premature white hair and a long face with stress-dark eyes.
“Any special things I can make for you, Arthur? Food allergies? Types of food you really don’t like?”
“Nothing special, but I tend to get up early. How soon is coffee available?”
“Any time you want. I’ll have a pot of fresh in the salon by 6:00 a.m. If you want it earlier yet, no sweat, just say.”
“No, that’s fine.” Arthur seemed to look through her, not at her. Cate fully understood that some people treated staff as invisible, but Arthur appeared more preoccupied than rude or snobbish. She made a mental note to watch out for him, make sure she found things to tempt him at mealtimes.
The last aft cabin was hers-the sleeping area was the size of a closet, with an adjoining hatbox-size head. Normally, she’d sleep in the crew quarters, but when Ivan lost his regular chef and interviewed her…well, Cate wasn’t about to sleep in a bunk in the open crew quarters, not when there was a spare cabin with a locked door.
On the starboard side, again she knocked…and the last of Harm Connolly’s guys yanked open the door. Yale. Had to be. Easy to guess how the two youngest men had picked up Ivy-League-type monikers, no matter where they’d actually gone to school. Yale was blond to Purdue’s dark, thin rather than muscular, and had a trimmed beard where Purdue was clean-chinned. Still, they both looked like up-and-comers, duded up with expensive labels and styled haircuts, in the same early-thirties age bracket.
“Hey,” he said, giving her the same up-and-down that Purdue had-although not as offensively. Somewhere in that practiced expression was some honest friendliness. “Quite a boat.”
“Fantastic, isn’t it?” She reeled off her short list of questions.
“I can eat anything.” He cocked his head. “You can’t be on 24/7.”
“I’m not. Once dinner’s put away, I’m on my own time.”
“So…you do have some free hours.”
She wasn’t about to pretend she didn’t understand where he was going. “Tons. Crew and staff eat together, tour together when we’re offshore. We’ll all have plenty of time to get to know each other. Once the dinner stuff’s completely put away, though, I’m on my own time. Which means you guys can stay up deck, drink all night, watch whatever you want and do whatever you want, without crew in your face.”
“That’s good,” he said, then opened his mouth to continue.
“I’m en route to your boss,” she mentioned, which shut him up beautifully.
Of course, it shut her up, too. Ivan had made clear to the crew that sucking up to Harm Connolly was required. Unfortunately, Cate had always flunked the course in kowtowing. It would have helped if she’d gotten a look at him before, she thought glumly, but no, she hadn’t thought ahead and made the effort. Truth to tell, failing to think ahead was a fault of hers. In fact, pretty much a fault on a daily basis. And she really didn’t want to put her foot in her mouth right off the bat with the head honcho…which meant she was all too likely to.
She rapped. Waited. Thought aha, maybe she could get a reprieve and not to have to deal with him right then- but then the door unlatched and there he was.
The punch in her gut was completely unexpected. He was the owner of a big-to-do company, for Pete’s sake. Mentally, she’d had pictured him as in his sixties, tyrannical, formal.
Instead she got a half-naked dude with sculpted shoulders, unshaven cheeks, and a head full of towhead blond hair, spiky and wet from a fresh shower.
At least he’d pulled on pants before answering the door, but the technogear revealed the long, lean muscles of an athlete, not a desk guy. His eyebrows and chest hair were as white-blond as his hair, his skin ruddy. The glower of impatience on his brow radiated arrogance, energy. He couldn’t be older than mid-thirties. And the sharp, dark gaze inhaled her in a single testosterone-colored photo snap.
His expression telegraphed that he knew what he liked, and he liked the look of her.
The overall punch was…well, downright bamboozling. It was more than his being unexpectedly hot. She just rarely, rarely got that suck-in-the-gut response for a guy. She loved men; what woman didn’t? And she’d slept with them now and then, of course. Liked a good-looking ass, naturally. But she always carefully steered miles around the rare guy who brought on that suck-in-the-gut feeling.
