Stryker's Wife (Man of the Month)

by Dixie Browning

  “Gimme that,” he said, and she wondered fleetingly if he was robbing her. “Watch yer step—there’s ropes and stuff.”

  Deke let him take the basket. He would hardly be warning her of hazards if he was planning on mugging her. Any mugger worth his salt would have grabbed her purse and camera case first. The camera alone was worth a couple of thousand dollars. It had belonged to Mark. It was one of the two things he had left her, which was just fine, because she hadn’t married him for his money.

  Three things, if you counted a nagging sense of disappointment.

  The boy handed her down into the boat with an old-world courtliness that Deke found oddly touching.

  “Thank you,” she murmured.

  He flashed her a grin and leapt onto the pier. “Gotta run,” he said just as someone spoke from behind her.

  “Miss that school bus, boy, and you’re road kill.”

  “Aye, sir!”

  Turning, Deke encountered the man she had seen only from a distance the day before. Tall, tanned, lean and blond, he would have been the handsomest man in captivity without the eye patch. With it, he was quite simply devastating. And not entirely because, as a writer of children’s adventure stories, she was partial to pirates.

  “Captain Stryker?”

  Kurt nodded. “Ms. Kiley.”

  “I’m early.”

  “A few minutes.”

  The words meant nothing. Kurt sized up his passenger. She was tiny. Looked as if a stiff breeze could capsize her. Good thing he didn’t charge by the pound.

  Still, a charter was a charter. Every one added a few more bucks to the house fund. In case the child welfare people wanted to make a federal case about his casual arrangement with the boy, he needed to get them off the R&R and settled in a real house as soon as possible. That ought to weigh in his favor.

  “I’ll set your gear below,” he offered, reaching for the basket, from which the neck of a dark green bottle protruded. “You didn’t have to bring your own rations. Sandwiches and drinks are included in the price of the charter.”

  She murmured something he didn’t quite catch, mainly because he was too busy checking her out. Yesterday he’d thought she was plain. Just went to show you the dangers of making snap judgments. She was plain the way a sunrise over a frozen bay was plain.

  He settled her in one of the three fighting chairs bolted to the deck and headed topside. Frog had cast off before he’d jogged out to meet the school bus. “You need any sunscreen?” he called down over the muffled throb of the wet exhaust.

  She twisted around and glanced up at the flying bridge. She had a nice smile. Simple, uncomplicated. She was probably a nice woman, he thought as he eased out into the harbor. Attractive, nice…and already spoken for, if the plain gold band on her third finger, left hand, was anything to go by.

  Not that he was interested.

  They were well beyond the breakwater, headed for open sea, when he sensed her presence on the ladder behind him. Some passengers weren’t content to stay put and let him get on with his job. That was where Frog came in. For a streetwise kid who was, in the parlance, “known to the authorities” in several states, he was surprisingly good with people.

  Kurt wasn’t. He hoped she hadn’t followed him topside looking for conversation.

  She was hanging on to the ladder, her eyes wide, her face a little too pale. “Do you know the place where that plane went down a couple of years ago?” She had to raise her voice over the sound of the engines.

  “Wreck Rock? Yeah, I know it,” he called over his shoulder.

  “Is it very far?”

  “About a thirty-minute run on a good day.”

  “Is this a good day?”

  Kurt was tempted to say it was looking better all the time, which surprised him, because he wasn’t into that sort of thing. “Yeah, this is a pretty good day if you don’t count the tropical depression that spun off the west coast of Africa a few days ago.”

  “Africa?” She looked puzzled, faintly worried.

  “Forget it. This late in the season, it’ll probably fizzle before it even hits the Leewards.”

  She still looked puzzled, making him wish he’d kept his answer brief and to the point. “Oh. Well, could we go there? The plane crash site, I mean—not Africa.”

  Ditzy.

  Nice. Attractive in a quiet way, but definitely ditzy.

