Safe Harbor

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Yeah. A bad-girl wannabe."

  She scowled. "I don't wannabe anything except free of you. Now will you please go? I have four more houses to paint."

  And she probably got paid as much for them as men did for doing the people-sized ones. Why was he feeling sorry for her? Why was he feeling anxious, protective, lusty for her? He'd been right in the first place and in the second place: she was just another poor little rich girl.

  He took his folded check from his back pocket and slapped it on a broken-down bureau. "Sweet dreams, darlin'," he said caustically, and he let himself out.

  Ooh, ooh, four more birdhouses to paint. He snorted. Talk about high-class problems.

  ****

  Upstairs, aware that she was downstairs, Sam had a hell of a time trying to fall asleep. God, what an irritant she was. Like a burr on his bedsheet, like a torn-back fingernail, she was all he could think about. He tossed and turned for what seemed like hours, mulling everything from the warmth of her breath to the charm of her hollyhocks. It was stupid; he'd got more sleep in the Corolla.

  He heard her dragging some pieces of furniture across the floor, and his instinct was to run down and help her, not from a sense of chivalry, but just to get some peace. Then she became quiet again and it was even worse: was she there, or was she not?

  He lit his watch: one-freaking-thirty. Where did she get her energy? He dragged himself out of bed and went to the east window to look out. Cool air washed over his bare body: a fog was rolling in. Below him, a rectangle of misty light cut past the mildewing lilac and spilled across the runaway ivy.

  Still there. Still working. He shook his head and sighed. If he could, he'd go down there and snap every one of her brushes in two; anything to get her to leave the area.

  He had a thought: maybe it was the fact that Eden had slept on the mattress beneath him that was making him so irritable and restless. He reached over for the pillow that had smelled like her that first day and dragged it across his face, inhaling deep. Yep. Eden, all right. He hurled the pillow across the room, knocking over a lamp in the process.

  Hell!

  Hotfooting gingerly across the floor, he straightened the lamp back up and waited for sounds of an irate landlady storming the stairs. But no; Holly didn't seem to care if he trashed the place or not. Grimly, he lay back down. He'd give it—give her—another half hour. If he wasn't asleep by then, it was back to Chez Toyota.

  The threat of the car bed worked. In the next little while, Sam fell asleep. Dreams followed, none of them sweet. Boats going aground, boats being stove in, boats being knocked flat on their sides in squalls and sinking—the theme was boats and the variation was disaster. The engraving did not fare well in any of them. In the last dream, the worst dream, Sam was trying to grab an inch-thick line dangling from a Coast Guard helicopter so that he could tie it around the engraving to airlift it from a sinking Vixen.

  The engraving did not fare well.

  Frustrated, Sam woke himself up and then realized that it wasn't a helicopter he had been hearing in his dreams, it was the rotting muffler of Holly's truck.

  He looked at his watch—three a.m.—and jumped out of bed, scrambling for his clothes. The little vixen was headed for the Vixen! He couldn't believe it. He thought he'd succeeded in embarrassing her out of her wild plan.

  He got out of the loft as if it were a burning building and made a dash for the Corolla through a blanket of fog that had turned London-thick. Just what she needed: help from above. There was no sign of Holly's taillights ahead, but Sam had no doubt where she was bound. The only question was, how many bunny rabbits scampering through the fog was he going to run over in his mad pursuit? He couldn't see a damned thing.

  He rolled down the windows for better visibility and wiped the inside of his windshield with the palm of his hand, to no avail. It was the kind of night where bad things happened to good people, and good people went out and did very bad things.

  And yet: if Holly wanted to go aboard her father's boat, who was Sam to say that she couldn't?

  Why am I bothering? Why not let the little witch do what she wants?

  Because I don't want her doing it for me.

  It all came down to guilt. Sam couldn't stand the thought of any more of it. It was bad enough that he—bunny rabbit! He swerved, catching some branches in his open window and carrying them along for the ride.

