Safe Harbor

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Well? Now what?" he asked, just for the pleasure of sounding dumb. Let her get off her duff and do something.

  She rolled her eyes. "Is there any actual damage?" she asked as she would a child.

  "Come out and see," he said calmly.

  "Not here. There's too much brush. Drive back to the house, please, so that I can assess."

  "Your wish is my command," he said in response to her command. What the hell, it was one way to get inside her place.

  Self-conscious now, he drove too fast, hit a pothole, and knocked his head against the roof of the Corolla. He swore again; it was all her fault. And what wasn't her fault was Eden's. Women! He should've gone to sea when he'd had the chance back when.

  He got out of the car, and so did Holly. It struck him again how truly guileless and innocent she looked. There was something about her face, maybe in those green eyes. Inexperience? If so, she was being brought up to speed the hard way. Eden's way.

  Damn it, Eden. Why'd you walk out on me?

  The thought vaporized almost as quickly as it formed, replaced by a rush of frustration over his ridiculously complicated pursuit of her. Her escape on a boat was bad enough. But a fender bender in the middle of a dirt drive—could it get any more stupid than that?

  "That's a nasty scratch," said Holly, pointing to his right arm.

  But it was his left arm that stung. Confused, Sam twisted his right one for a better look and was amazed to see a trickle of blood wending its way down the back of his forearm. He felt like a flunkout in an Outward Bound program.

  "I bleed easily," he said with an embarrassed smile.

  He'd found it out years ago after he came home one day to a cleared-out house.

  "Come inside," she said, surprising him. "You can put something on that before it gets bad."

  She breezed right past their beat-up bumpers without bothering to look at the damage. It gave Sam hope. She seemed to be a soft-hearted type; he'd be able to bend her to his needs.

  He followed her inside through a short center hall into a humble kitchen with a linoleum floor, a sink on legs, and a stove from the fifties.

  "Clean yourself up with soap and wet paper towels," Holly ordered as she tore off some sheets from a roll near the sink. "I'll get the iodine." She gave him a look that said, "And don't you dare try anything funny," then blew off his thanks on her way out of the kitchen.

  Sam dabbed at the scratches gingerly, trying not to make them bleed. The odd thing was, it wasn't an heiress's kind of kitchen at all. And yet Holly certainly came from money. Her parents had a million-dollar antique house in Vineyard Haven; he'd seen it himself. Obviously there was money in the family. Eden would never go after anyone poor.

  Except, he thought dryly, for that one time in her life eight years earlier at a waterfront festival. He remembered it well.

  Holly showed back up with antiseptic, Band-Aids, cotton balls—the works. Sam smiled and said, "I don't think it's all that bad, Miss Nightingale; but I appreciate it."

  She shrugged. "You never know."

  She lifted his left sleeve and peeked underneath, then decided to push the fabric up over his shoulder to clear the area. He heard a funny little half-sigh, and after that she became very businesslike as she swabbed his cuts with iodine-soaked cotton.

  "Does it hurt?"

  "Nope." Aagh.

  "I guess I ought to cut those shrubs back."

  "A guy could sue," he agreed.

  Her reaction was to rub in the iodine just a little bit harder. "But you're not that guy—right?"

  "We could work something out," he suggested over his shoulder.

  She stopped mid-cottonball. "Like what?"

  "Well ... like I was thinking you could show me the area," he said with a disarming smile.

  "Oh!" She became all business again, burying her nose in her work. "I suppose that would be all right."

  "Great. How about tomorrow at, say, six?"

  "Six would be fine," she said almost shyly as she dumped the last cottonball into a swing-top can. She turned to him with a surprisingly warm smile and said, "The sunsets Up-Island are really spectacular."

  Her face was a radiant sunset itself. He smiled in the sheer pleasure of seeing it and then said, "But I was thinking more along the lines of sunrise than sunset."

  "Sunrise?" She sucked in her breath. "I knew it! I was right the first time! Listen, mister, just because I let you in my kitchen, it doesn't mean you can assume you're spending the night. Who do you think you are? If that doesn't—"

  "Hold it, hold it—I meant, I'll pick you up at six. I won't even come in if that makes you feel better. I'll wait outside and blow the horn," he added, not without his own hint of contempt.

