“Not bird crap?”
“Yep.”
Despite the brisk wind, a seam of moisture ran down Ben’s forehead. Even though he tried to hide it, the sea freaked him out. So what was he doing on an island surrounded by ocean?
“Why do you hate the water so much?” The question tripped off her tongue and she winced as he shot her a look. It wasn’t any of her business, but he’d witnessed all of her recent screw-ups.
He was silent for so long she didn’t think he would answer. “A couple of older boys thought it would be cool to take turns holding me underwater when I was a little kid.” He shrugged, as if being nearly drowned was of no consequence.
“That’s awful.” It scared her, what children did to one another.
His eyes were hooded, too dark to read. “Being resuscitated by a hot chick was more embarrassing than nearly drowning.” His lips formed a smile, but anger anchored it.
“What happened to the boys who did it?”
The expression on his face didn’t contain an ounce of self-pity. It was arrogant and laced with satisfaction. He took a step closer and leaned down to whisper in her ear. “I grew.”
She studied him. Revenge was a powerful motivator. What had he done to the boys who’d tried to drown him? “Are they still alive?”
She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Her tongue had a mind of its own. Too many nerves, not enough tact.
His grin was as dangerous as the rocks below. “Last I heard, they were doing ten-to-life in the state pen.”
Sorcha’s jaw dropped. “What did they do? Shoot somebody?”
“They were drug dealers.” Steel underpinned the words. “They got what they deserved.”
She shifted and looked away. Admitting he scared her on one level but made her feel safe on another sounded as crazy as confessing she heard voices in her head.
“What about you? What did you do to the kids who tied you to that stake?” he asked.
Blinking rapidly, she whirled and faced the sea. Emotion choked her. She hadn’t done anything. They’d won. “My grandmother sent me away immediately after Dad’s funeral. To live with my mother.” Her voice scratched her throat.
On top of her father’s death, the shock of the abandonment by the only family she’d ever known had nearly destroyed her. It had taken years to trust again. Years to forgive. She watched whitecaps break in the distance. “I never came back until now.”
His hands rested on her shoulders, the weight of that connection heavy and reassuring. Clever fingers kneaded the knots of tension in her neck and she closed her eyes, dropping her head forward. The press of his lips against the nape of her neck nearly made her knees buckle. The screech of gannets reminded her where she was and what she was doing. She stepped away, forced her breathing into a normal pattern in order to stop the flutter of her heartbeat.
She glanced over her shoulder and found him watching her, an unreadable expression on his face. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she admitted.
Something flitted across his eyes before he looked away. Neither spoke, and for a moment only the sound of birds filled the air.
Ben broke the silence and gave her a wry smile. “I’m no expert, but I don’t see anything that looks like a puffin around here.”
Sorcha let him change the subject. “They leave the island in August after the breeding season is over. I’m just trying to get the bugs out of the system before they come back next spring.” It was autumn now, and Sorcha wondered where the comical little birds had flown.
Ben leaned down and poked his hand into the narrow entrance of a burrow. He squinted at her. “They live in these?”
“When they’re nesting, yes.” She dropped to her knees beside him, picked up a shiny black feather. Handing it to him, she watched his long fingers smooth out the plume. They were connecting on one level, maybe becoming friends, maybe becoming something else. She liked him and that worried her. “A lot of the work I do is lab-based, but I’m hoping to do some tracking next winter. We’re going to put transmitters on a pair of adults and a juvenile. And I want to film them during the summer to try to estimate the baby bird’s food intake, and correlate the information to mercury levels obtained from feather clippings.”
She slid her backpack from her shoulders, babbling because his eyes followed her lips in a way that generated heat and, for once, he didn’t seem to be aware of it. Even though she wasn’t looking for another broken heart, right now all she wanted to do was ease him back on the soft grass and kiss him.
“Look.” She whisked him around to face the beach—anything to stop thinking about hunger and desire. The muscles beneath her fingers bunched and she pretended not to notice. On a crescent of sand below, hundreds of seals basked in the sun.
