“So what happens?” Karen asked, her tone suggesting that the subject had changed. “After?”

“After?”

“After I see Charles. Then what happens to him, Ty? All those things he’s done…”

“I don’t know.” Hauck exhaled. He shielded his eyes from the sun. “Maybe you can convince him to turn himself in. We found him-someone else could also. He can’t run forever.”

“You mean go to jail, right?”

Hauck shrugged.

“I don’t think that would happen. I don’t see that, Ty.”

He tossed a pebble into the water. “First let’s see what he has to say.”

She nodded. They looked at each other a few seconds, neither of them wanting to put into words their fears for a future they didn’t know. Then Karen prodded him again with her toe, smiled. “So…uh, double or nothing on the way back?”

“Not a chance. You should know, I don’t take defeat very well.”

“Your loss!” Karen chimed in with a conspiratorial grin, looking back at him as she pushed herself up and into the waves.

He jumped in after her. “On the other hand, I don’t take being shown up particularly well either!”

Later they met for dinner. The dining terrace overlooking the cove was barely half filled. A few honeymoon couples and a couple of European families.

Hauck ordered a local spicy fish dish; Karen had lobster. Hauck insisted he pay, and ordered a fancy bottle of Meursault. Karen, already slightly tanned, was dressed in a black lace dress. Hauck knew the ground rules, but he could hardly keep his eyes off her.

Afterward they walked back along the pathway to the front desk. She checked her BlackBerry, disappointed. Then she asked at the desk for her messages.

Nothing there either.

“This was a nice day,” he said.

Karen smiled sweetly. “Yeah.”

Upstairs, he walked her to her door. There was an awkward moment until Karen leaned close and gave him a soft kiss on the cheek.

She smiled at him again, with a grateful twinkle and a wave of a finger, as she closed the door. But Hauck could see the worry in her eyes.

Still no word from Charles.

CHAPTER EIGHTY

There was nothing the next day either. Karen grew increasingly tense.

Hauck felt it, too. In the morning he went for a run outside the grounds, then came back and lifted some weights. Later he tried to distract himself with some departmental reviews he’d taken with him before he left.

In her room Karen checked her BlackBerry for messages a hundred times.

What if she had scared him off? she wondered. What if Charles had gone back into hiding? He could be a million miles away.

He would let her know, she told herself. He wouldn’t torture her again.

In the afternoon Hauck swam out to the reef again, floated on his back for what seemed an hour. He thought about what Karen had said, what he would do regarding Charles-after. Back at home.

He knew he had to lay it all out. Dietz. Hodges. The money offshore. The empty tankers. Pappy Raymond. The hit-and-runs.

Everything.

Even if she begged him not to. There’d be an investigation. Into Hauck’s behavior. He’d be suspended for sure. He might even lose his job.

He put it off and went back up to the room and lay down on the bed. His insides felt as if a jagged wire had been dragged through them. Charles’s silence was killing both of them. And the thought of “what after.” All of a sudden, the future, and everything it held, didn’t seem so far off.

He tossed the stack of work papers onto the bed, slid open the sliding door, and stepped out onto the balcony.

He spotted Karen across from him on her terrace. She was facing the ocean, doing yoga, in tight leggings and a short cotton tank.

He watched.

She was graceful, moving from one pose to another as in a dance. The curve of her finely cut arms, her fingers reaching toward the sky. The steady rhythm of her breaths, her chest expanding and contracting, the delicate deep arch of her spine following the movement of her arms.

His blood stirred.

He knew he was in love with her. Not probably as he had kidded-but completely. He knew she had awakened him from a deep slumber, the sweet lure of something that had been dead inside him for a long time.

It was bursting through him now.

She didn’t notice him at first, so intent was she in the precision of her movements. The arc of her leg, the lift of her pelvis, stretching. Her hair tumbling forward in its ponytail. The glimpse of her exposed midriff.

Goddamn it, Ty…

She brought her arms back in a wide semicircle and seemed to open her eyes. Their gazes met.

At first Karen just smiled, as if she’d been exposed in some private ritual, like taking a bath.

Hauck saw the blotch of sweat on her top, the shoulder strap off her shoulder, the wisp of honey-colored hair that had fallen across her eyes.

He couldn’t stand it anymore. It was like a fire blazing through him. Through the urgency of his nod. They didn’t say a thing, but something wordless and breathless was communicated between them.

“Karen…”

He was at her door the very second that it opened, pushing it wide, taking her and forcing her back inside the room and up against the wall before she whispered, “What the hell do you want from me, Ty?”

He pressed his mouth on hers, stifling any objection, tasting the sweetness of her breath. Karen pulled his shirt out in the same necessity, tugging at his shorts. He cupped his rough palm to the curve of skin underneath her leggings, heat radiating out of every pore, unable to stop himself.

Her chest heaved. “Jesus, Ty…”

He yanked down her leggings. Her skin was slick and sweaty from outside. He lifted her there, setting her straight against the weight of the high-backed rattan chair, hearing her murmur, her arms around his neck, lifting, until he was inside her, like two starved people ravaging for food, her legs straddling his thighs.

This time there was no softness, no tenderness. Only a yearning that rose up from deep within their core. She buried her face in his chest and rocked in his arms. He clung to her as tightly as he had ever held anything in his life. And when it was over, with a last, unembarrassed gasp, he continued to hold her, pressing her shape against his, and letting her drop easily into the big chair, Hauck leaning up against the wall, sliding to the floor, spent.

“So much for the conditions.” Karen groaned, brushing her damp hair out of her face.

“Didn’t work too well…” Hauck exhaled, raising a knee up off the floor.

“We could just leave,” he said to her. “We don’t have to wait around for him, Karen. I know there are things you want to hear from him, but the hell with it-all it’s going to do is hurt you, Karen, whichever way it falls. We could just leave. Let Charles go back to wherever the hell he wants to.”

Karen nodded. She forced a smile. “That doesn’t exactly sound very policelike, coming from you, Ty.”

“Maybe because I don’t feel very policelike. Maybe because for the first time in five years I feel whole. I’ve spent my entire goddamn life trying to do the right thing, and I’m scared-for once I’m scared-of what seeing him will do. What we’re doing here, Karen, this may be the biggest lie in the world. But whatever it is, it’s a lie I don’t want to end.”

“I don’t want to end it either, Ty.”

A sharp ringing cut her off. It came from the table where Karen’s bag was. Both sets of eyes flashed to it. She pulled her top over herself and ran and rummaged for her BlackBerry.

It was vibrating.

She looked up, anxious. “It’s him.”

Karen opened the message. “‘A boat will be at the St. James dock at eight A.M.,’” it read. “‘The captain’s name is Neville. He’ll take you to me. You alone, Karen. That’s the only way. No one else. Charles.’”

She came over and passed the phone to Hauck. He read it for himself. Inside, he felt everything slipping away.