by Linda Cajio
Someone was trying to break in through her sliding-glass front doors.
She knew that even if the person outside managed to unlock the door, he still wouldn’t be able to open it, since she kept a piece of broomstick between the door channels to prevent just such a thing from happening. Still, the thought didn’t stop the fear from roiling inside her.
Swallowing heavily, she slowly lifted the covers and quietly slid her feet over the side of the bed. She picked up the receiver of the phone on the nightstand, breathed a sigh of relief at the sound of a dial tone, and immediately punched out the number of the police. A calm, reassuring voice answered.
“Help,” she whispered. “Somebody’s trying to break in.”
“Could you speak up, please?”
“Hell, no, I can’t speak up!” she whispered frantically, nearly covering the mouthpiece with her hand so the person outside wouldn’t hear her. “Somebody’s trying to break in! Two-oh-seven Shore—”
“Hello? I can’t understand you. Are you drunk?”
“Help, police! Somebody’s trying to break into my house!” she bellowed into the phone, terrified that the dispatcher would become disgusted and hang up. “Two-oh-seven Shore Drive! Hurry up!”
“Thank you, miss. We’re dispatching a patrol car now. What is the address again?”
She nearly screamed in frustration. “Two-oh-seven—!”
From outside, she heard a sudden tumble of feet running across the deck and stumbling down the stairs.
Slumping, she muttered, “He’s gone, thank goodness.”
“Shall I recall the car?” the voice asked.
She ground her teeth together and said, “No. I’d like an officer to check the lock.”
“Fine. Name, please.”
When she finally hung up the phone, she flopped back in the bed and groaned aloud. She felt as if she’d just run an obstacle course and lost. She could understand that the police needed information, but by the time they were finished getting it, an intruder could have done his dirty work and been halfway to California. She doubted hers would be back that night. She’d probably frightened him as badly as he had her. Still, she’d feel a whole lot better after the police arrived.
One good thing about being scared out of her wits, she thought in dry amusement. It had driven Dallas’s explosive kiss from her mind.
Her home had almost been violated, though, and she dreaded the thought of staying there alone for the rest of the night. Jean, she decided, was about to have unexpected company.
She ignored the little voice inside that said a certain man would prove a more pleasurable host.
Five
Standing next to WinterLand’s back door, Dallas frowned as he watched Jean’s car come around the side of the building. He was sure the work schedule said she had this day off.
He strode over to the car as Jean emerged from it. “Isn’t Cass supposed to be here?”
“She’s taking my day off,” Jean said while locking the door on the driver’s side.
“She’s—”
“I bargained hard during negotiations and got the entire weekend in a trade.” Jean laughed. “It nearly killed her.”
“Dammit,” Dallas muttered, realizing he wouldn’t see Cass at all today. “She can’t do this.”
“Tell it to the boss.”
Her words gave him an idea, and he smiled evilly. “I will. How do I get to her house?”
“She’s not there,” Jean said.
He cursed again.
“She’s going out on her boat today,” Jean added. “But I think you can still catch her at the marina—”
“What marina, and how do I get there?”
She gave him directions, and as he ran for his car, she called out, “Shall I call Joe and tell him you’re trading days with him?”
Reaching his car, he turned around and said, “Tell him if he will, then he’s got the weekend off too.”
“He’ll kiss you for it!”
“I hope not,” Dallas muttered, unlocking the door and scrambling inside. He had his suspicions about Joe.
Gunning the car to life, he grabbed his sunglasses off the dash and put them on as protection against the sun’s bright glare. Another hot one, he thought absently, then backed the car out of the slot and took off for the highway. He smiled to himself. It was obvious Cass had thought to avoid him by taking the day off. He wasn’t about to let that happen. Not after the kiss they’d shared.
Dammit, he thought. Why had he ever told her they couldn’t kiss again? No sooner had the words come from his mouth than he’d sensed the trap he’d set for himself. The strong attraction he’d felt for her had settled in firmly with the kiss. Avoiding it wouldn’t make it go away, any more than avoiding him would make him go away. She’d face it; he’d see to that.
