Page 65 of Poison Evidence

“No,” he said. He’d give her the space she needed. “I’m going to sleep on the hilltop. Too hot in the cave.” Too hot sleeping next to Ivy, wanting her but knowing it wasn’t fair to her. The deeper they got involved, the more she’d want him to fight. The harder it would be for her to face the final outcome.

So he’d leave her alone. Done and out.

She stopped on the staircase and met his gaze, then gave a sharp nod.

He grabbed a sleeping pad and thin blanket from the supplies and climbed the hill. He set up his bed near one of the skylights. He could hear her, guard her, from here.

He stripped down to boxer briefs and lay down. Without light pollution, clouds, or moon, the stars were crystal clear. A vast universe unfolding above him.

It put him in his place, seeing the cosmos. He was but one man, insignificant amid the vastness of time and space. He’d done something good and important once, that night with Luke on the Interceptor. He’d helped save thousands of lives. But even that wouldn’t register against the hundred billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy, let alone the multiverse and all the infinite possible universes.

In an infinite number of those universes, he’d never been a spy. In at least one of those, his parents didn’t die in that car wreck, and after the Iron Curtain came down, they moved to the US, where he met Ivy in college. In that universe, he probably was a science major of some sort. Marine biology, or astrophysics if that Dimitri could handle the math. They married after graduation and had three kids. Patrick Hill was a goat who was killed in a farming accident, and the man who raped Sophia was never born.

In that universe, he wasn’t a killer.

A satellite drifted across the sky, hard to spot among the multitude of stars. It could be a US spy satellite, searching for him, here, in this universe, where he was a spy and an assassin for Team Russia with no future.

They’d better get a lead on the AUUV tomorrow. He didn’t know how much longer they’d be able to work together before he did something stupid, like start to hope for a future with Ivy in this world.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“I’ve done all I can without visiting the island to calibrate,” Ivy said as she stood from the workstation. She checked RON’s resting place, the narrow area where floor met ceiling in the dome-shaped space. Ninety percent charged, he’d be ready to fly by darkfall.

“We’ll go out an hour before dusk. Tourists kayaking through the channels will be heading back to port then, and we’ll be less likely to be spotted.”

She nodded. That gave them a few hours to kill. “May as well eat something. What can of food should we open tonight?”

“We could fish. There’s a decent beach on the lower inward curve of the island.”

“You aren’t worried we’ll be seen?”

“I’ll set out the inflatable kayak. You’ll put on your bikini. It’ll look like we’re day trippers.”

She crossed her arms and fixed him with a stern look. “If I’m going to wear the bikini, you’re going shirtless.”

He laughed. “Of course.”

It would be good to spend time out of the cave, to pretend, even if only for an hour, that she was just a simple tourist enjoying paradise.

It wasn’t until she dropped her towel on the beach and reached for the sunblock that she realized her miscalculation. They didn’t have any spray, so Dimitri would have to apply it. It was too early in the day and she burned too easily to forgo the lotion.

She held up the bottle. “When you’re done messing with the fishing pole, could you…?”

He dropped the rod and reached for the bottle. She lifted her hair and presented her back, bracing herself for his touch.

Which didn’t come.

“Dimitri?”

Featherlight touches came, high on her back, but there was no scent of lotion. No rubbing. The fleeting caress of fingers. Like the first night in the shower. He must be tracing the bruise she’d forgotten about.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

“Not since the day…after.” The day he’d abducted her, and the pain in her back had become the last thing on her mind.

It must’ve been too dark in the cave for him to notice it when he’d made love to her, or he’d simply been distracted.

As he had that first night, he kissed the mark on her back, the physical reminder of all the ways in which a man who’d promised to love, honor, and cherish her had betrayed her in the worst possible way.

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