by Lauren Esker
Roxy Molina, the Fair Lady's owner, shook his hand without either introducing herself or asking his name—but of course, by this point, he would've been shocked if she didn't know who he was. "Good work," she said. "Congratulations. You played very well, Mr. Lucado."
"Thank you." He wasn't sure what else to say.
Roxy Molina seated herself in the chair across from him, so he hesitantly sat back down as well. He could feel Jen's waiting tenseness in his pocket.
"As I expect you know," Roxy said, "this was merely the qualifying round. From here, you'll represent the Molina family in the tournament."
"I work for myself," Lucky said.
Although she was smiling, the Molina scion's eyes were hard as chips of flint. "You misunderstand me. That was not a request. You'll leave this yacht in our employ or not at all, I'm afraid."
Jen stiffened in his pocket. Lucky leaned back in his chair, deliberately relaxing himself. "Well then, I'm glad to be part of the family," he said, allowing his lips to turn up. "Terms?"
"We'll bankroll you at whatever level you need. Do not hesitate to bet as high as you need to go. If you win, we'll split the prize."
"And if I lose?" he inquired with a casualness he didn't feel.
"You'll be given all your winnings from today's game, plus a very generous severance package." She smiled again, a quick flash of wintry humor. "Come now, do you really think we expect to get your best performance if you're terrified of the consequences of losing?"
"I hear fear can be an excellent motivator."
"It can also make people careless. And we are in this game to win." She nodded to his shirt. "Do you mind if I ask what you have in your pocket?"
He got no buzz of fellow-changeling off her, so it was probably safe to show her. Jen had retreated into the depths of his pocket, and he had to work at getting his fingers around her to lift her out.
"Lucky gecko," he explained, holding out his hand with Jen on the palm. His fingers were curled up around her in a protective cage, not to stop her from jumping out, but to keep Roxy from snatching her away. His own feeling of protectiveness, tinged with jealousy, came as a surprise to him.
The mobster did not attempt to touch her, however. "You know, there's a lot of superstition in my business, as in yours. I thought I had seen every kind of good-luck charm there is. You have managed to surprise me, Mr. Lucado."
"I don't suppose having her with me will be a problem?" he asked, his heart pounding. "She's a very clean pet. Doesn't take up much room."
Jen's tail flicked against his palm in a gesture he was already coming to identify as impatient annoyance.
"No, it won't be a problem. Another boat is going to rendezvous with ours soon, so I suggest you gather your things. Is there anything else we can do to accommodate you?"
"There actually is one other thing. What are the rules on guests?"
Roxy Molina frowned, her steel-colored brows drawing together. "What sort of guest? I assume you don't mean the gecko."
Actually I do, but I'm not telling you that ... "I'd like to bring my girlfriend with me, if that's all right."
Jen went completely stiff in his hand. It was a bit startling.
"Girlfriend?" Roxy inquired. She tilted her head like an inquisitive bird of prey. "Is she here?"
"I assume it's not against the rules?" He'd noticed a few of the other gamblers had brought other people with them—significant others, personal assistants, bodyguards. None of the hangers-on had been allowed in the card room, but he had noticed them mingling freely in the lounge next door.
"No, it's not," Roxy said. "We won't make a special trip to pick her up, but you can bring her if she's already here. Where is she?"
"She's in my room, sleeping."
Jen was actually vibrating now. It was a good thing, he thought, that geckos didn't have much in the way of teeth.
"In that case, I suggest you go back there yourself, get your things together, and catch a bit of rest. We'll be making the rendezvous in an hour or two."
"Thank you, ma'am," Lucky said politely, and returned a furiously quivering Jen Cho to his pocket.
***
She waited only long enough for the door to close before leaping over the edge of his pocket. Shifting in midair, she landed in a practiced crouch and stood up to face him.
"You told her I was your girlfriend!"
"What else was I supposed to tell her?" Lucky asked. He slung his jacket over the back of the chair, looking very tired, but amused. "Would you rather go on to the next round of the tournament as a gecko?"
