Pearl Cove

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Nope.” His tongue dipped, tasted, savored. “What do you mean?”

  “It can wait until morning.”

  “It?”

  “Sex,” she muttered, embarrassed. She and Len had never talked about it. They had just done it.

  “Sex can wait until hell freezes over,” Archer said calmly.

  She gave him a startled look. The heat and laughter and confidence in his eyes made her feel as though she was being licked all over by tongues of fire.

  “Making love, now, that’s different,” he said. “That can’t wait a minute longer.”

  Her smile disappeared in a kiss that was both restrained and urgent. When it ended, she was naked on the bed and his tongue was sliding over her, lingering in all the tender places, the hidden places, the secret places where scent and mystery fused into heat. His hands caressed even as his mouth tasted, hovered, tasted again, before slowly, slowly sinking into her, unraveling her in a loving that was both tender and starkly intimate.

  Her breath stopped and her heart speeded as her climax uncoiled in a luxuriant whip of pleasure that arched her whole body. Seeing her lover’s dark hair against her skin as he turned and bit her with exquisite care sent another slow lash of ecstasy through her, another unraveling so beautiful that she couldn’t breathe. Yet somehow she said his name.

  He looked up, saw the hazy indigo of her eyes, and smoothed his cheek against the sultry flesh he could still taste on his tongue. When he felt the ripple begin again, the sweet slow clenching of her body, he could wait no longer.

  His name came in fragments from her lips when he entered her with a single, prolonged movement of his hips. The ravishing whip uncurled again, taking her, giving her to him. He took the gift and gave himself in turn, moving slowly, kissing her tenderly. Despite the urgency building with every leisurely stroke, he savored each moment, memorizing the scent and taste of her shimmering and crying, burning beneath him.

  And then he was burning with her, pulsing in light-shot darkness, spending himself until he had no more to give, no more air to breathe, no more body to feel, nothing but her arms holding him to tell him that he was still alive.

  It was a long time before he found enough strength to roll aside. Even then he didn’t leave her body. He simply gathered her closer and held her against him as he turned over. She made a murmurous sound, burrowed into his neck, and took a ragged breath as the silvery aftershocks of ecstasy rippled through her again.

  “You were supposed to be tired,” she said huskily.

  “I was. Next time you get to do all the work.”

  She smiled against his neck. “You’ll have to tell me how. In great detail.”

  The thought of it made his heartbeat quicken. He laughed softly. He had never been like this with any woman. The sensual revelation was as surprising to him as anything that had ever happened in his life. He nuzzled her ear, bit delicately, and said, “If this keeps up, you’re going to be pregnant for sure.”

  More than half asleep, she snuggled against him and said the first thing that came to her mind. “I hope so.”

  Relief and something very close to joy swept through him. He held her even closer, wondering if many people were ever lucky enough to know they held the world in their arms. “Good. I’ll make the arrangements tomorrow. We’ll be married as soon as—”

  “Married.” Hannah struggled upright and stared down at Archer as though he had grown two heads. “Who said anything about marriage?”

  “We did. When we agreed to make a baby.”

  “No.” She pushed away from him and sat on the edge of the bed. “I didn’t say anything like that.”

  “If you’re pregnant—”

  “I’ll sell my half of Pearl Cove,” she cut in, “buy a house, and make my living color-matching pearls for the other farmers. It would be a good, stable job, and it would give me plenty of time to raise my child.”

  “Your child?” Archer’s question was as cold as the chill he felt inside and out, everywhere that he had been warm from her. “What about me?”

  Angry, frightened, feeling cornered by life and wanting to lash out in all directions, she combed trembling fingers through her hair. She didn’t want to talk about this, any of it. She just wanted to go on as they had, suffused in passion, not asking about tomorrow because they both knew there wasn’t any tomorrow.

  Not for them.

  “Damn it, Archer. What are you complaining about? Sex with no strings attached? Most men would be dancing a jig.”

  Sex with no strings attached.

