Perfect Strangers

by Tasmina Perry

  She crawled over, gripped the bag between her teeth and pulled it over his hair.

  ‘Finally,’ coughed Josh.

  Sophie smiled in the dark, despite herself.

  ‘What do you think they’re going to do with us?’ she asked.

  Josh stiffened as another wave of coughing seized him.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said at length. ‘But I doubt they’re taking us to the movies.’

  They lay there on the floor, listening to the engine. They weren’t making many turns: were they on the highway? Heading out of town? Sophie couldn’t even tell if they had been driving for five minutes or twenty. All she could do was lie there watching yellow lights from the crack in the door sweep across the roof of the van.

  A single tear rolled down her cheek and Josh shuffled up closer to her.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he said softly. ‘We’ll get through this.’

  ‘It’s slowing,’ she said, her body tensing again. ‘We’re turning off the road. What are they doing?’

  Suddenly the rear doors opened and Sophie was grabbed by the arm by one of Sergei’s men and yanked out of the van. She was sent sprawling on to a dirt road, scraping her knees and the palms of her hands, still bound with rope. There was another thud and a groan as Josh landed next to her.

  Her stomach clenched with fear. This is it, she thought, feeling faint with terror. They were going to kill them. She looked at Josh and knew she just wanted to be held by him, to die with him. The Russian towered over them. She closed her eyes, her heart hammering, a faint groan escaping from her lips. Then she heard footsteps walking away from them, and the slam of a door. She opened her eyes and saw the van skid off, its wheels sending a shower of gravel into her eyes.

  ‘Josh!’ she yelled, scrambling to her feet and blinking in the setting sunlight as she watched the tail lights of the van disappear towards the horizon. Relief almost knocked her to the ground again.

  She wriggled her wrists around. The binding had not been put on tightly and she managed to get one hand free, then the other. She ran over to Josh and unfastened the rope around his wrists.

  He took her in his arms and she started weeping.

  Josh held her like that for a long time as she cried, stroking her hair, murmuring softly, ‘It’s okay, we’re safe, we’re safe now.’

  Right then, she only cared that she was alive and in Josh’s arms.

  Finally she pulled away from him and looked around. They were in swampland, possibly not too far away from the sea, as she could still smell the salt in the air and gulls circled overhead.

  Up ahead, they could see the yellow street lights of what looked like a main road. Josh stumbled and groaned, holding his side, and Sophie put her arm around him, supporting him.

  ‘So what now?’ she said.

  Josh nodded towards the road. ‘We should get back to Miami,’ he said firmly. ‘I wouldn’t want to be around here when it gets dark. It would be pretty lame if we survived Sergei and then got mauled by the gators.’

  41

  She could barely remember how they got back to the motel in Coconut Grove. Unable to reach Lana by phone, they had stumbled along the road, getting more and more anxious as the sun began to set, until finally a pick-up truck had stopped when Sophie stuck her thumb out to hitch a lift.

  She had never been more glad to see a hotel room. She double-locked the door, smiling grimly at the futility of it, and went to get some towels from the bathroom. Soaking one in warm water, she wiped the blood from Josh’s face, then carefully pulled off his still wet shirt, wrapped another towel around his shoulders and dried his hair.

  ‘TLC,’ she whispered.

  ‘I need to get beaten up more often,’ he chuckled, then winced, holding his side.

  ‘Should I call a doctor?’ she said, hating to see him in so much pain.

  ‘Nah, I’ve been roughed up worse than that back in Edinburgh.’ He smiled.

  She sat down on the bed next to him.

  ‘I don’t understand. Why did they let us go?’

  Josh shrugged.

  ‘If they saw us at Miriam Asner’s, maybe they assumed we were being tracked. I bet Sergei and Uri are in enough trouble without having the SEC seeing us going into the Kaskov compound alive, then turning up dead the next day. Besides, they probably think they might still need us.’

  Dead. Sophie’s mind jumped back to that scene by the pool and she reached for his hand.

