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“Fine.” Recognizing an old-fashioned snit when she saw one, even if the fit-thrower in question would surely wring her neck if she called it as such, Jayne dutifully dropped the promo T-shirt touting orange-flavored rum over her wet dress.
“While you’re mighty quick to point fingers at me, I’d be willing to bet you haven’t been celibate since we broke up, but you don’t hear me asking you about the whys and whens of your personal encounters.”
She wasn’t touching that one with a ten-foot pole. Even if she’d tried her very best to be a born-again virgin for the last six months, she couldn’t forget that she’d been pretty quick to drown her sorrows after Emmett.
What a screwed-up, self-destructive pair they made.
“Sorry to hear about the divorce.” She’d never been skilled with an olive branch, but considered this a fair attempt at making peace. “Just because I take offense at the idea of you offering up a marriage proposal to another woman mere days after you made the same offer to me, that doesn’t mean I would wish you ill-will.”
Who said she couldn’t be magnanimous?
“You need a ride somewhere?” Rising off the bar stool he replaced the phone under the bar and fished a set of keys off a hook on the wall. “I thought I heard you say you missed your boat, right?”
“I do need to find a hotel.” She took another halfhearted sip of her gin and tonic, wondering what Emmett had in mind. Desperate women couldn’t afford to be super-choosy about their rescuers and at least he’d had the decency to admit he’d messed up by marrying someone else.
“As luck would have it, so do I. What do you say we blow this clambake and call a truce?”
Let her guard down around Emmett? She’d have to be crazy to make peace with a newly divorced stud in a dangerous mood. But then again, no one had ever accused her of playing it safe.
Besides, she needed a ride.
“Truce.” She reached for her tiny purse, telling herself this was a practical solution to her problem. Even Rita would have to admit Jayne was making the best of a bad situation. “Just as long as we go separate ways once we get there.”
“Fine by me.” He walked over to the manila envelope and jammed the whole packet under his arm in defiance of the Do Not Bend dictate scrawled across the front. “But I’ve got dibs on the bar since I plan on getting rip-roaring drunk tonight. You think you can stay away?”
“I’m sure I’ll hold myself back somehow.” Sailing through the front door he held open for her, Jayne welcomed the raindrops that still poured in earnest from the sky. It was the next best thing to a bucket of cold water being splashed on her face—an age-old cure for a woman thinking completely inappropriate thoughts about a man she had no business daydreaming over.
And no matter that she was furious with him—not to mention hurt—over his rapid defection, Jayne couldn’t deny frequent mind wanderings picturing the man buck-naked. She had to admit he looked damn good. Both in her fantasies and in real life.
He jogged through the rain to a garage beside the bar and hauled open the door. Hurrying behind him, she saw the waves foaming with the storm on the other side of the road, the ocean empty of any ships for as far as the eye could see. She followed him into the dark and dilapidated clapboard structure that looked more suited to a backwoods farm than a tourist street. Squinting, she could see him unlocking the passenger door of a mud-encrusted Jeep.
Holding the door wide for her, he held his hand out to help her inside. She hadn’t touched him yet but couldn’t see how to avoid it now without making too big of a deal about it. No sense letting him know he got to her, right?
She reached for his hand, but his gaze had already fallen to her feet.
“Damn it, why didn’t you tell me you needed shoes?” He lifted her by the waist as if he couldn’t get her bare feet off the garage floor fast enough.
The imprint of his hands on her remained after he set her inside the vehicle, her skin warming all along her side.
“I guess I thought it was obvious I didn’t have shoes.” She wiggled her toes and had a flashback to a day in third grade when she’d outgrown her shoes and Rita had insisted she take hers since money was nonexistent in the years their mother had big gambling losses. Rita had worn an old pair of boys’ tennis shoes a neighbor had donated so Jayne could have their only pair of size five Mary Janes.
“Hell no, it wasn’t obvious since my eyes never made it past the dress.” He pulled a blanket out from behind the seat and tossed it in her lap. “Do me a favor and dry off.”
