MILLION DOLLAR BABY

by Patricia Ryan

  "That's how he looked when I knew him," Laura offered. "I never imagined him with long hair."

  "Are you checking this out?" Kay asked, pointing to the text of the article. "He saved two kids from drowning on the seventeenth." She read aloud from the article as Laura read along:

  "It was four years ago that 29-year-old Portsmouth resident Dean Kettering received his honorable discharge from the United States Air Force, in which he served as first lieutenant, but it was Saturday night that he truly earned his hero's stripes. Two Newport youths, 15-year-old Evan Ashford and 16-year-old Brent Campbell, after leaving a Saint Patrick's Day celebration at a friend's home in Portsmouth at approximately 1:00 a.m., found themselves at Howell's Marina. On impulse, they untied a canoe belonging to the marina and paddled it into the Sakonnet River, where it capsized, plunging them both into the bitterly cold water. The boys, being inexperienced swimmers and intoxicated at the time, would likely have drowned had their screams not awakened Dean Kettering, one of Howell Marina's handful of winter 'live-aboards,' who was asleep on his sailboat when the mishap occurred. Mr. Kettering jumped into the river and swam in the dark through chunks of ice to the two boys, hauling them both to safety."

  "Wow," Laura murmured.

  "Okay, time out," Kay said. "Are they saying this guy lives on his sailboat? Year-round? In the winter in New England?"

  "Evidently." Laura swiftly scanned the rest of the article. "Yeah, read farther down. It says he runs day charters in the summer and writes freelance articles for travel and sailing magazines in the winter."

  "What kind of a lunatic spends the entire winter all alone on a sailboat surrounded by ice?"

  Laura just sighed. No one had ever accused Dean Kettering of being conventional. Or sensible.

  "So…" Sitting back, Kay lifted Laura's wineglass out of her hand and took a sip. "Where do you suppose the money came from?"

  "Huh?"

  "The million dollars he gave you." Peering at Dean's disreputable-looking "after" picture, Kay said, "Could it be ill-gotten gains? You think maybe he uses that boat of his to run drugs – something like that?"

  Laura grabbed her wineglass back with a scornful roll of the eyes. "Dean Kettering is the last person in the world I would suspect of doing something like that."

  "I dunno," Kay said, studying the picture. "He looks like a real wild card, if you ask me."

  "Yeah, well, he is, to a point – or was. Back at Rutgers, Dean was … Will used to call him 'untamable.' For an ROTC guy, he was a real maverick, always raising some kind of hell with his superiors, then tearing around on his bike in the middle of the night – this awesome old 1973 Harley-Davidson Sportster. Once, when we were spending the weekend here, Will and I went looking for him in the morning and found him sleeping on the beach. He used to go off on his own a lot – disappear without a word and come back days later. When we asked where he'd been, he'd just shrug and change the subject."

  "Off tom-catting in the middle of the night?"

  "Maybe so, but no one girl could ever get a leash on him."

  "So he had trouble walking the straight and narrow." Kay grabbed the wineglass back. "If you're trying to convince me he's incapable of running drugs for a living, you're going to have to do better than this."

  "The thing you've got to understand about Dean is, underneath it all, he was pretty much a straight arrow when it came to the letter of the law. He never so much as took a hit on a joint the whole time he was in college. He's the last person I would expect to get rich from crime. Plus, if he were rich, I hardly think he'd be living on his sailboat – not year-round. It's got to be a brutal life in a lot of ways."

  "Okay, you've sold me. He's not a drug dealer. He's an okay guy deep down inside, even if he does march to a different drummer." Pointing to the article on the screen, Kay said, "Hell, he's a hero. So why won't you take the money?"

  "Can't we just say I have my reasons and leave it at that?"

  "For the record, I hereby refuse to tell you how to send something by Federal Express."

  "That's all right." Laura reappropriated her wineglass and took a slow sip as she studied Dean's picture – the new picture, with the long hair and the haunted eyes. "I'm not going to be sending the check to that lawyer."

  "Yes!" Kay shot a fist.