  “Sure, but tell me first, are we talking dolphin, as in the fish? Dorado? Mahimahi? Or dolphin, as in the mammal? What we call porpoise. The bottle-nose. Because if it’s the fish you want, I can take you to a place where you’re more apt to find ’em. Wreck Rock’s too new. Takes time to build up a good feeding reef.”

  “Oh, but—”

  She was a distraction, but he couldn’t very well ignore her. Besides, she looked as if she could do with some distraction herself. She was beginning to turn a bit green about the gills.

  The roll up on the bridge was more pronounced. He wanted to suggest that she go below and watch the wake, but she looked so…needy. It was the first word that popped into his mind. So he tried his hand at distraction. “Now, if it’s fish you’re interested in, there might be a few sheepshead around the place where that jerk from Virginia and his mistress went down. Not as much sport as billfish or big blues, but good eating. Real good eating. We might even run into a few tuna, too, speaking of good eating.”

  Maybe speaking of eating wasn’t such a hot idea. She was looking sicker by the minute.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said, just as if she weren’t fighting to hang on to her breakfast, “but the plane that went down happened to belong to a well-known businessman. The person traveling with him was his secretary, not his—”

  He saw her swallow hard, saw a film of sweat break out on her upper lip. He was sympathetic, but never having been seasick, he couldn’t exactly share her misery. “If you say so. I didn’t know ’em personally, you understand—it happened before I moved to Swan Inlet, but folks around here knew ’em both. They used to fly in and hitch a ride out to their private love nest, according to—”

  “She was his secretary,” the woman called Deke said firmly, then spoiled the effect by gulping and moaning softly.

  Oh, man. He should’ve offered her a patch or a pill when she’d first come aboard. Most fishermen, if they needed an anti-motion potion, brought their own, but this lady didn’t look as if she’d ever set foot on a boat before.

  “You want to go below and lie down?”

  She took a deep breath, climbed up a couple more rungs, and to his own disgust, Kurt couldn’t help noticing that as small as she was, there were some modest but intriguing curves under that sweatshirt. “No, I’ll be just fine. Tell me about—oh, anything. Just talk to me, take my mind off my stomach and I’ll be all right.” She smiled, but it was a weak effort.

  “Frog—he’s my mate—the kid who helped you aboard? He’s also my social director. I’m not much of one for talking.” He made a minor adjustment in their course and then set the squelch on his ship-toshore radio.

  “Why did you call it Wreck Rock? I didn’t think there were any rocks along this part of the coast.”

  Kurt shrugged. “There’s not, as far as I know. Just a name. Easier than calling it by the coordinates.”

  For several minutes she engaged in deep breathing exercises. Kurt hoped it worked. It was too late for Dramamine, and verbal distraction—at least his brand—didn’t seem to be helping much. The wind was picking up, pushing an incoming tide. He quartered the seas as best he could without getting too far off course.

  “I’m hoping to see the mammal, not the fish. I want to take a few pictures if we see any. And she was his secretary,” the woman said belligerently. “It said so in all the reports.”

  That was fine with him. If she wanted to believe Noah had gone down with all hands and hooves aboard, it was no skin off his back. “Okay, Flipper the mammal it is, and she was his secretary. They spent all those weekends out at his private is
land, just the two of them, working on quarterly taxes.” He scanned the sky, adjusted the throttle and made another minor course correction.

  When she didn’t argue, he cut her a sidelong glance and immediately wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He’d never been good at small talk, especially when his mind was on something else. And anyway, trying to talk a person out of being seasick was about as effective as trying to talk the tide into not rising.

  What was going to come up was going to come up.

  For a good-looking woman, she didn’t look so good. “You want to go below and lie down?” he offered again.

  “Maybe I’d better. Just for a few minutes.”

  Kurt set the controls and followed her below, hoping she could hold it down long enough to make it to the head. “Through the sliding door—watch the steps. Hang on and I’ll get you some fresh air.” That done, he deftly flipped down one of the convertible benches that served a dual purpose in the compact salon. “Head’s portside, forward. Uh, that is, it’s on the left, right over there. It’s kind of small, but you’ll find anything you need.” He handed her a plastic bucket, just in case.

