Amber Beach

by Elizabeth Lowell

  The Tomorrow’s blower was already on when Jake reached the dock. Before he had taken two steps the engine roared to life and settled into a muscular muttering. He went aboard fast.

  “Going somewhere?” he asked, closing the cabin door behind him. Hard.

  “It’s time I learned how to drive the boat.”

  He grunted. “There’s no way you can learn enough to search the San Juans alone.”

  Honor sat behind the helm and didn’t say another word until the SeaSport’s engine had warmed up to operating temperature.

  “Cast off,” she said without looking at Jake.

  “Not this time.”

  Without a word she got out of the helm seat and went to the dock. She undid the bow line and the stern line, stepped on board, and headed for the cabin. Jake was already in the helm seat.

  “I meant it,” she said through the open door. “I’m driving.”

  “Use the aft controls.”

  A moment later she put the gear lever in reverse and eased up on the throttle. The boat began backing away from the dock, out into the shallow cove. She started to turn the boat away from the dock the same way she had seen Jake do it, waiting until the bow was just clear of the end of the dock.

  Wind gusted, catching the Tomorrow full on the side. More quickly than Honor would have believed possible, the boat whacked broadside into the end of the dock.

  Jake came out of the cabin carrying a boat pole. He pushed the Tomorrow off the dock. “Try again.”

  She did. This time the bow banged against the dock.

  “Reverse,” he said.

  She missed the gate for the shift. Before she could find it, wind had blown the stern back onto the dock. Jake shoved off. She went into reverse, but somehow the wheel position was wrong. Instead of backing away, the stern was sucked against the dock again.

  Honor set her teeth to hold back the kind of language her daddy said only men used. She tried again. The bow scraped against the dock. Even as she jammed the gear lever into neutral to kill speed, she jerked the wheel as though to turn the bow away. It didn’t do any good, of course. In neutral, the steering wheel was useless.

  “Better,” Jake said, pushing the boat off the dock again. “It would have worked if the wind hadn’t stopped blowing the stern.”

  She reached for the shifter again.

  “No,” he said curtly. “Check your helm position first or we’ll ram the dock but good this time.”

  After a few more tries, Honor got the Tomorrow away from the dock despite the unpredictable wind. Bleakly she admitted to herself that it was more due to Jake’s instructions than to any of her own skill. She wouldn’t have believed how much a little wind could push around something as big as the Tomorrow. The thought of landing in a real wind made cool sweat break out on her spine.

  “Now take the forward helm,” Jake said. “Head for that point of land.”

  Honor looked where he was pointing and went into the cabin. He stood by the aft controls until he felt them respond to her hands. When he climbed into the pilot seat across from her, she didn’t so much as glance in his direction.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “To the marina to top off the tanks.”

  The thought of docking the Tomorrow made Honor cringe. She knew that coming up alongside a dock was a lot more tricky than simply pulling away from it—and she had made a real hash of that.

  She worried all the way to the marina.

  “I’ll take the aft station,” Jake said. “If I tell you to let go of the controls, do it.”

  She nodded and hoped her relief didn’t show. He went out on the stern and began calling directions to her. She didn’t argue or hesitate. She simply did what he said as best she could, even when she thought she should be doing the opposite.

  The dock approached with unnerving speed. She missed the gate on a shift into reverse.

  “Let go!”

  Even before Honor lifted her hands, the control levers took on a life of their own. While she wiped damp palms on her sweatshirt, Jake killed the forward momentum and tucked the boat alongside the dock with a few swift maneuvers.

  Honor let out a shaky breath. The whole time the gas tanks filled, she thought about what she had done wrong on the landing. Besides missing the shift gate, she had been coming in too fast and at too steep an angle. Easy enough to figure out now, but at the time everything had happened all at once and yet had taken forever, like fast-forward on a video machine and slow-motion terror at the same time.

  When she came back from paying for the gas, the blower was on and Jake was in the cabin. He killed the blower and started the engine.

  “Take the aft station,” he said, pulling the fenders aboard. “I’ll cast off.”

  She set her jaw and went to the controls. The wind was doing the same thing it had in the little cove, holding the Tomorrow against the dock like an invisible, relentless hand. She couldn’t back away and there was a boat blocking the front exit.

  Jake told her where to set the wheel before she engaged reverse. He gave the stern a shove, grabbed the bow, pushed hard, and swung himself up and over the bow railing. It took him only a few seconds to walk the gunwale and drop lightly into the stern well. The Tomorrow was well away from the dock.

  “Okay,” he said. “Take her out of the marina. Remember, no wake.”

  They got out of the marina without incident. Once they were in more open water, Honor began to relax—until she noticed the clouds. In places they covered the water like draperies of dove gray muslin. Where islands appeared, they were low dark lines capped by mist.

  “The weather report hasn’t changed,” Jake said, turning down the marine radio. “Drizzle and patchy fog in the early morning. Winds out of the southeast at ten to twenty knots. Squall lines possible this afternoon. Haro Strait might be a problem, though. There are small craft warnings at the mouth.”

