Lilly The Plain One. Lilly The Brain. Letter to Reader Title Page About the Author Dedication Acknowledgments Prologue 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

Lilly The Plain One. Lilly The Brain.

Lilly, who had far too much pragmatism to court dreams of wonder. And here she was, tormenting herself with the touch and smell and sound of the very kind of man she’d built those walls to protect herself against.

Pretty girls could expect to see an answering spark in the eyes of a man like Ethan. Lovely women with deep, melting eyes and the kind of figure that seemed poured over a perfect frame and set to movement with the wind.

Lilly hadn’t been poured. She’d been built.

Thank heavens his eyes were closed again.

That way he couldn’t see the tears that wouldn’t dissipate. This was so stupid, Lilly thought. She knew better. She’d known so much better her whole life that she’d structured everything so she wouldn’t even be tempted.

Tempted to fall in love with a man she could never have....

Dear Reader,

Hey, look us over—our brand-new cover makes Silhouette Desire look more desirable than ever! And between the covers we’re continuing to offer those powerful, passionate and provocative love stories featuring rugged heroes and spirited heroines.

Mary Lynn Baxter returns to Desire and locates our November MAN OF THE MONTH in the Heart of Texas, where a virgin heroine is wary of involvement with a younger man.

More heart-pounding excitement can be found in the next installment of the Desire miniseries TEXAS CATTLEMAN’S CLUB with Secret Agent Dad by Metsy Hingle. Undercover agent Blake Hunt loses his memory but gains adorable twin babies—and the heart of lovely widow Josie Walters!

Ever-popular Dixie Browning presents a romance in which opposites attract in The Bride-in-Law. Elizabeth Bevarly offers you A Doctor in Her Stocking, another entertaining story in her miniseries FROM HERE TO MATERNITY. The Daddy Search is Shawna Delacorte’s story of a woman’s search for the man she believes fathered her late sister’s child. And a hero and heroine are in jeopardy on an island paradise in Kathleen Korbel’s Sail Away.

Each and every month, Silhouette Desire offers you six exhilarating journeys into the seductive world of romance.

So make a commitment to sensual love and treat yourself to all six!

Enjoy!

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Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

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Sail Away

Kathleen Korbel

www.millsandboon.co.uk

KATHLEEN KORBEL

lives in St. Louis with her husband and two children. She devotes her time to enjoying her family, writing, avoiding anyone who tries to explain the intricacies of the computer and searching for the fabled housecleaning fairies. She’s had her best luck with her writing—from which she’s garnered a Romantic Times Magazine award for Best New Category Author of 1987, the 1990 Romance Writers of America RITA Award for Best Romantic Suspense and the 1990 and 1992 RITA Awards for Best Long Category Romance—and with her family, without whom she couldn’t have managed any of the rest. She hasn’t given up on those fairies, though.

To Jill Marie Landis, Mahalo nui

And to Ethan.

Thanks for going through all this

to make me feel better.

Prologue

Noah Campbell was ready for a hot bath. He’d just spent the past four days convincing a large herd of cattle that they really did want to head up to higher pastures, and he was exhausted. He was also filthy, bruised, battered, and happy as hell to be home.

“This sure ain’t Hollywood, is it, boss?” his foreman asked as they guided their weary mounts across the Bitter River.

Lifting his hat to wipe the sweat from his forehead, Noah grinned like a kid. “Thank God for small favors.”

Not that Noah minded his other job in Hollywood. After all, being the world’s number-one box-office draw under the name of Cameron Ross provided him with the cash to run his ranch the way he wanted. Heck, it had provided him with the ranch in the first place. But it also made it tough to escape to his real home without hordes of paparazzi trailing him.

To that end, he’d sent his cousin Ethan in the opposite direction the way he always did, so the press, long since taught to see the movie star Cameron Ross in Ethan Campbell’s similarly rugged features, would follow and record. Noah, slouched in his saddle with a four-day growth of beard and an urgent need of a bath, could relax.

“When you due back?” Hank asked.

“Beginning of next week. After I take Dulcy to the doctor’s.”

Dulcy. His wife of eight months, who was even now eight months pregnant, tied to the house and testy as a mare with a burr under her saddle. Until the last month, Dulcy had run the ranch single-handed. She still wasn’t happy about not being allowed to join in the drive, but the doctor had been adamant. Whether Dulcy liked it or not, neither her physician nor her husband was going to let her wrangle cattle up in the high mountain meadows when she could barely fit in her saddle.

Which was why Noah wasn’t surprised to see her standing out in the yard waiting for him to show up. Tiny, redheaded, round as a watermelon. Hand to eyes to shade them against the setting sun. Noah waved and kicked his gelding into a canter. Dulcy waved back, something in her hand, and began walking forward.

Walking fast, her movements taut and aggressive.

Noah hadn’t been married long, but he’d been married long enough to know what that posture meant. Something was wrong. Without even realizing it, he nudged his horse into a dead run.

“What’s the matter?” he asked as he skidded to a stop and swung down.

Dulcy had a death’s grip on a newspaper. Her face was screwed up in worry, and her hand was at her belly.

Noah grabbed her. “Dulcy? What is it?”

She handed over the paper. “We were just headed up to find you,” she said. “I think you’d better read this.”

Noah didn’t have to read more than the headlines. “Oh, God. I have to go.”

“We have to go,” she said simply.

He took one look at the tight cast of her eyes and knew it wouldn’t do any good to argue. His chest was on fire, and he’d just found out. She must have been chewing on this thing for twelve hours or more. “We’ll go,” he said, and curled an arm around her shoulder to support her. She wouldn’t have it, though. She just wrapped her arms around his neck and held him and didn’t ask what else this would mean, even though they both knew.

They didn’t care. It didn’t matter that the headline meant his anonymity was over, his cover blown like a storm door in a twister. It didn’t matter that their island of domestic normalcy would never be recovered. What mattered was why.

Noah wouldn’t remember dropping the newspaper. He just held on to his wife, suddenly terrified to his very soul. On the ground, the breeze riffled at the pages, but the headline on the front page was too big to miss. Just above the picture of Noah in his tux at the Academy Awards, screamed the words: Cameron Ross Missing and Feared Dead Off Hawaiian Islands.

One

He wasn’t missing, really. Just seriously misplaced. At least, he thought he must be, since he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here. Or why. Or when. All he knew was that he was lying on his back in the water looking up at a very blue, very bright sky. And that his head hurt. And his leg. And his ribs on his right side. Other than that, he figured he was probably just fine.

He tried to sit up, but that just made his head hurt worse. He closed his eyes, but that didn’t seem to help. He was thirsty, he was dizzy and he was a little seasick.

He was late. He knew that. He was supposed to be somewhere. He was supposed to be doing something Something important. But whatever it was refused to be identified. And, truthfully, he didn’t try hard. It was too much effort. He should probably just stick to finding out where he was.

The raft. He should look at the raft he was lying on Maybe he could find some kind of clue, a boat’s name or return address or something. He opened his eyes.

