“The waiting’s over,” he said, nudging her with
the iron-
hard evidence of his desire. “We’ve danced around this long enough.”
“Waltzed,” she whispered. “We were slowly waltzing in circles.”
His lips covered hers and he kissed her, his tongue a hot, deep caress that mimicked the movements of his groin against hers. Then he edged lower and lower. His tongue flicked lazily down the slope of her chest, and she found herself praying he’d kiss her breasts again. But he swept past her nipples, edging lower, still kissing, but moving downward until he reached the smooth plane of her lower abdomen.
There he stopped, raising his head and gazing up at her. With a growl deep in his throat, Greg lowered his head. And she thought this would be a repeat performance of the last time they’d been in bed.
How wrong she was. In an instant, he’d flicked his tongue over her most sensitive, private areas. She closed her eyes, dizzy with pleasure. He’d done this to her before, but this time she responded much more quickly. Because she remembered, she thought with a thrill of delight. You remembered, so you anticipated.
This was something she’d never forget. A truly unforgettable man.
He reared back, unzipping his fly and shoving down his shorts with amazing quickness. He hovered over her, so male, so fully aroused that she couldn’t help but feel proud of herself for having inspired such passion.
He lowered his body, the hot tip of his erection nuzzling her bare flesh. She grabbed his waist, pulling him closer and closer. She was dizzy with anticipation, the stars overhead whirling
in a velvet-black vortex. Why had she waited so long to make love to him?
She was aching with need, and willing, so willing, that she thrust her hips upward. His hand eased between their bodies, finding the sweet spot and tracing the sensitive skin with an experienced finger. She heard herself panti
ng, waiting in anticipation…
waiting.
He eased one finger deep inside her, and she cried out with pleasure. Smiling faintly, he slowly withdrew the finger, bringing with it moist heat. Then he twined two fingers together and slipped into her again. Harder and deeper. She clung to him, her nails embedded in the muscles of his back as his fingers rasped with bittersweetness against the most intimate part of her body, bringing a heady rush of breathless passion.
“Greg, oh, Greg. Don’t stop.”
He swore, half under his breath, muttering something about hell freezing over. Nudging the hot tip of his erection against her, he slowly parted the moist folds, entering her by degrees. Lucky raked her fingernails across his bare back, unable to stop herself. Greg shoved forward then, breaching her soft opening. In one swift movement, he buried himself to the hilt, then stopped, clutching her to him, the hard contours of his body dominating hers.
“Lucky, you have no
idea…
”
She couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. The searing hardness of him inside her was so erotic, so arousing. She responded instinctively, churning her hips beneath his. Hips hammering, pounding against her relentlessly, he drove into her. And she rose, meeting each thrust with eager passion.
Lucky heard him groan, instinctively knowing he’d climaxed. White-hot heat speared through her body, bringing her innermost muscles satisfying relief. Beneath her hands his body pulsed, trembling with spent desire. She closed her eyes, vaguely aware of her body sheathed with moisture, yet sated.
She stroked his hair, whispering, “I’m crazy about you, too.”
* * * * *
C
ody sat at one of Live Bait’s tables eating a slice of pizza that looked like the bottom of his shoe and tasted just about as appetizing. It was lunchtime, and the joint was filled with laundry workers noisily consuming pizza and kicking back a few brews before the whistle blew for the next shift. Across from Cody sat Scott Helmer, picking anchovies off his pizza.
“
It’s turning
out to be quite a case, huh?”
Scott commented.
It had been two days since the lab in Honolulu had matched the blood sample on the trunk liner with blood taken from Lucky when she was in the hospital. Helmer had gone ballistic when he found out the liner hadn’t been flown directly to the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit in Quantico, where the exhumed remains of the hiker were being analyzed. Cody had done it on purpose, wanting to give Greg an answer as quickly as possible.
Again he experienced the same gut-wrenching sensation that had hit him when he opened that trunk. He imagined Lucky being stuffed into the trunk, the lid slamming down, leaving her trapped in utter darkness. A cold knot formed in his stomach. Had she been conscious when she was in the trunk? Had she known she was going to die?
All this time he’d been down on Lucky, determined to get rid of her, but now he deeply regretted having treated her so harshly. He was going to make it up to her by doing the best he could to catch the men who’d tried to kill her. His money was on Tony Traylor. Now if he could just prove it.