When he reached the marina he drove slowly, searching for a sign of her. He spotted her about halfway down one of the small docks. She was loading a cooler onto a tiny rowboat with a small outboard motor hanging off its stern. Reading the boat’s name, he chuckled to himself. WinterLand II. Nice advertising touch, he acknowledged, and it reached a new group of potential customers. No flower child could have thought of that.
He parked the car, got out, and locked it. He strode down the ramp and onto the dock. Coming up behind her, he asked, “Do you always take the day off when you don’t want to face something?”
She jerked for an instant, then set down the beach bag she was holding and turned around. Her expression was cool, almost blank. “Good morning, Dallas. When you go back to the store, please tell Jean she’s definitely fired for blabbing about my burglar.”
“What burglar?” he asked, suddenly confused. He pushed his sunglasses onto the top of his head.
She made a face. “Me and my big mouth. I take it you didn’t come down here about my burglar.”
“What burglar?” he demanded, his stomach muscles suddenly tensing.
“My place was nearly burgled last night.…”
He stared at her with growing amazement as she told him about hearing noises at her door and scaring the person away with her call to the police. She added, “Actually, I don’t know who was more terrified—him or me.”
“Lord, Cass,” he said, grabbing her by the shoulders as an odd stab of protectiveness washed through him. Silently he cursed himself for not being there. The burglar, if he had known it, had been let off easy with a scare. “If he had gotten in—”
“I’m okay,” she interrupted firmly, stepping away from him and picking up a large wire basket. She set it in the boat. “It was probably just a kid, who’s had all thoughts of a life of crime scared out of him. I hope. Now, what are you doing here?”
He picked up a second basket and tossed it in the boat. “I’m going fishing with you.”
She started, then turned around. Her eyes were wide with shock. “The hell you are, Dallas Carter.”
“The hell I’m not, Cass Lindley,” he replied nonchalantly.
“But you have to go back to the store! Jean—”
“Joe is filling in for me.” He laughed. “I will be working the weekend with you.”
Cass moaned.
“You ought to know by now you can’t get rid of me,” he said. “Just think of me as a bodyguard. A fish could try to mug you out there, and without me along, where would you be?”
“A whole lot safer,” she muttered just loudly enough for him to hear.
He grinned.
In a normal voice she added, “Knowing you, you’d swim alongside the boat, just to bug me to death.”
“Now that you’ve given me the idea—”
“Just get in the boat, Dallas,” she ordered, glaring at him.
Without another word, he climbed aboard with a minimum of boat rocking and sat down on the prow seat. He pushed his sunglasses back onto his nose, then looked up to find Cass gazing at him with raised eyebrows.
“Well, at least you’re not a ‘slub,’ ” she commented, be
fore climbing into the stern. She took a pair of sunglasses from her shirt pocket and put them on, then plopped a straw hat on her head. Starting the motor, she said, “Cast off, Dallas.”
He pulled the bow rope off the anchor piling, and stuffed it under his seat as she cast off the stern line. Under her guidance, the small boat drifted purposefully away from the dock and the other boats, and out into the bay.
While they rode steadily toward their unknown destination, Dallas studied Cass. She was dressed in cheap thongs, threadbare jeans, and a man’s old white shirt, which was about six sizes too big for her. Her hair was in a loose topknot again, the stray tendrils swirling softly around her face in the light breeze. She looked almost like a young girl. Except for her eyes, he thought. Behind her lightly tinted sunglasses, he could see an anxious expression in them. He remembered now the redness that hinted at a restless night.
“Did you sleep at all last night?” he finally asked, absently grateful for the same breeze pushing cool air against his short-sleeve knit shirt.
“Barely,” she replied, looking past him to the traffic on the bay. “I kept Jean up all night, too, I think.”
“Jean?”
