Stryker's Wife

“Gimme that,” he said, and she wondered fleetingly if he was robbing her. “Watch yer step—there’s ropes and stuff.”

Deke let him take the basket. He would hardly be warning her of hazards if he was planning on mugging her. Any mugger worth his salt would have grabbed her purse and camera case first. The camera alone was worth a couple of thousand dollars. It had belonged to Mark. It was one of the two things he had left her, which was just fine, because she hadn’t married him for his money.

Three things, if you counted a nagging sense of disappointment.

The boy handed her down into the boat with an old-world courtliness that Deke found oddly touching.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

He flashed her a grin and leapt onto the pier. “Gotta run,” he said just as someone spoke from behind her.

“Miss that school bus, boy, and you’re road kill.”

“Aye, sir!”

Turning, Deke encountered the man she had seen only from a distance the day before. Tall, tanned, lean and blond, he would have been the handsomest man in captivity without the eye patch. With it, he was quite simply devastating. And not entirely because, as a writer of children’s adventure stories, she was partial to pirates.

“Captain Stryker?”

Kurt nodded. “Ms. Kiley.”

“I’m early.”

“A few minutes.”

The words meant nothing. Kurt sized up his passenger. She was tiny. Looked as if a stiff breeze could capsize her. Good thing he didn’t charge by the pound.

Still, a charter was a charter. Every one added a few more bucks to the house fund. In case the child welfare people wanted to make a federal case about his casual arrangement with the boy, he needed to get them off the R&R and settled in a real house as soon as possible. That ought to weigh in his favor.

“I’ll set your gear below,” he offered, reaching for the basket, from which the neck of a dark green bottle protruded. “You didn’t have to bring your own rations. Sandwiches and drinks are included in the price of the charter.”

She murmured something he didn’t quite catch, mainly because he was too busy checking her out. Yesterday he’d thought she was plain. Just went to show you the dangers of making snap judgments. She was plain the way a sunrise over a frozen bay was plain.

He settled her in one of the three fighting chairs bolted to the deck and headed topside. Frog had cast off before he’d jogged out to meet the school bus. “You need any sunscreen?” he called down over the muffled throb of the wet exhaust.

She twisted around and glanced up at the flying bridge. She had a nice smile. Simple, uncomplicated. She was probably a nice woman, he thought as he eased out into the harbor. Attractive, nice…and already spoken for, if the plain gold band on her third finger, left hand, was anything to go by.

Not that he was interested.

They were well beyond the breakwater, headed for open sea, when he sensed her presence on the ladder behind him. Some passengers weren’t content to stay put and let him get on with his job. That was where Frog came in. For a streetwise kid who was, in the parlance, “known to the authorities” in several states, he was surprisingly good with people.

Kurt wasn’t. He hoped she hadn’t followed him topside looking for conversation.

She was hanging on to the ladder, her eyes wide, her face a little too pale. “Do you know the place where that plane went down a couple of years ago?” She had to raise her voice over the sound of the engines.

“Wreck Rock? Yeah, I know it,” he called over his shoulder.

“Is it very far?”

“About a thirty-minute run on a good day.”

“Is this a good day?”

Kurt was tempted to say it was looking better all the time, which surprised him, because he wasn’t into that sort of thing. “Yeah, this is a pretty good day if you don’t count the tropical depression that spun off the west coast of Africa a few days ago.”

“Africa?” She looked puzzled, faintly worried.

“Forget it. This late in the season, it’ll probably fizzle before it even hits the Leewards.”

She still looked puzzled, making him wish he’d kept his answer brief and to the point. “Oh. Well, could we go there? The plane crash site, I mean—not Africa.”

Ditzy.

Nice. Attractive in a quiet way, but definitely ditzy.

“Sure, but tell me first, are we talking dolphin, as in the fish? Dorado? Mahimahi? Or dolphin, as in the mammal? What we call porpoise. The bottle-nose. Because if it’s the fish you want, I can take you to a place where you’re more apt to find ’em. Wreck Rock’s too new. Takes time to build up a good feeding reef.”

“Oh, but—”

She was a distraction, but he couldn’t very well ignore her. Besides, she looked as if she could do with some distraction herself. She was beginning to turn a bit green about the gills.

The roll up on the bridge was more pronounced. He wanted to suggest that she go below and watch the wake, but she looked so…needy. It was the first word that popped into his mind. So he tried his hand at distraction. “Now, if it’s fish you’re interested in, there might be a few sheepshead around the place where that jerk from Virginia and his mistress went down. Not as much sport as billfish or big blues, but good eating. Real good eating. We might even run into a few tuna, too, speaking of good eating.”

Maybe speaking of eating wasn’t such a hot idea. She was looking sicker by the minute.

“I beg your pardon,” she said, just as if she weren’t fighting to hang on to her breakfast, “but the plane that went down happened to belong to a well-known businessman. The person traveling with him was his secretary, not his—”

He saw her swallow hard, saw a film of sweat break out on her upper lip. He was sympathetic, but never having been seasick, he couldn’t exactly share her misery. “If you say so. I didn’t know ’em personally, you understand—it happened before I moved to Swan Inlet, but folks around here knew ’em both. They used to fly in and hitch a ride out to their private love nest, according to—”

“She was his secretary,” the woman called Deke said firmly, then spoiled the effect by gulping and moaning softly.

Oh, man. He should’ve offered her a patch or a pill when she’d first come aboard. Most fishermen, if they needed an anti-motion potion, brought their own, but this lady didn’t look as if she’d ever set foot on a boat before.

“You want to go below and lie down?”

She took a deep breath, climbed up a couple more rungs, and to his own disgust, Kurt couldn’t help noticing that as small as she was, there were some modest but intriguing curves under that sweatshirt. “No, I’ll be just fine. Tell me about—oh, anything. Just talk to me, take my mind off my stomach and I’ll be all right.” She smiled, but it was a weak effort.

“Frog—he’s my mate—the kid who helped you aboard? He’s also my social director. I’m not much of one for talking.” He made a minor adjustment in their course and then set the squelch on his ship-toshore radio.

“Why did you call it Wreck Rock? I didn’t think there were any rocks along this part of the coast.”

Kurt shrugged. “There’s not, as far as I know. Just a name. Easier than calling it by the coordinates.”

For several minutes she engaged in deep breathing exercises. Kurt hoped it worked. It was too late for Dramamine, and verbal distraction—at least his brand—didn’t seem to be helping much. The wind was picking up, pushing an incoming tide. He quartered the seas as best he could without getting too far off course.

“I’m hoping to see the mammal, not the fish. I want to take a few pictures if we see any. And she was his secretary,” the woman said belligerently. “It said so in all the reports.”

That was fine with him. If she wanted to believe Noah had gone down with all hands and hooves aboard, it was no skin off his back. “Okay, Flipper the mammal it is, and she was his secretary. They spent all those weekends out at his private island, just the two of them, working on quarterly taxes.” He scanned the sky, adjusted the throttle and made another minor course correction.