Deadly Little Lies

by Jeanne Adams

  “Ohhhh, yes,” she moaned, as she clamped his hands there, and arched her hips into his. She’d pulled her mouth away long enough to express her enjoyment, but she was quickly back, a hot, powerful woman, matching him kiss for kiss, caress for caress. When she slid a hand between them to grip him, he nearly exploded. Red passion hazed his vision and he envisioned lifting her up, tearing off her clothes and impaling her, pounding into her until neither of them could take any more.

  The thought was almost father to the deed. He lifted her easily, felt her wrap her legs around him. She was tugging at his shirt, unbuttoning it, pulling it open to run her hands through the thick hair on his chest.

  Now it was his turn to moan. Her slender fingers were an erotic dance on his fiery skin. He shed his jacket, letting the shock of cooler air add to the passionate play. With her body braced on his hips, her neck was open to him, and he ran hot kisses up the delicate line of her throat.

  Her guttural cries were like a match to a fire. He tugged her shirt free and felt himself harden even more at the sight of her lacy bra, and the magnificent breasts it constrained. He let himself feast on them, trying to be mindful of his beard. Her skin was so beautiful he hated to mark it in any way.

  “Let me, let me...” she said, pulling away to unfasten the garment, let it drop.

  Dav was undoing her skirt, with her hands mirroring the action on his belt, when he froze.

  “Wait,” he panted, desperate to have her, desperate to complete what they’d started. But if that sound were rescue, or their captors’ return, he wouldn’t leave her vulnerable to them, nearly naked in his arms. He gripped her close, his ears catching the sounds beyond their cell, beyond their passion. “Shhhhh.”

  “God, don’t stop,” she growled, shuddering in his arms.

  “Do you hear that?” he insisted. As the words left his mouth, the roar of a plane or truck reverberated in the sudden stillness above them. Whatever the vehicle was, it was close. Passion quenched by necessity, they sped to right their clothing, both straining to hear. Dav still wanted her desperately. The press of survival, of danger, made that desire an even sharper need. Though he’d long ago learned to control his body and his mind, this time, both were reluctant.

  The light had dimmed only slightly, but the shadow that passed over the grate was fast. A plane.

  “A flare gun would be nice,” Dav muttered.

  “If it’s someone friendly,” Carrie shot back. “If we’re in Central America, there could be a lot of unfriendly people.” She struggled back into her shirt and fastened her skirt, tucking the sweater in as it had been before they’d started at each other. They were both peering up through the grate, straining to see if anything was happening.

  Distant voices rang out, shouts and laughter, but they came no closer to where they waited crouched in tense silence. The sound of an engine neared, then died away, along with the voices.

  “Do you think... ?” Carrie began in a whisper.

  “Wait,” Dav cautioned.

  No sound reached their straining ears. Nothing moved above them, and nothing marred the clear silence of the afternoon, not bird calls or the wind, or the sound of trucks or planes. For at least fifteen minutes they hunkered down, elbow to elbow, out of sight of anyone who might look in, stretching every sense to hear anything that might connote rescue—or more enemies.

  “Do you hear anything?” Dav whispered.

  “No, and I have to stand up. I’m getting a cramp in my thigh,” she said irreverently.

  Thinking about her thighs was probably not the best thing, but he couldn’t help it. It was true that a man’s thinking started first with his body’s needs, he decided ruefully.

  “Here, let me help you,” he said, taking her elbow. He held on when she’d risen, turning her to face him. “Carrie, about our earlier interlude,” he began.

  She smiled. “Now you’re getting formal with your English again. An interlude? What a lovely thing to call it. I would have said, ‘About when you nearly jumped me, earlier, ’” she said, her voice holding a strange pain.

  “Well, since it was mutual and something I’ve longed for—” he said, stroking her cheek, watching her blue eyes change and darken. He hoped he wasn’t exposing himself too much, but he couldn’t bear that she might regret the whole situation. “Nothing could have pleased me more. I was sorry to have it interrupted.”