  "I'm going to bring it back to Dean myself. Tomorrow I'm going to drive up to Rhode Island and—"

  "Nooo," Kay moaned, literally tearing at her steel-wool hair.

  "’Fraid so. Listen, would you look after Janey while I'm gone? Tomorrow's Friday, so if you wouldn't mind driving her to preschool…"

  "Laura…"

  "I'll have to rent a car – my transmission is shot. And I guess I'll have to stay in a motel tomorrow night, so don't expect me back till Saturday afternoon." This little jaunt was going to set her back at least $150, Laura realized with dismay.

  "You're crazy if you think I'm actually going to assist you in this insanity. Unless…" A devilish spark lit Kay's eyes. "One has to wonder about this sudden decision of yours to bring the check back personally instead of just returning it to that lawyer."

  "Wonder all you want," Laura retorted, trying not to stare at Dean's image on the screen. "Do you have a map of New England? I don't think I do, and I've got to plan my route."

  "A map? How utterly antediluvian, my dear. That's what trip planning software is for." Kay logged off and popped a disk into the CD-ROM drive. "So, you never answered me. How come you're bringing the check back to him yourself?"

  Laura shrugged with forced nonchalance. "Maybe it's just the least he deserves after going to the trouble of sending it tome."

  "Common courtesy, huh?" Kay asked with a skeptical smile.

  "Something like that."

  After a thoughtful moment, Kay reached for Laura's hand. "You can tell me, you know. Whatever it is, whatever this is really all about…"

  "I know that, Kay. Just…" Laura squeezed her friend's hand and released it. "Not now. Not yet."

  Kay nodded and punched a few keys; a map and some colorful text unfolded on the screen, accompanied by a tinny flourish of trumpets.

  "Kay," Laura, said, "I really appreciate your helping me this way, even though you don't think I should be giving the money back."

  "Don't be so quick to thank me," Kay said as she typed. "Seeing the way you react to him, I'm half convinced he's going to talk you into keeping the money."

  "Impossible."

  "Is it? Once you're face-to-face with him, after all these years … anything could happen." Kay cast Laura a shrewd little smile. "Anything at all."

  * * *

  Chapter 4

  «^»

  Laura stopped in her tracks on the snow-dusted pier when she saw him. He was standing on the deck of his sailboat, backlit by the rosy flush of a setting sun as he broke up ice off the port side with a boat hook.

  An old salt who was a dead ringer for Popeye had pointed out the boat when she'd arrived at the marina after a brutal all-day drive from Long Island to Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

  "Dean Kettering's moored down that away," Popeye had informed her, gesturing with his pipe toward the far end of the pier. "A fine wooden sloop he's got. Thirty-six feet. Calls her the Lorelei."

  The Lorelei? It didn't mean anything, Laura told herself as she walked slowly down the pier, reading the names on the hulls of the iced-in boats. Dean had always been into the old legends. It wouldn't do to start reading meanings into things like that. She had a reason for being here, and when she'd done what she had to do, she'd turn around and go home.

  And never seek him out again.

  There it was. The Lorelei.

  And then she saw him, hacking away at the ice with fierce determination. Unkempt hair fell around his face as he thrust the boat hook, wielding it like a weapon. In lieu of a jacket, Dean wore a big, blue woolen sweater with a ragged scarf wrapped around his neck.

  She stared at him, her breath coming in icy gusts of vapor. Her ears burne
d from the cold; she pulled her hood up, wishing she'd brought a hat.

  It was him. She recognized the squarded-off breadth of his shoulders, the length of his arms and legs, the controlled, strangely savage grace of his movements.

  Laura jammed her hands – trembling despite her gloves – into the pockets of her parka. The check in its green envelope crackled in the righthand pocket. This was a mistake. She should have couriered the check back to that lawyer. She shouldn't have come here.

  Why had she?

  Dean turned and looked at her, his eyes like blue fire in the ruddy dusk, the boat hook held poised like a spear. Unshaved, his hair lashing his face, he looked like a barbarian warrior poised for the kill.

  Her heart thumped painfully in her chest.

  Turn. Go.

