by Linda Ladd
Once Novak was sure the woman’s airways were open, he positioned her head so that the blood was draining onto the deck and not down her throat. She was a small girl, looked pretty young, didn’t weigh much—really skinny, in fact. Probably not much over a hundred pounds, if that. A buck ten at most. She was bruised up pretty bad, too, and not just from the blows he’d seen her take. There were other bruises, some old, some new, some black and blue and pretty damn awful. She had been beaten, no doubt about that.
Her hair appeared to be dark brown under the dim deck lights, black maybe, and she wore it in a long braid that hung down her back, almost to her waist. Lots of strands had pulled loose during the struggle and were plastered against her cheeks and neck. She had on a white oversize oxford shirt, a man’s shirt, it looked like, long sleeves rolled up, dirty, bloody, ripped and torn, most of the buttons gone. She had on tight black nylon shorts and black boat shoes similar to his. She was a lot younger than he had first thought. Just a kid. Maybe even a teenager.
Novak pulled his T-shirt off over his head and wrapped it around her wounds, and then he slid an arm under her shoulders and another under her knees. He scooped her up, and she felt as limp as a boiled egg noodle. He carried her belowdecks to the fore cabin and laid her down on her side. Fetching his first-aid kit from the head, he brought it and a wet cloth back to the bed. She was sopping wet, and blood was still oozing out of the two-inch gash at her hairline. Both wounds were deep and ugly. He cleaned them out with some Betadine, pulled them together with butterfly bandages, and covered them with sterile white gauze. Then he washed a lot of the blood off her face and neck. She did not move a muscle the whole time. Her eyelashes did not twitch. She was not going to wake up anytime soon.
Leaving her lying on the bunk, he climbed the companionway to the aft deck. He took a few minutes to search the horizon with the night scope. Nothing anywhere. No lights. No roaring motors. Just the endless rocking of the boat on the cresting waves. The night was quiet, stars still glittering in their icy white splendor. They were alone. The two of them, two complete strangers, out in the middle of nowhere. He had no idea who she was, why she was with those guys, what the hell was going on. Great, that was just great, damn it. Exactly what he needed. Some helpless girl to worry about.
Once Novak was certain that the killer wasn’t coming back, he went below and stood in the threshold and stared at the young woman for a few minutes. Then he went inside, leaned down close, and tried to shake her awake. She did not move. A long slender gold chain hung around her neck. He pulled it out. A beautiful gold crucifix gleamed in the overhead light. Appeared that she might be a Catholic. He picked up her wrist and felt for a pulse. He found one, slow, but halfway steady. Her skin felt like ice.
So Novak stripped off her wet clothes, down to her underwear, and wrapped her up in some warm blankets. Her body looked wasted, impossibly thin, and sported bruises just about everywhere. After she was settled, he walked to the head and washed his hands and splashed cold water on his face. He was almost completely sober now, the dregs of the booze chased away by the adrenaline of the armed encounter. He needed to shake off the rest of it in a hurry, just in case her captor came back to claim her boat. The spike in his blood pressure was coming down, too, slowly but surely, his heartbeat returning to its normal pace. He stared at his reflection in the mirror. God, he looked like crap. He looked worse than crap. Two weeks of dark beard, bloodshot eyes from the booze, face and chest sunburned from weeks spent alone at sea. He looked like a bum.
Novak was a big man, six inches over six feet, with wide shoulders and thick muscles and a tendency to intimidate most people who met up with him. He was a scary looking guy at the best of times, and he knew it. The girl lying unconscious in that bunk was sure as hell going to wake up and panic when she saw him looking as unkempt and dangerous as he looked right now. That would not be good. Not after what she’d just gone through. On the other hand, she had already been in some very bad company before Novak had come along and saved the day, which might act to make him come off a mite better once she got the story straight.