  ‘Josh, I thought they were going to kill you,’ she said, her voice cracking.

  ‘Hey, come on,’ he said. ‘I’m tough as old boots.’

  ‘We shouldn’t have gone to see Sergei; it was so stupid.’

  ‘We had to, Soph,’ said Josh. ‘Those guys would have kept coming after us until they got what they wanted. Now they have it, we’re safer than we were.’

  ‘I guess. But now they can find the money and none of Asner’s victims will ever see a penny of it. It’s all going to go on Sergei Kaskov’s polo ponies and manicures.’

  Josh gave a weary laugh.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said more seriously. ‘I’ve let you down.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No you haven’t.’

  ‘But you wanted the money.’

  ‘Not for myself,’ she said firmly. ‘I wanted the money for the old guy who lost his life savings. I wanted it for the family who lost their children’s college fees, I wanted it for all those people who worked really, really hard and thought they were doing the right thing to safeguard it by investing it. I didn’t even want it for my dad. He shouldn’t have hidden it, whatever reasons he had.’

  Sophie paused for a moment.

  ‘You know,’ she said softly, ‘when we lost everything, I really thought my world had fallen apart. I actually cried when the Mulberry bags went to the dress agency and I was almost inconsolable when I had to leave my Chelsea flat. I was a spoilt little bitch.’ She gave an embarrassed grin.

  ‘I can’t say that the Asner scam was the best thing that ever happened to me, but having money made me think I was happy when really I wasn’t. People think money is security, it’s freedom, and for many people I guess it is. But for me, it was just insulation. I was drifting. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t think I was good at anything – I can see that now. If you need designer bags and exotic holidays to be happy, then I’m not sure that counts as really being happy.’

  Josh looked at her for a long moment.

  ‘So what does make you happy?’ he asked.

  ‘You.’

  The word hung in the air between them, but Josh didn’t move. What’s stopping you? she pleaded silently, wondering whether she had read the signals completely wrong. But I couldn’t have, could I? And then he reached for her, his hand brushing her cheek, his fingertips barely touching her skin, the most tender thing she had ever felt. He moved closer, and she began to babble.

  ‘We should phone the SEC,’ she said. His lips brushed hers and then pulled away teasingly. ‘Tell them everything we know,’ she added, her voice trailing off into a moan. And suddenly he was kissing her – urgently, passionately. She could taste blood on the corner of his lip and wanted to be gentle with him, but her desire was as strong as his. Her whole body ached for him. Unable to wait any longer, she lifted her dress over her head as he snaked his arms around her back to unfasten her bra. Her breasts sprang free, and he pressed himself against her, taking her head in his hands, planting soft kisses on her lips as if he were drinking her in like sweet nectar he had been long denied.

  ‘You are so beautiful,’ he growled, his voice full of desire, and Sophie pulled him in to her harder, smiling. She felt on fire, every nerve ending alight, every sense, taste, touch, smell heightened, her lust making her dizzy. She reached down to unbuckle his belt, impatiently tugging his trousers down and off, wanting, caring for nothing but to feel him inside her.

  Josh couldn’t wait either. They fell on to the bed and he spread her thighs, pulling her sheer panties to one sid
e and then sliding into her in one movement. She gasped, moaned, exquisitely full of him. Clenching herself around him, she rotated her hips as they found their rhythm. In and out, hard, soft, quick, slow. Kissing her throat, her earlobes, her nipples, his stubble rough, his lips soft, the extremes of sensation driving her wild.

  She had never felt more intimately connected to anyone. He was passionate and yet tender, maddeningly sexy and yet gentle and loving. They had known one another barely a week and yet he found her sweet spots with such accuracy it was as if they had been romantically involved for years.

  She could think of nothing except the absolute pleasure of him being inside her, moving as one, her whole body shivering on the edge of climax until finally she cried out, biting his shoulder with such force that it surprised her when he moaned with contentment rather than pain. White-hot ripples of lust radiated from her belly down to the tips of her toes, wave after wave of glorious, pulsating pleasure. He came moments after her, and they lay in silence, calm, exhausted, slowing their breathing together, overwhelmed by the intensity of what had just happened.

