She jumped at a sudden shrill ringing, then realized stupidly that it was the telephone by her bedside. She lifted the receiver.
“Hello?”
“You’re all right?”
Adam.
She was annoyed to feel a subtle warmth rise to her cheeks. “I was sleeping,” she lied.
“Jem’s there with you?”
“Yes. Where are you?”
“My cottage. I believe it’s the one you call Paradise.”
“Um.”
“Want to know about your guests?”
“Are you…alone?”
“Checking up on me? Worried about me? Miss me?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Were you imagining that I had Sukee here beside me?”
“It would be completely your own affair if you did, Mr. O’Connor.”
“Then why did you ask?”
She made certain that he could hear the depth of her very impatient sigh. “I was attacked this evening. Naturally I want to know as much as I can about who’s where on the island.”
“Interesting. Since you know so little.”
“Thank you for that assessment.”
“Do you want to know about your guests or not?”
“Do I?” she demanded. “You’re not going to hang up on me if I say yes?”
He laughed softly. She gnawed on her lower lip. Just the sound of his laughter seemed to brush sensually into her soul.
And other places.
“Talk!” she told him.
Amazingly, he obliged. “Your Mr. Avery Smith isn’t a Mr. Smith at all.”
“What?”
“Mr. Smith isn’t Mr. Smith.”
“Then who is he?”
“James Jay Astin. Founder and chairman of the board of SeaLink.”
Then, having made certain that Sam couldn’t possibly sleep all night, Adam clicked off.
The Walkers had a two-bedroom cottage on the opposite side of the main house from Sam.
The kids were tucked into bed. Judy was being silent. The kind of silent Lew Walker just hated in his wife. Her lips were pursed. She’d changed into her nightgown, a long silky thing that should have been nice and sexy, just right for an island vacation for a man and his wife. However, as she pulled the covers neatly down on the bed, she kept up her silence—creating a killer chill within the room. Any excitement he might have been feeling withered in his BVDs as he watched her.
Finally the silence got to him.
He walked behind her and slipped his arms around her body. She stood very stiffly, not fighting him, just casting that awful chill.
“Judy—”
“It’s not right,” she said. “What we’re doing—it’s just not right.”
“Judy, we need the money,” he said.
“There are other ways to make money.”
“We have two children. We have to survive.”
“We have two children. We’re supposed to teach them right from wrong.”
“We’re not really doing anything wrong.”
“The hell we’re not.”
“The way you see it, maybe.”
“Lew, just don’t touch me right now, all right?”
He froze himself, then released her. He walked around to his own side of the bed and slid beneath the covers, keeping his back to her.
Judy turned off the lights. Once she got into bed, she kept her back to him, as well.
The chill, Lew thought, had turned into a regular ice storm.
He sighed and tried to sleep.
The day after tomorrow, the Steps.
Jerry North sat, legs curled beneath her, in a wicker rocking chair on the small porch that surrounded their bungalow. She looked out at the night. The sky was velvet black, dotted with unbelievably bright stars.
Beautiful.
The island was beautiful. Peaceful, elegant, casual. A perfect place to call home.
How ironic, how sad.
She felt Liam coming out to stand behind her. “You’re going to have to go diving soon,” he told her.
She shrugged.
“I can dive, but it won’t help.”
“You’re the only one who really knows.”
“I don’t know anything. I didn’t know what I was doing then, and I surely won’t have the least idea now.”
“Well, who knows? Anything is worth a try. Adam O’Connor is here. You know damned well he has to be working for someone.”
“Maybe he’s just after the truth,” she murmured.
“What?”
She shook her head. “Nothing, really…”
Liam was silent, thoughtful. “You still haven’t learned anything from Samantha?”
“Samantha doesn’t know anything.”
She heard him sigh. He was getting insistent. She bit her lower lip.
And maybe not. Maybe what she did or didn’t know, could or couldn’t remember, mattered to him far more than she imagined. Well, almost everything else she’d ever done in life had been a mistake, why not this, too? Liam wasn’t bad. He never pretended he didn’t appreciate other women, nor did he ever pretend to love her. He was blunt, curt, rude, temperamental, aggressive. He could be violent—he was one of those men who believed a man had a right to knock a woman around a bit if she needed it—but never to the extent that he really hurt her.
And maybe she’d taken so many knocks in life that she’d grown to expect a few now and then.
Still, Liam had a strange honesty about him, at least where she was concerned, and she felt that if nothing else, at least she was playing the game with a full deck of cards. In that particular sense, she was getting more from him than he was getting from her.
She shivered suddenly, fiercely. No one could ever know the whole truth. No one. Partly it just hurt too damned badly. She couldn’t bear to have the scar ripped open.
Not for Liam. Not for anyone.
“Samantha knows something,” Liam insisted.
“She knows how to dive, and she knows the ship exists somewhere, and that’s about it,” Jerry insisted.
“You’re wrong. She lived with her father. She listened to him day in and day out. She knows something.”
“She doesn’t even like to talk about the
“He disappeared.”
“He’s dead.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know, I—I just don’t believe he would ever have left his daughter intentionally.”
