Heather Graham (17 page)

“Tougher and tougher … moving in.” Did Joshua Jones know that the police were closing in on him? Was he aware that the embezzler had been traced to the Costa del Sol? Did he know that he was not in the least safe anymore until he had touched down on Spanish soil?

She inhaled and exhaled, trembling slightly, anxious to talk with Flynn. She knew that he suspected Ian. He hadn’t said so, she just knew it. But she believed that his suspicions had something to do with a rivalry that had been going on long before she had arrived upon the scene. She had suspected Ian herself. He was so smooth, so charming.

But now it seemed that it had to be Joshua. If one of them could just follow him. Or perhaps that wouldn’t even be necessary. If she could find out when Joshua was leaving, where he would be staying, where he could be reached …

She could just call Brice and perhaps the police could close in on him when he was in the middle of another scam and then there would be proof and he could be prosecuted.

“Brittany?”

She turned. Juan had come back with her wine. She took it and thanked him and realized that he was watching her peculiarly.

“You’re pale. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, thank you.” She smiled. She realized that the Joneses had taken their seats beside their daughter. She tried to stare at the field below. At the racing horses, at the excitement. At Flynn and Arabesque, graceful and fluid together.

She didn’t see any of it. She knew only that the man who had killed her aunt was sitting three chairs away from her.

You have to be sure!
she warned herself.

At last the game ended with the British group victorious. Brittany clapped along with the others, growing anxious as the crowd rose, as her view of Flynn was blocked. She had to reach him, she had to tell him what she knew about Joshua.

“Let’s go down, shall we?” Juan said to her. And she nodded eagerly.

But when they reached the stables in the inner arena, only Rosa and Ian were there. Brittany congratulated Ian while Juan and Rosa met with a good-natured and dramatic kiss. Then Elly pushed by her to throw her arms around Ian, shrieking out how wonderful he was, how extraordinary, how handsome. Ian flushed, uneasily disentangling himself while watching Joshua Jones’s eyes over his daughter’s head.

“Rosa, where is Flynn?” Brittany was able to ask at last.

“Oh, Brittany. I’m sorry. He had to rush away. Business.” She glanced at Juan, as if they shared some secret, making Brittany very uneasy. “Juan must rush away too. I thought perhaps you would enjoy drinks and dinner with me. I know the loveliest sidewalk café. Will that be all right? I need only shower.”

Brittany frowned. Flynn had disappeared quickly. Very quickly.

She bit her lip in frustration, then shrugged, moving slightly because Joshua Jones was very close behind her.

“I … suppose. But you needn’t baby-sit me, Rosa. I can entertain myself, you know.”

“Oh, no, no!” Rosa protested. “I would love dinner. Please, you must come with me. I’ll shower now.”

She kissed Juan quickly again, smiled, and disappeared. Brittany absently moved over to the stall where Arabesque stood and patted his smooth muzzle. She smiled slightly, for the animal’s physical grace and beauty reminded her of its rider, and she was overwhelmed again with a cascade of emotions. It was terrible. Her feelings for him were so fierce, so desperate, and they could only lead to disaster.

It all had to come to an end—the quest for justice, the fevered affair. They were all tangled up together and the tension created made her feel that she was on a roller coaster and that if she was not careful, the car would slide from the tracks and she would hurl hopelessly into space and come crashing down …

“He’s a beautiful animal, isn’t he?”

She spun about. Joshua, smiling broadly, was standing next to her.

“Yes, he is.”

Brittany tried very hard to speak lightly. She forced herself to smile. “He’s actually Ian’s horse, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Flynn keeps trying to buy him. Ian hasn’t given in yet, though.”

“I hear you’re going to London?”

“Yes.” Joshua sighed. He shook his head. “I haven’t a magical touch like Ian or Flynn.” He gave off a broad, rocking laugh with bitter humor. “Or maybe they haven’t a teen-aged daughter. I don’t know.”

He shook his head hopelessly. Brittany was almost drawn to sympathy. Was she wrong?

“I understand that you trade, Joshua. And deal in investments?”

