She was on the floor, trying uselessly to fend off his blows. And then he kicked her.
Ares drew back his heavily booted foot once more. He was going to kill her, Rider thought in anguish. He couldn’t take this anymore. In the moment he opened his mouth to speak, Paige cried out. Ares paused.
“Please,” Paige said on a broken sob. “No more.”
“Where are the children?” Ares asked in a soft tone that was ominous rather than gentle.
“They’re…in a cave. On the other side of the island, straight east from the courtyard. There’s a path along the cliff and a narrower path down to the cave.”
Ares lowered his foot to the floor. Rider let out a long, shuddering breath. His gut had been churning as she gave up the children’s location, but there had been nothing else to do. She was hurt and bleeding, and there had truly been no choice. And her own distress at having given in was clear in her face, in her entire body as she lay on the floor, weeping. For the first time in his life Rider truly understood the phrase blood lust. Given the chance he would kill Ares with his bare hands and without a second thought.
Ares crossed to the door and summoned his two bodyguards.
“Untie his feet and lock them both up in that bedroom,” he ordered, gesturing toward the back room Rider had been kept in when he was first brought here. “Then call in Reyes and his platoon. I have a job for them.”
It was over.
Chapter 16
“It’s all right, Paige,” Rider said.
She lay curled up on the bed. After checking to make sure they were truly alone, that Ares hadn’t planted a spy outside the door, Rider had gone to the adjoining bathroom and gotten a damp washcloth to wipe her face. Ares hadn’t drawn blood, but Rider knew she was going to have some nasty bruises.
They would be a matched set, he thought: he’d caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.
She’d controlled her tears fairly quickly once Ares had dumped them into this room and locked the door. She’d untied his hands, even helped him clean his bleeding wrists. Rider had noticed before that they’d reversed the doorknob so the lock was controlled on the outside. He’d even tried to pick it from this side, although he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as if he wanted to rejoin Ares in the living room. But the room was four floors up, and the door the only way out. He thought he should at least see if he could do it.
He’d almost had it, too, when Ares had dragged him out for some more questioning about the children, questioning that bore a strong resemblance to what Paige had just endured.
He laid the cooling cloth over her forehead, hoping it would help.
“It’s all right,” he said again. “Paige, you had no choice.”
She went very still, and he sensed her sudden tension. He tried again to reassure her.
“You had to tell him. He would have killed you.”
She sat up, so abruptly it startled him. Nothing short of fury sparked in her eyes as she glared at him.
“Do you really think I would do that? That I would sell out those kids to save myself?”
He blinked, then winced as his battered eye protested. “I—”
“The children are long gone from that cave.”
“What?”
“Lani’s father, and every male still in the village, came for them. By now they’ve taken them off the island in their own boats, so there’s no chance they’ll be recaptured even if Ares thinks to send men on to the village from the cave.”
“Bless them,” Rider said fervently.
“And Kyle noticed one of those boats has a marine radio. They’re going to try and get a message relayed to Redstone.”
Rider breathed easy for the first time since she’d strolled into the suite. “I knew he was smart beneath all that stubbornness.”
“Yes. He is. Reckless but smart.” As if her own words had reminded her, she eyed him balefully. “You didn’t give in, or he wouldn’t have been asking me. So why did you think I would?”
He hesitated in the face of her anger. “I don’t know,” he finally said.
She was calmer now, but strong emotions were still clear in her eyes.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
He shrugged, stifling a wince. “I got lucky. They were afraid to just kill me, without Ares’s permission.” He grimaced. “So Filipo decided to deafen me instead, with that gun Kyle snagged. Fired it two inches from my head.”
She studied him for a moment. “Did you know that’s what he was doing?”
His mouth twisted. “No. I thought he was going to blow my brains out.”
Paige shivered. “I heard the shot. I thought you were dead.”
She sounded so upset it shook him. It wasn’t the time, he knew that, but he couldn’t stop himself. He leaned forward and kissed her, gently. Or he’d meant it to be gentle, but the moment the heat of her lips warmed his, he lost track of his intent. Lost track of nearly everything except the fact that this was Paige and she was kissing him back.
He poured everything he couldn’t yet say into that kiss. And Paige responded as if she heard every word, as if she knew just how deep in his soul he felt what he was giving her now. When a tiny sound escaped her, a quiet but eager whimper, his body surged to attention with a fierceness he hadn’t known in years.
He wanted more than anything else to take her down on this bed and lose himself in her sweet, giving heat. But he also knew the only thing more insane than thinking that would be doing it.
“Noah,” she whispered against his mouth, a husky note in her voice that made his entire body clench around a white-hot shaft of need.
He’d spent his life hating his first name, and had never quite forgiven his parents for leaving him open to innumerable jokes about boats and animals in pairs. But in this instant he wouldn’t change it for the world. Not after hearing it in that way, on Paige’s lips.
