High Tide (5 page)

“Yes,” she managed to say from dry lips.“I understand.”

“All right,” he said, then stepped away from her as though he couldn't move fast enough, then turned away. “Get into those clothes,” he said, his voice somewhat softer. “I'm going to try to find you some shoes.” At the door he turned back, strode across the room, picked up her cell phone off the bed, then put it into his pocket. “Don't try to leave,” he said at the door. “There are some nasty creatures out there.”

“Out
there?”
she managed to gasp, but he was already out the door.

Fiona took the three steps across the room to the bed then collapsed, trembling. She didn't know if she was afraid or
angry. She had never been talked to the way that man had just addressed her, and she'd certainly never been shoved up against a wall.

Survive, she thought, that's what she had to do over the next three days—survive. She had no doubt whatever that the man's threats were genuine. Hadn't even Jeremy thought that the man had a right to sue her?

It was amazing how a person's life could change in seconds. Had she left the plane earlier, she might have seen that the alligator was fake, then she wouldn't have …

“Strength,” she said aloud, then made herself get off the bed and look at the clothes. What had he meant when he'd said that he liked women to be
women?
She'd never before had any complaints about her appearance.

After a quick look around to see if there were spying eyes, she stripped down to her underwear, then quickly put on the man's clothes. The jeans were too big in the hips and in the waist; the shirt was too long in the sleeves. But she wasn't a New Yorker for nothing, she thought as she went into the closet to look for a belt. Fashion was her forte.

It was a big walk-in closet, but it was mostly filled with bird books and bird … things. She had no idea what most of the stuff was, but she was sure it all had to do with birds. In one corner hung three pairs of trousers and four shirts. There were two of those gray uniforms, like the one he had on today, folded on a shelf. Whatever else he was, he wasn't a clotheshorse.

Fiona found a cowboy belt with a fancy silver buckle hidden under a pile of brown file boxes. Peeking inside one of the boxes, she saw folders labeled with the names of different
birds. She tried the belt around her, kept her nail on the place where she needed a new hole, then found a Phillips screwdriver and jammed it into the leather. Actually, it felt good to hit something owned by “him” with a sharp instrument.

When the hole was made, she threaded the belt through the loops in the jeans and pulled it tight. With the shirt tucked into the pants, she rolled up the cuffs and stood the collar up at the back of her neck.

When she was dressed and he still hadn't returned, she went into the only other room, the bathroom, with her backpack. Looking in the mirror, she regarded her face. At work she wore little makeup, and she slicked back her hair with a spray that made it as stiff as pipe cleaners. She knew that Garrett thought that women in business was going against nature, so any woman who worked for him toned herself down. Plus, there was his vice president, who tended to put his hands on the prettiest of the female employees.

Now, Fiona filled the basin with water, then dipped her head into it and loosened the spray that she had put on her hair this morning out of habit. When her hair was thoroughly wet, she grabbed a towel and rubbed it dry. When she looked back in the mirror, she smiled to herself as her short, sleek hair sprang into fat curls. Her makeup was now running down her face, so she fixed it, but she used a heavier hand on her eyes.

When she stepped back, she looked at herself and again smiled. She was now emphasizing what she had spent years trying to underplay: she was a dead ringer for the fifties movie star Ava Gardner.

The next moment, she heard the door open, and she left the bathroom. When Ace stepped inside the room, a pair of sneakers in his hand, he did a tiny double take at the sight of her. It was a subtle movement, and he recovered himself quickly, but she saw it.

However, the anger did not leave his face. “Try these. I'll wait for you outside,” he said, then slammed the door behind him—and Fiona smiled. Maybe next time he'd think twice before saying she wasn't “a woman.”

The shoes fit perfectly. They were well-worn, old-fashioned sneakers, and she wondered where he'd got them. It was while she was bent over, tying the laces, that she saw something silver sticking out from under the bed. Except for the inside of the closet, the rest of the house was extremely neat. There were very few items in the house, but what was there was tidy and dusted. The bathroom had been very clean. In the corner were a couple of cabinets with a hot plate and a tiny under-counter refrigerator. The only picture on the wall was a black-and-white print of a man.

Other than all the bird things in the closet, there wasn't one personal item in the house, so she was curious when she touched the silver object hidden under the plain gray bedspread. It was a picture frame and the smiling woman in the photo was beautiful. She looked like every prom queen/ beauty queen/cheerleader in the world: long blonde hair, big blue eyes, perfectly pink cheeks, and a baby doll mouth.

Not even Kimberly is this pretty, Fiona thought as she turned the frame over. It was Tiffany sterling and written on the back was, “Lisa Rene Honeycutt.”

Fiona slipped the picture back under the bed, finished tying her shoes, put her pack over her shoulder, then turned to go outside. On second thought, with a one-sided smile, she turned back, pulled back the bedspread, and emptied her high heel shoes of sand onto Ace Montgomery's clean white sheets. She then arranged her New York clothes as though they had been removed hurriedly. Still smiling, she went outside where Ace was waiting and scowling.

“It's a beautiful morning, isn't it?” she said as she sailed past him, acting as though she lived in the house and he was just passing by. She came to a fork in the path and went right.

Three minutes later she was standing in front of a couple of shacks that had big locks on the doors.

“Are you finished showing off?” came Ace's voice from behind her. “Because if you're going with us, then this is the way. Unless of course you want to repay all of us in work. We have a swamp that needs to be mucked out. With all the animals it gets full of—”

“Very funny,” she said, then moved past him so close that her shirtsleeve grazed his chest.

