Killer Affair

Cindy Dees

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

Copyright

Cindy Dees started flying aeroplanes while sitting in her dad’s lap at the age of three, and got a pilot’s licence before she got a driver’s licence. At the age of fifteen, she dropped out of school and left the horse farm in Michigan where she grew up to attend the University of Michigan. After earning a degree in Russian and East European Studies, she joined the US Air Force and became the youngest female pilot in the history of the Air Force. She flew supersonic jets, VIP airlift and the C-5 Galaxy, the world’s largest aeroplane. She also worked part-time gathering intelligence. During her military career, she travelled to forty countries on five continents, was detained by the KGB and East German secret police, got shot at, flew in the first Gulf War, met her husband and amassed a lifetime’s worth of war stories.

Her hobbies include professional Middle Eastern dancing, Japanese gardening and medieval re-enacting. She started writing on a one-dollar bet with her mother and was thrilled to win that bet with the publication of her first book in 2001. She loves to hear from readers and can be contacted at www.cindydees.com

This one wouldn’t have been possible without

Nina, Sheree and Tashya. Thanks, ladies, for the

inspiration, laughter and sand between

my toes when I needed them.

Chapter 1

Another gust flung the tiny airplane sideways like a storm-tossed cork. Tom Laruso’s formidable muscles strained as he fought the controls, leveling out the Cessna floatplane’s wings and easing it down toward a lower and hopefully smoother altitude.

“Are we going to die?” the woman beside him quavered.

“Nah. This is just a little turbulence. No big deal. Think of it as a giant roller coaster. Take my advice, little lady, just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

She subsided, white-knuckled, beside him. Didn’t look as if she was buying the roller-coaster line. She’d been insane to insist on this trip, and he’d told her as much before they left the big island. But the client, who’d called herself only Madeline C., had been adamant. She had to get to Vanua Taru tonight. Hey, if she had a death wish, who was he to stand in her way? It wasn’t like staying alive held any great appeal to him. He was game to dance with death if she was.

But now that they were out here flirting with the leading edge of a Category Three hurricane—cyclones, they were called out here in the South Pacific—he wasn’t so sure this was the way he wanted to go. He’d much rather lose himself in the bottom of a whiskey bottle and just drift away, numb and painless.

The plane lurched, its left wing jerking up suddenly and half flinging him into Ms. Madeline’s elegant lap. His right hand gripped her thigh, which went as rock hard beneath his palm as any self-respecting stair-climber queen’s. He murmured an apology and pushed himself upright. His biceps strained as he wrestled with the yoke and finally bullied the plane back into more or less level flight.

She would have to look just like Arielle. Tom glanced over briefly at his passenger in the waning dusk. Hell, she even smelled like Arielle, all light and floral like some damned butterfly. It was uncanny, actually. The fine bones, silver-blond halo of hair, the dreamy, mint-green eyes. How many women anywhere looked like that? And to have two so similar come into his life one right after another… Yup. Weird. If Arielle was haunting him, he’d kill her…oh, wait. She was already dead. Searing guilt twisted in his gut. God, he needed a drink.

Something flashed at the edge of his vision, a streak of light, falling from above and slashing through the arc of the propeller. The plane bucked. The engine hitched and coughed. Not good. Instinctively, he pushed the yoke forward, putting the plane into a descent. When in doubt, get out of the sky and land. Or in this case, float. Miles and miles of ocean stretched away in every direction. All the landing zone a guy could ever ask for. Even if it was heaving into massive mountains and valleys of salt water as the cyclone approached.

He started to glance down at the engine gauges to see if any caution lights had illuminated on the master warning panel, when another flash of white light streaked past his peripheral vision. Crap. Another lightning strike.

He had no more time to think on the possible implications of the strike as flames erupted from the engine cowling directly in front of him. His passenger screamed. Immediately he shoved the nose over as hard as it would go. They had to get down!

The steep dive blew out some of the fire, but it was coming out the other side of the engine, if the woman’s continued screams were any indication. No time to reassure her, though. Not as if he had any comforting words for her, anyway. They were in a world of hurt. He fought the jerking plane grimly. The wild aluminum bronco was winning. This wasn’t turbulence. Something was terribly wrong. The propeller wobbled, horribly unbalanced, all but shaking the little plane apart.

The ocean loomed near. He literally stood on the rudder pedals and hauled back on the yoke for all he was worth. The Cessna groaned its protest, metal creaking and wing spars shuddering under the strain of the g-forces he was violently overloading them with.

C’mon, baby, hang together just a few more seconds. Every muscle in his body strained, pushed to the limit to maintain control of the aircraft. Were he not as strong a man as he was, they’d already be spiraling out of control into the sea.

Something tore off the nose of the plane and flew back, slamming into the windshield directly in front of him. The Plexiglas cracked into a crazed spiderweb that completely blocked his vision of the angry mountains of water just below.

He shouted at his passenger, “We’ve got to bail out! Open your door and jump! It’s not far to the water!”

He glanced over only to see her face contorted into a soundless scream of terror. She’d frozen on him. He let go of his own door handle to reach across her and push her door open. He shoved her toward the yawning void.

And then the plane exploded.

The burst of light and heat was blinding, like being consumed by the sun. He registered a vague sensation of the Cessna evaporating around him, flying outward until nothing remained but fire and the deafening roar of it. He floated weightless for a millisecond, then the explosion slammed into him in all its fury.

The world went black.

Madeline hit the water feetfirst, stunned by how much the impact hurt and how cold the ocean was. It shocked her horrified mind into a moment of utter, frozen panic, but then the icy chill penetrated and jolted her back to full awareness.

The great pressure of water all around her was terrifying. She opened her eyes, squinting against the violent sting of salt. But there was faint light above. She swam for it, her lungs burning. Her arms and legs were unbearably heavy, and she fought for all she was worth toward that flickering beacon of life.

It must have been only a few seconds, but each arm stroke, each desperate kick, each sluggish lurch toward the surface seemed to take an eternity. Her lungs were ready to explode and her eyes screamed their pain, but she fought on grimly.

And then she burst through to the surface, her head and shoulders erupting from the sea’s deathly embrace, breaking free to air and a deep, blessed gasp. She was alive.

She treaded water, turning in a slow circle to observe the debris littering the surface around her. Huge ocean swells bobbed her up and down in twilight’s last light. Now what the heck was she supposed to do? Her arms and legs were tiring fast. She paddled toward the nearest floating object, a large panel of metal lined with some sort of foam. Upon closer inspection, she saw it was the backseat of the airplane, a double-wide bench affair.

Whaddiya know. Those airplane seat cushions did float after all. She grabbed it and dragged her tired body across it. And as she glanced beyond the cushion, she spied something that tore a scream out of her hoarse throat.

A man’s face. Floating just below the surface of the water, pale and ghostlike, slipping away slowly into the abyss.

The pilot. Tom Something. Alicia had recommended him.

She lunged across the cushion, kicking wildly, and grabbed for him. She got a handful of his shirt. She pulled with all her might and managed to bring his face up to the surface. Lord, he was heavy. She rolled off the long cushion and wrestled awkwardly to shove it underneath the man’s back. She swallowed what seemed like gallons of salt water as she flailed frantically, trying to keep herself afloat, support the pilot’s dead weight and get the damned cushion under the guy. Finally, she got him draped awkwardly on his back across the cushion and situated herself in the water beside him with one arm thrown across his chest to keep him from rolling off.

Ahead, she saw a faint line of twinkling lights on the horizon. Was it land? Or was it no more than a hallucination born of her desperate desire to be safe?

She did a slow three-hundred-sixty degree turn timed with when the swells lifted her up high and saw nothing else in the descending vacuum of night. Just a long, uninterrupted line where the gray-black of the sea met the blue-black of the sky to the north and south. Far to the east, she made out flickers of distant lightning. Tropical Cyclone Kato was roaring toward them.