He went down beside her, unable to stop himself. Convulsively he pulled her to him, felt a glorious burst of gratification when she didn’t resist, didn’t even protest, but instead clung to him as if he were the last solid thing in a dissolving world.
He kissed her again, not quite so fiercely but no less intensely. And this time she met him equally, lifting her hands to cup his face, whispering his name again, as if it were the only word she knew or wanted to know.
When her tongue brushed over his lips, heat stabbed through him. He opened for her, urging her on with a quick, darting probe of his own tongue. She took the invitation, and he groaned low and deep when she tasted him, hesitantly at first, then as if she couldn’t get enough.
He felt her shiver and reveled in it. But then she broke the kiss, and even before she spoke he realized the insanity of it all.
“We can’t. Not now.”
With a wrenching effort he pulled back from her. “I know.” And he hung his every hope for the future on those last two words.
For a long moment he simply looked at her. He was aware of a sense of awe at her pure nerve, but even that was swamped by the knowledge of how badly he’d underestimated her. She had endured a painful beating simply to make her eventual confession more believable, and with pure courage she’d misdirected Ares. He’d send men out to that cave after the children, and they would be gone. A wild-goose chase.
A wild-goose chase….
“What are you thinking?” Paige asked, and he realized the thought that had just struck him must have changed his expression.
“He’s going to send men to the cave.”
“That’s what it sounded like,” she agreed.
“A platoon…that must be more than just a couple of men, even if it’s not as many as a regular military platoon.”
He could see realization dawn in her eyes as she got where he was headed. “Which means…there will be fewer men here.”
He nodded.
“Lani’s father said that when they’d gone to check the school after the children didn’t come home, they saw Ares’s men.”
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“But Tarak and Filipo didn’t see them?”
She shook her head. “This is their turf, don’t forget. But they did some counting. Their best estimate is that there are only about fifteen of them, maybe a few more up at the cell phone towers.”
“Fifteen…Ares and his two goons, a low guess of maybe three in this so-called platoon. That would leave nine.”
“The one that brought me in was down on the beach.”
“And there’s probably at least two or three more on the grounds. Which would leave only about five or six here at the hotel itself.”
“So…if we’re going to do anything, now is the time.”
He nodded again. Paige sat up straighter. “So what do we do?”
Rider felt like asking, “How should I know?” He’d rarely felt more out of his depth than he had since this had started. “We can’t assume Kyle’s going to be able to get through to Redstone quickly,” he said finally.
“Or that they’ll be able to do anything if he does,” Paige said.
Rider’s mouth quirked. “Oh, they’ll do something. If they don’t already know something’s up, I’ll be surprised.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “They get daily reports from each facility. Missing one is not that crucial. But two—” he glanced at the clock on the nightstand “—no, three, as of a couple of hours ago, that’s going to get their attention.”
“What would they do then?”
“Probably start out by calling. They—” He stopped abruptly as the logical next step hit him.
“What?”
“I just realized,” he said a bit ruefully, “that if they called, they’d probably ask for me.”
“You mean Ares may know by now who you are? And that Redstone is suspicious?”
“It might explain why he hasn’t just killed me,” Rider said. But then something else occurred to him. “On second thought, he may not know anything. If it’s just a routine check on why there’s been no contact, they’d probably just call my cell number.”
Paige’s eyes widened. “Kyle has your phone. I knew they’d search me, so I gave it to him and told him the same thing you told me.”
“So…if he was still within range of the cell towers, he may have already talked to Redstone directly.”
“And Ares would know,” Paige said, her voice tense.
“Easy,” Rider said, reaching out to take her hand. “He doesn’t know where Kyle is. The only way to find out would be with triangulation gear, and if that radio they were using is any sign of the state of their equipment, they don’t have anything that sophisticated. And since Kyle’s now offshore, there’s not a thing Ares can do.” He gave her a half smile. “Wish I’d thought of it myself when this started. I could have taken one of their boats out.”
“They would have caught you. Or at least seen you, and probably blown you out of the water.”
“Maybe.”
“Besides, he probably would have just tortured everybody on the island, thinking he could find…”
Her voice trailed off, and Rider knew it was because she had just realized that that was still a very real possibility, if they had indeed monitored any call to his cell phone.
In the silence they heard some commotion coming from the common room of the suite. Rider got up and quietly made his way to the door. What he could hear was muffled, but he made out enough to guess that Ares was indeed sending men to the cave. He couldn’t tell how many different voices he was hearing, just that there were more than two. But Ares’s last words, ordering them to hurry because he couldn’t afford for them to be gone long, seemed to confirm what they’d suspected; the man was indeed short on manpower.
When he turned back from the door he saw Paige had moved over to the window and was peering down. There was no real lanai on this smallest bedroom in the suite, only a small mock balcony not even large enough to stand on, with a decorative railing. And the window was simply a window, not a doorway.
