The Honeymoon Assignment Read online

  It was only inside Kelley that everything was still roiled up and unsteady. And she was more determined than ever not to let it show. If she accomplished nothing else on this assignment, she thought, she could at least show Sam Cotter that she was no longer the idealistic greenhorn who’d made such a tragic misjudgment three years earlier.

  This time she managed to reclaim her hand, and got past Sam’s barricading knee on her way out of the cockpit. “Unless you want people to catch us in the midst of yet another argument, I suggest we wrap this up,” she said. “I’m going to go see what Harold and Helen know about Steve Cormier. Did you pick up anything useful from anybody earlier?”

  “I learned that Jon Gustaffson knows every statistic for every player the Houston Oilers ever signed.”

  He didn’t look pleased about it, or maybe there was some other reason for the black look that had settled on his features. The intensity of his gaze was hooded now, like a sheathed sword. Sam’s personality was always a powerful force, Kelley thought, and somehow it only seemed more powerful when he withdrew into himself like this.

  “But now that we’ve gotten past sports trivia, I’m hoping to get some more relevant information out of him this afternoon,” he was adding.

  “Good.” Kelley moved away, toward the others on the deck.

  “This really is just all business with you, isn’t it?” Sam’s voice followed her, faintly astounded under its gravelly rasp.

  “What else could it be?” she asked. Although she didn’t turn back to look at him, she felt his heavy-lidded gaze following her as she crossed the deck in search of their hosts.

  Lunch was blessedly informal. It was easy to avoid Sam as everyone wandered around the big boat with plates of barbecued chicken and potato salad. Kelley saw him talking with Jon Gustaffson and Wayland Price, and hoped they’d gotten beyond sports scores. By then she was engaged in conversation with Helen Price.

  The unseasonably hot day had cooled a little by now, as the clouds above them started to thicken and block out the sun. Helen had finished her lunch and announced that the light was perfect for sketching now. Kelley followed as the older woman took out a big sketchbook and settled herself in a deck chair facing several other big boats anchored in the same quiet cove.

  “It’s a pretty scene,” Kelley said.

  Helen nodded. “I love this part of the world. When I was young I studied art in Europe for several years, learning all the right ways to do things, but you know, the landscapes there never felt quite right to me. I got the best all-around art training that my father’s money could provide, but I was never so happy as when I came back to Texas and could go back to painting the places I knew.”

  She painted with skill, Kelley knew. She had admired Helen’s big watercolors in the Windspray restaurant, and it was obvious now from the practiced movements of the older woman’s hands setting out her materials that this was something Helen was very, very good at. Kelley almost hated to interrupt Helen’s concentration with a question about Steve Cormier.

  “I don’t really know, dear,” Helen replied, in answer to Kelley’s query. “There’s just something about the man that makes me think he’s not giving us the whole story. He turned up so conveniently when we had an unexpected gap in the staff.”

  “Has he ever given you any trouble?” Kelley asked.

  Helen examined several soft lead pencils before choosing one. “No,” she said. “And you’ll think I’m odd for saying this—Harold certainly thinks it’s odd—but that’s one of the things that bothers me most about him. All of the other staff had questions and problems, especially at the beginning. But this Cormier man just does his job and goes back to his cottage. That’s all he does. That’s all he seems to want to do.”

  “So he has a cottage to himself?”

  “Yes. That was one of the reasons he wanted the job, he said. He was looking for a place to live, and Harold figured he might as well have one of the cottages that hadn’t sold yet.”

  “That makes sense,” Kelley said.

  Helen’s gentle brown eyes were scanning the bay now, finally settling on one of the other sailboats, whose young occupants were having a diving contest.

  “Oh, it makes sense.” She began to rough in the scene with quick, confident strokes of her pencil. “But he brought cases and cases of what he said was photographic equipment with him when he first arrived. But I’ve never seen him use any of it, not so much as to take a single snapshot. Doesn’t that seem a little strange to you?”

