Amber Beach (30 page)

Silence settled into the cabin like carbon monoxide. Jake wondered how long it would be before Honor looked him in the eye again, or at the very least stopped treating him like something that had stuck to her shoe. The tilt of her jaw didn’t predict a turn for the better anytime soon.

Half an hour dragged by. Jake had never thought of himself as a particularly chatty person, but the roaring silence was getting to him. Honor didn’t seem to notice it – or him. She hadn’t actually looked at him the whole time they had been on the boat. The way she acted he could have been a voice speaking out of the air.

More than once he caught himself checking in one of the
boat’s windows to see if he still had a reflection. He opened his mouth to tell her what he thought about sulky women. Then he remembered the way she had looked that morning when he had held her in bed with his hand on her thigh.

Direct confrontation hadn’t worked very well.

The radio crackled to life. The weather bureau had changed its report. Winds from thirty to fifty knots were expected in Haro Strait before noon. Twenty to thirty in the
islands.

“Turn around”, Jake said.

Honor started to look at him, caught herself, and stared ahead. “It’s only nine-thirty. We’ve got time.”

“No. Turn around.”

“But…”

“Get out of the helm seat.”

With a hissed word, Honor turned the SeaSport around. If it came to
a
contest of strength, she would lose. Big time.

Jake reversed the chart plotter so that it would give them way points back to the dock.

Silence settled in once more with the weight and color
of lead.

Honor glanced from the rumpled water in front of the bow to the “heads up” radar display. She was off course. Carefully she corrected, then waited for a few seconds before deciding whether she needed to correct again. She had learned that boats and cars didn’t drive at all alike. Most of the time boats were a lo
t less sudden. Sometimes they were a lot more.
The solid line on the radar merged with the dotted line of the course she was supposed to follow. She took visual sightings on the islands ahead, kept alert for floating logs, checked the angles and speed of approaching craft, and spared
&
few seconds to glance at the gauges for anything unexpected.

After fifteen minutes of watching Honor watch the water, Jake’s jaw ached from the tension of biting back all that he
wanted
to
say about stubborn Donovans. He set his jaw even tighter and decided to try a more subtle approach. Somewhere beneath all that icy female fury was an intelligent, reasonable woman. More to the point, she loved him.

He had it from her own sweet lips.

“I met Kyle about two months ago”, Jake said, “when Archer sent him to the Baltics to be the liaison between my own company, Emerging Resources, and Donovan International. Usually I work out of Seattle. The only reason I went to Kaliningrad at all was that my rep there had a bad appendix.”

He waited for some sign that Honor was listening. If she was, she didn’t respond to the lure. He made a disgusted sound, reined in his temper, and asked in a voice dripping with reason, “How can we settle anything if you won’t talk to me?”

“What’s to settle? I need you to teach me about the boat and you need me to get to Kyle.”

“What about last night?”

“Was it good for you, too?” she asked with a total lack of interest.

“It was the best I’ve ever had.”

“That’s nice. Why isn’t the outdrive gauge showing dead center?”

“It’s not supposed to be. Honor, I’m not going to let you turn your back on last night.”

“Should I be worried about those clouds? It’s getting really black along our course line.”

Jake didn’t even bother to look at the weather hanging low over the San Juans. “Talk to me.”

“I am, but you aren’t listening. Those clouds go all the way to the water.”

“We’re like a frog’s ass. Waterproof. How long are you going to make me pay for not cutting my own throat and telling you everything the first time we met?”

“A watertight frog butt. Now there’s a thought.”

“You were a Donovan and the Donovans got me kicked out of the Russian Federation.”

Honor held on to the wheel and her own temper. She had always thought that Kyle could talk anyone into anything. Now here was Jake with his earnest whiskey-and-velvet voice, his razor-edged mind, and a body that had taught her things about herself and overwhelming pleasure that she would spend the rest of her life trying to forget. Or duplicate.

Even worse, she kept going over and over it in her mind. Not just the sex, the whole mess. She hadn’t been honest with him. He hadn’t been honest with her. But she damn well hadn’t slept with him as a means to finding her brother. Jake couldn’t say the same.

Why else would he have been so careful to give her the kind of incredible pleasure he had? She had made it pretty plain that he attracted her; he had followed up in a way that was guaranteed to keep her happy about having him around. She was
a
fool. She had been a fool since Jake walked into her life, a life that was already thrown off balance by her brother’s disappearance.

Silence expanded until it was a living, smothering presence in the cabin.

Jake watched Honor for any sign of response to his words. All he saw was increasing tension and a disgust she couldn’t quite hide beneath her careful lack of expression.

“Is it so impossible”, he asked through his teeth, “that Kyle might, just might, have gotten in over his head with Marju and done something really stupid?”

“You know her better than I do.”

“She’s about the sexiest thing since Eve.”

“Kyle is hardly a kid. He’s been chased by experts.”

“Marju is different.”

“This will come as news to you, but we’re
all
different.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t”, she said, staring out through the increasing
rain. “I do know that asking me to choose between my brother who has never betrayed me and a man who has just betrayed me isn’t very bright.”

“I didn’t betray you!”

Rain poured down, drenching the
Tomorrow
in transparent sheets of water.

“You didn’t betray me”, she said indifferently. “Right. Where are the wipers on this thing?”