  He peered at her through his wind-whipped hair, his customary remoteness turned hard and impenetrable, his jaw set. She knew he couldn't see her face well enough to recognize her.

  She withdrew a hand from her pocket and lowered her hood.

  Several seconds passed. He reached up to rake the hair off his face. Softly, incredulously, he said, "Laura?"

  She swallowed, nodded.

  Dean lowered the boat hook slowly, his gaze never leaving hers, his forbidding expression easing into one of dumbfounded recognition. He looked her up and down, taking in her utilitarian parka, jeans and duck boots.

  His mouth softened. In a voice so low she could barely hear him, he said, "Hey, Lorelei."

  A smile tugged at her lips, but she looked away before it could get the better of her. Do what you've come to do and go.

  Pulling her right-hand glove off, she burrowed into her pocket and produced the green envelope. "I came to give this back."

  It wasn't until his eyes grew opaque again, and the line of his mouth severe, that she fully registered the pleasure that had buoyed his expression, if only momentarily.

  He regarded her in that dark, intense way he had for a moment that stretched six years into the past.

  She approached the boat, holding the envelope in her outstretched hand, now quivering noticeably. "Please take it."

  Dean glanced at the envelope, set the boat hook aside and walked over to her. At the edge of the deck, he reached toward her. She thought he was going to take the envelope, but instead he closed his hand – clad in gray woolen gloves with the fingers cut off – firmly around her wrist. "Come down below."

  "No." She tried to pull away from him, but he held tight. His sweater was faintly redolent of kerosene, its sleeves pushed up to reveal brown forearms roped with taut muscle. "Just take the check, Dean, please, and let me go."

  "You're shivering," he said, rubbing her inner wrist with the pad of his thumb, coarse as sandpaper. "Come down below. I've got a pot of coffee on."

  "Dean, please." She tried to twist out of his grip, but he was far too strong for that. "Just take the check and—"

  "First the coffee." Seizing her other hand, he urged her toward him until she had no choice but to step off the dock and onto the boat. "Then we'll talk about the check."

  Dean guided her with a hand on her back down the companionway and into his galley, where a battered old percolator bubbled away on the stovetop, infusing the small space with the heartening aroma of freshly brewed coffee. He peeled off his gloves and shoved them in the back pocket of his jeans, then pulled his blue sweater off over his head, revealing a threadbare gray sweatshirt underneath.

  "You don't need that jacket down here," he said, holding a hand out.

  Laura took her time removing her other glove and tucking them both away in a pocket of her parka, along with the check. "I'll keep it on. I'm not staying that long."

  "Come on, it's eighty degrees in here." Dean took hold of the pull tab of her parka's zipper, causing her to flinch slightly, and drew it down. Meeting her gaze as he opened the heavy jacket and slid it off her shoulders, he said, "If you think you need armor to protect yourself from me, you're wrong."

  Because he wouldn't try anything, or because there was no protection from him? She let him take the parka and toss it aside, along with his sweater.

  "It's just that I hadn't counted on this turning into a visit," she said as he retrieved two unmatched mugs and filled them with coffee.

  She blinked at the cup he handed her, a thick, oversize mug with a hairline crack meandering through a picture of a Yankee whaler under full sail. Below it, in a quaint old typeface, was the legend World's Greatest Dad.

  "It was cheap," he said in response to her nonplussed expression. "And I liked the boat."

  Laura wrapped both hands around the mug to let its welcome heat seep through her palms and up her arms. "I just didn't intend this, you know? I mean, I only came here to give you back your check, not…" She shook her head in frustration at trying to explain herself. What was she doing here? This was a monumental mistake. She ought to have her head examined.

  "One and a half sugars and lots of milk, right?" He plunked a box of sugar, a quart of milk and a spoon on the counter and leaned a hip against it to watch her.

  Laura sighed and occupied herself with stirring milk and sugar into her cup while she tried to ignore Dean's closeness, the brush of his arm against hers as he lifted his cup of scalding black coffee to his mouth, contemplating her as he took a sip. His head nearly touched the galley's low ceiling. It was too small for him in here, and way too small for both of them.

