Читать книгу Stryker's Wife - Dixie Browning, Dixie Browning - Страница 7

Inhaling the familiar aroma of salt, diesel fuel and fish, Kurt Stryker tilted the fighting chair, propped his feet on the transom of his charter boat, the R&R, and sipped his first beer of the day. Life, on the whole, was good, he decided. Idly, he watched through a forest of masts and outriggers as the sun slipped slowly beneath the surface of the Atlantic.

“How many o’ them things have you had?” his young mate demanded from the pier, having just arrived with their evening meal. “There’s coffee in the pot if you want sump’n to drink.”

“One. This is it.” Kurt held up the brown bottle.

A skeptical look on his freckled face, Frog boarded the boat carrying a paper sack of burgers and fries and a king-size cola. Kurt silently cursed the drunken bastard who had spawned the kid and dragged him all over the country, leaving him with more than his share of scars. Kurt knew about scars. He had already dealt with his own, but then, his were mostly the visible kind. Frog’s were the kind that had to be found before they could be healed.

“Did you pick up the mail?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

The boy shrugged his bony shoulders. “Usual stuff.”

Which meant bills. At fourteen, Frog Smith could barely read. Kurt had enrolled him in the local school, much to the boy’s disgust. In their spare time, between charters and maintenance work, he tutored him in reading, math, navigation and survival skills.

Frog had already mastered a few survival skills that Kurt, after years of flying search-and-rescue missions for the U.S. Coast Guard, had never even considered. Their relationship had progressed over the past two years from combativeness through wariness to a mutual respect. And perhaps something more, at least on Kurt’s part.

Frog handed over a few rumpled envelopes, and Kurt quickly scanned the return addresses. “Jones’s Hardware. That’ll be the paint.” The R&R was one of the few remaining wooden charter boats along this section of the North Carolina coast. He’d bought her for a song and spent a fortune bringing her up to standard. In a year or so, he might spend another fortune on a first-class fiberglass job.

Then again, he might not. Wood was good. Classic, you might say.

He examined another envelope but didn’t bother to open it. Pierce’s Electronic Repair. “This one’s going to bust the bank,” he muttered. It took more than a compass, a flare and a few life jackets to operate legally these days.

“We broke?” There was anxiety in the boy’s voice.

“Nah, we’re not broke, but we’re going to have to hustle if we plan to buy that house out on Oyster Point.”

“Hey, who needs a house? We got us a place to live.”

“We need a house, that’s who. Anywhere else, we wouldn’t get away with living aboard the R&R. There’s rules—”

“Ah—rules is for fools,” Frog said dismissively.

Shaking his head, Kurt quickly scanned the rest of the mail. No cancellations. Thank the Lord for small favors. The season was winding down. Barring storms, he still had five more charters on the book, but he was determined to make it through an entire season in the black before dipping into his retirement fund for a house that was in even worse shape than the boat had been when he’d bought it.

Actually, his first season as captain of his own boat had been pretty successful so far. He liked to think it was because he was damned good at what he did, but it probably had more to do with the fact that his rates were the cheapest along this section of the coast. The R&R was hardly a luxury yacht. Bottom-of-the-line carpet to cover the hatches. Ditto the plumbing fixtures. But she had a pair of dependable Detroit diesels and a hull that had been designed specifically for the waters around the Outer Banks.

“Three burgers? Who’s the third one for?” Kurt asked as Frog ripped into the sack.

“Hey, I’m a growing kid, awright?”

“I told you you need milk with your meals, not all those colas.”

“I ain’t growing all that much.” The towheaded teenager bit off a third of his first cheeseburger.

“Done your homework yet?” Kurt asked after awhile.

“Aww, man—you’re worse’n Pa ever was.”

Kurt doubted that. From what he’d been able to put together from the locals and a few of Frog’s remarks, the boy’s parents had migrated from somewhere out west doing odd jobs and knocking over the occasional convenience store. The mother had dropped out of sight several years ago. Nobody knew where she was. Frog and his old man had wound up at Swan Inlet, where that gentleman had found temporary work driving a fish truck. When he’d been sober enough. He’d been headed north with a load of gray trout when he’d tried to beat a fast freight train to a crossing. It was discovered during the cleanup of the ensuing wreckage that fish wasn’t all he’d been transporting.

