Emerald Fire

by Monica McCabe

  “What about the police?” she asked. “Aren’t we going to bring them in on the action?”

  “There’s no action, not yet anyway.”

  “So it’s a reconnaissance mission?”

  “Let me guess,” he said with a flat stare, “you like spy novels, don’t you?”

  “Occasionally,” she replied, just as the plane bumped hard onto the concrete runway. With a startled gasp, she grabbed his arm and her nails dug in.

  “Ouch.” He glanced at her rigid grip and back to her face. “It’s okay, Chloe. We’re on the ground.”

  She yanked her hand back in embarrassment. “Oh, sorry.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were afraid to fly.”

  “I’m not.” She looked out the window again. “I’m afraid of landing.” And no matter how many times she flew, it never got any easier.

  “It comes with the package, you know.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Want to tell me why?” he quietly asked.

  His sympathy surprised her. She expected the usual laughter or teasing, not understanding. It caught her off-guard enough that she gave him the truth. “My parents were killed when their plane crashed on landing. I was fifteen.”

  He stared at her in silence, a frown settling on his handsome face, and she could’ve kicked herself for the moment of weakness. He’d done nothing but tell her to go home since they met, and she’d just handed him another excuse to leave her behind.

  “It eventually fades, you know,” he finally said.

  She glanced down at her tightly clenched fists. “Does it?”

  “Some,” he said with a shrug. “I lost my mom a long time ago.”

  The plane rolled to a stop, and people began unbuckling and grabbing their overhead luggage. When the aisle cleared, they claimed their own bags and headed into Santo Domingo's Las Américas International Airport. They sailed through customs, rented a Jeep, and before long they were driving the highway east toward Boca Chica.

  The rental had seen better days. From the passenger seat, Chloe unfolded a map the clerk gave them and began navigating the way. It wasn't hard. A straight shot down a four-lane highway, and thirty minutes later they were weaving through the narrow streets of town.

  Daylight had disappeared by the time Finn found a small boutique motel, one that offered internet and a local café. He pulled in and parked by the lobby, then killed the lights.

  “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “One room,” she blurted out.

  “What?”

  “We’re sharing, but don’t get any ideas.” She’d no intention of letting him out of her sight for very long. The journal was far too important for her to lose someone with solid experience in tracking stolen vessels.

  “Ideas?” He scoffed. “I’m too damn tired to argue, much less harbor lewd intentions. Besides, you’re not my type.”

  He climbed out of the car, leaving her to wonder just what his type was. Probably blond with legs up to her neck and sweetly submissive. She was none of those things. And that was fine with her. He might be gorgeous to look at, but this was business, pure and simple. She leaned back in the bucket seat and closed her eyes. It was hard to believe she’d just met the man this morning. A few hours ago, they were strangers. Now they were about to spend the night together in a two-star hotel. Putting so much trust in someone she barely knew should plummet her comfort levels to an all-time low. The fact that it only caused minor hesitation ought to be a warning.

  The man from NorthStar will be your guide.

  That journal entry had puzzled her for months. She’d spent countless hours trying to decipher what it meant. Now here she was, being led exactly like the entry said, as though fulfilling a prophecy.

  She leaned toward the open window and breathed deep the humid night air. She was exhausted, hungry, and thinking crazy. Probably not making the best decisions either, but none of that mattered. Not with so much at stake. Years of research were on the line, and not just hers. Her mother started this journey, and Daisy Banks had been clearly on to something. She’d found a two-hundred-year-old kink in the family tree, one someone had gone great lengths to hide. That journal held the key, pointed to the proof needed to validate her mother’s theory. She refused to lose it. No matter the cost.

  Which meant tonight she had to learn a little more about her reluctant partner. If he was supposed to guide her, shouldn’t she at least try to know the man?

