Safe Harbor (8 page)

****

Holly tried to work that morning, but it wasn't easy; her brain was far too addled after being knocked around by so many different emotions.

Dominant among them was fear for her mother. Depression was one thing, dementia another: the image of a scarily boastful Charlotte Anderson standing in the middle of her husband's demolished study was one that Holly would never forget.

She had offered right away to clean up the mess, but her mother wouldn't let her. "Let it be," she had insisted. "I want him to feel this when he comes back, and he will. I want him to feel every last cut, every last blow."

After that there wasn't much that Holly could do or say, so she left, telling herself that time would make things better. The problem was, who had time to wait for time? Her mother's state was incredibly fragile. It was like watching a child playing with a loaded gun.

Holly's apprehension permeated every brushstroke that she tried to lay down, and the result, after a morning of work,
w
as something that looked like scrambled eggs.

Some sunset,
she thought in disgust. She dumped her paintbrushes into a can of turpentine and wiped off the botched drawer with a solvent-soaked rag. It would take a while to dry, she knew. Best to start on something else.

But what? She looked around with no enthusiasm. That big new bedroom suite taking up half of the barn—she could clear it out simply by painting the damn border on the bed and chests to match the wallpaper sample, just as she'd been commissioned to do. It was a mindless if lucrative job, but
... nah. The client was a pain and her kid was a brat.

She looked for something else to do.

The birdhouses? Half a dozen new ones sat naked in a row, waiting for shingles and picket fences and hollyhocks and little windows with shutters to be painted on them. They would sell like hotcakes. Once she painted them.

Nah.

Her design portfolio of country accessories for the home—what about that? It was an ambitious, ongoing project, and Holly had neglected it lately, which was stupid. She had every intention of shopping it around to a variety of furniture manufacturers. The problem was, she wanted it to look overflowing with ideas, and so far it didn't.

She could just do something simple for it: a design for a dishtowel, maybe, or a working sketch for a canister set. Any little thing, as long it was movement forward. Anything to bring her out of her paralysis.

Nope. Not today. Can't.

She chewed on a fingertip as she roamed the barn, looking for something to start that she could finish. She found a forgotten bag of chocolate chips on one of the easels. There was a job she could start and finish. Holly emptied the bag into the palm of her hand and munched the morsels one by one, stuck in a listless trance.

All the while, at the edges of her vision, ghostly images lurked: her mother, looking devastated. Her mother, looking righteous. Her mother, looking murderous. Those were the faces in Holly's imagination now, not cherry-cheeked kids and slant-eyed cats and sleepy dogs and grazing cows.

I know what I'll do. I'll shampoo my hair. I'll use that five-minute conditioner, that's what I'll do.

Whenever Holly felt really drained of inspiration, she hopped into the shower. There was something about standing there under a steady flow, with pencil and sketch pad unavailable, that let ideas break free and run wild.

She stripped off her shorts and tank top and stepped into her sun-filled shower stall, letting the water run cool and then hot. After shampooing twice, she worked the packet of conditioning oil through her shoulder-length hair and then stood with eyes closed and neck arched, breathing the steamy air. August or no August, she enjoyed the hot flow of water over her body; it melted away the tension, and with it, those appalling images of her mother's agony.

She tried to free her mind for bright ideas and pretty colors, but inspiration wouldn't come. The best she could do was a sudden, unwanted image of Sam Steadman. She saw him with maddening clarity: brown eyes, brown hair, chipped tooth, full lips, washed-out shirt, khaki pants, sockless in his deck shoes and oh-h-h, so not for her. Cocky, yes, that's what he looked. Like someone with a past who couldn't care less about it.

Holly shook her head, less willing to face the memory of him than the one of her mother. No, no, no. Think about something else. Someone else.
Anyone
else.

But distracting thoughts wouldn't come. Instead, Sam Steadman held full sway over her considerable powers of imagination. Where had he come from? How had he got there? Holly groaned and shut her eyes tight, trying to squeeze out his image. She realized for the first time that she had been fighting thoughts of him for the last twenty-four hours straight. It occurred to her—now, finally, duh—that she'd had dreams of him that night, blushable dreams. Suddenly she remembered them wel
l
... remembered his hands, those well-formed, capable hands
... roaming her body, pausing to cup and tease
... and caress
... roaming everywhere....

Her own fingers slid down across her soapy skin, on their way to re-capturing the intense pleasure of those dreams. Yes
... yes
... yes yes yes
....

No! Good grief, no no no! Not him! What are you thinking?

She pulled her hand away from herself, fearful of connecting Sam with conscious pleasure. The thought of
that
was strictly taboo. Sam had something do with
Eden
, and
Eden
had everything to do with her mother's pain. It was as simple, and as complicated, as that.

Holly sighed in massive frustration. Then she took the loofah brush from its hook and scrubbed her back until it hurt.

A
fter learning from the assistant dockmaster at Vineyard Haven that the
Vixen
was a forty-four-foot Roamer sloop, Sam hauled his ass off to the library on
Main Street
to see what a Roamer 44 looked like. In half an hour, he had his answer: it looked like any other forty-four-foot fiberglass sailboat, only a little fancier. How the hell he was going to pick one out from among an anchored fleet—or worse, a sailing fleet—he had no idea.

Shit. Holly Anderson was right: if this didn't qualify as a search for a needle in a haystack, nothing did. Sam's mood was completely frustrated and equally foul as he considered his next move.

