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“Climb aboard, you two. What the heck happened to your plane?” The helmsman steered the Churchill IV in close, and another rain-suited figure leaned over and tossed a thick, greasy rope.
“We crashed,” Dale answered shortly, though he wanted to know the same thing. One moment, Tansy had been landing as deftly as ever, and the next, the plane was sliding down the runway on its belly.
It made no sense.
He helped her aboard, then scrambled into the boat in a motion that came back easily after all these years. He checked on Tansy. She was pale and shivering, though the men had wrapped her in a coarse, soggy wool blanket. “You okay?”
“Never better,” she answered with a crooked smile that squeezed his chest.
Her aplomb was ruined by a thin trickle of blood from a cut on her temple, and the fine tremble of her lower lip. He took a step towards her. “Tansy—”
“I’m fine, Dale. Really.” She leaned away.
He knelt down in front of her and took her chilled hands in his own. “Tans—”
She pulled free and stood as the helmsman gestured his companion to the wheel and strode over. The boat’s running lights picked out the glittering tracks of salt spray that trickled down his yellow rain suit. A billed hood cast the man’s face in deep shadow, but there was something familiar about the rolling walk, the wide, powerful shoulders. A chill skittered through Dale.
Letters and a phone call hadn’t prepared him for this. Not really.
The slickered figure lifted a hand and pushed back his hood to reveal a shock of white-blond hair above a weather-beaten face that might once have been pale. The man’s tired blue eyes were clear, but dulled with worry. Dale steeled himself to shake the proffered hand. “Mickey.” He saw the face of a boy beneath that of the man. “It’s been a long time.”
“Welcome home, Cousin Dale.” Mick nodded and glanced down at Tansy, who sagged against the railing. “And you’d be Dr. Whitmore. Welcome to Lobster Island. I’m sorry for your plane, but thank God you’re both all right.”
Dale let the voice wash over him as he tried to fit Mickey’s image to the memories he’d carried for fifteen years. They’d been as close as brothers until the day Dale’s family had gone down in a ferocious spring storm, leaving the seventeen-year-old at the mercy of his grief-maddened uncle.
Trask. Even the memory of the name brought impotent rage.
“I see some debris. I’ll bring her around to it,” the other slickered man called, interrupting the memory, though not the anger.
“Some of the cases may have washed out of the plane,” Dale said harshly, trying to find his doctor’s focus. The job, he thought. Focus on the job. “Pick up as much of the equipment as you can. We’ll need it to investigate your shellfish poisoning.”
At his elbow, Tansy was ghost-white. Guilt seared through him, layered atop the anger. He should have told her about the island. He should have prepared her better for the shock of learning that this poor, wretched place had once been his home. That these people were his family, such as it was.
Mick muttered a dark curse at the mention of the outbreak. “It’s bad, or I wouldn’t have asked you to come. We’ve had three deaths since I called, and another two sick, including the mayor and the sheriff.”
Dread curled through Dale, though he hid it deep down with all the other emotions.
“That’s impossible,” Tansy said after a moment. “PSP isn’t fatal, and certainly not in those numbers.” Dale could see her mind working.
Personal problems, plane crashes, the cold and the wet faded to the background as his mind clicked over to field mode alongside hers. “You’ve had more cases?” he asked. “I thought the fisheries people locked down all your lobster traps.”
Mickey cursed and jerked his chin toward the dock, dark in the gathering twilight. Black, boat-shaped shadows bobbed gently at their moorings. “The fleet hasn’t put to sea in over a week. The catches were bad after the spring storms, but this is a disaster. If we don’t get the docks open, the whole island will be hungry by winter. That’s why I asked you to come.” He glanced out to the end of the marked runway. The landing lights shone bright in the darkness. “Though you almost didn’t make it. What the hell happened?”
Tansy answered with a tiny quiver in her voice. “It was like the landing gear…collapsed. Or maybe it fell off. But that doesn’t make sense. Landing gear doesn’t just fall off.”
A shiver started deep in Dale’s gut. No, landing gear didn’t just fall off.
Not unless it had help.
IT WAS RIDICULOUS, TANSY knew, to think the crash had been anything but an accident. Accidents happened. A pothole in the runway could have snapped a weakened strut. She might have missed a loose nut in her preflight check, or a bolt could have sheared.
But that didn’t explain why both wheels failed at once.