No clue. Just a big white inflatable raft with nothing in it but him...in a tuxedo. With bare feet. And a big black Stetson lying across his stomach. In the middle of miles and miles of water.

That settled it. The only thing he managed to do with his eyes open was confuse himself. He closed them and kept them closed. And then, just for extra measure, he plopped the hat over his eyes to keep out the sun.

He really wasn’t sure how long he’d been drifting. Minutes. Hours. Days. He was sweating, and he could tell his neck and hands were burning in the hot tropical sun, but he couldn’t seem to manage the energy to move. The drift of the water beneath him was just too soothing, the breeze only strong enough to cool the sweat on his chest. So he lay there like a well-dressed lump and let the sun cook him to the color of a rare roast and wondered where he was supposed to be.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

He heard her. He ignored her. Probably a gorgeous woman in an evening dress to go with his tux.

The thought damn near made him laugh. This sun really was frying his brain.

“Hey! Are you all right?”

Her voice was closer now. Maybe she was a mermaid. Or a navy-trained dolphin who’d broken the language barrier. Unless she had his itinerary in her hand with full explanations, he really didn’t want to know.

“Go away.” He sounded like hell.

She laughed, an abrupt burst of surprise. “Why?” she asked, very near now, her voice like that of the Lorelei on the Rhine—except with a different accent. “You waiting for a date?”

He didn’t bother to look over or remove his hat. He was dizzy enough as it was. “Sure seems to me like it’s a definite possibility.”

She laughed again, and he wanted to smile. “Well, I seriously doubt anybody’s going to want to dance with you looking like that.”

“Don’t be silly,” he told her. “I’m in my best clothes...at least, I think I am.”

“You think?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure of much right now...except that my head is killing me. You have any aspirin?”

“How ’bout if I take you in to land and we can find some?”

That was what finally got his eyes open. “Land? There’s land?”

“Of course there’s land. Where do you think I came from?”

“Twenty thousand leagues under the sea.” He tilted the hat enough so he could squint in the direction of her voice. All he could make out was an expressionist painting of colors. Lurid yellows and oranges in overlapping triangles, the blue of the ocean, and a smaller series of shapes and colors that involved flickering black, deep tan and bright red, tilting and repeating themselves into a pattern that was somehow familiar, no matter how weird. He interpreted it as a shapely woman on a small sailboat, done by Picasso.

He shook his head. “Oh, no you don’t,” he demurred, dropping the hat back over his eyes. “Just let me bake in peace.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to do if you don’t get off the water,” she protested.

He felt a bump alongside the raft and tried to ignore it. A mirage. A noisy mirage that smelled like coconut oil and plumeria.

“How do I know what plumeria smells like?” he wondered out loud.

Busy doing something that made the raft buck and sway, she ignored his question. “Come on, you need to get someplace safe. Can you tell me what happened?”

“I fell off a boat.”

“I guessed that. What boat?”

He frowned in concentration. “Don’t know.”

That didn’t seem to bother her. “Probably happened during the storm. You’re lucky you ended up so close to land. Now, if you’ll take off that hat and open your eyes, you need to help me get you over.”

He sighed, unbelievably tired, even after just lying around for...for how long? He remembered darkness, the jolt of cold water. A struggle trying to get shiny black pumps off in the water. Which made just about as much sense as anything else he remembered.

“I don’t suppose you could just tow me back like this?”

“Not in a sailboat,” she assured him. “Besides, if you can get over here, I have water.”

Water. That got his eyes open again. It got his limbs to move, although no one would have confused the results for anything graceful.

“God, I am thirsty,” he admitted, only now realizing how very hoarse his voice was. His throat was as charred as his face. He got all the way up, dizzy as hell, and almost landed in the water in his first attempt to get over into the sleek little sailboat.

“Oh, man,” she breathed in surprise, even as she held on to his raft with one hand and held the other out for him. “Your face is all bloody. You took quite a whack.”

He shook his head and almost ended up in the water all over again. He thought he was usually pretty nimble. He sure as hell wasn’t now. “I sure hurt like I did.”

He’d just about managed to lean forward into her boat when suddenly she just let go. “Oh, my God...” she whispered as the boats bumped and skipped away from each other. “You’re...”

This time he got a mouthful of water before she pulled him up.

“I do something... wrong?” he sputtered.

She was frozen solid, as if she’d just seen him rise from the dead. “You’re Cameron Ross!” she squeaked, almost letting go of the boat again.

He blinked at her. “You know who I am?”

She laughed, that musical, sweet sound that seemed to skip across the water. “You’re kidding, right? Who doesn’t know who you are?”

He frowned a moment. Took a look down at the bloodstains on what had probably once been a snowy tux shirt. Looked back up to what he figured was probably a very pretty young woman who held on to his arm as if he was about to splinter to pieces. Did his best to smile.

“Me.”

All Lilly had been looking forward to this afternoon was a few last hours of peace and quiet. A slow sail home from the old cabin on Molokai, where she’d been taking a few days away from the family. From the job. From the claustrophobia of Oahu, where too many people made too much noise and she was forced to participate.

Today she’d meant to have wind and water and sky. She’d ended up with Cameron Ross instead.

“Come on,” she urged him, trying her best to sound pragmatic and purposeful when she just wanted to shake. She wanted, ridiculously enough, to giggle.

He was beautiful. Every bit as rugged and dashing as he was said to be, with that just-too-long dark hair and those crystal-blue eyes. Dimpled chin, perfect nose and broad chest. And all of that floating in a life raft in a tux and Stetson. Who said life was mundane?

He didn’t look exactly like himself, Lilly decided, but that didn’t matter. Her cousin Koki, who had worked on Magnum, P.I., assured her that nobody really looked just like they did on screen. Cameron Ross looked good enough, that was for sure. Good enough to give Lilly weak knees.

Which wasn’t going to be much help, when he was hurt and confused and lost out in the Pacific on a life raft. So Lilly swallowed her surprise and reached out, not to Cameron Ross, but to the injured man in the life raft.

“Here,” she coaxed. “You get over here, and we’ll get some water in you. You really got smacked on the head. That’s probably why you don’t remember. Soon as I get you ashore, we can take a look at it. Are you dizzy or anything?”

“I’m dizzy and everything,” he assured her, his voice gravelly and tired.

She took hold of solid, strong arms and leaned back until his face was almost in her neck so he could get his legs over. He really must have been hurt. She’d seen Cameron Ross dance through a fight scene like Baryshnikov. Now he could hardly move four limbs at once.

And then she saw more blood.

“What did you do to your leg?” she asked, trying her damedest not to inhale the earthy smell of him. The sharp tang of sweat, the darker, smokier hint of cologne. It was distracting her from the rusty stain just above his left knee.

He flopped over into her little boat and took a distracted look down at his leg, as if somebody had left him with one he hadn’t used before. “I don’t know...hurts, though.”

