Carolina Isle

by Jude Deveraux

  Reaching back, he took her hand. “I want you on my side at the hearing on Monday. As for the kiss, a pretty girl and—”

  “Spare me,” she said, starting to walk again and dropping his hand. She was just one of many women. It was the big complaint of all the women who came weeping to her, saying that R.J. had broken it off with them.

  As they walked, she looked at the back of him and wondered what the truth was. “Do you have a plan about all this?”

  “None whatever. What about you?”

  “None,” she said cheerfully. “Are you sure Nezbit was dead? He wasn’t planted in the bathtub and pretending to be dead, was he?”

  “Very sure. His body was disgustingly cold.”

  “Do you think—?” she began but stopped when R.J. halted. She stopped beside him.

  “Don’t look back, but someone is following us,” he said quickly. “And I think someone is ahead of us too. I think it’s just possible there are a parade of people around us. See those rocks up there?” he asked. “Think you could walk along the edge of them?”

  “Yes,” Sara said, but she wasn’t sure she could. They seemed to go straight up and straight down.

  “Come on then,” he said. “Want me to carry your pack?”

  “No. I put all the heavy stuff in yours so I’m fine.”

  She followed R.J. through tall grass until they emerged on a rocky surface. Above them were sheer rocks, looming high overhead. “I think we can go this way,” R.J. whispered and held out his hand to help her up.

  She couldn’t find a foothold in the stone surface, so R.J. had to pull her up, and she scraped her knee on the rock.

  “All right?” he whispered.

  When she nodded, he turned and started climbing up until he was against the tall rocks, then he reached down for her. Sara was determined to make it on her own. She threw one leg up high, then used all her muscles to follow her leg with the rest of her body. She made it up, and R.J. caught her to him in his arms, his finger to his lips bidding her to be quiet.

  They inched along the rock, their backs to it, feeling their way to the left. Twice R.J. paused and looked out at what they could see of the countryside. Both times Sara was silent, hating the height, hating not having a good foothold, but she said nothing. When R.J. nodded, she started inching along again.

  “Look!” he whispered, but she couldn’t see around him to what he was seeing.

  With her breath held, she watched him remove his pack, then hand it to her. “Too many doughnuts,” he whispered, then he turned sharply left and disappeared from her view. Holding on as best she could, her pack on her back, his on her front, she tried to turn enough so that she could see what had happened to him, but she could see nothing.

  “In here,” she heard R.J. whisper. “Can you hand me the packs?”

  Sara shook her head. Taking off the packs would make her fall.

  He must have been able to see her because he said, “Okay, then, I think you’re skinny enough to come through with them on.”

  “I can’t move,” she whispered back to him.

  In the next second, he grabbed her arm and pulled hard. Sara went flying back into what seemed to be solid rock. The front pack caught but R.J. kept pulling, and she finally slid through the narrow space into a passage about six feet wide. Ahead of them the space widened and she could see light.

  She wanted to cover her fear. “We found Fenny’s gold, didn’t we? Tell me this is the cave where he disappeared and where no one could find him.”

  R.J. kicked something on the rock floor and Sara looked down. It was an old beer can. “I don’t think we’re the first ones to find this place.”

  They walked between the rocks for a few yards until they came out at a pool of water. Above it, the rocks formed a roof with a hole in it. “How beautiful,” Sara breathed. “Breathtaking.”

  “Yet another thing that someone doesn’t want to be found,” R.J. said. “I’ll bet this is the local skinny-dip pool.” He gave her a look from under his lashes. “You wouldn’t want to …”

  She knew he was teasing her, as he always had, but suddenly Sara felt different. Instead of turning up her nose at him, she thought it might be nice to strip off and dive into the pool.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” R.J. growled. “We have work to do. We have—”

  Turning abruptly, he pulled her into his arms and held her. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. I shouldn’t have let you come with me, but I couldn’t bear to think of you with that kid David, then with Gideon. Don’t you understand that they’re just boys?”

