by Anne Stuart
"I can't do much else, now can I?" Michael countered, lifting his metal cane in a negligent gesture. "Don't worry," he said again. "When I leave St. Anne, your cousin won't even know her brain's been picked clean."
"For your sake, you'd best hope so," Travers grumbled as the Rolls pulled up beside a small private jet.
Michael didn't bother to answer. Private citizens like Daniel Travers were one of the few things that made his job easier. He didn't know what motivated the man—patriotism, civic duty, or sheer boredom—and he didn't particularly care. All that mattered was that Travers put his considerable resources at the disposal of certain select branches of the secret service organizations of various countries, Travers's own and Great Britain among them. All the man asked for in return was a vicarious taste of the excitement and the knowledge that he'd struck a blow for democracy or whatever he was after.
Michael suspected he was deeply disappointed by the recent easing of relations with Eastern Europe. Travers still managed to cheer himself up with thoughts of Middle Eastern terrorists and the subversive branches of the IRA, but even South Africa seemed to be mellowing. If things continued as they were, Daniel Travers would be out of a hobby and Michael would be out of a job.
He doubted it would happen, though. He didn't trust any of it. Not the lessening of repression in Eastern Europe, not the free elections in Latin America, not the hopeful steps in South Africa. Thirty-seven years of life on the edge had made him an extremely cynical man, and a few examples of media manipulation and feel-good public relations weren't going to convince him that the intrinsic nature of the world had changed from bad to good. As long as there were people left alive, he and others like him would be needed. And the nastier, more unpleasant the job, the more often he would be the one to be called.
He hadn't been exaggerating—the past few weeks had been holy hell. He'd been pretty well shot to pieces, and a body takes time to heal, particularly one that had gone through this sort of thing too many times. He didn't like drugs, and his mind instinctively resisted painkillers, even when his body craved them. The pain had been the only thing that had kept him going when he'd first emerged from three weeks in intensive care. The pain, and the hatred.
Normally the idea of weeks in the sun, lying there doing nothing but swelter, would be his idea of hell, especially after such a long stretch of forced inactivity. But he wouldn't be inactive. While he lay in the sun and tried to marshal his strength, his energy, he would be finding out exactly what Frances Neeley knew. And just how deeply she'd been involved.
Of course, he hadn't confided those suspicions to Daniel. If the old man thought Michael suspected his young cousin of conspiracy, he wouldn't let him within a thousand miles of her. And Daniel could do just that, spirit her away on that ocean liner of a yacht he owned and head out into international waters where there'd be no reaching her.
So Michael had pretended to believe in the woman's innocence, keeping his own opinion in reserve. Word on the street had been divided. Some said she was sleeping with Dugan, some that she was just another victim. He intended to find out the truth as soon as possible and then head back to England to clean up the mess Dugan had left behind. See if he could find out who'd been pulling the strings, giving the orders. Who headed up the dread sect of the IRA known only as the Cadre. With Frances Neeley's information in hand, there was no way they could keep him on the sidelines, much as Ross Cardiff wanted to.
He was going to the Caribbean with a very simple goal in mind. To get stronger. And smarter. And meaner. Even though he knew that most people simply wouldn't consider that possible.
He wondered if he was going to have to sleep with Daniel Travers's plain, pale cousin to get what he wanted from her. And he wondered if he was going to have to kill her.
Francey had never liked the way the pink Jeep handled. It tended to pull to the left, particularly when she was enthusiastic with the brakes, and she had grown a little too accustomed to power brakes, power steering, power windows and the like. The old Jeep was not much of an improvement over a push-pull railway cart, and she'd been half tempted to rent a more reasonable car to get around the mountainous little island.
Two things stopped her. One, she didn't go out often enough to make the hassle worthwhile. Daniel had regular deliveries of food and staples arranged, and just about every need was taken care of by a silent army of workers who came and went with smiling faces and almost invisible presences.
The second reason was less practical but far more devastating. She simply didn't want to drive on the left-hand side of the road. She had too many memories of Patrick teasing her about her future, trying to drive on the left-hand side of the road when they went back to Ireland. She had too many memories of Patrick.
One of those almost invisible workers had just checked over the Jeep that morning, so at least she could reassure herself that the silly vehicle was marginally safe. The gas tank had been topped off, the bright pink paint was newly waxed, the awning clean, the vehicle swept clean of sand. She could only assume that whoever had checked the car was equally well versed in its underpinnings. The only sign that marred the spotless paint was a greasy thumbprint on the hood, proof that someone had known enough to at least check the engine.
One of the great blessings of Belle Reste was its remoteness from the rest of the small, busy island. One of its greatest disadvantages was its distance from the tiny airport, most of it over hilly, twisty roads. People also tended to fly in during the evening hours, making the trip even more hair-raising, but Francey navigated the narrow roads with her usual aplomb. She liked driving. And she hadn't yet gotten to the point where it mattered terribly if she lived or died.
Daniel's private jet had already landed by the time she drove the stubborn little Jeep into the airport confines. She slammed the vehicle into Park and jumped out, absently noticing that the brakes were a little spongier than usual. The moment she caught sight of the man making his way carefully down the flight ramp she held her breath, oddly startled.
