Follow the Sun (15 page)

“And Royce didn’t leave you anything in his will?”

“I told you that he didn’t!”

“Except for the Blue Princess.”

Tess bit each word off emphatically. “I told you, my grandparents
gave
me the diamond on my eighteenth birthday. They stole it from Queen Isabella of Kara because of some misguided urge for revenge. My mother died in an accident on a ski slope at a Karan resort.”

“That’s a ridiculous story. I had your grandparents checked out after they came to the marina and spied on me. They wouldn’t steal an apple from the corner grocery.”

Tess shivered with frustration. On that point she agreed with him. The story still perplexed her.

“I thought
you
weren’t capable of stealing from
me
. I thought you were a Florida businessman on vacation. I thought you were someone very special.”

“I retrieved your
stolen
diamond for its owner. Don’t play games with me. You knew the diamond was hot, and that Royce was the one who stole it.”

She shook both fists at him. “I’m telling you the truth, which is more than you ever told me! You were paid to get close to me, and you weren’t particular about the way you did it!”

He inhaled sharply. “I love you. Even if you’re still determined to lie about your past.”

“Oh, stop!” she demanded in disgust and shock. Tess pulled back from him, her eyes full of tears. She held the chain out defiantly. “Is this how you treat someone you love?”

“When it’s the only way to make her do what’s best for her, yes.”

“I don’t need that kind of love.”

“You need to stay alive, don’t you? And I intend
to keep you that way while my brother and Drake try to learn who the hell wants you dead. It would be helpful if you’d give me some clues.”

Her shoulders slumped. “I’ve told you all I know.”

“Dammit, I might as well talk to the mountains.” He waved curtly to Drake, who started up the trail again.

Tess slanted a look at him. “You’d better learn how, if you want friendly conversation.”

Jeopard urged his horse ahead of her and tugged on her chain. “Move it. The sooner you tell me the truth and make friends, the sooner I can let you off this leash.”

Tess bit back bitter words that would only antagonize him more and hurried her horse after his. The chain stretched between them like a bond neither could escape.

F
OR A CAVE
, it was cozy.

It looked as though some giant had scooped a handful of rock from the mountain’s side. There was nothing dank or dark about the cave; it had a wide, tall entrance that let in a lot of the afternoon sun. The floor was fairly level and the walls had a whitish limestone surface.

Tess stood at the entrance and gazed outward at a vista of gently rounded blue-green mountains. The ground sloped for a hundred feet in front of the cave, then dropped gradually toward a distant valley.

“It’s like looking out a window at the top of the world,” Drake observed as he began unloading gear from the pack horse.

“Get used to the view,” Jeopard told her. He took his end of her chain to a stout young maple tree growing by the cave’s entrance. There he knelt and padlocked the chain into place.

The chain was easily thirty feet long, so Tess could walk to the center of the cave or well outside the
entrance. But it was a short tether, considering her humiliation and anger.

She sat down on a rocky outcropping and stared into the distance, her back aching with the attempt to maintain her dignity, her thoughts turbulent. Jeopard refused to believe her story about the blue diamond, he claimed to be on her side, and yet he intended to keep her chained in a cave, at his beck and call.

And he’d said that he loved her.

“Here. Make yourself useful. Blow up these air mattresses.”

Jeopard dropped a heap of plastic and a bicycle pump onto the ground in front of her, then walked away. Her mouth clamped tightly shut, Tess went to work.

While she was inflating the first mattress, angrily stamping the foot pump, Drake came over and laid a large canvas bag beside her.

“Things for you,” he explained. “Jeopard told me to get them.”

Tess stared at the bag, wary of Jeopard’s continuing attempts at kindness. She hated the wistful, eager way her pulse jumped.

She started to open the bag, caught Jeopard watching her with a cool, slit-eyed expression, and changed her mind. Curiosity would make her vulnerable. After all, she’d never have gotten into this mess if she hadn’t been curious about an enigmatic stranger who had trouble docking his yacht.

She shoved the bag with her foot and went back to pumping up the air mattresses.