It had been on the tip of her tongue to tell him to do her a favor and go screw himself, but she would cut him some slack since she’d obviously walked into his life on a bad day. She didn’t know squat about marriage or how to make a go of a relationship but she knew divorce sucked—plain and simple.
Her childhood might have been fairly impoverished from a financial perspective, but at least her family had always been tight-knit and her mother had protected them from the upheaval of divorce by never remarrying. And Jayne had no doubt in her mind that no one besides their sainted father—God rest his soul—could have put up with Margie for long. Wrapping herself in the blanket Emmett had tossed her way, Jayne settled in for the ride while he started the Jeep and pulled out of the garage into the rain. She caught a glimpse of the Last Chance Bar through the downpour and wondered idly if Emmett would ever go back to the business now owned by his ex-wife.
The same business Jayne had made a beeline for in her darkest hour.
God, she’d been so caught up in seeing Emmett again she’d forgotten all about her fury with Horatio and the disappointment of her thwarted elopement. What a sorry excuse for a wife she would have made. She smiled as she tipped her head back against the seat and stared at the pattern of rain blowing across the passenger window.
“You’ll never guess what I was doing in St. Kitts today.”
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_d6f650d5-36d7-5855-b764-c34870a746a8)
HARRISON BYPASSED the wealth of restaurant options onboard the Venus the next morning, ordering his breakfast through room service while he struggled to put Rita out of his mind long enough to brainstorm a game plan for digging up information on Sonia’s disappearance.
No easy feat considering the attraction of a sexy redhead and their thwarted night that would have probably blown his mind. But this cruise couldn’t be all fun. He’d known even when Sonia left on this very same ship that she’d been seeing Trevor, but Harrison still hadn’t been prepared for the blow when Trevor took off for Grand Cayman a week later. And even though the Venus passenger records had shown Sonia went ashore at St. Maarten and never returned, he couldn’t help but think she’d made connections with Trevor afterward.
Blow to the ego, sure. But when 10k had turned up missing in Trevor’s golf store accounts, followed by almost 20k in weeks prior, Harrison had been pissed off on more than a personal level.
He needed to find her, to find the money and figure out what happened, but despite his best efforts over breakfast, he found himself thinking about Rita again and figuring out what happened with her sister. With Missy’s help last night, he’d eventually pieced together enough information to realize his high-kicking date had been filling in for her absentee sibling.
Now, as he carried his tray from room service out onto the ocean-view balcony, he wondered how he could wrangle time with a woman whose list of priorities put his own to shame. She filled in for her sister, gave her friend a shoulder to cry on…plus she had her own job and she’d sewed costumes for a whole production on top of that.
Something about Rita’s unique blend of fiery demeanor and cool practicality appealed to him on a gut level he couldn’t explain, powerful enough to have distracted him from his primary mission on the cruise. He needed to ’fess up to his quest for information about Sonia’s trip before much more time elapsed since he wouldn’t want Rita to think he’d been using her. Not in six years with the Bureau had he ever found cause to kiss a woman for the sake of his job and he wouldn’t let Rita think as much for even an instant.
He debated calling her room and offering his services for the day while she searched for her sister when a knock sounded on his door. Could she have come looking for him instead?
Logically, he knew it was probably housekeeping, but that didn’t stop him from vaulting over an armchair in his haste to get the door. Telling himself it was just the sex—or promise of sex—that had him so keyed up, he forced himself to wait another two-count before opening the door as a penalty for being too eager.
But it wasn’t Rita on his threshold. Missy waited there instead, her blue eyes huge and punctuated with dark circles underneath them. Technically, he recognized her as an attractive female, but she didn’t come close to Rita in his book.
“Sorry. It’s just me.” She apparently read the disappointment on his face in all of a second. “I hate to bother you again, but you were so smart about offering advice last night, I wondered if you could be persuaded to talk to Rita?”
“I was just having my breakfast.” And plotting his way into spending time with the ship’s seamstress. “But I can make time. Everything okay?”
