by Kate Johnson
“No ma’am, but there is coral, see the buoy? And the rocks to the west. When the tide comes in, they’ll be covered.”
The buoy was far enough out to give her some space. “Right.” To her PPOs, she said, “You might want to take shifts. I may be some time.”
The water was warm, much warmer than the last time she’d been in this particular sea. That rainy night with only adrenaline keeping her going, and the uncertainty as to whether she’d just jumped from the frying pan into the fire. At least she knew she could outswim most people.
She wished to hell she’d outswum Xavier that night!
It took about a kilometre to work off the anger that burned so hot she was amazed the sea didn’t boil. I hate him, I hate him, a rhythm she could swim to. Tears burned her face, and the sea washed them away.
She hauled herself onto the exposed rocks for a breather. I hate him, I hate him.
Please let me explain…
She didn’t want to hear him explain anything. He was too charming, that was his problem. Too handsome. She’d just fall for him all over again. If she let him explain anything he’d talk her round and she’d be trapped all over again.
Except, when were you trapped? a little voice asked.
He’d nearly trapped her into marriage. A motherhood she wasn’t ready for, and a marriage she’d find it hard to extricate herself from. Like his ex-wife, still reliant on his money five years later.
Evil scheming bitch. Well, that was the rhetoric all men had about their ex-wives, wasn’t it? How dare she take money from him to raise his child! How dare he be responsible! How dare he be dumb enough to do the decent thing?
She shook herself. He was conning her. All that stuff about the child not being his. How could he even be certain? Did they not have DNA tests in the state of Florida?
He never asked you for one.
No, because she was loaded. Even if the baby wasn’t his, he’d be married to someone who could keep him in fine style for the rest of his days.
The sun beat down on her, hot and mean. Someone on the beach waved, and it appeared to be one of her PPOs telling her to come in before she got burned.
Oh, he burned me all right.
She waved back and held up five fingers.
The sea lapped at her rock, and she watched a little bit of seaweed push against the stone, then ebb away again, over and over. It wasn’t getting anywhere, rather like the incandescent anger that had propelled her out here. Bloody Xavier…
…except it wasn’t Xavier, not really. He was a convenient target, that was all. Maybe he’d hidden something from her, or maybe he’d been telling the truth. Maybe if she hadn’t been so consumed with her own grief she might have realised that.
She just needed someone to blame.
“Ma’am!” yelled one of the PPOs, and she waved in frustration. I am not drowning, I’m screaming and thrashing.
Was that it? She’d lashed out at Xavier because she needed a target for her anger? Because she had no idea why this terrible thing had happened and he was a convenient scapegoat?
For the first time, she allowed herself to entertain the thought that had been tapping quietly at her conscience all this time. What if he’s grieving too?
Eliza swam back to shore, suddenly tired, and allowed herself to be wrapped in a bathrobe. She trudged back to the hotel which seemed much further than it had when she’d stormed down here, and stood under the huge showerhead for ages, washing the salt and tears away.
She at least owed him a conversation.
Eliza picked up her iPad and started to compose a report of the day’s activities, but the words tangled themselves in front of her. It was always worse when she was stressed. She made an audio recording instead, leaving out her altercation with Xavier on the steps of Government House.
Yeesh, in public like that. Ugh. Granny was going to give her a bollocking for that. Someone was, anyway.
Her gaze kept straying to the telephone. Her finger brushed the internet browser icon.
She supposed she could just look…
An hour later, a tap on the door heralded Tapper, the private secretary she’d been loaned for the trip. “I brought your flowers, ma’am. From Government House? The hotel found a vase.”
“Oh. Yes. Lovely.”
“Ma’am, I thought we could—”
“You know what, Tapper, would you mind if we left this until tomorrow? I have something I need to do.”
“Ma’am?”
Eliza stood up, realised she was still in her bathrobe, and crossed to the wardrobe. “Can you have a car brought around, please? And… can you also find somewhere on the island one might have a private talk with someone? I find myself in need of neutral ground.”
Xavier’s first inclination was to get screamingly drunk, but Valli would be there with the kids when he got back and he didn’t want them to see the state he’d be in. He walked for miles instead, until his feet were sore and his neck was grimy from sweat. The day had turned humid. Probably rain later.
He made his way back to their apartment. Valli was feeding the kids some garishly coloured snacks.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
He stared at her for a moment. Right. “It wasn’t her,” he said. “Sorry. No Ri-Ri.”
Valentina’s gaze slid sideways. He knew that look. That was her guilty look.
“What?” said Xavier heavily.
“I knew it wasn’t her,” she confessed. “I told you that to get you there.”
“You knew it was—it was her?”
The children watched them both, wide-eyed.
“I thought you should see her! Talk to her.”
“How’s you figure that? She’s a princess, she doesn’t just stop and talk to people like me.”
“She once did a hell of a lot more than talk to you, Xavi,” said his sister.
“Oh, you know what, eff you,” he snapped, but apparently the kids knew what that meant too.
“Mommy, he said a bad word!” they cried, as Xavier strode to his room and slammed the door. He threw himself onto his bed.