“Aren’t they gorgeous?” Excited, Sorcha thrust her binoculars into his hands, jolted again at the skin-on-skin contact.
His black-eyed gaze returned to hers, crinkled at the corners in a smile that didn’t reach his mouth but, for once, told her exactly what he was thinking. It wasn’t only her feeling that sensual awareness.
She swallowed as his hands wrapped around her binoculars.
When had hands become so attractive?
Since her imagination cast them across her body.
To distract herself she pulled out her thermos and poured coffee into a mug. Passed him the cup. His lips brushed the rim as he took a sip. He offered it back and she raised her eyes to meet his before taking a drink, blood rising in her cheeks.
Suddenly the wet wedge of sand recaptured her attention. Her breath constricted. Crap! The tide was almost out. She glanced at the time and realized it was much later than she’d realized.
“Oh, hell!” She’d have to sprint if she was going to get her yacht out of the landing before low water grounded it. The thought of having to spend the night on the island with Peter Hughes had her frantically screwing the lid on the flask. “I have to go.”
She seized her knapsack, but Ben grabbed it too.
“What’s the problem?” He held onto the strap even as she pulled.
“No time!” Sorcha yanked the bag until he finally released it and she stumbled away. He reached for her, but she was already running. “I have to catch the tide.” Sticking her hand in her pocket, she struck metal. Gritting her teeth on a yowl, she stopped moving. She still had the key to the Old Beacon.
“Can you do me a huge favor?” she asked.
Ben’s bemused expression looked as though he was humoring a crazy lady. “Sure.”
She tossed him the key, grateful he didn’t drop it down a puffin burrow or over the cliff.
“Give that to the warden before you leave, would you?”
***
She was already racing away, didn’t see the startled expression that moved over his features. The tightness in his chest had nothing to do with the ocean. Sorcha Logan was killing him.
He hated his job. The job he’d fought for and pursued with absolute dedication. The job that provided him the self-worth missing from every other aspect of his life. The job that now squeezed his conscience like a ten-foot anaconda. Only the memory of Jacob’s blood-drained face made him go forward to search that damned lighthouse. He owed his partner at least that much.
Jesus, the look on her face when they’d walked into that room and she’d picked up that mangled Barbie doll. She’d been a little girl all over again. And he’d been that tormented scrawny kid.
Dammit.
Ben attacked the ancient beacon from the western side of the island. He only had fifteen minutes before he had to be back on the tour boat.
He scanned the area, made sure no one saw him enter the squat white tower, and pulled a small flashlight from his pocket. Made himself do the job.
Innocent, hot, a goddamned freaking saint, Sorcha Logan was still a suspect until proved otherwise.
The scream of rusted hinges made him grimace as he closed the door behind him. It was creepy inside—murky, musty, eerily ali
ve. He walked over to the iron door and inserted the key. The well-oiled mechanism turned smoothly.
Inside he ran the flashlight beam over boxes and dust-covered tarps that were pushed against the wall in a jumbled mess. The darkness pressed down on him and apprehension touched his core with foreboding. He ignored the sensation, moved through the narrow gap in the junk until he got to a new-looking tarp at the far side of the room. Curling his fingers around the unyielding material, he pulled back the sheet and his stomach bottomed out.
White plastic-wrapped bricks were stacked neatly against the wall.
Goddamn.
Condemnation whirled through his mind like day-old confetti. He squatted, took a closer look. Carefully unwrapped a brick and scraped a sample of white powder into a plastic bag with a penknife. His heart rumbled beneath his ribs.
She’d lied.
The friction of his grinding teeth was deafening. All that crap with her room being ransacked—a distraction, a lie. He’d thought they’d bonded. And it had all been a goddamned con.
He gouged the penknife against bare earth. Swore under his breath. Her fingerprints must be all over this place. He looked around. What had he caught her doing? Checking the merchandise? No wonder she’d looked upset. He stabbed the knife into the floor. But to give him the keys? Did she think he was stupid?