  At first, she ducked her head, then met his gaze. “Me too.” She looked up again, then around the cell, and sighed. “This sucks.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said, following her assessing route. “Shall we try the idea of you standing on my shoulders to reach the grate?”

  “No time like the present, I guess.” She nodded, sighing. “You’ve got your jacket off already, so that’s one thing. Let me take my shoes back off.”

  “I have no idea how to get you to my shoulders,” Dav admitted. “Not something I’ve ever needed to do in my life, I confess, but I know it can be done. Do you have any experience with that sort of thing?”

  For the first time in hours, she laughed. “Yes, I do. I’ll have you know I was a cheerleader.”

  “Really now,” he said, imagining that and feeling his body respond again with the image of a younger Carrie in a short skirt, holding pom-poms. Being around her was a constantly stimulating experience. “So. You will instruct me.”

  “Okay,” she said, motioning him closer to the center of the room. “Here’s how it goes. You need to bend your knees and hold one hand here.” She positioned his arm to one side. “And one hand up here.” She extended his other hand upward. “That way, I can, essentially, use you as a ladder and your hands as a handrail. Once I’m up, you need to brace your hands on the back of my calves, okay?”

  “Got it,” he said, positioning himself as she directed. He felt foolish, in a way, acting as nothing more than a ladder, with her doing all the work. But the possibility of learning anything about their cage was too great to pass up.

  “Ready?”

  “Yes, ready,” he replied, helping her as she stepped first on his bent thigh, then onto his shoulder. It took them three tries to get their balance and movements coordinated enough for her to mount his shoulders, but they were successful.

  The experiment however, was a total failure.

  Even with her on his shoulders, the ceiling was at least three feet beyond the reach of her outstretched arms.

  “Well, it was worth a try,” she muttered, bracing herself on the wall to dust off her feet and slip back into her shoes.

  Dav agreed, adding, “We should eat again, while we still have daylight.”

  “Oh, is it getting dark already?” She looked upward, measuring the sun’s path. She looked around the room as if marking the time as she’d done first thing that morning. “Look.” She pointed to the wall, her face reflecting hope and a touch of awe.

  The path of the sun’s rays traced across the floor, bringing the carvings to life with shadow and relief. Demonic faces grimaced from the rock, and deep in their crevices gleamed gems. Dav squinted into the grate, noting that there were clouds skidding across the sky.

  “Do you remember anything about the weather, did you see the news or do you remember anything about it?” he asked with some urgency. He couldn’t remember if there was a rainy season in this tropical area, but the thought of torrential rains filling the cell was vivid in his mind.

  “Not for Central America. It was supposed to be sunny in San Francisco,” she added, her smile rueful. “Here, I have no idea.”

  “I do not either. I’m just wondering what this place is like when it rains. See—” He pointed upward. “The clouds are getting thicker.”

  “Hmmm. Not the best place to be in a storm.”

  He continued to stand, staring at the sky, racking his brain to remember anything about the countries in Central America. The geography was easy, thanks to his business dealings. But remembering the weather or other facts? That was hazy.

  �
��Dav,” Carrie called. “Let’s sit and eat.”

  He turned to see that she was arranging a picnic, setting out one of the canteens and the sandwiches. Another egg and a piece of fruit joined the feast and when she’d placed them just so, she looked up at him and smiled.

  “Very neat,” he complimented, dropping cross-legged to the ground. He could feel the stone’s dusty chill through the fine wool of his coat, laid out like a picnic blanket, but it wasn’t so bad with the warming sun still up. It would be colder by nightfall. Even in this tropical climate, early spring underground was cool.

  “So, what have we here?” he drawled, trying to inject some lightness into the situation. “A veritable feast. Something from almost every food group, lovingly prepared by our chef du jour, the divinely beautiful Carrie McCray.”

  “Thank you, thank you.” Carrie took up the play, but he saw the color in her cheeks. “And plated for you this evening by the chef herself. Here, m’sieu,” she said, using the French nominative. “Sit, enjoy, please.”

