Dark Nights Dangerous Men

by Elisabeth Naughton, Cynthia Eden, Katie Reus, Alexandra Ivy, Laura Wright, Joan Swan

  “Come for me, Querida”

  Her breath quickened, and she grew impossibly tight around his probing fingers. “I… Oh, God.”

  “That’s it.” He kissed her again and stroked deeper, searching for her sweetest spot. And he knew when he found it, the moment she pulled back from his mouth and shivered uncontrollably in his arms with his name on her lips.

  If it were possible to get pleasure from someone else’s orgasm without actually having sex, he’d just done it. He never stopped touching her, smoothing his fingers through her slick folds, his hand over her bare breasts, his mouth against her neck and lips as he brought her down slowly and relished every pulse and quiver and soul-searing sound she made.

  She shifted quickly, turned in his arms and hooked one knee over his hip as she crushed her mouth to his. “Enough teasing. I want you in me. Now.”

  Thank God. He was about to come in his pants.

  He was laughing when she pushed him onto his back and went straight for the buttons on his jeans, straddling his legs. He reached for her face, cradled it in his hands and pulled her mouth back to his. “Come here.”

  God, she tasted good. Like mint and coffee and everything sweet and spicy he’d been missing in his life. He kissed her harder, pulled her tight against his chest and rubbed his erection into the valley between her thighs, needing to get closer. Incredibly close.

  He was never gonna last. Not if she didn’t pick up her pace and take him right now. He saw stars when her hand dipped beneath his waistband, and when those graceful fingers wrapped around his hard length, he was sure he heard bells.

  He pressed into her hand, back and forth, tormenting himself but needing the contact, and reached for the button on her shorts. “Naked. You. Now.”

  With her free hand braced against the carpet at his back, she eased away from his mouth. She stilled and narrowed her brow as she looked back toward the kitchen. “Do you hear that?”

  All he could hear was that little voice screaming Now, now, right now!

  She let go of him and pushed up to stand. “It’s my cell.”

  “Lisa—” He tried to grab her, but she disappeared like a bolt of lightning into the kitchen, her perfect little ass waggling behind her.

  His head hit the carpet with a thud, and he groaned in pure frustration. He had a lead weight sandwiched between his legs, and the woman he craved had just run off, leaving him in mindless agony.

  There was some sick irony going on here. If he weren’t dangling on the edge of control, he might have found it funny.

  Her surprised voice drifted out to him, cutting through his self-pitying thoughts. The shock he heard in her words jolted through him, and he stood quickly, buttoning his jeans as he headed for the kitchen.

  She stood near the massive sliding door looking out at the beach, the phone pressed to her ear, deep furrow lines across her brow. “Are you sure? Yes. No. Oh, crap.” Her eyes slid shut, opened again to focus far off in the distance as she massaged her forehead.

  Carajo. She knew. He didn’t have to guess who was on the other end of the line.

  He leaned back against the cabinets and waited. The arousal he’d felt before chilled and dissipated.

  “Don’t you dare.” Her voice hardened, and she dropped her hand. “Shane—”

  She turned away from the window and pulled the phone from her ear. “He hung up on me.”

  That wasn’t the only thing her cop brother was gonna do.

  Her cheeks paled as she closed the phone. “I… That was Shane. I was waiting for a call from my assistant in San Francisco. I asked her to track down a few research leads for me. I…” She swallowed and looked up, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Alan Landau’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  Her eyes widened. “You know?”

  He nodded. “Pete just told me.”

  “I thought you went to the hospital?”

  “I did. I stopped by the gallery when I was done.”

  She braced a hand on the glass table in the breakfast nook and eased into one of the plush chairs. “Did you also know he was shot in the forehead, that they’re calling it a homicide?”

  He shook his head slowly as his gut tightened. She didn’t need to know the details. Why the hell had her brother mentioned it?