“Let me get this straight.” Helmer licked the grease off his index finger. “Tomorrow morning the DA is announcing that he’s dropping the case against the Jane Doe, and this whole trunk business will be reported in the local rag sheet.”
“Lucky has every right to know the truth and clear her name.”
“Yeah
…
well, it would have been a real help to keep the case under wraps for a while and see what we could turn up.”
Cody clutched the Primo bottle with both hands to keep himself fr
om bashing the callous jerk. “
I already started talking about the trunk in my office so the bug would pick it up. It might make whoever’s listening suspicious if I didn’t, then it came out in the
Tattler.
”
“Well, that’s the first thing you’ve done right.”
The heat rose across the back of Cody’s neck. “I explained why I hadn’t inspected the car’s trunk. Even if I had, I might not have realized that little brown spot was blood. It was the dog who clued us in.”
“Jeez-us! Good thing someone’s on the ball.”
“
I know what I’m doing. I spent four years with the LAPD.
”
The punk hooted. “That’s supposed to impress me?”
Cody lost it. He leaned across the small table and grabbed Helmer by the ear, twisting the silver skull and crossbones earring until the undercover agent winced.
“
Look, you cocky little shit, stop treating me like I’m some dumb fuck.” He released the punk’s ear. “I want to know what’s going on with this case. I’ve got a vested interest in it.”
Helmer gingerly rubbed his earlobe. “Your brother, right?
He’s involved big time with…
Lucky.”
“
Yeah,
”
Cody admitted, another stab of guilt knifing through him. He hadn’t been fair to Lucky. He should have abided by the innocent-until-proven-guilty theory. Instead, he’d assumed she was a criminal and had treated her like one. He bit into a slice of pizza, cursing himself.
Helmer waved two fingers at the waitress, signaling for more beer. “You’re still sworn to secrecy. This case is much bigger than attempted murder. I overnighted the trunk liner from the lab in Honolulu to Quantico, They put a rush on their analysis. Microscopic traces of Thelma Overholt’s blood were on the liner, too.”
The pizza hadn’t quite hit Cody’s stomach. It stalled halfway down as he imagined two terrified women—a year apart—in the same trunk. What kind of criminals were they dealing with? “The car was stolen several days before the hiker’s body was
discovered. Lucky was wearing Thelma’s shoe. The two crimes are linked, but how?”
Helmer spoke in a very low voice, even though no one could hear them above the Don Ho ballad blaring from the rickety jukebox. “Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. The orchids are the key. Your brother’s friend was right. Those bugs really were from plants grown only in southern China.”
Helmer paused to let the waitress plop their beers down on the table and sashay off. “Examination of the trunk liner revealed part of a dried orchid petal. I forget the name, but it was some rare, endangered species from the rain forest right here on Maui.”
Cody gulped his beer, excited to be part of an interesting, complicated case for a change. Not only were the orchids the missing link, but this was a detail known only to the killer or killers. Such facts were often deliberately kept from the public in order to eliminate suspects or nuts who confessed to every crime just to get their picture on the six o’clock news.
“Smugglers are stripping the rain forest of rare orchids. There isn’t enough manpower to keep an eye on them.” Cody swigged his beer again, thinking.
“
Of course, orchids and Maui Wowie grow side by side. Could be a drug deal gone sour. I really suspect Traylor.
”
“
Maybe,
”
Helmer said, not sounding convinced.
“
I checked with headquarters. A promising source claimed to have information on the credit card scam. The source was supposed to get back to us with proof. That information could tell us more about what Thelma was on to before she was murdered. It might help us make the connection between the two women.”
“I don’t trust secret informants,” Cody told him. From his brief stint with the LAPD, he knew just how unreliable they could be. “Most of them would sell their mother for a few bucks to buy drugs.”
“True,” Helmer conceded. “Secret sources are nothing but trouble. This one hasn’t contacted us again, s
o it probably doesn’t matter.”
Secret sources. Tony Traylor. Orchids. Friggin’ weird, Cody thought.
