Blooming in the Wild

by Cathryn Cade

She glared at him, her hands fisting at her sides, and the bedside bouquet trembled. She glanced over at it, suddenly remembering the sharp florist wire she’d often used to brace long stems in a bouquet. If she could make it to the bedside table…

  “Now,” he ordered, stepping closer, his knife flashing threateningly between them. “Or I give you a haircut you won’t forget.”

  Glaring at him defiantly, Bella did as he ordered, pushing her hair back, baring her breasts to him.

  He stared at them for a full moment while her skin crawled, and she fought tears of impotent rage. Somehow she found the courage to stare back at him while he looked her over. She could not control the hot blush of humiliation that covered her face and chest, however.

  She held her chin high, her teeth clenched. She would not let them use this to intimidate her. It was only a little more skin than she usually bared, and she was more than the sum of her female parts. She was herself.

  The others were all gathered on the outer deck. They did indeed look as if they’d gathered for an onboard cocktail party. Cassie and Tanah, huddled on a divan, wore flowered sarongs tied about their necks halter-fashion. Joel and Matt still wore their swim trunks. The four still had bare feet, as Bella did.

  Camille wore a silver silk-tissue pantsuit, and her hair was styled elegantly, her face made up.

  A new man had joined her. Tanned and beefy, like a once-fit athlete gone to fat, pouches under his cold eyes, he wore a dark Hawaiian shirt and slacks, his gray hair expensively styled. He lounged on the divan beside Camille, a highball glass in his hand.

  Everyone stared at Bella as she stepped out onto the deck, followed by Li, who melted away to the fringes of the group. The other girls’ eyes widened with horror, and Matt shook his head once, his handsome face tight.

  The stranger stared avidly, his mouth curving up in amusement. “So this is your new toy, Camille.”

  Camille looked Bella over, her face lighting up with satisfaction. “Yes,” she purred. “Isn’t she amusing? Rather like one of those little dolls one sees glued to dashboards, swaying back and forth.”

  Fighting the urge to wrap her arms over her bare breasts and shrink into a small huddle of flowers, curl into herself in the L where the wall met the door, Bella found Joel. She focused on his face like a lifeline, because despite his coolness earlier, somehow he was the one man, the one person she didn’t mind seeing her like this. Just looking at him steadied her, cut through the bitter haze of humiliation.

  Joel was lean and handsome in his damp shorts, the awning overhead setting off his tanned skin. His wet hair was combed back sleekly from his face, setting off the jewel brightness of his golden-brown eyes.

  But his stance and the look in his eyes were at odds with his casual appearance. He was furious, his face as hard as a carving, white lines pressed at both sides of his mouth. He looked into her eyes, and then slowly lowered one eyelid in a partial wink, as if they were the only two who mattered. Her heart swelled with the tenderness of his gesture, and tears filled her eyes. She blinked them away.

  Joel turned on Camille. “So now that you have us all here,” he said, “mind telling us what this is about?”

  “Oh, drinks first,” Camille chided, clapping her hands. “Then we’ll have story-time.”

  A slim blond man came out of the cabin and walked behind the bar at one side of the deck. Without a word, he pulled out a bottle of champagne and began to uncork it.

  Bella took a step toward Joel, and Camille gestured sharply, like an irritable director on a set. “No, stay there. You don’t move. You’re the entertainment, after all,” she added roguishly.

  The cork popped, and champagne bubbled into flutes, which the bartender passed out. Everyone took a glass and held it, except Joel, who shook his head. They looked like an ad for luxury yachting, Bella thought, if they weren’t so stiff.

  Only Camille and her friend were relaxed, sipping their champagne. Bella could feel the man’s gaze crawling over her like a touch. Camille’s gaze flicked from Bella to Joel and back again.

  The bartender did not offer Bella champagne, which was a good thing, as she would have thrown it in someone’s face. She’d drunk two glasses of water in the bathroom, so she wasn’t thirsty.

  She focused on Camille, now a different person than she had appeared on the photo shoot. Gone was the wry, humorous smile, the twinkling eyes. In their place was a hard edge of triumph, as brittle as the edge of the crystal flute she sipped from.

