Captain's Paradise (13 page)

She wasn’t reluctant, and slipped both arms around his lean waist. “Thanks,” she said unsteadily. “I was feeling a little shaky.”

“So am I,” he said, kissing her forehead gently.

“It’ll be all right,” she told him fiercely, rubbing her cheek against his chest. “Lisa and the other girls will be fine.”

“I know.”

Robin braced herself inwardly. “When you and Dane slip aboard the yacht, I—I’m going with you.”

Michael had been expecting that. He could have argued all the drawbacks, and argued convincingly. Robin was inexperienced at this kind of situation. She strongly mistrusted her own abilities and was convinced her fear would paralyze her. Still, he knew, she had unresolved feelings of guilt over having escaped when the other girls hadn’t, and she was furiously angry at the men responsible.

In a very real sense she was a ticking bomb that would either be safely defused … or blow up.

And that was why Michael couldn’t ignore her determination. If he refused to allow her to come with him and Dane for the sake of her own safety, her feelings of inadequacy would prompt her to hear the words:
I don’t have any faith in you either. I think you’ll freeze
.

He couldn’t do such a thing to her. Even
though the stakes were agonizingly high, the simple fact was he could no more do anything to hurt Robin than he could Lisa. And it was tearing him apart.

“Michael?”

He tightened his arm around her, drawing her closer. “I know that too,” he said finally, calmly.

“You didn’t report in again last night,” Daniel Stuart told his agent. “For God’s sake, Skye, what’s wrong with you?”

The man at the other end of the line cleared his throat. “Sorry, but there were a few—er, complications, and I had to move pretty fast.”

“What kind of
complications
?” Daniel asked with deceptive mildness to his tone.

Remembering his mental rehearsals of this information, Skye realized that the practice had done no good at all; he still didn’t know how to tell Daniel the whole story.

“Skye?”

“Yes, I’m still here.”

“Then talk to me, dammit. What’s going on?”

Skye drew an audible breath. “First, Michael has backup on this personal mission of his. The ladies I’ve been watching are now firmly in his corner, and they’re pulling strings right and left. Things are happening even as we speak.”

“What? Why would they—”

“Wait. I’ll get to that later. They’ve set up a dandy diversion to draw Edward Sutton away from the yacht where he’s holding Lisa along with several other girls.”

There was a long silence, and then Daniel asked, “Is Sutton a slaver?”

“You caught that quicker than I did. Apparently he is. Seems he had several girls taken from a number of clubs a few days ago. He probably meant to ship them south before Michael came after Lisa, but there’s a hell of a flap going on down here because of an alert for a drug shipment. The waters as well as the airways are hot. Sutton had to hole up and wait it out. Then one of the girls took her fate in her own hands and jumped ship. Michael fished her out of the water.
She was able to tie Sutton to the club where she was snatched. And Michael, given the knowledge that Sutton could be on a yacht, lost no time in finding out—via Dane—the name and location of the yacht.”

“My God,” Daniel muttered.

“Yeah. My thoughts exactly. At any rate, the ladies I’ve been watching teamed up with Dane and headed for the Ten Thousand Islands very late last night.”

“With Dane? What’ve you been doing?”

“Setting up the diversion at this end.”

“You—”

“What else could I do, Daniel? I’m a trusted friend of Dane’s, and somebody had to do the legwork.”

Finally Daniel asked, “Do they know who you are?”

“Of course not.”

There was another long silence, and then Daniel said, “I don’t understand how your ladies got into this. The only one of the three who’s even
met Michael is Raven Long. What brought them tearing down there?”

“The connection wasn’t with Michael, Daniel. They just went looking for him—and for Dane—because they needed information. A friend of one of them had turned up missing, and they were trying to find her.”

Daniel Stuart stared blindly across his office, the instincts and intuition of a lifetime going off like a bell. “Skye, a friend of which one?”

“Teddy Steele.”

“Not Robin,” Daniel said hollowly.

“She’s all right,” Skye said. “At least … Oh, hell, Daniel, she’s with Michael. She was the one he pulled out of the water. And, apparently, she’s determined to help him get his sister and the other girls off that yacht.”

