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  “Don’t lock the door,” he ordered.

  Jenner considered how far she wanted to push him, and decided she’d gone far enough for right now. Baby steps. After all, she had no real idea how he’d react if she really tested his patience. She didn’t know him, didn’t know what he was capable of. She didn’t want to inadvertently push the wrong button and get Syd harmed, just because she was laying groundwork and exploring her limits. So she didn’t lock the door, and she did pee, just in case he was listening.

  As she was washing her hands she looked at herself in the mirror.

  A pale, exhausted face stared back at her. God, what time was it? Glancing at her wristwatch, she realized there was a very good reason why she looked exhausted. She’d been up since before dawn, Eastern time, and it was now two a.m. Eastern, eleven p.m. Pacific—almost twenty-four hours.

  He opened the door. “That’s long enough. Come on out.”

  She finished drying her hands, examined the reddened skin on her arm where she’d been holding the ice, and decided she didn’t need any further application. She unfolded the hand towel and shook the ice into the basin, then neatly hung the towel over the rack to dry. As she left the bathroom he turned to precede her, keeping himself between her and the door, and she saw the swelling, purplish spot where she’d bitten him on the triceps. He needed the ice far more than she did. Unless he went swimming, though, he wouldn’t be taking off his shirt.

  She stared at his back, at the deep furrow of his spine bisecting all those muscles, and wished to hell he’d put a shirt on now.

  “I’m exhausted,” she said, to take her mind off the manscape in front of her. The only time she’d ever let good looks get in the way of her common sense had been with Dylan, all those years ago, when she was just twenty-three, and even then the insanity hadn’t lasted long. She was made of tougher stuff now. “Whatever you’re doing, it can wait until tomorrow. Lock me in here, sleep sitting up against the door, I don’t care. Just let me get some sleep.”

  “What I’m doing can’t wait until tomorrow,” he replied shortly. “And the more you interrupt me, the longer it’ll take. So sit down and shut up. Got it?”

  She got it. If she hadn’t, the fact that he pushed her down into the same chair and slapped a real pair of handcuffs on her, fastening her to the chair, would have gotten her attention.

  She stared down at the metal shackling her wrist. Somehow this seemed far more alarming than the plastic cuffs. These were real handcuffs, and whatever these people were doing, they were serious as a heart attack about it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  CAEL LAY ON HIS STOMACH ON THE BEDROOM FLOOR, drilling a small hole in the base of the wall that separated this suite from Larkin’s suite. Larkin could return to his suite at any time, though his duties as host of the cruise might keep him occupied for an hour or so longer, depending on who wanted to talk to him. If Cael didn’t get this done before Larkin returned, they’d be both blind and deaf this first night at sea. He didn’t like that option, so he ignored everything else and concentrated on what he was doing. He wanted ears in that suite, if nothing else.

  Normally, concentrating wasn’t a problem. Normally, however, he didn’t have a woman with attitude yammering at him nonstop.

  He’d been right about her having the guts to carry off the act he needed. He’d also been right about her causing trouble. Just for once, he wished he’d been wrong. This would have been so much easier if she’d been more like Sydney Hazlett, who was frightened and had cried some but hadn’t shown any sign of fighting back. She’d been told the same thing that Redwine had been told, that her friend’s safety depended on what she did, that each was hostage for the other. The difference was that, according to his people holding Hazlett, she was quiet. Redwine was anything but quiet.

  He silently cursed Larkin for being a paranoid son of a bitch and switching the suite assignments around at the last minute. Until then, the plan had been simple enough. From the suite Ryan and Faith had originally had, on the other side of Larkin, they could have set up all the surveillance necessary to gather information: his phone calls, his onboard meetings, his visitors. If Ryan and Faith had been in place, none of this elaborate charade would be necessary, the kidnapping wouldn’t have been necessary. The surveillance equipment would already have been installed and tested, and they wouldn’t be forced to settle, for now, on eyes and ears in the bedroom instead of the living area—and he wouldn’t be forced to listen to the nonstop commentary on what he was doing.

  “What are you, a thief? What are you doing? Is that a camera?” He could hear her shifting around in the chair, probably trying to get a better look at the equipment neatly arranged on the floor beside him, as well as what he was doing. “You’re going to an awful lot of trouble for a run-of-the-mill perv.”

  Cael stopped drilling and checked his progress. Drilling through a wall on a ship wasn’t exactly like drilling through a wall in a house. The requirements for stability and noise reduction were different, the wiring was different, the codes were different.

  Larkin’s suite was a big one, about thirteen hundred square feet, with the living room on the other side, adjacent to the suite Ryan and Faith had booked. In the middle was the dining room, and on this side was the bedroom. The equipment he was using was sensitive enough to pick up everything said in the bedroom, and part of what was said in the dining room. No way would it pick up the living room sounds. They’d have to get a bug on his phone, and if Larkin had a computer with him they’d also have to get access to it. They’d have had to do that in any case, but the layout of the rooms would have eliminated most of his problems—and the biggest problem that would have been eliminated was sitting handcuffed to the chair behind him.

  If they got through this without her blowing the whole scheme wide open with her mouth, it would be nothing short of a miracle. He would have to ride herd on her every minute of the day to keep her under control; he wasn’t sure any of his other people could do it.

  She’d already gotten under Bridget’s skin, and rattled Faith. Tiffany … nothing rattled Tiffany, but with the scene they’d set up, absolutely no one would believe that Tiffany and Redwine could become buddies, so Tiffany spending any amount of time with her was impossible. Matt couldn’t do it, because his cover as a ship employee wouldn’t let him be in her suite, either. That left Ryan, and as good as he was, he was also a married man and he and Faith were known to be very happy, so what excuse could he have for being in Redwine’s suite? Moreover, Larkin was so paranoid that if either Faith or Ryan, the original occupants of the suite adjoining his, suddenly began spending a lot of time in the suite on the other side of him, he would go nuts.

  That left Cael. God help me, he thought wryly.

  “Whatever your plan is, it isn’t going to work. No one is going to believe that you and I are together. I know some of the passengers on this cruise, and you’re so not my type, plus they won’t believe I’d ever bring you back to my suite for the night right after you just broke up with your girlfriend.”

  If she kept kissing him the way she’d kissed him up on the sports deck, they would. He stifled that particular memory before it could fully form, because the last thing he wanted right now was to get turned on. He focused on his work, threading two very thin cables, one with a tiny microphone on the end, the other with an equally miniscule camera, through the hole he’d drilled and into Larkin’s bedroom. According to the layout of the suite Bridget had given him, and the exact measurement he’d used to place the hole, the camera and mic were just beside the large plant that filled the empty space in that corner of the bedroom.

  He could have used a single cable that incorporated both audio and video, but in his opinion they weren’t as sensitive as the ones with dedicated functions. If he’d been threading the cables through a solid core, the task wouldn’t be half as delicate, but instead he was moving them through empty space. The camera was already operational, inserted just an inch or so, and he