He shrugged a broad, tuxedoed shoulder. “Perhaps you’re right, Annja dear. I have no wish to torment you, after all. I am not a cruel man, you know—I worked that out of my system long ago.”
She tried not to shudder, and tried harder not to envision just what he meant.
“Although I’m maintaining a low profile on this voyage,” he said, “and the world at large still does not know my face—an expensive status to maintain, but well worth the investment—I have a certain image to project to those with whom I’m carrying out a certain, most delicate negotiation.”
His accent was vaguely and indeterminately European. She suspected it was an affectation. He no doubt could speak English better than she could. He’d had long enough to practice.
Nonetheless it did contribute to making him devastatingly sexy. Curse him anyway, she thought. This could turn out to be a very long voyage.
“Aren’t you concerned about doing that under the noses of the Venezuelans?” she asked. The Ocean Venture had just steamed past Aruba in the Netherlands Antilles, and was scheduled to make landfall at Willemstad on the island of Curaçao the next morning to allow sightseeing and, of course, a spree of shopping. Venezuela’s north coast lay less than a hundred miles to the south.
“How do you know those aren’t the ones I’m negotiating with? Their oil holdings might prove of interest to EuroPetro. They certainly do to the Chinese.”
She looked at him hard. “Am I just arm candy?” she asked. She shook her head in almost reflex negation. “You could have your pick of supermodels or Hollywood stars. If you crooked one finger, Nicole Kidman would kick Keith Urban back into rehab and fly at you like somebody’s wristwatch to the inside of an MRI machine.”
He laughed with a gusto that made heads turn. He paid no mind. He did few things by halves. “You’ve a gift for unexpected expression,” he said. “Indeed, you’ve a positive gift for the unexpected. Is it not enough to know that I savor that? Because I do. Not to mention your beauty, which to my sorrow you constantly denigrate, and which possesses, to these jaded old eyes, a freshness few celebrities—especially the flavors of the week—can match.”
Annja snorted in a most unladylike way. “Flattery,” she sputtered.
He scowled and she recoiled slightly. She feared a lot of things and a lot of people—she had seen and experienced far too much not to—but she was intimidated by no one. He came close, though.
“Please, my dear,” he said, softening a degree or so, “never say such a thing again. I never flatter.” Then that grin, youthful and ageless, returned. “It implies I need to.”
“Point taken.” Finding her plate empty, she set down her fork, propped her elbows to either side, laced her fingers in their flame-colored long gloves and rested her chin on them. “Now, give. Why is it so important to have me along?”
“Perhaps I feel the need of additional security,” he said, with a roguish twinkle in his eye. Well, even more than usual. “You make a most exemplary bodyguard, as well as a—shall we say—disarmingly lovely one?”
She snorted again. “I don’t want to set off that touchy Renaissance pride again,” she said—she was something of an authority on the Renaissance, it being her period of professional specialization as an archaeologist and historian. “But that seems rather hard to believe. You can afford to travel with a phalanx of top security men. And you do—I’ve spotted a few of them on the boat. Immaculately dressed bald guys with wires in their ears.”
“Ship,” Garin corrected automatically. “Without meaning to denigrate your own falcon keenness of perception, don’t you think potential evil-wishers can do at least as well spotting such men? Whereas you are an extraordinarily gifted amateur, some of them are lifelong professionals at the craft.”
“Hel-lo,” she said quietly, “you’re immortal.”
He chuckled. “Being immortal doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t die,” he said. “It just means I haven’t.”
He made an easy gesture with one hand. “I am extraordinarily tough to kill, I grant. But there are certain fates that might make me wish I could die. What if I was trapped at the bottom of the sea? So that I was perpetually drowning, but couldn’t quite die? That would be like hell, would it not? So you see, I’ve plenty to fear. And of course, there is always my concern, now that you’ve claimed the sword, that my gift—the one that old rake Roux perversely prefers to consider a curse—of immortality might evaporate.”
Annja’s blood ran cold. She could never forget that Garin would—if he could—wrest the mystic sword of Joan of Arc away from her and break it to pieces again, as had the English soldiers who had captured St. Joan so many centuries before.
“Fear not, fair lady,” Garin said, eyes dancing as he finished his wine. “So long as I continue to wake up each morning feeling hale and whole—you can continue to wake up in the mornings. Shall we dance?”
“You’re a bastard,” she told him as he held her chair and helped her to her feet.
“Born that way,” he acknowledged, “although I like to think I’ve earned the title on my own merits, over the years.”
When the band, perched on its podium to one side of the great ballroom, struck up a tango, Annja thought for sure the evening couldn’t possibly get any worse.
“I don’t know how to tango,” she snarled in Garin’s ear.
“You’ll be fine,” he said. “You’re a natural athlete. And a trained martial artist. Remember your taijiquan balance training.”
“I don’t do taijiquan in heels,” she said. She knew now why they called them stilettos—they were like daggers stabbing her feet at every step. As much experience as she had wearing heels—very little—she walked in them with all the grace of a drunken baby duck. Whereas she danced in the high spike heels, she thought, like a water buffalo on skates. But a tango—“I’ll break an ankle!”
He laughed softly. “Follow my lead,” he said. “It’s worked splendidly for you so far.”
She struggled to keep her irritation from showing on her face. Her gown was backless, and its bodice consisted of what she tried not to think of as bunny ears from just south of her navel upward, diminishing to bitty strings tied behind her neck. It was held in place either by some kind of surface tension, like a bubble, or through magic. And she didn’t believe in magic.
She’d seen the tango sequences in True Lies. She secretly identified with Jamie Lee Curtis, a sort of standard-bearer for gawky women who could still be darned sexy. But once Garin started flinging her around she feared it would be mere seconds before her boobs came flying out of the dress like startled pigeons.
“Trust me,” Garin said with a wicked grin.
“Yeah,” she whispered furiously. “It’s not like you’ve tried to kill me.”
“Not recently,” he said. “And most assuredly not here.”
The preliminary violin strains died away. She felt his hand burning at the small of her bare back as if heated in a forge.
The tango began in earnest. He leaned forward. In response she leaned back, bent over his strong grasp. She felt her breasts ride up her rib cage and thought, This is not good.
That was when the terrorists barged in and fired a burst into the ceiling.
2
“Nobody move!” a black-hooded man shouted in Spanish-accented English. “We have commandeered this vessel in the name of the People’s Revolution!”
“How tedious,” Garin murmured, his face inches from hers. “It seems we’re being hijacked.”
“I’m