HiddenDepths (19 page)

In answer, he ripped his clothes off, without thought,
without emotion as she watched, slowly slipping one strap off her shoulder,
then the other. When the black cloth was bunched up around her waist, he came
at her—she was too slow for him—yanking the wet material all the way down her
body. As she stepped out of the suit, she said, “You should tie the boat down.
This storm is bad.”

He stood, taking the towel from her and briskly rubbing her
body before he snatched the investment banker’s shirt up and pulled it over her
head, the long, wet tail of her hair coming out to trail down her back.

“Fuck the boat,” he said shortly. “It can sink for all I
care.”

“With us on it?” she asked in a small voice.

“Your instinct for self-preservation kicks in at the oddest
times.”

She cocked her head. “So does your libido.”

Glancing down, he realized it had definitely kicked in, and
he didn’t know what the hell he was doing putting clothes
on
her, no
matter that the shirt barely came to the top of her thighs. Maybe he just
wanted her to be warmed up enough to have circulation while he fucked her
brains out.

Which he was going to do any second now.

But first things first.

He moved so there was barely a breath of distance between
their bodies and slid his hand underneath the hem of the shirt, against the
bare skin of her stomach, which was still chilled but warming.

“I don’t want to just fuck you,” he muttered against her
mouth, “I want to brand you. I want to own you so you never think to leave me
again. Do you understand that?”

She closed the gap between a mutter and a kiss, pressing her
lips to his, thrusting her tongue in. But whether she thought to placate him
with her kisses or not, it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. Still not letting
her go, he walked her back to the built-in bed against the bulkhead, yanking
off the covers and pushing her down, coming right on top of her.

When he had her beneath him, he said, “What’s your name?
Tell me.”

One shake of her head was enough to undo him. He kissed her
fiercely, again and again. “Tell me,” he demanded, wedging his legs between her
bare thighs, positioning his cock so he could bury it between her legs where
she was wet and ready for him.

Hands on either side of her head, he kissed her. “What is
your name, Andrea?”

“Athena,” she whispered.

He slid his cock in her tight, hot cunt, all the way in. Had
it been only a mere day or two since he had been between her legs? It felt like
an eternity. It felt like forever. She sighed, tilting her hips up to take him
deeper.

“My name is Athena Bennett Stavros. But you already knew
that, didn’t you?”

“I wanted you to say it. I wanted you to tell me.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not hiding from me anymore,
Athena
.”

She shook her head. “No. I’m not. It was never much of a
disguise. Not with you anyway. But I don’t feel like Athena anymore.”

“Yeah?” He thrust slowly, resting his hot forehead against
hers, and whispered, “Well, I don’t feel like Evan anymore either. So we’re
even.”

“You feel like Evan to me.” Wrapping her arms around his
neck, she crooned, “All hard and warm and sweet.”

He smiled down at her as the lights suddenly went out. Maybe
the boat really was sinking. Neither of them paid it any mind.

“Sweet?”

“Mmm.”

The rhythm he set was slow and, well, hell, kind of sweet,
he guessed. Not the fierce possessiveness he meant to show her.

“Why don’t you feel like Evan anymore?” she asked in a
murmur.

“Because Evan was laid-back and solitary and—”

She wrapped her legs around him.

“And calm,” he finished.

“And you don’t feel like that now?”

“From the very minute I met you, I’ve felt tense and wound
up and—”

“And what?” she urged.

“And lonely when I’m not with you.”

“Oh Evan.”

He’d always thought expressions of love—even in great
literature—rang false somehow. Undying declarations of this and that never
failed to fall flat, to him anyway.

But something about her simple sigh, her “Oh Evan” moved
him.

He thrust harder, suddenly sure he was about to recite a
Shakespearean sonnet to her. He could feel it. Maybe the one about love being
like a red, red rose. Or maybe that was Browning.

He thrust harder and she murmured a little, one soft hand
coming up to his face.

Or maybe it was a Linda Ronstadt song.

He tried to hold off.

He didn’t know anymore. He just knew he—God, she felt so
good beneath him—he loved this woman.

Without thinking, he slipped his hands beneath her ass and
pulled her as close as she could get and poured his love into her.

Or his semen anyway.

He groaned with his climax, feeling her shudder beneath him.

He supposed he should say the love part aloud once they
could both breathe again.

The rapid spate of Greek she let out threw him off. Raising
his head, he looked at her askance—she knew he couldn’t speak Greek—a smile
softening the skepticism, until he saw she wasn’t talking to him. She was
talking to the guy standing over them with a large automatic weapon.

The man yelled something, an obvious order to get out of
bed, motioning with the gun. Dressed all in black, he blended in with the
darkness it was now obvious he had engineered for his boarding. Whether he’d
been quiet about it or not, Evan couldn’t say, preoccupied as he had been at
the time and with the noise of the storm all around them in any case.