  She set her eyes on his from across the room. “Then you probably also didn’t know he had a crumpled piece of paper in his hand when they found him. And it had my name and flight number to Miami on it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lisa ran a shaky hand through her hair and tossed the phone on the table. She glanced up at Rafe, who was still standing on the other side of the kitchen looking a little shocked himself. “Landau knew I was after Tisiphone. He was playing me.”

  Silent steps carried him across the Mexican tile in the kitchen. He crouched in front of her, resting his hands on her thighs. “Are you okay?”

  She looked down at his long fingers splayed across her bare legs. His skin was shades darker than hers, golden instead of pale, rough and rugged instead of smooth. Five minutes ago those hands had taken her to heaven, and all she’d been able to think about was destroying him with her body. Now that seemed trivial compared to what Shane had just told her.

  Someone was dead because of her stubborn resolve to find the Furies.

  “Lisa?” He squeezed her thighs. “Querida, look at me.”

  She finally registered his question and blinked. “I’m fine. I…” Oh, God. “Who would have killed him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He had an idea. And he wasn’t saying. She could read it in his eyes. “Winters?”

  He was silent for so long, she wasn’t sure he’d answer. “Maybe,” he finally said.

  “You think someone else is in on this, don’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  It bugged her that he didn’t trust her enough to confide in her, that he was holding back. Emotions were one thing, facts were another.

  “They know we’re here,” she said, trying to fight back that pathetic hitch in her voice. She was tougher than this, dammit.

  His fingers tightened on her legs. “They know we’re in the area. No one knows we’re here.”

  She fought the urge to brush her hand across his stubbled jaw. Sinking into him wouldn’t solve any of her problems, no matter how much she wanted it to, and needing him for anything other than sex was a really bad idea. “Rafe, they know you work with Pete. How long is it going to take them to figure out Pete has a sister with a house in the Keys?”

  “Are you saying you want to quit?”

  Is that what she was saying? Was it worth all this? Risking their lives for a piece of marble? Putting others in jeopardy because she couldn’t let go of her past? Were the Furies really going to change anything for her—if she found them?

  A thousand questions ran through her mind, and she only had the answer to one. She wasn’t ready to walk away from this yet. Not without trying. Not without giving it one shot. And it wasn’t because of Rafe.

  It couldn’t be.

  He pulled her to her feet, as if he already knew the answer. “By the time they figure out we’re here, we’ll be long gone.” He brushed his knuckle over her cheek and half-smiled. “Would I lie to you?”

  She chuckled, despite the fact nothing about this situation was funny, and dropped her head against his chest.

  “Why don’t you show me what you were working on before I distracted you?”

  Swallowing around the lump in her throat, she remembered that sweet diversion and wished he’d do it again to get this pit out of the bottom of her stomach. But his mood had changed. His expression was soft, guarded, concerned. No longer that of the hot Latin lover who’d nearly devoured her minutes before.

  Probably a good thing. Every time he touched her, she forgot about her self-imposed don’t-get-involved-with-someone-you-work-with rules. And that little voice in the back of her head saying This time could be different was getting harder
and harder to ignore.

  She blew out a long breath, pushed back and led him into the living room.

  Her papers were everywhere. She bent and gathered them into a pile while he slipped his hands into his pockets and looked down at the maps of the Caribbean she’d printed out and pieced together across the carpet.

  He knelt down for a better look, taking in the small islands she’d circled. “Gonna tell me what these are?”

  She sat back on her heels and reached behind her for Doug’s journal. Reading it hadn’t been nearly as hard as she’d thought it would be, and part of her wasn’t sure if that was because of the situation they were in, or because of what had happened last night.

  She shook off the thought and pulled out a piece of paper she’d tucked between the pages. She opened to a random portion of the Iliad copied out in Doug’s slanted handwriting. “Do you know what a cipher is?”

  He studied the journal page with its underlined words randomly dispersed and the carefully listed letters she’d copied onto the blank page. “It’s like a code, right?”

  She nodded. “An algorithm for performing some kind of encryption. Codes tend to work at the level of meaning, so the words are generally translated into another word. Ciphers focus more on individual letters, rather than words or phrases.”

