by Kay Hooper
“Trust,” Kane said flatly. “That’s what it comes down to. We can be enemies without it, partners. We can even have sex without it, because we sure as hell have the desire. But we can’t be lovers.”
Tyler hesitated, then met his eyes with all the steadiness she could muster. “Maybe you don’t want a lover, just the sex. No emotions, no . . . connections. But I can’t risk that, Kane. Not for myself. I can’t risk seeing myself in pieces again because the choice was stolen from me. It has to be an emotional choice, not a physical one.”
Kane found it ironic that Tyler was just now confronting the knowledge he had faced days ago. Physically he could arouse her past the point of no return, and they both knew that. But he had also known, days ago, that the choice had to be Tyler’s, that he couldn’t steal what she wasn’t willing to give.
A little harshly he said, “I want more than sex, Ty. I can buy sex on a street corner. I want you.”
She felt her body respond to his grating voice and the demand of his desire, and a tremor shook her. Very softly she said, “I don’t want an enemy in my bed, Kane. Or a rival. I’m not even sure I—I want a lover. But we both know I can’t control what you make me feel. If I give in to those feelings without making a conscious choice to do that, it’ll be as destructive to me as it was to give in to that man because I wasn’t strong enough to fight him.”
“No,” Kane said. “It’s different.”
“Not to me. It’s the truth, and what I feel.”
Kane felt as if he hadn’t drawn a deep breath in hours, but he did now because his chest was hurting. He leaned back in his chair and let the breath out slowly, but the dull ache wouldn’t go away. There was something wrong with this, something that didn’t fit, but he couldn’t make it come clear in his mind. He believed that she believed what she was saying, but his instincts told him it was wrong somehow.
After a moment he stirred and said with deliberate dryness, “So you need to make a clear, rational, logical decision to take a lover.”
Tyler felt heat flood her cheeks, although she couldn’t have said why. “It isn’t as cold-blooded as you make it sound,” she objected.
“That’s just what it is. Tyler, by its very definition, physical desire is something we don’t control—it controls us. It’s a drive, an instinct millions of years old, it isn’t a logical thing.” Keeping his voice deliberate, he went on, “So what happens if you coolly decide at some future date that you’re ready to take a lover—and the desire isn’t there? Will you just find some likely candidate because you’d rather betray your body than your mind?”
The flush drained from Tyler’s face, and she stared at him. “No! I’d never . . .”
Kane went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “We’ve got—what?—a few weeks ahead of us at best? Then we go our separate ways, with or without the second chalice. You back to London, me back to the States. And maybe we’ll run into each other six months or a year from now. Or maybe not.”
“So it’s now or never, is that what you’re saying?” Her amber eyes had begun to glitter with anger. “Lust today, for tomorrow we may die?”
He didn’t have to force his grin. As always, he had found the quickest and surest way of angering her. This was the Tyler who would fight him on a level where he stood a chance, and he felt no remorse at needling her. Her guarded posture had altered to become stiff annoyance; rage had chased the shadows from her eyes and she looked like a cat about to hiss and claw at him.
In a mild voice he said, “You’re the one who has to make a choice, Ty. It’s up to you. I was just pointing out one of your options.”
Her glare narrowed. “Well, you made the point.”
“Good.” He nodded briskly. “Then why don’t we finish eating and get some more sleep. Tonio wants to leave before nine in the morning.”
Tyler blinked, then picked her spoon back up and began eating the cool soup. He had shaken her off balance again, damn him. Determined to keep that knowledge to herself, she managed to hold her voice calm and steady. “Tonio? Your friend with the plane, I assume.”
“Right. He’s going to fly us to Santa Marta. Where, you’ll be interested to hear, there’s a cargo ship now loading. Her destination is Greece.”
She stared at him as an uneasy suspicion prickled in her mind. “Don’t tell me.”
“Afraid so. Dimitri’s ship.” Kane smiled a little, but said, “Sorry, Ty, but it’s the only ship heading in the right direction, and it will take us all the way to Italy.”
