Angela's Affair (Pacific Waterfront Romances, #13)

by Vanessa Grant

  Beyond the jetty, a rocky bay led to the open ocean, providing partial shelter from the angry swells of the sea outside. As Stacey stopped at the end of the flat area on top of the jetty, Steven came up behind her and drew her back against his chest.

  “It’s cold,” she said absently, feeling the contrast of his solid warmth and the angry boiling of the ocean as it surged into the bay, bouncing off the walls and slamming back to form huge, boiling walls for any boat that tried to gain entry to the sheltered harbor inside. These were the confused waters that had caught the sailboat and thrown it off course for a moment. She wondered where the boat was now, wondered if there had been an empty slip in the Noyo mooring basin. Right now the fishing season was closed in this area, most of the boats back in their berths.

  “Stacey?”

  “Hmm?”

  Steven bent and she felt his lips warm against the back of her neck. She shivered when he turned her to face him. He caught her hands and placed them against his chest.

  “I do want you to marry me.”

  She thought of her room at St. Croix Lodge, of sitting alone with a book, hearing from downstairs the faint sounds of Nita laughing as her husband Jean-Claude teased her. Her room held only a bed and easy chair, and a desk she had turned into a little shop, where she was experimenting with a system for monitoring a boat’s bilges for pollution control. Filled with things, but empty of loving. She thought her little invention could turn into something big if she could figure out how to promote it. But it would not make her any less lonely.

  She thought of her father, of Lee and the lawyer’s letter that came yesterday. Steven wanted her. Was it enough? She wanted to say yes to him, to make herself safe, but the word would not come. He bent closer, the dark night clouds skidding across the sky behind his head.

  “Say yes,” he urged her softly, his lips taking hers.

  “Steven, what if I can’t ¼ love you.”

  “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “I’ll look after everything.”

  Russ raised anchor and left the little anchorage behind Fish Rock about eleven Thursday morning. He told himself the late start was reasonable in the circumstances. He had only an eight hour run into Fort Bragg.

  The truth was, he was in no hurry to get there.

  He raised his mains’l and jib and took advantage of the dying morning breeze from the south. By noon the wind had shifted, stirring up the sea against him. He pulled down the big Genoa jib and sheeted in the main for stability. Then he started the diesel and put on the autopilot.

  It would have been easier to go to Hawaii. The trade winds blew steadily, favorable for the trip from Mexico to Hawaii. Even the second leg, from Hawaii to Alaska or British Columbia, was usually fair going. The trip up the coast, on the other hand, was one long fight to windward.

  But he wanted to visit the west coast harbors he missed on the way south three years ago, wanted to get pictures, to do some research while he was working his way to that isolated anchorage in British Columbia.

  His older brother would say that he was being stubborn, deliberately choosing the difficult path. But he and his brother had seldom agreed about anything.

  Fish Rock shrank to nothing behind him and Russ spent the afternoon slogging into waves. If the wind didn’t pick up too much, he’d be in Fort Bragg before dark. Between frying himself a hamburger on his gimbaled gas stove, and putting on his foul weather gear to keep out the biting cold wind, he played with the idea of giving Fort Bragg a miss, motoring through the night until he reached the haven of Shelter Cove.

  If he did, his sister Allie would be furious.

  “You’re in San Francisco?” she’d demanded when he called three days ago.

  “Sausalito,” he’d corrected, his eyes finding Whisper through the window, watching his sloop roll on the wake of a ferry. “I’m calling from the Sausalito Yacht Club. Leaving in the morning. I should be in Port Angeles by—”

  “Fort Bragg’s just north of you, isn’t it?” Her voice had sharpened and Russ had braced himself for it. “You’re stopping at Fort Bragg?”

  “I’m in a hurry, Allie. I want to —”

  “Rusty! How long since you’ve seen him?”