  It was certainly worth checking, Kelley realized. Counterfeiting had traditionally been a job that required big, unwieldy equipment, far bigger than anyone could move single-handedly. But with the technology changing so rapidly—

  She was about to ask Helen whether there was any chance of getting into Steve Cormier’s cottage when she became aware of a change in the happy yelling from the sailboat Helen was sketching. For some time now there had been high-pitched squeals of excitement as the young sailors propelled themselves off the stern of the boat, but now something seemed to be wrong.

  Helen hadn’t noticed it yet. To her eyes, the scene was still just an appealing jumble of shapes and angles. But one quick glance told Kelley what was happening, and it was enough to get her out of her chair and over to the railing in a hurry.

  All the occupants of the other boat seemed to be children, unless there were adults with them who had gone below. One child, younger than the rest, had swum quite a distance away from the craft, in pursuit of a drifting beach ball.

  But the swimmer was in trouble now, waving frantically, then sinking just below the surface of the water.

  Cramps, Kelley thought. Or just plain panic. She didn’t wait to think about it, or to answer Helen’s startled question when she noticed Kelley tossing aside the pale blue cover-up she’d put on when the air had turned cooler.

  “My dear, what on earth—”

  The child’s head bobbed up again. Kelley heard a frightened wail, answered by the occupants of the other boat, who’d finally figured out that something was wrong. They were even farther away than Kelley, though. And there clearly wasn’t any time to waste. Thanking her lucky stars that she’d learned lifesaving techniques a few years ago, Kelley swung both legs over the railing of the Prices’ boat and let herself go.

  It wasn’t until she’d hit the water and come cleanly to the surface again that she registered a second splash off to her left. That was where Sam had been, she thought. And as she kicked herself into her fastest racing crawl, heading toward the floundering child, she caught a glimpse of a dark, drenched head and a pair of powerful arms speeding in the same direction.

  Chapter 5

  From the deck of the Prices’ big boat, the scene had looked so clear. Now, though, the waves and spray were confusing the scene, disorienting her.

  The chilly water temperature didn’t help, although Kelley was swimming as fast as she could. By the time she reached the spot where she thought she’d last seen the youngster’s head dip below the surface, Kelley could feel her teeth beginning to chatter.

  She told herself to ignore it and tried to block out the increasingly urgent shouting from the other boat, as well. The only thing that mattered at the moment was finding the child who’d been flailing helplessly in the deep water.

  To her left she could still hear the heavier rhythm of Sam’s strokes, propelling him toward the same spot. Kelley paused, wishing desperately that her vision wasn’t blurred by streaming water from her hair, when she heard Sam’s voice.

  “There!”

  She got her eyes cleared in time to look over at him, but he wasn’t pointing, just glaring with fixed intensity at a place halfway between them. Kelley scanned the area and saw what Sam had noticed—a slight roiling just below the surface, followed by a couple of big air bubbles.

  She gulped a big mouthful of air and dove, not stopping to wonder why Sam had stopped moving or what the furious look in his eyes had meant. She forced her own eyes
to stay open and focused on the place where the air bubbles had come from.

  She saw the child right away, thanks to the neon-green bathing suit he wore. He was young—not more than eight—and almost swallowed up in the murky, tide-churned water.

  Kelley gave a powerful kick and reached him just as he made a feeble effort to reach the surface again. It was hard to hold on to him, between the motion of the water and his own struggles, but she managed to get her arms around his waist and kick toward safety just as her own lungs started to protest the lack of air.

  Sam was there when she came up, helping her hold the boy, rasping out the phrase “Good work” in a voice so hoarse that it startled Kelley out of her single-minded focus on the child.

  Was something wrong with Sam? She thought she’d heard pain in his voice, but maybe it was just intense relief that she’d been successful. There was a sudden swarm of activity all around now, as a small motor-powered lifeboat—from the other boat, Kelley thought—zoomed toward them and a couple of other swimmers belatedly splashed their way to her side.