The big white-and-black yacht was still bobbing nearby, and he went back top decks and brought the Sweet Sarah up close, sent a grappling hook across the bow, and tied in to her. He looked at the yacht’s name again. Orion’s Trident. He ought to be able to find its owner on the registry in Cancun. The dead guy was still where he’d breathed his last, on his back, his face and most of his head pretty much gone. Novak sidestepped the blood and brain matter, took a knee, and searched the guy for ID. No luck with that. No driver’s license, no wallet, no nothing. After that, Novak went below and tossed the boat slowly and methodically, searching for proof of ownership, a name, mail addressed to the owner, anything, but could find no identifying papers, not even a ship’s log.
All of which was highly irregular. That told him that there had probably been some kind of illegal operation going on aboard the Orion’s Trident. Drug smuggling, maybe. Or something worse. Then he found a torture chamber located down in the bilge and knew it was something worse. Inside, he found steel rings attached to the wall and heavy chains lying unlocked in the shallow water covering the bottom of the hull. The girl had been a captive, all right, and so had the guy who had tried to protect her, it looked like. They must have gotten loose somehow and attempted to run for it, a decision that had turned out badly for both of them.
Novak was careful not to touch anything that he didn’t have to. He wiped off his prints when he did touch something. He didn’t want any of this illegal operation to come back on him. He found some women’s clothes and tennis shoes that looked like they might fit the skinny girl he’d rescued, so he stuffed them into a plastic bag. After that, he took some medical supplies and pain medications he’d found in the head, and then he went topside and leaped back aboard his own boat. He stopped again, carefully searching a full 360 degrees around the horizon. The guy was long gone. On the other hand, hijackers were not wont to give up an expensive boat they’d captured, not without a fight. That was fine by Novak. They could have the Orion’s Trident and the murdered guy on its deck. They could bring on a fight with him, too, but he wasn’t going to hang around and wait for it.
Novak took the controls of the Sweet Sarah, maneuvered her away from the yacht’s hull, and took off back to the reef where he’d been anchored. He considered heading directly to the nearest hospital but nixed that idea almost at once. They were out in the middle of nowhere. The closest ER would probably be a three-or four-day sail, at the very least. He could call in help on the sat phone, but it would be too long a distance to ask a medical chopper to fly, even if they would even consider coming so far out to sea to pick up one girl with relatively minor injuries. She was in bad shape at the moment, but her wounds were nowhere near catastrophic. The worst-case scenario might be a concussion from the blows to her head. Novak had the training and medical supplies to doctor her himself for a day or two and wait for her to regain consciousness and tell him what had happened, who had attacked her, and where she lived. After that, he could take her home and let her family deal with her. On top of all that, he had a feeling she was involved in something criminal, and he didn’t want to get pulled into a legal mess because of her. His course of action now decided, Novak swung the boat east and headed for a protected cove that he had used a couple of nights before. It could act as a temporary stop until she came to and could tell him what the hell had gone on aboard that yacht.
The anchorage he sought was on the far edge of a protected coral reef where nobody could sneak up on him. He had learned to be careful the hard way. He had been a Navy SEAL, and that training had paid off in lots of ways. He was fairly certain that he had stepped into something pretty damn ugly and something that could decrease his chances of living a long and healthy life. Oh yeah, something dark was gonna come back and bite him in the ass for this little Good Samaritan act. Time would tell, but that time was gonna be spent a good long way away from that abando
ned yacht. Once Novak brought the injured girl aboard, the die had been cast, whether he liked it or not. And he didn’t like it.
On the other hand, Will Novak had never been a man to turn his back on trouble, or on standing up for people who couldn’t fight for themselves. Truth was, he liked to fight—especially with dirtbags who deserved to die and die hard. He liked to win too, even better. And he usually did win. That guy who had fled and left the woman to drown was apparently a murderer, a torturer, and a kidnapper. He had turned tail and run like hell when somebody with equal firepower had challenged him. Novak wouldn’t mind teaching him a lesson. In fact, he’d get off on it. Maybe he’d go after him when the time was right, hunt him down and let him go up against a man, instead of a weak and injured woman. Right now, he had the unconscious girl to worry about, and that was plenty.
