before a bandage could conceivably stick, so that took another wait. Obviously, none of those minor actions took long…but all of them took touching him. She was close enough to smell and sense and see. To be aware.
“So,” she started out with, “is your first name ‘Harm’ symbolic of what you’re like to be around or what?”
He chuckled. “Nothing that interesting. Harm is just a Dutch name. Means
“Are they right?”
“I plead the fifth.”
It was her turn to smile. “So what’s the deal with this company of yours?”
He took his time answering, but eventually, out it came. “I never anticipated having anything to do with the company. That’s the problem. My uncle’s name was Dougal, hit a mother-lode lottery when he was twenty-five. He was only married a couple of years when his wife got cancer, pancreatic, which is one of the wrong kinds, the kind where there’s just not a lot of hope. Anyway, he was nuts about her, and that’s how it all started-he was supposed to be an engineer, but when she died, he poured everything into a research lab, determined to find a cure. Didn’t know shoes from shinnola when he first started.”
“But he learned?”
“He more than learned. He spent his life at it, and like I said, Connollys seem to have that particularly stubborn gene. The first really great drug he patented over twelve years ago. By then he was almost broke, but that brought in a new flood of money. He wasn’t interested in living high. He wanted the infusion for the research. The two areas he never stopped targeting were pancreatic and ovarian. Just when the lab had come up with an outright miracle drug, he fell ill. And right after that, the guys came through with an even more incredible breakthrough.”
“For one of the biggies he cared especially about? Pancreatic or ovarian?” It was a relief when she could step away from those eyes, that skin, the feel of him. She piled the first-aid supplies back in the box and whirled around, happy to talk-but with a little distance between them. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t find dinner chores to work with by then.
“Pancreatic. Two new drugs had passed FDA by then, and a brand-new one-the best, a true miracle drug-was a pinch away from the last clinical trials. That’s when Dougal died. I knew he wanted me to have the company, to continue with his work, but man.” Harm scrubbed the back of his neck. “I was in the military. Mechanical engineer. Built bridges, roads, had a ton of math but never much straight science. Only my uncle, he had a terror of the firm getting sold, falling into the hands of certain pharmaceutical corporations-he wanted it kept in the family, with people who had the same goals, to conquer this cancer thing. Not to just be about profit.”
“So he passed it on to you…” She put a little plate in front of him because that’s what she did-fed people. A few wedges of bread, fresh herbs in a dip for him to dunk, one of the hors d’oeuvres she’d put on in the salon in a bit.
“Yes. Only the will was barely read-I’d just found a place in Cambridge, wasn’t unpacked-when the clinical trials for BROPE, the new drug, disappeared-”
“BROPE?”
“Bright Hope. The guys named it-”
“Okay. Got it. So the drug was stolen?”
“No. The trials were. The data. The proving data.
She rolled her eyes. Just like a child, he was holding out the empty plate, begging for more. “But you didn’t?”
“No. There’s no way Fiske did anything wrong. Fiske is good to the bone. Can’t say he’s a twenty-first-century economics man-he was my uncle’s crony in age, old-fashioned in his thinking. But he’d have gone to the wall for Dougal. They were like brothers. But to sum up this cyclone-I’ve got this company that on paper is thriving beyond all anyone’s expectations, with a cure for pancreatic cancer, a real damn cure, on the cusp. Reachable. Only now the whole thing is at risk. Someone inside has to be the problem, but it’s not that easy figuring out the who. Yale and Purdue claim it was their research that was suddenly obliterated, so they’d hardly be guilty of any wrongdoing. They’ve been set back several years. And Arthur claims he’d been pushing Dougal for more careful recording and reporting practices for years, couldn’t get anyone to listen to him, so finding him guilty doesn’t make any sense, either.”
“And there’s no one else who could be the thief?”
“Not really. There’s other staff, but they’re clerical or broom pushers, some apprentices coming up. But no one who had access to those studies, the specific private lab or those computers. The thing is, over time, the whole formula could be recreated, but that’d be a matter of years. And literally millions of dollars. Probably more than millions.”
“Eek,” Cate murmured.
“Yeah. That’s what I’ve been saying.”
“So you’re in quite a mess.” She wasn’t exactly alarmed when he lurched up from the stool. It was just that her heart rate tripled when he stepped toward her. His eyes were on hers, a flash of flirting, a flash of stark, sharp sexual intent. Thankfully, she saw his hand aim for the bowl on the counter before she leaned into the kiss she thought was coming.
She slapped his hand.
“A major mess,” he agreed-although he tried one more time for a lick of batter from her bowl. Then he gave up, eased away, got serious again. “I closed the lab for a couple weeks. Took them all here. None of us can escape from each other, not on this boat, in this environment. I had to do something. This was the best choice I could think up.”
She nodded. “I think you made a great move. That’s what I do with a soup sometimes. Put the ingredients together, then just let it cook, see what happens.”
“Something will.”
She nodded again. “Something has to happen. When you mix ingredients together, the tastes start blending. Different flavors show up. Flavors that never existed before.”
“That’s what I need,” he said grimly. “Something to force…new information. To bring more out in the open.”
“Harm…” She couldn’t believe he had the nerve to go behind her back with his finger. This time she just motioned for him to remove his hand. He tried giving her a meek, apologetic look-but he couldn’t sell “meek” in this lifetime. “I heard something this afternoon. The fight? You heard it?”
He quit playing around. “What fight?”
“Two men. I don’t know which two, but they were really going at it.” She rinsed her hands, wiped them on a linen towel. “At first I thought everyone would have heard them. But then I realized, of course no one would have, below deck-or in the pilothouse, with those doors closed and the engines going. Still. You didn’t hear anything at all?”
He shook his head. “After lunch, I grabbed a catnap. Hadn’t slept in two days. I went down so deep I wouldn’t have heard a cannon.” He cocked his head. “You didn’t see who it was?”
“No. But, as you may have noticed, I’m not the shy, retiring type. A little argument wouldn’t have bothered me. I’d never have thought twice about it. But this fight…it was…wrong.”
She’d have said more, but the side door to the galley suddenly opened. Ivan popped in, his jaw dropping when he saw Harm in the galley with her. “Hey. You letting the guests get hors d’oeuvres ahead of me? Where is the justice in life?”
She shooed them both out, snapping her towel, warning they’d get no food at all if they didn’t let her get back to it. By then, she had to buckle under and get serious about her dinner prep. But her conversation with Harm still troubled her.
