Seven
All Ellie wanted was a soak.
The washroom at the Hotel Rio Nuevo had been a delightful surprise. The floor was tiled in cool, clean white. Frosted glass on the windows let in the light without risking any immodest peeks from the outside world. The shelf on the wall was packed with soft, freshly laundered towels. A polished brass rack for them stood beside the tub so that Ellie could wrap herself up as soon as she emerged from her soak. The massive clawfoot bath was currently filled with steaming hot water.
Someone had added a sprinkle of rose-scented soap flakes. They had dissolved into a perfect froth of bubbles that covered the top of the water.
Ellie had peeled off her travel-worn clothes and slipped into the light summer dressing gown that Constance had thrown into the valise back in Canonbury. At the time, Ellie had thought the garment an unnecessary extravagance. Now, she was grateful for the light, airy length of blue silk.
The blissful quiet of the room was everything she hadn’t known she wanted since leaving the ship earlier that morning. It should have been the perfect start to her stay in British Honduras.
And it was… right up until Ellie gave the temperature of the water a check with her hand, and a sleek, narrow black head lifted through the bubbles, fixing yellow eyes upon her.
The scream that escaped from Ellie’s throat at the sight was not particularly violent. It was really more of a yelp—just an involuntary spasm of the lungs.
The door to the bathroom crashed open, splinters flying from around the shattered lock.
A filth-covered stranger stalked inside. His feet were bare. He lacked a coat, and his muddy shirt sleeves had been rolled up to expose his forearms.
He was holding the biggest knife Ellie had ever seen.
“Where is it?” he demanded.
For possibly the first time in Ellie’s life, words flatly deserted her. All she could do was stare at the intruder, mouth agape, as a distant part of her brain wondered if she had caught some tropical ailment and started to hallucinate.
“Hey!” He snapped his fingers. “No fainting. Where’s the thing?”
Something in the intruder’s words finally began to cut through the fog of shock enveloping Ellie’s brain.
“Did you just accuse me of being faint?” she said, ire edging her words.
The ire sparked against a host of other feelings—most of them various forms of horrified outrage—and Ellie’s shock was replaced by a sharp, dangerous focus.
“Get out of this room,” Ellie demanded, her tone deceptively calm.
“Listen, lady—I’m trying to help here.”
The stranger had a flat Yankee drawl. His eyes were a startling blue. The color stood out starkly against the mud that streaked across his sun-darkened features.
“Remove. Yourself. Now.”
Ellie’s last syllable was a threat. Fury rose under her skin. It felt like the rage that had recently gotten her arrested.
The maniac with the knife looked ready to make a retort—which would most certainly not have gone well for him—but the creature in the tub chose that moment to whip across the surface of the foamy water.
The stranger lunged across the floor and shoved Ellie against the wall. He pinned her there with his broad, solid back as he held his ridiculous blade ready in front of him.
There was, of course, an entirely reasonable way for a normal, sane person to respond to the presence of an unknown reptile in the tub. It involved dressing, fetching the hotel proprietor, and safely removing the animal so that she might possibly continue with her bath.
It did not include being squished into a corner by a beastly American in his shirtsleeves.
“Get off me!” Ellie barked as she shoved at him.
It was like trying to move a boulder.
“Stop wiggling,” he retorted, his eyes glued to the surface of the tub.
Ellie had never wished quite so much that she had made the time for Sensei Tani’s jiu jitsu classes. Still, though she lacked martial arts skills, she was quite familiar with the basic principles of physics—like the center of gravity.
She gritted her teeth, making a concerted effort to keep her tone reasonable.
“If you do not remove yourself from my person, I will be forced to use more extreme measures,” she informed him.
His eyes narrowed with irritation as he glanced back at her.
“If you’d shut up and think for five seconds, you’d see that I’m trying to—”
Ellie didn’t give him a chance to complete the sentence, as it was obvious he had no intention of ending it by getting out of her washroom.
She shoved her right leg between his thighs, feeling him jolt with surprise at the unexpected contact. Hooking her calf around his shin to hold it in place, she twisted her body, forcing more space between his hips and the wall—and then shoved.
The muddy brute flew forward with an ear-burning curse… and promptly tripped into the tub.
Time slowed to a crawl.
His knife clattered against the tiles. The better part of the bathwater washed across the floor in a gentle tide, punctuated by little patches of bubbles.
The foam-covered surface of the bath roiled as the stranger slid to a stop, mud rinsing from his face in long streaks. He went perfectly still as his eyes locked on the surface of the bath framed by the twin peaks of his soaked knees… and Ellie wondered whether she had just inadvertently murdered him.
Her pulse thudded, low and regular, in sync with the drip of the water on the tile. She distantly observed that the man had an objectively nice face. It was strong, with well-cut angles.
A flicker of motion cut through the still-soapy water.
The stranger’s arm flashed out with a quick, cat-like movement. He grasped hold of an oily black form—and chucked it across the room.
The snake slid to a stop against the wall. It coiled, hissing with outrage, but the mud-streaked maniac was already surging out of the tub, taking most of the remaining water with him. He snatched up the brass towel rack as his bare feet slapped down against the tiles. He whirled the brass in his hand like a javelin and thrust it at the black, sinuous form of the reptile, pinning the creature’s neck.
The snake hissed again, exposing pale, needle-like fangs that made Ellie’s stomach clench.
The man took a step closer and peered down. Ellie stared worryingly at his exposed toes. They seemed terribly vulnerable. Her breath stuck in her chest as she wondered what he could possibly do next. Would he try to crush the creature with the towel rack? Order her to run for help?
He did neither of those things. Instead, he smiled and dropped his voice to an indulgent coo.
