SeductiveIntent

by Angela Claire

“No time for chit chat,” the pirate, if that’s what he was and it was certainly looking as if it was, answered.

  “Look, if it’s the yacht you want, it’s yours,” Brendan offered, taking Sophia’s hand as he did so.

  “Most generous, Mr. Beckett.”

  Sophia felt an almost imperceptible squeeze of her hand at the pirate’s use of Brendan’s name. She knew what that meant too. This was targeted, not a random “ships passing in the night” pirating as it were. Perhaps this was a kidnapping.

  “But your offer is most unnecessary. We have in mind other more lucrative ‘booty’, if you’ll pardon the expression.” The pirate looked her up and down in a way that caused her to feel nauseous.

  “Just leave the girl here,” Brendan said, snatching his hand back. “She means nothing to me and she can convey your ransom demand.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid we require both you and the lovely Miss Sophia.”

  At the use of her name, she shot the pirate a startled look. “Just what the hell is going on here?”

  With an order to take them rattled out in German, the spokesman turned away and several men came forward to prod them up and out onto the deck.

  Brendan didn’t offer his hand back to her, whether he was trying to protect her with seeming indifference or whether the pirate’s use of her name made him suspicious again, she couldn’t tell. Hard to believe that in this dire situation that she would even care one way or the other, but she did. More fool she.

  The pirates pushed them into the motorboat they’d apparently arrived on. Since they didn’t tie their hands—automatic weapons being so much more of a statement, probably—Sophia wondered if she should make a move. Arthur had taught her a thing or two on that score.

  “Don’t,” Brendan muttered, in Spanish. She looked at him sharply. “There are too many of them with those guns. Let’s just see where they’re taking us. Agreed?” He didn’t glance at her as he spoke and the men guarding them, if they had noticed he was speaking Spanish rather than English, didn’t seem to care. It appeared that except for the leader, who spoke English, these men spoke neither, but who could be sure?

  She nodded, though Brendan wasn’t looking at her.

  “Is there any chance these guys are mixed up with your partner?” Again in Spanish and he didn’t use Arthur’s name, perhaps purposely in case they were.

  “I don’t know,” she answered honestly, in Spanish as well. “And I don’t know which way that would cut anyway.”

  He said nothing as they revved the boat out to sea at first, and then cut in a different direction, though she couldn’t tell which. Not back toward land, in the direction they’d come, but she couldn’t be sure which way in the dark night. Brendan made no further effort to speak to her, in Spanish or in English.

  Probably thought he couldn’t trust her. Add to that her worry that she couldn’t trust Arthur, if he was mixed up in all this, and that she was probably in even more trouble if he wasn’t, and she was having a really shitty night.

  * * * * *

  Captain Michaels had assured Sam and Mindy that he could pilot The Ann on his own without the need to round up the rest of the crew, who were undoubtedly dispersed all along the bars and hotels of the island, well on their way toward full-blown intoxication anyway. Sam agreed just because at this point he was so fucking worried.

  Beckett hadn’t answered the radio call they put in.

  “You just don’t know, Brendan, Sam,” Mindy had responded to whatever look the lack of radio response had put on his face. “He’s probably just got that Sophia in bed and believe me, he won’t hear anything until he’s done. He’s a total pig like that. A one-track mind, I’m sorry to say, and don’t get me wrong, I love him. He’s my brother. But really, sex is all he thinks about with somebody like that girl.”

  She’d rattled the speech off as the captain backed the motor boat out of the dock. The fact that Mindy was even with them hadn’t been his idea, but the former navy SEAL was a pussy about taking orders and since she was a Beckett, blah, blah, blah. Even the fact that they didn’t know what they were heading into didn’t change the captain’s mind. Why should it? He hadn’t heard the story Arthur had given him. He just thought he was taking an obnoxious paranoid asshole and his boss’ baby sister out to the yacht to interrupt his boss in his play, which the guy didn’t look too happy about either, but orders were orders.