  “Are we going there?”

  “It’s the shortest way to the last route Kyle stored. At least, it’s the last route I can make the machine show me. He might have something hidden. If he does, I don’t have the code.”

  Honor thought she did, but she wasn’t going to share that information with someone who had a grudge against Kyle.

  “Put the route up,” she said.

  Jake’s mouth thinned. “The place is ninety minutes out in good weather. It will be a lot longer if the wind gets strong enough to make us sneak along in the lee of the islands.”

  Honor looked at the water. It wasn’t exactly smooth, but there weren’t any whitecaps. “Looks good to me.”

  “The chop isn’t bad,” he agreed, “but adjusting to it will add time, unless you want to hammer your spine.”

  “How much time?”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Wind, tide, and visibility.”

  “We have radar.”

  “You want to drive blind?”

  Honor’s fingers clenched around the wheel. “Not particularly.”

  “That makes two of us. In case you hadn’t noticed, some mighty big ships share those narrow passes between islands with us. On a boat this size, you bet your life on radar only when fog catches you short of land. You don’t just blithely fire up and head out into the soup for the hell of it.”

  “I’m not doing any of this for the hell of it.”

  She leaned over and pushed a button on the lower electronic unit. She had been watching him closely yesterday; she got the screen to switch from the depth sounder to the chart plotter on the first try. She hit the menu button, scrolled down to the stored routes, and punched the last number on the list.

  A chart popped onto the screen.

  “This the route?” Honor asked.

  Jake said something savage under his breath.

  “Right,” she said. “This is the one.”

  She swung the boat around until she was headed for the first way point on the stored course.

  “Do yo
u remember the most efficient rpm for speed versus fuel efficiency?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Bring us up on plane.”

  After several tries—and a few hair-raising zigzags caused by badly deployed trim tabs—Honor got the SeaSport up on plane. She could tell when she had done it right; if she lifted her hands from the wheel, the boat held a true line. She soon realized that, unlike a car, the boat did better when she left it alone.

  “That’s better,” he said. “You’re learning not to oversteer.”

  Honor looked over her shoulder at the water they had covered. Even through the gloom she could see that the wake wasn’t as straight as when Jake drove. But it wasn’t all that bad, either. She was getting the hang of driving on a road that had no markings and didn’t stand still.

  The computer cheeped. Honor flinched.

  “It was just telling you that we’ve passed the first way point on our route,” Jake said. “Watch the radar screen. With the next sweep it will show what your new heading should be. So will the lower screen, but it’s not as easy to read.”

  Saying nothing, she waited and watched the screen. A few seconds later she turned the wheel, adjusting course. Immediately the boat became harder to handle. It didn’t like taking the chop at this angle. Though the rpms hadn’t changed, the speed dropped.

  “Bring the bow down two clicks on the left trim tab and one on the right,” he said.

  The ride evened out. Adjusting the trim got back some of the lost speed, but not all.

  Jake looked out the stern. The usual boats were pacing the SeaSport. He didn’t envy Conroy in the open Zodiac. Today the Coast Guard would be grateful for their bright orange dry suits. He looked at the sky and thought about their destination.

  His thoughts were as unhappy as the set of his jaw. Kyle’s last fishing hole was almost on the invisible border between Canada’s Gulf Islands and the San Juan Islands of the United States. Right now the SeaSport was more or less paralleling the weather front, but the front would overrun them before too long.

  He turned up the marine radio. Even though it was after the hour, the forecast hadn’t changed. No small craft warnings had been posted yet, though advisories were out along the strait.

  That didn’t make Jake feel much better. Forecasting weather was an art, not a science, especially in the San Juans. The islands were notorious for sudden winds and unexpected squall lines.

  Silence settled into the cabin like carbon monoxide. Jake wondered how long it would be before Honor looked him in the eye again, or at the very least stopped treating him like something that had stuck to her shoe. The tilt of her jaw didn’t predict a turn for the better anytime soon.

  Half an hour dragged by. Jake had never thought of himself as a particularly chatty person, but the roaring silence was getting to him. Honor didn’t seem to notice it-or him. She hadn’t actually looked at him the whole time they had been on the boat. The way she acted he could have been a voice speaking out of the air.

  More than once he caught himself checking in one of the boat’s windows to see if he still had a reflection. He opened his mouth to tell her what he thought about sulky women. Then he remembered the way she had looked that morning when he had held her in bed with his hand on her thigh.

  Direct confrontation hadn’t worked very well.

  The radio crackled to life. The weather bureau had changed its report. Winds from thirty to fifty knots were expected in Haro Strait before noon. Twenty to thirty in the islands.

  “Turn around,” Jake said.

  Honor started to look at him, caught herself, and stared ahead. “It’s only nine-thirty. We’ve got time.”

  “No. Turn around.”

  “But—”

  “Get out of the helm seat.”

  With a hissed word, Honor turned the SeaSport around. If it came to a contest of strength, she would lose. Big time.

  Jake reversed the chart plotter so that it would give them way points back to the dock.