  "Oh! Oh. I misunderstood. Sorry."

  Slow, deep color flooded her cheeks. For some reason, Sam thought instantly of Eden, of how he'd never once seen her blush—not involuntarily, anyway. Some actors could cry on demand; Eden could blush on demand. She could cry, too, needless to say. She'd given Sam some Oscar-caliber performances in that regard.

  "Why are you looking at me like that, Sam? I said I was sorry."

  It took a second for him to refocus on the woman before him. "Uh, I know that. I was thinking of something else, that's all."

  Holly was watching him through an appraising squint now. "Why six in the morning? Isn't that a little early?"

  He smiled reassuringly. "Not for the grand tour. There's a lot around here I'd like to see." Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire...

  "I have to warn you, Mr. Steadman, that I'm not very bright-eyed at that hour," she said as she washed up, then tore off more paper towels. She leaned back on a wainscotted cupboard and dried her hands, and her smile seemed as genuine as his had been calculating.

  "One reason I became an artist," she admitted, "was that I could set my own hours. Not a very lofty motive, is it?"

  He shrugged and said, "Who knows why people feel the need to create?" And then he added in all honesty, "I liked your whirligigs. They made me smile."

  "Maybe, but your photographs make me think," she said in a hopelessly earnest way. "They're intense, they're real—they make me see fishermen for the first time, somehow. I can't tell you how moving they are to me."

  How the hell old was she? Her gallery bio said thirty-one, but just then she looked like a freshman sitting in the front row of Photography 101, the kind of student who waved her hand frenetically at the professor with an I-know! expression on her face.

  "You didn't seem to be paying much attention to my photographs when you flipped through the book at the bookstore," he pointed out, doing a little fishing of his own.

  She turned away to toss the towels. "I went back and bought the book," she murmured.

  "Did you."

  "Yes, I did." She turned back to him and said with silly cheer, "So you're one royalty richer than you used to be!"

  He grinned and said, "Super. Now you can have orange juice with your breakfast tomorrow."

  The laugh they shared sprang from common ground: the struggle of every artist, everywhere, to pay his own way through his work. The difference between them was that her parents could afford to bail her out if she failed, and Sam's could not. Which brought him full circle back to the reason why he was standing in the kitchen of this gentle, whimsical stranger who had smacked up his rental and bound up his wounds: Eden had absconded with his parents' old age.

  Eden. Eden. Here he was, seven years later, and she was still leading him on a merry chase.

  "So ... then... you'll come by to pick me up at six?" Holly said, poking gently at his revery.

  He tried to shake himself free of the vision of Eden, smiling her come-hither smile. "Uh ... yeah! Sure will! And then we'll see some sights."

  From a quarter-mile up, he should have mentioned, but that was tomorrow's problem.

  "Oh, my God—I almost forgot about your car!"

  Sam waved away her concern. "I'll just say someone hit me in a parking l
ot."

  Her eyes got wide. "Sam! You wouldn't do that."

  Not only was she scandalized, but Sam could see that he'd lost credibility with her again. Shit: all his fence-mending, wasted. The fact that he had planned to pay for the damage out of his own pocket was irrelevant now; she'd never believe him. Shit.

  He decided to throw himself at her mercy. "You're right. That was dumb. I wasn't thinking it through. That's what happens when you've never been in an accident."

  "You've never been?"

  "Never." Not unless you counted the speedboat he stole and ran up on the rocks in Woods Hole. Since the owner had never bothered to file a report—the man was a drug dealer—Sam hadn't had to worry about an insurance hassle. (The Coast Guard, now they were a different story.) As for the stolen Corvette, Sam had driven it around for less than a day, and when he dumped it near its owner's house, it didn't have a single scratch on it.

  "Are you going to forgive me?" he asked with a pleading look.

  Holly seemed mollified by the display of repentance. She even offered an apology of her own: "I'm sorry if I seem testy," she said on their way to the door. "It's—well, you can guess. My father. Eden. This has been so devastating. I'm worried sick about my mother. She's coming apart at the seams."