“There’s one other thing,” Helmer said, his eyes darting around the room. The whistle had just sounded for the afternoon shift, and Live Bait was nearly deserted. “I got the final report on the hiker’s death. The cause was a blow to the back of the
head
…
by the exact same instrument that was used on Lucky.
”
“Shit!” Cody slammed his bottle down on the wood table, his stomach churning. Thank God, he was sworn to secrecy. He couldn’t tell Sarah this. She’d cried, sobbing for almost an hour when he’d told her about Lucky being the victim of coldblooded killers who’d thought nothing of stuffing her in a trunk. “Both crimes were the same thing. An icing.”
Icing.
The word alone sent a chill through Cody, accompanied by a stab of fear. The
hui
was notorious for ridding itself of troublesome people in a way that appeared not to be murder. Accidents and suicide were favorites of the Hawaiian gang. Profits from tourism were the gang’s lifeblood. Murder and paradise simply did not mix. No way was Hawaii going to become Florida—a tourist’s nightmare—so the
hui
iced people. And they were buried without a police investigation.
The icing. The orchids. Tony Traylor. Cody bet they were all linked. What he wouldn’t give to solve this case, to make Sarah and Greg happy. All right, he’d feel less guilty about the way he’d treated Lucky, too. But in the back of his mind he realized that just because they had tried to ice Lucky didn’t mean she wasn’t somehow involved in some type of criminal activity.
25
“
I
’m going to kill that fucking dog!” yelled the Orchid King’s partner. “If it hadn’t been for him, no one would have known we tried to ice her. Now they’ll tie us to that bitch from American
Express.”
The 800 number blared across the screen, signaling the end of
Missing!
The Orchid King switched off the television. The program had
been astonishingly accurate…
up to a point. The actress portraying Lucky hadn’t done her justice.
And they had no idea what she really looked like. The picture they’d shown of her had been taken the day she’d been brought to the hospital. She had looked like death with big hair. Blonde hair.
“Calm down,” he said to his partner. “Nothing can link us to those icings.”
“Unfuckingbelievable! You’re not worried.”
The king turned away to inspect a crystal vase with a rare lady slipper orchid in muted tones of mauve. “I’m not in the least bit concerned about the police. I’m more worried that someone from her past will turn up.”
“But the FBI has the American Express agent’s remains.”
The king examined the delicate veins of deep amethyst running through the orchid’s petals like a fine cobweb. “So? They haven’t come up with anything, or the bug would have told us about it. Thelma Overholt was six feet under for two years. That means major decomposition. Plus she was embalmed— all her body fluids were removed. It doesn’t leave them a lot to work with.”
“I don’t like it. I don’t like
the feel
of this.”
“I prefer the privacy that using a computer gives us,” the king agreed. “We can probe into everyone’s closet and yank out the dirty linen without them knowing we’ve been there. That’s why I don’t like paying people to plant bugs and send us tapes, but sometimes it can’t be helped.”
The dirty linen comment he’d just made gave the king an idea. Computers ruled the world for sure. He’d tapped into numerous data banks and erased one woman’s entire existence because she’d crossed him. Why not fuck up Braxton? Alter his credit rating or max out his charge cards. Come to think of it, the prick didn’t have any charge cards. What type of man went through life without a Visa?
The kind of man who deserved to suffer.
G
reg checked his watch and saw that it had been exactly nineteen minutes since he’d last gone down to check on Lucky. Seemed like hours. He couldn’t help himself. He wanted to be with her, not preparing the log for the yearly journey to Niihau Island to count the monk seals and give the males their shots.
It had been an agonizingly long three weeks since
Missing!
had been shown. The episode had generated hundreds of tips. Lucky had been spotted in more places than Elvis. From Vermont to Arizona, people claimed to have known Lucky. None of the leads had panned out. Thank you, God.
The phone rang and he picked it up, hoping it wasn’t the bank again. Some idiot had made a mistake and the money
he’d deposited hadn’t been credited to his account. He’d bounced checks from one end of the island to the other.
It was Cody. “Yo, Greg. How’s it going?”
“Great,” he responded, but every muscle in his body tensed. He kept waiting for the ax to fall, for Cody to tell him that someone was going to take Lucky away from him. “Hear anything on Lucky?”
