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“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
“Mr. Ross is badly injured,” Lilly said in that dece tively soft voice of hers as she tightened her hold on hi “You need to get him some help.”
“Well, he wouldn’t’a been hurt if he’d just stayed on board like a good boy,” Louise retorted. “We would have had the ransom and dropped him off just like we promised y now.”
“Ransom,” he said, more to himself than anybody else. His head pounding and his stomach swirling, he turned his attention to Lilly, who, with both of them upright, only stood as tall as his armpit. “I guess that settles it. I must be Cameron Ross.”
It still felt wrong. Fit wrong, like a badly tailored shirt, s if he’d pulled a name out of somebody else’s closet. For some reason, he was sure it was something not to be discussed in front of Huey, Duey and Louise, however.
“You guess?” Duey demanded with an outraged snort. ‘What are your other choices—Beavis and Butthead?”
“Madonna,” Huey added.
“Elvis,” Louise retorted.
“Hey,” Duey protested. “I seen Elvis. And he ain’t no Elvis.”
He was starting to sweat and sway. Not good. Lilly knew, though. Lilly tightened her grip. After a quick look on his direction that he thought might have been concern, the glared at their captors.
“What he is,” she said through gritted teeth, “is hurt. And if you don’t let him lie down soon, he’ll be dead before you can get any ransom. Is that what you had in mind?”
“You tellin’ us what to do?” Duey demanded.
“Shut up,” Huey snapped in his best military tone. ‘Get ’em locked back in. And don’t you two do nothin’ stupid in there.”
“How stupid is vomiting?” he asked.
That got them to move fast.
“Better?” Lilly asked ten minutes later, her voice inches from his left ear.
He didn’t bother to open his eyes. It was one thing to be dramatically injured in front of a beautiful woman. was another to be ignominiously sick, especially when she had to hold your head while you did it.
“Yeah.”
He felt a cool, wet cloth being draped over his forehead and thought he would die from the simple pleasure of it The gentle attention of those butterfly hands.
“I think I’m in love,” he managed.
She laughed. “You’re not very choosy.”
He smiled back, eyes still closed. “Any girl with a ra in a time of need.”
She was quiet for a moment. Looking around, he imagined. He could hardly blame her. He was lying on a be the size of Rhode Island in a room that looked more like a country house than a ship’s cabin. Dark walnut paneling lush green carpeting, recessed lighting and an entertainement center. Windows instead of portholes, and big vase of what had been fresh flowers a couple of days ago though they now wilted at alarming angles. At least, that was what he assumed. As bad as his vision was, that could have been a bad wall sculpture of linoleum and shag he was trying to decipher.
“Well,” Lilly said with a half sigh, “if you’re going to be kidnaped, you might as well do it in style.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“You don’t sound particularly worried.”
“I’m sure that once I remember what this is all about I’ll be terrified. Right now I’m concentrating on not humiliating myself again.”
Another instinctive flutter of fingers against his cheek He wondered if she even realized she was doing that. She was a toucher, tactile contact as much a part of her communication as words and expressions. He wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think he knew many people who were unself-conscious enough to do that—especially with somebody who was purported to be a world-famous movie star.
“You’ll be fine,” she murmured.
He smiled again, surreptitiously inhaling the bouquet of her perfume. “I already am. Or I will be when I get you someplace safe, anyway. I have a feeling I should know what to do about stuff like this.”
“It is too bad your memory isn’t working,” she mused, ettling on the bed so that he could feel the heat of her against his side. “This reminds me of another movie we could make use of. Home from the Sea.”
“Mine?”
“Uh huh. You were kidnaped by terrorists who needed he computers you designed to rule the world...or something.”
“Memorable flick, huh?”
He heard the grin without opening his eyes. “Actually, it was. You were a family man who only wanted to stay on your house in Indianapolis. You were kidnaped on oard a yacht, along with the President of the United States. Pretty much saved the world with your brain instead of a gun.”
“In a tux?”
She chuckled. “Afraid so.”
He shook his head. “Cinéma-vérité, huh? How’d I get s out of it?”
“Reprogramed the ship’s computers from the bathroom after being blinded by a bullet. You were pretty amazing.”
For some reason, that made him frustrated. “It wasn’t ne.”
She touched him again, a hand to his shoulder. “Oh, I know. Your character, I mean. But you chose the role You played it. It says something about you.”
“It says, evidently, that I like to spend my time in a tuxedo.”
For that he got a moment of silence. “You don’t sound as if it makes you think highly of yourself.”
She was right. That was how he sounded. He wondered what it meant. He wondered what, when he finally cleared out the fog that muddled his thoughts and displaced his memories, he would think of the person he discovered lurking back there.
“Do you know that you have an Academy Award?” she asked gently.
He answered instinctively. “It isn’t mine.” Then he reached up to lift the rag from his eyes. That had mean something. It meant more than misplaced humility. “Neither is Cameron Ross.”
Lilly was watching him, her face a soft, round blu against the diffuse afternoon light that poured in through the windows. He couldn’t see well, but he could discern her concern. It made him, for the first time, frightened.
“That doesn’t belong to me,” he insisted. “I don’t know why. But it doesn’t. I’m someone else.”
“A different name,” she suggested. “I don’t know that much about you, but could Cameron Ross be a...like, a stage name?”
A thread of tension broke in his chest. “Yes.” It was right. “Yes, it is. But it’s still not mine.”
She shrugged, still sincerely distressed. “I don’t know what else to call you.”
“It’s okay to call me Cameron,” he said, knowing that too, was somehow right. “But I don’t think of myself that way. Neither does he.”
“Who?”
He opened his mouth to say something. Some name. Some face. Nothing came out. He closed his eyes again and tried to ignore the panic that was crowding out the comfort of her presence. “I don’t know. I just know that it’s important. It has to do with why I’m on the boat. Why I’ve been snatched instead.”