  It was bad enough that he felt responsible for having put a skilled con artist in close proximity with the most kind and trusting couple he knew. But if Holly were arrested trying to rescue his parents' nest egg, if she were to suffer fresh hurt and humiliation because of Sam's once and technically still-current wife—if she were to suffer the least little smidgen of pain because, in any way, of Sam ...

  It all came down to guilt.

  If I catch up to her, I may just kill her.

  He couldn't stand the thought of any more guilt.

  He slowed down past the police station, dropped onto Water Street, and then bore left, pulling off almost immediately at the marina where the Vixen lay roped off from the ordinary world.

  Although probably not for long. Sam spotted Holly's truck and pulled in behind it, effectively blocking her escape. Gotcha! was the single thought that formed in his brain—but then, it was three a.m. and he wasn't capable of much more than simple concepts.

  He kicked off his deck shoes and left them in the car; no point in announcing his approach during the long walk down the length of the dock. In the soupy fog he could barely see three slips ahead of him as he padded barefoot over splintery dockboards toward the Vixen. The good news was that there was no dock master around. The bad news was that Joan of Arc was riding high.

  A distant foghorn hooooed ominously, setting the tone for Sam's mission. His mission was ... what? To get Holly out of the boat and back to her house. He was going to do that ... how? At the moment, no clue; he was going to have to show up at the scene and see what developed.

  He paused just before reaching the taped-off sloop. The dropboards were out and lying on a cookpit seat.

  Through the open companionway he could see that the cabin below was dark. Standing in the mist-filled air, damp and chilled in his tee shirt and khakis, he waited for some indication of where she might be. A siren added its forlorn wail to the ominous brooding of the foghorn: be warned ... be warned.

  Down below, Sam saw a small beam of light arcing across the overhead in the main cabin, pinpointing Holly's position. Her back was to the companionway as she scanned a collection of rolled-up charts in an overhead rack, then pulled one out. Ah. Charts. Not a bad place to roll up an engraving—if it were a contemporary piece. But one that was several hundred years old? Hard to believe that it wouldn't crack or crumble.

  He took advantage of Holly's preoccupied state to climb aboard the yacht. Stepping down slowly into the cockpit, praying that the teak grate wouldn't knock against the fiberglass sole beneath it, he went forward to the bridge deck, all without her being aware of him. God, she was immersed. No wonder she was so good at her art.

  She was in the process of rolling the chart up before slipping it back into the overhead rack when Sam made his move. He dropped down into the pitch-dark cabin and slapped one hand over her mouth before she could scream. During the act he felt her body go rigid with terror in his arms, and the sensation sickened him.

  "Shh! Not a sound," he whispered in her ear. "I cannot believe that you're this big a fool. Not a word!" he repeated. "All right ... I'm going to let go now. Don't scream."

  Gingerly he took his hand away from her mouth, trusting that she wouldn't put them both in jeopardy.

  She turned and kicked him viciously in the shin.

  "OW!"

  "What're you doing, scaring me half to death like that?" she said in a low hiss.

  "This—this—is dumber than bungee jumping," he shot back in his own furious hiss.

  "So why are you here, then?" she whispered.

  "Because I don't want you do
ing an end run around me!"

  "Fine. You can look through half the charts; there are twice as many as I remembered."

  "You're nuts, you know that?" he muttered in her ear. "What makes you think the cops haven't been through these?"

  "They might have been," she admitted as she slid a chart back into the overhead rack, "if they were in fact looking for the engraving. But maybe that's on tomorrow's docket. State police investigators like to go home for supper, too, you know."

  She took down the next chart. "Here," she said, slapping him across the chest with it. "Make yourself useful."

  So this, apparently, had been Sam's plan: to report to Holly Anderson for lawbreaking duty on the sailing yacht Vixen at 0300.

  If Millie Steadman could see him now.

  He shook his head, wondering how he had managed to get snagged on Holly's spur as she rode hell-bent for perdition, dragging him blithely behind her. "Okay, just ... fine. Let's get this over with."

  He took down a chart and tried to unroll it in the dark—she had the flashlight—but his elbow ended up in her breast.

