quite welcome.”
You’re quite welcome. How long since she’d heard that phrase? These days people said “no problem!”—as though her thanking them was one.
When the elevator stopped on the Promenade level, she walked ahead of him nervously, SeaKey in hand. Lola felt like a little girl being herded to the office for lying to the teacher. Or for not wearing panties to school. The nuns would’ve fainted—or gotten out the paddle—at that sin!
“I’ll wait right here. Take your time,” DeSilva said as she slid the key card into the lock.
“Ah. So it was only my fantasy that you’d come into my room,” she quipped, and then her cheeks flared with embarrassment. “I’m so—that was inexcusably rude, to—”
Rio sucked in his breath. Here in the dimmed lights of the corridor, with her ivory face flushed and her robe clinging to curves that called out to his hands, it was a fantasy he certainly shared. He looked through her open door to rein in his runaway thoughts, and then grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Wait! Someone’s been in here, rifling through your room! You’d better stay right here while I check for an intruder.”
Pulse pounding—from the thought of intruders, and from the heat of his skin through her robe—Lola grabbed the door jamb as Rio stepped into her stateroom.
“Anybody here?” he demanded, throwing open the bathroom door. He was bristling with business now—not a burly man, but not one she’d want to get crossways with, either. Rio DeSilva’s angles looked sharp enough to slice like a saber.
As she peeked in after him, Lola let out a long sigh. With Fletch’s undershirts and socks strewn everywhere, the place did look ransacked. And when DeSilva leaned down to pick up a crumpled piece of paper, she knew she had to come clean.
Lola stepped inside. Leaned against the door to close it. “I have a confession,” she breathed.
Rio’s heart skipped a couple of beats. He felt like anything but a priest. Lola’s robe had fallen open again, enough to tease him with her pale pink cleavage…round and firm and sweet. His tongue flicked the roof of his mouth, wondering how those painted points would feel—and taste.
He cleared his throat. This was an adult cruise, yes—the fantasy Captain Skandalis alluded to in his welcome spiel—but he was strictly forbidden to be in a passenger’s room while she was in it, too.
“Yes? I’m listening,” he replied. He was uncrumpling the paper he’d picked up out of sheer habit—searching for clues, about a possible intruder or Dennis Fletcher’s situation, he would say if the captain quizzed him about this breach of behavior.
“That story about Dennis going ashore to—and maybe being too sick to come back?”
Lola hated it that her eyes were tearing up over the way Fletch had jerked her strings, but dammit she’d loved the guy! Or thought she did.
“Well, I made it up. He—he left me that note you’re holding, saying he—he’s found a woman with a seaside villa—and—well, I got pissed off and threw his clothes out of the drawers!”
Rio stopped fidgeting with the note. “So you went down to the gangplank area, to see if you could chase after him?” Dressed like that? he almost added.
Lola sighed, yanking the lapels of her robe together. “I was so—so irked that he’d taken off with somebody, when we were supposed to get…married tomorrow….”
“I’m so sorry.”
It was the merest whisper, yet it carried the weight of his concern: the key that opened the innermost room of her heart. A room Dennis had never known, or cared, how to reach. Lola slumped, letting her hair fall like a curtain so DeSilva wouldn’t see how ugly her face got when she bawled.
“Please excuse me, I—”
“There is no excuse for the shabby way he’s treated you,” Rio stated, more fervently than he had a right to. Lola couldn’t know yet just how true that was. Every nerve ending in his body warned him to step away, to get himself out of her room and out from under her spell while there was still time.
Her shoulders shuddered pathetically when she tried not to cry. To keep from pulling her into his arms, Rio skimmed the note.
—found my true soul mate—someone who won’t—boss me around—have the last word—get better acquainted at her seaside villa—
The lying bastard deserved to rot in jail for this! DeSilva looked up from the note before Lola could catch him reading it, and took inspiration from the small safe in the open closet.
“Is his passport—any sort of identification—still here?” he asked in his most official-sounding voice. “It will help the authorities process him. Or help you, if you need to—what’s wrong, Lola?”
She opened the safe, surprised it hadn’t been locked, and then frantically yanked the drawers open below it.
“My cell phone’s gone! I put it in this top drawer when I came back to take my—and my purse!”
My Camels! The bastard took my only pack of—
She scanned the room, her gaze raking the top of the TV, the corner desk and its open shelves, the glass-top coffee table, and the upholstered love seat. “I brought it back from shopping onshore, after lunch, and I put it—if that bastard took—he’s got my credit cards! My checkbook’s in there—and so is my passport!”
Fletch knew damn well I’d get crazy if he took my security smokes!
Rio’s jaw clenched as he watched her desperately search every inch of the stateroom, her expression growing more alarmed by the second. As well it should! Here on board her SeaKey was all she needed, but stepping ashore in any Caribbean port without identification was risky. Not to mention the predicament it would put her in when she went through Customs on her way home.
“Why on earth did he have to take my—it’s not like he’s hurting for money, but God! My cell had all my clients’ numbers, and my appointments, and—”
Lola stopped rummaging around the bed’s comforter and pillows, engulfed in a deep chill. Ah, jeez, now she was shaking like a junkie, just at the thought that he stole her—
“What is it? What else has he taken?” Rio stepped toward her, determined not to touch her because just recalling her soft skin and the fresh scent of that bare body had him reeling.
“Cigarettes,” she finally mewed. Then she screwed up her face, which was already blotchy from crying. “I—I quit, dammit! For good this time! But I carried around one single pack of Camels, still wrapped. With strapping tape around it to remind me not to open them, no matter how jittery and desperate and bitchy I got!”
Lola cast another miserable, futile glance around the ransacked room. “I had them in my purse this morning, when we were shopping onshore!” she rasped. “He must’ve—”
Her insides twisted into a tight knot. She held herself, knowing it made her look like a nympho going into withdrawal, but things were suddenly a whole lot worse than Dennis’s note had led her to believe. What he’d said about his
