Now You See Him(21)

But obviously someone didn't see it that way. Someone had come to her peaceful haven of St. Anne to make her pay. And the innocent, harried man beside her was going to pay the price, too, for something he'd had no involvement in.

"Stop the car," she said suddenly.

He glanced over at her, not slowing their hurtling pace in the slightest. "Why?"

"I want to get out."

"Don't be a fool." The words were calm, without rancor. He drove well, she noticed. Better even than she did. "I suppose there's a chance in hell that this was simply a coincidence, but I don't plan on taking that chance."

"It's not your chance to take. It's not you who's in danger. It's me. Stop the car and let me out."

"Virgin sacrifice?" he said pleasantly. "You want me to find a live volcano so you can throw yourself in?"

"Don't be a fool."

"Don't you be a fool!" he said. "You seem to forget, I'm a perfect British gentleman. I was brought up to bring aid and comfort to damsels in distress."

"Not at the cost of your own life."

"Nobility makes me want to puke."

"Michael…"

"Which way?" They'd come to a crossroads. The narrow little-used dirt roadway led down to Shaman's Cove.

"I'm not telling you," she said.

He slammed on the brakes, hurling them both toward the padded dashboard. He took her wrist in his large hand, and the pain was sudden, numbing, unbelievable. "Which way?" he repeated in a calm, emotionless voice.

"The dirt road."

He released her, putting the car in gear again, and she glanced down at her wrist as she hugged herself. There was no mark. The sudden, shocking pain must have been in her imagination, part of this entire, unbelievable nightmare. Michael Dowd wouldn't hurt her. Wouldn't know how.

She didn't know whether Michael was fearless or simply terrified as he plowed the sports car down the narrow, overgrown roadway. At one point she closed her eyes, too frightened to watch as they hurtled toward certain doom. He was going fast, too fast, and he didn't know the area. They were going to die, no thanks to whoever had rigged the gas heater. She told herself she should regret dying, and, indeed, she did. She thought of the man beside her, driving with consummate skill and recklessness, and thought she might really want to live after all.

The car slammed to a stop, and her eyes flew open. By some miracle they'd made it to the bottom of the narrow roadway, out onto the tiny spit of pink sand. He killed the engine, glancing around them, and she told herself it was only her imagination that he seemed wary, dangerous, like the hunter instead of the hunted.

"Are you all right?" He had to ask twice before she pulled her scattered thoughts together enough to respond.

"I guess so."

He reached out, and it said a lot for her disordered frame of mind that she didn't flinch from hands that had hurt her. He touched her face with consummate gentleness, and she knew then that she'd imagined the moment in the car, the icy pain in her wrist. She smiled at him shakily, and for a moment his face darkened, shadowed by some distant emotion she could only guess at.

And then he was tugging her out of the car. "We've got to get out of sight. Cecil said he'd come by with a boat, but in the meantime, we don't want anyone seeing us."

"No one comes here," she said, following him as he headed for the underbrush. "They think it's haunted."

He glanced around him. Funny, she hadn't realized how tall he was. He was usually hunched over the cane that had somehow gotten left behind, and she wondered for one absurd moment whether he really needed it. Whether he was the innocent schoolmaster he pretended to be.

"Haunted, is it? I think we'll need more than ghosts on our side to keep us safe." He sank behind a hummock that gave them a decent view of the dazzling blue sea, pulling her with him. "So tell me who haunts it while we wait."

His body was warm beside her, warm while she was cold, so very cold. Ghost stories were a good enough way to pass the time, and part and parcel with the unreality of the situation. "There are rocks out there," she said, rubbing her bare arms absently as she hunched closer to him. "I presume Cecil knows that, since he must have grown up here. Back in the seventeen hundreds there used to be wreckers here, pirates who never bothered to set out to sea. They'd wait for people to go off course, blown by the storms, and they'd use lanterns to lead them to a safe harbor. Except that the harbor was protected by a coral reef, the boats would founder, and the people of the island drowned anyone who happened to make it to shore."

"Nasty business," he said absently. "I thought they only had wreckers in England."