“Really, I can’t.”
“It wouldn’t be for long. I figure we’ll be in Cambridge no later than three days from now. Late Friday night’d be the soonest, if we can book flights and arrangements all work out. If we’ve got a chance of finding something, I believe it’s got to be this weekend-before everyone shows up on Monday, and the culprit has another chance to cover his tracks.”
“Really, Harm. I can’t.” In the dining room, she heard sounds…probably Arthur, pouring his first cup of joe. And then Purdue. Both of them started talking, then went up on deck.
Harm picked up the argument the instant they were out of earshot. “The police have been all over the place, found nothing. And there’ll be a funeral I’ll need to attend, for Fiske. My absence will be another occasion for the culprit to hide his tracks. So we’ve only got a short time where there’s a shot at getting to the bottom of this. And you’re the only one who can help me.”
“Harm, are you deaf? I can’t!”
“I’d worry if you said yes easily,” he admitted. “You’ve already been hurt. The last thing I want is to risk putting you in any more danger. The problem, though, is that our guilty guy could think you know something, which is likely why he pushed you off the deck to begin with. And if he’s smart enough to pull off everything else he has, from theft to hiding something so massive and protected, to possibly murder and definitely hurting you-then he’ll sure as hell be smart enough to track you down, wherever you are. So, I think you’re safer with me than alone. That we’ll both be safer if we stick together until this is resolved.”
For the first time since early yesterday, her head screamed like a banshee. “You’re so slick. You think you can talk anybody into anything,” she said disgustedly.
“Only for my girl.”
“I’m not your girl. And just for the record, I’m not falling in love with you!” She whirled around, just in time to see Arthur and Yale standing patiently at the end of the doorway.
“We were just going to ask about breakfast,” Yale said guilelessly.
“Out! All of you! Out!”
Yale shot out of sight. Then Arthur. Harm turned around, too, carrying the two dishes she handed him to put on the table-but he still didn’t leave until he’d dropped a kiss on top of her head.
“Last night,” he said, “you took my heart.”
Then he left. After doing that same thing that roiled up her stomach and igniting the same miserable fight-flight instinct again.
Chapter 10
When the jet bounced down onto the tarmac at Logan Airport, Harm was buzz-tired. Making sudden travel arrangements meant all of them had been on different flights, different times, and never, for damn sure, conveniently. He’d managed to keep Cate with him all the way, but they’d still been traveling for two nonstop days, with meals on the run, and layovers in airports that all looked alike.
He’d never been able to sleep on planes, partly because he was prone to insomnia and primarily because the seats were made for midgets. Cate, by contrast, had zoned out each time an engine started and slept like the dead, mostly sprawled on him. Now, she galloped down the aisle, all perky and bossy.
She started out with, “You and I are going to have a serious talk. About what I’m really doing here.”
“You know why you’re here.”
“Humph.”
She went along with those humphs until right before the baggage claim escalators, where she stopped all passenger flow by stopping dead and wagging a finger in his face. “I’ll help you if I can. That’s not even an issue. But you and I both know what’s really going on here. You want to be with me. I want to be with you. We’re having temporary delusions that we’ve something mystical and fantastic and rare and extraordinary going on together.”
“And this is criminal how?” he asked carefully.
She didn’t answer that. Someone bumped her, and she charged off toward baggage claim again. “This is just not planned out well. I don’t have any clothes, for one thing. For Pete’s sake, all I carried with me were the clothes I needed for a boat trip in Alaska.”
“Doesn’t seem that hard to use a credit card in a store, does it?”
“I hate shopping,” she informed him.
“I knew you would,” he said mildly. Somehow, even with no rest, his eyes gritty from dryness, and Armageddon waiting for him at the lab, he felt as relaxed as a sleepy lion. It was Cate. Everything she’d said was true. Everything about his feelings for her were suspect and not to be trusted and, well, odd. Odd for him, anyway.
No man felt sure of a woman. Certainly, no man after two divorces felt sure of a woman-much less one as capricious and unreadable as Cate.
But there it was. The feeling that anything was solvable when she was next to him. That nothing would ever be right again if she wasn’t.
She fell silent for a brief-very brief-stretch, while they picked up their gear and made the trek to the long-term parking lot. The weather was a mighty contrast to the damp greens of Alaska. The late-afternoon sky sun-bleached and summer heat baked into the pavement. In the car lot, once he’d given her the general location, he had to chuckle when she instinctively aimed for a black BMW 128i convertible.
“How on earth could you guess which was my car?”
“It’s obvious. Look at the rest of the cars in this row-the Taurus and Chevy and Mazdas. But don’t try telling me you bought it because it’s a precision driving machine.”
“It is.”
“It’s also the sexiest BMW they ever put out. How fast can you get that top down?”
“You’re a good woman, Cate. Forget all the insults I said before.”
She rolled her eyes, but she was getting it back-that irrepressible grin. “We’d better quit with the chitchat. Do we have a plan? Besides your needing to clock in some serious hours of sleep.”
“I don’t need sleep.”
“Harm. You’re going to crash, soon and big. You have to have some rest.”
Maybe he did, but Harm figured he’d have to manage. He knew the other men’s travel schedules. Come Monday morning, latest, everybody would be back to work at the lab. That left him the weekend, at most, for him and Cate to take that place apart from stem to stern.
It wasn’t likely to be enough time.
Even so, he had priorities before that. It felt good to slide behind the wheel, get the top off, put his baby in gear. There weren’t that many miles between Logan and Cambridge, but it was Friday, approaching rush hour, so naturally the roads were jammed. Rather than face Interstate 93, he ducked down the side roads around Harvard.
Truthfully, he could have found a better route than that, but he wanted Cate to get a glimpse of Harvard Square, the white-spired churches, the historical streets with the red brick and white trim and black lanterns. Big old shade trees cooled the side streets, showed off small, elegant gardens, history hiding in every side corner.
“You like?” he asked, but he could tell from the way she absorbed it all.
“Totally love,” she corrected him.
“Yeah, that’s how I felt when I first got here. I don’t know the entire region that well yet. And traffic in Boston-there’s no swear word bad enough to describe it. But still…the whole area’s been growing on me.”
“New Orleans was like that for me. I first went because of the fantastic chefs located there. It’s impossible in the summer, not just hot, but sick-hot. Still, there’s so much character and flavor in the city that it was easy to fall in love with.” She turned to him. “You still haven’t told me the plan.”
“Because I don’t have anything that specific.” There was a lot on his mind, but for long minutes, he’d just been aware of the summer wind in their faces, tossing up her hair, her riding next to him, how nothing had felt this easy or right in a long time. Maybe never. “First plan. We need to drop our bags off at my place. Both of us probably want to catch a shower. Then-out for a decent dinner. Too late to get reservations at a place like the Barking Crab restaurant, but I know a good place locally. So…we’ll freshen up, eat, then drive over to the lab. I don’t know that we can get much of anything done tonight, but we can at least map out our time from there.”