“Nope. Not a damn thing. The FBI’s checked out all of the promising leads already. They’re just running through the other stuff now. They say after this much time, it’s unlikely they’ll find anything. It’s totally weird. You’d think that someone would recognize Lucky.”
“What about your investigation? Any idea who tried to kill her?”
“I’m still working on it.”
Cody sounded discouraged, but Greg didn’t question him further. He knew the FBI was working with Cody, forbidding him to discuss any details. He reached for the stack of unopened mail and began sorting through it as they talked.
“We’re taking the boat out to the rookery on Niihau tomorrow,” Greg said, tossing aside yet another announcement that he was a grand sweepstakes winner. “Time to count the monk seals and give the males their shots.”
“Shots?”
Greg had forgotten the program had gone into effect when he hadn’t been speaking to Cody. “Yeah, it’s a new thing. They developed it over at the U of H. We give the males a shot to lower their testosterone.”
“Jeez-us! Don’t come near me with that stuff. Why are you doing that?”
Actually, the way he’d been behaving around Lucky, Greg figured he should give himself at least a dozen shots.
“
There are so few females left—another was just eaten by a shark— that the males mob females in heat. By the time they’re through, she’s either crushed or severely injured. Either way she dies, meaning there are still fewer females, so the mobbing gets
worse with each season. We’ve made the males less aggressive by lowering their testosterone levels. More females are surviving.”
“Sounds like gang rape to me.”
Greg couldn’t disagree. “It’s the instinct to survive. Monk seals never behaved like this when there were enough females.
”
“Be careful out there. Don’t those males weigh a quarter of a ton or more?”
“Yeah, and they can be mean.” He added a bill for Abbie’s goat’s milk to the stack of unpaid bills. The next one looked strange, and Greg ripped it open while Cody told him about the twins’ next soccer game “Shit!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Cody, you won’t believe this. They’re going to repossess my car. They’re totally screwed up. I made the payment on time. I have the canceled check.”
“Those things happen. I’m always getting late notices.” Cody laughed. “I deserve ’em. I’m always juggling bills.”
“It’s weird. My bank account shows overdrawn even though there’s plenty of money in there, and I have the deposit slips to prove it.”
After two beats of silence, Cody
said, “
Coincidence, that’s all. Look, I gotta go. Call me when you come back from Niihau.”
“Right. I owe you one.”
I
owe you one.
Cody was still smiling when he drove up to Mama’s Fish House to meet Scott Helmer. It felt great to be talking to Greg again. What he wouldn’t give to discuss the case with him. This need for secrecy was a bitch.
He spotted the Toyota that Helmer had rented and knew the agent was waiting for him down on the rocks. Stiff winds buffeted the horseshoe cove, making it a favorite with windsurfers. Riding colorful boards with clear vinyl sails trimmed in fluorescent pinks, greens, and purples, the kids flew across the
white-capped water, delighting the tourists chowing down at Mama’s. Some of the surfers could actually do backward flips with their boards.
“It’s a wonder they don’t break their necks,” Cody said to Helmer as he came up beside the agent, who was sitting on a boulder watching. He eased himself down on a nearby rock as a sand crab scuttled away.
“Crazy kids.” Helmer pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head, facing Cody. “Where’d you get the name of that shrink who hypnotized Lucky?”
“I contacted a buddy at U of H in Honolulu. He put it on the Internet, and Dr. Forenski contacted me. Why?”
“She was in your office, right?”
Cody suspected where the punk was going with this. “Is she the one who planted the bug?”
“Yeah. She’s holed up in a condo not far from your office, transcribing tapes recorded by the bug.”
Cody stood up and walked over a few feet to the tide pool. “One of my men picked her up. She was supposed to go directly to the clinic, but she had him drive her by my office. Said she wanted my ‘impression’ of Lucky on the day she was brought in. I should have smelled a rat, but I didn’t. She had excellent credentials. She seemed like a nice old lady.”
“There’s nothing wrong with her credentials. She’s a first-rate hypnotherapist in Honolulu. Someone got to her. They’re paying her a fortune to sit around here.”
“Who?” He returned to the rock, truly excited. This could be the break they needed.
“
Dr. Forenski’s cooperating, but she doesn’t know who hired her. She agreed to treat Lucky, then someone contacted her on the phone. It was so much money that she went for it. Question is, how did they know to contact her?”