Even in the electric light she could see that his color wasn't good. He was deathly pale as he moved down the stairs, leaning heavily on the handrail and a cane, and his eyes seemed too big for his face. He was tall and as thin as a scarecrow, his rumpled white suit flapping around his long legs, and his face was narrow and lined with pain beneath a shock of incongruous auburn hair.
A thousand confusing emotions swept over her as she leaned against the mesh of the fence, watching him as he reached the tarmac and moved slowly forward. She didn't quite know what she was feeling, whether it was déjà vu, the odd sense that this had all happened before, or something else. Some strange, psychic knowledge that the sick-looking man walking slowly across the empty runway was going to matter to her very much. Was going to make the difference between life and death. And that he might mean death.
She shook her head, forcing such morbid thoughts away,, and the movement caught his eye. Across the deserted tarmac he looked at her, and while she knew that he wouldn't be able to see that well across the artificially lit distance, she suddenly felt uneasy. As if she'd been caught spying.
Opening the wire gate, she started toward him, forcing a welcoming smile onto her stiff face. "You must be Michael Dowd," she said when she reached him. "I'm Frances Neeley, better known as Francey." And she held out her hand.
It took him a moment to laboriously shift the cane, then reach out his own thin hand. His grasp was weak, ominously so, and for a moment she forgot her own concerns in worry over him. "I'm Michael," he agreed, and his voice was surprisingly warm, strong and unnervingly British, During her brief time with Patrick Dugan she'd learned to think of British accents as those belonging to the enemy, compared to Patrick's charming lilt… No, she wouldn't think of that.
"How was your trip?" she asked, pushing away her instinctive doubts. "How are you feeling? The Jeep's just over there—you won't have far to walk. Unless you'd like me to see whether I could find a wheelchair."
&nbs
p; "No wheelchair," he said flatly. "I've already spent too much time in them since the car accident. And I feel like hell."
Querulous, Francey thought with a trace of satisfaction. A pale, weak, querulous man. A pain in the butt and nothing worse.
And then he looked down at her and smiled, and the charm he was exerting was a palpable thing, something she could no more resist than she could stop her heart from beating. "I'm a pain in the butt, aren't I?" he said, reading her mind. "I promise you I won't spend my time here whining. I'm just done in."
She found herself smiling back, up into eyes that were very, very blue. "That's all right," she said soothingly, falling into her natural role of caretaker. "We'll get you home to Belle Reste and get you settled. By tomorrow you'll be able to lie out in the sun and feel a lot better."
"If you say so." His expression was wry. "Lead the way to the Jeep. I'm assuming that pink monstrosity is yours."
"Daniel's, not mine. Where's your luggage?"
"Lost," he said succinctly. "The airline people said they've managed to track it down, and someone will be bringing it over in the morning. In the meantime, I can borrow something of Daniel's can't I?"
"Of course." She held out her arm, to give him some extra strength to lean on, and for a moment he simply looked at her, his eyes distant and unreadable.
"Thanks," he said, taking it and leaning heavily. "I need all the help I can get."
It was a slow process to reach the Jeep. By the time she got him settled she was breathing heavily herself, and she glanced over at him as he lay back in the seat, his eyes closed, his color pale, his chest rising and falling beneath the too-big suit. "Are you sure you're all right? We don't have much in the way of hospital facilities here on the island, but they might be able to help—"
"I'll be fine," he said without opening his eyes, and his voice sounded slightly fainter.
Whatever doubts she'd had about him vanished the moment she realized how very sick he was. She'd been able to be a remote, gracious hostess to the other lost souls Daniel had sent her. Michael Dowd was another prospect altogether. For the first time in months she found someone whose needs superseded her own. Someone to concentrate on, ignoring her own helpless pain. From the moment she'd felt his weak clasp and looked into his pain-lined face, she'd known he wasn't really a threat at all. He was simply a sick man, someone she wanted to help.
She drove with uncharacteristic sedateness through the narrow streets of the town, then headed up into the hills toward Belle Reste with only a decorous increase in speed. Driving was one thing she really enjoyed, and during the past few months of penance and mourning she'd been denying herself that pleasure. Now, suddenly, she felt like stretching her wings, but she knew that with an invalid beside her she had to be as demure as an old lady. Maybe tomorrow she would see about renting a car after all. A small sporty convertible, something with a little power beneath the hood. Her new houseguest would probably enjoy going for drives once his strength increased a bit.
The road to Belle Reste was a series of three hills and three valleys, with the villa lying at the end of the final valley on a spit of land jutting out into the warm Caribbean. With Francey keeping a sedate pace and a companionable silence as her passenger rested, they made it through the first hill and valley, up the next hill, and were heading downward again when the car began gathering momentum.
Francey pushed her sandaled foot down on the brake, but instead of slowing down the Jeep seemed to move even faster, and she glanced down, wondering if by some odd chance she was pressing the accelerator instead.
The brake was all the way to the floor. Pumping was utterly useless—the speedometer was climbing past its well-bred thirty-five to something beyond fifty. Suicide, on roads like these.