  At the last second, Arthur had shown up on the dock and jumped on board the motorboat.

  “Great, let’s just bring everybody along,” Sam muttered.

  “If Sophia is okay, I’m not going to let her take this alone.” The Chameleon looked exactly as he had earlier. Sam was a little disappointed.

  “And if she isn’t?” he asked.

  “If she isn’t…” the guy faltered.

  Great. He just hoped he wasn’t steering them all into some trap the luscious little Sophia had engineered. Two Becketts for the price of one or something.

  Mindy smiled at him serenely.

  Or something worse.

  Chapter Eight

  If this was the Grand Caymans, it was an isolated portion of it. More likely, it was one of the sister islands, Little Cayman or Cayman Brac or even one of the smaller unnamed islands. The pirates, or whatever the hell they were, beached the motor boat on the deserted sand and led Brendan and Sophia through some tangled scrubland to what looked like some kind of spooky deserted plantation house. In disrepair and abandoned by the looks of it, the house had vines growing through the window frames and any glass panes were long gone. Shoving them up the rotting stairs to a room on the second floor, the pirates locked the door, barring it as well by the sound of it. There was probably at least one man left outside to guard too, though they heard the rest of them go downstairs.

  Inside the room, which Brendan could just start to see with the beginnings of dawn, there was nothing but some crude wooden chairs and a table, the floor no more than rotted wood. They’d be lucky if they didn’t fall through it.

  Brendan had been careful to look at Sophia as little as possible during all this time since they had been taken off The Ann. It should have been because he was suspicious of her, but it wasn’t. Maybe it was the mark of a superb con-woman that she made him believe so completely in her fear. He hoped it was. He hoped Sophia hadn’t been wearing the expression she was wearing—the few times he’d been unable to resist making eye contact with her—because she was really scared out of her wits and knew no more about all this than he did.

  Fuck, he hoped to God she was just taking him for all he was worth, because he couldn’t stand the thought that she might really get hurt in all this.

  How lame was that?

  “What is going on?” she asked, though it sounded as if she might have just been asking it to herself.

  “No clue,” he said, keeping to Spanish for the hell of it, he supposed.

  “I really don’t know, Brendan,” she said in the same language. “I swear.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I guess I believe you, but I don’t know what that says about either of us.” He collapsed into one of the chairs. On top of everything else, he had a hell of a hangover. “You speak Spanish pretty well, by the way.”

  “Well enough.”

  “To play a Spanish maid?”

  She looked at him sharply.

  “Once I knew who you were, I figured it out. It was you I was defending in that Four Seasons hallway. What a joke, eh?”

  She fell to a crouch in front of him, switching to English. “It wasn’t a joke, Brendan. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I know it’s not good and I want to tell you something. Nobody ever stood up for me like you did, ever. I was, I don’t know, hooked, I guess, ever since that moment.”

  He reached out a hand to touch her face, her cheek so soft. “How could a man ever trust you, Sophia?”

  She jerked her head back as if he had slapped her. Then she stood up, looking down on him. “How can anybody ever trus
t anybody? Even if I wasn’t who I was, if I was just a girl you’d picked up at a wedding, could that girl trust you? You, who’d slept with how many pretty girls and lost interest? What’s one more to you? How could a girl ever trust somebody like you, rich and handsome and experienced? Will you ever fall in love with anybody, Brendan, and will she be able to trust you?”

  She was right. And fuck, maybe it was the residual of the whiskey and the memories of last night—not to mention the adrenaline of the fear—but he kind of felt as if he already had. But he’d be damned if she’d ever find out about it.

  “Let’s just leave our little drama at the door, Sophia. I’ll take it as a given that you don’t know why we’re here any more than I do. I guess then I’m going to assume this is a plain vanilla kidnapping of a rich man. Maybe they only knew your name because you’re the babe the rich man had on board. Maybe somebody in the crew was even complicit.”

  She crossed her arms, looking doubtful.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, except it seems like an awfully big coincidence.”