  He nodded and sat next to her. She took that as a sign he was interested, and went on.

  “During his research, Doug acquired a box of letters at auction written by and addressed to Frederique Rousseau. She was a young girl who lived in Jamaica in the early nineteenth century who supposedly saw the Furies washed ashore after a Spanish galleon sank in a storm off the island. According to the letters, all three pieces were carefully stowed in a crate that survived the wreckage.”

  “I’ve heard this story,” he said, interrupting her. “A wealthy European collector was on that ship with our ladies. He drowned when it sank. Frederique had two friends, Annalise de Los Cruz and Sophia Le Blanc. The three girls were playing on the beach after the storm and found the crate. Each girl took one of the pieces. Sophia returned to Antigua with Tisiphone, Annalise’s family later moved to Puerto Rico with Magaera, and Frederique stayed right where she was in Jamaica with Alecto.”

  “Right.” Obviously, he’d done his homework. “Doug was convinced Magaera had been passed down through family lineage and was in a private collection somewhere, because he couldn’t find any mention of it, besides in Frederique’s letters. That, he figured, meant it had probably remained with the de Los Cruz family.”

  “Maybe,” Rafe said with a frown. “Could be her parents saw it and threw it overboard on the trip home and no one ever mentioned it. Not exactly beauties, those Furies.”

  “You don’t believe that.” She shot him a look. “You wouldn’t be here if you did.” And they wouldn’t be running for their lives if that were the case. “Besides, the notes you took from Landau’s safe confirmed the same thing.” She handed him the pages and waited while he scanned through them.

  “Now, Alecto,” she said when he’d finished reading, “is mentioned in various accounts from passing traders and a few historical documents across the island of Jamaica. The Rousseaus were famous for their parties, and from what Doug could find, it seemed Alecto had hung on a wall in the parlor of the Rousseau plantation among other works of art for nearly fifty years. Until it disappeared.”

  A smile tugged at his mouth. “I know this one, too. They say it was stolen by a voodoo priestess convinced it was an evil spirit bringing destruction to their little village. She didn’t like all those snakes coming out Alecto’s hair and had it cast into the bowels of the earth.”

  Lisa remembered sliding through the intestines of that bowel and shivered at the sharp memory. “Yes. And that information fueled more than one treasure hunter into looking for it in the caves of Jamaica.” Including Donald Ramsey, whom she’d met briefly in that dank cavern.

  “Like you?” he asked with a lift of his brow.

  Her? A treasure hunter? She’d spent her life loathing what they stood for, but when it came down to it, that’s exactly what she’d become. Her mouth went dry. “Including me…I guess.”

  He looked back at the journal. “A treasure hunter and a thief. Querida, we were meant for each other.”

  Her heart skipped a beat, and she darted a look up, but he didn’t meet her gaze.

  “So that explains Magaera and Alecto,” he said. “But what does any of that have to do with Homer’s Iliad?”

  She cleared her throat and tried to shake off that strange tightening in her chest. “These were young girls, twelve to fourteen years old. Pampered, aristocratic girls looking for a little excitement. Give them something new, something foreign and romantic like buried treasure and sunken ships, and, well, you can only imagine that their minds would take off. Girls are girls, no matter when they lived or died.”

  “Thank God for girls.”

  Rafe’s cheesy grin relaxed her, and she smiled. “Doug found long passages copied from the Iliad in Sophia’s letters. Some from the beginning of the poem, some from the middle, other sentences pulled from here and there in no particular order. It was like she randomly chose passages that made no sense when examined as a whole, but did when you were looking at—”

  “At a cipher,” he finished for her, eyes narrowing on the letters she’d listed.

  “Yes.” A relieved smile pulled at her mouth. He got it. “The letters span nearly four decades. They stayed in touch. They talked about the Furies. About what they’d each done with their piece.”