  "Want to sit down?" Dean asked. "Or would that be too much like a visit?" Not waiting for an answer, he turned and ducked through a doorway.

  After a moment, Laura followed him, finding herself in a small cabin, homey and deliciously toasty. The pleasant tang of wood smoke scented the air, underscored subtly by hints of tobacco and kerosene. Looking around, she saw a fireplace mounted into the bulkhead at one end and a portable kerosene heater at the other.

  "All the comforts of home." Dean pushed an old typewriter, a half-crushed pack of Marlboros and a scrawled-on legal pad to one end of a little table and set his coffee cup down. Reaching into a box beneath the fireplace, he grabbed a few short lengths of wood that looked as if they'd been salvaged off an old boat, and fed them into the flames. "Even if it is pretty much an ongoing battle to keep warm."

  "I can relate," Laura said, looking around for a place to sit. The cabin's two upholstered benches were almost completely hidden beneath piles of books and papers. "I fantasize about having a furnace."

  "You're still making do with that old woodstove?"

  "That's right."

  He shook his head. "It's a lot of work, keeping a whole house warm with that thing."

  "I don't mind tending the stove. It's chopping up wood all winter that gets to me. My hands are so callused you wouldn't think they could still get blistered, but they do. I just had a cord delivered, and I can barely stand to look at it." She frowned as she took a sip of her coffee. "I was wondering – how did you know I was still living in Grandma Jane's cottage? A lot of years have passed since we last saw each other. I might have been living in Alaska, for all you knew."

  The wood in the fireplace hissed and popped as Dean rearranged it with a poker. "Didn't you once tell me she'd left you that house in her will?"

  "I couldn't have. I didn't even know about it till after she died, which was the summer after … I lost Will."

  "How did she die?"

  "A heart attack, and you're changing the subject."

  "Bad habit of mine."

  "No, it's not. Not that you don't have your share of bad habits…"

  He smiled grimly. "The understatement of the millennium."

  "But that's not one of them."

  "A new addition to my repertoire of character defects. Don't let it be said that Dean Kettering doesn't know how to grow and change."

  Laura rolled her eyes.

  Dean turned to face her as he dusted off his hands. "Must have been hard on you, losing your grandmother, especially so soon after Will."

  And the baby – the fi
rst baby – but the only person who'd known about her miscarriage was Grandma Jane.

  "I coped," Laura said.

  "You're good at that," Dean said. "You're very strong. I've always admired that about you – your capacity to tolerate whatever you had to tolerate, and not let it get to you."

  Wanting to redirect the conversation, Laura looked around and said, "Yeah, well, I'm not sure I could tolerate living the way you do – spending all winter in such a small space. Don't you get claustrophobic?"

  "Nah. This is my cave. I hibernate in here all winter and make up for lost time when spring comes."

  "You run charters, right?"

  "Yeah, once I get back from Bermuda."

  "Bermuda!"

  "I sail there at the end of May for a couple of weeks of scuba diving, just to get the winter kinks out."

  "Do you take on a crew?"

  "God, no. Just me. Then I head back here and do the day charter thing for the rest of the summer."

  "You never get lonely?"

  "I'm no pack animal, Laura. You know that."

  All too well.

  "What about you?" he asked. "Do you get lonely?"

  It seemed suddenly very still and close in the little cabin. "No – not really."

  "Is there some guy in the picture?"

  She shook her head. "I'm pretty much a homebody. But that doesn't mean I'm lonely. My best friend lives next door, and I see a lot of her. She used to be a psychologist, but then she decided she didn't believe in psychology anymore, so she decided to open up a bed and breakfast. Remember the old Sullivan place?"

  "That big old Victorian monster?"

  "Yeah, Kay bought it and turned it into a B and B called the Blue Mist She does a sellout business in season."

  Dean nodded, rubbed the back of his neck. "I guess you'd have to call me a homebody, too. Living like I do kind of kills the old social life."

  Was that his way of telling her he wasn't involved with anybody? She wondered why he'd felt the urge to reveal that.