  He closed his eyes and tried to accept the fact that the woman he could have loved all the way to his soul felt nothing more than lust for him. “I’m not most men.”

  “I know. That’s why I can’t marry you.”

  Rage chased in the wake of pain, caught it, raced neck and neck in a headlong run toward destruction. Archer let the pain sear through him, but he fought the anger savagely. At a level too deep for words, he knew if he slipped the leash on rage, he would regret it even more than he regretted leaving Hannah to Len’s mercy ten years ago.

  “Why can’t you marry me?” he asked evenly. “Explain it to me, Hannah.”

  She looked at him. Her breath caught at the drawn lines of his face, as though he had his hand in fire and was fighting not to show pain. Yet it was there. Agony. Stark and real.

  Something terrifyingly like his agony sliced through her to her soul.

  Then he opened his eyes. They were the color of steel. They belonged to a man who knew no mercy.

  “Look in the mirror,” she whispered. “You’ll see why.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You’re like Len!” Her breath broke on a sob. “Damn you, you’re like Len! Great smile, great body, and underneath it all, as cold a bastard as ever walked the earth. That kind of ruthlessness makes love impossible. It makes everything impossible, even the most simple affection.” She took a tearing breath. Tears blocked her view of Archer, but it didn’t matter because all she could see was the past. “I was pregnant once. When I miscarried, I wanted to die. I almost got my wish. Later, much later, I went down on my knees and thanked God that I didn’t have a child to raise in Len’s cold shadow. I’ll never expose my child to that kind of ruthlessness. Never.”

  Once, years ago, Archer had been beaten to the point that it was agony to breathe, to move, even to blink his eyes. He felt that way now. “I would never hurt any child, much less my own.”

  She just shook her head. “You don’t understand. You can’t. Like Len. He didn’t get up each morning and decide to be the way he was. He just . . . was.”

  Silence stretched, stretched, thinned. Snapped.

  “Let’s see if I understand,” Archer said, his voice low and flat. “Marriage is out because you don’t trust me and you don’t like me, but you don’t mind having sex with me.”

  She gave a broken laugh and wiped her eyes. “I trust you. That’s why I called you. I know you won’t kill me.”

  “You trust me with your body, but not your emotions, your future, and your children, is that it?”

  The blunt words made her flinch, yet she didn’t argue. “I like you. I didn’t want to, but I do. And the—the sex is good.” She shivered. “Very, very good. Can’t that be enough?”

  It had been enough for Archer in the past, with other women. It wasn’t nearly enough now.

  “Sex and protection, that’s all you want from me?” he asked, driven to be certain.

  Again his blunt words scraped over her emotions, touching raw spots she didn’t even know she had. “Yes.” Her voice was bleak. “That’s all.”

  Archer looked at Hannah’s bruised eyes and trembling lips, at her chin tilted up and her shoulders squared. He remembered the girl who had stood on a street corner in Rio de Janeiro with empty pockets and a raw determination to survive. With a distant sense of surprise he realized that he had fallen in love with Hannah then: her courage and her fear, her despair and her hope, the lif
e that burned so incandescently within her, giving her a beauty no other woman had ever equaled in his eyes.

  Nothing had changed in ten years.

  Nothing would change.

  He would never have the woman he loved.

  The mattress hitched suddenly as Archer got up and began dressing. “If you’re pregnant, I will support you and my child.”

  “No, I—”

  “The child will know his or her cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents,” he continued relentlessly, zipping up his pants with a quick jerk. “Most of all, the child will know me.” He buttoned his shirt with quick flicks of his fingers. “If that upsets you, I regret it, but it’s not negotiable. If you wanted a child without complications, you should have gone to a sperm bank.”

  “But I—”

  “See that intercom?” he cut in, pointing to a lighted panel on the wall by the bed.

  She nodded.

  “If you want protection or sex, punch number six.”

  Seventeen

  Ian Chang shut off his car engine and got out while the red dust was still boiling up toward the gunmetal sky. As he strode over the walkway to the verandah, he ran through all the points his father wanted him to cover with Hannah McGarry—who was buying what, who was selling what, and the gradations of threat to apply at each point in the negotiation.