She glanced over at Dale, deep in conversation with his cousin, and she felt like Alice down the rabbit hole. She didn’t understand what was happening. Chillier than a corpse, she pulled the wet wool blanket tighter. Control. She wasn’t in control of the situation. Knowledge is power. She knew nothing. And her head hurt like hell.
When they reached the dock, Dale jumped from the wet, unsteady boat with a practiced motion that made him look like someone other than the man she’d known for so long, the man she’d once thought herself in love with. He took her hand and helped her stumble onto the dock with a good deal less grace than he’d shown.
“Come on. We’ll go to the motel and scrounge some dry clothes.” His voice was almost the same, but she knew the man beside her even less than she’d known him when they had been lovers. Now, his perfectly groomed hair was plastered to his skull with salt water. The fine linen shirt, monogrammed at the cuff and collar, was ripped askew, and she could see the shadowy old tattoo she’d always assumed was a scorpion. She’d had to assume. He’d refused to answer questions about the tattoo. But the scorpion-shadow had never quite meshed with the urbane polish of his Boston self.
In the glare of the lobster boat’s running lights, something flickered in the back of his blue eyes. Something uncivilized.
Without really meaning to, Tansy took a step back. “Dale?”
This time it was irritation that sparked in his eyes. “I told you to stay in Boston, Tansy. You don’t belong here.”
“Neither do you,” she countered. “We’re here to do a job.” But she wasn’t sure which of them she was trying to convince. She shivered from the cold, and from the strangeness of it all.
The poised, elegant Dale Metcalf she knew from Boston would have slid an arm around her shoulders and shared his warmth—though not his heart. The stranger he’d become the moment he set foot on Lobster Island merely turned away and walked toward shore, calling over his shoulder, “Come on. Let’s get dry. Then we’ll figure out how to get you home.”
“I’m not going home,” she yelled back through chattering teeth. “We have a job to do.”
“You’re going back to Boston and that’s final. I don’t want you here.”
Tansy flinched. They’d been broken up for three months now. The thought that he didn’t want her shouldn’t hurt anymore.
She heard the crinkle of a rubber rain suit and felt a hand on her shoulder. “Come on, Dr. Whitmore. Let’s get you inside and dried off. That cut on your head should be seen to, as well.”
Miserable from the cold, sick with fear and plagued by an otherworldly feeling, Tansy nodded mutely and followed Dale’s cousin to a windowless old jeep.
The men loaded eight salvaged equipment cases into the vehicle, completely filling the back. Dale climbed in the front and held out a hand. “Come on. You can ride with me.” He patted one knee, though his eyes told her he wished there was another way.
Tansy stalled. They’d ridden sandwiched together in a hundred military vehicles, before and after becoming lovers. With only one or two transports for the HFH equipment and crew, there was rarely room for comfort. It had never bothered her before. It shouldn’t bother her now.
But it did.
Dale saw her hesitation and snapped, “Don’t be foolish. You’re freezing. Get in. I won’t touch you.”
But it was a hard promise to keep when the jeep rocked along the bumpy dirt road and jostled them against each other. After a few minutes, his arms encircled her and pulled her back against his chest.
“Relax,” he whispered. “It’s nothing personal. We’ll be at the motel soon.”
It’s nothing personal. Tansy cursed the surge of hurt, and hated him for not understanding that it was personal. Everything between them was too personal, and not personal enough. It had been personal when they’d become lovers on a thin pallet in Tehru. It had been personal when they’d moved in together on assignment. And it had been very personal when he’d drawn away from her every time they returned to home base.
Eventually, she’d realized he wasn’t letting her in any deeper. Then she’d seen the signs her mother had warned her about. The frequent, unexplained absences. The furtive phone calls. The emotional withdrawal.
When she’d accused him of finding someone else, he hadn’t denied it. He’d let her walk out and he hadn’t come after her. That alone had proven Eva Whitmore’s point. Either you knew a man inside and out or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, you were in for a nasty surprise.
The jeep bumped along, and Tansy realized she’d unconsciously relaxed against Dale, sinking into the familiar spots where they fit together so well. Not strong enough to pull away, she sighed and turned her attention to the view. They passed a row of small cottages that might have been pretty once upon a time. Now, paint peeled from the clapboards and fell into weed-choked planting beds. An empty swing dangled from a tree. The whole area was deserted. Depressed.
