Chapter 24
I’d had a weird dream . . . or was it a dream? I rolled over and reached to the other side of the bed. Had Cam really been there? When my hand felt nothing, I realised with a disappointed sigh that caught me off guard, that it had all been a dream after all.
But then, a familiar scent wafted up from the bed.
‘Wait!’ I sat up and looked around. He wasn’t in the bed, but it hadn’t been a dream either.
I walked onto the patio and looked towards the sea, and there he was.
Did this guy ever stop swimming? I rolled my shoulders.
Everything felt tense, especially that rotator cuff.
I was meant to go to physio, but I was here in the Seychelles instead.
I went back inside, excited to send the footage from my camera to Sharaz. The sooner she had it, the sooner I could leave this island.
I opened my laptop – and froze.
I’d turned it off last night, but now the home screen sprang to life. An alarm went off in the back of my head as I located the file and pressed play.
I blinked.
Black screen.
I hit play again.
Still blackness.
It took my brain a few seconds to catch up, to process what I was seeing – or more accurately what I was not seeing.
And when it did . . .
‘YOU ASSHOLE!’ I rushed outside and yelled at Cam, who was bobbing up and down in the water like some carefree idiot who hadn’t just ruined my life. ‘You deleted my footage.’
‘Maybe keep your voice down, honey bunny. Wouldn’t want to wake the neighbours,’ he said, walking to shore like this was some casual day at the beach and not a full-blown crisis.
‘Shit,’ I hissed under my breath, realising too late that I had just screamed my espionage activities to the entire island. But I was furious – no, furious didn’t vaguely cut it; I was murderous.
When he reached the beach, he bent down casually to pick up his towel. I put my foot on it to stop him.
‘Why the hell would you do that? You knew I needed that footage to finish this job and get off this damn island. Which, by the way, is what you want too. Like you said, it’s way too small for both of us.
So why screw it up for me? Why screw it up for yourself?
You want me gone just as much as I want to be gone. ’
‘Maybe I don’t want you gone.’
‘Huh?’ My foot slid off the towel in shock. ‘Why?’
‘Maybe I want to spend more time with you.’
‘What the hell does that even mean?’
He exhaled and ran a hand through his hair. ‘I haven’t seen you in six years, Lizzy. We used to be so close. We spent every day together for so long, and then . . .’ He trailed off.
‘What?’
‘We had that night together, and it was amazing, and then—’
‘Don’t! I told you, that night is off limits.’
‘We were friends, Lizzy; no, more than friends.’
‘We weren’t more than friends. In fact, I would argue we weren’t even friends. Sparring partners at best.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘We were. You know it, and I know it. And even if things didn’t work out between us the way we would have liked them to—’
‘We would have liked them to?’
‘Oh, come on, Lizzy. You wanted that as much as I did. We’d both wanted it for years.’
‘Speak for yourself.’ I turned and started walking away from him, afraid that if I stayed a second longer, someone would land up with a broken body part, and it would not be me.
‘I need your help!’ he shouted after me.
I stopped walking. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
He caught up with me and lowered his voice. ‘We got word this morning that Victor’s definitely planning some kind of diamond deal on the island. We don’t know where, we don’t know when. We have our suspicions about who, but that’s not enough. We need to catch him in the act.’
‘And what the hell does that have to do with me and my footage?’
‘I have an idea, but I need you to make it work.’
‘And what’s this big idea of yours?’
‘I need to get close to him.’
I shook my head. ‘I still don’t see why you need me.’
‘I figured that the best way to get close would be to befriend them.’
‘Befriend them?’
‘Victor and Amber. You and me.’
I stared at him. ‘You cannot be serious.’
‘Dead serious.’
‘You want to befriend Victor and Amber, with me?’
‘Exactly.’ Cam took a small step forward, as if testing the waters. I made sure to take a bigger one back.
‘And hypothetically, how on earth would we do that?’
‘Undercover Work 101. Mirroring and matching. Aligning yourself with the targets. Becoming familiar to them, acting like them, walking and talking like them. Becoming them.’
‘You want us to become Amber and Victor?’
‘I want us to become the kind of couple that Amber and Victor would want to be friends with. The kind they might invite to dinner, play golf with, talk about precious gems with.’
I stopped listening after he said the word ‘couple’. Because after that particular word, everything went very fuzzy, and rightly so.
‘We’re already pretending to be jilted bride and remorseful groom for a Mafia assassin,’ he reminded me.
I shook my head. ‘Not happening, Cam. Ever.’ I turned and headed back towards the villa. I needed to be as far away from this man as possible.
‘I didn’t delete your footage,’ he called after me.
I stopped and turned around. ‘What?’
‘It’s saved on a hard drive.’
‘Why the hell did you pretend you had?’
He shrugged. ‘To make you stay. You would have needed to get more. I wanted to buy myself more time to convince you. It was dumb. I’m sorry.’
