Sail Away

“I remember a storm,” he said, his voice muffled as Lilly gently eased the little Sunfish over around the way she’d come. “Lots of noise and lights.”

“Night before last,” she said, gingerly stepping over him. “It was a beaut. I almost lost a roof and a radio in it. We’re expecting a bigger one later. I was trying to get home before it got too close when I spotted you.”

“I remember...diving. Diving? That’s stupid. Why would I dive?”

“Probably falling off the side. Was it a sailboat?” she asked. “A cabin cruiser? Do you know if you had a crew? If you were on a ship of any size, there’s probably a search out for you.”

If she’d actually listened to that radio she’d had at the cabin, she might have known. But she’d walked. Thought. Wished.

Mr. Ross lifted a hand to rub gently at his chest. Sore, Lilly thought. There’d probably be a bruise or two under that once-starched tux shirt.

“I don’t... remember,” he admitted. “I don’t remember much more than the wind and lightning, and trying like hell to get my shoes off. But I feel like...like there’s something important I’m forgetting.”

“More important than your name?” she asked, alternating her attention between him and her task. The wind had caught her sail, and the little boat skipped like a flat rock, the wind spinning her hair out behind her and cooling the sweat on her chest and back from the effort of hauling in a strange man.

“Not like name important,” he said slowly, thinking hard beneath that hat. “But important.”

“Well, don’t worry about it,” Lilly said, much more blithely than she felt. “As soon as we get you ashore, you’ll have plenty of time to remember.”

They were still quite a ways from help of any kind, but with any luck, once they swung into the Pailolo Channel they would run into a good-sized yacht, maybe a deepsea fishing charter, that wouldn’t mind conveying Mr. Ross to a doctor. And, if worse came to worst, Maui was only about five miles beyond.

Wait ‘til she told her mother, Lilly thought with a stunned little shake of her head. Wait ’til she told her colleagues. So there I was, minding my own business, just breaking the speed record between Molokai and Oahu, and who do I happen to rescue in his tux and Stetson but Cameron Ross? They wouldn’t believe it. Heck, she still didn’t believe it.

The brightly striped orange-and-yellow sail strained with the wind, and the cliffs of Molokai were slipping slowly past. Time to check her patient again. Lilly once again tied off the boom and bent to retrieve the water.

“Mr. Ross?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. She panicked.

“Oh, please don’t do this to me,” she begged, dropping right back to her knees to shake his shoulder. “I’m not good in a crisis.”

She lifted his hat to find him squinting up at her. “Doin’ okay by me,” he said with a rakish grin.

Lilly almost clobbered him. “Don’t do that. I think you’re not supposed to fall asleep, but I can’t remember why. Health wasn’t my section.”

“Your section of what?”

“Research. I’m a research librarian. I can find the information once I get home, but I can’t remember it. All I can remember is the line of Stuart succession.”

He scowled. “Well, don’t tell me that. I’d be out in a nanosecond.”

Lilly wanted to smile. “Not into British royalty, huh?”

“Nope.”

“How ’bout Hawaiian royalty? I can name you that succession, too.”

“How about telling me your name? Since you seem to know mine.”

“Lilly,” she said, handing over the bottle of water. “Lilly Kokoa.”

He squinted again. “Named after that Hawaiian queen? Liliuokailani?”

“Nope. The flower. I was born on Easter.”

He grinned. “Not nearly as romantic. You are Hawaiian, aren’t you?”

“Half. Quarter Portuguese, quarter Chinese. I’m a mutt.”

He squinted again, as if assessing. “I’m no judge right now, but I’d bet that when I can actually see you, you’ll be the best-looking mutt I’ve ever come across.”

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

“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.”

“Instead of what?”

Her hand. On his chest, resting as lightly as a breeze. Warming him, calming him, letting him know that no matter what he could or couldn’t remember, no matter what was wrong or lost or in danger, she was there with him. Instinctively, he reached up to take hold of it and anchor himself there.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t seem to know much.”

She held on tight. Leaned closer. “It’s okay. It’ll all come back, you’ll see. For now, though, let’s just pretend. We’ll pretend you’re Cameron Ross so you have a name. So you know how to react to people.”

“And who will you pretend to be?” he asked.

There was tension in her fingers, even if her voice was just as soft and soothing. “I never learned to pretend for a living, Mr. Ross. I’m just me.”