  “Well, it does to me too, but you said you weren’t involved.”

  “I said I wasn’t involved. I said I didn’t know about Arthur.”

  “No honor among thieves, is that it?” he responded, unable to hide the disgust from his voice. “Nice crowd you hang around with, honey.”

  “It’s not like that. It’s just that Arthur was getting his marching orders from somebody else. I mean, we had targeted you, the way we always—” She halted abruptly, as if remembering who she was talking to.

  “By all means, go on, unless you’re afraid of giving away trade secrets.”

  She stiffened. “Fine. We targeted you the way we always target rich guys. We usually allow a few months for surveillance. Not constant of course. In fact, the least amount of surveillance over that period that we can in order to avoid arousing suspicion and still get as much intelligence on the mark as possible. We do the surveillance in disguise usually, which is why I was dressed as a maid that time. I was searching your room.”

  “Nice to know. Find anything of interest?”

  “No, but by the by, I got trapped in the closet when you came back unexpectedly with that woman, I forget her name.”

  “Me too. Oh yeah, Kim. She’s a bitch.”

  “Yes, I could tell right away how much thought went into your carnal relationships.”

  “And you just listened to the whole thing, did you?”

  “Actually, I watched it. Remember how those closet doors were, the slats?”

  “Oh yes, how nice for you. You should have come out and joined us. I do that too sometimes, jaded playboy that I am.”

  “Thanks, but I wasn’t dressed for it.”

  “So what was your point here, other than to creep me out?”

  “I seem to be good at that. Virginity, voyeurism, they all creep you out. You’re surprisingly conventional, Mr. Beckett.”

  “Your point?”

  “My point is we had put only a few weeks into the job when suddenly Arthur said we didn’t have time for the usual methods. He insisted that we had to search your apartment instead and plant the bugs and then go to the wedding the very next day. That was bound to make anybody suspicious.”

  “Anybody but me. I just trotted off to the Caymans with you.”

  The little witch had the nerve to smile at that. “It was really very sweet.”

  “Enough,” he said sullenly.

  “My point is somebody else was calling the shots, not Arthur.”

  “That’s not how it usually is?”

  “Almost never. Especially not in the last few years. And he wouldn’t tell me why the box was so important.”

  “Oh, yeah, the famous puzzle box.”

  “Where is it anyway?”

  “Is this the part where I tell you what you want to know, thinking we’re in the same boat? And then once you’ve gotten the information you need, you admit this was all a hoax and you’re behind the whole fake kidnapping thing?”

  “Sadly, no,” she assured him. “Though I would like to know if you even have the damn thing.”

  “Not anymore.” They had been speaking in English and if this was the information their captors, or even Sophia herself, was waiting for, they were welcome to it. He tilted back on one leg of the chair. “I bought the box originally for Virginia as a wedding present. The guy who offered it to me would only take cash and I thought it was neat. Not neat enough to merit all this fuss of course.” He gestured around them. “Go figure.”

  “Where’d you get it? Arthur wouldn’t tell me that either. Maybe he didn’t even know.”

  “There was this Italian guy at a house party I was at a few months back. He was kind of an asshole, but he was talking about it one night and I thought it sounded intriguing.”

  “Talking about it how?”

  “See, this is just perfect.” He couldn’t help but smile, even though he wasn’t a hundred percent sure he was kidding. “I’m going to unwittingly give you whatever morsel of missing information you need and your partner’s going to pop in, making it clear you were just luring me on with this ‘damsel in distress, in the same boat as me’ thing.”

  “Well, could you hurry it along then? I have a facial to get to and we have to knock you off and everything afterward.”

  He grinned, shaking his head. “I guess this kind of thing is no big deal to criminal masterminds—”

  “Petty thieves.”

  “—like you, but I’m scared shitless.”

  She shrugged. “You don’t look scared shitless, by the way.”

  He put a hand to his pounding head. “I’m too hung over to show the proper amount of cowardice.”

