Vortex (Cutter Cay)

by Cherry Adair

  Though he’d shaved earlier, his dark beard had grown enough to shadow his cheeks and chin. The stubble was soft under her hand.

  The arm behind her back tightened and he drew her to him as he bent his head and his mouth closed over hers in a kiss so sweet, so gentle, her throat closed and tears welled once more. For several minutes or hours he did nothing more than smooth long strokes down her back, and drop tender kisses on her face.

  She was almost asleep, still joined to him, when he brushed away the hair stuck to her cheek. “Sleep on your back or belly?”

  She breathed out a sleepy breath. “Tummy.”

  Gently, he scooped her up and turned her, and she immediately burrowed her face in the pillow and breathed a contented sigh low in her throat, one eye open.

  He smiled as he reached out to pull the sheet over them. His hand stilled, then he bunched the sheet out of his way and his eyes flared with another kind of heat.

  Oh God. How had she forgotten for even a second? She reached back to draw the sheet up over her ass, her heart pounding now for another reason. Through one eye she saw him reach out to touch … His fingers curled into a fist inches from her skin.

  “What the hell—” His voice was raw and laced with fury as he demanded. “Is this a … brand?”

  He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the mattress, not touching her. “No more lies and half-truths, Daniela. I need to hear everything.”

  Throat aching, chest impossibly tight, the harsh tone of his voice much more painful now that he’d been so tender with her, Daniela rolled over and sat up, bunching the sheet to cover herself. It wasn’t enough.

  “I have to get dressed first.” She slipped off the bed on the opposite side of Logan, and picked up her scattered clothing from the floor. She didn’t try to hide her nakedness, he’d seen everything, after all. It was the memories she wanted to armor herself against.

  Her hands were clumsy as she yanked on the linen pants, not bothering with underwear. “I don’t even know where to start—”

  “The senator.” His voice was very calm. The kind of calm that had tightly leashed rage behind it. “The son of a bitch branded you on the ass with his fucking initials?! Jesus, Dani—”

  Personally. With relish. She pulled the T-shirt, inside out, over her head, tugging it down. “It took two of his aides to hold m—” She swallowed bile. “To hold me down. I prayed I’d pass out. I didn’t. Do you know what burning human flesh smells like? Not unlike a nice barbecue pork rib. Sweet … sweet and acrid and a hundred times more nauseating. I tasted that smell, and did for weeks afterward.”

  And just talking about it brought back a rush of Technicolor memories and smells that stuck in her throat. Her skin prickled with cold sweat as she drew in a deep, shuddering breath and walked to the door leading to the balcony.

  “Do you want a drink? All I have is water or beer.”

  “Beer.”

  He got up and went to the mini fridge. She heard him pop the cap, and seconds later, the pop and fizz as he poured the beer into a glass. She watched his reflection as he padded, strong and naked, back to the bed carrying a glass and the bottle. He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. “Finish it.”

  “If only—” Staring blindly at her own reflection in the night-dark glass of the doors, she let the air out of her lungs slowly. “As the branding iron burned through the nerves it—it eventually stopped hurting.”

  Logan’s jaw was ridged and locked as he too was reflected in the dark glass, the beers in his hands forgotten. “Why would anyone do such a thing?” he demanded rhetorically.

  He had no idea. He was too good. She breathed deeply through her nose, hands clenched, heart tripping. She turned to face him. She couldn’t make eye contact. “Have you heard of autoerotic asphyxiation?”

  “Choking one’s partner to heighten sexual pleasure.”

  “I’d never heard of it. Never imagined it.” Her face felt hot, and she placed her icy hands on it to cool the heat. Embarrassment. Humiliation. Shame. And all-encompassing anger. “He came in one night while I was in the bath, and held my head under the water.” She dropped her hands and clasped them tightly at her waist. She needed a moment more to push the words through her constricted throat. “It was only a few seconds, but it was a few seconds when I panicked, and freaked out. He said it was a joke and laughed it off—” She recoiled from the icy fury in Logan’s midnight-blue eyes.