She’d been a fool to try to race the storm to Vanua Taru, but she’d really wanted to just get the job done and go home to safe, boring Chicago before this awful trip got any worse. One of her Secret Traveler colleagues, Zoë Conrad, had gotten involved with a resort owner accused of murder and they’d nearly died before the police figured out another man had done it. Her second colleague and good friend, Alicia Greco, had been kidnapped and nearly killed by the same murderer, a serial killer who was still at large. The way their luck had been going, she was next in line for some disaster to befall her. Apparently, trying to run away from that bad luck had led her straight into it. A plane crash of all things!

For lack of anything else to do or anywhere else to go, she aimed the pilot’s limp body at the lights and started kicking. She didn’t even know if he was alive or dead. But if their positions had been reversed, she’d have wanted him to take her body ashore and not leave it for the sharks and whatever else lurked beneath the sea.

How long she swam, up and down the enormous waves, on and on in a morass of fatigue and pain that clenched her entire body in its vise, she had no idea. She threw up a few times. Probably a combination of swallowed seawater and shock. She stopped to rest a couple of times, too, but each time the flashes of lightning behind her seemed closer. She had no idea how far the electrical charge of a lightning strike could travel underwater, but she bloody well didn’t want to find out the hard way. She dug deep and forced herself to get moving again.

True night fell quickly, the last vestiges of daylight wiped out by the encroaching storm bands of Kato. It was unbelievably dark out here. She could barely see her own hand in front of her face. Literally. Whenever she and Tom swooped down into the bottom of a trough and the line of shore lights was blocked, it seemed as if she’d been swallowed up by the depths of hell. But then the ocean would fling them dizzyingly, frighteningly high and she’d get a quick fix on her goal before being sucked down into the belly of the beast once more.

At some point, the pilot groaned and moved a bit. He was alive, then. Her exhaustion was such that she barely had time to register exultation that she wasn’t entirely alone out here in the vast ocean. She didn’t even particularly like water. She’d grown up on a farm in central Illinois, about as far from oceans as it got.

But in a flash, the Pacific Ocean had become her entire world, her entire existence. Just her and the cold, seductive embrace of the sea, slowly, inexorably sucking the life out of her. Well, the unconscious pilot was here, too. But at the moment, he was still little more than deadweight.

With dogged determination, fighting for both of their lives, she plowed on, pitting her tiny will against the massive expanse of ocean all around her.

That line of lights might possibly be drawing a little closer, but it could also totally be her imagination. And then, all of a sudden, she became aware of a black silhouette on the horizon. A jagged hump above the line of lights. Land.

Relief coursed through her, making her limbs warm and weak. Not far, now. She became aware that she was sobbing, breathing in ineffective gasps, but she didn’t care. Almost there. Almost safe. With renewed strength, she swam on, using her free arm to paddle while she kicked the fiery spaghetti that was her legs.

Finally, she heard waves breaking nearby and smelled the green, living scent of land. She was close to shore now. Something banged into her foot, startling her. It was rough. Oh, God. Was that a shark? To be this close to land and be attacked now….

She kicked furiously. Again, something banged into her feet, hard.

Then enlightenment broke across her mind. That was sand dragging against her toes! She tried to stand up, but the bottom past the sandbar was still a bit too deep. She paddled on a few more yards and was able to stand up between waves this time, her chin barely out of the water. She pushed off the bottom and swam a little more. In a few seconds, she was able to walk between sets of waves. When the breakers weren’t rolling in, the water was no more than chest-deep. But when the angry surf caught them up and flung them forward, she guessed the water was ten-feet deep beneath them.

The good news was the waves pushed the pilot’s makeshift raft shoreward in front of her. The even better news was a sandy beach stretched before them. They wouldn’t be dashed to death against rocks tonight. A violent undertow of waves rushing back out to sea sucked at her legs and lower torso. It was all she could do to hang on to Tom’s raft and ride the surface waves to shore.

But then she could stand up, no more than thigh-deep. Even when a big wave came in, she was able to jump into it and land mostly back on her feet. She dragged Tom the last few feet to shore on his floating pallet. Without the sea’s buoyancy to hold him, he abruptly was unbelievably heavy. But she had to get him far enough out of the water so he wouldn’t drown.

Using the piece of metal backing still attached to the cushion as a sort of sled, she dug in her heels and leaned back, pulling on his inert form with all her strength. By inches, she managed to wrestle him up the beach to what seemed a safe distance from the water.

They’d made it.

Relief making her even shakier than she already was, she knelt down on her hands and knees to check him for injuries. Not that there was a whole lot she could do about it even if she had found something wrong with him, but it seemed like the thing to do. She ran her hands over his bare legs…they were muscular and hard. Under the tattered remnants of his short-sleeved shirt, the guy had an impressive set of shoulders. She didn’t find any obvious broken bones or cuts.

The guy sure was in great shape—and shaped great. Were she not so exhausted, hardly able to keep her eyes open, she’d have enjoyed drinking her fill of the sight of him. As it was, a thrill of…something…tingled through her palms and throughout her body at touching him like this. It was terribly personal. So…intimate.

Despite getting felt up by her, he remained unconscious. A head injury, maybe? She pressed her ear to his chest to listen to his heart, and its beat was a slow, steady thump beneath her ear. Stymied as to what to do for him, her own exhaustion finally overcame her. Shivering, she stretched out on the warm sand beside him, pressing the length of her body against his solid, reassuring heat. Mmm. Nice. She laid her head on his shoulder. Whether she passed out or merely fell asleep she couldn’t say as the darkness closed in around her, sucking her down, down, into nothingness.

Tom roused slowly. His first sensation was of a splitting headache. And then pain. Grinding slowly through his entire body. He must’ve gone on a hell of a bender to feel this bad. He was wet. And lying in sand. He struggled to sort through the fog enveloping him. Something heavy was sprawled across him.

And that something was soft. Curvy. Intensely feminine. Hello. He made a habit of never picking up women when he went on a binge. He hated not remembering anything about them the morning after, not their name, nor where he’d met them or even what they’d done together. But apparently he’d broken his rule.

He lifted his impossibly heavy arm and looped it around the woman’s tiny waist. Her toes tickled his shins, and her head rested on his shoulder. She felt small against him. Fragile. That was odd. He never went for the petite, delicate ones. They usually made him feel big and awkward and clumsy.

He cracked one eye open. The sky overhead was black. Turbulent. Looked like bad weather brewing. Groggy recollection swam through his head, half-understood. Something about a storm coming.

His brain might not be working, but his ears were. A sound not of the night registered. The ocean was rumbling like a ticked-off Rottweiler to his left. But this noise came from his right. From the shoreside. A rhythmic whoosh of sand, too slow for someone walking at normal speed. But if that person were creeping cautiously toward a threat of some kind, the measured noises were about right.

Instinct roared through him. Danger!

The man crouched in the shadows, stunned. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing! After all the publicity, all the news coverage, this pair in front of him had the temerity to roll around like a couple of savages on a beach?

For the past few weeks—ever since the last cleansing of souls he’d undertaken—the beaches he prowled had been satisfyingly deserted. Pure. This part of the world was unbelievably sinful. Tucked far away from most of the world, the South Pacific attracted people who wanted to hide their dirty affairs.

The woman in front of him moved, draping herself even more blatantly across her lover. Rage exploded behind his eyes, sending ice picks of unbearable agony through his skull. He grabbed his head with both hands to keep it from splitting in two.

Must. Stop. The. Pain.

He fumbled at his waist blindly, feeling for God’s instrument of punishment. His palm caressed the form-fitted rubber grip, his loyal and trusty friend. His vision cleared, and the sinners—all but naked—writhed before him.

Usually, he waited until they were lost in the throes of their sin, but these two were taking too long, and the pain in his head…ah, God, the pain…he couldn’t take it anymore….

He moved farther out of the shadow of the trees, one cautious step at a time.

Tom struggled to rip away the gauze obscuring his brain, to bring himself to full battle alert. But his head wouldn’t cooperate. And his body responded even more sluggishly. He flailed against the awful feeling of paralysis gripping him.

Threat! He didn’t question the intuition. It had saved his neck and his clients’ more times than he could count. If only his body and mind would obey him…he silently cursed himself.

With effort, he managed to slit his right eye open enough to make out a pale ankle protruding from a khaki pant leg. It was hairy. Male, then. Caucasian. Easing forward, rolling from heel to toe with each careful step, like a hunter stalking his prey.

