by Karen Harper
Blinking back her own tears, Claire got up and went around the table. She was almost afraid to touch Darcy at first, but she leaned close and put a hand on her shoulder. She’d always leaned on Darcy. Right now Claire hadn’t exactly lied, but she could hardly tell her the truth. She prayed she wasn’t endangering Darcy, her husband, Steve, and two kids by sharing even this much. But word would get out, and her family—what was left of it—had to know.
Worse, wait until Jace heard. Once he’d arrived back in US airspace, he texted her from the plane that he’d heard they were headed home with Lexi so he was coming back too. But he’d go absolutely ballistic when he heard his daughter had a new stepfather. He’d feel so betrayed if she couldn’t explain it to him—and could she?
“M-m-maybe,” Darcy said through sniffles, “I’m more like our mother than I wanted to admit—like, I mean, maybe I’ve had my head in the sand, like she always had hers in a book.”
“No, it isn’t that. I—I just didn’t level with you about Nick. This is all on me.”
“And here, I was psyching you out that you still cared for Jace and vice versa, but then you’re the psych major, not me.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. Please don’t cry. You’ve been so great to me, always. As the older sister, I should have been the strong one, but it’s been you, and I’m trying to catch up on that.”
“Stop talking in the past tense, like we’re over! Like we won’t see each other, or someone’s dead. But I guess things have changed.”
“Not my feelings for you, for Jilly, Steve and Drew. Darcy, I know I’ve made a mess of things, and my narcolepsy and cataplexy have been a burden, but—”
The kitchen door banged open, and Darcy’s daughter, blonde Jilly, Lexi’s age, rushed in sobbing, sucking in huge breaths. “Mom!” she cried and circled around Claire to cling to Darcy on her other side. “Aunt Claire got married, and Lexi was a flower girl, and we weren’t invited!”
Darcy shrugged off Claire’s touch and held Jilly tight. Lexi came in, hands on hips and tears on her cheeks. “She’s not happy for us, Mommy! She’s mad at me and you too!”
All four of them sat at the table and cried. Claire hated Clayton Ames even more right now. She made her vow to herself again: she’d do everything she could to help Nick ruin Clayton Ames, if they could find a way—and a way to stay alive.
* * *
Jace was glad to see his flying bud, Alex “Ace” Rutherford waiting for him when he taxied Ace’s Cirrus SR22 into a back lot hanger at the Naples Municipal Airport. Ace had married money and also had a cabin cruiser and a house in Grey Oaks, a ritzy, gated clubhouse community in Naples. He worked in stocks and bonds for his father-in-law, though he always said he’d rather be fishing.
“Hey, my man,” Ace called out as soon as Jace popped the door, “at least you brought my baby back in one piece.”
At least, Jace’s thoughts echoed, Claire and Nick had brought my baby back in one piece. Ames had assured him they had taken off from Grand Cayman just this morning. When he’d texted Claire, she’d texted back to say they were okay and not much else except to say thanks for the backup help and stay safe. That’s a joke, he thought. He’d nearly gotten himself killed.
“Hope you didn’t doubt me,” Jace told his friend, but he doubted himself. Not that he’d had a choice, but he’d agreed to work for the man who had ordered his daughter abducted, who had evidently set it up for Nick and Claire to get hitched. And if Lexi hadn’t been kidnapped, he wouldn’t be so sure that they weren’t in on that.
“Doubt you? No way,” Ace said. “Not after we were such a success with ‘The Ace and Jace Show’ that bombed the hell out of the Taliban. No problems down or back?” he asked, clapping him on the shoulder after Jace climbed down onto the concrete hangar floor. “You look like you haven’t slept. You okay, guy?”
“Sure, sure. Your new toy handled great. Hey, I got a new gig from a high roller I met down in the Caymans. Going to fly his new Learjet that will be delivered here in a couple of days. The damn thing’s worth about sixty-five million.”
“Sweet! He got a company here? Would I or ‘Daddy Dearest’ know him?”
“He’s an expat, lives down there but needs people flown around from here sometimes.”