"Yes! I thought that was the plan!"
"And then you have to stay a gecko, permanently. This way you have a legit reason for being there. I thought you'd be happy about my advance planning."
The worst part was, it actually did make sense. Except for the part where ... "We're just going to spend the whole tournament hanging off each other and pretending to be in love?"
He sat down on the edge of the bed and started taking off his shoes. "You invited yourself along. I'm doing you a favor."
Which was ... also a point she had to concede in her head, if not to him. And she'd gone undercover with various male coworkers before, pretending to be a couple.
But that had felt different. There had been a preexisting work friendship, and a mutual understanding that it was all part of the job, and the relationship would end as soon as they clocked off.
And there hadn't been this powerful, bone-deep sex appeal. She really liked Avery and Jack and Dev and the other guys she worked with. They were great guys and she'd happily trust any of them at her back in a firefight. But none of them made her think, I'd bang THAT like a screen door.
Lucky, though. Hot damn.
And she was going to have to pretend to be his girlfriend?
Suddenly she wanted very much to put some pants on.
"Well, don't do me any more favors," she said, pulling on the tuxedo pants. They were made for someone with a lot more in the hip area, and sagged weirdly on her.
"Trust me, after the way you reacted to this one, it's not going to be a problem." He flopped down on the bed and threw his arm over his eyes.
She picked up the tuxedo shirt. "Er, didn't you forget something?"
"Hmm?"
"A bra? Not to mention the lack of shoes. I'm not going to be inconspicuous like this, you know."
Lucky took his arm away from his eyes. "Are you going somewhere?"
"I have a few things to do." She dropped the shirt and cracked the door open, peeking out into the corridor. No one was around. Excellent.
"You know you're still topless, right?" Lucky said from behind her.
"Not for long." She shed the pants and stepped out into the empty corridor, shifting as she went. To her relief, he didn't try to follow her, which saved her the trouble of having to lose him.
One quick, furtive scuttle later, she emerged from an air vent into cold gray daylight. Clouds covered the sky, and a stiff wind whipped up a cap of white froth on each wave. Somehow the entire night had passed, and part of the day; it was hard to tell with the omnidirectional cloudlight, but she thought it was probably around noon, perhaps even as late as early afternoon.
The plastic-wrapped package was right where Eva had said it would be, taped to the inside of the tarped-over starboard lifeboat. Jen sat under the lifeboat's bow, where she had some cover, and stripped away the plastic and the wad of tape holding it in place. The package contained a full set of clothes (complete with shoes; Eva, unlike Lucky, minded the details), a burner phone which was completely useless in the middle of the ocean, a money clip with a small roll of cash for expenditures, and her badge and sidearm.
First things first. She got dressed, shivering in the sea spray. Being in her own clothes for the first time in over twenty-four hours was a nice feeling. Then she booted up the phone on the off chance that she'd be able to pick up a cell signal.
No dice.
She was going to owe Avery a fr
ee "I told you so." There had been some arguing over whether to give her one of the department's handful of satellite phones, and it was Jen who'd argued the hardest against it. The satphones were bulky, expensive, hard to conceal, and (she'd thought) unnecessary, since she'd expected they would make landfall, or at least would be close to land, within a day or so.
Well, she'd simply have to find a way to use the ship's own communications center to get a message out, and trust that he wouldn't go too overboard at sending help after her if she didn't surface for a while. You know me, buddy. We've worked together a long time. You know I can handle myself undercover, and I'm not going to break cover to stay in touch.
She turned off the phone and pocketed it, in the hope it might be useful later.
The gun and badge had to go. She couldn't be caught with the badge, and she'd already observed that the only armed people on the Fair Lady were Roxy's security staff. Reluctantly, she wrapped them both in the discarded plastic and tape. The gun would weigh the package enough to sink it. She stood up, looked around to be sure she was unobserved, and dropped the package over the side.