“The computer. They’re monitoring on-line services.” Then a flash of insight hit him. “They’re screwing with my brother right now.”
“What do you mean?”
The silver skull and crossbones earring in Helmer’s ear winked in the bright sunlight as Cody explained. When he finished, there was grudging admiration in the punk’s eyes.
“You’re probably right. I’ll get our experts on it. I’ll bet it ties to the credit card scam. Someone’s able to breach the bank’s security systems. That’s how they know which accounts to use and when to get out before we catch them.”
“What about Traylor? Anything on him? I still think he’s tied to this.”
“I’m working on it, but it looks like he’s running a little Maui Wowie, that’s all.”
Clearly, trafficking marijuana didn’t rank high on the agent’s priority list. Who could blame him? The agency was strapped for cash, and major drugs were coming in from Mexico and South America. But Cody cared. This was his island; his family lived here. He promised himself he’d get Traylor.
“
Is it okay to tell Lucky that the wound on her head matches the one on Thelma Overholt? She has a right to know the same person who tried to kill her murdered the hiker.”
“Shit, no! We’re close to cracking this case. Don’t blow it.”
Cody hated keeping something this important from Lucky. And Greg.
G
reg managed to work for a few hours, then he went down to the pool, anxious to see Lucky. She’d been through an experience so horrible it defied the imagination. The fact that she couldn’t remember the experience made it even more terrifying. What had happened to her in those hours before the car was pushed off the cliff?
I can make you love me.
She’d been desperate, willing to do anything to save her life.
What else had they done to her?
Again, the urge to kill overwhelmed him. If he ever learned who had made her suffer, he doubted he could control himself. Yet Lucky seemed to have accepted her fate. If revenge was
on her mind, she hadn’t mentioned it to him. Instead, she concentrated on building a new life. Her courage and spirit gave her a power and a depth that made other women he’d known seem weak.
“Aikane,
you gotta see this.”
Hearing Nomo call him buddy in a happier tone than normal, Greg ducked around the oleander hedge and into the seals’ area.
“She’s a natural,” Nomo told him as he pointed to Lucky, who was in the pool.
"Hele, hele, ”
she called in Hawaiian for Abbie to come on. The pup was on the ramp leading into the water, but having none of it. “It’s okay, sweetie. Come here.
Hele.”
Lucky’s hair was wet and slicked back, which emphasized her green eyes. Everything about her called to him. Once it had been just her body. He still adored every inch, from the scarred soles to the small scar on the back of her head, but what drew him to her now was a much deeper emotion.
Lucky waved at him, then called, “Dodger, show Abbie what to do.”
Dodger pranced over to the ramp and nuzzled the timid pup. Taking tiny steps, the dog inched down the ramp, with Abbie at his heels, mincing along. They reached the water and Dodger plunged in, swimming rather than dog-paddling, not splashing at all. The pup flopped into the water, flippers slapping frantically, her eyes wild with fright.
Nomo shook his head.
“
That’s what happens when you don’t know you’re a seal. Abbie’s bonded with Lucky and Dodger, not with the other seals. We’re trying to get her back on track developmentally.”
"Pono!”
Careful
!
cried Lucky. “Watch me!” She sliced her arms through the water, pretending to be a seal.
It was the most ridiculous, comical sight he’d seen since he’d watched the reruns of
Spanky and Our Gang
while Aunt Sis had been out playing poker. Slapstick comedy. But it was working. Little Abbie seemed to take courage, bobbing up and
down like a furry cork, fluttering her flippers and sending a skein of water droplets toward the sunny sky.
Dodger hovered nearby, treading water. Suddenly, Abbie got the hang of it and stopped the frantic splashing. Her flippers glided through the water, propelling her forward effortlessly.
“Akamai
’oe,”
Lucky told Abbie.
“You’re so smart,” Greg translated, looking at Nomo. “You’re teaching Lucky a lot of Hawaiian.”
The big man shrugged, grinning even more than usual. “She wants to live here. We don’t want people thinking she’s a tourist, do we?”
Greg watched the threesome swim to the deep end of the lagoon-shaped pool and back. Lucky was executing a flawless breaststroke, careful not to kick up any water, which might frighten the pup.