  Sara felt anger well up inside her and she pushed him away. “I’m not going to be one of your women,” she said. “I’ve seen what you do to them and I won’t be one of them. I knew why you let me come with you, but it didn’t matter as long as I got to go. I let you kiss me because … I don’t know why I did it. It was the right moment and the right time, but now …”

  She had to push away from him because she was afraid she’d fall against him and give herself to him. She’d worked hard in the last two days to control the fear that was coursing through her, and she’d been closer to R.J. than she ever had before. He was a sexy man. He wasn’t handsome, but there was a charisma about him that drew women to him. But she wasn’t going to be one of many!

  “Sorry,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I mistook what I was seeing. I thought—”

  “You don’t have to tell me what you thought. I know you, remember? You think all women are dying to jump into bed with you. But I’m not!”

  The moment the words were out, Sara wished she hadn’t said them. She knew she had given him a look that was suggestive. She’d thought about jumping in the pretty pond with him and her eyes had said that. But when he reacted, she’d attacked him. “This is my fault,” she said under her breath. “Could we just go wherever it is we’re going?”

  R.J.’s face was cold. “Maybe you should go back to Gideon. Or to Ariel. Help her with her makeovers.”

  “No, I don’t want to,” she said more fiercely than she’d meant to. “Could we just go? Please?”

  He nodded, then turned and started walking, and she could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was angry.

  They managed to climb out of the big room, up the side of the rock, and Sara wished she hadn’t been so adamant when R.J. put his arms around her, for his attitude had changed. Instead of laughing and teasing, flirting, he was now cool and distant, formal and polite. He held out his hand when she needed help, but he withdrew it quickly.

  She followed him across the top of a ridge of rock and when she tripped, he stopped and looked back at her, but he didn’t offer to help her up.

  The first time they stopped to rest and drink water, she asked if she could see the map that Gideon had drawn. She studied it and saw that the trail Gideon had marked was below them. They were heading in the right direction, but they weren’t on the trail that Gideon had marked.

  “You don’t trust him, do you?”

  “I don’t trust anyone on this island.” R.J. took a deep drink of water. “I’m beginning to think that if I get out of here, I’ll tell Charley to buy every inch of land and evict all these people. My gut feeling is that there are some very ugly things going on around here.”

  “Or we’re being lied to,” Sara said idly.

  “Nezbit’s dead body wasn’t a lie.”

  “No, but in a way, murder is sort of normal, isn’t it? Shipwrecks and children being brought home like puppies in a blanket are not normal.”

  R.J. was looking at her with his head cocked to one side. “Do you think we were sent up here to get rid of us? Get us out of the way until the hearing on Monday? Maybe the goal is to keep us quiet for a few days and what better way than to send us up to have a look at the old hot springs?”

  Sara moved away from the rock she was leaning on and looked around her. It was afternoon now and she was hungry. “How about if we get to the hot springs, look at them,
then get ourselves back to town as fast as possible?”

  “I think you’re right,” R.J. said. “Or we could skip the hot springs altogether.”

  At that moment they heard a shot. It was a long way off, but it still echoed until it sounded as though there were a thousand people firing rifles. “Let’s go,” R.J. said, shoving the plastic water bottle in his pack and putting it on his back.

  In the next second they felt the first warm drops of rain. Two seconds later a storm erupted. Fierce thunder and lightning split a downpour so thick that Sara could hardly see R.J. in front of her. Bending over, his head down, he was running along the narrow, steep trail.

  “You okay?” he yelled back at her. She shouted yes, but she wasn’t sure he heard her. They had ponchos in their packs, but there was nowhere to stop to put them on.

  Around them were tall trees, and the lightning seemed to be cracking right above them. In one particularly loud flash, with the thunder coming instantly and so loud that it was deafening, Sara screamed. In the next second, R.J. was beside her, his arm across her shoulders protectively.

  “I think I saw shelter,” he yelled. “Come with me.”