Frog had already gone to earth by the time the first social worker had come sniffing around. It had been generally assumed that he’d moved on, and that was the end of that. Three weeks later, when he was caught shoplifting food at a neighborhood supermarket, one of the locals had offered him a room and a job. The boy had declined. Claimed he was seventeen, used to being on his own.

He was fourteen. His voice was still in the process of changing. He’d been bunking aboard a dry-docked commercial fishing boat and doing odd jobs around the marina when Kurt had bought the boat right out from under him, so to speak, and had more or less inherited the kid. They were a team now. A pretty good one, although Frog didn’t always agree with that assessment.

“Homework,” Kurt reminded him now.

“Hell, man, you told me yourself you never got no degree. What’s the big deal?”

“Didn’t get a degree, not never got no. Don’t swear, and we’re talking high school diploma now. A diploma is a big deal. We’ll talk about your degree later.”

“If I’m still around,” Frog muttered.

“You’ll be around.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. Who else is going to keep me on course? One beer, no smokes and no fast women?” Kurt grinned. Slipping off his eye patch, he scratched his head where the tapes tied in back. “A man’s gotta have someone he can count on when the chips are down.”

Frog nodded sagely. “A guy to watch his back and see don’t nobody break no bottle over his head.”

Kurt didn’t bother to correct his grammar. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Right now he was more concerned with teaching the boy trust, responsibility and the advantages of a basic education. “You got it, kid.” He held up a palm. Frog high-fived him just as a woman emerged from the fifty-five-footer on the other side of the finger pier and sent him a speculative look.

“Captain Stryker, isn’t it? You took out that fishing party from Kinston? I heard you guys when you went out this morning. I was still in bed.”

“Sorry if we disturbed your sleep, ma’am.”

“Ma’am. That’s cute. And Captain—you can disturb my sleep any old time.” She smiled. She had a pretty smile. At least most people would call it pretty. For some reason, it made Kurt nervous.

“Shark off the port beam,” Frog mumbled under his breath. He was grinning from ear to ear. One of his chief sources of amusement since they had teamed up had been watching women’s reactions to Kurt and Kurt’s reaction to women.

“Ever do any moonlight cruises?” the woman inquired, her voice laced with all sorts of possibilities.

Frog covered a snort of laughter with a grimy hand. Ignoring him, Kurt concentrated on not staring at the woman’s sagging halter. What was inside it wasn’t sagging. Not at all.

“Er, ah…” He cleared his throat.

“I’ve heard it can be awfully nice offshore on a calm night.”

“Long’s you wear plenny o’ clothes. Them vampire skeeters’ll be all over you the minute the wind drops off,” Frog put in with a knowing snicker.

“Stow it,” Kurt growled quietly. He had no intention of taking the woman up on whatever it was she was hinting at. Nevertheless, it was the captain’s decision to make, not his mate’s.

And the captain was single, dammit. He was male. He might be an aging, one-eyed gimp with a lousy track record where women were concerned, but that didn’t mean he was out of the race. Not by a long shot. If he wanted a woman, he would damn well have one. And regardless of what he’d said earlier, he didn’t need any smart-mouth kid to run interference for him.

She kept looking at him. Kurt was used to having women look at him. His nickname in college had been Handsome. Which had embarrassed the hell out of him, even more than the stuttering that had made his life miserable all through grade school.

Which was one of the reasons he was still somewhat socially retarded. His two best friends back in high school, Gus and Alex, had teased him about being shy. Their girlfriends had thought he was cute.

Cute! Judas priest. That was even worse than being shy!

He’d been a damn good football player in his high school and college days, though, which had probably accounted for his popularity with women. There was sure as hell nothing out of the ordinary about dark blond hair, gray eyes and his father’s square jaw and blunt nose.

After he’d dropped out of college and joined the Coast Guard, the uniform had only seemed to add to the attraction. Unfortunately, it had been too late to do him much good. The woman he’d been in love with at the time had preferred Alex’s money to Kurt’s good looks or Gus’s rough charm.