“Here.” Jake’s hand shot out and slammed on all three wipers at once. Then he let out a seething breath and tried sweet reason
again.
It wasn’t very successful. His voice was more
angry
than sweet. “I didn’t betray you and you damn well know it.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Shit.”

“Another point of agreement. See how easy it is?”

Jake took several slow breaths and another, hopefully better, grip on his temper. Honor’s newfound habit of agreeing with him and not meaning a word of it was sawing away at his self-control. It was impossible to argue with someone who was so damned agreeable.

The computer cheeped, signaling a way point successfully passed. Honor watched the
radar
screen until it completed a sweep of the circle and put the new course in place. She corrected the wheel, looked where her new course would take them, and instantly changed her mind about staying on it.

One of the massive Washington State ferries was barreling toward them out of the rain. In addition to the
Tomorrow and
its three watery shadows, there were three more small craft to keep an eye on, plus a huge tanker with accompanying tugs, and a shrimper crisscrossing the water while dragging its strange-looking net in search of even stranger looking prey.

“A boat with nets out has the right of way”, Jake said.

“What does he think he’s doing in the center of the shipping channel?” Honor muttered, adjusting course.

“Fishing. And he’s not in the center. He’s at the crotch of the Y where two shipping channels merge.”

“What about the freighter and the ferry?”

“They’ll miss each other. And unless the shrimper is nuts, he won’t push the right-of-way issue. Just like we won’t. We’re in the ferry’s danger quarter, but we’ll give way to him instead of vice versa. Man-made rules are one thing. The natural laws of mass and momentum are another thing entirely. There’s something known as being dead right.”

Cold rain made the windows start to steam up. Jake reached past Honor and turned the defrosters on low. She flinched and jerked back when his arm brushed against her. He ignored it, adjusted the radar to reach out into the rain for miles in all directions, and studied the new display. No new boats showed up along the
Tomorrow’s
course.

“All right”, he said. “Imagine an old-fashioned clock. We’re at the center. Straight ahead of us is twelve o’clock, straight
back is six o’clock…”

“Three o’clock is ninety degrees to the right”, she interrupted impatiently, “and nine o’clock is ninety degrees to the
left. Now what?”

“Head halfway between one and two o’clock”, Jake said.

Honor glanced uneasily at the closing gap between the freighter and the ferry. That was where Jake’s directions would take the SeaSport.

“Do it”, he said flatly. “The longer you hesitate, the worse
it will be.”

While she changed course, he brought the radar back in to sweeping only the nearby water. The rain was letting up, but not the clouds. They were coming right down to sit on the ocean. Though the resulting condition wasn’t the same as fog, it had a bad effect on visibility.

“Jake, I can’t see the…”

“Look at the
radar”,
he interrupted, pointing to the screen. “That’s the ferry. That’s the freighter. That’s the shrimper.

That’s the sailboat. That’s the Grand Banks cruiser. That’s the idiot in the skiff. You’re going here. Bring your speed up.”

“What about the boats behind us? One of them is veerins toward shore.”

“Conroy. His
Zodiac
has a really shallow draft. The tide is low, but he’ll be able to scoot along the shoreline out of traffic. The rest of them can drop back or take their chances.”

“What about us?”

“At high tide we could get away with what Conroy is doing. But there are rocks that come within two feet of the surface at low tide. We need more water than that. The freighter and the ferry need a hell of a lot more. They’ll stay well inside the channel markers. We’ll stay just outside them. Watch for logs. Two currents come together right around here, which means debris collects. Remember what I told you about a log if you can’t avoid it?”

“Steer into it, not away from it. Jake, that freighter…”

“I see it”, he interrupted.

What he saw was that the freighter wasn’t holding the expected course. It was staying in the
Tomorrow’s
danger quarter, which meant there would be a collision unless one of them changed speed or course.

Quickly Jake checked the
radar.
Instinct ran cold fingernails over his spine. Normally he would have cut back on the throttle and waited for the traffic to clear. It was the sensible thing for a small craft to do when playing with seagoing elephants.

But if the
Tomorrow
slowed down now, they would be swamped by the oncoming ferry. The ferry’s captain would get a reprimand and an early retirement for not suspending natural laws by giving way to the SeaSport in the ferry’s danger quarter. Jake and Honor would get an early grave.

“I’ll take over”, he said.

If she had any objections, she didn’t get a chance to voice
them. He pulled her out of the helm seat and dumped her in the pilot seat before she could open her mouth.

“Hang on”, he said as he reached for the throttle. The second set of carburetor jets kicked in with a throaty growl of delight. Jake’s fingers danced over the controls as he set a new course, adjusted the trim, turned the defrosters onto high, and settled in for a short, rugged run through the narrowing window of safety.

The
Tomorrow raced
across t
he water. There were moments when it was more like riding a skipping stone
than a boat, but it worked. The freighter began shifting out of dead center in their danger quarter.

Even so, it was going to be close. Very close. The freighter gave three short blasts of its horn. “Stiff-necked bastard”, Jake muttered. “He’s got better radar coverage than we do. He could change course without endangering or even inconveniencing himself.”

Obviously the freighter wasn’t going to do that. In fact, if it had changed course at all, the result was to bring the huge ship closer to rather than farther away from a collision with
the SeaSport.

Honor gripped the dashboard with one hand and the fixed armrest with the other. Even so, the force of the boat hurtling through the choppy water lifted her off the seat and slammed her back down with spine-rattling force. In tight silence she watched the freighter loom closer and closer on the
radar.