Page 40 of Poison Evidence

She’d dreamed of men chasing her and had sought his protection in her nightmare. She placed a hand on his chest and breathed in his scent. Ocean, sun, and testosterone all wrapped in a ripped body. His thick-muscled arm closed around her. She felt his strength across her back and found it a comfort, not a threat.

“Sleep, Ivy,” he murmured, more asleep than awake himself. “I’ve got you.”

If anyone wanted to hurt her, they’d have to get past Dimitri. She pressed closer to his side and dropped into a deeper, thankfully dreamless, sleep.

The night was dark and deep when Dimitri surfaced from sleep to find Ivy still curled at his side. Her T-shirt had ridden up, and his hand rested on her bare back. His arm was numb, but still, he didn’t move, not wanting to wake her and have her retreat to the far side of the bed again.

Had she managed to contact Dominick yesterday? He hoped she had. He’d gambled on the assumption the attorney general would seize the opportunity to exploit Dimitri’s inside information. For his part, Dimitri was more than willing to use Curt Dominick to gain Ivy’s reluctant cooperation.

It would play out in a vicious circle. Once they found it, Ivy would attempt to take the AUUV from Dimitri, but there was no way he could let her walk with it. No one was double-crossing anyone, because they weren’t really aligned, but it would feel that way to her once she realized the depth of his manipulation.

They were two people doing what they had to do. Plain and simple as that. In the end, Dimitri would win; Ivy would lose. And she’d spend the rest of her life hating him.

For him, the rest of his life would be short, and he’d probably spend it with a hard-on, aching for her.

He’d wonder why God hated him, but he’d stopped believing in any benign deity when the fifty-year-old sadist who controlled his life raped his little sister—again—as a means to control Dimitri. A dozen years later and he could still hear Sophia’s screams.

Ivy’s hair tickled his nose. She’d showered in the interval between finishing her work and their dinner on deck, and the scent of shampoo pulled him back to the present, away from the fetid apartment where he’d sold his soul a second time, too late to protect his sister.

He breathed Ivy in. Salt air, tea tree shampoo, and sweat mixed to create essence of her. Curled against him as she was, he could almost pretend that in a different world, she might belong by his side. Her aroma and warm body were a silent lullaby. Tactile poetry. He drifted toward sleep, numb arm and all.

Sometime later, a soft noise outside jolted him awake. The sound wasn’t right, not the usual water lapping against the hull. A footstep, or a small craft bumped against the stern. Someone was here. He could feel it. A glance at the clock indicated it was less than an hour before dawn.

He inched his arm from beneath Ivy’s shoulder and whispered in her ear, “We’ve got company.”

She snuggled tighter for a moment, then woke fully and stiffened at his side.

“There are men on the aft deck,” he whispered again. He nodded toward the window above the head of the bed. “They’re climbing onto the deck above us.”

Her eyes rounded with alarm. Her reaction appeared genuine, so it wasn’t SEALs or her cousin’s mercenary army, unless she was a better actress than she’d let on so far. He was sure that if she’d managed to call in for reinforcements, triumph would have flashed in her eyes.

“Do you suffer from claustrophobia?” he whispered.

She pushed against his chest. “You can’t stuff me in the cupboard—”

“Shh. Okay.” He pressed his mouth to hers, then slid from the bed and pulled on skintight black pants and top, and tucked his gun into the built-in holster at the small of his back. He tossed matching clothes to her. “Hurry and put these on. It was supposed to cloud over in the night. It’ll be dark on deck.”

The ankle-to-wrist-to-neck clothing would be warm in the tropical climate, which was why he didn’t sleep in it, but the camouflage on the dark deck was a fair trade.

She changed quickly, and they left the stateroom. Lights on the security panel in the salon indicated the men had moved to the upper deck. Thank goodness the helm could be enclosed and locked. Dimitri turned on the monitor for the night-vision camera mounted outside the helm. Three men, all dressed in snug-fitting assault wear.

Dimitri gave thanks once again that paranoid mafiosi believed in sparing no expense on their security systems.Libertyhad plenty of secrets that gave him and Ivy the advantage.

“Will they get in?” Ivy asked.

“Not without setting off the alarm. They’re trying to avoid that, to keep the element of surprise. My guess is they want to take the helm and control the boat, then come after us.”

“So we just wait for them?”

“No. First we listen, find out who we’re dealing with, then I attack.”

Liberty’s cameras all had microphones. He handed her a wireless headset, then slipped a second pair over his own ears.

“We don’t need the boat. We need the whore,” a man with a heavy Syrian accent said.

“That’s Spiderman,” Ivy whispered. “I have a good memory for voices and accents.”

A glance at the monitor showed a dark blotch over one man’s eye. He was half-blind thanks to her stilettos.

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