The Deeper the Passion...

by Jennifer Lewis

  You led him on. She could hear her friends’ accusatory voices in her head, even though she hadn’t told any of them about him. Maybe she was embarrassed to stoop so low for a free meal. And now she was here leading Jack Drummond on for the chance to win a reward that would once have been pocket change to her.

  Did this make her a strumpet? It probably would if she was actually sleeping with them. Or even kissing them. She shuddered at the memory of Leo’s cold, wet, sloppy attempt. A fumble from Jack, though...

  She let out a sigh and deleted the rest of her messages. Nothing important. Life was happening back in New York as usual. The rich getting richer, the poor getting screwed out of what little money they had. She couldn’t wait to work her way back into the former group. Which was the only reason why she was here right now.

  Where was Jack? She headed out to look again. The sunset blazed through the kitchen windows, casting a mellow golden light over the expensively refurbished stone counters and the huge industrial appliances. Lights had come on in the hallways—subtle sconces embedded in the limestone walls—but that seemed to happen by magic or automation. “Hey, Jack. Where the heck are you?”

  No answer. She cruised through the living room where a pair of patio doors stood open to the outside, no screen. No wonder he had lizards on his ceiling. Outside the open doors the salt tang of the sea greeted her and a breeze whipped her hair, but there was no sign of her host.

  Barefoot, she picked her way over the prickly grass and down some stone steps to the dock nearest the house. His boat was gone. He’d abandoned her here on this island in the middle of nowhere.

  Suddenly, the golden fingers of sunset, spreading across the dark, still, ocean, looked downright spooky. She glanced over her shoulder. What was she expecting? The ghost of a peg-legged pirate? She sucked in a breath and suppressed a shudder.

  Jack was probably in the arms of some well-stacked barmaid, like all his salt-caked predecessors. What did she care? She only wanted him for his expertise, so the quicker she could get out of here, the better.

  She went back to the map and stared at it, her stomach growling. There were a lot of numbers, but none of them very high. In fact she hadn’t seen a number higher than twenty-five.

  An idea flashed into her mind. If each number corresponded to the place of a letter in the alphabet—if III was the letter C, say, and VII was the letter G...

  Frantically, she grabbed a fresh sheet of notepaper, then scrolled back and forth through the alphabet, translating the numbers again using this new system. Slowly and painstakingly, a message from the past emerged on the crumpled sheet of paper in front of her.

  * * *

  Start at dawne and rouwe due north from Deade Men’s Cowve to the baneyan tree. Set course east northeast and row ye three score strokes. Swing thy prouwe to the horizon and row five score strokes towarde the sunne, where the north spalle of the island meets Raster’s Docke. Keepe them close as ye row seven score strokes east southeast. Hold thy oar alofte at noone and it shall point to that which ye seek forty fathoms belowe.

  * * *

  When she reached the end, she stared at the paper and let out a long exhale. She felt like leaping into the air...for a split second. Then she realized how insubstantial the directions actually were. Dependent on the position of the sun and the angles of the boat to the shore, they might not yield the same results at all after three hundred years of geologic change.

  On the other hand...

  How could Jack abandon her like this? She climbed off the bed and made her way to the kitchen, where she managed to forage together a turkey wrap so he wouldn’t return to find her bleached bones on his patio. Three score strokes. A score was twenty, so three score was sixty. But surely strokes by a big man would be different than strokes by a scrawny cabin boy, and how would she know which was right?

  Let’s just assume Jack’s ancestors all looked exactly like him. Burly, brawny and badass. She sighed. She needed Jack and a rowboat. And he was busy under a barmaid.

  She couldn’t wait until she was independent and didn’t have to depend on anybody for anything.

  * * *

  It was nearly dawn when she heard the sound of a boat engine in the distance. She wondered whether to pretend she’d been asleep the whole time and hadn’t noticed he was gone, then decided she couldn’t be bothered. Instead, she marched to the dock and waited there in the moonlight with her hands on her hips like a neglected wife.

