“You don’t remember anything about golden lions in any of the stories?” he asked, and his tone said that she was a moron for not remembering something so important.
“Don’t start on me,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “You grew up in this swamp, on the site of the map, so why didn’t you find the nails and the lions when you were a kid?”
“Actually, I did.”
That statement stopped Fiona in her tracks, but Ace reached back, grabbed her arm, and pulled her forward. “Please don’t make a scene,” he said quietly. “Do you want the others to know?”
“Know what?” she asked, and there was a hysterical tone beginning in her voice. “Know that you, not me, have known everything all along?”
“If you start playing female on me, I won’t tell you anything.”
“Me play female?” She pursed her mouth, ready to hit him with something. “ ‘Oh, Ace, darling, I can’t lift this feather, and it’s hurting my teeny tiny ankles,’” she mimicked Lisa.
“You’re jealous, aren’t you?”
“As jealous of her as you are of Jeremy,” she snapped back at him.
“Then that’s quite a lot,” Ace said softly, and looked at her from under his eyelashes.
In spite of herself, Fiona’s breath caught in her throat, and when she nearly tripped over a fallen log, Ace put his hand under her elbow to steady her.
“Still mad at me for not telling you that my family is fabulously wealthy and that I can easily afford to manufacture your swamp doll and set you up in your own toy plant so you can run it the way you want and never again have to worry that some jerk will fire you?”
At that overlong sentence, without a pause in it, Fiona had to laugh. “When you put it that way, it’s not such a bad idea. Maybe I could stand it. But …” Hesitating, she looked away for a moment, then back at him. “But what about … about …”
“Lisa?”
“You are going to marry her, remember?”
“When you snooped through my house at the park entrance, didn’t you wonder why her picture was under the bed?”
“I didn’t—Okay, so maybe I did look and maybe I did wonder, but you’ve confessed undying love for her since I met you.”
“I was lonely, I went back to my parents’ place for a month-long visit, and Lisa was there. We had a great time, what can I say? I thought I wanted to spend my life with her. But when I got home, back to here …” He motioned his hand to include the swamp and the constant barrage of wildlife around them. “I knew that she wouldn’t, couldn’t, fit in. I was planning to break it to her gently, but …” He shrugged.
“But I came along and broke your crocodile, then woke up with a dead man on top of me and—”
“Alligator,” he said.
Fiona gave him a brilliant smile. “I know, but does Lisa?”
Ace kept his eyes straight ahead, then lowered his voice. “I think maybe Lisa has found something she likes more than Montgomery money.”
When Fiona gave a puzzled frown, Ace nodded over his shoulder and Fiona looked backward. Their little line of people was paired off as though they were entering Noah’s ark. Suzie and Gibby were head to head, whispering urgently to each other, while Lisa and Jeremy were …
Fiona looked back at Ace in wonder. “I guess they’ve spent a lot of time together in the last week or so.”
“Seems so,” he said, eyes straight ahead, but Fiona saw the tiniest bit of a smile about his lips. His beautiful lips, she thought.
Her heart was beating hard and fast, and she took a deep breath to try to calm herself down. “So it looks like your wedding is off,” she said after a while, trying to sound nonchalant.
“And yours too,” Ace said with so much little-boy eagerness that Fiona laughed again.
For a moment they walked in silence; then suddenly, Ace tripped over a piece of wet ground and fell against a hard-barked palm tree. And when he fell, he took Fiona with him, so that they landed in a tumble of long legs and arms. And, somehow, his mouth found hers, and he kissed her for several long, delicious seconds before the others came running.
“Are you all right?” Lisa half screamed. “Oh, Ace, darling, I’d just die if anything happened to you.”
Sitting on the ground, Fiona looked up, shading her eyes against the sun, and saw that Jeremy’s hands were made into fists at his sides. “We are fine,” she said with emphasis. “Just tripped over a snake.”