  Sam Chang wanted Pearl Cove, even if it meant partnership with Donald Donovan’s Number One Son.

  Unfortunately Hannah had refused to answer her phone or return messages left on her answering machine, which meant that Ian Chang had been forced to make the boring drive from Broome just to talk to her. Irritated, he knocked hard enough to rattle the verandah door on its hinges. The thunderous sound startled a flock of cockatoos. They took off in a swirling, darting, shrieking cloud of white.

  It was the only response Chang’s knock got.

  “Hannah, it’s Ian,” he said loudly. “Let me in.”

  No one answered. It was the same for the back door. Nothing but silence and the muted echo of his fist thumping on the door. Cursing in a sizzling mix of Cantonese and English, Chang lit a cigarette and headed for the scattering of cottages where the workers lived.

  Coco waited on the front porch of the third cottage, leaning languidly against the wall. She had been leaning there since she saw Chang’s car roar up to the McGarry house. She could have saved him the trip down to the cottages, just as she could have saved him the trip to Pearl Cove by returning the messages she had listened to in the middle of the night, when no one would notice her inside the McGarry house.

  But Coco wasn’t in a mood to save anyone trouble. She was in a mood to cause it. Especially with Ian Chang, who had forgotten their date a few nights ago. She wasn’t used to a man forgetting her. Just as she wasn’t used to a man looking past her to Len McGarry’s pale, sexless wife. The memory still stung.

  “Is Hannah diving again?” Chang demanded in English without so much as a greeting.

  “No.”

  “Is she in what’s left of the sheds?”

  “No.”

  “Then where the hell is she?” He drew in smoke and sent it out again in a rush of silver.

  Coco shrugged, but her black eyes gleamed with cold amusement. She liked seeing Chang upset. “She gone.”

  “What do you mean, she’s gone?”

  The angry demand in his voice was like wine to Coco. She had his full attention now. “Just that. Gone. Fffft.”

  “Where?” he snarled. “Did Christian get her?”

  Laughter that was both soft and hard curled out of Coco. “No, it is Donovan.”

  Uneasiness cooled Chang’s anger. He took another pull on the cigarette, swallowed smoke, and let his temper damp down. “She’s with Donovan?”

  “Oui. They go to Broome and never come back. Cable Beach, mmmm, the rooms grand and the sheets ver’ cool and smooth.” She took the cigarette from him, sucked deeply, and returned it. Then she licked her lips with the deliberation of a cat grooming itself. “Maybe they in bed still, yes? He is a ver’ potent man. Long time since she was a woman.”

  Chang didn’t like to think about it—Hannah and Archer, the tangle of legs and musky sweat and pumping hips. “You should have called me.”

  “But why?” She smiled with pure malice at what she saw in Chang’s expression. She asked in French, “Did you lust to see how well he fills the hole between Sister McGarry’s white legs?”

  Chang flipped the burning cigarette onto the ground between Coco’s bare feet. His left hand shot out and wrapped around her throat. “Don’t play the bitch with me. I haven’t time for it. Where is Hannah?”

  “Where is Donovan?” Coco countered, amused.

  His fingers tightened enough to leave marks on her tan skin. “If I find out that you knew more than you told me, you’ll be stuck with your half sister back on an atoll in Tahiti that’s smaller than your ass. Do you understand me?”

  Smiling, she inched closer to Chang, brushing her breasts against him, then her thighs. “Coco understands many things.”

  For a moment he was tempted to take what she was so plainly offering.

  Seeing it, Coco smiled. Like the cigarette smoke curling up between her feet, her smile was cool.

  Chang let go of her and stepped back a bare inch. Just enough not to feel her hard nipples against his chest. “I don’t have time now. Later.”

  Black eyebrows rose like sleek whips. “What if I do not have time later?”

  “Find it.”