He opened his eyes. Considered the face that hovered over him like a soft, bronze moon. The eyes wide, dark and deep. The hair, black as night and tumbled around bare shoulders. The soft, full body tucked into a bright red swimsuit. An impressionist portrait of femininity. A dream of comfort and life. The smile of the sun and the water holding his hand.

“You’re perfectly fine, Lilly,” he assured her, lifting his free hand to her soft face. “Perfectly fine just the way you are.”

Her teeth flashed against her tanned skin. “You did get hit on the head, Mr. Ross. Tell you what. You just close your eyes. I’m going to rummage around and see if I can find some first aid supplies, since they sank mine with my boat. If you don’t do something about those cuts and bruises, you’re going to have some scars you don’t want.”

Her voice sounded breathless, almost upset. He couldn’t place it. But when she pulled away, she did it gently, so she didn’t hurt him. What surprised him more was that it did hurt. Ached, as if he’d been separated from something vital.

“You the oldest in your family, too, Miss Kokoa?” he asked.

She halted. Waited. Smiled again, as if surprised. “As a matter of fact, I am. Terminal caregiver, that’s me. And you don’t need to call me that,” she said. “Especially after what we’ve just been through. Please call me Lilly.”

“I had much the same thought.”

“You want to be called Lilly?”

For the first time since he’d found himself in the raft, he laughed. Really laughed. Even though it hurt like knives, it felt familiar, healing, as if he resorted to it in times of stress. Which, considering the circumstances, was probably appropriate.

“I may be called many things,” he assured her. “I sincerely doubt Lilly is one of them. I guess Cameron will do. Or hey you. Or whosits.”

“Whosits it is,” she agreed. “Now, close your eyes and rest. I’ll be right back.”

“Lilly?”

She stopped. “Yes?”

He tried to make his smile nonchalant. He knew, without seeing her, that she wouldn’t be fooled. “While you’re scrounging up supplies, could you find some aspirin? And maybe some food? I have a feeling that part of my problem is bad nutrition.”

She huffed, as if impatient. “I should have thought of that. Not a lot to eat on a life raft, huh?”

“Why should you have thought about it?” he demanded. “Are you trained for finding strange guys on life rafts?”

He at least got a little chuckle out of her. “Sure. Standard Hawaiian schooling for all the dumb haoles who can’t paddle a canoe. Now, close your eyes for a little while, while I figure this out.”

He did. Even so, he held on to the sound of her, the soft pad of her feet, the throaty hum of her voice as she moved. He didn’t want to let her out of his reach. And not just because she was the only thing he was certain of—because she was something he thought he hadn’t seen much of. She was someone he thought he shouldn’t let loose, like a rare bird sighted in the high branches of a backyard tree.

Lilly. Flower of rebirth. Sweet and tough and bold at once. He liked the image. He liked the woman. He lay with his eyes closed and just drifted on the nearness of her.

He was scaring her. Not just by the fact that he still couldn’t remember, still couldn’t see, but by the fact that he was making her so comfortable around him. So committed and concerned.

She’d been stroking his face. Lilly didn’t do that. Not to anybody but the people she loved. She knew better. The world wasn’t comfortable with touchers. Her Tutu Mary had been a world-class toucher, with hands like miracles, soft and bright and healing. Kahuna’s hands. But Lilly didn’t have kahuna hands. No one did anymore. Lilly just had the instincts bred of a dozen generations of healers, whether she admitted it or not.

For a moment she just stood at the bottom of the bed and stared at him. Just considered what she’d gotten herself into. Lilly Kokoa, librarian extraordinaire, Mike and Wanda Kokoa’s little girl, who knew everybody on the north shore and wanted nothing more in her life than to live near her family and practice a trade that didn’t involve wearing a grass skirt in front of strangers. And suddenly she was stuck in the middle of a movie plot with kidnapers and international movie stars in tuxedos. The Lilly who had left Oahu four days earlier would have laughed at the idea. The Lilly who stood on the carpeted deck of a luxury cruiser, staring down at the compelling features of a man she barely knew, didn’t.

Lilly wasn’t a dreamer. Lilly knew what her life would be. She’d known it from the first moment her mother had said, “Lilly, child, somehow all those beautiful genes of your ancestors mixed up just a little wrong on you.” The reactions of the boys she’d known had borne it out, and the world at large had cemented it. Lilly, whose sister had been a finalist for Miss Hawaii, was plain. She was a young woman with a better brain than a face, and a pragmatism that balanced with age-old instincts that still made people nervous. But Lilly didn’t mind. She didn’t need what she didn’t have and cherished what she did. Which was her family and her interests and her home.