  Chapter 5

  They’d shared a quick meal at a nearby café and walked in silence back to the hotel room. The darkness and humidity suited Chloe’s mood as she alternated between simmering anger over Lisa’s treachery and jangled nerves from the prospect of spending the night with a gorgeous bounty hunter from NorthStar. She still knew very little about him. Dinner had been stilted, full of one-sided conversations and dead-end attempts at interrogation. He was too private, too serious, and she’d kept her answers short and vague.

  He appeared to be just what he claimed, an insurance bounty hunter. He didn’t appear to know about the journal, didn’t know he was one half of a strange two-hundred-year-old treasure hunt. Yet things were rarely as they seemed.

  Under the meager light of a lone streetlight, Chloe shot a calculating glance Finn’s way. His strong jaw clearly spoke of resolve, an essential quality if she’d any hope of recovering the journal. He said he’d been around boats all his life, and that rang true. The guy was practically a nautical wizard. He also had a no-nonsense attitude and commendable focus that probably served him well in business dealings. What she needed to figure out was why he was here at the same time as her, with the same end goal. Coincidence was the obvious answer, which meant it was the wrong answer.

  And that twisted logic could very well be the result of exhaustion.

  Finn unlocked the room and pushed his way in, holding the door open for her to follow. The quarters were small but held two double beds. She claimed the one by the door and dropped onto a flowered tropical coverlet bright enough to light the town square, but too tired to worry about the lack of sleep it’d surely cause.

  Finn settled at a small desk where he’d plugged in the laptop to charge and checked for email alerts.

  “Anything?” Chloe asked, torn between an unreasonable hope for action and a pressing need for sleep.

  He shook his head. “We may be in luck. They haven’t moved the Fire.”

  Thank God for small miracles. When Google Earth filled his computer screen and he began studying the layout of Boca Chica again, she dug for her toothbrush and the unflattering tank top and stretchy shorts she preferred to sleep in, then made for the bathroom.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d pulled a crazy stunt in a hunt for museum artifacts. She’d handled riskier situations than this. What worried her was a growing need for vengeance that escalated with every passing second. After Aunt Sarah passed away, Lisa had pounced on Uncle Jon and cashed in on his grief. But the clothes, jewels, and exotic trips weren’t enough for her. Now she’d crossed a line, gone from gold digger to black widow, and it infuriated Chloe to boiling point. If something had happened to her uncle, she intended to deliver a day of reckoning for Lisa Banks.

  But that cold certainty begged a question. Had her objectivity been compromised by out-of-control emotions? Chloe already knew the answer. Yes. Which meant she needed the bounty hunter’s level head because she couldn’t count on her own. She gathered her things and emerged from the tiny bathroom.

  “My turn?” Finn asked when she settled back on her bed to brush her hair.

  “All yours,” she replied with a sweep of her brush. He grabbed his shaving kit and disappeared.

  The telltale squeak of shower knobs and splashing water sounded, and she closed her eyes on a welcome moment of solitude. But the brief respite didn’t last long. Her mind immediately went to the journal.

  The man from NorthStar will be your guide.r />
  Finnegan Kane was definitely the means to a very important end, but seriously, how could this weirdness even be possible?

  Finn’s NorthStar was an early nineteenth century boat company. That fit the time frame of William Desmond, an English nobleman, her alleged ancestor, and author of the journal currently in peril. But what were the odds that her great grandfather, eight greats to be exact, had a connection to Finn’s great, great whatever?

  They were damn near impossible. It was too far-fetched to believe.

  But how else did one explain it? And even more perplexing, if the connection was true, then it had to apply to more than just finding the Fire. Because there was no way Desmond knew that two-hundred years in the future his journal would be stolen by pirates and a bounty-hunting boat restorer from NorthStar would help get it back.

  It was a riddle that made her brain hurt.

  She went back to brushing her hair, using long, slow strokes to help her focus. How could Finnegan Kane, NorthStar, and Desmond’s cryptic clues possibly be connected?