Dina. All three of them had been in love with her. She’d chosen Alex, and eventually, Kurt and Gus had gotten over her.

At least, Kurt had. Since then he’d gotten over a number of lesser attractions before getting involved seriously again. Then, ironically, it had been his lack of looks that had done him in. He’d still been pretty much of a physical wreck when Evelyn had left him leaning on his crutch at the altar.

Idly, he wondered what Dina and Evelyn would have made of a dinky little no-stoplight fishing village like Swan Inlet.

What would they have made of Frog? A homely kid who was all long, skinny limbs, big feet and tough talk.

He couldn’t picture either one of them being content to live aboard a reconstituted commercial fishing boat with no Jacuzzi, no maid service—not even a CD player. The whole idea struck him as amusing and just a bit sad.

So, okay. Maybe he would go ahead and start the process of buying that house. He had a family now—or as much of a family as he was ever apt to have. After nearly twenty years of pulling up stakes every three years, moving from base to base—from Carolina to California, from Hawaii to Alaska to the U.S. Virgin Islands—he was more than ready to settle down.

“Captain Stryker? I’m pretty much at loose ends almost every evening,” the woman in the loose halter said, her voice a husky invitation.

Kurt shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Yes, ma’am. The thing is, I’m…uh, booked up pretty solid.”

Frog smirked.

The woman sniffed.

Kurt pretended an intense interest in the rumpled statement from Pierce’s Electronic Service.

Overhead, a gull flapped past with a finger mullet in his bill. Something hit the water not two feet abaft the port beam. It wasn’t the finger mullet.

“Splotch alert,” Frog quipped.

Kurt decided the boy’s vocabulary had improved, even if his grammar hadn’t. “Thanks, mate. We’re covered, but maybe you’d better pass the word.”

Kurt glanced up at the overhang from the flying bridge that covered a portion of the cockpit. They grinned at each other. Frog nodded toward the woman in the white shorts and halter, who was stroking her legs with after-sun lotion, her gaze straying frequently toward Kurt.

“Bet that stuff she’s rubbin’ on ‘er ain’t gullproof.”

When Kurt didn’t reply, Frog noisily finished his drink and dumped the ice overboard. “Know why she keeps looking at you?”

“No, but I expect you’re going to tell me.”

“It’s that eye patch. Makes you look like a pirate. Women like pirates.”

“Oh, yeah? How would you know what women like?” They’d talked about women before. Mostly warnings on Kurt’s part and bragging on Frog’s.

The boy shrugged. “I notice stuff like that. What about tomorrow, you gonna let me go out?”

“That’s a negative.” They had talked about this subject, too. No weekday charters during school months. It was still a sore spot between them, because in season, Frog’s tips could run anywhere from twenty-five to a hundred dollars a trip, depending on the length of the charter, the number of fish caught and the size and generosity of the party. Kurt had insisted on starting a savings account for him, much to the boy’s disgust.

“How you gonna run the boat and wait on fishermen? You need me, man.”

“What I need is a partner who can read a chart, lay out a course and follow it. What I need—”

“Awright, awright! So maybe I’ll just shove off and try my luck somewheres else where I don’t have to learn all that crap.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d threatened to leave. Kurt could only hope he didn’t mean it. He had no hold on the boy. No legal hold. “Anyhow,” Kurt said, “this Kiley fellow’s not a fisherman, he’s a photographer. No hooks to be baited.”

“So who’s gonna put film in his camera and hand over his fancy bottled water when he wants a swig?”

“Nice try, kid.” Kurt chuckled. Another crisis avoided. “Now go below and get started on your homework. I’ll be down directly to check you out.”

It had taken two years, but Debranne Eliza Ellen Kingsly Kiley, called Deke by most of her friends, was on her way. Finally!

“Funeral, here I come,” she muttered, and was mildly shocked by her own irreverence.

Her husband’s first funeral had been a circus. His brother had planned it with no input at all from her. Not that she’d been up to it at the time. She’d still been in shock.