The lights went on again, showing it wasn’t just one
intruder but three, the other two spaced at intervals back to the stairs to the
deck, all three in black from head to toe, all three with those nasty machine-gun-looking
things. The one standing over them barked out his order again but Evan was
reluctant to roll off Andrea.

He glanced back down at her tense beloved face and for one
brief second, he harbored the hope that these men were mere run-of-the-mill
pirates who maybe wanted the investment banker’s boat more than even he had,
but the voice over his shoulder cured him of that illusion.

“Mr. Reynolds, what a godsend you’ve been. I send my men
here to help with a little drowning and they radio me you’ve brought me my
Athena back. So of course I came to check it out myself. To make sure. I mean,
I
assume
this is my Athena. You didn’t come halfway around the world to
ask your questions and then fall into bed with the first slut who climbs up on
your deck, did you?”

Evan glared back to see Stavros peering at the bed.

At that, Andrea pushed at his shoulders and he relented,
rolling off her so she could sit up, dragging the top of the sheet with her to
cover her nakedness.

Stavros smiled a crocodile grin and murmured something in
Greek.

“Fuck you,” Andrea responded calmly in English.

“Athena, how I’ve longed to see you. I knew here,” he
gestured dramatically to his chest, “in my heart, that your own heart still
beat, my angel.”

“Oh? Did the goons you sent after me tell you that?”

Evan sat fully up in bed as well, glancing around. He
wondered if the investment banker had kept any handguns on board, like maybe
under the pillow or something he hadn’t noticed.

This wasn’t turning out to be exactly a good setup for what
he originally had in mind for an ending to all this, which was
Stavros
dying, not him and not, God forbid, Andrea.

Fredrico Stavros looked the same as every nightmare she no
longer had about him. Big. Prosperous. Powerful. Like some mythic monster, he
didn’t even seem to have aged in the eight years since she had seen him. He was
just there. Like Zeus. Or death and taxes.

God, how she hated this man.

“I was going to kill you anyway, Reynolds,” Uncle Freddie
was saying amiably, “but under the current circumstances any Greek court would
call it justifiable homicide since I’ve found you in bed with Athena, defiling
her. Legally, I’m her closest relative, you know.”

Evan pulled her closer. “You piece of filth. You raped your
own niece.”

“Bah! She was no Stavros. My brother was a poof. Everybody
knew that. Angelica knew that. That’s why she married him. That’s why she
passed another man’s child off as his. A Stavros! You see these pale cheeks,
these blue eyes.” He gestured expansively toward her. “You think she’s half
Greek?”

“I’m not sure I trust your assessment of family attributes.”

“How about DNA? Do you trust that? Because that proved
conclusively there’s no blood relationship between me and Athena.”

She tried to digest this latest revelation, one she’d never
heard, as a matter of fact. He tossed it out so glibly, she was surprised she
never had. He clearly seemed to think the fact they weren’t blood-related made
it okay to treat her as he had.

Paul Stavros, the man she had known as her father, was a
faint, warm memory—of calm brilliance and affectionate acceptance—but no
clearer than her memory of her mother. She perhaps should have felt more
surprise that she was not his biological daughter, if Freddie was even telling
the truth. But she didn’t. She was so weary of this whole Greek tragedy.

“Why were you so anxious to get rid of her, then?” Evan
asked.

“Because it didn’t matter. My weakling of a brother left his
whole fortune to his wife and if she died, then to his so-called daughter. It
didn’t matter if she wasn’t really his or not.”

There was another reason that Freddie was so anxious to get
rid of her as well, although she wondered if he would dare to voice it.
Sometimes she wondered if he even knew. He’d never acknowledged that he did.

But she knew the truth. She had seen what he had put in her
mother’s tea that day. And for that reason alone, she was a threat to him.

“So you weren’t raping your niece. Just your stepdaughter.
Nice.”

“He never raped me,” she said quietly. “He just beat me to a
pulp. He left the actual sex to one of my ‘bodyguards’.”

She remembered the cold, brutal insertion of a penis into
her vagina those few times, usually no more than an unzipping of a man’s suit
pants and a shoving of her skirt up, with the crotch of her panties pushed
aside. The dry painful process. The violation.

It wasn’t even the same thing as the lovemaking she had
shared with Evan.

And after those first few times, Freddie didn’t force her to
do it anymore. It didn’t hurt enough apparently and she didn’t struggle enough
for his tastes. If she could have taken all his punishment that way, perhaps
she could have avoided it. But as careful as one tries to be, it is nearly
impossible not to show a reaction to broken ribs or internal injuries. So those
Freddie continued to mete out with regularity and, thank God, left the sexual
part out.

