A Matter of Circumstance

  Revisit this tale of danger and desire from New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham, now available for the first time in ebook!

  The tranquil waters of a Bahamian paradise turn dark and treacherous when Amanda is ruthlessly abducted. Sean, a Miami undercover cop, witnessed the crime and throws himself into danger, pretending he’s Amanda’s lover. It’s a perilous game, but Amanda knows there’s no one to pay her captors, and she finds it’s easy to play along with her irresistible mystery man…

  Originally published in 1987

  A Matter of Circumstance

  Heather Graham

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER 1

  From one of the assorted ketches, catamarans, speedboats and yachts, a Jimmy Buffet tune was rising high on the air, tarnished by only a shade of static. The late afternoon was tempering the heat, and a breeze was flowing in from the water, cooling Sean Ramiro’s sun-sizzled arms and chest. To all outward appearances he was as negligent and lackadaisical as the carefree Sunday loafers who laughed, teased, flirted and played around the docks. But when he raised his head for a moment, tilting back the brim of his Panama hat, a careful observer might have noted that he surveyed the scene with startlingly intense green eyes.

  All seemed peaceful and pleasant. A lazy afternoon by the water. Girls in bikinis, guys in cutoffs, tourists with white cream on their noses, and old geezers in bright flowered shirts. Kids threw fish tails to the gulls that hovered nearby. Sean arched his shoulders back, grimacing at the feel of the wooden dock piling that grated through the thin material of his cotton shirt. He’d been sitting there a long time now.

  Farther down the dock Sunday fisherman were cleaning their catches. A young sailor in tie-dyed cutoffs was hosing down his small Cigarette boat. A group of beer drinkers passed him, heading for the refreshment stand that was located where the rustic-looking wooden docks gave way to the cold reality of the concrete parking lot.

  Sean heard a little titter of laughter and gazed sideways, annoyed to realize that he had become an object of fascination for two well-endowed teenagers in string bikinis. He tensed, swearing to himself. If something was going to happen after this long and futile day, it would surely happen now, while the kiddies were in the way.

  He lowered his head, feigning a nap, hoping they would go away.

  At his side, what looked like a credit-card-sized AM/FM receiver suddenly made a little buzzing sound. Sean picked it up and brought it to his ear.

  “Hey, Latin lover!” Anderson teased. Sean looked up; he could see Harvey Anderson in the refreshment stand, chatting while he turned hot dogs on a grill. “You got a fan club going there, you know? I think you should be on grill duty. You’re too pretty to blend into the woodwork.”

  Sean idly moved the radio in front of his mouth. “Anderson, it’s not that I’m too pretty—you’re just too damned ugly. You’d scare away the devil himself.”

  Todd Bridges, unseen, but not far away in the parking lot, broke in on the conversation. “Must be those Irish eyes, Sean. Keep ‘em lowered, eh?”

  “Todd…”

  “Hey, who said duty was a chore?” Harvey interrupted. “Will you look at that? I am in love! Thunderstruck and all that junk. Now I really think you should be grilling the hot dogs, Ramiro! Ah, I’d like just a whiff of the air she breathes!”

  Harvey was always falling in love with anything in a bikini. But Sean idly turned his head, tilting the brim of his hat just a shade. He arched a dark brow and was surprised to discover that his breath had caught in his chest.

  This time Harvey was right on the mark.

  She was coming in from the end of the dock. She walked slowly and casually, and with the most sensual grace Sean had ever witnessed. She wasn’t wearing a bikini, but a one-piece thing cut high on the thighs, and man-oh-man, did those slim sexy thighs go on forever.

  If someone were to have asked Sean Ramiro what he first noticed about a woman, he would have given it a little thought, then answered with honesty, “Her eyes.” Eyes were the mirror of the soul, as the saying went. And so he looked first at her eyes.

  He couldn’t see their color, not from his position, not with the way he was forced to squint into the sun. He did see that they were sparkling like the sun, that they were large and exquisite, that they were framed with thick lashes…that they enchanted.