  Laughing, she came behind him and set two fingers on each of his temples, massaging lightly. His eyelids dropped closed. “God, that feels wonderful.”

  She said nothing as she massaged him into jelly for a few minutes. “You didn’t show cowardice back there,” she finally said softly. “You tried to get them to leave me on the boat.”

  “Mmm.” He didn’t want her to stop the head rub. “Think how stupid I’m going to feel when I find out you’re behind all this.”

  The fingers stopped. “You don’t really believe that, do you, Brendan?”

  He opened his eyes to find her leaning over him, waiting for his answer. He kissed her lightly. “No.”

  She smiled. “So tell me the rest of the story. About the Italian guy.”

  “The Italian guy. Right. So anyway, this guy at the house party was going on about this puzzle box he had inherited from his South American grandmother. She’d gotten it from some Nazi after the war. Or maybe the grandmother was German. I don’t remember. Both maybe.”

  He leaned forward and pulled her by her hands on to his lap, kissing her nose. He cuddled her close, as if they weren’t in a probably life-threatening situation. He just wanted to hold her, to feel her in his lap. “And you know how in a puzzle box, there’s usually one part of the box that moves to the side and opens another part that opens another part and so on in a combination sort of until the real box in the middle is revealed?”

  She nodded, looping her arms around his neck.

  “Well, he was claiming that no one could figure out this combination, but that according to his grandmother, there was some incredible jewel inside. Apparently it had belonged to Goring’s wife. He was going to show it to us, but then with one thing or another—”

  “What happened?”

  “His girlfriend, the hostess of the party, caught him in bed with my butler.”

  “Your butler?” She laughed.

  “And anyway, we didn’t see him after that.”

  “The Italian guy with the puzzle box or your butler?”

  “Unfortunately, not my butler. But the guy with the puzzle box showed up a few weeks later and offered to sell it to me for fifty thousand dollars in cash.”

  “Tell me you didn’t pay him that!” He apparent
ly looked guilty enough of such stupidity, and was, that she marveled, “I could’ve bilked you for a fortune.”

  He kissed her, hard. “Still could if we make it out of here. But anyway, I kind of felt I was paying it more along the lines of blackmail to get him out of my butler’s life, my life I guess, and I did think the box was cool. It was just the kind of thing Virginia might find neat, although she’d probably be able to open it in seconds flat, which would take all the fun out of it. But then there was supposed to be this jewel or something inside.”

  She kissed him, long and leisurely.

  “What was that for?” he asked breathlessly when she lifted her head.

  “Well, you’re about to get to the part about where the box is and since my evil cohorts and I have to knock you off right afterwards, I thought I’d sneak a kiss in. You’re a really good kisser.”

  He bent his head to her again, demonstrating the point. “Thanks,” he said when he was done. “You too.” His hand wandered down to her luscious ass, fondling. “But I don’t care how sexy and kooky you are, you’re not going to lure me with your wicked ways into having sex with you while we’re under armed guard,” he murmured.

  She wiggled her bottom in his lap, demonstrating she was aware of his erection, and exacerbating it in the process. “Oh yeah? No condoms, Mr. Responsible?”

  “More like ‘don’t want my dick out and in the middle of something when automatic weapons are in the vicinity.’”

  “Okay, so where’s the box then?”

  “It was in a drawer in my desk at the office. I’d put it there, intending to ask my secretary to wrap it for the wedding.”

  “You chauvinistic pig.”

  “Absent-minded chauvinistic pig. I forgot all about it.”

  “So what did you give your sister for her wedding?”

  He grinned.

  “And you’re a bad brother too,” she whispered, laughing.

  “So I told Sam Kendon where it was.”

  “Who is he? Oh, wait, that’s the big tattletale who ratted me out, isn’t it?”

  “Otherwise known as the private investigator I hired to find out who broke into my apartment and held me at gunpoint. Yes.” He kissed her, long and leisurely, one hand at her ass, another dipping under the neckline of her tee.