want to go below and lie down?”
She took a deep breath, climbed up a couple more rungs, and to his own disgust, Kurt couldn’t help noticing that as small as she was, there were some modest but intriguing curves under that sweatshirt. “No, I’ll be just fine. Tell me about—oh, anything. Just talk to me, take my mind off my stomach and I’ll be all right.” She smiled, but it was a weak effort.
“Frog—he’s my mate—the kid who helped you aboard? He’s also my social director. I’m not much of one for talking.” He made a minor adjustment in their course and then set the squelch on his ship-toshore radio.
“Why did you call it Wreck Rock? I didn’t think there were any rocks along this part of the coast.”
Kurt shrugged. “There’s not, as far as I know. Just a name. Easier than calling it by the coordinates.”
For several minutes she engaged in deep breathing exercises. Kurt hoped it worked. It was too late for Dramamine, and verbal distraction—at least his brand—didn’t seem to be helping much. The wind was picking up, pushing an incoming tide. He quartered the seas as best he could without getting too far off course.
“I’m hoping to see the mammal, not the fish. I want to take a few pictures if we see any. And she was his secretary,” the woman said belligerently. “It said so in all the reports.”
That was fine with him. If she wanted to believe Noah had gone down with all hands and hooves aboard, it was no skin off his back. “Okay, Flipper the mammal it is, and she was his secretary. They spent all those weekends out at his private island, just the two of them, working on quarterly taxes.” He scanned the sky, adjusted the throttle and made another minor course correction.
When she didn’t argue, he cut her a sidelong glance and immediately wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He’d never been good at small talk, especially when his mind was on something else. And anyway, trying to talk a person out of being seasick was about as effective as trying to talk the tide into not rising.
What was going to come up was going to come up.
For a good-looking woman, she didn’t look so good. “You want to go below and lie down?” he offered again.
“Maybe I’d better. Just for a few minutes.”
Kurt set the controls and followed her below, hoping she could hold it down long enough to make it to the head. “Through the sliding door—watch the steps. Hang on and I’ll get you some fresh air.” That done, he deftly flipped down one of the convertible benches that served a dual purpose in the compact salon. “Head’s portside, forward. Uh, that is, it’s on the left, right over there. It’s kind of small, but you’ll find anything you need.” He handed her a plastic bucket, just in case.
She lowered herself carefully, one arm clutching the pale blue bucket. There was a bruised look about her that made him want to comfort her, only he didn’t know how. Wasn’t sure she’d appreciate it, even if he did. The collar of her black silk shirt was rucked up in back, so he smoothed it down and patted her shoulder once, but that didn’t seem like much comfort, not if she was feeling as lousy as she looked.
Kurt wondered whether to head back to port or keep going. His passenger didn’t look up to making the call, so he backed out of the salon and left her there. If it was Wreck Rock she wanted, it was Wreck Rock she would get. The customer was always right.
“Lie on your left side,” he called down from the open companionway. “They say it helps.”
He’d heard it somewhere but didn’t know if it was true or not. He did know that in a case like this, people needed to believe there was someone in charge who knew precisely what they were doing.
Dutifully, Deke turned onto her left side, which gave her a view of a shirt and a baseball cap hanging on a hook on the wall—or whatever the nautical equivalent was. It was swaying. And swaying, and swaying, and swaying.
Oh, mercy.
“‘All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full,’” she whispered. “Ecclesiastes one-seven. Onesix, one-five, one-four, one-three—” As a child, she’d been prone to stomach upsets. Granna Anne used to make her quote Bible verses to keep her mind off her stomach. It hadn’t worked very well. Counting back-ward didn’t work, either. She tried talking to herself. “It’s almost over, Debranne. In a little while you’ll have paid your proper respects to the past and be on your way home.”
Wherever home was. The Victorian house where she’d grown up was gone, the furniture being pawed over by a swarm of antique dealers. The run-down apartment building where she lived now was about to be demolished to make way for new low-cost housing, which she probably wouldn’t be able to afford, as she earned a few too many dollars to qualify. Her fall royalties this year had amounted to a hefty $23.11, but she had two part-time jobs, each of which paid the minimum wage, less deductions.
“Talk, don’t think, you nut! Did you bring your light meter?” Talking was supposed to prevent her from thinking about that awful feeling in her belly. “I hope you brought your meter,” she muttered, “because shooting on water is tricky, and you’re going to have to come up with a few decent pictures if you’re planning to write this whole wacko expedition off on your taxes.”
Because she was going to do it. Guilt or no guilt, she fully intended to write Mark’s memorial service off on her taxes. The whole blooming thing, charter, motel, mileage and all. Caught in the throes of guilt and nausea, she clutched the bucket and moaned.
But then, Mark would have approved, she reminded herself. Hadn’t he written off their entire honeymoon trip because he had spent a few minutes looking over a shopping complex on Maui?
Still, she did feel guilty. Partly about the tax thing, but mostly about the fact that she hadn’t really grieved as much as she should. Not that she knew what she could do about that. Evidently she was one of those people whose feelings didn’t run very deep.
As for this empowerment business, she was beginning to think it was a mixed blessing. So far, all she felt was confused.
“Hey, you all right down there?” the captain called from the open companionway. He had a nice voice. A little like rusty velvet.
Goodness, that didn’t even make sense! Deke managed a wobbly smile. “Fine. I’ll be upstairs in a minute.”
He grinned and saluted her, and she thought, What a nice man. Any other time she might have thought, What a strikingly masculine, stunningly handsome man, but right now, nice was all she craved.
Mark hadn’t been nice. There, she’d admitted it. He’d been suave and sexy and Hollywood handsome, but nice?
No. Not really. At least, not after they’d been married for a few months. She’d put it down to his being so busy, so ambitious to get ahead. There’d been all those late nights at the office. All those business trips. Nearly every weekend.
With his secretary.
With his young, drop-dead-gorgeous secretary who was supposed to be such a whiz on her laptop he couldn’t travel without her.
Or maybe she’d been such a whiz on his laptop.
Deke remembered the night Mark had taken her out to dinner for her birthday. When he’d opened his wallet for