“Why didn’t you contact me? I could have—”

“What? Flown down here? Things were moving so fast then, you wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of stopping them. Between them, Raven and Dane had come up with a plan to cut the odds, and they put that plan into motion. I helped, because
it seemed the best thing to do. Now Sutton’s on his way to Miami, and Michael and Robin have a very talented group as backup.”

“I’m coming down there,” Daniel said.

“Yeah,” Skye said. “I thought you would.”

K
NEELING BETWEEN
M
ICHAEL
and Dane in the tangled undergrowth of the Maze, Robin stared across more than twenty feet of placid water at the
Dragon Lady
. The yacht was a peaceful sight, a couple of lights glowing dimly in starboard portholes, and a radio played quietly. Though it was only half past four, the cove was heavily shaded, and the yacht drifted in the shadows of twilight.

“How long?” Michael asked softly, tension evident in his voice.

Dane looked at his watch; in his free hand he held a small radio transmitter much more compact than a conventional walkie-talkie, and set to a frequency that would not interfere with normal radio transmissions. “Fifteen minutes,” he answered, his voice equally low.

Robin, most of her mental energy involved in a determined battle against the cold fear crawling inside her, tried to keep her thoughts clear. The big cruiser, with Raven, Teddy, and Kyle—and three of Sutton’s guards—aboard was anchored just outside the cove, and all around the islands small and large fishing boats had swarmed in to try to win the unexpected prize money.

More than twenty minutes before, Raven and Teddy had hung over the side of the cruiser, dressed in scandalously brief swimsuits, and called out a laughing, pseudo-drunken invitation to the men on the yacht to join them for a party. After a brief, heated argument among Sutton’s guards, three of them had launched an inflatable rubber dinghy and rowed over to the cruiser to accept the invitation. Robin, Michael,
and Dane were waiting tensely for Raven to notify them that those party-inclined guards had been put out of commission.

Their best estimate was that there were four guards left on the yacht, at least two of whom, Raven had radioed, had dropped lines off the port side in a clear attempt to resemble fishermen.

“She should have radioed by now,” Michael said.

“She will.” Dane appeared unperturbed but kept one eye on his watch.

They could have moved against the yacht then, but neither Michael nor Dane had even considered doing so. They needed to know those guards would not be returning to the yacht, and they wanted to make certain Raven and her friends had no problems in subduing the men who had taken their bait.

Quietly, and still dividing his attention between his watch and the yacht, Dane said, “We should touch as little as possible on the yacht.
Experts should be able to get a few of Sutton’s fingerprints.”

Michael gave him a sharp look. “You think this case will ever make it to court?”

“I think so,” Dane replied calmly. “One of those thugs will be more than willing to talk if it means saving his own skin. The other ladies and I can testify to the fact that Sutton’s been aboard the yacht. My credibility may be a little shaky,” he added in a wry tone, “but those ladies are above reproach. And to top it all, you feds have been trying to get your hands on Sutton for some time now. This ought to do it.”

Robin looked up at Michael. “Will it be enough for you?” she asked. “If Sutton goes to prison?”

After a moment Michael replied, “We’ll see.”

She knew what that meant. Once they found out how Lisa and the others had fared, Michael would decide whether to leave justice to the courts.

Dane’s radio transmitter whispered softly, and they all heard Raven’s muted but cheerful voice.

“Our guests are trussed up nicely. In five minutes all the guards left on the yacht should be on the port side, with their attention focused on us. Good luck, guys.”

Some of the tension eased from Michael’s face. Almost to himself, he murmured admiringly, “No wonder Hagen kept drafting those people.”

“Hagen?” Robin asked, and it was Dane who replied.

“A federal honcho.”

Michael gave him a look. “How do you know about him?”

Dane grinned. “I know a lot of things—and people—I’m not supposed to know.”

“I’ll bet,” Michael remarked.