It wasn’t what your average trafficker would do, however he’d already figured Sorcha wasn’t your average drug runner.
He hadn’t wanted to sleep with any other drug runner.
Frustrated and angry, Ben pulled the pocketknife from the ground and wiped the blade clean. He folded it and thrust it back in his jeans along with the drug sample. Took a couple of photographs for evidence.
With a sick feeling that had nothing to do with the water, he stood and checked the time. He’d have to hurry to catch that boat. He re-covered the coke with the tarp. Strode to the door and glanced around outside in case someone spotted him.
He’d located the shipment. He should have been ecstatic. He should have been jazzed because he was close to nailing the people who’d betrayed a man he’d loved like a brother.
Instead he felt duped.
World-weary disappointment twisted his insides as he left the tower, anger wrapping around him and tightening his determination. This island was a stop-gap storage facility for cocaine smugglers. Suddenly the oldest lighthouse in Scotland had become the latest focus of a multiple jurisdictional investigation, and Sorcha Logan was once again his prime suspect.
Chapter Eight
Ben awoke in his living room, in sweat-soaked clothes and in desperate need of a shower. Rubbing his eye sockets, he picked up a tumbler of scotch, took a sip and rolled the fiery liquid over his tongue. On the trip back, panic had squeezed him so tight you could have played ping-pong with his balls. Some freaking DEA agent he’d turned out to be. He was never doing that again. Nothing on earth would get him back on a boat.
He crunched his shoulders, stretched his neck, glanced at the phone. Was Chicago five or six hours behind?
He should have called his mother.
“Hell.” He didn’t want to call her, but then she’d worry.
He picked up the phone and dialed. It rang once, twice. Normally she picked up on the first ring. Three times. Four. Worry had him gripping the handset tighter. Five times, and still the phone continued to ring.
Where the hell is she?
“Hello?”
Finally, his mother’s voice eased the constriction in his chest.
“Hey Mom, how you doing?”
“Ben?” He heard the smile in her voice, and the strain that backed it.
“Yeah, it’s me. You okay?” Ben asked.
“Yeah, honey, I’m fine. Just your grandfather—”
“What, another heart attack?” Every mile stretched wide with guilt. Why had he taken another assignment so far from home?
“No. No, he’s fine, it’s just…Well, it’s been hard for him to adjust.”
“Adjust?” Ben stared at the phone in disbelief. “He’s got you home to care for him, just like always. Why the hell does he have to adjust?” The words left his mouth and he heard his mother withdraw even before she spoke.
“It’s hard for him, Ben.” The censure was there, the silent pleading not to make a scene.
He pressed three fingers into his temple to try to ease the pressure. This was why he took so many overseas assignments, because it was better than watching an old man torture his daughter for producing a bastard son.
The phone cord bit into his flesh as he wrapped it around his hand. How did you fight a situation you couldn’t control? He’d rented his mother an apartment, tried to get her away from the vindictive sonofabitch and his particular brand of religious bigotry. But she always went back for more.
Chasing down leads from Colombia had proved a much better option than being in that hellhole. Closing the loop, avenging his dead partner in Scotland, gave him a purpose because he sure as hell couldn’t rescue the one person in the world he actually cared about.
Silence stretched and he decided to hang up before something unforgivable slipped out, like “Let the old bastard die.”
“Gotta go, Mom.”
“Ben, I love you, honey. Take care.”
He waited for the click, imagined her placing the receiver in the cradle and bracing her thin shoulders against another of his grandfather’s incessant jibes. There were some things he could change, but his mother’s relationship with his grandfather wasn’t one of them.
Blindly he picked up one of the surveillance photos he’d laid out on the coffee-table. Stared at it until he could erase the thought of his mother’s suffering from his mind.
Sorcha.
