Wiser Than Serpents (8 page)

He didn’t smile. “It’s henna. And please tell me that Kwan didn’t, um—” he closed his eyes, as if even asking it caused agony “—rape you.”

Her stomach did a little painful twist. “No. He hit me a couple of times, but no, no one hurt me like that.”

A muscle pulled in his jaw as he digested that information. His arms tightened a little more around her. “I about lost it when I saw you sitting there. I’ve never felt such an urge to hurt someone as I did Kwan.” He ran his hand down her cheek. “I’m sorry he hit you. No man should ever hit a woman.”

Of course he would think that. If only that standard might be adopted worldwide.

“David, I have to ask…why were you there? What did I walk into?”

His mouth turned into a wry smile. “Can’t tell you. Not if I want you to stay alive.”

“Covert American op to stop drug smuggling?”

“Something like that.”

She dug her fingers into the lapels of his shirt. “I just can’t believe I destroyed it. All your hard work—”

“What exactly were
you
doing there?”

Yanna closed her eyes, a spike of pain making her tremble. Idiotic tears wet her eyes. David deserved to know, but she knew the moment she revealed her stupidity, he’d react like Roman. Maybe even worse.

She couldn’t tell him, not yet. She needed this moment with him to be…good. Especially because it might be the last one.

Perhaps he took her silence for fear. Or a post-traumatic response. She had no idea what David might be thinking, but surprisingly, he didn’t push her.

“I’m just glad I was around to…intervene.”

And then, the way he looked at her made everything inside her go a little weak. As if he might be contemplating exactly her thoughts.

Which, at the moment, entailed her lifting her face to his and letting him see how glad she truly was to see him.

No, this was not a good idea. Because, had she so easily forgotten what happened to Elena when she trusted her heart instead of her head? And if that weren’t clear enough, Yanna just had to take a look at her brokenhearted mother.

Most importantly, she simply had to remember the last and only time she’d kissed David and tell herself that one delicious moment in David’s arms, letting her emotions off their leash, would destroy ten years of friendship, so carefully carved out and honed. She needed David as her friend. Her best friend, sometimes.

Yet longing stirred within her, the one she’d buried over and over. David. Her David. The man who took her breath away.

The man who had saved her life. She smiled up at him, the kind of smile that told him exactly what was on her mind.

He didn’t flinch. But he swallowed. And wet his lips, an invitation….

But even as she opened her mouth, even as she considered touching her lips to his, the dinghy rocked. Seriously rocked, as if it had had enough of both of them and wanted to dump them in the drink.

Yanna jerked out of David’s arms, grabbing the side.

David steadied her and sat up. “Oh no.”

“What?” Yanna searched the darkness for anything that might match his tone.

Her blood turned to ice in her veins. Not fifteen feet away cruised an oceangoing freighter, churning up a wake that could overturn their rubber raft. And behind it, maybe a mile behind, she made out the outline of yet another ship.

“I drove us into a shipping lane!” David climbed to his knees. “What was I thinking?”

“That you wanted to save us from the bad guys?”

Apparently that wasn’t a good enough answer, because he turned away from her and grabbed the outboard motor. He affixed it to the back panel, sat back and gave the ripcord a yank. “I obviously left my brains in the States, because this op has been one stupid mistake after another.”

Like saving her?

The motor sputtered, died.

“C’mon!” His outburst shook her. Never, in all her years of knowing him, had he raised his voice in anger.

Then again, maybe she didn’t know David anymore. The real David.

He yanked it again. The motor coughed and again refused to engage.

Another wave rocked the dinghy, throwing its passengers to one side in a tumble.

“Get over to the other side, even out the weight. This thing could flip if we both land on the edge.”

Yanna crawled to the opposite edge, holding on to a rubber handle.
Please.
She didn’t want to go back into the water.

David unscrewed the primer and pumped it. “Please have gas, please have gas.” Then he closed it and yanked on the cord again.

The motor gave another feeble effort and then died completely.

Silence preceded another wave. This one she rode by throwing herself across the side, counterbalancing David’s weight.

See, she was an asset.

Except David wouldn’t even be in this mess if it weren’t for her, would he?

