Free Sin and Sacrifice by Danielle Bourdon Page A

snapped a look up
from the bowl to find him studying her. What remained of the
bruising had faded down to yellowish smudges and the split in her
lip lacked even a scab this morning. She had healed even more than
she'd thought she would given time to rest. Self conscious, she
touched her cheek and nodded.
    “ I'm lucky it's healing
well. Thanks again for lunch, Mister Nichols.”
    “ I didn't know what you
wanted to drink. Help yourself to water or bottles of juice and
whatever else he's got stocked in there.” Rhett gestured toward the
small bar in the parlor before turning on a boot heel and
disappearing inside.
    Evelyn watched him,
fiddling with the utensils he'd rolled into a linen napkin. He
hadn't pursued the subject of her unnaturally fast healing and for
that she was thankful. It made her curious what he thought though.
Rhett Nichols did not strike her as a slow man who let obvious
things get by him.
    Sitting in a chair, she
attacked the salad and glanced around for Christian while
pretending to be absorbed in her meal. Which was excellent, she
noted, while spearing a slice of seasoned chicken. The other agent
seemed to be elsewhere on the yacht. She doubted he would have
disembarked with Rhett needing some downtime, leaving her
unprotected. Evelyn weighed her options and the risks. She could
stay here and not try to make contact with her sisters, or she
could hurry about her errand and return before anyone noticed her
gone.
    She made her decision after
another discreet check of the deck.
    It took her less than
fifteen minutes to disembark, hail a taxi, and have him drive her
to a small café bordering the marina. Bustling with tourists, the
café had floor to ceiling windows along the front, a small seating
area around the doors and palms in pots lining the walkway. She
went inside and bought herself a ten minute block of time on one of
the public laptops lined up on a long counter facing the
harbor.
    Feeling strangely
vulnerable out in the open without Rhett at her side, she engaged
the search directory and typed in the email address for the private
account. Glancing over her shoulder, she scanned the faces of the
customers, looking for anyone who seemed too interested in what she
was doing. No one, in her estimation, was paying any
attention.
    Fingers flying over the
keys, she typed in their user name and password and hit enter. The
account scrolled into view. No new messages. Evelyn checked the
spam folder and the sent folders too, thinking maybe her sisters
might have hid something in there so that it wasn't seen at first
glance on the screen.
    Nothing.
    Two days was more than
enough time for one of them, if not all of them, to make contact.
An uneasy pang clenched her stomach. Alexandra, at the very least,
would have found a way to access a computer. Which meant her other
sisters had suffered the same fate as Galiana, or they had been
captured after their escape from the parking lot and were sitting
underground somewhere like she'd been. Tortured and
interrogated.
    There was no way she would
be able to find them without outside help. Help like Rhett and
Christian could give her. It was part of their job, wasn't it, to
recover kidnapped Americans in foreign countries? They'd
recovered her .
    As dangerous as it was to
continue interacting with the government on such intimate levels,
they had access to information and resources she just didn't have.
This kind of situation was their specialty, she thought, and it
certainly wasn't hers. Unless there was a message waiting when she
arrived in Cairo, she decided to stay with the agents a while
longer.
    Going through the history,
she erased any trail of where she'd been on the laptop. Leaving the
seat with time still on the 'clock', she wove her way through the
bodies and back outside. Brushing wayward strands of hair from her
cheek, she glanced left and right and hailed another taxi. With
directions to take her to the nearest bank, she settled in the
seat, watching the