“Can you sit up?” Lilly asked. “Just for a minute. You need to get that jacket off.”

It took some struggling and more than one surprised grunt of pain, but between them they managed, while Lilly held her breath and tried valiantly to ignore the spread of his shoulders and the curl of chest hair that glistened beneath an unbuttoned collar.

Then, settling him back on the deck, she reacquainted him with his hat and broke out the bottled water she always carried with her. “It’s not cold,” she offered. “But it’s wet.”

He just lay there at her knees, his eyes closed. The skin around his eyes and mouth was white, in contrast with the raw red of the rest of his face. His chest rose and fell in short, ragged breaths. His eyes were closed and his mouth open. Lilly tried not to be afraid. Her first movie star, and he was going to die on her boat because she’d taken off his jacket.

“Mr. Ross?” she whispered, a hand out to his head. Almost. She couldn’t quite touch him, as if her intentions and her fantasies were getting scrambled.

He didn’t answer. Just lay there, breathing with a funny grunting sound Lilly recognized all too well. She had three very large brothers who played sports and loved nothing more than a good fight. Unless Lilly had wasted all that time in emergency rooms, Mr. Ross had hurt his chest. Or worse.

“Mr. Ross, please,” she begged, now touching him. Feathering her fingers against his hair, along his cheek, his throat. Just to make contact, to reassure herself with his warmth. “Please. You need some water.”

He gave another little grunt and then startled awake, flinching. “Sorry...I, uh...don’t feel very...good.”

She tried smiling upside down into fabulous robin’s-egg-blue eyes that were now clouded and tight. “You have every nght not to. Take some water and then put your hat back over your head so I can get us to Maui.”

He blinked at her. “Maui? Is that where I was going?”

She gave up waiting for him to lift his head and did it for him, resting it against her thighs so he could drink. “That’s not even where I was going. I was on my way back to Oahu, but we’re much closer to Maui, and I think you need closer. Now, drink.”

He did, gulping, so the water ran down his neck. He raised his hands to cup hers and closed his eyes. Lilly let him drink a little and then pulled it away. “I have plenty,” she assured him. “You need to take it easy.”

He rested his head back against her thighs, still watching her. “Thank you. I think...I think you’ve just saved my sorry butt.”

She couldn’t help smiling again. “Trust me,” she said. “It’s my pleasure.”

She even prided herself on not mentioning how very not sorry his butt was. His feet were bare, she suddenly realized. Now, why did that make her giddy? She wasn’t exactly a foot fetishist, but the idea of bare feet on a man wearing a tux was unbelievably erotic. Besides, they were beautiful feet. Long and strong and graceful. But Lilly shouldn’t have time to think of that either. She should have been thinking that they were probably going to blister from that sunburn.

She couldn’t quite think that, though.

“Can I ask?” he asked. “How you know me?”

Lilly dragged her attention back to the look of uncertainty he was sharing with her. “Everyone in the civilized world knows you, Mr. Ross. You’re probably the most famous movie star there is.”

He stared at her for a minute, processing. Then he just snorted. “No, I’m not.”

Lilly laughed. “Oh, I’m afraid you are.”

“What about you?” he asked.

She should be moving. She couldn’t manage it. Somehow, even battered and bloody, he had managed to dredge up the most delightful sparkle in those eyes of his. “What about me?” she asked, breathless all over again.

“Are you a movie star?”

“Almost,” she said with a bright grin. “I’m a librarian.”

Now he smiled. Really smiled. It was a softer smile than on screen, less assured. A little boy’s smile, all heart and humor, and Lilly understood just why he’d earned that reputation he had as a lady-killer.

“And my name’s Cameron Ross?” he said.

She nodded.

He thought about it for a second. “Doesn’t sound right. I don’t know why, but it...” He shook his head, closed his eyes. “There’s something else, too. Something I think I should remember. And something I’m supposed to be doing....”

Lilly found herself perilously close to stroking his cheek again, just to soothe that look of tension. Instead, she straightened. “Well, it’ll wait ’til we get you back in. Or at least to a motorboat that can get you there faster. If you’d had the good sense to fall off your boat on the south side of Molokai, you would have been picked up in a minute. It’s lousy with traffic down there, and within sight of Maui and Lanai both. On this side there’s just water.”

“And you.”

“And me. Who should have paid a lot more attention to her Tutu Mary when she was teaching me first aid.”

“Tutu Mary? Who’s that, a ballerina?”

If anybody else had asked that, Lilly would have bristled. Somehow Cameron Ross failed to make the old joke offensive.

“Tutu is Hawaiian for grandmother,” Lilly explained. “My tutu was a healer. She tried to teach me, but I was better at theory than practice.”

At least, that was what Lilly had always contended.

He smiled again. A soft smile of understanding. “I know first aid.”

Lilly smiled back. “Of course you do.”

Even so, she checked his leg to find that the bleeding was old, the tear in the slacks minimal. She checked his head to find a couple of good gashes up beyond the hairline, and one along his temple that some fancy plastic surgeon was probably going to charge a fortune to fix. Nothing was bleeding actively, though. Lilly couldn’t see anything else obvious, and she couldn’t do anything about it if she did, so she decided it was time to sail.

“Here,” she said, wetting down a beach towel and draping it over his blood-caked head. “I’m going to give you your hat back to keep the sun out of your eyes.”

She did, tilting it just enough that he could feel the wind underneath.

“Is that Molokai over there?” he asked, closing his eyes.

Lilly turned to see the undulating curtain of emerald cliffs that seemed to simply spill from the clouds straight into the glistening sea.

“It is,” she said, her voice unconsciously softer.

“Can’t believe I didn’t notice it before. Can’t we just go there?”

“Not on the north coast,” she said. “No way to get you to civilization from there.”

“It’s beautiful.”

Lilly smiled like a fond parent. “It is.”

Actually, there was civilization on the north coast. Kalaupapa. A small peninsula of lush green that had been poured straight down the side of those forbidding cliffs to form a perfect tongue atop the sea. It held a community. It had medical care. Lilly had actually given brief thought to staying on her original course and landing there. But the only people living on the Kalaupapa peninsula were the last of Father Damien’s children, elderly survivors of Hansen’s Disease. Leprosy. As rigidly as they now guarded their privacy and shelter, Lilly wasn’t sure they wanted the notoriety of a famous star dumped on their doorstep. Besides, Maui would be much better suited to transporting and pampering somebody who wore tuxes and sailed in yachts. Carefully climbing to her feet so she didn’t disturb Cameron, Lilly untied the boom and set to work.

“I remember a storm,” he said, his voice muffled as Lilly gently eased the little Sunfish over around the way she’d come. “Lots of noise and lights.”

“Night before last,” she said, gingerly stepping over him. “It was a beaut. I almost lost a roof and a radio in it. We’re expecting a bigger one later. I was trying to get home before it got too close when I spotted you.”

“I remember...diving. Diving? That’s stupid. Why would I dive?”