  “Don’t,” he murmured hoarsely, his eyes glittering now with something dark and nameless. “I’d cut off my own arm before I’d ever hurt you. And this was not your fault. Any of it. Autoerotic drowning—Jesus. Was this before or after you discovered he was moving drugs through the gallery?”

  “A month before. The next time he held me under I threatened to press charges.”

  “You should have.”

  “I know.” It was her biggest shame that she hadn’t. She’d wanted to believe him when he apologized with utmost sincerity. She’d thought she loved him. He loved her to distraction. He’d teased her for overreacting, and eventually she was convinced she had.

  “I walked in on him in the bathroom a week later. He wasn’t alone. He and his publicist and a hooker were in the tub together. His bodyguards were holding them under the water as they had sex. Sick, I tried to run, but he’d told his people—They held me and forced me to watch. After that I left for good.”

  The glass in Logan’s hand shattered. The yeasty smell of spilled beer permeated the room. He didn’t seem to notice that his hand was bleeding as he carefully placed the bottle and broken shards of glass on the bedside table.

  Daniela, grateful for something to do, went into the bathroom and came out with a hand towel. Sitting beside him on the bed, she gently cupped her hand under his to inspect the inch-long gash. After wrapping the towel around it, she lifted his hand to her cheek.

  “Finish it, for God’s sake. No,” he said when she started to get up. “Stay right here.”

  “I called the police and charged him with assault. He was like this”—she held up twined fingers—“with the police commissioner, and the complaint was never filed. I told him I never wanted to see him again, and if he ever came near me, or the gallery, I’d go to the newspaper. If the police wouldn’t do anything, I figured the press would.”

  He brushed hair out of her eyes with a tender finger, then traced the curve of her cheek, his eyes intent and only inches from hers. “You didn’t hire a hit man?” he muttered, probably not joking. The savagery in his voice was in direct counterpoint to the gentleness of his touch. Daniela’s throat and chest ached, and her eyelids burned. “I didn’t think about it. Then. He begged me to come back, told me how much he loved me.”

  “I hope you kicked him in the balls.”

  “I probably would have if our conversations had been face-to-face at that point. But I’d had my locks changed, and refused to see him.”

  “What about your family and friends?”

  “I was too embarrassed to tell my friends, and of course I never told my parents. Oh, my God…”

  Wrapping her arms around her body, she got up and padded back to the doors to look out over the dark water. The silence grew thick as she swallowed, struggling to formulate an explanation of what had happened. How she’d allowed it to happen. Logan just sat there, still as a statue.

  “I know it had nothing to do with me. But I have to admit, I wondered. If I’d done some of what he wanted…” Rubbing her bare arms didn’t get rid of the bone-deep chill. The events had been hideous enough, but to tell Logan what had happened was humiliating. She sounded like an idiot for staying as long as she had.

  She’d had resources—and a powerful boyfriend who’d already blocked her attempts at getting a restraining order. The press loved Senator Victor Stamps, and he played them like a Stradivarius. “He called incessantly, sent his aide, then his campaign manager to reason with me. They made it sound as if what he was doing was normal, and I was a prude.”
/>   “You’re not.”

  “I refused to see him. The press speculated about our breakup. He was afraid that without me, he’d lose all those Latino votes come election time, and his calls became more threatening and wild. He inundated me with flowers and expensive jewelry. The press had fun with it, championing his romantic cause.”

  Logan watched her, unjudging.

  “I finally agreed to see him one last time. So he could ‘apologize properly,’ as long as my manager and a few employees were present at all times. He came to the gallery and cried, begged—. I told him emphatically no more and I meant it. That night, after the gallery closed, and I went upstairs, I—I found Pyewacket—my cat—floating in a bucket of water in the middle of my living room.”

