Mesmerizing Stranger

by Jennifer Greene

  “Oh, well,” she murmured.

  “We’re in public.”

  “I’m afraid that’s your problem. I told you not to start something the next time you didn’t intend to finish.” She was teasing. Until she wasn’t. Her hands suddenly framed his face. “Harm. I don’t know where we’re going. But I know darn well we’re moving.”

  “You think you can count on me to say no?”

  “I think I can count on you to come through for me. And I’m not sure if you know it. But you can trust me.”

  That was the thing. Just the thing. He didn’t trust anyone, hadn’t in years, couldn’t remember if he ever had. Yet there was something in her, something different. And for the first time since hell froze over, he felt an unwilling yielding…a wanting to believe, a need to believe in trust again.

  She spurred him all the more, because he knew she trusted no one, either.

  It was exquisitely clear that she’d abandoned trust when the world crashed on her head as a child, and she’d never given life a chance to hurt her like that again. But she was giving that chance to him. Opening that damned scary door.

  And suddenly he was kissing her again, the talking done, nothing else in his head or heart but her. Every instinct condensed into the most basic urge and surge-to take her. Own her. To be owned right back.

  The water that had seemed so luxuriously sensual now felt constrictive. He couldn’t move fast in that liquid flow. Her clothes refused to easily peel off, and when he moved, they both seemed to embrace in a languid spin where she ended up under water, then he did, both of them laughing…then not.

  He wanted her. Right then. Now. Yesterday. And once he plunged inside her, he wasn’t letting her go. Maybe ever.

  “Yes,” she said, in a whisper that roared in his ears.

  He was there. At the nest of her, the crest of her, in a tangle of legs and clothes and heat and fire. Ready to plunge. When he heard voices from below the hill. “Harm! Cate! Harm! Hurry! Something’s wrong with the captain! Where are you two?”

  Darn hard to run when her head hurt and her side hurt and most of all, her heart hurt. Harm would have been deep inside her. Two seconds. That was all it would have taken. He was right there…and so was she, emotionally and physically and mentally, when she’d heard Arthur’s frantic cry, then Yale and Purdue.

  She’d locked eyes helplessly with Harm for all of a millisecond. Then they’d both surged from the water, gasped from the cold, grabbed clothes and started chugging down the hill. Harm kept waiting for her, trying to help her.

  “Harm, don’t wait for me. I’ll get there. You just go see what’s wrong with Ivan.”

  But he wouldn’t leave her. You’d think she needed a babysitter. The only thing she needed right then was a heart-sitter, Cate thought, because repercussions were starting to filter into her brain about what she’d done-or what she’d been about to do. No matter how much she wanted to straighten out some things with Harm, though, there was no possible time.

  Down the hill, past the scattering of buildings, halfway down the dock to the boat, Ivan was on the ground, clutching his stomach and bellowing. “I’m fine! I’m just sick! Get me on board and leave me alone!”

  Hans’s gentle face reflected confusion and worry. Harm hustled between the group and crouched down. “What are we dealing with?”

  “Hurling. That’s what we’re dealing with. Disgusting, but there it is.”

  “Like food poisoning? Something you had here at the café? Something we could need a medic for?”

  “All I need is my own bunk, my own head, some privacy. And time. I’m not the wrong kind of sick. I just want to get the hell out of Dodge.”

  By the time Cate reached Ivan, the captain was using increasingly colorful language…and he’d been sick over the dockside right there, which made all the men step back several feet. Except for Harm. Cate knelt down, carefully poked the captain’s sides, felt his forehead for fever, checked his pulse, looked for signs of shock.

  Harm didn’t ask what she was doing, just echoed, “I checked for the same things, but it’s been years since I had first aid in the army. What do you think?”

  “I don’t see any signs of anything serious, like appendicitis…”

  “Would you all get away from me? If I’m gonna hurl, I don’t like an audience. And I’m not going to a hospital. I’m going to my boat.”

  “Quit being a child, Ivan,” Cate said.

