Hell or High Water

by Julie Ann Walker

  “My name is Olivia,” the woman answered easily.

  “Well, duh.” She frowned. “These things on the side of my head are called ears.” When Olivia lifted a brow, Maddy tilted her head toward the blond behemoth. “I heard the golden god over there call you that when you came bargin’ in.”

  “Oh, ay!” Swoon-Worthy interjected. She’d bet her bottom dollar he grew up somewhere in east Jersey, close to New York City. “A set of balls and a smart mouth. Anyone ever told you neither of those things is very attractive on a lady?”

  “Yep. All the time,” she assured him. “Anyone ever tell you that when you find a group of folks who just got shanghaied by terrorists they thought were Cuban refugees, and then after that same group of folks watched you kill all those not-really-Cuban refugees, you should skip the personal introductions because, Lucy, you got some serious ’splainin’ to do? When I—”

  “Maddy,” Captain Harry tried to interrupt again, but she kept talking right over him.

  “—asked who the hell you were, I meant who the hell are you workin’ for and what the hell is goin’ on here? And just what the hell did we stumble…er…sail into?”

  And, sure enough. She was probably pushing her luck. But between the shock of everything that’d happened, the dead body on the ground at her feet, and the weirdly distracting warmth caused by Swoon-Worthy’s nearness, she feared she was edging her way toward a full-on emotional or psychological breakdown, or both. And since she abhorred appearing weak, she tended to go in the complete opposite direction, putting on a brazen, in-your-face, won’t-back-down front.

  Thankfully, it seemed to work. “You’re right,” Olivia said. “You deserve to know what’s happening.” Maddy blew out a covert breath. “But first, go back. You thought those men were Cuban refugees? Why?”

  “Well…” Maddy lifted her hands, relieved to discover they were no longer tingling from lack of circulation. But they were shaking. Definitely shaking. I’ll just keep them clasped behind my back, how about that? Yessiree, Bob, that sounded like a good plan. “Because they were floatin’ in a broken-down dinghy out in the middle of the Straits of Florida. And they looked the part.”

  “Fits yours and Morales’s theory about their boat sinkin’,” Golden God said.

  “Yeah.” Olivia nodded at him before returning her attention to Maddy. “And you…what? Tried to bring them on board so you could take them to the authorities?”

  Not knowing just which government authority these folks reported to, and wanting to avoid any time in an eight-by-ten—she looked ghastly in orange—she decided it was probably best to keep her answer vague. “Somethin’ like that.”

  Swoon-Worthy grunted, a deep sound that reverberated low in her belly. When she looked up, it was to discover his pretty eyes were narrowed into slits that caused his thick lashes to cast crescent-shaped shadows on his cheeks. He wasn’t buying her story. No real surprise there. She’d never been very good at lying. Her mama always told her she had an honest face and any fibs flashed across her expression like neon signs on Las Vegas Boulevard.

  “I, uh, I see,” Olivia said, and Maddy suspected she just might. But, thankfully, she didn’t pursue the subject further. Instead she said, “Okay, so here’s what you need to know. Those were terrorists. They were floating out here because they—”

  “You really think you should be tellin’ her all this?” Golden God interjected.

  “Come on, Leo,” Olivia said. Leo? Hmm. Fits. “After everything they’ve witnessed here today”—she hooked her thumb over her shoulder at Lead A-hole’s corpse—“they’ll have to be debriefed and made to sign nondisclosure contracts, and the yacht will have to be impounded for evidence collection. Given all that, I don’t see the harm in letting them in on the basics.”

  The basics. Not too hard to read between the lines of that one. Of course, the fact no one was going to give her the whole truth and nothing but the truth was playing second fiddle in her mind to the word “debriefed.” She imagined herself sitting in a soundproof room, hooked up to a lie detector while a bare overhead bulb shone down on a bunch of men in suits who would pummel her with questions while recording every single word out of her mouth. This day is crazier than a three-dollar bill.