  What if she was being scammed, and Finn was after more than just her uncle’s yacht? He wouldn’t be the first person to suspect what she was truly after. Owen knew about her mother’s papers. He ridiculed her for believing in fairy tales and claimed that William Desmond was a lunatic, that he had fabricated the tale of royal emeralds to buy the favor of a daughter who hated him. Chloe wasn’t so sure.

  She was in the business of digging up history, and there were conflicting accounts over the sudden appearance of that girl child. But that wasn’t important right now. The problem was that even though Chloe worked hard to keep things quiet, Owen always seemed to know when she pieced something together. Her research undoubtedly had alerted others, too. What if Finn was a treasure hunter on the prowl, one with a passing knowledge of Prussian history, like her?

  No, not like her. This was personal. Desmond may have ended up alone, a recluse slowly losing touch with reality, but he played a critical role in the Napoleonic Wars. His journal held page after page of loneliness, dedication, and willing sacrifice for a deserving queen. He clearly loved Louise Auguste Mecklenburg, Queen of Prussia, and he had given up everything for that love. His home, his family, even his country. But it was what he gained from that sacrifice that intrigued Chloe. He’d never married. No mention of a mistress either. Yet in 1808, he suddenly sailed to America with an infant daughter.

  Chloe’s mother had pointed at the Queen. It was a logical assumption. In 1806 when Napoleon decimated Prussia at the Battle of Jena and ransacked the country, Queen Louise was devastated over the French occupation. Her health suffered, and she went home to her father’s estate in Germany in hopes of recuperation. Louise was the sixth child of a Duke and raised on a country estate. She had no inkling she’d one day be a queen. Chloe’s mother had reasoned there’d been a first love, a local boy. Though no word or hint of scandal was ever associated with the queen’s trip home, months later the royal couple spent weeks in St. Petersburg with close friends. Daisy Banks believed the Queen had an inconvenient daughter, a secret entrusted to her friend and royal protector, William Desmond. If that were true, then Chloe’s ancestor wasn’t Emily Desmond, it was Emily Mecklenburg, the bastard child of a queen.

  The bathroom door opened, and Finn stepped out.

  The man from NorthStar will be your guide.

  A sudden shiver traced along her nerve endings. Whether from the prophetic words or the darkly gorgeous man himself, she wasn’t sure. It could go either way.

  Fresh from the shower, Finn wore cotton sleep pants and an allover tan that proved he spent a lot of time in the sun. Even more intriguing was the maritime compass tattoo that capped his shoulder. Add damp hair with a slight curl, ocean blue eyes full of sinful temptation, and she risked losing all coherent thought.

  “I figured you’d be asleep by now.” He tossed a wet towel in the corner and went to check his laptop again.

  She should be. She’d been up since three a.m., and it had been a long and stressful day. But the truth of it was, right now, staring at the play of masculine muscle as Finn moved to lift his duffle bag to the bed and dig around, she couldn’t think of anything beyond the unwelcome surge of her pulse.

  That alarmed her. Attraction, no matter how small, robbed focus at a time when she needed every last brain cell. Time was not on their side.

  “I’ve been thinking about tomorrow,” she said. Not entirely true, but they did need to strategize. “What do we do first?”

  He shrugged. “Not sure yet.”

  That made her frown. Surely, he was used to this sort of thing; it was his job after all. At least he’d said it was, a nagging suspicion whispered in her ear. “You do have some sort of plan, right?”

  He laughed. “Can I let you in on a little secret?”

  At her slow nod, he continued. “There is no standard operating procedure when it comes to bounty hunting. Most of the time, we just wing it.”

  Her worry factor hitched up a notch. “That doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy. I thought you were good at what you do.”

  “I am.”

  “A girl likes to know that her partner has skills.”

  He zipped the duffle bag closed and tossed it on the floor next to his bed before circling around to stand in front of her.

  Eye level with his trim, bare waist she lifted her gaze to well-defined abs, a light sprinkling of chest hair and all the way up to an extraordinary mouth totally meant for kissing. She blinked and shook her head, trying to clear a sudden fog in her brain.