  "Hey, watch it!" she hissed.

  "You're in my way."

  "You're in my way!"

  "Oh, for God's sake!" Sam snapped. "We need a system. I'll take them down and unroll them; you roll them back up and rack them."

  "No, I'll unroll them. I want the satisfaction of discovering your precious Durer myself."

  Unbelievable. How had he ever considered her either naive or vulnerable? She was a witch! An overconfident, uncontrollable, irrepressible, just-plain-ornery witch.

  He let her have her way.

  They fell into a fairly smooth rhythm of unroll, check, roll and rack. Sam was close enough to catch a whiff of her fragrance, despite the lingering smell of resin from the fiberglass repairs that had been done to the boat. Occasionally their arms brushed. He tried not to notice.

  Toward the end, Sam—who had not been able to make himself believe that the engraving was hidden there—began actually to feel sorry for Holly. She was so sure.

  He murmured, "Wouldn't there be a risk of your father finding it when he took out a chart to navigate?"

  "Not really," said Holly as she pulled down the next- to-last chart. "If they were sailing to Maine, she'd be fairly safe hiding it, say, in a Long Island chart." She added, "There'd be some risk, naturally."

  "Which doesn't sound like Eden."

  "Oh? Did you know her that well?"

  Whups, walked right into that one. "I meant, considering how much the engraving is worth."

  "In any case, it would hardly matter if my father had discovered the theft," Holly said glumly. "He told me he would have been willing to cover its value."

  Sam did a double take. "You didn't tell me that."

  "No, I suppose I didn't. Well, this is the last one." She took the chart down and unrolled it. Nothing. Her sigh was a feathery whisper of disappointment.

  "Okay, that's it. Let's go." Sam was suddenly sick of the whole escapade. "Once we step onto the dock, we'll be home free."

  Meanwhile, of course, he was thinking that his bare feet were leaving much better traces on the boat than any measly old fingerprints could do.

  "One more minute. The engraving is on this boat, Sam, I know it. Let's look under all the seat cushions."

  "What?"

  "Shhh!"

  "Are you crazy? he whispered. "No one would put it somewhere so obvious."

  "We have to make sure. If she died suddenly, she had to have left it somewhere on the boat."

  "She's not dead. Either she's already fenced it—"

  "She did not fence it! She stayed with the boat all the way back from New Hampshire. That means it's still here."

  Through gritted teeth he muttered, "She has it with her, then, wherever she's gone. Obviously!"

  "I don't think so."

  Ignoring him, Holly began lifting every cushion on the boat, from the long settees to the little triangular filler-piece in the forward cabin. Every damned cushion was held in place with Velcro; the sound of the strips being separated from one another roared in Sam's ears, more irritating than a hundred fingernails across a chalkboard.

  Holly was focused on their discovering the engraving; Sam was focused on someone discovering them. Undoubtedly that explained why he and not she was able to hear footsteps approaching on the dock. In two strides Sam was alongside her, shushing her and urging her gently down to the cabin sole with a hand to her shoulder.

  She dropped low on the spot and they crouched together, waiting for the footsteps and low voices to continue past.

  A couple of sport fishermen out before dawn? Sam waited, feeling vaguely ignominious squatting in the dark. If it weren't for the fact that Holly was thigh-to-thigh with him ... if it weren't for the fact that he could feel her warm breath on his hand as he held her softly in check ... if it weren't for the fact that his tired body was springing in predictable ways back to life ...

  Don't do this, he thought as he brought his hand up to her cheek and gently turned her face toward his.

  Get a grip, Steadman, he warned as he angled his head and brought his mouth over hers.

  This is not the time, the place, the woman, he argued as he let his tongue glide over hers, savoring the sensational sweetness he found there.

  His objections skipped across his consciousness like pebbles on a pond, and then they sank without a trace. He gave himself up completely to the blissful joy of the moment, perfectly willing for it never to end. He wanted nothing more, demanded nothing less out of life than that particular kiss, in that particular harbor.

  And yet end it must.