“Probably falling off the side. Was it a sailboat?” she asked. “A cabin cruiser? Do you know if you had a crew? If you were on a ship of any size, there’s probably a search out for you.”

If she’d actually listened to that radio she’d had at the cabin, she might have known. But she’d walked. Thought. Wished.

Mr. Ross lifted a hand to rub gently at his chest. Sore, Lilly thought. There’d probably be a bruise or two under that once-starched tux shirt.

“I don’t... remember,” he admitted. “I don’t remember much more than the wind and lightning, and trying like hell to get my shoes off. But I feel like...like there’s something important I’m forgetting.”

“More important than your name?” she asked, alternating her attention between him and her task. The wind had caught her sail, and the little boat skipped like a flat rock, the wind spinning her hair out behind her and cooling the sweat on her chest and back from the effort of hauling in a strange man.

“Not like name important,” he said slowly, thinking hard beneath that hat. “But important.”

“Well, don’t worry about it,” Lilly said, much more blithely than she felt. “As soon as we get you ashore, you’ll have plenty of time to remember.”

They were still quite a ways from help of any kind, but with any luck, once they swung into the Pailolo Channel they would run into a good-sized yacht, maybe a deepsea fishing charter, that wouldn’t mind conveying Mr. Ross to a doctor. And, if worse came to worst, Maui was only about five miles beyond.

Wait ‘til she told her mother, Lilly thought with a stunned little shake of her head. Wait ’til she told her colleagues. So there I was, minding my own business, just breaking the speed record between Molokai and Oahu, and who do I happen to rescue in his tux and Stetson but Cameron Ross? They wouldn’t believe it. Heck, she still didn’t believe it.

The brightly striped orange-and-yellow sail strained with the wind, and the cliffs of Molokai were slipping slowly past. Time to check her patient again. Lilly once again tied off the boom and bent to retrieve the water.

“Mr. Ross?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. She panicked.

“Oh, please don’t do this to me,” she begged, dropping right back to her knees to shake his shoulder. “I’m not good in a crisis.”

She lifted his hat to find him squinting up at her. “Doin’ okay by me,” he said with a rakish grin.

Lilly almost clobbered him. “Don’t do that. I think you’re not supposed to fall asleep, but I can’t remember why. Health wasn’t my section.”

“Your section of what?”

“Research. I’m a research librarian. I can find the information once I get home, but I can’t remember it. All I can remember is the line of Stuart succession.”

He scowled. “Well, don’t tell me that. I’d be out in a nanosecond.”

Lilly wanted to smile. “Not into British royalty, huh?”

“Nope.”

“How ’bout Hawaiian royalty? I can name you that succession, too.”

“How about telling me your name? Since you seem to know mine.”

“Lilly,” she said, handing over the bottle of water. “Lilly Kokoa.”

He squinted again. “Named after that Hawaiian queen? Liliuokailani?”

“Nope. The flower. I was born on Easter.”

He grinned. “Not nearly as romantic. You are Hawaiian, aren’t you?”

“Half. Quarter Portuguese, quarter Chinese. I’m a mutt.”

He squinted again, as if assessing. “I’m no judge right now, but I’d bet that when I can actually see you, you’ll be the best-looking mutt I’ve ever come across.”

Lilly frowned down at him. “What do you mean, when you can see? Can’t you see?”

His shrug was minimal. “It’ll probably clear up. I’m already less sick.”

Lilly knew he was trying to ease her mind. He wasn’t having much success. Not only did she know perfectly well how she looked, she knew just what it meant that he couldn’t tell. She’d lied to him about not knowing about head injuries. She knew enough, and he was scaring her again.

“Have some more water,” she begged, hoping that maybe it was dehydration talking rather than head injury. After all, if he’d really fallen out of his boat the night before last, he’d been out in the sun an awfully long time.

“Thank you, Lilly,” he agreed, once again wrapping his hands around hers to bring the bottle to his lips.

He had wonderful hands, she thought. Beautiful, long-fingered and callused from real work. Marred by nicks and old scars across a couple of knuckles. Strong hands. Lilly watched them, watched him sip the water, his eyes closed, the liquid dribbling down his throat. And she thought he didn’t look a thing like a pampered movie star. His hands hadn’t been manicured in a while, and his face was rough with old beard and new sunburn. Even in the tux, he looked like an outcast. A sexy, charismatic, vulnerable outcast.

And Lilly had been alone for too long, she decided, pulling away before her libido got the best of her.

“You don’t want to rush that,” she warned him, closing the bottle with hands that shook just a little. “It could make you sick.”

“More research?” he asked, his voice weary and sore.

“No. Several viewings of Man on the Run, that movie you did where you were lost in the desert.”

He got one eye open. “Uh huh.”

“Come to think of it,” she said with a grin, “you were in a tux there, too.”

He sighed. “Must be my standard uniform for disasters.”

Lilly was about to answer him when an air horn interrupted her. She whipped around to see an ocean-going yacht bearing down on them from the west.

“Now, how come I didn’t see that?” she demanded, shading her eyes with her hand.

Cameron tried to look past her. “A boat?”

“More like a cruise ship.”

Pulling out an emergency flare, she lit it and waved it over her head. The ship honked again and increased its speed until it was almost up to her little Sunfish. Lilly had to crane her neck to see up to the cabin.

“Do you need help?” a gravelly voice boomed through a megaphone.

“I have an injured man!” Lilly yelled through cupped hands. “Can you help me get him to a doctor?”

“Uh, wait...” Cameron protested, trying to sit up.

Lilly immediately pushed him back. “It’s okay,” she said. “They can move faster than I can.”

“Happy to!” the other ship answered. “We’ll pull alongside.”

Cameron dropped the hat, squinting hard at the sleek hite yacht with its bristling aerials and gleaming brass. There’s something...I don’t...”

“Mr. Ross, please,” Lilly begged, a hand at each shouler. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“No, I’m not,” he argued, pushing her away with sudden strength and sitting up. “They are.”

“What?” Lilly demanded.

“Hold it right there,” the voice from the ship depanded.

Lilly spun around to find herself staring up into a double-barrelled shotgun. Alongside the man holding it stood o more people holding automatic weapons, each smil ing as if they’d just found gold.

“Good to see you again, Mr. Ross,” the guy with the shotgun greeted them. “I knew you wouldn’t deliberately tin a good kidnaping.”

Lilly turned back to see that Cameron had gone very white. He turned toward her with a half-hearted smile. “I think I know what, it is I needed to remember.”

Two

Lilly was a blur. More to the point, everything was blur. He wasn’t sure why, but that didn’t scare him the way it probably should have. Then again, that could ha been simply because the guns were scaring him much much more.

“I wish you hadn’t gone and involved somebody else his captor said to him with an odd sincerity. ”I hate collateral damage.”

Considering the fact that they’d just watched Lilly bright little Sunfish being dispatched to the bottom of the ocean, he bet Lilly was wincing at that one.

“What a charming term,” she said, posture erect a defiant. “You were with the military, weren’t you?”

