Love Under Fire. Frances Housden
are you and your friends doing at Halloween?”
“It’s going to be real exciting. We heard where the black-magic cult have their meetings. It’s at Te Kohanga National Park, and we thought it would be a hoot to spy on them. They’re bound to be up to something on Halloween.”
Chapter 3
Eight o’clock. If Rowan was still on board surely he would be ready, waiting for her call? A call that frankly refused to go through. If Jo heard that computerized voice saying the number she’d dialed was either switched off or out of range one more time, she would spit. But then that’s why she was walking down one of the floating wooden fingers of the marina. To see for herself.
The sea was remarkably calm, due to the huge anticyclone covering the country. A circumstance she gave thanks for. She hated that feeling, as if the bottom had dropped out of her world when she put her foot down, and the floor disappeared. Besides, these were her best high-heeled shoes.
At last she spied it, Stanhope’s Fancy II. Larger than life and twice the size of the boats moored alongside, it was hard to miss its gleaming white hull. On the couple of occasions she’d ventured out on one of these, she’d learned this type of craft was called a midpilothouse motor yacht.
With one arm wrapped round a mooring post, she leaned out over the wooden lip to peer inside. No one around. Hmmm. She looked down at the toes of her red-and-black, faux-lizard shoes, and past them to the flotsam floating in the gap with a sinking feeling. They would have to come off.
Her bag landed with a thump on the boarding platform, but no one came to investigate. With a grin, she did a quick scan of the area, imagining the headlines if she got caught: Detective charged with indecent exposure.
Her red skirt hit just above the knee. Hands on both sides, she hitched it eighteen inches higher, just below her panties, and stepped into space, shoes clutched in one hand.
“Easy,” she told herself, balancing by a fingertip on the stern rail, ignoring the slap of water against the hull as it slopped over her feet. Happiness was planting them on the other side of that rail.
She gave the glass door two loud bangs, then tried the handle. Like a hot knife through butter, the door slid open.
“Hey, Rowan! It’s me, Jo. Can I come aboard?”
Silence spiked tiny tremors of fear at the base of her skull. From the depths of her overactive imagination, she culled the ghost ship, Marie Celeste. And the thought gelled as she took in a galley to one side of the entrance; it sparkled as if neither dish nor spoon had ever cluttered its counters.
Mmm. Her feet sunk into thick blue-gray carpet. She curled her toes into it, drying her damp panty hose. Sheer luxury. So this was what it meant to be a Stanhope. Rowan had landed on his feet working for Allied Insurance. On her side of the line this would smack of corruption, but from Rowan’s the label read, perks of the job.
On the lush, woolen pile, she crossed the main saloon as if walking on water, then drifted up two short flights of steps, passing the upper saloon by, and into the pilothouse. Silence thundered in her ears as if the soft suede walls swallowed every sound she made. Her skin prickled. The horizon slid up and down the outside of huge wraparound windows as the boat tugged at its moorings as if eager to be gone.
“Good idea, I’m outta here, too,” she muttered, spinning on her heel to retrace her steps, coming to an abrupt halt on the top one. Shaking her head, she laughed. “Good Lord, you need a change of reading material. You didn’t used to be so easily spooked.”
The briefcase on the dining table didn’t catch her attention until her return journey. Immediately, she reversed her decision to leave. Rowan had to be around. He wouldn’t go off, leaving the place open for just anyone to enter the way she had. Once more, she called his name, “Rowan!”
At the next set of steps, she hesitated. The sleeping quarters lay below. No problem, all she had to do was knock first.
She went on down.
The door on her right stood ajar. L-shaped bunks took up two walls, all of them made up as neat as a new pin. Across the companionway the door was closed. She rapped on it with her knuckles, then gradually eased it open, but saw no signs of occupation. Her choices narrowed to one last door.
Her shoulders drooped as she spied another neatly made-up bed without even a hollow in its surface to say someone had sat there. Expelling a gusty breath did nothing to relieve the disappointment threatening to swamp her. “Wrong darn boat!”
“Depends which boat you were looking for.”
“Rowan!” she gasped, caught off guard, her mouth gaping at his half-naked figure framed in wisps of steam in a doorway that was hidden among the paneling.
“I…I did knock,” she stammered, trying to make sense of a breathless response that tied her larynx in knots, cutting off the air to her lungs.
Water darkened his hair to burned sugar, molding it tightly to his scalp, until it fell into damp curls at his nape. His broad, broad shoulders glistened where diamond-bright drops of water beaded, pausing momentarily before the slide down the long muscles of his arms.
She had never seen Rowan without clothes. Had never expected to. Never even imagined it before today, and still she couldn’t believe her eyes.
Was it any wonder he’d taken her breath away? Sculpted satin-smooth curves and hollows fitted his upper body as God had intended. Perfectly.
His chest shuddered lightly on the aftermath of a sigh. Even as she watched, his flat, male nipples set wide on the curve of his pectoral muscles, crested, tensing in the wake of her gaze.
Jo’s blood leaped from her heart to her face.
Embarrassment was no hindrance to eating up his manly beauty with her eyes. No power on this earth could make her drag them away.
A narrow white strip, edging his charcoal-gray shorts, deepened his tan in contrast. Languor weighed her eyelids, a sensual heaviness. She knew she should look somewhere else, up…down…anywhere and pretend his body hadn’t responded to her blatant voyeurism. But Lord, the sight of cotton knit molding his form stole her breath away.
Jo swallowed. Oh, my.
The seconds it took to remove her gaze dawdled like hours. Yet one glance at his thighs sent her reeling back to the safety of the companionway. Her stomach shot up to meet her throat and devoured every particle of heat from her body.
Cold. She felt so cold.
And sick.
She had done that. Blighted all that perfection in one unthinking second, with no other justification than she had been focused on Max. But after Rowan’s sacrifice, how could she make excuses? And whom could she make them to?
The scars alone mightn’t have been so bad, time would take care of them, turn scarlet into silver. The missing muscle, though, could never be replaced. Not after the bullet that should have been hers, had ripped it apart, spraying it over the grass where she stood.
“I’d better go back up…” she whispered through chattering teeth “…until you get dressed.” The complete understanding in his eyes was worse than anything she’d ever experienced.
God help him, he hadn’t been able to control his body’s reaction to her. He’d stepped out of the shower, thoughts of her running through his mind, and suddenly she’d been there, as if he had conjured her out of thin air.
The same but different.
Her dark curls, as riotous and ruffled as a black, Oriental poppy after a storm, caught in a tangle at the back of her collar, unveiling a secret. Revealing another layer of the mysterious sway she held over his libido.
If he’d had the courage to ignore the danger of her thrall, when he’d first known her, he would already have pushed back that black silk curtain to discover for himself the smooth tender hollow where her jawline met her neck.