  With a wrenching effort, he broke off the kiss. He tipped his forehead into hers and murmured softly, "That never happened."

  "Yes it did," she whispered.

  "No, Holly. It can't happen."

  "Yes it can. Watch," she said, dropping the rest of the way to her knees and kissing him with a tenderness that rocked him.

  She sat back on her heels and said, "See how easy?"

  Strange as it seemed—considering the circumstances—it was much more agonizing for Sam to keep her at arm's length than it had been in the loft. In the loft the issue had seemed so simple: animal desire. Despite the surge of it that Sam had felt, he was a man who knew how to control his basic instincts. It hadn't been easy, it had taken hellish discipline, but he had succeeded. In the loft.

  But this ... ah, this. This feeling scared the hell out of him.

  The sound of a powerboat's engines revving up nearby was the wake-up call that Sam desperately needed. He held Holly firmly by the shoulders and whispered, "Okay ... they're leaving. I suggest we wait until the boat pulls out and then you and I ... we ... ah ..."

  She was tracing the outline of his face in the dark, skimming her fingertips lightly around the shape of his mouth. In his life, Sam had never had a woman touch him that way. It was the touch of an artist, the touch of an angel. The touch of a lover.

  With excruciating reluctance, he caught her wrists and held them. "Holly ... don't," he said, practically groaning the words. "You don't know me ..."

  Her laugh was achingly rueful as she whispered, "One thing I've learned recently: no one knows anyone, when you come right down to it. But... I'm more than willing to take a chance."

  Though he still held her by her wrists, he saw in the dark that she had opened her hands palms up, in a signal as endearing as it surely was candid.

  Please, let's be lovers. That was her plea.

  He sighed. "Ah, love ...."

  In the distance he heard the moan of the foghorn: be warned... be warned.

  Was he headed straight for the rocks? Very possibly. But somehow he didn't care anymore. Her song was far more compelling than any Siren's, an irresistible coupling of innocence with ecstasy. He was suddenly desperate to hear it at closer range.

  "Holly ... sweet, unheeding Holly ..."

  Lost in her allure, he released her wrists, then caugh
t the hem of her top in his hands, lifting it up and over her head and tossing it aside. Her shudder of acquiescence thrilled him to the marrow: she truly did want to be his.

  Humbled as much as he was emboldened, he lowered his head to her bare breast, kissing and nipping gently, reveling in the sweetness of her surprised gasps, driving them up to the level of moans.

  Not enough. He wanted her to beg for more, to cry out his name. He pulled her to her feet and pounded her with kisses, aware that it was madness, aware that they might be caught in a spectacularly compromising position. They could go to jail. Did he care?

  Not enough. He groped at her zipper, then—grateful for a looser buttonhole this time—undid the fastener of her jeans. "Here ... on this berth," he said, easing her onto her back.

  Madness.

  She said, "I'm not forcing you, am I?" and he laughed out loud, sending her into a fit of answering giggles. Laughing, kissing, hushing one another, they hurried through their disrobing and lay down side by side on the narrow berth. No room for acrobatic loveplay here: Sam relished her breasts, small and firm and cool, up against his chest, but she had to put up with his rock- solid hard-on jamming her stomach. He repositioned himself so that his parts would lay against her parts in the right places, murmuring giddy endearments the whole time to this most endeared of all God's creatures.

  She was a delight, hot and coy and easy and teasing at the same time, stroking him lightly, still giggling between kisses, her giggles dissolving into deep, labored moans as he began to work his fingers against the warm, wet flesh at her entry.

  Sam had never enjoyed seeing enjoyment so much in his life. She was bliss to make love to—uninhibited without being histrionic, deeply emotional without being theatrical. The artist in her made everything intense, and the innocent in her made it even more so.

  He was in awe of her.

  "Come in me now before I die," she murmured in his ear.

  "Oh, sweetheart—oh, yes," he said, swinging a leg over hers and positioning himself to come in. "I thought you'd never ask."

  Another burst of giggles, joyous and giddy and—on the Vixen—outrageously dangerous.