There was a smile in the guy’s voice. “Yes, ma’am sure was.”

“Until that little misunderstanding with the grenade and the CO’s wife,” one of the others piped up. Captor number-one spun around. “That wasn’t my fault.”

They were all standing out on the deck of the yacht: three guys, Lilly and he in a tableau straight out of a movie. Between the smack on the head and the fact that very time he put weight on his left leg it just gave out him, he was pretty much being held up by Lilly as the three guys—for some reason he thought of them as Huey, Huey and Louie—discussed the finer points of a good kidnaping. Which did not, Huey insisted, include collateral damage.

Huey was short, squat, with a sailor’s rolling walk, and, om the shine on the top of his head, no hair to speak f. His voice sounded more like a big brother’s than a big gangsta’s, as if he were trying hard to break the other two without help.

The other two were pretty much interchangeable to somebody with blurred and double vision. Tall, thin, own, with shortish hair the color of Lilly’s. So far only Huey had spoken. Louie kept quiet. And kept his gun pointed directly at Lilly’s midsection.

Lilly.

God, he wished they would get whatever theatrics they had in mind over with so he could go back to laying his ead in Lilly’s lap. Forget yachts and movies and kidnap s. He wanted to lie back, close his eyes and just sink to the featherlight stroke of her fingers, the glitter of her ughter as it skipped over the water like sunlight. Maybe it was the fact that he was still foggy and lost. Maybe it was the fact that she’d saved him. Or maybe it as the fact that she had a voice that could ease heartache d a lap that was as soft as a sigh, but he had a feeling he was going to get seriously stupid over her.

And he didn’t even know what stupid was for him.

Startled at his own loss of focus, he shook his head There was a gun pointed at Lilly’s chest, and he w thinking about tropical breezes and puppy love. I needed to concentrate.

Unfortunately, all that shake had done for his head w to send it spinning again.

“We need to get going, boss,” a new voice interrupted “Let’s get them below before Mister Moviestar just kee over.”

He squinted hard at the third member of the kidnaping party. Time to reassess that first impression. He had been kidnaped by Huey, Duey and Louie. He’d been kidnaped by Huey, Duey and Louise. Boy, did he wish could remember what had happened!

“Tell you what,” he offered as nonchalantly as could. “Let the young lady go, and I’ll be happy to f down wherever you want me to.”

“We just finished sinking her boat,” Huey remind him tersely.

“Isn’t that the life raft I was in right behind you?”

Nobody turned. “We couldn’t just leave it out the People are already lookin’ for you. And sooner or late somebody’s gonna find your crew on that deserted land.”

“Lilly can get to Molokai on the raft,” he said. “I and her go. I’ll cooperate if you let her go.”

“No,” Lilly argued.

“No,” Huey, Duey and Louise echoed decisively. He moved to argue with all four of them, but that j set off the dizziness again. Everything was suddenly ti ing like a carnival ride. Damn, this wasn’t working rig

“Mr. Ross is badly injured,” Lilly said in that dece tively soft voice of hers as she tightened her hold on hi “You need to get him some help.”

“Well, he wouldn’t’a been hurt if he’d just stayed on board like a good boy,” Louise retorted. “We would have had the ransom and dropped him off just like we promised y now.”

“Ransom,” he said, more to himself than anybody else. His head pounding and his stomach swirling, he turned his attention to Lilly, who, with both of them upright, only stood as tall as his armpit. “I guess that settles it. I must be Cameron Ross.”

It still felt wrong. Fit wrong, like a badly tailored shirt, s if he’d pulled a name out of somebody else’s closet. For some reason, he was sure it was something not to be discussed in front of Huey, Duey and Louise, however.

“You guess?” Duey demanded with an outraged snort. ‘What are your other choices—Beavis and Butthead?”

“Madonna,” Huey added.

“Elvis,” Louise retorted.

“Hey,” Duey protested. “I seen Elvis. And he ain’t no Elvis.”

He was starting to sweat and sway. Not good. Lilly knew, though. Lilly tightened her grip. After a quick look on his direction that he thought might have been concern, the glared at their captors.

“What he is,” she said through gritted teeth, “is hurt. And if you don’t let him lie down soon, he’ll be dead before you can get any ransom. Is that what you had in mind?”

“You tellin’ us what to do?” Duey demanded.

“Shut up,” Huey snapped in his best military tone. ‘Get ’em locked back in. And don’t you two do nothin’ stupid in there.”

“How stupid is vomiting?” he asked.

That got them to move fast.

“Better?” Lilly asked ten minutes later, her voice inches from his left ear.

He didn’t bother to open his eyes. It was one thing to be dramatically injured in front of a beautiful woman. was another to be ignominiously sick, especially when she had to hold your head while you did it.

“Yeah.”

He felt a cool, wet cloth being draped over his forehead and thought he would die from the simple pleasure of it The gentle attention of those butterfly hands.

“I think I’m in love,” he managed.

She laughed. “You’re not very choosy.”

He smiled back, eyes still closed. “Any girl with a ra in a time of need.”

She was quiet for a moment. Looking around, he imagined. He could hardly blame her. He was lying on a be the size of Rhode Island in a room that looked more like a country house than a ship’s cabin. Dark walnut paneling lush green carpeting, recessed lighting and an entertainement center. Windows instead of portholes, and big vase of what had been fresh flowers a couple of days ago though they now wilted at alarming angles. At least, that was what he assumed. As bad as his vision was, that could have been a bad wall sculpture of linoleum and shag he was trying to decipher.

“Well,” Lilly said with a half sigh, “if you’re going to be kidnaped, you might as well do it in style.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“You don’t sound particularly worried.”

“I’m sure that once I remember what this is all about I’ll be terrified. Right now I’m concentrating on not humiliating myself again.”

Another instinctive flutter of fingers against his cheek He wondered if she even realized she was doing that. She was a toucher, tactile contact as much a part of her communication as words and expressions. He wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think he knew many people who were unself-conscious enough to do that—especially with somebody who was purported to be a world-famous movie star.

“You’ll be fine,” she murmured.

He smiled again, surreptitiously inhaling the bouquet of her perfume. “I already am. Or I will be when I get you someplace safe, anyway. I have a feeling I should know what to do about stuff like this.”

“It is too bad your memory isn’t working,” she mused, ettling on the bed so that he could feel the heat of her against his side. “This reminds me of another movie we could make use of. Home from the Sea.”

“Mine?”

“Uh huh. You were kidnaped by terrorists who needed he computers you designed to rule the world...or something.”

“Memorable flick, huh?”

He heard the grin without opening his eyes. “Actually, it was. You were a family man who only wanted to stay on your house in Indianapolis. You were kidnaped on oard a yacht, along with the President of the United States. Pretty much saved the world with your brain instead of a gun.”

“In a tux?”

She chuckled. “Afraid so.”

He shook his head. “Cinéma-vérité, huh? How’d I get s out of it?”