  He said, “You’re fired.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Everyone participated in getting Ivan aboard and below, which was probably why it took forever. En route, all Harm’s men were singing the same tune. Enough was enough. Catastrophes were following them like ants at a picnic. It was time to call this trip off and get home.

  Late afternoon, Harm left the pilothouse in search of Cate. As he might have guessed, she was in the galley. He’d barely opened the door before he was bombarded by enticing and exotic smells. Bowls and pans and utensils cluttered every counter. Cate, garbed in an apron and a T-shirt that read Incrediby Good-Looking And Built To Last was shimmying to rock and roll in her head-at least until he startled her by opening the door.

  “What are you doing? You should be resting!”

  “I am, I am.” She motioned. “I figured on some Yukon sourdough bread pudding-because we had some day-old bread, so might as well find a good use for it. Then saffron risotto cakes. Herbed tomatoes. And then chops with a warm-belly barbecue sauce…”

  He scraped a hand through his hair. “Cookie. You’re hurt. You’re exhausted. The captain’s sick. Everything’s a disaster. So maybe you still felt responsible for coming up with dinner for the group, but what would have been wrong with some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”

  “Well…nothing. But this isn’t work for me, Harm. It’s stress relief. Honest. And in the meantime, what’d you find out?” She seemed to read his expression.

  “Autopsy results. What is warm-belly barbecue sauce?”

  “Something that’s guaranteed to put hair on your chest.” She flashed him, lifted her long-sleeved T-shirt-showed him braless breasts, bitsy, adorable-then swiftly covered up again. “Which you’ll find out, via taste, at dinner. In the meantime, you get nothing more until you fill me in. What’d the coroner in Juneau say?”

  He wasn’t going to make it through this trip. Embezzlement, theft, murder, maybe poisoning. And this woman who could spin his world on its axis in two seconds flat, without half trying. He started to answer the question, found his throat too dry to emit sound. Tried again. “I forget the formal phrase they used. But the cause of death was essentially a heart attack.”

  “All right.”

  “Like you said-his throat and esophagus were raw. Some substance had to cause it, but they couldn’t pin down a chemical or poison.”

  “Which there wouldn’t be. For peppermint. Not like it’s an illegal or managed substance.” She opened the gimballed oven, pulled out what looked to be a big, round pudding thing with a crust. It smelled like sin. Sin times ten. He instinctively moved toward it, but she blocked him with the royal finger. “Go on,” she said.

  “The bottom line is that the pathologist couldn’t pin down anything that would be a court-provable homicide. I repeated the peppermint question. He acknowledged that could have created the problem-but it still doesn’t prove or establish how that happened or exactly how it might have contributed to Fiske’s death. His heart suffered a massive arrest.”

  She started splashing all kinds of unknown things into a bowl, swirling them together with a wooden spatula. “So it doesn’t matter if peppermint killed him?”

  “It matters. But the substance itself doesn’t prove that he deliberately chose to take in the peppermint. Or to take too much of it. Or if it was forced on him. There’s no bruising or verifiable evidence of force.” He didn’t want to talk about this. He wanted Cate back at the springs, couldn’t stop replaying how close they’d come to making love. Her eyes, her mout
h, her hands. The emotions bursting from her, flying off him. He couldn’t explain it, what was happening with them-but it had nothing to do with Fiske, with his uncle’s business, with all the increasing nightmares around them.

  “So,” she said. “We’re stuck on a boat with a murderer. This is so not what I had in mind when I took this job. And Ivan being sick isn’t helping anything, either… Uh-oh.” She glanced up, caught the expression on his face. “What else is wrong?”

  “I hate boats.” He balanced between the counters, but he could feel it-how the wind had picked up. The boat was sloshing from side to side. He couldn’t fathom how she could continue to cook. Even more, he couldn’t imagine why tumultuous seas didn’t bother her.

  “Are you going to turn green on me, Harm?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t get seasick. I just hate boats.”

  “I’ll bet you only hate things you can’t control or fix on your own, right?”

