Safe Harbor (9 page)

Except, he thought dryly, for that one time in her life eight years earlier at a waterfront festival. He remembered it well.

Holly showed back up with antiseptic, Band-Aids, cotton balls—the works. Sam smiled and said,
"I
don't think it's all that bad, Miss Nightingale; but I appreciate it."

She shrugged. "You never know."

She lifted his left sleeve and peeked underneath, then decided to push the fabric up over his shoulder to clear the area. He heard a funny little half-sigh, and after that she became very businesslike as she swabbed his cuts with iodine-soaked cotton.

"Does it hurt?"

"Nope."
Aagh.

"I guess I ought to cut those shrubs back."

"A guy could sue," he agreed.

Her reaction was to rub in the iodine just a little bit harder. "But you're not that guy—right?"

"We could work something out," he suggested over his shoulder.

She stopped mid-cottonball. "Like
what?"

"Well
... like
I
was thinking you could show me the area," he said with a disarming smile.

"Oh!" She became all business again, burying her nose in her work. "
I
suppose that would be all right."

"Great. How about tomorrow at, say, six?"

"Six would be fine," she said almost shyly as she dumped the last cottonball into a swing-top can. She turned to him with a surprisingly warm smile and said, "The sunsets Up-Island are really spectacular."

Her face was a radiant sunset itself. He smiled in the sheer pleasure of seeing it and then said, "But I was thinking more along the lines of sunrise than sunset."

"
Sunrise
?" She sucked in her breath. "I knew it! I was right the first time! Listen, mister, just because I let you in my kitchen, it doesn't mean you can assume you're spending the night. Who do you think you are? If that doesn't—"

"Hold it, hold it—I meant, I'll pick you
up
at six. I won't even come in if that makes you feel better. I'll wait outside and blow the horn," he added, not without his own hint of contempt.

"Oh! Oh. I misunderstood. Sorry."

Slow, deep color flooded her cheeks. For some reason, Sam thought instantly of
Eden
, of how he'd never once seen her blush—not involuntarily, anyway. Some actors could cry on demand;
Eden
could blush on demand. She could cry, too, needless to say. She'd given Sam some Oscar-caliber performances in that regard.

"Why are you looking at me like that, Sam? I said I was sorry."

It took a second for him to refocus on the woman before him. "Uh, I know that. I was thinking of something else, that's all."

Holly was watching him through an appraising squint now. "Why six in the morning? Isn't that a little early?"

He smiled reassuringly. "Not for the grand tour. There's a lot around here I'd like to see."
Rhode Island
,
Connecticut
,
New Hampshire
...

"I have to warn you, Mr. Steadman, that I'm not very bright-eyed at that hour," she said as she washed up, then tore off more paper towels. She leaned back on a wainscotted cupboard and dried her hands, and her smile seemed as genuine as his had been calculating.

"One reason I became an artist," she admitted, "was that I could set my own hours. Not a very lofty motive, is it?"

He shrugged and said, "Who knows why people feel the need to create?" And then he added in all honesty, "I liked your whirligigs. They made me smile."

"Maybe, but your photographs make me
think,"
she said in a hopelessly earnest way. "They're intense, they're real—they make me see fishermen for the first time, somehow. I can't tell you how moving they are to me."

How the hell old
was
sh
e? Her gallery bio said thirty-
one, but just then she looked like a freshman sitting in the front row of Photography 101, the kind of student who wave
d
her hand frenetically at the professor with an
I
-know! expression on her face.

"You didn't seem to be paying much attention to my photographs when you flipped through the book at the bookstore," he pointed out, doing a little fishing of his own.

She turned away to toss the towels. "I went back and bought the book," she murmured.

"Did
you."

"Yes, I did." She turned back to him and said with silly cheer, "So you're one royalty richer than you used to be!"

He grinned and said, "Super. Now you can have orange juice with your breakfast tomorrow."

The laugh they shared sprang from common ground: the struggle of every artist, everywhere, to pay his own way through his work. The difference between them was t
hat her parents could afford to
bail her out if she failed, and Sam's could not. Which brought him full circle back to the reason why he was standing in the kitchen of this gentle, whimsical stranger who had smacked up his rental and bound up his wounds:
Eden
had absconded with his parents' old age.

Eden
.
Eden
. Here he was, seven years later, and she was still leading him on a merry chase.

"So
... then... you'll come by to pick me up at six?" Holly said, poking gently at his revery.

He tried to shake himself free of the vision of
Eden
, smiling her come-hither smile. "Uh
... yeah! Sure will! And then we'll see some sights."

From a quarter-mile up,
he should have mentioned, but that was tomorrow's problem.

"Oh, my God—I almost forgot about your car!"

Sam waved away her concern. "I'll just say someone hit me in a parking lot."

Her eyes got wide. "Sam! You
wouldn't
do that."

Not only was she scandalized, but Sam could see that he'd lost credibility with
her again. Shit: all his fence-
mending, wasted. The fact that he had planned to pay for the damage out of his own pocket was irrelevant now; she'd never believe him. Shit.

He decided to throw himself at her mercy. "You're right. That was dumb. I wasn't thinking it through. That's what happens when you've never been in an accident."

"You've never been?"

