Intent to Kill Read online

  “What are you going to do now? Work-wise, I mean,” she asked, desperate to get breathing space, desperate to prevent herself from falling mindlessly into his arms. That would be wrong, a wrong beginning—a train wreck. They needed time and the visa gave them that.

  “Both Arun and I resigned from Interpol. I’m going back to my first love, archeology, and Arun is going to sculpt.”

  Claire smiled. “And if that fails he has Vanna to support him.”

  His fingers twisted through hers.

  The hands of a man who now worked with his hands laced with those of one who made her living by the pen. Smooth against rough they melded and blended. Their gazes meshed and their lips met. It was a kiss soft and sweet in its promise that quickly became hot, a living burning thing that had no place in a hotel lobby. Gently she pushed him back.

  “I’m sorry about your uncle, truly, Claire. I’d change it for you if I could.”

  “Don’t,” she said softly. “He’s a different man now and somehow he’s come to terms with it all. And I will too, eventually.” She looked away. “That’s one lesson he taught me that I can’t forget, forgiveness.”

  And despite her talk of forgiveness, there was regret in his eyes. “I wish it had been different.”

  “But you had no choice,” she finished. “Your integrity is part of what I love about you.”

  “Claire, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything. Just answer me this, would you ever leave here?”

  “Yes,” he said with a surety that surprised her.

  “What would make you leave here?” she dared to ask.

  He caught her hands. “You,” he replied throatily. “I need you.”

  She squeezed his hands in return. Her throat closed up and words wouldn’t come.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. Inside there were bills and a picture. He pulled it out.

  “Don’t, Simon,” she began, realizing how hard it was to gaze on that long-dead face. She stopped as she realized that the picture he held was one of her. Sunburned and smiling she stood in the entrance to Angkor Wat. She remembered that day so vividly, the kiss that eclipsed the sunset, his gentleness, the sparks that ignited between them.

  “I left the other where it belonged.” He folded the wallet and slid it back into his pocket. “At her memorial.”

  • • •

  The children called to the tourists begging and demanding in turns that they purchase their goods. In the background the majesty of Angkor Wat rose out of the remains of what had once been jungle. Amid dense green foliage, lush and silent, it had stood for so many years against the tides of discovery. Even now it seems to hold the promise of ancient treasures in a land that was still shadowed by mystery.

  Claire read the words with a satisfied smile and hit save. A lot had happened in the last month. Her Uncle Jack had been returned to Cambodia for the first time in decades and she’d left any greetings in the hands of the authorities. Some things in life were not what one expected and Uncle Jack—he was one of them. She’d finally come to terms with that.

  “Finished?” Simon asked, his hand tracing circles on her bare waist.

  “For now,” Claire replied. “There is so much more to write.” She turned to face him. “The paper wants me to send more articles. It means staying over here longer.”

  “How long?”

  “A year anyway.” She leaned on an elbow and ran a hand along the planes of his face.

  His hand moved to circle her bare breast.

  “Will you stay with me for the year?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” she teased.

  “Will you stay with me for the rest of your life?” His hand lifted from her breast and he brushed her hair back from her face. “I love you. You know that.” He kissed her gently. “I want to be with you.”

  She sat up, clutching the sheet to her chest. “You’re serious?”

  He sat up beside her. “Never more.”

  “I’m not sure I can stay here forever,” she said.

  “Neither am I. We can face it together.”

  “I don’t know, Simon,” Claire murmured. “We’re so different. Asia is in your blood. I don’t know if it will ever be in mine.”

  He smiled that slow, mellow lifting of his full lips. She’d do almost anything for that smile. He arched his eyebrow, as if reading her thoughts.

  “I’m at peace with you.” He tugged at the sheet until she released it. He pulled her gently down beside him. His face was more serious than she had ever seen it. His finger skimmed over her breast, tantalizing the soft flesh, trailing a pattern around her areola and rapidly stiffening nipple. But his eyes were locked with hers even while his hands continued their sensual torture. “I love you, Claire. More than any country or anything else, I love you, Claire. Only you.”

  He nuzzled her neck. “Where you are, that’s home.”

  “Home,” Claire whispered.

  The tropical night’s sweet texture was a warm balm to her soul.

  She traced his lips with her finger.

  He nipped her finger.

  She feigned a yelp and drew back.

  He brought her back, holding her tight.

  “Welcome home, sweetheart. Welcome home.”

  Thank You!

  Thank you for reading Intent to Kill! I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please help other readers find this book by posting a review on the site where you purchased it, online review sites, or blogs.

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  Excerpt from Fatal Intent

  Keep reading for an excerpt

  from the thrilling

  romantic suspense novel

  Fatal Intent

  An expedition into the Borneo rain forest is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for entomologist Garrett Cole. It’s this trip that could finally make her a star in her field. But when her team’s guide is found dead and headless on the banks of the river, Garrett’s dream trek suddenly becomes a nightmare. Lost in the heart of the jungle, she must fight to maintain her composure while leading a panicked team of scientists to safety.