The screaming voice of caution in Tom’s head was deafening. Trouble! Warning! Wake up! But still, his mind and body steadfastly refused to answer the call. He felt drugged, unable to swim free of the haze of it.

The feet stopped maybe six feet away.

Below the crashing noise of the sea, a male voice muttered something just beyond the edge of Tom’s hearing, syllables that didn’t quite form meaning in his sluggish mind. But the tone of voice was unmistakably hostile, dripping in vitriol.

Tom forcibly readied himself for action, ordering his muscles into a state of relaxed readiness. He was probably deluding himself that they would react with any semblance of speed or accuracy to his commands. But his threat-response training had been drilled into him so deeply over the years that even now, barely conscious, mind and body went through the motions.

The woman, perhaps because of his arm tightening about her waist, moved against him, a sinuous, sexy stretch across his sprawled body that would have riveted him had it not been for those feet paused in the sand so close.

“Whore,” the voice gritted out. “Sinners.”

Blank incomprehension was all Tom’s mind could muster to the unexpected words. But as he regained his senses bit by bit, he became aware of evil radiating from the stranger. Malice rolled off the man in waves as every bit as powerful as the ocean’s fury beside them.

The guy leaped.

In sheer reflex, Tom exploded into motion, rolling away from the pouncing attack, carrying the girl with him, covering her protectively with his body, presenting his back to the attacker. Something slashed past him, burying itself in the sand where they’d been lying, not a second before. Agonizing pain sliced across his back. His skin melted like butter before a hot knife. A knife. The bastard had just cut him!

Tom surged up onto his hands and knees, driven by the pain, some primitive part of his brain taking over completely. On pure instinct, he leaped to his feet and whirled, dropping low into a fighting crouch, his hands outstretched before him. Killing rage roared through his brain. This wasn’t fight or flight. This was kill or be killed. Fury erupted from his throat in a feral snarl.

The attacker was already running, a dark shadow fleeing up the beach and melting into the jungle beyond. Tom lunged forward, intent on catching his prey and crushing him, when a mewl of distress from behind drew him up short.

The woman.

Reluctantly, he turned away from the trees and dropped to his knees beside her. Had the bastard hurt her with that deflected knife slash?

Quick concern sent his hands skimming over her baby-soft skin. No dark welling of blood marred her body anywhere. He squatted on his heels and pushed her wet, stringy hair away from her face.

His mind stumbled. Arielle? No, not Arielle. Not even asleep had she ever looked this sweet. This angelic. Who was this woman he’d apparently picked up and made love to on the beach, if her mostly unclothed state was any indication?

He plucked at the scrap of cloth clinging to her slender shoulder. The edge of it was black. Almost charred-looking. No accounting for fashion among the jet-set party girls who came to the South Pacific to play, far from the prying eyes of the paparazzi.

A remembered flash of something black blinked past his mind’s eye. Sprinkled with round shapes. He frowned. Reached for the vision again. Dials of some kind.

An airplane instrument panel. What did that have to do with anything?

The woman at his feet groaned. He ran his fingers across her forehead and down her cheek to the graceful, elegant line of her neck. She reminded him of an expensive Persian kitten. Even soaking wet and passed out cold, she was stylish. How in the hell had he landed a classy act like her? She was way out of his league these days. He had to give himself credit; he’d sure picked himself a looker. Man, the two of them must have painted the town red. He wished he remembered it.

He shrugged, and the movement sent glass-sharp daggers streaking across his back. The pain accomplished more to clear the cobwebs from his mind than anything else, so far. Tom glanced up at the jungle and then back down at the unconscious woman at his feet. They had to get out of here before that sicko came back to finish them off.

Who was that bastard, anyway? And why in the hell had he tried to stab this woman? Or maybe the guy’d been after him. Lord knew, he had plenty of enemies of his own who could account for the attack.

He reached down and scooped her up in his arms, startled at how light she was. What were the odds he could stretch their one-night stand into two? And this time he would stay stone-cold sober. He’d give his right arm to remember making love to a woman like this.

Chapter 2

A blinding flash of light, followed in a moment by a giant crack of thunder, finally roused Maddie to full consciousness. Groggily, she reminded herself that she was no longer Maddie Crummby, farm kid from central Illinois. She was Madeline C., world traveler and hotel connoisseur. At the moment, it didn’t seem to really matter, though. She felt…floppy. And the universe was moving rather oddly around her.

She blinked her gritty eyes open and was startled to see a solid wall of darkly tanned skin. And muscle. Acres of it. What the—She jerked upright, or at least tried to. Strong arms gripped her tightly, preventing her from actually moving more than her pinkie fingers.

“Easy, kitten. I’ve got you.”

She looked up at the deep, raspy voice. The hunky pilot who’d been flying her to Vanua Taru, who yelled at her to bail out of the airplane just before it blew up, whose life she’d saved in that interminable swim, on whose chest she’d collapsed when they finally reached shore. His name came back to her. Tom.

What a chest. Muscles rippled beautifully over it, not so thick as to be ungainly, but manly in no uncertain terms. She snuggled closer until it dawned on her what she was doing. She stiffened abruptly.

“You can put me down. I’m fine,” she said quickly.

He let her feet slide slowly to the ground, which had the startling effect of pressing her body against his from her neck to her toes for an unforgettable instant. Heat built between them like chain lightning, flashing back and forth, faster and faster until it painted a dizzying chaos of light and heat in her eyes.

She clung to his strength, steadying herself as his hot skin scalded her palms. His dark eyes glowed down at her, the only steady reference point in her spinning world.

“Maybe I should carry you,” he murmured. His arm tightened around her preparatory to picking her up once more, pulling her close against that magnificently naked chest of his again. She couldn’t help it. She melted into him like warm butter soaking into fresh bread. An urge to lick his chest, to see if it was as rich and delicious as she imagined, overcame her.

She drew her tongue delicately across his skin. Salty. Warm. Smooth. Mmm. She liked that. He jolted away from her mouth, swearing.

She’d just licked a total stranger. What was wrong with her?

But then he was back, one arm around her shoulders, the other hand splayed against her lower back, pulling her against him, sending her whirling thoughts tumbling once more. Up and down, left and right, they tangled together, the same way her limbs did with his. Where he stopped and she began, she had no idea.

His mouth closed on hers, sucking the life out of her and breathing his back into her all in one devouring, devastating kiss. Ho. Lee. Cow. Never, ever, had she been kissed like that. She hadn’t even known a kiss like that was possible. Stars exploded behind her eyes and unadulterated lust tore through her. She gasped at the sudden throbbing in places she’d never throbbed before. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy sex. It was just that she was…focused…when it came to sex. It was something she studied, even when she participated in it. She wanted to be good at it so when she landed the perfect husband she’d be able to please him. But this…this tore anything but wanting more clean out of her mind. She stretched up on her tiptoes hungrily.

“Do that again,” she breathed joyfully.

He lifted her clear off her feet this time, his mouth hot and wet, moving across hers as if he was devouring a feast. “What have you done to me?” he muttered, an almost desperate note in his voice.

“I was about to ask you the same.” She plunged her hands into his thick, dark hair and tugged. “Kiss me again. Please.”

His hand slid down to her buttocks, lifting her tighter against his unmistakable reaction to her. She groaned, crawling even closer to him if it was possible, all but purring her pleasure. Her hands crept around his ribs to his back, kneading his ridged muscles…and encountered something wet.

He hissed into her mouth and lurched upright, arching his back away from her touch.

“What did I do?” she asked quickly in distress.

“My back. I got cut,” he gritted out between clenched teeth.

“How?”

To her dismay, he released her and stepped back, frowning down at her. She felt terribly cold and alone without his arms around her.

He answered reluctantly, “Some nutcase tried to stab you a few minutes ago and sliced me instead.”

“Stab—me?” And then the rest of it hit her. “You’ve been stabbed?” she cried. Fear ran cold in her blood, chilling her all the way through. “Let me see.”

He turned to face her when she would’ve darted around behind him to see how badly he was hurt.