“At least it wasn’t another dead body,” Suzie said, standing in the background near Gibby, and Fiona wondered what it was that they had been talking about with so much intensity.
“Now that everyone is stopped, maybe we should camp tonight,” Gibby said, looking hard at Ace. “Unless you want us to circle around some more.”
“Circle?” Lisa said quickly. “What does he mean, Ace, honey? You aren’t leading us in a circle, are you?”
“Of course not,” Ace said, but Fiona could see that he wasn’t looking anyone in the eye. “Gibby just means to ‘ circle the wagons,’ that sort of thing, don’t you, old man?”
“Sure thing,” Gibby said, but his eyes never left Ace’s.
Ace got up off the ground, then hefted his backpack. “I brought fishing gear. Gibby, you get some bait, and you, lawyer, get the kerosene stove working. Suze, you know how to fish?”
“I can do most anything, including following a map,” she said, looking at Ace with cold eyes.
“I guess we know what they were talking about,” Fiona said into Ace’s ear as she got up to stand beside him.
“Go away,” he said to her, under his breath, and for a moment Fiona thought he meant he wanted her to get away from him. But then she figured out what he wanted.
“Suzie,” Fiona said brightly, “I’ll help you fish just as soon as I, uh, take a trip into the bushes.”
“I’ll go with you,” Lisa said in that age-old belief that women should go to the powder room together.
Turning to pick up his pack from the ground, Ace looked up at Fiona and gave her a barely perceptible shake of his head.
“ ’Scuse me,” Fiona said, as lightly as she could manage, “but the absence of stalls makes me crave privacy.”
Lisa blinked for a moment at that, then gave a little giggle. “Oh, sure. I understand. You aren’t going to escape, are you?”
“I didn’t know that I was considered a prisoner,” Fiona said, aghast. The woman really was too much.
“Oh, yes. It’s all over the news. The police want you very much. They think you—”
Jeremy took Lisa’s arm in his. “She knows that. She just—”
With a swiftness that surprised all of them, Ace knocked Jeremy’s hand off Lisa’s arm. “If you want to keep that hand, lawyer, keep it off my woman!”
When everyone’s attention was on Ace, Fiona slipped through the bushes unnoticed.
Ten minutes later she was still hidden from the group and still waiting. Where is he? she thought. Had she misunderstood him? Maybe he hadn’t meant for her to meet him alone? Maybe he was … Maybe he’d been so overcome with jealousy over Jeremy’s touching “his” woman that Ace was now in a brawl to the death with Jeremy, and maybe Ace would never show up. And maybe Ace had been lying about—
When Ace touched her arm, Fiona nearly jumped out of her skin. To keep her from making a sound, Ace put his mouth on hers.
“Do you always talk to yourself?” he whispered against her lips.
“Your woman?” she said with more venom than she meant. In truth, she hadn’t meant to say anything about Lisa. Jealousy was unbecoming to a woman of her caliber. “Your woman?”
Ace laughed, then grabbed her hand and started pulling her through the brush. “I’ve given them so much to do that I figure we have thirty minutes before they miss us,” he said as he adjusted the heavy pack on his back.
Fiona pulled back on his hand, as though she were reluctant to follow him. “Sure you don’t want Lisa to go with you? Wherever we’re going, that i
s.”
Ace halted for a second. “To find the lions, of course,” he said. “Did you forget that I told you that I know where they are?”
Actually, she had forgotten that; between the kisses and then his declaration of Lisa being “his” woman, lions, gold or otherwise, had skipped her mind.
But right now logic didn’t have much to do with anything, and Fiona stood where she was, not moving.
Ace dropped her hand, then took a step toward her and put his hand under her chin to tilt her face up to his. “Would it help if I told you that I only said that to create a diversion? Would it help if I told you that I’ve come to love you very much and that if we ever get out of here, I plan to marry you?”
“That, uh, yes, that does help a bit,” she managed to say.