Tyler lost her appetite. She put down her spoon again and took a drink of her milk. “Great. That’s just great. I’ll have to spend days on a ship that should have sunk from sheer age a decade ago, being leered at by a crew of pirates, and listen to Dimitri try and entice me away from you—because of course I’ll be pretending to be your woman again.”
They—actually, Kane—had created that particular fiction on their previous trip aboard Dimitri’s infamous ship, after Kane had caught one of the crew trying to creep into Tyler’s sleeping bag in the middle of the night. Kane had thrown the sailor overboard, which might have been a little drastic except that he could swim and Dimitri stopped long enough to fish him out of the Mediterranean. After which, Kane made a brief trip from bow to stern, telling every man on board with a chillingly mild smile that the next one who dared to touch his woman would be dead before he hit the water. And he made the promise in fluent Greek, to avoid future misunderstandings.
“It worked the last time,” Kane murmured.
Tyler admitted that silently. The leers had continued—out of Kane’s sight—and Captain Dimitri had tried his hand at verbal persuasion, but she hadn’t been forced to defend herself. She had been somewhat amused at the time, and realistic enough to have shrugged an acceptance of Kane’s protection; she disliked having to depend on any man for anything, but the cloak of Kane’s fictional possession had allowed her to sleep nights, and at that point the rest had more than made up for the blow to her pride.
Besides that, Kane had an odd habit of defending her honor, something that had at first enraged her and, later, bemused her somewhat. And no matter how many times she’d told him to let her get herself out of sticky situations prompted by unwanted male attentions, he had never listened to her. After a while she had resignedly accepted his actions, attributing them to his occasionally primitive instincts; she had never stopped to wonder why he was so protective of her, and she didn’t want to wonder about it now.
“Unless you have a better idea?” Kane added.
“No.” She sighed. “This will be a much longer trip than before, and I don’t fancy sleeping with a loaded gun and one eye open.” She drank the last of her milk and pushed her chair back. Getting up, she said, “What time are we leaving here?”
“I’ll order breakfast for seven. That okay?”
“Fine.” She went toward her room, but paused in the doorway as Kane asked a quiet question.
“Will you be all right?”
He meant the nightmare, she realized, and nodded. “I’ll be fine. Good night, Kane.”
“Good night, Ty.”
She went into her room, leaving the connecting door open a few inches, and crawled back into bed. She turned off the lamp on her nightstand and lay in the dark room listening as Kane pushed the room service cart out into the hallway and then returned to bed himself.
Tyler couldn’t fall asleep immediately, even though the nightmare had disturbed her sleep before and left her feeling something less than rested. She was still tired, but couldn’t seem to close her eyes. Thoughts met and tangled in her mind, snatched at by emotions so that nothing made sense.
She didn’t regret her honesty with Kane, because he seemed to have understood. But he had also, quite mildly, made it plain that if he were going to be the lover she “chose” she’d better be making up her mind about it. And even though she had known she was raising a last defense against the desire between them, his mild acceptance had disturbed, and even h
urt her. Not because she didn’t trust him not to push her—she did, oddly enough. But because . . .
Because he didn’t seem to care terribly about the matter. He wanted her, yes. That was obvious, and he certainly made no secret of it. Or at least he had made no secret of it up to now. But then he had spoken of the distinct possibility of not seeing her again for six months, a year—ever—without so much as a flicker of emotion in his voice or on his face. Nor had he even implied that if they were to become lovers they wouldn’t, afterward, go their separate ways.
That seeming indifference and total lack of a commitment of any kind should have shored up her resistance to him, but instead, angrily conscious of an echo of shame, she couldn’t help but wonder if Kane was another man with no taste for . . . damaged goods. He wouldn’t have expected her to be a virgin, but a sexual history that consisted entirely of a single brutal memory might well present a hurdle he wasn’t eager to attempt.
