She dropped her jaw and put her hand over her mouth, exaggerating the movement.
There was something about this story that he wasn’t buying, but he went along with it anyway. “Did it work?”
“No. His eyes kept drilling into me the entire remainder of my act. So I knew I couldn’t just play it off.”
“Scary.” He put a hand on her shoulder, giving her a squeeze of sympathy that she’d crossed paths with someone so dangerous.
“Yes, it was. I knew I had to notify the authorities. I managed to take a photo of Mr. Bad Guy with my mobile phone and showed it to the ship’s security head. I explained that I was sure he was a wanted criminal. He was able to match my photo with a passenger, Sebastian Perro, a father and tropical fish exporter with no criminal record. He told me I must be mistaken. But I’m absolutely sure I wasn’t.”
“Did he let you scan through the ID photos yourself?”
“No, he said that would be a breach of our passengers’ privacy. But he said that he would check into it further.”
Tristan had no idea if the privacy argument was true. Then again, so much of this seemed a little fishy. Starting with the Singing in the Rain act. “And did he?”
“He said he came up clean.” A shadow of anger darkened her eyes. “He told me to ‘go back to my can-can’ and forget about it.”
“Sounds like an asshole.”
“Yes, although the proper word would be wanker. Still, I knew there was a chance I was mistaken. A photo can be misleading. My memory for faces is good, but not infallible. I tried to find the crime show online but came up empty. I had nothing more to prove my case. Until…”
Something shifted in her expression and he got the sense she was censoring this story, sifting through it to decide how much to share.
“Until…” he prompted.
“Until I took a sip of my morning coffee and ended up in the infirmary. I would have died if I hadn’t been on deck at the time, and a gust of wind made me lose my grip on my cup. It went flying overboard, and the next thing I knew, I was vomiting on the deck. My friends took me to the medics, and they immediately suspected that I’d ingested something toxic. Even more toxic than the crew coffee,” she added.
It was a pattern with her, wasn’t? Using light humor to cover up her fear. “Did they figure out what it was?”
“They said it would take a few days to get the results. I don’t know what it was, but I do know he tried to poison me. Or someone else did.”
“How many enemies do you have on the Northern Princess?”
She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “There was the time when one of my high-kicks went awry and bruised Angela’s jaw. Maybe she tried to poison me in revenge, even after I ordered her the biggest box of Turkish delight the gift store carried. Can you imagine Turkish delight being your favorite sweets, when peppermints are right there?”
He had to admit, he liked the way Lulu told a story, with plenty of detours for some extra entertainment.
“What happened after that?”
She put a hand over her heart, as if testing her heartbeat. “I felt cornered. As long as I was on that ship, I didn’t see how I could avoid more threats on my life. I suspected that he had at least one other person working with him—a bodyguard sort of bloke. Once again, the security head dismissed my fears, and I began to believe that perhaps Mr. Bad Guy had paid him off. I couldn’t perform two shows a night with a target on my back. When they announced we were staying in port overnight, I decided it was my best chance to make my escape.”
Okay, well. It was a story. A hair-raising one. Maybe it was true. But he’d bet the Desperado it wasn’t the whole truth.
He heard shouts from the road, and recognized Darius Boone’s deep, worried voice. Everyone knew his truck, with its Desperado bumper sticker. He felt a short pang of grief for his beloved black Chevy, but shoved it aside. At least it wasn’t his boat. “We’d better get up there and let them know we’re alive.”
“Do you think it’s safe?”
He met her eyes, luminous in the shadow of the rock. “I have no idea. But I’d rather be in the middle of a crew of firefighters than hiding down here.”
She nodded, and put a hand on his arm. “Tristan, after this I’m leaving. It’s not fair to make you suffer because of whatever this is.”
Despite her brave facade, he felt the tremble of her hand. She was scared down to her bones, and he didn’t blame her. Maybe it would be easier if she left. He didn’t owe this woman anything. She was a stranger who’d parachuted into his life and cost him his truck. What good could he do her anyway? He wasn’t a bodyguard or a police officer or an FBI agent.
But no matter how much his brain argued the point, some core part of him wouldn’t—couldn’t—let her face this on her own.
“Are you telling me the whole truth?” he demanded.
A muscle in her cheek twitched. “That’s the gist. I can add much more detail if you like, for instance about how I executed the escape. I waited until the overnight shift change, then—”
“It’s okay.” He waved her off. Even if she wasn’t telling the whole truth, he still felt compelled to help her. Why, exactly, he didn’t know. But he was going with it.
“Then I’m coming with you.”
“Coming with me? What are you talking about?”
He poked his head out of the rocks and did a careful survey of the beach and the breakwater. Nothing caught his eye, so he climbed out of their hiding place, then offered her a hand to help her out. “I think we need to get out of town.”
“We?”
As soon as her sneakers touched the beach, he bundled her ahead of him.
“No, Tristan. We don’t need to do anything. You need to get back to your life and I need to disappear.”
“Shh. Don’t argue with me. You owe me that much.” He guided her to a shortcut over the rocks.
“I owe you some peace and quiet and lack of exploding trucks, that’s what I owe you.”
“And I’m holding you to that.”
Twelve
The fire chief turned out to be an imposing black-haired giant of a man who explained that without his previous experience in big city fire departments, he never would have recognized the signs of a detonation.
“Pissed anyone off lately?” he asked Tristan.
“Well, sure. I just pissed off the entire fishing community, and then there’s Trixie, she’s generally ticked off at me. My crew, because it took me some time to get back to fishing this summer. The rest of the Dutch Harbor fleet because even though we got started late, we kicked ass. Toni usually has some kind of beef with me.”
Darius dug a hand into his hair. “Enough. Sounds like you’ve been pissing people off your entire life but no one’s tried to blow up your truck before.” He turned to Lulu, who wanted to shrink away from his penetrating gaze. “Is it safe to say you’re the target here?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no idea—”
“We should pull Maya into this convo,” Tristan said. Lulu appreciated the way he stayed close to her, and made it clear they were a team. As much as her guilty conscience kept screaming at her to leave, it felt really good to have an ally.