‘Dumb. Understatement, because if you think pretending to delete my footage would in any way entice me to work with you, then I have no idea how your brain works.’
I turned and started walking again. I could hear his footsteps behind me.
‘Stop, Lizzy. Just hear me out.’
‘I’ve heard enough.’
‘But think about it. As a happily engaged couple, we could get close to them. We could have cocktails by the pool, you and Amber could have a spa day and—’
I stopped and swung around. Cam came to a grinding halt, kicking up sand as he did. ‘Me befriend Amber? A woman who probably spends more on facials than I do on rent? We have nothing in common.’
‘Come on, Lizzy. Put everything else aside – our history, your anger at me – and tell me you don’t want to stay. That you don’t want to bring Victor to his knees, or better yet, see him behind bars and stop an illegal diamond deal while you’re at it.’
I folded my arms across my chest as Cam continued approaching.
‘I know you. You’re all about justice, the law, you always have been. This is your chance to take down a criminal.’
I tightened my arms. I could feel something rising in me, and I didn’t like it.
‘You and me going undercover together, that would be the best way to get Victor. Tell me you don’t enjoy the chase as much as I do. Catching the bad guy. You love it!’
Shit! I hated that Cam knew me like this. That he knew I always chased justice. If it was in my power to stop someone from doing something wrong, I had to do it. I was compelled to.
‘Come on, let’s catch the bad guy together.’ And then in case that wasn’t going to work, he changed tack. ‘If not for me, then for Sharaz. Think about it. Not only are you coming home with footage of her husband cheating, but you could also send the cheat to jail. That’s two for the price of one.’
I shook my head again, because unfortunately Cam was right. If Victor was involved in something illegal and I had the chance to stop him, how could I walk away? The only problem? It meant working with Cam. And right now, he was the last person on the planet I wanted to work with.
‘Amber will never buy me as someone she could be friends with.’
‘Then we’ll make her buy it,’ he countered. ‘You’ll be charming. You’ll be bubbly and outgoing—’
I burst out laughing. ‘Now you’re acting like you don’t know me at all.’
‘You can be charming, Lizzy, when you want to be.’
I scoffed at him.
‘A pedicure couldn’t hurt either. Maybe a hairbrush?’
‘What’s wrong with my feet?’ I looked down at them defensively, until I saw that all my toenails were different lengths, depending on which one I’d stubbed doing something physical, which one was damaged from being in a rugby boot, and which one I’d actually bothered to cut.
Then there was my unruly hair. I reached up and touched it.
‘Come on, Lizzy, do this with me. Let’s put a bad man behind bars.’
‘I don’t know . . .’ I rubbed my temples.
The thought of Victor behind bars was really very tempting.
Forgoing hors d’oeuvres for slop served on a plastic plate.
Exchanging the country club steam room for a communal shower with low pressure and a small bar of soap used by fifty inmates. But then another realisation hit me.
‘His assets would be frozen if he’s arrested for fraud and money laundering. My client wouldn’t get a dime.’
‘We’ll make sure she gets what she’s owed,’ Cam said confidently.
‘How exactly do you plan on doing that, a GoFundMe?’
He gave me a smug, self-satisfied look. ‘You know who I work for.’
I scrutinised him for a while. It was true. It would be easy enough for him to keep that promise.
‘I’ll get it in writing before we begin,’ he said.
‘Aargh!’ I threw my hands in the air.
‘Lizzy, this could be the case of your career. Bigger than catching cheaters.’
‘I like catching cheaters.’
‘I’m not asking you to do it for me. I’m asking you to properly finish the job you came here to do. Your client wants justice, and if you help me, that’s what you’ll be giving her. In fact, it will be more justice than she bargained for.’
I groaned, letting my head fall into my hands.
‘Why don’t you pitch it to her and see what she says.
’ I hadn’t noticed until now, but Cam had somehow managed to walk all the way up to me.
The sun was behind him, and it framed him in a way that made him bloody glow.
He was still shirtless, and the play of light and dark on his chest was doing something to all those stupid muscles. ‘You know you want to.’
‘Fuck!’ I hissed.
‘Talk to Sharaz, see what she thinks. And if she doesn’t care, then you can just walk away from this and I will leave you the hell alone. You will never see me or hear from me again. But if she likes the idea, well . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Let’s play happy couple in love and go catch a bad guy.’
I tried to play it casual, like it was any other job, any other cover, but it wasn’t.
This was anything but casual.
I needed more time with her.
Just a little more time to make her see what I already knew – that whatever this thing was between us, it wasn’t fake, and it sure as hell wasn’t going away any time soon.
Should I have pretended that I’d deleted her footage? No. Stupid, stupid move. But I always found myself making these idiotic mistakes when I was around her, because when I was around her, my brain didn’t really work the way it should, and logic flew out the window.
Because when I was around her, it was all emotion. Nothing rational survived.