Tyler felt a throb of pain, and even as it ebbed dully she refused to examine the cause. She told herself fiercely that it would be best if Kane lost interest, best for them both. They could cross back over that stupid line and be rivals again, and know the rules. The safe rules.
It was almost dawn when she crept from her bed and went into the bathroom. She closed the door and turned on the light, then shed her robe and turned on the shower. The water was hot, and she stood under it for a long time, soaping and rinsing her tense body over and over again.
IT WAS JUST over an hour later when Kane pushed open the connecting door to find Tyler fully dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt and sitting on the bed as she braided her hair into its accustomed neat style.
“Breakfast is on its way,” he offered, then noticed the plastic-wrapped clothing lying over the dresser by the door.
“They brought your clothes up as well when I called down for mine,” Tyler explained.
Kane looked at her for a moment, then picked up the clothing and said, “Let room service in if they come before I’m out of the shower, will you?”
“Sure.” She wasn’t looking at him.
He retreated, frowning a little. She was aloof this morning, and he didn’t like it. Was she regretting, now, a painful confession sparked by a nightmare? He had forced himself to be deliberately low-keyed, even though he had ached to hold her in his arms and comfort her, to wipe away the remembered anguish. But she had been on the thin edge of control, and he hadn’t dared take advantage of that. So he had needled her instead, and her own temper had steadied her.
He had lain awake long into the night thinking, studying the germ of a realization. But he didn’t know quite how to handle the conclusion he was left with. It was Tyler’s choice, whether they became lovers, it had to be after what she’d gone through. And yet the terrible experience that made that choice so vital was blinding her, he thought, to the reasons for her own reluctance to take that step.
He had to make her see—and he couldn’t afford a mistake in doing that. She had stubbornly and courageously taught herself to face all her fears except one. But that one was the most devastating, and it sickened him to think of an act of violence so terrible that it remained an open wound on her spirit even after ten years.
Kane saw the irony of it. If he hadn’t begun as Tyler’s enemy, there would never have been a question of a personal relationship between them. On the personal level, she was far too guarded, too aware of attempts to get close to her. If he had met her simply as a man attracted to her, she would have run—and rationalized her reasons. But they had met in a dangerous situation, immediately rivals and even enemies, and having neatly assigned him that place in her life Tyler had felt safe.
Until this encounter. Until awareness as heated as the steamy jungle had surrounded them. And, too late, she had realized that her enemy was a man, and that he had gotten too close. She couldn’t run; she wouldn’t let herself fight, not the way she needed to fight.
“Hey, breakfast.” The announcement was accompanied by a rap on the bathroom door.
“Coming.” Kane finished shaving, then got an iron grip on his patience and went out to join her.
chapter seven
THREE DAYS LATER Tyler leaned somewhat gingerly against a rusted railing and gazed off across a dull gray expanse of ocean, her loose hair blown back from her face by the steady breeze. The sun was hidden somewhere behind the clouds, not yet below the horizon. It was just a lull in the storm, she knew, but she had taken the opportunity to go up on deck and get some fresh air.
The cabin she and Kane occupied was hardly worthy of the name, having been stripped of all its fixtures years before, but it was the only empty cabin, and held the added advantage of being on the opposite end of the ship from the crew’s quarters.
With an eye to the main chance, Dimitri had long ago converted the cabins to storage space and carried, in addition to his legitimate cargo, a number of crates and boxes that would never pass through customs. In any case, since Dimitri never smuggled drugs or guns, officials tended to more or less ignore him. And he rarely carried passengers. When allowed on board at all, they were expected to make the best of scanty accommodations.
Kane had done his best, and with his scrounging talents his best wasn’t bad at all. He had firmly taken possession of the small cabin before Dimitri could stuff it full of cargo, and had managed to bring aboard a thick mattress to provide extra cushioning against the steel-plated deck. With their sleeping bags laid atop the mattress, the bed was reasonably comfortable.