  “You’re the boss.” Leo threw up his hands, but it was obvious from his expression that he didn’t really believe that. Also what was obvious from his expression was that he had a thing for Olivia. It was the way he looked at her, his eyes following her every move, his gaze covetous and molten. Lava hot. Some other time, Maddy might have taken a moment to wonder what the dealio was with those two. But today she had bigger things to wonder about. Starting with…

  “Why were they floatin’ out there?” she prompted Olivia, itching, as Paul Harvey used to say, to hear the rest of the story.

  “Because they stole something from us and were making a run for it.”

  And it didn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to figure out that Olivia wasn’t going to elaborate on exactly what had been stolen. “And by ‘us’ you mean…?”

  “Let’s just say we’re working for the government. And that’s all you need to know.”

  Maddy tilted her head toward Lead A-hole’s body. “He thought you were CIA.” She jerked her chin at Swoon-Worthy. “But he says you’re not.”

  Olivia shrugged, but there was a definite gleam in her eye.

  “Okay.” Maddy puffed out a breath. “So, let’s say I’m buyin’ what you’re sellin’ and willin’ to go along with it because, hey, what choice do I have? Y’all have the weapons, right? I only have one question left.”

  “What’s that?” Swoon-Worthy asked.

  “Did you come out here to kill those men? Or did you come out here lookin’ to recover what they stole?”

  “The latter,” Olivia admitted. “We didn’t even know for sure if they’d survived the sinking of their boat.” Which would make sense, seeing as how Olivia and the boys obviously hadn’t been prepared to face those dadgummed rocket launchers. “And, quite frankly, their deaths cause us more problems than they provide solutions. There are questions they could have answered. Very important questions.”

  Very secret questions, apparently. But that was fine by Maddy. She figured the less she knew about the nitty-gritty of it all, the better. Government agents were known to fit pesky, inquisitive civilians with cement galoshes, right? Or, again, was that just in the movies?

  Something caught Olivia’s attention. It was the satellite phone that Lead A-hole had smashed in a fit of rage when he realized his men weren’t going to emerge from beneath the undulating surface of the sea. She bent down to grab it, and the golden god…er…Leo basically smacked her ass with his eyes. Maddy thought just maybe she could hear a tiny thwacking sound echo through the bridge.

  “What’s this?” Olivia asked, holding up the decimated clump of plastic and wires.

  “Lead A-hole’s…er…that’s what I was callin’ the guy…satellite phone,” Maddy said. “Or what’s left of it anyway.”

  “Did he make any calls?” That gleam was back in Olivia’s eyes.

  “Yeah. He made one right after y’all hailed us on the radio. But I couldn’t tell you what he said other than he wanted to sink your boat with his rocket launchers. He was speakin’ in another language most of the time. I think maybe it was Arabic.” Of course, it could have been Farsi or Tajiki. An expert in Middle Eastern dialects she was not.

  “He didn’t make another call after firing the rocket launchers? After the guys here killed his men?”

  “No.”

  Olivia’s eyes swung back and forth, the way a chess player’s did when contemplating the next series of moves. Finally, she glanced up, pinning Maddy in place with a hard, searching stare. If this gal isn’t a spy, she missed her calling. That look reminded Maddy of Angelina Jolie when she played Salt. “And there was nothing he said that you understood? No phrase or word that he repeated?”

  “There was something,” Captain Harry piped
up. When she glanced over, Maddy saw he had some color back in his face. That was good. For a while there, after Lead A-Hole demanded they weigh anchor—and after he forced her to her knees execution-style—she was worried Harry might suffer a coronary. “But now I can’t remember what it sounded like.”

  “Oh, yeah.” She nodded, frowning. “He kept sayin’ ‘Banoo, banoo, banoo.’”

  “Mean anything to you?” Leo asked Olivia.

  She shook her head. “Not a thing. Could be a person’s name.”

  Feet pounded up the stairs outside and Leo, Olivia, and Swoon-Worthy—I wonder what his name is?—all armed themselves, their big, black machine guns up in firing position in a split second. The destroyed satellite phone fell out of Olivia’s hand and slid toward the bulkhead, butting up against Lead A-hole’s weapon. Maddy prepared herself for another blast of gunfire, lifting her hands to her ears and grimacing. But it was just the hugely muscle-bound guy who threw open the door.