Chapter Two
While the girl was bandaged up and still unconscious, Novak spent the next few hours making tracks. When he got to the giant reef, he felt better. Here, he could stay out of sight but still see and hear any boat coming at him from any direction. After he was anchored and saw that the coast remained clear, he cleaned himself up some, showered, trimmed his shaggy dark blond hair close, and shaved his two-week beard. Pulling on a clean white T-shirt and khaki shorts, he felt a hell of a lot better. Like a human being again. Felt better than he had since he’d left the States two weeks ago. Up top again, he checked out the water in every direction, saw no boat, heard no motor, so he descended back down to the galley and sat at the dining table. From his seat on the bench, he could see the fore cabin. The sliding door was open, and the unknown, unconscious young woman was still struggling to breathe out of what sounded like a broken nose. A nose that had probably been straight and attractive a day ago but was going to be crooked from this day forward, unless somebody fixed it.
The girl wasn’t moving, but she wasn’t shivering anymore, either. She was just so damn young. Turned out to be much more a child than an adult. Eighteen, nineteen, maybe even in her early twenties, but that was pushing it, by the looks of her. So young that she made him nervous, made him feel like a lecher messing with some captured kid. Other than her bruises, she looked healthy enough, just a normal kid before the abuse and hard blows began. Some jerk had worked her over pretty good. She did not look physically fit. Looked like the skinniest kid he’d ever seen.
She was thin to a ridiculous degree. Anorexia was the new look du jour, it seemed. Each bone in her rib cage had been readily apparent when he’d undressed her. Hell, he could have counted her ribs if he hadn’t been so eager to get her covered up and warm again. She had either dieted to the size of a walking stick or had been starved into skeletal proportions. Very dark tan, though, like his, but with bikini tan lines, probably from days spent out at sea under the tropical sun. Long, lean legs. She had fought for her life, despite her thinness. He was more interested in her background than her physical appearance, and he wanted to know more about her, especially how and when and why she’d gotten herself into the kind of jam that put her up against a brutal thug like the one Novak had dealt with.
Who the hell was she? Who was the guy in the Zodiac? And the other guy he’d shot down in cold blood? Her husband, maybe? Her boyfriend? Whoever her captor had been, he had shown no compunction leaving her out in the middle of nowhere to drown. Or maybe she was the bad news in this little scenario, only getting her due punishment for some terrible act she had committed. Stranger things had happened. He’d known a few evil women in his day. That didn’t seem likely to him, though. Not with this kid. Nothing made sense. He could ferret out her story easily enough. He just had to be patient, and he was a patient man. Always had been.
After about an hour spent inside the salon in the silent boat, studying nautical maps, trying to locate the nearest hospital in case she turned out to need one, he rolled up the maps and put them in their waterproof tubes and stowed them away. Then he just sat there, waiting and listening to her gasping and snorting and sputtering out of a once-attractive nose that was bent out of shape, and in the literal sense, so dysfunctional that it impeded her breathing to a dangerous point. After listening to her struggle to take in air for a while, Novak stood up and walked back to the bunk. He stood for a moment, looking down at her, and then he reached down and placed his thumb on one side of her nose and two fingers on the other side. He felt for the break in the cartilage, and then with one quick jerk, he put her nose back into place. Battleground first aid. Something he’d had to do to himself a time or two, and for an injured buddy once in a while, usually after some knock-down, drag-out fight, either in the desert in Iraq or in some seedy Asian brothel. The girl didn’t move when he snapped it, didn’t groan, didn’t react, but she sure as hell started breathing better. Her nose had stopped bleeding, but she was lucky she was unconscious. Novak went top decks every quarter hour, checked for interlopers and encroaching enemies, found none, and came back down and waited for his new, unwanted, uninvited, injured guest to come to.
