She nodded.
“So whatever you did, or felt you had to do, with this Interpol agent—”
“He never told me he was an agent.”
“It doesn’t matter. I would have done it myself.”
She smiled slightly. “I’m not sure you would have been asked to.”
He smiled as well.
“But Vik didn’t seduce me or anything like that. It was the other way around.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He said it again, but there was an edge to his voice this time.
“I practically—well no, I actually threw myself at him.”
Michael stood up and sat next to her, straightening the pleat of his slacks, as if giving himself time to think. “As I said, Samantha, I would have used any weapon I had in my arsenal to win over an ally in this situation, especially if you didn’t know he was an agent. There’s no blame attached to that. It was smart.”
“No, it wasn’t like that. He was protecting me already.”
A long silence. Then, “And so he just thought it was okay to help himself to a reward.”
She knew it. They were blaming Vik. Of course. They always thought whatever man she was with was taking advantage of her, usually for her money, but they seemed to easily transition that over to sex as well. “No! It wasn’t like that.”
“I’m sure you think you’re in love now,” he said dismissively.
“No. Of course not.” It sounded kind of hollow when she said it, though. “I’m just saying Vik didn’t help himself to me. I helped myself to him. It made me feel powerful, better. Sex can do that.”
This time, it looked as if she’d startled a smile out of her big brother. “Yes, I’ve heard that,” he murmured. Then he dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Anyway, you’re safe now. That’s all that matters.”
“Vik was up on deck, you said?”
“Yeah.”
Samantha took a deep breath and stood up.
“While you’re up there,” he called out as she exited, “find out if Father has browbeaten the pilot into taking off.”
She nodded. When she went up on deck, though, her father wasn’t anywhere in sight. The pilot was, but he didn’t look as if he was doing a preflight check. She wondered if the pilot wasn’t so easy to browbeat after all.
If they weren’t leaving right now, she presumably had more time to hash out what she wanted to hash out with Vik, although maybe he would leave first and go back to whatever Interpol spy stuff he had on his plate. He was still there at the railing talking to his friend, though.
“Yeah, tough break your undercover work going down the drain like that,” J.D. said, flicking his cigarette butt into the ocean and grinning at Vik as he did so.
J.D. was a good guy, but not what anybody would call P.C.
“Yeah, I was so close too. That’s the killer part. But I was talking to Chaps. If your force is game, we could go back on the island—”
“No can do, Vik. You know that call gets made much higher up than me. We came to get the girl. We got the girl.”
Vik nodded. He hadn’t really expected anything different.
“Besides, buddy, you don’t even know if that island’s connected to this whole thing or not.”
“It is. Some of the radio transmission I overheard when I first got there mentioned Samantha’s name.”
J.D. looked at him doubtfully. “I could take it up with headquarters if you really think it’s worth it.”
“Worth what?”
Samantha was suddenly behind him. She had changed into a skirt and a loose blouse and her hair was tied up. He missed the scanty pajamas.
J.D. nodded at her. “Miss.” Then he turned to Vik. “Let me go talk to my boys and then maybe we can see what we can do.”
“Thanks.” When he was gone, Vik stared out to sea and Samantha took her place beside him.
“You didn’t let all that crap from your father get to you, did you?”
“He was worried for me.”
“Maybe, but he had no right to judge.”
“It’s never stopped him before. My brother was pretty nice about everything, though.”
“I should hope so,” Vik muttered under his breath.
“I can really never thank you enough, Vik.”
He pushed off the railing. “Spare me the Dear John speech, okay? I got bigger things on my mind and now that I don’t have to worry about you, maybe I can finally take care of them.”
Behind him as he descended the stairs, he heard her grumble, “Jerk.”
And God knew he was a jerk—for ever thinking that a girl like her could feel something for a guy like him.
Outside of when she was being held hostage of course.
Samantha watched Vik storm down the steps.
“Was that man bothering you?”
She turned sharply at the voice. The State Department guy was hovering behind one of the lockers on deck and came into sight. She got the creepy feeling it was almost as if he’d been hiding.
“No. No of course he wasn’t bothering me.”
“I only ask because he seems such a rough fellow. Is he one of the seamen?”
How was she ever to resolve anything with Vik with all these busybodies around?
“As a matter of fact, that was the agent who saved my life.”
“I’d say rather our SEALs did that. He had you cornered in some remote island two-by-four, waiting like a sitting duck up in some rickety old tower in the air.”
A “you have got some nerve” was right on the tip of her tongue, but she held it off. Why bother? Even the mixed metaphor observation wasn’t worth it. Then something occurred to her. “How did you know we were in the air?”
“What?”
She had been lectured by Vik and by Vik’s friend not to share any of the concrete details of the island until the authorities could debrief her. And she hadn’t. Not even with her father or brother. She assumed all the others on the mission had followed the same credo. So how did this guy know about the tower?
“How did you know we were in the air?” she repeated.
“I was briefed on it. Obviously. I practically engineered this whole rescue mission, you know.”