  Silence settled in once more with the weight and color of lead.

  Honor glanced from the rumpled water in front of the bow to the “heads up” radar display. She was off course. Carefully she corrected, then waited for a few seconds before deciding whether she needed to correct again. She had learned that boats and cars didn’t drive at all alike. Most of the time boats were a lot less sudden. Sometimes they were a lot more.

  The solid line on the radar merged with the dotted line of the course she was supposed to follow. She took visual sightings on the islands ahead, kept alert for floating logs, checked the angles and speed of approaching craft, and spared a few seconds to glance at the gauges for anything After fifteen minutes of watching Honor watch the water, Jake’s jaw ached from the tension of biting back all that he wanted to say about stubborn Donovans. He set his jaw even tighter and decided to try a more subtle approach. Somewhere beneath all that icy female fury was an intelligent, reasonable woman. More to the point, she loved him.

  He had it from her own sweet lips.

  “I met Kyle about two months ago,” Jake said, “when Archer sent him to the Baltics to be the liaison between my own company, Emerging Resources, and Donovan International. Usually I work out of Seattle. The only reason I went to Kaliningrad at all was that my rep there had a bad appendix.”

  He waited for some sign that Honor was listening. If she was, she didn’t respond to the lure. He made a disgusted sound, reined in his temper, and asked in a voice dripping with reason, “How can we settle anything if you won’t talk to me?”

  “What’s to settle? I need you to teach me about the boat and you need me to get to Kyle.”

  “What about last night?”

  “Was it good for you, too?” she asked with a total lack of interest.

  “It was the best I’ve ever had.”

  “That’s nice. Why isn’t the outdrive gauge showing dead center?”

  “It’s not supposed to be. Honor, I’m not going to let you turn your back on last night.”

  “Should I be worried about those clouds? It’s getting really black along our course line.”

  Jake didn’t even bother to look at the weather hanging low over the San Juans. “Talk to me.”

  “I am, but you aren’t listening. Those clouds go all the way to the water.”

  “We’re like a frog’s ass. Waterproof. How long are you going to make me pay for not cutting my own throat and telling you everything the first time we met?”

  “A watertight frog butt. Now there’s a thought.”

  “You were a Donovan and the Donovans got me kicked out of the Russian Federation.”

  Honor held on to the wheel and her own temper. She had always thought that Kyle could talk anyone into anything. Now here was Jake with his earnest whiskey-and-velvet voice, his razor-edged mind, and a body that had taught her things about herself and overwhelming pleasure that she would spend the rest of her life trying to forget. Or duplicate.

  Even worse, she kept going over and over it in her mind. Not just the sex, the whole mess. She hadn’t been honest with him. He hadn’t been honest with her. But she damn well hadn’t slept with him as a means to finding her brother.

  Jake couldn’t say the same.

  Why else would he have been so careful to give her the kind of incredible pleasure he had? She had made it pretty plain that he attracted her; he had followed up in a way that was guaranteed to keep her happy about having him around.

  She was a fool. She had been a fool since Jake walked into her life, a life that was already thrown off balance by her brother’s disappearance.

  Silence expanded until it was a living, smothering presence in the cabin.

  Jake watched Honor for any sign of response to his words. All he saw was increasing tension and a disgust she couldn’t quite hide beneath her careful lack of expression.

  “Is it so impossible,” he asked through his teeth, “that Kyle might, just might, have gotten in over his head with Marju and done
something really stupid?”

  “You know her better than I do.”

  “She’s about the sexiest thing since Eve.”

  “Kyle is hardly a kid. He’s been chased by experts.”

  “Marju is different.”

  “This will come as news to you, but we’re all different.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t,” she said, staring out through the increasing rain. “I do know that asking me to choose between my brother who has never betrayed me and a man who has just betrayed me isn’t very bright.”

  “I didn’t betray you!”

  Rain poured down, drenching the Tomorrow in transparent sheets of water.

  “You didn’t betray me,” she said indifferently. “Right. Where are the wipers on this thing?”

  “Here.” Jake’s hand shot out and slammed on all three wipers at once. Then he let out a seething breath and tried sweet reason again. It wasn’t very successful. His voice was more angry than sweet. “I didn’t betray you and you damn well know it.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Shit.”

  “Another point of agreement. See how easy it is?”

  Jake took several slow breaths and another, hopefully better, grip on his temper. Honor’s newfound habit of agreeing with him and not meaning a word of it was sawing away at his self-control. It was impossible to argue with someone who was so damned agreeable.

  The computer cheeped, signaling a way point successfully passed. Honor watched the radar screen until it completed a sweep of the circle and put the new course in place. She corrected the wheel, looked where her new course would take them, and instantly changed her mind about staying on it.

  One of the massive Washington State ferries was barreling toward them out of the rain. In addition to the Tomorrow and its three watery shadows, there were three more small craft to keep an eye on, plus a huge tanker with accompanying tugs, and a shrimper crisscrossing the water while dragging its strange-looking net in search of even stranger looking prey.

  “A boat with nets out has the right of way,” Jake said.