  “If we don’t see each other, we don’t fight.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Rusty! You’re not a kid!” Allie, the youngest, had always tried to make peace between her brothers. She wasn’t about to give up now that all three of them were in their thirties, and both brothers still stubbornly intolerant of each other. “You sound like my girls. Bickering over nothing. Rusty, if you don’t see him, he’ll be hurt.”

  “I suppose you’re coming down to referee us?” he’d grumbled to Allie, but he knew when he was beaten. “I’ll stop. I’ll see him. I’ll grit my teeth and I won’t say a word when he starts giving me advice.”

  Russ was the younger brother by three years, but he had never been willing to lose just because he was younger, smaller, less experienced. They had fought their way through adolescence, while Russ grew to be the bigger and the tougher of the two. They had parted explosively when Russ was nineteen. So far as Russ knew, his older brother had never forgiven him for Emily. They had never talked about it, not once in almost fifteen years.

  “We’ll fight,” he had told Allie on the telephone. Crazy that a man could reach his thirties, could be diplomatic with everyone from his critics to the aggressive talk show host, yet be completely unable to keep his cool around his own older brother.

  “All right,” he had told Allie. One night, he decided. An overnight and a phone call, and sorry you’ve got other plans, but I’ve got to get out of here while the weather’s with me. Next time, okay? So long, brother.

  “And you’ll be diplomatic?” Allie had insisted. “You’ll try?”

  He suspected that he would blow it, and he hung up hoping something would happen to make a stop at Fort Bragg impossible. After leaving Fish Rock, in mid-afternoon, with the northwest ocean swell growing and Whisper’s speed down to four knots, he pulled out the chart of the Noyo River entrance again. It was a bar crossing. West coast bars could be incredibly dangerous in adverse conditions. A big ocean swell rolling into the narrow entrance could pick up a boat and throw it into the rocks.

  He would call the Coast Guard when he got close. Then, if they reported bad conditions on the bar, he’d go on north. Even Allie couldn’t argue with that. A man would be crazy to take a boat across the bar when Coast Guard said it was hazardous.

  The wind backed enough to the west that Russ managed to keep the mains’l full. Whisper leaned into the waves and, under motor and sail, ploughed her way towards the Noyo River. Two miles short of the outer buoy, he picked up his microphone and called Fort Bragg Coast Guard.

  Nothing.

  He checked that he was on channel 16, made sure he was on high power, and tried again. Still nothing. He looked at the map, and it was impossible that twenty-five watts wouldn’t get his radio signal three miles, but when he called again there was still no answer.

  Ten minutes later he heard a fishing boat calling Coast Guard, heard the coast station answer, loud and clear. He followed when they changed channels, listening in, and although neither boat heard when Whisper called, he learned what he needed to know. Eight foot swells at the outer buoy; four foot swells at the inner. A rolling ride going in, but the bar was not considered dangerous.

  He went in ahead of the fishing boat, turning when he came abreast of the outer green buoy. The swell was bouncing back across the outer bay, the seas confused. A wave heaped up under him, twisting Whisper and pointing her into the rocks. He spun the wheel, hard, then threw it back as he came down the other side of the wave. Then he was pointing for the gap between the jetties, lined up perfectly on the range markers.

  He was unprepared for the magical beauty of the Noyo River. He was busy following markers, staying on the dredged side of the narrow channel as he went under the bridge, but he picked up the impression of beauty as he piloted Whisper
to the right, then to the left, the sun setting somewhere behind him and throwing everything into a dark green, almost black against the sky.

  He knew it was a river harbor, but had not expected this narrow, winding channel of water, meandering through fish packing plants and waterfront restaurants, with boats rafted up three and four deep on each side of the channel.

  The stuff postcards were made of. A small community, filled with people who worked and lived with the ocean. Cold, though. It was May, but he felt the cold north wind coming straight off the ocean. He was going to have to light up the oil stove. He hadn’t used it once during three years in Mexico, couldn’t remember if he had cleaned it out before he started using it as a place to store his constantly growing supply of reading material. Where the devil would he put his books with the fire going?