“What
were
you trying to do anyway,
Uncle
Freddie?” she asked him. “Beat me to death? Because you could have really gone
about it so much more simply.”

“Ah, but where would be the fun in that?”

Freddie whipped his head around at the lilting Greek accent
Andrea recognized even before the speaker herself came into the light.

“Frannie!” Stavros said. “See! I was right. Athena was
alive.”

The implication chilled her. Deep down, after all the pain
and betrayal she had experienced in her life, she still held on to the hope
that some people had not been part of it. And Francesca Stavros was one of
those. A lush and full beauty, Aunt Frannie had always seemed so full of life
and love. Athena had never wanted to believe she had known about any of this,
about how Freddie had treated her, niece or not. But she supposed she should
have known better when the woman had not taken her up on her anonymous offer to
help her to escape Freddie. She had seen pictures of her aunt in the society
columns over the years, always expensively dressed and coiffed, diamonds
everywhere.

And now here Aunt Frannie was, her jet-black hair swept up
elegantly and her soft citrus perfume wafting around her, leisurely stepping
into the scene of an about-to-be double homicide.

“Yes, right again, Freddie.”

The gunmen fell back as she approached the bed and in a
Judas-like moment, leaned over to kiss Andrea lightly on her cheek, taking her
hand and bringing it up to her own soft cheek.

“Athena. As beautiful as your name, as ever, my dear. And
the spitting image of your mother.” She glanced back at Freddie. “Isn’t she?”

He grunted. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to
be here, Frannie.”

“Nonsense. I couldn’t have Athena here in Greece, almost
home
,
and not come by to say hello.”

The gunmen in the background traded identical looks of
confusion and Evan wasn’t far behind. Andrea blinked rapidly. She’d always felt
safer when Francesca was around, even though it hadn’t made much sense at the
time. Frannie was Freddie’s mistress when he married Angelica Stavros and his
wife when Angelica died, and if stereotypes had held, Athena should have hated
her.

But Frannie had never played the part of evil stepmother or
the
other
woman. Only ten years or so her senior, she had been the one
to give Athena a much-needed hug at her mother’s funeral, the one to take her
to buy tampons when she unexpectedly got her period in true mortifying fashion
during the wake, the one to encourage her to make her peace with her parents’
deaths, and to make friends at school and…and…to just be a girl sometimes.

Athena, and now Andrea, had never wanted to believe
Francesca had known what Uncle Freddie had done to her, or to her mother.

But here she was, so obviously part of this.

“And who is this absolutely handsome young man we find you
in bed with, Athena?”

“You know who it is, Frannie.” Her husband seemed to be
wearying of whatever game she was playing.

“Well, I don’t think it was very smart of you to plan to
kill a member of the Reynolds family, Freddie, right after he visited you too.
My goodness, his father would have your head.”

“It’s going to look accidental,” Freddie muttered.

“Not if there’s a bullet hole in him when he washes to
shore.” The little titter she gave at that sent a shiver down Andrea’s spine.
Evan took the hand Frannie wasn’t holding and squeezed it. She shrugged, no
more sure what this meant than he was, no doubt. “Well, in any case, you’d best
get down to it. His brother apparently is in town.”

Freddie muttered a vicious Greek swear word.

“He called right before I came out here and, my, my, he
seemed agitated when I said you weren’t available.”

“Do you think if you’re going to arrange my death, I might
get up and get dressed first?” Evan asked calmly.

“Oh please do.” Frannie dropped her hand and stepped back.
“I can’t wait to see what you have under those covers, you beautiful young man.”

The slap Freddie whipped his wife’s head back with took them
all by surprise and the Greek he spat at her needed no translation even for
Evan. Freddie was calling his wife the worst kind of whore as she delicately
brought her fingers up to her bleeding lip.

“Take care,” she responded in Greek. “This is going to show,
my dear.”

“Enough!” Freddie snapped in English again.

“There’s another reason why you treated Athena as you did,”
Francesca said conversationally. “Isn’t there? She knew what you did to her mother.
Not the ‘special’ care you gave her and me, but something less ‘loving’, you
might say. Poison is a woman’s weapon usually, isn’t it, Freddie? But just as
effective as your fists.”

Andrea swallowed hard. He
had
known.

“And when she tried to tell her mother what you were doing
to her, well, we know what happened then, don’t we? So you not only needed
Paul’s half of the fortune, you needed Athena’s silence too, didn’t you?”

The blood from the split lip blended with Frannie’s lipstick
to make a garish, joker-like smile.

“Take Athena back to the house,” Freddie growled at one of
the guards. “My
wife
will go with you too. We’ll deal with the girl
there.”