  Laughing at themselves, they ate. “This is the first picnic I’ve ever had,” Dav admitted, crunching through the dry bread, bacon and cheese.

  “You’ve got to be joking me.” Carrie looked at him, astonished. “No childhood picnics?” she began, then her face fell. “No, I guess not. But college? Nothing?”

  “I was too busy surviving and working and building my business,” he said, wondering what else he’d missed in his search for freedom from his father and brother, for the power to tell them all to go to hell. That gave him another thought. “I thought I would never go back, you know. To Greece.”

  “Really?” She cocked her head, a listening pose. “Why did you?”

  “My mother. I had just graduated. I had decided to say to hell with my father, and I applied for citizenship, as I mentioned.” He grinned as she shook imaginary pom-poms.

  “Good for you.”

  “Ah, but the villain of the story had other plans, alas,” he said dramatically, lowering his voice to the basso profundo range to make it sound serious and scary.

  “Oooh, tell, tell,” she played along again.

  “I’d found a job with a major investment and shipping firm. I was to start on a Monday. My father’s secretary called me the Thursday before. She said he’d told her to call, to tell me that my mother was in the hospital and I should come home.”

  “And you went,” Carrie said, unhesitatingly.

  “Yes, I did.” The bitter pill of that memory still choked him. “They said she was dying.” He sat silent, remembering.

  “Dav? She wasn’t dying?”

  “No,” he said, and something in his face must have given away the anguish he’d felt back then. “She wasn’t dead, but she’d been desperately ill for six months and they hadn’t told me. No, this time it was my father who was in the hospital, but he knew I wouldn’t come if I thought it was him.”

  “He played you,” she said, reading the situation perfectly.

  “Of course. Then, once he had me, he kept me. He had his ways, his connections with the authorities, and I knew it. I could have left, yes. But I would have had to make a scene in a public place, and he knew I wasn’t yet that desperate. I put off my return, but in the end, I had to decline the job in America, stay in Greece. At least I was there when my mother did die.”

  She laid a warm hand on his arm. “I’m sorry.”

  He smiled, sorry to have gone back in time to that memory. “Me too. I never got to say good-bye to my mother. She wasn’t a strong woman, she never thought to defy him, never understood why I would. She was lost to me though,” he said, finally. “She had Alzheimer’s. It had come on early for her. There were many hospital stays when I went home. The last one, I chose to meet with my father instead of taking visiting hours one day, and she slipped away. He had dismissed her from his life, of course. Nurses managed her. And finally him too.”

  “Was that when he died? After he had to have nursing care?” she asked, softly.

  “Yes. He called me in a last time. We fought.” Dav rose, knowing he couldn’t sit still, couldn’t bear her sympathy. He walked to stare upward at the grate, still talking.

  “We’d had altercations before, but nothing like the row we had over his making me his heir. I told him I didn’t want his business, to give it to Niko. He told me I’d won, that Niko wasn’t his choice and would never be. I could, he said, fire all the people in the company, turn them out to starve if I wanted to, leave them jobless and alone, or I could take the reins of the company and make it mine. He no longer cared what I, or anyone else, did.”

  “Did you fall for it?”

  “Not at first,” Dav said, managing to choke down the last bites of the dry sandwich, using it to give him time to think, to figure out how to explain the dynamic between his dying father, his ruthless brother, and his own desire to be gone from Greece, and free.

  She too, was eating, and obviously having just as difficult a time with the dry bread and crusty contents of the sandwich.

  “Here, ma’am,” he said, seeking to return the mood to the lightness of their earlier banter. “Let me offer you one of our finest vintages, freshly decanted by our own sommelier,” he joked, unscrewing the canteen and smelling the contents. Water maybe, something that didn’t have a strong scent. “I think it’s water.”

  “Well, let’s give it a try.” She held out a hand.

