Page 74 of For Better or for Ransom

She sobered up, barely.

“Can we please talk first?” she reluctantly asked.

Luke lifted his arms and hands, freeing her body from his touch, and spilling even more water on the floor.

“I think we need to continue the conversation where I started sharing with you my views on marriage,” Sol finally said.

Luke

The water inside the bathtub felt frigid.

“I know you don’t want to marry a third time.” Uttering those words had been harder than he’d anticipated, but he finally said them. Luke had been thinking about it during their ride back from Cala Formentor. Divya had been the one driving and he’d allowed himself to think about his relationship besides trying to glue the case together. He could live without the stupid title. He just needed to live with Sol as his partner, that was all that mattered.

Sol shook her wet hair, turned around in the bathtub again so that she faced him, sat on the opposite side of the tub, her legs entwined with his. She managed to do all that in a swift, elegant move and spilling no water. He wasn’t sure how she’d managed it.

“Yeah, it’s not that I don’t want to marry a third time,” she said.

Oh god! His heart sank. “You don’t want to—you don’t want to marry me?” He stopped being playful.

“What?” Sol’s nose flared, her lips thin with anger. “Don’t be ridiculous! You’re pretty much the only person I would even consider marrying, Luca. It’s not that I don’t want to marry for a third time—let alone if it’s to you. It’s that I absolutely don’t want to divorce for a third time. I’ve recently realized that I have another marriage in me, but I just don’t have another divorce. If we do this, we do this.”

Had he heard that correctly? For a moment he’d thought he was facing a crossroads in their relationship: the point at which she told him why he wasn’t the right man for her. Only they’d taken a very different turn.

He suspected that he was smiling like a fool. The words “Let’s do this” were about to leave his lips when there was a loud knock on the door.

Not again!

43

Sol

Luke was probably thinking the same as she was: Not fucking again.

“Sol, Luke, please don’t hate me. But you need to see this,” Divya said from the other side of their room’s door. “He’s posted again.”

“Two minutes,” Luke growled. He sent Sol an apologetic look that she interpreted to mean so many things: I’m sorry we were interrupted. This conversation is NOT over. I still need to prove whatever other kind of sex you find uncomfortable or inconvenient isn’t—if practiced the right way. You said you want to marry me, right? I didn’t hear that wrong? You really can’t take it back now. Oh, and let’s do this!

They got out of the tub, dried hurriedly, and put some clothes on. When Luke went to open the door, Sol was still toweling her wet hair.

Divya barged in right away. “I’d love to have a laugh at whatever was going on here.” The Mancunian made a circular move with her right hand, encompassing the bathtub, the wet floor, and Sol’s and Luke’s damp hair. “But there’s no bloody time. He’s posted again.”

“Do you mean FadeToBlack?” asked Luke. He was showing a lot of restraint for a man who, Sol assumed, had a lot of things on his mind. She knew she did.

“Of course FadeToBlack, mate. Would I be interrupting you like this if it was anyone else?” Divya spoke through a tightly gritted jaw.

“I don’t know.” Luke shrugged his shoulders. “You keep doing this.”

Divya’s gaze tightened on him, then took her cell phone out and read: “You’ll never find his shadow in the pines. Stop ignoring me like you ignored my art. What do we make of it?” She then stared from Luke, to Sol, as if hoping one of them would have the answer to the new cipher.

“It’s almost as if he was giving us breadcrumbs. I’m not sure if he wants us to find him or he’s simply teasing.” Luke inhaled and exhaled deeply as he paced the room. “What’s that about ignoring his art?”

“I mean, with that handle, it could be someone on Leonardo’s orbit, in the industry,” Sol offered. “A creator of some sort, who feels slighted.”

Luke seemed to ponder her words, then asked. “What’s the picture on the post?”

“Some turquoise sea water photographed from up close,” Divya said, while still holding her phone and looking at it, then handing it to Luke so that he could see the image himself. “There’s no distinguishable line of the coast, if that’s what you were wondering.”

“So a pool and now the sea. Can we infer that wherever he has Leonardo, it must be by the sea?” Luke passed the cell phone to Sol. “I mean, considering this is a bloody island, it doesn’t narrow it down much.”