“It’s just a scratch,” he bit out, his gaze skimming down her body and back up again. A flash of something hot and forbidden glinted in his gaze. “Damn, you’re beautiful,” he murmured. “As much as I’d like to tear off the rest of your clothes and make love to you right here, we’ve got to get off this beach.”

She glanced down at the remnants of her clothes and gasped. Scraps of sodden cloth clung to her chest enough to provide a minimum of modesty, but not much more than that. Her silk Chanel blouse, no less. It had cost her a week’s pay and the neckline draped exactly perfectly. Drat. She’d loved that blouse.

The man in front of her shifted impatiently, peering suspiciously over her shoulder as if he expected the attacker to come back any second. Abruptly, the pieces fell together in her head. They’d been lying on a beach…it was nighttime… and he said that out of nowhere a stranger had tried to attack them…

She exclaimed, “I bet that was the Sex on the Beach Killer!”

“The who?” Tom responded blankly.

This guy hadn’t heard about the psychopath roaming the South Pacific killing pairs of lovers on beaches? He’d have to be a complete hermit to have missed that news flash. The killer had last struck on Fiji’s big island a couple of weeks back. He was due to strike again, according to Agent Griffin Malone, the FBI profiler who’d saved Alicia’s life.

“The Sex on the Beach Killer,” Maddie repeated. Cold chills that had nothing to do with being wet and nearly naked snaked down her spine. A psychopath had tried to kill them? A fine trembling erupted throughout her entire body.

“How—” Her voice broke. She tried again. “How did you scare him off?”

He shrugged.

“Did you get a good look at him? Police have been chasing him all over the place. No one knows what he looks like. Well, besides the fact that he’s Caucasian and around six feet tall. I know that because my friend found a pair of his victims, and she got involved in the investigation and met the FBI profiler and she told me a little about the case, you know, what to look out for and…” And she was babbling. She did that when she got really nervous.

He stared down at her as if she was jabbering a foreign language at him.

She huffed, “You have heard of him, right? The guy who’s been running around the South Pacific stabbing lovers on beaches while they…do the deed.”

His eyebrows lifted at that, but he made no comment. Not real talkative, her handsome pilot. But, hey, the guy kissed like a god. She swayed toward him once more.

“C’mon,” Tom growled. He took off striding down the beach, his long legs outdistancing her quickly.

“Wait up!” she called after him. She ran through the heavy sand, feeling as clumsy as a drunken chicken. Ugh. Style note to self: never run on beaches.

He stalked onward without slowing down to wait for her. Not exactly the most social guy on the planet when he didn’t have his arms around her and his mouth on hers. Exasperated, she tagged along, wishing he’d slow down, but too unaccountably annoyed at her uncontrollable attraction to him to ask it of him.

Eventually, they came to a stretch of beach bordered by tall, rocky cliffs. Before long, he veered away from the water and headed for a pale shape zigzagging up the face of the black, wet rocks. Her gaze followed the jagged line upward. She spied a dark, rectangular hulk at the top of it, perched not far from the edge of the cliff.

They drew a little closer and she saw that the pale line was a set of stairs. It led to a bure, a traditional Fijian dwelling made of stucco, logs and thatch. The house nestled within a grove of banyans and palm trees.

“Who lives there?” she asked cautiously. The last thing they need to do was walk into the Sex on the Beach Killer’s hideout.

Tom tossed over his shoulder, “The weather’s about to get nasty. We need to seek shelter now.”

“But—”

“Ladies first,” he interrupted gently.

With a sigh, she set her feet to the long staircase. Something inside her was disappointed that they’d found civilization. For a minute there, she could’ve really enjoyed being stranded in a deserted paradise with a hunky pilot who made her knees weak when he kissed her.

Not that the fantasy ought to do a blessed thing for her, of course. Madeline C. didn’t go for sand, drinking out of coconuts and building palm-frond shelters. She was a city girl all the way. She liked her plug-in creature comforts and was never caught without a makeup kit or the perfect shoes. Of course, she had neither at the moment. Her hair was a sodden mess, and her clothes were destroyed. She’d have to extract a promise out of the pilot never to reveal to anyone that he’d seen Madeline C. without her chic armor polished and firmly in place. And no cameras! If he took a picture of her looking like this, the Sex on the Beach Killer wouldn’t be the worst of his worries!

The Plan. She had to stick with the Plan. Build a new life for herself firmly anchored in the bright lights and big city. Find herself the richest—and nicest, of course—guy she could find and marry him with all due haste. No way was she spending the rest of her life working her fingers to the bone through drought and freezing cold and searing heat to scrape a living out of the ground. She was absolutely not repeating her mother’s mistake. No, sir. She was Madeline C.

She took a deep breath and peered upward, trying to catch a glimpse of the dwelling above her. Even if Tom did kiss better than ought to be legal, there was no room in her life for heavy panting with some beach bum bush pilot. Focus. It was all about focus. It was how she’d dragged herself out of the ocean, and it was how she would drag herself off the farm and into a new life.

She tromped up the stairs, her already exhausted legs burning fiercely. Her personal trainer back at the gym would be appalled that a simple set of stairs was doing her in like this. But hey! She’d spent a couple hours fighting the Pacific Ocean in all its fury. That had to count for something.

Man. What a day. This trip had been jinxed from the moment she and her fellow Secret Traveler reviewers left Chicago. She just wanted to get home, go to her favorite spa, get a mani-pedi, a full body wrap and a facial and forget she’d ever been to this miserable corner of the world with its cyclones and serial killers and tempting strangers.

She glanced at the ocean pounding behind her. The waves were getting bigger by the minute, swallowing a few more inches of the beach with every crash of surf upon the shore. She didn’t know a whole lot about the South Seas, but common sense told her that spending the night down on the beach might not be the smartest thing in the world to try with a storm rolling in. Reluctantly, she continued up the long line of steps.

Finally, several stories above the ocean, she set foot on level ground once more. Tom took her elbow and escorted her firmly to the house’s front door. He fiddled with the doorknob for a few seconds, and then the door opened under his hand. Good grief, the guy’d just broken into the place! She stared, appalled.

“Are you coming or not?” he tossed at her.

“I don’t think we should just walk in there like this.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Well, the owner might be scared if we barge in. What if he’s got a gun?”

Tom snorted. “The owner has several guns.”

Her eyebrows shot up in alarm. “How do you know that?”

He bit out, “I’m the owner.”

She stared. “What?”

He glanced over at her and didn’t bother to repeat himself. A girl could get tired of listening to herself talk, trying to have a conversation with this taciturn guy. She followed him inside. If she thought it was dark outside, it was inky black in here. She banged into something about knee-high and yelped.

“Stand still,” he ordered.

She was more than happy to oblige. A light flared on the far side of the room as he lit a match. He held it to the wick of an old-fashioned oil lamp and put a glass globe down over the flame. A dim, but warm, glow suffused the open space. The hard thing that had attacked her knees turned out to be a beautifully carved wooden end table.

The bure’s interior was bigger than she’d expected. A vaulted ceiling high overhead added to the impression, giant logs forming an inverted V of cantilevered support beams. If she wasn’t mistaken, that was a thatched roof on top of the log frame. Lovely. Grass for shelter from an approaching hurricane.

Bamboo and mahogany furniture blended seamlessly with the white gauze curtains and crisp, ice-blue linen upholstery. A kitchen occupied one corner of the space, separated by a gorgeously carved mahogany breakfast bar with a pair of elegantly curved stools before it. It was a shockingly stylish room. And he lived here? Clearly, he’d bought the place furnished.

She glanced over and saw him standing in front of a mirror, peering over his shoulder at his reflection. Checking out his deltoids? She knew guys were vain, but sheesh!

And then she saw the dark slash across his back, about two inches below his shoulder blades. The Sex on the Beach Killer. He’d said the guy had scratched him, but the cut extended almost all the way across his back!

“Good Lord!” she exclaimed. “You call that gash a scratch? I’d hate to see your idea of a serious wound. Let me see that.” She rushed over to examine the cut, which still oozed blood. “You need to see a doctor. That thing needs stitches.”

“No doctor,” he replied sharply.

“Why not?”