  “Are you insulting me again?” But he was immediately diverted when he saw her open a bottle of liquor and pour it liberally into a saucepan. “You take up drinking while cooking? Not that I’m against it.”

  “Actually, no, although this would sure be a good day for it. The dessert’s called Yukon Bread Pudding because it has some liberal Yukon Jack liquor in the sauce.”

  “What kind of liquor is that?”

  “Trust me. You won’t care when you taste it.” Possibly because this day, like yesterday and the day before, had been exhaustingly traumatic, she suddenly zipped across the galley, pounced up on her toes and planted a good, solid kiss right on his open mouth.

  He had no chance to react before she was back to whisking cream and butter into the Yukon Jack on the stove.

  He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Did I just dream that?”

  “Uh-huh. It never happened,” she assured him.

  The response in her eyes, though, wasn’t teasing but…warning. The two of them had a reckoning coming. It had nothing to do with murder and mayhem, and conceivably might be even more earth-shattering than murder and mayhem, anyway.

  At least for him.

  Maybe for her, too. She stirred the whiskey so hard it almost sloshed out of the pan.

  The sound of the intercom startled them both. Harm was being paged to the pilothouse, where Hans’s voice relayed there was a message for him.

  “Damn,” he murmured.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” she murmured right back.

  But he had to go.

  Chapter 9

  An hour later, Cate was a pinch away from putting dinner on, and mentally yelling at herself for stupidity. Dinner had turned into an award-winning feast, which was ridiculous. She’d created way, way too much to do for a woman recovering from a nasty headache and major bruises.

  In the next life, she was going to learn. She was going to be smarter. And for damn sure, she was going to have good hair.

  She carted plates and silverware to the dining room, then went back to her galley. She glanced at the clock, thinking she had just enough time to hustle down to the crew quarters, and make sure the captain was still alive. Her last trip below, Ivan had yelled that he was dying and anyone who bugged him would die with him-which seemed a good sign. If he was strong enough to yell, he couldn’t be too bad off.

  She stirred, checked, piled used pots into the dishwasher, opened wine to breathe, pulled the herbed tomatoes from the oven. On the intercom, she heard Hans. “Some rough weather building,” he warned her. “Shouldn’t get here for another three hours, but then we’ll all want to batten down the hatches, get things sealed up tight. Afraid it’s going to slow up our return run into Juneau.”

  “You need help, you just say,” Cate said. “You out of coffee up there?”

  “Don’t need coffee, but I’m sure hungry.”

  “It’ll be ready in another twenty,” she promised. Maybe all her flying around wasn’t such a bad idea. She couldn’t dwell on her hurts, on obsessing about who had pushed her last night, on fear for her life. Fear for Harm. Fear of Harm. Damn it. She’d escaped falling in love for twenty-nine years, so how could it possibly happen in less than a week’s time?

  Falling in love just wasn’t in her game plan.

  Yet her heart sprinted the instant she saw Harm, his face and jacket splashed from the temper-prone sea. He had his hand on the door to her galley when he was interrupted. Yale had just walked into the dining room. Harm changed course and entered the side door into the dining area.

  Cate told herself to quit mooning and concentrate. She tasted, almost burning her tongue. It wasn’t easy to get the exact ratios of horseradish and Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce and onion and lime just right. For darn sure she didn’t have time to eavesdrop…but it wasn’t her fault that voices carried clearly from the open dining area.

  From the sound, she suspected Yale had just poured himself something to drink from the liquor cabinet. “I didn’t think I’d get a chance to talk to you alone,” he said to Harm. “Everyone’s going to be coming up for dinner, so maybe this isn’t the time, either. But I’ve got something to say.”

  “So go for it,” Harm encouraged him quietly.

  “I found Arthur going through my stuff. And if you want the truth, I went through Purdue’s things when we first got here. This is killing us all. We’re turning into animals instead of the team players we used to be. I need to be cleared of this. So I want you to…”

  “What?”

