The Men of Thorne Island

“Well, you did make him mad with all that special request nonsense.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Sara handed Nick a jar of pickles and he slid it into the refrigerator. “Just because I don’t want to eat Frosted Flakes or Captain Crunch.”

Nick looked up at her, a mock-serious expression on his face. “Tony the Tiger and the captain are American icons.”

She handed him a frozen dinner to put away. “And I don’t mind microwave meals, but do I have to buy every one of them in ‘hungry man’ or ‘family-size’ portions?”

“When you’re living with men, I guess you do. You’re making life different around here already, Sara, and you’ve got to know that’s not easy for any of us.”

She scowled at him before she read the price sticker on a can of tomato soup. Then she read the sticker on a loaf of bread and a half carton of eggs. “All these groceries are from Kroger’s,” she said.

“So?”

“But the marked prices are the same as the ones Brody charged me. He didn’t add anything to the Kroger price.”

Nick didn’t say anything. He indicated another question by raising his eyebrows.

“Well, if he gets the food from Kroger’s…”

“Winkie fills the order at Kroger’s, according to Brody’s list, and delivers it to us,” Nick corrected.

“Okay, but if Brody pays Winkie and doesn’t increase the price to you guys, he’s not making any money.”

“He doesn’t care about that.”

Nick’s offhand statement had just reduced years of accounting principles to insignificance. The idea of being in business, after all, was to make a profit. “He doesn’t care about making money?”

“No. He’s got tons of it already. And the thing about Brody is, he’ll never take a dollar from anyone, but he’ll never give one away, either. I guess that’s how rich guys stay that way.”

She pictured the scowling, ill-tempered old goat and almost laughed out loud. He wore that stupid hat with all the rusty lures. His shorts were held up with a tow rope. His canvas shoes had holes in the toes. He lived in a three-room cottage, which cost him a mere one hundred dollars a month, with a twelve-inch black-and-white TV for entertainment. “So Brody is rich?”

“As Midas.”

“But how…?”

Nick read the label on a can of Vienna sausages and grimaced. “I don’t know how you can eat these things,” he said. “How’d Brody make his money? He invented things. Then, for years he managed the factory that produced his inventions.”

Sara grabbed the can out of his hand and shoved it into the pantry. “What things did he invent?”

“If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”

That was a heck of an answer. “Well, at least he should see if there’s a warehouse club around here, in Sandusky maybe, or—”

“Sara.”

She clamped her mouth shut and stared at him.

“Leave it alone.”

“But I could show him how volume buying…”

Nick stepped closer to her and put his hands on her shoulders. Suddenly the cotton fabric of her T-shirt felt warm, as if heated by the pressure of his palms.

For a moment he said nothing. He just kept a tight hold on her and stared into her eyes. “What do you do for a living?” he finally asked.

“I’m a tax accountant.”

The temporary heat became a cold chill. Nick released her and took a step back. “That figures.”

“What’s wrong with being a tax accountant?”

“Nothing. It just figures. All that talk about volume buying. And the concern over the rent we pay. Your comment yesterday about Millie’s ‘unsound financial arrangement.’ I should have guessed.”

The hot blood of indignation surged through her veins. “What’s wrong with caring about money? What’s wrong with making it, tracking it, keeping it, for heaven’s sake?”

“It’s fine, Sara. Be the best accountant you can be. Just let Brody be the kind of grocer he wants to be.” He turned away from her and headed for the door. “I’ve got work to do,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you later.”

An unwelcome press of guilt weighed on Sara’s shoulders, and she tried to shrug it off. Why should she feel guilty for making a few comments meant to help the man who’d treated her abominably just a few minutes ago? And yet she did feel guilty. It was ridiculous. All she was doing was offering a little common-sense advice that anyone with half a brain would recognize as logical and…

Sara’s mind wouldn’t let her continue her rationale. All at once every heightened sense was focused on the man walking out of the kitchen. All she could think about were his strong, broad shoulders and the graceful tapering of his hips under loose-fitting shorts. Such a man could banish all rational thought from any woman’s mind. “Excuse me,” she said.

He stopped in the doorway and looked back at her. “Yeah?”

“About that bottle of wine you promised me. If you bring it, I’d be willing to share my family-size lasagna tonight.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got a lot to do.” He left her standing there with her temper skyrocketing and her ego plummeting.

She grabbed the cleaning supplies from the cupboard and began scrubbing and scouring everything in sight. And she pictured Nick Bass’s face in every grimy surface.

BANNING CROUCHED in the dark hallway and pulled his service revolver from the shoulder holster. The smells of unwashed bodies and stale beer mingled with the scent of his own fear.

“Come on, come on,” Nick grumbled to the screen. For the last thirty minutes—ever since he’d left Sara—he’d been staring at the words he’d entered into his computer and willing others to follow. These first lines of chapter five of Dead Last had come to him last night just after he’d gotten into bed and turned out his lantern. He’d struck a match and relit the wick so he could scribble the words down on a dog-eared tablet on his nightstand. He often did that—committed the words to paper so his next writing session would start fluidly.

He’d tried to come up with the next line in Detective Ivan Banning’s crisis before extinguishing the light a second time, but nothing else had come to mind. Telling himself a literary lightning bolt would strike him the next morning, Nick had snuffed the lantern flame again and settled down to go to sleep.

Only sleep hadn’t come, and Nick knew why. In the six years he’d lived in the Cozy Cove Inn, never once had a soft, willowy blonde lain between her own sheets—well, his sheets, really—just a few doors away from him.

Nick loved to write about guys whose lives were always in turmoil, men for whom the word norm was synonymous with boredom. But he didn’t like it when his own situation threatened to follow that same path. He’d gotten used to the flawless, undiluted routine of life on Thorne Island, and Sara Crawford was like oil to the pure water of Nick’s existence.

He didn’t like thinking about her sleeping down the hall. He didn’t like not sleeping because he was thinking about her. And he especially didn’t like the hot, sweet jolt of energy that thinking about her brought to parts of his body that had become accustomed to their own special tempo of regularity.

And now there was this new dilemma. He couldn’t figure out how in the world Banning was going to move from that smelly hallway into apartment number seven. Sure as black on a bat, Nick had writer’s block. He rarely suffered from it, but the inability to put words to paper did afflict him every once in a while. Like when he remembered with spine-chilling clarity the cold, gray gutter slush of Prospect Avenue seeping into his clothes and turning red with his blood. Or when he recalled the hands of the medics working over his lump of a body, and the one cheerful guy telling him he would be all right. And Nick knowing full well he was lying.

Now those were good reasons to experience writer’s block, but Sara Crawford? If he had to rate the significant moments of his life, he wouldn’t put meeting her up there with nearly dying. Thinking about it rationally—and telling himself that thoughts about women could be handled this way—Nick knew why Sara’s presence had affected him so adversely.

He’d touched her.

In the kitchen he’d put his hands on her shoulders and looked into those fresh-water-blue eyes and nearly forgotten what he was saying.