JAKrentz - The Pirate, The Adventurer, & The Cowboy (20 page)

She did not pretend to misunderstand. "My ex-husband? No, you're not like him at all. As you said, night and day."

He heard himself ask the next question before he had the good sense to think about what he was saying. "If you were ever to get married again, would you want someone like him? I mean someone like the man you thought he was when you married him? A sensitive, literary type? A guy with the soul of a poet or whatever it was you thought he had going for him?"

"Nope." Kate worked steadily on her tuna, apparently relishing every bite.

"I see." Jared found himself stewing in unaccustomed frustration. He hadn't wanted to ask the question in the first place, but having asked it, he had certainly expected a more complete answer than the one he had gotten. Kate was normally chatty as hell. "Do you, uh, know what you'd want the second time around?"

"No, but I expect I'll know it when I see it. Think you'll ever find someone who will fill Gabriella's shoes?"

That startled him. "I don't know." He frowned down at his tuna, trying to sort through his jumbled thoughts. "I'm not sure if that's really what I want, anyway. I used to think it was. But maybe it's not such a good idea. Lately, I've started wondering. I loved her. If she were still alive, I would still love her. But she's gone and I've done some changing and nothing stays the same, does it?"

"No." Kate smiled with a curious understanding. "That's the one sure thing in life. Nothing stays the same."

Jared nodded and then found himself saying aloud something he had never admitted to a living soul. "I had to be so careful with Gabby. She was very fragile. So gentle. You could crush her with just a look. I treated her like rare crystal most of the time, but once in a while I didn't and then I'd feel guilty for days."

"I know what that kind of guilt is like. I wasn't always gentle enough with my husband," Kate said. "I would get impatient with him. His ego was so fragile and he used to get so depressed so easily. I don't think I was as understanding and compassionate as I should have been. It must have been hard on him watching me get successfully published while he kept accumulating rejections. Especially when he was convinced that what he was writing was infinitely more important than what I wrote."

Jared let the silence that followed her comment hang for a while. He realized he felt at peace with Kate for the first time that day. He replayed his own words in his head and saw the truth in them. Somewhere along the line he had stopped looking for a replacement for Gabriella. He wanted a wife, but he wanted someone who was a unique individual, a person in her own right, not a clone of Gabby.

"You really don't know what you want in a second husband?" Jared asked again.

"Like I said, I'm sure I'll know it when I see it."

That comment shattered his feeling of being at peace with her. He scowled across the table, annoyed. "What are you expecting to happen? You think some guy will walk into your life and you'll take one look and know he's the right man?"

"Sure. Why not?"

"You know what your problem is? You've written one too many romance novels," Jared muttered.

"Well?" Letty demanded a few days later when she happened across Kate curled in a shaded lounger. "Fill me in on the latest. How's Amelia doing with her pirate?"

Kate glanced up from the diary in her lap. "Whipping him into shape, I'm happy to say. She locked him out of her bedroom on her wedding night because he showed up drunk after too much carousing with his crew. She made it stick, too. Mostly because Roger was too drunk to find the key, which she had wisely hidden."

"I love it. What happened next?" Letty sat down nearby and poured herself a glass of iced tea from a pitcher Kate had ordered earlier.

"Roger was too embarrassed the next day to admit he hadn't made it into his wife's bedroom. So he tried acting as if everything was normal between himself and Amelia. Pretended there wasn't a thing in the world wrong. Unfortunately Amelia fell for the act. She went for a walk with him down to a secluded little cove." Kate wondered privately if it was the same cove where Jared had first made love to her.

"I'll bet Amelia soon found herself flat on her back in the sand."

"Eventually. It wasn't as bad as it sounds, though. Here's how she puts it:

Roger apologized very prettily for his uncouth behavior of the previous night and began a very learned discussion concerning the marital obligations of husbands and wives. I informed him that I was very well aware of those obligations, and having found myself wedded, however unwillingly, I intended to do my duty. He then explained in a rather awkward fashion that he would prefer it if I did not act entirely out of a sense of womanly duty. I knew then that he loved me and I was content.

"That's sweet," Letty said.

"Maybe. Maybe not. I can't help wondering if Roger had finally figured out that charm would work better than a lot of loud, blustering machismo."

"I prefer to think he had learned his lesson and wanted to please Amelia."

"More likely he just didn't want to spend another night locked out of his bedroom." Kate closed me book, wondering if she would have believed Jared loved her if he had tried the same line on her.

Probably. He was, after all, the man of her dreams. He just didn't know it. She remembered their discussion over lunch a few days earlier and knew she had not been exactly truthful with him. But she was not about to confess to Jared that he was exactly what she wanted in a second husband. Not yet, at any rate.

Before this relationship could go any further she had to find a way to save him from his own piratical tendencies. She had to discover what was going on at
Hawthorne
Castle
.

The next day she got her first real clue. It was late in the afternoon, shortly before she was due to meet Jared for dinner in the hotel restaurant, when Kate came across the most interesting portion of the diary that she had yet encountered.

Amelia Cavendish, inquisitive lady that she was, had discovered the mechanism that unlocked the hidden door at the bottom of the stone staircase.

Amelia, Kate decided as she carefully memorized the instructions, was definitely turning out to be a kindred spirit. She had been unable to resist finding out what was behind the locked wall and Kate was filled with the same gnawing curiosity.