  He watched her from the deck. “Nice to be welcomed home by a beautiful woman.”

  “I’m glad you came home. I thought I might be marooned here forever if you got hit by a bus.”

  “I don’t think there’s been a bus near here since the 1960s.”

  “What a relief. And I cracked the code. Now all we have to do is go dig up the loot.”

  Still in the boat, a cardboard box in his arms, he paused. “Where is it?”

  “Under the sea, of course. Off a spall and three score strokes here and there. We’ll find it.” And she turned and marched back to the house, hoping her backside looked sexier than his barmaid’s.

  “I went to visit a friend.” He put some items in the fridge from the box he’d brought in.

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “Not that kind of friend.” He looked amused. “Were you jealous?”

  Embarrassed that her voice or face had apparently given too much away, she only risked a shrug. “It’s your life.”

  “My friend is an old fisherman who’s been catching dolphin and sea bass off these shores for fifty years.”

  “Dolphin? That’s disgusting.”

  He laughed. “What we call dolphin is what you Northerners call mahimahi. It’s a fish that swims with the dolphins.”

  “Well, that’s clear as clam chowder.” She crossed her arms over her chest again, not at all sure if she believed the fisherman part. “Did you stay up all night singing sea shanties?”

  “I wanted to ask him if he’d ever seen traces of the wreck or bits of spar that could be from it. He said he never has.”

  “How encouraging.”

  “It might be. If it’s buried beneath the sand or locked into encrusted coral it might be more or less intact—missing cup parts and all.”

  “Except that we’ll never find it.”

  He poured himself a big glass of orange juice and swigged it, his Adam’s apple throbbing rhythmically. She tugged her eyes from the sight of his powerful hand holding the glass. She needed that hand to tug on some oars. “Not without my cannons, no.”

  “Cannons? You’re going to lob cannonballs into the surf?”

  “Nope. These are high-tech treasure hunting cannons. They blow air with force and rip holes in the seabed, exposing all the goodies hidden under it.”

  “Boys and their toys. And how many hours did it take you to find out that your friend hadn’t seen anything floating in the water?” She instantly regretted her pathetically catty question.

  Jack grinned. “I like it when you’re jealous. I see sparks flashing in those mystical eyes of yours. Gets me going.”

  “I hate you.”

  One brow lifted slightly. “Getting better all the time. I’ll have to stay away longer next time.”

  “I’ll swim ashore.”

  “I bet you would.” That annoying twinkle of humor lit his face. “And you’ll have to take these with you.” He pulled a big stack of papers out of the cardboard box. “It appears you had some mail forwarded.”

  She felt her face heat. “I needed to send it somewhere. I used your address because I wasn’t sure where I was going to stay.”

  “Or because you knew you were going to stay with me.”

  “Nonsense. But I did come down here to see you, and I figured you wouldn’t mind.” This was getting worse and worse. She didn’t want to admit that she literally had no fixed address now. Her mail and subscriptions followed her like a pack of stray dogs behind a gypsy camp.

  He riffled through he
r morning papers. “The Wall Street Journal? The New York Post and Women’s Wear Daily?”

  “Just trying to keep abreast of certain trends.” The lifestyles of New York’s rich and famous, to be precise.

  “Most people would use the internet.”

  “I’m traditional in some ways. I like to get newsprint on my fingers while I enjoy my morning coffee.”

  He laughed. “You’re an old-fashioned girl in many ways, Vicki. One more thing to love about you.”

  She tried to look steely and unconcerned as she took her papers from him. She’d kept her familiar subscriptions going through her first couple of moves, assuming she’d soon be settled. Once she knew the routine it was easy enough to arrange for them to follow her on her travels. They were a turtle shell of familiarity in her ever-shifting and far-too-mobile world and she hated to start the day without them. Already she was dying to flip to Page Six and see if anything about Sinclair Drummond and his new fiancée, Annie, had crossed the pages. If she did one good deed in her lifetime, it was forcing those two to see they were meant for each other.

