by Delta James
Her skin prickled, her stomach twisting into knots. God, what if Christian’s spanking had left its own evidence—handprints or redness and swelling? Her own throat choked her, killing her voice until it was nothing but a ghost of a whisper.
“I’m sorry.”
“Does sorry tell me where you were?”
“I w-wanted to go swimming.” It was a terrible excuse, but the only thing her racing mind could latch onto. She didn’t know what she’d do if he didn’t accept it. She was a terrible liar. He always knew whenever she tried—always.
Looking her over, he shoved off the door and lazily stalked.
Don’t look away.
Like a mongoose with a cobra, she kept her eyes riveted on him. He’d know she was lying if she couldn’t hold his stare. She held herself frozen until he was close enough to reach up and cup the back of her head. His fingers trailed through the dark hair at her nape, not unlike Christian had done just before he seized hold of her there. The experience now, however, was completely different, without so much as a shred of pleasure.
“Your hair isn’t wet,” he commented.
She barely managed not to look away.
“I changed my mind.” A corner of his mouth quirked up when she added, “I didn’t want to get in more trouble.”
“Such a good girl.” He stroked the back of her neck, then her hair, following the flow of it down the small of her back to her waist. Finally, he took his hand away. “To bed with you. I’m sorry, my love, but I must be strict. You are grounded until morning, no swimming. Would you like a cup of warm milk and honey brought from the kitchen to help you sleep?”
She nodded faintly, praying he wouldn’t notice how badly she was shaking.
“To bed with you,” he said again and walked out of her room.
The strength left her legs the moment he was gone. Grabbing onto the corner of her dresser to keep from falling, the air whooshed out of her. She covered her mouth before it could become an audible sob.
Eventually, she was able to make it back to her bed, where she sank down, just trying to breathe. Christian was right, she was a terrible spy, and she was absolutely going to get herself killed, if she hadn’t already. She wasn’t going to be able to leave this room again, not tonight, not unnoticed. Sometime tomorrow morning, someone was going to find Fariq’s broken laptop and the paper she had dropped.
The best she could hope for was a sudden wave might catch them sideways, knocking things askew. Fariq might believe his laptop had broken that way.
Maybe.
But the note.
Please, oh please, let her have dropped it outside his office, somewhere on the deck where a stray night breeze might somehow catch it, whisking it out to sea.
That wasn’t going to happen. Trapped as she was on this ship, she already knew she’d never get that lucky.
Chapter 8
Christian looked at the piece of paper he’d found on the floor by Fariq’s broken laptop, and it was all he could do not to charge his way to Aliya’s room, grab her by the shoulders, and shake her until her common sense rattled free from whatever corner it was stuck in. She’d brought the written list of NATO’s requested information onto Fariq’s ship? Hell, she’d brought it into his office. Where she could just as easily have been caught by anyone other than him, and if they had found this paper… Dear God.
Digging a matchbox out of Fariq’s cigar drawer, he went into the bathroom, flipped on the exhaust fan, and set the list on fire over the toilet bowl. He held it for as long as possible, letting it burn all the way down to his fingers before dropping it into the water and flushing. Trusting the fan to take care of the smoky smell, he replaced the matchbox in Fariq’s desk, exactly as he found it—tucked in the corner, right side up, with the letters face backward into the drawer. The man was nothing if not observant and liked to make traps out of the most mundane things. He’d found a pen out-of-place once, and it had set him off like nothing Christian had ever seen. For three days, the man had brooded—or at least, that’s what Christian thought he was doing—right up until he walked up to two men having dinner in the mercenaries’ mess and shot them both.
“If anyone else desires to know what’s in my desk,” he’d announced to the silent room, “feel free to ask.”
After that, Christian had taken great pains if his moments of subterfuge took him into Fariq’s office or quarters to make sure either he didn’t touch anything or put it back exactly as it had been.