  She lowered herself carefully, one arm clutching the pale blue bucket. There was a bruised look about her that made him want to comfort her, only he didn’t know how. Wasn’t sure she’d appreciate it, even if he did. The collar of her black silk shirt was rucked up in back, so he smoothed it down and patted her shoulder once, but that didn’t seem like much comfort, not if she was feeling as lousy as she looked.

  Kurt wondered whether to head back to port or keep going. His passenger didn’t look up to making the call, so he backed out of the salon and left her there. If it was Wreck Rock she wanted, it was Wreck Rock she would get. The customer was always right.

  “Lie on your left side,” he called down from the open companionway. “They say it helps.”

  He’d heard it somewhere but didn’t know if it was true or not. He did know that in a case like this, people needed to believe there was someone in charge who knew precisely what they were doing.

  Dutifully, Deke turned onto her left side, which gave her a view of a shirt and a baseball cap hanging on a hook on the wall—or whatever the nautical equivalent was. It was swaying. And swaying, and swaying, and swaying.

  Oh, mercy.

  “‘All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full,’” she whispered. “Ecclesiastes one-seven. Onesix, one-five, one-four, one-three—” As a child, she’d been prone to stomach upsets. Granna Anne used to make her quote Bible verses to keep her mind off her stomach. It hadn’t worked very well. Counting back-ward didn’t work, either. She tried talking to herself. “It’s almost over, Debranne. In a little while you’ll have paid your proper respects to the past and be on your way home.”

  Wherever home was. The Victorian house where she’d grown up was gone, the furniture being pawed over by a swarm of antique dealers. The run-down apartment building where she lived now was about to be demolished to make way for new low-cost housing, which she probably wouldn’t be able to afford, as she earned a few too many dollars to qualify. Her fall royalties this year had amounted to a hefty $23.11, but she had two part-time jobs, each of which paid the minimum wage, less deductions.

  “Talk, don’t think, you nut! Did you bring your light meter?” Talking was supposed to prevent her from thinking about that awful feeling in her belly. “I hope you brought your meter,” she muttered, “because shooting on water is tricky, and you’re going to have to come up with a few decent pictures if you’re planning to write this whole wacko expedition off on your taxes.”

  Because she was going to do it. Guilt or no guilt, she fully intended to write Mark’s memorial service off on her taxes. The whole blooming thing, charter, motel, mileage and all. Caught in the throes of guilt and nausea, she clutched the bucket and moaned.

  But then, Mark would have approved, she reminded herself. Hadn’t he written off their entire honeymoon trip because he had spent a few minutes looking over a shopping complex on Maui?

  Still, she did feel guilty. Partly about the tax thing, but mostly about the fact that she hadn’t really grieved as much as she should. Not that she knew what she could do about that. Evidently she was one of those people whose feelings didn’t run very deep.

  As for this empowerment business, she was beginning to think it was a mixed blessing. So far, all she felt was confused.

  “Hey, you all right down there?” the captain called from the open companionway. He had a nice voice. A little like rusty velvet.

  Goodness, that didn’t even make sense! Deke managed a wobbly smile. “Fine. I’ll be upstairs in a minute.”

  He grinned and saluted her, and she thought, What a nice man. Any other time she might have thought, What a strikingly masculine, stunningly handsome man, but right now, nice was all she craved.

  Mark hadn’t been nice. There, she’d admitted it. He’d been suave and sexy and Hollywood handsome, but nice?

  No. Not really. At least, not after they’d been married for a few months. She’d put it down to his being so busy, so ambitious to get ahead. There’d been all those late nights at the office. All those business trips. Nearly every weekend.

  With his secretary.

  With his young, drop-dead-gorgeous secretary who was supposed to be such a whiz on her laptop he couldn’t travel without her.

  Or maybe she’d been such a whiz on his laptop.