“No, I didn’t.” It still stuck her as odd that they would brief this, this functionary, so soon.
He made to move past her and she accidentally, purposefully, got in his way, bumping into him.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I’m all off-kilter I guess.”
“Perfectly understandable.” He walked away quickly and she saw his hand going to his jacket pocket. Then he stopped. A search of the pants pocket came next, then the jacket pocket again.
“Did you lose something?” she called out.
“No,” he mumbled. “I just can’t seem to find my phone.” He strode back to where he had been standing, scouring the deck, although not deigning to get on his hands and knees to do so.
“Maybe you left it down in the salon,” she suggested.
With a curt nod, he left, presumably to look.
When he was gone, her hand went to her own skirt pocket and she extracted the device. “Phone” was being rather modest about it. She hadn’t ever seen something like this. It was no bigger than a cell, but when she popped off the back, she saw it was more like a miniature wireless computer.
Our tax dollars at work or something more sinister?
She slipped it back into her pocket and hurried to get down to the stateroom she had changed in for some privacy.
She had a powerful hunch. And since her time with Vik, her instincts were kind of spot on. She had felt as if he was a good guy and in fact he was.
If there was one thing she was going to make sure she did after she peeked into the “phone”—and thanked her old prep school pal Mandy for teaching her how to pick pockets with the best of them, just for fun of course—it was to trust her gut more.
Why the hell hadn’t Samantha and her whole damn family helicoptered off here by n
ow? He’d heard her father arguing with the pilot about it.
Vik sighed. “Are you going to follow me around now? Is this some displaced post-traumatic stress or something?”
He took a sip of the coffee he’d just poured. It was worse than hers had been.
“Please, Vik, just look at it.”
Putting down the cup, he obliged Samantha, taking what she had held out to him. “Okay, a phone. So what?”
“Not a phone,” she said excitedly. “It’s really sort of a miniature computer that wipes all transmissions after they’re sent or received and read.”
“So? Whose is it?”
“It’s that State Department guy’s.”
“Nobody told me you were a kleptomaniac. So the good ole U.S.A. has nice toys. I’m not surprised.”
“It’s designed to wipe the transmissions but I figured out to retrieve them.”
“Mmm.” He looked at the back where she had popped off a panel. It did look fancy. How come Interpol never got any neat gadgets like this? Not to mention, out in the field, he didn’t get shit.
Bug. Exterminator.
His head shot up. Jesus, he was a fucking idiot. His only excuse was that he was still mourning the loss of her sweet body in his bed and so found it hard to think around her now.
“This guy was transmitting messages? To Washington?”
“No! That’s just it. I think he was transmitting to the island.”
“Why do you think that?”
Her technical explanation—apparently she was a good little hacker—did nothing for him. But it didn’t need to. He believed she’d done what she said she had.
“And the message said?”
“Stand by for possible follow-up force.”
“Shit.” That meant they might already be too late. Whatever evidence was on that island would probably be gone by the time they could get to it.
“Don’t worry, though, I sent a communication that said ‘false alarm, leaving vicinity.’”
Startled by her nerve, he laughed and then kissed her swiftly and went to get J.D. and Chaps. They had an interrogation to conduct. Quickly.
Avery Windom was Vik’s absolutely favorite kind of traitor. The cowardly kind. With little more than a dirty look or two from him and J.D., the man was singing like a canary, every detail he knew of the sex ring tumbling out.
The raid they mounted based on that intel shortly thereafter was an unqualified success. In a supreme example of the kind of international inter-agency cooperation that never would have been possible before 9/11, Vik and J.D. and J.D.’s team of SEALs had swooped down on the little hole in the wall known as Visto—it wasn’t on that particular island, that was just a holding pen—and had captured, or killed, a lot of very sick motherfuckers. And rescued a lot of young girls.
The sex ring was definitely shut down. Permanently. At least this one anyway and that was about all anybody could do. Take ‘em on one at a time.
So why was he so down in the dumps?
Maybe because by the time he made it back to The Victory, the one young girl he wanted to see was already gone, spirited away by her rich father, probably never to sully her hands with the likes of him again.
So instead of the solid, job-well-done feeling he usually got after a successful mission, he felt like shit. And drinking to try to counteract it didn’t much help. On what he figured was about the fifth day of his bender, Crenshaw showed up, just showed up, on the bar seat next to him in some dive in…where was he again?
Oh, hell, what did it matter? He ordered another scotch. “Hi, old man.”
“Hello, Vik.” Crenshaw ordered his usual martini, in Lithuanian.
Oh, that was where he was. He remembered now.
Retired from Interpol, Crenshaw still looked suave as he sipped his martini. The guy was probably the original prototype for James Bond.
“You look like shit, young man.”
Vik laughed. “Thanks. And I was just thinking how cool you still look for such an old fart.”
“Compliments will get you nowhere, my boy.”
“What’s up?” He didn’t question how Crenshaw had found him. That was pointless.
“I’m here to congratulate you on a successful venture. And yet when I show up, I find you look like you’ve lost your best friend. Or,” he added, “your best girl.”