“If they’re really going, they’ll have to go that way,” she said when he came up beside her.
Less than two minutes later she was proved right as three men went through the hotel courtyard at a run.
“Three. So we’re close on our guess.”
“For all the good it will do us.”
She sounded as if it was all catching up with her finally. And for some reason that spurred him to renew his efforts to figure a way out of this.
“Four floors,” he muttered as he looked at the too-distant ground. “A bit much for the old bed-sheet trick to get down.”
“The guards would see, anyway, from the courtyard.”
“Yeah.”
So far he wasn’t doing well on the escape planning. As he was thinking, his gaze fell on the bedside phone. One of the guards had yanked out the cord and removed it when they’d put him in here the first time.
“What are you thinking?”
He shrugged. “That it’s too bad we don’t have a phone. If Kyle’s gotten a call then we’re half-burned already, so what’s a little more? If we worked it right, maybe we could thin them out even a little more.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe dupe them into thinking help’s closer than it is.”
Paige looked thoughtful. “You mean a bogus phone call?”
He nodded. “Hopefully he’d send somebody to check out a possible threat first, and worry about who made the call later.”
Both ideas were academic, of course, they had no phone and no way to get down from here, on the top floor.
No way to get down. The top floor.
“We can’t go down,” he murmured, “but…”
“But what?” Paige asked.
“Maybe we can go up.”
“Up? But we’re on the top floor.”
“Exactly.”
As usual she caught up with him quickly. “You mean the roof?”
“I don’t think there’s anybody up there. There were no guards at night when I was out. I don’t think he’s got enough men.”
“And since he’s got everyone locked up, he must figure he doesn’t need anyone up there now.”
Rider nodded. “And if I recall the drawings correctly, there’s a stairway at the far end of the building.” He looked out the window once more. “I think I can make it if I stand on that railing. I know you’re hurting, but if we knot up a sheet, do you think you could climb?”
“I’m fine. I’ll climb,” she said firmly. “If it would get me out of here, I’d learn to fly.”
“I’ll just bet you would,” he said softly.
Thankfully, the window slid open quietly enough. While Rider removed the screen, Paige quickly and efficiently tied knots in the bedsheets at one-foot intervals. It was going to be long enough. Barely. Rider edged his way out onto the mock balcony, hoping that the builders hadn’t stinted on construction quality here just because it was decorative and not meant to hold weight.
He found he could reach the top of the building, but not enough to get a grip and pull himself up. He dropped back down to the tiny balcony, swearing under his breath.
“I’m about two inches too short.”
Paige looked up, then at the railing. “Use me,” she said.
“What?”
“Stand on my shoulders. That’ll give you enough.”
“But you’re hurt, can you— Never mind. Of course you can.”
For the first time since she’d walked into the suite, Paige grinned at him. And Rider suddenly felt as if he could leap to that rooftop in a single bound.
Instead, after another glance down at the courtyard, he climbed back up on the railing. Paige stepped out and braced her hands on the railing, putting her feet apart to give herself better balance.
“I’ll be careful,” he said.
“Don’t worry about hurting me. Just do it. Fast.”
He couldn’t help worrying—he’d witnessed what Ares had done to her—but he did it. As fast as he could m
anage it, ignoring his own sore spots. He winced as he felt one sole of his shoe digging into her, but then he was up and over, the sheet he’d tied to his belt trailing after him. Quickly he secured it to a pipe on the roof and then signaled Paige.
She pulled the window closed behind her and replaced the screen—a good idea, he thought, if it slowed them down even a minute or two in figuring out what they’d done—then reached for the makeshift rope. True to her promise she climbed. She wasn’t quick or stylish, but, using the knots for hand and footholds, she got it done. Only when she reached the top did she have a problem, and at that point Rider simply leaned over and pulled her the rest of the way. Then he reeled in the sheets until they were out of sight from the ground.
There was no sign of anyone else on the roof. They moved with agonizing slowness and care until they were certain they were no longer on top of Ares’s temporary quarters. Then they moved toward the middle of the roof, so no one could see them from below.
He spotted the triangular structure that was the entrance to the stairway, and pointed. Paige nodded, and they veered that way. In moments they were inside the stairwell. Rider felt both less exposed and more threatened: they were back inside, and so was Ares and what men he had left.
Rider had his foot on the second step down, when he came to an abrupt halt.
“What?” Paige whispered.
He dodged back upstairs, looked on the wall just inside the door, and there it was—a small gray metal box. He went to it and pulled the door open, revealing a telephone.
“It’s to report problems with equipment or leaks up here,” he explained when Paige came back to stand beside him. “But I think it’s got outside-line capabilities, too.”
He picked up the receiver and dialed seven. There was a click, then a dial tone.
“Yes,” he hissed. He’d been afraid Ares might have had somebody savvy enough to sabotage even this latest model phone system. Quickly he began to dial his cell phone number, then stopped, looking at Paige.
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