When Drake and Jeopard finished setting everything up she had her own territory on the left side of the cave. Tess arranged a pillow and sleeping bag on her air mattress and sat down.

She watched them fiddle with elite camping gear-powerful lanterns, a small kerosene-powered grill, buckets, pots, skillets, and a dozen other items.

“My apartment isn’t this well furnished,” Jeopard quipped.

He put his mattress on the opposite side of the cave, fixed a campfire site in the center, then came to her and gestured with one finger. “Up. Test time.”

She raged inwardly when she realized what he meant. He led her to the end of her chain, then moved gear around to make certain she couldn’t reach it.

“Afraid I’ll attack you with a spatula?” she asked grimly.

“Frankly, yes, War Woman.”

Drake set a CB radio on Jeopard’s side of the cave and ran a long cable to an antenna outside. “Six
P.M
. every day,” he called.

“I’ll be listening.”

Tess went back to her side of the cave and sat down. “Exactly how long are we going to be here?”

“As long as it takes. Look at it as a native cultural experience. Cherokees may have hidden in this cave a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“I doubt they had CB radios.”

She touched her voluminous jeans and shirt. They were hot and uncomfortable. “What am I supposed to wear?”

“Anything you want. Go naked. I could use the entertainment.”

“Perhaps you can amuse yourself by throwing rocks at small animals or pulling the wings off of insects.”

“I think I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone,” Drake interjected. “I’m not a good referee.” He mounted his horse and tipped a hand to his forehead in salute to Jeopard. “And you thought the Russians were tough.”

Jeopard glanced drolly at Tess. “I know how Custer felt.”

Russians?
Tess was intrigued, but refused to ask for an explanation.

A sense of foreboding filled her as Drake rode away, leading the other three horses. When the forest swallowed him up, it was as if he’d never existed. She and Jeopard were alone, and the cave seemed awfully small and quiet.

His back to her. Jeopard knelt by a bag, unzipped it, and rummaged inside.

“What now?” she asked in a weary voice.

“Drake says there’s a big creek not far from here.” He stood and turned to face her. He carried towels and a bar of soap. He smiled pleasantly. “I’d say we both need a bath.”

I
T WASN’T JUST
a creek, it was a natural work of art, with a ten-foot waterfall that bubbled over a granite ledge into a shallow pool.

If she hadn’t been so upset, she would have sighed with awe. Tess sat down on a flat boulder by the pool and hugged her knees.

“I have no desire to bathe while you watch,” she told Jeopard.

He chained her to a nearby tree. “You spent the better part of a week naked in my bed. There’s no reason for you to be modest with me now.”

She stared into the shimmering pool while a knot of bittersweet pain grew inside her. “That was different,” she murmured. “I wasn’t ashamed of loving you then.”

He slowly sat down beside her, The air seemed to crackle with emotion. “You’re ashamed now?” he asked in a husky voice.

“Yes.”

Tess looked at him. A muscle flexed in his jaw, and his eyes were shadowed, but he looked more regretful than angry. She could have sworn that he was struggling with deep sorrow.

“Take a bath, Tess,” he finally said, his voice tired. “I won’t try to make love to you, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

He turned away and stripped off his clothes. Tess watched, strange emotions gnawing at her as he revealed his body without inhibition.

Jeopard took the bar of soap and stepped into the pool, his back to her. “Are you coming in?”

“Is this the only chance I’ll have to wash?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” she said in a defeated tone. Tess removed her clothes and slid into the water, then turned her back and sank down until the water covered her to the shoulders.

She heard Jeopard splash water on himself and wanted to cry at the memory of running her hands over his body, of touching him everywhere, of pleasing him in every way a woman could please a man.

“Why did you want me to fall in love with you?” she asked in a tear-soaked voice. “Was I so easy and foolish that you couldn’t resist?”

“It was the other way around. I couldn’t resist you.”

She shut her eyes.
Stop lying to me, Jeopard
. “But you stole from me.”

“And after I turned the diamond over to its rightful owner, I planned to come back to Long Beach and tell you why I’d done it.”

“You did it for money. Someone paid you. How much?”

He hesitated for a second. “Twenty thousand dollars to my brother and me. We work together.”

