Amber Beach (3 page)

“How old were you?”

“Thirteen.”

“Did you go out fishing again after that?”

“Do I look like a masochist?”

“For all I know you’re wearing a hair shirt underneath that floppy sweat suit.”

She whipped up her black sweatshirt, revealing a tourmaline-green sweater that fit very well.

“Regulation cotton”, she said. “And my sweat suit isn’t floppy. It’s comfortable.”

Hastily Jake looked away from the sleek torso Honor had so unexpectedly revealed. Beneath sweats that were big enough for a man his size, his employer was built just the way he liked women. Not too skinny. Not too fat. Not too big. Not too small. Just right for his hands. Just right for his mouth. Just right everywhere.

Too bad she was a Donovan. Jake was long past the age of screwing a female he didn’t trust.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember the last time a female interested him as much as this one did. Besides, there were few better excuses to stay close to a woman than a new, red-hot affair. And he intended to stay close to Honor every step of the way to finding Kyle and the stolen shipment of amber.

Jake looked back at her and smiled.

“Comfortable, huh?” he said. “Well, if I get wet, I’ll know where to find a dry sweat suit.”

“Hold your breath. I’m more likely to get wet than you are.”

“Standing on the dock?”

She sighed and looked at him. As soon as she went down into the boat, she would be looking up at him
again.
And bouncing around. With a silent prayer, she took the long step off the dock – and promptly caught the heel of her running shoe on some unexpected part of the gunwale.

Jake caught Honor as easily as he had stepped into the boat himself. He looked into her startled eyes, smiled slightly, and released her much more slowly than he had grabbed her.

“Thanks”, she muttered.

“You’re welcome. There’s a place in town that sells deck
shoes.”

“Good for them.”

“Better for you. When the deck gets wet, you’ll think you’re ice-skating unless you wear deck shoes.”

“Wet! The deck isn’t supposed to get wet. That’s why I hired you.”

“Water is wet. Boats float in water. Boats get wet.”

“There goes your tip.”

Jake snickered, then shook his head and laughed out loud. Whatever her bad taste in siblings, Honor Donovan was someone he could like.

The thought sobered him instantly. The last thing he needed was to like Kyle’s kid sister. Just because she obviously had inherited a full dose of Donovan charm was no reason to like her, much less to slide downhill into trusting her. At the end of that slippery, treacherous slope was the kind of rage and disappointment he had felt when he discovered that Kyle was as crooked as he was good company. Jake’s corporation would be years recovering from the
damage
Kyle had done, if recovery was even possible.

It had been a long time since Jake had misjudged a human being so badly. As far as he was concerned, hell would freeze solid before he made such a mistake again.

People died making mistakes like that.

“I’ll survive without a tip”, he said. “Get deck shoes when you get the fishing license.”

Honor stared at him, surprise clear on her face.

He forced himself to smile and reminded himself that whatever else Kyle’s sister might be, she wasn’t stupid. She read him far too clearly for his comfort. And for hers, apparently. She didn’t look happy with whatever she had seen in his eyes.

Nothing new in that. A lot of people got uncomfortable when he looked at them a certain way.

Jake held out his hand.

“I thought you didn’t expect a tip”, she said.

“Keys.”

Without a word she dug into the pouch pocket of her sweatshirt and brought out a simple floating key chain. There were only two keys on it. One looked a bit like an old-fashioned skeleton key. The other looked like an overgrown luggage key.

“I don’t know how to start the engine”, she said.

“I do. That’s why you hired me.”

He took the old-fashioned key, inserted it into the door leading into the boat’s cabin, and turned the handle. The door opened easily. Its big tinted glass panel flashed in the sunlight.

“Why don’t you sit in the pilot seat for now”, he said.

“Uh, sure. Where is it?”

“Up front on the port – left – side”, Jake said, “directly across from the helm seat. The helm is the thing that looks like a steering wheel.”

“There’s one of those right behind you.”

“That’s the aft station. I want you inside.”

Honor didn’t move. “You’re supposed to teach me how to run the boat. I won’t learn anything sitting in there while you’re busy out here.”

“You’re serious about that part of it?”

“Very.”

Jake looked into her level, golden-green eyes and didn’t doubt her words. Whatever lack of interest she had in fishing, she wanted to learn how to operate her brother’s boat.

Both relief and disappointment coursed through him – disappointment because she was part of Kyle’s scheme, whatever that was, and relief that she wasn’t as clueless as she had sounded on the phone with Archer.

“Okay”, Jake said. “Ready for lesson number one?”

Honor nodded.

“The first thing you do after coming on board is lift the engine cover and check the engine.”

“That little compartment?” she asked, pointing to the
stern.

“No. This big compartment.”

He pointed to the squared-off hump that took up more than half of the standing room in the open stern of the boat.

“You opened the little compartment first”, Honor said. “Then you opened the door to the cabin.”

“I wanted to make sure you were out of the way before I checked the engine.”

“Why?”

“The cover eats toes.”

“Would it settle for a cheese sandwich?”

He tried not to smile, but couldn’t help it. She was a very female, even more unquenchable version of Kyle.

Kyle, who could charm rust off steel.

“Stand over here”, Jake said, positioning Honor to his right, away from the dock. “Watch your toes.”

He bent, hooked the fingers of his left hand in the engine cover, and lifted it back on its hinges. The compartment yawned open at the stern. With the lid tilted back vertically, there was barely enough room around the edge of the hole to stand without falling in. There was no room for a man to slide between the cabin door and the cover.

