“Exactly what are you thinking?” Katie asked. She tried to play it cool, but anticipation and nearly-uncontrollable joy twisted her mouth into a sexy grin.
Carson answered her query with a lightning-quick movement, one arm going around her back, the other grasping the back of her head, pulling her head forcibly to his. Two sets of willing lips pressed into each other, with Katie parting hers in surrender to him. “Oh, god, Katie,” he said between kisses on her neck and cheeks. “I missed you so much! So many times, I wanted to come to you, to be with you, and the hell with the cops!”
Katie wanted to tell him all was forgiven, especially now, but she couldn’t catch her breath enough to speak. The emotional intimacy shared by the two lovers connected so deeply and so perfectly she knew what Carson was going to say the instant before he spoke.
“I love you, Katie.”
Katie was overwhelmed. For so long she’d feared never hearing those words again, not from him. A tear formed in each eye, but she welcomed them, even more than those when she had seen him on the dock, which seemed like forever ago.
“I love you too, Carson.”
“It was so wonderful of you to set this all up for us. How long are we going to stay here?”
Carson opened his mouth, but seemed to change his mind about his response. “How long do you want to stay here?”
Katie dismissed the silly offer. “Come on. This is great, but it’s got to be costing you a fortune. You don’t have to spend money to get me – I’m already yours.”
“I know,” he nodded, “but you don’t really understand the situation right now. Going back to Delaware might not be the most desirable course of action.”
“Yeah,” she said glumly, a little irritated he was already back on practical matters. “You’re worried about the cops or the feds, or that maybe some of Chops’ other gang members might be carrying a grudge. I get it, they might come after you.”
“Nah,” he said with a shake of his head. “I’m dead. No one’s going to waste time looking for a dead man.”
“Well, you haven’t been declared legally dead. Trust me, I’ve checked. We should get back and fix that so we can get back to a normal life.”
“Why bother? Who really believes I’m still alive?”
“I did.” Katie said matter-of-factly.
“I’m sure you did. But that was from an emotional perspective. Investigators and mob guys, they act on facts. The facts tell them I either blew up or drowned and got eaten by a shark.”
“True, but what happens when you do get back? Someone might see you.”
Carson’s eyes sparkled with mischief. “What makes you think I’m going back?”
“I don’t understand. Where will you go?”
“Home,” he replied in a cavalier tone.
Katie reached the end of her patience with his cryptic answers. “What are you talking about?”
Carson took her hands in his. “What happened to the ransom money?”
“It got blown up in the explosion. The Coast Guard recovered bits of 20 or 30 burned hundred-dollar bills floating in the bay. They said the explosion was so extreme the rest burned up.”
Carson smiled, the self-satisfaction evident on his face. “Even better than I thought. I had the money in my backpack the whole time, Katie, and when I came-to, there were a bunch of little fires still burning here and there on the ship. How hard do you think it was to pull a few bills out, rip them up, singe the edges in the fire, and drop them in the water from the other side of the boat?”
Katie stared, trying to process what she was hearing. His shit-eating grin told her there was more to his story than what he had relayed, but she was still rather overwhelmed and had trouble thinking it through. After a few seconds, she connected the dots.
“Carson, what did you do?” Her voice was almost a whisper, like someone besides her might hear his answer.
“Well, I didn’t buy this entire island and this building with my good looks and charm.”
“You saved the cash? And used it to buy this island?”
“Yes I did,” he stated matter-of-factly. “All the sand and the trees and even the natural fresh-water spring. And I pay a cook, a butler, and a groundskeeper very good money to be here so I don’t have to work too hard. And I didn’t spend anywhere near all of it. US dollars go a long way down here, and the lion’s share of it is in an account in the Cayman Islands, earning an obscene amount of interest.”
Katie was fascinated by the gall of this man. It wasn’t enough to make an incredible escape from a dire situation and make everyone think he had died in the process. No, that challenge didn’t really test him. He figured out a way to keep the money and make everyone think it had burned up in a fire. Absolutely fucking brilliant.
“You’re…” She couldn’t finish the simple sentence – the word to describe what she was thinking didn’t exist, at least not in her vocabulary.
“A genius? A man with no equal? The greatest hero in American history?” Katie cut him off with a smack on his arm before he could come up with a fourth ridiculous self-description.
“No, you jerk! I just can’t believe you pulled this off without anyone knowing.” She paused as a new thought jumped into her head. “Wait a minute. How’d you know I’d go on the cruise?”
“Ah, that. Yes, well, that was a combination of good memory and an optimistic assumption on my part. The day you almost drowned,