  When sexy and rugged Aidan arrives in the jungle looking as if he belongs, Garrett has no choice but to accept his help. But Aidan is more than she bargained for—a man of few words and fewer answers, as comfortable in the jungle as the mysterious native tribesmen. And as the days pass and passion flares between them, Garrett wonders if Aiden’s good intentions are just another of the jungle’s illusions.

  In a land rife with predators and a killer still on the loose, can she trust the one man who claims to be their rescuer?

  Chapter One

  She saw him floating headless through a mist of tears.

  Even the river’s roar was not enough to mask her scream, as overhead the Borneo midday sun skidded a brilliant reflection across the river’s surface.

  Garrett clapped her hand over her mouth and squinted against the bright sun. As if that would shift reality or change the fact that all that stood between Malcolm and anonymity was the San Diego Chargers logo on his torn, water-soaked T-shirt. Instead, tears washed her vision.

  Malcolm’s smiling face—his smiling, missing face. She choked and her foot slipped, bringing her dangerously close to the riverbank, and the body.

  Brush crackled and something screeched, the sound harsh and loud in a place where there was never silence. It would have sent chills through the uninitiated but it was only an insect, an oversize bug—an insect that might not be classified, identified. There were so many and that was what brought her here. But now her guide was dead, headless. That thought alone was preposterous even when the evidence lay in front of her. She wanted to weep. She wanted to run. But it was up to her to get her team out of here. She needed another focus before panic clouded everything. And then sh
e caught sight of Ian spewing into the tall grass that grew wild and untamed on the edge of the clearing.

  “Ian!”

  It was only the two of them—for now. She and Ian. Ian, who was minus the balls God had given his mother, all feminine screams and hysteria in a crisis.

  Her fingers trembled and she clenched them into her palms, nails pinching the skin. Her thoughts jittered everywhere.

  There was no answer as Ian began to cry in large gulping sobs.

  “Ian!” she shouted, trying to use tough love, hoping that would bring him back from the edge. There was no time for sympathy and neither of them could afford hysteria. They had to survive. Small choking sounds came from the brush. “C’mon, Ian,” she muttered, swallowing her own bile as it crept up the back of her throat.

  Dead.

  Only yesterday morning she had laughed with Malcolm over some inane joke one of the other Iban had told him, something that related back to his heritage and the Iban’s history as headhunters.

  “Headhunters,” she whispered. “Don’t be utterly ridiculous.” There were no headhunters, not anymore. Just tribal people who took great pride in a history that once had included headhunting. Once, she reminded herself, no more. Her gaze flitted back to the corpse, the corpse that was minus a head.

  I’ll be back before dark. Keep to the river. I’ll find you.

  Those were the last words Malcolm had spoken.

  Keep to the river.

  Garrett and the team had kept to the river, until it began to get dark and he hadn’t returned. Now here he was, one day later—headless.

  She remembered her father’s words: “There’s violence and greed and money to be had in the jungle. That fact does strange things to men. Don’t trust anyone.”

  Garrett knew that her father, a member of the university board that funded her expedition, had been referring to the resources being stripped from the jungle, legally and illegally, with no thought to anything but money. What had Malcolm stumbled on? And where were his killers now?

  “It could be an accident,” she whispered and prayed it was.

  The body shifted and broke free of the bank.

  “No!” She raced to the river, yet it seemed as if everything was in slow motion and it was forever before she was wrestling from the river what had once been a man. She clutched the waterlogged T-shirt, reluctant to touch the water-pulverized skin for fear of what she might take away. For fear that the skin would slough off, leaving raw meat, leaving . . .

  She closed her mind, clutched the material, prayed it would hold, and pulled. The San Diego Chargers logo on the T-shirt, which he’d bartered from Sid only the other day, split down the middle. She sucked in air and touched flesh. She registered blankly that his arm felt normal, just cold. Maybe her foot slipped or maybe it was all too much, but whatever it was, one minute she was standing and the next she was flat on her butt. The body was now partway out of the water but still lifting in the current and looking as if at any moment it would break free and head downriver.

  She looked across the rushing water to the undisturbed forest. She refused to look at what lay at her feet. Malcolm. Even though he lived in the city, in Kuching, he was so proud of his tribe—the tribe of former headhunters. He had claimed that a hundred-year-old skull still hung in his tribe’s longhouse. The last man hunted. Or was it? Somewhere in the depths of this forest was Malcolm’s head. Or maybe—she covered her mouth with her hand, the thought too horrible too contemplate—it was at the bottom of this river.

  She remembered something else, another quote of her father’s: “Things can get deadly out there. Expedition of ’62 we lost a member of the group. It was horrible. He was missing parts of his body. He was . . .” He had dragged the last bit out, leaving her in a strange mockery of suspense. “His head. We assumed a monitor got him.”

