Now You See Him by Anne Stuart

wait."
    His body was warm beside her, warm while she was cold, so very cold. Ghost stories were a good enough way to pass the time, and part and parcel with the unreality of the situation. "There are rocks out there," she said, rubbing her bare arms absently as she hunched closer to him. "I presume Cecil knows that, since he must have grown up here. Back in the seventeen hundreds there used to be wreckers here, pirates who never bothered to set out to sea. They'd wait for people to go off course, blown by the storms, and they'd use lanterns to lead them to a safe harbor. Except that the harbor was protected by a coral reef, the boats would founder, and the people of the island drowned anyone who happened to make it to shore."
    "Nasty business," he said absently. "I thought they only had wreckers in England."
    "These were English convicts, sent out as slave labor for the sugar plantations," she said, clenching her muscles to keep from shivering. "Nice bunch of people you're descended from."
    He smiled then, a brief upturning of his mouth. Not the devastating charm he'd sent in her direction on several occasions, not the sexless, friendly smile of a housemate. It was a smile of real amusement, devoid of any particular role he was playing. She didn't even stop to consider why she thought he would be playing roles for her.
    "You're from the same stock," he said. "Anglo-Saxon Protestant to the core."
    "Actually, my father was Irish Catholic."
    "Same difference," he said, shrugging. A man who'd grown up in Great Britain during some of the bloodiest Irish Catholic struggles, and he dismissed the differences. Before she could even think further about that, he reached out, putting his hands on her, pulling her into his arms. "You're freezing to death," he said, tucking her close against his heated body. "Shock will do that to you."
    She wanted to resist his comfort. She didn't trust him. She was back to the way she'd been months ago, after Patrick had been killed. She didn't trust a soul, friend or stranger, relative or enemy. She didn't want to trust him.
    But his heat was insidious, working through the block of ice around her body, melting it, melting the fierce tension within her. She tried to hold herself stiffly in his arms, but she couldn't, not with his long fingers kneading the cords of tension at the back of her neck, exposed by the skimpy cotton sundress.
    She sighed, letting the fear drain out of her body, and leaned against him. "That's better," he murmured approvingly, and his accent was oddly more pronounced, and yet softer. "I'm not your enemy, Francey."
    "I know you're not," she said wearily. "Honestly I do. I just get so frightened, so confused, not knowing whom I can trust…"
    "You can trust me," he said. "You
need
to trust me. I'll do my best to help you, but you have to tell me what the hell is going on. Who would want to kill you?"
    She sighed again, closing her eyes to the endless blue sea, afraid to look for the boat that would bring them salvation, afraid it would be the wrong boat, one that would bring them both death,
    "It's too complicated," she murmured.
    There was no answering tension in his body. His hand continued, warm, at her nape, stroking her beneath her heavy fall of hair, spreading heat and security through her chilled body. "Since it seems likely that they'd just as soon kill me along with you, I think I deserve to know. No matter how complicated it might be."
    "You're right. It's just…" Her voice trailed off in the stillness. "Is that a boat?"
    He was motionless, so utterly still that he might have been turned to stone. She didn't know a human being could be so still. "Yes," he said finally. "Either Cecil is unbelievably efficient, or we may be in real trouble."
    She should have been frightened. But once more his hand moved, that sinuous, stroking motion on the back of her neck, and the panic couldn't spread over her as it wanted to. "I thought we were already in real trouble."
    "Trouble's