Holly. Yep, it all came back to her. Holly Anderson knew
Eden
, knew the boat, and knew the situation as well as anyone. Whatever facts she didn't possess, Sam did; between them, they could surely recover the etching. He wasn't crazy about dragging her into an unholy alliance—she seemed like a sweet enough kid—but catching
Eden
would take all the forces that he could muster.

He got into his rental Corolla (slated to do double duty as a room that night) and drove out
Main Street
, headed for the
Lake
Tashmoo
area on the north side of the island. He knew from their brief encounter that Holly had a house there with a barn out back. How hard could it be to find?

Pretty damned hard, it turned out. Sam drove from
Main
to Daggett to the end of
Herring Creek Road
, where he found a nice little beach but no house with a barn. He had to backtrack to town for better directions, and after one or two false turns down dirt lanes that led either to nowhere or to other dirt lanes, he finally found what he hoped was Holly's place, at the end of an overgrown drive.

He parked his car and looked around. The
Cape Cod
house, white and cozy, was surprisingly isolated. Sam could just barely see its red barn behind high scrub and thick trees. Rubbing the bloody scratch he'd got from a branch through the driver's window, Sam made his way to the front door, knocked hard, and waited.

Holly wasn't home.

By then Sam was mad and sweaty and deep in the grip of caffeine withdrawal. He let loose with a round of curses at the whole dumb mission. He considered leaving her a note, then nixed the idea. What would he say? Come
fl
y with me after
Eden
?

He dropped sullenly back into the seat of his rented Corolla and threw the car into reverse, backing down the scrub-lined drive. He was steering by mirror and was into the second blind curve when he heard and felt it: the sickening crunch of someone's bumper locking with his.

Son of a bitch.

He swung his head around in time to see Holly hanging halfway out of her truck's window and yelling at him.

Perfect.

He climbed back out of his car, tearing more skin on yet another bush, and eased his way between the brush and the vehicles, stopping to check the damage on the way. His rental had taken a bigger hit than her old but higher Ford.

Perfect.

He saw that she stayed put in her seat, opening and closing her fists around the steering wheel in an apparent attempt to stay calm. What nerve.

"I wasn't going very fast," he felt obliged to point out.

"You were going
backwards.
How smart was
that!"

He went on the offensive. "There's hardly room to swing a cat in front of your house. Why don't you clear out some room there?"

"Why? So people like you can stop by?"

"Yeah, well, never mind me; what about your patrons? How the hell do you expect them to find this place?"

"I don't expect them. This is my home. Clients go directly to the studio in the barn," she said, hanging out the window again. She hooked a thumb over the roof of her truck. "They use the drive over that way, the one that leads to the barn? That's why there's a sign over there and not over here?"

Ah, those question marks; those hints of contempt. It fueled Sam's growing conviction that despite her sweet face, Holly Anderson was just another garden-variety socialite—this one, a subsidized
artiste
killing time until the right rich man came along to lift her out of her genteel struggle and drop her into a beachfront house. Which was one thing you had to admit about
Eden
: she didn't expect anything; she always went out and fought for it.

"Well? Now what?" he asked, just for the pleasure of sounding dumb. Let
her
get off her duff and do something.

She rolled her eyes. "Is there any actual damage?" she asked as she would a child.

"Come out and see," he said calmly.

"Not here. There's too much brush. Drive back to the house, please, so that
I
can assess."

"Your wish is my command," he said in response to her command. What the hell, it was one way to get inside her place.

Self-conscious now, he drove too fast, hit a pothole, and knocked his head against the roof of the Corolla. He swore again; it was all her fault. And what wasn't her fault was
Eden
's. Women! He should've gone to sea when he'd had the chance back when.

He got out of the car, and so did Holly. It struck him again how truly guileless and innocent she looked. There was something about her face, maybe in those green eyes. Inexperience? If so, she was being brought up to speed the hard way.
Eden
's way.

Damn it,
Eden
. Why'd you walk out on me?

The thought vaporized almost as quickly as it formed, replaced by a rush of frustration over his ridiculously complicated pursuit of her. Her escape on a boat was bad enough. But a fender bender in the middle of a dirt drive—could it get any more stupid than that?

"That's a nasty scratch," said Holly, pointing to his right arm.

But it was his left arm that stung. Confused, Sam twisted his right one for a better look and was amazed to see a trickle of blood wending its way down the back of his forearm. He felt like a flunkout in an Outward Bound program.

"I bleed easily," he said with an embarrassed smile.

He'd found it out years ago after he came home one day to a cleared-out house.

"Come inside," she said, surprising him. "You can put something on that before it gets bad."

She breezed right past their beat-up bumpers without bothering to look at the damage. It gave Sam hope. She seemed to be a soft-hearted type; he'd be able to bend her to his needs.

He followed her inside through a short center hall into a humble kitchen with a linoleum floor, a sink on legs, and a stove from the fifties.

"Clean yourself up with soap and wet paper towels," Holly ordered as she tore off some sheets from a roll near the sink. "I'll get the iodine." She gave him a look that said, "And don't you dare try anything funny," then blew off his thanks on her way out of the kitchen.

Sam dabbed at the scratches gingerly, trying not to make them bleed. The odd thing was, it wasn't an heiress's kind of kitchen at all. And yet Holly certainly came from money. Her parents had a
million
-dollar antique house in Vineyard Haven; he'd seen it himself.
Obviously
there was money in the family.
Eden
would never go after anyone poor.