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“Is that what I’m doing, trying to get you in bed?”
“That’s usually where you want me when you first come home. A new routine tonight?”
“No. I like the old routine.”
“That’s why you’re staring at my mouth?”
“You always kiss me right about now. Da, I like the old routine. So where is my welcome-home kiss, wife?”
Callia went up on her tiptoes, one hand curling around his neck as she offered him a warm kiss. When she would have pulled away, he slid his hands over her backside and pulled her into him, lengthening the kiss.
She was naked beneath the flimsy caftan. He released a primal moan, then let her go.
“Give me a quick update on Erik so I can concentrate on my wife.”
“He’s still opposing college,” she said, giving way to her disappointment and frustration over her most recent argument with her son. “He wants to work with you.”
“And that frightens you?”
“Shouldn’t it?”
“You know I would never let anything happen to our son.”
“Can you please talk to him.”
“You mean change his mind?”
“Please?”
“I’ll speak to him. I see you’ve already started working your magic on decorating the villa. Not overdoing it are you?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“Fine isn’t wonderful. Zeta told me you had an asthma attack a few days ago.”
“Spring pollen,” she said to dismiss the incident that had put her on her back for two days. She still wasn’t feeling a hundred percent—it would take days—but she would deal with it as she always had, without complaint. “So you like what I’m doing with the house?”
“I like whatever you like. The villa is adequate. Soon to be beautiful. Whatever you want.”
“You spoil me.”
“I have an ulterior motive. A spoilt wife is happy and content.” He cupped her face and kissed her again. “A man would have to be crazy not to give you whatever you wanted, just to be in the company of that smile. Now then, what were you saying about our routine?”
He liked it when she made the first move. Dutifully, she reached up and began unbuttoning his shirt. Three buttons open and she spotted an angry red scar that hadn’t yet healed completely. “What happened?”
“A minor accident. A careless mistake.”
“You’re never careless.” She stepped away from him, reluctant to ask him what had happened, but needing some kind of assurance that nothing had changed. That they were still safe. “Who did that to you?”
She saw his eyebrows furrow. “You know the rules, and you know by now that I’m indestructible.”
He left her standing on the veranda and walked back into the bedroom. He removed his shirt, and she saw more scars overlapping the old ones that had ravaged his body years ago. Some horrible injustice—a betrayal before they had met—is how he’d explained what had to have been a near death experience.
Callia understood betrayal. Her own had left her scarred, and although the wounds weren’t visible, she’d been cut deeply and forever changed.
She stepped into the bedroom, still watching him. Naked, he tossed the gold coverlet off the bed and stretched out on the blue satin sheets.
“Show me, Callia. Show your husband how beautiful you are. I want to feast my eyes on every inch of you. I’ve thought of nothing else the entire time I’ve been away.”
She slid the caftan off her slender shoulders and let it fall to the floor. For a woman in her forties, she was still trim, her breasts high and firm, her curvy body and slender legs toned like an athlete from years of long walks on the guarded beaches of Greece.
His eyes moved slowly over her as she came to him and curled up beside him. She knew he liked to be touched, and again she made the first move, gliding her fingers gently over his bare chest. Then lower.
A moan of pleasure made his eyes drift shut. “That’s it, work your magic.”
“You’re tired. You should sleep.”
When his eyes remained closed and he didn’t answer, she attempted to leave the bed, but his hand snaked out and gripped her wrist. Eyes open, he said, “Straddle me, Callia. I’ll sleep later.”
With Merrick’s duties at Onyxx left in Sly McEwen’s capable hands, and Harry Pendleton’s blessing, he prepared to leave for Greece. He made a quick trip back to the country house to pack, then arrived at the airport early in the afternoon. Before he boarded the plane he called Sully Paxton to apprise him of the recent turn of events.
“I’m flying to Rome. I don’t want to give Cyrus a heads-up, so I intend to avoid the airport in Athens. He’s probably got it staked out. We both know why he wants me back in Greece. He’s expecting me to lead him to you and Melita.”