“Only medic on Vanua Taru is also the sheriff.”

She didn’t know which question to ask first. Why he wanted to avoid the law, or if they really were on Vanua Taru, which had been her destination this evening in the first place. Caution won out and she asked the second question, for fear of the answer to the first. “We’re really on Vanua Taru?”

He nodded, his lips pressed together in a tight line.

“Are you in pain?”

He shrugged, a tense move of a single shoulder.

She knew that look. Her brothers and father used to get it when they’d been hurt but didn’t want to act like sissies in front of one another. Tom was having a bout of macho maleness.

She rolled her eyes. “Well, at least let me clean that cut out. It has sand in it.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“You can barely see it, let alone reach it. Where’s your first-aid kit?”

He scowled at her for a moment, then moved through a doorway into what looked from a glimpse like a bathroom. He came back in a moment with a big backpack crammed with a shockingly well-stocked first-aid kit. A person could practically perform surgery out of it. Growing up on a farm far from any immediate help, she and her siblings had all learned basic first aid early. It was surprising how much veterinary medicine applied to human beings in a pinch, too. She rummaged through the supplies until she found what she needed.

“Let’s go into the bathroom. When I flush out that wound, it’s going to make a mess.”

He sighed, but did as she suggested. In the end, they both stepped into the big, Roman-tiled shower, clothes and all. He stood under the water until the sand and blood were gone, then she soaped up his back gently but thoroughly and finally he rinsed off again.

He turned to her, his hair slicked back from his strong, tanned features. He looked like a freaking cover model, even if he was white around the mouth at the moment. An errant urge to kiss away his pain washed over her. Focus, girlfriend. The Plan.

“Thanks,” he murmured.

Butterflies leaped in her stomach and she took a step backward, her back coming up against the cool, tiled wall. He braced his left hand beside her head and smiled down at her a slow, lazy, sexy smile that promised hours and hours of mind-blowing lovemaking.

“Have you got any scratches I can clean out for you?” he drawled.

“I…I don’t know.”

“We’d better check. Cuts infect fast in this climate.”

He plucked at the scrap of cloth clinging to her shoulder and she glanced down. Then stared down in shock. In the dim light of the oil lamp flickering on the counter outside the shower, the remnants of her silk shirt and her lace bra clung to her breasts transparently, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. She watched, mesmerized as his brown fingers trailed over the pale fabric, around the outside curve of her breast, then lightly along the sensitive underside of the mound. Her nipples puckered hard, standing up proudly, begging for his touch. She closed her eyes in mortification—and longing. Something warm and firm touched her temple.

His mouth. He was kissing her again. Her toes started to curl. Ohboyohboyohboy. The… What was it that she was supposed to remember? He straightened and she tipped her mouth up to his. In the midst of the warm spray of water, he captured her lips with his, sucking her lower lip into his mouth and laving it with his tongue.

Her hands crept up to his shoulders. Urged him closer. His arm swept around her waist, pulling her away from the wall and against his big, hard body. The shower pounded down, raining heat and steam all around them.

He sucked in a hard breath as the spray hit his back and she lurched. His injury. And here she was, crawling all over a wounded man. She sagged against him in frustration, pressing her forehead against his chest for a moment before pushing herself away from him.

“Let’s get you out of here and get that cut dressed and covered,” she sighed.

He matched her sigh with one of his own. “But I didn’t finish scrubbing your back yet.”

“Next time.”

“Promise there’ll be a next time?”

Whoa, baby. There’d be a next time if she had anything to say about it! Belatedly, she recalled herself. Madeline C. The Plan. This man was trouble with a capital T.

They stepped out of the shower and dried themselves quickly, and Maddie—Madeline—then used paper towels to blot his wound dry. She couldn’t bring herself to ruin one of the fluffy, snow-white Turkish towels from his linen closet. She had to give the guy credit. She would never have guessed he even had a linen closet, let alone one neatly stocked with high-end bath and bed linens.

She carried the oil lamp back into the kitchen and set it down on the counter beside the first-aid kit. “So do you not have electricity at all, or is this a temporary power outage?”

“I haven’t tried the lights. It’s usually pretty reliable, though.”

“Then why in the world am I trying to patch you up in the dark?”

“I prefer to live simply.”

Simply? The very word made her shudder. Give her every electrical convenience modern technology could summon up, thank you very much. She liked her zoned air-conditioning, and her blow dryer, and towel warmer and wireless-Internet-capable cell phone/camera/television.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Where’s a light switch? I need to see what I’m doing.”

He sighed and pressed a rocker switch on the wall beside him. Bright halogen lights imbedded in the beams overhead suddenly shone down, making her squint for several moments. Tom’s wound came into focus.

“This definitely needs stitches. It’s pretty deep.”

“Just slap some butterflies on it and call it good,” he growled.

She sighed. “All right, but you’re going to have to be careful. I don’t know if butterflies will hold or not.”

He threw her a look so hot it made her bare toes bend into hard little knots of anticipation. “I can be careful,” he murmured. “Very careful.”

Her hands inexplicably shaky, she tore open a half-dozen sterile wrappings and laid the butterflies out on the counter as he turned his back to her.

“Are you always this cussedly independent?” she asked as she gently drew the edges of the wound together and commenced taping them in place.

“Nope. I’m usually worse.”

“Great.” She finished with the butterflies and laid a strip of rayon over the wound, covered it with gauze pads and secured it all with long strips of adhesive tape. She studied the bandage, pondering its chances of staying in place. Not good. She rummaged in the first-aid kit and found an elastic bandage. Perfect.

She held one end of the long, beige wrap against his left side and passed the three-inch-wide strip under his right arm. Her palms skimmed across his ribs, and her own stomach couldn’t help but contract at the way the slabbed muscles of his abdomen tensed into impressive ridges under her touch. To reach all the way around him to pass the bandage from her right hand to her left, she had to lay her cheek against his chest and all but hug him. His big body radiated enough heat to scald her.

Her hands wanted to stray lower, to test his desire for her. Sheesh! The poor guy was hurt, for goodness’ sake, and here she was, pawing him like some sex-starved desperado. Except, at the moment, she felt exactly like a sex-starved desperado.

She jerked back, startled by the thought. She did not chase after guys. She didn’t even particularly crave sex! Yet here she was, her palms itching to run all over his naked body. Must be some weird hormonal reaction to almost dying.

Forcing herself to pay attention to the job at hand, she moved around behind him, passing the bandage carefully across the cut and leaning forward to reach around him again, this time from the back. And again, a visceral need, electric and disturbing, ripped through her as she hugged his athletic form. Wouldn’t you know it—the end of the bandage ran out smack dab on top of his stomach. She ducked under his raised arm to pin the end of the bandage in place.

And made the mistake of looking up at him. His eyes blazed, black as night, consumed by a fire that incinerated her to her very fingertips. Yowza. She jerked her hands away from him, and actually glanced down at her palms to see if the skin burned from touching him. Her every nerve felt raw and exposed.

She stumbled backward, staring at his back hungrily as he carried the first-aid kit into the bathroom. She looked away hastily as he came out. He offered her the bathroom for a solo shower and she didn’t hesitate to take him up on the offer. Did cold showers work on women, too?

She chickened out on testing the theory and opted instead for the relaxation of a nice, hot shower. However, when she finally turned the water off and stepped out into the bathroom, she was appalled to see a neatly folded man’s T-shirt lying on the counter beside the sink.

He’d come into the bathroom while she was bathing? Her gaze whipped around to the shower door, and she was relieved—and disappointed—to see it was milky glass with wavy patterns through it.

“Hungry?” he asked as she slid onto one of the bar stools.

“I don’t know. I suppose so.” She’d been so wrapped up in staying alive and then her inexplicable reaction to him that she hadn’t stopped to think about anything as mundane as food. But now that he mentioned it, she realized she was ravenous. And thirsty.

He set a beautiful double old-fashioned glass on the counter in front of her. The elegantly carved crystal caught the light from overhead and cast prisms all over the mahogany kitchen cabinets. She recognized the crystal pattern. Her brows lifted slightly. Waterford crystal? Who was this solitary pilot for hire? Silently, he poured water from a pitcher he took from the brushed stainless-steel refrigerator for her. She drank down the whole glass in a few gulps. He filled it again, seeming to know that she’d be desperately thirsty.