  He didn’t know why, but his eyes fell then to take in the whole of her. Her easy, idle movement. Her walk…

  He was—even on duty—spellbound by that walk. The never-ending length of her golden tanned legs, the curve of her hips. He liked her waistline, too, smooth and sleek. Just like Harvey, he was instantly in love. Spaghetti straps held the yellow swimsuit in place. The top was straight cut, but she needed no help to display her cleavage. Her still-damp skintight bathing suit couldn’t hide the fact that her breasts were firm, round, perfect. Sean realized that he felt a bit like a kid in a candy store, almost overwhelmed by the desire to reach out and touch.

  “Will you look at those…eyes,” Harvey breathed in awe.

  “What is it?” Todd demanded from the parking lot.

  “Boy, did you draw the wrong straw!” Harvey told him.

  Sean looked back to her face.

  It was a perfect oval. High boned. Classical. She could have posed for history’s most famous artists, and not one of them could have found a flaw. Her mouth was generous, but elegantly defined. Sean could imagine her laughing; the sound would be as provocative as the curve of those lips. Her nose was long and straight, and her eyes—those wondrous eyes!—were framed by high brows that added to their captivating size and beauty. And her hair…

  Her hair matched the coming of the sunset in glorious color. It wasn’t blond, neither was it dark. It was a tawny color, like a lion’s mane, with deeper highlights of shimmering red to match the streak of the sun against the sky.

  “I am in love!” Harvey repeated.

  “Oh, watch your hot dogs!” Todd grumbled from the parking lot.

  Sean grimaced, jerking involuntarily as the radio suddenly gave out a burst of static. Then Todd’s voice came back on the air.

  “I just got a buzz from Captain Mallory. Someone pulled in faulty information. Blayne isn’t here, and he isn’t coming. He’s got a reservation on a flight north at six.”

  For a moment Sean completely forgot the woman, as he closed his eyes in disgust. Damn that Blayne! The senator had received threats against his life, but he had lifted his naive nose to the police, who had bent over backward to protect him. Still, as public servants, it was their job to protect him.

  They’d been tipped off today that Blayne, who had mysteriously disappeared, had ordered a catered lunch delivered to the docks this morning for a sailboat registered as the Flash Point. Meanwhile, another threat had been phoned in to the police. Of all the lousy details to draw, Sean had drawn this one. He’d had to spend the whole stinking day on the dock, waiting for Peter Blayne to make an appearance and to see that he got off the docks without mishap.

  Now it seemed the fool had never been anywhere near the docks to begin with, nor intended to be. The boat had gone out earlier, but without the senator aboard.

  Sean opened his eyes again. Not even his disgust at the wasted day could really have any effect on him—not when he was staring at her, and she was coming closer. A scuba mask and a pair of fl
ippers dangled from one hand as she moved along, still at that lazy, no-hurry pace. Her face was tilted upward, and the smallest signs of a smile curved her lip, as if she was savoring that soft kiss of sun and breeze against her cheeks.

  Just like some ancient goddess, Sean thought, and he could almost see her walking along at that slow confident pace, naked and assured, in some flower-strewn field, while a primitive drumbeat pulsed out the rhythm of her fluid motion and an ancient man bowed down before her.

  “Hey!” Harvey’s voice, quiet and tense, suddenly jolted Sean from his daydream.

  “What?”

  “It’s back. The Flash Point. Way down the dock—she didn’t berth where she should have!”

  Sean stared down the dock. It was true. The Flash Point was in, and two kids—or young men—were securing her lines.

  He stood, slowly, carefully, unaware that he grimaced as all the muscles in his six-foot-two frame complained. Absently he rubbed a shoulder and stared down at the ketch. Nice. It had three masts and probably slept a dozen in privacy and comfort.

  It was Blayne’s boat, and someone had gone out on it. But if Peter Blayne was really catching a six o’clock flight, they couldn’t possibly have picked him up and brought him back on the ketch. It was six now.

