“Whoops!” Stephanie said, grasping Ivan by the shirtfront. “Guess I don’t have my sea legs yet.”
His hands clasped her waist, and Stephanie felt as if the air had suddenly become too thick to breathe. He was warm and firm, and she had an overwhelming desire to explore the contour of his shoulder and let her fingers travel the length of his back. She watched his eyes focus on her mouth and knew he was going to kiss her.
“This probably isn’t such a good idea…” Stephanie murmured without much conviction.
“It’s a damn stupid idea,” he answered, his hands possessively tightening on her hips as he dragged her closer. His mouth moved over hers, and they clung to each other in an exchange of passion that was far too powerful, too intimate, too perfect to have happened between strangers. They paused and watched each other warily, trying to assess what had just taken place.
Sun-bleached eyebrows drew together over Ivan’s eyes as he wrestled with his sense of propriety. If he didn’t stop kissing her right then, nature would definitely follow its course. It was not the sort of initiation he ordinarily gave his new crew members and certainly not the way he preferred to start a cruise. Not to mention, cabin walls were a quarter inch thick, and this was the woman who had rolled down the hill and uttered an expletive that carried halfway across Camden Harbor. Lord knows what she’d be like in the throes of passion. She could be a screamer or a groaner!
He clenched his teeth, took her by the shoulders, and positioned her against the wall. “Stay right there! Don’t sway, don’t jiggle, don’t breathe heavy.”
Stephanie pressed herself into the paneling and struggled to gain some control, noticing that Ivan wasn’t doing too well at regulating his breathing either. “Wow,” she said.
Ivan nodded in mute agreement, keeping his gaze on the floor while he wondered just how fast he could find another cook if he really put his mind to it. He was going to have to wear a midthigh raincoat for the rest of the trip if he didn’t get rid of Stephanie Lowe.
“I don’t think this is going to work out,” he finally said. “I think it would be best if I radio around and try to find another cook.”
“You can’t do that! I need a toilet!” Stephanie narrowed her eyes. “Boy, you have a lot of nerve. First you foist your ramshackle house off on me. Then you practically attack me and use it as an excuse to kick me off the ship. I’m going to get the Better Business Bureau after you. I’m going to call the League of Women Voters. I’m going to tell your mother!”
Ivan ran his hand through his hair. “First of all, my house wasn’t ramshackle until you moved in. Second, that was a mutual attack. Third…” He stopped and sighed. Stephanie’s big blue eyes were shining with fury, and her lips were pressed tightly together in indignation. She didn’t like this any more than he did, he thought, but she really needed Stanley Shelton to fix her plumbing. He swore softly, knowing he wouldn’t try to get another cook, and plucked a piece of leaf from her hair. “You picked up some hitchhikers when you tripped and rolled down the hill,” he said, his smile returning.
Stephanie combed her hair with her fingers, looking for more leaves. “I didn’t trip. I was pushed.”
Ivan looked at her sideways. “I don’t remember seeing anyone else up there.”
“I know. Isn’t that odd? I was sure I was alone, and then all of a sudden I felt two hands give me a shove.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you’re very strange?”
“Yeah, well, strange things have been happening to me ever since I bought your house. I had a perfectly normal life till then.”
Ivan nudged her out the door. “I find it hard to believe you ever had a normal life. What did you do before you became an innkeeper?”
“You’re pretty nosy.”
Ivan snagged her by the back of her shirt as she started up the ladder. “I have a right to know my employees’ work records.”
She couldn’t argue with that, but she wasn’t ready to talk about her previous job. And besides, she was annoyed that he had figured she wasn’t normal. She turned to face him. “I was sort of a teacher, sometimes… in a government program.” And this wasn’t the first time she’d had to hedge about her work. Go ahead, ask her anything. She was a master at evasion.
He looked skeptical. “Why did you stop teaching? You get fired for wearing illegal socks? Accidentally misplace some of your students?”
Stephanie shrugged. “I just got tired of it. I decided it was time to get away.” Time to get away before she was blown away, she thought ruefully. She wasn’t effective anymore. In three months she’d be thirty. Too old to fit in with teens. Too well known for her own good. And her personal life was a shambles.
“My whole family is in Jersey City. All the kids I went to high school with are still in Jersey City. Do you know, every Sunday for the past eight years I’ve gone to my parents’ house for roast chicken dinner. Think about it… eight years of roast chicken. Four hundred and sixteen chickens!”
“That’s a lot of chicken.”
“I love all those people, but I need something new. I guess I need to find myself. Pretty corny, huh?” She shook her head in amazement. “My work was so consuming, I took the easy way out on personal relationships. I needed them to be safe and predictable, and so I was calmly going around and around and around in circles. I’d made these daily grooves that I was able to follow without even thinking. One day Steve, the guy I’d been dating for four years, told me he had this special announcement. I thought he was going to propose to me. Turned out he was going to officially marry his roommate Roger.” She rolled her eyes. “All those years I thought Steve was shy! I kept wondering why he wasn’t interested in… uh, well, anyway, that was why we never got around to…”
“Wait a minute. You went with a guy for four years and you never… and then it turned out he was gay?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have anyway. I’m saving myself for marriage.”
Swell. A virgin. He had his stomach tied in knots for the only virgin left on the East Coast. “Lady, you’re not going to keep your virgin status very long if you go around kissing heterosexuals like you kissed me a minute ago.” He leaned his back on the wood-paneled wall and loosely crossed his arms over his chest. “I think it’s safe to say your chances of keeping it until you’re married are slim. Especially if you stay on this ship.”
Stephanie slumped against the ladder. “You have a point. Twenty seconds ago I didn’t give a hoot about my virginity. It was a lot easier to have high standards when I was dating Steve.” Stephanie made a flamboyant gesture with her hands. “I should have seen what was happening. I should have realized there was something wrong with our relationship, but I’d gotten so dull, so placid when I wasn’t working. I had to have a comfortable personal routine because I didn’t have any energy left over for myself. Boy, was I boring, or what? It’s no wonder Steve dumped me for Roger.”
Ivan grinned. He couldn’t imagine her being boring. She was bright and sexy and talked faster than any two people put together.
Stephanie grimaced at the painful memory of rejection. She’d said too much, but once she’d gotten started, it had all poured out. Not that it mattered. The only thing significant about her personal life was that it was insignificant. “Anyway, I decided to start over. So I cleaned out my paltry savings account and went to Atlantic City to gamble.”
“And you made a big killing?”
“No. My uncle Ed died while I was there and left me all his money. That’s how I bought your house… with Uncle Ed’s money.”
It had seemed like the perfect move. It was the antithesis of her former life. It was calm, cozy, normal. It would give her a chance to meet people who weren’t staring back at her down the snub-nosed barrel of her service revolver.
She turned, pulled herself halfway up the ladder, and stopped. She looked at Ivan over her shoulder. “Is the house really haunted?”
“Some people think so.”
“Do you?”
He put a friendly hand on her backside and encouraged her to go topside. “I think you’d better check on Ace. Make sure he doesn’t knead anything other than bread dough. He’s hell on divorced women, and we have three of them on this cruise.”
Stephanie scooted up the ladder and blinked in the bright sunshine. “You avoided my original question.”
“Does it bother you that the house might be haunted?”
