“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 mouth, 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.