Never Trust A Lady

she’d slept on, and which for some reason made his fingers itch with the urge to touch it.

“Well, I’m ready if you are,” she said, puffing slightly as she struggled to unwrap her feet and disentangle her legs from the mounds of packing blankets. That accomplished, she heaved herself upright, holding on to the piano for support. He heard her say with a laugh and a groan, “Mercy, I’m stiff!”

Hurriedly freeing himself from his own swaddlings, he joined her, still in his stocking feet. He was stiff, too, though his ego didn’t let him say so, and he tried to get in a few limbering-up stretches as best he could in that cramped space. The flashlight’s batteries were noticeably weakening; he turned it off and jammed it into his jacket pocket. “Okay, here goes,” he muttered.

An instant later he froze, his upraised fist suspended in darkness.

“What’s that?” gasped Jane.

The long, drawn-out, deep-throated bellow was a familiar sound to Hawk. As it died, he clutched her arm and hissed, “Shush!” although she hadn’t said another word. Because now he could hear what he’d missed before- beneath the gravelly growl of the truck’s diesel was another, deeper, rhythmic throbbing. A second and even more powerful engine.

“Hear that?” He said it with a note of triumph. Now he knew. or was fairly certain he knew, where they were and where they were going. “You know where we are? We’re on a ferryboat. That’s what this is-a damned ferryboat!”

“A…ferryboat?” Her voice sounded faint and worried.

“Yeah.” He chuckled exultantly, his hand traveling up her arm and along her shoulder to the back of her neck, to give her what he thought he meant to be a friendly and reassuring little squeeze. “Can you believe that? Now, the bad news is, everybody’s probably gone topside, so there’s not going to be anybody to hear us if we holler. The good news is, we’ve got to be pretty close to where we’re going.”

“How do you know?” It burst from her with a lot of breath, as if she’d been holding it.

It occurred to him just then, if he were to ease his hand across, say, to her opposite shoulder, and turn her a little bit, he’d have her neatly in his arms. It seemed so right, so easy, almost as if it was meant to happen just that way.

“Think about it,” he snapped, self-discipline making him testy. “Where do ferries go?”

“On water.” said Jane in a dismal voice.

“Across water,” he smugly corrected. “To islands, mostly. And the only reason this eighteen-wheeler is going to be sitting on a ferry is if that’s the only way to get there, right?” If memory served him, there was only one set of islands served by ferry that was about six hours or so driving time from Washington, D.C. “Mrs. Carlysle, I’ll bet you a fresh seafood dinner as soon as we get out of this box that we’re in North Carolina. The Outer Banks, to be exact.”

Jane’s response was utter silence. Then a tiny gulp-an audible swallow, and a whispered, “Oh.”

“So,” he expounded, feeling pleased with his powers of deduction, “way I figure it, we’ve got maybe forty-five minutes or so for the crossing, then no more than fifteen, twenty minutes, tops, to get wherever we’re going. These islands aren’t very big, and it’s the off-season, so there’s not going to be much traffic. We should be out of here in-”

And then she did turn, of her own accord. And she was in his arms, but not quite in the way he’d imagined. Trembling, but not the way he would have liked, which was in response to, or hunger for, his touch. Her arms were doubled up again, making a barrier between them, in fact, and her hands must have been pressed against her mouth, because her voice came small and muffled.

“I get seasick.”

Though they weren’t exactly words he wanted to hear, he found his arms going around her, and felt an indulgent, unfamiliar tenderness. Soothingly, he said, “The crossing shouldn’t be rough this time of-”

“I get seasick tied to the dock.”

All Hawk could think of to say was, “Uh… well…”

“It usually helps if I can watch the horizon, but in here…”

“Don’t panic.” That was for his benefit. To her, he said calmly, “The best thing to do is, don’t dwell on it. Think of something else.”

She was gripping his arms, shaking her head; he could feel the tickle of her hair across his lips. Her voice was hushed and breathy. “I’m sorry. I’m just not good with boats. I grew up in the Mojave Desert. I saw the beach for the first time when I was twelve. I’ve only been-”

“It’s okay…” Soothing words, comforting chuckles. But he found that his chest felt as bumpy inside as her voice sounded, as if something vital that held everything else together had broken loose. His hands were just lightly stroking her arms, her shoulders. But he wanted…needed…he knew that if he could only hold her close, hold her tightly, that the hollow, shaken feeling inside him would ease. His jaw ached with the effort it cost him to keep her that small, essential distance away.

“I guess you don’t, huh? Get seasick?”

Her arms had relaxed a little; he could feel her hands on his chest, her fingers playing with the textures of his cable-knit sweater. He snorted softly and said, “I live on a boat.”

And realized that with those five words he’d revealed more about his living arrangements than he ever did, even to casual friends and the people he worked with, much less to total strangers.

Although…he wasn’t sure Jane Carlysle would still fit that latter category, after the way they’d spent the past few hours. He was surprised to discover he didn’t want her to. He just didn’t know quite how to make that metamorphosis from stranger to…something else. It had been too long since he’d even tried.

Her response to his revelation was, “You’re kidding!” It was spoken not in the tone of flat dismay he might have expected, but with the interested quickening in her voice that went with that sudden brightening he knew would also be there, now, in her eyes. He cursed the darkness for making him miss it. He realized he’d come to watch for it the same way he watched for dolphins leaping in the sunlit sea.

Maybe that was why, when she asked him where his boat was, he told her. In fact, he told her about many of the places he’d tied up, never for too long at a time. And he told her, with a touch of undeniable pride, about his ’46 Grand Banks classic with the teakwood trim, two staterooms and galley down, twin CAT 3208TA’s, and all the options, including a big generator and full electronics.

“What’s her name?” she asked.

“No name,” he told her. He’d never found one that suited.

“Like Cat,” she murmured, and he could feel her nodding. “In Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

He wondered if she knew they were under way. If she didn’t, he sure wasn’t going to be the one to tell her.

“How wonderful it must be, to live on a boat,” she said. “So…adventurous.” It may have been the darkness, or he may have imagined it, but he thought she sounded wistful.

Well, it did have its moments. He wanted to tell her about the dolphins, and about seeing double rainbows after a summer squall, and about a little cove he knew of on an island off the coast of Maine where the pines came right down to the water’s edge and the smell of the woods and the sea on an autumn morning was like the finest champagne. But he didn’t.

He cleared his throat and said, “Well, to tell you the truth. I’m not at home all that much.”

“So,” she said, “I guess you must not be married.”

“No.”

“But you were.” She said it softly, and with such certainty.

He didn’t ask her how she knew, just replied, “Yes.”

It was then he discovered that his left hand had not stayed in its safe, friendly berth on her shoulder, that while he’d been busy navigating perilous conversational shoals it had gone wandering off on an even more hazardous quest of its own. That his palm now curved around the side of her neck, his fingertips flirted with the curls on her nape and his thumb was beginning an exploration of the ridge of her jaw and the velvety curve of her cheek. From out of nowhere a pulse began to pound in his belly, like an impromptu solo from a surprised but eager drummer.

He couldn’t for the life of him figure which would be more dangerous, the turn the conversation had taken, or the direction his wandering hand was leading him. He did know that if she asked one more question, the next