“Deal in investments.” He sniffed. Again he sounded bitter. “Well, yes, and my investments lately haven’t been the best. That’s my hope now, I’ve heard of a new company forming, with the stock going dirt cheap. Flynn is even up on this one. He says it can’t fail.”

“Flynn?”

Icy little rivulets scampered down her spine. Flynn? In it with Joshua. No. She couldn’t believe it. She had to be wrong, wrong from the start. Joshua was innocent, and so was Flynn …

Things were going to get better, Elly had told her. They always did when her father went to London.

She couldn’t see suddenly. She couldn’t see clearly. She felt that she had to get away. That she had to reason things out.

“Excuse me, Joshua, will you?”

She pushed past him blindly. She didn’t want to be with Rosa, she didn’t want to be with anyone. She wanted to rush out and find a cab and have him take her away from all these people, away to some private place where she could think it all out …

She crashed into Ian and paled, not wanting to be delayed from leaving.

“Brittany!” He caught her shoulders. “I’m so sorry. It’s just that I’m in such a rush …”

“I’m sorry; I crashed into you.”

“No, no. I’ve just got to hurry …”

He stepped past her. No delay there. She saw that Rosa had reappeared in a charming white dress that enhanced all her dark beauty.

Brittany stepped behind a boisterous group of Spaniards. Then she turned and ran for the entrance to the arena, rushing outside as fast as she could.

There were taxis everywhere, but there were people too. She kept dodging around them, running farther and farther along the street. The farther away from the entrance that she came, the more likely she might find a free cab.

She found one. The driver was a young man with a beautiful white-toothed grin—who didn’t understand a word of English. Brittany thought for a moment and gave him Flynn’s name and the word
casa
, and that he did seem to understand.

The water was what she needed, she had decided. She could take one of the small craft out and be totally alone at sea and there she could desperately try to unravel everything that she knew.

The cab driver let her off in front of the house. Brittany didn’t go in. She walked around the great
casa
to the dock in the back.

She felt stiff, awkward, disjointed—as if even walking were an alien chore. Something burned inside of her, something aching and horrible that brought crimson humiliation and fury to seethe inside her.

She had fallen in love with him. Easily. For everything that she had known and read, she had been with him barely a week before the desire had killed all sense and logic. Like a totally naïve fool she had fallen in love with him and given him everything. And it seemed now that he was in on it. She had known that it had to have been one of three people, but she had fallen in love with him anyway, with his husky voice, his sleek broad shoulders, his smooth and practiced seduction that had taken her …

No!
she cried out to herself. She didn’t really know anything. She knew that Joshua was going to London. That things always got better when he went to London. That Flynn was in on this one with him. No, she couldn’t be wrong. She had poured out her heart to him. She had given him all the details of her lost and barren little life and she had been as pathetic as putty in his hands.

He could be laughing at her. Laughing at her so hard. Listening to her story and pretending and enjoying the whole thing because even if she did know the truth, there wouldn’t be a thing that she could do, not unless she could get him back onto English soil and not even then could she do anything unless she had proof …

It wasn’t Flynn. Her heart cried out that it wasn’t Flynn. And then the most logical sense of it all came to her. No, it wasn’t Flynn. He had been going in league with Joshua just now in order to trap him—in order to get him to England so that he could be arrested!

Brittany stopped short on the dock before approaching the little fleet that included the yacht and the catamarans and …

A boat she had never seen before.

It was painted indigo. In the coming darkness, it almost blended in entirely with the water. There was no name upon it; it was almost like a ghost ship. It was a power boat, about forty-five feet long, with a set of ropes and grappling hooks set along the side.

She was too stunned at first to even begin to imagine what the boat was doing there. Numbed, she approached it. Still not thinking, she doffed her heels and hopped aboard in her stocking feet.

She looked at all the ropes and the grappling hooks and admitted in her mind long before she could do so in her heart that the appearance of the nameless craft could only mean one thing.