  Russ hated to get rid of books, but living on a forty foot boat with an ever multiplying population of novels and reference material was a constant challenge.

  He realized as he twisted his way through the Noyo River that he had been hungering for the north a long time. The perpetual holiday of Mexico had become tiresome, but the wall-to-wall yachts of Southern California weren’t his scene either. He’d missed seeing fishing boats, working boats, even the odd sailboat rigged with stabilizers and a fish hold. The Noyo River was exactly the kind of place that could tempt him to change his plans, to spend the next few months soaking up atmosphere while he worked. Except that Fort Bragg was his brother’s current home, and years ago he had realized that he and Steve were best with at least five hundred miles between them.

  Chapter Two

  The fisherman wandered into the shop. “Fixed?” he asked.

  Eric, his eyes on the oscilloscope, pushed back his thinning hair and jerked his head towards the bench where Stacey was bent over a disassembled radio.

  “Ask her,” he growled.

  “How about it?” asked the fisherman, leaning against Stacey’s bench. “That my radio?”

  She glanced at the work order, trying to remember his name. The work order gave only the boat name, and she never seemed to have a problem with boat names.

  “It’s yours,” she said absently. She used the tiny insulated screwdriver in her hand to push back a soft strand of dark hair that had escaped the elastic. “I’m almost done.”

  She switched channels to the continual weather broadcast. As the weatherman speculated on the future, she used the tuning tool to bring his voice up strong. Then she turned the tool further and the voice cracked. She backed it to the peak.

  Bob or Sam or Harry grumbled, “Hear that? Rain tonight, and I was going to fiberglass my hold.”

  “Bad luck,” Stacey agreed, wondering what she and Steven would do about tomorrow’s hike if the rain turned into a downpour. She fitted the case back on the two-way radio and rummaged for the screws to close it.

  Maybe they would go to Eureka to pick out her engagement ring. She could imagine the jewelry store, Steven’s head bent over her hand, herself staring at the few strands of gray that made him look distinguished. Then she looked at her hands as she lifted the radio. Impossible to make those nails look like the elegance one would expect in a banker’s wife. She kept her nails short and tidy for work, but inevitably she collected nicks and scratches a manicure couldn’t hide.

  “What’s the damages?” asked the fisherman.

  She said, “A thousand dollars should do,” and he laughed as the telephone rang.

  “Bob’s Electronics,” she said to the telephone, the receiver jammed between her chin and her shoulder. “Fifty-five dollars,” she murmured to the fisherman.

  “Stacey!” Nita’s voice, shrieking in her ear. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Hold on,” said Stacey, hooking the receiver on the edge of the bench.

  She left Nita’s voice and went to the cash register with the fisherman, agreeing that you couldn’t do fiberglass in the rain, and it was damned frustrating sitting in Noyo harbor with the fishing season open up in Eureka, and the north winds making the Cape too hazardous all week, then suddenly this front coming and not a gap in between.

  Eric was playing with the knobs on the oscilloscope and she suspected that he was really listening, not working.

  She got back to the phone, said, “What didn’t I tell you?” and Eric turned to glare at her. Stacey hid a grimace and started taking the cover off a global positioning system unit that gave readings as if it were in South America, not California.

  “You and Steven!” Nita was talking fast. “I just talked to him. He says you’re going to marry him. You didn’t tell me!”

  “You were asleep.” Stacey used her coffee cup to jam the service manual open to the GPS schematic drawings, remembering last night. Steven had walked her to her doorway. They’d kissed and she’d shivered, remembering things she didn’t want to remember.

  “I know you want to wait,” Steven had said. “We will wait if you want, until we’re married.” He had smiled when she pulled away, and she thought of passion and need.

  Better not to need too much. Steven would keep her safe. He’d protect her. And ten years from now, when she heard a knock on the door, it wouldn’t be the police come to tell her the sea had taken her lover.