During the brief conversation they had been getting ready for the short, cautious swim to the yacht. The men were in swim trunks, with a number of waterproof equipment pouches belted around their waists; several items had come from Michael’s boat, the remainder Dane and Raven had anticipated and brought along from Miami. They each carried an automatic pistol
equipped with silencer, a long hunting knife, several short lengths of nylon rope, several pairs of the plastic handcuffs some federal authorities had begun using instead of metal ones, and compact tool kits—all just in case. In addition, Michael carried a coil of rope, knotted at intervals, with a rubber-tipped grappling hook on one end.

Robin wore a swimsuit borrowed from Teddy, with a similar belt containing a silenced automatic, several pairs of the handcuffs, and a Swiss Army knife. All of them carried an extra clip of bullets as a precaution, and each hoped not a single shot would be fired.

They were ready to execute their plan.

For Robin this situation was out of her worst nightmares. For almost half her life she had dreaded being put to this sort of test. She was an equal partner here, with her own role to play, her own set duties to perform, and if she failed in those duties, people could die.

She was a part of this by her own choice, but it was only Michael’s matter-of-fact confidence in
her that had allowed her to come this far. Dane’s easy acceptance had helped, but it was Michael who knew only too well just how afraid she was. And with his own sister’s life at stake …

Robin had never been so afraid, and she had never been more determined to control her fear. The single most important realization Michael had forced her to face was that she
had
hedged the biggest bet of her life. She had failed an exam she should have passed easily, and that failure had marked her.

This was a test she had no intention of failing.

The side of the yacht nearest them, the starboard side, had been empty of activity as long as they had watched, but they waited until they heard Raven’s clear, merry voice hailing the boat before they slipped into the water. Occupied with swimming as quietly as possible, they didn’t catch much of the shouted conversation, but it appeared Raven was castigating them for having
redneck friends who were making a shambles of her cruiser’s cabin.

Her language was decidedly colorful, and seemed to amuse the men remaining on the yacht.

Reaching the yacht and moving carefully to a point where they could climb aboard unobserved by the guards, they trod water for a few moments, and then Michael very cautiously tossed the grappling hook up to the brass railing. It caught with a barely audible thud. Within seconds he was climbing the knotted rope quickly and easily.

Robin followed a moment later, not quite as quickly but with no wasted time or motion, and Dane came up after her.

They were pressed against the wheelhouse, and the sounds of Raven’s conversation with Sutton’s men were clearer now; she was still giving them hell, and they were still laughing and encouraging her.

Robin found herself automatically reaching for her gun and thumbing off the safety, holding
it in a two-handed police grip at her right shoulder, pointed upward. She remained beside Michael as Dane eased toward the bow; until she got safely below, his job was to keep watch and make certain they weren’t surprised by an approach from the front of the yacht. Then, when Robin was below, Dane would ease around to the port side and come at Sutton’s men from the bow while Michael advanced on them from the stern.

Michael slipped along the wall of the wheelhouse, edging toward the stern until he could peer around and locate the entrance to the cabins below. Dane had provided a sketch of the complete layout of the yacht, and their movements once they got on board had been planned carefully.

Michael whispered, “The guards must be on the other side of the wheelhouse; I can’t see them.”

“I’m ready,” Robin murmured.

Michael nodded once and exchanged places with her, holding his gun ready. “Three minutes,
then Dane and I make our move. We’ll be as quiet as possible. As soon as the guards topside are disarmed, I’ll be heading below.”

“Right.”

“I’ll cover you.” He looked at her, his hard gray eyes lightening briefly in what was almost a smile. “Watch yourself, honey.”

“You too.” Robin managed a smile, drew a deep breath, then slipped around the side of the wheelhouse. Her bare feet made no sound on the deck, and it took only the space of heartbeats for her to cross the required space to the stairs leading below.

And this was the part of the plan that, by necessity, had been loosely constructed. The best efforts of Dane and the ladies had not told them how many men, if any, might be belowdeck. They had theorized that a ship of this size, with at least ten men usually aboard, could have a cook, even a steward; they had no way of knowing if one of the “guards” was also the pilot, if one or more men had remained below since the
yacht had been under observation, or if there was a crew in addition to Sutton’s thugs.