Once she’d been able to think again, she had thought about having her own private memorial on the first anniversary of the occasion, but when the time had come she’d been sick with stomach flu that had dragged on for weeks, so she’d postponed her plans for another year. A year and six weeks wouldn’t do. Deke was cursed with an orderly mind, which meant that anniversaries came annually, not any old time it was convenient.

So now it was the second anniversary, and she was in perfect health. This time, she was determined to see it through. The champagne alone had cost nearly a week’s rent, but it was Mark’s favorite kind. While she was at it she had splurged on a pair of beautiful, brand-new crystal champagne glasses, too, because Mark had also appreciated fine crystal.

The leis had been even harder to find than the champagne, but as they had honeymooned in Hawaii, leis had seemed a fitting floral tribute.

So now she was on her way. She refused to think about those nasty whispers she had overheard a few weeks after Mark’s death, about his wandering eye. He’d been too busy building an empire for any extracurricular hanky-panky.

Goodness, he’d hardly had time for his own wife, and they’d still been in the honeymoon stage.

To clear her mind of unworthy thoughts, Deke went over her checklist. She had been taught early and well that orderliness was right up there alongside cleanliness, which was right next door to godliness. “Camera case, notebook, overnight bag—check! Champagne, glasses, leis—check!”

And then she moved on to her next list. Lights off, stove off, windows locked, door locked. Done, done, done and done.

Orphaned at the age of thirteen, Deke Kingsly Kiley could barely remember her father, who had died when she was five, but she’d never felt a lack of love. She’d been brought up by a mother who found life rather overwhelming, and by three elderly women whose notion of propriety had been formed during the Coolidge administration. She had loved them all dearly, and they had loved her right back. Although she had to admit that none of them had left her particularly well prepared for life as a single woman in the nineties. The nineteen nineties, that is.

Still, she’d made it. She was doing just fine, thank you. She had two published books to her credit, another one under contract, a part-time job at a day-care center and another one at Biddy’s Birdery, feeding baby birds and cleaning cages.

Not to mention one brief marriage.

Three and a half years ago she had married a handsome, highly successful businessman from nearby Norfolk. Mark Kiley had owned the shopping mall where she’d been signing her first book. He’d seen her there and stopped by to ask how it was going, and one thing had led to another. A week later, on their third date, he told her that her serenity and her quaint, old-fashioned beauty had knocked him clean off his pins.

Two weeks later they’d been married.

Her great-aunts had been horrified. A year’s engagement was de rigeur, Aunt Ellen had insisted. Anything less was hardly even decent, according to Aunt Eliza.

If Granna Anne hadn’t passed away the previous spring, Deke might never have been allowed to marry, because Anne Kingsly had been nobody’s pushover. Of all the Kingsly women—Deke’s mother, Deborah, her grandmother, Anne, and her two great-aunts, Eliza and Ellen, Granna Anne had been the only one with any backbone at all. Deke liked to think she had inherited it, but there were times when she wondered, she truly did.

Hers had been a storybook romance. Unfortunately, it hadn’t had a storybook ending. No happily ever after. She’d been so sure that once her family got to know Mark they would love him as much as she did, only there hadn’t been time. First Great-aunt Ellen had died, and then, in less than a year, Great-aunt Eliza had died. Mark had been too busy overseeing a huge development off the coast of South Carolina to help Deke deal with her grief. Not to mention dealing with all the legal red tape of a joint will that had been written before Deke had even been born.

She had begged Mark to help her. He’d promised to look into it just as soon as he could spare a minute. He was always incredibly busy, but then, one of the things that had attracted her in the first place had been his ambition. His aggressiveness. It had been enormously appealing to a woman who’d been trained from the cradle to be pretty, polite and passive.

It had been shortly after that that she’d seen the advertisement for a mail-order course in self-empowerment and assertiveness. If she hadn’t been so worried about her marriage—the gloss seemed to have gone off rather quickly—and overwhelmed by all the legal hocus-pocus she was hearing from her great-aunt’s executor—not to mention her concerns about her second book, which wasn’t coming along as it should…

If it hadn’t been for all that, she never would have sent off for the blasted thing.

