusted—my security staff. I just let them deal with everything…”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have,” Jose said. “Maybe you should have had some say in who was employed. After all, it is you who is to be protected. Did you not want to be involved in the process?”
She appeared worried, biting her lip like that again.
Jose sighed. “Come down into the living quarters with us. We have a laptop with access to privileged information. Tell us their names. We’ll determine who is who and which one, if any, you must fear.”
Chapter Five
I limped across the sun-hot deck toward the entrance to the galley. I was pleased with the suggestion to go below because I was sweating. Little droplets forming on my temples and in my cleavage. I hated to sweat—sweating was gross whether it was from physical heat or nerves, and this was a mixture of both. Soon I would somehow have to wash without getting my foot wet, otherwise I would start to smell bad.
Neither guy offered to help me down the steps, but it was okay, because with my dress shortened, even with my tender foot and cuffed wrists I could move much easier.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim light of the kitchen area, an image of Jose’s expression when he’d come on deck and seen me standing in my harshly cut mini-dress came to mind. He’d widened his eyes despite the solar glare, and slackened his jaw causing his lips to part. I’d noticed his knuckles pale as he’d gripped the tray and couldn’t help but wonder if the blood from his hands had rushed to his cock.
It was a look I’d seen a million times before, and I knew then and there that he was a fan; he was just trying to act cool about it. Dillon, on the other hand, couldn’t care less if I was an award-winning country and western star or a grubby street urchin trying to pick his pocket. At one time that would have annoyed me, but not right now. Right now what I needed most was someone with a steady head to look into my dilemma. I got the feeling Dillon might be just the man for the job despite his rough edges.
When the sun had started to scald my shoulders and Jose had gone below deck to put on more coffee, I’d eventually struggled down from my perch and headed into the partial shade of the green bimini covering the seating area.
Dillon had drawn in a deep breath and through clenched teeth had asked me to start from the beginning. Almost as though he didn’t want to hear, but knew he had to. Not out of politeness, I was sure, just out of some strange cop obligation.
At least he was showing some humanity.
I recalled our conversation.
“At first it was notes in the mail, through the fan club,” I said. “Scores of them and with a variety of zip codes.”
“Any correlation to places you’d visited or performed in recently?” he asked.
I thought for a moment. “Yes, I think so. No one told me much about it, though. But I heard Tommy discussing extra security with a stage manager before a concert in Louisiana. It freaked me out the way he was demanding this and that so I made him tell me the whole story.”
Dillon rested back and folded his arms over his wide chest. The dark haze of hairs on his forearms meshed with the swirl of body hair in the center of his sternum. He cocked his head. “And the story from Tommy was?”
I blew out a breath, my stomach turning as I remembered the fear that had swept through me back then. “That the notes from this particular fan had increased in frequency and any sweetness or admiration had gone. Now they were just pure malice.”
“Death threats.” Dillon didn’t say it as a question, more of a statement.
Nodding, I looked out to sea. Studied the horizon and wondered what the hell I’d ever done to anyone to deserve my life being brought to a brutal end. “Yes, death threats. Lots of death threats.”
“And did forensics look at these notes?”
“You mean like fingerprints?”
“Yeah, fingerprints, DNA, semen, the usual stuff.”
“Semen?” I turned back to him, shocked.
He shrugged. “Weird guys do weird things.”
“So you think it’s a guy?”
“No idea, but if there was semen on the note it would rule out half of the population.”
“I guess.” I pulled my hair back into a ponytail to allow the salty breeze to fan my hot neck. “But no, forensics found nothing. No fingerprints, no DNA, no stray hairs, no…semen. They said it had been very skillfully done.”
He drummed his fingers on his left biceps. “And then what? How did nasty notes escalate to a panic situation that had you high hopping onto my boat?”
“Because whoever is stalking me was there, at the restaurant in the marina.”
He raised his brows. “How do you know this for sure?”
“Because when I went into the restroom there was a single word on the mirror.”
“Which was?”
“Now.”
Unfolding his arms, he rested his hands on the table, fingers splayed. “And that one word had you running like a crazy chick?”
I let go of my hair, felt it fall down my back with a swish and frowned. “Yes, because the note I’d had that very morning, under my hotel room door, had read soon. What the hell was I supposed to think?”
“You thought that soon he would come for you?”
“Of course, soon he would come for me, soon I would die. I’d seen the other sick notes by then.”
“Tommy showed you?”
“I made him.” I pursed my lips, remembering the argument we’d had. They were few and far between, disputes between Tommy and me, but that had been a row of volcanic proportions. I sighed. “The things the writer of my notes was planning to do to me were beyond twisted, way beyond a normal person’s imagination.”
“So you were stuck in the restroom with the man you thought to be your would-be killer?”
“Yes.” I swallowed down a bolt of nausea. The images his strangely cut-out words conjured would be forever burned into my mind’s eye.