They actually had a small bathroom with a tiny shower to themselves, and if the mattress took up most of the floor space in the cabin and there was no porthole, at least they had privacy and a door with a working lock.
The crew remembered them, but Kane nonetheless repeated his announcement of so long ago. He had also been extremely possessive of Tyler, remaining close to her almost all the time and offering the crew few opportunities to leer. And Captain Dimitri wore a disgruntled expression on his florid face after Kane had several times frustrated his attempts to entice Tyler.
As for the only woman on the ship, she was all too aware of ragged nerves and a pain she didn’t want to explore. Kane had returned to his old mocking self when they were alone, and that coupled with his public possessiveness—blatantly for show—had served to steadily reinforce her belief that there was no longer a choice for her to make. Kane had made it himself.
Tyler might have salvaged something, self-respect or pride, but their enforced intimacy left her trapped with him. They slept in separate sleeping bags, but shoulder to shoulder on the mattress, and the body he had awakened ached long into the night.
She wasn’t looking forward to the coming night, because they had hit rough seas for the first time and, though it was calm now, the forecast promised more rough weather within hours. Tyler was a good sailor, but the thought of her being tossed into Kane’s reluctant arms while the ship heaved beneath them was one that made her feel sick.
“Where’s the watchdog, missy?” Dimitri’s voice was jovial, but there was a touch of wariness, as well.
Tyler straightened from the rail and turned to him, thinking for the tenth time that the captain of this heavily laden vessel looked more like a young Santa Claus than a smuggler. His tightly curling hair and beard were black, his dark eyes gleamed merrily, and his cheeks were like polished apples. He was portly, though surprisingly light on his feet, and his accentless voice was caressing when he spoke to her, bland when he addressed Kane, and a bullhorn bellow when he was ordering his crew.
Replying to his question, Tyler said dryly, “Where you should be, Captain. On your bridge. He went to check on the weather up ahead.”
Dimitri gestured expansively. “We won’t be into the rough until after midnight, missy. It’s just a low-pressure system, nothing to worry your pretty head about.”
Tyler didn’t bother to point out that hurricanes originated in low-pressure systems, and she ignored the caressing tone. He was far more dan
gerous than he looked or sounded, but she wasn’t afraid of him. Then she saw Dimitri’s eyes widen fractionally as he gazed past her toward his bridge, and wasn’t surprised to hear Kane’s mild tones.
“Hello, Captain. Taking in the scenery?”
Dimitri smiled widely at him, murmured something about a course change coming up, and sidled around the much larger man as he made his escape.
“I can handle him, Kane,” Tyler said, turning to face him. “I’m not afraid of him.”
Kane’s face, so impassive these last days, tightened suddenly. “Yeah, I know. You aren’t afraid of any of them, are you, Ty? Just me.”
She automatically grasped the rail for balance as the ship wallowed heavily between one trough and another, staring up at Kane. “I’m not afraid of you!” she flared.
“No?” He laughed harshly. “Every time I get within two feet of you I can see you stiffen. What’s that if it isn’t fear?”
The ship rolled again, and Tyler used the movement as an excuse to turn away from him. “I’m going below. I feel queasy.”
“You don’t get seasick,” Kane retorted, following as she made her way through the jumble of crates Dimitri had chosen to lash to his decks.
“I might this time,” she muttered, moving through an open hatch that would be bolted shut if the weather worsened. The hallway was narrow, and worn iron steps led down into the dimness of the cabin area. Tyler found her way more by memory than sight, since Dimitri had removed most of the lights along the hallway.
The light was on in their cabin; it was a large hurricane lamp that Kane had brought on board, and not subject to Dimitri’s habit of turning off electrical lights to save power. Tyler took a step toward the mattress, and the door thudded shut behind her as hard hands grasped her shoulders and turned her around abruptly.
“I can’t take any more of this, Ty. We have to talk. I’m not going to let you bury your nose in one of those books you bought before we left port, not this time.”