That didn’t happen until mid-morning the following day. What happened at that point was not a pretty sight. She awoke abruptly and without giving him any warning. Novak’s mystery guest came up off the mattress like a bat out of hell, screeching and flailing and kicking and fighting, terrified the hell out of her skull. Novak had gotten enough shut-eye through the night, basically dozing in his aft cabin and starting awake every half hour to check on her and scan the horizon. He now sat in the galley at the breakfast table, his empty plate still in front of him, watching the girl go nuts while he sipped his third mug of his favorite and very strong Jamaican coffee. He watched calmly as her fear ratcheted up a couple of levels to pretty much batshit crazy, figuring she’d have to calm down and act rational sooner or later. He wasn’t going to get himself kicked and scratched up trying to fight her initial hysteria. She deserved some kind of outlet for her terror, anyhow. She had been mistreated horribly. Chained, beaten, and God only knew what else. He didn’t like to think about what else. But she would be thinking about what else. For the rest of her life.
The panicked girl finally scrambled down off the bunk and headed for the galley. When she saw him sitting at the table, she froze in her tracks. When he offered no reaction, just stared silently at her, she realized she was nearly naked. Shivering all over, her nose bleeding a little, she grabbed a towel off the bench, wrapped it around herself, and then inched around on the other side of the galley as far from him as she could get. Then, eyes still on him, she fled helter-skelter up the companionway to the aft deck. Novak just sat there and drank more coffee and listened to her footsteps pattering around up top, running down the gangway to the bow and back. If he followed her, it would only scare her more, so he just sat and waited for her to calm down, tire out, and think coherently. She wasn’t going anywhere; nowhere to go. They were anchored out in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. Not even an island for miles around. The good news was that she didn’t appear to be too bad off physically, not the way she was getting around.
His selected course of inaction went well enough for a time, up until the moment he heard some doors bang open and realized it was the cabinet where he stowed his own small Zodiac.
Lucky for Novak, the girl wasn’t familiar with the Zodiac’s controls, because she already had the craft lowered down to the water by the time he reached her. She jumped down into it but was pretty much hysterical and kept killing the motor. The woman was clearly not a conditioned sailor. Not any kind of sailor. Novak stood back, leaned his palms against the wire, and called out that he wasn’t going to hurt her. Tried to sound harmless. She didn’t seem to think so and continued to try the ignition. After a few minutes, Novak got tired of it all, reached down, and grabbed her arm. She fought him in a panicked kind of frenzy, using her fingernails and teeth and anything else she could think of—scratching and hitting and biting and yelling and big-time getting on Novak’s nerves. He got her out of the small boat and hoisted her back up over the rail without too much e
ffort. She weighed next to nothing. She was trying her best to kick him in the groin, but that wasn’t going to happen.
When she wouldn’t stop fighting, he jerked her around until her back was pressed firmly against his chest, immobilizing her there with his forearm around her neck and his other arm clenching her arms and waist tightly against him. She kicked desperately and struggled and fought his hold, but he kept her immobile without a lot of trouble. She finally tired herself out and simply hung against him, limp and done. She had to be weak from loss of blood, so it hadn’t taken long to take the fight out of her.
“I’m not going to hurt you, kid,” he told her calmly, relaxing his grip a bit.
That caused another fit of fighting, but she tired quickly. Novak figured her head was pounding like the devil now. Her wounds were probably bleeding again. She would not be able to struggle much longer. She would not be able to do much of anything much longer. When she hung in front of him, panting and shivering, he tried to reason with her, keeping his voice low and soothing and unthreatening.
“I’ll let you go as soon as you settle down and quit fighting me. Like I told you before, I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want anything from you. I’m trying to help you get out of whatever jam you got yourself into. For what it’s worth, if I hadn’t pulled you out of the water last night, you’d be at the bottom of the sea right now.”