Tansy thought it strange to find parallels between an island off Maine and the shattered Third World villages they so often visited for HFH. But the island, like the man, was a surprise. She’d envisioned a quaint old New England fishing village with a healthy tourist trade. This poor, dispirited place was anything but. It might have been charming once, might have been picturesque.
Now, it was just dreary. Dale’s cousin, Mickey, had mentioned a recent stretch of bad lobstering. She bet it had been going on longer than that.
Automatically, she scanned the area, registering the details of the outbreak location. The familiar action soothed her, distanced her from the feel of the man wrapped around her and the memory of the roughest landing of her piloting career.
Why the hell had the landing gear snapped? As soon as she dried off, she’d call the FAA. There would be an investigation, and an answer.
A sudden lurch of the jeep threw her against Dale’s arm and she felt the brush of his thumb along one breast like wildfire. She stifled a gasp as her flesh tightened, and she cursed the flood of wet warmth that swirled at his touch. Her body, it appeared, hadn’t forgotten Dale any more than her heart had.
“Sorry.” He moved his hand and shifted in his seat, and she became aware that hers wasn’t the only body with a memory. She could feel him, hard and ready, against her buttocks. And, God help her, she wanted him with a deep, insistent pulse she hadn’t managed to conquer in the time they’d been apart.
She was no better than her mother, willing to accept so much less than she deserved because of an illusion of love.
They bumped past a low collection of cottages with a No Vacancy sign and a few cars in the lot. “Turn in here,” Dale snapped, his voice rough with a tone that sent a ripple of memory through her. “I left a message reserving rooms.”
Rooms, plural. Tansy hated the flash of disappointment. Of course they weren’t staying together. They were broken up. Finished. She was only on the island because HFH management had insisted Dale take his partner. Tansy thought she might strangle her boss when she got home, which would be sooner than later, if Dale got his way.
Home. It was tempting. She was out of her depth, not in control of the situation. But at the same time, it was clear the outbreak wasn’t as small an issue as she’d thought. If patients were dying, if people needed her, she’d stay.
Especially since her plane was at the bottom of the ocean.
Chilled, she leaned back against Dale. His arm tightened across her waist as Mickey passed the motel and said, “Sorry, there aren’t any vacancies.” He turned onto a dirt track, barely visible in the thin headlight beams. Stunted island trees closed in, reaching soggy branches toward the travelers. “The clinic is too small for all the patients. We’re using the motel as a hospital, and the only available room is being rented by a big-shot real estate developer named Roberts.”
She felt Dale’s body tense. “Where are we sleeping, then?”
In Tehru they had picked the dying up off the streets, carried them into the crumbling hotel rooms and treated them on the beds. The HFH doctors had slept on the floors when they’d slept at all. The lodgings weren’t important. The patients were.
So why did Dale sound upset? Why was his body tense beneath hers? She looked back over her shoulder and saw his eyes dart from the road to the passing land, as though he wanted to look around but couldn’t bear to.
“Your uncle kept the place up,” Mickey said, turning into a narrow drive, toward a sprawling house that looked a few degrees better maintained than the cottages near the water. “Painted it every few years and kept the utilities going, just in case.”
Just in case what? Tansy wanted to ask, but she choked it down.
Fear and curiosity battled with a growing sense of disillusionment as she realized how much of himself Dale had kept hidden. How little he’d really trusted her.
How little he had loved her.
“I couldn’t care less what Trask has or hasn’t done.” The chill in Dale’s tone reminded Tansy of the times she’d pushed him for more and he’d given her less. Cold. He could be so cold.
And she was so confused. What the hell was going on here?
She slid from the jeep and stumbled in a muddy rut. Dale caught her elbow and propped her up. When her feet were steady, he stepped away, attention focused on the cousin, who could have been his weather-beaten twin.
Mickey shook his head. “Your uncle has changed, Dale. I swear it. He’s sorry for what he did back then. You should talk to him.”
“Not if my life depended on it.” The uncivilized spark crackled in Dale’s eyes and his voice heated a degree. “Not even if he was dying.”
Mickey stared at him for a long moment before nodding. “If you say so.” He touched Dale’s shoulder briefly, and something akin to regret flickered in Mickey’s faded blue eyes. “There’s no agenda here, Cousin. I wouldn’t have asked you to come back if I had another choice. And I wouldn’t make you stay in this house if there was someplace better. But there isn’t, unless you want to stay at Churchill’s mansion.”