  Someone behind him began an excited conversation, half in Spanish, half in English. Two men cleaning fish were talking about a woman, trying to decide if it was “her” or not. Without thinking, Sean tuned in the words, then tuned them out, more concerned with the arrival of the Flash Point than he was with “that rat’s old lady.”

  He supposed he should saunter down and ask a few questions. Pulling his open shirt across his chest to conceal the holster strapped underneath, he stared at his quarry, then started toward it. He rubbed his jaw and the dark stubble there, wondering if he didn’t look more than a little like a bum. Good for sitting around on a dock idly, but a little scary, maybe, to the elite teenagers battening down the Flash Point.

  He didn’t realize how quickly he was moving until he suddenly plowed into somebody—and knocked them down. He started to bend down and offer a hand, then he noticed that he wasn’t the only person racing toward the Flash Point.

  From the end of the pier a slim, handsome young Latin with a grim look of purpose and something bunched in his arms was hurrying toward the ketch—or toward the end of the dock. Sean wasn’t sure.

  What he was sure about was the man’s identity.

  It was Garcia. Definitely. Julio Garcia, old Jorge’s son. He had his father’s flashing dark eyes and arresting, near-gaunt face.

  Sean immediately felt tension riddle him. The police might have been wrong about Blayne’s whereabouts, but if so, it seemed a strange coincidence that the people threatening him had received the same faulty information.

  “You stupid ox!”

  Momentarily startled, Sean stared in the direction of the feminine voice that had spat out the epithet. It was her. The sensually swaying woman with the never-ending legs and great eyes.

  Eyes…

  They were topaz. Not brown. Not green. Not hazel. They were the color of light, shimmering honey, sparkling now like liquid sunlight, like precious gems reflecting the last dying rays of the sun in a burst of rebellious glory.

  And he’d just knocked her down flat, without a word of apology. He could reach out and touch her. He could…

  He offered her a hand. She took it with delicate fingers, watching him warily.

  If only Garcia wasn’t just yards away…

  “Hey!” The voice came from down the dock. Garcia was gripping the arm of one of the kids who had been working on the Flash Point. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  Even from this distance Sean could hear the kid’s angry retort to whatever Garcia had said. Then the kid’s voice lowered, and Garcia said something with a frightening vehemence.

  Sean didn’t know that he had dropped the woman’s hand when she was halfway up until she thudded back to the wood with a furious oath. “You are the rudest person I have ever met!”

  He barely heard her; he was too tense, watching Garcia.

  “Don’t you speak English? Estúpido!” the woman snapped.

  Absently he offered a hand to her again.

  “Don’t touch me! Just move, please. Honest to God, I don’t know what’s wrong with people these days!”

  Sean ignored her, anxious to reach Garcia. But even as he stepped past her, the kid with Garcia looked up and started yelling. “Hey, Mrs. Blayne! Can you do something with this guy? He insists that the senator is aboard and I keep telling him that he isn’t!”

  Blayne!

  Sean swung around and stared at the beauty he’d just knocked over, then ignored. Mrs. Blayne? His wife? She couldn’t be! Blayne was in his mid-forties or early fifties if he was a day; this woman was twenty-five, twenty-eight, tops!

  She was impatiently dusting herself off after her fall on the sandy dock, but she smiled at the kid with a rueful shake of her head. “Tell him Peter had to be in Washington tonight. He isn’t on the Flash Point—he probably isn’t even in the state anymore.”

  The kid started speaking earnestly to Garcia. Sean was momentarily frozen, with two thoughts registering in his mind.

  Blayne wasn’t here; they had all been wrong, and it was probably for the best. Garcia hadn’t identified himself during any of the threatening calls, but who else could be so violently angry with the senator except for some crackpot? And Garcia was definitely a crackpot.

  The other thought, which interrupted his professional logic in a way that annoyed him, was about her. She was married to the man. And quite obviously for his money, since the age difference was definitely vast!