  "I understand," he said softly. Oh, and he did. "Completely."

  She took his hand in hers, surprising him again, and turned his arm gently. "Keep an eye on those scratches," she said as she looked them over. "It's so easy to become infected."

  He reassured her that he would and then he left, feeling oddly soothed when it really should have been him doing the soothing. It was only later, when he was sitting alone with a roast beef sandwich in a crowd of happy, sunburned tourists, that it hit him: without wearing gloves, Holly Anderson had cleaned up the blood of a total stranger.

  He shook his head and stabbed at his fries in a state of vague pique. The woman clearly had a lot to teach him about trust—and a hell of a lot more to learn.

  Chapter 7

  Holly Anderson woke up at four-thirty, too excited to sleep. The thought of going with Sam on a sunrise sightseeing tour (she wasn't—quite—willing to call it a date) struck her as wonderfully romantic, much more so than some routine candlelight dinner. Granted, the offer was a little goofy; but when was the last time a man she knew had acted goofy? Okay, there was her father. But Sam's idea to go sightseeing was a charming kind of goofy, and God knew, her life had been a little scant on charm lately.

  Sam was changing all that. Whatever his reasons for chasing after Eden, he had laid them aside and had made a decision to stick around. With me, on my enchanted island. Holly gave her bare body a squeeze of sheer happiness, and then she added a few more rose-scented crystals to the water in her big clawfoot tub.

  ****

  Sam Steadman woke up well before sunrise, thanks to a diligent cop who caught him sleeping in his rented Corolla. Bleary-eyed and dry-mouthed, he drove the Corolla to a new parking area at another beach before instantly being discovered there as well. What were the odds? Disgusted with the way he felt and smelled, and furious with the island for not having enough rooms on it and for closing its showers for the night, Sam gave up his struggle to sleep, stripped to his shorts, and waded into the sea. He had to get cleaned up somehow.

  ****

  Charlotte Anderson lay in her king-sized bed, lost and alone and waiting for the sun to come up so that she could fall asleep. She was afraid to close her eyes at night anymore; it was a little too much like death. Mere weeks ago, her husband had been lying in bed with his arm thrown around her, and she had eased it away because it had been too hot. But now she was cold at night, colder than she'd ever been.

  She pulled up the covers and shivered in wait for the sun.

  ****

  Eric Anderson zipped up his windbreaker, turned off the autopilot, and took over the wheel of the Vixen himself. They were in the last hour of an overnight sail, and every one of his senses was on alert. He knew that sailors made their most serious mistakes at the end of a passage with land in plain sight. The thought of making a navigational blunder and then having to call for a rescue made him positively cringe.

  But it was going well, this trip. He'd never known such exhilaration in his life. He loved the anonymity of being on a boat—loved the idea that he could go where he wanted, do what he wanted, see what he wanted, be what he wanted. Finally.

  He leaned to port and peered through the companionway into the cabin below. The red light over the nav station threw a warm glow on Eden, asleep in the quarter berth without a care in the world. It took Eric's breath away, the way she trusted that he could handle the boat and keep her safe. Not once had he heard her say, "Are you sure?" More than anything else—more than the sex, more than the laughter, more than her willingness to hide out on the boat with him—that's what Eric Anderson loved: the fact that Eden Walker made him feel like a man.

  He felt the boat lift and fall underneath him in a smooth rhythm not unlike a second round of lovemaking. Patting the boat's starboard flank, he whispered, "Easy does it, girl; we have all the time in the world."

  His thoughts drifted inevitably to the confrontation he'd had days before at the office. He would not be coming back, he'd said. Duncan was incredulous, Jack, furious. It was annoying. He had warned his partners before that he was planning to throttle back. They knew he wanted to go off voyaging—and that was before he'd met Eden. When did they think he'd do it? When he was seventy-five?

  They didn't understand. How could they? Duncan had been married even longer than he was, and Jack was an old fart of a bachelor. In any case, with them, the firm came first. Eric had felt that way, too, once upon a time.