It had to be a pirate ship.
The
pirate ship playing havoc on the coast. Indigo like the water, like the horizon. A ship that could sneak upon other ships and prey upon them. It was the right size; it would have the speed. It was laden with all the equipment needed to hold fast to another vessel while that victim boat was ravaged and stripped.

“Oh, God,” Brittany breathed aloud.

And she looked around herself quickly, very quickly. There was no one about the dock. Tears stung her eyes with the deep horror of being able to find no denial.

It was here! Berthed at Flynn’s docks, among his ships. There was no way that he couldn’t know it was here. Of course he knew; he used it; it was his indigo privateer.

Flynn was an embezzler, a crook—and a pirate. He had known who she was from the very beginning because he had known damned well that El Drago hadn’t attacked her—because he was El Drago himself. She had slept with the man who was responsible for her aunt’s death. The man who was ravaging the seas.

She pressed her hands against her cheeks and remembered with horror all the intimacies that they had shared. How she had blushed but then laughed and learned and come to him with whispers and cries on her lips, abandoning all dignity.

She drew her hands away and swallowed tensely, then reminded herself coldly that she was on El Drago’s ship and that there might well be some proof against him on it. The British government might be very interested in discovering proof against the pirate ravaging the property of Britons. If she could continue to play the innocent, she could lure him back to England. If the Spanish police might be interested in doing something; El Drago was a Spanish menace.

Brittany hurried to the short flight of steps that led to the cabin below. The wheel of the motor craft was forward; the hatch and steps were just before it. She noted uneasily that the sky was very dark. She hurried below deck anyway.

The galley was first, a small area with little attention given to the needs of cooking. There was a counter, a small stove top and a small refrigerator. Right behind it was a chart desk and it was there that Brittany hurried. But though she rummaged through the drawers, there was nothing there. Nothing but charts that warned of the islands and shoals and currents that surrounded the coast.

Islands …

Like the little island where he had taken her. Where they had run naked on the beach. Made love on the sand. Where she had given him the wasteland of her past, and believed him when he had told her that he loved her …

Nothing.

She sat down at the table and looked down the hallway and realized that there were cabins beyond. She rushed down the hallway and found that the first wooden door led to a little cabin. Very small in size, but still that of the captain, she was certain. It housed a bunk and another desk.

She started quickly through the desk and found paper that contained dates … and lists. She read it over and over—and found with increasing horror the exact date that her aunt had died. With a cross reference to the exact amount of money embezzled from her.

Brittany let the paper fall to the floor, and stared after it.

She fell back on the bunk and knew that the other dates and amounts must relate to the other elderly people who had been swindled.

Someone had been taken just two days ago.

Two days ago, when Flynn had been out all day, well into the night, on business.

She inhaled and it was a sob and she slipped her arms around her knees and rocked back and forth. And then suddenly, she realized that the night had come alive with sound.

The motor was running.

Like lightning she came to her feet and rushed to the door. She came silently down the hallway and stood in the galley, staring silently up the stairs.

At the helm were two men and a woman. The woman, Brittany quickly realized, was Rosa.

“I’m sorry! I don’t know what happened! She was very agreeable—but then she was gone! Perhaps she is up at the house. Perhaps—”

“Rosa! I searched the house!”

It was Flynn. Brittany squinted against the darkness that was only alleviated by dimmed cruising lights.

The other man was at the wheel; Flynn was facing Rosa. He was dressed entirely in black. Black jeans, black turtleneck, black scarf around his throat. He looked like a lethal panther, muscled and dark. One with the night. Ready to strike. A pirate …

He turned suddenly, saying something to Rosa about checking below. Rosa said she would go back to the house and wait for Brittany.

They were all in on it. Oh, God! All of them. Flynn and Rosa and Juan and Joshua. Ian was quite probably the only innocent man of her acquaintance.

Flynn started toward the steps.

Brittany panicked. He wasn’t expecting her—not here. If she could only find something …

There was a frying pan hung on a hook behind the stove top. She raced silently for it, grappled with the hook, and grabbed it, her heart racing like thunder. She freed it from the hook and retreated down the hall, shaking. Her only chance against him was the element of surprise.