“I think she’s content with giving Danielle a little cool down period first, like you suggested.” She teetered on the threshold of his stateroom as if scared to put so much as a pinkie toe in his suite. “But she’s getting frantic about her sister and—”
Harrison didn’t hesitate. Turning his back on his work, he slid into his shoes and scooped up his cell phone while he listened to Missy pour out the Tale of Two Sisters. It was a lot to absorb, even if they had thirteen floors to descend in order to reach Rita’s cabin on the lowest level of the ship. But Harrison took in everything he could, gleaning that Rita was as much a workaholic as he’d ever been and that her sister played a crucial role in her life. And as Missy related what she knew of the events of the past few days, Harrison wondered if it was such a bad thing that Jayne was missing.
He began to revise the opinion when Rita opened the door for them, however.
Ear glued to a telephone, she had red-rimmed eyes and wild curls flying in every direction as if she hadn’t slept all night but stayed up to pull her hair out. She gave him a halfhearted wave as she admitted him, but when he turned to let Missy enter first he realized the dancer had apparently tucked her tail and run, leaving him to deal with the crisis. From somewhere down the hall he heard the bing of an elevator car and silently cursed Missy for a coward.
In the meantime, Rita paced with the corded phone tucked between her shoulder and ear as she carried the base around the room with two fingers. Her room was strewn with half-finished sewing projects, uniforms of all kinds on hangers dangling from a makeshift stretch of rope at the foot of one bed, pins jabbed in hems and sleeves at every angle.
“…can’t you just double-check? Her name is Jayne Frazer. Or else Jayne Garcia. And sometimes for fun she books herself under a code name like Cinderella. Or Ariel. Do you have an Ariel?” Rita covered the handset with her palm while mouthing words to Harrison. “She’s big-time into Disney.”
He knew then and there he had zero chances of getting to know Rita—let alone ever quizzing her about Sonia—until she found her sister. Now, he focused solely on how to find yet another missing person. All his leads on Sonia had dead-ended because he’d allowed the trail to grow cold. He wouldn’t make the same mistake with Jayne.
“They hung up on me.” Rita slammed the receiver back onto the base and stared at him with cold fury in her eyes. “Do you believe that?”
“We’ll find her.” He was a patient man and he didn’t mind working for the things he wanted. His wild fantasies about Rita would keep.
“We need a boat.” He started working up a plan to help. They should have a real boat. Not some fifteen-story mega-cruise liner that put as much room between their guests and the water as possible. “You could get around the island in a hurry and check with all the harbormasters.”
Too bad Rita didn’t look hyped about the idea. Her face was pretty pale for a woman who’d just inherited the dedicated help of a special agent as an answer to all her problems.
“My God. You don’t think they ever would have tried boating over to Barbados from St. Kitts to meet up with the ship?” In an instant, the phone was tucked back under her ear. “It never occurred to me to check in with the harbormasters.”
Panic welled in Rita’s throat at the idea of brainless Horatio possibly talking her sister into sailing into the port at Bridgetown. But it made perfect sense in a screwed-up way. He wouldn’t want to lose his job aboard the Venus any more than Jayne would want to lose hers.
And Rita had to find Jayne as soon as possible—not only to make sure she kept her job, but also to corral her into helping manage the latest Margie scare. Their mother had telephoned well after midnight in a rare and very expensive phone call to inform Rita that the bar where she’d been singing a couple of nights each week had just installed video poker.
Just exactly what Margie didn’t need. The machines were probably illegal but Rita knew those kinds of laws were poorly enforced. And the Frazer women couldn’t withstand another bankruptcy. Margie could be homeless by the time the ship docked in Fort Lauderdale.