  “So why would Sophia hide it?” he asked. “I mean, the Rousseaus prominently displayed their piece. You said you thought the de Los Cruzes passed theirs down through the family line. Why would the Le Blancs be any different.”

  “Roberto Le Blanc was a missionary sent to the Caribbean. You’ve seen Alecto. Do you think that’s something a man of God would want his daughter coveting?”

  He shrugged and looked down, his finger following the long list Lisa had made from the passage on page twenty-seven of Doug’s journal.

  “Doug thought it was a code,” she went on, pointing at the words he’d underlined years before. “He narrowed down the words that were important in each passage, but couldn’t ever figure out how they translated into a clue about where Sophia had hidden Tisiphone.”

  “Because he wasn’t looking at letters.”

  “Right.”

  She pulled out a blank page and grabbed a pencil from the coffee table, intent on showing him what she meant. “I think this might be a Caesar cipher. It had to be simple for the girls to use it, and a Caesar cipher is the easiest cipher there is: a shift in letters in the alphabet. The key is figuring out which direction and how far. I’ve been playing with it all morning. I just haven’t had enough time to work it out yet.”

  He took the paper and pencil from her hand, grabbed a magazine from the coffee table as a hard surface to write on, and leaned back against the couch, drawing up his knees. His serious gaze was focused on the paper, his brow furrowed in thought.

  And she smiled, not irritated he’d tried to take over, simply amused he thought he could figure it out when Doug had never been able to, when even she was having trouble with it. “It’s all about counting—”

  He held up a hand to stop her. “I get it. I’m good with puzzles. Give me a few minutes.”

  She sat back with another paper and pencil and bit her lip to keep from grinning as she went back to work.

  A few minutes turned into an hour, and her stomach finally growled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten yet today. She dropped her papers and stretched. “I’m going to get some lunch. Do you want anything?”

  Brow creased, he grunted something she didn’t understand and continued to make chicken scratches on his slip of paper without looking her direction.

  She shook her head and pushed to stand. The man never did anything half-assed, she could say that about him. She wandered into the kitchen and peere
d into the massive refrigerator. He was determined, relentless, sometimes bordering on obsessive.

  A lot like someone else she knew.

  Shaking her head and the ridiculous thought away with it, she closed the refrigerator and found bread and peanut butter from the cupboard. She was just pulling her finger from the jar for a taste when her notebook smacked the granite counter at her side, causing her to jump.

  She looked up into Rafe’s smug face. He closed his mouth over her finger and smiled. Her heart kicked up when he let go of her finger and licked his lips in a sleepy, sexy way that sent heat pooling in her belly.

  “Berry Islands,” he said in that deep, husky voice. “Bahamas.”

  Her eyes grew wide, and she darted a look at the paper where he’d made a series of marks and notes. “No way. How did you come up with that?”

  He lifted the jar from the counter, found a spoon in a nearby drawer and scooped a mouthful of peanut butter. “The Le Blancs were French. You forgot to translate, Querida.”

  Translate? She looked back at him. He’d settled himself onto a stool at the counter, eating peanut butter right out of the jar. “You speak French?”

  He shrugged and licked the spoon. “I traveled with the Navy. Picked up a little here and there, enough to get me by. The romance languages aren’t all that different.”

  They were to her. She knew how to say Where’s the bathroom? and I’ll have a beer in Spanish, and that was it. She remembered hearing him speak Italian in Milan. The man was a never-ending puzzle.

  “But where?” she asked, refocusing. There were nearly thirty islands in the Berry chain.

  He dropped the spoon into the empty jar and stood. “Not sure. But it’s in there, you just have to wade through the rest of it.”

  “Me?”

  His smile was all teeth. “Since I did the hard part, you should be able to figure out the rest, Doc.” He reached for a map he’d stuck in the back of the notebook and smoothed it on the counter in front of her. “It’s a two-day trip by sailboat to Great Harbour Cay. I already called Hailey and asked her to bring up my boat. Didn’t figure it would be a good idea for me to be seen in Key West right now. I need to make a supply run before she gets here.”