According to the diary, Roger Hawthorne had built the hidden room as an emergency escape route to the sea. There was, according to Amelia, a wharf inside a natural cave adjoining the castle.
Hawthorne had widened the entrance so that a small boat could get through to the sea and then concealed the enlarged opening with a movable section of stone that blended with the lava.

It is a very large opening, quite large enough to permit a boat to enter and dock at the small wharf inside the hidden chamber. I fear the room is not merely to be used as an emergency escape route. I believe Roger uses this secret place to unload his most valuable cargoes. I also fear these cargoes are not such as result from the honest shipping business in which he is supposedly engaged. I shall have to put a halt to such practices immediately. Roger Hawthorne is the son of an earl and I am a daughter of a respectable family. We do not indulge in this sort of thing. I will make that quite clear to him.

"Attagirl, Amelia," Kate whispered. She closed the diary and wondered more than ever if Jared was following in his ancestor's footsteps. If so, she must be as firm as Amelia had been.

NINE

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"W
hat the hell do you mean, you can't repair that railing today? Tomorrow is Thursday, remember? By tomorrow this place will be crawling with cruise-ship people. We'll need all the extra bar seating we can get. I don't want to have to block off this area just because you couldn't get the damned railing fixed in time." Fists on his hips, Jared confronted the two workmen in front of him. They both shrugged.

"Take it easy, boss," said the taller of the two. "Not much we can do without the teak. You know that. Hank said he checked over on Ruby this morning 'fore he left and it hadn't come in from
Hawaii
yet."

"That teak was due two weeks ago."

"
Island time, boss," the second man said philosophically. "Hey, you know how it is out here. Two days, two weeks, two months. Don't make much difference. It'll get done one of these days. No hurry."

"I don't want that railing repaired one of these days, I want it fixed by this time tomorrow. I didn't get this place built by running it on island time, and I'm not going to lose the seating capacity on that terrace tomorrow just because the damned teak didn't leave
Hawaii
yet." Jared studied the broken section of terrace railing. He was used to improvising. Out here in the islands, a man either learned how to get creative or he didn't survive in business.

The two workmen stood on either side of Jared, examining the broken railing with grave concern.

"Okay, Mark, I think I've got an idea," Jared finally announced. "Remember the lumber we had left over after we finished the new changing rooms?"

"Sure. We stored it in the back of the maintenance shed." Mark's face lit up. "Think there's a piece that'll fit?"

"Go check. It's not teak, but who's going to notice?"

"Right, boss."

The two men ambled off the terrace just as Letty and David came around the corner. Letty smiled.

"Still waiting on the teak for the railing, Jared?" Letty surveyed the broken section.

"Hi, Letty. Yeah, still waiting. Far as I can tell it hasn't left
Hawaii
. The usual story. It'll get here one of these days." He looked down at his son. "How was school?"

"Same old thing. You seen Kate?" David's face was screwed up with concern. "I've been lookin' all over for her. We were gonna practice my kicks again today and then go snorkeling."

"Haven't seen her since lunch," Jared said, deliberately quashing the memory of Kate's oddly distracted air earlier. It had irritated him because he was almost certain she was already starting to make plans for her trip back to
Seattle. This was the final week of her stay and that fact was eating at him. Thus far, neither of them had brought up the subject of her imminent departure.

"Maybe she went swimming," Letty suggested.

"She wouldn't have gone down to the beach without me," David said, obviously certain of that much. "She promised she'd wait for me. She always keeps her promises."

His son was right about that, Jared thought. If Kate made a promise, she would keep it. He wondered what it would take to get Kate to promise she'd wait for him.

Then he wondered for the hundredth time how a supposedly intelligent, mature woman could entertain the silly romantic notion that she would recognize her perfect mate the moment he walked into her life. It was a particularly ridiculous and infuriating example of feminine logic and he intended to point that out to her again tonight. He himself was rapidly learning that the right person didn't always show up packaged as expected.

"She'll turn up soon. Don't worry about it," Jared told his son.

Letty smiled at David. "Your father's right. If Kate said she'd be around to work on those kicks this afternoon, then she'll be here. Why don't you go try her room again?"

David brightened. "I will. See you later, Dad."

Jared nodded. "Right. Don't forget we're going to have dinner at home with Kate tonight."

"I won't. Is she cooking again?"

"Uh-huh. Said she'd make tacos."

"Oh, boy!" David whirled and dashed off the terrace.

Letty's mouth curved in amusement. "First pizza, then hamburgers, then macaroni and cheese and now tacos. Kate certainly knows the way to a little boy's heart."

"You can say that again. If she hangs around long enough we may get hot dogs and peanut butter sandwiches." Jared made a production out of studying the broken railing. "Ten to one that's the only kind of stuff she knows how to make."

"I doubt it. But Kate's too smart to fix coq au vin or rabbit
provençale
for a kid."

"She's smart enough, all right. About some things."

"Speaking of little boys' hearts, how is yours doing?"

"I'm not a little boy, Letty."

"Oops. Sorry. Didn't mean to stomp on any toes."

"Don't worry about it." Jared heard the roughness in his own voice and stifled an oath. "My toes are tough."

"I won't worry a bit about it. You've always been very good at taking care of yourself. Time's running out, though. Are you really going to let her just up and leave in three days, Jared?" Letty wandered over to the unbroken portion of the terrace railing and leaned her elbows on the teak.

"If she wants to go home like all the rest of the tourists, there's not much I can do about it."

"I guess not. Pity, though."