“Reprogramed the ship’s computers from the bathroom after being blinded by a bullet. You were pretty amazing.”

For some reason, that made him frustrated. “It wasn’t ne.”

She touched him again, a hand to his shoulder. “Oh, I know. Your character, I mean. But you chose the role You played it. It says something about you.”

“It says, evidently, that I like to spend my time in a tuxedo.”

For that he got a moment of silence. “You don’t sound as if it makes you think highly of yourself.”

She was right. That was how he sounded. He wondered what it meant. He wondered what, when he finally cleared out the fog that muddled his thoughts and displaced his memories, he would think of the person he discovered lurking back there.

“Do you know that you have an Academy Award?” she asked gently.

He answered instinctively. “It isn’t mine.” Then he reached up to lift the rag from his eyes. That had mean something. It meant more than misplaced humility. “Neither is Cameron Ross.”

Lilly was watching him, her face a soft, round blu against the diffuse afternoon light that poured in through the windows. He couldn’t see well, but he could discern her concern. It made him, for the first time, frightened.

“That doesn’t belong to me,” he insisted. “I don’t know why. But it doesn’t. I’m someone else.”

“A different name,” she suggested. “I don’t know that much about you, but could Cameron Ross be a...like, a stage name?”

A thread of tension broke in his chest. “Yes.” It was right. “Yes, it is. But it’s still not mine.”

She shrugged, still sincerely distressed. “I don’t know what else to call you.”

“It’s okay to call me Cameron,” he said, knowing that too, was somehow right. “But I don’t think of myself that way. Neither does he.”

“Who?”

He opened his mouth to say something. Some name. Some face. Nothing came out. He closed his eyes again and tried to ignore the panic that was crowding out the comfort of her presence. “I don’t know. I just know that it’s important. It has to do with why I’m on the boat. Why I’ve been snatched instead.”

“Instead of what?”

Her hand. On his chest, resting as lightly as a breeze. Warming him, calming him, letting him know that no matter what he could or couldn’t remember, no matter what was wrong or lost or in danger, she was there with him. Instinctively, he reached up to take hold of it and anchor himself there.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t seem to know much.”

She held on tight. Leaned closer. “It’s okay. It’ll all come back, you’ll see. For now, though, let’s just pretend. We’ll pretend you’re Cameron Ross so you have a name. So you know how to react to people.”

“And who will you pretend to be?” he asked.

There was tension in her fingers, even if her voice was just as soft and soothing. “I never learned to pretend for a living, Mr. Ross. I’m just me.”

He opened his eyes. Considered the face that hovered over him like a soft, bronze moon. The eyes wide, dark and deep. The hair, black as night and tumbled around bare shoulders. The soft, full body tucked into a bright red swimsuit. An impressionist portrait of femininity. A dream of comfort and life. The smile of the sun and the water holding his hand.

“You’re perfectly fine, Lilly,” he assured her, lifting his free hand to her soft face. “Perfectly fine just the way you are.”

Her teeth flashed against her tanned skin. “You did get hit on the head, Mr. Ross. Tell you what. You just close your eyes. I’m going to rummage around and see if I can find some first aid supplies, since they sank mine with my boat. If you don’t do something about those cuts and bruises, you’re going to have some scars you don’t want.”

Her voice sounded breathless, almost upset. He couldn’t place it. But when she pulled away, she did it gently, so she didn’t hurt him. What surprised him more was that it did hurt. Ached, as if he’d been separated from something vital.

“You the oldest in your family, too, Miss Kokoa?” he asked.

She halted. Waited. Smiled again, as if surprised. “As a matter of fact, I am. Terminal caregiver, that’s me. And you don’t need to call me that,” she said. “Especially after what we’ve just been through. Please call me Lilly.”

“I had much the same thought.”

“You want to be called Lilly?”

For the first time since he’d found himself in the raft, he laughed. Really laughed. Even though it hurt like knives, it felt familiar, healing, as if he resorted to it in times of stress. Which, considering the circumstances, was probably appropriate.

“I may be called many things,” he assured her. “I sincerely doubt Lilly is one of them. I guess Cameron will do. Or hey you. Or whosits.”

“Whosits it is,” she agreed. “Now, close your eyes and rest. I’ll be right back.”

“Lilly?”

She stopped. “Yes?”

He tried to make his smile nonchalant. He knew, without seeing her, that she wouldn’t be fooled. “While you’re scrounging up supplies, could you find some aspirin? And maybe some food? I have a feeling that part of my problem is bad nutrition.”

She huffed, as if impatient. “I should have thought of that. Not a lot to eat on a life raft, huh?”

“Why should you have thought about it?” he demanded. “Are you trained for finding strange guys on life rafts?”

He at least got a little chuckle out of her. “Sure. Standard Hawaiian schooling for all the dumb haoles who can’t paddle a canoe. Now, close your eyes for a little while, while I figure this out.”

He did. Even so, he held on to the sound of her, the soft pad of her feet, the throaty hum of her voice as she moved. He didn’t want to let her out of his reach. And not just because she was the only thing he was certain of—because she was something he thought he hadn’t seen much of. She was someone he thought he shouldn’t let loose, like a rare bird sighted in the high branches of a backyard tree.

Lilly. Flower of rebirth. Sweet and tough and bold at once. He liked the image. He liked the woman. He lay with his eyes closed and just drifted on the nearness of her.

He was scaring her. Not just by the fact that he still couldn’t remember, still couldn’t see, but by the fact that he was making her so comfortable around him. So committed and concerned.

She’d been stroking his face. Lilly didn’t do that. Not to anybody but the people she loved. She knew better. The world wasn’t comfortable with touchers. Her Tutu Mary had been a world-class toucher, with hands like miracles, soft and bright and healing. Kahuna’s hands. But Lilly didn’t have kahuna hands. No one did anymore. Lilly just had the instincts bred of a dozen generations of healers, whether she admitted it or not.

For a moment she just stood at the bottom of the bed and stared at him. Just considered what she’d gotten herself into. Lilly Kokoa, librarian extraordinaire, Mike and Wanda Kokoa’s little girl, who knew everybody on the north shore and wanted nothing more in her life than to live near her family and practice a trade that didn’t involve wearing a grass skirt in front of strangers. And suddenly she was stuck in the middle of a movie plot with kidnapers and international movie stars in tuxedos. The Lilly who had left Oahu four days earlier would have laughed at the idea. The Lilly who stood on the carpeted deck of a luxury cruiser, staring down at the compelling features of a man she barely knew, didn’t.

Lilly wasn’t a dreamer. Lilly knew what her life would be. She’d known it from the first moment her mother had said, “Lilly, child, somehow all those beautiful genes of your ancestors mixed up just a little wrong on you.” The reactions of the boys she’d known had borne it out, and the world at large had cemented it. Lilly, whose sister had been a finalist for Miss Hawaii, was plain. She was a young woman with a better brain than a face, and a pragmatism that balanced with age-old instincts that still made people nervous. But Lilly didn’t mind. She didn’t need what she didn’t have and cherished what she did. Which was her family and her interests and her home.