Well, that was it. He’d had his chance and he’d blown it. Eliza hated him. She really, really hated him. She’d practically kicked him down the steps.
You’re beneath me.
He sat up, rubbed his face and decided to go get drunk anyway. But as he left the room, Valli was on the phone. “Oh, here he is. It’s the front desk,” she said. “They need to see you for something.”
“What?”
He took the phone, but the polite voice just asked him to come down and refused to say what for. Right, well, he was probably in trouble for making that scene. The Bahamas were a British protectorate, weren’t they? Or something. The Queen still ruled here. Commonwealth! That was it.
He’d secretly tried to learn all this stuff, when he was with Eliza, so he could surprise her with his knowledge. Hah.
“I’m Xavier Rivera,” he said to the front desk. “I understand you wanted to see me?”
“Right this way, sir,” said an English accent, and he looked up at one of Eliza’s PPOs.
“Oh, great, it’s you,” he said glumly. “Okay then.”
Jail, or a beating? Maybe they’d throw him over the side of a yacht.
He was put in the back of a car—a nice car, not a police car—and driven to the harbour by men who remained stony and silent.
“Are you going to kill me?” he asked as they got him out. “Because right now I really wouldn’t mind. But tell my sister she’ll need a babysitter tomorrow.”
A boat bobbed at the quay. A nice boat. Small, well-appointed, fast.
Eliza’s head popped up from the cabin. “Get on board,” she said.
Xavier looked from her protection officers, to her, to the water. “Uh?”
“I said, get on board.”
Her tone brooked no questions. Xavier did as he was told.
The cabin wasn’t large, enough for a few people but still close with
just the two of them. It was even closer with the two PPOs crowded in.
“Okay,” said Xavier.
To his surprise, it was Eliza who took the helm. She piloted the boat smoothly out of the harbour and across the open water, heading out to sea. The journey was short, to one of the small cays that clustered near New Providence. She tied up, told him to follow her onto the jetty, and then the boat left.
“Okay, you brought me here to kill me,” Xavier guessed, and she gave him a withering look.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
She had a backpack, which he offered to take and was ignored. He followed her off the jetty and onto a small beach with a couple of unused wooden structures on it.
“I’m told they use this for weddings,” she said, with what sounded like weary irony. “There’s a honeymoon shack further up there. Very romantic.” She looked around the deserted beach. “I think this is Tapper’s idea of being funny.”
Xavier looked around. There were no signs of any other humans.
“Are we marooned on a desert island again?”
She huffed a sigh. “Yes, Xavier, because I’m that stupid. We’re a very short boat ride from the main island, I have a radio and a phone to contact my team, and just in case, there are survival rations in this ditch bag.”
“Ditch bag?”
“To take onto the life raft. I told you, I’ve been learning.”
She also appeared to have a blanket, which she spread on the ground. “Sit,” she said, and like an obedient spaniel, he did.
“I have a fully charged phone and a radio, with a solar charger,” she said. “My new watch has a GPS tracker—I vetoed having one implanted in my arm—and we have sufficient provisions to survive for several days, should a summer storm render us incapable of returning to the big island.”
Xavier looked at the sky, which had darkened considerably since this afternoon.
“Trust me, it took one hell of a lot to persuade the team I wasn’t running away again.”
She sounded weary, sitting down beside him at a safe distance. She’d changed from her pretty, formal outfit into a floating wisp of a dress, and now she slipped off her sandals and wiggled her toes in the white sand. Her hair had been braided into short pigtails against the humidity of the day, a look she managed to pull off with dignity.
She looked tanned, healthy, strong. She looked beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” said Xavier, as Eliza sat there with her chin resting on her forearms, staring out at the endless, impossibly blue sea. From the other side of the island, Nassau would be visible, probably within swimming distance. Well, swimming distance if you were Eliza.
“Not half as sorry as I am,” she said, and sighed.
“I should never have come today. Confronted you in public like that. I’m sorry I caused a scene.”
“Well, really it was me who made it into a scene,” she said drily.
“Which you wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t been there.”
“How did you even know where I was? Do you get court circulars in Miami?”
Xavier groaned. “My sister. She told me Rihanna was there and asked me to go take a photo. She lied. I guess she saw you were coming over, and took the opportunity.” He frowned. This holiday had been booked pretty quickly. “Oh, jeez, she booked the whole vacation around this, didn’t she? I bet Bill isn’t even working away. He’s probably staying with a buddy somewhere.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Eliza crisply. She still hadn’t even looked directly at him.
“My sister, who I am going to kill later,” Xavier said. “How far in advance do you publicise these visits?”
She shrugged. “It was only confirmed last month. It had been on the cards since—well, you know. But delayed because… well. You know that too. The suggestion had been made that someone else could come in my place, in case it was too traumatic for me, but I’ve been trying to face my fears, and anyway, Jamie reckoned it—” She broke off.
“Your cousin Jamie sent you here?”
“At the same time you’re here.” She groaned. “None of this is a coincidence at all, is it? I bet Tapper booked this sodding island for our use weeks ago. If we go up to the honeymoon shack, are we going to find rose petals strewn on the coverlet and champagne on ice?”