  Deke remembered the night Mark had taken her out to dinner for her birthday. When he’d opened his wallet for his credit card, she’d seen a little silver packet. She’d wondered at the time why he still carried a condom, but she’d been too embarrassed to ask.

  All the same, she had wondered. She wondered all over again. Wondered about that and a lot of other things she had tried for too long to ignore because it wasn’t seemly to think ill of the dead.

  Suddenly, like watching tea leaves settle into a pattern in the bottom of a cup, a picture of her relationship with Mark came into focus. “Well…damn!” she whispered plaintively.

  Still struggling to deal with guilt and nausea, she was overcome with anger. It never even occurred to her that the motion of the boat had changed—less forward, more up and down, with a jiggly little corkscrew action thrown in for good measure—until she heard the sound of uneven footsteps on the little ladder doohickey that led into the living room.

  She sat up, still clutching the bucket. Tears streaked her cheeks, but they were tears of anger. “Are we there?” she demanded as Captain Stryker hovered over her, looking almost as stricken as she felt.

  “Kiley,” he said. “His name was Kiley, wasn’t it?”

  Numbly, Deke nodded. It was one thing to be made a fool of. It was quite another to have it become common knowledge.

  It occurred to her that he looked oddly vulnerable for such a powerful man. “You should’ve told me to shut up and mind my own business,” he growled.

  She swallowed hard. Sitting up made her feel marginally more empowered, but it didn’t do a thing for her seasickness. “I was taught never to tell anyone to shut up. In my family, we say hush. It, um—it sounds softer.”

  “But it means the same thing.” He raked his fingers through his shaggy blond hair, then hooked both thumbs under his belt. “You should’ve said something. I’m sorry, Ms. Kiley—just as sorry as I can be.”

  “Hush. It’s not your fault.”

  He grinned, looking more than ever like the hero of a pirate story in his faded, body-loving khakis. “Hush, huh? How does your family go about telling somebody to butt out and mind their own business?”

  A fresh wave of nausea swept over her, but gamely she replied, “Mostly they just change the subject. Are we there yet?”

  “Speaking of changing the subject? Sorry, we’re only about halfway. I thought I’d better check on you. Do you need anything? Sure you don’t want to head back in?”

  Deke thought about how much this project was costing her. She could hardly
ask for her money back just because on the way to memorializing her late husband she happened to have discovered that he was a philandering, four-flushing, lying, greedy snake in the grass.

  At least he had been all of those things while he was still alive. Poor Mark. No one, she supposed, deliberately chose to be a stinker. As long as she’d come this far, she might as well pay tribute to whatever good there was in him. It would make a nice, tidy end to that particular segment of her life, and she needed that to satisfy her sense of orderliness.

  “I want to go on to Wreck Rock,” she said as firmly as she could, considering she was about to disgrace herself into a plastic bucket that smelled of disinfectant.

  For a minute he just stood there, swaying with the motion of the boat. A shaft of sunlight slanted down through an open hatch, highlighting the golden hair on his tanned, muscular forearm.

  “We’d better hustle you topside,” he said, after studying her with a single sympathetic gray eye. “You’re no sailor, that’s pretty clear. Maybe if you suck on a cola and let the wind blow in your face, you’ll feel better.”

  Under a thin layer of cheap indoor-outdoor carpet that served primarily to cover the twin hatches, the deck vibrated to the beat of the engines below. Kurt noticed that the atmosphere was none too fragrant. Frog had a bad habit of hanging his fishy clothes in his locker instead of tossing them out to be washed.

  Bracing his bum leg against the bulkhead, he bent and slipped his arms under her slight form. She didn’t protest. Probably felt too lousy to argue. Funny thing, though—Kurt had a feeling that small or not, she was nobody’s pushover. He’d caught a glint in her eye, a certain tilt of her delicate chin before she’d been done in by a weak belly.

  In the cockpit, with a cool northwest breeze in her face, he figured she’d come around pretty fast. “Breathe deeply,” he said. “That’s it, nice and steady—inhale, exhale…no, don’t hyperventilate, just take regular breaths. You’re doing fine.”