“I think you’d be able to wrangle your answers faster if we rented a boat. Any harbormaster worth his stripes spends more time out on the docks than taking calls anyway. You can bring your phone to keep making calls, but we’ll look around all the docking areas for ourselves once we find a boat.” Harrison explained the strategy patiently enough but he looked ready to bolt from her tiny, cramped cabin. He couldn’t walk two feet in any direction without stepping on Jayne’s strewn clothes, Rita’s sewing jobs or bumping into furniture. “How about we check with some of this guy’s—Horatio’s—friends to see if they knew where he planned to take his bride?”
“Of course.” Nodding at the practical wisdom of his plan she slammed the phone down again. “I don’t know why I didn’t think to do that right away.”
“You want me to go ask some questions while you get ready to disembark?” He backed toward the door, careful to sidestep a shimmering gold satin bra.
He would do that for her?
“That’d be great.” She’d never had smart, sensible help before while facing a crisis, so having Harrison around seemed really…nice. Most guys who were interested in a cruise fling would have zero desire to play private detective for the sake of a missing sibling, but Harrison Masters was obviously not most guys. “Horatio is friends with a few other casino workers. Mostly a lady pit boss—Fiona, I think—and a nerdy security guard named James who makes sure nobody pockets chips that don’t belong to them.”
“Got it. Meet you by the atrium on the Bacchus deck in an hour? We should be docked within thirty minutes.”
He checked his watch before his eyes went to the clock radio beside her bed. Just that brief flex of his muscles and the sight of big, male hands brought back memories of those hands on her. Amazing how being with him had made all her worries retreat into the far recesses of her mind last night.
“Let’s meet in twenty minutes.” She could pull it together in ten if need be, but she figured Harrison would need at least that much time to track down some of loser-boy Horatio’s friends. “And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the help.”
“Not a problem.” He shrugged as he stepped out into the corridor of the ship’s lowest deck. “It was high time I had a little excitement in my life anyway.”
She had to smile at the thought, even if she wouldn’t exactly classify Jayne’s disappearance as “excitement.” What woman wouldn’t be attracted to this smart guy who led a sensible, low-key lifestyle without a lot of drama?
“Stick with me, handsome. There’s plenty more where that came from in my family.”
* * *
I CAME TO St. Kitts to elope.
Emmett replayed Jayne’s confession in an endless audio loop in his brain the next morning, his attempts at drowning out her admission with a particularly fine Kentucky bourbon having failed miserably. As he rolled onto his back and smacked a pillow over his eyes, he had to own up to the fact that all he’d succeeded in doing was adding a headache to the news that Jayne had wanted to get married, she just hadn’t wanted to marry him.
Well, welcome to the freaking club.
Claudia hadn’t really wanted to be married to him either, although she seemed damned happy now that he’d signed over the lucrative Last Chance as part of their divorce settlement. Son of a bitch, but he couldn’t get used to seeing all his dreams incinerate before his eyes. He might have the Midas touch when it came to business, but he’d acquired some sort of cursed ability to decimate anything he tried to grasp in his private life. His marriage? Boom. Explosive failure.
Jayne? Pow. He’d sent her running so fast he’d gotten whiplash as she peeled out of his life.
He’d promised to drive her to the local landing strip to catch a charter plane to Barbados today so she could meet up with the Venus, but for all he knew she’d left already. She’d gone real quiet in the Jeep last night after he’d spluttered in disbelief—and possibly yelled a tad about the foolishness of rash plans—at the news of her elopement.
But what had she expected him to say? Good job ditching work to marry a blackjack dealer with zero plans to make a real future with you? For that matter, what kind of loser stood up his bride-to-be?
It’d been on the tip of his tongue to tell her she sure had shit taste in men, but caught himself just in time. Pretty damn humbling to realize he’d fallen into the same category as a guy who couldn’t say “I do” and then didn’t have the balls to say “I don’t” to a woman’s face.
Nice.
An efficient knock at his door echoed through his hungover skull with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. He moved the pillow off his head to shout back at the knocker.
“I’m still in bed.” And he wasn’t moving until he had proof positive that Jayne was still in the hotel and needed a ride. If not, he was making the Seawinds Suites his new home now that his divorce was official, his house had become the sole property of his ex-wife, and Claudia had neatly boxed up his every freaking possession and shipped everything to a local storage facility.