“Did you see him?”
“No, but there was another cubicle occupied and I’d had an odd encounter with a man with a mustache and dark glasses when I’d gone in.” I dropped my head in my hands. “Trouble is this has all made my brain fuzzy, made me kind of paranoid. It was probably nothing, this other man.”
Dillon was silent for a moment and I concentrated on taking deep breaths, willed my mind to recall the events clearly and stop hopping all over the place. “But I’m sure there was someone else in there. There must have been. How else would they have written on the mirror?”
“Maybe it was there when you walked in and you just didn’t notice. It could have meant something else entirely or been for someone else’s eyes.”
I shook my head. “No, I looked in the mirror as soon as I stepped in. It wasn’t there before.”
He rolled his eyes, as though I’d looked in the mirror out of vanity and he would have expected nothing less of me.
“If you must know I gave myself a bit of a pep talk.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I was upset, on edge. I didn’t want to be. I wanted to enjoy t
he meal with my friends and not let some psycho spoil my entire day. I told myself to snap out of it.”
He drew down the corners of his mouth and placed his elbows on the table. “I guess I can’t blame you for that.” He paused. “So someone definitely wrote it while you were in the cubicle?”
“Yes, and they were waiting for me to come out. That’s why I jumped through the window. It was my only means of escape. I couldn’t get past them to the door. And then once I was outside, I heard someone slamming around in the restroom. Banging the doors angrily. Within seconds I was being chased through the alleys. It was awful, really fucking awful.”
There was a long pause.
“I see,” Dillon said eventually. “You should have explained more clearly before.”
I glanced up. Jose had come back up with a tray of fresh coffee. He looked tense and worried. No doubt he’d heard some of the conversation.
A worried cop didn’t fill me with confidence. A worried cop meant there was something to worry about. Something to fear.
“I would have,” I said, reaching two handedly for one of the mugs of coffee Jose set down. “But things didn’t exactly happen where I could slot the information in, did it?” I sighed at the memory of Dillon finding me and scaring me stupid, cuffing me like a criminal.
“I suppose not.” Dillon ran a hand through his fringe causing it to stick up messily. His brow was damp with perspiration and the slick black hair in the center of his underarm was plastered to his body in the shape of comma.
“Put yourself in my position.” I tugged my gaze away from the stretch of his torso as his arm remained raised and he fiddled with the strands at the nape of his neck. “For all I knew, you could have been him. Yes, I’d been running from someone, but there could have been two of you sending me those notes, working together. You could still be those two.” The coffee was strong and hot. I blew the surface, creating tiny ripples. “I mean, anyone can get fake cop badges, and if I saw one I wouldn’t know any different.”
“Listen.” The base of his bluer-than-blue eyes softened ever so slightly, and he reached forward and placed his hand on my arm. A big, hot hand that was firm and steady.
“I assure you we’re cops, and we’re not the ones sending notes. Now, exactly how long has this been going on? Give me a timescale.”
Jose had pulled up a lounger and sat next to us. He looked too calm, like his mind was working on overdrive yet he was trying to give an air of nonchalance.
“Quite a while.”
Why are my damn hands shaking?
I proceeded, as calmly as possibly, to tell them everything I’d made Tommy tell me, every last detail and some that just came to me about the night before. Dillon listened intently and though his eyes hadn’t softened further at my story, they glinted with intelligence and perhaps the hint of him rising to a challenge. Jose even threw in the possibility of someone on my team being the one sending the notes.
Now, sitting below deck at the table, I watched Dillon pull a laptop from a black leather bag and whir it to life. Jose fiddled around in a cupboard and began to bang what looked like bread and cheese onto the counter.
I’d been missing only twelve hours but surely a grand investigation would be underway by now. The police would be involved and probably the coastguard too. But what if someone on my team was part of the whole terrifying scheme? I’d be getting passed straight back into the danger zone again when I was found.
The thought didn’t bear thinking about. It would be a no-brainer to be safe here with these two—even if they did insist on cuffing me—and then jump into the hell that was my life again. I wasn’t stupid. I could accept it was a possibility someone I trusted was the one, but I didn’t want to.
I glanced between the two police officers and realized that I’d have to put my faith in them, even if it was just for a little while. It was hard, though. Tommy had always been my rock, my pillar of support. Hell, why wouldn’t he be? I had known him most of my life and he’d never done anything but put me first. Even, I felt, at the expense of his own career. There had been a time he was singing to audiences too, and playing the guitar as though he was born strumming.
“Come on,” Dillon said, tapping the side of the laptop. “Don’t play up on me today.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“It’s just being slow, it’s not the most up-to-date model and sometimes getting a connection out here is bad.”
“Oh.”
A silence descended over us. I glanced at a narrow door that I suspected to be the toilet.
“Do you mind if I use the bathroom?” I asked.