She gasped. “Who wanted the diamond that badly?”

She heard sloshing noises. The water undulated around her. Suddenly Jeopard touched her shoulder. Tess jumped.

“The soap,” he said brusquely, and let it slip down her chest.

Trying to control her voice, she asked again, “Who wanted the diamond?”

He told her about Olaf Starheim, the Duke of Kara.

“But why would he want to kill me?”

Again Jeopard touched her. She wanted to withdraw, but couldn’t make herself do it. He ran his hand back and forth across her shoulders, massaging her.

“You tell me,” he murmured. “Tell me, and let’s go on with our relationship.”

Tess’s momentary languor dissolved in anger. She moved away from him and said tautly, “I won’t forget what you are and what you really want from me.”

“Just the truth.”

Tess dropped the soap in the water and buried her face in her hands. “I’ve told you. You don’t believe me. You’re hopeless. I don’t understand you. I don’t really know who you are.”

“I’m not sure myself these days,” he said bitterly.

“You frighten me. I don’t feel safe with you.”

“
Tess
. That’s the one thing you shouldn’t doubt.”

“Fine words from a con artist.”

His voice was more anguished then angry. “You’re awfully arrogant for a jewel thief.”

Tess grabbed the soap, twisted around, and threw it at him. He caught it just in time to keep from being hit in the head. Slowly, his eyes taunting her, he smiled.

“I’m definitely keeping the spatula away from you.”

I
F HE’D COUNTED
the times she spoke to him during the next few days, he doubted they’d have come to more than a dozen. She withdrew into a silent, wary world, doing what he told her to do, asking quietly when she needed something, but otherwise ignoring him.

The one time he saw excitement and pleasure in her eyes was when she opened her canvas bag and found all the books and pamphlets he’d instructed Drake to buy for her at the museum on the Cherokee reservation, which wasn’t far from the Nantahala area.

“I thought you’d enjoy them,” Jeopard told her.

She clasped a book titled
Myths and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees
to her chest and drew herself up regally. “What do you want in return?”

He glared at her as if she’d just slapped him, then went outside the cave and stayed until nightfall. Had he lost her entirely? She was so bitter that there wasn’t
any point in talking to her just then. The knowledge that she found him repulsive tore at his soul.

When he returned she was poring over the book of myths and formulas, and he had the disturbing notion that she was searching for some incantation to do him harm.

D
RAKE CAME BACK
a week later, bringing supplies, smaller clothes and more books for Tess, and a packet from Kyle.

“He’s been researching Kara,” Drake explained. “He thought you’d like to see what he found, even though it’s nothing exciting.”

That night, as Tess stirred a pot of soup over the campfire and a gas lantern cast sharp shadows on the cave’s walls. Jeopard opened the packet and began reading photocopies of articles about Kara.

“Kara is only a short flight from Sweden.” Tess spoke in a rare break from her habitual silence. “I went there many times on vacation. It’s a Scandinavian version of Monaco. Tiny and expensive.”

“Lots of ski resorts and casinos, it says here.”

“A beautiful little country. It’s an island, you know, between Sweden and Denmark. The royal palace is a fairy-tale place on a mountaintop that overlooks the North Sea.”

“What I can’t understand is how monarchies survive in the modern world.”

“The people loved the king and queen. I remember when the king died—I must have been about twelve—I was visiting Grandmother and Grandfather in Stockholm. Grandfather, being a member of the Swedish parliament, went to the funeral as a matter of courtesy. Grandmother and I went with him. I’ll never forget the people I met. They were sincerely grief-stricken over the king’s death. And they adored the queen.”

“Too bad nobody likes the king and queen’s nephew. Olaf has apparently been waiting all his adult
life for the queen to pop off, so he could take over, and nobody’s happy about his claim to the throne.”

“So recapturing my diamond will win him some brownie points?”

“It’s not your diamond.”

“And killing me might win him more?” she continued pertly. “Tell me, if Olaf had approached you for that job, how much would you have charged?”

Jeopard struggled to keep from beating one fist against the cave floor. “I don’t kill people for pay. That’s the last time I’m going to say it.”