“Well, then, come on, there isn’t much daylight left.”
Twenty-one
Okay, so a woman gets a proposal from a gorgeous man and she expects to be made love to. You know, champagne and oysters on the half shell, candlelight, that sort of thing.
But what Fiona was receiving was none of that. Instead, she was being pulled through slimy water that was kneedeep (which meant it would be over cute little Lisa’s head, she thought, with a smirk), and Ace (the man she loved) was frequently warning her about snakes. And alligators. And other things that she didn’t want to inspect too closely.
Needless to say, Fiona’s mood wasn’t the best. And there was no one to take her bad temper out on but the man slicing through the thick water ahead of her.
“I don’t see why you couldn’t have figured this out before this,” she said petulantly. “If only you’d realized that you knew where the lions were a long time ago, like, say, maybe right after the ol’ teddy bear was killed, maybe we could have—”
She paused because Ace had stepped back to allow a snake to slither past them. If Fiona thought she could have closed her eyes and remained living, she would have done so. But she had to keep her eyes open and see everything: dark, murky water, overhanging trees, huge birds flashing by and seeming to laugh at them.
“I only knew what it was that I’d seen when I saw the map my nieces sent. Remember that I grew up on this land. I know it well.”
“What a charming childhood playground,” she said sarcastically as she hit at an overhanging bit of Spanish moss.
“Beats those concrete-and-steel places they give kids nowadays. Here, watch that, it’s a hole.”
Turning sideways, Fiona made her way past what looked to be a cavern beneath the water. “How deep is that thing?” she whispered.
“Bottomless, as far as I know.” He tugged on her hand, but when she didn’t move, Ace grabbed her and picked her up to swing her over some rotting vegetation, then deposited her onto dry land. Sort of dry land. It squished under her feet.
“I will never be clean again,” she said, looking down at the wet slime that covered the bottom half of her.
Ace climbed up beside her, then bent his head to kiss her. “Yes you will be,” he said softly against her lips, then straightened, turned away, and started walking again. “So where do we want to spend our honeymoon?”
“The Sahara Desert,” she said quickly, making Ace laugh.
It was a good thing that Fiona was tall, because otherwise she would never have been able to keep up with his long stride. It was obvious that he knew where he was going, and he meant to get there quickly. She was glad of that because what light there was, was fading quickly.
“Is it too much to hope that at the end of this little walk there’s a hotel waiting?”
Ace snorted at that, as though she’d just made a very funny joke.
As the light faded, Fiona moved nearer Ace, not that there was room to slip a dime between them as it was, but she tried to get closer.
As she was looking about her, hearing ominous sounds from every shadow and seeing shadows where there shouldn’t be any, Ace said, “We’re almost there,” and his voice made her jump.
“It’s all right,” he said softly, “you’re with me.”
“Yeah right,” she said, “like all the snakes and ’gators know you by name.”
“Mostly,” he said, amusement in his voice. “Wanta hear how I found the lions?”
She was sure that something huge and hairy had just moved behind that tree. But then, maybe the tree was moving. She was holding on to Ace’s hand with both of hers now, and her whole body was plastered against his side. Silently, she nodded.
“I think I was about ten, and I was out walking one day—”
That made her halt. “Ten? And walking in this?”
“Come on,” he said, tugging on her hands. “You sound like my mother. I was in more danger near traffic than here. Anyway, I was walking and I saw a TV disappear behind some vines. Because of what happened later I don’t remember much except that suddenly there they were, staring at me. I think they have emeralds for eyes.”
Fiona waited for him to finish the story, but he just kept moving through the swampy land and said nothing else.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” she said after a while. “You were out slogging through swamp, fighting off snakes, mosquitoes, and man-eating crocs, and you were following a walking television when you came across a couple of golden lions—with emerald eyes, no less—and then what? Years later you didn’t remember it? Was your childhood so exciting that you found pirate treasure and anthropomorphic machines every day, so you couldn’t remember all of it?”