He went to the refrigerator and emerged with a green and yellow fruit about the size of his fist. He pulled a knife out of a drawer and peeled and sliced it efficiently. He stabbed a piece of the fruit and held it out to her on the end of the knife.

“Mango,” he announced.

She nodded and took the juicy fruit. It was sweet, a cross between a peach and an orange. Odd, but tasty.

“Are you sure this place belongs to you?” she asked dubiously.

He frowned at her. “Yeah. Why?”

“It doesn’t seem to…fit you.”

He glanced around. “What’s wrong with it? You don’t like my decorating taste?”

He’d decorated this place? “Nothing’s wrong with it.” That was the point. It was too perfect. Too elegant, too…classy. This was the sort of place she’d pick for herself. But he…he was rough around the edges. Primal. She’d picture him in a beach shack with empty beer bottles and old pizza boxes overflowing the trash can. She opened her mouth. Closed it again.

He glanced at her wryly as if he knew what she was thinking. He turned away and fiddled with putting his water glass in the sink. “You can sleep on the couch.”

“Where are you sleeping?” she blurted.

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Why? Are you offering to share my bed?”

Just how tempted she was at the idea shocked her into silence. It was all well and good to be turned on by this guy but to sleep with him? That was a big step.

To get naked with him…to experience all that masculine power unleashed…to completely let go of her inhibitions with him…

Man, it was tempting. And totally out of character for her. Obviously, she was suffering some sort of strange aftereffect of the accident and her brush with death. She’d regret it tomorrow if she took him up on his offer tonight. Reluctantly, she shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, but I’d better not.”

He frowned, almost as if confused. Opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it again. He turned off the overhead lights and left the room without speaking. At least he left her the oil lamp. In its soft glow, she turned to face the couch, which was underneath a wide picture window that framed a magnificent view of the ocean below. Even in the darkness, she could make out the rolling and crashing white of the breakers rushing in toward the beach. Drawn to the view, she moved over to the window. A light rain whipped around the bure, driven by a sharp breeze. Cyclone Kato was beginning to breathe upon them.

She started when something heavy thunked down behind her. Jumpy, she whipped her head around. Tom had just dropped a blanket, pillow and sheets on the coffee table.

He shrugged apologetically. “I’d sleep on the couch, but it’s too short for me, and with my back, I’ll need to lie on my stomach.”

She smiled understandingly at him, grateful that he was being a gentleman about the sleeping arrangement. Truth be told, she felt like a heel for climbing all over him, but then turning him down when he took her up on her unspoken offer. “I don’t mind sleeping out here. The couch will fit me just fine.”

He nodded once, turned and disappeared on silent, bare feet into the bedroom. Suddenly, she was so exhausted she could hardly see straight. Mechanically, she made up the couch into a bed. She left the oil lamp burning. For some reason, she wasn’t quite ready to face the dark and her suddenly overactive imagination. She stretched out on the couch.

As exhausted as she was, her brain wouldn’t unwind enough for her to immediately contemplate going to sleep. She lay there for a long time. Eventually, she forced herself to extinguish the lamp and still, sleep eluded her.

Without warning, it all hit her. The terrifying plane crash, the desperate swim for her life, the shock of finding out about the attack on the beach. She started to shiver, and then to shake. And then the tears came. At first they were no more than hot streaks down her cheeks, but before long they’d blossomed into racking sobs. She turned her face into the pillow to muffle the sound, but for the life of her she couldn’t stop the sobs from coming.

She started violently when a male voice rumbled from above her, “Oh, for crying out loud.”

Reluctantly, she looked up at his dark form within the larger darkness of the room. Even as exasperated as he sounded, his presence was insanely comforting.

He rumbled, “I suppose you want me to hug you and tell you everything will be all right, don’t you?”

Miffed at the humor lacing his voice, she snapped, “Far be it from me to force you into such an onerous task.”

He made a noise that could have been laughter bitten off sharply. But she wasn’t sure. He sighed and sat down on the couch beside her. “Fine. Come here.”

She sniffed, “No, that’s all right.”

He ignored her and gathered her up in his arms, drawing her easily into his lap, surrounding her in his big, comfortable embrace. As hard as she tried to stop it, the floodgates opened up again. She sobbed into his shoulder for several minutes before it dawned on her that his shoulder was naked. And warm. And sexy.

And in an instant, the nature of their hug changed completely. She felt it in the way his arms suddenly tightened around her, in the electric energy zinging between them, in the sudden pounding of his heart underneath her ear. Despite herself, her own pulse accelerated, her breathing growing shallow and fast. She was not going to randomly crawl all over him, darn it! Her lust for him was just a reaction to her near death experience. Nothing more. She wasn’t actually attracted to him in the least.

Liar.

When his finger tipped her chin up to him, she didn’t fight it. When she gazed up into the dark planes and shadows of his face, she didn’t say anything to forestall what was coming. And when his head started down toward hers, her lips parted in breathless anticipation. Nope, not attracted to him in the least.

Chapter 3

Tom inhaled the scent of her, female and faintly sweet beneath an overlay of deodorant soap, unable to stop himself from wanting to inhale the rest of her. Sex poured off her in powerful waves that belied her feeble attempt at maintaining her distance from him.

When her sobs first woke him, he’d been asleep in his bed, dreaming disturbing images of fire and water and spider-webs. He’d have to talk to Joe, the local bartender, about the quality of the whiskey the guy was stocking these days. He really wished he could remember how he’d ended up on that beach with that woman draped all over him.

Maybe Joe could shed some light on that, too. When he didn’t just stay home and drink himself into a stupor alone, the other place he went to drown his sorrows was Joe’s place, the Paradise Lost Bar & Grill. That would undoubtedly be where he’d picked up Maddie.

Her name rocketed through him. As clear as a bell, the moment came back to him, a bolt out of the blue. He’d stared, shocked, into her light green eyes as she introduced herself. None of the context of the moment came with the memory, though. Not the setting nor any conversation before or after. Just that one disembodied moment. “Hi. I’m Madeline-and-I-prefer-not-to-be-called-Maddie.”

She’d looked just like Arielle. Just like Arielle. The same willfulness gleamed in her striking green eyes, the same determination was apparent in her firm handshake. They were two women who knew what they wanted and both went after it full bore.

Maybe Arielle was a little more exotic in her features. But Maddie—how could he not call her that after she’d made such a point of it? He loved the fire in her eyes when she got hot and bothered—definitely looked less dissipated. Arielle had been an exceptionally hard-partying girl, and at age twenty-four, her lifestyle was beginning to take its toll on her looks. Although he’d place Maddie in her mid-to-late-twenties, she seemed worlds more…grown up. Heh. Not hard to achieve in comparison to Arielle, who had been a pampered and extremely spoiled pop star since her early teens.

Maddie snuggled closer as if she was cold, and he pulled the blanket across both of them. Nope, definitely not Madeline material. Maddie just seemed to fit her better.

Why had an obviously classy lady like her condescended to spend time with a guy like him, anyway? What did she want from him? Unfortunately, suspicion of everyone and everything came with his line of work. Well, his former line of work. He used to be a bodyguard. A damned good one. Fought over by a who’s who of international celebrities. Until Arielle. Or rather, until she died. On his watch.

Damn, he needed a drink.

He’d noticed several new bottles of whiskey in the cabinet in his room earlier. He shook off the memory of Arielle’s dead, green eyes staring up vacantly, her back arched in death spasms, her blond hair matted black with dried blood. He swore silently to himself. How rude would it be to dump Maddie off his lap and make a beeline for the liquor cabinet?

Probably unforgivably rude. And he really liked the warm, soft, cuddly feel of her in his lap like this. She fit just right against his chest, her forehead tucked against his neck, her arms wrapped lightly around his ribs. Holding her, like he was now, was…comforting. Made him feel not so alone. He wasn’t lonely, of course, he told himself hastily. But a hug felt nice now and again. Even to a bastard like him.