She liked adventure. Hell, she loved risk.
She just didn’t like risky men.
“You’re the chef,” he said, in a voice that sounded like rough gravel.
“Yes. And I don’t want to bother you. I just wanted to ask you a couple of short-”
“Come in. There are a few things we should cover.”
She didn’t want to go in any of the boys’ cabins. But she tapped her pencil on her list and sucked it up.
The master cabin was an awesome comfort zone-queen-size bed, teal carpet thicker than a lawn, teak cabinets for gear, an angled private head. Steam was still pouring from that bathroom, a thick white towel abandoned on the bed, all of it smelling like wet, clean male-intimate, distracting. Somehow there wasn’t room enough for the two of them, even in the most spacious cabin onboard.
She backed up against the door, thumbed on her ballpoint and started with the questions, but he immediately interrupted her.
“I’ll be fine with any food you serve.” He radiated impatience, more than annoyance. “I need some meeting time with my staff. The dining room would work best because of the table size. When’s it free?”
“Whenever you want it to be.” Ivan would be proud of her. It was a kowtower’s answer, even if her chin was already chucked up to hold her own. The man was too damn tall. Not counting his other faults.
“This is the deal. I want my staff to have a vacation out of this. Want to see them interacting in relaxed situations, onshore, offshore, meals and all. But I need to secure some uninterrupted time with each of them-with the door closed, just me and each of the men, for a good hour each day.”
“So you specifically need the dining room then. Morning or night?”
“Morning. After breakfast. Obviously, that schedule will need to be flexible, depending on the trip agenda for that day.”
“No sweat. Dining room’s yours from nine until ten-or later if you want it. I do need to start setting up for lunch by eleven-thirty, ballpark. If that won’t work for you, just let me know.”
“Fine. Now, problem two. The captain told me you’d be sleeping down here.”
She wasn’t sure where he was headed, but somehow she was already bristling. “Yes. If the captain didn’t mention it, his usual chef is a man, who came with his son, who worked as a cabin boy. Normally, everyone bunks in the crew quarters. But when the chef had emergency surgery, the job came open for me-”
“I don’t need all these details.”
“I was only trying to explain that the crew quarters were set up for men. I mean, it’s an open space, everyone bunking together. I could have done that if I had to, but I’d rather have some privacy, and you didn’t book all the cabins, so there was the small cabin aft, has its own head. If you’re afraid I’ll be noisy-”
“I’m not afraid you’ll be noisy. I’m afraid you’ll be an awkward distraction.” He took another impatient breath, looked away, then back at her. “Arthur’s married. The others aren’t.”
“I have to admit, I think Fiske is adorable,” she offered, referring to the oldest of his staff, but he just sighed at her attempt at lightness. Clearly, he had no sense of humor.
“This is the story, Cate. I inherited my uncle’s pharmaceutical company when he died a few months ago. At the time I was living across the country, outside Portland, Oregon, but I moved, put the life I had there on complete hold. There just was no one else to take on Future, Inc. It was more than a family commitment. The company was in the middle of doing…extraordinary things. None of that is your business or your problem. But my situation is that my science management team is in the middle of a major crisis. I’m using these two weeks of being trapped on this boat to ferret out personalities, problems, solutions. But I’ve got my hands full without adding further complications to this…soup.”
“Aw, shoot. I was planning to seduce Yale one night, Purdue the next and run down the halls naked between cabins at all hours of the day and night.” Eek. He wasn’t smiling. And suddenly she felt awkward as a prickly thorn. He’d shared something of a problem and she’d buzzed him off. If he hadn’t implied she’d be a sexual distraction for his employees, she’d have behaved better. Darn it, Cate knew she got ticked off easily. So now she had to try to fix it. “I didn’t mean to make light of a touchy situation. And I appreciate your filling me in. When you’re working with your guys, I’ll do my best to keep us all out of your way.”
“It’s you I’m concerned with. Not the rest of the crew.”
