by Kate Johnson
A few years younger than himself, but not much. “And no independence?”
Eliza laughed bitterly. “I can go wherever I want, so long as I don’t go alone. My family is… very wealthy,” she said finally. “It’s not considered very safe.”
“I see.” Oh, hell. Over-protective parents, lots of money, awkward meeting people… Jesus, please don’t be mafia. Please don’t.
“Do you?”
Xavier looked down at his hands on her shoulders, fingers caressing the sore skin, and hated himself for jumping to conclusions. Plenty of people made lots of money legitimately. Surely her family fell into that category, and he was just a suspicious bastard.
“I see why you wanted to stay on this island a little longer,” he said, and she turned then, hope in her eyes. “Away from the world?”
“Yes.” She reached for him, tentative, and Xavier did it for her, slipping his arms around her and holding her against him. She smelled sweet, like coconuts, and her bare skin was hot. “I know we have to go back,” she said, her head on his shoulder. “And I do want to, honestly. Being stranded on a desert island isn’t half as much fun as it looks on telly.”
“Nothing ever is.”
“But with you…” Her fingers played at the nape of his neck, which sent extremely pleasant shivers through him. But with me…?
Eliza’s lips brushed his skin. “It’s not so bad, I guess,” she said, affecting nonchalance.
Xavi smiled. “I guess I don’t mind you either,” he said, and she looked up, smiling, and kissed him.
“Maybe,” she said, as his hand cupped her breast, “maybe you should show me some more of what I’ve been missing?”
“Gladly,” said Xavier.
Sleeping naked under the stars might have seemed romantic, but Xavier knew what kind of bugs lived on these islands and didn’t fancy meeting them when he had no clothes on. He cuddled Eliza close inside their little tent, careful of her sunburn as she fell asleep.
What would happen when they were back in the world? Her possibly-Mafiosi over-protective parents would come find her, presumably, the minute she could get word to them. If a boat or a plane came tomorrow, theoretically they could be back in civilisation in a few hours. A telephone call or two would set a chain in motion for her, and then…
And then she might end up at the British Embassy, or whatever they had in Nassau, while he’d be shipped back to Miami ASAP. His mission had failed, and they’d have to set up someone else to infiltrate these assholes. Unless maybe they’d all been so busy shitting themselves they’d run aground on some coral somewhere. He could but hope.
Small justice, though, for all the lives they’d ruined. For the good Miami-Dade patrol officer Jorge had shot dead last year, for the half-starved drugs mules intercepted at Immigration, for the girls like Eliza they’d stolen, never to be seen again. For Benita.
He needed the gang to be taken alive, because they were only the smallest tip of a very large iceberg.
Morning came, and with it the squawk of some loudmouth bird far too close by. Eliza stirred in his arms, blinked up at him, then blushed and smiled.
“Hey,” he said, and she snuggled in close. He kissed the top of her head, then said, “I have to go, honey. Little boy’s room.”
She made a sleepy nose and curled into the warmth he left behind. Xavier smiled as he left her.
The fires on the beach had almost died down. It wasn’t light yet, so he busied himself building them up, teasing them into flame.
“We should put some leaves on,” said Eliza, and he turned to see her watching him, drinking from the plastic bailout jug. She was tousled and sexy in her hot pink t-shirt and bikini bottoms, her legs long and brown. “To make them smoke.”
You’re already smokin’. “Good plan,” he said, and they spent a while collecting palm leaves and arranging them over the pyres. By the time they were done the fires were high and the beach filled with smoke.
“That should get their attention,” he said.
He kissed her for a while, standing in the lee of the trees and watching the smoke rise. It might still be days before anyone came. He might have this time with her.
She felt so good in his arms, so absolutely right. This woman he barely knew, full of contradictions and unexpected revelations, whose blue eyes looked up at him with something that looked like trust mingled with despair. He didn’t want this to be over any time soon.