Xavier kind of hoped so. “We’ve been set up.”
“We’ve been so set up.”
She glanced at him then, and a bit of a rueful smile tugged at her lips.
“I guess they figured we needed to talk,” Xavier said.
“I suppose they did.”
They sat in silence for a while, watching the waves.
“I read the court records,” Eliza said eventually. “They acknowledged the DNA evidence.”
“They did,” said Xavier evenly.
“Your lawyer said it was the expected outcome.”
“You spoke to Abe?”
“Yes. I won’t repeat the things he called you. Does he always swear that much?”
“Only out of court.” Wow, she’d really done her homework.
“The judge said you’d always believed the child wasn’t yours.”
“Well, being that we’d been living apart for six months when he was conceived, it seemed unlikely,” he said drily.
“Then why did you pay? Why not tell the courts straight away you had no claim on him?”
Xavier rubbed his face. “Because she was alone and scared and God knows she wasn’t great at taking care of herself. I even thought about letting her move back in with me, but then I knew I’d never get rid of her and, to be honest, I just couldn’t stand her by then. Marisol was… is… very fiery and passionate. Sexy. Tempestuous.”
“All right, I’m getting the picture,” Eliza said sourly.
He hid a smile. “My point is, I was suckered in by her. She was exciting. It was her idea to get married so quickly. She said it was a whirlwind romance. Well, have you ever seen the aftermath of a whirlwind?”
“I’ve visited islands after hurricanes,” she said. Her gaze flickered up to the sky, which looked even darker.
“Then maybe you get some clue of the devastation someone like Marisol leaves behind her. Exciting is as exciting does.” He made patterns in the sand with his fingers. “I figured the least I could do was support her until her lover came back. Only, of course, he didn’t. We were still married, so the assumption was that the baby was mine and that meant she was entitled to child support payments. Of course, what I didn’t know then was that under Florida law you don’t have long from suspecting the child isn’t yours to actually disestablish paternity. So after that, it doesn’t matter how clear the DNA result is, the court won’t do anything to change the legality. I’ve still gotta pay until he’s eighteen.”
“I read that, but I couldn’t believe it was true. It’s ridiculous.”
He exhaled. “Yeah.”
“Can’t you even reduce the payments?”
“No. She gets a portion of my salary. The less I earn, the less she gets.”
“You should quit just to spite her.”
He snorted out a laugh, because that was fine for the daughter of a princess and a duke to say. “The thought had occurred to me.” He sighed. “I hate my damn job anyway.”
“I thought you loved being a cop?”
“I did. What I hate is being pushed underground, ‘because of my injury’ into desk duty. Everyone knows it’s the negative press, they’re just too damn cowardly to admit it.”
“Negative press?” Eliza said tentatively. “I thought the Lopez case was going well. I filmed a testimony.”
He’d seen it. Eliza, her back ramrod straight, speaking clearly and almost unemotionally about what she remembered of that night. He’d had to pretend his burning eyes were due to allergies.
“It is going well. But no one wants a ‘hero cop’ who’s abandoned his child.”
“Even when it’s been proven that you didn’t?”
He shrugged. “And all the while suggesting that I’d bailed on you the minute things got tough. ‘Only in it for the money,’ I believe is the phrase most commonly used.”
Eliza hugged her knees. “I’m sorry about that.”
“I didn’t mean you.”
“Yes, you do, I threw exactly that at you earlier. I was angry, and upset, and you caught me unawares.” She fiddled with the hem of her skirt. “I was so angry. I don’t think you’re beneath me.”
Xavier wanted to touch her. To reach out and take her hand, to feel her skin against his, to hold her close. But she was so closed off from him. “Good to know,” he said instead.
Eliza pressed her chin against her knee and stared at the sea. “My cousin Victoria came to visit me,” she said. “She’s had three miscarriages. None of us even knew. So that was some perspective.”
“Perspective? That doesn’t make it three times less bad!”
“Yes, I know. I felt guilty for even thinking it. You know what the worst thing was, though? She kept saying how wonderful Nicholas had been throughout it all. How supportive. How kind. Such a rock.” Her voice broke a little, and Xavier realised he had tears in his eyes too.
“I kind of wanted to stab her in the eyes with a fork,” Eliza added matter-of-factly, and he found a smile at that.
“Eliza, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. I wanted to be. I tried to be.”
“Yes, Laurens told me how he bodily removed you. I didn’t know about that.” She hesitated. “I said I didn’t want to see you. I… might have been over-zealous. I didn’t… I didn’t really think about how you were feeling. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry it happened. That you went through it alone, but that it even happened.” He swiped at his eyes. “I nearly hit a guy at work because he told me it wasn’t a real baby. Just a bunch of cells.”
“I’d have murdered him,” said Eliza. Tears fell freely down her face now. “I know it was a mistake and it wasn’t supposed to happen but I wanted it. I thought we’d be…” She sobbed, the words disappearing.
“A family?” he suggested, not trying to hide his own tears any more.