Perfect Strangers

He looked up at her, a wide grin on his face.

‘All we have to do is go and get it.’

Sophie knew she should feel excited, she knew she should whoop for joy; after all, that was what they had been looking for all this time – the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But she didn’t, she just felt flat. The one thing this journey had taught her was that money only brought heartache.

‘It’s stolen money, Josh,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want stolen money. My dad would know that.’

‘Would he?’ said Josh.

‘What do you mean?’ said Sophie, pulling the towel higher.

‘Listen, your dad loved you, right?’

‘Of course!’

‘And he knew you liked the good life. He would have wanted you to be comfortable, to give you everything you’d always wanted. Nice house, nice car, all that.’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve met a lot of rich people in my time. Gangsters. Corrupt businessmen. You look at their wives, their grown-up kids, do you think any of them stop to question how Daddy is paying for it?’

‘I’m not like that!’

‘I know that, Sophie. But did he?’

She suddenly felt terribly sad, because she knew there was a grain of truth in what Josh was saying – more than a grain, in fact. She had been fixated on material things: the shoes, the postcode, the boyfriend with a big engagement ring. And now she realised how little all that meant, but her dad had never met – would never meet – his new daughter and that was a tragedy. Maybe there was some way of making amends, maybe she could still fix it – but to do that, they had to get to the money before the Russians or anyone else.

‘We have to go to Scotland,’ she said quickly.

‘I’ll call Lana. Maybe we can get out of Miami this morning. We have to get there before Sergei works out what we have.’

‘Why didn’t you give him the false co-ordinates in the book?’

‘He’s not the sort of man you want to lie to. You just have to out-smart him.’

She looked at him, doubt creeping in.

‘Are we going to call Hal Stanton?’

‘No.’

She frowned. ‘Why not?’

‘Because we’re almost there, Soph.’

She felt a cold shiver somewhere deep inside her. It was a moment before she recognised what it was. Doubt.

She looked at Josh playing with a route map on his iPhone. There was a definite reluctance to get the authorities involved. Was that because he had an inherent distrust for the establishment? This was a man who skirted around the law, not worked with it. Or was it something else?

An unwelcome thought began to present itself in her brain. A thought that made her pull her towel a little tighter round her body. Josh couldn’t have an ulterior motive for wanting to keep the authorities out of this, could he?

As she tried to rid herself of the notion, Josh curled one strong arm around her waist. P

ressed up against him, she could feel him harden beneath his boxer shorts.

‘This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for a first date,’ he said, stroking her hair. She felt herself relax in his arms. She was wrong to question Josh. She trusted him implicitly. He’d had so many opportunities to abandon her, and yet he’d stuck by her side from the moment she’d left his houseboat and been chased by the Russians.

‘When this is over, we’ll go somewhere hot and sunny and wonderful. Brazil, Bali, the Maldives. We can stay there six months, a year, longer. You can write books or poems or paint pictures, or we can just sell coconuts and spend the rest of our time doing what we did last night. Doing what I wanted to do to you since the moment I saw you. But first we have to find the money.’

She pulled away from him. ‘You wanted to have sex with me at the Chariot party?’ she grinned.