Lola Carlyle Reveals All

He sat on the bench seat where he’d seen Lola sleeping that morning and slowly leaned forward. He took as deep a breath as possible, then held it as he untied one boot and then the other. The night before, he’d wondered if there’d been some underhanded government plan to get rid of him. Now that he’d had time to think it over, he didn’t believe that to be the case. With every job, there were always a dozen or so things that could go wrong at any given time. It was Murphy’s Law, and last night, Murphy’s Law had ruled from the very beginning.

Max had first recognized it when his flight to Nassau had been delayed an hour and he’d missed his contact within the local DEA. No problem, he still had fresh intel, less than twenty-four hours old, locked away in his brain.

From the moment he’d set foot on Nassau the assignment had gone straight to hell, and he should have aborted right then, but he couldn’t.

He was Max Zamora, and the one thing that made him so good at what he did was the one thing that had almost cost him his life this time. He hated failure. He’d only failed once in his life, and he took it personally.

That hatred was also the one thing that made him the perfect government operative. That and the fact that he had no family, and when he wasn’t covert he lived a fairly normal life.

Lieutenant Commander Maximilian Javier Gunner Zamora was officially listed as retired from the United States Navy. He’d been a member of SEAL Team Six, and after the team had been disbanded in the mid-1990s, he’d been recruited by the Navy’s Special Warfare Development Group.

Currently, he was self-employed as a security consultant. Max’s firm, Z Security, was very much a legitimate company and was more than something he did when he wasn’t covert. He’d built it from the ground up and employed retired SEALs to work for him. He and his men instructed major corporations on how to tighten their security against guys like them. Guys who found ways to walk into secure installations.

He unpinned the elastic bandage around his abdomen and took it off. He pressed his fingers against his sixth and seventh ribs and sucked in his breath. Pain was good, he reminded himself. Pain let him know he was alive. Today he was very much alive, but he’d certainly lived through worse. Freezing his balls off and getting shot at in the North Sea while clinging to an ice-covered oil rig came to mind. Now, that was Max’s version of hell, and he was certain when he did eventually die, that was where he’d play out eternity. In comparison, sitting aboard a disabled forty-seven-foot yacht with a few cracked ribs, a pain-in-the-ass underwear model and her pain-in-the-ass dog wasn’t so bad. In fact, a little Caribbean vacation might be just what he needed.

Chapter 3

Wearing nothing but her patented Cleavage Clicker bra, Lola stuck her head out of the bathroom and looked around. Her gaze moved from the locked stateroom door to the blue dress lying on the king-sized bed. She’d forgotten to bring the dress into the bathroom with her, and she glanced up at the tinted porthole. When she didn’t see a set of black and blue eyes peering back at her, she rushed to the side of the bed and quickly threaded her arms through the short sleeves. The nightmare of a dress was covered with bunches of red cherries, yellow bananas, and green grapes. It looked like it had been hit by a fruit stand, or with ambrosia salad, the stuff her grandmother always took to the families of those whose loved ones had “passed over.”

She pulled the front closed and buttoned the material over her breasts and her pink bra. The Cleavage Clicker had been one of her first designs, and at that time a revolution in comfort and support. First-year sales had beaten projection by twenty-six percent, and it was still her biggest moneymaker. Embroidered lace over soft stretch satin, with delicately scalloped edges, it was not only comfortable, it gave the wearer three different cleavage-enhancing options. Of course, shortly after it had appeared in her first catalog, the bra had been copied by just about everyone.

At the moment, though, enhancing her cleavage was the absolute last thing she wanted, but with the dress so tight across her breasts, it couldn’t be avoided. When she was through with the buttons, she reached into her purse and pulled out her brush. She carefully removed the tangles from her hair, then raised her arms and wove it into a single braid. It was coated with salty sea air and felt like straw. She would have killed for a bath. A real dunking with soap and water, but she didn’t dare. Not with “good old Max” aboard.

Using the water from the pitcher Max had told her about, she’d brushed her teeth, then filled the sink in the bathroom and had washed as much of her body as possible. Then she’d taken off her pink panties and washed them as well. Once she’d finished, she’d hung them over the shower stall to dry. She figured if she kept her arms down, no one would notice that she wasn’t wearing panties. No one meaning Max.

Besides being a thief, the man might be a murderer, too. And why that didn’t frighten the heck out of her, she didn’t know. Maybe because, other than tying her up and bruising her wrists, he hadn’t really hurt her. And she figured after she’d threatened him with the flare gun and accidently shot the helm, he probably wasn’t going to kill her at this late date.

He did scare her, though. Even with his bruised face and battered body, he had overpowered her with ease. With the fish knife, she felt slightly safer around him.

More than her fear of him was the impotent anger building inside her. The more she thought of it, anger didn’t even begin to describe what she felt about him and the situation he’d forced on her, never mind that he probably hadn’t meant to drag her into his problems. He had anyway, and now she was stranded and there was a real possibility that she and Baby would die in the middle of the Atlantic. After the conversation she’d had with him that morning, she not only had to wonder if she’d die either of hunger or dehydration, but now she had the added worry that she might die at the hands of the drug lords who’d beaten Max to a pulp.

Now when she held the signaling mirror in her hand, she’d have to wonder if it would save her life or bring a fate worse than starving to death. Either way, she had to try. No doubt the Thatches had already reported the yacht stolen, and surely someone would have noticed her missing also. They had to be searching for her.

So she would take her chances, be it with a drug lord or Coast Guard. She would keep signaling for help until someone got her off the darn boat.

Lola searched the stateroom for sunscreen and found a tube of SPF15 in the bathroom. She rubbed it into her dry skin, giving her face and neck a double coating. Sometime last night, she’d lost her sandals, and she looked around the room for another pair. She found nothing but an old pair of canvas sneakers and decided to pass.

She tilted her head to one side and studied herself in the mirrored closet doors. Besides being god-awful ugly, the dress obviously belonged to Dora Thatch, a woman who was five inches shorter than Lola and thirty pounds heavier. It fit loose about her hips and tight across her chest. The buttons closing the front gaped, and even when Lola lowered her arms, the dress hit her about midthigh. But the most disturbing part was the bunch of cherries strategically placed like a big fig leaf over her crotch.

From outside, Baby let loose with a barrage of wild barking and her heart about leaped from her chest. She grabbed the binoculars and mirror and headed out through the galley.

It wasn’t until she stood on the aft deck, staring at nothing but endless blue ocean and sky, that she realized she’d expected to see the Coast Guard speeding toward them. Hope shriveled in her chest and sank to the pit of her stomach.

Baby stood at the open door at the stern of the boat, staring down at the swimming platform. He barked so hard his back legs rose off the deck. Lola moved to the wraparound seat, glanced over the stern, and got an eyeful of good old Max’s naked butt. Obviously, he didn’t suffer from modesty and had no problem bathing in front of her.

He lowered a bucket tied to the end of a rope into the ocean, then raised it and dumped it over his head. Water ran through his black hair and splashed on his wide shoulders. It ran down the defined muscles of his back and the indent of his spine. Droplets slid down the cheeks of his behind, the backs of his thighs, and puddled at his feet. He shook his head and beads of water flew in all directions.

Lola turned away, feeling a bit guilty for staring. God only knew what he really did for a living and what sins he’d committed doing it, but he had the kind of body reserved for the pages of a men’s fitness magazine or a stripper calendar.