  “I’ll do it,” he said, taking a cautious sip. The water was fusty and tasted of the interior of the canteen, but there wasn’t a taint or anything foul in it. After another sip to be sure, he passed it her way. “Water. Not too bad, not too good.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and she took a cautious sip. “If it does rain, we should set this out, make sure it gets filled back up.”

  “Now there’s the survivalist,” he praised. “Good thinking. That’s a good way to begin our conversation about what we’re going to do next.” And an excellent way to move beyond his ancient family trials.

  The dead kept their secrets, and his father was surely dead even if Niko wasn’t. There were some things no one else living needed to know.

  Chapter 6

  “The grate is too high for us to reach,” Dav summed up the situation. “I don’t think the potty over there”—he pointed toward the aluminum and plastic john—“will support either of our weight for any acrobatics, much less the weight of both of us. We have your multitool, the keys, I have some mints,” he said with a smile, reaching down to fish the dented tin out of the topcoat’s deep pocket. “Neither my gloves, my wallet nor your purse does us any good here. The chains there”—he pointed to the wall—“are rusty and, again, probably no use since we can’t stand on them.”

  “We might be able to toss them up and climb them to get to the grate,” Carrie speculated, glancing from the chains to the grate and back. “I don’t know if I have enough upper body strength though, to pull myself up.”

  Dav walked over and tugged at the heavy manacles, dropping them after a few hard tugs showed them to be firmly planted in the ornate carvings.

  “Not easily loosed, and since we don’t have bolt cutters, there isn’t much to do once we get there.”

  “True. So,” she said, shifting to sit with her back to the wall.

  Dav continued, pacing under the grate, assessing it. “We’ve got the room, a little bit of food and the promise that they’ll be back in two days, at which point they may or may not let us out.”

  “And, if they let us out, they may or may not kill us.” Carrie carried that thought to its final conclusion.

  “Exactly. Which leaves us with each other, a bit of food and a lot of time on our hands. Too bad we don’t have a chess set, eh?”

  “I suppose we could make one in the dust,” she said, looking over the room. “I didn’t know you played.”

  “I do, yes,” he said, surprised that she did. “Do you?”

  “Yes, I do too. My father taught me.”

  “Tomorrow
then,” he said, pleased at the idea of matching wits with her. “To pass the time, we’ll play.”

  “We should do yoga, to keep us from getting stiff,” she said, unexpectedly, then blushed. “I mean...”

  Laughing, he took the opening she offered to talk about their interrupted passion. “Carrie, it is fine. We can talk about it. The situation is dire. We’re attracted to one another.” He shrugged. “I’ve been attracted to you since before I met you.” He turned to look at her, face her and show her the truth of his words. “I watched you, from outside the window before I came into Prometheus that first day,” he admitted. “You were so vibrant, so alive.”

  Knowing he would most likely die in the next few days, he decided not to lie to her. “And I’ve wanted you every day since.”

  “So, you have him,” the older man stated, and then he smiled. Watching from across the room, Niko felt his gut clench. Suddenly, the room seemed colder, the fog beyond the windows more impenetrable. He hated San Francisco, hated the cold.

  “You plan for ransom, I presume?” the man continued. “Numbered Swiss account?”

  “The Caymans,” Niko finally said, chilled by the implied menace in the other man’s smile. There was something different now, something ... off. He’d never seen it before, not in this man.

  Niko’s confidence faltered, ever so slightly. He knew this man—his mentor in so many things—was dangerous... deadly, in fact. Niko also knew that he himself was not the one in control here. He did have something the man wanted and thus he was still useful, which meant he would probably live through this encounter.

  Probably.

  “We’ve sent the items for proof of life, with instructions. With the money deposited, we’ll give the security geek the coordinates to his location.” Niko managed to keep his voice level, professional and without emotion. As when facing a jungle cat or a feral beast, if you showed fear, you would indeed die.

  “Good.” The neat white mane of hair didn’t move as the other man nodded his approval. “Very good. Where have you put him?”