“Knock yourself out,” Dillon said, scratching the right side of his collarbone in an irritated kind of way.
I looked at Jose. He was staring out the small porthole next to the sink, a slight frown on his face, a hunk of bread held aloft in his hand.
For a brief second I wondered about asking to have the cuffs removed, but then figured what was the point. Why waste my breath?
I grabbed my purse from the bedroom then headed into the bathroom. It was tiny, minuscule, and I had to step over a high lip to get inside. There was a toilet, a small shower cubicle and a sink that you could barely fit both hands in at the same time; which was a necessity for me. Even so I took the opportunity to freshen up with a dry, white washcloth and a tiny bar of green soap. I stole a blob of toothpaste and did my best with my index finger. It was strange having to make do. Normally people fell over themselves to ensure I had everything I could possibly want—and more.
Opening my purse, I sighed when I saw it was an engraved compact mirror Meredith had given me for Christmas that had broken when I’d slung my bag from the restroom window. Shame, it was of sentimental value as well as being solid silver—perhaps I could get if fixed when this madness was over.
Miraculously the perfume bottle was still intact, so I spritzed some on, gave my lips a faint slick of gloss and tamed my messy hair into a more acceptable state.
I stepped back out into the cabin feeling less disheveled and my foot finally feeling more normal; the throbbing had mercifully stopped. Jose was still staring out of the porthole. Dillon was tapping away on the laptop, flying his fingers over the keys with well-practiced speed.
“Jose,” I said quietly, wondering what he could see outside that had captured his attention so fully.
He didn’t answer.
I stepped up to him, my bare feet almost silent on the wooden floor. “Jose, what is it?” He had a strange, faraway look in his eyes. He was hardly blinking and a slight frown creased his forehead.
Sidling up next to him, I went on tiptoes and my cheek came level with the ball of his shoulder. I stared out the small porthole. There was a boat in the distance, bouncing through the water and creating white frothy waves in its wake.
“Who do you think that is?” I gasped.
“What?” He jumped, dropping the lump of bread. “Shit, Dillon. We’ve got company. We’re going to have to make decisions quick.”
Dillon sped to another window, stooping to peer out as he pressed his hands onto the wall. “Fuck, I knew it wouldn’t take them long.”
“Who is it?” I asked again, studying the white and red boat that appeared set on a collision course with our vessel.
“It’s the damn coastguard,” Dillon said.
“But, but what will we do?” I staggered away from the window, my butt crashing into a cupboard behind me. “You haven’t done the checks on my staff. I could just be throwing myself into the lion’s den, I—”
“Shh, it’s okay.” Jose reached forward, gripped my upper arm and steadied me. “We’ll handle it, Miss Moore.”
“But.” He stepped up close and I could feel heat from his bare chest burning toward my cleavage.
“We just need to know one thing for sure,” Dillon said, looming next to Jose and doubling the amount of heat and intensity surrounding me.
“What?” I asked, trying to keep the quiver
from my voice. They were both so damn big. I felt like a bird in a cage, two hungry tomcats licking their lips and staring at me.
A shiver wound its way up my spine; my stomach clenched.
“Do you trust us?” Dillon asked, narrowing his eyes so much that I could barely make out his blue irises.”
“I-I think so.” Was I was making a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea?
“You think so?” Jose asked in a low, soft voice as he raised his eyebrows and swept his tongue over his full bottom lip.
I gulped and stared at the sheen of saliva his action had left behind. “I mean, yes, yes I do.”
Do I have a choice?
“Good,” Dillon said sharply, cupping my jaw with his palm and lowering his face. He brushed my chin with his thumb. “In that case, get yourself hidden. Go to the room you spent last night in and let us deal with these guys.”
I glanced at the shut door to my left and was aware of my heart thudding. Was I making a terrible mistake? Should I be shouting and screaming for the coastguards to come and save me? Get me away from these men I hardly knew, but had been conveniently there when I was being chased—too conveniently maybe?
“It’s okay,” Jose said, “just keep real quiet and let us do all the talking.”
“But…” I looked over his shoulder to the steps leading up-deck. Should I make a dash for it? Could I with the damn cuffs on? How much time did I have?
“Listen, honey,” Jose said, sliding his hand up to my shoulder in a soft, sweeping gesture. “If there is one thing that really riles both Dillon and me it’s seeing a woman scared or hurt, so I promise you, we’re on your side.”
“Yeah,” Dillon said, still cupping my face. “You’ve got us fighting in your corner now, everything is going to be just fine. We won’t let any sick, cowardly, note-sending bastards hurt you.”
“You won’t?” I looked between them, my mouth dry, my chest tight.
Two sets of earnest expressions. Two grimly set jawlines.
“We promise,” Dillon said. “But right now we’re out of time, so get your ass in there and hide beneath the covers.”
“But what if they search the vessel?”