“You know he’s left someone behind in Washington to follow you.”
“They won’t be on my ass for long. I want to talk to Melita when I get there.”
“The report I sent you was complete. She answered every one of your questions about Cyrus to the best of her knowledge. Remember, Melita grew up in a bubble. One that Cyrus built around her. He kept her in the dark on his business affairs, and virtually a prisoner at Lesvago until he moved her to Despotiko. We know more about the bastard than his own daughter does.”
“I’d still like to talk to her. Maybe a few new questions might spark a memory that could help us find him. It’s all we have right now.” Merrick gave Sully some last-minute instructions. “Send your man Hector to Crete with a boat. Tell him to leave it in Iráklion for me.”
“It’ll be there. Have a safe trip.”
The flight left on schedule. Merrick forced himself to sleep on the plane knowing that when he arrived in Greece his days and nights would be rolled into one. He reached Rome after a rough trip over the ocean. Three people on the plane from Washington took the same flight to Iráklion on the island of Crete. Two businessmen and one woman.
Merrick rented a room at a resort hotel, changed clothes and waited for the cover of night. Leaning on a cane, dressed as if he were years older, he shuffled his feet toward a taxi and instructed the driver to take him to the harbor.
As Sully Paxton had promised, Hector had left a sixty-foot sport cruiser christened Aldora—winged gift—for him. Hector had been a guard at Despotiko during Melita and Sully’s incarceration. More loyal to Melita than Cyrus, Hector had been an integral part in her escape with Sully months ago. Since then he had remained with them on Amorgós.
Sure no one had followed him, Merrick boarded the Aldora and sped away into the night in the gutsy twelve-hundred-horsepower yacht. She had a lean underbelly, an enclosed cockpit, one stateroom, a bathroom and galley—everything a man would need to survive months at sea.
An hour before dawn, Merrick reached Amorgós. He spotted the villa on the southeast coast. When he reached the hidden cove, he saw Sully’s wicked speed-demon cruiser moored in the harbor. He studied the villa on the top of a rugged hillside. Sully had chosen the spot with strategy in mind. No one could enter the cove without being seen. Already Sully Paxton was heading down the hillside, that silly little goat of Melita’s trailing him in the moonlight.
Merrick leaned into the dock railing as Sully came toward him.
“Were you followed from D.C.?” Sully asked.
“All the way to Crete. No problem after that. They weren’t looking for an old man with arthritis.”
They shared a grin.
“Did you tell Melita I wanted to talk to her?”
“I did. But like I said, I don’t think you’re going to learn much that we don’t already know. She lived at Lesvago with Simon when she was growing up. They were raised by maids and housekeepers. Cyrus popped in now and then. She says she spent one week once every other year with Cyrus and his wife and her half brother, but the visits were always on a different island.”
The look on Sully’s face made his dark Irish expression even more foreboding than usual. Melita’s life as Cyrus’s daughter had been no life at all. A virtual prisoner since he had killed her mother and taken her and Simon to Lesvago on the island of Mykonos. She’d been eight at the time.
Sully said, “I’ve been combing the islands for weeks, and I don’t have one damn lead on Cyrus’s current hideout.”
Cyrus’s corrupt activities had made him a wealthy man and allowed him to set up a maze of compounds throughout Greece. From a strategist’s standpoint, the islands were the perfect mecca for a criminal to hide and never be found.
“When can I talk to Melita?”
“She’s sleeping. Why don’t you catch a few hours yourself? You look beat. I’ll bring her to you when she wakes up.”
Merrick returned to the Aldora, but he never slept. He unpacked his duffel bag, tossed his shaving kit in the bathroom and his clothes in the drawers beneath the double-wide berth. All the comforts of home, he thought. Sully had even stocked the galley.
He never went anywhere without the picture of Johanna in the garden at the country house, and he pulled it from his duffel and laid it on the table as he entered the galley. He’d snapped the picture in the backyard a few months before her death. Johanna was standing among the roses wearing jeans on her narrow hips and a lavender silk blouse. She was smelling the roses, her hand holding back her long hair from her face.