Ace cocked his head and squinted at him. “No lie? Thought you loved the international airline gigs and were set on making pilot’s chair.”
“I’ll be more my own boss this way,” he told Ace as they watched the mechanic who oversaw private planes walk in to check out the Cirrus.
But, Jace thought, as Ace went over to talk to the guy, that was a lie. He’d put himself under Kilcorse-Ames’s very tight thumb to save himself. There were perks to the job, but sky-high risk too with very little leeway about taking orders from the top. He’d be flying Ames High, Inc.’s staff here and there on call as well as keeping a close eye on the murder case Ames said Nick would be taking. And he’d sworn to keep an eye on Claire and Nick—which galled him to no end, especially since that’s exactly what he wanted to do.
Though he had the perfect excuse to drop in on them to see Lexi, he hated being another of K-A’s spies. Still, Claire had betrayed him, maybe not to marry Markwood if she was forced to in order to save Lexi, but to get involved in the first place with that too-clever criminal lawyer. Jace wasn’t even sure he’d take Claire back if Markwood dumped her, or, as K-A had hinted, if something bad happened to him. The fact that Markwood took on the man’s murder case provided at least temporary life insurance for him.
But what K-A didn’t figure on was that Jace was big on paybacks.
* * *
“Your eyes are red,” Nick observed when he picked Claire up at Darcy’s in yet another rented car, this time a Jeep Cherokee. “Did your sister take it hard?”
“Very. Her little girl, just Lexi’s age, did too.”
“But she said she’d keep Lexi for a little while?”
“We all cried, then made a tenuous truce. Nick,” she said as she closed the car door, “I knew it would really hurt her that I more or less eloped. But what Ames is planning to do is dangerous to know, so I couldn’t tell her any of that. So where are we going that Lexi couldn’t come along? To meet with your endangered species friend Haze?”
“I’ll take you to meet him as soon as I can figure out a battle plan. Time’s a-wasting since the police may arrest him soon. But first, I wanted you to see a place I think we can live. I didn’t want Lexi falling in love with it first, so you can hear me out and decide. You said Jace borrowed his wealthy friend’s jet to come down to Grand Cayman. Well, this is a yacht that belongs to a friend of mine who has been after me to return a favor I did for him. That, and Lexi saying she loves boats, made me think of it.”
“A yacht? He must owe you a big favor.”
“I saved his life—or life without parole—by proving he didn’t murder a woman on this boat. A woman who wasn’t his wife. I established she was trying to shake him down, that he wasn’t having an affair with her and that someone else came on board and killed her before he even got there.”
“I remember that in the papers, and on Nancy Grace’s TV show too. She always digs up sensational stuff like that—screwed-up lifestyles of the rich and famous. So you’re going to show me a yacht where a murder took place?”
“True, but once you see it, you’ll forget about that. He hasn’t used it much since. He and his wife are still barely speaking. It’s a beautiful boat with six cabins and a small back deck pool, no less. It’s been just sitting at a marina in Naples Bay.”
“It would give us freedom to move around and keep strangers out, at least until you—we—work on this so-called Mangrove Murder. Lexi doesn’t start preschool until the New Year. Maybe she’d see it as a vacation.”
“We’ll tell her it’s an extended honeymoon. However hard we have t
o buckle down,” he said, reaching out to take her hand from her lap, “maybe it can be that.”
* * *
As Claire stood on the dock, she thought the Sylph looked like a floating palace. Sleek lines, pale gray-and-white hull. It had a Jacuzzi as well as a small pool. She could see that much from where they stood on the dock, so what must it be like inside? She could tell that its owner Dylan Carnahan was excited to have Nick use it for a while, at least. But it had stunned her to hear the man call the yacht his “twenty-million-dollar baby.”
Dylan was about Nick’s age and almost as tall. He had much lighter hair and seemed to have a—well, a jumpy, nervous persona.