Jogging on a beach in St. Andrews, looking so goddamn beautiful. She was a witch all right. One taste of her skin, and he’d have sworn she was as innocent as a newborn babe. For all he knew she had a stash of coke on her dinghy and he’d been so blindsided by hydrophobia and the potential for getting laid, he hadn’t even searched it.
Damn.
The phone rang and Ben snatched it up.
It was his liaison, Detective Sergeant Ewan McKnight, on the line. “I’ve got the tox report on the young man you pulled out of the water—” Ben heard the shuffling of papers and murmur of background conversation, “—Alec McCabe was high as a kite when he jumped off that bridge. He was a known junkie and a smalltime dealer.”
Another weird coincidence that didn’t sit well.
“I spoke to Scottish DEA and Lothian and Borders Police by the way. They’re thrilled you found the shipment but—”
“—without catching the traffickers in action, there’s no case,” Ben finished for him. He worked out a kink in his shoulder. So it was business as usual here in undercover hell. Ben needed to continue delving into the lives of the Logans while Lothian and Borders Police set up surveillance cameras on the old lighthouse.
“In the meantime they’re going to send undercover officers over for daytrips, just in case the smugglers move the consignment in broad daylight.”
“Good idea.”
Drug traffickers were bold. Ben had seen puppies surgically implanted with liquid heroin. Young women’s stomachs packed full of condoms and coke.
He’d seen their autopsies too.
He said goodbye to McKnight and debated whether or not to get drunk. He poured himself another finger of single malt and stared into the fire, watching flames eat coal. They’d found no trace of money in Sorcha’s bank accounts, though they were still searching.
The warden, Peter Hughes, was in on it. Ben would bet his entire Superman comic collection on it. He’d thrown the key at the bastard, brilliantly nonchalant, almost forgetting it in his haste to leave, but not quite…
He sipped his whiskey.
It had been a nice touch, that quick pivot, fumble and throw. The guy had glared at him as the key slammed into his chest, probably pissed at his buddy Sorcha rather than suspicio
us of Ben. The warden probably figured him for some moonstruck idiot with the hots for the blonde, only Ben wouldn’t compromise his career for a roll in the sack with his chief suspect. He didn’t consort with drug traffickers. He put them in prison.
Then maybe he could let go of the festering pain that had consumed him since Jacob’s death. Take that job with the DEA’s International Training Section for a few years’ cushy living, away from scumbags and murderers.
The surf rumbled in a background, a distinctive hum even on a quiet night.
Where’d she gone?
On the way back to his cottage he’d knocked on her door, testing himself, wanting to push her—or punish her. But she hadn’t been there and neither had her roommate.
Background checks were in on Carolyn and the boyfriend. She was clean, though Kevin Cassidy had a couple of sealed juvenile offences that Ewan was trying to crack open.
Suddenly Ben was wide awake. He sat forward and looked out at the moonless night. Now was the perfect opportunity to do a little covert investigative work.
***
Throbbing pain pulsed through Sorcha’s skull with every step she took. After the day she’d had, she felt unsteady in every way. Turning the doorknob of her cottage, she slumped as she realized it was locked. Carolyn must be at Kevin’s. Sorcha had escaped the discussion group early. Cradling her fingers against her forehead, she wished to God she hadn’t had to spend the evening listening to a talk on communication between parrots, with each earsplitting screech dissected and replayed ad nauseum.
Sure, it was fascinating—to parrots.
Shivering despite her thick winter coat, she rummaged for house keys in her bag. The heater on the bus hadn’t been working and, although it was only October, by the time they’d wound their way to Cellardyke her toes were blocks of ice.
Frustrated and exhausted, she delved through her notebooks and dug deep. Finally. She hooked her keychain with her forefinger, pulled it out and unlocked the door. Pushing it open, evil crawled over her skin like a living entity.
She froze. Danger hit her in the solar plexus and she nearly doubled over in agony. Her hand gripped the doorknob and she couldn’t let go.
Storm Warning Page 10