  They made love again a little while later; slower, less frantic the second time around, with more time taken to explore and enjoy each other’s bodies. She took him in her mouth, savouring his taste, bringing him to the edge of pleasure, astonishing herself that she could make one man so wild with desire.

  She had no idea what time they fell asleep. So when she woke up in the middle of the night, she felt completely displaced. It was perfectly quiet. No ceiling fan, no noise of traffic on the street outside, just the faint sound of crickets and bullfrogs in the distance. For a second she tensed, before the blissful recollection of falling asleep in Josh’s arms came to her. She reached for him, but the other side of the bed was empty. Still drowsy, she sat up and pulled the white sheet around her naked body. Josh was sitting in a chair in his T-shirt and boxer shorts, bent over a reading lamp.

  ‘Josh?’

  He looked up, and when he didn’t smile, Sophie immediately felt a stab of pain: she didn’t regret what had happened for one second – did he?

  ‘Everything okay?’ she asked.

  He looked at her for a moment.

  ‘I think I know where the money is,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ she said, suddenly feeling wide awake.

  He held up a battered paperback book, and Sophie’s heart gave a jump – I Capture the Castle; she would have recognised that green cover anywhere.

  ‘How the hell have you got that?’ she gasped. ‘Sergei took it from us.’

  ‘Sleight of hand,’ smiled Josh. ‘When I was out doing my research on the Russians, I found a little second-hand bookshop. They had about five copies of I Capture the Castle, so I bought one and copied the name and the numbers into it. I knew the Russians wouldn’t know the difference.’

  She got up and walked over, wrapping a towel around herself.

  ‘Josh, why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I knew you wouldn’t have reacted in the same way. Sergei had to believe he was getting the real thing. I’m sorry.’

  He handed it to her. ‘And I thought you’d probably want to hang on to the original.’

  She looked down at the desk. Josh’s smartphone was sitting there, and he had been writing something on a pad.

  ‘So what’s all this about?’

  ‘You were right, Sophie,’ he said, excitement in his voice. ‘The book is the key to it.’

  ‘You know who Benedict Grear is?’ she said incredulously.

  ‘Not who, where,’ said Josh. Sophie sat on the arm of his chair as he turned to the front page. ‘We always wondered who Benedict Grear was, rather than what it was. You know why I thought of it? Walking into the restaurant yesterday, seeing all those tourists, thinking they probably thought the Steppes was named after the stairs at the front of the restaurant. Stupid, I know, but it triggered something in my mind: what if Benedict Grear isn’t a name?’

  Sophie frowned.

  ‘But it is a name . . .’

  ‘Yes, a name of a place, not a person,’ replied Josh, running his finger under the text. ‘Benedict Grear is Ben Grear,’ he said. ‘Ben is Gaelic for mountain. I did a search; there’s a Ben Grear in Scotland. And this number here?’ he said, pointing at the faint pencil numerals in the corner of the page. ‘Again, we were making wrong assumptions. We thought it was a date of birth or a sort code or account number. But it’s Ordnance Survey coordinates.’

  Josh picked up his phone.

  ‘There’s an OS Explorer map of the Ben Grear area and you can download digital copies.’

  He played around with the phone until he showed her a map page.

  ‘Look, here’s the mountain, and if you read off the numbers from the book, it gets you here.’ He tapped his finger on the screen, just below the mountain. ‘It’s a building, on an outcrop of land in this small loch. You said your dad always told you he’d get you your own castle one day, didn’t he? I bet that’s it. And I bet Asner’s money is hidden somewhere there.’

  He looked up at her, a wide grin on his face.

  ‘All we have to do is go and get it.’

  Sophie knew she should feel excited, she knew she should whoop for joy; after all, that was what they had been looking for all this time – the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But she didn’t, she just felt flat. The one thing this journey had taught her was that money only brought heartache.

  ‘It’s stolen money, Josh,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want stolen money. My dad would know that.’

