Captain's Paradise (19 page)

Robin caught at his back, her fingers digging in, gasping at the incredible sensation that was still a briefly unfamiliar one; it was like the
memory of pain that was a thought, the real sensation always unexpected and stark. He was filling her, throbbing inside her, a part of her.

Michael tangled his fingers in her hair and covered her mouth with his, kissing her deeply but with a new, searing tenderness. He was still, buried inside her, the tight heat of her sheath holding him in an unbelievable secret caress. He couldn’t stop kissing her, delving into the hot, sweet darkness of her mouth again and again. Her long legs were around him, her hands stroking his back almost frantically, and the hardness of her nipples prodded him.

“Have I told you you’re beautiful?” he asked in a raw, husky tone, still unmoving, heavy on her.

She struggled for breath enough to respond. “I don’t remember,” she managed finally, a bit wildly, the coiled tension of her body holding her in a taut, blissful grip.

His mouth curved. “You are.” He kissed her again, then again, and his body moved subtly.

Robin gasped, all her senses flaring, her arms
and legs going briefly rigid around him. “Oh …” She lifted her head and bit his shoulder abruptly, maddened.

His chuckle was a rough sensation against her throat. “Beautiful Robin,” he said, kissing her throat, moving again in that delicate way that sent a jolt through her entire body. “Beautiful, brave Robin. And mine. Mine?”

“Yours.” She moaned. “Oh,
damn
you, Michael!”

“Mine,” he said in a rasping tone, his eyes clinging in a primitive look of deep satisfaction. He moved again, then again, the gentle, subtle undulations of before becoming long, slow thrusts. She cried out, clinging to him frantically, her body moving with his.

“Love me,” he said softly.

“I do.” The tension was rushing now, storming, battering her in increasing waves of pleasure. “I love you.”

Michael made a low, rough sound deep in his throat, the controls of tenderness and teasing splintering to release the inferno inside him. He
wanted more of her, wanted to imprint her with the very essence of himself, suddenly terrified of losing what he had only just admitted he needed so critically. Robin. Beautiful, brave Robin, with her heartbreaking eyes and quick mind, her courage and her passion. He thought he’d die with needing her.

With loving her.

The explosion of emotion was like something rupturing inside him, marking him indelibly; in the same instant Robin cried out wildly, and the hot inner contractions of her ecstasy caught him in another tearing storm, until shock waves of pleasure tangled with the wild emotions.

And though it emerged in a hoarse whisper and with his last ounce of strength, nothing on earth could have stopped him from saying, “I love you, Robin.”

When she could move again, Robin managed to raise herself on an elbow and stare down at
him. “When did you get so possessive?” she asked somewhat weakly.

He opened one eye, then closed it again. “I always have been. You just didn’t notice,” he told her.

Robin made herself comfortable beside him again, her head pillowed on his shoulder. “I would have noticed that,” she said musingly. “You weren’t. Not until today.”

“It just got away from me today, that’s all. Does it bother you?” he asked politely.

She giggled a little, so exhausted and blissfully sleepy she could hardly think straight. “No shabby tiger. Mine isn’t shabby either, in case you missed that.”

He chuckled, drew her a bit closer. “I didn’t. In fact, you clawed my heart up good and proper. Go to sleep, love.”

Smiling, she did.

Michael woke slowly, his internal clock telling him he’d slept only a couple of hours. The sun
was setting, throwing its dying orange light through the window. He was tempted to drift off again, but a niggling sense of wrongness prodded him until he finally eased away from Robin and sat up.

She murmured something and turned her face into the pillow, and he looked down at her, tenderness rushing through him. One day he might find the words to tell her how much she meant to him, if any words could. One day he might be able to tell her that her vivid green eyes were the only light he’d ever known in the shadows all around him; they kept the darkness at bay.

One day.

He pulled his gaze from her reluctantly, looking around the room and wondering what was wrong. Then he realized. The gun Daniel had left for his daughter after the FBI had confiscated hers lay on the dresser, where she habitually left it, but his own was missing. It took him a moment to remember, and he closed his eyes, almost groaning.