But Lilly wasn’t a savior. She wasn’t an action heroine. She wasn’t a Bond girl.

So what the heck was she doing here trying to save a man who wouldn’t have so much as noticed her if he’d come across her any place else? More important, what was she doing being so afraid for him, as if he meant something to her?

It’s those feet, she said to herself with a wry smile she didn’t feel. I go to do my good deed for the day and find myself obsessing over naked toes.

And hands. And wry, sweet, unfocused eyes the color of deep ocean.

Lilly shook her head as if she were shaking off water and headed for the bathroom to try to scare up some supplies. She should have been laughing at her ridiculous predicament. Instead she was praying.

“You’ve been shot!”

“I was thinking...”

Lilly looked up from the wound she’d just exposed. “Did you listen to me? I said you’ve been shot.”

Positioned with his back against the headboard, his head already circled in a dramatic slash of white gauze, Cameron Ross flashed her an easy grin. “I heard you. Since I’m still alive and my leg seems intact, I imagine it’s all right.”

Lilly wanted to cry. She wanted to run. She was way out of her league here, and it just kept getting worse.

“No, it is not all right,” she insisted. “You can hardly stand up, you have a concussion, and now I find out you’ve been shot. How can that be okay?”

He smiled like a little boy. “I’m alive,” he said. “Considering the alternatives, that’s not bad. Now, are you going to listen?”

Lilly took a second to shut him away beyond closed eyelids. She was tired already, and she’d just been up today. Not out in a life raft for two days. She’d let Cameron sleep for two hours, and he looked more alert than she felt. It wasn’t fair. And that didn’t even take into account the problem at hand, which was the extent of the injuries he’d sustained. Considering how battered and bruised he looked, he should be semi-comatose.

Lilly took another look at the angry gash in his thigh, where the bullet had entered. The salt water hadn’t hurt it, but the time hadn’t helped. Lilly couldn’t think of anything else to do than what she’d already done for his head. Hydrogen peroxide, antibiotic ointment and a dressing. Trying to ignore the fact that her hands were shaking, she set to work.

And did her best to ignore the hard ridges of muscle in that thigh. The flat, washboard abdomen only inches north.

Everything else in between.

Lilly shut her eyes again. This was insane. She was losing her mind, terrified one minute, lusting the next. Or maybe the same. She couldn’t tell anymore. She just knew she should never have told him to strip off that tux. Now he was lounging on the bed in boxers and bandages, and she was in more trouble than ever.

“Lilly?”

Silk boxers. With cartoon figures of Tweety Bird and Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian, who all seemed to be laughing at her.

She refused to open her eyes. “Yes.”

“You’re not getting sick on me, are you?”

If only it were that simple. “No.”

“How soon is the storm coming?”

That did get her to look at him. Lounging back on that bed, lean and male and magnificent, even with those unfocused eyes and all the bruising and abrasions starkly set against too-pale skin. “What?”

He smiled, as if it would help coax the information free. “When was the next storm expected?”

Distracted, Lilly took a look out the window, where the sun was sinking in a red haze to the west. So instinctive was her adjustment to the feel of the increasing swell beneath her that she hadn’t even noticed it. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Tonight sometime. Maybe early morning.”

“You mean you can’t read the waves or anything? I thought you said you were Hawaiian.”

She spun on him, ready to snap, only to see the glint of humor in his eyes. Here he was injured, held captive, and he was trying to make her feel better. She could fall in love with a guy like this.

Good thing she knew better.

She managed a none-too-enthusiastic grin. “We Kokoas have the distinction of being the only Hawaiians ever to sink our outrigger.”

“A fine one to be making cracks about us haoles.”

She wanted to giggle. The problem was, if she giggled, she would never stop. Her hands were shaking, and she wanted to vomit. And he was the one with the head injury.

“My Portuguese ancestors, on the other hand, landed on Hawaii during a storm just like this one... well, they didn’t land so much as smash into the shore.”

“Quite a family tree.” His grin was still light and easy, and Lilly wanted to play along. Until his next declaration. “I figure we can use the storm to get free.”

Lilly had been all set to clean his leg. That brought her attention sharply back. “We can what?”

That grin again, brash and fearless, as if he weren’t darn near horizontal from the last try. “Well, it worked before. Why not again?”

“It did not work before,” she retorted. “You’re right back where you started. Only this time you’re working on only one leg and half a brain.”

“Ah, that’s okay,” he assured her. “I have a feeling I’ve never worked on more than half a brain before anyway. What kind of distraction can we provide?”

That brought her to her feet, balled fists on hips. “Don’t do this,” she insisted. “We should wait here. Find out what’s going on. Wait until the ransom is paid, and then we’ll be released.”

She tried very hard to face down his skepticism. It didn’t work.

“Is that how the movie came out?” he asked gently. “The one where I’m kidnaped? Did the kidnapers let the president go after the ransom was paid?”

Lilly stared out the window. “It was just a movie.”

Biting back an oath at the effort it took, Cameron launched himself up to sit, his legs hanging off the side of the bed. “I may not remember much, Lilly,” he told her, his eyes empty of that mad sparkle, “but I think I remember that if a kidnaper is going to let his victims go, he generally tries really hard not to let them see his face.”

Well, that made her feel better. “I know.”

“Then you know we have to get out of here.”

That brought her head up. “How?”

He looked around as if he could actually focus. “I don’t know. Let’s check out the room and see if we find anything. Who knows? Maybe the ship’s computer system goes through here and I can reprogram it.”

“This isn’t a movie, Cameron.”

He smiled. “But I do know computers,” he said. “Find me one, and maybe I can do some damage.”

“You sit down,” she said. “I’ll look.”

He shook his head and got unsteadily to his feet. “No. We’ll both look.”

Lilly took a look as every inch of his more than six feet uncoiled before her and found herself struggling for breath. “Well, would you at least put some clothes on first?” she demanded. “It’s really hard to be serious about this when the only thing you’re wearing is Daffy Duck.”

She saw the real confusion in Cameron’s eyes when she said that. He looked down, as if trying to remember what he would find. “I could probably use a good mouthwash and a shave, too, couldn’t I?” he admitted ruefully.

Lilly almost laughed. His head couldn’t be so banged up that he didn’t realize how stop-traffic-on-a-six-lanehighway-gorgeous he was. Pecs and a six-pack, her sister would have said. The Impossible Dream, was how Lilly saw it. And topped off with a face that only seemed more roguish with that stubble of beard he was affecting. Gentle and wise and rare.

And she wasn’t even going to consider his feet.

So she turned around and began searching the cabin.

The room would have been huge even if they’d been on land. It was also clean. No, not clean. Almost sterile. Devoid of little musses and dropped objects that signified real occupation. Empty of personal photos or comfortable clutter.

“Don’t you know anybody well enough to hang their picture?” she asked.