  Never again, Bella vowed through the humiliation that gripped her, would she ignore her instincts about someone. If she had insisted that DelRay replace Camille that first day, none of this would have happened. Of course, perhaps Li would have pulled out that automatic weapon then and there. If Camille had this kind of money and power, she would have made sure her plan went into action one way or the other.

  And who was the man? Was he one of the Helmans? Had the Ho’omalus been mistaken to think them all dead? Was Camille his wife or mistress?

  “Now then,” Camille said grandly, waving her flute of champagne. “As our action hero so cleverly guessed, this is about Miss Ho’omalu.” She glared at Bella, and her face changed, an ugly scowl behind the careful cosmetics.

  “Yes, it’s about her,” Camille hissed. “Look at you. Such a fresh young thing, on the cusp of your life. You’ve just discovered that you’re a member of a large, wealthy family, so you can come here and live like a Hawaiian princess. Choose your groom from one of the wealthy elite here and live out your dreams in paradise.”

  Her acquaintance stirred, frowning uneasily. “Now, Camille, take it easy. You said—”

  She turned on him like a snake. “I said you’d get what you wanted, Decker. That was our deal, and this is my part of it. Stefan and Denas are gone, but I’m here—and I will have my revenge.”

  “Because you’re a Helman,” Bella said.

  Camille swung her gaze toward Bella. Her skin crawled. This was a dangerous woman, as well as an unbalanced one. Was dressing Bella in such a sexual fashion merely to humiliate her, or did Camille plan to give her to the man as some kind of horrid gift?

  “Yes, I am a Helman,” Camille agreed proudly, rising from the divan. She touched her heavy pendant, stroking the shape. An H, Bella realized. Not the Z she had first thought it. The clue had been right in front of her nose the entire time, and she hadn’t recognized it.

  “And thanks to your dear family—so noble, so true to their Hawaii—I am the last of my line.” Camille’s voice sank to a sibilant hiss, and icy fear slithered through Bella’s middle.

  “How do you figure that?” Joel asked, shifting. He shoved one hand in the pocket of his swim trunks. “The news reports said their deaths were accidents. Stefan fell into an unstable volcano vent, and Denas died in a diving accident. Near here,” he added, turning to look back at the shore yards away.

  Only now it was farther away than it had been, Bella realized with horror. They were underway. The big engines had been idling when they boarded, and she had not realized until now that they were moving. Away from the shore, away from safety.

  “You may be gullible enough to believe the news reports,” Camille said. “But I’m certainly not. No, I was there when Stefan reported to Denas that he was having a problem with some local landowner who’d had one of his men thrown in jail. ‘Ho’omalu’, he said. Then Stefan and five men died on the mountain, very near Ho’omalu land.”

  She whirled and paced across the deck and back again like an actress enjoying the spotlight, Bella thought spitefully. But she was an actress who knew her lines all too well.

  “Then we lost another man,” Camille continued. “In a mysterious explosion aboard his boat. And I was with Denas in Kailua when a tattooed local caused trouble with men we’d hired. He threw them off the public dock and then insulted my brother. His name? Ho’omalu. The same man who we were told had miraculously escaped injury when that boat went down.”

  She drained her champagne f
lute and held it at her side. “Then Denas died, supposedly in a diving accident. With all his men? I didn’t believe it, any more than I believed that Stefan’s and his men’s deaths were accidental.” She turned and pointed her glass at Bella. “No, it was your family who killed my last two brothers. And now…”

  “And now what?” Joel demanded contemptuously. “You’re going to kill all of us?”

  Tanah gasped, and Cassie whimpered quietly. Joel ignored them, striding across the deck to Bella. He lifted his hands, pulling her hair forward over her breasts, and stood at her side. “You’ll never get away with it,” he said to Camille. “Too many people know where we are. And we were due back in Kailua Harbor about now. When we don’t show up, they’re going to come looking for us.”

  Bella moved closer to him, feeling warmed and protected despite the continued peril of their situation.