There was no way to do that with Fariq’s laptop. The screen was broken. He scoured the room, looking for any other sign he or Aliya had been in here, but there was only the laptop, and there was just nothing he could do about that except hope they had rough seas before morning.
He left it on the floor where Aliya had dropped it. The whole way back to his quarters, he went over and over it in his mind, wondering who to direct the inevitable witch hunt toward.
Shit. He shook his head.
If he saw Aliya in the morning, he was going to strangle her.
Or put her back across his knee, blistering her backside before taking his belt off and welting her sexy ass.
No, what would be best would be to turn around and walk the other way. She was the single most dangerous thing he’d ever encountered. Even more so now that he knew, best intentions aside, he couldn’t keep his hands off her. The minute he’d touched her tonight, every lick of sense and ounce of self-preservation he’d ever possessed had fled the scene, and his cock had done all the thinking.
Now, he was hard again. He’d barely softened after he’d come, and his dick was now fully erect, throbbing, and knew exactly what it wanted, pounding in the heated, tight-balled way that had nothing to do with the agony of getting kneed.
Well, he knew better than to grab her like that again, that was for sure. Next time, he’d immobilize her first, then paddle her backside until she finally got it through her stupid, stubborn, beautiful, irresistible, little head, she was not a goddamn spy, and this wasn’t a game.
Regardless of what that NATO operative had told her, she needed to leave everything Fariq-related to those whose job it was to stop the man—like him.
If only he had a way to sneak a message to her, so she didn’t have to worry about someone finding that ridiculous note. No way he could get into the hall unnoticed or sneak past Fariq’s door and his guards to slip a note beneath her door. He was as sure of that as he was that his time under Fariq’s employ had a deadline locked-in, ticking down the seconds. No other agent had remained hidden in Fariq’s employ even half the time Christian had been here. No one had done half as much damage to Fariq’s infrastructure, yet the man was undefeatable. As fast as Christian hacked into his personal information or leaked information to his NATO handlers, Fariq changed it. He wasn’t doing any good here, and sometimes, he wondered if anything he’d done had been worth the blackness that had rubbed off Fariq onto his very soul.
He needed to get out.
Aliya needed to get out. Before her soul turned black, too.
Aliya was her NATO handler’s problem, not his, he tried to tell himself, but he already knew that wasn’t true. Aliya was—God help him—innocent. Actually innocent of everything associated with Fariq, not that anyone in NATO was inclined to either believe that or care. That much was obvious from the fact they would try to recruit her to turn on her brother.
Jesus, she was the wrong person for the job. What had they done, given her a three-month crash course on ‘how to spy?’ For fuck’s sake, she didn’t have the slightest clue how to go about it without exposing herself.
Now that she knew about him, it really was too dangerous for him to remain here—especially if he couldn’t keep his hands to himself. It only took one time to get caught doing what he’d done to her in her brother’s office—his face in her hair, breathing in the faintly floral shampoo scent so intoxicatingly tangled in her hair, her soft, small body pinned to the wall beneath his bigger one… better yet, pinned ben
eath him as he thrust in and out of her sweet pussy. God, he wanted that—days and days just fucking her with nothing more to worry about than what to order from room service.
She really was going to get them both killed.
He needed to stop this now. He needed to go back to his room, get some sleep, and get his head out of her panties and back into the game before he made a mistake that locked him permanently into Fariq’s unyielding sights.
He needed to forget about Aliya.
That’s what he had to do… for everyone’s sake.
Far, far easier said than done. He made it back to his room unseen—he hoped—but much like he started the night, he ended it, lying flat on his back in his bunk, staring at the ceiling, and thinking about the soft, small, innocent woman lying in her own bed, two floors above him. She might as well have been miles out of his reach, but he could still feel the heat that had so thoroughly beguiled him as he’d held her, grinding the bulge of his painfully contained cock into the valley of her ass cheeks before fucking her mouth and emptying himself into her belly.
The ass he would give anything to have bouncing on his hips right now.