  “Do you want to hear what the map says or not?” He didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

  “Sure. Mushroom omelet?”

  “Why not.” She pulled a folded paper from the pocket of her pants. “Here’s what your crusty old ancestor wrote.” She looked up, and was further annoyed to see Jack pulling out a pan and retrieving ingredients from the fridge instead of riveting his attention to her words. As she read, though, he turned and frowned with gratifying concentration.

  “What the heck is a spall?” he said, after a long pause.

  “I looked it up. A spall is something that has broken off. So maybe a little chunk of land off the end of the island?”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “Maybe it’s under the sea now.” Why was he arguing with her over this minor point? “More importantly, where’s Dead Men’s Cove?”

  “Thataway.” He tilted his head toward the fridge. “I found another skeleton embedded in the rocks there the other day. The old family story was that shipwreck victims were washed into the cove by the current. I now suspect it’s where they buried their enemies.”

  She shivered. “Lovely people, your ancestors.”

  He dropped quivering raw egg onto the bubbling oil, and she watched as it hardened into a solid, golden mass. “We’re a proud and solitary race, who don’t take well to interlopers.” He winked.

  “I’d better watch my back, then.” She dragged her eyes from his once again. His wink had sent a little frisson of sensation darting across her midsection. Which was ridiculous. She distracted herself by pulling plates from a shelf and hunting around for cutlery. “What about Raster’s Dock?”

  “Whatever it is, it’s long gone. There was an old homestead just up the coast with a spit of rock, like a jetty, in front of it. Maybe we’ll assume it’s there for the sake of argument.”

  “Do you have a rowboat?”

  “Several score of them.” He grinned. “How many is in a score anyway? I’m guessing you looked it up.”

  “Twenty.” She glanced out the window. “We’d better hurry if we’re going to make it by dawn.”

  “Don’t worry. We have another forty-five minutes. We’re a lot closer to the equator down here than you’re used to. Dawn doesn’t wake you up in the middle of the night, even in summer.”

  She took her plate, now freshly decorated with half the omelet, and dug her fork right into it. She was glad she’d managed to avoid another night in Jack’s bed. She was beginning to think it could be far too risky to enjoy his charms. They might have the same effect as “just one drink” on a former alcoholic. “Let’s hurry.”

  Five

  Jack’s broad back flexed in the light from the electric lantern as they tugged the rowboat from its dusty grave in the disused boathouse. Nets and buoys and fishing rods of every size and description lined the walls and crisscrossed the sandy floor.

  Vicki tried not to break a nail as she helped him lift it over an old crate filled with tangled rope. “When did someone last use this, 1964?” The rowboat was an indeterminate color, somewhere between beige and pink. “And what makes you think it will still hold water?”

  “She’s a trusty one. I use her all the time.”

  “That’s not what this layer of dust is trying to tell me. When would you ever need to row somewhere?”

  “When I don’t want anyone to hear me coming.” He turned back to her and shot her a sly grin.

  Which made her stomach do a crazy flip.

  She grabbed one end of the boat and peered into its depths. “Great. This is your sneaking-up-on-unsuspecting-maidens craft. I hope there aren’t too many condom wrappers in the bottom.”

  He chuckled. “Nope. Don’t see any. Maybe we’ll have to put a couple in there.”

  He didn’t turn around to see her faux-shocked expression. “In your fantasies, Jack Drummond.”

  “Indeed.” He hoisted his side of the boat higher, no doubt to further unhinge her with the sight of his powerful physique. “A man’s allowed his dreams. One of the few rights and privileges no one can take away from us.”

  “Hmm, you’re right. I’m surprised there isn’t a tax on steamy male imaginings.”

  Now she had an eyeful of his burly chest as he walked backward—without looking, she could tell his eyes were entirely on her—out of the old boathouse and down onto the beach.

  She tried to glance past him, out to where the sky was brightening every second, even though the sun hadn’t peeked over the horizon yet. “How long will it take us to row to Dead Men’s Cove?”

  “About three minutes, once we’re afloat. It’s pretty calm today.”