  “This morning,” complained Nita. “How could you leave without telling me?”

  Stacey thought of this morning’s chaos in the dining room at St. Croix Lodge. “Nita, are you kidding? Don’t you remember breakfast? The couple from New York, and their two little hellions playing tag—”

  “Oh, lordy. Do you know what they did? Those kids? They checked out this morning, and I went up to their room and there’s toilet paper everywhere. They must have unwound three rolls, streamed it around and around the room, tied up the lamps and the chair and the bed and—everywhere.”

  Eric glared at her. Any minute he’d break out in one of his tirades.

  “Nita, I have to go.”

  The GPS was stubborn, resisting her efforts to diagnose its problem. Then Eric sent her out to the fish packing plant to look at their base station. The sky overhead was turning gray and dark. There had been weeks of sunshine, but now Steven had asked her to marry him, the rain was coming.

  He was exactly what she wanted. She had no right to feel so unsettled today. Remembering Lenny.

  “He wants you to call,” growled Eric when she came back from the cannery. She glanced at her watch and realized it was almost lunch time.

  She dialed the bank and got put on hold. She wedged the receiver against her shoulder with her chin while she took the elastic off her hair and pulled it all back and re-fastened it. She knew she was too much of a mess for a lunch date with Steven. If that was what he wanted, she would have to make some excuse.

  “Stacey?” Steven’s voice, and murmurings in the background. “I can’t talk now.”

  “You called.”

  “Sorry, I forgot. Yes, that’s the one. And the Andrews file—Sorry, Stacey. We’re going out to dinner tonight. Six o’clock. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “Six—Steven, can we make it later?”

  She waited through a murmured conversation at Steven’s end of the line, then he said, “I’ll pick you up at the lodge.”

  Not a very romantic call. He hadn’t said he loved her last night either. He’d never said it. Nor had she. She told herself that’s what she wanted, mutual respect, and safety. Steven was exactly what she wanted.

  “Eric?”

  He was still playing with that scope. She had an idea that it was out of adjustment and he hadn’t realized it yet.

  “You ready to start work yet?” he growled.

  She grimaced. She’d taken two personal phone calls, but she had worked her way through five radios including the one at the packing plant.

  “It’s lunch time. Do you mind if I work through and leave an hour early?”

  He shrugged a grudging assent.

  The rest of the day was one mad dash. With the fishing seaso
n closed locally, half the fishermen seemed to feel it was a good time to get their electronic equipment checked. Stacey knew Eric sent her out on boat calls deliberately, but actually she liked climbing over boats and solving tricky antenna problems. She finished the last call at four thirty, then drove her little truck back to the lodge.

  St. Croix lodge had once been a rambling family home. Nita and Jean-Claude had turned it into a successful lodge, taking advantage of the tourist trade in season, and renting some of the rooms at reduced rates on a long-term basis to people like Stacey and Steven. Stacey had been living at the lodge for two years, ever since she moved to Fort Bragg from Eureka. Then, six months ago, Steven had moved into the room across the hall from hers.

  The first time she saw him, she had been coming home from a date, dressed up and still smiling because the movie was hilarious. She came in the front door, waved good-bye to her date, then turned to cross the lobby and walked straight into Steven. When he put his arms around her to steady her, she stared up into warm brown eyes and a quizzical smile.

  “Now I know I’m going to like it in Fort Bragg,” he said softly.

  The next day he invited her out to dinner, and the next week, and the next. Six months, and he was the man she had thought he was in that first moment. Steady, reliable, safe. Now, he wanted to marry her.

  She parked her truck at the lodge and went in the back way, through the kitchen where Nita stood at the grill, a wooden spoon in her hand. Nita was a fraction of an inch over five feet tall, dwarfed by the big shiny grill and the massive pot of soup.

  “What are you doing in here cooking?” asked Stacey. “Doesn’t the cook do the soup?” Through the archway she saw a middle-aged couple at one of the dining room tables.