  “He’s right, Camille.” Camille’s friend, or compatriot, whoever he was, levered himself off his seat, and stood, shaking his head chidingly at Camille. “I won’t be a party to any kind of physical violence. You never said anything about that.”

  “Then perhaps you should leave now,” Camille said, her nostrils flaring with displeasure.

  “I thought we were going to have dinner?” he protested. “I just got here. I didn’t fly over from Honolulu just to head right back.”

  She cocked her head at him. “Choose, Decker.”

  He shook his head again. “I’m going, then. But don’t do anything stupid. You mess up this land deal, and it’ll be billions down the drain. Neither of us can afford that.”

  He turned away, waving his hands in gesture that dismissed the situation and everything that happened here.

  “Yeah, don’t forget to call the police when you get there,” Joel suggested sarcastically.

  Tanah erupted off the divan, stepping into the big man’s path. “Take me with you,” she begged, her hands clasped in entreaty. “I want to go to Honolulu.”

  “So do I,” protested Cassie. “And Matt.”

  “Oh no, no.” Camille waved her empty glass. “That would ruin my party. Besides, you three are my insurance policy.” She winked at Joel, and Bella felt rather than heard his soundless growl of rage and disgust.

  The beefy Decker pushed Tanah away with what looked like regret and strode away across the deck and out of sight down the steps leading to the back of the yacht. They heard a boat motor start up, and a moment later, a sleek motorboat sped away, headed west toward Kona.

  Chapter Fourteen

  To do: Faced with hostile persons in a foreign setting, the tour director will remain calm, while attempting to contact proper authorities.

  “So,” Joel said through his teeth. “You’re Camille Helman. Would that be the LA Helmans, who sell drugs, illegal weapons and people when they can get them? I believe I’ve heard about your family on the news.”

  Camille perched again on the empty divan, waving her glass at the silent bartender for a refill. The trio sank onto their divan like deflated balloons, watching her.

  “But you never saw any arrests,” Camille reminded Joel. “Merely annoying trials and speculations. No, the poor police and FBI just can’t seem to get enough evidence to pin anything on us. Besides, one must make a living. If there weren’t idiots lining up to buy what we sell, then we wouldn’t be so successful, would we?”

  “LA’s pretty rich pickings,” Joel said. “What are you doing here? These are just islands, when all’s said and done. Just little dots on the map.”

  She gave him a chiding look, swinging her slender foot, shod in a silver ballet flat. “Hawaii is not just ‘islands’. It’s the American paradise. And I”—she took a drink of champagne—“am going to own a very large chunk of it before I’m through.”

  “Using your drugs,” Bella guessed. She looked up at Joel. “That’s why she’s here, to sell the drugs her brothers’ chemists dreamed up in their labs and get Hawaiians hooked on them. Kona Kula—Kona Diamonds, a sick play on the Kona Gold nickname for the marijuana grown here.”

  Camille raised her glass in a mocking toast and drank again. “Good, good. You’re so clever. But not clever enough, because I’ve got you, haven’t I, Miss Ho’omalu.”

  Bella shivered. This woman changed moods with such mercurial swiftness, perhaps she used drugs herself.

  “Yes, you’ve got it all,” Camille murmured, almost to herself. “Your family is wealthy, and they’re respected, even revered here. Artists, landowners, philanthropists. They look after their island as if they were patrons.”

  The polar opposite of her own family in every way but one, Bella realized with sickening clarity. “You hate me because even with all your money, you’ve never been looked up to, admired. People in LA must be afraid of your family. Hurting me won’t change your life,” Bella said, her voice shaking. “It will only make it worse. If you sink to your brothers’ level, you’ll destroy yourself.”

  “Sink to their level?” Camille erupted from the divan, throwing her champagne aside. It landed in Cassie’s lap, and she gave a little shriek of fear.

  Joel moved, his arm outstretched like a protective barrier before Bella, but Bella’s gaze was locked with Camille’s. She felt as if she had loosed a spitting serpent from its cage.

  “My brothers would have chewed you to a bloody pulp and spit you out in the streets, you stupid little piece of Hawaiian twat,” Camille hissed. “They were my heroes. All my life I watched them and emulated them. My mother was a weak fool, addicted to her prescription drugs and her booze, but I watched, and I listened, and I learned. Oh yes, I fooled everyone. Chameleon—that was the nickname my brothers gave me, because I could always make people believe anything I wanted them to.