“I’m not leaving Evan.”

Freddie charged toward them, trying to yank her up, and Evan
socked him in the jaw, causing a yelp of pain from the older man and a powerful
conk on Evan’s head from one of the gunmen who joined the fray but then fell
back at a word from Freddie.

“Fine! You want to see him die, Athena? You’ll see him die. Hold
him up!”

The order was no more than out of his mouth when Freddie’s
face suddenly turned an eggplant shade of purple and he clutched his chest,
sinking to his knees.

“Mind your heart, Freddie,” Francesca said in a low singsong
voice as she watched her husband crumple to the floor, his henchmen immediately
falling beside him, frantically loosening his necktie as it became clear he
struggled for breath.

“Oops,” Frannie said. “Anybody know CPR?”

“I do,” one of the gunmen said and Frannie snapped, “Then stay
the hell away from him.”

Confused, the man looked to one of his compatriots.

“Look at that,” Frannie observed as with one last rattle,
Freddie went still. “He’s dead now anyway. So who do you think you work for?”

After a second, the men fell back.

“Go on,” she persisted. “Go back up on deck and wait for me
there.”

“But, ma’am—”

“Now!”

When they were gone, Francesca said, “It’s so hard to get
good help these days.”

Smiling down at the corpse of her husband, she said, “My,
did I get the dosage wrong.”

Andrea and Evan looked at each other in astonishment.

“Oh yes,” Francesca confirmed softly. “I’m what you might
call the ‘deus ex machina’ in this little play, although I must admit I
expected the shot of poison I gave him to kick in much earlier. I couldn’t believe
it when he was still able to get on the motorboat and come out here, so I
thought I better follow along. Good thing I did, I suppose, don’t you think?”

“You poisoned your husband?” Evan asked. “I don’t
understand.”

“I don’t either, Aunt Francesca,” Andrea added in a rush.
“Why live with him all these years—take
that
from him—and not leave him,
or not, well, not do this? Before now, I mean.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t leave him, I suppose, because
somehow I felt I couldn’t. You were always stronger and smarter, even though
you were barely a child. I couldn’t leave as you did. So I suppose I felt I
deserved it.”

“That’s absurd,” Andrea said swiftly. “He was the evil one,
not you.”

“Was he? I thought he was. And I suppose I didn’t kill him
because, well, because I thought my immortal soul would be lost if I did.”

“Yeah, well,” Evan said, “I’m going to go out on a limb here
and say I don’t think St. Peter’s exactly holding open the Pearly Gates for
your husband. And anyway, you killed him to save Andrea, I mean Athena.”

“Did I? I could have just called the police. Or told your
brother. He really did call, you know, and it was clear he was worried.
Something about you not coming back to your hotel room. But I knew Freddie was
searching for you, Athena, ever since that old fool Tottingham put him on to
you. I knew he was sending men after you, but I always felt you were too smart
to get caught by him. Or maybe I was just making excuses for my own cowardice.
I don’t know. In any case, I always stayed out of it. But when Freddie got the
call tonight and I overheard him say you were here, right here, I knew he
would
kill you tonight. I knew he would.”

“So you saved me,” Andrea whispered.

Francesca shrugged. “Maybe I’ve just lived with a monster
long enough to become one myself. Maybe I wanted him dead and that’s all there
was to it.”

“Look, however you feel,” Evan said, “you don’t need to go
confessing right now. A coroner is going to see this as a heart attack. I’ll
make sure of that.”

“Oh, I’m not confessing anything.”

“Francesca, was what Freddie said at the end true? Is it
true I’m not a Stavros?”

She shook her head. “He never told me anything like that.
But I suppose in his warped brain it might have been true.”

“That’s certainly easy enough to find out.” Evan looked
dispassionately at the corpse. “DNA tests work just as well with the dead. But,
ah, do you think maybe we could get out of bed and get dressed?” he asked
Frannie.

She winked. “Be my guest.” A beat, then, “Oh, you’d like
some privacy.”

One of the gunmen trotted down the stairs and at Frannie’s
glare, said quickly, “There’s a police boat approaching. What do you want me to
do?”

Frannie looked back to Andrea and Evan. “I have the feeling
there’s going to be a lot of reeducation needed with Freddie’s workforce or
else there’s going to be a lot of involuntary terminations.”

The man blanched and she added, “That just means firing, not
shooting, by the way, you dolt. Anyway, if the police are approaching, then
fine, let them board. We have nothing to hide. My husband had a heart attack.”

“And those guys?” Evan asked, fingering his head.

“Well, how about in exchange for my little favor here
tonight we stay silent on that, shall we? As I said, I’ll be doing some
reorganization of the Stavros organization. I don’t think we need to involve
the authorities in that, do we?”