“No,” Dale said flatly, staring up at the house. “No, this is fine.” He dipped a hand into his pocket, and Tansy saw his fingers work. It was a habit he never seemed aware of. She’d come close to searching his pockets once, to find out what sort of talisman he carried, but she’d stopped herself. That was her mother’s game, not hers.
Mickey glanced at his watch and jerked his head toward the sagging porch. “Go on in and get showered and changed. My wife, Libby, left you some basics—towels, clothes, a few odds and ends. Our doctor, Dr. Hazel, will meet you at the motel to go over the patients when you’re ready.”
As Mickey backed the jeep down the narrow trail, Tansy’s confusion and anger tumbled together in a righteous buzz. Still feeling Dale’s touch on her flesh, and hating the frigid control he used like a shield, she rounded on him. “What the hell is—”
“Later,” he interrupted with a short, chopping motion of his hand and a hard look in his eye that sent her back a step. “I’ll explain later.” He paused, and his eyes softened into something more familiar. Something she almost understood. Something that tugged at her and made her wish things were different. “Let’s go inside and get warmed up. I want to have a look at that bump on your head, too. You may need a stitch.”
“It’s fine. And if I needed a stitch, I’d do it myself,” she replied, feeling the adrenaline and the fear, the cold and the confusion, all catching up to her at once. “Your sutures are lousy. And don’t think you’re getting out of an explanation, Metcalf.”
His eyes softened further, though something dangerous still lurked at the back. “Atta girl. Come on.”
He led her up the porch. A hollowed-out shingle near the scratched brass mailbox yielded a key that slipped easily into the simple lock. The faded plaque beside the door contained a single word.
Metcalf.
As she passed through the door into a bare hallway, she murmured, “Welcome home, Dale.”
She got a pithy curse in reply. For some reason, it made her smile. But when she turned, she found him watching her with cold, angry eyes.
“This isn’t a joke, Tansy. You don’t belong here. There are things going on that you have no part of, and I don’t want you hurt.”
Though his words and expression were hard, she couldn’t help the quick lift of her heart. He cared what happened to her. The hot, wanting pulse returned. “Oh? I assumed you didn’t want me along because of what happened between us.”
Emotion, or maybe desire, flared hot in his eyes, then iced as quickly as it had sparked. “Don’t fool yourself. There is no ‘us’ anymore.” He turned away and toed a pile of towels and clothes near the staircase. “The shower’s the second door on the right. The water takes a few minutes to warm up.”
Then he walked away, leaving only an echo of footsteps on dry floorboards to mark his presence. Tansy dropped her salty, aching face into her hands.
That was what she’d wanted. No regrets, no hard feelings. Nothing between them. He hadn’t been able to give her what she needed, and they’d parted ways. Simple, right?
But there was nothing simple about the ache in her heart. There was nothing simple about the landing gear ripping off, or about an outbreak that was too deadly, too virulent to be shellfish poisoning.
And worst of all, there was nothing simple about the man she’d once thought herself in love with. The playboy doctor who’d looked like a leading actor among extras in the Tehru clinics, and instead had turned out to be…what? A lobsterman’s son? The prodigal returned?
She had no idea.
Let me inside, she had pleaded during one of their last real fights. Don’t keep shutting me out. I can’t help you if you won’t let me in.
Now, she glanced around the cold, bare entryway, noting where squares of darker wood on the walls suggested pictures long gone. If this was the inside of Dale, she might be better off back in Boston. At least there, she understood the rules.
Here, she understood nothing.
WHEN HE FINALLY HEARD the shower thump to life, Dale pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the kitchen window and closed his eyes. If she had followed him and demanded answers, he wasn’t sure what would have come out of his mouth. There is no
“us” anymore. It was the truth. It had to be the truth. Everything that had happened between them was based on a lie.
He wasn’t the son of a wealthy Boston shipper. His family’s single boat had gone down one night amidst a ferocious spring storm. Or so he’d been told. Nobody, not even the uncle who’d lost his wife in the accident, had wanted to hear Dale’s suspicions. The day a drunken Trask had tried to beat the questions out of him was the day seventeen-year-old Dale had fled the island with Walter Churchill’s help.
Make yourself into someone else, Churchill had demanded, and sent him off with enough money to do it. You’re better than Lobster Island. You don’t be long here.