  Kelley helped ease the coughing boy over the side of the boat, relieved beyond words to see that his eyes were open and he seemed to be all right. His friends—that had to be who the other swimmers were—were swarming around him, and the boat’s driver, a shaken-looking youth of about twenty, was alternately patting the child on the back and trying to thank Kelley.

  “God—we were only below for a few minutes—they said they’d stay close to the boat—if you hadn’t been watching—

  The phrases tumbled out on top of each other. Kelley just nodded in reply. She was suddenly shivering uncontrollably, and the water around her felt icy.

  She knew it was just a reaction to the adrenaline rush that had spurred her rescue effort. Now that it was over, she felt drained. As she turned to swim slowly away from the lifeboat, even her concern about Sam had faded from her mind.

  Until she saw him.

  A second motorboat, piloted by Wayland Price, had arrived without Kelley noticing it. Sam was still in the water, grasping the gunwale of the boat with one hand. And he seemed to be in worse shape than the boy who’d nearly drowned.

  “Sam?” She breaststroked toward him, wishing she could control the shuddering in her own muscles. He looked drawn, gray and savagely angry.

  And suddenly Kelley knew what it must be.

  Sam Cotter had saved her life three years ago by putting himself directly in the path of a speeding truck. He’d been trying to swing aboard to wrestle the steering wheel out of the driver’s control and run the vehicle into a dead end.

  She’d seen his whole plan in her own mind the moment he’d jumped for the driver’s door handle. Turn the wheelaim for that big stack of boxes—take advantage of the moment to get the gun out of the driver’s hand. It had been one of those moments they’d sometimes shared, when they’d seemed able to read each other’s minds.

  Things hadn’t worked out quite the way Sam had intended. The driver cranked the wheel hard to one side, jolting Sam loose, slamming him against the loading dock with a bone-cracking force Kelley still couldn’t bear to think about.

  But by then she’d taken his cue and thrown her whole weight against the driver, wrenching the wheel around. By the time the truck came to a halt, cushioned by the stack of boxes, it was Kelley who’d been holding the gun.

  Without Sam, she would probably have been dead, shot at the first opportunity the driver had been able to find.

  And the white, clenched look of pain on Sam’s face as he gripped the side of the dinghy told her the price he’d paid to save her.

  Wayland was urging them both into the boat, commending them on their quick thinking, responding over his shoulder to his parents’ shouted demands that he bring Sam and Kelley back to warm up and dry out.

  Kelley barely heard him. She watched Sam haul himself painfully over the side of the small boat and winced at his angry refusal when Wayland offered to lend a hand. Wayland seemed pumped up about all this, Kelley thought, as though he’d played a much bigger part in the rescue than just jumping into the small craft fastened to the stern of his parents’ sailboat.

  And Sam, who’d put himself on the line again, was sitting silently, grim-faced, holding his torso in a way that told Kelley exactly how much it had hurt him to make that speedy dash through the water toward the drowning child.

  Both of them stayed silent as they headed back to the big boat. Kelley submitted to the praise and concern that everyone was lavishing on them, but her thoughts were far away, drawn involuntarily back to that gloomy warehouse. The scene replayed itself over and over again in her mind as she let herself be shepherded below the deck into the main bedroom below.

  “Here,” Helen said, opening drawers in the built-in wardrobe against the inner wall. “Get dried off, and borrow whatever fits. You look chilled to death, and no wonder.”

  She bustled away, saying something about hot coffee in the galley. Sam and Kelley were left standing next to the big bed, looking at each other.

  Kelley couldn’t imagine what to say. She’d worked so hard to make sure she had all the training and experience she needed to do her job efficiently and well. And none of it seemed to cover this.