“I owe you everything, pal,” Dylan told Nick after they were all introduced where he greeted them on the dock. The man was very talkative. Sometimes that meant a person was hiding something, but this man actually seemed lonely. “I’m happy to hear you have a ready-made family, and the Sylph’s all yours for a while,” he went on. “I’m gonna probably sell it, but not yet. Despite everything, it’s hard to let her go. I’ll get you a crew too, as it only has a captain and cook right now. I’d love to have her go out again. She doesn’t deserve her bum rap. You know what a ‘sylph’ is, Claire?”
“Some kind of water nymph?”
“It’s a slender, graceful woman. In short, Nick,” he said, bumping Nick’s upper arm with his fist, “an appropriate ship for your new bride and first mate.”
“Fated to be mated—Claire and me and the ship?” Nick countered.
“You got that right. Sorry, Claire,” Dylan said, “about the bad publicity here, but Nick saved my hide—not that I was guilty. I know you’ll do the same for that guy on Goodland too, pal.”
Nick’s head snapped around. “How do you know about that?”
“In the paper this morning, made you sound like the attorney from heaven. Don’t ask me how they got the word you’re defending Hazelton if you didn’t tell them. You know, the victim got let go from the staff of the Naples newspaper, but now they sound like they’re really into this story, fellow journalist and all that. I saw something on CNN’s Headline News about it too. I sympathize with the guy, ’cause I know how it feels to have the media mavens on your tail, even if you’re innocent.”
Nick and Claire looked at each other. The master in distant Grand Cayman was pulling strings again, using the fact Nick was well-known and respected here to set this all up. Local newspaper articles were one thing, but a national TV cable network?
“So, hey, let me show you newlyweds around,” Dylan said with a sweep of his arm toward the gangway. Claire almost felt she was boarding one of those Grand Cayman cruise ships.
She tried not to gawk at the opulence of the Sylph’s layout and decor. Lexi would absolutely flip out. The wall and fabric color scheme was stark black-and-white with touches of gold throughout. Chrome gleamed everywhere she looked, except in the stainless steel galley, where, Dylan said, the cook would be happy to not just be cooking for himself and the captain.
Everything was so modern, sharp and clean. Two suites and four bedrooms—though Dylan corrected her to use words like staterooms and cabins; to say heads for the four stunning bathrooms; and passageways for hallways. It was another world but it would provide privacy and safety.
While the two men huddled at the dining room table over details, Claire stood at the point of the prow, remembering Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the movie Titanic shouting, “I’m the king of the world!” What a love story but a tragic one.
She had not been able to say yes, she’d marry Nick, because he hadn’t asked, and it had been out of her control. But she’d said yes to living here, despite the fact the lounge had been the scene of a murder. At least this would work until Lexi started school and for the time it took them to clear Hazelton and tout Ames’s Youth products.
But what if Hazelton wasn’t innocent? She’d have to help Nick find out the truth. As for keeping Lexi safe, they planned to hire an au pair, a sort of nanny, a Hispanic woman related to Heck Munez. They would be docked here, but possibly move to different island ports, or maybe even go to sea.
She went back in and wandered to the master suite again. She’d insist that Nick take this stateroom, and she’d stay in the slightly smaller one next door. They could put Lexi next to hers and each have a cabin to use as an office, when they were here and not onshore at Goodland and beyond, working on the murder case. There would still be a guest bedroom here for Darcy and her family—if they would visit.
As much as Claire feared and hated Clayton Ames, this part of their new situation was working out well. He wouldn’t know exactly where they were, and if they saw his drones hovering, Nick had joked, they could shoot them down with the setup for skeet shooting at the back—the aft—of the boat. They could move about at will without cameras and listening devices.
She glanced at the king-size bed decked out in stark black-and-white with gold lightning strikes jagging across the pattern. She couldn’t recall much about the murder of the woman that had happened on this ship, so maybe she should try to find that episode of Nancy Grace on YouTube again. No, she wouldn’t think about all that. She had a lot to do, to get ready for.
She stopped at the doorway to look back once again at the big bed. For the first time she noted there was a mirror on the ceiling over it.
Her insides cartwheeled. She hurried out, closing the door behind her.
