Page 66 of Hot Intent

“Has anyone ever told you you’ve got quite a way with words?” she asked dryly.

He tied some sort of line coming from the dinghy around her waist as he replied, “Sheila’s call me a silver-tongued devil all the toime.”

Emphasis on devil.

“Ship’s watch’ll be makin’ rounds soon. Off ye go, then.” The Aussie grabbed her around the waist and had the gall to actually grin as he bodily hauled her to the rail.

“No! You can’t do this!” She fought with all her might but was no match for the burly sailor. He scooped her up off her feet and threw her out into space.

Alex pawned the solid gold bracelet operatives like him wore for emergencies just like this one. He got a fraction of its value but he wasn’t concerned. A casino was open just down the street.

He walked down the Havana beachfront to a hotel and its attached casino, keeping careful watch for tails. He knew he hadn’t been spotted when he entered the city, but that didn’t mean someone hadn’t picked him up in the past hour. Watchers were everywhere on this island.

The all-consuming panic from before had settled down enough for him to function with caution and discretion. A lifetime’s worth of training came down to this moment. He was a spy, fully in his element and at the peak of his abilities.

At the casino, he traded his meager stack of cash for chips and headed for the blackjack tables. Of all the games casinos ran, its odds were most in the player’s favor.

Also, it was the easiest game to cheat at and the fastest way to accumulate winnings. Of course, the blackjack tables were closely watched for card counting and other illegal behaviors. But he had at least an hour to play before anyone got suspicious enough to detain him. He glanced at the dealer’s watch and got to work.

A horrible, gasping scream escaped Katie on the heart-stopping fall thirty or more feet down to the water. What breath she hadleft was ripped out of her by the freezing temperature of the water as she slammed into it.

Panic clawed at her as the black water closed over her head. Bubbles tickled her face as the life jacket did its work and carried her back up to the surface. She popped up like one of the little red and white plastic float balls her dad attached to her fishing line as a kid.

She heard the roar before she felt the pull of the Caelum. Turning in the water, she recoiled, backpedaling hard with hands and feet as the massive hull of the ship loomed shockingly close. A terrible, churning turbulence tried to suck her forward. She kicked with all her might, scared out of her mind, certain that she was about to be chopped to bits, after all.

As quickly as the awful suction started, it stopped. The ocean settled into blackness around her once more, and she bobbed, tiny and helpless on the not inconsiderable swells as the Caelum quickly retreated into the night. The dinghy. Where was it? Had she lost it in that damned fall?

She felt at her waist and found the line. She reeled it in and spotted the bundle floating in the water beside her. She fumbled around on its slick surface and found what felt like a T-handle. She gave it a tug, and the damned thing practically exploded in her face. If she ever saw that Aussie again, she was going to have to hurt him.

The dinghy turned out to be a tiny little circle of yellow rubber tubing with a membrane suspended in the middle. And it was a pain in the butt to climb aboard. She tipped it over twice before she managed to heave herself across it far enough to grab the far side and scrambled into the middle. She flopped on her face and got a foul mouthful of sea water, but managed to right herself, cursing. She didn’t know whether she was more eager to kill Alex or the Aussie for getting her into this predicament.

She scouted out the tiny vessel and found a small cone made of heavy plastic. She used it to scoop out most of the water out of the bottom of the boat. Attached to a nylon cord, she found the emergency locator beacon. An orange light flashed on one end of it, so she presumed it was activated and calling in her supposed ride. The beacon turned out to have a flashlight built into it, not that the thing did her a lick of good. All it showed her was rain falling from above and scary big swells below. She turned the light off. Ignorance was bliss right about now.

She was delighted to discover some sort of waterproof cover rolled up and tied to one side of the raft. She unfurled it over herself. Wet, cold, and miserable, she huddled beneath it and listened to the rain pattering off her meager protection. The thin rubber floor of the raft did little to insulate her from the heat-leeching chill of the sea beneath her, and she curled into in a ball of misery, hugging her knees in a failing effort to conserve body warmth.

She held the cone outside the tarp and caught a few ounces of rainwater at a time in it, which she drank. Up and down, up and down the dinghy went. She barfed over the edge of the raft enough times that her stomach finally was completely empty and she only dry heaved now and then.

Once her clothes sort of dried out, she warmed up a little. Just enough to make the mistake of peeking out from under the tarp. She was a tiny speck in the middle of a giant, yawning blackness. There was no way anyone would ever find her out here.

This was so not how she’d imagined dying. Her thoughts turned to Dawn, and she grieved for the little girl who’d lost one mother at birth and now was going to lose another one to sheer stupidity.

What had she been thinking to follow Alex to Cuba? Had she been so besotted with the man that she’d been willing to throw away everything, even her responsibility as a parent, for him?

She argued with herself that the purpose in going to Cuba had been to make sure Dawn had two parents to raise her. But now she saw it for the insanity it had been. Funny how, now that she was dying, so much became clear to her.

One fact stood clear of all the rest. She’d been a damned fool to love Alex Peters.

In forty-five minutes, Alex had enough chips to buy his way off the island even if he had to take less than legal means of transportation. He tossed a hefty chip to the dealer and took the rest of his stack to the cashier’s window. No sense getting greedy and attracting too much attention to himself.

The hour was late, but he gave a cab driver the address of a jeweler who ran a lucrative side business forging international travel documents. The man was grumpy when Alex pounded on the back door at this hour, but let him in when he saw the wad of cash in Alex’s fist.

It would take the forger overnight to work up a throw-away, one-time use passport and fake visa, so Alex headed back to the beach to hit up a couple more casinos for funds to pay for the documents. Prices had gone up since the last time he’d been down here.

He made drive-by hits on three casinos before he figured he had better not press his luck any further. He took his winnings and retreated to a hotel room to clean up and sleep off the past two days.

Katie jolted awake when something bumped the side of her dinghy. Crap. Was that a shark? She’d heard they rammed stuff they were curious about.

“Anyone home?” a voice called.

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