speed Cote d’Azur cruiser.
The most avant-garde design team in the world had created a vessel built of advanced composites that could cruise offshore comfortably at sixty knots. Three 5,600-horsepower gas turbine engines drove the boat. People had described the new Wally design as “psycho origami.”
To Hawke’s naval eye, she was a staggeringly beautiful vessel. Her knifelike hull and fiercely aggressive superstructure resembled nothing so much as a wildly experimental stratospheric airship. Lazzarini-Pickering, the principal naval architects at Wally, had designed a boat all rake and flat planes and sharp angles from stem to stern. Stealth, Hawke thought, had long become a design cliche. But this new boat left any such tired ideas in her wake. Even sitting alongside an old Navy pier in Key West, she seemed to be doing fifty knots.
With his newly appointed crew present on the dock, he had just christened her Stiletto, smashing a bottle of Pol Roger Winston Churchill against her razor-edged bow. The crew had cheered wildly, eager to be off next morning. Already a crewman was carefully stenciling the newly christened yacht’s name in blood red on her dark flanks. She was completely finished in a very deep gunmetal gray , vaguely metallic in direct moonlight.
Her magnificent bow, with a deeply inset teak deck, swept aft to a prominent knife-edged pilothouse built of carbon fiber and laminated composite glass. The three large rectangular windows of thick, bulletproof Lexan, sharply angled aft, were tinted a shade of dark charcoal. The massive air intakes for her gas turbine engines, mounted amidships on either side of the hull, owed much to intensive wind tunnel testing the Wally design team had done in Italy at the Ferrari racing facility at Maranello.
HAWKE PUT his head back and let the stinging water strike his face.
If it was possible for a man to love a machine, he thought, then this was love. Tomorrow morning, he would light out for the Equator and points south. He and his sleek new girl would go racing across the blue sea at speeds approaching one hundred knots. He would take her far up the Amazon, deep into the jungle, and show her where life and death lived together in such uneasy coexistence. He would find the devil standing at the crossroads and he would kill him.
“Need any help?”
With the noise of the shower, he hadn’t heard her come into his bathroom. Now there were two more hands washing him. And her naked body was up against his, moving against his leg, her head nuzzling in the curve of his neck and shoulder. Her mouth was at him too.
Hawke said nothing. What was there to say? No? Yes? Maybe? He simply stood there in the green glass box with his head and shoulders against the wall, feeling her hands moving on his upper body now as she set about scrubbing his face and hair and shoulders.
“I was afraid you’d start without me,” she said.
“If you get soap into my eyes, you’ll be sorry,” Hawke said.
“I’ll try to be careful.”
Her hands moved down the length of his arms and over his chest to his belly where they paused.
“You’ll have to do the rest, I’m afraid,” she said, blinking the streaming water from her eyes as she looked up at him, smiling.
“I will not. And be thorough about it, will you?”
“I’ve never washed a man before.”
“Really? Then something tells me you are a woman with abundant natural talents.”
She bent to her task.
“Hard work.”
“Yes, isn’t it.”
I am drowning, he thought.
And then the woman was in his arms, the two of them were standing in the steamy mist and drenching downpour, both of their bodies slick with soap and heat and desire. He felt the soft weight of her lovely breasts pressed against his chest. He kissed her mouth for the very first time and was surprised at the violence of that kiss, at the need of it, how hard he kissed her and how hard she kissed back, the fierce tenderness of it all, and how wonderful she tasted on his lips.
Somehow, he managed to turn the shower off. He lifted her in his arms and carried her through into the bedroom where he gently laid her upon his bed. She was smiling up at him through half-closed lashes as he reached for the light.
It had been a long time since he had been with a woman and he took her with a gentle brutality, the sweetness of which surprised them both. When the moment came, she dug her fingernails into his hips to take him with her and then she cried out, blessing or cursing his name, perhaps both, and he drove himself into her harder and faster until at last he buried his face in her hair and urgently whispered her name.
Afterward, he lay still on his back, gazing up into the semi-darkness of his cabin and listening to the sound of their tandem breathing. Eventually, her breath slowed and became rhythmic and quiet. Moonlight was pouring through the half-opened shades on either side of his paneled cabin. He closed his eyes, sleep tugging at him, pulling him down.
At some point, he, too, must have drifted off, for he awoke with a start. There were still puddles of moonlight on the floor at the foot of the bed. He sat up, coming awake instantly. It was three o’clock in the morning. The bedside phone was ringing. The green light was blinking, meaning it was his private line.
He reached across her for it, but she’d already taken it off the hook and was sleepily saying, “Hello? Who’s this, please? Yes, he’s right here. Hold on a tick.”
She rolled over and offered him the phone.
“Who is it?” he whispered, his cold eyes flashing with anger at her impertinence.
“It’s your friend,” she said, stifling a yawn as she handed him the phone.
“Which friend is that?” he said, covering the mouthpiece and instinctively dreading her reply.
“The American Secretary of State, Consuelo de los Reyes.”
“Conch?” Hawke mouthed the word.
“Mmm.”
“Bloody hell, Pippa!” he whispered fiercely.
54
H awke put the phone to his ear. The girl in his bed turned her back to him and yanked the bedcovers up over her head like a small child desirous of a private tantrum. Was she actually pouting? Bloody hell, he’d just have to ignore her.
“Good evening, Conch,” Hawke said, with a good deal more bravado than he’d intended.
It was a full two minutes before Alex Hawke was allowed to insert a single word edgewise.
“Sorry,” he finally managed to wedge in.
“He says he’s bloody sorry!” he heard the girl under the covers cry, thankful the exclamation was somewhat muffled.
Pippa rose from the bed without another word, swaddled in trailing bedclothes, and padded silently across the hardwood floor to the head. She pulled the door firmly closed behind her. Thirty seconds later, she emerged once more in one of the white terry robes that hung in all the guest staterooms. Her hair looked different, and Hawke realized she must have used his silver military brushes. The robe, which was obviously what she’d worn when she’d crept below to his stateroom, was belted tightly about her waist.
She crossed his cabin without even a backward glance and, on her way out, banged his stateroom door shut just hard enough to avoid splintering it.
“Conch, this is not at all what it seems,” Hawke said, wincing at the sound of the slamming door, easily loud enough to be heard over the phone, “Can we just move on?”
“Alex, relax. Your personal life long ago ceased to have any fascination for me. And I would happily let you go back to whoever you were doing except for one thing. I’ve just gotten off the phone with the president. He is in full crisis mode. And, he specifically asked me to call you.”