9
It was almost 5:00 p.m. when Nick drove them around to the back entrance of his law office. Claire had noticed that the discreet sign in front read merely Markwood, Benton & Chase without any mention of attorneys-at-law, but then Nick was already well-known for some big cases in Southwest Florida. Seeing those other names hit Claire hard. She didn’t know any of Nick’s senior or junior law partners, and only one man who worked with him on his covert company South Shores. Her stomach cramped. Here she was married to Nick, but did she really know him?
“We will have to tell people we’re married, won’t we?” she asked.
“I’ve laid the groundwork for that with my assistants. Heck ferreted it out for himself by finding Paul Kilcorse’s link to our Grand Cayman marriage license. There’s not much my tech expert can’t find—except where Ames makes his permanent base.”
“If he has one. It’s ironic Heck has a Cuban heritage, and that’s where Ames might hide out.”
Nick just frowned at that. “I told Heck to come in the back way and meet us in my office. Although he mostly works for me more or less undercover for South Shores, my partners here know he’s a consultant. And about announcing our marriage, I’d like for us to have a reception later for friends and family. Right now, this case and protecting you and Lexi come first.”
“And protecting yourself.”
After they walked to the building, he unlocked the back entrance door, and they went up a concrete staircase, a far cry from the glass-and-carpeted front entry she’d glimpsed with a chandelier and live tropical foliage inside. Although the office building faced the busy Tamiami Trail, it seemed so silent here, even with most of the other lawyers and their staff still at work in offices above. Nick said he’d sent his secretary home early and told the colleagues he intended to use on the Mangrove Murder case not to come to his office right now. Clayton Ames might reek of power, she thought, but in his own realm, criminal attorney Nicholas Markwood did too.
“Nick,” she said, turning back to put her hand on his shoulder. Since he was a step below her on the stairs, they faced each other eye to eye. “I thank you for being so good with Lexi. I realize the five o’clock Happy Meal just now at McDonald’s is not your usual time and place for dinner, and you were great with Darcy’s family when we took Lexi back there for a little longer stay tonight. She’s very excited about living on a big boat.”
His smile lifted the corners of his mouth and era
sed the worry line on his forehead. “The good news is I do care for her—and, especially, for you. The bad news is, that’s exactly what Ames is banking on to keep me in line with unspoken threats to all of us. But I also want to be good not only with Lexi but with you.”
He leaned against the banister and pulled her to him. She put one hand on the back of his neck and the other on his cheek. His beard stubble, so unusual for him, rasped against her damp palm. They both kept their eyes open as they kissed, carefully, gently. But suddenly, he anchored her to him with both hands hard on her waist. They breathed together, moved together, deepened the kiss and their embrace.
A door slammed above them, and the sound echoed in the stairwell. “Boss, you okay?” came Heck’s voice with its Hispanic lilt. “Saw you drive up and walk in.”
“Yeah, okay. Just a sec.”
“Wanted to be sure. After everything, you might need a bodyguard as well as a cyber genius—ha!”
Nick finally moved away from Claire and looked up the stairwell. “You’re my man! We were just talking. Be right up!”
With a metallic echo, the door above them closed. As Claire fanned her flushed cheeks and went up ahead of Nick again, he patted her bottom. “You’re the one who needs a bodyguard, sweetheart,” he whispered up to her, “and I’m it.”
“Don’t you know redheads tend to flush when they get excited?” she whispered back at him.
“I’m counting on it.”
But, despite his teasing, which absolutely rattled her poise, as they walked out onto the third floor and headed toward his office, she could sense that Nick became all business, just as the surroundings seemed to. This hall had dark green carpet with two, tall-backed, upholstered chairs and a large Oriental vase of purple orchids on a dark wood library table. Inside the first door where Heck waited was a secretary’s or receptionist’s desk, vacant now.
“Best wishes to the newlyweds, que bueno!” Heck told them with a grin as he shook Nick’s hand and then hers. “If it wasn’t out of the frying pan and into the fire with this new mess, we’d celebrate, yes?”