  “Plans are fluid,” he said with quiet intensity. “I didn’t plan to be in the Dominican Republic, yet here we are. And I certainly didn’t plan on sharing a hotel room with a beautiful, but reckless historian. Again, here we are.”

  There went her pulse again. None of this helped her comfort level a bit.

  “Thing is,” he continued as he sat on the bed next to her, leaning his forearms against his knees and clasping his hands, turning his head to look at her, “I can handle that kind of change. What bothers me is that I suspect there’s more to your motives than you let on.”

  Insistent blue eyes stared at her, and she fought a sudden urge to fidget. But she kept her cool. She’d no intention of sharing anything beyond a need-to-know basis.

  “What are you not telling me?” he asked.

  Despite her best efforts, the pointed question made her tense. She struggled to hide the revealing response and searched for an evasive reply, one that wouldn’t alienate the only person in the Caribbean she’d found willing to help her.

  One who practically guaranteed success.

  “Nothing,” she declared simply. “It’s exhaustion. You. Me. We both need sleep.”

  That was the absolute truth. She didn’t like it, didn’t want to sleep. With the Emerald Fire in the crosshairs, she was desperate to get her feet on deck and retrieve that journal. No matter the physical cost.

  But he couldn’t deny it.

  “You understand that recovering the yacht requires you to be honest with me. If there’s something out there that can impact the variables, I need to know about it.”

  “The only thing impacting us is wasted time. Pirates don’t sleep. They’re too busy chopping up stolen booty.”

  He shook his head and sat back up. “That imagination of yours is formidable.”

  More like crazy and jumped to far-fetched conclusions. How else could she explain she was actually entertaining the idea that her alleged great-times-eight grandfather predicted she’d be working with the man from NorthStar? And why, oh why, did she wonder what it would be like to kiss him?

  Not a good idea. At all. She’d be better off formulating strategy. And sneak skills. One didn’t just stroll onto a pirate compound and politely ask for a yacht back. Nor did one entertain the idea of kissing a complete stranger when they were sharing a hotel room.

  That didn’t stop her from wondering, though. />
  He was close enough for her to get a whiff of clean, soapy male, and even with the semi-interrogation and Mr. Serious attitude, she wanted to lean in and do exactly what she knew she shouldn’t.

  But then again, maybe she should. That would certainly distract him from asking so many questions.

  There was only one major flaw in this plan. Her seduction skills were practically non-existent. She really should’ve paid more attention to developing feminine charms instead of studying geography and deciphering cryptic historical tomes. She placed the hairbrush she forgot she was holding on the nightstand and shifted to face an exasperated Finn.

  “You aren’t being honest with me,” he said. “You want to continue this partnership? Come clean.”

  That sealed it. She straightened her spine and lowered her gaze to his lips. He just sat there, staring at her, so she leaned slightly toward him and slipped the tip of her tongue out to moisten her lips.

  The action caught his attention. He glanced at her lips then back at her eyes with an inquiring lift of one brow.

  Damn, he wasn’t going to make this easy. With a long, slow breath of courage, she reached across and lightly ran a fingertip along the strong line of his jaw. When he didn’t move a muscle, not even so much as a blink, she kept up her exploration and softly stroked his lower lip before looking into his eyes.

  Their blue color had darkened. It was the only visible effect of her seduction, but it was an effect. Which meant it was working. She smiled.

  “You’re trying to distract me,” he said with a flat edge.

  “Maybe,” she replied. There was too much at stake to be playing games now, but suddenly, just for a minute or two, she wanted to forget the urgency of their situation and the danger they would face tomorrow. Call her crazy, but she really wanted to know what it was like to kiss a man like Finnegan Kane.

  So she summoned her long-lost inner siren and leaned over, stopping a mere inch from his mouth. He didn’t move, so she drifted over to his freshly shaven cheek and blew a little puff of warm breath over his skin, enjoying the clean scent of his shaving lotion.