  It was irritating, and somehow it hurt—for all that any feelings on his part were ridiculous. She was just a dream. The absolute, perfect dream you might see on the page of some magazine, then forget just as soon as the page was turned. Yet he wanted to shake her. To demand where her morals were—and her dignity and pride!—that she would marry an old guy like Blayne just for the sake of material possessions.

  But even as he thought that, he smiled a little ruefully. Because the question that was really bothering him was, why him and not me? I’m thirty-three and as healthy as the “ox” you just called me. I’m the one who could show you what life was meant to be, just what you were built for, lady!

  He reminded himself that he didn’t like blondes. But any man, face-to-face with this particular blonde, would want her.

  “Roberto, man, it is her! Julio, the old lady!”

  Sean frowned, realizing then that the two fishermen were yelling to Garcia. He was halfway to the man himself, but paused.

  The two fishermen jumped into a speedboat.

  “Hey, wait—” he called to them. Where the hell was Harvey? Couldn’t he tell something was happening? But how would he? Nothing illegal was going on. Two men had jumped into a speedboat, and Julio Garcia was talking to a kid. Nothing to get arrested for, but…

  “Get out of the way! Get down!”

  The heavily accented command came from Julio Garcia. Sean ducked, then fell flat as a whole barrage of bullets was suddenly spewed haphazardly in his direction. He tasted sand as he fell hard against the wood, reaching for his .38 caliber Smith & Wesson as a second barrage began.

  Julio was fast; he kept firing as he raced down the dock. The shots rang out discordantly against the absolute and lazy peace of the afternoon, shocking everyone, causing chaos and so many screams that Sean didn’t know where to look.

  The woman!

  He rolled just in time to see that the thing under Julio’s arm had been potato sacking, and that Julio had looped it over her head, thrown her struggling but constrained figure over his shoulder and made a wild leap for the speedboat.

  Sean didn’t dare shoot; he would hit the woman.

  He didn’t think; he just reacted. He dove into the water, determined to reach the boat before it could jet out into open
water and head for the endless nooks and crannies that the mangrove islands could provide.

  CHAPTER 2

  He wasn’t accustomed to making mistakes. A homicide detective simply couldn’t make mistakes and expect to live.

  But as he dove into the murky water his gun was swept from his hand by a stinging collision with the wood and instantly disappeared into a growth of seaweed. Still submerged, Sean could hear the motor of the speedboat revving up, and he knew he didn’t have a spare second left. It seemed necessary at any cost to reach that boat and then come up with a plan of action, minus his gun.

  His fingers grasped the edge of the boat while it was already in motion. Water splashed into his face, blinding him, gagging him. He held on, feeling the tremendous force of the pressure against him.

  Ass! he accused himself, but too late. To give up now would be to risk the murderous blades of the propeller, so, thinking himself the greatest idiot ever to draw breath, he grated his teeth against the agony of his hold and tried to bring his body as close as possible to the side of the boat.

  The motor was suddenly cut, and Sean remembered just in time to ditch his ID card and gun clip.

  “;iqQué pasa? ;iqQué pasa?”

  He heard the furious query, then a colorful spate of oaths in Spanish. Someone reached over the side of the boat to pull his half-drowned body over the edge.

  He was dizzy; his head reeled as he lay soaked between two side-to-side seats. He gasped in a breath even as he heard the motor rev into motion again and felt the vibrations with his entire body.

  The three men—Garcia and the two fishermen—were fighting away, screaming and gesticulating over the terrible hum of the motor, an occasional word of English slipping into the Spanish tirades.

  “What happened? Who the hell is he?”

  “I don’t know. Why didn’t you kill him?”

  “We’re not murderers!”

  “We agreed if we had to—”

  Something pounded viciously against his head, and Sean groaned despite himself. Twisting, he saw that the burlap sack containing the girl was stretched out over the seat so that her feet dangled right over his head, only the toes bared.