Don't panic, she told herself, still pumping the useless brake pedal. Keep steering and try to downshift.
The gears ground noisily as she tried to push the stick shift into third, and the speedometer climbed to fifty-five. Her passenger turned his face toward her, opened his sleepy eyes and said in a tone of complete unconcern, "Brakes failed?"
She couldn't help it—his mundane tone made her want to laugh. "It seems so."
"You've tried pumping them, you've tried shifting down," he observed casually. "What about the emergency brake?"
"It never worked." She allowed herself a quick glance over at him. She would have expected him to look even worse, paler, now that death stared them in the face. Instead his color had improved, and his eyes had something that might almost be called a sparkle in another man, another situation.
"Then you're simply going to have to drive like hell," he said. "Or we're going to die."
The speedometer had reached sixty. They were only halfway down the hill, and coming up was a series of S-curves worthy of the Grand Prix of Monte Carlo. "Maybe in a Ferrari," she muttered, "with decent tires. We have maybe a snowball's chance in hell of making it."
Michael Dowd laughed. "Well then, Francey, it's been nice knowing you."
"Nice knowing you, Michael," she muttered, concentrating on the steering. The speedometer was edging toward seventy, the S-curves were approaching, and Francey Neeley didn't want to die. Patrick Dugan was dead, cut down in a hail of bullets, and she didn't want to run the risk of ever seeing him again, even in some nebulous afterlife.
She took one last glimpse at her passenger before they headed into the curves. At least he didn't seem to mind dying. That should have made two of them. But she didn't want to die. She didn't want to take the easy way out, the coward's way out. There was too much left to do, to accomplish.
"For heaven's sake put your seat belt on!" she shrieked at her passenger, just noticing he hadn't bothered to fasten himself in.
"Will it make a difference?"
"Humor me. We just might make it. If we get through the next section there's a stretch of rocky beach. I might be able to steer this thing into the water."
"I don't fancy drowning any more than I do crashing."
"Shut up and let me drive."
She almost made it. Not by slowing down, something that was beyond the Jeep's capabilities, but by speeding up just at the curve of each turn. She was cursing beneath her breath, a steady litany that had to take the place of the prayers she'd forsaken months ago, and by the time they entered the final S-curve she knew she was going to make it. The curve was ending, the beach was up ahead, all she had to do was steer across the stretch of rocky beach…
She hadn't counted on the moped with the teenager on board, driving too fast and blithely ignoring her oncoming Jeep. She stared in horror at the accident about to happen, momentarily paralyzed, and then Michael reached over and yanked the wheel sharply.
They went sailing past the teenager, past the stone abutment, past the rocky beach. Gripping the steering wheel, Francey closed her eyes and prepared to die.
Chapter 2
« ^ »
The Jeep banged down on the rock-strewn beach, its deadly momentum slightly blunted as it hurtled toward the water. Francey was beyond fear, beyond rational thought, as the water loomed ahead. Bracing herself for the impact, she was astonished when the Jeep came to a stop almost immediately once it hit the ocean. Water sprayed up around them, drenching her, and for a moment she didn't move, letting the water settle around them in the sudden, deafening silence.
Then she reached over and turned off the engine that had already stopped, pulled out the key and turned to her passenger.
Michael Dowd was looking a great deal healthier than he had less than an hour ago when she'd picked him up at the airport. He'd fastened his seat belt sometime during those last frenzied moments, and his baggy white suit was drenched. "You're one hell of a driver, you know that?" he said in a conversational tone. "Where'd you learn to handle a car like that?"
The water was lapping over the side of the Jeep, over her sandaled feet. "I had lessons from a bootlegger." She smiled at the almost forgotten memory.
"Bootlegger?"
"He did a good job," Michael said. "What else did he teach you?"
She glanced at him, startled. "Not as much as he wanted to. I was seventeen, but I was strong-minded."
"I can believe you. What next?"
She glanced around her, at the water lapping up around them. With a resigned sigh she climbed out into the hip-deep water. "I need to push this thing out of the water. You stay put while I see what I can do…"
But he'd already unfastened the seat belt and climbed out the other side. "You can't do it alone."
"But you're in no shape…"
"One and a half people are better than one," he said flatly. "And I'm in no shape to spend hours sitting in a Jeep in the middle of the ocean. Let's go."
She knew it would have been a waste of time to argue. The moon had risen sometime during their wild flight, and the silvery color danced off the ocean waves, gilding his pale face. He was right; she needed to get him warm and in bed as fast as possible. But they couldn't leave Daniel's Jeep in the middle of Martinus Bay. Not without checking what had happened to the brakes.
It was easier than she would have thought, given the push of the water against the Jeep. By the time they rolled it onto the rocky beach, water was pouring out of the engine, and a group of people from the nearby village had joined them, helping push.
She was in the midst of explanations to her curious helpers when her eyes sought out Michael. He was off to one side, talking to a man she'd never seen before, a huge black man who looked more like a football linebacker than the fishermen on St. Anne who'd come to her rescue.