There was a pause. “I don’t know.”

Lilly flinched. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Well, we won’t get any hints about the real Cameron Ross in this room. I don’t think he lives here.”

She got another pause, this one longer. Lilly turned to see Cameron standing in the bathroom, balancing himself with his hands against the sink, his consideration on the man in the mirror.

“Familiar?” she couldn’t help but ask.

He didn’t answer right away. Just kept staring. “I don’t ever think it occurs to anyone that he won’t recognize the face he sees in the mirror.”

Lilly didn’t even realize she was moving until she stood next to him in the bathroom door. “You mean it?”

She should have sounded less afraid. She shouldn’t have reached out to touch him. But when he turned, she was right there, her hand on his arm. And he smiled. A smile that only hinted at the turmoil that must have been going on behind those sky-blue eyes.

“Kind of silly to be this afraid of somebody I’m supposed to know pretty well.”

Lilly was a toucher, just like her tutu had been, and hers before her. So her natural instinct was to touch. To offer comfort. Without a qualm, she just rose on her toes and wrapped her arms around him.

And he held her, too, curling around her as if she were his last hold on sanity. As if he were reassuring himself with her reality to bolster his own.

“It’s going to be okay,” she insisted in a whisper, her cheek against his chest. “I promise.”

His instinctive laugh was a rumble against her ear. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, young lady.”

Lilly pulled her head back and smiled for him. “But I can keep them,” she said. “My ancestors were kahunas. The keepers of the secrets, who knew magic and medicine the likes of which we’ll never know again. They knew things the world has lost, and in my dreams they share them with me. I know what’s going to happen, and I know what isn’t. And I know you’re going to be okay.”

She said it more for the soothing sound of a voice, any voice, to pull him away from whatever precipice on which he found himself balanced. She didn’t realize how much she wanted to believe it, just this once. Just for him.

She didn’t realize how her wish would affect him.

She did when he kissed her. Wrapped in his arms, tight against his chest, her body full and flush against his, her hands against his broad back, her head tilted and her eyes, impossibly, closed.

Lilly Kokoa had been a practical girl. She was a practical woman. For just a moment, though, a hairbreadth of time locked on the edge of disaster, she lost her logic and flew.

And then pulled gently away.

Her breathing was ragged, her skin on fire where it met his, her mind in a puddle. She saw only needy blue eyes, craggy, haggard cheeks, the beginnings of a beard that had left her own cheeks scrubbed. She heard the syncopated rasp of their breathing and knew exactly what she had to say.

“Um, there’s...something I have to tell you....”

He didn’t budge. Didn’t loosen his hold or his need or his fine, sweet gaze. “What?”

At least he sounded as confused as she felt.

So she closed her eyes. “You’re married.”

Which was, of course, the exact moment that their kidnapers slammed through the cabin door and knocked her straight back into his arms.

Three

“What are you two up to in here?” Huey demanded, automatic pistol pointed at Lilly’s back.

Cameron—though he still couldn’t quite think of himself as Cameron—just held on to her, as if that could somehow protect her from a trio of inept kidnapers carrying more firepower than the Dallas police department.

“Trying to get his injuries taken care of,” Lilly grated against his chest.

At least she wasn’t trying to pull out of his arms. He was sure he didn’t want her to, for the sole reason that these guys were itchy and unprofessional and might shoot. Not because she felt so healing there. Not because he could smell those flowers in her hair, or because he thought she had the softest skin he’d ever touched.

Which, of course, he shouldn’t be feeling, since he was already married to somebody else.

Married.

Nothing came. No image, no feeling, no name. He knew he still hadn’t lost that nagging feeling that he needed to be somewhere else, but the idea of a wife didn’t cement any reason for it. He just felt antsy, as if he had to get home.

He looked at Duey and Louise lining up behind Huey and decided that his matrimonial status could wait.

“What do you want?” he asked as calmly as he could.

Huey smiled. “Financial security in troubled times. Peace on earth. A house in Jamaica the size of LAX. Got a problem with that?”

Cameron shook his head. “Every boy’s dream.”

Huey laughed and pulled the gun in to rest across his chest, which he could do, since his partners still had theirs trained on ground zero.

Louise snickered. “That what famous movie stars wear under their evening clothes these days?” she demanded.

He looked down to realize that he was still damn near naked. Standing there with Lilly in his arms. Able to smell that plumeria that drifted off her like smoke and struck by the most powerful urge just to sink his face in that silky hair of hers.

Maybe he’d been in a lot of movies where he’d pretended this happened, but he would bet it had never happened to him in real life.

“My personal comment on fashion,” he said as evenly as he could.

He wanted to ask what they wanted. He was afraid to. Afraid they would demand that Lilly leave. Demand worse, when he knew damn well he didn’t have the skills to prevent it.

He had the urge, the overwhelming reflex, to just lash out. Considering the fact that he still couldn’t put his weight on his left leg, he knew how well that would work out.

Then Huey surprised him again.

“Who’s Ethan?” Huey asked.

He lifted his head, stunned. “What?”

“Ya deaf? Who’s Ethan?”

His answer was instinctive. “Me.”

Lilly almost cracked his chin with the back of her head when she looked up. “You?”

“What are you talking about?” Huey demanded, the pistol back in place.

He didn’t know. God, he just wanted to lie down for about four hours and figure it out. Tickle the rest of that memory loose. Figure out this married thing so he could get back to Lilly.

All he could do was close his eyes and hold his breath.

Ethan.

It was his; more than Cameron, more than the tuxes, more than this ship. But he didn’t know why. He didn’t know how.

“His middle name,” Lilly spoke up, turning carefully to face their captors.

“That don’t make sense,” Duey snapped.

“Shut up,” Huey told him. “Makes perfect sense. The computer keeps asking for Ethan, like it’s a password or something. Of course Cameron Ross isn’t gonna just put his real name out there for the world.” Then he turned to Lilly. “You sure?”

Lilly flashed him a smile. “You kidding? I’ve had Cameron Ross on my bedroom wall since I was twelve. I know more about him than his mother.”

Huey scowled with meaning. “You know he’s married?”

Cameron...no, Ethan. Ethan wanted to laugh. Didn’t it just figure he would be kidnaped by criminals who picked and chose their commandments?

“Of course I do,” Lilly assured the man. “What kind of person you think I am?”

Louise’s laugh said it all.

Lilly glared at the three of them. “You knocked me into him, you jerks. He wanted to clean up, and I was trying to get him into the bathroom on a leg that isn’t working very well because you shot him.”

All three looked down at the gauze and tape that circled Ethan’s leg.

“Oh,” Huey said, surprised. “Sorry.”

Lilly sniffed. “You should be. Now get out so he can finish. It’s getting pretty rank in here, and I doubt you’re going to let me get any fresh air any time soon.”

Obviously stunned at hearing that particular tone of voice coming from a kidnaping victim, Huey turned on Ethan with a little wave of his gun in Lilly’s direction. “You let her talk to you like that?”

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