“Cut the bullshit. I’m sure you didn’t expect me to be celebrating. I’m sure you’ve probably been watching me on some fucking spy cam for days.” Vik didn’t believe that. Not really. Well, not when he was sober anyway. “So is this going to be some lecture or what?”
Crenshaw shook his full head of silver hair. “It’s no use lecturing you, Vik. I found that out early on. You go where you want to go.”
“Like hell! I go where I’m told to go.”
“But never unless you want to.”
He grunted.
“So where do you want to go now, Vik?”
“Not that drafty old castle you keep trying to get me to. What, is my long-lost grandmother on her deathbed or something? Has my evil old uncle been informed he’s not the true heir of whatever you call it earldom?”
Crenshaw bit into an olive. “You know I’d never go against your wishes and inform them of your whereabouts or petition for the title on your behalf.”
“Position for the title?” Vik laughed, hard.
“Petition.”
“That is so fucking ridiculous.”
“Perhaps, my boy. Perhaps it’s an antiquated sense of identity that you can never assume because you’ve been away from it too long. But you have to assume some identity.”
“I have assumed an identity. I’m Vikram Pillay. When I’m not working that is. When I’m working, I’m Vik Standish. Or maybe it was Stanford.”
“No, Vik, you’re not. Pillay, I mean. You’re a little boy who got lost when his father was murdered and who got taken in by a kind woman. That’s all. And when she died, you lost even that identity. And this, what you’ve been doing all this time with Interpol, you’re good at it. Very good at it. But it’s not you. And it’s a young man’s game.”
Vik scoffed.
“No really. You’re thirty-three.”
“Ancient,” he muttered.
“Unless you want to die on the job, yes. Undercover work can last only so long until it eats out the real man.”
“What real man?” Vik downed the last of his scotch. Had he gotten a room in this dive? He could barely remember.
“Come on. Come back to London with me.”
Vik shook his head. “No thanks. I’m not done here.”
“What? Drowning your sorrows? Vik, you are a real man. A good man. Complicated, but good.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Crenshaw slipped off his bar stool. “If you won’t admit you might want to see that drafty old castle sometime, maybe you could admit you might like to see the lovely Miss Reynolds.”
Vik stared at the bottom of his empty glass. “Yeah, that I would.”
“Good, because I was afraid I was going to have to leave that sweet girl waiting in the car forever.”
His head popped up. “Samantha is with you?”
“Yes. It seems she wanted to see you and couldn’t find out where you were. Her brother used his influence to put her in touch with J.D. Kates, who put her in touch with me.”
That fucking Kates. Vik strode to the door.
What a great guy.
He followed Crenshaw out to the limousine and slid in the back seat. Where Crenshaw went, he had no idea. He had eyes for no one other than Samantha. Her silky brown hair was tied back in a braid that he could not stop himself from winding around his fist and she was dressed in some kind of suit.
She looked so fucking beautiful.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea seeing her when he was this drunk.
He pulled her to him with her braid and kissed her, tasting the fresh clean mint of her.
She, however, undoubtedly tasted no
thing but scotch on him. After a second, she pulled away, laughing. “I guess I don’t have to ask what you’ve been doing these last few days.”
He smiled crookedly. “You have me at a disadvantage, Samantha. I’m drunk as hell and, despite all the rigorous training Crenshaw put me through a million years ago, I’m going to tell you the truth about anything you ask me. So, yeah, I’ve been drinking, but you know why?”
She shook her head.
“To forget that I wasn’t with you anymore.”
At that, she launched herself into his arms again, and laughing, he held her a little away. “Now you. What have you been doing?”
“I’m not drunk.”
“No, but you’re much worse at lying than I am. So you pretty much are an even bet to tell the truth anyway.”
“Okay, you got me there. I’ve been sulking because I wasn’t with you anymore.”
“We’re a pair, aren’t we?” He laughed.
“Yeah. We are.” She kissed him so sweetly he thought he would cry. Oh Christ, he better sober up or he was going to embarrass himself big-time. He pulled her into his lap.
“So you met Crenshaw?”
“Yes. What a nice old gentleman.”
“Don’t let him fool you. He’s hard as nails.”
“Well, I’m very familiar with nice, hard-as-nails old gentleman.”
“Speaking of which, how is your father?”
“Not quite the ogre I’m always trying to paint him to be. When I told him how I felt about you, you know what he did?”
“I would’ve said locked you away somewhere, but here you are, so I guess not.”
She laughed. “No, I would’ve said that too. But no, he said he was proud of me. It seems like he and Michael were pretty impressed by my escapades with you. They’ve finally agreed to let me live my own life, make my own decisions. And I’ve finally agreed to stop blaming them for everything and acting out.”
“Well, we’ve got everything figured out here. Who needs psychoanalysis?” He noticed suddenly that they were moving. The opaque screen of smoked glass kept him from seeing the driver, or Crenshaw for that matter, if he was in the front seat. “Where are we going?”
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