Not that it had helped much. When it worked at all it was in fits and spurts, usually when she least expected it. She still blamed Lesson Two for what happened when she’d asked Mark if they could please start a family. Empowerment is the birthright of every woman, the first paragraph had stated. It is important to express your needs in unequivocal language.

So she had. An only child, Deke had desperately wanted babies of her own. She’d said so.

Mark had laughed. He’d told her she was child enough for him, and that it was about time she grew up because she was beginning to bore him with her childish demands.

That had hurt her feelings. With all the dignity and empowerment she could summon, she had asked why he had married her if he hadn’t wanted a family.

“Why? God knows. Maybe because you were a virgin and that’s a pretty rare commodity in this day and age.”

“You couldn’t possibly have known that—not then, at least.”

“Ah, come on, honey, you were practically advertising the fact. The way you dressed—the way you talked—even the way you sat there, with your knees together and your feet flat on the floor, like you were scared to death a fly would buzz up your petticoat.”

It wasn’t true. None of it. Oh, it was true enough that she’d been a virgin, but she’d been wearing a sophisticated new outfit, a new hairstyle and a new shade of lipstick in honor of her very first autographing when they’d met.

Besides, things like that didn’t show…did they? “I don’t believe you,” she’d said flatly.

Mark had sneered. There was no other way to describe it. “You were a novelty, darling, but let’s face it—novelties wear off, so be a good little girl and get off my back, will you?”

That was when the mail-order course had kicked in. She’d thrown a vase of roses at him. A Steuben vase. It had been a wedding gift, and Mark had known to the penny how much it had cost, which she’d thought rather crass at the time, but of course, by then, her training had quit cold on her, so she hadn’t told him so.

Never go to bed angry. That, along with that business about turning the other cheek, was one of her great-aunts’ favorite sayings.

So Mark had slammed out, and Deke had waited up, unable to sleep until she had apologized and smoothed things over between them.

He hadn’t come home at all. The next day his partner had called to tell her that Mark had gone out of town on another business trip and wouldn’t be home until the following Tuesday.

Still furious, hurt and determined to get over both, she had applied herself to packing away her great-aunts’ clothing to give to the church’s Helping Hand Society.

And then word came that Mark had been killed in a plane crash.

Deke had run the gamut of emotions. Remorse, regret, anger, denial, grief—although not necessarily in that order. Suddenly, she’d found herself completely alone, without family and dangerously short on resources. In the midst of all that, poor old Mr. Hardcastle, her own family lawyer, had come to inform her that he had finally finished settling her great-aunts’ convoluted estate, and that, my how he wished he had insisted they update their will, but then, the Misses Ellen and Eliza had been a law unto themselves, hadn’t they?

The Kingsly home place, where Deke and her father and his entire family had grown up, was now the property of a distant cousin from Cleveland, who intended to put it on the market immediately because he needed the money.

The furniture was to be auctioned off, all except for one or two personal bequests.

On the heels of dealing with all that had come the news that the house she had shared with Mark had been leased in the name of the jointly owned development firm, of which Mark’s older brother, Hammond, was not only the legal counsel, but senior partner and major shareholder.

Deke had blamed herself for not becoming more informed while there’d still been time. She had blamed that darn course in self-assertiveness for letting her down and for her last quarrel with Mark. She still felt guilty over that. It was the last time she had ever seen him.

However, having no other choice, she had picked up the pieces and got on with her life. Not particularly gracefully, but at least she’d managed to deal with things as they came.

And boy, had they come! The minute word of Mark’s death got out, people she had never even met had swarmed all over her, taking over, talking over her head, going though things, shoving papers under her nose for her to sign. Hammond, who might have been more supportive, had been among the worst.

After all three estates had been finally settled with all the whereases and heretofores and bequeathings—goodness, the process took forever!—Deke had ended up with her husband’s camera and his last name, and her grandmother’s parlor organ, which was seven feet tall and weighed a ton.

Not that she could play a note, because she couldn’t. And even if she could, the bellows wheezed, but all the same, she appreciated the sentiment.