As she watched her gun and badge vanish into the icy gray waters of the Pacific, she had the sudden, powerful feeling that she'd just irrevocably closed a door behind her. She was no longer Special Agent Jennifer Cho, representative of the U.S. government, with the clout of an entire law-enforcement agency behind her. Or, at least, she'd just given up her ability to connect her identity to that person, or to prove she was here as anything other than a gold-digging gambler. And she couldn't even call for help if she got into trouble.
More than ever before in her life, she was on her own now.
Chapter Five
As Lucky emerged onto the deck of the Fair Lady, stinging spray hit him in the face. The wind was picking up, the yacht rising and falling on the waves. He averted his eyes from the water, focusing instead on the low gray sky.
Jen was a step behind him. After leaving his cabin, she'd returned a bit later wearing a red vinyl jacket over a cream-colored sweater and a pair of jeans. She refused to tell him where the new clothes came from. Either she'd been lying about coming on board as a gecko, or she'd rejected his tux only to go break into someone else's room. They had been saved from an awkward, glowering silence by the arrival of a stone-faced security guard to escort them above.
And now it was too late to back out.
A small group of people waited for them at the rail. Roxy Molina was one of them, her short hair whipping in the wind. She was bundled into an incongruously bright orange windbreaker. Her people held one out for each of them, and then silently buckled life preservers over the top.
Risking a glance down, Lucky saw a speedboat floating beside the larger yacht. A detachable ladder was slung between the two watercraft. He could feel himself paling at the realization that he was going to have to climb down that.
"You've gone all green," Jen murmured, nudging him. "If you're going to be sick, aim away from me, okay?"
He opened his mouth to say something, but she didn't give him a chance. Instead she grabbed the ladder, flashed him a wild grin, and scrambled down it with gecko-like dexterity.
He'd gone and partnered himself with a crazy woman.
One of Roxy's people took his bag from his nerveless fingers. Swallowing hard, he took hold of the ladder. Jen was already hopping off below, and it was mainly fear of looking ridiculous in front of her that had him climbing down as fast as he could, until finally his feet touched the unstable, swaying deck of the speedboat. Strong hands and small ones helped him down: one of the boat's two crew members, and Jen.
He'd been too caught up in the climb to realize, until he stepped away and looked up the side of the yacht, that Roxy was following. She accepted her henchman's hand off the ladder, but Lucky got the impression she was being polite rather than genuinely needing the assistance.
"Coming with us, are you?" he asked, clinging to the speedboat's railing with one hand and retracting his other into the sleeve of the windbreaker. He was already cold, and they weren't even moving yet. The boat wobbled under him; he couldn't get his footing. And he'd thought the yacht was bad.
Boats. Why did it have to be boats?
"I believe in protecting my investment," Roxy said. "Nothing this important can be left to chance." She stepped away from the bottom of the ladder, and waved to the crew members above. "Cast off, please."
"Where are we going?" Jen asked. "We're nowhere near land." It was some comfort to Lucky in his current misery that she looked as cold as he felt, hunched into her windbreaker with the hood up and the drawstring cinched down around her face.
Roxy, in contrast, might as well have polar bear blood. If she felt the icy spray dampening her hair and slicking her face with moisture, she didn't show it. She also didn't bother to answer the question. "Find a seat," she said, and made her way along the pitching deck to speak to the pilot.
The speedboat wasn't large enough to have an enclosed cabin; there was merely a sort of covered alcove with a windshield for the pilot, and seats with weatherproof plastic cushions behind that. Jen and Lucky sat opposite each other, while Roxy stood holding onto the back of the pilot's seat. Her other henchman stowed Roxy's luggage and Lucky's valise, then made his way to the back of the boat and unhooked the ladder. The crew on the deck above threw down a line, which he coiled and stowed, and they pulled away into the choppy waves.
The motion of the sea was easier to deal with, Lucky found, once they picked up speed. It was still bone-jarringly rough, the hull of the boat slapping against the tops of the waves, but at least he no longer felt it so intensely in the pit of his stomach. He looked across at Jen and saw her grinning at him, all her teeth showing. Strands of wet dark hair straggled across her face.