He really needed to stop thinking about that. He was never going to get to sleep at this rate.
Except somehow, he did. One minute he was half-heartedly considering venturing another deck down to knock on the door of one of the women Fariq employed to keep the mercenaries happy in their off-hours, and in the next, a shuddering explosion hit the yacht, knocking Christian clean out of his bunk. He hit the wall, then the floor, rolling sideways with the sudden listing of the super yacht, and finally came to a startled stillness, staring up at the gray light of pre-dawn. The sun hadn’t risen above the ocean horizon, but that didn’t mean anything when the warning alarms began to blare.
Another explosion rocked them, and the yacht listed hard back the other way—the dangerous roll of instability that came as they began to take on water at a terrifying rate.
Was this a nightmare, or were they really sinking?
The room tilted as the nose of the yacht rose, and the stern sank.
No, not a nightmare, Christian suddenly realized as everything in his room that wasn’t nailed down began to slide straight at him. He scrambled out of the way and didn’t even bother with his shoes. Bolting from his room, he ducked and dodged between those among Fariq’s crew of mercenaries who were as quick to respond to the danger. Others were slower. Slow could easily mean going down with the yacht. The cooks, the servants, the ladies whose job it was to look pretty by day and keep the mercenaries happy by night—everyone hired not because they had experience holding a gun but to keep life aboard this ship as normal and comfortable as possible for those who did—all of them were going to end up trapped in these halls as the ship slipped under the waves. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about that.
Already, he could hear the ratta-tat-tat of rapid-fire weapons being fired and returned on the upper decks as he took the stairs in his bare feet two at a time. One guy made it to the door ahead of him, and Christian almost knocked him down when the other ducked behind the door to get a look at the fire-fight outside. Everybody died at some time or another, and God knows, most of those on board this ship deserved to die—all but one.
He knocked the mercenary out of his way, ducking to keep his head down as he charged out into the exchanging gunfire. He didn’t have his guns, and there wasn’t time to get them. The stern was only above water by only six feet, and they were losing inches fast. Smoke billowed from the lower floor windows, and he could hear shouting and the desperate high-pitched shouts and screams of people trapped in the graveyard the below-decks were about to become.
Aliya.
Blocking out the sound, Christian ran for the stairs leading up to the next level. Storage was in the front, and Fariq’s lavish rooms and Aliya’s elegant prison were to the back, protected by reinforced steel in the walls and bullet-proof glass on the windows. He was almost there when Fariq came bursting out of the ship, his gun in one hand, Aliya, wide-eyed, sleep tussled, dressed in only the thinnest slip of a pink silk nightgown and terrified in his other, both barefoot.
“Go, go!” Fariq told him, and Christian took point, running just ahead of them, a living shield for the bullet Fariq preferred not to take himself, toward the stairs leading to the highest level, where the helio-pad and helicopter were… until the ship gave out a shuddering groan of steel frames bent and metal ground on metal. The nose of the yacht lifted sharply, spilling all three of them rolling to the floor.
Aliya screamed, but they were already sliding backward, coming up hard against the railing as the nose of the ship rose until it was almost standing out of the water. Christian grabbed for the railing. So did Fariq, dropping his gun to grab it, never letting go of his sister.
There was banging, men who weren’t quick enough to secure their grip on the ship, bouncing off the rails on other floors before falling into the water now directly below them, where the aft of the ship stood planted in the ocean as if it were a statue on a watery base.
Except this was no statue. This was a vessel, and it was sinking as water poured in through holes in the hull, rapidly filling its insides.
“Life raft,” Fariq shouted, but Christian was already staring at it, not twenty feet below them on the fucking wall where he was far more likely to fall and break his back or neck, hitting the rails before the water than he was to snag one.
But if he didn’t, Aliya was going to die, pulled down into the undertow of the ship as it sank into the ocean depths or shot by the mercs in one of the two boats he could see circling their yacht, firing aimlessly at anything they saw moving.