By then, of course, she had been informed that although state law allowed the widow a portion of her late husband’s assets, when those assets were corporate assets, and the corporation was privately held by a partner who was not only a lawyer but a relative, and when her late husband had allowed his life insurance to lapse rather than pay the premiums that had increased dramatically when it was discovered that both his blood pressure and his cholesterol levels were in the stratosphere—why, then, there was really nothing much the state could do.

Deke hadn’t pushed. She’d still been feeling guilty on too many counts, including the fact that once the initial shock had worn off, she’d been more angry than grieved.

It had been the most hectic period in her life, what with everything piling on at once. Tomorrow would be the second anniversary of the day Mark’s plane had gone down off a place called Swan Inlet, killing him and the secretary who’d been traveling with him. The time had come to bid a proper farewell to her late husband and get on with the rest of her life.

Unfortunately, it was easier said than done.

She scanned the two-lane highway ahead for a gas station. Her car was a guzzler, which was probably why it had been so cheap. She blamed her great-aunts for not teaching her such practical things as how to deal with bankers and lawyers and nosy reporters. She blamed Mark for not teaching her practical things like how to shop for a reliable secondhand car. And she blamed herself for trying to blame others for her own shortcomings.

Maybe she should shop for a mail-order course for handling guilt.

It was late in the afternoon by the time she checked into Swan Inlet’s one and only motel. Fortunately, it wasn’t one of the costlier chains. This entire project was beginning to erode her meager savings rather badly.

Before setting out to locate Captain Stryker and his boat, to make sure that everything was on schedule, she washed her face and brushed her straight, shoulder-length hair, tying it back with a narrow black ribbon. Not for the first time she wished she’d been born with black hair. Or red, or platinum blond. Anything but plain old brown. The next time she broke out in a rash of self-assertiveness, she just might march down to Suzzi’s Beauty Boutique and get it cut, bleached and frizzed to a fare-thee-well before she came to her senses.

Kurt was on the flying bridge hanging out laundry because the marina’s dryer was on the blink again when a woman pulled up in a spray of gravel. He noticed her right off because her car obviously needed a ring job. And then he noticed her because of the way she was dressed. Most women around these parts dressed pretty casually. It was that kind of place.

This one was wearing a dress. Not just any dress, but a floaty, flower-printed thing with a lace collar. The kind of dress he could picture his mother wearing to teach Sunday school back when he was a kid.

She had a plain face. Not homely, just plain.

Although she couldn’t be much more than five feet tall, there was nothing at all plain about her body.

She picked her way carefully out along the finger pier, dodging the clutter of lines, buckets and shoes. And the cracks. She was wearing high heels.

“Excuse me, sir, but do you know where I can find a Captain Stryker?”

“You found him.” Kurt dropped the pair of briefs he’d been about to pin to the line and waited. She smiled then, and he decided maybe she wasn’t so plain, after all.

“Oh. Well, I’m Deke Kiley. Debranne Kiley? I wrote you—I sent a check? For tomorrow?”

From the hatch just behind him, Frog said softly, “I thought you said you was taking out some camera guy tomorrow.”

Deke Kiley. D.E.E. Kiley. That had been the name on the check. The stationery had been plain. No letterhead. If she was a Deke, then he was a blooming hibiscus. “Yeah, I got it. You’re on.” And under his breath, he said, “Pipe down, pea brain. She’s a paying customer.”

“Yes, well…I’ll see you tomorrow morning then,” the woman called out in a soft little voice that reminded him of something from the distant past. “I just wanted to be sure which boat was yours,” she went on. “Eight o’clock, is that all right?”

Kurt nodded. It wasn’t all right, but it would have to do. A charter was a charter, and if some lace-trimmed lady photographer wanted to snap pictures of dolphins, he reckoned her money was as green as anyone else’s.

“Hey!” he yelled after her. She stopped and swiveled around and he remembered what it was she reminded him of. The ballerina on a tinkling little music box that used to sit on his mama’s dressing table. “Wear sneakers tomorrow, okay?”

She smiled and nodded, and Kurt watched her swish her shapely little behind down the wharf, climb into a yellow clunker about the size of an aircraft carrier and drive off.

Semper paratus, man. The Coast Guard’s motto was Always Prepared. Kurt had a feeling he just might not be prepared for this one.