He had to figure out how to keep her in his life.
He was teaching her how to use the rudimentary fishing net he’d rigged when she squinted into the distance and said, “What’s that?”
Xavier squinted too. Something moved on the horizon.
“Is that a ship?”
Hope and disappointment mingled in him. “It might be. It must be.”
“Where’s the mirror?”
Xavier had it in his pocket. He fumbled it free and flashed it nine times at the horizon: three short, three long, three short.
“We should get our stuff,” he said, because he didn’t even have his shirt on and they were both barefoot. “If we have to climb the coral—”
They raced back to the camp, and he flashed the signal several more times. Eliza was trembling, and took two tries to get her shoes on.
“They might just sail right on by,” he warned her.
“Or they might not. Oh God, Xavi. This could be it.”
She fell into his arms and he held her, breathing in her scent of coconuts and hot skin.
“It’s not over,” he said. “Even if we leave, it’s not over. You know that, don’t you?”
She nodded, and then her attention was dragged back out to the boat. “I think it’s getting closer,” she said, peering through the smoke.
“Maybe.” Xavier looked around at their pitiful collection of belongings. He clipped his pocket knife and machete to his belt alongside his gun and handed Eliza her knife, the cord of which she slung around her neck. She still had on her hat, and it seemed to him that she’d been wearing it longer than three days.
“Eliza,” he began, and ran out of words.
She opened her mouth as if to speak, and didn’t seem to know what to say either. She brushed his cheek with her fingertips, kissed him softly, and took his hand.
They ran down to the shore, and Xavier set off a flare. If the boat had seen them, that would definitely get their attention.
For several anxious minutes they waited, hand in hand, Eliza bouncing with something that looked like a horrible combination of excitement and dread.
“It’s definitely coming closer,” he said.
“It definitely is.”
Xavier peered at the coral reef. At high tide, like now, it was completely submerged, and their life raft might even have swept over it. They’d noticed a few small gaps in it, which a person might swim through if they were careful, and it looked as though it might come to that. Whatever kind of boat was coming their way wouldn’t be able to breach the reef without scuttling itself.
He kept flashing the SOS signal, and it came closer, and he turned to Eliza and kissed her deeply while he still could, and then said reluctantly, “We should go out to the reef, make sure they stop before they get there.”
She nodded, and they waded out, swimming towards the coral. The sunlight on the water was blinding, and that was why Xavier didn’t recognise the approaching boat until it was too late.
“Hey!” Eliza yelled, waving her arms in the air. “Here! We’re here! Come and get us!”
“No,” he cried, and her head whipped round in confusion, just as a figure appeared on the deck of the Rosa and lifted a gun to aim at Xavier.
“Get down!” he yelled, blood thundering in his ears, and dove under the water. He tried to get to Eliza, to pull her down, because bullets wouldn’t move properly under water, only then he had to come up for air and everything seemed to happen at once.
The surface of the water flattened out, because it wasn’t his blood thunderin
g in his ears, it was a helicopter above.
The force of the water and the tide drove Eliza away from him, into the coral, and she screamed as it ripped her to shreds.
There was a loud bang, and something knocked him back into the water, like being punched by a giant.
On the deck of the Rosa, Jorge stared him down as he fired again, and the clear water of the lagoon began to cloud with red.
Chapter Six
There were a lot of people.
People in uniforms of various kinds. Army, maybe. Navy. Medical. Large men in black with guns and helmets. Urgent faces shouting medical jargon. An English voice babbling into a radio, “We have her, sir, we have her.”
Xavier was taken away from her, surrounded by people who quickly got covered in all the red blood spurting from his chest. Eliza screamed and screamed, and then things faded away for a while and when she came back to herself she was covered in bandages and sitting in a hospital bed while people told her how lucky she’d been.
“Where is he?” she kept interrupting to ask.
“Your father? He’s on his way. Your mother and sister too—”
“No. Xavier. They shot him. Where is he?”