Feeling like a caged animal, he headed up the companionway and left the Aldora to stroll the beach. He’d been traveling nonstop and was dog-ass tired, but his adrenalin was pumping. For some unexplained reason he felt he was about to learn something crucial that would put him back on the scent of his enemy.
Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but he’d always felt as though Melita was the key to finding Cyrus. She knew something, even if she wasn’t aware of it.
With the scent of his wife lingering on his body, Cyrus rose early. He grabbed his black robe off the chair and pulled it on. Callia was stilled curled up on the bed after he’d had her every way imaginable. The smile he wore as he left the room was that of a prevailing conqueror. The sex had been carnal, fueled by a rapturous hunger that would never be quenched.
Sated temporarily, he focused on his game of cat-and-mouse with Merrick. Soon his old buddy would return to Greece and lead him to Sully and Melita.
Melita’s latest escapade of rebellion had damn near cost him his life. His daughter had to know that he wouldn’t rest until he’d been compensated for that.
Downstairs he phoned Holic Reznik. “Give me an update. Is Merrick on his way yet?”
“He flew to Rome.”
“Why Rome and not Athens?”
“I don’t know. From Rome he took a flight to Crete.”
“And?”
There was a long pause.
“Don’t tell me you lost him. Did he make you on the plane?”
“I don’t know how he got out of that hotel in Iráklion without us seeing him.”
“Idiots. He’s a damn master of disguises, that’s how. I warned you to expect anything, and overlook nothing.”
“He never made me on the plane. I look damn good as a woman, better than I expected. I did find out that a boat was waiting for him in the harbor.”
“How do you know that?”
“I always find a way to make people talk, you know that. Before the fisherman choked on his own blood he told me a man left the harbor around midnight in an expensive little speed-demon cruiser.”
“How do you know it was him?”
“The fisherman said the old man was wobbling on a cane with two left feet, but that he had no need for the cane or the limp when he leapt on board and sent the cruiser out of the harbor at full throttle.”
“That doesn’t help me now.”
“I have the name of the cruiser.”
“Did the fisherman say if someone picked him up? Paxton?”
“No. The Aldora was empty when Merrick sailed her out of port.”
“Find the cruiser, and find Merrick. I didn’t fly to Washington for nothing. Do it, Holic. I hold you responsible for my daughter’s escape from Despotiko. Redeem yourself, or I’ll have no reason to keep you around. You’ve been a disappointment lately, and you know what I do to men who disappoint me.”
“Father?”
Cyrus slid his phone into his pocket, then turned around to see his son wearing sweat-soaked fatigues and a muscle shirt. “Where have you been, Erik?”
“I took a morning run.”
“Your mother asked me to talk to you. She’s still asleep. Perhaps this would be a good time.”
“She’s on the college kick again?”
“If she asks, tell her we’ve talked and you’re considering it. Now come and fill me in on your progress.”
His son followed him onto the veranda. Once they were seated, Cyrus studied Erik. The workouts over the past year were paying off. It was even more than he’d hoped for. It appeared Erik was putting his heart and soul into his work.
“I looked over the file Kipler’s been keeping on you. It’s impressive.”
“Kip says I’m a natural. I can nail my target eighteen out of twenty now.”
Erik flexed his muscles, and Cyrus could see that Kipler had made good on his promise to turn his son into a fighting machine.
Erik was staring at the fresh scars on his father’s chest. “What happened?”
“An encounter with Merrick.”
“Did you kill him?”
Cyrus had shared certain secrets with Erik. One of those secrets had been his life as a betrayed Onyxx agent left for dead in Prague. “No. He’s as good as I am at cheating death. But the opportunity will come again. That’s why you need to continue to keep up with your training. I don’t want you vulnerable should he show up someday unannounced.”
That would never happen. He’d made sure of that, but Erik needed to stay focused.
He didn’t intend to tell Erik about Melita’s defection. He would eventually have to if he didn’t get her back in a timely manner, but for now Callia and his son would believe Melita was safe at Lesvago with Simon.