  She dropped her head in her hands.

  A woman has never led an expedition.

  Not possible, not at her age.

  The voices of the board of entomologists, her father’s cohorts, came to her. Her father had stood up for her. Her father, the same man who had once said that fieldwork was not for a woman and definitely not for his daughter. Her father, always distant with her and passionate about his work, a fact she resented most of her life.

  There was no time for memories. She took a deep calming breath.

  “We have no choice. We’re going to have to take the body.” She rose.

  “We’ll drag him to civilization?” Ian’s tone was dubious. “Why?”

  “We can’t leave him here. That’s so wrong.” She shook her head and pushed wet hair off her face. “It’s not even that, but we don’t know what happened to him. If we leave him here, no one ever will.” She glanced at Ian. Tears welled in his eyes. “Don’t, please.”

  “His body would be gone in hours,” he whispered. “I won’t let him be eaten by lizards or ants, or . . .” Ian broke off as he began breathing in hitches and bent over, clutching his belly.

  And the mention of ants only reminded Garrett of what she was leaving behind, and she chastised herself for even thinking that. But they were ending an expedition with only a dead specimen, a beetle like none of them had seen before and a hunch that this was special. No live specimen, no live colony, just one unclassified insect and the hope that this would make her career. She rubbed the back of her neck and pushed the guilty thought to the background. Malcolm was dead and she was thinking of her career. She turned her attention to Ian.

  “We’ll stick as close to the river as we can.” She glanced to the forest. “Of course, we’ll wait for the others. Oh, never mind waiting.” She pulled a walkie-talkie from her vest pocket. The small radio crackled as she pressed the on button. “Sid, do you copy?” More crackling.

  “Garrett?”

  “Sid, there’s been an accident.”

  “What? Are you all right?”

  “We’re fine, Sid,” she said. “Just get back, now, please.” She ended the call.

  “Let’s get him out of the river.” She glanced at Ian, who looked like he was going to throw up again. “Ian?”

  He nodded. “I’m fine.” He shuddered. “Move over a bit. I’ve got his belt.” But his hands were still shaking. “What a crappy way to die.”

  Garrett glanced at him. “Crappy?”

  “Sorry. Maybe I understated.”

  “A tad,” Garrett said. She grimaced at the mundane conversation amid the grisly circumstance. But there were no rules of decorum. Not any that she knew of, not for any kind of venture into the Borneo rain forest. Malcolm was dead and the rule book was lost, or maybe it was never written.

  “Okay, let’s do this. Are you ready?”

  Ian nodded gamely and she could only respect him for that.

  They heaved the corpse clear of the water with less effort than she expected.

  She took a deep breath but kept her gaze away from the body.

  “It’s not a crime.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” So much for taming her aggression, but she could feel the tears brushing the surface of her reality and anger was the only thing that would tamp them back.

  “To cry.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I know. You never do,” he said softly. “Do you think it was tribal revenge?” He hesitated. “Or something else?” His face was pinched, his lips thin. He glanced into the emerald mystery that surrounded them. It was impossible to see past the first feet of dense foliage. Trees grew on trees, vines twisted through low-growing plants and climbed upward, seeming to cling to every living thing before reaching the tips of massive trees that grazed the sky as they formed the forest’s canopy. It was all rather mysterious and today it appeared inhospitable. “Whoever it was, they might still be around.”

  “Or it was an accident, or an animal.” Garrett ached for the pain Ian was feeling. She’d seen the relationship growing between him and Malcolm, a relationship that had ended so tragically.

 
They had agreed to meet Malcolm farther upriver, and when he hadn’t arrived last night her team of entomologists had scoured the area in safely controlled distances from their starting point. None of them were navigators, or overly familiar with the jungle, but they had two-way radios to keep in touch. They had spent the night in a deserted hut. The hut where Malcolm had said he would meet them over twenty-four hours ago.

  Garrett hunkered down beside the body. She had to get it together. But all she could think was that whatever was out there—whatever had taken Malcolm—might be waiting, for them.

  She sucked in a deep breath as she forced herself to look at what remained of Malcolm. She was the team lead on this expedition. It was up to her to take care of the team. She had failed.

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  Books by Ryshia Kennie

  From the Dust

  Ring of Desire

  Fatal Intent

  Intent to Kill

  About the Author

  Ryshia Kennie is an award-winning author of two romance novels. From the Dust is a romance set during the Great Depression and her second book, Ring of Desire, is a magical romp into medieval England. Her recent novels focus on romantic suspense and women’s fiction. When not writing, she loves to hang out in any number of places—usually with a book in hand. She lives on the Canadian prairies with her husband and one opinionated Irish Terrier.

  For more, visit her website at www.ryshiakennie.com or her blog at www.ryshia.blogspot.com.