No one seemed to know. No one would tell her. Even after her parents arrived, bursting in and hugging her and scolding her and hugging her some more, no one would tell her where Xavier was.
Everyone kept Your Highnessing her. Eliza yearned to be called Princess by someone who didn’t know she was one.
She wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital until they’d pumped her full of fluids and antibiotics and God only knew what else. She was put into a luxurious car and driven to a luxurious hotel where she was given a luxurious bed to sleep in, but sleep wouldn’t come.
The whole right side of her body throbbed with pain that her pills only dulled a little. She didn’t dare peek under the bandages to see the damage the coral had inflicted. Whispers about scar tissue and plastic surgeons reached her through the closed door. People kept pausing as if changing their minds about what to say to her.
It took a while to realise her bedroom was completely devoid of any kind of mirror.
A press conference was arranged, with everyone asking if she ‘felt strong enough’ and casting surreptitious glances at her face. By the time Eliza finally got to see her own reflection, she was used to the dressings on her arm, her hip, her leg, all around her eye socket. The mirror didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know, and she wasn’t allowed to see what lay underneath.
Whenever she switched on the TV, there was an over made-up news anchor gushing about the kidnapping and rescue of the British princess. Interviews with her family at home, who all looked very concerned and then very relieved, as the news came through. Melissa, tearful and remorseful, the snake.
Eliza didn’t move from her bed, surrounded by room service debris, zapping channel to channel watching the same old footage of her in a terrible hat from her cousin’s wedding. Zap. The deserted beach. Zap. The hat. Zap. The news tickers full of nonsense.
And finally, “We can confirm the identity of the man airlifted from the scene as Xavier Rivera, a narcotics detective with Miami-Dade Police Department. Detective Rivera sustained serious wounds apparently at the hands of the original kidnappers, whose pursuit led the rescue forces to the remote beach where he and the princess had been sheltering. Detective Rivera was stabilised in Nassau before being flown to Miami for further treatment. His condition is now described as fair. The kidnappers have been taken into custody…”
Fair. Fair was good, right? Fair wasn’t critical or serious or dead.
When she closed her eyes she could see the lagoon turning pink with his blood.
Eliza picked up the phone by her bed and called Anker, her mother’s private secretary who was co-ordinating things in Nassau. “I need to get to Miami,” she said without pre-amble.
“Your Highness, you really should be resting—”
“If I rest any more I’ll go insane. I need to see Xav—to have,” she corrected herself, painfully, “the opportunity to talk to Detective Rivera before he talks to the press.” There, that sounded good.
“We’ll send someone.”
“No. I want to talk to him. I spent three days on an island with him. Let me bloody talk to him. I am a princess and I demand it,” she snarled, tears coming to her eyes.
Anker was silent. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and that was probably as good as Eliza was going to get right now.
Xavier woke to flowers and teddy bears and at least one of his colleagues pacing outside his room at all times. He endured the jokes and the manly hugs and the congratulations, which he didn’t think he deserved.
“Smile, Rivera,” said Lieutenant Silva, a tough woman who had just delivered a press conference about the incident. “We got the bad guys, the princess is back in the bosom of her family, there’ll be medals all round by teatime.”
“Yeah, you’ll probably get a knighthood,” said Villanueva. “Those Brits do love a knighthood.”
“Maybe a tiara,” said Perez.
“Yeah, you’d be cute in a tiara,” said Villanueva.
“Guys,” said Xavier. He was exhausted, despite not moving for several days. He couldn’t. He was wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy. “Is she okay?”
“Your princess? Sure, far as we can tell. They don’t let any details out.”
They? Who was she? “What’s happening with the Rosa crew?”
“Jorge Lopez was shot but survived. The other two taken into custody in the Bahamas. It’ll be a legal tangle working out jurisdiction—”
“Exactly what we didn’t want,” Xavier sighed, because cases like this were complicated enough.