Or worse, they were pulled into one of their boats to be ransomed to someone. Fariq had a lot of enemies, any one Christian could easily see not thinking twice before making Aliya pay for Fariq’s crimes.
“I’m on it.”
Climbing along the deck railing was like playing on playground monkey bars, only with a hell of a lot farther to fall if he lost his step or grip. The rail was broken into sections, the once vertical rails in the railing now horizontal, becoming the next step he reached for with his feet as he lowered himself, section by section. Shaking, the boat wasn’t holding still beneath him as it was sinking. He could feel the ominous vibrations of the water as it poured in, filling the interior beyond its ability to stay afloat.
Every thirty seconds or so, one of the two motorboats circled around him, and those inside took shots at the ship. They weren’t here to raid or looking for money or plunder to steal, but everything about them screamed pirate.
How had that meeting with Murammar gone? Caught up in what had happened at the bazaar, he’d forgotten to ask, but he was pretty sure if this wasn’t related to it, Fariq had yet another enemy who’d taken exception to something he’d done.
“Hold on to me, my darling,” Fariq told his sister, soothing her silent panic with his tone as he clasped her arm and carefully lowered her down into Christian’s reaching grasp. “Watch your step.”
The boat came around again, and a line of bullets sprayed the water, shooting everyone who’d fallen or jumped. Cheering, waving their guns in the air, the pirates made only another few passes, sometimes shooting up the side of the yacht, mostly just shooting in the air before turning and speeding back the way they’d come.
“Watch your step,” Fariq said again, making sure Christian had Aliya before daring to release his grip. Glaring after the retreating boats, he quickly scaled the railing to stand on the rail with them, reclaiming his grip on his sister before sending Christian down the next step. The water was racing up fast to meet them. At an awkward level with the inflatable emergency raft on the deck wall, Christian glanced at it, then at Aliya.
“Wh-what are you doing?” she stammered. Her wide eyes looked strange, and her teeth were chattering. Shock must be setting in. Although cool this time of the morning, it wasn’t cold. Not until they hit the water, anyway. “Y-Yo
u can’t reach that, Christian. Y-You can’t reach.”
“Ladies do not address men outside of the family by their given name,” Fariq censured mildly, securing both his grip on the rail and on his sister. His dark eyes were fixed on Christian, coldly ordering him to jump.
Christian wasn’t fooled or offended. If he missed the bright orange raft attached to the wall, there were two more chances, each attached to the wall about six feet apart, then nothing else for him to grab onto between here and the white frothing water violently chewing its way up the sinking ship. If he did miss, he didn’t doubt for a second, Fariq would leave his sister clinging to the railing while he made the same daring attempt to save their lives. If they both missed, they would end up in the water, either sucked down in the wake of the sinking ship or to watch helplessly as Aliya went down with the vessel, eyes wide and teeth chattering all the way.
Fuck.
Eyeing the raft, he leapt. He grabbed onto the raft, but his weight snapped the emergency bag right off its hook on the wall. Barely getting his feet under him, he belatedly leapt, but only after gravity caught him. His leap went sideways, enough to get him over the rail, but he must have caught the deployment line on something. The bright yellow raft exploded, rapidly inflating as he fell. Regardless of what the cartoons might show, it didn’t slow his descent. Nor did he hit anything bone-breaking on the way down, though that might have been due more to sheer dumb luck. Still, hitting the water from this high up was more like landing shoulder first in a puddle of wet concrete. It gave way beneath him, but it hurt like hell.
Water enveloped him, but the buoyancy of the raft didn’t let him sink. His grip on a side-handle meant he dove only as far as the length of his arm before he was yanked back to the surface, and the ocean spat them both out again.
The cord cut into the knuckle grooves of his fingers, but he didn’t dare relax his grip. The waters around Morocco were white shark central. Not only was there a lot of blood in the water from all the men their attackers had shot, but he didn’t for a second trust Fariq to help him get into the raft if he was stupid enough to let himself get separated from it.