  She kept her head down, hiding under his arm, trying to keep the rain from lashing at her face. Twice, she tried to look up, but R.J. pushed her face back down. Around them the lightning came fast and brilliant, and she heard what sounded like trees breaking. “Can we go back?” she yelled up at him and thought she heard the word “no.”

  She twisted around to look at the trail behind them. A flash of lightning exposed a blurry image. Had a tree fallen across the trail?

  As she looked out from under his protective arm, a flash of lightning came and for a split second she saw Gideon standing about a hundred yards behind them. He was clearly outlined in the light, a pack on his back, a rifle in his hands. For all that the rain was coming down hard, he had his head up, his eyes straight ahead, watching them. He looked like a mountain man of old, as though he belonged there on that rocky surface, with the trees all around him. And he looked as though he was hunting bear—but his eyes were on them.

  Twisting around again, Sara got as close to R.J.’s ear as she could and said, “I saw Gideon. He’s behind us.”

  “Yes,” R.J. said, then he started walking faster.

  When she tripped over the rough ground, his grip on her tightened until he was nearly carrying her. She wanted to ask where they were going, but she was sure he didn’t know. Or did he? Had he asked Gideon for a map to test him? R.J. said he’d studied King’s Isle for weeks before they came here. Had he studied maps also? For all she knew, R.J. had called in engineers to report on the place. Had R.J. seen that Gideon’s map wasn’t correct and he’d gone the way that he knew to be correct? But correct to get them where?

  “Here!” R.J. shouted, then he turned left abruptly. Again, she looked under his arm and waited for the lightning to flash. She saw no one, just an empty trail and the hard-driving rain. When a second flash came, she saw what looked to be a pile of stones where R.J. had turned left.

  In the next second, everything happened at once. Lighting flashed beside them, a huge tree cracked, R.J. tightened his grip on Sara and made a leap. When they hit the ground, Sara started to take another step, but R.J. pulled her back.

  There was no other step. They were on the edge of a precipice.

  With the tree crashing down above them, they dropped to the ground, clinging to each other tightly, R.J.’s arms over Sara’s head. The tree came down all around them, but none of the heavy branches hit them. When the tree stopped coming down, and the earth stopped vibrating, they looked at each other and smiled. They had made it!

  But then the ground under them broke away and they fell down. Wrapped into one being, they fell down and down, to land hard on the floor below.

  “Sara?” R.J. whispered after the dirt settled. His arms were still around her. He’d managed to twist so he came down on the bottom. “Are you all right?”

  When she didn’t answer, he disentangled their bodies and tried to look at her. There was little light. About fifty feet above them he could see the hole that they’d come through. The branches of the fallen tree covered the opening, blocking out the dim light that got through the storm.

  As his eyes adjusted, R.J. looked at Sara. She was limp in his arms, and for a horrible moment he thought she might be dead. But he could feel her breathing. Slowly, he ran his hands over her body. He began to breathe again when he found no blood on her head, nor even any lumps that showed she’d hit her skull. When he felt her ribs, she didn’t gasp so he didn’t think she’d broken any ribs. It was when he reached her leg that he realized her right leg was broken. He could feel the break in the shinbone, but was glad it wasn’t protruding from her skin.

  Carefully, he laid her down on the ground, then got his backpack and pulled out the flashlight. The first thing he did was make a quick inspection of where they were. It was a round cave that seemed to open only at the top, a lot like the one they’d seen with the pool, except much smaller. As far as he could tell, there were no signs that any other human had ever been in the cave. He was glad to see that no resident of King’s Isle was lurking in the corners.

  He ran the light over Sara, making another inspection of her body. Pulling out a big knife from a front pocket of his pack, he cut her trousers up to the knee. Broken but not bad, he thought, and he was glad she’d passed out in the fall. He needed to bind her leg to keep it from moving. He would have to carry her out of here and he didn’t want the jarring to dislodge her broken bone.

  He used two broken tree branches as stabilizers, then he cut long strips from one of the flannel shirts and wrapped her leg from knee to ankle. When he’d finished, she began to move her head and groan. He grabbed a bottle of water and pulled her head onto his lap as he gave her something to drink.