“However, he shot and severely wounded an MDPD officer, which goes against him. We got this, Rivera. All you got to do is recover.”
“Recover, sure.” Because a gunshot wound to the chest was easy to recover from. “I’ll probably be out rock climbing by the weekend.”
Perez, who’d been watching the silent TV, suddenly turned it up. “There’s you, boss,” he said, and they all looked up to see Lieutenant Silva speaking to the press. She was mostly giving the details she’d just given to him, the assembled reporters clearly bored with the case details and impatient for something else.
Like who Eliza was. Please don’t be mafia. Please.
“Any questions?” TV Silva finally asked, and a thousand voices clamoured for attention. She looked resigned.
“Any questions not about Princess Elizabeth? As I have stated, she is under the care of her family and they will release a statement in due course. I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
“When will they release a statement?”
“Is the princess staying in America?”
“Is she dating the cop?”
The real Lieutenant Silva zapped the sound. “That’s enough of that.”
Xavier frowned at the screen. It had gone silent, but the picture showed a fuzzy, smartphone clip of a fleet of Escalades arriving outside a luxury hotel. Security staff blocked the view of the passengers being hurried inside.
Princess Elizabeth.
His colleagues were talking, but Xavier wasn’t paying attention. On the screen there was now an inset picture of Eliza, his Eliza, smiling off-camera. She wore an insane-looking hat that vaguely resembled a lobster. Under it was the caption ‘British Princess Elizabeth rescued by Miami cop.’
Princess Elizabeth. Princess.
“Xavi? You okay?”
“Princess?” he said, wondering if he was having a bad reaction to whatever was being drip-fed into his arm.
“Yeah. We can’t get any details. You know the Brits, they got sticks up their asses about the Royal Family.”
“Nassau says she was discharged yesterday. You were probably in surgery.”
Silva peered at him. “Can you guys give us a minute?” she said to the other two, who protested, but left. Perez snagged some fruit
on the way out.
“Rivera. What’s up?” said the Lieutenant, when they were alone.
He stared at the TV until the story changed, but the ticker along the bottom still kept telling him Eliza was a princess.
Well, at least she’s not mafia.
He nearly laughed at that. “When you said ‘princess’ I thought… it was a joke, I used to call her that.”
Perez eyed him shrewdly. “You didn’t know?”
“No.” Sheltered background. Wealthy parents. No privacy. Not mafia, but this is… yeah, this is probably worse. “I thought she was just some rich kid. Seriously, a real princess?”
“Seriously. Her mother is the daughter of the Queen. Fourteenth in line for the throne, so they tell me.”
Fourteenth. Throne.
“Holy shit,” whispered Xavier.
“You really didn’t know?”
“No! I thought it was a joke!”
Ohhhh shit. He’d had sex with a princess.
The shock must have shown on his face. “I’m gonna fetch a nurse,” said Silva, getting to her feet.
“No, I’m okay,” he protested, weakly, but she was gone.
Xavier would have put his head in his hands if one of them hadn’t been strapped to his chest. He’d had sex with a princess. And she’d been a virgin. Had he just committed treason? Was she supposed to be pure before marriage? How the fuck was he supposed to know?
The nurse came in, declared he was fine but should have some rest, and added, “Oh, Detective. Some more flowers for you.”
A candy-striper brought them in, two bouquets of colourful local flowers. She looked terribly excited. “Read the tags!” she said.
Xavier gestured that he couldn’t take them, not with one arm out of action. “Can you?”
“Oh! Sure. ‘To Detective Rivera, with our most humble thanks for the safe return of our daughter. HRH The Princess Royal’,” she squealed at that part, “and these are from the Duke of Suffolk, ‘with greatest thanks for your valiant deeds’!”
Not Eliza. She hadn’t sent him anything.
“Wow,” he said, for the candy-striper’s benefit. She was bouncing with delight.