David sat back on his haunches. “We’re going to have to paddle.” He didn’t look at her when he said it, almost as if he were talking to himself. He reached under the lip of the dinghy, into the folds, and surfaced with a folded paddle. Snapping it open, he turned and braced his knees against the bottom. “Hold on. This might get bumpy.”

He turned the dinghy into the next wave and Yanna held on to the front as seawater sprayed her face, running down her shirt.

In the distance, lights from shore mocked them as the next ship bore down, on course to run them over.

Whoever had decided to lean on Vicktor’s doorbell at two in the morning, driving shards of noise into his sleep-hazed brain had better be bleeding from his or her ears and in dire need of help, or they soon would be. Vicktor’s bare feet froze against his cold linoleum floor as he yanked open his door. Roman put a hand on his chest and pushed him back inside.

“Don’t…hurt…me.” He drew in heavy breaths, as if he’d run all three kilometers from his apartment to Vicktor’s.

“You do have a telephone at your place, right?”

“Get…your…gear…” Roman leaned against the wall, his breath less fierce now. “Yanna’s in trouble.”

“What?” Vicktor turned on the hall light, bathing the foyer in harsh luminescence. Roman wore a pair of black jeans and his leather jacket. Vicktor felt a little stupid bare chested and in his sweatpants. “What do you mean in trouble?” He turned and headed for the bedroom, yanking his jeans off a hanger in his wardrobe.

“She has dual tracking devices. One is still working—her phone—but she was supposed to call me twelve hours ago. I didn’t panic until her GPS—the one she’s wearing—went dark about two hours ago.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“I’m telling you now.”

Vicktor yanked a T-shirt over his head. “What kind of GPS was she wearing?”

“A pair of diamond-studded earrings. It’s got global GPS and a panic button. She texted me from Korea, said she’d checked in. We were both hoping that she’d befall the same fate as Elena, and that she’d be able to connect with her kidnappers. Yanna and I figured that whoever had her would find her phone. But her GPS going dead isn’t great.”

Vicktor was already tying his shoes. “I’m sorry, did I hear you correctly—you wanted her to be kidnapped, perhaps killed? Because, in my line of work, that’s not such a happy ending.”

“No—if you’d listen, we believe Elena is alive, and Yanna thought she knew who had taken her, so she posed as one of the girls in the dating service. And, just to be clear, I’ve hated this plan from the beginning.”

“Apparently not enough to stop her. Please,
please,
tell me that you have a backup plan.”

Roman looked away.

“Oh, that’s perfect, Roma. She’s pulling a classic Roman Novik—run off into trouble without a plan.”

“Hey, for your information, I
tried
to stop her. I tried to tell her to wait for us. But she wasn’t having any of it. She had Elena on the brain and wasn’t going to hang around waiting for us to get clearance for Taiwan.”

“Like I said, pulling a Roman.”

Roman clenched his jaw. “I got clearance,” he said finally. “We leave in an hour. Transport to Korea, and from there a commercial flight in.”

Vicktor stood in the doorway, an uneasy feeling clenching his gut. And it wasn’t just Yanna’s disappearance that made him want to hit something. His fiancée, Gracie, had become increasingly distant over the past month, and he’d finally screwed up the courage to ask, beg…plead for her to tell him the truth.

Did she really want to marry him? Yes, theirs had been a lightning-fast courtship, with the kind of life-threatening drama that would push any girl into the arms of her protector. But since then, they’d had a relatively calm, no-one-shooting-at-them sort of relationship, and he thought everything he saw in her beautiful eyes when he’d proposed had been true.

Real.

Only, that had been nearly a year ago, and she still wouldn’t set a date, still wouldn’t give him the faintest hint of encouragement to run down to the embassy and apply for a fiancée visa.

He was losing her. And he hadn’t a clue why.

He blew out a breath, rubbed his temples with his finger and thumb and let out a cry of frustration.

“Soglasno,”
Roman said. “Ditto on your frustration.”

“No, it’s not just Yanna. I was supposed to hook up with Gracie online tonight. We had a fight last time we talked about her living alone in downtown Seattle. I hate being a few thousand miles away, especially when I don’t know how to fix whatever is going wrong between us.” Her words, from a previous conversation, rushed back at him:
You don’t always have to fix everything. Sometimes I just want you to listen.

