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One
She simply couldn’t ignore the bullets.
Or the bombing.
Or even the last twenty-four hours hiding in a damp and dark cave under some cliffside in the Aegean Sea.
Regardless of how much Iris wanted to live in denial.
“You okay, ma’am?”
She looked up from where she sat, shivering on the bench of the fishing trawler, the sun from the cloudless Greek sky warming the towel she draped around her shoulders.
“Yes. Just…tired.”
The man, mid-sixties, cast his shadow over her, cutting off the glare of the sun. His skin was the shade and texture of deep leather, with white whiskers, perhaps a couple days old, on his face. He wore a fisherman’s hat that shaded his blue eyes, and a navy-and-white striped tank top, a pair of rubber pants, and connected boots held up with suspenders.
But it was his kind eyes that drew her, and now he gave her a small compassionate frown. “How long were you at sea?” His English was choppy, thick with accent.
She glanced at fellow castaway, Hudson Bly, who was now climbing aboard the trawler, being hauled up by a couple younger fishermen, perhaps the sons of the elder. He was pretty scraped up, given his heroics in the cave, his shoulders and back bearing the claw marks of the rocks. But under the sun, with his blond hair, that hard-athlete body, square jaw, dark-blue eyes, he still looked every inch a sort of Australian Adonis.
Who’d nearly lost his life because of her.
“Overnight,” she whispered.
The fisherman handed Hudson a towel now also, and he slipped over to sit beside her on the bench, his body warm against hers.
Nope, she wouldn’t think about the cave.
Or how they’d nearly died…again.
“Our boat blew up,” Hudson said, wiping his face, then shaking his head like he might when he emerged from a shower after one of his Vienna Vikings football games.
“Engine trouble?” This from one of the younger fishermen, same blue eyes, dark-brown hair. He wore a T-shirt, the arms ripped off, and identical rubber coveralls.
“Something like that,” Hudson said, and glanced at her.
Oh, she could barely look at him, because the man was so lying, and the truth of it just burned through her.
No, she wanted to say. Not engine trouble. Because someone bombed our boat.
Hudson might have read her mind, because he frowned, then gave the slightest shake of his head.
“Lucky to be alive,” said the older man. “We will get you back to port.” He nodded toward his son, the one at the helm, and the boat engaged. “We already have our catch.”
He gestured to a pile of sopping nets in the front of the boat, writhing with small red lobster-type critters, hundreds of pale silver- or red-patched fish, and a few massive striped blackfish. The net seemed alive, the fish thrashing for air as the younger fisherman threw water from the sea onto the mess.
“We will take them to port and separate them,” said the man. “Name is Xaris. That is Theo, my nephew, and my son Nico in front.” He hung on to the canopy over the bridge as the boat churned up the water. “Nearly didn’t see you. Could have run right over you.” He raised an eyebrow.
Yes, it might not have been the best idea for them to swim out of the cave, shouting and yelling for rescue—and not only because the blue-and-orange trawler happened to be motoring by, picking up nets, possibly hooks hanging out. But because of other reasons.
People-hired-to-kill-her reasons.
The boat bounced over the waves as they headed out to the open sea between the island they’d hidden on and bigger Santorini. She’d stared at the lights for the better part of the night, tempted—well, at least until the tide had come in.
But now, as the boat skimmed across the water, cutting through the waves, frothy-tipped out here in the open, Hud had been right.
Better to hide, to take their chances in the dark maw of the cave than at sea.