  She choked a bit, coughed, then opened her eyes. “What happened?” she asked, then the pain hit her.

  “Ssssh,” R.J. said softly, stroking her cheek. “We fell into one of those holes. I think there must have been a volcano here at one time. You broke your leg and I tied it up.”

  Sara tried to sit up, but the pain was too much for her. She bit her lip to keep from crying.

  “You don’t have to be tough,” R.J. said. “Go ahead and cry. Yell. Scream at me for being a fool to bring you here and getting you into this mess.”

  “I did it,” she said, gasping out the words. Above them the storm had quietened to just rain. The thick covering of the fallen pine tree kept out most of the rain, but little patches dripped through onto the floor. “I agreed with Ariel and she made Mr. Dunkirk’s wife get him to—”

  “I know,” R.J. said. “But I only agreed to go because Arundel is your hometown.”

  “My—?” she began, then waited as a wave of pain went through her. “That’s not on any application I ever filled out. How did you know that?”

  “I know a lot about you, Sara Jane Johnson,” he said softly, stroking her hair. “Haven’t you realized that yet?”

  “No,” she said flatly, then turned her head to look at where they were. The flashlight was beside R.J. and he lifted it to shine it on the walls. Rock walls that oozed little trickles of water were around and above them. Beneath them was a thick padding of dirt and rotten wood.

  He pointed the flashlight up to the tree above them. “We didn’t make that big of a hole. I think we were on the edge of it and … see? It broke there. We just missed being hit by the tree. I think that over the centuries lots of trees have fallen across the hole and have rotted. Lucky for us or we would have hit rock.”

  “I don’t feel very lucky right now,” Sara said.

  He moved her head out of his lap and carefully put it on the second flannel shirt. “I’m going to see if I can find anything we can burn. It’s going to get cold tonight.”

  “What about—?” She broke off.

  “About Gideon?”

  “Yes. I know I saw him just be
fore you turned. You seemed to be heading toward something, as though you knew where you were going.”

  “I’d seen some maps on the Internet,” he said, but didn’t explain more. He was looking inside his pack and withdrew a small bottle of Amaretto di Saronno, an almond-flavored liqueur. “I want you to drink this.”

  “Where did you get that?” Sara asked, again trying to sit up.

  Without a word, R.J. bent and picked her up, then deposited her in the farthest, driest corner of the cave. “While you were drooling over the kids, I found it in Gideon’s cabin and put it in my pack. I had hoped for a romantic moment and—” The look she gave him made him smile. “Can’t blame a man for trying.”

  “Sure you can,” Sara said, panting, her face breaking out in a sweat from the pain. She wanted to yell at R.J. She wanted to yell at anyone right now, about anything. Maybe rage would take her mind off the reality of the situation. How were they going to get out of here? Was Gideon, that nice-seeming young man, above them with a rifle? Was he planning to shoot them like fish in a barrel? Her thoughts showed on her face.

  “None of that now,” R.J. said, his hand caressing her cheek. “It’s going to be all right.”

  “You don’t know that, do you? We’re strangers on this island and no one knows where we are. You left a note to Ariel and David saying heaven only knows what, so they’ll be angry and won’t look for us. As for the rest of these people, they hate us. And they don’t even know that they’re going to think we killed someone.”

  Standing up, R.J. handed her the bottle of liqueur. “I want you to drink all of it. Maybe it’ll give you a better outlook on life.”

  “Life,” Sara said, taking a swig from the bottle. “That’s what I’m trying to hold onto. I still can’t understand why I let Ariel talk me into that ridiculous switch.”

  “Which didn’t work for even five minutes,” R.J. said as he examined the cave with the flashlight.

  “I think it did. David said—”

  “What does he know? He’s so in love with Ariel that he can’t think about anything else. ‘David, dear,’” R.J. said in a falsetto voice, “‘please go outside and shoot yourself, but be sure and do it in a field somewhere as I wouldn’t want the mess to soil my pretty house.’”