Yeah, well, he didn’t operate that way.

“She’s probably just busy with work.” Roman picked up Vicktor’s arm holster and tossed it to him.

“Sarai and I go head-to-head about once a month and then I spend the next twenty-four hours trying to get her to talk to me. I’ve decided that it’s a pretty good trade-off for the rest of the month when she’s trying to get me to listen. Don’t forget your passport.”

“At least you know that Sarai is committed enough to live in the same country as you. Gracie doesn’t know where she wants to live.”

“I thought she was waiting for God to tell her.” Roman picked up Vicktor’s leather jacket.

Vicktor loaded his pockets with his money clip and attached handcuffs to his belt. “I’m hoping that is a legitimate argument and not just a reason to put off the wedding date. Because I’ve told her I’d be willing to live in America.”

“And she’s willing to live in Russia?”

“She says she is. But I don’t see her applying for a visa, do you?” Vicktor grabbed his watch from the bathroom shelf, put it on. “She says I treat her like she constantly needs to be rescued. That I think she goes looking for trouble.” He looked up at Roman. “I might have said she knows how to find it, but I’m not overprotective, am I?”

Roman gave him a sad grin. “Oh, Vicktor. Do you not know yourself at all?”

He wasn’t a stalker, was he? Vicktor shot a look in the mirror. Bloodshot eyes and an overnight beard growth. “You have to admit, she gets into more trouble than most women. And I hate living so far away. I want to marry her, and now. But I’m starting to wonder if that’s what she really wants.”

“Who can tell with women? I took Sarai’s car to the repair shop two weeks ago, and it’s still waiting in the lot for parts. She’s mad at me because she doesn’t have a car. But she seems to think that the ‘add oil’ light means to drive a little slower. I’d be surprised if it didn’t need a new engine. I’m in trouble regardless of what I do. Grab your cell and the charger.”

Vicktor swiped it from the table, gave a longing look at his quiet computer. “I’ve asked her what the problem is. I get a ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ which I know really means, ‘You’ve really bumbled it now, pal, and it’s up to you to figure out not only exactly what you did, but how to fix it.’” He pocketed the cell.

One side of Roman’s mouth lifted up, but he shook his head. “Maybe you should give her what she wants.”

Vicktor took his coat from Roman. “What’s that?”

“Stop rescuing her.” Roman opened the door. “Give her some space. Don’t hover. Stop fixing things.”

“Like we’re doing to Yanna?” Vicktor followed Roman through the door and closed it behind him.

“We’re not dating Yanna. Besides, this
is
different. She’s in trouble, and the last thing she needs is to be out there by herself.”

“I just don’t want Gracie to think the same thing.”

D
avid ached from his shoulders to his toes. The early-morning dawn illuminated the shoreline in a jagged outline and he figured he had about an hour before either he landed on shore or Kwan’s men discovered their so-called American arms dealer floating on the high seas.

He should have driven Kwan’s speedboat straight into shore and made a run for the nearest airport. But no, he had to get tricky.

And it might cost him and Yanna their lives.

They’d finally cleared the shipping lanes, no thanks to his stellar paddling and all due to the generous wake churned up by the freighters that pushed them toward shore. Frankly, he could probably sit back and let the current bring them in. But paddling gave him something to do.

Something to focus on.

Something to get his mind off what he really wanted to do—and knew he shouldn’t.

How he’d like to somehow hit Pause and regroup, return to the moment when Yanna was in his arms, looking as if she wanted to kiss him, looking as if she needed him…

And he’d nearly kissed her. When she looked at him like that, searching his face, everything inside him had simply shut off—all the voices from the past, voices of reason that had kept him from doing something foolish over the years, like quitting his job, packing up his life, and moving over to Russia just to be in her airspace.

No—more specifically—he wanted to be in her arms.

And it didn’t help that he’d almost lost her, that he’d spent nearly an hour with her tucked close to his chest, that he’d traced her face with his gaze, noticing the changes, the tiny lines of stress around her eyes, the way her hair still looked like silky chocolate. She was so beautiful—more than even when she had been in college—and it had all swept over him in a wave, washing away his reservations, his fears, leaving only desire.