Brenda Harlen - Dangerous Passions

A few seconds later she heard the rumble of engines and felt a cool breeze against her cheeks. She could smell salt in the air now, confirming that they were on the ocean.

But where was he taking her?

Why?

She had so many questions but her brain was still too muddled to attempt to come up with any answers.

Instead she closed her eyes and drifted into sleep.

From as far back as he could remember, Mike had been groomed to take over the family business. For almost the same amount of time, he’d balked at being fitted for that mold. He wanted to make his own way, without reliance on the family fortune or social connections. He’d done so, first by joining the army and later—and quite successfully—through his partnership in Courtland & Logan Investigations.

Still, Mike’s father never passed up an opportunity to express disappointment that his only son had abandoned his legacy. And his mother never failed to point to his single status as proof of the unsuitability of his career for someone of their social standing.

Only his sister, Rachel, supported his choice. Partly because she coveted the job he’d been offered at Courtland Enterprises, but mostly because she understood him—what he wanted and what he needed—better than anyone else ever had.

So when he found himself at the end of the dock, watching Peart’s boat disappear into the darkness, he didn’t think twice about what he was going to do. He didn’t wonder whether it was luck or coincidence that Peart had chosen to moor his yacht at the same marina where Rachel docked Pure Pleasure. His only concern was getting to Shannon.

Not that his sister’s boat was any match for the powerful engines on Peart’s luxury yacht, but if he couldn’t catch up immediately, Mike was confident he could at least keep track of it while he radioed back to the Coast Guard for help.

He wasn’t too proud to ask for backup, not when Shannon’s life could be in danger.

He picked up the handset, saw that it had been forcibly disconnected from the receiver/transmitter. He stared at the broken radio, suddenly sure Peart’s choice of location had been deliberate—an intentional act to bait him into following.

Which meant that his cover had been blown. Somehow Peart had figured out that he was in Miami to protect Shannon, and he was counting on Mike to go after her.

Even knowing it was a setup, he considered no other option.

He flipped open his cell phone, glanced at the signal indicator. It was weak but steady. He kept his eyes focused on the dwindling shape of Peart’s boat as he steered through the choppy water and pressed redial.

She was still on the boat.

It was Shannon’s first thought when she woke up, substantiated by the gentle rolling motion of the vessel moving through the water.

She glanced around the room, at surroundings illuminated by the gentle glow of light from a shaded lamp on the bedside table. Dark walnut furniture polished to a high gloss and trimmed with gleaming brass hardware. A wide bed with fluffy pillows and a cream-colored satin comforter.

She sat up cautiously, leaned back against the headboard and exhaled a slow sigh of relief that the world remained upright and relatively stable.

Her vision was clear but her throat was tight and dry and the inside of her mouth tasted sour. She slid her legs over the side of the bed, found the floor.

Her legs trembled when she stood, but she carefully made her way toward the door only a few feet away.

A bathroom.

Head, she automatically corrected herself. On a boat it was called a head.

She nearly whimpered with relief as she opened the taps and cool, clear water poured out.

She splashed her face, rinsed her mouth, then drank, deeply, greedily. As she drank, her trembling eased and her mind cleared, and the events of the past several hours came flooding back to her.

A spiral of events that had all started with the man on the beach.

She thought she’d learned from the mistakes of her disastrous relationship with Doug. The impulsive marriage had been followed by a carefully planned divorce and a determination to never again succumb to impetuous desires that could easily lead her astray.

Then she’d met Michael—or whatever his real name was—and invited him back to her hotel room.

It was humiliating to admit that she could be so weak, embarrassing to accept that her more-basic instincts could overrule her common sense.

She turned off the water, dried her hands.

She felt no compunction about rummaging through the cupboards, and when she found an unopened toothbrush, she didn’t hesitate to use it. She hadn’t had a chance to retrieve her own toiletries and she was desperate to clean her teeth.

After she’d done so, she went back to the stateroom to search for her suitcase. She remembered packing it, but she couldn’t remember carrying it out of her room. She didn’t even remember leaving the hotel, and she still wasn’t entirely sure why she was here.

All she knew was that she was on a yacht in the Atlantic Ocean on the way to God-and-Drew-only-knew-where. She frowned, desperately trying to get a handle on the direction in which they were headed. They’d been moving eastward when they’d left the marina, her senses hadn’t been so disoriented she’d failed to register that fact, but she didn’t know if they’d changed direction since then.

Maybe she’d take a walk around and try to get her bearings.

It wasn’t until she was tiptoeing down the narrow, dimly lit corridor of the boat that she found herself wondering why she hadn’t been locked in the stateroom. Why wasn’t Drew concerned about her wandering around the boat?

She made her way up onto the deck and stared out at the endless expanse of ocean, the answer to her questions suddenly and painfully obvious: Drew wasn’t concerned about her going anywhere because there wasn’t anywhere to go. Everywhere she looked was water—eerily dark and ominously deep.

She looked up at the sky, at the thin crescent moon and the brilliant array of stars sparkling in the black velvet darkness. She could see the outline of an island in the distance, faint but discernible. The Bahamas?

If she knew anything about astronomy, she could use the stars to ascertain their direction, maybe figure out where they were going. Unfortunately, she knew nothing about the subject.

She sighed as despair threatened to overwhelm her. She shook off the sense of impending doom. Maybe she’d be able to see something more from the other side of the boat.

Silently she made her way around the stern, biting back a yelp of pain when she rapped her shin on a large wooden crate. As she bent to rub her injured leg, she saw that the lid had been knocked askew by her collision with it. Curious, she pushed it aside farther and stared in a combination of shock and disbelief at the contents.

Weapons packed in a bed of straw. Lethal-looking military hardware she’d only ever seen on news reports about wars or terrorism in faraway countries.

Then she heard voices, softly at first, distant, then growing louder as they drew nearer.

Her breath caught in her throat; her pulse hammered.

She glanced around frantically. There was a pile of scuba gear in the corner: wetsuits and tanks and masks and fins. She moved in that direction, crouching down to melt into the shadow of the equipment.

“…she wasn’t part of the plan,” an unfamiliar voice protested.

“The plan changed.” It was Drew who answered, unapologetically.

“I didn’t sign on for this,” the other man grumbled.

“When you signed on with the organization, Rico, you signed on to do whatever needed to be done.”

“Not murder.”

She’d known what Drew was planning, had seen the blood-lust in his eyes before he’d jabbed the needle in her arm, but it still shocked her to hear the word spoken and know they were talking about her.