  They shoved the boat out into the water and carefully climbed in while it rocked in the quiet surf. Her feet were bare and the bottom of the boat felt dusty and splintery. Jack rowed and she sat up in the bow, trying to remember the words she’d written down as it wasn’t yet light enough to read.

  “This is Dead Men’s Cove,” said Jack quietly, as they rounded a small spit of land just as the first white-hot sliver of sun peeked over the horizon.

  “Row due north from Dead Men’s Cove to the banyan tree. Where’s the banyan tree?”

  Jack tilted his head back the way they came. Vicki looked through the predawn gloom to see a huge, gnarled tree rising above the sea grape near the beach. “Let’s go.”

  He swung the boat around with minimal effort, bare chest shimmering gold in the first rays of sun. Couldn’t he have worn a shirt? This was distracting and she needed to focus all her attention on following the details of the directions. “How old is that tree?”

  “Dunno. Been there almost forever, I guess.” His muscles contracted and released as he pulled on the oars, sending powerful ripples across his hard belly. She tugged her focus to the spreading branches of the tree again, but her gaze shifted inexorably back to the vision of his strong body at work. Apparently, she had been manless for too long.

  “When we get to the tree, you row east-northeast.”

  “The tree is inland.” He glanced over his shoulder at it.

  “Go as close as you can get and then turn.”

  His broad hands gripped the oars with force. Why was she paying attention to his hands at a time like this? They had only a few minutes to find the location before the sun would be in the wrong place until tomorrow. “How do you know which way east-northeast is?”

  He chuckled. “In my blood.”

  “You probably have a compass somewhere near your solar plexus.” She glanced at it for a moment—flat, hard stomach, beaded with trickles of sweat—then looked hard at the horizon. She could see a boat in the distance, and another farther to the south. She wondered if any of them could guess their strange changes of direction were due to three-hundred-year-old instructions.

  As they neared the rocky coastline by the tree, he swung the boat around ninety degrees and rowed farther out into the oc
ean. “One, two, three...” Sixty strokes. She kept count, glad of something to do while Jack put his entire body weight into propelling the rowboat through the shining water. “Sixty. Now row toward the horizon.”

  With little visible effort, Jack swiveled the boat again and started pulling for the dividing line between sea and sky. Again she counted, this time to one hundred, the words beating an eerie rhythm with the splashing of the oars, out in the quiet world of the open sea.

  She peered back at the shore. To where the north spalle of the island abuts Raster’s Docke. The end of the island was cloaked in trees right to the water. The shoreline behind it looked similarly featureless. Was this where their quest would end? “Eighty, eighty-one, eighty-two...” She kept the count going, staring at the island, looking for a sign, for anything. There was no spall and no dock, with or without extra e’s. “Ninety-nine, one hundred. Stop!”

  Jack brought the boat to an impressive stop by spinning it in place. “We’re supposed to be at the place where the north spall of the island abuts Raster’s Dock, but were out in the middle of nowhere.”

  He squinted at the coastline. “Those rocks there, you can barely see them now, but at high tide they’re exposed and look like the remains of a jetty. I’ll bet anything that’s Raster’s Dock. Don’t know about the spall, though. There’s nothing under the ocean there. If there was, I’d have run aground on it at some point when I was a kid.”

  “Damn.” Vicki chewed her lip and glanced about. “We’re obviously supposed to stare at how they line up as you row east-southeast.”

  “What if the spall isn’t a spall anymore, but is part of the island? It could have been built up by sand shifting in a storm.” Jack stared hard at the wooded tree canopy. “Never bothered crashing my way in there, though, so I don’t know.”

  “Let’s pretend it is and give it a try.” The end of the island didn’t quite line up with where the rocks started. “I think we need to shift thataway a bit.” She jerked her chin to the right.

  “North-northeast, ma’am. I’m on it.” Jack smoothly turned the boat and pulled at the oars. “I see it. Look at those tall trees—or trees on taller land—now they’re lining up with where I know the rocks are. What next?”