Honor whistled when she saw the gleaming black beauty that filled the compartment. “That’s an engine!”

“Four hundred and fifty-four cubic inches”, he agreed. “Goes like bloody blue blazes, if you don’t mind buying gas.”

“No free lunch?”

“Not even a snack.”

He pulled out the dipstick, checked it, and held it out for her to inspect.

“Looks like oil to me”, she said.

“Good news. Salt water in the oil is like sugar in the gas tank. Bad luck. So the first thing you do when you get on
board is check to make sure nothing has seeped in since you docked.”

He replaced the dipstick. Then he squatted easily on his heels and
began a
thorough inspection of various hoses, clamps, and fittings.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“Careless maintenance.”

“Kyle is quick-tempered but he isn’t careless.”

Jake grunted and kept right on looking. In the short time he had known Kyle, he hadn’t appeared to be careless. But then, he hadn’t appeared to be a crook, either. When it came to Kyle Donovan, Jake wasn’t counting on one damned thing he hadn’t held in his hands and examined with a wary eye.

“Shipshape and looking good”, he said, standing again. “Watch your toes. This cover is heavy enough to take them right off.”

Honor crowded back against the side of the boat as Jake lowered the engine cover back down. There was no latch to keep it closed and no need of one. The weight of the cover alone was enough to hold it in place.

“What next?” she asked.

“Blower. Go in and sit to the left of the driver’s seat.”

“Driver? Aren’t boat folks called captains or pilots or something important?”

“Depends. Personally, I drive boats and don’t talk any more nautical than I have to.”

Honor stepped down into the cabin, walked up the short, narrow aisle, and climbed up to a bench seat that looked forward over the bow. Unlike a car, the steering wheel of the boat was on the right-hand side. The “windshield” was three separate windows with a steep inward slant from top to bottom.

After a moment Jake came and stood beside her seat. He filled the narrow aisle. Every breath she drew in smelled of soap and heat and something indefinably male. His black
beard was either new or very closely cropped. His skin was
lean His hair was a thick, gleaming black pelt that was
combed away from his face. His mustache was slightly longer
than the rest of his beard. It emphasized the crisp line of
his mouth.

She was tempted to trace the sharp peaks of his upper lip and the promising curve of his lower lip. The thought startled her even as it intrigued her. She hadn’t felt such an intense feminine curiosity about a man since puberty.

“This is the blower control”, he said.

Reluctantly she looked at the console in front of the steering wheel. He was pointing to one in a row of black rocker
switches.

“Blower control”, she repeated.

“The blower sucks air out of the engine compartment. Never start this boat until the blower has run for several minutes.”

“Why?”

“Gas fumes. If they’ve built up and you hit the ignition switch, the explosion could put you in near-earth orbit.”

Her eyes widened. “Bad luck.”

“The worst.”

He hit the rocker switch. A fan kicked in somewhere at the stern of the boat, inside the engine compartment.

Jake lifted the bottom of the driver’s seat and tilted it toward the steering wheel. There was a small sink tucked away underneath the seat. He turned on the water pump, rummaged for a kettle and settled for a saucepan, and put some water on to boil on the small galley stove.

Then he turned back to the boat itself. He went over the controls, turning on electronics, checking dials, and listening to the marine weather report from Canada, twenty miles away. As he touched each piece of equipment, he gave Honor a short explanation of its function.

She watched, listened, and absorbed intently. Under normal circumstances she wouldn’t have known a marine widget from a nautical whatsit and wouldn’t have cared. But nothing had been normal since Kyle vanished.

The
Tomorrow
was her best chance of helping him. The logical part of her mind knew that the boat wasn’t much of
a
chance. Her emotions didn’t care. This was the only chance she had. She would make the most of it and ignore Archer’s smug advice about going back home and catching up on her designing.

It was hard to design when she couldn’t shake the feeling that the key to Kyle’s disappearance – and reappearance – lay somewhere in the San Juan Islands, just waiting to be discovered by her. That was why she had plastered the town with “Wanted: Fishing Guide who knows SeaSports” notices.

She finally had the guide. Now all she had to do was keep her mind on cold electronics instead of on a stranger with clean hands and a wry, sexy curve to his mouth. Considering that she had given up dating precisely because she was tired of men who thought sex was as obligatory – and exciting – as breathing, keeping her mind on electronics shouldn’t have been a problem.

But it was.

She wondered if Jake would mind not exhaling for a bit, just while he was so close to her. The coffee-and-cream scent of his breath was making her restless.

“Chart plotter”, Honor said, trying to gather her thoughts.

“What about it?”

She frowned at the small computer screen to the left of the steering wheel. The screen, and assorted other electronic equipment, was mounted on a swinging arm that could be pushed out of the way into the V berth when the boat was at anchor. There were rows of buttons with cryptic labels bordering the screen. There was another number pad below, but it wasn’t set up like any computer she had ever seen. None of the labels helped her to figure out what all the buttons did.

In addition there was one of Kyle’s crazy add-ons wired into the lot. She had no idea what modification her brother had made to the standard electronic setup.

But if he had an electronic “lock” on this computer, she knew the password he used to access his other computers. All she had to do was figure out how to use the basic electronic equipment while learning how to run the boat itself. Then she would access the special computer stuff – if any – with Kyle’s password, find out the key to everything, fire up the SeaSport, and go rescue her brother. Simple.