  Coco thought of the cache of pearls she had built over the years, of the payments she had received from the Chang family, and of other payments from the pearls her half sister sold whenever Coco gathered enough to make it worthwhile. She would take Chang’s money and his screwing, because he was the most interesting game in town at the moment; he wanted her, but not enough to beg.

  Nakamori had been hers for years, enslaved, pleading for the sweet poison he was addicted to. Flynn was too much like her; neither of them felt jealousy as other people seemed to, something to kill or die for. With Flynn there was simple sexuality, a bull covering as many cows as presented themselves. All women were the same to him. Cows. Just as all men were the same to Coco. Bulls.

  She would always regret that Len had died before she could find the key to seduce him. From him she would have had the secret of the black pearls that looked like Australia’s famous black opals. And from him she also would have had the only emotion she felt deeply.

  Fear.

  Sighing, Coco stretched and rubbed herself against Chang. “C’est vrai, mon cher. Coco find time. Later.”

  Chang didn’t bother to say good-bye. He simply turned and strode off to his car, leaving Coco with a thin wisp of cigarette smoke coiling up between her bare legs.

  Before Pearl Cove vanished from his rearview mirror, Ian was calling Cable Beach hotels. Most people who demanded to know if someone was registered at a hotel would be politely told that such information wasn’t given to the public. The Chang family, however, owned one hotel outright and had employees at all the others. When a Chang wanted answers, he got them.

  By the time Ian sped into Broome, he knew he was in trouble. He went to his office, looked at the deceptively placid ocean until he was certain of his own self-control, and then called his father’s private line.

  “There is a problem,” Ian said in curt Cantonese when his father came on the line.

  “Increase the offer by ten percent.”

  “That is not the problem.”

  “I listen.”

  Ian didn’t doubt it. Being listened to by Sam Chang was an experience most people didn’t wish to repeat. It reminded everyone of the days when emperors were gods who anointed or executed at will.

  “Hannah McGarry has vanished,” Ian said baldly. “So has Archer Donovan.”

  The silence that came back told him that Sam was still listening.

  “She is not at any hotel, motel, or rented room in Broome,” Ian said.<
br />
  “Not under her own name, perhaps?”

  “Of course,” Ian snapped. Then he reined in his impatience. He had had a lifetime to get used to one simple fact: his father thought that his Number One Son was incapable of doing anything more taxing than producing sons. It had taken five tries, but Ian had managed to get a son and heir. Unfortunately, as far as Ian was concerned, said son and heir was useless, a gambler and a wastrel whose greatest ambition was to clean out his father’s and grandfather’s bank accounts.

  “Speak,” Sam said harshly.

  “Hannah McGarry is not staying in Broome under any name. No tall Caucasian woman with short sun-streaked hair and big indigo eyes has checked into any accommodation, with or without a man. No tall, muscular Caucasian man with pale eyes and short black hair and beard has checked into any accommodation, with or without a woman. Donovan’s car has not been turned in to the rental agency, which means that they are probably in Derby by now. Or even Darwin.”

  The silence was different now. Ian couldn’t say how it was different; he just knew it was. He had had many years to learn how to read his father. Right now the senior Chang was thinking hard, fast, and cruel. Ian hoped he wouldn’t be on the receiving end of the cruelty, but braced for it anyway.

  “Incompetence,” Sam said angrily. “When will I grow accustomed to Number One Son’s incompetence?”

  Ian muttered the required apologies for living, breathing, and disappointing his father.

  “I will find them for you,” Sam said, his voice harsh. “Then you will bring me the secret of Pearl Cove.”

  “If I have Hannah alone, you will have your secret,” Ian promised. “If Archer Donovan is with her, we will have a great problem. The Americans want him unharmed.”

  Sam made a curt, throaty sound possible only to a Chinese autocrat. “I will test their resolve on this Donovan.”

  “Please do,” Ian said smoothly. “While you negotiate with the Americans, I will search Derby and Darwin for our missing pawns.”

  Sam grunted. “With luck, we will not need them.”

  Though Ian didn’t move, he came to full, quivering attention. “May I ask why?”