  “Find anything, Mason?” Leo asked. Mason, Mason, Mason… Maddy committed the name to memory as she lowered her hands. She certainly couldn’t call him Sir Lifts-Weights-a-Lot to his face.

  “Nothing. Yacht’s clean.”

  “And Wolf?” Leo asked. “Where’s he?” Maddy blinked. What were the odds she’d been calling him “Dances with Wolves” when his real name was Wolf?

  “Down uncuffing the rest of the crew and getting them some water. What’s the plan now?”

  A strange silence descended over the room, and then Leo glanced at Olivia. “With the Wayfarer and all our gear gone, there’s no way we can dive down and retrieve…” He let his sentence dangle, flicking Maddy and the captain a look. “The jig is up. We have to mark this one in the L column.”

  “Uh…we have dive equipment,” Maddy offered, ignoring the little voice in her head that was screaming, What the hell are you doin’? Just stay calm, stay quiet, and get yourself out of this as quickly as you can! Calm she figured she could handle. The quiet part was never something she’d been good at. “Wet suits and tanks, buoyancy compensators and—”

  “We need special deep-dive gear,” Leo cut in. “The bottom is two hundred feet down.”

  “Right. So you’d want tanks with oxygen, helium, and nitrogen. Trimix, yeah? And a special high-performance regulator?” What the blue blazes do you think you’re doin’? She felt all eyes in the room land on her. “What? My oldest brother is a diver. And he wanted to go down on a wreck that was past the 130-foot mark, so he got certified. All his gear is on board and—”

  “Maddy,” Mr. Swoon-Worthy said, and she glanced up to see him smiling at her. She nearly ass-planted at the sight. Because if he was swoon-worthy before, now he was panty-melting. She’d never seen a man quite so handsome. It should be outlawed.

  “What?” she asked, unconsciously licking her lips.

  “Anybody ever tell you that big brass balls and a loud mouth are sexy as hell when they’re combined with deep-dive equipment?”

  She snorted, the sound not at all ladylike. “Nope,” she told him, a wry smirk kicking up the corners of her mouth. What the heckfire was wrong with her? Nothing about this situation should make her smile. But here she was, grinning like a loon. “You’d be the first.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  3:37 p.m.…

  “Have they found it yet?” Leo asked, closing the refrigerator door and leaning against it.

  Olivia propped her hip on the counter in the yacht’s galley. Unlike the one on Wayfarer-I, this floating kitchen had all the bells and whistles. Stainless-steel countertops, rich teakwood cabinets, and a wine refrigerator stocked to the gills with expensive vintages. Fancy. But she preferred the salvage boat’s galley. Probably because it reminded her of Leo. No frills, no frippery, a little rough around the edges, but completely, one hundred percent dependable. Practical. Unfortunately, thanks to her, that galley was now sitting at the bottom of the Straits.

  Guilt and regret had pretty much become her constant companions since Syria. And when you added in the steaming pile of shit that this day had become? Yeah, she might need to come up with some pet names for the twin emotions soon.

  “No.” She shook her head. “But it’s not for lack of trying. Everyone except the engineer and the deckhand, who I suspect are in their cabins slathering themselves in aloe, is on the bridge with eyes on the depth reader and the fish-finder sonar.”

  “That can’t be fun,” Leo said, twisting off the cap on a bottle of Fiji water.

  “Well, it’s not nearly as high-tech as the equipment on your ship, but since we know approximately where to search, the gear on board should be enough to do the job.”

  “I meant bein’ up on the bridge. You know, what with the near-headless terrorist and all.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” There was that. “Maddy put a sheet over him and another over most of the mess.” The woman was like a shaken soda can, fizzing with energy and vitality. “So it’s not as bad as it was. But, still…” She shuddered.

  “You’re not very good around dead bodies, are you?” He took a swig of water, his tan throat working over the liquid. She wanted to stop talking about corpses and walk over there to run her tongue over his pulse point, feel the life in him thrumming hot and heavy against her lips. He would welcome it, she knew. More than welcome it. He’d probably make that low, growly noise in the back of his throat, the one that was both a supplication and a warning. But to do that would be the coward’s way out.