“Well, you gave us quite the scare, didn’t you?” he said before tossing the towel rack aside and plucking the snake from the tiles with his bare hands.
He gently forced the reptile’s long, angrily whipping body straight and turned back to display it to Ellie.
“No yellow, see?” he said. “She’s a snail sucker, not a coral snake. Harmless—aren’t you, lil’ darling?” He turned the animal’s face toward his own and gave it an affectionate little wiggle.
The man was entirely insane.
Ellie edged one step toward the door, then stumbled back as he turned in the same direction, carrying the snake out into the hall.
She was torn between the urge to slam the busted door shut behind him or to follow after him and make sure he didn’t pose a threat to any innocent passers-by.
Her horrified curiosity about what he intended to do with the snake tipped the scales.
Ellie made a quick adjustment to her dressing gown, which had become hopelessly soaked in the tidal wave from his plunge into her bath, and then hurried out.
The ground floor hallway was empty save for the boy from the lobby, óscar. The teenager took one look at the snake-carrying lunatic and pivoted, hurrying in the opposite direction. Ellie could hear him call out as he went—something about a topógrafo loco and otra vez.
Ellie’s Spanish was admittedly rudimentary, but she was fairly certain that last part meant again.
Her bath invader stopped where the wing ended and kicked neatly through another door. This one gave readily under his foot, opening onto the veranda that faced the extensive rear garden of the hotel—a shady paradise of sprawling calabash trees and flowering oleander.
The stranger strolled outside and extended his arm over the railing.
“Here you go, beautiful,” he said and released his grip on the snake.
It slithered free of his arm and dropped into a thick stand of hibiscus. An older couple who had been strolling on the adjacent path stopped and stared, the woman’s grip paling on her companion’s arm.
The madman wiped his hands on his trousers and came back inside.
“They like the heat,” he announced.
The better part of the filth covering him had washed away in the tub. He was soaking wet, his shirt and trousers plastered to his body. He had the sort of male form Ellie had only previously seen in statues at the British Museum. It was admittedly distracting.
“What?” she said numbly.
She was having a difficult time removing her eyes from his pectorals.
“Snail suckers,” he repeated, looking at her as though she were a bit thick. “They like the warm water. You should’ve checked around the tub before you filled it.”
“I didn’t fill it,” Ellie replied absently as she forced her eyes from his chest back to his face. “óscar did.”
“And skip the bubbles,” he added pointedly.
Ellie narrowed her eyes. “óscar added those as well.”
“It’s rare to find the dangerous ones here in the city,” he went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “But it isn’t unheard of, and you do not want to cross paths with a coral snake. It’s lucky I was here.”
His words sparked her fury back to vivid, blazing life.
“Lucky?” Ellie echoed dangerously. “Exactly who the devil do you think you are?”
“I think I’m the guy who just saved you from a snakebite,” he replied, sounding a bit put off.
“Saved me?” Ellie seethed. “You believe that breaking down the door, waving a knife around, and shoving me into a corner is saving me?”
“You screamed,” he countered.
“That is not an invitation,” Ellie snapped.
“Were you gonna deal with that on your own?” He crossed his arms over his obnoxiously well-formed chest. “Forgive me for saying so, but you don’t look like someone who’s had a lot of experience with snake wrangling.”
“Had I needed help, I would have acquired it. What I did not need was some mud-drenched lunatic barging into the washroom with a sword.”
“Sorry I wasn’t up to your standards of hygiene when I came to your rescue,” he shot back.
“This has nothing to do with hygiene!” Ellie exclaimed.
“Listen, Princess.” He took a step toward her. The move forced Ellie to crane her neck back a bit—the lunatic was decidedly on the taller side. “In case you hadn’t noticed, you’re not in jolly old England anymore. Most of the local animal life in the colony is harmless, but there’s plenty of stuff that’ll kill or maim you before you get a chance to think about it. Around here, if you hear somebody scream, you err on the side of caution—whether or not it’s in the damned bathroom.”
“Princess?” Ellie hissed.
He shrugged. “If the slipper fits…”
Ellie drove an admonishing finger into his sternum. It was like poking a piece of granite.
“I may not be capable of recognizing the different species of local fauna—yet—but I am not such a fool as to climb into the bath with one,” she retorted. “I was entirely capable of handling the situation on my own without being manhandled by some knife-wielding thug.”
“Knife,” he repeated.
His hand went instinctively to the empty sheath on his belt. He pushed past Ellie into the bathroom and plucked the huge blade from the muddy puddle where it lay beside the tub. He wiped it off on his soaked sleeve and slipped it back into place at his side.
“Are you quite finished now?” she demanded.
He cocked his head thoughtfully to the side as his eyes dropped to the top of her robe.
“What’s that around your neck?” he asked.
Ellie’s hand flew to her throat. She pulled up the wet folds of her dressing gown, clenching them over the place where the medallion still rested against her skin.
Fear lent an urgent burst of fuel to her fury. Ellie snatched the fallen towel rack from the ground.
“Out,” she ordered as she raised the weighty brass staff menacingly. “Now.”
“Are you really threatening to beat me with a towel rack?” the lunatic asked skeptically.
Ellie swung.
“Ow!” He jumped back, rubbing his arm. “All right, I’m going!” he promised, holding his arms up placatingly.
He took a quick step through the door. Ellie slammed it shut, then slumped her back against it. She slid down to the wet floor, clutching both the towel rack and the cold black stone under the soaked silk of her robe.
Her hand shook—but not from the encounter with the snail sucker. Her fear rose from just how close the stranger had come to seeing the secret she wore over her heart.