  “I want to give you access to my bank accounts, my personal records, everything. I want you to investigate me. I want you to verify that I haven’t come into any sudden wealth, that I have no change in circumstance. I’ll sign anything you want, to give you permission to find out anything you need to about me.”

  Cate held her breath, wanting to hear Harm’s answer…only she couldn’t. The risotto cakes had turned crisp and she still had to prepare the last-minute dishes. She carted dinner up to Hans in the pilothouse, checked one last time on Ivan below-who was still only communicating in swear-speak-then started to serve.

  By then, Arthur and Purdue had joined the group. There was no joking at dinner about anyone falling in love with her. They ate. In fact, they devoured everything she put in front of them, which should have fed an entire platoon. Several times, Harm ordered her to sit down and relax and eat herself.

  Several times, she tried.

  Outside, clouds had blown in, darkened the sky, started pitching rain, which only added to the gloomy mood of the guys.

  “We need to go home,” Yale kept saying.

  And that became the general mantra. As soon as they got home, everything would be better, they’d figure it all out, they’d do this, they’d do that. Arthur suggested publicly at dinner the same thing Yale had cornered Harm about just an hour before.

  “I’ve thought relentlessly about the disappearance and loss of our project,” he said to Harm. “And I think one thing you need to do…you must do…is look into all of our circumstances. Check out financial records. Our homes. Whatever you need to do to make all of us more transparent.”

  “I already offered that,” Yale said.

  “I’m not hot to have anyone in my private life,” Purdue said uncomfortably. “But you can look at my finances and taxes and all that crap for sure.”

  Several times, her gaze locked with Harm, even though she was running around between the galley and dining room. But the conversation seemed extraordinary, considering someone had to be guilty of theft-and likely murder and assault, as well. All of them sounded so innocent. All them appeared more than willing to prove there’d been no financial or any other kind of gain or change in their lives.

  Only the formula was gone.

  And Fiske was dead.

  And she’d been pushed off the top deck.

  And now Ivan was sick as a dog-maybe not poisoned, but it seemed beyond coincidental that a man with a cast-iron stomach would suddenly get ill, particularly because his illness proved to be a
catalyst, the one thing that guaranteed they’d all call off the trip and head for home.

  After dinner, Harm announced he was going up to the pilothouse. “Hans must be exhausted. I don’t know when he plans to drop anchor for the night, but I’ll spell him until he chooses to hang it up. If the captain’s still sick tomorrow, I think we should all take turns.”

  Everyone agreed to that. By the time she’d sanitized the galley, the ship was pitching and tossing. The guys all claimed they were turning in early. She checked on Ivan one more time, then headed below deck to her claustrophobic cabin.

  Internet connection was sporadic, but she still managed to connect with both sisters. Startling her no end, there were a series of notes from both. Who is this Harm? demanded Sophie several times, and Lily echoed the same kind of comments. You never mentioned a guy since I can remember. Call immediately when you get back on dry land.

  Cate couldn’t remember saying a word about Harm. Weirder yet, her sisters must have forgotten that she was the caretaker and question-asker, the nosy one who watched out for the two of them-not the other way around.

  She didn’t need watching over.

  After turning off the computer, she stared at the wild seas through her porthole…and then moved. There was something she still needed to do tonight. Something more important than anything she’d done in a long, long time.

  Possibly it took some traumatic accidents and disasters to make her rethink about what really mattered.

  Harm prowled the circumference of the boat one last time-a pretty senseless thing to do in the rain, but he couldn’t rest. Everyone had long gone below, holed up in their cabins like squirrels on a dark winter day. He’d spoken with Ivan, gotten his own key to the pilothouse so he could continue sending and receiving messages through the night. It was still late afternoon in Cambridge, so it was possible more information could still come through from home base.

  He’d accumulated information from the radio tonight nonstop. He had information and evidence of all kinds coming out of the woodwork-but nothing that had settled his mind. He’d never needed their permission to investigate his three men, but the P.I. firm he’d hired had dusted every closet in their lives.