  It was Sam who finally spoke, and then it was only to point out that her teeth would probably come loose if she didn’t dry herself off. “Personally, I can’t wait to see what Harold’s got in his wardrobe that fits me,” he said, tossing Kelley one of the thick white towels Helen had laid out and taking one for himself. “Can’t you just see me in sailing whites, with a captain’s hat on my head?”

  Kelley couldn’t join in his grim attempt at a smile. She quickly toweled herself off and slipped into a pair of pale yellow sweatpants and matching top. But as soon as she was dressed, her heart was wrung all over again by Sam’s slow, painful movements as he dried his upper body.

  “It still hurts, doesn’t it?” She made her words blunt on purpose. She was aching with sympathy for the stilted way he was moving, and for the damage her own stupidity had caused to that magnificent body of his.

  But sympathy was a dangerous thing to indulge when she was standing next to a half-undressed Sam Cotter. And so she fell back on the kind of toughness Sam had always told her was the first requirement for anyone doing their kind of work.

  He started to shrug, then stopped abruptly. “It’s fine as long as I take it easy,” he said.

  Taking it easy didn’t include no-holds-barred racing sprints across open water, Kelley knew. She frowned and stepped closer to where he sat at the edge of the bed.

  “Can I see?”

  She hadn’t planned to ask the question. Suddenly, though, it seemed important to face the results of her mistakes of three years ago.

  She’d faced her own physical trauma—the loss of the child she was carrying, in a miscarriage the doctors had said was probably prompted by the terror of her brush with death. But Sam had shut himself off from her after that horrible night. There had been no chance for her to see how badly he had been injured trying to save her.

  Until now.

  He seemed to be on the verge of saying no, but as her eyes met his—searching those steely blue depths for something, anything that would hint he’d forgiven her for her mistakes that night—he gave another half shrug and dropped the towel that had been covering his shoulder.

  “Ain’t much to look at,” he told her. “They patched it up pretty well.”

  It was disconcerting to be looking down at him this way. His rangy body had been a kind of battlefield long before she’d come on the scene, and she remembered with sudden, aching clarity the way he’d pointed out all his old scars early on in their relationship.

  She still remembered every one of them. The faint mark of an old rope burn on his palms. A horseshoe-shaped indentation courtesy of a crazy wild bronco at the state championship one year. The long white line of an old knife wound he’d gotten in a bar fight in the days when he’d been too hotheaded to k
now better.

  And now, the scars from that night in the warehouse. He was right: there wasn’t much to look at. The real pain, she realized, must be on the inside, where it didn’t show.

  Like her own.

  Kelley reached out almost blindly for his injured shoulder, resting her fingertips on it as though she could absorb some of Sam’s pain. She closed her eyes without meaning to and felt her own pulse throbbing at the ends of her fingers, where they touched Sam’s hard, uncompromising muscles.

  “I’m sorry.” She half whispered the words.

  “It doesn’t matter.” He was holding himself stiffly again, as though her touch was as excruciating as the way he’d torn up his shoulder plowing through the water a little while ago.

  “It doesn’t matter? How can you say that? After everything that went wrong that night—”

  “I don’t want to talk about this, Kelley. All right?”

  Maybe it was the way she was standing next to him, looking down into his eyes. Or maybe there really was something new in that steel blue gaze of his, something very different from his usual take-charge attitude. He seemed to be pleading with her, or at least as close as Sam Cotter could come to pleading. Kelley withdrew her hand, startled by the change in his face.

  “All right,” she said, because her own memories suddenly seemed so raw and fresh that she was glad to escape them. “But there is something we need to talk about.”

  Sam got to his feet, drying off the rest of his body while glancing through the drawers Helen Price had opened. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “If we’re going to stay here and finish this job, we’re going to have to agree to work together. Can’t you see that?”

  He pulled a navy blue sweatshirt out of the drawer and lifted it—slowly, cautiously—over his head. He seemed to have lapsed back into silence, so Kelley went on. “We need each other, Sam. We needed each other just now, out there in the water.”