"You're having way too much fun," he shouted at her above the wind screaming past them.
"I love this!" she called back. "I might have to get myself one of these!"
Roxy, who hadn't bothered sitting down, made her way back to Jen's seat by hanging onto a line strung along the rail, apparently for that purpose. "You like boats?" she asked.
"I like anything that goes fast," Jen said cheerfully.
"I was involved in stock-car racing at one time," Roxy said. "As a much younger woman, of course."
"You mean you sponsored drivers?"
Roxy's grin was a feral mirror of Jen's. "Of course not. I was the driver."
Crazy. Everyone here but him was crazy.
While the two of them started talking about fast cars, Lucky looked out across the ruffled gray sea. Through the spray and mist, now augmented by a drizzling rain, he glimpsed something dark enough to stand out. They seemed to be aiming for it. Another boat, of course. Joy.
Size and distance were hard to judge on the open sea, and from the size of the boat's dark mass, Lucky assumed they must be close. Yet the thing kept getting bigger and bigger while the details were still obscured by rain and fog. It was much, much bigger than the yacht they'd left behind. This one was the size of a Carnival cruise ship, but it wasn't shaped like one. It was squarish and long. A container ship, maybe?
The closer they got, the more he was able to pick out details ... and none of the details made sense.
Jen finally noticed the ship as it loomed over them. She fell silent, mouth open, before she said, "What the hell."
"Lady and gentleman," Roxy said. She smiled as she stood swaying gracefully with the boat's rough motion, one hand lightly clasped on the guide line. "Welcome to the Memphis."
The Memphis, its sandstone-colored side now towering above them like a cliff face, was an enormous floating sphinx.
Its huge, serene face, crowned by an Egyptian headdress the size of a six-story building, gazed steadily out to sea as the speedboat came in between the sixty-foot-high paws. A wide, garage-type door was opening in the left-hand paw (port, Lucky thought; on a ship, that's port), revealing a brightly-lit and enormous space inside. The speedboat throttled do
wn and motored through the doorway, where wavelets lapped around an indoor pool. The door rolled down behind them, and the water began to froth around the speedboat's hull, draining away.
The interior of the sphinx's paw was a huge indoor docking area. A long row of speedboats and launches of various sizes were dry-docked in shallow berths. The iron scaffolding that supported the inside of the paw's structure was visible, giving it an unfinished look and serving to emphasize its vast scale. Down at the far end, the workers hurrying busily around looked as small as ants.
Even Jen was speechless.
"Who built this thing?" Lucky asked.
"The Memphis belongs to an individual known as Lux." Roxy stepped casually from the speedboat to the deck. Her fingers twitched as if she wanted to help the crew secure the boat, but she left it to them. "As to who Lux is ... no one knows. He came onto the international scene very suddenly a few years ago. I am only assuming he's a man, since there are not very many women in this business, but who knows? In any case, he works through intermediaries. He conducts business in English, but no one is sure of his nationality, since he stays on his ship and his ship stays in international waters." She smiled thinly and extended a hand to Jen, helping her down. When she grasped Lucky's hand in turn, her fingers were ice-cold and strong as iron. "Very few people have ever met him. An honor, I assume, that will go to the winner of the tournament, whoever it may be."
"How fortunate," Lucky murmured, retrieving his bruised-feeling hand as his feet found their purchase. The rolling of the ocean was less noticeable inside the enormous ship, more of a gentle rocking than the wild lurching of the speedboat or even the yacht's unsteady sway. He might be able to get used to this. He hoped.
They shed their windbreakers and life preservers, leaving them with the speedboat. While Roxy's men were stowing those and getting out their luggage, a crew member came to greet them. She was wearing a bright crimson and gold uniform, decorated with gold braid down the front and set off with a small red cap; her blond hair was braided down her back. The holster at her hip was also decorated with gold braid, making the stark black Ruger look vulgar by comparison.