Kathleen Korbel - Sail Away

Lilly frowned down at him. “What do you mean, when you can see? Can’t you see?”

His shrug was minimal. “It’ll probably clear up. I’m already less sick.”

Lilly knew he was trying to ease her mind. He wasn’t having much success. Not only did she know perfectly well how she looked, she knew just what it meant that he couldn’t tell. She’d lied to him about not knowing about head injuries. She knew enough, and he was scaring her again.

“Have some more water,” she begged, hoping that maybe it was dehydration talking rather than head injury. After all, if he’d really fallen out of his boat the night before last, he’d been out in the sun an awfully long time.

“Thank you, Lilly,” he agreed, once again wrapping his hands around hers to bring the bottle to his lips.

He had wonderful hands, she thought. Beautiful, long-fingered and callused from real work. Marred by nicks and old scars across a couple of knuckles. Strong hands. Lilly watched them, watched him sip the water, his eyes closed, the liquid dribbling down his throat. And she thought he didn’t look a thing like a pampered movie star. His hands hadn’t been manicured in a while, and his face was rough with old beard and new sunburn. Even in the tux, he looked like an outcast. A sexy, charismatic, vulnerable outcast.

And Lilly had been alone for too long, she decided, pulling away before her libido got the best of her.

“You don’t want to rush that,” she warned him, closing the bottle with hands that shook just a little. “It could make you sick.”

“More research?” he asked, his voice weary and sore.

“No. Several viewings of Man on the Run, that movie you did where you were lost in the desert.”

He got one eye open. “Uh huh.”

“Come to think of it,” she said with a grin, “you were in a tux there, too.”

He sighed. “Must be my standard uniform for disasters.”

Lilly was about to answer him when an air horn interrupted her. She whipped around to see an ocean-going yacht bearing down on them from the west.

“Now, how come I didn’t see that?” she demanded, shading her eyes with her hand.

Cameron tried to look past her. “A boat?”

“More like a cruise ship.”

Pulling out an emergency flare, she lit it and waved it over her head. The ship honked again and increased its speed until it was almost up to her little Sunfish. Lilly had to crane her neck to see up to the cabin.

“Do you need help?” a gravelly voice boomed through a megaphone.

“I have an injured man!” Lilly yelled through cupped hands. “Can you help me get him to a doctor?”

“Uh, wait...” Cameron protested, trying to sit up.

Lilly immediately pushed him back. “It’s okay,” she said. “They can move faster than I can.”

“Happy to!” the other ship answered. “We’ll pull alongside.”

Cameron dropped the hat, squinting hard at the sleek hite yacht with its bristling aerials and gleaming brass. There’s something...I don’t...”

“Mr. Ross, please,” Lilly begged, a hand at each shouler. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“No, I’m not,” he argued, pushing her away with sudden strength and sitting up. “They are.”

“What?” Lilly demanded.

“Hold it right there,” the voice from the ship depanded.

Lilly spun around to find herself staring up into a double-barrelled shotgun. Alongside the man holding it stood o more people holding automatic weapons, each smil ing as if they’d just found gold.

“Good to see you again, Mr. Ross,” the guy with the shotgun greeted them. “I knew you wouldn’t deliberately tin a good kidnaping.”

Lilly turned back to see that Cameron had gone very white. He turned toward her with a half-hearted smile. “I think I know what, it is I needed to remember.”

Two

Lilly was a blur. More to the point, everything was blur. He wasn’t sure why, but that didn’t scare him the way it probably should have. Then again, that could ha been simply because the guns were scaring him much much more.

“I wish you hadn’t gone and involved somebody else his captor said to him with an odd sincerity. ”I hate collateral damage.”

Considering the fact that they’d just watched Lilly bright little Sunfish being dispatched to the bottom of the ocean, he bet Lilly was wincing at that one.

“What a charming term,” she said, posture erect a defiant. “You were with the military, weren’t you?”

There was a smile in the guy’s voice. “Yes, ma’am sure was.”

“Until that little misunderstanding with the grenade and the CO’s wife,” one of the others piped up. Captor number-one spun around. “That wasn’t my fault.”

They were all standing out on the deck of the yacht: three guys, Lilly and he in a tableau straight out of a movie. Between the smack on the head and the fact that very time he put weight on his left leg it just gave out him, he was pretty much being held up by Lilly as the three guys—for some reason he thought of them as Huey, Huey and Louie—discussed the finer points of a good kidnaping. Which did not, Huey insisted, include collateral damage.

Huey was short, squat, with a sailor’s rolling walk, and, om the shine on the top of his head, no hair to speak f. His voice sounded more like a big brother’s than a big gangsta’s, as if he were trying hard to break the other two without help.

The other two were pretty much interchangeable to somebody with blurred and double vision. Tall, thin, own, with shortish hair the color of Lilly’s. So far only Huey had spoken. Louie kept quiet. And kept his gun pointed directly at Lilly’s midsection.

Lilly.

God, he wished they would get whatever theatrics they had in mind over with so he could go back to laying his ead in Lilly’s lap. Forget yachts and movies and kidnap s. He wanted to lie back, close his eyes and just sink to the featherlight stroke of her fingers, the glitter of her ughter as it skipped over the water like sunlight. Maybe it was the fact that he was still foggy and lost. Maybe it was the fact that she’d saved him. Or maybe it as the fact that she had a voice that could ease heartache d a lap that was as soft as a sigh, but he had a feeling he was going to get seriously stupid over her.

And he didn’t even know what stupid was for him.

Startled at his own loss of focus, he shook his head There was a gun pointed at Lilly’s chest, and he w thinking about tropical breezes and puppy love. I needed to concentrate.

Unfortunately, all that shake had done for his head w to send it spinning again.

“We need to get going, boss,” a new voice interrupted “Let’s get them below before Mister Moviestar just kee over.”

He squinted hard at the third member of the kidnaping party. Time to reassess that first impression. He had been kidnaped by Huey, Duey and Louie. He’d been kidnaped by Huey, Duey and Louise. Boy, did he wish could remember what had happened!

“Tell you what,” he offered as nonchalantly as could. “Let the young lady go, and I’ll be happy to f down wherever you want me to.”

“We just finished sinking her boat,” Huey remind him tersely.

“Isn’t that the life raft I was in right behind you?”

Nobody turned. “We couldn’t just leave it out the People are already lookin’ for you. And sooner or late somebody’s gonna find your crew on that deserted land.”

“Lilly can get to Molokai on the raft,” he said. “I and her go. I’ll cooperate if you let her go.”

“No,” Lilly argued.

“No,” Huey, Duey and Louise echoed decisively. He moved to argue with all four of them, but that j set off the dizziness again. Everything was suddenly ti ing like a carnival ride. Damn, this wasn’t working rig