His ex might not love him, but she sure as hell had efficiency down to an art form.
“If that’s an invitation, your technique has really fallen apart over the last year.” The voice on the other side of the door sounded both sexy and bitchy and totally turned him on.
What kind of defective libido did he have that a haughty, high-maintenance woman like Jayne could inspire a hard-on even in the midst of a hangover from hell?
“If you get an invitation, woman, I guarantee you’ll know it when you hear it.” Shouting and wincing at the same time, he swung his legs off the bed and pulled on a pair of pants while he went to brush his teeth.
She could damn well wait.
“Emmett?” The conciliatory note in her voice was a surefire clue she needed a favor. He hadn’t dated Jayne for long, but for those few months he’d known her more intimately than any other woman. And he damn well recognized now just from the way she said his name that she needed help.
Did her moronic blackjack dealer understand her needs half so well?
Rinsing and spitting, he stalked to the door and opened it.
“What?”
He’d caught her by surprise. He could tell by the way she quickly pulled her softened features into a mask of cool collectedness. Still, he’d seen the hint of vulnerability on her face, felt her uncertainty for one disconcerting instant.
“There seems to be a problem with my bill because it’s ridiculously high.” She had folded and unfolded the piece of paper in question ten times over as she stepped around a matching sheet on the floor of his suite. “I think I got charged for your room, too.”
Her gaze dipped to his bare chest for a fleeting moment before she breezed past to pull open the curtains on the window overlooking the water.
“This looks right.” He scooped up his bill and compared it to hers, noting his ungodly bar tab and her dry cleaning bill for her dress along with the purchase of a pair of cheap rhinestone-studded flip-flops from the gift shop. “I’ve got it.”
“I don’t expect you to pay for my room. Or my shoes.” She flashed him a better view of her glittery pink thongs as she reached to take back the paper. “I just hadn’t realized these resorts were allowed to rob their guests blind for the chance to sleep in a dry bed.”
“I’m paying the damn bill and I’m not arguing about it since every word I utter reverberates in my head like a steel drum, you understand?” He hadn’t given a thought to the cost when he brought her here last night, but he knew most cruise companies didn’t pay their employees much for their efforts.
Jayne had never shared much about her past, but he’d gotten the impression she came from fairly humble roots not all that different from his own. Life had been kind enough to him since he’d figured out how to translate a gift for stock market prediction into cold, hard cash, but he’d seen the inside of the welfare office enough times in his youth to appreciate not everyone was lucky enough to find an honest means of living well.
“You play, you pay.” She stared out over the endlessly blue water. “Sometimes I have a hard time remembering that one myself.”
Emmett wasn’t touching that one. For all he knew he’d misunderstood what sounded to his clueless ears like an admission of normal human weakness, something completely uncharacteristic of the most proud female he’d ever encountered.
He remained silent so long she finally twirled on her heel to face him, her sundress swirling gently around her thighs with the movement.
“Are you ready to take me over to the landing strip yet, or did you change your mind about the ride?” She nodded toward the vast expanse of ocean out the window, her glossy red curls slithering seductively around her shoulders. “I’ve got to get back to the Venus to kick a certain man’s ass and apologize to my sister before a seven-o’clock rehearsal tonight.”
“You don’t think this loser ex-fiancé of yours is still on the ship?” Emmett reached for his shirt, his head clearing at the thought of losing Jayne for the second time in twelve months.
“He really likes his job. We weren’t planning to quit when we eloped, we just figured we’d take the night off to be wild and crazy.” Shrugging, she fished around in her purse and retrieved a pair of sunglasses. Shoved them on her nose. “Or so I thought. Guess I’m the last of a dying wild and crazy breed.”
Something about seeing proud Jayne Mansfield Frazer duck behind designer knockoff lenses clenched strangely at his gut. She’d changed since their first meeting a year ago and some sucker-for-punishment facet of his ego wanted to know how. Why.