She glanced at him, then away. “I … I couldn’t stay at my place, so I went over to hers for the rest of the night.”
He could understand her feeling; alone and vulnerable in a house where someone had already tried to break in. She would have been insane if she’d stayed.
“What did the police say?” he asked.
“Just that whoever it was had scratched up the metal pretty badly around the lock. It sounded like they meant an amateur, so I figured a kid.” She smiled wryly. “I think I would have been a whole lot happier if he’d picked a night when I wasn’t home.”
Dallas chuckled at her observation. “Install a burglar alarm. I assume you don’t have one. You didn’t say.”
“I don’t have one. But I think I will after last night.” She shivered in the hot sunlight. “It’s silly to be scared of a kid.”
He refrained from saying that if there were a next time it might not be a kid. She didn’t need another nebulous anxiety; she was clearly suffering from a few, as it was. He decided she’d been wise to come out on the boat. A day of quiet fishing would be relaxing. Leaning his elbows back on the prow, he vowed to give her easy, no-pressure companionship. After what she’d been through, she deserved it.
From beneath hooded lids, he watched her expertly bring the boat across the bay and into one of the numerous inlets. The noise of the boat traffic gradually faded as they made their way around islands of tall sea grass. The breeze disappeared too. The air grew heavy and pungent, and the sun seemed even hotter. Silently Dallas cursed the heavy jeans and the knit shirt he was wearing. Perspiration was already trickling down the sides of his face. He knew he’d feel like a slowly roasted turkey before the day was over. Not only did Cass look gorgeous, but she was no doubt cool and comfortable too.
Cass finally brought the boat to a halt next to one of the islands. Dallas sat up and glanced around. “I never realized that fish used these inlets. Do they breed here?”
“Some do. But we’re catching crabs, Dallas, not fish,” she explained.
“Crabs?” He frowned at her. “But you just caught some the other day.”
“I’d catch them every day, if I could. I have this thing for them.” She chuckled. “Kind of like what Nero Wolfe has for shad roe. Have you ever read the Rex Stout books?”
Dallas nodded. “Wolfe’s a favorite of mine. I remember that he eats roe every day that it’s in season.”
“Just like me.” She dropped a small anchor weight over the side, then started rummaging through the gear. She baited a line with a piece of fish. “Since I like crabs very fresh, I decided years ago it was sensible to live near the source. Bait one of those baskets and drop it over the side, will you?”
He picked up a basket and studied it. It was more like a wire cage, but in this case, all four sides opened flat, with a line attached to the top edge of each side. He assumed the four sides would lie flat until the fisherman drew up the center cord, thereby closing the sides and entrapping the crab as it nibbled on the bait inside. It had been years since he’d been fishing, and he’d never been crabbing before.
“How do you know when a crab is in here?” he asked, turning the basket around to see if he could find some signal device.
Cass smiled. “You don’t. You just haul it up every so often and hope to find one in it.”
“Okay.” Dallas tossed it over the side with a loud splash. The basket’s anchor line slithered over the edge of the boat and disappeared into the water. At the same instant he realized he was supposed to have tied the line onto the boat. Hoping to see it floating on the water, he leaned out over the side. No line.
“Ah … Cass?”
She glanced up from baiting another line. “Yes?”
“How much did you like that basket?” he asked, smiling innocently at her.
“How much did I …” The puzzled frown on her face deepened. “What happened, Carter?”
Searching the water once again, he said, “I didn’t know I was supposed to anchor the line.”
She groaned aloud as she leaned over the side in her own search. “Damn! The current must have taken the line, and now we’ll never find it. A perfectly good basket …”
Dallas straightened and flipped off his loafers, then began pulling off his socks.
“What are you doing?”
“The line’s probably under the boat, and we just can’t see it.” Deciding the jeans would have to stay on, he eased his legs over the side of the boat, then flipped over onto his stomach so he could let himself into the water without upsetting the tiny vessel.