"Never." Not unless you counted the speedboat he stole and ran up on the rocks in Woods Hole. Since the owner had never bothered to file a report—the man was a drug dealer—Sam hadn't had to worry about an insurance hassle. (The Coast Guard, now they were a different story.) As for the stolen Corvette, Sam had driven it around for less than a day, and when he dumped it near its owner's house, it didn't have a single scratch on it.

"Are you going to forgive me?" he asked with a pleading look.

Holly seemed mollified by the display of repentance. She even offered an apology of her own: "I'm sorry if I seem testy," she said on their way to the door. "It's—well, you can guess. My father.
Eden
. This has been so devastating. I'm worried sick about my mother. She's coming apart at the seams."

"I understand," he said softly. Oh, and he did. "Completely."

She took his hand in hers, surprising him again, and turned his arm gently. "Keep an eye on those scratches," she said as she looked them over. "It's so easy to become infected."

He reassured her that he would and then he left, feeling oddly soothed when it really should have been him doing the soothing. It was only later, when he was sitting alone with a roast beef sandwich in a crowd of happy, sunburned tourists, that it hit him: without wearing gloves, Holly Anderson had cleaned up the blood of a total stranger.

He shook his head and stabbed at his fries in a state of vague pique. The woman clearly had a lot to teach him about trust—and a h
el
l of a lot more to learn.

H
olly Anderson woke up at four-thirty, too excited to sleep. The thought of going with Sam on a sunrise sightseeing tour (she wasn't—quite—willing to call it a date) struck her as wonderfully romantic, much more so than some routine candlelight dinner. Granted, the offer was a little goofy; but when was the last time a man she knew had acted goofy? Okay, there was her father. But Sam's idea to go sightseeing was a charming kind of goofy, and God knew, her life had been a little scant on charm lately.

Sam was changing all that. Whatever his reasons for chasing after
Eden
, he had laid them aside and had made a decision to stick around.
With me, on my enchanted island.
Holly gave her bare body a squeeze of sheer happiness, and then she added a few more rose-scented crystals to the water in her big clawfoot tub.

****

Sam Steadman woke up well before sunrise, thanks to a diligent cop who caught him sleeping in his rented Corolla. Bleary-eyed and dry-mouthed, he drove the Corolla to a new parking area at another beach before instantly being discovered there as well. What were the odds? Disgusted with the way he felt and smelled, and furious with the island for not having enough rooms on it and for closing its showers for the night, Sam gave up his struggle to sleep, stripped to his shorts, and waded into the sea. He had to get cleaned up somehow.

****

Charlotte Anderson lay in her king-sized bed, lost and alone and waiting for the sun to come up so that she could fall asleep. She was afraid to close her eyes at night anymore; it was a little too much like death. Mere weeks ago, her husband had been lying in bed with his arm thrown around her, and she had eased it away because it had been too hot. But now she was cold at night, colder than she'd ever been.

She pulled up the covers and shivered in wait for the sun.

****

Eric Anderson zipped up his windbreaker, turned off the autopilot, and took over the wheel of the
Vixen
himself. They were in the last hour of an overnight sail, and every one of his senses was on alert. He knew that sailors made their most serious mistakes at the end of a passage with land in plain sight. The thought of making a navigational blunder and then having to call for a rescue made him positively cringe.

But it was going well, this trip. He'd never known such exhilaration in his life. He loved the anonymity of being on a boat—loved the idea that he could go where he wanted, do what he wanted, see what he wanted, be what he wanted. Finally.

He leaned to port
and peered through the compan
ionway into the cabin below. The red light over the nav station threw a warm glow on
Eden
, asleep in the quarter berth without a care in the world. It took Eric's breath away, the way she trusted that he could handle the boat and keep her safe. Not once had he heard her say, "Are you sure?" More than anything else—more than the sex, more than the laughter, more than her willingness to hide out on the boat with him—that's what Eric Anderson loved: the
f
act that Eden Walker made him feel like a man.

He felt the boat lift and fall underneath him in a smooth rhythm not un
like a second round of lovemak
ing. Patting the boat's starboard flank, he whispered, "Easy does it, girl; we have all the time in the world."

His thoughts drifted inevitably to the confrontation he'd had days before at the office. He would not be coming back, he'd said.
Duncan
was incredulous, Jack, furious. It was annoying. He had warned his partners before that he was planning to throttle back. They
knew
he wanted to go off voyaging—and that was before he'd met
Eden
. When did they think he'd do it? When he was seventy-five?

They didn't understand. How could they?
Duncan
had been married even longer than he was, and Jack was an old fart of a bachelor. In any case, with them, the firm came first. Eric had felt that way, too, once upon a time.

He leaned to port for another view into the cabin and marvelled that the lithe, fair creature sleeping below had ever deigned to look twice at him.

Let them find me,
he thought, enthralled by his good fortune.
Let them try.

S
am heard the seaplane before he saw it, swooping down to the water as nimbly as a cormorant after a fish. The pilot was Sam's oldest friend, a
New Bedford
wharf rat like him, but one who'd somehow managed to stay out of jail and then get a pilot's license. Billy and seap
lanes: they went together like ...
cormorants and fish.

Sam grinned and gave his pal an overhead wave, sniffing his shirtpit tentatively in the process. The scent of Mennen overwhelmed, thank God. He didn't want to offend the sensibilities of the freshly scrubbed, sweet- smelling woman who was his one and only link to
Eden
and the engraving.