Dumb. He’d left it in the den when they had
wandered out onto the deck, and what with one thing and another he’d not given it a single thought since. And the French doors standing wide open, a blatant invitation. Daniel’s two men, stationed outside and under cover, were watching the house, of course, but that hardly excused his own carelessness.

Some agent he was.

He slipped from the bed, careful not to wake Robin, and bent briefly to draw the sheet up over her. She stirred and smiled in her sleep, and he fought the urge to climb back in beside her and wake her with kisses, maybe even …

Later. First he had to get his gun and lock up downstairs. He found his jeans and pulled them on, then went softly to the door and out onto the walkway above the den. The orange light spilling through all the glass downstairs gave the place a hellish glow, and he noted that idly as he went down the stairs.

He closed and locked the French doors first, then turned toward the kitchen. His gun was on
the counter beside the other door; he’d put it there when—

Michael stopped suddenly halfway between the den and kitchen, all his thoughts tumbling, senses flaring, his muscles tensing in an instinctive reaction to danger.

His gun. It was gone.

And then a man rose abruptly from behind the breakfast bar, and there was the gun, in his hands, pointed with deadly accuracy at Michael.

“Hello, Captain.”

“Hello, Sutton,” Michael answered hollowly.

E
DWARD
S
UTTON SMILED
, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. He was normally a handsome man in his forties, with the blond good looks that generally adorned lifeguards; the past few days obviously hadn’t been kind to him. His clothes were rumpled, he was unshaven, and the gleam of revenge in his cold blue eyes had escalated to something near madness.

“You couldn’t stay out of my life, could you?” he demanded, his voice harsh.

Michael was trying to think clearly. “Come
off it, Sutton. You took my sister as bait to draw me out, and we both know it. Surely you didn’t think I’d just sit on my hands.” Sutton’s back was to the walkway above; Michael deliberately let his voice rise.

Sutton nodded jerkily. “Oh, I knew you’d come after her. I knew you’d suffer because I had her. That’s what I wanted. For you to suffer. The way I suffered after you meddled years ago and broke up my cartel.”

“Cartel?” Michael laughed, playing for time. “Is that what you called it? That’s a laugh. You and your
associates
were bleeding that country dry, violating every international law in existence. If I’d been your judge, I’d sure as hell have done more than exile your ass!”

Michael had caught a flicker of motion from the corner of his eye, but didn’t dare look to see if it was Robin moving silently down the stairs. If she could get into position at the bottom, she’d have a clear shot at Sutton. He set a mental time limit, knowing she wouldn’t shoot as long as that gun remained pointed squarely at his chest.
Just a few more seconds …

“… I’m going to kill you,” Sutton was saying in a kind of monotone. “I wanted to watch you suffer first, but now I’ll just kill you. They’re after me again, thanks to you, and I don’t have time to waste.”

“Less time than you know,” Michael said.

Sutton laughed harshly. “Those two outside? I took care of them before I came in here. You ought to choose your watchdogs more carefully—”

“Not them,” Michael interrupted flatly. “Do you really think I’d just sit here alone, waiting for you to take
my
bait?”

“You always work alone,” Sutton declared, but his eyes were beginning to dart nervously.

“Not this time. This time I have a partner. How else do you think I managed to board your yacht and disarm your men? I have a partner, Sutton. Holding a gun on you right now.”

“You’re lying!” Sutton shouted.

“No, he isn’t,” Robin said. And she took no chances; the instant the armed man twitched
toward her and his gun no longer covered Michael, she shot it out of his hand.

Michael retrieved the gun while Sutton clasped his hand to his chest, cursing. Putting a bit of distance between himself and the wounded man, Michael said calmly, “Thank God for your marksmanship; it’s twice you’ve done that.”

Robin, dressed only in one of his shirts, her arm braced against the stair railing and the gun still steadily covering Sutton, flicked him a glance and said, “Actually, I meant to warn you about that. Marksmanship was always my weak point. So we’d better not count on a third fluke.”