  She buried her face in her hands for a moment until she could stop shaking. More anger now than fear. That filthy bastard, she wanted to annihilate him, to wipe him off the face of the earth. She’d settle for the less dramatic and more practical route of putting him in prison for the rest of his natural life.

  “I called the police.” She turned to face Logan, who still sat, hands dangling between his spread knees, his face a mask. His eyes were like burning coals in his set expression.

  “There wasn’t a shred of proof that Victor was responsible. We hadn’t fought that afternoon. In fact, my manager Adam told them we’d made up and it was nothing more than a lover’s quarrel.”

  “Let me guess. You signed this dick’s paycheck, but Adam worked for Stamps.”

  “I found that out much later. This time the police questioned Victor, and his aide, and the security guy. For all the good that did, since they all had the same story.” Daniela scooped her hair up off her neck and held it on top of her head with one hand, then let it drop.

  “I woke up the next morning to find Victor and three men standing over my bed.” Don’t relive it, she warned herself, nausea churning in her stomach, and chills racing up and down her spine. Just tell the story. She blew out a long low breath, trying to control the panic seeping back into her bones. “He was livid. They held me down, and—they—basically the men waterboarded me while he watched. And then he brought out the branding iron, and gave me this so I would know who I belonged to.”

  She couldn’t look at him.

  “I knew I couldn’t just run, unprepared. So I started planning. In the couple of weeks it took for me to pretend that everything was all right, that I was back to being the perfect ethnic arm candy, he made me watch him with other women every day. His bodyguards stayed in the bathroom, and made sure I didn’t leave. Every night was a different woman in the water with him.”

  She’d only thrown up the first time he’d forced her to watch. After that her fear and fury kept her focused on how and when she’d make her move. It was the only thing that prevented her from falling apart.

  She turned to face Logan. “I was forcibly restrained in the bathroom by his bodyguards. They’d take me home afterward. I stayed at the gallery later and later after work, avoided our social calendar by threatening to go public. It all came to a head when I went down to get my phone and discovered the drugs in the shipping crate. Everything sped up after that. I called the FBI, they referred me to Special Agent Steve Price at the DEA, and he helped me get away.” Her words tumbled one over the other in her haste to get everything said and out in the open. “I had to leave everything behind. And as well as I covered my tracks, Victor’s men still found me.”

  “And lost you,” he pointed out, voice flat.

  “And lost me, yes. And now, found me again.” She shuddered, cold to her marrow. “The harder I try to knit up my life, the more I feel like he’s behind me, unraveling and unpicking like hell. I was once an asset, now I’m a loose end he can’t afford. He’s going to kill me, Logan.” He opened his mouth, and she shook her head. “Yes, he is, and he’ll go to any length to do so.”

  Thirteen

  The wind danced like a skipping stone across the water, whisking the waves into peaks frothy as whipped cream. The early morning air, with the windchill factor, was crisp. Scudding clouds smudged the pale blue sky, and a crimson streak across the horizon heralded an approaching summer storm.

  Sea Witch perched on the horizon like a small dark bird of prey. She hadn’t started diving yet, but she would, and soon, as they brought more and more artifacts and coins to the surface. She was just one more complication to take into account when the shit hit the fan.

  Logan didn’t know the redheaded captain, nor did he give a flying fuck what happened to her when she was out of sight. But he felt a sense of misplaced responsibility for her when she was anchored off his bow. She was a nuisance, but he didn’t want her blood on his hands if this thing turned deadly.

  A situation he had to address, and add to his checklist, before the day was over.

  He’d convinced Daniela not to leave. Not until he knew exactly who all the players were, and what to do about them. He’d taken steps to protect her right here on board. For now, normalcy was the name of the game.

  Dog, who’d twirled in circles while wagging his tail the instant they’d emerged from Logan’s cabin earlier, as if giving his approval on their mated status, now slept with contented dog snores beneath Daniela’s chair.

  Wrapped in the soft black throw from his cabin, she rested her chin on her knees. Fear remained etched around her eyes, which were dark, and shadowed by concern. “If you’d just listen to reason—”

  “Hipolito doesn’t need your help right now. He’s cleaning up last night’s mess. Let him do his job uninterrupted.”