“Be careful, Dallas,” Cass warned, grabbing the edges with both hands as the boat rocked violently. “And watch where you put your feet. Who knows what might be down there.”
“I’m okay,” he said as his feet sank slightly into the squishy bottom. He stood chest high in the cool water. Lord, but it felt good, he thought as the heat that had been building in his body instantly dissipated. Still, he didn’t relish the idea of diving under the murky surface to retrieve the basket. The damn line was too light to have gone down deep, though. Reaching under the boat, he carefully swept around with his hands. The tips of his fingers brushed against something nearly under the hull, and he grabbed at it.
“I’ve got it!” he called out, triumphantly holding the sodden line up for her to see. He stepped sideways, closer to her end of the boat. “Here, you can—”
An agonizing bolt of pain shot through him. something had latched onto his left foot. He yelped, and leaped for the side of the boat, nearly tipping it over. His head hit the cooler, and a second sharp pain jolted to life.
“Dallas!” Cass shouted, scrambling toward him. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Flopping half-in, half-out of the boat, he shouted curses as the pain intensified. He must have walked into a shark, he thought in a panic. He was positive his foot was gone and the maniacal thing was eating its way up his leg. Desperately he tried to shake the monster off. He turned his head in an unconsciously morbid attempt to see what was happening, but the awkwardness of his position and the churning water made it impossible.
Suddenly Cass was laughing. She shouted, “Don’t move! I’ll get the net.”
“The net!” he gasped out. “What the hell … !”
“You caught ‘Jaws’!” she yelled in a clearly gleeful voice. “Whatever you do, don’t move!”
“Don’t move!” he exclaimed angrily, thrashing around even harder with his body at the thought of a huge, gaping-mouthed great white gnawing his kneecap. He’d seen Jaws twice. Water sprayed all over him from his efforts.
“Drat, don’t move!” Cass whacked him on the backside with something hard, then sat straddled on his back to hold him still. His lungs in a sudden vise, he gasped for air. “Hold … hold …”
He�
��d hold, he thought in a red haze of fury at the pain and her weight on his back. He’d hold his hands around her throat when she finally got off him!
“I’ve got him!” she screamed, bouncing up and down on his back. The breath whooshed out of him, and the vise was replaced by a vacuum. He struggled frantically against it.
Suddenly she was off him, and pure air was rushing back into his lungs. Relief washed through him, and in one mighty effort he yanked the rest of his body into the boat. He slumped onto the bottom, grateful for the feel of the tackle box and other sundries jabbing into his sides.
“My foot,” he whispered weakly as he remembered the terrible pain. He slowly opened his eyes. “The shark got it, didn’t he?”
“What shark?” Cass asked, leaning over him.
“Jaws,” he said, gazing at her. Her face was upside down and absolutely beautiful.
She had a fit of giggles. “There was no shark, Dallas. Just the granddaddy of all crabs. I knew there was a big one around here. For weeks something smart was taking big chunks out of my bait, but avoiding the traps. And you caught it!”
A damn crab, he thought, closing his eyes again as the vision of a huge shark was replaced by a scuttling shellfish. A damn crab. Then he remembered the power in the claws, and he said, “My foot. How bad is it?”
He felt her stretch out next to him. She cradled his foot with one hand, her fingers gently probing. “I hate to tell you this, Dallas …”
He braced himself for the worst. “Yes?”
“You’ve got a cut about the size of a dime, and some scraped skin.”
Opening his eyes, he struggled to sit up. “That’s it?” he asked in disbelief. “Just a small cut?”
“Look for yourself.”
He did. Except for a small cut, his foot was fine. Feeling the heat rise to his face, he glanced up at Cass, who was grinning at him.
“The Attack of the Giant Crab!” she exclaimed. “If the folks at M & L could have seen you …”
She collapsed into hysterical laughter.
He glared at her. Privately he admitted his pleasure to see that the frightened, almost hunted look she’d had earlier was now gone. Still, he would have been much more pleased if it hadn’t been at the expense of his dignity.