  She crossed her arms, not sure if the gesture was one of self-defense or more because the interior of the yacht was air-conditioned and the cool air against her damp clothes raised goose bumps. “Is anyone good around dead bodies?” she asked.

  He shrugged one huge, bare shoulder. He didn’t seem to notice the chill. Probably because he’d already changed out of his soaking clothes and donned a wet suit. Or partially donned a wet suit. He was only really wearing the lower half. The upper half was unzipped and rolled down around his trim waist, the neoprene arms dangling beside his thickly muscled thighs. That meant his mile-wide chest with its smattering of burnished blond hair was on display. Maddy had called him a golden god. Olivia couldn’t refute her. All that tan skin, all those gleaming muscles, all that health and breadth and height did make him seem almost ethereal. Too perfect to be mortal.

  But then there were his scars…

  Add one more to the list. He’d hurriedly pulled the edges of the torn flesh on his right shoulder together with a half-dozen butterfly bandages. But no amount of suturing would keep it from leaving one whopper of a mark above his big, colorful Navy SEAL Budweiser tattoo. And besides revealing that he was, indeed, corporeal, all the evidence on his body of past injuries spoke rather loudly of the life he’d led. A life of fighting and violence. A life of killing.

  “Do you ever think maybe the things we do in the name of the flag make us bad people?” she asked, fiddling with the long black thread that had come unraveled from the hem of her tank top. Not meeting his eyes.

  “Nope,” he said, his lips making the P-sound really pop. “I know I’m a bad person.” And that had her gaze snapping up to search his face. “I think you have to have a bit of bad in you to do what we do. But we’re bad people workin’ on the good side. And that makes it okay. Because the bad people workin’ on the good side are the only things standin’ between the good people and the bad people who are workin’ on the bad side. Every lie I’ve ever told, every life I’ve ever taken was in the name of keepin’ innocents safe. And that’s what lets me sleep at night.”

  Which made sense. Perfect sense. Still…

  “I just feel like—” She blew out a breath and glanced over her shoulder toward the line of oblong portholes and the rays of golden light shining through them. Dust motes danced on the beams like tiny sparkling fairies. So pretty. So simple.

  Why can’t everything be that simple? A dance of dust in the sun?

  But that was a ridiculous question, wasn’t it? Considering she’d spent her
entire life dreaming of being a spy, which was about as far from simple as a person could get. Of course, there was that saying about being careful what you wish for. And its bosom buddy: “Nothing is ever what it seems.”

  Maybe she’d just convinced herself that’s the kind of life she wanted because it was easier. If she chose a solitary existence, a life that kept her from ever getting too close to anyone, no one could ever reject her or pass her over again. Remaining aloof and unloved would be her decision and—

  Whoa there, Nelly. Don’t go getting all maudlin. Next thing you know, you’ll be sporting sweats, eating frozen dinners, and drinking boxed wine. Olivia Mortier: cover girl of Woe Is Me magazine.

  Okay, so, armchair psychoanalysis aside, the fact remained that she still had physical symptoms to worry about. “I get sick to my stomach when I see mortal violence,” she admitted to him. “Literally sick. That’s why I had to leave the bridge. It was either that or introduce everyone up there to the breakfast I had on this morning’s flight to Key West.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  She turned to find him walking toward her. His loose-hipped strut emphasized his coordination, his extreme agility. And she could have gone on simply watching him move, watching his muscles ripple, his skin catch the light and gleam, for the rest of her life. But he finished off the bottle of water in one long gulp—hydrating before the dive because hydrated blood meant thin blood which, in turn, meant more easily oxygenated blood—and set the empty container on the counter behind her. He kept his hands planted on the cabinet top on either side of her waist, boxing her in. She was instantly awash in the waves of heat coming off him. It was delicious, comforting. She wanted to snuggle into him like a cat curling up in a patch of sunshine.

  “Do you think it’s a bad thing, darlin’?” His tone was hot and dark, his accent as syrupy as burned sugar.

  “Considering my line of work,” she said, not surprised to hear her voice had gone hoarse. His nearness always had that effect on her, “tossing my cookies at the first sight of violence could be a bit of a hindrance. To me. To whoever my partner might be at the time.”