  He leaned to port for another view into the cabin and marvelled that the lithe, fair creature sleeping below had ever deigned to look twice at him.

  Let them find me, he thought, enthralled by his good fortune. Let them try.

  Chapter 8

  Sam heard the seaplane before he saw it, swooping down to the water as nimbly as a cormorant after a fish. The pilot was Sam's oldest friend, a New Bedford wharf rat like him, but one who'd somehow managed to stay out of jail and then get a pilot's license. Billy and seaplanes: they went together like ... cormorants and fish.

  Sam grinned and gave his pal an overhead wave, sniffing his shirtpit tentatively in the process. The scent of Mennen overwhelmed, thank God. He didn't want to offend the sensibilities of the freshly scrubbed, sweet- smelling woman who was his one and only link to Eden and the engraving.

  He turned to her and said, "Ever flown in a seaplane?"

  "No, never," Holly answered, oblivious to the fact that she was about to board one. Still, she seemed as intrigued by the pontooned flying machine as the two kids who were fishing on the dock beside them.

  "Well, here's your chance," Sam said. "That's our tour bus."

  Don't get mad, lady, please don't get mad.

  "What?"

  He shrugged his most boyish shrug and smiled sheepishly. "I'm not presuming, am I?"

  She rounded on him and said, "You certainly are, Sam! I can't let you spend that kind of money taking me around. It wouldn't be right."

  "Sure it would," he argued, knocked off balance by her reaction. "The pilot's an old friend of mine; he's doing it for gas money."

  "Well, that's not right, either. You're taking advantage of him!"

  "Look, it's no big deal—honest. Guys do this for guys. I've given Billy plugs in my books. It comes out even."

  "No, really," she said, crossing her arms. "The gesture is too extravagant. I can't accept it."

  And meanwhile Billy was threading through the moored boats with a shit-eating grin under his handlebar mustache. Perfect. Somehow Sam had thought that he'd be able to explain the point of the plane over breakfast. Didn't happen. Then he tried broaching the subject of Eden en route. No dice. Then the damn kids on the dock struck up an unlikely conversation with them, and now here's Billy, fifteen minute
s early, and to top it off she thinks it's, of all things, a little too romantic. How the hell—when the hell—was he going to explain?

  The seaplane glug-glugged its way to a halt alongside the dock, and Billy threw open the door to the passenger seats. "Hop in! Let's go, for chrissake, before the dockmaster gets on my tail! C'mon, c'mon!"

  So that was simple enough. In they hopped, with Holly alternating between mutters of dismay and disapproval. After hurried introductions, Billy spun the plane neatly around and reversed his winding route, dodging an anchored catamaran that was drifting back and forth across a wide swath of harbor.

  Billy's language, never bland, became even more exuberant than usual. "Geez, will you lookit the size of that thing? If I had my way, I'd blow that frigging catamaran right out of the water! There's no room in this harbor for a cat that size. Look at that frigging thing roam! Who the hell let that monster in here, anyway? Where am I supposed to go? I'm gonna write the FA A about this for sure. Damn frigging cats!"

  "It's a boat, Billy, which gives it more right to be in the harbor than a plane, so cool it, wouldja?" said Sam, taking little comfort from the look on Holly's face. She was rigid. Whether she was more afraid of Billy or of the seaplane, Sam couldn't say, but she was holding on with white-knuckled zeal.

  "You'll want to belt up, Holly," he suggested.

  "No, I don't think so," she responded grimly, staring ahead. "You can turn the plane around now, please."

  The waves were a little choppy outside of the harbor. The seaplane began to bobble up and down and tip from side to side, like the cork on the water it was. With every plop of its pontoons, Holly let out a little gasp. "Back, please. Now, please."

  Billy gave her a wink and said, "First time?"

  "Yeah-h-h..."

  "Best time," he said, snugging his baseball cap over his head. "Where you wanna look first?"

  "Look?"

  "He means, 'sightsee,' " said Sam, pinching his pal's shoulder in warning. "Do the closest harbors first—Hadley; the rest of the Elizabeths. Then swing up to Padanarum and follow the south shore, and after that, move on to the Cape."