  “ Camille is such a society girl, but so useless,” she mimicked. “Good thing they kept her out of the family business. A woman could never run an empire like that. She’ll have to marry someone who can take over, now that her brothers are gone.

  “But no more hiding, no more Chameleon. I’ll show them all my true colors. Beginning here. I’ll sell my Kula to your natives. They’ll fight to get it, believing it will aid them in their traditional worship—the fools!

  “When I’ve finished with the Ho’omalus and all your ‘people’, not to mention all those who’ve looked down at me and are trying to horn in on my family’s business…well, let’s just say they’ll change their tune.”

  Tossing her head, she sat down again and snapped her fingers at the bartender. “Now, let’s have some Hawaiian music. And our little doll can dance a hula for us.”

  Taken aback by the flood of bitter revelation, followed by this lightning change of mood, Bella gaped at her. Then she shook her head. “Sorry. I don’t know how to hula.”

  As the rich strains of Hawaiian guitar and ukulele filled the air, Camille waved her hand. “Well, I’m not particular. Make something up.”

  Bella looked her in the eye. “No.” No matter what, she would not dance like a puppet on a string for this woman.

  “Oh.” Rather than looking angry or disappointed, Camille merely pursed her lips, as if biting back a smile. Then she beckoned, and Li came sauntering forward. Bella tensed—she’d forgotten the little snake.

  “Then off you go,” Camille said like a parent to a naughty child. “If you’re not going to dance, you can go to your room.”

  But the sly laughter in her eyes promised much worse. Bella realized that Camille had known she would refuse to dance. She had something else in mind—something that involved Li.

  Li grasped Bella’s arm and yanked at her. Joel held on to her other arm, reaching for Li, and the nearest of Camille’s men, the big, bald one, strode forward from the boat rail.

  “Joel!” Bella screamed as the man raised his weapon. Joel turned, and Baldy struck him across the side of his face with the butt of the weapon. Joel fell back against the wall of the cabin with a thump.

  Li yanked Bella away from him. She dug her heels in, straining to see ov
er her shoulder. “No, no. Joel!”

  Had the blow killed him? Was the thug even now beating him down with the weapon?

  Li pulled her through the main cabin, down the passageway, and pushed her into the small stateroom.

  When he let her go, she scrambled away from him, back across the bed, to crouch in the plush pillows at the head. She was trembling, her heart pounding.

  He put his knee on the foot of the bed and leaned over toward her, his eyes alight with malicious glee.

  “Get away from me,” she cried.

  “Too bad you didn’t stay to dance. ’Cause now you’re mine,” he crooned, crawling onto the bed. “I’m gonna have fun with you, little hula girl.”

  “No!” Bella screamed as he leapt across the bed at her. She kicked at him, but he grabbed her skirt and held on, holding her there as he levered himself up and over her, pinning her to the bed.

  “I’m gonna fuck you,” he hissed, his breath hot on her face, his eyes bright and fierce. “And then maybe I’ll cut you. I like to cut pretty girls. The prettier, the better.”

  “No,” she gritted, jabbing at his eyes with her outstretched fingers. “You’re not!”

  He yelled as she dug her nails into his sockets, narrowly missing his eyeballs, and then yanked her head back with a handful of her hair, glaring at her from his reddened, swelling eyes. “No more Mr. Nice Guy,” he hissed. “For that, I’m gonna cut you first and then fuck you while you bleed.”

  She struggled wildly, but he held her fast, and his knife appeared before her face, the blade shining as he held it before her eyes, waving it teasingly, his chest shaking with that silent laughter.

  Bella strained away from him, watching the blade come closer. Then she heard a crash, and water splashed over her bare shoulder. She peered to the side. The bouquet had fallen, and the flowers were littered on the bed, their wet stems glistening.

  “How about if I start right here?” Li asked, touching the knife blade to her throat. “Maybe you’ll bleed out while I’m fucking you. That would be fun.”