there was no possible time.
Down the hill, past the scattering of buildings, halfway down the dock to the boat, Ivan was on the ground, clutching his stomach and bellowing. “I’m fine! I’m just sick! Get me on board and leave me alone!”
Hans’s gentle face reflected confusion and worry. Harm hustled between the group and crouched down. “What are we dealing with?”
“Hurling. That’s what we’re dealing with. Disgusting, but there it is.”
“Like food poisoning? Something you had here at the cafe? Something we could need a medic for?”
“All I need is my own bunk, my own head, some privacy. And time. I’m not the wrong kind of sick. I just want to get the hell out of Dodge.”
By the time Cate reached Ivan, the captain was using increasingly colorful language…and he’d been sick over the dockside right there, which made all the men step back several feet. Except for Harm. Cate knelt down, carefully poked the captain’s sides, felt his forehead for fever, checked his pulse, looked for signs of shock.
Harm didn’t ask what she was doing, just echoed, “I checked for the same things, but it’s been years since I had first aid in the army. What do you think?”
“I don’t see any signs of anything serious, like appendicitis…”
“Would you all get away from me? If I’m gonna hurl, I don’t like an audience. And I’m not going to a hospital. I’m going to my boat.”
“Quit being a child, Ivan,” Cate said.
He said, “You’re fired.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Everyone participated in getting Ivan aboard and below, which was probably why it took forever. En route, all Harm’s men were singing the same tune. Enough was enough. Catastrophes were following them like ants at a picnic. It was time to call this trip off and get home.
Late afternoon, Harm left the pilothouse in search of Cate. As he might have guessed, she was in the galley. He’d barely opened the door before he was bombarded by enticing and exotic smells. Bowls and pans and utensils cluttered every counter. Cate, garbed in an apron and a T-shirt that read Incrediby Good-Looking And Built To Last was shimmying to rock and roll in her head-at least until he startled her by opening the door.
“What are you doing? You should be resting!”
“I am, I am.” She motioned. “I figured on some Yukon sourdough bread pudding-because we had some day-old bread, so might as well find a good use for it. Then saffron risotto cakes. Herbed tomatoes. And then chops with a warm-belly barbecue sauce…”
He scraped a hand through his hair. “Cookie. You’re hurt. You’re exhausted. The captain’s sick. Everything’s a disaster. So maybe you still felt responsible for coming up with dinner for the group, but what would have been wrong with some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”
“Well…nothing. But this isn’t work for me, Harm. It’s stress relief. Honest. And in the meantime, what’d you find out?” She seemed to read his expression.
“Autopsy results. What is warm-belly barbecue sauce?”
“Something that’s guaranteed to put hair on your chest.” She flashed him, lifted her long-sleeved T-shirt- showed him braless breasts, bitsy, adorable-then swiftly covered up again. “Which you’ll find out, via taste, at dinner. In the meantime, you get nothing more until you fill me in. What’d the coroner in Juneau say?”
He wasn’t going to make it through this trip. Embezzlement, theft, murder, maybe poisoning. And this woman who could spin his world on its axis in two seconds flat, without half trying. He started to answer the question, found his throat too dry to emit sound. Tried again. “I forget the formal phrase they used. But the cause of death was essentially a heart attack.”
“All right.”
“Like you said-his throat and esophagus were raw. Some substance had to cause it, but they couldn’t pin down a chemical or poison.”
“Which there wouldn’t be. For peppermint. Not like it’s an illegal or managed substance.” She opened the gimballed oven, pulled out what looked to be a big, round pudding thing with a crust. It smelled like sin. Sin times ten. He instinctively moved toward it, but she blocked him with the royal finger. “Go on,” she said.
“The bottom line is that the pathologist couldn’t pin down anything that would be a court-provable homicide. I repeated the peppermint question. He acknowledged that could have created the problem-but it still doesn’t prove or establish how that happened or exactly how it might have contributed to Fiske’s death. His heart suffered a massive arrest.”
She started splashing all kinds of unknown things into a bowl, swirling them together with a wooden spatula. “So it doesn’t matter if peppermint killed him?”
“It matters. But the substance itself doesn’t prove that he deliberately chose to take in the peppermint. Or to take too much of it. Or if it was forced on him. There’s no bruising or verifiable evidence of force.” He didn’t want to talk about this. He wanted Cate back at the springs, couldn’t stop replaying how close they’d come to making love. Her eyes, her mouth, her hands. The emotions bursting from her, flying off him. He couldn’t explain it, what was happening with them-but it had nothing to do with Fiske, with his uncle’s business, with all the increasing nightmares around them.
“So,” she said. “We’re stuck on a boat with a murderer. This is so not what I had in mind when I took this job. And Ivan being sick isn’t helping anything, either… Uh-oh.” She glanced up, caught the expression on his face. “What else is wrong?”
“I hate boats.” He balanced between the counters, but he could feel it-how the wind had picked up. The boat was sloshing from side to side. He couldn’t fathom how she could continue to cook. Even more, he couldn’t imagine why tumultuous seas didn’t bother her.
“Are you going to turn green on me, Harm?”
He shook his head. “I don’t get seasick. I just hate boats.”
“I’ll bet you only hate things you can’t control or fix on your own, right?”
“Are you insulting me again?” But he was immediately diverted when he saw her open a bottle of liquor and pour it liberally into a saucepan. “You take up drinking while cooking? Not that I’m against it.”
“Actually, no, although this would sure be a good day for it. The dessert’s called Yukon Bread Pudding because it has some liberal Yukon Jack liquor in the sauce.”
“What kind of liquor is that?”
“Trust me. You won’t care when you taste it.” Possibly because this day, like yesterday and the day before, had been exhaustingly traumatic, she suddenly zipped across the galley, pounced up on her toes and planted a good, solid kiss right on his open mouth.
He had no chance to react before she was back to whisking cream and butter into the Yukon Jack on the stove.
He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Did I just dream that?”
“Uh-huh. It never happened,” she assured him.
The response in her eyes, though, wasn’t teasing but…warning. The two of them had a reckoning coming. It had nothing to do with murder and mayhem, and conceivably might be even more earth-shattering than murder and mayhem, anyway.
At least for him.
Maybe for her, too. She stirred the whiskey so hard it almost sloshed out of the pan.
The sound of the intercom startled them both. Harm was being paged to the pilothouse, where Hans’s voice relayed there was a message for him.
“Damn,” he murmured.
“That’s what I was thinking,” she murmured right back.
But he had to go.
Chapter 9
An hour later, Cate was a pinch away from putting dinner on, and mentally yelling at herself