  ‘Would he?’ said Josh.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Sophie, pulling the towel higher.

  ‘Listen, your dad loved you, right?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘And he knew you liked the good life. He would have wanted you to be comfortable, to give you everything you’d always wanted. Nice house, nice car, all that.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve met a lot of rich people in my time. Gangsters. Corrupt businessmen. You look at their wives, their grown-up kids, do you think any of them stop to question how Daddy is paying for it?’

  ‘I’m not like that!’

  ‘I know that, Sophie. But did he?’

  She suddenly felt terribly sad, because she knew there was a grain of truth in what Josh was saying – more than a grain, in fact. She had been fixated on material things: the shoes, the postcode, the boyfriend with a big engagement ring. And now she realised how little all that meant, but her dad had never met – would never meet – his new daughter and that was a tragedy. Maybe there was some way of making amends, maybe she could still fix it – but to do that, they had to get to the money before the Russians or anyone else.

  ‘We have to go to Scotland,’ she said quickly.

  ‘I’ll call Lana. Maybe we can get out of Miami this morning. We have to get there before Sergei works out what we have.’

  ‘Why didn’t you give him the false co-ordinates in the book?’

  ‘He’s not the sort of man you want to lie to. You just have to out-smart him.’

  She looked at him, doubt creeping in.

  ‘Are we going to call Hal Stanton?’

  ‘No.’

  She frowned. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we’re almost there, Soph.’

  She felt a cold shiver somewhere deep inside her. It was a moment before she recognised what it was. Doubt.

  She looked at Josh playing with a route map on his iPhone. There was a definite reluctance to get the authorities involved. Was that because he had an inherent distrust for the establishment? This was a man who skirted around the law, not worked with it. Or was it something else?

  An unwelcome thought began to present itself in her brain. A thought that made her pull her towel a little tighter round her body. Josh couldn’t have an ulterior motive for wanting to keep the authorities out of this, could he?

  As she tried to rid herself of the notion, Josh curled one strong arm around her waist. P
ressed up against him, she could feel him harden beneath his boxer shorts.

  ‘This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for a first date,’ he said, stroking her hair. She felt herself relax in his arms. She was wrong to question Josh. She trusted him implicitly. He’d had so many opportunities to abandon her, and yet he’d stuck by her side from the moment she’d left his houseboat and been chased by the Russians.

  ‘When this is over, we’ll go somewhere hot and sunny and wonderful. Brazil, Bali, the Maldives. We can stay there six months, a year, longer. You can write books or poems or paint pictures, or we can just sell coconuts and spend the rest of our time doing what we did last night. Doing what I wanted to do to you since the moment I saw you. But first we have to find the money.’

  She pulled away from him. ‘You wanted to have sex with me at the Chariot party?’ she grinned.

  ‘I was as jealous as hell that Nick had got his paws on you first.’

  ‘Maybe you should have tried a bit harder,’ she replied, circling his T-shirt with her fingertip and feeling the coarse scrub of chest hair underneath. As she looked up at him, she wondered how things might have panned out had she met Josh before rather than after Nick. Or if Josh had tried harder, hung around a little longer to talk to her. Would he have charmed her away from Nick? If he had succeeded, where would they be now? On his houseboat, enjoying the English summer, or in her tiny Battersea studio, which seemed so remote it was as if it belonged in another lifetime? Or would she not even have given him a chance? Josh was the antithesis of her usual type, but it had taken this week, this journey to realise that he was exactly what she wanted.

  He smiled, and the corners of his soft grey eyes creased into fine lines. It was a hell of a sexy smile.

  ‘Much as I would like to make up for lost time, we should get moving.’

  Sophie unfolded herself from his embrace and began to dress. She splashed some water on her face, brushed her teeth and threw all their belongings in their two small nylon bags. She was ready to finish this.

  It was almost four a.m. and the sky was still black.

  They shut their room door quietly and dropped the key off in a drop box, leaving two fifty-dollar bills behind the reception desk.