Ace laughed. “A ‘TV’ is a turkey vulture, and there was a little more to it than that.”
“So?” she said impatiently.
“Eager, aren’t you?”
She narrowed her eyes at him in threat.
“I had a bit of an accident that day.”
She was not going to encourage him to go on with his story. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of begging him to finish what he was telling her.
“If you use this story with that doll of yours, do I get a cut?”
“You get tourists and me. What else do you want?”
At that Ace turned and pulled her into his arms and kissed her more thoroughly than he ever had before. “ Nothing,” he said, his lips against her ear. “Just you.”
After a moment, he pulled away, and holding her hand securely, he started walking again.
“So what happened that day?” she asked, breaking her vow not to ask. But his kisses seemed to make her forget things.
“Broke my leg, then had to walk back because I knew no one was going to find me where I was, and I ended up with a fever. Later I thought I’d made up the lions, something I’d seen in delirium.”
She thought about what he was saying and tried to imagine a little ten-year-old boy hobbling through the swamp with a broken leg. “How long were you in the hospital?” she asked softly.
He squeezed her hand in acknowledgment of her perception. “A couple of weeks.”
Just when it got so dark that Fiona could see nothing, Ace pulled her into what seemed to be impenetrable jungle, but he was able to part the curtain of vines and enter into a space of such blackness that the void frightened her. And when Ace released her hand, it was all she could do to keep from crying out in fear.
But she held herself in check and stood silent and motionless as she heard him fumbling about with his backpack; then, after what seemed forever, he turned on a flashlight.
And that made things worse. All around them was dark, creepy-looking vegetation. The silence of the place made her skin crawl.
“Let’s get the lions and get out of here,” she whispered. “I don’t like this place.”
“That will be a bit difficult to do,” Ace said, amusement in his voice. “We’ll have to ‘get them’ as you say, in the morning.”
It took her a moment to understand what he was saying. “Morning?” Her voice was rising in hysteria. “Morning? You want us to spend the night here?”
When Ace put his hand on her ankle, she did give a squeal of
fear. But his hand moved up her calf, and she looked down at him. While she had been looking about the place in terror, he had unfurled a sort of sleeping-bag tent, a place that one could crawl into and zip the front and be safe from the darkness that was outside.
But, more important, the look in Ace’s eyes was unmistakable. She looked into those eyes and she forgot about lions and murders and police trying to find them. Her knees gave way under her, and she sank down slowly to his open arms.
Deftly, easily, Ace pulled her into the little tent and zipped the door shut behind her; then he turned the flashlight off. For one small breath, Fiona seemed to be alone; then, suddenly, Ace was on her, pulling her to him, holding her, caressing her.
She hadn’t realized how much pent-up emotion and longing was inside her until she touched him. In an instant, they were tearing at clothes, pulling them over their head; shorts went down over knees and ankles.
And everywhere hands and lips and skin touched. When Ace’s mouth found her breast, Fiona moved her head backward, giving him access to the most sensitive spots on her throat.
His hands moved downward, over her hips, over the roundness of her buttocks.
And she explored his body. She touched the shoulders and back that had made her mouth dry with lust many times. She didn’t know how long she had wanted him, but at that moment it seemed to be forever.
When he entered her, she cried out in surprise and delight, and Ace’s mouth covered hers.
She didn’t know what she had expected him to be as a lover, but the fire in him was not what she’d expected. But she had known he was a passionate man, passionate about his birds, passionate about his swamp, so when the fire that was within him came to the surface, she was the willing recipient.
They moved about within the little tent, their long arms and legs pressed against the sides of it, and they pushed and pulled and tried to reach more of each other, tried to get closer than they were.
Fiona wrapped her legs about Ace’s strong waist and held on as he drove into her with force. And her body arched to meet each thrust as it hit her inner being, completing her, filling her, unleashing some deep secret within her.
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