Maddie’s sobs renewed themselves, although quieter this time. She swiped at her eyes, dashing away tears, then tucked her fist under her chin, childlike. He recognized the body language. She was crying out some sort of trauma that had transformed itself into a desperate need for comfort. Any kind of comfort. A cuddle, or sex or whatever. And he happened to be the nearest able-bodied male able to fill her need. And Lord knew, he was willing.

No guy in his right mind would care about being used for comfort sex by a woman this hot. Not that he’d been in his right mind for the past six months or so. But still. He was totally okay with being this woman’s shoulder sponge and sex toy.

Alarm jolted him. Jeez. What if he was the cause of her being this upset? He racked his brain. What boneheaded thing had he said or done to her within the massive black gap yawning tauntingly in his memory?

He worked through the logic quickly. She wouldn’t have come home with him if he’d hurt her or been rude to her, would she? Was she on the rebound from some other jerk, maybe?

He swore under his breath. He really had to cut back on the booze. He couldn’t recall a damned thing about the past day or so.

Thing was, Tom sighed, he knew better than to be some socialite’s casual beach fling like this. He’d watched Arielle blast through men like a demolition derby driver, leaving a messy trail of wrecked lives in her wake. The sour taste of it in his mouth washed away the lingering traces of Maddie’s impossibly sexy scent.

He probably ought to do something to draw her out of her crying jag. She’d been at it for a while now. He sighed. Ever the good guy, he was. It was probably why he never got the girl. He’d vowed to hang up his good guy white hat once and for all when he came here to the end of the world. But apparently, a few vestiges of it lingered, dammit.

Instead of kissing her like he’d originally intended, he halted, his mouth inches from hers. “Can you feel it?” he murmured.

“Feel what?”

“Blood flowing through your veins. Air moving in and out of your lungs. Heat on your skin.”

She blinked a couple of times as if she was having trouble registering the meaning of his words. Lost in a sexual haze, was she? An instant of male triumph surged in his gut. So, sue him. Yeah, he got a rush out of turning on a good-looking woman.

He half whispered, “We made it to shelter before the storm. We’re safe. Doesn’t it feel great just to be alive?”

Her eyes were big and wide as she gazed up at him in the dim lamplight. Sudden, intense awareness of their bodies rushed over her face as plain as day. He didn’t have to see her blush to feel its sudden heat radiating off her. She swayed closer to him, her fingers toying with his chest hair in unconscious flirtation.

He could so have her right now. And she’d so hate him for it in the morning. He sighed and drew back slightly. He wasn’t the kind of jerk who took advantage of a woman when her emotional defenses were down. He might want to be that kind of unfeeling ass, but it just wasn’t in him to take advantage of any female like that. Not to mention he had no intention of dragging anyone else into the train wreck of his life. Despite the occasional one-night stand, at the end of the day he wanted to be alone. End of discussion.

Except, a small voice whispered at the back of his head, Maddie feels damned good in your arms.

He ought to invite her into his bed, not for wild bunny sex, but just to hold her and make her feel safe so she could sleep. But panic flitted through him at the idea. No one was allowed into his bedroom. Ever. It was his last retreat, his most private, personal sanctuary.

Instead he offered, “Do you want me to sit with you until you fall asleep?”

One perfectly plucked eyebrow curved up at him. “Do I look like a five-year-old?”

He tilted his head and studied her. “Nah. I’d put you at nine or ten at least.”

Her mouth pursed in disapproval, but her anxious eyes told a different tale altogether. And he noticed she wasn’t making any aggressive move to remove herself from the circle of his arms.

He let her off the hook and announced in a tone that brooked no argument, “You’re lying back down here on the couch, and I’m moving over to that armchair and not budging until I hear you snoring.”

She laughed. “I don’t snore!”

“I bet you do.”

“Do not,” she retorted indignantly.

He grinned down at her. Better. “I’ll let you know.” He let go of her and went to stand. But he hadn’t counted on the lady having other ideas.

“Don’t move,” she whispered, looping her arms around his neck.

“But—”

She cut him off. “I want to listen to your heart beat. It lets me know you’re really alive. When I was swimming to shore—I didn’t know if we would live or die—I was so scared—and it was so dark…”

She’d had some sort of drowning scare? When was that? She was talking as if he already knew about it. Dammit. She’d no doubt confessed all the gory details while he was drunk off his ass. Unfortunately, he wasn’t one of those men who got loud and obnoxious when he was wasted. People often mistook him for being much more sober than he was.

Maybe her big scare was how he’d gotten her into the sack with him in the first place. He’d played the “I can keep you safe, little lady” card. And at one point, that might have been true. Before Arielle got killed—stabbed to death by a stalker fan—when he’d been in charge of her security detail.

Careful not to promise to protect her, he thought and gathered Maddie close. “You’re safe now. Everything’s fine.”

Except apparently, everything was not fine. She wriggled in his arms until he turned her loose. He expected her to climb out of his lap, but noooo…she threw her left leg across his hips and straddled him. Right there on the couch. Groin to groin. Pressing down on him just like she would if they were making love. Only a few pieces of flimsy cloth kept him from plunging up into her wet, tight heat, of sliding her up and down his length until he forgot everything and exploded…

Jeez! What the hell was wrong with him tonight?

She laid her right ear against his heart and stilled, listening intently. And for some reason, it was one of the sexiest things a woman had ever done to him. Maybe because it was real. A reaching out for human connection at the most fundamental level of existence. Confirmation of a simple heartbeat. And it all but pushed him over the edge.

“We’re alive,” she murmured in awe. “Both of us.”

Ohh-kay. Poor kid had definitely had some sort of major fright recently. “Uh, yeah,” he mumbled. “Alive. Miraculous, isn’t it?” More like a nightmare from where he sat, but he wasn’t going to quibble with her about the relative benefits of being alive or dead while she was straddling him like a cowgirl about to ride him until his knees buckled.

“It’s a wild thing inside me, this feeling of having cheated death.”

Oh, Lord. He knew exactly the sensation she was talking about. It tore through a person like chain lightning, making every inch a soul tingle, every nerve jangle on edge, every breath a triumph. Blood pounded through him, hot and thick, and abruptly he could count his pulse in the throbbing of his male flesh, so hard and needy he couldn’t stand it.

Gritting his teeth against an urge to throw her down and drive himself into her until they both screamed, he managed to force out, “Honey, you’re going to have to climb off me or be prepared to do something about where you’re sitting because I’m about to have some serious self-control issues.”

She laughed. She laughed!

A noise escaped the back of his throat. Whether a growl or a groan, he couldn’t exactly say. But it made her jerk her head up off his chest and stare at him, startled, her eyes big and wide and…have mercy…aware.

He actually saw her breath hitch. Her chest started to lift, then hesitated, then finished the breath. He closed his eyes in pain. Must. Not. Do. This.

She made a little sound, a soft, “Oh,” that shot through him like a fifty-thousand-volt taser. And then she leaned forward as if to kiss him. Except the movement also had the effect of rocking her gently against parts of him that didn’t need any more rocking at the moment. She froze, her pupils black in the subtle, and suddenly unbearably sensual, light suffusing the room.

He muttered, “Yeah. That.”

She melted on top of him, flowing over him like warm honey, her body softening and relaxing against his. Her hands slid over his shoulders to toy with the short hairs at the back of his neck. Her breasts came to rest against him, hard nipples cushioned in the gently resilient softness of her breasts. Her thighs opened wider, pressing her even more firmly against him.

He closed his eyes. Threw his head back against the sofa cushions in an agony of need so great he barely noticed his back protesting. And damned if she didn’t lick his throat. She really had to quit that licking bit unless she planned to lick all of him. Soon. Hands tugged at his head, drawing it forward once more. And then she was kissing him, her mouth open and wet and inviting. How could a guy say no to being eaten alive like this?

His own adrenaline rush answered hers. He had no idea where it came from, but it tore through him like a tornado. With her body surfing his, sliding across him with her mouth—with her whole self—he rose up to meet her helplessly.

Her hands fumbled at his waist, untying the drawstring of his shorts. She lifted up enough to slide them down his hips, and then he was spilling into her hands, hard and hot and jumping beneath her touch.