Michael could have laughed out loud, and nearly did. Instead, grinning, he said, “If you’ll keep him covered, I’ll go check on the backup we were supposed to have.”

Robin moved to a point halfway into the kitchen, cutting the distance between herself and Sutton. “Sure. I’m bound to hit him from here.”

“You could hit him from there with a baseball
bat,” Michael observed, and went out to check on the backup.

Sutton didn’t chance it.

Two hours later Sutton was gone, towed away by the two FBI men who were nursing sore heads and subsequently disinclined to view their prisoner with kind eyes. In fact, they were rather obviously hopeful he’d try to escape so they could shoot him, a fact that a very subdued Sutton seemed to appreciate.

“I think he’ll make it to Miami,” Michael said as he came back inside. “At least I believe they won’t kill him.”

Robin was standing before the open refrigerator door, peering within. “We’ll have to get more groceries. If we’re staying until the end of the week, that is.”

“Hey.” Michael turned her around to face him, looking down at her gravely.

She slid her arms around his waist and held him tightly for a moment, then pulled back and
smiled up at him. “I’m fine. I was scared to death, though.”

Repeating something she had once said to him, Michael declared, “It didn’t show.”

“I love you,” she told him fiercely. “All I could think was that I wasn’t about to let that rotten, no-good bastard take you away from me!”

He turned her face up and kissed her as fiercely as she had spoken. Huskily he asked, “Remember when I paraphrased something about two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage?”

Robin was having trouble with her breathing. “Umm. I remember. You said that’s what I had.”

“The rarest kind. Instantaneous courage. That’s what you have, love. You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever met in my life, and I love you.”

Sometime later Robin said, “Um … who were you paraphrasing anyway?”

“Napoleon.”

She giggled.

“Well. I could have used Thoreau, except that
he
misquoted Napoleon and called it three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage.”

“What’s an hour, more or less?”

“My sentiments exactly.”

Three days later the
Black Angel
cruised away from the house at the beach, heading for Fort Myers. Lisa was virtually recovered; the other girls had been released and gone to their various homes. Sutton was in jail awaiting trial, whenever federal, state, and international authorities agreed on the order in which his offenses would be tried. It developed that Sutton had never transferred the
Dragon Lady
out of Dane’s name, so Daniel pulled a few strings and got the yacht released to him.

Michael said he’d just lose it again in a poker game. But he was smiling when he said it, and Robin thought there was more friendship between the two men now. More trust. She was glad to see that.

As for her relationship with Michael, Robin had never been closer to anyone in her life. She had never given or received so much love. And
the very fact that without hesitation Michael had trusted her twice to “get the job done” in dangerous situations, first risking his sister’s life and then his own, had given her more self-confidence than she would have believed possible. The demon of fear was gone now, assigned its proper place as a natural reaction and an impetus to do what had to be done.

But there was still a last, shadowy demon at her heels, and Robin knew it was one she had to face.

As the boat neared Fort Myers, she became more and more quiet, standing in the doorway of the wheelhouse as she had in the beginning and watching him guide his boat. She felt content in his love, and secure, but she wasn’t certain how he’d react when she told him—

“Stop nerving yourself up for it and just tell me,” he said suddenly, with a flickering smile.

Robin was startled, but not much. “Well …”

“I’ll tell you.” He reached for her hand and carried it briefly to his lips, then said quietly, “While I pick Lisa up and head back to Miami,
you’re going to fly to San Francisco. And take that test at the academy.”

She held his hand in both of hers. “I don’t want to leave you, Michael, even for a week. But I have to. I’ll be haunted by that if I don’t go back and try again.”

“I know, love.” He drew her to him and slipped an arm around her, keeping one hand on the wheel. “I’ve known that all along. And I applaud.”

A bit shakily she said, “If you sail off while my back’s turned, I’ll track you down.”

He bent his head and kissed her thoroughly, then smiled, his eyes glowing. “Not a chance. I’ll be at the marina waiting for you to come back to me.”

“Promise?”

His arm tightened around her. “I promise. And if you’re not back within a week, I’ll come after you. That’s a promise too. I know a good thing when I fish her out of the ocean.”