  Daniela wanted to go and help Chef in the galley. Logan didn’t want her out of his sight. Not now. Not ever. Perhaps it wasn’t realistic, but then what she’d been through had been a hellish nightmare and he wanted to make sure that bastard Stamps never got a chance to breathe the same air as her again. They were seated on the aft deck while Galt and Cooper suited up for a reconnaissance dive before breakfast. Business as usual. Or as close to as usual as made sense.

  She slipped her hand from beneath the throw, reaching for her steaming coffee mug and taking a cautious sip. Logan noticed how her lashes were spiked from her morning shower, and her eyes, in this light, were more cocoa than aged whiskey. She swallowed and met his gaze over the rim of her cup. “I hope you pressed charges.”

  Against her cousins. “Yes.” But the senator? For what he’d done? Prison wasn’t bad enough. And no term could be long enough. Logan, who was usually too busy moving forward to bother with paybacks for people who crossed him, wanted time to formulate a punishment fitting and cruel enough for Victor Stamps, after what he’d done to her.

  She put the mug down so she could hold back dark strands as the wind whipped her hair around her head. She looked so beautiful. Logan’s chest ached with pride. Courage and determination were as much a part of her as her broken nose, her brow, or her soft mouth.

  While she’d slept with tears on her cheeks, or, he suspected, had fallen unconscious resisting sleep, he’d contacted Wes and Jed in Arequipa and ordered them to bring back more security. He considered, and rejected, abandoning the salvage.

  A brand for fuck sake. A goddamn brand. He couldn’t wrap his brain around it. A one-inch-across oval, with the initials VS inside, marred one smooth, creamy ass cheek.

  He wanted to rip the senator’s fucking nuts up through his nostrils, roast them slowly over a blowtorch, and then make him eat them.

  Stamps knew where Daniela was. If he’d managed to track her here, he would track her anywhere. She knew too much for him to let her go.

  “While we were dealing with the Apazas, another group of men—and I have to assume they were sent by Stamps—boarded the ship. We think they came from one of the boats that was lurking at the one-mile limit. Our best guess is that they used individual underwater propulsion devices to get from there to here undetected. When our guys chased them off, they went straight for the dive platform and vanished. Probably had their gear tied up there for a f
ast exit. Anyway, the whole thing was short, over almost before it had begun. One of my security people shot and killed one of them—Jed took the body to the authorities for ID. Two of my guys were shot as well.”

  “Oh, God, Logan. Are they—are they dead?”

  “They didn’t even need medical attention,” he assured her. “There were various injuries that everyone is now claiming were no big deal.” But then they were professionals. To the security men, getting shot at was part of the paycheck.

  “Men! Did anyone actually go and see a real doctor?”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  She gave him an incredulous look. “All of this is my fault! If not for me—”

  “If not for you I wouldn’t have had the best sex of my life an hour ago.”

  “I’m serious.”

  He smiled. “So am I. Look, we figure that last night was reconnaissance to see what they were dealing with. Now they think they know. My security guys tell me there were ten or twelve of them. They didn’t expect to encounter armed men on board the Sea Wolf.”

  He drank his coffee while she mulled that over. But Logan sensed that if Daniela had been seen, it would’ve been a snatch and grab. He wasn’t letting her out of his sight for a nanosecond. He didn’t realize how long he’d been silent until she nudged him with her foot under the table.

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on in your head instead of glowering at my coffee mug?” Daniela suggested sweetly.

  Because I don’t want you to discover that I’m a brutal son of a bitch just like your sick-fuck ex. He’d never been violent before he’d met her. But shit changed when a man—shit changed. “Just working through some logistical problems.”

  “I can solve those logistical problems for you. Let me go somewhere else so you and your people are safe. I’ll call Special Agent Price. He’ll send someone to get me. We can try protective custody again…”