“Oh, my,” she sighed.

She had to quit that sighing thing, too. It was driving him out of his mind. He reached forward, lifting the hem of her—his—shirt off her. She rose out of his lap, a naked nymph called forth from the heart of nature, perfect. Ethereal. Beautiful. Her breasts were high and firm, not large, but beautifully shaped. With a chest like that, she ought to walk around topless all the time. He restrained the urge to reach for the pale mounds and just looked at them, savoring the way they rose and fell with her rapid, shallow breathing. His gaze traced the slim inward curve of her waist, the gentle flare of her hips, the shadowed place where their bodies met.

“Well, touch me, already!” she demanded.

He glanced up at her, startled. And grinned. “Sorry. I was enjoying the view.”

She leaned down and kissed him voraciously, biting his lower lip hard enough to draw his undivided attention to her mouth. Vixen. He slid a hand up to the back of her head under her silky hair, anchoring her in place as he took control of the kiss, plunging his tongue inside her mouth. It tasted of the ocean, salty and primeval. It called him home. He sucked at her, drinking in her sighs, devouring the taste of her, the smooth slide of her tongue against his, the way she surged against him.

He skimmed his fingertips down her body, and she stretched sinuously under the light caress, inflaming the inferno already raging inside him. “Yup, you’re definitely alive,” he murmured.

She arched her back, rocking her hips against his provocatively. Except now there was nothing between them, just hot, slick flesh on hot, slick flesh.

He leaned forward, wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up and away from him. “Are you sure about this?” he murmured.

“I’m not sure about anything except that by some miracle we made it. We’re here. We’re alive.”

He could wait no longer. He plunged into all that vibrant exuberance and groaned when she cried out in joy. His buttocks clenched until they nearly cramped, driving him up and into all that heat and energy, hot and tight upon him and around him. He touched her very core, and it pulsed against him once. Twice. He surged beneath her, drawn into her as if she was a force of nature. Her internal muscles milked him powerfully, sucking life from the very dregs of his soul. And he gave it all to her. He pumped into her with abandon, holding her hips down to push into her more and more deeply.

The sea roared outside and he shouted his release inside. She threw her head back and let out a keening, shuddering cry of pleasure that broke something loose within his soul. Something he’d not even known was bottled up within him. He collapsed as new awareness of it, of her, of himself, flooded over him.

Wonder suffused his consciousness. Indeed, she was right about one thing. He was alive. For the first time in a long time. Since before Arielle. Before…

Inexplicably, the end of the thought slipped away from him. Before what? How long had it been since he’d felt like this? His short-term memory might be shot to hell, but his long-term memory was just fine, thank you very much. And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this good.

“Mmm.” She curled up in his arms, his wild, elemental force of nature back to being a kitten once more, limp and sleepy.

“You need to rest,” he murmured.

“You, too,” she murmured back drowsily. “Big night. Almost dying and all.”

He had no idea what she was talking about. The cut on his back? It was no big deal. Annoying, yes. But life-threatening? No. The only threat some guy with a knife posed to them was catching him drunk enough not to defend them. The bastard had come close to that tonight. But it wouldn’t happen again, Tom vowed silently to himself. As long as Maddie was with him, he would not get so drunk that he blacked out or that he couldn’t fend off some asshole with a blade.

Tightening his arms around her, he leaned forward. She made a sound of protest as he stood up with her in his arms, but she settled quickly against his chest. He laid her down gently on the couch, tucking the blankets in around her chin.

“Sleep,” he murmured, smoothing her hair away from her creamy brow. There was something eminently satisfying about making love to a woman until she lost consciousness. He watched her eyelashes flutter down. She was out like a light in a matter of seconds.

His arms felt unaccountably empty and he frowned at the sensation. True to his word though, he sat down gingerly in the armchair opposite her. After their athletics, his back stung like hell. But it was worth it. And how.

He propped his feet up on the end table he’d carved last month in a failed attempt to climb out of the bottle. His sharp eyes picked out her profile against the larger blackness of the storm outside. The seas were worse than he’d ever seen them. Vague memory of a storm approaching tickled his consciousness.

He and Maddie had stirred up quite a storm of their own in here, tonight. Fascinating woman. A study in contrasts. Calculating the odds of turning their now two-night stand into a three-peat, he locked his fingers across his stomach and settled in to watch over her.

An uncomfortable sensation of déjà vu crept over him. He used to watch over Arielle like this wherever she happened to pass out after one of her wild escapades. She used to tell him to quit hovering over her like a nervous mother hen, to go get some sleep in a real bed. She actually thought she could out-stubborn him. It had never worked. But she’d never given up trying.

Right up till that last night. He’d been ready to strangle her for insisting on going out on an evening when he was not only off duty but had other plans. But he’d never broken the implacable calm that was part and parcel of his job. Bodyguards weren’t supposed to show emotion, and they certainly weren’t supposed to throttle their impulsive, immature, spoiled, self-destructive clients. Even if the client richly deserved it. Not even if the client snuck out when her chief of security was out and her other guards were sleeping, and the client went and got themselves carved up by a nutcase. But it didn’t stop him from wanting to wrap his hands around Arielle’s neck and squeeze some sense into her.

Nor were bodyguards supposed to seduce females in their living rooms and make love to them until they screamed, even if they richly deserved it, too. Particularly when the poor woman was clearly upset and exhausted. What Maddie had needed was a decent night’s sleep.

But in spite of what he should have done, he couldn’t stop relishing what had happened. Images of Maddie in the throes of screaming pleasure danced across his mind. As he sat there in the dark, listening to her quiet breathing, fantasies of her crawling all over his willing body again and again in as many different ways as his imagination could conjure stole his breath away. Who’d have guessed he had such a vivid imagination?

Desperate to distract himself, he listened to the storm gathering steam outside. Kato. The name popped into his head. A moment later, its meaning came back to him as well. That was the name of the cyclone spinning in toward Vanua Taru. He hated it how these random snippets of memory kept dropping into his mind like capricious gifts from a prankster deity.

The ocean sounded furious below. Like a woman whose lover, almost in her grasp, had been stolen out from under her nose. What an odd thought that was. But then, this had been an odd night all around.

If these rain bands got much worse, the island would be completely shut down by morning, cyclone or no. That could be a problem since he had food and drink in the house for one. He hadn’t expected to ride out the cyclone with company. He had some shopping to do, assuming he could convince her to stay with him until Kato passed. Three or four days marooned in his villa with nothing to do but listen to the storm and try out a couple dozen of his fantasies sounded like a little slice of paradise.

Looked like a trip to town was in order first thing tomorrow—or rather, later today. Given the searing pain in his back, he’d probably have to give in and get some stitches in his back, too. Which would also give him a chance to tell the sheriff about the attack on the beach.

He frowned, considering the chances of the attacker escaping the island before Kato hit. He bloody well wouldn’t fly in this weather, and neither would any of the other island-taxi pilots. People wishing to leave Vanua Taru would be down to ferry service or private boats. Joe the bartender, also the local ferry pilot, was extremely stingy about sailing his precious ferryboat in heavy seas. The Merry Widow was probably already tucked safely in her boathouse and not likely to emerge until after the storm. Unless the attacker had his own boat and a death wish, he wasn’t going anywhere until Kato passed. Nope, the Sex on the Beach Killer was stuck on Vanua Taru for at least the next several days. If that was, in fact, who’d attacked them.

Without any great heat, the thought that he could use a drink passed through his mind. But it was overridden by a much more pressing concern. He seriously didn’t need to be trapped on this tiny piece of real estate with some crazy bastard looking to slice folks into bits. Truth be told, the thought made his blood run cold. Six months ago, he’d have laughed at the prospect. Back then he was still invincible. Had still never lost a client. He’d still been the baddest badass bodyguard in the biz. Nothing had gotten past him. But all that had been before.

And besides, Maddie was with him now. He had her safety to think about.

A flash of Arielle’s bloody corpse flashed through his mind’s eye. By some trick of his imagination, or maybe his subconscious, the face in his memory morphed from Arielle’s into Maddie’s. And suddenly he felt sick to his stomach.

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