Two steps later he grabbed both her upper arms, then swung her around so she was headed back toward the shacks.

“Keep your hands off of me!” she shouted.

“All right, then go ahead. Be my guest.” With that he moved back, his arm outstretched, and she saw that she had almost stepped into what looked like the foundation of yet another shack. Whatever had been there, it was now only a deep hole barely covered with vines.

“That's dangerous,” she breathed.“ Some kid could—”

“Right. There are lots of places of danger around here, but
it takes man power to fix them. And man power costs money. And we get money from tourists who might come to see a mechanical alligator or from investors. Yesterday I had both of those, but today I have only one left.”

He said all of this in a tone that implied that she was an imbecile.

“You know,” she said quietly, “I don't think I've ever disliked a man as much as I dislike you.”

“I can assure you that the feeling is mutual. So now, shall we go before Roy packs up and returns to Texas?”

Three
 

The boat was no yacht. No, it was a beat-up old fishing boat that Roy said he'd had for twenty years. To Fiona's tired eyes, it was an exact duplicate of Robert Shaw's boat in
Jaws
—the one the fish ate. “Caught a lot of fish in this baby,” he said.

“And I can smell every one of them,” Fiona said under her breath. When Ace gave her a look of warning, she coldly smiled back at him. After she'd walked out of that ruin that was laughingly called a park, Roy had been so overwhelmed by her resemblance to a woman he declared to be his all-time favorite movie star that thereafter Fiona could do no wrong.

“They don't make women like her today,” Roy had declared as he ushered Fiona along, leaving Ace to come or go as he pleased, since Roy seemed to have forgotten all about him. “Back then women looked like
women
. Today the actresses
are just girls. Julia Roberts. That Guinevere girl. What's her name?”

“Gwyneth Paltrow?” Fiona said. “But you like women who look like women, right?” She said this last over her shoulder loud enough to awaken any birds that were still sleeping, but, gathering from the growing racket around the three of them, they were all awake.

Roy didn't seem to miss anything. “You're just gonna have to tell me all about that first meetin' you and Ace had. He say somethin' you didn't like?”

“Horrible things,” she said, batting her lashes at Roy. Considering that he was at least four inches shorter than she was, this wasn't easy. “I do so hope you'll beat him up for me.”

With a roar of laughter, Roy tried to put his arm around Fiona's shoulders and pull her close. But his attempt was not successful because he had to lift his arm up, and besides, his arm wasn't quite as long as his belly was wide. Easily, she escaped his grasp.

There was a car waiting for them, and when Fiona bent to get inside, Ace said into her ear, “You want to stop playing the simpering maiden and behave yourself?”

“What was that?” Roy said when she was inside.

“What was what?” Fiona asked innocently.

Ace got in the front seat next to the driver, while she and Roy were together in the back.

“Ace, my boy, are you all right? I thought I heard you give a holler.”

“He banged his shin against a hard object,” Fiona said, refusing to give in to her need to rub her heel that she'd used to give him a good swift kick.

During the twenty-minute ride to the boat, Fiona had done little but ease Roy's hands off various parts of her body. He would point out things along the highway, then lay his hand on her knee when she leaned forward to look. Next there was something on the other side of the car, so he'd leaned across her that way.

Each time, Fiona would twist around in such a way that she eluded his many hands. And the one time when the car unexpectedly turned a sharp curve and Fiona went plowing into Roy, Ace had to turn around and see it. He gave Fiona a scowl that was meant to tell her to stop enticing the old man. She had no way to defend herself. What could she do, yell that the dirty ol' man couldn't keep his hands off of her? No, she thought as she tried to remember why she was there.

Because she had been threatened and blackmailed, she thought. Her entire career was on the line. And probably everything she owned, if Ace was to be believed.

“You sure are pretty,” Roy said under his breath, and Fiona could have kicked herself for “revealing” her resemblance to an old-time movie star. In her late teens, she'd loved being told that she looked like a glamorous movie star, so she'd studied Ava Gardner's movies and her looks. She'd learned to make what was a strong resemblance into an impersonation that a drag queen would envy.

But by the time Fiona hit twenty-four, she was tired of receiving attention because of looking like someone else, so she'd started playing down the resemblance. People didn't realize that movie stars didn't look like themselves when they first stepped out of the shower. It took work to look great. And when Fiona didn't work at looking like someone
else, she didn't look like her. No one at Davidson Toys had ever said she looked like anyone else.

And with this randy old man pawing her and trying to relive his youth when he'd lusted after a dark-eyed beauty, she wished she hadn't played up the resemblance. But that odious man Ace had accused her of not being a woman so—

By the time they reached the boat, she was sick of good ol' boy Roy, sick of the black looks she was constantly receiving from the Birdman, and, all in all, sick of being blackmailed. In the last forty-eight hours she'd been blackmailed by two men, first by her boss, Garrett, then by a man who would step over anyone to get money.

So when Ace gave her one of his quelling looks because she'd made an innocent comment about her concern about the safety on the old boat, she was tempted to push him overboard. In fact, she lifted her hands to do just that. But he sidestepped her.

“Do you always solve everything with violence?” he asked, a curl to his upper lip. “Do you always strike first, then find out what you've done later?”

“Me?” she managed to gasp. “You're the one who held me against a wall and—”

She broke off because Roy had called her to come admire his scaling knife—or some other thing he had in his possession.

“If you mess this up for me, I'll make you sorry,” Ace hissed as Fiona started toward the end of the boat, where Roy was beckoning her.